The silence of City T's abandoned industrial sector was a lie. It wasn't empty; it was watchful. Lin Mei lay prone on the gritty rooftop across from the Blue Peacock Pharmacy, the biting night wind doing little to cool the tension coiling in her gut.
This place felt wrong. It was a graveyard of steel and concrete, but the ghosts here were still breathing.
"Five hidden cameras on the eastern wall, two more disguised as ventilation units," whispered Swift, her scout, her voice a ghost in the comms. "Two spiritual energy sensors sweeping the main gate. The city guard patrol just passed. As the General predicted, they left a seven-minute blind spot. We're clear to move."
Lin Mei nodded, her eyes scanning the decrepit facade of the factory. "Vultures, you're on point. Nomad, we're right behind you. Move like shadows."
The five figures detached themselves from the darkness. They wore the 'Nyx' Boots Hephaestus had forged, and the effect was profoundly unnerving. Their feet made no sound on the broken pavement. It felt less like walking and more like floating, their connection to the ground severed. They were ghosts, just as the craftsman had promised.
They reached their infiltration point: a large, forgotten storm drain, its entrance covered by a thick, rusted steel grate. But behind the rust was the faint, tell-tale shimmer of a modern laser security grid.
"Amateurs," Glitch, the Vultures' tech expert, muttered. "Mixing old world decay with new world tech. Sloppy." She and Xiao Zhang got to work.
"This is a pressure-sensitive laser grid tied to a silent alarm," Xiao Zhang analyzed, his tablet reflecting in his glasses. "We cut it, and every guard in a five-kilometer radius knows we're here."
"Then we won't give it a chance to scream," Lin Mei said. "Xiao Zhang. The welcome gift."
Xiao Zhang nodded and rolled a small, metallic disk—a 'Silence' Grenade—towards the grate. There was no sound, no flash, but the air suddenly felt heavy, thick with an invisible static that made the hairs on Lin Mei's arms stand up. The brilliant red laser grid flickered erratically, like a dying heartbeat, and then vanished.
"Ten-second window!" Glitch snapped.
Tien, the Vultures' leader, produced a plasma cutter. With a low hiss, he sliced through the grate's lock in less than five seconds. The team slipped through the opening into the suffocating darkness below just as the laser grid flickered back to life, none the wiser. They were in.
The change was instantaneous. The smell of damp decay was replaced by the cold, sterile scent of antiseptic and filtered air. They had left the graveyard behind and entered a tomb. A clean, white maintenance corridor stretched before them, its bright, shadowless lights feeling more oppressive than the darkness they had just left. Underneath the clinical smell was something else. Something faint, metallic, and sickeningly organic, like a hospital that was trying to hide the smell of the morgue next door.
As they moved deeper, following the schematics from Old-Man-Jiang, they passed a series of heavy, windowed doors. Lin Mei, driven by a need to understand the enemy she was fighting, peered into one.
Her breath hitched in her throat. Her hand instinctively tightened on her combat knife.
Floating in a large tank of bubbling green fluid was a thing that had once been a young woman. Her limbs were twisted and elongated. Patches of dark, iridescent chitin grew from her skin like a cancerous shell. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, were still recognizably human, locked in a silent, eternal scream of agony.
This is what they do, Lin Mei thought, a cold, pure rage solidifying in her heart. This is what we are here to burn to the ground.
They reached the central server room. Two guards, clad in the sleek, black combat gear of elite corporate soldiers, stood watch. Their spiritual energy felt calm and steady. They were professionals.
So were Lin Mei and Tien.
From the shadows of the corridor, the two hunters became blurs of motion. Before the guards' combat instincts could even register a threat, it was over. Lin Mei's hand chopped down on the nerve cluster at the back of one guard's neck. Simultaneously, Tien's fingers jabbed into a pressure point beneath the other's armpit. There were two soft, choked gasps, and then the sound of two bodies slumping silently to the floor.
The tech specialists rushed forward. "Triple-encrypted mag-lock," Glitch diagnosed. "But the power conduit is external. Xiao Zhang, the EMP."
