Chapter 764: Surveillance

One of the earliest spells that the System had offered Jadis was, despite its inherent usefulness, an option that she had dismissed time and time again whenever a new level opened up a skill slot for her. Her first and most immediate reason for rejection had been the complete lack of use she had for the spell. At the time, her environment did not lend itself to the particular conditions that the magic required, and so it would have been a detrimental choice for her. The second, and almost as immediate, reason given was the simple fact that she didn’t have a big enough magic pool to use the spell back then. A single cast cost ten times her total reserves, and thus she never would have been able to use the spell even if the other conditions had been met. The third reason, which was the reason she had fallen back on once conditions changed and her magic reserves had grown large enough to accommodate, was an entirely subjective one.

She just didn’t like the spell.

The modestly named Looking Glass was, in simply terms, a sort of reverse illusion that would allow her to see through the reflective surface any object that was within five hundred yards. The limitations being that she had to be already aware of the object, and that said object could not be a living being. The effect would last for ten minutes at the cost of one hundred magic points.

Upon reflection, Jadis had severely underestimated just how powerful the spell that had been offered to her was, especially considering how early it had become available to her. Not necessarily valuable to her on a personal basis, but instead compared to what other classes who specialized in spy work and information gathering were given at such a low level. Considering Mirror Knight wasn’t something she or anyone else who knew about it would ever call an infiltration-style class, the Looking Glass spell was a magic that any spy with half a brain would have traded their lung and maybe a kidney to possess.

Certainly, when Maeve had found out about Looking Glass, she had been utterly incensed that such a tremendously valuable tool had been wasted on a “meathead” like Jadis.

Casting aside the unnecessary aspersions against her intelligence, Jadis had to admit that her logic for disregarding the spell wasn’t particularly sound. Sure, she had a moral objection to the idea of spying on other people. She wouldn’t want it done to her, so she was completely disinterested in doing it to others. Jadis had since come to terms with the fact that she needed a good spymaster who could handle such nefarious deeds due to her unique position in life, but she saw those actions as more defensive than anything else. And besides, she had a beautiful, loving, sometimes crazy, shapeshifting wife who was more than happy to do get metaphorically dirty on her behalf. Therefore, using something like Looking Glass herself was completely unnecessary.

Except that it wasn’t really unnecessary, was it?

It was wrong to expect Maeve to do all the morally questionable work for her, even if she was thrilled to do so. Jadis wasn’t going to pretend to be some kind of paragon of virtue while she had others work in the shadows for her. If she was going to be playing those sorts of games, she vowed that she should know about everything going on, what was at stake, and all of the costs, otherwise she should not allow such things to proceed at all. Therefore, shying away from a spell that would be hugely useful for delicate information gathering was, frankly put, stupid.

Of course, the spell had more uses than morally questionable ones. She could cast Looking Glass for scouting purposes, to help her stand watch, or even in battle, depending on the circumstances. Jadis had to wonder how many of those sight-obfuscating spells that had been cast on her in the past might have been bypassed if she had had access to Looking Glass and had carried a hand mirror around in one of her many pockets. Perhaps none; Jadis wasn’t certain of how such spells would interact with each other. Regardless, the point stood that Jadis had been denying a powerful spell for a long time that she was long past the point of having any reasonable objections to obtaining.

Therefore, during the latest round of level ups, she had bitten the non-existent bullet. Looking Glass had been added to her ever-growing arsenal and, having since cast the spell a few times for purposes of practice and experimentation, Jadis had to admit the honest truth: she absolutely hated the spell.

“I feel like a pervert,” Dys complained as she scrolled through the illusory images before her.

“You are a pervert,” Bridget bluntly pointed out.

“Not that kind,” she sighed. “I mean then creepy kind. The ‘gets put on a government list’ kind of pervert, not the ‘has sexy times with sexy ladies’ sort.”

“I don’t think Thea would appreciate that assessment,” Sorcha commented dryly.

“Thea’s the sexy pervert type! Don’t you dare compare her to the trenchcoat-wearing sex offender type!”

“What’s a trenchcoat and why does it sound like a mistake?”

“Some of them actually look pretty cool, depending on the wearer—that’s besides the point! I’m just saying, I hate this.”

“Sorry, can’t sympathize,” Bridget shrugged. “Maybe if I could see what you were seeing, I would. But I can’t. So, tough apples, love.”

“I don’t have apples,” Dys countered. “You do. At least, you did last night.”

