After a brief rest, it was time to move again.
The team began methodically packing up.
They folded their high-tech optical camouflage cloaks, which automatically "hardened" into rigid panels when folded, making them easier to store. Each panel slid into a small, inconspicuous pouch on the back of their belts that looked, from the outside, like an ordinary tool bag.
Then they carefully straightened the carefully prepared, ragged outfits that matched the local civilians' style.
Leon raised the collar of his work jacket a little to hide his jawline.
Mike pulled his hood lower to cover more of his face.
Maggie let her dark red hair fall more loosely and wrapped it with a filthy bandanna to reduce how recognizable she was.
Their primary weapons were hidden under their loose outerwear, while pistols sat in concealed holsters under their arms or at the small of their backs, positioned so they could draw quickly if needed but would attract no attention otherwise.
"Alright, we now look like three unlucky bums who just finished picking through trash in the ruins."
Adjusting the deliberate tear along his pant leg, Mike cracked a joke to try to dispel some of the heaviness still lingering since last night.
Leon checked the stains on his jacket to make sure they looked "natural" enough and replied, "Image matches expectations. Remember, right now we're desperate civilians trying to survive. Eyes dead, movements sluggish. Don't stand like soldiers."
"Acting notes received."
Maggie added lightly. She had already adjusted her state; the sharpness in her gaze was now replaced by just the right mix of exhaustion and dazed confusion.
Once ready, they slipped out of the abandoned apartment block like real drifters and blended into the slowly waking streets.
With daylight, the curfew was lifted.
In the abandoned outskirts and the slightly better-off outer residential zones, scattered pedestrians began to appear.
Compared to the dead silence of night, there was a faint, sickly "vitality" here now.
Control, however, had not relaxed—only changed form.
"Soldiers" and "traitor" patrols still roamed the streets everywhere, sweeping their gazes over every passerby. They would shove or berate residents hurrying through the streets for no reason at all, displaying their authority and stoking fear.
As planned, Leon, Mike, and Maggie split up and merged into the thin streams of pale, anxious locals hurrying toward the inner city.
They walked with heads down and backs slightly hunched, perfectly mimicking the cringing posture of people who wanted to reach their destination quickly but were terrified of drawing attention.
As they moved, their senses ran at full power, taking in every detail around them.
The level of damage to the buildings, patrol shift patterns, camera locations—
But most importantly, they watched how the abused locals reacted.
With immense field experience, they had seen countless souls struggling under oppression and were masters at reading people's true emotions and intentions.
They saw that most civilians shoved or cursed at by soldiers or traitors reacted with pure fear and terror. They dropped their heads instantly, bodies trembling, voices cracking as they begged for mercy again and again, then bolted like frightened rabbits, too scared to linger or show the slightest sign of resistance.
That was a normal response for people who had lived under extreme terror for a long time.
Yet they also caught, with trained precision, a tiny minority whose reactions were different.
On the surface, these people showed the same fear—head bowed, body shaking—but if you watched their eyes closely—
In that fleeting moment when they glanced up, what flashed in their gaze was not submission, but resentment, anger, even a spark of defiance forced down into hiding.
Their fists would quietly clench at their sides, then relax a second later, but that instant of body language exposed their true feelings.
Those subtle reactions were like fireflies in the dark—there for only a heartbeat, but impossible to miss for professional operatives.
Leon noticed one middle-aged man who, when shoved, instinctively reached for his waist.
That was a reflexive search for a weapon, even if his hand found only an empty belt before he shrank back into a cowering posture.
Mike saw a young man whose neck muscles went taut as iron while he bowed and apologized—an involuntary physical response to anger being brutally suppressed.
Maggie picked out a middle-aged woman who, though visibly trembling at a shouted order, adopted a posture that held a trace of resistance.
"See the guy at nine o'clock in the gray jacket?" Mike's voice came through the encrypted bone-conduction earpiece. "When they shoved him just now, the fire in his eyes almost burst out before he looked down.
He wiped his right hand along his pant seam three times. That's a classic stress response. It means he's used to handling weapons."
Catching the fleeting figure disappearing around a corner, Leon swept him with the edge of his vision, committing every detail to memory. "Log him as Target A. Male, thirty-five to forty, gray jacket, scar over right eyebrow.
Clearly still has the will to resist, just lacks opportunity and means. Note that when he left, he chose an alley with more camera blind spots."
"Or..."
Maggie's cool voice joined the channel. She was pretending to adjust her shoelaces by the roadside while in fact watching another target. "Some of them may already be members of the resistance.
This kind of smothered rage looks more like trained operatives forced to swallow it while on a mission.
I've got eyes on a woman carrying a grocery basket. She looks panicked, but she keeps her body angled to shield a specific part of the basket. That spot might be hiding contraband."
That matched their working theory.
Real resistance fighters, in order to survive and serve a larger goal, had to become perfect actors in front of the enemy.
They would tremble just enough when humiliated, show fear right on cue when shoved—but in some tiny moment, the signs of training would slip through.
Maybe it was a too-perfect evasive movement, maybe an unusual familiarity with certain routes, or even an unconscious tendency to avoid surveillance cameras.
Leon quickly adjusted their approach.
"Cast a wide net. Eventually something bites," he said, his gaze sweeping the crowd like a scanner. "Pick suitable targets and tail them separately.
Focus on those with contradictory behavior—timid on the surface but with firm eyes, slow in their movements but unnaturally alert to their surroundings."
His eyes settled on one particular target:
A young woman, probably just past twenty.
She wore a washed-out old coat and clutched an empty cloth bag to her chest. Moments earlier, she'd been scolded by a "traitor" for walking too slowly.