Xiao Zhang placed another 'Silence' Grenade against the control panel. He triggered it. The electronic lock sparked and died. Tien easily forced the heavy door open.
The server room was the cold, beating heart of the facility. Racks of humming servers stood in neat rows, their blinking lights the only sign of the monstrous data they held.
"The main terminal," Xiao Zhang said, pointing. "Let's get to work." He approached the terminal and pulled out the 'Leech'. He attached the spider-like device to the primary data port. "Planting the bug."
He began the injection sequence. And then, a shrill, silent alarm flashed across his tablet screen.
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED HARDWARE SIGNATURE DETECTED. INITIATING SYSTEM-WIDE SECURITY LOCKDOWN. T-MINUS 60 SECONDS.]
"Dammit!" Xiao Zhang hissed, his face pale. "They have a hardware firewall! It's better than I thought! I can't stop the lockdown sequence!"
Sixty seconds. In sixty seconds, every door in this facility would seal, the room would be flooded with nerve gas, and their mission would end in a catastrophic failure.
Lin Mei's mind raced. There was only one impossible, desperate option. "Oracle," she whispered into her comms, a prayer to the ghost in the machine. "If you are listening, we've hit a hard-firewall. We have less than a minute before we are compromised."
For a heart-stopping ten seconds, there was nothing. 'He can't hear us,' she thought, despair beginning to creep in.
Then, a new data packet materialized on Xiao Zhang's tablet, arriving from an untraceable, impossible source. It was a single, beautiful, terrifyingly complex line of self-executing code.
"Captain... I'm receiving something..."
"Don't ask questions, Zhang! Use it!" Lin Mei commanded.
With trembling fingers, Xiao Zhang executed the divine script. The aggressive, red countdown on his screen, which had just ticked past T-minus 20 seconds, froze. It flickered, spasmed, and then dissolved into nothingness, erased from existence. The indicator light on the 'Leech', which had been flashing a frantic red, turned to a steady, confident green. The Ghost-Stream protocol was active. It had not just bypassed the firewall; it had devoured it, integrating itself into the lab's network like a natural part of the system.
The primary objective was complete. "We're done," Lin Mei whispered. "Let's get out of here."
They were in the final corridor, the exit to the storm drain just meters away, when they heard it.
The sound of calm, approaching footsteps and muffled voices.
"The energy fluctuations from Specimen 7B are stabilizing," a calm, authoritative voice said. "But I want a full diagnostic. The Director is getting impatient."
Lin Mei's blood ran cold. She shoved her team into a dark alcove behind a series of thick coolant pipes, their hearts hammering in their chests.
The footsteps grew closer. A high-level researcher in a pristine white lab coat appeared, flanked by four elite guards. They were walking directly towards them. There was no escape. They would be seen.
Lin Mei's hand tightened on her knife. 'A silent takedown on five targets? Impossible.'
Just as the lead guard's boot was about to cross the invisible line that would give him a clear view into the alcove, the world went black.
The bright, sterile lights of the corridor vanished. The hum of the facility's machinery died. Every system, every light, every sensor plunged into an absolute, suffocating darkness and silence.
A second later, emergency power kicked in. Blood-red alarm lights began to strobe, and a blaring klaxon echoed through the halls. "WARNING! CASCADE POWER FAILURE IN SUB-LEVEL C! WARNING!"
The researcher and his guards stopped dead in their tracks, their confident demeanor shattered by confusion. "A power failure? Impossible! The geothermal tap has a dozen redundancies!" the researcher snapped. "Security! Forget the patrol! Get to the main reactor and find out what the hell just happened! Go!"
The guards, their mission forgotten, turned and sprinted back the way they came. Their path was clear.
Stunned but seizing the opportunity, Lin Mei gave the signal. Her team slipped out of the alcove and vanished into the storm drain, the blaring alarms covering the sound of their escape.
As they made their way back to the surface, a single question burned in Lin Mei's mind. A cascade power failure, at that exact, perfect moment? It was too convenient. It was a miracle.
Was this chaos, this perfectly timed, life-saving miracle, also part of her mysterious shepherd's impossibly intricate plan? She had a chilling feeling that she already knew the answer.