The dark flush that spread across the orc’s cheeks didn’t stop her from rapping her knuckles against her armored groin.

“No apple or tree today, thank you very much.”

A terrible shame, Jadis mentally noted. While Aila often kept her cock on for weeks at a time, some of her other girls only brought their stalks out on rare occasions. Jadis supposed it was just a matter of when the fancy struck them, but she really enjoyed playing with their equipment and it had been almost two months since Bridget had last brandished her viridian club. Other than the previous night, naturally. She’d have to ask her to go with the pole again soon. Sabina and Meli, too, since it had been a while for both of them as well. And Sev had only ever used her cock the one time despite having had so much fun with it. That definitely was a situation that had to change.

Shaking her head to clear her mind from thoughts of beautiful lovers and their lewd appendages, Dys focused on the illusion before her.

Just as Bridget had said, she was unable to see the display that Dys could. In point of truth, no one could see the display except for Jadis, as that was the nature of the Looking Glass spell. Every mirror-like surface that Jadis was aware of within range provided her with a sort of live feed. It wasn’t as though she was seeing everything in her mind the way she did with her own eyes. Instead, the spell acted in a way that was almost like CCTV. Illusory copies of the surfaces appeared to float in the air before her providing windows to their real-world counterparts. Jadis could sift through the different images, moving one to the fore while the others fell away, sort of like swiping through videos on a tablet device. In fact, swiping was exactly what Jadis was doing. She could do everything mentally, but the hand motions helped her focus. To everyone else it looked like she was just standing around making weird gestures, but for her, it really was like interacting with a sort of magical surveillance app.

Whether that was because of how the System designed the spell or if it was due to her own technically alien presence on Oros, Jadis had no clue.

“You know, this is kind of like Eir’s Rose Tinted Memories,” Sorcha commented with her head cocked to one side. “She just stands around poking at the air for a while, too. Only, something happens after a few minutes for her.”

“Something is happening,” Dys growled at the goblin’s snark. “Just… not what we’re looking for, yet.”

“Well, Ned better show up soon,” Bridget piled on, “because give it another ten minutes and my eyeballs are going to start to float.”

Dys readily sympathized with Bridget’s complaint but decided to get her own dig in.

“If you still had your cock on, it’d be a lot easier to pee in that jar, or—”

“Piss off,” Bridget laughed while stifling her volume.

“You’re the one who’s about to piss off,” Sorcha mumbled with a crooked smile.

“Bloody green pea.”

“Green pee? That’s not healthy.”

“Pea! Not pee!”

“Not healthy if it’s bloody, either.”

“Shut up!”

Dys continued to banter with her two lovers while making sure to keep an eye on her section of the mirror images. There really wasn’t much else for them to do, as they had been cooped up inside of the cramped, featureless basement for hours. That was the problem with stake outs. Movies made them seem exciting or at least tense. In truth, they were a whole lot of boring. At least Jadis had the advantage of having company.

The images Dys was focused on were of a modestly furnished living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a study. The bedrooms, the attic space, and various points on the exterior of the decently sized city dwelling were being watched by her other bodies. A convenient interaction between her mirrored bodies and the Looking Glass spell was that Jadis could use her extra selves to view different images at the same time, giving her far more coverage than a singular entity would be able to handle. Since proximity was required, and stealth was paramount, Jadis three selves had been divided up into separate locations, accompanied by a few companions whose skills would potentially prove useful in their sting operation.

The home Jadis was spying on belonged to a merchant named Eileen Straus, a human woman who was a business connection of Duchess Umberlund. She had distant ties to the Umberlund family on her mother’s side, from what Maeve had recounted to Jadis, but those sorts of background details didn’t matter much to her. What did matter to Jadis was the fact that Mrs. Straus was a merchant who dealt mainly in the trade of valuable minerals, including eleria, and that her business would soon be sending a consignment of the magic crystal to the northern border. Only, Mrs. Straus had no idea that her seal and signature were attached to said consignment, nor did she have any knowledge of the forged documents that were going to be placed inside of her study desk sometime that evening while she was away on business outside of the capital.

That was to say, if Ned Aubert ever showed the fuck up.

“Someone’s coming down the back alley,” Dys informed Bridget and Sorcha. “Male, elf, hooded.”

The image she was relaying was not seen in her Looking Glass images, but the ones that Jay was monitoring. And, just like all the other times she had let Bridget and Sorcha know what was going on outside, the pedestrian did not match Aubert’s description. Not that Jadis expected any of them would. If she were a spy who was about to break into a person’s home, she wouldn’t be doing so looking like herself, and she doubted that Ned was any different.

