7, 2025 · Unrestricted Airspace over Northern Schwarzwald, Germany · 02:17
The Night-Wing's side hatch opened into a wall of rain.
Wind screamed past the fuselage at two hundred kilometres an hour, loud enough that Alen felt it in his chest before he heard it. He stood at the threshold with one gloved hand on the overhead rail, looking down. Below was nothing — a solid black ocean of treetops, the forest canopy so dense it blocked any ground light, lit only by occasional lightning that turned the whole of the Schwarzwald into a flat white photograph for half a second and then took it back.
Rebecca's voice came through the earpiece. "Two minutes to drop zone. Wind shear at eight knots."
He stepped out.
The rain hit his face immediately — cold, driving, serious. The trench coat snapped open in the slipstream and then the wind flattened it back against his body and then there was nothing but the fall and the rain and the forest coming up in the dark below. Three seconds of freefall. The Night-Wing's lights shrank above him. He twisted, coat flaring, and activated the Spatial-Phantom Movement — the world stuttered, he went from a hundred metres up to ten metres above the canopy in a single blink, then down again, boots hitting moss-covered earth in a controlled impact that sent a shockwave through the ferns. His knees absorbed it. The coat settled around his calves with a heavy, wet sound.
The forest closed in. Rain hissed on pine needles. Somewhere in the ridges a wolf howled once and went quiet.
He stood up.
He rolled his shoulders, testing the rig under the coat — every strap seated, the USP snug on the right thigh, the chakrams in their forearm sheaths, the Uroboros integration coiled under the skin of his back, present and available. He checked nothing twice. He had done this enough times that checking twice would mean he'd lost confidence in himself, and he hadn't.
Reality-Lens came on with a thought. The forest bled cold blue. Raindrops froze mid-fall in the edge of his peripheral vision. Two hundred metres ahead, through the spruce and fir, three red outlines moved in a lazy triangle — perimeter patrol, flashlight beams cutting thin yellow lines through the haze. He could read the ghost-trail of their last circuit painted on the ground in translucent red. A looping pattern. It left a forty-second gap every eleven minutes.
He started moving.
∗ ∗ ∗
Not running. The Spatial-Phantom Movement carried him in short controlled bursts — five metres, ten metres — each one a silent flicker between the massive trunks. The coat barely stirred. His boots made no sound on the wet needle-bed. The terrain was steeper than the satellite data had suggested, moss-covered ridges and sudden outcrops that would have slowed a normal approach considerably. He adjusted.
He paused behind a fallen log thick enough to hide a vehicle. The first patrol was thirty metres away — two men in black rain gear, MP5s slung low, Connections insignia barely visible on their shoulders. One was complaining about something in thick German. The other laughed once, a short bark that died quickly.
He watched their pattern. Eleven minutes, four seconds. Exactly as Yoko's intelligence had mapped it.
The moment their backs turned he moved — one burst through the ferns that placed him twenty metres ahead in their path, coat pooling around him as he dropped low. The lead guard walked into his sightline. Alen's hand came up. The chakram left his fingers in a flat, spinning arc, speed making the throw invisible to anything without enhanced optics. It took the first man at the base of the skull in a clean pass. He dropped without a sound, knees folding, body settling into the moss. The second guard registered the soft collapse and turned.
Half a second.
The chakram was already back in Alen's palm. A white Uroboros tentacle erupted from beneath the coat's shoulder slit — fast, thick, barbed — punched through the second man's open mouth before the scream could form and yanked him backward between two trees. A wet sound, brief, then nothing. The tentacle retracted.
He wiped the chakram once and returned it to the sheath.
He walked on. The terrain climbed. A small stream cut across his path and he treated the surface like ground for three strides, Phantom Movement letting him cross without breaking pace.
∗ ∗ ∗
Lightning hit to the south and for one full second he saw the entire valley — the facility entrance set into the hillside, camouflaged with living vines and moss, a pillbox to one side and two floodlights that the rain kept half-blind. Exactly where Trinity had said it would be. 48.712°N, 8.312°E.
He crouched at the treeline, sixty metres out, and studied it.
Through the Reality-Lens he could see one red outline inside the pillbox — a technician on the camera feeds. Outside, two guards in rain ponchos paced the concrete apron. Their overlap pattern left a forty-three second window.
He waited for it.
When the guards turned their backs in unison he moved. First burst carried him twenty metres, coat snapping once in the wind. Second burst — through the fence itself, phasing between the chain links without touching them. Third burst put him directly behind the pillbox wall. He pressed his back against the wet concrete. The technician inside was humming an old German folk song, oblivious.
He phased through the pillbox wall and was inside before the man reached the chorus.
The technician never finished it.
One chakram across the throat. Alen caught the body before it could knock over the coffee mug beside the keyboard, lowered it to the floor, and killed the floodlights with a palm strike to the breaker panel. Darkness swallowed the apron.
Outside, the two guards noticed the lights and their voices rose. "Scheiße—power surge again?"
They turned toward their radios.
Alen stepped out of the pillbox into the rain. A tentacle came up through a drainage grate and took the first guard from below, silent, pulling him down until only his boots showed. The second spun, MP5 rising. A chakram took him through the temple. He dropped.
Alen caught the returning ring, pocketed it, and placed his palm against the blast door's electronic lock. A soft chirp as Trinity's pre-loaded backdoor protocol worked through the system. The lock cycled green. The door hissed open on hydraulic pistons, revealing a sterile white corridor descending into the hillside.
He crossed the threshold. Behind him the forest went on, indifferent. The door began to close.
He adjusted his collar and walked deeper.
— END OF CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX —