In Magic City, just as Mei's group had once done in Imperial City, the Sakura delegation had rented an entire floor of a five-star luxury hotel as their temporary residence.
Night had already fallen, and most members of the Sakura exchange team were in their rooms, settling in to rest.
As expected, the exchange team's base was being watched by dedicated personnel from the Cloudspire Alliance. For now, it was nothing more than routine surveillance by a handful of plainclothes officers, their attention fixed almost entirely on the team's most gifted members. The ordinary members of the delegation drew barely a second glance.
It was precisely this gap in attention that gave the Sakura Alliance's hidden operatives the opening they needed to make contact in secret.
One by one, several unremarkable figures from the team slipped away from their rooms, as though meaning only to find some company for the evening, and gathered quietly in a single room. Nothing about the scene stood out. A few friends meeting to play cards, share a meal, or simply talk was hardly worth a second look, and the order to raise the surveillance level had not yet come down. Gatherings like this had likely happened countless times before, fading into the background until they were invisible.
Once the door was shut, they swept the room with specialized equipment to be sure no listening device had been planted, then switched on a signal jammer. With every precaution in place, the tension that had gripped them while they worked began to ease.
"Phew~"
One of them let out a long breath and sank back into the sofa.
"Kenji-kun, any word from 'over there'? By the schedule we agreed on, they should have reached out to us a long time ago."
"Nothing at all, for this long? Do you think something happened to them?"
Another voice cut in from across the room.
"Ichiro's right to worry. Something could easily have gone wrong on their end. Honestly, everything about this has felt off lately. What happens to the people 'over there' isn't really our problem—but that item is still sitting in our hands, and that is our problem."
"If something's gone wrong and the Cloudspire Alliance catches even a whiff of this, we're finished."
"Exactly..."
"We're already—"
The room dissolved into overlapping voices, everyone talking at once, unsettled that their contact had missed the meeting and left them holding something they no longer wanted. If this went badly, none of them would ever be allowed to leave Cloudspire again.
Listening closely to these unremarkable members of the Sakura exchange team, one could uncover a secret startling enough to unravel everything the delegation appeared to stand for.
The true purpose behind the Sakura exchange team's visit to Cloudspire was anything but simple—or rather, the purpose driving these particular individuals was anything but simple. The team's public leaders, the celebrated geniuses everyone watched, were nothing more than a convenient façade. The real weight of the mission rested on the shoulders of these forgettable, easily overlooked figures, and the entire exchange team existed to give them cover.
What they were actually here to do was nothing good. It tied directly back to The End Church, a group the Cloudspire Special Security Forces were hunting down like rats scattering from the light. Their task was to deliver an item carried from the Sakura homeland into the Church's hands, in the hope that the cult's fanatics would use it to cause the Cloudspire Alliance as much trouble as possible, ideally leaving a trail of dead Alliance members behind.
The bad blood between Cloudspire and the Sakura ran in both directions. It wasn't only the people of Cloudspire who despised this arrangement—the disaster from years past had devastated their people too, reducing many of them to working as ordinary blacksmiths just to get by.
And yet, even now, the outcome they had been counting on had failed to arrive.
"Damn it, that seal hasn't been reinforced in half a year now!"
"If we don't do something soon, it's going to—"
Kenji, the one leading this small group, lifted his eyes toward the others, who were still arguing heatedly among themselves.
"You're right. We can't just sit here and wait to die."
"The rest of you, go out and see if 'over there' left any kind of sign for us."
At his order, a few of them rose, gathering up their scattered pieces of equipment. But that left an obvious question hanging in the air: what about everyone else who stayed behind?
Hearing one of his companions voice that very question, the rest of the group faltered for a moment, caught off guard—but the thought passed as quickly as it had come.
A sharp glint crossed Kenji's eyes. If there had been any other way, he would never have sent people out to hunt for traces the other side might have left. It was too dangerous. If they were caught by the Cloudspire Alliance, this would no longer be a question of whether they could go home.
Smuggling that item into Cloudspire, and worse, working alongside The End Church to do it—these were actions that could not be forgiven. Handled carelessly, they would bring consequences far beyond what any of them could survive. The Cloudspire Alliance already regarded their delegation with deep suspicion, and if it ever learned what this small group had been doing behind closed doors, the matter would go far past simply being sent home. At that point, even death might start to look like mercy.
None of them could shake the anxiety twisting in their chests.
After a tense round of back-and-forth, they settled on a plan: they would search for whatever secret markers or codes The End Church might have left for them. The item could not remain in their possession a moment longer than necessary—it needed to be handed off as soon as possible.
With that decided, the group filed out of the room one by one, their expressions carefully composed, betraying nothing. To anyone watching, it was simply a few friends parting ways after an evening together. No one outside those walls would ever know what had truly been decided in that room during the quiet half hour they had spent behind a locked door.