A Crow's Repayment of Gratitude (1)
Senior really is desperate to recruit me!
Erso was deeply moved. Anyone in this line of work knew that resolving a month-long, extensive commission in a single day was completely out of the question. Yet Senior had declared he would wrap it up within twenty-four hours. It just proves how badly he wants me!
He was willing to clear out an entire commission in a day just to get Erso into his recruitment test. Erso’s runaway delusions were swelling by the second.
“Senior, while I appreciate the sentiment, I must decline,” Erso said, trying to sound dignified. “I took this commission myself, so I ought to see it through to the end.”
At moments like this, a man had to show some backbone. That way, Senior would think of him as someone who honored his professional word. However…
“No. Unacceptable. A month is far too long.” Ziel shut him down without missing a beat.
“Really, Senior, it’s fine. As a Crow, any job I accept must—”
“I don’t know what the job entails, but if it takes you a month, a single day is plenty for me.”
“……”
Ziel had gauged Erso’s capabilities with surgical accuracy.
Is he bragging, or is he insulting me? Erso let out a helpless sigh, torn between envy and wounded pride. “W-Well, Senior, as you know, client confidentiality is…”
“I know. You cannot divulge it. And you never did.”
As he spoke, something was already resting lightly in his fingers.
“Th-That’s—!”
It was the commission scroll. Erso had deliberately stashed it where no one could possibly spot it.
“H-How did you find that? Where did you even look?”
“It was just visible.”
There it was again. How could it have been just visible? An operative either kept a contract tucked securely inside their coat or hid it in the deepest, most concealed recess imaginable. Yet he claimed it had simply caught his eye. Just like that secret door back then.
“I see.” Ziel scanned the contents once before handing the parchment back to Erso.
Now that he’s read it, he’ll understand. I told him it wasn’t some walk in the park. Erso felt vindicated. The target was none other than Waters of Illusion, the private gallery belonging to the Blackwood family. The objective was to infiltrate its deepest sanctum and retrieve a specific document.
House Blackwood was renowned throughout high society for its obsessive collection of fine art. Furthermore…
They’re absolute bastards.
Underworld operatives rarely concerned themselves with petty notions of good and evil, but even by their lax standards, House Blackwood’s greed bordered on depravity. If they took a liking to a piece, they acquired it by any means necessary—no matter how filthy or bloody the methods. Naturally, they poured an astronomical fortune into security. It was an infiltration that would easily demand a month of painstaking preparation, not a measly day.
“A month, you say.”
Aha. It seemed Senior had finally reconsidered. Breaking into the Blackwood gallery was an agonizingly difficult prospect. Erso had only accepted the contract because the target was a sheet of paper; had it been a physical painting or a bulky sculpture, he would have declined on the spot. Even with a full month on the clock, he had privately worried the deadline was too tight.
“It really will take a month, won’t it, Senior?”
Ziel replied in his usual flat tone. “A day is plenty.”
“Pardon?” How could anyone pull this off in a single day? “A-A day?”
“No. My mistake.”
Erso breathed an inward sigh of relief. Right. There’s no way—
“Tonight will be more than enough.”
Whenever the topic of high art arose in the Valdrain Empire, House Blackwood was invariably named first. Their obsession lay in amassing every rare, breathtaking masterpiece the world had to offer. Curiously, rather than pursuing political office, the family had dedicated generations of accumulated wealth purely to the acquisition and display of fine arts. While many nobles sought their favor in hopes of leveraging that prestige, the family remained stubbornly fixated on their gallery alone.
Just looking at this place gives me the chills.
Erso crouched in the shadows near the perimeter. Even a passing glance revealed security so suffocating it made his skin prickle.
Can’t go through there… and entering from that side will definitely trip the alarms. There isn’t a single blind spot.
It was sealed so tight not even an ant could crawl past unnoticed. Housing so many irreplaceable treasures under one roof meant the compound was saturated with defensive magic tools. Rumor had it that House Blackwood even employed 5th-Circle mages solely to maintain the defensive arrays.
Utterly hopeless. How on earth were they supposed to breach this fortress? Erso had tagged along, but surely even Senior would have to admit—
“Senior?”
Where did he go?
“Wait, what?”
Erso was struck speechless. Ziel was already on the move. Before Erso had even realized it, the man had slipped across the open grounds and closed the distance to the gallery’s outer wall. Erso scurried after him in a frantic rush.
“S-Senior, approaching blindly like this is—”
“Do you see that small window up there?”
“Huh?”
Erso looked up. On the third floor sat a narrow casement window, barely wide enough for a slender human body to squeeze through. But what did that matter?
That’s impossible.
