154 Chapter 154: Dealing with Spies

Chapter 154: Dealing with Spies

Staying at Zyl's the second time was even nicer than the first. It was also different, in a lot of ways.

He and Zyl didn't sleep in the same room yet, but they were a lot closer. A lot of time was just spent chatting between the two. Zyl, especially, needed it. He was still somewhat fragile, needing to stay in bed a lot, and occasionally, Mercury would help him walk with a little bit of <Telekinesis >.

The days went by quietly, one after another, as the two focused on just making a few happy memories, rather than the constant state of turmoil their lives were so often in. Leon would smile at the two of them occasionally, then give them more space.

If Mercury were to be asked about it, he'd call it really, really nice. It felt welcoming and warm. The mansion had a very comfortable temperature, despite the late winter time. They could occasionally see a little bit of snow fall on the city below the cliff, then melt away again under the next day's sun.

So, time drifted past, hour by hour, day by day. Mercury ate and played and talked, and Zyl got better. He stood outside more often, and after some time, the two of them even got to go on a walk and a little picnic in the nearby woods. Now that Berthorn had what he wanted, at least he didn't threaten the city anymore. Unbar was as peaceful as ever.

Mercury also took the time to genuinely relax. He didn't dive into ihn'ar too much, and spent the nights sleeping or playing with Whisperstar. Old Dreamweaver appeared once as well, but the ancient teacher also decided that perhaps some decompression was in order.

The nice days lasted for a bit of time, and some longer then. Until one night, as was always clear to happen, there was a small interference when Mercury went to enter his dream. He hardly noticed at first, simply brushing it off, not thinking too much of it. Until it happened again the next day.

And then again.

Despite his newfound patience, Mercury did note that the tugging got just slightly stronger each day. As though someone was slowly spinning a connection and making it a bit thicker. Maybe for most people, they wouldn't notice it with the incremental increase, but to Mercury it was plain as day.

But, given his last experience with this kind of thing, he chose not to enter that door at night. He simply stood, and stared at it.

The feeling was strange, spending time outside a dream at night. The darkness all around the doors seemed deep and terrifying, all-consuming even. Sometimes, he'd hear whispers of promises, temptations, or threats, like little nightmares. But he simply shielded his mind, and gazed at the door with ihn'ar.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he traced the thread back to where it led. Followed it along inch by inch, until he finally found the culprit. It was like a small light having lit up at the back of his mind, a tiny beacon in the dark. And he knew where the person who placed the mark was.

Then, once that was done, he stopped through to his own dream, and spent the rest of the time there. Mercury did wonder why these people had not given up on tracking him. They were sent by Berthorn, he knew that much, but why were they still trying a method of tracking he'd stopped before?

He shook his head. Maybe it was a different method and his mental stuff just worked against it as well. He decided it was unimportant.

- - -

The next day, Mercury set out to find who tracked him. It didn't take much effort, he just told Zyl that he wished to explore the city for a bit, then followed the beacon. He wanted to tell the dragon the truth, but there was a decent chance more people were watching them, so he decided to wait.

It was a very nice city, with clean streets, elevated sidewalks, and lots of greenery. Despite all that, it still had its fair share of little alleys and things one could use to watch someone.

Mercury didn't know much of the city, but he wasn't in a hurry. The mopaaw just kind of walked until he found his chance. It took a couple hours, but eventually, the spy made a mistake, not that they'd have known it was wrong.

The presence in Mercury's mind would shift occasionally, whenever the spy moved. It could go fast or slow, track him through crowds or cover massive distances in a moment. But after some time, it appeared in an alley. One that was a dead end.

Immediately, Mercury let out a satisfied hum as he split his mind and then hardened it two rijns, using them to essentially block the way out of the alley as he headed towards it.

There were no people he could see inside, yet the presence was quite clearly there. It stood stock still, hiding far in a corner.

Mercury smiled. "It's quite alright, come on out," he said, in the direction the presence indicated.

Nothing.

He stepped a little closer. "Now, now. I'm not gonna hurt you," he said.

Something told him that the spy didn't quite believe that.

"You're really not making this easy for me." He sighed a bit after he spoke and stepped even closer, slowly expanding his mana. He had gotten more practice and could do it somewhat decently now.

Slowly, he tapped against the surfaces with his more supernatural senses. He could feel the presence in his mind flicker for a moment, as though it was trying to move. "Ah, please don't do that. I'd really rather just find you now and talk, or else we'll have to do this the more annoying way. Dunno what you heard of me, but the last assassin sent after me didn't particularly like the annoying way."

There was a shiver there. Was he… really that fear inspiring? That was a strange thought. Maybe the whole Crimson Sun deal had changed something about his aura?

