Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 255. A Controlled Burn

Rick was already putting on his boots when Carmilla knocked. When he opened the door, she was already walking down the hall.

This told him two things.

The first thing was that she had been awake before the news came, which meant that her instincts had been ahead of her.

The second thing was that whatever was going on at the Council building was important enough that she didn’t bother to knock twice.

"East wing," she said, walking next to him. "There’s some kind of fire... something that’s called a magical origin...?"

"The guards say that the ward signature doesn’t match anything in the Council’s spell library."

Natasha came out of the study with her coat half-buttoned and a small analysis crystal in her hand that was already glowing blue. It seems that she never really stopped working.

"The ward penetration technique is foreign," she stated, and she continued to keep pace with them without any pauses.

"Someone brought in a fire source that bypassed the building’s standard suppression network... It didn’t trigger the initial alarm layer because the signature was unrecognized, not because the wards failed."

"This seems familiar..." Rick asked, "Is this the Shadow Covenant at work?"

"Not sure... but we know for sure that it wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t careless behavior by someone."

After the small talk, they walked toward the main hall. Sylvia was already there, calm and alert in the way she always got when she had looked at a situation and decided it needed to be dealt with.

Zara came out of the tactical map room still holding the scroll she had been looking at, which made it seem like she had never really gone to sleep.

Then Zephyra came down the steps.

She had the enchanted carrier strapped to her chest with Sophia inside it. Her folio was under her arm, and she had the same flat, professional look on her face that she always did.

But her eyes were sharp and already moving, counting how ready the group was before she got to the last step.

"East wing." She said, "Is that correct?"

Carmilla stared at her. "How did you know?"

"A foreign fire source of that size makes a unique ward pulse..."

"I’ve had a monitoring setup running on the Council building’s network since we got here." She kept walking as she got to the ground floor. "Sophia stays here with the house staff. I’m coming."

Nobody argued. The tone she used didn’t leave room for it.

Heinz came out of the back of the house with a cup of tea that he had apparently made himself. He blinked at the door with the look of a man who has just walked into the end of something and is trying to catch up.

"Uh... Is something going on?" he asked.

"Stay inside, Heinz," Zephyra said as she stood by the door.

"Should I call someone?"

"No."

"Should I—"

"No."

He looked at the door as it closed behind the group. Then he sat back down with his tea, changed how he was holding the cup, and seemed to accept this outcome with the calmness of a man who has learned that some things are beyond his control.

...

The fire was mostly out by the time they got to the Council building. Emergency suppression wards had kicked in, and the flames were down to a low smoldering in one room in the east wing.

Two Mage Council guard teams were patrolling the perimeter, and a small group of nightwatch staff stood further back, at the safe distance that people instinctively keep when magic is involved.

Fredrich was already there.

He was outside the burned room, talking quietly with two senior council mages. His silver hair didn’t look as perfect as usual, which made it seem like he had gotten dressed quickly.

When Rick’s group arrived, he turned with an expression that was appropriately grave and moved toward them with the purposeful warmth of a man who was genuinely glad to see help arrive.

"Hero of Mature Hearts," he said, "I’m glad you came... and it seems like this... is bad timing for everyone."

Rick asked, "What happened?"

"The archive room... someone broke into the outer ward and used an accelerant technique we haven’t recorded before."

"Several documents were destroyed before the suppression network kicked in." He paused, and his face showed that he was giving terrible news. "Mostly administrative records."

"The Council’s plans to keep an eye on infrastructure from the last two sessions, the ones that passed while you were away."

Rick let that sit for a while without moving his face. The papers that were on fire were the same ones Zephyra had seen on the way back from Tidebreak.

These were the papers that granted the Mage Council additional authority over civilian magical infrastructure.

Fredrich went on, "It could be Shadow Covenant..."

"They have a history of going after Valdris’s administrative systems when it helps them... as they always do, and right now... we’re trying to look into it."

What he said made sense. Everything was tracked.

Rick thanked him and said the team would look into it. Fredrich nodded and made a gesture toward the room that was both helpful and permissive.

Zephyra had already gone past Fredrich and into the burned room without waiting for the sign. People let her pass because she had the kind of energy that comes from someone who expects to proceed unimpeded and is always right.

Rick went in after her.

...

The room smelled like char and the specific chemical residue that suppression wards left behind when they worked hard. Several filing shelves on the left wall were broken, leaving only black frames with piles of ash at the bottom.

The emergency lights made everything look flat and cool white, which made the damage look worse than it would have in firelight.

Zephyra was already crouching down next to the part that had burned the most near the back wall. She took a small analysis lens out of her coat pocket.

It was thin glass with mage runes carved around the edge. She was looking at the burn pattern with the same level of focus as someone reading a difficult book.

Rick squatted down next to her. Natasha came in behind them and started a different scan from the door. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Her monitoring crystal was on and casting a faint blue light over the burned shelves.

"So..." Rick talked in a low voice. "What do you see?"

"All I see is a controlled burn pattern," Zephyra said, not looking up from the lens.

She moved it slowly along the edge of the damaged area, following the line where the fire stopped. "This wasn’t destruction because of panic or carelessness."

Someone knew exactly which shelves to hit and stopped the fire on purpose before it could spread." She pointed to the shelf to the left, which was only slightly burned on the near edge but was otherwise fine. "The caster kept the fire away from that shelf on purpose..."

"It wasn’t touched."

Rick looked at the shelf that was still there. "What’s in it?"

"Implementation records... the procedural files for the oversight proposals."

"The paperwork that shows how the expanded authority is used in real life, which departments it covers, what review processes are needed, and what the operational chain looks like."

Rick saw it. "They burned the proposals themselves, but..."

"...kept the files for putting them into action."