“Passing overhead,” Sorcha whispered, her long ears twitching as she stared up at the hatch that would lead to the alley above them.

“He’s leaving,” Dys shook her head. “Around the corner and… gone.”

“Maeve said this fucker was going to do this tonight, right?” Bridget scowled in complaint.

“He’ll be here,” Dys murmured, her confidence in Maeve’s information gathering unwavering. “We just have to be—wait.”

As the two women with her went still, Dys squinted her eyes at the illusion that showed her the inside of Straus’ study. The mirror hanging on the wall wasn’t located so that it could see the whole room, but it was in the right position that she had an easy view of the large desk with many neatly piled papers and a locked ledger placed on top. That back wall position also gave her a partial view of the locked window that overlooked the back alley.

The locked window that was slowly opening.

Confirming from her Jay self’s perspective as well, Jadis could see that the window, which Maeve had personally confirmed had been locked earlier that morning, was ever so slowly inching upward, as though an invisible hand was acting upon it. Which, for all Jadis knew, was exactly the case. There was no one at the window. No one in the alley, either. The study was on the second floor of the building, so even if there had been someone, they would have had to have been hanging on the wall to reach the window. Again, a distinct possibility, even without magic.

“The study window is being opened. No one is visible. And… I just asked Maeve to take a look, and she can’t see the window moving,” Dys relayed to the others with a frown. “There’s an illusion in place.”

That was interesting. Either Jadis’ Resilience had grown high enough that she could see through the illusion being used to cover up the window’s movement, or her Looking Glass ability was having some effect. She wanted to ask Thea to take a look, to see if her much higher Resilience would let her see through the falsehood, but the shieldmaiden was stationed on the front of the building with Syd and if she moved, it could spoil their trap.

“I can’t see anyone inside,” Dys continued to describe what she could see to Bridget and Sorcha, “but the desk drawer just opened. Papers moved… and… yup, a document just appeared out of nowhere and was placed inside the drawer. Drawer is now closed… and… window is being lowered…”

There were a lot of possibilities for how Ned Aubert was doing his dirty deeds. In fact, it was entirely possible that he used many different methods and varied them depending on the job. Maeve had knowledge of who he was, but that didn’t mean that she knew all of his trade secrets. Knowing that he was going to be planting the forged documents had been enough, though, for Maeve to guess at the most likely of the various methods that he might use to accomplish his goal that day. Bribery of domestic servants was one. Highly skilled stealth infiltration was another. The use of magical illusions was a third and, as it turned out, the means that had been apparently utilized.

“Now!” Dys ordered as she kept her attention on the images.

With a roar of burning flames, Bridget’s body erupted into blue fire. Moving with supernatural speed, she burst through the cellar door that she had been waiting next to and, with her flail raised high, lit up the whole of the dark alley with her bright light. At the same time, Sorcha, who was being carried under Bridget’s offhand arm, pointed a wand at the blank wall of the house, right next to the partially closed window.

“Freeze!”

For a moment, there was no sound other than Bridget’s flames. Then, a muted thump reached their ears as something not visible to any of their eyes impacted cobblestone alleyway. As Jadis watched from her perspectives, Bridget quickly slammed her flail where she heard the thump. It took a second try, but that second hit struck a raised object rather than the ground and, in that same instant, her azure fire wreathed the outline of a man locked in a paralyzed shape.

Jadis and her companions had come up with all sorts of plans, counterplans, and contingencies for how they would catch the man who had been spying on them for months. Jadis was positioned in multiple areas, her companions with her and ready to cast any number of spells or react to any number of sneaky escape attempts. Meli had even woven webs in her spider form over at least twelve different locations in the sewers, just in case. And yet, for perhaps the first time in a long time, Jadis’ primary plan had worked without issue.

Stepping up out of the cellar, Dys took hold of the paralyzed invisible man, making sure that she had a solid grip not on his clothes, but on bare neck and both wrists, just in case. When Bridget’s flames faded, so too did the illusion hiding the spy, revealing a redheaded human man with a splattering of freckles on his cheeks and decidedly unhappy look in his brown eyes.

“Ned Aubert, I presume?” Dys asked with a not particularly kind smile.

“I’m fucked, aren’t I?” Ned gurgled out around Dys’ grip.

“Yup.”