Heat from the smoldering perimeter fence scorched Raymond's cheek as he rolled through the gap. Acrid black smoke from burning tires provided a shifting, oily veil. Twenty meters ahead, the "wrecking crew" was being systematically dismantled by the Reformers' automated systems, their dying shouts serving as the perfect acoustic cover.
Raymond kept low, his chest nearly brushing the grit-covered concrete. He activated [ Basic Sneak ]. The familiar translucent shimmer rippled across his vision, a cool static that seemed to dampen the sound of his own pulse.
Twelve meters.
The Augmented—low-level grunts with crude hydraulic limbs and flickering optical sensors—scurried toward the breach. They moved with a jerky, insectoid urgency, their heavy boots clanking against metal floor plates. One passed within three meters of Raymond's position, its head rotating in a full three-sixty arc. Raymond froze, melding into the shadow of a buckled shipping container. The grunt's red sensor swept over the smoke, found nothing, and moved on to patch the perimeter.
Clumsy.
He waited for a rhythmic gap in their patrol. Three seconds. He bolted across the open yard, feet silent on the soot. He reached the base of a maintenance block and scaled the rusted ladder in a single, fluid motion, his Agility stat making the vertical climb feel like a horizontal sprint.
He hauled himself onto the roof and flattened his body against the corrugated metal. Propping himself behind a massive, skeletal billboard—the peeling remains of a "Dahran Synthetic" advertisement—he peered through the rusted iron supports.
The central compound sat five hundred meters inward. Unlike the industrial exterior, this structure was a windowless monolith of matte-black composite. No lights. No visible seams. It radiated a clinical, cold authority.
Raymond adjusted his position, the metal beneath him groaning softly. He ignored the tactical noise of the dying skirmish at his rear. All his focus funneled into the dark entrance of the monolith.
Raymond shifted his weight, the rooftop's grit biting into his palms. He maintained his focus on the matte-black monolith, waiting for the high-value targets to break cover.
Directly in his line of sight, situated barely forty feet from the central compound's primary ingress, sat a structure that had been conspicuously absent from Marcus Chen's blueprints. It was a nondescript, rectangular building that mimicked the utilitarian design of an old public urinal. The concrete was cracked, and the external walls were a mess of sickly, mustard-yellow paint.
Raymond squinted. The way the paint curled and peeled felt calculated—as if someone had meticulously shredded the edges rather than letting the coastal salt air do the work. It was a visual anomaly, an artificial layer of rot designed to make the eye slide right past it.
The building sat in the dead center of the monolith's kill zone—a gauntlet of open ground with no cover. He let out a slow, measured breath, forcing his focus back to the black doors. He couldn't afford a tactical diversion now. If the lieutenants emerged, he needed to be ready to shadow his mark. The urinal could wait.
The forty-minute mark passed with a grueling, rhythmic slow-down of time. Raymond remained motionless behind the skeletal billboard, his breath fogging the interior of his high-collared jacket. Below, the compound was an ant nest of clinical violence. Grunts with pneumatic pistons for legs patrolled the inner perimeter, their movements synchronized and devoid of human hesitation.
High-level security cyborgs—beings more steel than marrow—carried out periodic visual sweeps, their optics glowing a predatory crimson as they scanned for thermal signatures. Raymond's position was precarious, but Marcus Chen's equipment held. The signal scrambler tucked into his belt hummed almost imperceptibly, creating a pocket of dead air that baffled the facility's low-level motion sensors and heat seekers.
Raymond's patience paid off when the monolith's heavy doors hissed open. He pulled the military binoculars strapped to the side of his backpack to observe the person exiting the central compound.
A woman stepped out, moving with an artificial fluidity, her every motion meticulously calculated. She wore a tailored suit of charcoal silk, a sharp contrast to the brutalist industrial surroundings. Through his scope, Raymond cataloged the details: dark hair in a sharp asymmetrical cut, pale skin, and elongated, slender fingers that moved with the precision of surgical needles.
Lieutenant Tavi Korr.
The Facilitator. Marcus's dossiers had been explicit: she was the architect of the Reformers' human capital acquisition. If anyone knew the specifics of the train movements, it was her.
