Cody headed to Purple Scorpio’s headquarter after parting ways with the other Miracle children. She soon stepped into the 5th Street.
As far as she knew, there weren’t as many public order issues as the 12th Street, so Silver Aquarius had it rougher.
Cody doubted Purple Scorpio’s wickedness.
Still, once she asked for their headquarter, her opinion changed drastically.
The building she was looking for apparently wasn’t in that street, as endless rows of private houses stretched all through the block.
Purple Scorpio had camouflaged their headquarter to make it look exactly like any other building of the street, and located their base underground.
Only someone with a guilty conscience would place their base underground… I guess their Guild Master always had a wicked personality.
Cody’s mission was to free Purple Scorpio’s Guild Master from the collar that controlled him.
The strongest adventurer in that guild was a S rank, so not even an army of them would have posed a threat to her. She could fight them all and probably win unscathed.
However, she thought it was better not to attract unwanted attention until she completed her mission. She suppressed her urge to break into the front door of what was supposed to be Purple Scorpio’s headquarter and slipped behind the building looking for a rear door.
As she walked, a couple of beasts detected her and readied to jump on their prey.
Purple Scorpio wasn’t a guild that could be taken too lightly—they left tamed wolves to guard their places.
I like dogs, and wolves are so cute…! No, wait, they’re a bit scary.
Two huge wolves charged at her from different directions, growling like hungry beasts. Their mouth was wide open and their sharp teeth were ready to sink in the girl’s flesh.
She reacted in a moment, bringing her hand over her head and summoning the sword of light.
Flash veil.
A blinding light exploded in front of the wolves. They fell on the ground writhing in pain and Cody chose not to kill them. Turning them powerless was enough.
Magic sword release—Harmonics.
Her light sword turned into a tuning-fork-shaped sword in her hand and started vibrating, putting the two beasts to sleep in a few moments.
She knew that she still had a long way to go compared to Dick, but she still wanted to catch up to him when it came to magic swords and spirits, that’s why she made a lot of researches about them.
The wolves rolled over and lied down with their bellies in plain sight, peacefully asleep.
Looking at their beautiful fur, Cody smiled while letting her magic sword disappear.
“You’re so cute when you sleep… everything is…!”
The woman stood still in front of the door, keeping an ear out for people, but she could hear nothing coming from behind it. It looked like it was soundproof.
She made sure that the door hadn’t traps of any kind, then summoned her light sword again and slipped it in the crevice of the door, cutting the lock.
She could project the light spirits of her sword within the building to grasp its structure by feeling how they reflected on the surfaces.
It would’ve been dangerous if I never used this trick on our expedition…
Dick had never seen Cody change her clothes exactly thanks to that—she used this trick to detect his position within the places they slept in. She was sorry about it, but she didn’t want to let him know about her.
She remembered clearly how surly he was at first and how she never understood what was crossing his mind. She had never got in contact with a boy almost as strong as her, so she never let her guard down, and she now came to regret it.
During their expedition, Cody saw that Dick was the kindest person in the world with girls. No matter how unreasonable or egoistic the other three were: even when they said they wanted to quit and forget about it, he just accepted their words.
She believed that men weren’t trustworthy, and she soon came to hate herself for that.
Maybe I’m just fickle… does he feel more at ease now that he knows about me and I don’t have to hide anymore? Am I the only one who’s stressing over it and thinking that it might’ve been better if he never knew?
She asked Dick to train together because they were friends, but it wasn’t like he had to keep his ‘promise’ at all costs.
However, if she really believed that, why had she reminded him about it?
The more she thought about all of that, the more she believed that she had made another mistake.
He shouldn’t have found out about her.
Her mind kept clinging to the same thought—when did he come to know about me?
Was it right for her to ask him directly?
Cody stepped into her destination, brushing those thoughts away, and walked into a room.
It was a kitchen, but there weren’t food or ingredients stocked in there. It looked uninhabited.
A stingy smell of mold pricked at her nostrils.
She guessed that it was just a set up place to deal with intruders or visitors. Still, somewhere in that house was the path to Purple Scorpio’s underground headquarter.
Cody was envious of Dick’s full mask in that moment and pulled out an handkerchief to cover her nose and mouth, fastening it around her head. Thinking that she now looked like a robber made her smile.
She readied herself to secure the man that was tailing her and pretended to let her guard down to let him get closer, then she turned around in the blink of an eye and twisted one of his arms behind his back, pushing him to the wall.
