"Yes… Yes…we…could have," said Gerald while huffing between each word due to exertion.
"I could have done that, but can you guarantee that we could have taken him down without him informing someone or have succeeded at all?"
"Gerald, you are just letting your fears from decades ago make you indecisive. This brat is likely a mercenary posing as a clock tower enforcer, and even if he really is one, then so what?"
" If any magi work this low-class job instead of studying and researching mazercraft, then they are either trash or complete wastes skimming about while following delusions of grandeur."
Countered Lucy with the stereotypical holier-than-thou speech, while the man on top of her just smiled helplessly and said
"You only have magic circuits numbering in single digits, and their quality is dirt poor, so you are not the one to talk rubbish like this. Then again, we lose nothing if you can confuse the boy and feed fabricated information back via him."
Said Gerald as he watched Lucy's eyes open wide in aggression and her lips contorted into a disdainful sneer, signalling that she was about to use her tongue like a blade. Watching this, the man let out a booming laugh and smashed his lips onto her. Their wild kissing session was followed by grunts and creaking of the bed alongside half moans and half growls of Lucy, which made her sister`s eyes flutter open.
Ignoring the couple busy in each other beside her, she picked up a glass bottle filled with a light brown liquid and took a deep gulp. Her face flushed red, and then she took another sip, but instead of drinking it she held it in her mouth, making her look like a squirrel. In an instant, she pressed her mouth onto her very surprised sister`s mouth and fed the concoction to her mouth-to-mouth.
Gerald let out a crackle at this and took a sip from the bottle. Maria manhandled her sister and then threw her below him. With a woman wrapped on his back and another beneath him, he continued his labour, while Lucy screamed
"Maria, you shameless bitch!!"
.
.
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....
Shirou had had enough of searching through gangs like a headless chicken. Irritated but helpless, he could only revert to the worst method, which was patrolling throughout the city, hoping to find his target.
Half bored and half expecting the night to be over like the past few days, he sped past the dark alleys on his borrowed bike. His days were so bad that the most interesting thing happening was going to school, and learning what kids his age had to learn. The most pressing issues were homework, besides a random arson case that Gerald had told him about.
He caught a faint arid smell in the air; it was a sickly kind of odour that made the nose burn and made you cough. He stepped down on the gear and neutralised it and led his ride into a gentle pause. The closest thing that matched this smell was formalin in his memory. He pulled out his sword from the luggage and then put on his backpack.
He crept closer to the direction from which the traces of mana leaked with the grace of an octopus hunting a shrimp. He navigated through the alley while continuously searching for locations that could be used as a perch. With a short sprint and leap, he climbed on a ledge above a window.
With the generous use of reinforcement, maze craft and a well-trained physique, the therapy-deprived boy reached a sufficiently high vantage point and crouched low and retrieved the obnoxiously large sniper rifle. Setting the gun on a tripod, he used the scope as a farsight after finding his view blocked by buildings and the visible portion ahead empty, he reminded himself to buy a pair of binoculars and then moved forward while trailing mana traces.
Man purposes but god disposes, so the wannabe magus killer discarded his death from above and walked on foot obediently after not finding any proper way forward from the roof.
Rapidly covering the distance, the trail got frimer and frimer until it finally became a beacon for any mana-sensitive organism. He followed it to a garage with half its shutter open and the sound of flesh hitting flesh echoing within it. Suppressing his twinge of discomfort, he peeked into the interior and witnessed a black van parked in it alongside an ajar door from which masculine grunts reverberated intermittently in between a constant rhythmic clapping sound.
Falling to the ground, he slid under the shutter and peered into the door. Inside the 1st thing he saw was the shaking buttocks of a man and his swishing testicles as he pounded into what appeared to be a very anaemic woman lying below him with furry.
Shirou was stunned into confusing for about a whole minute. He was here to investigate this random mana trace he found, not watch live porn featuring some random guy, so he sat beside the wall while focusing on the source of the mana. But suddenly his eyes focused on the man`s crotch.
It was glowing with the telltale sign of magic circuits alongside his upper body and left arm. He assumed that the pair were conducting a mana transfer, but if the mana was leaking out from them was enough for even him to trace from a killometer away from them it wouldn`t make sense.
While he was caught up in his thoughts of mana transfer, its efficiency and what the hell was going on here. The arid smell suddenly increased, and he reflexively peered in and found that the woman was rapidly drying up and appeared to be rotting from her extremities. This pattern immediately made him connect the dots and conclude that whatever had happened to the corpse he examined was this.
He was about to do something, and as he took a step, suddenly his heart contracted as he felt a sensation of death similar to what he felt in his dreams. He instinctively turned around in an instant, and at the same time, a knife about 6 inches long struck the wall beside him with its tip penetrating the wall by a few centimetres.
His hands went to grip his sword tightly, and he inspected his opponent. It was a woman wearing an oversized t-shirt and a baggy jeans alongside a pair of sneakers. Her blond hair was neatly tied in a ponytail behind her head, and her green eyes looked to be glowing with a poisonous glow.
His immediate focus was drawn to her hands, where she was holding a dagger in her left hand, and her right hand hovered over some form of holster with about a dozen throwing knife handles sticking out of it. The clear attempt on his life without any question made him sure that he was in the right location, and this woman was likely an accomplice of whatever was killing the woman inside the room.
"Ughhh...yeah!"
Their tense standoff was immediately broken by the man inside the room, grunting in pleasure. The blondie took advantage of this by trying to poke a few more lethal holes in the boy. This scene of child abuse had just begun when the man, no older boy inside the room, charged out with his dripping junk swinging around.
His eyes glowed with mana, and shirou locked eyes with him while trying to ascertain his threat level. As soon as the pairs of orange and green eyes met, the orange ones widened in shock. Shirou felt the air around him thicken as if it were mud. This sudden change affected his motion, and he slammed face-first onto the concrete as well as a thrown knife found its mark in his right thigh and left behind an inch-deep puncture wound running on the outer surface of the limb.
"Lumi, what in the damnation happened here?" asked Ray to the girl who cutely turned her head to indicate her lack of knowledge about his question.
"Sigh! May a thousand curses befall your bloodline, Williams!"
Lumi explained how she went to relieve herself, and when she came out of the washroom, she saw "a suspicious man" performing "voyeurism". She took action with the intent to plant his head on the wall, but shirou turned by coincidence and saved himself.
Ray, being the one ever cautious of the unknown, gave shirou a thorough pat down and seized the pair of deser eagles, spare magazines and his mana-filled gemstones. Looking at the bunch of gems, Ray`s excitement was visible to all.
The magus family of Ray was considered extinct, as his parents didn't have any magic circuits. While Ray himself didn't have any circuits or rather, he had only 2 dormant magic circuits so he was also considered to be a washout. This continued until his mystic eyes awakened while forcing his circuits open when he was on his deathbed due to the poison William`s mother had fed him.