Chapter 56: The Black Card
After reading the final entries in the journal, Kian Voss let out a long, heavy breath. He hadn't expected the skeleton before him to be such a cold-blooded monster. The Count had lost everything—his business, his children, his legacy—and in his final act of spite, he had chosen to flip the table and drag everyone into the abyss with him.
Kian toyed with the Seal of Albos Arbor in his hand, his mind racing with possibilities and doubts. He was currently just a small "Sump-rat." He couldn't even walk into the Spire, let alone participate in the shadow-games of the High Nobility.
His ambition whispered to him: Become the Count. Rule the Spire. But his survival instinct countered: The guy killed 100 million people with a nerve-gas bomb. Every surviving noble house in the Spire would want the "White Tree" lineage extinguished. House Albos Arbor was likely a name synonymous with a planetary-scale war crime.
"I'll sit on this for now," Kian muttered. "I'll figure out the Spire situation once I've moved up from selling moonshine to selling high-tier relics."
He finished his sweep of the remaining rooms on the platform. His efforts were rewarded with a few more pieces of "Spire Trash": two golden wine chalices, an engraved golden dinner plate, and a heavy gold signet ring.
In a universe where the common laborer wore synthetic rags and ate recycled paste, gold remained the ultimate marker of the "Old Blood." Even in the 41st Millennium, the elite used the precious metal to flaunt their wealth.
[LOOT SUMMARY]
Gold Chalices & Plate: ~45,000 Agri-Scrips.
Gold Ring: ~5,000 Agri-Scrips.
Total Haul: 50,000 Scrips.
"Not a bad day at the office," Kian smirked.
He prepared to leave, but as he stepped out onto the metal gantry and looked down at the sixty-meter drop, a nagging sensation tugged at the back of his mind.
It was an itch he knew well from his past life. In the "Extraction" games, this was the feeling you got when you ran past a loot-room and caught a glimpse of something in the corner of your eye just as the extraction timer hit zero. It was the "Big Leak" instinct.
His eyes twitched. His Mental Clarity was at 25—nearly three times the peak of a normal human. His brain was processing details he wasn't even consciously aware of.
"No... no, I missed something. I know I missed something."
He turned back and re-entered the Count's final room. He tore the place apart again. He checked the floorboards, the seams of the reinforced wall-panels, and even crawled under the bed. He ended up covered in ancient dust, looking like a chimney sweep, but found nothing new.
"That's impossible," he grumbled, wiping soot from his brow. His sixth sense was screaming at him.
He looked at the skeleton leaning against the wall.
In the 41st Millennium, clothes for the masses were made of high-durability synthetic fibers. These materials were so resilient they could survive a century in a Sump-puddle. You could pull a shirt off a hundred-year-old corpse, wash it, and it would be brand new.
But the Count was a noble. He wore hand-woven silk—organic protein secreted by genetically modified insects. Silk felt like heaven, but it lacked the durability of the "Corpse-Fiber" synthetics. It had rotted away over the decades, turning into a pile of fragile, brown flakes that lay around the skeleton like fallen leaves under a dead tree.
Kian stared at the pile of rotted silk. His intuition flared. He knelt beside the bones and began carefully sifting through the remains of the Count's clothes.
His fingers brushed against something hard and cold. He pulled it out.
It was a rectangular card, roughly the size of an Imperial ID, crafted from a pitch-black, unknown metallic alloy. He wiped away the dust, and the card shimmered as if it had just come off the assembly line. There was a single, silver engraving on the face: The White Tree.
[COGITATOR SCAN INITIALIZED]
[Item: Strategos Black Card — Logistics Key (5/10)]
Value: Priceless (Relic Tier)
Description: A high-security electronic master-key used by House Albos Arbor to manage their private Strategic Reserve Warehouse.
Utility: Unlocks high-security automated shipping containers within Sector S-65.
System Note: To prevent unauthorized theft, the Black Card features a "De-magnetization Protocol." Each use consumes one charge. After ten uses, the card must be taken to the Spire to be re-sanctified by the Count's private cogitator-terminal.
Kian let out a sharp, triumphant whistle. "A Key Card! This is the legendary 'Black Card' drop!"
He immediately ran to the locked room he couldn't open earlier. He swiped the Black Card through the reader.
Bzzzt-Err.
The reader let out a sharp, red error-tone. The door didn't budge.
Kian frowned and checked the card's description again. 'Unlocks high-security automated shipping containers.' This wasn't a door key; it was a loot-box key.
He walked to the edge of the platform and looked down at the warehouse floor. Below him, stacked like a labyrinth of steel, were thousands of massive shipping containers. Most were open and empty, looted by gangs or emptied by the PDF decades ago. Others had been breached by melta-cutters, their 50mm-thick plasteel walls torn open by scavengers who had spent weeks trying to get inside.
But hidden among the debris were hundreds of containers that remained sealed. No gang had the specialized tools or the patience to cut through fifty millimeters of reinforced plasteel just to find a crate of dehydrated vegetables.
Kian looked at the Black Card. He had five "Pulls" on the grandest lottery in the Underhive. He could walk up to any of those armored vaults, swipe the card, and have the Machine Spirit open the doors for him.
His heart began to pound with the fever of a gambler. He was already planning his return with a team of mules to haul the treasure away.
But his reverie was shattered. In the darkness of the warehouse floor, far below his perch, a flickering orange light appeared. Then another. And another.
Torches.
Someone is coming!
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