Amazon Apocalypse 7: Chapter 17

I waited impatiently for the Mucaria mystic realm to open up. If Adrian was missing, I had to search for him. But first I needed to find Bridget. She'd know where to start the search.

When the mystic realm opened up, I was the first inside and rushed to her apartment. The teleportation arrays and trains to get around the mystic realm would take too long, so I just flew.

I opened the door but found her gone. The stove had half-cooked food on it, but was cool to the touch. Bridget liked her kitchen clean and would never willingly leave it dirty. She would only leave it like this if she left in a hurry.

If I had formed a party with her earlier, I would have been able to contact her through the party interface. But right now I had no idea where she was.

I looked around the apartment hoping some clue to either her location or Adrian's would jump out at me, but there was nothing. I should have asked that wizard at the front gates where Bridget had been seen. I'd just assumed I'd find her at her apartment, but that was foolish. If Adrian was missing, she'd be looking for him.

I went to Doomblade's Armory, hoping they'd heard from her. Unfortunately, all the employees were gone and the store was marked closed. I suspected Bridget had already recruited every employee we kept on staff to help with her search. I didn't know enough of them by name and face to spot them on the street, so I might have passed one of them without even realizing it.

My next stop was the Obelisk. There were posters there frequently, and I hoped to find one Bridget left searching for Adrian. Unfortunately the chaos outside meant there were already thousands of such posts. If Bridget left one, it was already buried.

Surely there was a more efficient way to do this. I checked my account with the Obelisk and found my battle merit waiting for me to use. I could request just about anything from the Dragon Lodge. So I entered a request to hire wizards with magic specialized in finding people. I'd previously hired a private investigator to follow Cyra for a bit, so this was much the same.

My request was approved in short order, and thanks to offering generous pay I was soon contacted by experts in the field. After consulting with them and waiting for a few divinations, they pointed me where they thought Bridget might be.

The first search took me to an empty classroom. The door had been kicked down sometime recently, but there was nobody there. Next, I checked out an apartment belonging to someone working as a tutor for young children. The door had also been kicked down, but I found nobody there either.

I finally caught up with Bridget when I went to an administrative building. There were several office workers standing around the outside of the building looking nervous.

They glanced to me and the jade medallion around my neck. Between that, my level, and the Dragon Lodge robes I was wearing they quickly rushed to me.

"Thank goodness you're here, sir! Some crazy woman kicked down the door to our office!" one of the office workers glanced nervously at an unconscious guard lying outside the building. Clearly, attempts to stop her hadn't gone well.

"Golden hair with two wolf-ear tufts on the top?" I asked, and the worker nodded in quick confirmation.

"That's her! Watch out, she's both powerful and furious. Nobody could stop from tearing through our documents," the office worker said.

"I'll take care of it," I replied.

I entered the office and followed the noise of frantic searching to find Bridget tearing through paperwork.

"Come on... where did you take him..." Bridget muttered. She was normally well dressed and was put together, but today she looked like a madwoman with torn clothes and hair sticking everywhere. Her face bore a furious look, like anyone who dared to pull her away from her current task would be lucky to leave the building in one piece. Hopefully, things would go better for me than for the guard.

"Bridget? I heard what happened."

Bridget's eyes went wide as she saw me, and the furious expression rapidly melted to one of anguish. She rushed to me and wrapped her arms around me.

"They took our son! He was supposed to go to class and then come right home!" Bridget sniffled.

"Who took him?" I asked.

"The tutor and care worker I hired. She seemed so nice at first and came highly recommended. I thought it'd be good to give Adrian time with other kids. But in the end..." I felt two wet spots forming on my chest.

"Shh. We'll find him. Now start from the beginning and tell me everything you've discovered." I stroked her hair fondly, and she did her best to pull herself back together.

Bridget told me what she knew, which was a lot considering she'd had less than an hour to investigate. I got the impression that she'd broken a few local laws to learn so much so fast. That was made especially apparent when a full contingent of guards showed up to stop us.

"Halt! That woman is under arrest for multiple counts of breaking and entering!" a guardsman said.

I held up my hands. "This is my wife, and she's looking for our son. I'll pay for any damages. Please just let this one drop."

The guard glanced at me and my jade medallion and considered things for a moment. He wore a conflicted expression on his face.

"Sorry, sir, but the law is the law. I'm sure you can get her out of trouble soon enough, but we still have to take her back to the station," the guard said.

