Montague calmly shut the cabinet door, walked briskly to the front desk on the first floor, and used the phone to dial his grandfather’s private number.
After hearing the description, the Old Count asked just one question.
"Did you touch it?"
"No, grandfather."
"Good."
The Old Count told him to leave the library immediately, make no stops on the way home, and cut off all outside contact once he arrived.
The Old Count went to the Royal Academy himself, bringing men with him.
After he met with the department head, the entire departmental library was closed for the night. The official reason given was a "utility malfunction."
The Old Count stood before Montague’s locker for about five minutes, then decided his grandson was to refrain from any public activities for the next three months.
Montague wasn’t present; the order was relayed to him after the fact.
"Why?"
"They’ve cast a line, and our family has no need to take the bait. Three months is long enough for their attention to drift elsewhere."
The Old Count had invited a friend of his, a Secretive One of the Sun Tradition who had reached the Grand Mastery Level.
His method was more "direct." Without reciting a single Curse, he simply covered the terracotta coin with his right palm facing down and pressed gently, lowering his hand three inches.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
After the violent booming sounds, he lifted his hand to reveal that not even a speck of ash from the terracotta coin remained.
Throughout the entire process, the Old Count stood by the library window, gazing out at the central lawn.
"Very cunning," he remarked to the friend beside him.
"Oh?"
"They didn’t go to his bedroom, nor to the family estate. They went for his locker."
"For our generation, protecting our children has always been focused on the ’home’."
He turned. "From now on, we’ll have to rethink our approach."
Catherine Blackwood found the terracotta coin at a small branch library in the Imperial Capital.
The main campus of Cheltenham Ladies’ College is in Gloucestershire, but it maintains a small branch in the Imperial Capital exclusively for alumnae and upperclassmen to use for research purposes.
Catherine had been granted special permission by the college to use a small reading room at the branch library, furnished with a narrow desk, a lamp, and a wall-mounted bookshelf.
That evening, when she pushed open the door to her reading room, a grayish-white moth was sitting on the desk.
The moth slowly disintegrated under her gaze, its scales dissolving into ashen wisps of smoke that slipped out through the cracks in the window frame.
Where the moth had been, two objects now lay.
The face of the terracotta coin was stamped with a bow and a crescent moon—the emblem of Artemis.
Catherine’s right hand was still on the doorknob, her left still clutching her leather handbag.
She held that pose, staring at the coin for about twenty seconds, then gently pulled the door shut and locked it.
She rounded the desk and approached the coin, but didn’t reach out to touch it.
Catherine had no direct relatives at the Grand Mastery level whom she could ask for help.
Her father had died five years ago in an "accident." He was only a Practitioner and hadn’t left much of an inheritance.
If someone were to scan her by some means, the most obvious signal they would detect would be the vestige of the Moon-Hunting Tradition in her bloodline.
She had heard from her uncle that Etheric traits could be passed down to descendants through the bloodline.
Although her family had declined in recent generations, her ancestors had included several Hunters who reached the Grand Mastery Level.
Even though she herself had never undergone any training as a Hunter, her blood still carried a faint trace of it.
They had detected this trace and thus assigned her Artemis.
The Hunting Goddess, a match for the Moon-Hunting Tradition.
Logically, it made sense.
But Catherine realized the problem almost immediately.
’I’ve never walked the path of a Hunter.’
Catherine was at Cheltenham studying Classics on a scholarship for Latin and Rhetoric.
She had excelled at the Cicero Cup in speech and debate, not in swinging a blade to slay monsters.
’If they truly understood me, Nemesis would have been a more fitting choice than Artemis.’
The personification of vengeance. A fire for reckoning burned in her bones.
Catherine turned the terracotta coin over in her hand, her chin lifting slightly.
’Their understanding is shallow.’
’So shallow that they rely solely on Ether Layer detection to label people, without having done even the most basic intelligence gathering.’
Catherine placed the terracotta coin back into its small, hard case and closed the lid.
She didn’t call her uncle.
Her uncle was a Hunter of the Minor Mastery Level; his abilities were limited.
His advice would most likely be, "Don’t touch it. I’ll hand it over to my superiors to deal with."
But Catherine had no desire to cede the choice to people she didn’t know.
And besides the four from the Cicero Cup, there were over a dozen of these scattered keepsakes in total.
However, most recipients didn’t even meet the minimum activation standard; the Spirit Realm Messenger would take one look from afar and then simply depart.

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