He chuckled to himself. "I think too much, sorry. Now, please, stop being so touchy and just come out?"

Suddenly, many things happened at once. The beacon in his awareness flitted towards his side, aiming for the exit to the alley, and he felt something pass through the tendrils of mana he'd expanded.

Before the moment could pass, Mercury already manifested his rijn. He didn't want to hurt the person too much, so he just put it up as a wall in front of them, and sure enough, there was quite a solid impact moments later, along with a high-pitch yelp.

"You okay there?" Mercury asked, still looking around for what impacted the barrier and finding nothing at all.

Once again things were silent.

"Look. You're here on a job and that's fine and dandy, and-" there was another impact against his rijn, just as heavy as the first one. Mercury sighed, then continued. "And I respect that. But you should really reconsider your decisions from here. I mean this very genuinely when I say that I'm trying to be nice."

Finally, a voice answered him. It was high and squeaky, and what he could only properly describe as mousey. "Doesn't- doesn't seem very nice to me!" the voice squeaked back at him.

Mercury had to hold back a chuckle. "Well, that's unfortunate, because this is as nice as I'm going to get. One more time, let's talk face to face?"

"I would really prefer to-" there was a pause, as Mercury's eyes narrowed a bit. Then silence hung in the air for a few moments. His rijn suddenly hovered a lot less passively. "Yeah, no, alright, face to face it is!"

And suddenly, just a few feet from Mercury, someone appeared. It looked a little like the air ripped apart, like cutting through a curtain of camouflage. And in front of Mercury stood what he could only describe as a tiny humanoid dragon.

It had a dragon-like head, with a bit of a square snout and sharp eyes. The creature had raptor-like feet, with three claws at the front and one in the back, which it shifted on uncomfortably. Its hands also sported claws, glistening forth from between grey scales.

The squeaky-voiced person was dressed in purple-blueish robes, and had steely eyes. Overall, they felt very… unremarkable to Mercury. He'd seen similar people in Unbar before, but never had one felt so unassuming. Which might be because of a Skill, actually, he realized.

"You've been watching me," the mopaaw noted.

"No!" Squeaky immediately denied.

"Yeah you did!"

"Did not!"

"Then why have you been following me?!"

"You have no proof!"

Mercury stood there, staring at the little bastard for a bit, before taking a deep breath, and letting out a long sigh. "Look," he said. "I know you work for Berthorn, I know he asked you to monitor me after I came back from what he deemed certain death. Has he told you what I did to all the assassins he sent after me?"

Squeaky hesitated. "N-no?" they said.

"Let me be very clear here, then." Mercury leaned in a little closer, an infinite expanse of stars dancing in his lilac eyes. "Not a single one of them lives."

Squeaky shivered.

"So. Once again, let me ask you some simple questions," Mercury said calmly, withdrawing and giving them some more space. "Have you been watching me?"

"Yes…" they admitted.

"Cool. What and who are you?"

"My name's L- Lic," they said, stammering a little. "I'm a dragonkin. Some people call us kobolds, those people are asshats."

"A dragonkin?"

"Yeah. We're often employed by full-blooded dragons. It's a little different from normal partial kin, since, ya know. Dragons aren't exactly… well. They don't exactly associate with other true kin. Which leaves us in an even crappier position than other kin, because all other kin already hate us, and the dragons view us as inferior. Also, being short always ends up crappy."

Wow. That was some seated species-specific baggage there. "I'm also a guy, by the way," he added.

Mercury just nodded at all that. "Well. I'm sorry to hear you have to go through that. But you are still spying on me." He flinched at that. "So uh. Would be, like, real cool if you did not do that. Does that make sense?"

"And get myself executed?"

"That's one hell of a severance package," Mercury mumbled. "Are you planning to continue watching me, then?"

"..."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. Come on. Let's get you a meal," Mercury said.

"What?"

"What what?"

"You want me to eat with you?" Lic asked, somewhat taken aback.

"You, uh, got any other plans?"

"... No."

- - -

"So, Zyl, this is Lic. Lic was spying on me, because silly Berthorn put him up to it. Say hi Lic!" Mercury explained.

Zyl stared at the dragonkin with much, much less empathy, his arms crossed and back straight. He looked a little like a chiselled statue. Mercury fought back a blush.

"H-hi…" Lic stammered.

"Mercury?"

"Yes?"

"Why did you bring a spy to my house?" Zyl asked pointedly.

"Well, you see. If I send him back, he gets executed, right? And I think that's not very cool. So I, uh, invited him."

"How would Berthorn know he was spying on you?" the dragon asked, his eyes narrowing.

"Oh, come on now. We both know there would never be just one spy. This is the same person that sent twenty assassins after me, Zyl."

"... I see your point."

