The Insider System

Chapter 337: Gone Forever

After some time Lake decided to look at his skills to see if he had one that could help him. He had so many at this point he didn't know all the things he could do and with the fact he was sitting behind a couch safe for the moment there was plenty of time to read them again to jog his memory.

After a while he found a skill called Ghost Touch and wondered when he had even received it. He didn't even remember seeing this skill but he knew there was a chance he had used it in the past and just forgotten about it. He tended to not remember everything he did or thought so there was really no telling.

Ghost Touch (L) Lv.1

You can turn things you touch ethereal for a short amount of time.

While they're ethereal you can still interact with them.

Doesn't work on living things as well.

(Amount of time scales off of Intelligence)

The second part said he could still interact with the things he made ethereal if he wanted but that might mean he could just slide through them if he didn't. If that was the case he could just slide through the floors and walls to get to where he wanted.

He needed to be careful because the other things on the floor would probably fall through as well but he was hopeful that he could control how much of something he turned ethereal with the skill. He was going to test it on the couch he was sitting behind to see if this was true. Touching the side of the couch, Lake activated Ghost Touch and could tell right away this skill had enough control for him to use it the way he wanted. Not only could he control what percentage of the item was ethereal it seemed he could shrink the area as long as he was still touching it.

With that test done he just needed to see if he could pass through the area that was affected and he would be ready to make his escape. Passing his fingers into the couch cushion, Lake ignored the weird feeling and made sure he was ok if he did this a few times in a row.

Once he was done he flexed his fingers a few times to make sure there weren't any side effects before turning his attention to plan a way through the building. It looked like most of the people that were still in the castle were in the lower levels and the ones that weren't were stationary meaning they were probably guard.

With these two factors he should have no problems making his way to the lower levels but he wanted to make sure no one discovered one of his ethereal spots if he ended up having to use it in the middle of a hallway. Once he knew where he needed to go on each floor on the way down to make sure no one was around he turned a small part of the floor next to him ethereal and dropped down to the next floor.

He ended up in an empty room like he expected and he quickly did the same to go down again. Those two floors were easy but he couldn't move down like this anymore because there were guards under him now so he was going to move over through the wall before going down to the next floor.

After passing through a few more walls and floors he was finally back on the ground floor and could pass through the front gate to enter the courtyard. He didn't go right away though because he was kind of worried people would wonder where he had been if they saw him walk outside.

He was sure the person he was currently had things he was supposed to be doing all of this time and as soon as they noticed him they would come and question him about what he had been up to. There was a way to avoid this though and all he had to do was walk through a few walls including the big one out onto the street.

There he could find a place to change and get out of the city to hide the body of the guard before someone found it. From there he might come back to the city to sell stuff but he didn't think he would. The glow that encompassed the entire city kind of made him feel like going somewhere else to break the law so he was going to follow his gut and leave probably.

If that was the purpose of the light he had to think that there wouldn't be much crime in this town to begin with so it would probably be better to go somewhere else to sell the stuff anyway. This would also make it harder for whoever they sent after him to find the items he stole and sold since they would be further away.

He wasn't sure if that would stop them from being able to track him but he figured it would help. Since he was someone who could look at item's details he knew the name of the person who stole it could be found that way and he didn't want that to happen to him because with a name it wouldn't take that long for them to find him.

Getting ready to start walking through walls with his path planned, Lake was able to go straight for a while before he had to switch directions to avoid people in the next room ahead of him. After two more walls he made it outside and didn't stop heading right for the wall ahead of him.

There was no one looking this way and he didn't want to spend a lot of time out where someone could turn and see him so even though he would have liked to test his skill on something as thick as this wall before he walked into it he didn't. If he wasn't in constant contact he would be more worried but he was able to completely control Ghost Touch while inside the wall.

After an estimated twenty feet of wall Lake popped out on the other side and just walked away like he was supposed to be. Now that he was outside the other guards up on the wall would see him so how he acted as he walked away needed to be normal enough that they didn't think about where he had come from.

They would all know the wall's gate hadn't been opened so a guard outside all of a sudden would look weird. It wasn't important enough for them to think about these facts though if he wasn't running so none of them would put this together and start asking questions.

They would just think someone was heading home or had something to do in town and go no further to put things together. Once he was about to turn the first corner to go behind a building he felt the amount of attention on him go up slightly and knew one of the guards probably saw him but a few seconds later the feeling went away and he knew the guard had already forgotten about him.

Being out of sight he picked up speed and headed to where he had placed his things earlier in the day to get changed. If someone had been chasing him he would have left the items here and recalled them to him later but since he had made a clean getaway there was no reason to not get changed before he headed out of the town.

Once he found his stuff, which was all still there, he quickly got everything including the clothes he had stolen earlier off of him and put his own clothes back on. He decided to take all the stuff that he had just taken off with him and destroy them once he made it out of town because they could be used as evidence like anything else he had taken.

Once he was outside of the city he took off and flew to a nearby rocky area to burn all of the evidence. Getting everything into a pile he started the burning using Fire magic before calling the body of the guard to him. This was the biggest piece of evidence that could lead them to him so leaving it in a pile of garbage with its face intact had been a mistake.

All that would have had to happen for him to get caught was someone to discover the body before calling the guards who would recognize the face of the person he had turned into and the guards would have spread word that he had died. Then they would see him alive and it wouldn't take a genius to put together that there was something wrong.

None of that had happened though and he was able to destroy the body now with no one ever knowing what had happened. He was sure they would find it weird that one of the guards disappeared around the time they were robbed but he would be gone by then and all the evidence was going to be dust.