Leon was almost surprised when he made it over the villa’s low wall.  He hadn’t sensed anything concerning within it, but it was still odd that a place like this villa, where its main buildings were obviously so heavily warded, would have an unenchanted outer wall—and Leon knew that it was unenchanted, for if it had even the tiniest of defensive wards, then his invisibility would’ve been disrupted.  When he hit the ground on the other side, his feet sinking down at least an inch in the soft soil of the garden, he was still invisible.

Leon counted himself lucky and moved on.  Chief among his concerns was Jormun.  If the pirate was able to see everything that was going on in these ‘trials’, then why hadn’t he tried to screw with Leon again?  Where was he and what was he doing?  He’d been quite chatty in the spatial tunnel and in the chamber with the golden colossus, so it struck Leon as odd that he suddenly went silent.

Maybe he had some kind of limitation that Leon wasn’t aware of, maybe it wasn’t nearly as simple as he made it out to be.  Maybe Leon’s invisibility worked on him as well, even with all the tools apparently at his disposal.

Regardless, Leon wound his way through the strangely deserted garden paths, his eyes, ears, and magic senses all open and searching for any sign that he’d been discovered.  So far, however, all of the villa’s curiously light security detail remained at their posts, and Leon could detect no signs that Jormun was manipulating anything behind the scenes.

It wasn’t long before Leon found himself on the final approach to the villa’s main building.  He began to slow down, noting that each of the villa’s entrances had at least one guard stationed by it.  The few servants around were also mostly concentrated around here, greatly complicating Leon’s intention to make his way inside the building despite his invisibility.

He supposed he could just fight his way in, but Leon was loath to try.  None of the guards seemed stronger than the fourth-tier, but as of yet, Jormun wasn’t interfering.  Leon didn’t want to screw with the place too much just in case the only reason Jormun was staying out of this was because he hadn’t been able to find Leon.

So, with fighting relegated to a distant if-all-else-fails plan, that left more subtle means of infiltration.  The villa’s wards kept him from seeing inside this huge building, but he had a fairly good idea what was where just by inspecting the outside.  Leon came to a halt just behind some shrubs where he hoped none of the servants might accidentally bump into him and did his best to map out the villa complex using his magic senses once more in as excruciating detail as he could.

The most obvious point of entry that he could see was a large multi-level veranda on the north side that ran nearly the entire length of the villa and also contained several outside stairs.  If he could jump up there and avoid some of the guards, he could access three of the villa’s four stories.  However, the guard detail there was heavy—especially so given how lightly defended the rest of the villa complex seemed to be.

On the eastern side, Leon didn’t see many points of entry, but there was a large open exedra with a door leading inside that was guarded by only a single third-tier mage.

Finally, Leon took note of a river that flowed through the villa complex.  It seemed to flow directly into a pool on the villa’s west side, where Leon could see it sucked down via magical whirlpool and vanished down a pipe more than large enough for Leon to fit through, and more than deep enough that his magic senses couldn’t penetrate far enough to see where it went.  There were large fountains and other water features around the villa’s gardens, plus the water needs of the villa’s inhabitants to worry about—it made sense to Leon why the villa might need a source of fresh water to alleviate dependence on water enchantments that might need constant maintenance.

But he couldn’t see into the reservoir all of that water flowed into, and for all he knew, that river water only led to the outside fountains.  There was no guarantee that if he managed to get in, that it would lead inside—even less likely that it allowed access via any pipe or chamber big enough for him to use.

These three locations were the only locations that Leon could see without doing something blatant and drastic like opening a window.  He couldn’t be sure his invisibility would hold if he interacted too heavily with the villa, so risking his infiltration by touching the windows was out of the question.

Leon decided to investigate the veranda first.

He swiftly snuck over, easily avoiding the inattentive gardeners and other servants moving about.  The villa as a whole was largely empty and deserted, but here around the main building there were enough people that Leon had to keep on his toes and avoid making too much noise or accidentally running into people.  Thankfully, his invisibility, his old hunter’s instincts, and the complacent servants made this almost trivial to accomplish.

Upon arriving at a good vantage point in the gardens that gave him an unobstructed view of the northern veranda, Leon’s eyes confirmed what his magic senses had already noted: the veranda was heavily guarded.  However, that guard detail grew increasingly sparse on each subsequent floor.  Leon could easily jump up to the third floor and have a much easier time moving about, but that was still a big enough risk that he hung back and didn’t immediately try it.  If he were unable to find a way inside from the second or third floor of the veranda, then he’d have to find some way to scale down the huge white marble pillars holding up each successive balcony without attracting attention—just jumping down would fly in the face of his current desires to remain stealthy.

Leon moved on.  He was in a hurry, but not so much that he felt comfortable abandoning all caution.  His next destination was the eastern exedra.  It was a large, open-air meeting place, a raised half-circle platform next to a small road that ran along the entire perimeter of the main building.  The platform was big enough to hold at least fifty people, with a generic-looking marble statue of a Legion commander in the center.  The exedra was ringed first with white marble benches, then by a low wall, and finally by a long blind arcade along the walls of the villa where the exedra cut into its footprint.

