The world outside the penthouse had gone dark, but within the vault of mana-glass, every surface shimmered with anticipation. The walls were transparent, impossible to shatter, but tonight they felt as thin as skin. In the center of the living room, the holo-table projected a wireframe of the Lancaster facility: a blue-lit labyrinth, its security nodes pulsing with the slow, deliberate confidence of old money and newer, hungrier software.
Ellen Lee stood nearest the table, expression carved from winter. She handled each item with ritualistic precision: mana-dampening cloak unfolded and smoothed; disruptor field checked, then double-checked; blade unsheathed and sighted along the edge, measuring for any imperfection. Her movements were precise enough to shame a machine, but there was nothing mechanical about her. The slight hitch in her breath as she calibrated the fire glyphs, the way her thumb traced the scar at her wrist—these revealed an inner turbulence no armor could hide.
Hazel Fujiwara perched on the lip of the sunken pit, her knees tight to her chest. She wore her comms headset askew, glasses flickering with a cascade of magical overlays. Six virtual screens hung before her, each displaying a different flavor of chaos: leyline fluctuations, encrypted police bands, low-res drone feeds from Sombra and Lockwood. Her fingers danced in the air, weaving glowing sigils—pauses, reversals, then corrections as she rewrote firewall after firewall to keep the outside world from eating their mission alive. Every few seconds, she glanced sideways at the others, as if expecting a reprimand or an ambush.
Owen Dagger circled the table, all kinetic tension and restless calculation. His body was built for violence, but his mind ran colder and faster than any algorithm in Nueva Arcadia. He flicked through the holo-table's layers, isolating guard rotations, marking fallback routes in scarlet, then running the simulation again. Every time he cycled the breach, he found a new flaw—a forgotten camera, an unexpected line of sight—and his jaw clenched tighter with each run.
Jane Navarro presided from a low chair, her presence the center of gravity for the whole room. She wore a white shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled to the elbow, revealing the blackened scars of a dozen old burns along her forearms. She sipped from a coffee mug, the steam rising to half-hide her jaguar eyes. Jane didn't speak unless necessary; her authority lived in the way she marked every shift in the team's rhythm, the way she leaned forward a little more when Ellen's hand shook, or the way her gaze hardened when Owen muttered about "impossible odds."
They worked in near silence, broken only by the hum of the security system and the low, regular pings from Hazel's console. Outside, the city ran on the usual diet of neon and predation. In here, every moment felt like the last calm before the dam burst.
It was Hazel who broke the silence. "Mana's spiking in the west blocks. Feels like someone's doing a hard sweep for illegal flow. Not city cops—this is Nexar-level volume." Her voice had that up-an-octave edge it got before things went fully to shit.
Ellen didn't look up from her checks. "Standard pre-holiday lockdown?"
Hazel shook her head, eyes flicking between readouts. "No. They're rerouting comm traffic off the regular grid. Ghost signals, airwave jamming, total lockdown around Sombra. That's not a holiday. That's war games."
Jane set her mug down, the sound louder than it should have been. "How does it hit our window?"
Hazel tapped a control, overlaying the district's pulse atop the Lancaster schematic. "If they keep expanding, we lose exfil from the north, and every fallback west of the canal is fried."
Owen stopped pacing. "That's not an accident. Someone knows about the job."
Jane let the words hang, then turned to Ellen. "You see anything else in the gear?"
Ellen checked the status on the disruptor's mag-cell. "Nothing extra. Everything's tight. But if they're running anti-mage, we'll have to go cold until we're inside."
Hazel's hands hovered, then dropped to her lap. "I can spoof the sensors for maybe four minutes. After that—"
"We won't need four," Owen said, voice flat. "We either hit the vault or we're dead."
The holo-table blinked, then flashed red. Owen's personal terminal buzzed. He moved to it, scanned the screen. For a moment, his features twisted with recognition, then something more brittle. He thumbed a quick unlock, and the message displayed across the table in a blocky, hesitant font.
