Free Web NovelChapter 94: Figure
Victor’s heart raced when he saw the black figure quickly turning the corner of the guest room corridor. Without hesitation, he began a fast chase.
Victor ran so fast that he could catch an arrow in mid-air and to gain even more speed, at the corner he used one of the corridor walls to make an agile and precise turn using his feet. His agility for his size was insane. Because of this move, Victor didn’t lose sight of the figure and saw it turning down a corridor to the left this time.
The Selvarum Mansion was gigantic, so big that the corridors intertwined with each other with several doors to different rooms between them.
The corridors seemed never-ending, with their twists and turns challenging Victor’s perception, as he had to make quick decisions in the midst of the chase. He concentrated on the figure’s every move, following it as his muscles responded instinctively.
Although the figure maintained an impressive speed, Victor drew ever closer.
After a few seconds, they had reached such a speed that the corridors finally became small and narrowed, with the walls seeming to close in around them.
Victor knew that this mysterious person would tire at some point, so he kept up the pace, but he was out of luck. Suddenly, as the figure turned a corner, it disappeared from Victor’s sight for a brief moment. When he turned the corner, he came across a room instead of the long corridors for the first time.
In this room, there were several closed doors and a long path through which the figure could not have fled, as Victor would have arrived in time to have seen it even for a moment.
Panting and a little sweaty, Victor took a deep breath, without much patience, and walked through the room with the doors.
In this large room, there were no less than eight identical doors, with no furniture, carpets or paintings.
It was technically impossible for Victor to know exactly which door the mysterious figure had hidden in. Using Den would be pointless, because the tracks of the figure Victor had chased wouldn’t suddenly appear, and using Black Magic seemed a rather desperate alternative while he could simply check door by door.
"Come on, where are you?"
Victor stared at the eight doors before him and his eyes scanned the locks, looking for any sign of movement or sound that might indicate the presence of the mysterious fugitive, but silence reigned in this room.
So he decided to start opening door by door and approached the first door on the left.
The cold metal of the handle contrasted with the warmth of Victor’s hand, whose blood was boiling in his veins. With one smooth movement, he turned the handle and slowly pushed the door open. His eyes gazed around the room revealed before him. It was a richly decorated living room, with antique furniture and a carpet in the center, but it was almost completely dark, and from the dust Victor was feeling on this doorknob, no one had entered this room for at least a few months.
Victor entered the room cautiously, his footsteps echoing lightly on the wooden floor. He stopped by the door and looked at every corner, every piece of furniture, but found nothing beyond that. No sign of the fugitive. So he left and closed the door softly to move on to the next one.
The second door on the right was naturally his next choice. Victor repeated the process, turning the handle carefully. The door opened to reveal a room full of mirrors, where the walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, reflecting multiple images of Victor from every conceivable angle.
"Humph... Nothing here." muttered Victor to himself, his voice echoing off the multiple mirrored surfaces.
It was impossible for the figure who had lost him to be in this room, because if he had been, Victor would have found him effortlessly.
"Lucky loser," Victor muttered, because if the person who escaped had entered this room instead of any of the other seven, he would have run out of options of where to hide.
The third door was now the chosen one. Victor walked up to the door and looked at the handle, but before he could turn it, a voice cut through the silence.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
The voice was thick and authoritative, and Victor recognized it immediately. Then he turned abruptly to face a tall man, dressed in black clothes and without a strand of hair on his head.
"Frugeon? What are you doing here?"
"I just asked you that. I was going up to my room when I heard the sound of doors opening."
Victor couldn’t simply say that he was chasing a figure, but he couldn’t say something like: "I’m looking for the bathroom." fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓
No, Victor should say something that would help him right now, not create more enmity with the Frugeon guard. So he looked at the next door and said to Frugeon:
"Someone has broken into the mansion."
"What? What are you talking about? It’s impossible that someone broke in. Luísa can sense everything and everyone in the house with her magical energy, she always knows where people are and I was in her living room two minutes ago. If there was an intruder, I would have known."
Victor put a hand to his chin. "So the person in this room is someone from the mansion?" He muttered to himself.
Frugeon arched an eyebrow, seeing Victor mutter, and sighed. "Please put your hunter instincts aside for a moment. Don’t waste my time with your paranoia."
Victor wasn’t angry at being labeled crazy, perhaps he was actually seeing and hearing things. He had died so many times that it was impossible to say. Still, he preferred not to believe that he was going crazy and tried to reason it out:
"Something tells me we need to investigate further."
Frugeon was starting to get visibly irritated by Victor’s persistence. "Victor, let me make it clear, you’re just a guest here. Leave the security to us. Go to your room and rest. There’s no need to worry about imaginary intruders."
The tension between the two men was clear from the first moment. Victor pondered for a moment, weighing up his options. He could give in to Frugeon’s orders and return to his room, or he could insist on continuing his investigation on his own, risking an even more tense dialog with the mansion’s guard.
"All right, I’m going back to my room." Victor communicated his decision aloud.
Frugeon looked at Victor suspiciously, but saw that the hunter was serious. "All right, and make it quick. I don’t want any more interruptions tonight."
"However, Frugeon, if I may, I have just one more question," said Victor.
