The closer they got to the untouched mud building, the more cautious their movements became. Deacon's hand signaled again, three fingers held up this time, then gestured toward the crooked alley between two smaller, collapsed mud houses. Jass nodded, her grip tightening slightly on her glaive.
Their target was near.
Bonehead slunk past her, holding a glass vial in each skeletal hand, one for knockout gas, another for a potion that caused temporary blindness on skin contact. Sam and Esmerelda, meanwhile, prepared another pair of Manabolts. However, while doing so, they kept their mana usage for Manabolt to a minimum, careful not to alert any patrolling cadets or hidden mages, or trigger any mana detection tools that might be nearby.
The alley they walked through led them out into a broken courtyard littered with mud, debris, and half-standing walls. In the middle of the space was the building, the only one that still looked whole, its dark surface still damp with water and faintly reflecting the night's scattered moonlight.
There hadn't been rain in the past week or so in any of the islands in the Isle of the Damned.
"Three outside," Deacon whispered under his breath. "Two by the door. One circling the perimeter."
They all knew what to do without needing to say it.
The patrolling cadet made the mistake of turning the corner without much care for his surroundings. As a result, Jass and Deacon stepped out from behind a broken support beam in unison. She struck low, sweeping his legs while Deacon's right fist struck true against his throat, and his left caught him by the collar and yanked him behind the broken support beam.
Seconds later, a muffled thud was heard before the cadet's head slammed against the wet grass, his consciousness fluttering before Jass pressed the knockout damp cloth to his face.
He went limp in less than two seconds flat.
The other two cadets who were posted like statues on either side of the door, weren't as easy. One of them shifted suddenly, the one on the left, turning toward a sudden thudding sound that sounded to come from the nearest collapsed building, where they saw one of their own disappear into, just as Bonehead hurled the vial of knockout gas in between the two of them. The glass shattered against the ground between them, and mist bloomed upward in a fast swirl.
The cadet on the left stumbled back, choking, only to be caught by a point-blank Manabolt to the back from Esmerelda that sent him flying into the dirt in an attempt for the cadet to not make the foundations of the untouched mud building shake and potentially awaken some of the more light-sleeping individuals within it.
The second cadet, one of the few female ones they'd seen in this place, tried to run, but Jass was already on her.
Jass cut her off at the side of the building with a sprint and a leaping kick that knocked the cadet clear off her feet. Her hand came down like a hammer on the back of the cadet's head, driving her head to the dirt before she could let out a shout after she'd overcome the knockout gas that seeped into her lungs. Another cloth soaked with Bonehead's brew found her face, and she didn't even manage to let out a groan.
They paused, breathing in silence for a beat.
"…That's all of them," Sam muttered, peeking around the building's corner. "No alarms. No backup."
"Deacon, this is the building, yeah?" Jass asked, crouched low again, her eyes scanning the threshold. The door looked old, sure, but untouched. Untouched in a way that made her skin crawl.
"Yeah," Deacon said, voice tense. "I saw him walk onto the top of this from the stairs inside. I assume Jeremiah lives in it because it's the only untouched building that also happens to be the largest mud building in this town. And because Jeremiah is always surrounded by other cadets from noble houses, I assume he's also in a party with them and they're staying together as a form of safety."
"…Then why is it not locked?" Esmerelda asked, motioning with her fingers. "There are wards surrounding the town, but none of them were anything other than Proximity, Sound Dampening, and Alert wards, nothing remotely dangerous."
"Not to mention, I'm not sensing any other wards or magical protections on this house," Sam finished, and Esmerelda nodded in confirmation.
"Maybe whoever is living inside it wants someone to walk in," Bonehead muttered, narrowing his eye sockets as he stared at the structure. "Maybe this whole place is some sort of trap, or something they were gonna set up for later? Like when someone clears the Floor and after the grace period granted to us for being below Floor Ten ends, other members of their noble houses and guilds they are a part of can use this place to search for Artifacts and other valuables on the isle."
"But that's not until a couple weeks from now, because no one would risk the Records you'd be able to gain while exploring a treasure hunt map and Floor to its fullest," Sam interjected.
Deacon looked at the door again, then back at his team. "Should we go in? I mean, everyone we knocked out is probably going to remember what happened to them, so, coming back is probably out of the question, so… I think we should just go in and see what it was that this whole place was for, be it a place for Jerimiah and the nobles around him to sleep in or a place they're using to store the treasure they found. Because either way, we'd find good loot inside it."
The door creaked open a lot louder than Deacon would've liked, as every inch of movement sounded ten times louder in the dead hush around them. He winced at each groan of the hinges but didn't stop.