I frowned. "I'm told I earned a lot of battle merit with the Dragon Lodge and Glacian Imperial Army recently."

"Sir, I'm sure you made your contributions... but..." the guard's voice trailed off as he checked a System screen before him, revealing the amount of battle merit I'd earned. From the way his voice trailed off, I suspected it was a lot.

I smiled hopefully. "I want to spend some of my battle merit to clear my wife's name immediately. We don't have time for a trip to your station, we're looking for our son."

The guard suddenly changed his tune. "Not to worry, sir. As of this moment, there will be no records of any crimes your wife committed. No need for a trip to the station. And naturally we'll employ the full resources of all of Mucaria's guard contingents to help you search for your son."

***

Once I realized how much help these battle merit points would be, I began spending them in earnest to aid with the search. They worked a lot like currency, but seemed far more valuable than money to anyone working directly for the lodge.

Compared to Glacia, Mucaria was largely unharmed. The chaos here was mostly logistics and aid work. I suspected things would return to normal in Mucaria in a few days, so it was a good place to base our search operation.

Glacia was more chaotic. The shields had mostly held, but certain void monsters possessed the ability to bypass them as I had. Those void monsters had done a lot of damage before the forces that stayed on the ground had taken them out. Children were tucked away in hidden pocket realms where they were usually safe, but young adults could be anywhere.

Since we weren't the only parents looking for our child, I ended up scaling up our operations to find any lost family member and spent battle merit like confetti to do so.

I hastily assembled a communication network for Glacia. I stuck to enchantments, since that was what the locals were familiar with, but the core idea was all Earthling technology. Messages turned to simple binary information, binary information was transmitted magically through extradimensional cables, and then was converted back into messages which were then printed off.

It was more like a fax machine than the internet, but it was good enough to keep people in communication across the whole planet. A few of the local wizards even called the idea revolutionary, but I couldn't take credit for it since I'd stolen the core concepts. If I had more time I might have done more with it, but it was just a means to an end in my search for Adrian.

Using the power of a magical fax machine and a few thousand divination spells courtesy of the best investigative wizards in Mucaria, we got in contact with the parents of every child that had gone on this field trip Adrian had vanished on and confirmed their kids were missing too, though thankfully most of them turned up eventually. Many of them remembered Adrian, but couldn't point us to where he wound up.

A young boy stood before Bridget and me as we asked him what happened.

"...And then Adrian grabbed the wand. He waved for us all to start running, but I looked back! He shot the wand and stared back at the scary eyeless lady and spoke in a weird voice. There was this golden light, and he said 'You know not what what you have done. I wished to dream a while longer.' Then he when wham, wham and there were more glowing lights! After, the scary eyeless lady went ahh! Then her monsters turned into goo! Adrian looked back at us all serious-like, then and there was more bright light. When I opened my eyes again we couldn't see them anymore. The professor said we'd been teleported."

I glanced at Bridget. "Does that sound like Adrian to you?"

Bridget frowned. "He enjoys his naps. I've never woken him up in the middle of one though."

In the end, the other children were a dead end. They'd left Adrian behind, and it was hard to make heads or tails of the nonsensical tales most of them were weaving about what happened. Even if Adrian broke my seal and partially awakened some past-life memories, using them would be a gradual process that should take years. The soul the System attached to him was well and truly dead, and Adrian had to absorb it before any of it would function again. Maybe some lingering passive defense ability on the corpse triggered when Adrian was in danger, similar to my old deflect spell. It was the only thing I could figure.

So our search continued. We turned over several cases of misfiled paperwork in the process. The field trip wasn't scheduled for weeks in advance but had been moved up unexpectedly. Many of the chaperones who usually accompanied the students on this trip had gone missing and new applicants had tried to fill the roles, but only one could clear background checks in time. And she was the woman Bridget hired to watch and teach our son at and between classes.

Further divinations into her background exposed a sudden change in behavior as recently as a week ago, when she was already working for Bridget. This happened shortly after a corpse was discovered in the Mucaria pocket realm with clear signs of possession by a now-absent parasitic lifeform. Mucaria's guards had been looking for any sign of the creature. Given how things turned out, I was pretty sure we knew where it wound up.

Bridget grew angrier and angrier as the search went on, and I began to fear she blamed herself. Especially when we discovered the field trip Adrian had been on was to the planet that had been hit the hardest. The two of us were sitting in Bridget's apartment surrounded by stacks of paper and one of my magical fax machines as we went over reports from the thousands of people I'd hired for the search.

