The warehouse district sprawled across the city's eastern edge like a wound that had never properly healed.
The buildings here were old, pre-war construction, their brick facades stained with decades of industrial grime and the more recent scars of the bombings. Broken windows gaped like missing teeth.
The air smelled of rust and diesel and the faint, acrid undertone of chemicals.
Neila walked three paces ahead of him, her white coat catching the thin afternoon light.
Her footsteps were silent on the cracked pavement, her posture relaxed, almost bored.
Her blonde hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, not a single strand out of place. She looked like she was attending a business meeting rather than breaking into a high-security facility.
"The guards are keeping a tight perimeter," she said without turning around. "Rotating patrols every fifteen minutes. Motion sensors at the main entrance. Thermal imaging on the roof. Standard security protocols for a site this valuable."
"How many guards?"
"Who knows? It is difficult to be certain from the reconnaissance photos." She paused at an intersection, consulting a small device in her palm, a mana signature detector, the screen glowing faintly blue. "The insider's information suggests the night shift is lighter. Skeleton crew. Easier to bypass."
"Then why are we doing this during the day?"
"Have you ever seen anyone rob during the day? People are awake now, these guards are more or less used to call out to other people instead of protecting this place themselves." Her lips curved. "He's predictable in his paranoia. Always has been."
"Assuming your enemies think like you."
"Exactly." She pocketed the device and resumed walking. "You've been paying attention. I'm impressed."
"I try my best."
They continued through the warehouse district in silence. The streets were empty here—no vendors, no pedestrians, no signs of life except the occasional rat scurrying through the gutters and the distant cry of gulls circling the harbor.
Neila stopped in front of a nondescript building halfway down a narrow side street. It looked abandoned—boarded windows, a rusted loading dock, graffiti scrawled across the brick facade in layers of fading color. But Hoshimi could feel it now, the faint thrum of mana emanating from somewhere beneath the structure, a low, constant vibration that resonated in his teeth.
"This is it," Neila said quietly. "The entrance is through the loading dock. There's a hidden stairwell that leads to the underground facility. The insider provided the access codes."
"The security is looser than I'd thought," she murmured. "Almost insulting. My father must be getting arrogant in his old age."
Hoshimi walked beside her, his hands in his pockets, his violet eyes scanning the shadows between buildings.
"Or it's a trap," Hoshimi said.
"Always the optimist."
"I'm not an optimist."
"I know. That was sarcasm."
She stopped at the corner of a building, peering around its edge at the warehouse ahead. "Two guards at the front entrance. One at the side door. Patrol passes every seven minutes. The insider said there's a maintenance entrance on the north side that's been left unlocked for the past three weeks."
"Convenient."
"Suspiciously so." She glanced at him. "But we're here anyway."
"Two at the entrance. Four more patrolling the upper level. The rest are stationed in the lower levels, near the production site itself." She turned to face him, her blue eyes sharp. "This is where your part begins."
Hoshimi nodded. "You'll need to hold my hand."
"Huh?"
"For the invisibility. I can extend it to cover you, but I need physical contact to maintain it." He held out his hand, palm up. "Unless you'd prefer to find your own way past the guards."
Neila stared at his offered hand like it was a dead fish. Her expression flickered—something that might have been annoyance or might have been something else entirely. "We're holding hands now?"
"Would you prefer if I'd piggyback you?"
"No, I'm not a child."
"I don't make the rules."
"Fine," Neila said finally, her voice clipped. "But if you try anything—"
"I'm not going to try anything."
He had touched her hands once before.
Her fingers were small. Delicate. The hand of someone who had never done physical labor.
Her expression had shifted. Just slightly. Just enough for Hoshimi to notice.
A slight tightening around her eyes. The way she was looking anywhere except at their joined hands.
"Let's go."
He activated his ability.
The world shifted. Colors muted. Edges softened. His body dissolved into absence, his mana signature compressing to a whisper, his physical form becoming nothing more than a faint shimmer in the darkness.
The effect spread to Neila, flowing through their connected hands like water through a channel. She made a small sound, not quite surprise, not quite discomfort and her grip tightened on his fingers.
"Fascinating," Neila rolled her non existent eyes. Her voice was slightly unsteady. "I'm completely blind, I don't even know how you're even managing to make your way through this."
"Keep your voice down."
"I know how stealth works." But she lowered her voice anyway.
"We're invisible, of course our eyes can't catch any light, use your mana detection."
They moved through the loading dock entrance, past the two guards stationed at the front. The men were alert, professional, their eyes scanning the street with the practiced vigilance of career soldiers. But their eyes slid over Hoshimi and Neila without catching. To them, the street was empty. Just another quiet afternoon in a district that was always quiet.
The access code Neila had obtained worked perfectly. The keypad beside the hidden stairwell beeped softly, a green light flashed, and the door swung open on silent hinges. They slipped through, Hoshimi pulling Neila behind him, and descended into darkness.
The stairwell was narrow, industrial, lined with exposed pipes and the occasional flickering light bulb. The thrum of mana grew stronger as they descended, a low, omnipresent vibration that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It felt almost alive. Like a heartbeat.
"Hey Neila," Hoshimi said quietly. "Are you sure the mana is supposed to be that overwhelming?"
"The magic tools require a massive amount of mana to manufacture. My father's been siphoning it from somewhere for years. I've never been able to figure out where."
"This doesn't feel like any production site I've ever heard of."
"I know." Her grip on his hand tightened. "I know."
They reached the bottom of the stairs. A heavy steel door barred their path, its surface covered in warning labels and security seals. Neila punched in another code, her free hand moving with practiced efficiency, and the door hissed open.
