Chapter 353
'Let this serve as our comfort in the midst of this long, exhausting watch.'
Five long and draining hours stretched out before them, from ten at night when the city began to fall asleep until three in the morning, when the darkness reached its deepest point.
Theo held his position at the observation post, a statue of patience paid for with muscle tension and mental endurance.
To fight back the growing urge to sleep, he repeatedly lifted a can of energy drink to his lips, swallowing the cold liquid that was bitter and overly sweet.
Each gulp felt like a brief injection of alertness that burned his throat before fading away, leaving an unpleasant sensation in his empty stomach while his eyes were forced to stay open.
He repeated this ritual over and over, filling his body with artificial fuel as his gritty eyes remained fixed on the dark border area under his responsibility.
In the distance, along the vast perimeter he was guarding, Aldraya carried out her duties silently and efficiently.
Yet, amid the tense silence of the night, every so often something that was not a sound but a clear vibration of thought slipped into Theo's mind.
Through the telepathic network they maintained, Aldraya sent a conversation.
Not a situation report or suspicious coordinates, but questions that sounded light and trivial in the middle of such a dangerous mission.
She asked whether love was blind.
She wondered whether closeness with a man could become a source of pure happiness for a woman.
Those questions fluttered like butterflies over a battlefield—so innocent, so childish, and utterly mismatched with the image of a vengeful former angel or a cold academy student.
They were the questions of a girl who had just entered her teenage years, trying to understand the complicated human world and the unfamiliar emotions that might be beginning to pulse within her.
Theo, who was fully focused, was initially a little startled by the interruption.
However, he did not ignore it.
Behind every trivial question, he could sense a deeper thirst—Aldraya's attempt to stay connected, to dispel the loneliness and anxiety of the long night watch, or perhaps to understand something about the vague feelings growing between them.
Through telepathy, without facial expressions or tone of voice, Theo tried to answer seriously yet briefly, offering his pragmatic but nonjudgmental perspective.
'They're no longer hiding. They're signaling.'
Three forty-nine in the morning.
The nighttime atmosphere, previously colored by awkward and half-formed teenage love poetry in Aldraya's mind, suddenly cracked like glass.
That childish creative process was brutally cut off, replaced by a cold and sharp emergency report.
Through the same telepathic channel that had just carried unclear verses about attachment, now flowed dense and dangerous data.
Aldraya instantly switched modes.
The voice of her thoughts, once filled with naive curiosity, became flat, precise, and highly alert.
She delivered a concrete observation.
Fifty people.
A significant number, far too many to be a coincidence in the dead of night at the academy's border.
From her elevated or concealed vantage point, the movement of the large group did not resemble janitors or routine security patrols.
There was a pattern, a coordinated spread, an approach that was too quiet and too deliberate not to arouse suspicion.
'If there are fifty people moving in an orderly manner from the northeast, and there's a signal from the southwest… this isn't a coincidence. They're advancing from two directions.'
Theo's first instinct was to move, to dash toward Aldraya's position to ensure her safety and directly observe the threat.
However, the foot that had just prepared to step forward suddenly froze.
His head, almost imperceptibly, slowly shook.
Instead of advancing, he slowly turned his body, focusing his sharp eyes toward the opposite side, trying to catch any shadow or movement that might confirm Aldraya's report from his own angle.
Meanwhile, inside his mind, his voice rang clear and firm across the telepathic bridge.
He did not ask for further reports or argue.
His instructions were immediate and operational.
He ordered Aldraya to immediately withdraw from her current observation point.
The command carried undeniable urgency, an acknowledgment that her position might no longer be safe or would soon be detected.
Then, before the girl could question or object, his next sentence followed at once.
Theo provided a new rendezvous point—a corridor whose location he knew well, not far from both of their surveillance areas yet sufficiently hidden and strategic to avoid detection by the group of fifty.
'There's no time to hesitate. A decision has to be made now.'
The meeting in the silent corridor was swift and without pleasantries.
Two silhouettes approached each other from opposite directions, their faces vague in the darkness, but the tension in the air unmistakable.
Their reports were exchanged briefly and concisely through voice and hand signals.
The picture that emerged from combining their observations was far more terrifying than expected.
The group of fifty people Aldraya had spotted turned out to be only a small part of a much larger force.
As time passed, more and more shadows slipped into the academy's outer perimeter with trained, stealthy movements.
Their rough estimate skyrocketed—from one hundred and fifty people to possibly three hundred or even more.
This was not merely an escort.
It was a small military operation.
Realizing the true scale of the threat, Theo did not hesitate.
His decision was made in an instant, a response to the stark imbalance of power.
Facing such a force in direct confrontation would be suicide.
So he chose a subtler and deadlier tactic.
He turned to Aldraya and, with a look full of conviction, proposed combining their abilities.
Both of them possessed unique techniques of concealment or disguise, legacies of their respective worlds and training.
By merging and synchronizing those abilities, they could potentially become ghosts—unseen, unheard, and unscented.
Their objective shifted.
No longer merely to observe or evade, but to carry out a highly risky intelligence operation right in the middle of the enemy.
They would infiltrate, search for the leader—the captain or head who commanded the hundreds of Bathee family subordinates.
Finding and identifying the mastermind behind this operation could give them the strategic advantage they desperately needed, whether to learn detailed plans, locate weaknesses, or even, if possible, silently cripple the command structure.
In that dark corridor, the two allies nodded to each other, a wordless agreement.
Then they began to concentrate, channeling their energy, and slowly, their silhouettes started to fade, blending into the shadows, ready to merge with the night and slip into the heart of an enemy formation of overwhelming numbers.
'And even now, we're still blind.'
Back in the present, behind the accidentally open curtain of the Star Academy window, the frozen tension on Theo's face was no longer due solely to lack of sleep.
There was a deep simmering anger, a restrained frustration born from the fact that their infiltration mission that night—despite successfully avoiding detection—had ended in a bitter dead end.
The deepest root of his irritation lay in that very fact.
They, with all their concealment abilities and caution, had infiltrated the midst of hundreds of enemies, observing up close, filtering every whispered conversation, every hand signal, every visible hierarchy.
Yet the result was nothing.
They had not found a face—nor even a form—of the figure who was the brain behind this massive operation.
Neither the leader nor the deputy, the entities supposedly commanding more than three hundred Bathee family subordinates, had revealed themselves.
To be continued…