He had one hand hovering near the hilt of his right short sword, and the other held out to keep pushing open the door as he entered the mud building. While he'd prefer not to kill any of his fellow cadets when they hadn't really done anything to him, if push came to shove, and he had to choose between the lives of his friends and his own, he wouldn't lose sleep over killing people he didn't really know.
Inside, the building was strangely pristine; the mud floors were smoothed out and packed, and walls reinforced with dried wood struts that definitely hadn't been there when the building was first erected.
As they pressed further in into the narrow hallway and into a much more open area within the building, they took notice of the stairwell curved off to the left, leading down into what looked like either a basement or a lower floor, and another hallway stretched forward, lined with hanging drapes that shimmered faintly, likely enchanted for light blocking or sound masking.
Probably a sleeping area, Deacon mused.
They all gave each other a look before they all headed toward the stairwell that curved to the left. With Deacon taking the lead, and Jass covering the rear of the group, but not without casting a glance over her shoulder at the hallway blocked by drapes.
As they reached the bottom of the stairs and entered the lower floor, they all immediately froze as they were able to hear soft giggling and breathy voices coming from the nearest drapery-covered room on their left.
They all turned to one another and rolled their eyes, except for Bonehead, who remained locked onto where the sound was originating from.
Carefully and cautiously making their way toward the room, Deacon and Jass poked their heads in to see two cadets making out with one another and showing no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Poking their heads back out, Deacon and Jass shrugged their heads and moved back to their group, with Jass's confused expression turning into a wry smile.
" Were they doing it?" Bonehead whispered with untold amounts of amusement. "Who was it? Anyone we know?"
Jass and Deacon let out a huff of defeat before Jass said, "It's Thu'la and Barni, and they're just making out."
"Oh, my spirits," Esmerelda exhaled, eyes wide, looking at Jass in shock. "They're finally getting together?"
"Fuck," Bonehead muttered under his breath. "I should have known that was the reason why she stood me up on graduation night."
"What?" Deacon asked in confusion, along with Sam. "You know them?"
"You don't?" Jass and Esmerelda asked, looking at them incredulously. "Those two have had it out for each other for the past two years, and everyone knew that they would end up getting together. It was the hottest topic in the academy."
Deacon and Sam gave each other a confused look, with Deacon saying, "Why?... I don't… can we just focus on robbing these people?"
They both gave him a look, before turning to each other and making a few facial gestures to each other before turning to him and saying, "Fine."
Moving past the room with the moaning couple, they continued to walk down the hallway, as they walked past a couple of the empty rooms, both Sam and Esmerelda simultaneously stopped and stared at one open room in particular.
"Guys," Sam whisper-shouted at the backs of Deacon, Jass, and Bonehead, who turned on their heels to look at the both of them with momentary panic at thinking that they were caught.
"This doorway is covered in wards," Esmerelda whispered to them, causing them to backtrack and look at the doorway in question.
Staring at it with the naked eye, like what they did, showed that it was a doorway leading into an empty mud room that held nothing but a couple of dead rats. But when concentrating their mana around the doorway, they were able to detect the tens of wards that covered it from head to toe.
"Woah," Deacon muttered as he stared at the wards that covered the doorway, as he spread his magical senses around the doorway. "I couldn't even detect that these were all there."
"How long would it take for you two to disable the wards?" Bonehead asked Sam and Esmerelda as he began rifling through his own spatial storage. "Cause if it's too long, I do have some thermite somewhere in here."
"Probably ten minutes or so, if we're thorough," Sam said while turning to face Esmerelda, who nodded in agreement. "Plus it'll be a lot quieter."
Jass took position near the edge of the door frame, glaive angled downward in one hand, eyes flicking between the hall behind them and the pair of magic users at work. While Deacon mirrored her across the way, standing just under the cantilevered staircase made out of stone, monitoring if someone or a group of someones would come down or if Thu'la and Barni finished up their personal time with each other before they finished.
After a few seconds of silence, Esmerelda glanced sideways at Jass, who was nearby. "Okay, but seriously, can we go back to Thu'la and Barni for a second?"
"Guys, I don't think that'll be a good idea," Sam muttered as he deactivated the Proximity ward on the doorway and moved onto the Anti-Scrying ward.
Ignoring him, Esmerelda continued whisper-gossiping with Jass as she worked on disabling one of the Alerting wards.
***
Ten long, tense minutes later, Sam let out a sigh of relief as he and Esmerelda finished disabling the last of the wards that blocked the doorway, which also banished the illusion that protected the room.
As they gestured for the team to gather by them, their jaws dropped as the illusion fell, revealing to them that the room was littered with gold, packs stuffed with treasure, spatial storage bags, and various other pieces of equipment that this large group had managed to collect within just over a week of constantly scavenging and gathering within the central island of the Isles of the Damned.
And in the center of the room was a large cartographic map with the title, Isle of the Damned, written on the top, with various circles marked in red and Xs.