Setting the sheer height aside, the defensive mechanisms keyed to that aperture were notorious. The system constantly measured airflow to verify whether the frame was sealed, while magical sensors swept the surrounding masonry in continuous pulses. If an unfamiliar silhouette altered the profile of the wall, the alarms would trigger instantaneously. Even that scrap of intelligence had only been gleaned after dozens of infiltrators had paid for it with their lives.
“We’re going in through there,” Ziel said.
“How?”
“We just go in.”
“……”
“I will enter first. When I give the signal, leap immediately and follow.”
None of it made an ounce of sense. But rather than explaining, Ziel drew a small throwing dagger from his coat and flicked his wrist.
Thwip.
The blade struck the window latch with pinpoint accuracy, popping it open. What followed left Erso’s jaw hanging slack. Ziel produced a small, nondescript item and hurled it cleanly through the newly opened slit.
“Wait… what?”
The alarm remained silent. External air had rushed inward, so the sensor should have sounded immediately. Why hadn’t it?
“H-How did you do that?”
“I prevented the outside air from entering.”
Erso hadn’t said a single word about the airflow sensor, yet Ziel had deduced its presence and neutralized it on the spot. “How, though?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“……”
Ziel continued calmly, “As I said, when I give the signal, leap and enter through the window.”
Before Erso could formulate a reply, Ziel launched himself upward. The way he soared into the air, caught the narrow sill, and slipped inside was the pinnacle of weightless grace.
How does anyone move like that…?
The vertical leap was staggering enough, but Erso had never witnessed such uncanny flexibility. Squeezing an adult frame through a half-opened crack without once brushing the glass or frame defied anatomical logic.
He told me to wait for the signal.
Erso shook off his daze and focused every nerve. A moment later, a pale hand flashed through the gap.
Now!
Erso kicked off the ground and launched himself toward the third-floor window, barely managing to scrape his way through the gap and tumble onto the indoor floorboards.
“Haaah… whew.”
“Your flexibility is lacking,” Ziel observed flatly. “Strengthen the muscles supporting your spine and loosen your hip joints beforehand.”
Erso had already spent years strengthening his back and stretching his hips to their absolute limits. You’re the freak here, Senior, not me!
Click.
Ziel re-latched the window behind them. Erso pinched his arm, wondering if he had fallen into a bizarre dream.
We actually made it inside.
The commission had allotted an entire month. While that timeline accounted for surveillance, contingency planning, and failed attempts, the actual infiltration typically occurred in the final days of an operation. Yet Senior had reached the execution phase within hours of taking a look at the contract. He had bypassed the airflow ward and somehow eluded the magical scanning tools entirely.
He really is a monster beyond comprehension.
No klaxons wailed. The gallery’s interior remained steeped in profound silence. Only then did Erso take in their surroundings.
Incredible…
From the third-floor balustrade, the vast open atrium plunged downward, revealing the lavish exhibition floors of the second and first levels spread out beneath them.
“We are moving,” Ziel whispered. “From this point forward, do not take a step without my signal.”
“U-Understood.”
Reverence sprouted like wild weeds in Erso’s chest. He swore to himself then and there: he would join Senior’s organization no matter what. He would become one of its elite, soak up every scrap of knowledge Senior possessed, and become the greatest operative in the world—
“Now.”
Erso scrambled forward. To his untrained eye, the third-floor gallery looked mercifully devoid of intricate security devices, but…
“Halt.”
Erso froze mid-stride. “There’s nothing there, Senior.”
“The scent is subtly different.”
“The scent?”
Ziel pointed a finger toward the ceiling. “Look closely at the overhead pattern.”
Being an aristocratic exhibition hall, the ceiling was covered in elaborate, artistic relief panels.
“That pattern mimics the circuitry of a magic tool.”
“What? How could you possibly…”
“I just know.”
If it mimicked the internal structure of a magical circuit…
“The other ceiling panels are decorative facsimiles,” Ziel explained, “but that specific panel matches an active circuit configuration down to the millimeter.”
“Are you saying that ceiling tile is actually an active magic trap?”
“Yes.”
The panel hung directly above the route they would have walked. In plain terms, it was a lethal defense ward disguised as decorative molding.
Now I see it. Focusing his gaze, Erso finally caught the microscopic deviation in the relief carvings. But how had Senior spotted that in a pitch-black gallery with barely a sliver of ambient light? Hanging from the outer balustrade, the pair slipped past the trapped zone and descended toward the second floor.
The document is kept in the basement.
Their target lay locked inside an underground vault. That was the real crux of the mission: breach the perimeter, slip past layers of arcane wards, infiltrate the subterranean archive, crack the safe, and vanish without leaving a shred of evidence behind. There was zero room for error.
Yet Ziel advanced without a trace of hesitation.
“Halt. Three paces ahead of where you are standing, there is a pressure plate on the floor.”