The man let out a groan of pain.
“Trust me, you don’t want to move. Were you checking on the wolves? I already put them to sleep.”
The man didn’t answer and soon gave up on freeing himself from her grasp.
She was holding him with only one hand, so she used the other to extract his poisoned short sword from his belt, throw it away and then destroy it with her sword of light.
The man looked extremely surprised, but he kept silent as a lightning-speed attack, impossible to be seen by his eyes, made his short sword melt.
Cody could control the ray lights of her sword and turn them incandescent. She called it ‘light eraser’ and it allowed her to cut through metal like it was butter. It could also set things ablaze if she concentrated enough light on one thing.
The short sword fell on the ground completely melted, and the man, who should’ve been used to violence and insane situations, was now trembling in fear.
“The law allows people to use poisoned weapons only to hunt beasts outside the capital. Can you explain why were you carrying one around here?”
Losing his cool, the man started to scream and struggle to run, but she pinned him to the wall with too much strength, and then decided to silence him by hitting him behind his neck, like Dick did in the past when he saved her.
The man limply fell on the ground the next moment and silence filled the air again.
I guess I’m not suited to these kind of operations… I’m not smart like Dick, I don’t really know how to move…
“Hey, why’re you screami—!”
She wanted to end it all in silence, but the enemy had been alerted.
After she ‘put the enemies to sleep’, she turned her light blade into the tuning-fork-shaped one again and used its sound to make them powerless like she did with the wolves.
Cody slapped one of the fainted men awake and had him tell her what she needed to do to reach the basement, then she hit him again to sleep.
She had to look for the scorpion statue on the first floor and unlock a secret passage with it.
Cody confirmed that the poisoned short swords of her fainted enemies looked slightly worn out, which meant that Purple Scorpio wasn’t different from a guild of killers, then she hurriedly destroyed them.
She didn’t want to exploit her own power to crush them all like powerless ants, but that was exactly the urge that was slowly welling in her heart.
Maybe trying to suppress this impulse is another reason why Dick wanted to join a guild…
Cody was now a leader, so she didn’t have many occasions to fight alone. She always found it boring, but she had slowly understood that she was blessed.
She thoroughly searched the floor and finally found the scorpion statue and the contrivance in the hallway wall—a lock-like crevice where she could insert the statue’s sting. After doing so and turning it, a section of the wall slid away, leaving an opening behind that revealed the stairs to the basement.
Cody thought that she was going to face a lot of enemies from that moment, so she set her spirit sword to ‘auto-counter’, forcing it to shoot down every projectile that flew her way with its ray lights, and unsheathed her duty sword, which was just a normal sword unlike her spirit one.
There were a lot of enemies lurking in the shadows. They held sickle and chains, woodman’s hatchets, crossbows, blow guns; but none of them could harm Cody as she advanced by mowing them down.
They never talk… I guess assassins never spell a word in fight.
All their attacks were aimed to vital and sensible parts, but none of them ever reached her body as they were one-sidedly crushed.
After she had defeated around twenty of them, she finally reached the last door.
The air changed in there—miasma wafted and stagnated in the motionless hallway. She wondered if she was going to face the Guild Master in that room as she relaxed ever so slightly while solving the mechanism to open the door.
Then, as gears started to turn and the iron door slid open, someone jumped down the ceiling and stabbed her with a talon knife.
“Die.”
The tone of that male voice conveyed an evident bloodlust as the poisoned blade pierced through Cody’s back, which distorted and vanished.
The man was confused.
The next moment, he clearly heard footsteps coming from the dark room that had just opened in front of him—three more copies of Cody emerged from the darkness.
Those were highly detailed illusions born not by mere Illusion Magic.
Cody could control light, which meant that she could manipulate the light that entered her foe’s vision to create perfect copies of herself.
The assassin in front of her wore a battered deep purple overcoat and his entire body was covered with bandages—that was Purple Scorpio’s Guild Master. He had yet to recover from the fight he had with Clave Garland.
Cody looked at the contraption that circled around his neck with pity, as she tried to recall the chronological order that brought everything to this point.
“You had it though, but there’s no need to push yourself so hard anymore. You don’t have to fight in that state.”
The man shrieked and charged the Cody he heard speaking: he bent his body forward to be faster and readied his talon knife to slice the intruder, but the head of knights’ Light Mirage ability wasn’t that simple to overcome.
