Michael and Gaya both transformed themselves into their other personas.
"Take care of them" Gaya ordered Azazel before disappearing from the room along with Michael.
The next moment, they appeared in a dark alley behind some houses.
Unlike Royal land, the river town didn't have lamp posts to brightly light the streets. Only the rich cities could afford Vedrite stones lamps. The small towns like river towns used torches instead of lamps.
"He should be somewhere near," Gaya said while Michael willed the system to give him the drones. Soon, five drones materialized above their heads. He sent the drones in all directions. After deploying the drones, both of them ascended to the sky. Although the roofs and buildings prevented them from clearly seeing the dark alleys, one of the drones picked a figure painting the wall. The figure gawked around to see if anyone's watching him.
The figure also looked at the sky vigilantly yet the darkness covered the drone. Since Michael kept a safe distance between the figure and the drone, the faint motor sound didn't reach the figure's ears.
"Found him" Michael grabbed Gaya's hands before activating the lightning dash towards the figure's direction. The figure was halfway done painting the letter 'L' when Michael appeared directly above him. The bow of Legolas appeared in Gaya's hands. She knocked an arrow dipped with Michael's paralyzing poison.
Noticing the figure's cultivation level, Michael sighed in relief as the figure was at Core Formation stage level 3. Compared to Michael, the figure was 5 levels below him, 6 levels below Gaya. In addition to the Fusion stage bone, the 40% boost given to Gaya by the system increased her cultivation speed by several times. Even without any boost, she had a monstrous cultivation speed, with Michael's boost, she became a heaven-defying talent. With her speed, she would never fall back from Michael's cultivation speed.
Whoosh!
The arrow soared through the air as a bullet fired from a gun. The figure barely had time to react before the arrow nailed his leg to the ground.
"Ah!"
The figure squealed in pain. The voice however, was not of a man's but a woman's. The paralyzing poison immediately spread through the woman's body, making even lifting her pinky impossible. Michael landed before the figure. She was covered in full black clothes from top to bottom.
"It's a woman" Gaya's brows arched up behind her mask.
"Let's have a chat in the forest nearby. I heard the forest at this time is particularly creepy and dark, just like we like it" Gaya chuckled evilly. Without wasting any more time, Michael paid the required badass points to teleport the three of them to the forest surrounding the river town.
The possibility of this figure might belong to the Guardians prevented him from taking her back to his secret lair. He was prepared to do any means necessary to extract the reason why she is painting his symbol all around the kingdom. It was extremely risky as the church and the guardians were scouring the kingdom as they speak, to find Lucifer.
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The forest surrounding the river town was huge, misty, and verdant. Its canopy was contested by maple, larch, and holly; still, plenty of moonlight passed through their crowns for a hodgepodge of sprouts to burst from the soft, rich soils below.
Coiling branches hung from the occasional tree, and a mishmash of flowers, which grew in abundance, enhanced the otherwise green forest floor. A variety of wild sounds, most of which were birds and vermin, filled the air and formed a chaotic orchestra with the sounds of several woodpeckers in the distance.
The moment Michael appeared with the figure and Gaya, he took out a bunch of Spyders from his space ring. The Spyders crawled through the forest ground towards the figure. Just imagining creepy spiders crawling into her clothes made Gaya grimace. Gaya slowly squatted beside the woman who was lying on the ground motionlessly. Conjuring an orb of fire for light, Michael patiently waited to see the woman's face.
The moment Gaya pulled off the cloak covering the figure's face, both Michael and Gaya were stunned.
"Sadie" the girl behind the mask was none other than the girl Michael first made love to in this world, Sadie Kaplan of SilverMoon. Thanks to the mask they were wearing, Sadie couldn't see their reactions. If Michael had an expression of shock, Gaya had a mixture of shock and anger. In this whole world, she hated four-woman the most, her stepmom, Xanali, Sadie, and finally Lailah. Her reason for hating the last two was that both of them slept with Michael. Of course, she knew Michael was forced to spirit walk with Lailah yet she hated Lailah for putting Michael in danger. Although Michael slept with Sadie way before she confessed her feelings for him, she still hated Sadie.
"Let's kill this bitch and be done with it" She unsheathed her dagger, placing it on Sadie's throat.
"I want to hear Sadie Kaplan's reasons for summoning us" Michael also squatted beside Sadie. With a flick of his wrist, he took two potions from the system storage, healing potion, and the antidote for the paralyzing poison.