In the back, about as close to the center of the exedra as it could be, was a small, recessed portico where a guard watched over a single-person door.  Given its location and everything else that Leon could sense about this villa, he assumed this to be the servant’s entrance.  The exedra was likely a place where the servants would gather in their off-time and leave or arrive from, as there was nearby a small unpaved road just large enough to ride a horse along that extended all the way off the villa’s estate, whereas the main paved road that led in and out through the main gates was on the south side of the villa.

The recessed portico, as far as Leon could tell, would be hard to infiltrate without violence.  With violence, however, it would be quite easy; the guard had little in the way or armor—a simple, if functional steel cuirass, a leather hood dyed black, and a padded tunic covering his arms and shoulders.  He had no gloves, no leg protection, and was armed with nothing more than a short five-foot-long spear.  He also looked rather inattentive, leaning against the wall next to the door with his eyes closed, looking like he was barely keeping himself awake and upright, let alone keeping an eye out on the gardens just past the exedra where Leon still lurked, invisible.

All it would take would be a single arrow, the guard would fall, and Leon could approach the door with significantly less anxiety than he currently had.  The door, even if unenchanted, still had enough magic flowing through it from the rest of the villa’s enchantments that Leon wondered if he could touch it without disturbing his invisibility.  He was also unsure what he would do with the guard’s body; it wasn’t like the area around the exedra was heavily forested or featured convenient hiding places for bodies.  There weren’t many gardeners running around, but Leon didn’t want to complicate this if he didn’t have to, and a gardener finding a body before he found Gaius and a way out or away from wherever this was would complicate this greatly.

And that was assuming the door wasn’t locked beyond his ability to bypass, an assumption Leon couldn’t allow himself to make.

Leon slunk away from the exedra and toward the pool.  At the very least, the pool seemed reasonably magic-free, and it wasn’t guarded or surrounded by the villa’s few workers.

With how sparsely the gardens and grounds were populated, Leon soon found himself within eyesight of the pool.  Unlike the exedra or veranda, the pool wasn’t by the estate’s gardens.  Instead, the pool and the river that emptied into it were surrounded by a huge, well-manicured lawn that sparkled bright green in the sun.  It was wide and open and beautiful, but Leon couldn’t help but scowl, for if he decided to try infiltrating the villa here and something went wrong, causing his invisibility to fail, he’d have nowhere to hide for the five minutes it would take for his ring to reset and allow him to make himself invisible again.  The pool itself wasn’t guarded, but there was a heavily guarded entrance to the villa nearby that would be able to quickly investigate anything suspicious at the pool if he attracted their attention somehow.

Leon approached the pool, but he didn’t get too close—merely close enough to start to get an idea of what was below the water’s surface since his magic senses couldn’t penetrate beneath it.  It didn’t have a bottom, there was far too much river water flowing into it for the storage space to be finite… or so Leon assumed; he reminded himself that wherever or whatever this place was, it didn’t necessarily follow the same rules that governed the real world.  This was a place birthed from the mind of whomever was being tested by the Serpent’s Temple; it could be all completely illusory, in which case the water could simply vanish from ‘existence’ as soon as it flowed into this pool.

However, Leon was inclined to think that this entire place was consistent enough with the way things worked in the real world that this wasn’t the case.  The pool had to flow around the estate and empty out somewhere… but he also had to admit that this wasn’t nearly as certain as it might be anywhere else.

With a sigh, Leon turned away from the pool.  If this weren’t some illusory ‘trial’ world, he acknowledged to himself that he would’ve been far more tempted to take a quick dip into the pool and see where it led—only tempted, though, and actually following the pool into whatever reservoir it had to empty into would be a much taller order.

As it was, however, killing one guard and checking on the door by the eastern exedra seemed less risky to Leon, for at least that was a more certain outcome.  For all he knew, if he tried swimming down to the bottom of the pool, there’d be nothing waiting for him except for a hole in the world, or maybe even something more concrete—or more literally concrete, in keeping with the rest of the pool’s structure.

[This place…] Leon murmured into his Mind Palace, [I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.  I don’t know if anything I see can be taken at face value…]

Instead of Xaphan speaking up, as Leon was expecting, it was Nestor’s voice he soon heard.

[You can probably take nearly everything you see here at face value,] Nestor said, though there was enough uncertainty in his voice that Leon didn’t immediately believe him.

[What makes you say that?] Leon skeptically asked.

[This spatial pocket is far too advanced for this plane,] Nestor explained.  [I never saw anything like it during my father’s conquest, and from what I’ve seen of your world through your eyes, the people of this plane haven’t advanced far enough into the field of spatial magic to build something even half as powerful as this, let alone have it be old enough to be abandoned ruins by the time you stumbled across it.  This place… shouldn’t exist.]

[We are in the Divine Graveyard,] Xaphan spoke up, his deep, crackling voice cutting Nestor off from whatever else he was going to say.  [Who can say what may or may not be buried here?  Who can say who may or may not be buried here?]

