Allen’s Office in the Silver Association Base

Allen slams his fist down on his desk, causing a crack to form on it as he shouts at Sage, “What the hell do you mean they’re missing?!”

The woman in front of him simply looks him in the eye and answers calmly, “They just vanished one day from our trackers. You know what this means.”

“Damnit!!” he shouts, barely holding himself back from slamming his fist into the desk again. “How? Just how could this happen? And how did they hide from me for years?!” Before Sage can answer, he asks, “Which of the orphans were they?”

Sage rattles off three names without any hesitation, making Allen frown.

I remember them… Jamie, Jarod, and Jennifer. A set of triplets. And if I remember correctly, they were found together in a dumpster by Scarlet of all people. Then they followed her home and wouldn’t leave until I got back and welcomed them to the orphanage…

“So stupid…” he mutters, clenching his fist. “How could I not have noticed? Changelings shouldn’t be able to hide from me for that long. Not unless… did they have a magic item?”

Sage just watches as her boss begins pacing back and forth, trying to figure out how the three changelings managed to sneak into the orphanage without him being able to figure out what they were.

After a few seconds, he stops and looks at Sage while asking, “And you say they left surveillance soon after the last Demonic Assault began?”

Sage nods her head, “Correct. They were last seen by the drones transforming into their original forms before breaking through the city’s barrier and rushing into the wilds.”

Damnit… at least they can’t be traced back to me since I disbanded the orphanage, regardless of how cruel that may sound… I still wish I didn’t have to disband it though. I was hoping to at least keep an eye on the kids in case they needed help, but this wasn’t what I was expecting to find instead.

Allen eventually sits back down with a sigh.

“Tell me of their actions throughout the days prior to the Demonic Assault,” he asks, looking up at Sage in the process. “Did they show any strange behavior? Meet anyone strange?”

Sage shakes her head and answers, “Negative. There were no deviations from their normal behavior.”

Then they must’ve gotten intel from their fae somehow, or through a telepathy skill of some sort… but what suddenly made them break their cover? And why didn’t they ever kill anyone? Most changelings hunt as many humans in the upper districts as possible, moving around faster than the regular human eye can even see them… but they were under surveillance this whole time, so they never did any of that.

He narrows his eyes for a second and asks, “Do you know if there was any tampering on the footage in the drones?”

“There was none, sir,” she answers, her hands held together behind her back like always. “That was the first thing that we did after learning of their identities and sending a squad of Tier III Guardians to take care of them.”

“And the squad?” Allen asks, a frown beginning to form on his face.

“They came back empty handed,” Sage replies, mirroring Allen’s frown with one of her own. “Said they couldn’t find hide nor hair of the changelings.”

Allen groans while leaning back in his chair.

Which means we have three changelings roaming around the wild near Rothwell City… damnit. Why would they choose now to escape the city anyways? They had plenty of opportunities before. In fact, why would they even bother escaping the city in the first place? And why go to an orphanage run by a Class IV Guardian? And the fact that it was Scarlet who originally found them…

“Why can’t anything go as expected nowadays?” Allen mutters while staring up at the ceiling.

It would make things so much easier if the System didn’t automatically translate every language into a single one regardless of the world you’re on… because then the changelings would at least have to learn the language on Earth first before infiltrating.

Several seconds pass in silence before he mutters, “I think I need a drink…”

Sage wisely doesn’t say anything in response.

Somewhere in the Wilderness

Morax the Deceiver rushes through the trees with both Vapula the Tinkerer and Nebiros the Plague Bearer behind him, each of the three changelings moving far faster than any regular human eye could ever hope to spot.

‘I didn’t think this day would ever come,” Vapula says through her telepathy skill, the she-demon’s leathery wings flapping behind her every time she rushes from tree to tree. And Morax can’t help but agree. This has been a long time coming.

The day they were finally freed from that city by the Prince’s direct command. Or at least, freed to head to a different city. One known as Terra by the filthy humans of this world.

Morax still can’t help but shiver at just how long he had to imitate those terrible creatures.

Except the Princess of course, because she’s royalty. And she will eventually shed her filthy human genes for the superior blood lycan genes of the royal family.

Morax believes this with all his heart as he rushes through the trees, for once feeling the wind passing through his leathery red and black scales and his humanoid face covered in lighter scales than the rest of his body. Just feeling his ears extended to their full, sharp length rather than stuck in the form of a human child.

And the feeling of his tail out and whipping around again!

It feels so good to be back in my original form again!

‘Remember that we still have a job to do,’ Nebiros states, his voice sounding gruff and scratchy in the other twos’ minds. ‘If anything happens to Her Highness, both the Demon King and His Highness will have our hides over a dozen times over.’

That snaps Morax out of his moment of bliss as he and the other Class III changeling demons pick up the pace towards the capital of the human world.