"How didn't I see this coming?" Bridget asked.

I stroked her head and leaned her in toward my chest. "The void dwellers have more resources than I thought. When we find Adrian again, we will not allow something like this to happen again."

"When?" Bridget asked hopefully.

"I would know if he was dead. He's out there," I promised.

"Your magic seal thing, right? You can tell he's still alive? Can you tell if he's hurt? If he's nervous?" Bridget asked hopefully.

I shook my head. "Just that he's out there. He's a strong kid."

Truthfully, I wasn't sure how Jade's Kindling manipulation techniques worked. Maybe the seal I'd placed had broken because he died. All I had right now was a vague feeling that our boy was still alive. I was hoping it was my bloodline talking and not foolish parental desperation.

Our quiet contemplation ended when I received a notification. The bulk of both my Dragon Lodge and Glacia battle merit had suddenly been cashed in all at once. I sat up and frowned at the notification. I'd set things up so that I'd automatically spend battle merit to compensate the wizards from Mucaria as they worked, and the task that had just completed was a divination. But why had it cost more than a thousand times what a masterwork divination from a B-Grade diviner had cost?

The answer knocked on our door a while later. Bridget and I both frowned, since we weren't expecting guests. I went to check the door and Bridget went to the bathroom to change out of days-old clothes and messy hair she hadn't had time to take care of with all the work we'd been doing.

I opened the door and found the God-King of Glacia standing in the hallway outside Bridget's apartment. In a lot of ways he was less impressive than most Dragon Lodge wizards, since he often dressed like a homeless man who'd thrown on wizard robes. But I knew him for the A-Grade he was.

"Ted?" I asked, blinking in surprise.

"Carter, lad! I saw that quest you put out and figured I'd try my hand at locating your son, since nobody else could crack the puzzle. I gave it a few days since I thought some other diviner would take care of it, but when nobody did I figured the modern generation was getting sloppy. Or so I thought!" Ted stroked his beard thoughtfully as I opened the door wide and let him in. I guided him to the table and he immediately began telling me what he discovered.

"Your son is under some powerful anti-scrying, anti-fate, and anti-divination wards. Some of the best work I've ever seen. It seems the younger generation isn't as incompetent as I feared, and I'm no longer surprised a thousand of the Dragon Lodge's best diviners were unable to track him down. Even for me, it took a creative approach and a few days of work. These are ancient spells, but older doesn't always mean better. Quite the opposite. A lot of old spells have known weaknesses, especially those meant for things like anti-scrying wards."

Ted adjusted himself and eventually started helping himself to the remains of our dinner. He scooped up a piece of Bridget's custard pie and looked like he was eating it out of habit at first, but his eyes lit up once he tasted it and he finished the slice in one bite. I nudged him the rest of the pie, and he gladly accepted.

"Carter? Who's your friend?" Bridget asked as she emerged from the bathroom. I realized she'd never met Ted, at least not like I had. She'd probably seen his likeness in recording crystals, but it was hard to realize the regal god-king depicted on coins and in recordings was the same as the ill-dressed homeless man rifling through our leftovers.

"Bridget, Ted said he's successfully divined Adrian's location!" I waved her to the couch, and Bridget was there in a heartbeat.

"Well, his exact location is still a mystery, but I know where he's been recently. I'll take you both, but it's a bit of a trip so make sure you grab a bite to eat before we go," Ted said as he finished the last of our food. "Anyway, I'll meet you back at my palace in a few hours."

Soon, he was gone, and Bridget looked at me.

"What a strange man..." she muttered. "Also, what was that he said about a palace?"

I chuckled. "That was Ted, the God-King of Glacia."

"Oh..." Bridget looked down at herself. She'd replaced her days-old clothes with a hastily thrown on loose-fitting dress. It was the sort of thing a housewife might wear around these parts, but certainly not fit for greeting royalty.

"I'm going to get changed again." Bridget returned to the bathroom, and I went to rummage through the pantry.

<Note>

So, before I said I was going to do four chapters and then take a break. This is the fourth chapter, but I think we still have two more before we get to the chapter I had in mind. You'd think I'd be able to estimate these things a bit better after all this time. Oh well.

Hopefully I can get the next two out quick so it doesn't delay book 6 much. Normally I'd be more in a rush, but I'm still hoping for my artist to come through with some Jade cover art for book 6 that I can swap in. I do really need to focus more on that for a bit starting soon.