Manipulating the light that someone sees means that she could mess and destroy her foe’s sense of orientation: even if he tried to attack the source of the sound, he would only slice through thin air.
Exactly at the same time that his weapon cut through what he believed was his target, his collar had been severed and he fell unconscious.
Cody had completed her mission with a single slash of her light sword. She decided to use her strongest weapon to pay her respects to the pitiful man collapsed at her feet.
“Sleep tight. I’ll force you to make up for your wrongdoings when you wake up.”
Then, Cody turned her light blade into the tuning-fork-shaped one and rang it.
Purple Scorpio’s Guild Master should’ve had protective equipment against sound attacks, but she guessed that being controlled by the collar made him act only by instinct and not by logic.
She noticed that she had cut through his guild tag’s chain along with his collar, so she picked it up and read it—his job was ‘Master thief’. It meant that he had been a proper adventurer who finished all his duties and achieved all the criteria to become a master.
Thieves were usually called bandits, but adventurer thieves weren’t like that. Still, many ended up becoming assassins and bandits thanks to their lock-picking abilities, the tricks up their sleeves and their sly nature.
Cody, looking with even more pity at the collapsed man, thought that people shouldn’t ‘buy’ one another’s strength only for egoistic means. Adventurer guilds should’ve kept adventuring, just like their name suggested, not limiting themselves to only accept requests.
She wondered if Dick thought the same. She was sure he would listen to her if she talked to him about it.
Then, Cody picked up the broken collar and left the building.
A great idea was floating in her mind.
Since their expedition against Verlaine hadn’t been a real adventure, she wanted to try the real deal with the other Miracle children. They never did anything like that so far, and as the general of the army, she would’ve taken quite the long holiday to go…!
Then, the flow of her thoughts was interrupted.
The magic tool that Dick handed her, the magic stone piece, started vibrating, signaling that Dick and Mylarka were having a hard time in their fight.
It was hard to believe, but Cody guessed that they were facing someone at least as strong as them.
She had to hurry.
She left Purple Scorpio to the members of Silver Aquarius and the knight’s order, then she headed to the 1st Street.
Cody headed to Purple Scorpio’s headquarter after parting ways with the other Miracle children. She soon stepped into the 5th Street.
As far as she knew, there weren’t as many public order issues as the 12th Street, so Silver Aquarius had it rougher.
Cody doubted Purple Scorpio’s wickedness.
Still, once she asked for their headquarter, her opinion changed drastically.
The building she was looking for apparently wasn’t in that street, as endless rows of private houses stretched all through the block.
Purple Scorpio had camouflaged their headquarter to make it look exactly like any other building of the street, and located their base underground.
Only someone with a guilty conscience would place their base underground… I guess their Guild Master always had a wicked personality.
Cody’s mission was to free Purple Scorpio’s Guild Master from the collar that controlled him.
The strongest adventurer in that guild was a S rank, so not even an army of them would have posed a threat to her. She could fight them all and probably win unscathed.
However, she thought it was better not to attract unwanted attention until she completed her mission. She suppressed her urge to break into the front door of what was supposed to be Purple Scorpio’s headquarter and slipped behind the building looking for a rear door.
As she walked, a couple of beasts detected her and readied to jump on their prey.
Purple Scorpio wasn’t a guild that could be taken too lightly—they left tamed wolves to guard their places.
I like dogs, and wolves are so cute…! No, wait, they’re a bit scary.
Two huge wolves charged at her from different directions, growling like hungry beasts. Their mouth was wide open and their sharp teeth were ready to sink in the girl’s flesh.
She reacted in a moment, bringing her hand over her head and summoning the sword of light.
Flash veil.
A blinding light exploded in front of the wolves. They fell on the ground writhing in pain and Cody chose not to kill them. Turning them powerless was enough.
Magic sword release—Harmonics.
Her light sword turned into a tuning-fork-shaped sword in her hand and started vibrating, putting the two beasts to sleep in a few moments.
She knew that she still had a long way to go compared to Dick, but she still wanted to catch up to him when it came to magic swords and spirits, that’s why she made a lot of researches about them.
The wolves rolled over and lied down with their bellies in plain sight, peacefully asleep.
Looking at their beautiful fur, Cody smiled while letting her magic sword disappear.