“Move now. Keep your head low as you pass the statue on the left.”
“Tripwire. Step over it without brushing the fiber.”
Wards camouflaged as priceless sculptures; kinetic triggers buried beneath hardwood planks; invisible filaments strung across corridors that would summon guards at the slightest disturbance—Ziel identified and neutralized every single one. It was as if he held a master blueprint in his head. As if he had strolled through these halls yesterday.
The Blackwood gallery scrambles its security layout every single month, though.
Unless Ziel had literally surveyed the facility yesterday afternoon, he was discerning and circumventing complex security arrays on the fly through pure observation and instinct. It was staggering. Just where did this man’s abilities end? His keen vision, his split-second adaptability, and above all…
“Behind the statue. Now.”
His sheer intuition.
Clack, clack.
Moments after they pressed themselves into the shadow behind an ornate marble bust, a sentry marched past their hiding spot. Even after the patrolman disappeared around the corner, Ziel kept Erso pinned with a raised palm. Sure enough, the guard pivoted on his heel and retraced his steps, checking his blind spots before finally leaving for good. Only when the hallway fell dead silent did Ziel signal.
“Out. We proceed.”
Erso hurried after him, his mind racing. Could he ever have pulled this off alone? Not in a million years. A chilling realization dawned on him: was this commission truly achievable in a single month by ordinary means?
Sinking deeper into doubt, Erso followed Ziel past the second floor and down through the ground level until they reached the threshold of the subterranean corridor.
This is going to be rough.
At the far end of the hallway stood an armed guard. The most reliable security in the world was always a living, breathing sentry. Stationing a guard across a narrow choke point was a barrier no lockpick could bypass.
“We seek a detour,” Ziel murmured.
The cardinal rule of covert infiltration was to leave no trace. While neutralizing the sentry with a sleeper hold or poison needle was simple enough, a downed body was definitive proof of a breach.
What do we do now? This is a dead end. Erso surveyed the walls, finding nothing that resembled an alternative route. At least, not to his eyes.
To Ziel, however, the corridor looked entirely different.
Click.
Ziel inspected the wainscoting along the baseboard, glanced up at the ceiling, and popped off a decorative wooden panel with a deft pry of his fingers. Beneath it lay a narrow ventilation duct.
“A concealed vent.”
“How did you…”
“The air current is uneven,” Ziel replied casually. “Furthermore, people who commit what society calls ‘evil deeds’ generally have a fond preference for secret passages.”
Erso had grown too exhausted to act surprised anymore. Following Ziel into the ceiling, he crawled through the cramped metal shaft. Naturally, even the ventilation ducts weren't left undefended. Optical motion sensors were mounted at regular intervals—calibrated to ignore small rodents, but sensitive enough to catch anything larger.
Ziel dealt with the sensors by slapping a dollop of translucent paste over the lenses.
“What is that?” Erso whispered.
“Redwood sap, softened with body heat. When the mana pulses emitted by the device pass through the sap, their refraction index bends upward.”
In other words, the ward’s detection cone was warped toward the ceiling of the duct, leaving a blind space beneath it for them to crawl through safely.
“Proceed.”
After navigating the tight ductwork for several dozen yards, Ziel came to a halt. “Look below.”
Peering through the grate, Erso caught sight of the subterranean vault. They had arrived. It had taken barely twenty minutes since breaching the perimeter. Senior said a day would be plenty, but at this rate, we’ll be out of here in under an hour!
As Erso marveled at the sheer efficiency of it all, muffled voices drifted up from the room below.
Were there guards stationed inside the vault?
“So what’s the play?”
“We wait, obviously.”
“For a whole month?”
“Are you insane? Why would we sit in this damp cellar for a month? We slack off for two weeks, then post up here for the remaining two.”
“Two weeks down here is still miserable.”
Erso’s ears twitched. What were they talking about?
“Are you certain the bastard is coming?”
“Told you, the commission has a one-month window. Thieves always spend the first few weeks scouting and strike right near the deadline. That’s why we take our positions two weeks early.”
“Can’t we just wait until the final week?”
“Can’t risk it. If he shows up early, our heads are on the chopping block. We hold out here, wait for the alarm to trip when he breaches the vault, and box him in.”
“And then?”
“Signal the perimeter. The moment he bolts for the exit, our boys outside bag him clean.”
“Heh, poor bastard has no idea what’s coming.”
Erso went rigid as ice.
The commission… was an ambush?
Right on cue, Ziel murmured into the dark.
“It appears the contract you accepted was not an ordinary job, Crow.”
In that instant, a recent memory flashed through Erso’s mind with crystal clarity.
It was the memory of the day he had flatly turned down a commission from the head of the Southern Branch.