"I'm not sure..."
Deep down, Angel did not quite believe her. After all, she was one of the Demoness Sect's higher-ups and had operated in Trier for years. The Sauron Family, meanwhile, was a former royal family whose influence could not be ignored in Trier—or even across Intis—and an angel family that had once held Sequence 1 of the Hunter Pathway.
If the Primordial Demoness coveted the Adjacent Pathways, her first target would surely have been the declining Sauron Family, not the Augustus family, which still ruled the Loen Kingdom. Only after establishing that there was no hope on the Sauron side, or that it would be too difficult, would she have considered making a deal with George Augustus III, helping traffic people and creating the Great Smog to conceal the evidence in exchange for the Conqueror characteristic he held.
Yet Angel openly performed a quick divination, and the result was that the Black Witch, Clarice, truly did not know Vermonda Sauron's whereabouts.
Surely my divination wasn't interfered with? If a Sequence 2's divination of a Sequence 3 can be disrupted, the only possibility is that a higher power is protecting her... Angel resolved to find Klein afterward and have him, a proper Seer, verify it. Only then did she nod, set the topic aside, and continue asking:
"Who do you report to within the Demoness Sect? Who are the other higher-ups?"
She intended to use this to determine exactly who was sheltering Clarice!
Clarice answered honestly:
"I report directly to the Old Ancestor, as do the other higher-ups in the sect. Including the Old Ancestor and myself, there are thirteen High Sequence Witches in total. They are either angels or Sequence 3 Unaging Demonesses, and all use colors as their code names."
"The Old Ancestor?" Angel repeated the strange