"This is the guild leader." Vanessa pointed at a blonde man with a sickening smile on his face.

Matthew closed his eye. He had to use Purify on himself to hold the demonic mana inside of him. The acts the picture was showing were too much for him to keep his calm.

"How did you find this?" Matthew asked sitting on the bed trying to take away his mind from what he saw.

"This man." Vanessa pointed at someone in the screen. "It was in this man's office." She said. "I don't know why or how it got there. But I was lucky to find it."

"Why would someone take pictures of…" Matthew tried to ask, but his own disgust made him stop.

"These people are monsters. They are sick. They have no soul." Vanessa hissed while looking at the pictures and taking notes.

On the internet, she found out later that the lawyer who had the flash drive was an old schoolmate of the Howling Spear's guild master. By the apparent age of the lawyer and guild master in the pictures, those were taken more than 10 years ago. The relationship between the lawyer and the guild master went astray in that time, but he kept the pictures.

Why? She couldn't say for sure. But by the sexual nature of a lot of those pictures, she could deduce it was for self gratification.

"It's very likely that Donovan himself doesn't know he had these pictures." Vanessa said referring to the Howling Spear's guild master.

"Isn't this enough to destroy them?" Matthew asked.

"It is." Vanessa said. "But I also want his mother, the mayor."

"And how do we get her?"

"I have a lot of evidence here to put her away for a long time. But none of it is admissible in court. Even if I publish them, she'll just say they are fake and the press will just run defense for her. I need something concrete, like these pictures. Something they can't make go away."

"What you're thinking about?"

"We need to get this documents to be found by the police legally. And we need that the people responsible for finding them is not in the mayor's pocket." Vanessa scratched her chin.

"You have someone in mind?"

"Not yet. I need to do some research."

"So… What do we do now?" Matthew asked getting up and stretching his back.

"Want to kick some drug dealers butts?" Vanessa asked.

"What?" Matthew looked at her confused.

"There's a flow of cash here to this game house. I dug a little and found out it is a front for drug dealings. If we go there, we might find something new." Vanessa explained.

"Is this what you have been doing all this time?" Matthew asked her worried.

"That's why all this is illegal in court." Vanessa pointed at all the documents on her desk.

"Eric was right to be worried." Matthew shook his head. "But yeah. Let's beat some drug dealers." He added. Even purifying himself didn't get rid of the anger in his heart brought by the pictures he saw. It made him remember things he kept trying really hard to forget.

Vanessa gave him a helmet and they both mounted her bike.

"You should get a driving license." Vanessa said while rolling her bike from the garage.

"Why?" Matthew asked.

"So you can buy yourself a car. Or better. A bike of your own." She explained. "You made enough money for that, didn't you?"

"I bought new gear and this Vitality necklace." Matthew said. "But I might still have enough to buy a cheap bike."

"Best thing you can do now, kid. Stop depending on buses." Vanessa said getting into a highway.

The place they went to was a game shop on a noble part of town. Tucked in an alleyway between large luxurious buildings, it looked inconspicuous. Just a small store that sold and rent physical copies of games, fixed computers and other electronics, and had a small array of gacha and crane machines filled with popular figurines and plushies.

They entered the store pretending to be there to get a cute plushie from one of the crane machines. The idea was to have Ffyr take a look around while they played and see if she found anything suspicious.

Pacted spirits, unlike normal spirits, could not travel far away from their partners in their ethereal forms. They needed to be nearby for the soul connection to keep them fed. This could be averted by possessing an object, which could sustain the spirit in their ethereal form with the mana inside the object. However, in their material form, pacted spirits could travel as far as they wanted.

Ffyr took advantage of that. With Mathew inside the store, she could travel far enough in her ethereal form to look behind the closed doors. Once she made sure no one would see her, she turned into her material form and traveled further inside the store.

"I found something odd." Ffyr said to Matthew. "There are people eating flour with their noses in the basement."

"Ok. Don't let them see you. We'll be right there." Matthew responded chuckling to himself for her innocence.

Having confirmation that the store was a front for drug dealings as she suspected, Vanessa threw caution away. Her Sense Others skill allowed her to sense the people downstairs and how much mana they had. That way she could confirm that there were no adventurers in there at that moment.

She kicked down the door that led to the basement bringing the eyes of the few patrons nearby to her, but most of them assumed she was known by the staff, since none of the staff acted to stop her. The staff themselves knew what happened in the basement and weren't going to call the police on her. Instead, they called their boss.

The basement was a dimly lit room with game consoles and TVs where people gathered to do drugs and play video games. Drugs were laying around unorganized on the tables and some needles were scattered on the floor. The room had 5 people in it. Two men were playing a soccer game on a console while smoking, another one was watching the game with a beer can on his hand and the other two, a man and a woman, were laying on a mattress on the floor half naked.

"Who the fuck are you?" The man with the beer asked them as soon as they barged in the basement.

"It doesn't matter." Vanessa said looking around and frowning from the smell of the room. "I'm here for the Howling Spear."

"What?" The man asked taking out a gun from his pants. "You better get out of here now."

Vanessa threw a dagger at the man's hand making him drop the gun and scream in pain when the knife pierced his hand.

"What the fuck!" The man screamed. "My hand!"

Matthew got a bit concerned watching her behaving like that. That was not how she usually were. Her eyes were filled with anger. Matthew could understand her. He too was filled with rage after seeing the pictures in the flash drive, but that man there was not in them.

"It's enough." He stopped her when Vanessa drew another knife. "Let me do this."

"What do you mean enough?" Vanessa asked looking at Matthew like she could hit him.

"It's enough." Matthew insisted. "Let me do it my way." He said walking towards the man holding his bleeding hand.

Vanessa took a deep breath and decided to trust Matthew. But she kept a hand on her knifes ready to draw them again if needed.

The others in the room were just looking scared. It was obvious they were just drug users and had nothing to do with the dealings of that place other than being customers.

Matthew touched the bleeding man's shoulder and applied his Witchcraft skill on him instilling a feeling of trust and calmness on him.

"We just want information about the Howling Spear guild." Matthew said tranquilizing the man. "Tell us what you know."

"Ok. Just don't hurt me." The man said easily falling under the skill's influence. "You want Yuki. She owns the place."

"Yuki Takeda?" Vanessa asked getting close.

"Yes. She comes by every Wednesday to grab her money. Sometimes she comes by unannounced to have some fun." The man confirmed.

"Who is Yuki?" Matthew asked Vanessa.

"She's Howling Spear's vice leader." Vanessa explained. "Does she live nearby?"

"She lives two blocks down-street." The man answered.

"Is that enough?" Matthew asked Vanessa.

"That's actually perfect." Vanessa smiled making up a plan in her head. "Let's go."

They hurried away before other people arrived and turned that incursion into a brawl. They were sure the people upstairs called for some kind of help, even though they knew it was not going to be the cops.

The drive back home was quiet. Vanessa was too focused elaborating her plan while Matthew was thinking about Vanessa's behavior in there. She was not alright.

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