Mage And Wolf
Chapter 281

Chapter 281: Chapter 281

Fortunately for me, the Shadowed Blade Sect have quite a few techniques at their disposal for infiltration, and thanks to Elder Po, I know most of them. Karl has an area sleep spell, so he will go to the barracks first while I take the catwalks. We don’t know where the four immortals will be when we arrive, so it’s really up to chance just how much risk of exposure we will face.

With a bit of luck, one or two will be off shift and sleeping, but things rarely go that smoothly for us. I’m personally hoping there’s one up on the walls, so I can eliminate him early before he can raise the alarm.

With the help of the locals, we manage to sneak within a kilometer of the compound and find a good hiding spot for Elder Song and Lelou. From that distance, they can reach us in under a minute if they’re an emergency, but it’s far enough away that they won’t get spotted, even if they’re not entirely masking their energy.

"Ready pup?" Karl teases me while casting some spells towards the camp.

"Good to go. Have you found any of their locations yet, Elder Song?" His senses are the strongest of anyone due to his cultivation, so he has been trying to detect the exact location of the Immortal Realm Guards. I can smell the place in the wind, but that doesn’t tell me who is who.

"Nothing yet; they’ve got some barrier up to hide them from detection. It’s not limiting the prisoners powers, but they might be impossible to identify from beyond the walls without alerting them to our presence."

That makes it extra fun. They might be able to detect us, but they’ll be shielded from our search until the last second. All we can do is watch and guess, taking out our first targets by appearance alone. Karl and I both activate Shadow Meld and sneak off into the woods to wait for it to get dark. It’s a good concealment ability, but against other immortals in broad daylight, it’s just not going to work.

As the sun fades from the sky, I watch the guards on the upper catwalks make their patrol circuits. They seem to be following a routine, the same path around the prison repeatedly, except for one man. Their uniforms are identical, dark blue cultivators’ robes, but he has the presence of someone in charge and doesn’t follow a set pattern. That makes him my first target of the night.

He’s slowly making his way towards the portion of the wall neatest to me, looking down into the compound. I’m just about to make my move when he starts shouting something and sending all the other guards running down the stairs. Karl didn’t get caught already, did he?

The perfect moment to strike is here, though. Everyone is distracted by whatever is going on, so I quickly fly up behind him, using a burst of cultivation energy to throw myself then letting it fade, so he’s not alerted by the energy used nearby. My dagger slides smoothly into the back of his skull, and I toss his body into a storage ring before heading towards the nearest guard station, a room with windows on all sides looking down into the yard.

Six of them ring the perimeter, not visible from the outside, each with a small desk and a single chair inside. I can see now what the commotion was about. A fight over food has broken out in the yard, and it is taking over half of the guards to quell it.

The first tower I reach has the windows open, and the guard is leaning forward out of one for a better view. A rookie mistake that no cultivator should make, and today it costs him his head. The head goes into my storage, while the body falls backward out of reach and sight. That shouldn’t be a problem. Soon, there will be no guards to find him.

The fight has ended as suddenly as it began, and the compound has gone eerily quiet. The only sounds that my Lycan hearing can pick up are the soft breathing of sleeping prisoners and the guards’ boots returning to the walls. They must have knocked the fighters out, or used a sleeping pill on them. One guard is coming for the station I’m at. If his pattern returns to normal, he’ll check in then reverse his walk back to the next building. I can’t wait for that to happen though, the body inside the room would raise too much of an alarm.

Sliding down under the mesh of the walkway, I prepare to take him out before he notices that the other nearby guards are dead. His footsteps are even and unhurried; he’s done this a hundred times before and prefers watching the ground level. His head turns to the door in front of him as he prepares to pull it open, and I silently swing up over the catwalk, breaking his neck and dragging him into the enclosed area of the guard station. I place him in the chair; head flopped back like he’s asleep. There’s still one more body to attract attention here though.

It’s not well lit inside the cramped room, so I stash the other body in my storage ring and hope that nobody notices the bloodstains on the floor and wall. At least not right away. You can see the guard in the chair through the windows, and it looks like he’s slacking, the perfect disguise. I’ve only got a half minute before the next guard gets here on his circuit, so I move out through the open side window, moving along the now isolated stretch of the walkway towards another guard position.

This guard hasn’t yet returned from breaking up the fight at ground level, so I hide inside the door and wait for him. I can feel that he’s one of the Immortals and relatively strong, but he’s become complacent in this duty with no real challenges. He steps in without even a cursory glance, letting me hit him with a paralyzing strike that renders him immobile long enough for me to crush his partially formed Divine Soul and ensure he doesn’t return from the dead.

The patrol has reached the tower I left the dead guard in now, knocking at the window, trying to wake him up discretely and not get anyone in trouble. He’s beginning to realize something is wrong, but he hasn’t quite figured out that his coworker is dead yet. Before he does, I hurl a throwing knife across the compound’s distance and into his heart, stopping him in his tracks and making his body fall from the catwalk.

He lands with a resounding crash on top of some old metal bins, and all hell breaks loose. Both among the guards and among the prisoners, who just realized that someone is killing their captors.