Wailing. That was the absolute first thing Jeanne detected the moment her boots crossed the threshold of the engineering sector—a sound of pure, unadulterated despair escaping from Closure. The vampire engineer looked ready to swing a heavy wrench at the nearest bulkheads out of sheer frustration.
Seeing the technomancer weeping over the wiring harness while Theresa stood by offering cheerful encouragement, Jeanne made a swift, executive decision: she slipped into a shadow cast by a structural support column to quietly observe the spectacle from afar.
She noticed a third figure lingering near the interactive consoles—someone she hadn't interacting with frequently. It was W, the Sarkaz mercenary commander. While Theresa kept up her stream of morale boosts for the technician, she also seemed to be enjoying a remarkably pleasant chat with the mercenary.
"Aaaah! Theresa, please just grant me permission to rig this structural plate with demolition charges and blow the entire mechanism to smithereens!" Closure shrieked, tearing at her hair. She looked ready to borrow a handful of claymores from the mercenary standing beside her just to shatter the barrier. "This is my eighth attempt to bypass the logic circuits! The heavy gears won't budge a millimeter. I am entirely convinced the underlying physical hardware is fundamentally warped!"
She couldn't comprehend what kind of absolute lunatic had engineered this security network. Why on earth would anyone expend this much energy making an internal bulkhead so ridiculously resilient?
"But Closure, salvaging the pristine structural framing is still our best-case outcome, isn't it?" Theresa reasoned softly, her voice filled with gentle compromise. "Our current capital reserves are exceptionally strained. Even if our refinery continues to mint fresh rose-gold bars at maximum capacity, it won't entirely plug the deficit in our quarterly ledger."
Theresa was equally desperate to breach the chamber, and if she truly resorted to brute force, her own arts possessed the destructive capacity to shatter the steel plates far more cleanly than raw explosives.
But replacing a heavy motorized bulkhead required significant material assets, and when she factored in Babel's current financial deficit—not to mention the massive treasury they needed to accumulate to convince Fafnir to deploy in future campaigns—she felt a heavy weight on her shoulders. If their expenditures continued at this rate, her only remaining option to secure the dragon's assistance would be to package herself up and sell her own royal services to the greedy creature.
Hearing the grim financial reality, Closure instantly abandoned her dreams of glorious demolition. She slumped back over the main control housing, resuming her grueling struggle against the encrypted electronic network. Meanwhile, Jeanne and Fafnir remained tucked away in the dark nook, silently taking in the scene.
Standing here watching them burn through their remaining brain cells while I secretly enjoy the entertainment from the sidelines... is that a bit too mischievous of me? Jeanne mused, a faint smirk touching her lips.
"Wait a second, this makes zero sense," Closure muttered, tapping the side of her visor. "I explicitly requested the Doctor to summon Jeanne to our sector. The commander confirmed she was already en route, so why hasn't she crossed our perimeter yet? Did she manage to lose her way in the maintenance corridors? Let me give her a quick ring."
The vampire pulled out her communication device and dialed Jeanne's frequency. A second later, a bright, cheerful melody began echoing through the quiet cavernous space, emerging from an obscured corner just a few paces away. The rhythm sounded remarkably identical to Jeanne's personal ringtone.
The three figures at the console stiffened, turning their heads in unison toward the source of the sound. The dark, recessed alcove was easily large enough to accommodate a couple of grown individuals. The reality of the situation was instantly, hilariously obvious.
Realizing her cover was blown, Jeanne casually stepped into the illumination, cradling Fafnir in her arms with absolute composure. Her face remained entirely clear of any guilty blush, behaving exactly as though she had just arrived that very second as she offered a warm, enthusiastic wave to the group.
W offered a brief, knowing nod, while Theresa greeted her with a warm smile. Closure, however, delivered a death glare of absolute fury. The technician didn't just suspect—she was entirely certain—the Saintess had been lurking in the shadows, enjoying the spectacle of her mental breakdown.
Given their desperate circumstances, Closure wisely chose not to call out the spy. After all, actually forcing the heavy door to cooperate still required the girl's extraordinary intervention.
Jeanne maintained her pristine, innocent smile in the face of the glare, acting as though the lurking onlooker had been someone else entirely. Her performance was so seamless it made one wonder how many dozens of times she had practiced this exact evasion to accumulate such experience.
Still, a trace of lingering awkwardness pricked at her chest. To redirect their focus, she gently set Fafnir down on a nearby crate and stepped up to inspect the stubborn electronic barrier that had completely stymied Closure's professional intellect.
Left to her own devices on the crate, Fafnir turned her head, her large eyes locking onto W's gaze. The ancient dragon and the volatile mercenary stared blankly at one another, their eyes wide as they engaged in a silent staring contest without a single syllable of spoken dialogue.
W was secretly harboring her own doubts. She evaluated the small child, trying to place the girl's lineage. A Vouivre... right? She recalled Hedley mentioning that a specific curvature of horns and a thick tail generally pointed to a Vouivre heritage. Beyond the taxonomy, she couldn't shake an overwhelming sense of familiarity.