Raymond felt the familiar spike of adrenaline and pushed it down. He didn't move. He watched her through the crosshairs as she stepped into the open yard. She appeared casual, almost bored, as she began a slow stroll around the inner perimeter. She paused to inspect a stack of carbon-fiber crates, her hand trailing over the lid. She stopped to exchange a few words with a towering security cyborg, her green bioluminescent eyes flashing in the dim light.
Classic, Raymond thought, his eyes narrowing.
Her pathing was erratic—stopping at uneven intervals, changing direction without tactical reason, frequently glancing toward the upper gantries. It was a sophisticated anti-surveillance dance. She wasn't just inspecting the facility; she was acting as live bait, drawing out any secondary infiltrators who might have slipped through the initial chaos.
Raymond drew a slow breath through his nose, keeping himself still. Following her now meant certain exposure. In the world of high-stakes intelligence, the first one to move was usually the first one to die. He would wait for her to finish her "aimless" walk and lead him to somewhere she actually felt safe.
The monolith's doors hissed again, venting a plume of pressurized nitrogen. Raymond adjusted his grip on the binoculars, shifting focus from Tavi's serpentine walk to the new figure emerging from the dark interior.
This was Lieutenant Vryn Ta'las. According to Marcus, he was the architect of the Reformers' internal logistics and the heavy hand behind their local enforcement. He looked like a man constructed from scrap and stress—skeletal, draped in a drab grey jumpsuit, his left arm a matte-black composite exoskeleton that caught the dim yard lights.
Vryn stopped, his head twitching with a rhythmic, mechanical anxiety as his deep-set eyes scanned the perimeter. Satisfied the grunts were handling the breach, he didn't head toward the command center or the security gantries. Instead, he strode with a lean, purposeful gait toward the mustard-yellow urinal.
Raymond's brow furrowed. The monolith was a sophisticated central command; it undoubtedly possessed high-end sanitation. Yet, a high-ranking lieutenant was crossing sixty meters of open ground to visit a dilapidated, peeling communal urinal.
Impossible.
Vryn reached the door, glanced back once more with clinical precision, and disappeared inside. There was more than waste being handled in that ruin.
Descending the maintenance block, Raymond crossed the courtyard, his [Basic Sneak] blurring his silhouette against the industrial grime. He reached the mustard-yellow structure and slipped inside. The interior presented a tactical dissonance; the tiles were scrubbed clinical white, devoid of the salt-stains or pungent ammonia typical of a public latrine. It smelled of ozone and filtered air.
Vryn stood before a rear wall. He used his matte-black composite arm to toggle a recessed switch that was disguised as a cracked pipe. A segment of the floor hissed and slid open, revealing a stairwell descending into a subterranean chill. As Vryn stepped onto the first riser, Raymond followed, maintaining a three-meter interval, his footsteps silenced by the system's veil.
Abruptly, Vryn stopped. He spun around, his matte-black composite arm whirring as it locked into a defensive posture. His red optic filters flared, scanning the narrow concrete throat of the tunnel for heat blossoms or shimmering air. Raymond held his breath, pressing his back against the cold wall.
"Paranoid wreck," Vryn hissed, his voice a monotone rasp. He rubbed his scarred temple, his diagnostics clearly showing nothing.
He turned and continued down, the hidden door sealing Raymond into the darkness with him.
Raymond tracked the lieutenant through a labyrinth of reinforced concrete and flickering strip lights. The descent felt endless, a spiraling trek into the gut of Cyber City's industrial foundation. With every floor they dropped, the air grew stagnant and heavy. The crisp, filtered scent of the upper levels vanished, replaced by the cloying heat of unventilated machinery. Sweat began to bead on Raymond's neck, the humidity clinging to his skin like a wet shroud.
Vryn moved with a twitchy, rhythmic gait, his boots clicking sharply against the metal gratings. The man didn't look back again, but his augmented left arm remained partially flexed, the black composite plates shifting as if the limb were breathing. Raymond stayed precisely five meters back, his body coiled.
[Basic Sneak] remained active. To Raymond, the world felt muffled, his awareness centered on the placement of his toes and the timing of his breaths. He was a shadow amongst shadows, a ghost following a machine.
