Esta leaned over the box and looked at the two young girls inside it.

  "... Strange."

  "Very strange." Ava said.

  Esta narrowed her eyes at her sister, "Do you truly understand why this is so strange?"

  "Of course I understand!" Ava yelled, understanding nothing.

  The one-foot-long lizard resting on Esta's shoulder sighed, "Enough of this. Ava, take as many photographs as you can. You only have two minutes, so hurry it up."

  "Yeah yeah, I know. Just give me a sec and I'll have the whole area recorded."

  The butler, Lundy, handed Ava an elaborately designed image capturer, and she immediately began leaping through the air, recording everything and anything in view as she poured mana into the device.

  Esta cringed every time she heard her sister say 'Toh!', Ho!', Huzzah!', or whatever other annoying words came to her as she jumped into the air, but Esta knew better than to reprimand her. Her sister would just double down and look for even more ways to annoy Esta.

  "Why would Dai risk sending actual people through his shipping company? There are back channels for this. This can't be something Father requested of him." She said.

  "Or he did, and Dai chose the worst possible way to go about it. I wouldn't put it past a house-cat to do something this stupid." Her brother Riddick, the currently transformed lizard on her shoulder, said in response.

  "Mmm..." Esta sniffed the air around the box again, "This gross smell is bothering me too. They were clearly drugged, but with what?"

  "I'm done!" Ava interjected, breathing heavily from all of the unnecessary acrobatics she had been doing.

  "Good. Now let's get out of here before---"

  "Not yet." Esta interrupted her brother, who traced the direction she was looking at and couldn't help but snarl when he saw the object she was focused on.

  "... Esta, we don't have time for this. That Protector will be back any minute now with his squad. We will not be able to escape, nor beat, an entire squad by ourselves."

  "I need to know why my Moonblood is here." She looked at Lundy, "When I found it last year, did I not tell you to hide it somewhere deep inside the warehouse so it would never be found? Where did you end up putting it?"

  Lundy was doing his best to remain calm, but all three of the siblings could immediately tell that the man's knees were shaking. 'God damnit...' Riddick mumbled as Esta stomped one of her feet into the cement, sending a directed shock wave into Lundy's legs, causing the man to buckle and fall onto the ground.

  He looked up at his mistress in a panic, "M-Miss Esta! Your father called for me directly after you left the warehouse! I had no choice but to leave!"

  "And then what? You forgot to return?"

  "T-That, that's not quite..."

  Esta couldn't believe her luck the year prior when she was scrounging through the warehouse looking for anything she might be able to turn into personal capital. Their father provided basic necessities for them, but past that, they had to make their own way. Which she had hated as a young teenager, but in the past couple of years, she had really begun to appreciate it.

  And that struggle to build her own wealth is what led to her feeling like she was on cloud nine when she had found that barrel, lost and forgotten to time. Esta had never related to the treasure hunters or adventurers in the stories she'd read with her sister, but in that moment, she fully understood them, and might have even begun to see them as her favorite types of protagonists.

  But she knew if her siblings found out about the barrel, they'd steal it, and even if those two didn't find it, they had cleaners and other wage-earners in their home all the time, so she kept it in the warehouse. She figured if her soul-contracted butler hid it and destroyed the paperwork, there was a zero percent chance that anyone would ever find it.

  Clearly, that had been a blunder on my part. A blunder that I am not going to make again.

  Esta raised her right hand up to her waist, palm up.

  "Tsk...! Ava!!" Riddick yelled as he leapt over onto her shoulder.

  Lundy, who had been kneeling on the cement, suddenly fell onto his side as blood splattered everywhere on the floor around him. His legs had ruptured from the inside out, but he was barely able to begin to scream before Ava disappeared him into a big black sphere.

  "Whew... He was about to give me a giant headache!" Ava turned and glared at her sister, "I hate listening to people scream! You know I hate it. So why would you do that here? Punish him at home in one of the soundproof rooms next time."

  "I knew you'd put him into stasis for me. And see? I was right." She smiled at Ava, who was rolling her eyes in response.

  "I repeat, again, we do not have time for this!" Riddick jumped off Ava's shoulder and onto the cement. "Quickly, contract the sphere and pocket it. I need to clean this blood up, and then we really do need to get out of here, you two."

  As her siblings worked to clean up her mess, Esta stared at the area around the boxes again. They had only entered the warehouse out of curiosity after one of Riddick's scouts keeping an eye on the Protector's main office saw one of them slipping out in normal clothes.

  Judging by the bootprints and amount of snow covering them, two people left the warehouse first, and then the Protector left soon after that... Did the two individuals come to steal from the warehouse, crack the high-quality boxes open first, and then call the Protectorate when they saw what was inside?

