While Avery and Kasandra were celebrating after taking first place in the free-for-all battle event, Jasmine was finally starting to make some real progress gathering evidence in her investigation.

With an actual confirmed target, it had become easier to focus their direction rather than just looking for any suspicious behavior.

It took several days, but Jasmine had compiled a list of grants that were likely to be fraud.

All of them had been approved and pushed through by the current Under Secretary of the Department of Education, and three specific auditors that Jasmine had identified as coconspirators were in charge of making sure of the institutions' legitimacy.

From what she could tell, on average about one hundred forty million Krenin a year was being allocated to these fraudulent grants.

Some years seemed to be less than others, while a few that she had found exceeded two hundred million.

On an individual level, this was a great deal of money, but the central government of the Dramid Alliance dealt with trillions of Krenin. Losing only a bit more than a hundred million Krenin each year was like a single drop of water leaking out of a faucet every now and then.

Still, this was only one instance of stealing from government funds that Jasmine had found. No doubt there were others no matter how hard the Dramid Alliance tried to prevent such things. Crafty and greedy people would find ways around existing security measures to line their own pockets.

"Let's see if I'll learn anything good today." Jasmine said, activating a listening device and camera that been planted in Under Secretary Andras' private office.

A couple of days ago, Olivia had managed to sneak inside and had secured a nearly indetectable bug developed by Grito in the room.

Since then, they had managed to collect some very interesting bits of information.

Jasmine's, Ezra's, and Kaiden's foray into the underlayers of the planet where they had investigated Andras' old mentor, Huijari had left Andras in quite the fluster.

While Jasmine had tipped the Alliance Police off the illegal activities occurring in Huijari's gambling den, by the time they had arrived the man was already dead.

There was almost no doubt that the one that had tried to follow Jasmine, Ezra, and Kaiden had been the ones to kill him.

Once he had leaked information, his fate had been sealed, and he was shut up permanently.

This had basically sent Andras into a panic, since not only had his mentor and friend been killed, but it was now certain that someone was snooping around his criminal affairs.

If he was caught, he would likely spend the rest of his life in prison considering how many counts of fraud and theft he had committed.

However, that would probably be an unlikely outcome for him that would be heaven compared to what truly awaited him.

Most likely he would end up being silenced just like Huijari had been. Possibly in a very painful way depending on how sour the mood of his superior was.

"Yep, he still looks agitated. Even more so than usual."

With the monitor keyed into the bug's frequency, Jasmine zoomed in on Andras to look at what the man was doing.

Before she and the other members of Avery's team had begun their investigation, he had been a well-groomed and fit man in his mid-sixties, but he had seemed to age and deteriorate years over just the last week.

The full head of slicked back hair he used to have had thinned to the point where he had multiple bald spots.

His physique that had been well maintained was also starting to fall apart.

To help cope with the stress he had been eating copious amounts of highly caloric foods and taking addictive drugs that only increased his appetite.

Frankly, Jasmine had never seen someone spiral out of control so quickly before.

Except, through her investigation, Jasmine had found that it was not just Huijair's death and information being leaked about him that was causing Andras' immense anxiety.

Apparently, the boss of this operation that had bene handling him had wiped his hands clean of everything and passed management off to some associates of his.

Jasmine had already learned that this man went by the alias of Adder, and it seemed he was as slippery as his name suggested.

At the first sign of real trouble, he had thrown away Andras and pawned everything for on someone else while he slithered away.

From what Jasmine had gathered, there were two people that were in charge of the operation now and would be taking the grant money for themselves.

Jasmine had managed to see a few messages that Huijari had received from them on a burner terminal that he disposed of and traded out every week.

She had also picked up some of his grumblings.

It seemed that his new masters wanted a bigger cut of the profits from the scam and were going to be squeezing Huijari for it.

They had paid Adder for the right to collect from the fraudulent grants, and it was apparent that they wanted to make their money back quickly.

Of course, Jasmine had seen a number of threatening messages sent towards Huijari. His new bosses were quite the task masters.

Wanting him to ramp up the number of fraudulent grants and to find the people that had been looking into the matter.

"I just hope that he doesn't die of stress before we're finished collecting evidence. We're almost done here. I just want to learn the identities of the ones behind all of this if I can." Jasmine said, intently keeping a watch on what Andras was up to.

Now that they had identified the main culprit and many of the grants that he was stealing money from, they already had enough to hand over to Azade's Representative and the Chancellor.

Frankly, Avery's team of mercenaries did not have the manpower to look into every false institutions set up just to siphon off grant money, but Jasmine's mother did.

Along with the messages and recordings of Andras that Jasmien had collected, her mother would easily be able to bring all of this crumbling down.

Being the leader of an entire planet, she could mobilize investigative journalists or her own private forces to collect evidence on the places of interest.

Then once she had enough, Regia could use her political influence to push the issue through and have everything Andras, and his coconspirators built over the last several decades come crashing down around them.

'I almost feel bad for those that are involved. My mother can really cause a storm if she wants to. A lot of people are going to get caught up in this and crushed.'

It was quite possible that Andras' bosses in the Department of Education would be dismissed even if they did not end up implicated as complicit in his crimes.

Allowing a subordinate to get away with fraud on such a scale for so long was a sign of major incompetence. Jasmine would not be surprised if the entire staff of the Department of Education was gutted and most of the personnel replaced after all of this.

"Oh, looks like he just received a new message."

Jasmine could tell immediately that it was from Andras' new handlers since he was holding his burner terminal and his body language had chaged.

He was shifting around more than before and was clearly agitated by another unreasonable request.

Unfortunately, he could not just ignore the orders he received.

One major problem with getting involved with illegal activity of this nature was that if you did not stay useful, you typically did not get to stay alive.

It would really be a pain for the ones trying to take over here to eliminate Andras, but they would probably do so in a heartbeat if he became even slightly more trouble than he was worth.

"Seems like I'm in luck, his new masters have finally summoned him. Now I'll be able to find out who they are so long as I trail him.

Jasmine carefully read over the message several times, putting it through a software the looked for certain patterns just in case there was another hidden message within what was in plain sight.

She had already seen such tactics used in a couple of the messages that Andras had received before.

Sometimes every third word in a sentence came together to create a new message, or other things of that nature.

The more impact the information, typically the more well-hidden it was.

"Doesn't look like there is anything else of note here. I guess all I can do is wait for him to get going and tail him." Jasmine said, pulling out her own terminal.

Currently Ezra and Kaiden were following up on some other leads, looking into some less than savory associations of Andras.

That left Olivia as the best partner to take with her when following Andras to the location he would be heading to.