Since the idea was to leave no trace of his home invasion, he obviously couldn’t break or siphon the wards on the safe — he had to trick his way past them and leave them intact. There were lots of ways to do that in the books Gurey had given him, since Aldwin was primarily interested in that sort of solution to the wards himself, but until Zorian took an actual look at the safe he couldn’t tell which ones he should use. So he settled on simply practicing all of them.
As the date of the summer festival approached, Zorian decided to visit Vani one more time to see if the man had any news on the missing soul mages. He didn’t, though he admitted he hadn’t tried to find out anything about that very hard. It was a matter for law enforcement, Vani had claimed, and getting involved would just paint them as suspects. He was probably right, and Zorian knew there was no point in snooping around now that the case was being investigated by the police, but he definitely intended to launch a personal investigation in future restarts to see what was going on there.
Vani had asked him whether he had found the shifter tribe, but Zorian admitted that he sort of gave up on that. He couldn’t go to Raynie, as she was in Cyoria, and nobody else could direct him where to go. Or maybe they could, but didn’t want to — the result was the same in either case. Besides, he was skeptical in regard to how much they could actually help with his issue.
Finally, the day had come. Gurey had managed to get a small plaque inside Vazen’s house by stuffing it inside an envelope and mailing it to the man along with some ridiculous advertisement. Zorian couldn’t believe that had actually worked, but it had, and now they just had to wait for the man to go to work before he could teleport inside and search for the safe. Vazen was a 40-year-old bachelor, so there was supposed to be no one in the house with him gone, but Zorian had prepared a set of concealing clothes for himself anyway (that he intended to throw away immediately after the operation) and was willing to teleport out at the first sign of trouble.
After an hour of waiting, Vazen left the house and Zorian teleported inside. Gurey remained outside under an invisibility field, acting as a lookout — if he spotted Vazen coming back, he would press a button on the stopwatch Zorian had given him, which would cause a ring on Zorian’s hand to heat up.
The house was, thankfully, completely empty… but also completely lacking in safes, warded or otherwise. Even after he’d added an additional layer to the wards in order to exclude the inside of the house from the anti-divination ward, his spells still gave no results… probably because the safe was itself warded against divinations. Frustrating. It was obviously hidden behind something, but Zorian couldn’t figure out where. There were no hollow walls, secret hatches beneath the carpet, places where the floor was scraped due to constant movement of furniture, and so on. Just as Zorian was about to give up and hit the books for an exotic divination spell that could work despite the ward, he finally found it. It was in the fireplace, of all things — if he hadn’t noticed how relatively clean it was (and reminisced about how much he hated cleaning the one back home in Cirin), it would have never occurred to him to look there.
The fireplace was not built for convenient access, so interacting with it was rather annoying — the safe was positioned to the left, making it impossible to actually see the lock without the use of a mirror. Still, that was just an inconvenience, not a real obstacle. He began casting analysis spells at the ward that protected the safe, trying to find a way past them.
He had just enough time to register that there was a very weak, localized ward present in the fireplace before he was forced to jump back and erect a shield in front of him. A deafening explosion erupted from the fireplace, enveloping the whole room in blinding, choking ash as the ward triggered the explosive trap in response to detecting his analysis spell. His shield protected him from the blast, but the ash cloud was hell on his lungs.
He teleported out, grabbed Gurey and then teleported again — this time away from Vazen’s house. The operation was a bust.
In the aftermath of the botched operation, the whole idea had been scrapped. Security was bound to go up now that Vazen knew there was someone after the documents, and Zorian didn’t fancy going against the new and improved defenses when even the old ones nearly killed him. Gurey was, if anything, even more shaken about the whole thing than Zorian was. He apologized profusely for the whole episode and ranted about how such lethal traps were illegal and how he couldn’t believe Vazen would employ such a thing, which Zorian found more than a little amusing. It helped explain why Vazen seemingly didn’t bother to report the break-in to the police, though.
Personally, Zorian was feeling pretty annoyed with himself. Despite what Gurey seemed to think, this was all on him. He really should have checked the fireplace for traps. Hell, he should have checked the whole house for those! Just because Gurey had said there were no other defenses didn’t mean he should have taken it for granted. The man had even said his information was outdated…
Well, no matter — he got some nifty spells out of the whole thing and he knew what to watch out for in subsequent restarts.
He thought about confronting the grey hunter at the end of the restart, but then decided against it. He would have just died messily, and he’d had enough brushes with death in this particular restart.
He went to sleep and woke up with his sister wishing him a good morning.
Chapter 031
Marked
Zorian stared at the grinning face of his opponent, his own face a blank, expressionless mask. This was it. This last round would decide who the victor was, no question about it. His opponent thought he had Zorian backed into a corner, but Zorian had a secret weapon — he had already peered into the man’s thoughts and knew that he had already won.
The rules of the card game were pretty clear, after all.
“Twelve of pumpkins,” Zorian said, placing his last card on the table. The man’s face instantly lost its grin. Zorian tried to keep a cool façade, but he probably smiled at least a little.
“Motherf— How are you this lucky!?” the man cursed, slapping down his own card on top of the stack — a measly seven of oaks, not nearly enough to win — and taking a swig from the glass of hard liquor next to him. He drank way too much in Zorian’s opinion, his thoughts steadily growing more and more muddied to Zorian’s mental probes as time went by… and while that did make him harder to read via psychic powers, it also made him progressively worse at playing the game. He probably didn’t even need to cheat to win the last two games, but cheating was kind of the whole point — he joined the card game to practice his mind reading skills in a real environment, not to win money off hapless victims.
“Well, this is it for me,” Zorian said, standing up. “It was fun and all, but I really have to get going now.”
“Hey, you can’t just leave now,” the man protested, frowning at him. “That’s not how it’s done! You have to give me a chance to win my money back!”
“Orinus, you’re drunk,” one of the other men at the table said. The two of them dropped out three games ago, but they still stuck around to talk, drink, and act as judges and money holders. “You didn’t lose anything. It’s the kid who just got back the money he lost to you in the previous game. Nobody has to pay anyone anything.”