"So," Mercury pushed Lic forward towards Zyl. "Are we giving him a chance to live or not?"

Zyl looked at Lic for a long time, his eyes hard. The dragonkin was forced to just stand there, looking at the floor, not daring to meet Zyl's gaze. Eventually, the taller man sighed, and ran a hand through his flame-red hair.

"Fine. Do you know anything about other spies, Lic?" he relented.

The dragonkin stared for a few moments, then swiftly shook his head.

Zyl sighed again. "Thoughts so. Sadly it seems Berthorn hasn't gotten that careless yet. A shame. Alright, you can eat here today, then you go home."

"I, uh," Lic fidgeted, "don't really got that."

"You don't have a home?" Mercury asked.

Lic shrugged. "It is what it is. My parents were killed, I racked up gambling debt, then was one day found in a gutter and picked up to be a servant by someone. Don't remember them, I was passed out drunk. Turned out I'm decent at being quiet, and got slowly put onto more important things. Listen in on conversations while refilling tea, that kinda deal. Things escalated from there." He sighed. "But no. No place to go back to. People like me gotta be expendable."

A long bit of silence hung in the room.

"Alright, let's get you eating, Lic," Zyl said, then swiftly turned around and walked off.

The dragonkin followed after a moment of hesitation, seemingly having given up on getting out of things. Maybe to him, dying with a meal in his stomach was better than dying on the streets.

Mercury looked at Lic's back for a while before he followed. Baggage was his weakness, after all. He mentally sighed to himself. This would be an exhausting situation to deal with.

- - -

Lic did not, in fact, leave the next day. He was instead put under a bit of surveillance to make sure no fishy messages were sent, and otherwise just… allowed to exist. They got meals, were allowed outside with some people accompanying them, and Mercury would occasionally chat with them.

Dealing with it felt stressful to him. He didn't want to just send Lic to the streets, but at the same time, he also didn't quite know if the dragonborn was a liability. Sure, he could figure it out by drawing him into the dream, but that would be exposing a major secret to a potential enemy, and if he was still an enemy, Mercury didn't want to kill him.

He sighed. Why did everything have to be such a pain? He just wanted to sit with his beautiful boyfriend and cuddle and chat and have nice dates and do all the lovely things couples did. And yet, he had to deal with spies and stuff. Who does that? Who sends spies after some cat?

He sighed again. Sometimes, he really wished the nice times just lasted longer. Maybe he could just live with being spied on? Did he really need revenge on Berthorn?

No, not technically, but at the same time, would that man hurt Zyl again? Yes, he probably would. Which was something Mercury could absolutely not tolerate. So he needed to do something against the spies, but they probably weren't exactly happy about their job either.

Well. There probably were some fanatics who did it passionately and wanted to ruin lives. But Lic wasn't like that, at least. He'd just been dealt a really shitty hand. At least, Berthorn didn't include some remote controlled self-destruction device.

Maybe they did have some sort of poison to kill themselves? Mercury shook his head.

The train of thoughts was going nowhere. He wasn't killing Lic. He also wasn't tolerating any more spies coming after him. How could he counteract it?

If he wanted to stop it, he'd need to catch all the spies at once. Wait. Did the spies counter check each other? Lic said they didn't know who the others were. Perhaps the others also only knew that there were others, but didn't know who?

Then… maybe. He smiled. What if he pulled them into the dream and convinced them one after another? There was no need for anyone to get hurt that way, and he could convince them politely to not tell their employer about it all. He knew that the dream had a relatively menacing effect, based on the bishop, so there was at least some sort of shot.

A plan slowly coalesced inside his mind.

That night, when he felt something coalescing on the edge of his mind, he grabbed the thread and yanked on it, pulling another mind into his dream. His palace, his home turf.

- - - - - -

Tray had been working for Berthorn for as long as they remembered. It had been… decades? Their memory was so hazy. They had long since forgotten who they were before, long forgotten the empathy they used to have for their victims.

They'd watched and loved and betrayed. Played the cards and played the players and played the masters of the game. They had been on an incredible number of jobs, and yet, they had never seen something like this.

Of course, they occasionally dreamt of their targets. They were their entire focus. Entering their lives unnoticed, then finding out more. In this case, that was not their task, it was to simply watch from the shadows, but they still obsessed over the target. They knew the mopaaw was soft-hearted. It didn't enjoy violence, and wished for people to simply be kind.

It also knew it was being watched, and had incredibly powerful mental defenses, far greater than they had any right to be, quite frankly. That was why it had taken them so long to coalesce a mark.

Tracking Skills were tricky. No two of them worked the same way. Tray used a very specifically tailored one that generally made their target less likely to notice them. Sort of an Antimemetic connection they could tie neatly between people, using specific tethers. For the mopaaw, they had chosen stamina, deeming it the weakpoint of the creature.