[Valid point,] Nestor conceded.  [No matter this spatial pocket’s origins, though, Leon, from everything I can see, this estate has been built much like a Mind Palace: with the Mists of Chaos.  Darkness magic is used to read the mind of whoever is taking this ‘trial’, and then the Mists are used to provoke some kind of reaction—without getting an in-depth look at the underlying enchantments, I can’t say exactly what reaction the enchantments are looking for, though.]

Leon sighed as he processed that information.  [I wasn’t aware that the Mists of Chaos could leave a soul realm, though…]

[Our Ancestor has told you not to think of the soul realm as some metaphysical, unreal space, correct?  A place that doesn’t exist anywhere but in your mind?] Nestor asked.  [It’s as much a physical space as the outside world, just as this place is just as physical as the outside world.  Don’t think of the outside as ‘real’, for this place is just as tangible and real as it.  You’ve just been thrown into a slightly tangled and distorted corner of the world, not removed from it entirely or subjected to some mind-invading illusion.  Treat this place as you would the real world.]

Leon nodded out of habit, then quickly replied, [Got it.  These enchantments sound rather mind-bendingly complicated, though…]

[Such things are… the-they would’ve been difficult for me to design even during my prime,] Nestor quietly admitted, though the admission had him tripping on his words a bit.  [I probably would’ve needed at least a thousand wisps devoted to maintaining them, too—they never would’ve functioned properly without some kind of intelligence to guide them, even if that intelligence was simple.]

[So you’re saying that there might be something other than Jormun guiding these enchantments?] Leon asked.

[Probably, but again, I can’t say for sure.  At the very least, I doubt very much that your pirate friend has the skills necessary to run enchantments this complex.]

With an invisible shrug, Leon whispered back, [I wouldn’t count him out.  Me and mine have underestimated him enough already…]

Leon kept as much of what Nestor said in mind as he could.  Despite being told that he could treat this place like it was real, Leon still didn’t turn back around to indulge his temptation to take a swim into the pool and see where it might lead.  Instead, he slowly made his way back to the exedra, though he had to stop at one point when a gardener boxed him into a dead end.  It would’ve been easy enough to escape by jumping or something like that, but Leon was concerned that it might attract undue attention.  Fortunately, the gardener hadn’t stayed long and Leon soon found himself right back where he was only about fifteen minutes before: hiding behind the bushes staring at the guard almost hidden in the shadow of the servant’s covered entrance.

After verifying that there wasn’t anyone else around who might notice what he was about to do, he quietly drew his bow from his soul realm along with a handful of arrows, drew one back, paused for just long enough to ask himself if this was really how he wanted to play this, and loosed.

In an instant, the arrow sank into the guard’s throat, spraying blood across the inside of his hood and across a little bit of the wall.  The guard’s eyes went wide as he fell to his knees, his mouth opening and closing several times as he tried to speak, but only succeeding in sputtering and choking on his own blood.  And then, he fell, his face hitting the stone floor with a sickening crunch, his body twitching a couple more times before falling still.

By that point, Leon had already sprinted over, his bow and remaining arrows disappearing back into his soul realm as he filled his arm with water mana.  With a quick wave, the blood on the wall was washed off, and the man’s body was pulled into his soul realm.

Leon had to grit his teeth to bear that.  Whether or not the man was real or some construct of this pocket world didn’t matter; Leon hated the idea of pulling corpses into his soul realm.  With that thought, though, it struck him as a little ironic that he had an entire mausoleum to the fallen giants in the mountains around his Mind Palace, but he didn’t contemplate that for too long.  He simply blasted the floor with a few jets of water to wash off the blood, leaving the recessed portico a little wet, but otherwise empty and clueless as to where the guard had gone.

Unfortunately, Leon had to let his invisibility drop to allow him to use his magic.  This left him waiting for five minutes that were so agonizingly long he briefly weighed the merits of putting on the dead guard’s bloody clothes to try and blend in better.  This didn’t turn out to be necessary, which he was grateful for, and he spent much of that time studying the door.

The door held no detectable wards, and when Leon took a deep breath and gripped the doorknob, it opened easily enough.  He slipped inside, light bending around him as he regained the use of his ring .

He found himself in a thin hallway with bare stone walls, dimly lit, and with a handful of nondescript doors leading off of it.  Nothing impressive and about what he’d expect from the area of the villa where the servants might be expected to work, but as he stood just inside the doorway, letting the door close behind as quietly as he could manage, Leon’s heart sank.

He’d tried to project his magic senses to get a better idea of what he might be facing inside; he was inside the wards, so it shouldn’t have been a problem.

Unfortunately, as he found out as soon as his magic senses brushed against the walls just to his right and left, the interior walls were warded against magic senses, as well, not just the outer walls.  He’d have to scout the villa out without the aid of his magic senses.

Worse, it meant that there was enough magic flowing through the interior walls that his ring of invisibility would likely be disrupted at every doorway.

He had to find Gaius somewhere in this place, and he couldn’t rely entirely on his magic senses, nor his ring of invisibility to do so.

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