Unaware of the grand secret regarding Fafnir's true draconic identity, the mercenary simply assumed she had crossed paths with the youth during some forgotten campaign in the barrens. She racked her brain, searching her memories to pinpoint exactly when she could have encountered this blank-faced youth.
Noticing a subtle resemblance between the child's delicate features and Jeanne's own striking looks, W casually wondered if the girl was a younger sibling or perhaps an unspoken relative. Though the math didn't quite line up if one assumed the girl was Jeanne's direct offspring, stranger bloodlines existed across Terra.
Hoping to offer a casual greeting to the silent youth, W extended a hand, intending to offer a friendly pat to Fafnir's head. But before her fingers could make contact, the child executed a swift, disdainful dodge, tilting her frame away with a speed so immense W's reflexes couldn't even register the motion.
What a bizarre little creature, W thought, drawing her hand back. Then again, considering the child was an inseparable companion to the dragon lady, exhibiting a few logic-defying traits was entirely par for the course.
BANG!
Before W could attempt a second approach to build rapport—perhaps hoping a friendly relationship with the child would allow her to get closer to Jeanne and secure a chance to examine those magnificent drakes—a resounding impact shattered the quiet of the engineering bay. The sheer force behind the strike left a heavy ringing in the air.
W whipped her head toward the source of the noise. Jeanne was standing directly before the massive security gate, her fist still extended from a devastating straight punch. On either side of her, Theresa and Closure stood frozen, their expressions locked in pure, unadulterated shock. They hadn't anticipated the Saintess would employ an engineering methodology this remarkably crude.
Yet, a heartbeat later, the heavy motorized gears groaned. The massive security gate, which had resisted Closure's sophisticated decryption protocols for hours, began sliding open with agonizing slowness. A single punch had resolved the entire system lock, leaving Closure staring blankly at the mechanism, seriously questioning why she had spent her entire morning calibrating digital frequencies.
"Just as I suspected, the internal alignment was simply caught on a foreign fragment," Jeanne remarked smoothly, peering into the exposed mechanical housing. She offered the casual explanation aloud to rationalize her violent intervention, ignoring the complex circuitry entirely.
Closure could only offer a hollow, strained smile in response. Her professional pride was currently lying in absolute ruins. At that exact moment, she desperately wanted to find a secluded storage vault, track down a duplicate electronic door, and hammer it with her own fists just to release her pent-up frustration!
W, on the other hand, felt a profound appreciation for Jeanne's direct methodology. She quietly committed the tactic to her long-term memory: If a complex electronic terminal refuses to cooperate, simply deliver a massive physical strike to the housing.
Naturally, her future adoption of this philosophy would lead to the total destruction of countless expensive communication relays down the road, but that was a problem for a later date. Once she formed the habit of striking malfunctioning hardware, the reflex became a permanent part of her character.
Over the next few hours, through a combination of Jeanne's brute force adjustments and Closure's frantic rewiring, the pair successfully managed to "repair" the vast majority of the stuck automated bulkheads throughout the sub-levels. The chaotic process left the vampire technician harboring severe doubts regarding the validity of her own engineering degrees.
During the frantic rush, W quietly slipped away from the engineering bay, vanishing into the lower corridors without a sound. Aside from Fafnir's sharp eyes tracking her departure, the busy repair crew remained entirely oblivious to her exit.
Reflecting on her brief impression of the mercenary, Jeanne recalled W as an exceptionally quiet, reserved individual. She hadn't detected a shred of the volatile mercenary archetype within her demeanor; the woman's tranquil composure felt entirely disconnected from the bloody reputation of the barrens.
Since they lacked a solid foundation of shared history, Jeanne hadn't managed to exchange more than a few basic words with the striking Sarkaz. She began to wonder if her previous assumption—that W possessed a wild, eccentric personality—had been nothing more than a total hallucination.
How could a Sarkaz this quiet possibly be a chaotic wildcard? Jeanne thought, shaking her head to clear her mind. Perhaps my initial judgment was simply flawed. Even Theresa mentioned she was an individual of exceptionally few words. She dismissed the lingering curiosity, letting the matter drop entirely.
It wasn't until weeks later, long after the main mercenary contingents had completed their formal withdrawal from Babel's territory, that Jeanne crossed paths with the woman again and discovered the reality of her status.
To her total surprise, the mercenary had formally severed ties with her independent faction, choosing to enlist under Theresa's personal banner as a solo operator. As Jeanne evaluated the cockroach-themed mercenary during their unexpected reunion, she detected a subtle, inexplicable transformation in her bearing compared to their quiet encounter in the lower decks.
And it didn't take long for Jeanne to realize exactly what had shifted! Her initial instincts regarding the woman's chaotic nature hadn't been an error at all; the serene composure W had displayed in the workshop was nothing more than a defensive mask used to evaluate strangers.
Once that barrier dissolved into familiarity, Jeanne realized she wasn't dealing with a quiet scholar at all. The unhinged, explosive personality that emerged left her feeling as though she had just encountered an epic, heavily upgraded variation of a rowdy Snow Yeti!