The guest room window was locked, but that was little obstacle for Ren's strength. A quick tug and the wood cracked, the sound muted even to Ren's ear. The ambient sounds of wind and sea were quite potent. He cracked the window and eased himself back inside Madarame's mansion. He landed lightly upon a carpeted floor, listening intently. Ren heard nothing nearby, so he stood and closed the broken window as best as he was able- reducing the subtle murmur of the sea to a small whistle of wind forcing its way through the cracked wood.

Ren could now hear distant footsteps within the house. Multiple people were moving nearby, though the distance was hard to determine. The upper floors must be mostly carpeted and rugged, as steps sounded muffled. They were surely investigators combing through the building, and they were on this floor with him.

Ideally, Ren would wait for them to pass, but he didn't have the time. Every moment increased the chance of Madarame's hidden persona being discovered- or himself. The last thing he needed was to be spotted in here. Ren knew that most pure humans didn't notice his heritage, but most humans were not really paying attention. The authorities in this house were certainly going to be attentive, and even if Ren were to escape cleanly after being spotted, it would not take a huge leap of intellect to deduce his identity within Tock-Yo.

Ren edged open the guestroom door, and gasped quietly as the scent of fresh blood gusted into his face. Too fresh to be Makoto's or Ann's or any other prior victim in the home- and it didn't smell like them anyway. Ren paused and sniffed carefully, opening his mouth slightly to allow air onto his pallet. It was three different people, but too muddled for him to glean any other information. He wasn't even sure which direction it was coming from. The air was saturated and still, giving no indication of direction or concentration.

He peeked into the hallway. Empty to the right, one door along the right hand wall before the corridor turned the corner of the home and continued unseen to the left. In the other direction, a long hallway along the seaward side of the mansion. A long line of doors on the left, surely all guest rooms with impressive sea views- and near the far end, leather-clad figures exited one room and entered the next on the way towards Ren. They didn't notice him, being nearly 50 meters distant and too focused on their immediate surroundings. The search party, obviously- for this floor, at least.

Ren had not been up to this floor the previous night, but along the way towards the search party, a corridor opened right and presumably went towards the atrium in the center of the building. Madarame's office had been more central, near the small stairway which had descended to the killing floor hidden far below. Presuming a logical rectangular shape of the mansion, Ren thought he could avoid the party by heading immediately right, following the hallway to the left and reaching that side's central-leading hallway to the atrium, and from there, the passage to the office.

He waited for the methodical searchers to exit their current room and enter the next, then Ren darted out and down the hallway away from them. A quick peak of down that side of the house revealed no searchers, so he hot-footed along, ignoring doorways to either side. The smell of blood was lesser here, so Ren felt reasonably sure he had moved away from the source a little, but he wasn't here to discovered whatever the source might be. If someone else had died in here since last night, it wasn't his business. He needed that war persona, and it was surely hidden in some safe part of the house, and the most likely spot to start looking was Madarame's office.

Ren headed left again towards the center of the home. The atrium was a short distance ahead and the dull murmur of human voices slowed Ren's gait. There were perhaps three people, men- Ren was sure. Likely more of those black-leathermen soldiers, whoever they were.

"Mumblemumble- seen the priestess?"

"No. She's probably found something she wanted. We're gonna be here all day."

"Seriously?"

"Yes. Seriously. The last time we found something like this, she found this stack of papers and just sat down and read them all. I had to stand there for hours."

A sigh. "Well, better than mopping the temple floor, though."

"Amen to that."

The voices were emanating from the ground floor, roughly where Madarame had fallen. Ren crouched low to keep the lip of the balcony between him and whoever was below. He needed to get around to the other side of the atrium, but luckily there seemed to be no soldiers upstairs. So with a graceless, dog-like crawl, he moved silently around the boarder of the room, keeping as close to the inner wall as possible, never once coming into the line of sight of anyone who might be below.

One more hallway, one more turn, and Ren would be at the office again. Just hours before, his small group had been desperately limping their way out of a sprung trap. It seemed ages ago; but the smell of Makoto and Ann Sakamoto were still lingering in the area, faint under the fresher, unknown scents- but Ren's senses were tuned to those young women, so he could probably smell a drop of their blood in a horse trough. Regardless, their scent nor this new blood scent was his objective: only the persona mattered.

The office door was before him. A closed door at the terminus of a small corridor. Ren quick-stepped towards it, hearing no motion inside. That fresh blood smell was overpowering here. Ren paused, listening harder for anything that might be alive behind the closed door- perhaps some ambush? No. Just silence here. Somewhere behind him, footsteps echoed in the atrium. Someone was on the move. Ren might not have a lot of time.

He crept closer to the door, his eyes noting faint bootprints on the carpeting, their shape imprinted in dark red. Someone had left the office ahead, and had blood on their boots at the time. But Ren wasn't interested in boot prints, he turned his attention to the door, opened it, hissed as a wave of blood-scent hit him- hunger twinging vaguely in the pit of his stomach. But he was not here to lick the floor, either. Ren slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

The office was splattered with blood- all surfaces and the ceiling covered in red sprinkle. In the center of the room, there was the remains of something… probably a human woman, but it was hard to tell. There was a discernible leg and what might be scraps of a dress of some sort, maybe black, but that could also be soaked and dried blood. There were two more corpses in the room: male and mostly whole. The first, wearing what appeared to be a Council Guard uniform, had a nearly severed head. Another was one of the leathermen. Amidst the gore, Ren could not immediately discern any wounds on that last corpse, but the man was certainly dead like the others.

