The vault door was huge. It was made of polished steel and pulsing red runes covered the surface
From his viewpoint in the sub-basement corridor, Jonah watched the two guards standing like statues. They were like the physical lock while the glowing runes were the magical one. To a normal team, this was the end of the line. Tʜe sourcᴇ of thɪs content ɪs novｅlfire.net
But Cipher wasn't a normal tool.
Go, Jonah commanded, his mind extremely focused. Straight through.
The tiny creature moved slowly forward. It passed through the first guard's armored chest. The man shivered slightly, like he felt a sudden chill, but otherwise felt nothing.
Then it hit the vault door.
The sensation was like diving into ice cold, extremely dense water. For a moment, Jonah's linked senses were a mess of tightly packed metal, tangled power cables, and the buzzing mechanism of the lock. It was a foot of solid steel, and he could feel every single inch of it.
Then, with smooth push, he was through. Fzzt.
The server room was like another world itself. It was cold and the air was filled with the high-pitched sound of a thousand cooling fans. Racks upon racks of black metal towers stood in neat rows, their surfaces covered in tiny, blinking green and amber lights.
This was the brain of Aethelred Bio-Mechanics.
In the center of the room, one server rack was bigger than all the others. The mainframe. The heart of the system.
Interface, Jonah ordered.
Cipher shot forward and landed gently on the surface of the mainframe. It positioned itself over a sealed data port and then lowered its glowing green stinger.
The moment the filament made contact, Jonah's mind exploded.
He was hit by a flood of pure information. A huge wave of code, data, and pure electricity slammed into his consciousness. It was millions of emails, decades of financial records, thousands of hours of security footage, and endless lines of programming, all hitting him at the exact same time. It was like trying to drink the entire ocean through a straw.
For a terrifying second, he felt his mind start to break from the huge amount of information.
But then, Vanessa's work kicked in.
The Runic Transducer she had built into Cipher's core flared to life. The chaotic storm of ones and zeroes was caught, filtered, and translated. The painful, screaming noise of raw data was instantly organized. It was still an overwhelming flood, but now it was a flood he could understand. It flowed through him not as code, but as images, feelings, and thoughts.
He didn't have the time to be gentle. Security protocols would already be trying to find and isolate the strange new bug in their system. He had minutes, maybe seconds.
He pushed his will into the data stream, his mind screaming a single command. Search!
He ignored the secrets and blackmail material. He bypassed the financial accounts and employee records. He was hunting for one thing. He searched for keywords, projecting them into the network: Arena. Sabotage. Blood sample. Tournament.
Then, with a hunch, one powerful word: Jonah.
A hit. A project file, hidden deep in a series of encrypted folders, flashed in his mind. It was heavily secured, but Cipher was already past the firewall. Jonah tore the file open with his will.
The codename was simple, arrogant, and sent a chill down his spine.
"Project Prometheus."
He quickly checked the files. Medical reports. Genetic analyses. Energy signature readings. It was all there. It was his blood, his power, dissected and laid bare in cold, clinical detail. The sight of it made his stomach twist.
He didn't have time to be sick. He needed the location. Where was the lab?
He found it in a sub-folder labeled LOGISTICS. A single blueprint. The lab wasn't in another city or a hidden bunker. It was right here. In this building.
A secret, lead-lined chamber hidden directly behind the server room.
Jonah pulled Cipher's connection from the mainframe. He turned his new ghost's attention to the back wall of the server room. It looked like a solid, featureless slab of concrete. But Jonah knew better.
He pushed Cipher forward, and it phased through the wall.
He expected to see a lab. He expected machinery, stasis pods, maybe even leftover notes.
The room was there, just as the blueprint had shown. But it was empty. Totally, disturbingly empty.
It was worse than empty. It was sterile.
The concrete floor was spotlessly clean, but Jonah could see the faint, circular outlines where heavy equipment had once been bolted down. The air smelled of chemical cleaners and a sharp tang of magical decontaminants. Not a single piece of paper, not a forgotten tool, not even a speck of dust remained.
Every single piece of equipment was gone.
The entire room had been scrubbed. Wiped clean. Erased.
Jonah's consciousness floated in the center of the sterile chamber, the crushing weight of the truth landing on him.
They weren't just one step ahead of him. They had been waiting for him.
The Bureau knew they might be followed. They knew someone might trace the energy signature from the arena. They had planned for this. This entire facility, this perfect corporate front, was just a temporary shell they had used and already discarded.
This wasn't the work of clumsy thugs. This was the work of professionals. Competent, paranoid, and ruthlessly efficient professionals who didn't make mistakes.
Jonah let out a long mental sigh, feeling the cold, bitter taste of defeat.
Back in the van, miles away from the Aethelred building, he opened his real eyes. Vanessa and Seraph were looking at him, their expressions tense with anticipation.
"Were you able to find it?" Seraph asked, her voice low.
Jonah shook his head slowly, the image of the empty room burned into his mind.
"We found it actually," he said, his voice flat and filled with disappointment. "But they were already gone."
The trail had gone cold. They were too late.