The tunnel finally leveled out into a corridor of smooth, seamless obsidian. At the terminus stood a set of monumental double doors, their surface etched with the geometric patterns of the Reformer's creed. To the side, a console hummed with a soft, bioluminescent glow.
Vryn stopped, his fingers dancing over the interface. Red light washed over his face as a retinal scanner engaged.
"Authentication recognized. Lieutenant Vryn Ta'las. Proceed to the Inner Sanctum."
The mechanical voice was devoid of inflection. Deep within the wall, heavy hydraulic rams began to groan. The sound was a tectonic bass note that vibrated in Raymond's marrow. Slowly, the massive doors parted, the seal breaking with a sharp hiss of pressurized air.
Vryn stepped through the widening gap into a chamber flooded with harsh, blue-white light.
Raymond accelerated his pace, slipping through the threshold just as the doors began their ponderous closure. He moved to the left, hugging the shadows of a massive structural pillar.
The room beyond was a cathedral of forbidden technology. Rows of glass canisters lined the walls, each filled with suspended artificial organs and twitching cybernetic limbs. In the center of the hall, a colossal holographic projection of the Dahran Sultanate's infrastructure hummed, its flickering nodes of light revealing the Reformers' true reach.
The sheer scale of the mechanical wonder before Raymond made him hesitate. Rows of suspended cybernetic limbs twitched in rhythmic patterns, their hydraulic tendons flexing with surgical precision. At the chamber's heart, the holographic display pulsed with data streams, mapping the infrastructure flaws and human biological weaknesses in crimson vectors.
Vryn moved ahead without pause. His augmented arm emitted a soft mechanical hum as it interfaced with the central console. His fingers danced across the surface with machine-like precision.
Raymond remained rooted in place. His objective had changed—from passive observation to active intelligence gathering. He scanned for blind spots in the Reformers' surveillance.
To the right, a cluster of decommissioned equipment loomed—twisted metal skeletons of old exoskeletons and shattered diagnostic pods. The shadows there were deep, untouched by the chamber's sterile lighting.
Without a sound, Raymond began moving. Each step was calculated, his body low and controlled. He reached the shadow's edge and pressed against cold steel plating.
Raymond stared at the bio-mechanical supercomputer, its organic neural interfaces pulsing with alien rhythms. He'd expected data terminals—conventional access points he could hack or physically extract from. Instead, he faced a living machine, its command structure requiring neural implants or genetic authorization he didn't possess.
Operating this behemoth to locate the trafficking records, the raid logs that would reveal where those shipping containers originated—it was beyond him.
The realization clarified his next move. He couldn't extract the data. But he could ensure Marcus received these coordinates. Then he'd make his death count.
I hope Vryn will be classified as a tier 1 enemy. If Raymond could kill the lieutenant before the automated defenses shredded him, at least he'd gain the 8 REP. The System would reset him to the white room, but he'd have [Basic Analyze] unlocked. A worthy trade for a temporary death.
Raymond reached into his tactical vest and withdrew the signal emitter, a palm-sized cylinder etched with matte-black cooling fins. He assessed the surrounding cavern. He stood under dozens of meters of reinforced concrete and obsidian, a geological tomb designed to swallow conventional radio waves.
The device required a high-powered electromagnetic pulse to punch through the bedrock and reach Marcus's receivers on the surface. It wouldn't make a sound, but it would scream across the electronic spectrum.
Raymond looked toward the massive supercomputer at the center of the hall. The machine's sensory arrays hummed, its logic cores constantly scrubbing the airwaves for the slightest hint of interference.
The second I hit this, I'm a lighthouse in a storm.
He tightened his grip on the cylinder. Activating the pulse meant surrendering his stealth for a pinpoint data strike. It was a calculated risk—trading his invisibility to ensure the Table had the Inner Sanctum's coordinates locked.
He pressed the primary trigger.
The signal activated, transmitting on a high-powered frequency that punched through the reinforced barriers overhead. Immediately, the supercomputer reacted. Cold blue light shifted to an aggressive, strobing violet. Cooling fans spun up into a high-pitched whine that echoed through the cathedral, and every holographic display in the room flickered and reset. The unauthorized energy spike had been logged.
A piercing, rhythmic synthesized chime cut through the air. The detection alarm.