Dread settled into Ren's gut like an icy ball. The violence itself was not unsettling to him- he'd seen worse. But the possible sources of such wanton violence were few- and fewer still in human territory. Ren pulse thundered suddenly in his ears. He was too late, though he hoped he was wrong. The memory of the blood-outlined bootprints on the carpet flashed before his memory. Someone had left this room after this slaughter- or something had.

Not willing to abandon hope, Ren ignored the mangled ruin of three human lives and gazed about the office, seeking some other aspect that was different from his hurried search last night. Nothing caught his attention, except that the desk at the far end of the room was the cleanest part of the room. He headed towards it, trying to keep his cloak out of the soaked carpeting- his boots squishing softly.

Under the desk, where someone might have their feet when working, a hatch of some sort was open. Inside, a box was also open, and it was filled with a sort of padding. And the empty depression in the padding was shaped like the bottom half of a sphere.

Ren cursed under his breath. The war persona was gone! He stood up, looking once more over the gore of the room. These three humans knew who had the persona, but they were dead. Most likely, the persona was inside a fourth human, the owner of those boot prints outside. Human because there was no scent of vampire in the room, outside of Madarame's latent scent- and he was dead. There were too many smells to get any sense of a specific human scent (besides Makoto and Ann), but Ren was sure there was no other vampire here.

So a human had a war persona. Or, perhaps more accurately, a war persona now had itself a host. Persona were vampire weapons and tools, but the Sakamoto twins were living proof that humanity could utilize persona, too. But the Sakamoto's had stumbled upon tools. This persona, if the Clan Yaldabaoth letter was to be believed, was a weapon. They were something else entirely. Ren doubted younger-blood vampires could handle a war persona, much less a human. So this persona, whatever it was, was essentially on the loose and on God-knew what agenda. It needed to be found. And quickly.

But who found it? A human from the biggest human city in the region? The thief could be any of the hundreds of thousands of humans in Tock-Yo!

Well, no, Ren realized he could quickly rule out most of the populace: only a select few people would have been aware of this mansion, still fewer had actually entered. Perhaps that Captain Akechi or one of his men? Ren's eyes fell on the dead council guardsman. No- that was one of their men there, so it probably wasn't one of them. Even under the sway of the persona, allies and subordinates would be valuable resources and not enemies. And then there was one of the dead leathermen here, too; so, that seemed to rule out the thief being a member of that faction, too, whatever it was.

So… there must be some other faction in the city? But who? And that's assuming he was right about-

The office door opened.

A man in black leather stared at Ren in shock. Ren stared back, equally shocked. He'd been so absorbed in thought, he'd lost track of movements outside the office. The spell broke. The leatherman reached for his pistol. Ren snatched up the heavy desk chair and flung it at the doorway. The man's eyes widened further before the wood smashed into his face and he fell back with a yell.

The office had no other exit other than the secret stairs into the dungeons below, and Ren knew that was a dead-end. He had to get out the doorway. He vaulted over the desk and jumped over the corpses. Unfortunately, the leatherman had not been knocked out.

"Help! Intruder!" The man was on his back in the hallway and had managed to pull out his pistol. Ren arrived at the office doorway to see a gun pointed at his gut.

POP!

Ren spun sideways just before the shot, feeling only the pressure of air escaping the gun barrel. He kicked the man's hand, hearing bones break with the blow. The leatherman screamed in pain and rolled over to protect his broken arm, his gun tumbling down the carpeted hallway.

Shouts went up from the atrium. More boots were climbing stairs.

So much for a quiet escape! And the leatherman had saw him! But there was no fixing that, now. Ren couldn't just slaughter men going about their duty, and he wasn't even sure what human faction these men represented. They might very well be allies for all he knew. He needed to get out of here before he was forced to defend himself to more fatal effect.

Sprinting towards the atrium revealed a small cadre of leathermen climbing the stairs, they pointed at him and shouted. Guns leveled. Ren dove forward and rolled along the carpeting as small arms fire splintered woodwork along the atrium paneling. Gunshots chased him around a corner and out of line of sight.

Ren sprinted down the hallway, sure that the room he used to enter was on the opposite corner of the mansion. If he could make it to the end of this hallway, the guest rooms on that side of the house should have their seaward windows he could-

Leathermen came around the corner ahead of him. The first search party! They stopped and aimed their pistols. Ren dove sideways into a door, splintering it into a shower of wood. This was a tiny guest room, or perhaps a servants quarters. It featured only a tiny window which let in some meager daylight and a limited view of the side of the neighboring mansion. Lacking options, Ren dove for it, exploded into daylight in a shower of wood and plaster, smashed into the opposing mansion due to excess momentum, and then fell to the earth below in an ungraceful heap.

Scrambling to his feet, Ren realized his only escape was the seawall he climbed to get here. The neighborhood street would have whatever reinforcements the leathermen might have nearby, maybe council guard, too. An arduous climb in full daylight was his only way out of this pennisula without bloodshed, and it would take him over an hour to get back to his horse.

How long would it take for the leathermen to report to their superior? And that person to their superior? And that person to someone capable of connecting the dots between the report and the single, notoriously black-clad dhampir in Tock-Yo?

Hopefully, two hours- at least.

***