Like everyone else, she had immediately bowed her head, apologized, and hurried off. But Leon had caught that instant when she turned away: a flash of deep hatred and stubbornness in her eyes that did not match her age.
That combination of youth and expression suggested she had only recently come into contact with resistance ideas—or that, because of her age, the authorities didn't consider her especially suspicious, making her ideal for peripheral operations.
"I've locked Target B. Young female, short brown hair, old coat, about one sixty-five tall."
Leon reported quietly while adjusting his direction and pace, shambling along after her like a vagrant with nowhere to be.
He deliberately kept about fifteen meters between them, using street vendors and other pedestrians as cover, stepping precisely into camera blind spots or crowded sections of the street.
"Copy. I'm on Target C—the guy at the repair stall. He's hiding something."
Mike responded, watching a man pretending to repair a radio. The man's motions were clumsy, but his technique with the screws was far too professional.
More suspicious still, he kept touching a bulge at his waist whose outline didn't match any common tool. Mike added,
"His left leg has a slight limp, but the wear on his shoe soles is even. The limp is an act."
"Target D, basket-carrying old woman. Gait doesn't match her age. Suspicious."
Maggie's tone stayed calm, but she had already tagged the hunched-looking old woman.
"Her gait shows core strength way beyond normal for that age bracket. And three times she changed course just in time to avoid patrol checkpoints. That's either incredible luck or she knows their patterns by heart."
The three began shadowing their chosen targets in silence, disappearing into the chaotic, oppressive morning crowds.
Leon noticed that after turning two corners, Target B started deliberately checking if she was being followed.
Mike observed that Target C lingered at his repair stall far longer than necessary.
Maggie saw that Target D made a barely noticeable hand signal at one intersection.
They were certain that among these people carrying embers inside, there had to be a trail leading to the local resistance.
A silent chase and selection process unfolded in the enslaved city.
Leon kept up his shambling yet precisely controlled stride, following the young woman from a distance.
Unlike most people, she did not head toward the inner city where there might be jobs or ration points. Instead, she kept turning into narrower, more dilapidated alleys.
What made Leon even more alert was that her general heading was toward the very abandoned district where their safe house lay.
That area held nothing but ruins, death, and the occasional patrol. No normal civilian would willingly head there in broad daylight.
"Target B's route is abnormal." Leon reported through the encrypted channel, voice steady, though his vigilance had spiked to maximum. "She's moving toward the outer ruins, not the inner city. Repeat, target's direction is abnormal."
His mind raced, evaluating possibilities.
From their earlier observations, this city, though brutally ruled, still maintained a minimal level of operation.
Most civilians would try to reach the inner zones during the day, trading backbreaking labor for the pitiful scraps needed to survive—
A bit of synthetic food, maybe a can of clean water.
The girl's behavior ran completely against that survival logic.
Instead of seeking resources, she was willingly walking into a place with fewer supplies and greater danger.
That strongly suggested her goal was anything but ordinary.
She was doing the opposite of what most people did, Leon thought, and a hypothesis sharpened.
She was very likely a resistance member—and her current destination might be a nearby safe house or contact point hidden in the ruins.
In an instant, the value of the target skyrocketed.
"Mike, Maggie," Leon called his teammates at once, "converge on my position. Coordinates synced. Target B is acting abnormally. High probability of resistance connection. I'm still tailing. She may be heading to a base. Need backup in case things go sideways."
"Copy. Moving to you now. Stay on her," Mike replied immediately.
"In position. Twenty-five meters off your flank," came Maggie's even shorter answer; clearly she had moved faster.
Leon continued the tail while growing even more cautious about his surroundings.
He noticed the girl paused for a split second at every turn, as though checking behind her out of the corner of her eye.
Her route selection was also deliberate, often using broken walls and collapsed structures to create visual blind spots.
She was very likely on a recon or liaison run.
And by the usual MO of such groups, she was almost certainly not alone. Someone should be shadowing her from behind, watching for tails.
The thought had barely taken form in Leon's mind when the situation suddenly changed.
The girl led him into a particularly narrow alley with high walls on both sides. At the far end, a half-collapsed brick wall turned it into a textbook dead end.
The moment Leon stepped into the alley, the girl stopped, turned around slowly, and crossed her arms over her chest. The fear and numbness she'd worn before were gone, replaced by a calm, appraising look.
She just stood there, as if she'd known she was being followed and had been waiting for Leon to walk into the trap.
Almost at the same time, faint footsteps sounded behind him.
Without turning around, Leon knew from experience and peripheral vision that two sharp-eyed men in civilian clothes had cut off his retreat.
One of them flipped back his coat hem to show the pistol grip at his waist—a wordless threat.
Tension flooded the alley in an instant.
Leon was caught between front and back, boxed into the dead end.
Just as the two men blocking the way began to move in and the girl in front tensed, ready to give a signal—
"Hey, guys, having a party? Why didn't you invite us?"
A teasing voice floated down from the low wall to one side of the alley.
Mike was somehow already perched on the wall, idly spinning a small knife in his hand, a relaxed but dangerous grin on his face.
On the other side of the alley, in the shadows, Maggie's form coalesced like a ghost. She said nothing, but the chill in her eyes and the coiled readiness in her posture were more threatening than any words.
In a heartbeat, the situation flipped.
The girl and her two companions, who'd thought they had their prey surrounded, suddenly realized they themselves were encircled.
The girl's expression changed. Her arms dropped from her chest, and her eyes filled with shock and suspicion as she flicked her gaze between the newly appeared Mike and Maggie.
The two armed men stiffened at once, moving back to back. Though they were still wary of Leon, their attention was now split.
In the cramped alley, the two sides faced off, the air seeming to congeal.
Leon stood in the center, his expression as calm as ever. He knew the first step in making contact with the local resistance had just begun.
______
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