Chapter 137
The interior of the second warehouse stretched before Lucas like the belly of a steel beast, its walls lined with racks of weapons that gleamed dully in the low light of enchanted crystals suspended from the ceiling.
Enchanted Swords in sheaves of oiled leather, spears with shafts of reinforced oak, arrows fletched with feathers from mana-sensitive birds all of it arranged with the meticulous order of a military that knew exactly what it possessed and exactly how quickly it could deploy it.
Lucas moved through the aisles with the steady, unhurried pace of a worker who belonged there. His borrowed face was blank, unremarkable, the kind of face that no one remembered after seeing it.
Beside him, Ethan had already peeled away toward the eastern section of the warehouse, his own illusory features equally forgettable.
They had split up without speaking, because speaking was unnecessary.
The plan was simple: plant the bombs at structural weak points where the damage would be catastrophic, places that were important enough to cripple the warehouse but obscure enough that no patrol would stumble across them before the charges detonated.
Lucas had taken the western half. Ethan had taken the east.
Lucas knelt beside a support pillar near the back wall, his hands moving with practiced efficiency as he withdrew a compact explosive charge from beneath his worker's tunic.
The bomb was small—no larger than his palm—but the runes etched into its surface glowed with contained power.
He pressed it against the base of the pillar where shadow pooled thickest, and the adhesive seal on its back held it in place. No one would find it unless they were looking for it, and no one was looking.
He moved on.
Across the warehouse, Ethan was doing the same. Lucas could feel his team leader's mana signature moving in a careful pattern, pausing at intervals that matched his own.
They were synchronized without having discussed it, two agents working in parallel toward the same objective.
What Lucas did not know—what he could not have anticipated—was that someone was tracking them.
Tisha had been hiding in the ravine for three days, her mana signature suppressed to the point of invisibility, her body utterly still as she waited.
She had not known what she was waiting for, only that the supply depot was vulnerable and that the Hidden City of Sky would eventually realize it.
The Calamity Tiger stirred within her, its awareness extending outward through her senses. Together, they tracked every footstep in the depot.
Every worker, every guard, every driver who passed through the gates left an imprint on her memory, a record of movement that she could review with perfect clarity whenever she chose.
The two new workers had arrived with the afternoon transport. Their steps were different.
Not obviously suspicious—most of their movements were predictable, following the same routes as the workers they had replaced.
But there were deviations.
Pauses in places where no one paused. Stops near support pillars and junction boxes and the reinforced wall that separated the weapons storage from the rest of the building.
Tisha opened her eyes.
She rose from her hiding place without disturbing a single stone, her body moving with the fluid silence of a predator who had learned patience over decades of hunting.
She did not release her suppressed mana, because that would alert whoever had come here, and she wanted to see their faces before they knew they had been seen.
She entered the warehouse through a side door that the guards had forgotten to lock three months ago and had never remembered to check. The interior swallowed her, rows of weapons stretching away on either side, and she began to walk.
She visited each place the two workers had stopped. The support pillar near the back wall. The junction box beneath the stairs. The ventilation shaft that ran along the ceiling. She found nothing at any of them—no bombs, no sabotage, no evidence that anything had been touched. But the steps themselves were wrong, and that wrongness gnawed at her.
She followed the closer set of footprints to its source.
Lucas sensed her before he saw her. The shift in the air, the faint displacement of mana, the weight of a gaze that was not friendly. He turned, and she was there—a woman with blond hair and cold eyes, her hand resting on the dagger at her hip, her presence filling the narrow aisle between the weapons racks.
She released her bloodlust. It was not the wild, uncontrolled rage of a elite warrior but something precise and surgical, a pressure that pressed against Lucas's chest and demanded a response.
The air between them grew heavy, and the world beyond the aisle seemed to fall away, leaving only the two of them in a bubble of silent threat.
No one else in the warehouse noticed. Her control was that perfect.
"What are you doing?" Tisha asked. Her voice was low, calm, the voice of someone who already knew the answer and was only waiting to hear how creative the lie would be. "Who are you?"
Lucas met her eyes without flinching. His mind had already prepared for this, because he had known from the moment he sensed her position that she might intercept him. The lie was ready.
"I was given a secret mission from the Zenith King," Lucas said, his voice steady. "The warehouse is going to be attacked. I am here to look for signs of it before it happens."
Tisha's expression did not change. Her eyes studied his face, searching for the tells that every liar eventually revealed.
The Calamity Tiger stirred within her, its senses extending outward, tasting the mana in the air around this stranger.
"The old bastard would send people for such a mission," Tisha said finally, and there was something almost like respect in her voice. Not for Lucas, but for the thoroughness of the Zenith King's paranoia.
But she did not leave. Her eyes remained fixed on Lucas, and something flickered in their depths—recognition without memory, the feeling of having met someone before without being able to place where or when.
His mana signal felt familiar in a way that nagged at her, a note played slightly off-key from a song she had heard somewhere long ago.
She searched her memory, running through the endless catalog of mana signatures she had recorded over years of battle and surveillance.
Thousands of signals, each one distinct, each one filed away for future reference.
She did not find him.
"Continue," she said, and she turned away.