“You’re so cute when you sleep… everything is…!”
The woman stood still in front of the door, keeping an ear out for people, but she could hear nothing coming from behind it. It looked like it was soundproof.
She made sure that the door hadn’t traps of any kind, then summoned her light sword again and slipped it in the crevice of the door, cutting the lock.
She could project the light spirits of her sword within the building to grasp its structure by feeling how they reflected on the surfaces.
It would’ve been dangerous if I never used this trick on our expedition…
Dick had never seen Cody change her clothes exactly thanks to that—she used this trick to detect his position within the places they slept in. She was sorry about it, but she didn’t want to let him know about her.
She remembered clearly how surly he was at first and how she never understood what was crossing his mind. She had never got in contact with a boy almost as strong as her, so she never let her guard down, and she now came to regret it.
During their expedition, Cody saw that Dick was the kindest person in the world with girls. No matter how unreasonable or egoistic the other three were: even when they said they wanted to quit and forget about it, he just accepted their words.
She believed that men weren’t trustworthy, and she soon came to hate herself for that.
Maybe I’m just fickle… does he feel more at ease now that he knows about me and I don’t have to hide anymore? Am I the only one who’s stressing over it and thinking that it might’ve been better if he never knew?
She asked Dick to train together because they were friends, but it wasn’t like he had to keep his ‘promise’ at all costs.
However, if she really believed that, why had she reminded him about it?
The more she thought about all of that, the more she believed that she had made another mistake.
He shouldn’t have found out about her.
Her mind kept clinging to the same thought—when did he come to know about me?
Was it right for her to ask him directly?
Cody stepped into her destination, brushing those thoughts away, and walked into a room.
It was a kitchen, but there weren’t food or ingredients stocked in there. It looked uninhabited.
A stingy smell of mold pricked at her nostrils.
She guessed that it was just a set up place to deal with intruders or visitors. Still, somewhere in that house was the path to Purple Scorpio’s underground headquarter.
Cody was envious of Dick’s full mask in that moment and pulled out an handkerchief to cover her nose and mouth, fastening it around her head. Thinking that she now looked like a robber made her smile.
She readied herself to secure the man that was tailing her and pretended to let her guard down to let him get closer, then she turned around in the blink of an eye and twisted one of his arms behind his back, pushing him to the wall.
The man let out a groan of pain.
“Trust me, you don’t want to move. Were you checking on the wolves? I already put them to sleep.”
The man didn’t answer and soon gave up on freeing himself from her grasp.
She was holding him with only one hand, so she used the other to extract his poisoned short sword from his belt, throw it away and then destroy it with her sword of light.
The man looked extremely surprised, but he kept silent as a lightning-speed attack, impossible to be seen by his eyes, made his short sword melt.
Cody could control the ray lights of her sword and turn them incandescent. She called it ‘light eraser’ and it allowed her to cut through metal like it was butter. It could also set things ablaze if she concentrated enough light on one thing.
The short sword fell on the ground completely melted, and the man, who should’ve been used to violence and insane situations, was now trembling in fear.
“The law allows people to use poisoned weapons only to hunt beasts outside the capital. Can you explain why were you carrying one around here?”
Losing his cool, the man started to scream and struggle to run, but she pinned him to the wall with too much strength, and then decided to silence him by hitting him behind his neck, like Dick did in the past when he saved her.
The man limply fell on the ground the next moment and silence filled the air again.
I guess I’m not suited to these kind of operations… I’m not smart like Dick, I don’t really know how to move…
“Hey, why’re you screami—!”
She wanted to end it all in silence, but the enemy had been alerted.
After she ‘put the enemies to sleep’, she turned her light blade into the tuning-fork-shaped one again and used its sound to make them powerless like she did with the wolves.
Cody slapped one of the fainted men awake and had him tell her what she needed to do to reach the basement, then she hit him again to sleep.
She had to look for the scorpion statue on the first floor and unlock a secret passage with it.
Cody confirmed that the poisoned short swords of her fainted enemies looked slightly worn out, which meant that Purple Scorpio wasn’t different from a guild of killers, then she hurriedly destroyed them.
She didn’t want to exploit her own power to crush them all like powerless ants, but that was exactly the urge that was slowly welling in her heart.
Maybe trying to suppress this impulse is another reason why Dick wanted to join a guild…
Cody was now a leader, so she didn’t have many occasions to fight alone. She always found it boring, but she had slowly understood that she was blessed.
