Chapter 91 Must’ve Been The Wind.

  Isaac walked behind in front of the guard down the hallway. At first glance it would seem counterintuitive for an invisible thief to walk in front of a patrolling guard, but that was why Isaac was doing it. He had no idea what the trigger conditions were for any of the wards and traps in the castle. For all he knew, there could be one with the trigger condition: ‘If a humanoid pocket of air is further than ten feet away from an individual, then activate on that pocket of air.’ If Isaac was in charge of making the traps, that was something that he would have set. Everyone knew that a thief was harder to catch than two so thieves and assassins would work alone whenever possible.

  Isaac was aware that if that specific trigger condition was used on any of the wards closer to the entrance than they would have already been activated. The fact that they hadn’t didn’t mean that the traps and wards were not going to get increasingly more complex the further he went. The more complicated the ward the more expensive it was after all. Who would want to waste a thirty thousand gold ward on a target that could be handled by a two thousand gold one? That was why Isaac’s mind was racing as he moved. The chance that he hadn’t thought of some kind of trigger condition, but one of the countless mages throughout the existence of the castle had, made him uneasy. The fact that he knew that there was a guard staring right at his back without realizing it didn’t make that feeling any less prominent.

  Isaac reached the last turn in the hallways, the final checkpoint before The Queen’s office and waited to cross the threshold until the guard did. He carefully slipped around the guard as he turned in place and gave the incoming guard a nod. It was then that Isaac noticed that the guards were checking each other over during that brief glance. They were looking for anything amiss just in case someone had tried to replace a guard. That was also why their visors were flipped up so they could see each other’s faces.

  Once the guard that Isaac had led to the second checkpoint was leaving, Isaac stopped moving entirely. He waited for the next guard to finish his twenty foot walk as the guard that he had just clung to walked further and further away. As Isaac waited, he noticed that there were four more guards, two at each of two doors, down that hallway. One of them was all the way at the end, Isaac assumed that it was the king’s. The other was half way down it and on his left. There was also the fact that the checkpoint that Isaac now found himself at was actually a three-way intersection, where one of the intersections was a set of stairs that had a pair of guards standing at the entrance.

  Isaac shook his head to clear it, he was going to have to just go. He couldn’t wait around for more and more people to go walking through where he was standing and hope that none of them tripped into him or felt that something was off. He slipped around the guard and then walked in front of him again down the hallway until he was only around six feet from the Queen’s Office. From there, Isaac jumped towards the wall and then sprang off of it towards the other one and then sprang off of that one so his hands could reach the rafters.

  The rafters were not very kind to Isaac, as many of them were loadbearing from the floor above them, but there was still enough to grab onto. His hands tried to dig into the heavy wooden beams but between his shadows and the strength of the beams they were not affected. What was affected however was his ability to pick his legs up to ensure that he was high enough for the guard to pass under him. Seeing as Isaac was hanging on the one beam that was not load bearing nearby, it meant that he had almost no ability to climb them. What he did have, however, was enough space to wedge himself with his boots and palms against the beam and the beam next to him. There, hanging in an ‘X’ formation between the two rafters, Isaac put the next part of his plan into action.

  Isaac focused while his muscles burned. He felt his connection to the shadows and focused his way down that connection, through each little crack between the stone above and the top of the wooden support beams. His focus zigged and zagged until he reached the shadows just above the door to the Queen’s Office. Now came the best part, as long as he was careful enough, as long as he did everything perfectly, then he could make it.

  Isaac’s plan was to shadow-step into the office without dropping his shadow-cloak. That wasn’t that hard, he did it quite often in fact, but he rarely did it while under extreme physical strain, while trying to leave as few shadows behind as possible, and while trying to move slowly and gently enough that none of the guards would notice. At least he had one thing going for him. When he was connecting his shadows over open and illuminated space, his shadows were still two dimensional. That meant that, at the current angles, as long as he waited for the patrolling guards to both be facing away from him, no one except the guards standing at the door could possibly notice, and it was going to be behind them.

  Isaac could feel himself sweating and had to hope that he wouldn’t drip sweat down into the floor. His muscles burned but they held out until the perfect moment when he was able to thread his focus down and into the office. He was on the ceiling but that was fine. Isaac only looked as far as to see if he would land on anything before he shadow-stepped. The rest of his preparations were already in order and his masterful control over his element really proved itself. When Isaac had shadow-stepped away, the silhouette that he left behind was so thin that it had faded away before a single guard was able to get a direct line of sight on it as it drifted down from the rafters.

