Chapter 108: Mana Replenishment
This woman was named Alpha, and she was the leader of a group of ninja spies called the Shadow Phantoms!
Alpha and her team were known as the most notorious spies across hundreds of worlds, and there was no piece of information that they could not retrieve if they had enough time! But the group hadn’t always been the super-successful spies that they were today! A long time ago, the Shadow Phantoms had only been a group of slaves who were kept under magical oath by a corrupt king in a distant world!
The king had bought the Phantoms as child slaves from a travelling merchant, and once he learned that the Phantoms had a talent for espionage, he began using them as assassins to take out any competitors in his world and even those in worlds parallel to his own! It was an unfulfilling, bloody existence that the Phantoms hated, but they had no choice since the slave magic kept them loyal to their master no matter what!
It wasn’t until a wandering couple appeared in their world one day that their fates changed. Verati and Rita had gone to their world for a festival, and the King just so happened to see Rita in the crowd of people! The King felt an immediate admiration for the extraordinarily beautiful woman, and he demanded that the guards bring her to him! That had been his first mistake, and if that had been all, then Rita could’ve simply overlooked it since she didn’t care about the desires of fools. But the King’s second mistake was not being able to take no for an answer, and when the King openly demanded that Rita leave her ’pathetic partner’ and come be his wife instead, Rita decided that she had had enough!
Rita took the King’s head off with one rapid [Blood Blade] spell, and the King died so quickly that he didn’t even know what had happened! The festival immediately exploded in fear! The death of the king was such an unexpected event that no one knew what to do, and the civilians all began to run away while the guards rushed out of the castle in droves to confront Rita! Verati hadn’t been with Rita while all this was happening since he was busy buying some food for them, so you could only imagine his surprise when he returned with the food and saw his partner standing in the middle of thousands of dead guards with a headless king lying beside her.
That day, Verati and Rita had fought off more than a hundred thousand guards who were trying to kill them, and at the end of it all, they somehow ended up meeting with the Shadow Phantoms. Now that the King was dead, the Phantoms no longer had a master, and they were free, but the Phantoms had never known any life other than killing and bloodshed, so they prepared to attack Rita and Verati like the king would’ve wanted!
Rita was more than ready to kill all of them, but Verati had stopped her at the last moment, and for some reason he decided to spare their lives. Alpha did not know why, but Verati decided to take them under his wing, and he trained and helped them for the next year to help them grow as people.
This had all happened close to seven years ago when the Phantoms had only been young teenagers, and that one act of kindness allowed them to discover themselves and grow into the feared group known today as the Shadow Phantoms! Right now, there were ten Shadows in the Phantom group, and each and every one of them was a master in espionage, assassination, magical warfare, and information gathering! But no matter how large they got or how far their reputation spread, every single member of the Shadow Phantoms still had an unwavering loyalty towards the one man who gave them this new life. And so, when Percy had reached out to the Phantoms asking for help getting some information, Alpha immediately dropped everything she was doing, and she rushed to carry out Percy’s order!
Once Alpha entered the library, she looked around to make sure that there was no one else there before she pulled down her mask to reveal a youthful oval face! Alpha was extremely beautiful, with a small nose and full red lips that fit perfectly with her catlike grey eyes! Percy turned towards Alpha with a smile, and Alpha felt a blush growing on her cheeks as she quickly walked towards him and fell to one knee.
"Master Percy."
The dangerous aura around Alpha seemed to vanish immediately, and it was replaced with a deep adoration as she gazed up at her master. It had been close to two years since Alpha last saw Percy, and every cell in her body felt excited just from being so close to him! It was obvious that Alpha had desperately missed him!
Percy put his hand on Alpha’s head and ruffled it calmly.
"Hello, Alpha. How’ve you been?"
"I’ve been well, master. I’m honored to be in your presence once again."
Percy let out a calm sigh before shaking his head in amusement! Percy had been telling Alpha for multiple years now that she could relax around him, but for some reason, all the members of the Shadow Phantoms refused to ever relax when they were in front of him! They acted like he was some sort of god that they worshiped, and Percy couldn’t help but find it amusing sometimes! Percy told Alpha to come along as he continued walking around the library, and Alpha got to her feet and followed behind him.
"So, do you have any news?"
Percy said this while putting a book on the shelf, and Alpha nodded.
"Yes, master. We already began searching across the world for any sign of an evil cult, and we’ve been using one of the replicas of the Chronos Medallion lock to track down new time dilations. We haven’t found anything yet, but it shouldn’t be long before we track them down. But I actually came here regarding another matter."
Percy hummed while glancing back at Alpha for a moment, and he asked her what had happened.
"In the process of looking for the cult responsible for the time dilation, we ran into a few other minor cults. We simply placed trackers on them all since they didn’t pose any significant threats, but there was one cult that worried us a bit. It appeared they recently carried out a Full Moon ritual."
"A ritual? Did you see what it was for?"
"No, master. We arrived after the ritual had already concluded, so we couldn’t find out. But we kidnapped one of the members and extracted all the information we could from her. It turns out that ritual was a Mana Replenishment Ceremony. A demihuman cult was trying to manipulate the innate affinity of a young boy."
Percy immediately stopped what he had been doing, and he turned to face Alpha fully! Percy already knew what Mana Replenishment Ceremonies were because they had been very common a couple hundred years ago. Back when people were still only learning how to utilize magic properly in this world, there were many people who weren’t happy about the fact that they could not choose their affinities, and these people were usually displeased with the affinity that they would be born with! So this ceremony had been developed to help those people change their affinity.