Without letting Saide see the potion, he poured the potion into her wound. Then he injected the antidote into her left arm. Gradually Sadie began to move her limbs.
"Lu...Lu...Luci...Lucifer" Gaya tried to calm her anger. After what happened last time when she lost control, she was working on anger management.
Sadie picked herself up with difficulty. The usual playful smile or the glistening of her skin was nowhere to be found. Compared to the last time Michael saw her, she had lost several pounds to the point Michael could see her neck and collar bones. Her eyes lost their shine, they looked dull like she was crying continuously for several days.
Michael really started to wonder what pushed Sadie to this state.
"I...want to...trade...my soul" Sadie stammered. Her voice had a mixture of overwhelming sadness, anger, and fear.
"Trade your soul? For what?"
The concept of devil in this world didn't vary too much from the concept of devil in the earth. For instance, people in both worlds believed the devil would take a soul in return for one's desire.
"For my sisters" her eyes watered up. She went to her knees, begging Michael with her hands clenched against her chest.
"What happened to your sisters?" Michael asked.
While tears were flowing down from her eyes, Sadie retrieved a stack of posters from her space ring. She reached out to give the posters to Michael.
Gaya took the posters from her hand carefully. She could see a painting of a beautiful girl with her basic details like name, age, cultivation level, address, and last known location. Gaya flipped the poster stack to see another girl with all those details. Each poster had a face and detail of a young girl.
Gaya handed over the posters to Michael as he did the same, going through all the posters one by one. It seemed all the girls were missing. There were at least fifty posters in the stack.
"They are all missing. It's my fault...all of them...gone...my fault..." She fell belly flat to the ground. Her cry of sorrow seemed legitimate. Seeing her cry like this made even Gaya feel pity for her.
Since Michael knew the Guardians acted as the major law organization, he asked the obvious question first although he knew the answer.
"If they are all missing, why didn't you go to the Guardians?"
"And why isn't your SilverMoon looking into this?" asked Gaya.
"The Guardians humph" the sorrow in Sadie's eyes transformed into a fit of volcanic anger. Her eyes became eye-shot in a blink of an eye.
"Tell us the full story," Michael asked. Although this was not a situation he should be happy for, his mind quickly formulated a plan to increase his power using this unfortunate situation. If he could somehow find the missing girls, he would be able to get Sadie to his side. In the future when Sadie became the SilverMoon sect head, she would work for him. Thus, the SilverMoon would become another major power under him.
While tears gushed out of the eyes like a flood out of the floodgates, she began to tell them the story of these missing girls.
*********************************
Sadie's story was simple yet Michael could sense a tragedy in her story. The short version of the story was the SilverMoon used to send girls to noble parties, galas, and rich people gatherings to accompany rich, noblemen. Since the girls were extremely beautiful and trained to sway the men, many noblemen desired for these girls to be their partners even for one night. The SilverMoon girls would make these men happy while getting crucial information from them. Knowledge was power and SilverMoon thrived on gathering knowledge.
Noblemen asked, they SilverMoon sent girls, they came back with the information. That was the cycle until recently when something began to change. The girls Sadie sent began to go missing. Since it was not unlikely for SilverMoon girls to run away, at first, Sadie thought they ran away. Soon afterward, more and more girls began to go missing, including little girls who didn't even come of age. Of course, the SilverMoon never sent little girls to the noblemen yet they began to go missing while going to another city or traveling with their senior sisters.
Michael dealt with human trafficking back on earth and this looked like one.
As for Michael's question about going to Guardians, the answer was she went to Guardians, filed a complaint, and never heard from them again.No matter how many times she dropped by at the guild, they just gave her some half-assed answers. The sect was worse, according to Sadie, these girls just ran away. The sect was too busy with other things to go search for the girls.
Out of desperation and guilt, she began to look for the person who said he came to punish the evildoers, Lucifer. Considering she investigated a few murders of Lucifer at the beginning, she knew about his signature. So she painted the symbol all around the kingdom to get his attention.
Playing hero was not Michael's intention. If Sadie was not in the line to become the next head of SilverMoon, he would have dropped the posters in the hands of Noah as he loved to be the good samaritan. Noah was competent so Michael knew he would have eventually found these girls.. However, Sadie was in line to be the next head, which made Michael take this task into his own hands.