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  Isaac fell to the ground, practically on his face, only barely managing to save himself from breaking his nose on the floor, before he pushed himself up to his feet. He had made it, he was inside The Queen’s office. Now was the time when he expected one of the hyperspacific trigger condition traps to go off. He waited with baited breath for a trap to try and lock onto his position. ‘One, two, thr-’ Isaac counted in his head and then all of a sudden he felt a magical spell activate. Isaac instinctively shadow-stepped forwards to stand on the other side of the Queen’s desk and grabbed her pen. A dispelling effect impacted the area where he had just been and then he felt another lock onto where he appeared. Their activations were slow but Isaac wasn’t sure why. He also didn’t have the time to contemplate it as slow still meant that he had somewhere between three and one second to move before he was going to be targeted by another one. Isaac shadow-stepped to the door. He had to get out of the room before another trap was triggered but he needed to make a connection to the shadows in the rafters if didn’t want to risk someone se-

  The door flew open in his face and Isaac barely managed to jump back in time. He was so prepared for another trap that the sudden physical entrance was incredibly unexpected. “Something’s wrong.” The guard who threw open the door told the other one. “Some of the wards are triggering, only the anti-div-pro ones.”

  “Thief.” The other guard said and grabbed a metal plate off of his belt. He held it up to his mouth as Isaac danced through them and out into the hallway. “Captain, Commander, we have a situation in the Queen’s office. A.D.P. wards have been triggered, no sign of what caused them to go off.”

  Isaac took off in a run towards the guards blocking the stairs to the second floor. He knew that he was not going to be able to shadow-step out the way that he had come in, at least not before his silhouette would be seen by at least two guards. Instead, he had to leave via a window or balcony door. Luckily, there was a balcony door on the second floor. Unless Isaac had gotten turned around, then it would only be around five more seconds of running in order to escape that way. The reason that he hadn’t gone in that way was because the balcony was within the line of sight of no less than three patrolling guards on the outside. That made connecting his shadows risky and any silhouettes that he would leave behind would get the alarm raised before he had even gotten properly into the building. It was a perfect exit however.

  Isaac slipped between the stairwell guards right as they moved to lock their spears to cover the doorway. He nearly tripped as he reached the first step but managed to save himself and sprinted up the stairs. As soon as he was out of line of sight from the first floor he shadow-stepped to the other side of the guards at the second floor entrance. He did so right as they too locked their spears together after they heard the guards on the first floor call up to do so. The guards looked concerned but alert, however, their own movement into their locked position generated enough of a breeze on their faces for them not to notice the small bit of wind that Isaac’s appearance generated.

  Isaac ran down the hallway and then stopped when he noticed a guard stalking towards him. Isaac was certain that the guard didn’t know that he was there but was instead on his way towards the commotion or maybe the guards at the stairs. Knowing that, Isaac slowly moved out of the way and let the guard pass before he continued on his way. At the end of the hallway, Isaac turned and was almost instantly greeted with another pair of guards and the exit to reach the balcony. Both guards had their spears locked but they kept looking back towards the door behind them. Apparently they did not like having their backs to an exterior door, not that Isaac blamed them. If there was an attack, then they would most definitely be blindsided by whatever came through the door. On the other hand, they really needed to pay attention to what was in front of them.

  The hallway that Isaac was in was an exterior one. The entirety of the exterior walls of the second floor were actually hallways as a defensive measure. It meant that any intruders would have to get through a highly patrolled area before they even got into a room. What it meant for Isaac was that he had not one by four tied open curtains on the wall to hide behind. They were close to the guards, which meant that they had a higher chance of seeing his silhouette but a lower chance of feeling or seeing his shadow connection to the outside. As for using a window like how Isaac had done with Izen all those months ago? That was out of the picture. Isaac was one hundred percent sure that every window in the entire castle was trapped to the high heavens and back. There was no way that a castle with royalty didn’t have windows that could only be opened with a specific magical key or something and any attempt to pass mana through or around them would cause an alarm to trigger.

  Now, Isaac did think about using a window anyway, especially now that they were on to him, but if his fears were right, then just trying to would get a Reality Bubble placed around him and the window, on both sides of the wall. Instead of going out the window, Isaac waited. He waited until the one guard that had a chance of noticing him turned the other way and then shadow-stepped to the other side of the balcony door.

  Isaac appeared outside and heard metal moving. Right behind him there was another pair of guards. ‘How many freaking guards do these people need?’ Isaac internally exclaimed.

  Isaac looked around for where to go from there but apparently one of the guards had felt something from his arrival. “Did you feel that?” He asked the other guard.

  “Just a breeze.” The second replied. “Look.” He gestured towards one of the large leafed plants as its leaf bobbed in the gentle night breeze on top of the mountain.

  “Hmm.” The first one grunted. “Yeah, it must’ve been the wind.”

  Isaac was instantly assaulted by a headache as the phrase tried to trigger some missing memory. All Isaac knew for certain was that he would have found it funny and that he really hated how unfair the timing of those migraines could be. Usually, Isaac could help his pounding head with liberal use of death flames, this was not one of those usual times. Isaac’s vision was suddenly less sharp and he felt like his balance was slightly off. ‘Damn it.’ He swore internally but continued towards the edge of the balcony.

  Isaac stopped at the edge of the balcony and looked around. Even with his vision only at around ninety percent, he could still see three guards, not counting the ones behind him, patrolling the walls and in a lookout tower facing inwards. He looked down over the balcony railing and saw a tiny moat with fresh water fish in it. It was not a moat for protection but was rather a part of the garden. That was fine. Isaac vaulted the railing and fell.