And yet. Here they were.

Tray dreamt sometimes. But it was never this vivid. In fact, it hardly felt like a dream, instead, they were more lucid than while awake. They found themselves staring upwards, lying flat on the ground. The sky was a patchwork of colours, blues and purples and oranges and crimson and pink.

There was grass along their back, but each stalk felt rigid and hostile. A few seemed to move, reaching out and latching onto their ankles, as though attempting to hold them down. When they jerked up, they got blinded by movement across the firmament. There were multiple celestial bodies there, ones they didn't bother to identify, but the one that caught their eye was moving.

A dark star flitted across the sky, seemingly following their every move with sinister curiosity.

Immediately, Tray felt each of their muscles go on high alarm.

"Huh, I was not expecting a lizardperson," a voice noted, followed by the clicking of a tongue.

Tray whipped around, gazing upon a strange, rocky construct of mana veins. "Right," the thing spoke into their mind, "you won't recognize me like this."

As they said so, Tray saw the creature be covered in a facsimile of veins and fur and flesh and blood. They shivered at the process, a strange, sinister twisting of what would be life. The thing's appearance was a lie - that was no mopaaw, that was a monster.

On the thing's fur, the stripes were even deeper here, gazing into an eldritch firmament dark enough to devour. Tray shivered again, stumbling back. "You," they whispered.

"Yes, me," their target replied, once again speaking into their thoughts, smiling a sinister smile full of sharp teeth.

They could feel their own fear spike. There were so many things that their senses told them, so many strange sensations, and at the same time, their mind was filled with the knowledge, the absolute certainty that this was real. Entirely real.

"How- Where is this?!" they hissed, taking another two steps back and reaching for their weapon. It wasn't there.

'Ah, this.' The creature's voice grew even more ephemeral. Its lips no longer moved, the words projecting directly into Tray's mind. 'You see, this isn't wholly a where. This is more of a… who. You're inside my dreams, just as all the others before you were.'

Something about the words was deeper than just the surface. Tray knew more than they should. They knew the creature was absolutely confident in its safety. They knew they were powerless here. Their claws and teeth would not leave a scratch on the thing in front of them.

Additionally, the creature's words spoke of a promise. One that they would return safely if they just cooperated. It made them tense even more, the thinly veiled threat of what would happen upon non-cooperation was not lost to them.

"What do you want, monster?" they asked, still slowly retreating, but the thing never became more distant, as though their steps never mattered. And every single step would land them on hard, sharp grass, scraping along their scales.

'I want your silence, spy,' the voice sounded in their head. This was a demand, underlined by some amount of regret. The creature was kind, surely, so this was regrettable to them. Tray froze. It was regretting this, because it thought it might force it to commit violence on them.

"Silence?" they asked. They were good at being silent.

'Speak of this to your master, and sadly, you will regret this.'

It wasn't so much a threat as a promise. Tray knew it was true. There was such a clear, distinct knowledge that the monster in the fur of a mopaaw was willing to impose heavy consequences; they shivered at it. It seemed to grow even more resolved as it felt their fear.

'You're afraid. Sorry about that, but I need to be genuinely certain. I'll repeat it. Be. Silent. About this. Understood?'

Tray managed a nod, a fearful one.

'Good. I know you've been watching me. Just like I knew Lic was watching me. You know Lic?'

They nodded again.

'Good. You were watching me under Bethorn's orders?'

A pause, then another nod.

'Good. Keep your reports normal. Keep your mark on me. Act as though nothing happened. Got it?'

Another nod.

'Good. Then, let me tell you one final thing. I don't want to hurt you. I want to be able to send you off safely, maybe have you retire. But for that to happen, either Zyl or Berthorn need to get a clear fucking loss, and only one of those is happening. I swear to you that I am not losing this battle.'

Tray fell on their ass as the voice sounded in their mind. There was an unbelievable, boiling anger underneath the surface there, a determination and fury to emerge victorious, as well as unshakable confidence that it would happen.

'When all of this is done, I will get a happily-ever-after. This much I promise you. So. Tell Berthorn things about me that are normal. I will tell you when to change this. Be off.'

Then, with no additional symphony or fanfare and no warning, Tray woke up, breathing heavily in the grass they laid on. Somehow, the small stalks still felt hostile to them, stabbing their back.

They swallowed and the saliva felt terribly dry. To be sure that it was over, they looked at the sky. It was no longer a patchwork, and only had the regular amount of moons.

Slowly, they breathed, calming their far too rapidly beating heart.

They had forgotten a lot of feelings during their work as a spy.

This proved that fear was not one of those.