Chapter 28

"Couldn't you clean yourself BEFORE coming home?!"

Came the question from an irate James. He was standing next to a man tied to one of the chairs of the dinner table with a cloth bag over his head.

He was yelling towards the entrance where Anthony, with half of his torso missing, was attempting to mop up a sizable trail of blood. He had a bucket full of soap water beside him, which he had to refill with almost every other sweep.

Peter carefully made his way towards the adults, curious to learn what happened. As it turned out, Anthony was tasked with raiding a building owned by the fireflies and capturing the man tied to the kitchen chair. And regarding who he was…

"He's Brann's advisor, basically his second in command. There were a lot of bodyguards."

Peter took another look at the man, more carefully this time. He couldn't really believe what he heard.

[Entity class 5]

[Ability: Prediction]

His confusion only grew after reading the information. Gregory specifically seemed like someone who would want someone strong beside him.

"He seems a little weak for that position."

Anthony decided to explain the situation between refills, much to James' annoyance.

"As I understand it, he got his position mostly due to the circumstances. His ability was the only thing they had to counteract Helen's prophecies. With him out of the picture, the fireflies are basically defenseless against any type of attack. The reason I captured him alive was so you could steal his ability and Helen also wanted to turn him in to the police, since he's worth quite a lot even by her standards."

Since the tied up man's presence was supposed to be a gift for him, Peter walked up to him and touched him on the shoulder.

[Absorption failed.]

Instead of being disappointed by the message, he simply took a step back and kicked the man in the head, shocking the other two present, before trying again.

[Successfully absorbed class 5 prediction blessing.]

[Result: INT +0.05, MGC +0.05, EXP +50]

[Level up!]

[Divine weaponry unlocked!]

[You have not met the requirements to use Divine weaponry.]

It was a bitter sweet feeling. There obviously wasn't any disadvantage to having an unavailable ability and he did get a much needed boost to his brainpower, but it simply felt wrong to get something new and not being allowed to use it. He consoled himself with the fact that based on its name, he would probably get to use it after getting some more divinity.

After helping to clean up the liquid red carpet, Anthony sat down with the kids to ask them if they wanted to travel with him. The two were excited to go, even though their father spent much of the conversation explaining how boring his job was.

In order to travel around peacefully they wanted to sort things out at home. To let them fit inside the one-week time limit, the usual team of four split up to go after separate targets. Even Peter was allowed to go alone, but only at night and with James' supervision.

He was given a separate list with some less combat oriented members of the fireflies on it. The one exception among them being one of the mid-level leaders who he was supposed to fight after finishing the rest of the list. Peter chose to start with him because in spite of his injuries, he got a lot stronger recently without fighting much and he wanted to test himself out.

The target was known to frequent bars at night and the list mentioned a few places he would frequent. Peter would have had to guess where to start searching among them, if it wasn't for a helpful neighbor who just so happened to know where he would go that night.

Peter and James narrowly missed him entering the establishment. They didn't want to cause a brawl by fighting inside so they were forced to wait for him outside.

In order to not cause suspicion, James went into an alley and pretended to be passed out drunk with his limited acting skills, while Peter just covered himself in shadows and tried to stay away from any street lights.

After three hours of waiting in the cold night, the person of interest finally walked out of the building. It was clear he had more to drink than what was advisable due to his disoriented movements and the fact that he broke the windows of three cars before finding his own, then breaking that as well because he had trouble getting the keys out of his pocket.

It was a golden opportunity to take the man out so Peter jumped at the him while he was trying to get inside the car and threw him into a fire hydrant before following up with a kick to the stomach. When the kick landed, however, it felt as if he hit the aforementioned fire hydrant. He quickly backed off to avoid a potential counterattack and to assess the situation.

He had to acknowledge that while the personal information he got for the target was spot on, he was not informed about the kind of fight he would have to engage in.

[Entity class 7]

[Abilities: Iron body, Spike formation]