  That didn't fit though. Not when only a single Protector came, and he came disguised as a civilian. Also, somehow in the middle of all that, someone had rolled her Moonblood barrel next to the boxes, and then, even stranger, just left it there.

  They brought it out before opening the boxes, and then subsequently forgot to take it with them in the chaos that followed... Perhaps?

  Esta folded her arms and tapped one of her pointer fingers against them. The theory seemed sound enough, but despite her annoyance with the failed Moonblood thief, she was far more worried about what Dai was doing. Shipping in barely alive people suggested sacrifices, but sacrifices for what?

  The mines. We'll need to check the mines.

  That, however, also had problems of its own. They had plenty of miners on the take, so if something dodgy was going on down there, at least one of them should have been able to see something by now and reported it.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Let's go, now. No more delays, Esta." Riddick said from Asta's shoulder as she was opening the nearby side door. Esta knew that any further delays were way too risky, and she'd seen enough anyway, so she followed her siblings outside into the alleyway.

  I don't want to leave my drum there, but that one Protector who was here earlier will notice right away if it disappears. If I hide it in the warehouse, his crew will go looking for it to see why someone moved it, and if I take it home, my lovely sister here will definitely steal it from me... It won't be an issue though, the drum has no markers, and the Protectors won't care about anything unrelated to the box-coffins. But I'll definitely need to find another place to hide it after all is said and done.

  Both Asta and Esta then jumped up onto the other warehouse's wall before kicking off back into warehouse-c's wall. They traversed like that toward the back of the warehouse district that was lined with a very tall wall. Leaving prints behind would be a very bad idea since the Protectorate had both the tech and abilities for tracking people, which meant that if they were thorough, they might even pick up on some of the prints on the walls. Parts of the walls were covered in snow or ice, so it was inevitable that they'd leave something behind, but the siblings didn't have the time required to fully erase any trace of their presence.

  The two of them reached the back wall and began scaling it until they reached the top. It was barely taller than the warehouses, so they couldn't see the street beyond unless they were near one of the alleyways.

  Too close... Brother was right to worry.

  As they passed by one of the alleys, Esta caught sight of several tall individuals with hoods up walking in warehouse-c's direction.

  They continued running along the wall until they reached the last warehouse, where they stopped because Riddick was tapping on Asta's shoulder.

  "Staying here, brother?" Asta said.

  "Yes. I'm going to keep an eye on those Protectors, and probably this district as a whole for a while. If you need me, I'll be buried in the snow at the end of this warehouse here, alright?"

  After Asta nodded, Riddick leapt off of her onto the nearby warehouse's roof, where he quickly scuttled over toward the other side.

  Esta watched as her brother's scales changed to a pure white color, making it hard for even her to keep track of him in the snow.

  The remaining two sisters then made their way home. On the way, Esta kept ruminating in her mind about how she was going to check the mines. All of the men on the take were technically her father's subordinates, so she wasn't allowed to give them orders without running it past him first.

  Sadly for her, that wasn't an option. Their father had been scheduled to return a few days ago, but they hadn't seen or heard from him yet, not that it was any real surprise to the siblings. It wasn't rare for their father not to keep them updated. He seldom told them anything after all. 'Figure it out yourself' was his motto.

  Riddick is our only other option then... Or Lundy? I'm sure I could come up with a halfway decent excuse for why our butler is down in the mines. Except no matter how good the excuse is, Dai won't buy it, which means he'll suspect we know something about whatever it is he's doing down there.

  And that was assuming it really did involve the mines. Although Esta was already pretty certain of that. Not one hundred percent, but she was easily near eighty percent convinced. If those boxes were moving through the factory, then that meant they were being shipped within the outpost, and that factory had plenty of belts that went straight down to different levels of the mine. On the flip side, if they were intended for storage in someone's home, then there'd be little to no reason to run them through the factory.

  Esta smiled and leapt around her sister so she could speed up. It had all been nothing but an intriguing mystery at first, but she was beginning to realize that the scope of what was happening was probably far deeper than the minor nonsense she had to deal with for her father normally. And it was also going to be the first time the siblings would be on their own. It was all far more exciting for her than she had expected.

  But first...

  The siblings landed on the roof of their mansion and began walking toward the door.

  Lundy needs a little re-education before we get started.

  "Wow, you weren't kidding. This place is a real dump!" The lady said before ripping her winter gear off and plopping down on Gavin's recliner, "And I love it! It reminds me of the home I grew up in."

  Yuji pulled his hooded jacket off, hanging it on the nearby rack. "What's your name, anyway? Mine is Yuji." He said as he pulled his boots off.