She thoroughly searched the floor and finally found the scorpion statue and the contrivance in the hallway wall—a lock-like crevice where she could insert the statue’s sting. After doing so and turning it, a section of the wall slid away, leaving an opening behind that revealed the stairs to the basement.
Cody thought that she was going to face a lot of enemies from that moment, so she set her spirit sword to ‘auto-counter’, forcing it to shoot down every projectile that flew her way with its ray lights, and unsheathed her duty sword, which was just a normal sword unlike her spirit one.
There were a lot of enemies lurking in the shadows. They held sickle and chains, woodman’s hatchets, crossbows, blow guns; but none of them could harm Cody as she advanced by mowing them down.
They never talk… I guess assassins never spell a word in fight.
All their attacks were aimed to vital and sensible parts, but none of them ever reached her body as they were one-sidedly crushed.
After she had defeated around twenty of them, she finally reached the last door.
The air changed in there—miasma wafted and stagnated in the motionless hallway. She wondered if she was going to face the Guild Master in that room as she relaxed ever so slightly while solving the mechanism to open the door.
Then, as gears started to turn and the iron door slid open, someone jumped down the ceiling and stabbed her with a talon knife.
“Die.”
The tone of that male voice conveyed an evident bloodlust as the poisoned blade pierced through Cody’s back, which distorted and vanished.
The man was confused.
The next moment, he clearly heard footsteps coming from the dark room that had just opened in front of him—three more copies of Cody emerged from the darkness.
Those were highly detailed illusions born not by mere Illusion Magic.
Cody could control light, which meant that she could manipulate the light that entered her foe’s vision to create perfect copies of herself.
The assassin in front of her wore a battered deep purple overcoat and his entire body was covered with bandages—that was Purple Scorpio’s Guild Master. He had yet to recover from the fight he had with Clave Garland.
Cody looked at the contraption that circled around his neck with pity, as she tried to recall the chronological order that brought everything to this point.
“You had it though, but there’s no need to push yourself so hard anymore. You don’t have to fight in that state.”
The man shrieked and charged the Cody he heard speaking: he bent his body forward to be faster and readied his talon knife to slice the intruder, but the head of knights’ Light Mirage ability wasn’t that simple to overcome.
Manipulating the light that someone sees means that she could mess and destroy her foe’s sense of orientation: even if he tried to attack the source of the sound, he would only slice through thin air.
Exactly at the same time that his weapon cut through what he believed was his target, his collar had been severed and he fell unconscious.
Cody had completed her mission with a single slash of her light sword. She decided to use her strongest weapon to pay her respects to the pitiful man collapsed at her feet.
“Sleep tight. I’ll force you to make up for your wrongdoings when you wake up.”
Then, Cody turned her light blade into the tuning-fork-shaped one and rang it.
Purple Scorpio’s Guild Master should’ve had protective equipment against sound attacks, but she guessed that being controlled by the collar made him act only by instinct and not by logic.
She noticed that she had cut through his guild tag’s chain along with his collar, so she picked it up and read it—his job was ‘Master thief’. It meant that he had been a proper adventurer who finished all his duties and achieved all the criteria to become a master.
Thieves were usually called bandits, but adventurer thieves weren’t like that. Still, many ended up becoming assassins and bandits thanks to their lock-picking abilities, the tricks up their sleeves and their sly nature.
Cody, looking with even more pity at the collapsed man, thought that people shouldn’t ‘buy’ one another’s strength only for egoistic means. Adventurer guilds should’ve kept adventuring, just like their name suggested, not limiting themselves to only accept requests.
She wondered if Dick thought the same. She was sure he would listen to her if she talked to him about it.
Then, Cody picked up the broken collar and left the building.
A great idea was floating in her mind.
Since their expedition against Verlaine hadn’t been a real adventure, she wanted to try the real deal with the other Miracle children. They never did anything like that so far, and as the general of the army, she would’ve taken quite the long holiday to go…!
Then, the flow of her thoughts was interrupted.
The magic tool that Dick handed her, the magic stone piece, started vibrating, signaling that Dick and Mylarka were having a hard time in their fight.
It was hard to believe, but Cody guessed that they were facing someone at least as strong as them.
She had to hurry.
She left Purple Scorpio to the members of Silver Aquarius and the knight’s order, then she headed to the 1st Street.
