“You think you can fight the Elysium Order on your own? I don’t know what the two of you are, but you can’t seriously believe that running head on into one of their strongholds will turn out well.”
“Run in? Fight?” Eva shook her head. “Not in the slightest. I doubt I could fight a single nun. So long as they’re healthy, at least. No, my plan involves a great deal more subtlety and stealth. We have a map. We know roughly how many nuns are around. It is late at night; many nuns will be asleep.” Eva glanced at Arachne. “Shapeshifting into smaller forms won’t hurt our chances.”
“Sneaking in?” The vampire hummed. After a moment of thought, she turned a glare on Wayne. “That’s a far better plan than what we did last time. And, it is something that my talents will be useful for.”
“Great. Splendid. Can we please get a move on?”
Into the Cathedral
Three things made getting into the Elysium Cathedral much easier than it had any right to be.
The first was the map. Drawn by Nel both from memory and from scrying, it had possible routes to the relic chamber along with some annotations about which directions would have them encounter how much resistance. Most of it was guesswork and estimations. Nel had to remain behind to prepare the salt, so she couldn’t give real-time updates. The nuns could and would move around and invalidate most of her efforts.
But that was the second thing. For whatever reason, there were hardly any nuns about. A handful of guards was about all that they had to sneak by. They hadn’t passed the sleeping quarters, so it was entirely possible that the majority were asleep. Nel had mentioned that there should have been more guards, so Eva wasn’t about to question their luck.
Eva wanted to say that the third thing was her own blood sight. The ability to effectively see through walls, see which direction guards were facing, and to tell whether or not a guard was asleep at their post was an amazing asset on a job like this. Something that Eva wished she had figured out back when doing odd jobs with Devon.
However, while it helped, Eva had to begrudgingly give a nod to Serena and her unique abilities.
Two guards stood alert outside of the doorway leading to the basement of the cathedral.
There was another way inside, but they would have had to backtrack through a good portion of the building, negating much of their work so far. And, if this one was guarded, that door was likely guarded as well.
Turning to the others, Eva said, “Arachne can handle this.”
At hearing her name, the spider demon poked her head out from under Eva’s shirt.
They didn’t actually need to be silent. Something that Eva was beyond grateful for. Part of her reason for wanting to go in alone was that it was far easier to be stealthy with fewer people. Arachne had shrunk and latched onto Eva’s chest just to help reduce their total footprint. More people meant more noise, no exceptions.
Except when Zoe was part of the group. She just twisted her dagger and the air itself didn’t allow sound to pass beyond a small radius around their group. The vibrations froze in mid-air.
That hadn’t made Arachne unshrink. A group of people was already a larger visual target than a single person, and Arachne was larger than any one person in their group. Zoe’s air magic couldn’t hide them from sight.
“How?” Serena asked with a wide smile.
The tone of her voice wasn’t hostile and it was a fair question. It still sent Eva’s eye twitching. Not only was it a question that Eva had been about to answer on her own, but it was Serena asking.
She wasn’t certain that she liked the vampire. Every time she glanced in Serena’s direction, she found the vampire staring at her.
To Eva, it didn’t feel much like a friendly stare or even one of the curious stares that her classmates often gave her hands and eyes. It was of the hungry variety of stares. Like the vampire was just waiting for her to let her guard down so she could have a quick snack.
“Arachne climbs on the ceiling–no one ever looks up,” Eva said, glancing up herself.
If asked, she would say that she had glanced up as emphasis on her words. It was definitely not because she too never bothered to look up. While her blood sight worked in a sphere around her, there could be nonliving concerns on the ceiling.
Looking up only to find a trapped ceiling slowly descending to crush them would be
Bringing her eyes back down to Serena after finding nothing, Eva said, “Arachne then drops on their heads, bites them, injects venom, and then we walk past two recently deceased nuns.”
Zoe shifted, probably about to say something about killing people.
Serena beat her to the punch. “Buut, that will leave two dead nuns.”
“You care?”