"Strange environment in Sombra. Heavy police presence. Nexar Dynamics everywhere. Something big happening." It was signed only with a single glyph—a stylized mouse.
Ellen's eyebrows rose a millimeter. Jane grunted. Hazel's eyes went wide.
"Is that—?" Hazel started, but Owen cut her off.
"Yeah," he said. "That's Mouse."
Ellen moved closer to the table, her movement feline, predatory. "Do we believe him?"
Owen watched the blue lines of the message swim in the air. "He's never lied. Not to us. And he's got no reason to start now."
Hazel reached out, her hands trembling as she summoned another set of feeds. "Confirming... yes. Street-level in Sombra is nuts. Nexar's got full tac squads, armored mages, even a couple of drones in gridlock. There are firewalls up I've never even seen before. They're scanning everyone. Even the dumpsters."
Jane inhaled, the air whistling through her teeth. "So either they're onto us, or they're onto something bigger."
"Or," Ellen said, a hint of humor in her voice, "they're onto nothing, and we just get caught in the crossfire."
Hazel's glasses flared as she tried to open another channel. The colors on her screen stuttered, then froze. "They just locked down my backdoor. That's not possible. I ghosted it myself."
Owen considered, then double-tapped the message from Mouse, running it through three separate decrypts. No embedded malware, no signature beyond the kid's usual paranoia. "If the environment's that hot, our whole op is at risk. We go in, we're not coming back."
Jane's lips pressed together, the old scar on her chin whitening. "We adapt. That's what we do."
Ellen started to re-pack her kit, but slower this time, eyes flicking to the city outside the glass. "So who burned us?"
Hazel looked up, panic and curiosity mixed. "Maybe nobody. Maybe it's a power shuffle. Or maybe—" She stopped, unwilling to say it.
Owen finished for her. "Maybe someone wants to see if we'll take the bait. Or if we'll improvise."
The silence was heavier now, but more focused. The four of them leaned in, every muscle and neuron primed for the new uncertainty.
Hazel's fingers worked the air, drawing sigils to try and crack the next wall. "If we wait too long, they'll lock down the target, too."
Jane's voice was a low growl. "Then we don't wait."
Ellen, calm again, zipped her bag and checked the blade one more time. "If we go early, we beat their prep. If we go late, we walk into a kill box."
Owen reset the holo-table, clearing the overlays until only the bare bones of the Lancaster vault remained. "Two hours. We hit it before the next guard cycle."
Hazel was already scanning for alternate escape routes, her hair damp with sweat. "There's an unmarked service conduit off the east side, but it runs right past a Nexar substation."
Jane nodded, the decision already made. "We'll take our chances. When the world goes off script, you run your own."
The prep accelerated, every movement sharp, efficient, and a little desperate. Ellen locked down the last of the gear. Hazel ripped through the last firewall with a trembling flourish, then killed her console, shoving it into her bag. Owen ran the plan again, this time marking every possible point of failure. Jane stood, shoulders squared, and regarded the team as if taking mental inventory of what she was about to lose.
As they moved to the elevator, the city below erupted in a latticework of red and blue lights—emergency beacons, gunship strobes, and the flicker of uncontrolled magic. Sombra District was alive with the kind of violence you couldn't contain, only hope to survive.
In the vestibule, Ellen leaned close to Owen, voice so soft only a wolf would hear. "You think the kid's okay?"
Owen didn't answer right away. He let the question float, as if afraid an answer would break the fragile pact holding them all together.
"He's smart," Owen said finally. "And he's not alone. Not tonight."
The doors shut, and the team descended into the city's heart, toward a future that no longer cared for plans.
Above them, the penthouse blinked to dark, a ghost of four shadows left in the blue afterimage of the holo-table.
In Nueva Arcadia, you never saw the hand that tipped the scale until it was already crushing your throat.