The chamber beyond was vast.
It stretched into darkness in every direction, its ceiling lost in shadow, its walls lined with machinery that hummed and clicked and pulsed with an energy that made Hoshimi's teeth ache.
Conveyor belts moved endlessly along their tracks, carrying components, blades, casings, power cells.
Robotic arms descended from above, their movements precise and mechanical, welding and soldering and shaping with inhuman accuracy.
At the center of the chamber, suspended in a web of cables and conduits, was a figure.
She was small. Barely larger than a child.
Her body was emaciated, the bones visible beneath skin that had gone gray and papery from years, decades, perhaps centuries of abuse.
"What the hell is that thing?"
Her hair was white, not the white of age but the white of absence, of color drained away by something that had no name in any human language.
Her eyes were closed, her face slack, her chest rising and falling in the slow, mechanical rhythm of someone who was being kept alive by machines rather than by their own will.
But her mana.
Her mana dwarfed everything else in the chamber.
It was a presence, a weight, a pressure that pressed against Hoshimi's temples and made his vision blur at the edges.
It made the sword in his wrist vibrate.
[The tool Reina gave me. It seems like the weapon wants to return back to its owner]
The thing made his own mana, the vast, impossible reservoir feel like a candle before a bonfire.
Neila had stopped breathing.
"This," she whispered, "is stupid crazy."
Hoshimi's eyes were fixed on the figure, on the way the cables pierced her skin at a dozen points, draining her mana, siphoning it away to power the machinery around them.
The tubes that ran from her arms and legs and chest to the production lines, carrying that impossible energy to the tools being assembled on the conveyor belts.
They moved closer, their footsteps still silent, their forms still invisible. The light grew brighter as they approached, and the shapes around them resolved into something that made Hoshimi's stomach clench.
It's face was uncannily human, almost wrong. The features were too smooth, too symmetrical, as if someone had tried to sculpt a human face from memory and gotten all the proportions slightly off.
A plaque was mounted on the machine beside her. He stepped closer, still invisible, still holding Neila's hand, and read the inscription.
LADY VERT
MAMMON
PRIMORDIAL GODDESS OF GREED
CONTAINMENT UNIT 7
DO NOT APPROACH WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION
"Vert," he said. The name felt strange in his mouth. "The Primordial Witch of Greed."
"Don't be stupid, it must probably be a nickname. No?" Neila's voice was sharp, but something was beneath it. "The Primordials aren't real. They're myths. Religious propaganda. Stories we tell to make ourselves feel better about being tools."
"Look at her." Hoshimi gestured at the figure, at the mana radiating from her in waves, at the machinery that was drinking her essence like water. "Feel that. Does that feel like a myth to you?"
"Don't be stu—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I don't know, don't ask me, I don't know anything. This definitely must be just a nickname, what else…what else could explain whatever this thing is??"
"It feels like a god."
Neila was silent.
Hoshimi's mind was racing. Reina's words came back to him, fragments of conversations that had seemed strange at the time but now slotted into place.
{History tends to get diluted more and more as years pass on. People long ago tended to exaggerate a lot of things. Beings like gods must've been overexaggerated to the heavens.}
{Even if they don't exist, people need them. They want meaning to their lives, that their very existence is somehow special and they have a role in this universe.}
{Keep that cranium open. Don't make any of your beliefs concrete. Be open to new ideas.}
{If they're good, then the humans will use them to further their exploration of technology and magic. If they turn out to be evil, then we slaughter them.}
[Reina knew, there's no way she didn't know. If she didn't know then what was up with those hints!? This is a Primordial Goddess for fuck's sake.]
"She knew," he said quietly. "The vice knew."
"Knew what?"
"That the Primordials were real. That they're here. That humans have been using them." He looked at Vert's emaciated form, at the tubes draining her mana, at the machines that turned her essence into weapons. "A god…right in front of us. Being used by humans for their greed. Isn't that poetic?"
"That's—" Neila shook her head. "That's insane. If the Primordials were real, they'd be unstoppable. They'd be gods. How could anyone—"
"Look at her and tell me she's unstoppable."
Neila looked.
The goddess hung in her web of cables, her gray skin stretched tight over bones that had never known sunlight, her white hair limp and lifeless. She had been here for a long time.
[Reina must've kept their existence hidden because of some government contract.]
Long enough to forget what freedom felt like. Long enough to become nothing more than a power source for the machines that surrounded her.
Sarah's words. When he had pulled out the sword.
{You humans can be so cruel! Even to your own progenitors!!}
[Could she be….]
"The Primordials are real," Hoshimi said. "They've always been real. And someone, your father, probably, has been keeping this one prisoner. Using her to manufacture magic tools. Turning her into a product."
"And the other families—"
"Of course they knew, they were using the same source of power, a struggle between the families over a God of Greed. The government is definitely in on this too, the Vice knew about this, no wonder the government was too scared to anger the families, they would lose permanent access to it."
Neila sighed. "My father. I don't know what's on his mind. The families.. And the government could come after him."
"You said that the Goddess was being shared by the families right?"
"Yea, each one of the families share one fourth of the Goddess."
"They must've made an agreement with the government to let them use it with a price. With the Goddess in your father's hands, he'd probably be planning to reduce the entry fee to get on the government's good side. And with that happening, the other families will fall."
"You're rather good at this, aren't you?"
"It's my job."
"Fair enough." Neila looked at the Goddess. "Let's get this thing out of here, it's rather unfair that I don't have access to her as well."
Hoshimi pulled out his phone.
"Don't move."
The voice came from behind them. Then the lights came on.
They were surrounded.