The guards outside Titania's chamber remained exactly where Kaiser had left them, sprawled across the clean stone floor with their faces pale and their chests rising shallowly. Ludwig stepped over the nearest one without looking down for long. Killing them would have been easy, and after everything he had seen in the cells, it would have even felt deserved. But dead guards outside Titania's door would announce that someone had found her. Unconscious guards could still be explained as being lazy or an incident happened.
Redd paused beside one of them, the tension in his arm showing that he had considered finishing the job anyway. Ludwig saw it, but he did not need to speak. Redd looked once toward Titania's closed door, then toward the stairwell ahead, and moved on with his blade still in his hand.
Kaiser noticed the direction of his attention and glanced toward the staircase. "You were expecting the source to be below us," he said as they started climbing.
