He watched them.
An impossible distance away, where the earth and sky melted into the horizon, he sat on a mountain range. Back straight against the stone (posture is important), legs crossed beneath him, left hand resting calmly on his left knee and his right holding a pair of rusted opera glasses to his eyes. Tawdry for his usual taste, but the contraption's design and execution far outweighed its garishness.
It started as a sophisticated arrangement of telescopic lenses. The magnification yield was impressive. But not quite what he needed. He threw in a the bare minimum of arcana, specifically calibrated to produce the absolute maximum. It was getting better, but it still lacked something. Ah yes, of course. A row of runes, painstakingly etched onto the razor-thin edges of the lenses by hand and scalpel, supplied him with filters. Thermal and night-vision for starters. He decided to add in the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, and threw in the coterminous planes for the hell of it.
Almost . . .
The probabilistic distribution put it pretty black and white. The chances that someone was sensitive enough to sense the magical hum of the optical system from the distance it placed him at were absurd. A 'sleeping sensitive' felt out to an approximate range of 30 feet. An 'awakened sensitive' carried the distance out from anywhere between 30 and 60 yards. Gifted brought one to a mile. Prodigal meant comfortable handling of a five-mile radius.
'Sensing' in all directions constantly, at all levels of power strata, equated to unimaginable strain.
But it couldn't hurt to give himself a bit more of a cushion. So he made a case for the optical system out of Uru, an energy absorbing metal mined in Terrenus, and shaped it like a pair of opera glasses. The rust nothing more than a function of pure aesthetics, achieved with meticulously placed pigment.
The energy leak was now near non-existent. It could pass right beneath a psychic's nose. Most people were loaded with more than enough anti-divinity to choke a roomful of oracles. But pure line-of-sight ingenuity was an untapped market.
The girl could make her weapon disappear at will, which no doubt meant she could summon it just as easily. The body language between her and the boy was interesting but as yet had no context, so he did not yet bother to index it.
The boy though. The boy gave him volumes. Throwing his swords around in disregard, but treating just one delicately. With care. Might as well tell the whole world.
Procuring a blank notebook, purchased just for the occasion and complete with pencil (ink froze at this temperature), he laid its open face across his lap. Without once drawing his eyes away from the scene developing between Masashi and Payne, he pressed the pencil tip against the beginning of the very first line and waited.
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