The air in the warehouse was thick with the ghosts of forgotten industry. Dust motes, ancient and undisturbed, danced in the few shafts of grimy light that pierced the gloom from cracks in the boarded-up windows. It smelled of rust, stale grease, and the cold, damp earth of the Tianjin waterfront. This was Yuan Shikai's domain—a place off the books, beyond the reach of imperial inspectors, a black site where the true work of his shadow empire was done.
He stood in the center of the vast, empty floor, a figure of immaculate, tailored silk in a world of decay. The contrast was deliberate, a projection of his own nature: order and ruthless purpose imposed upon chaos. Spread before him on a wooden crate were newspaper clippings, their headlines stark and sensational. "THE APPALACHIAN FIRE!," screamed one. "Panic Grips Eastern Seaboard!," declared another.
"Look at this, Corporal," Yuan said, his voice a low, satisfied purr. He gestured at the papers with a manicured finger. "Look at the fruits of your labor. Panic. Chaos. The American President, that bellowing fool Roosevelt, recalled from a hunting trip to deal with a crisis he cannot comprehend. You have wounded the beast, Riley. You have thrust a hot poker into its eye."
Corporal Riley did not look. He stood a few feet away, a hollowed-out man lost in the cavernous space. The crisp, confident lines of his U.S. Marine bearing had dissolved, leaving behind the slumped shoulders and haunted eyes of a man tormented by his own actions. He was thinner than he had been just weeks ago, a nervous tremor in his hands that he tried to conceal by clenching them into tight fists. He looked like a photograph that had been left out in the sun, his colors faded, his edges blurred.
"How many…?" he asked, his voice a dry, rasping whisper that was swallowed by the warehouse's oppressive silence. He cleared his throat and tried again. "How many people were hurt?"
Yuan Shikai turned to look at him, his expression shifting from satisfaction to a faint, clinical curiosity, like a scientist observing an unexpected reaction in a petri dish. "Hurt?" he repeated, as if the word were a foreign curiosity. "Some local firefighters, I believe. A few villagers who got too close. Irrelevant. Collateral damage in service of a greater goal. Casualties are a line item in the budget of war, Corporal. Results are the only thing that matters. And your results," he conceded with a thin smile, "have been magnificent."
He saw Riley's weakness, the moral rot that was clearly setting in. But Yuan, in his supreme arrogance, saw it not as a critical liability but as a manageable flaw in an otherwise useful tool. He believed fear and control could cauterize any wound of conscience.
He swept the clippings back into a briefcase, the rustle of paper loud in the stillness. The time for praise was over. It was time for escalation.
"Destroying their infrastructure was a fine opening move," Yuan said, his voice dropping, becoming more intimate, more conspiratorial. "It has sown confusion and strained their economy. But confusion is not fear. True fear, Riley, is personal. It is indiscriminate. The American people must be made to feel that they are not safe anywhere. Not in their factories, not on their streets, not even in their own homes. We must poison the very air they breathe with terror."
From his briefcase, he produced not a newspaper, but a blueprint. He unrolled it across the crate, weighting its corners with spare metal parts. It was a detailed architectural diagram of a large, bustling building. A ferry terminal. The South Ferry Terminal in New York City.
Riley's eyes widened in horror. He stepped forward, his gaze fixed on the diagram, on the cross-sections of waiting rooms, ticketing halls, and boarding platforms, all filled with tiny, schematic figures of men, women, and children.
"No," Riley breathed, shaking his head. "Sir… Minister… that's a civilian target. That's… these are just people. Families. That wasn't the mission. The mission was to disrupt their industry, to hit their war machine, to make them back down…" His words tumbled out, a desperate, pleading litany.
Yuan's face hardened, the mask of the patient mentor melting away to reveal the cold, brutal butcher beneath. "The mission is what I say it is," he hissed, his voice like chipping ice. He took a step closer, invading Riley's personal space, his presence overwhelming. "You are a soldier. You follow orders. Or have you forgotten your position? Have you forgotten Captain Stone, languishing in a cell, his fate entirely in my hands? Have you forgotten that you are a traitor to your flag and country, and that the only thing standing between you and a firing squad is my continued satisfaction with your performance?"
He let the threats hang in the air, heavy and suffocating. "Do not forget who holds your leash, Corporal."
Riley flinched as if struck. The fight went out of him, replaced by a shuddering, resigned despair. He stared at the blueprint, his shoulders slumping in defeat. He was trapped. A ghost in a foreign land, a puppet whose strings were held by a monster.
"What… what do you want me to do?" he asked, his voice dead.
"You will build another device," Yuan instructed, his tone returning to one of cool, operational command. "Smaller. More subtle. It will be placed in the main waiting hall during the evening rush. The objective is not structural damage. The objective is maximum human carnage. The timing mechanism must be perfect. Untraceable. Like before."
As they began to discuss the specifics of the bomb's construction, Riley's mind detached. The technical details were a refuge, a purely mechanical problem that allowed him to temporarily wall off the horrifying moral implications of his task. But his internal turmoil, his frantic desire to just get it over with, to appease the monster and be left alone with his ghosts, caused him to make a critical mistake. Yuan, his mind soaring with the grand, strategic vision of bringing America to its knees, was too preoccupied to notice the flaw in the foundation.
"The timer," Yuan stressed. "It must leave no trail. No clue that could lead their investigators back to us."
"Yes, sir," Riley said, his mind racing, grasping for the simplest, most available solution. He was thinking like a desperate field operative now, not a meticulous saboteur. "I… I can modify a standard Westclox 'Pocket Ben' watch. The gearing is reliable, mass-produced. They are everywhere in America. It's common, easy to acquire here in the port markets. No one would look twice at it."
The mistake was made. A common, mass-produced American clock. An item with lot numbers, manufacturing runs, and distribution records. It was a loose thread. A tiny, almost insignificant error born from an asset's compromised mental state, and enabled by a master's arrogant assumption of his own infallibility. To Yuan, the plan was perfect because he had willed it to be.
Yuan nodded, satisfied. "Excellent. See to it. You will have the funds and resources you require by tomorrow. Do not fail me."
With a final, dismissive look, Yuan Shikai packed his briefcase, turned, and walked away, his polished leather shoes echoing on the concrete floor. He was a specter of clean, decisive power, disappearing back into the shadows, fully confident that his perfect weapon was being primed for its next devastating strike.
Corporal Riley was left alone in the vast, dusty silence. The single blueprint on the crate seemed to suck all the light from the room. His hands were shaking violently now, the tremor uncontrollable. From the pocket of his worn coat, he pulled out a cheap, nickel-plated American pocket watch he had bought days ago. He held it in his trembling palm. The steady, mechanical ticking of the mechanism filled the silence, each click a step closer to an atrocity. It sounded as loud as a hammer striking an anvil, forging a future of unimaginable horror and, unknown to anyone, the first critical crack in Yuan Shikai's monstrous and perfect machine.