  "Hmm..." She leaned back into the couch and stared up at the ceiling in thought.

  "Fine, keep it a secret. I'll just refer to you as goldy or something."

  "No, it's not that. It's just that I've been called 'Seraph' or 'The Seraph' for four or five hundred years now. But lately, I really want to return to my original name. Sarah."

  Yuji was halfway to the cooler when he stopped and whipped around, "Four or five hundred?! Is that a joke?"

  Her eyes glazed over, "Believe whatever you want."

  "......"

  He continued to the cooler, retrieved two Udines, and then returned to the front of the trailer, sitting on the end of the couch next to where Sarah was.

  "Here." He said, holding out the Udine. Sarah looked over at the bottle and grabbed it out of his hand. With a quick twist she popped the top off and began drinking it down.

  "O-Oooh!! This is it! Oh my god, I can't believe I remembered what soda was like even after all these years... The Human mind is honestly amazing sometimes."

  While she was drinking, Yuji was thinking back to everything Sarah had said, and that's when he remembered something that both he and Zen had glazed over.

  "'Earth'. You said that was the last time you had one of these uh, 'Sodas', right?"

  "Yep! It was all we had to drink after everything went to hell since my Dad used to make Soda for us with his uh, what was it called... word that starts with c machine?" She continued, "I don't mind talking about my past. And honestly, it might be the only thing I'm interested in at this point, but for now, tell me why you invited the weird lady with demon wings you found in a box back to your home, little Yuji."

  "Um, well, it was mostly because you mentioned abilities, and even though you said yours were locked, you were still ready to fight Zen then and there."

  "That tells me nothing. Unless you fell in love with me or something, then I really don't understand what one thing has to do with the other."

  He dropped his head into his palms, "Ugh, see, the problem is that I realized halfway back to the trailer that you said you didn't know what 'Awakened' were, even though you have abilities. I've recently Awakened and was hoping to get some advice from you, but if you don't even know what it is..."

  "Oh yeah, your friend did ask me if I was an Awakened or a Rogue, right? I don't know what those are, but just tell me what happened to you, and maybe it'll be similar to something I've seen at some point in the past."

  Yuji finished the rest of his Udine in one last gulp, then set it on the ground. Sarah saw that and did the same before kicking the recliner back and lying down sideways on it, facing him.

  "Well, I was a normal person who only knew how to channel mana because of a previous job I had at a Crystal Factory, but a few days ago I woke up with a dead body at my feet that had its blood sucked out of it. From there I was able to confirm that I had 'Awakened', and that my two elements were Blood and Shadow."

  "Uhh... None of this is sounding familiar, and I've never even heard of 'Shadow' as an element before." She continued after a brief pause, "Focus on this Awakening thing for now. It sounds like everything else flows from there."

  Yuji nodded, "Alright, I'll tell you what I've picked up on through the television and briefly read in the Archives, but I don't know how accurate any of it is at this point." He tried to remember what the Grimoires looked like, but he couldn't even remember what show they were featured on. "I can't remember what they look like, but you need to read two Grimoires of specific elements, and that's the first catalyst that opens the door for you to become an Awakened. And past that, you can pray to specific Gods with an element you chose, which supposedly gives you abilities close to what that God uses."

  "Hmm~, this is a pretty unique way of getting someone to pick their two main elements, but what's the point? I could easily teach you a thing or two from each element without all this Grimoire mumbo jumbo." She shook her head, "What else? Is there a reason you worded it earlier as if you didn't remember draining the blood out of that person?"

  "Because I didn't! That's normal for when you finally 'Awaken', it's claimed. But I should also mention that I have no memory of ever reading Grimoires. That part you are supposed to remember, but I sure as hell don't recall ever reading anything of the sort. I was hoping to find something in my Soul World that would explain---"

  "WHOOOA, HANG ON!" She shot out of the chair and leaned down over Yuji, "... You have a Soul World? You have one? Someone who had never used abilities up until a few days ago?"

  "Is it really that surprising? The Archives did make it seem unlikely, but honestly, I'm having a hard time believing it's my Soul World. Nothing about it looks like my 'Perfect World'. If anything, it felt like a strangely designed hotel area inside of an Eldritch."

  Sarah quirked an eyebrow and stood up, "That doesn't sound right... Take me there with you."

  "I can do that??"

  "Yes. Now hurry up, let's do it in your room so your family doesn't interrupt us." She grabbed Yuji's hand and pulled him off the couch, but instead of moving to his room, she ended up looking back and forth between the four doors in the trailer before saying, "... Okay uh, which one's your room?"