Honestly, despite having literally just cleared the room, Cole couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still hiding in one of the corners, ready to jump them. There was nothing there, of course, but still… whatever. He shook it off and got to work.
“Graves, Elina, Vale – cylinder’s yours.” He glanced at Miles. “Check the cabinets and drawers; hopefully, you’ll find something useful.”
Cole turned toward the door. “I’ll be right back. Gonna go update the guys.”
He worked his way back up the stairwell to Mack and Ethan. “Yo. We found the ritual site. It’s just an empty glass vat, all covered in blood.”
Mack connected the dots instantly. “K’hinuum.”
“My gut says the same,” Cole said. “Celdornians are trying to verify if that’s the case.”
Mack’s face darkened. “Hm.”
Cole knew where that path led. He didn’t like reminding his men of anything, but it seemed prudent here and now. “I feel the same, Mack. But even if it is him, this isn’t the best place for a rematch.”
Mack stood there for a moment before finally sighing. “Yeah.”
Cole left it at that. “Hold here another ten, give or take. We’ll head back once they’ve got a read on the glyphs.”
“Copy that.”
Cole headed back down.
By the time he returned, Graves had an update. “We’ve an insight, Captain. The blood seems mammalian in origin – chiefly of pack animals, though I would not wholly rule out that some part is of men.”
Miles looked up from a cabinet. “Hell, that’s gotta mean vampire, no?”
“Ah, well, the matter is not quite so tidy,” Elina corrected. “Blood is common to a great many rites, and as sustenance to a great many entities. Though for this… I must admit I am quite inclined to agree with you.”
“Right. Suppose it doesn’t change much either way. Damned if it is, damned if it isn’t,” Miles said, returning to his work.
Cole left them to it and drifted over to the platform where the Celdornians were working, close enough to see what they were looking at without getting in their way. His own interest was on the vat itself, specifically the question of when its occupant had left and how.
The first thing he noticed – it was hard not to – was that the inside was still wet. Droplets of blood still clung to the walls, though most of it had already pooled below. The creature must’ve emerged sometime within the last few days, but not exactly today.
If it had emerged unassisted, there’d be bloody footsteps leading away from the platform. No such evidence existed, so the creature must’ve had retainers waiting for the day they could tend to it.
“Captain?” Elina asked.
Cole glanced at her. “Yeah? You got something?”
“Ah, no. Nothing of note,” she said. “I meant only to ask whether you had found anything.”
He shook his head. “Not yet. Just trying to work out the timeline.”
She gave him a small nod and returned to the glyphs.
The forensic evidence was lackluster, but based on the recency, they could probably assume that it still needed some recovery time. He couldn’t really derive anything else, so he turned his attention to the cabinets and joined Miles in sifting through the dusty old clutter.
They worked through another few minutes without saying much. Unfortunately, the only documents they managed to uncover were worn-out manuals, almost at the point of desiccation.
The Celdornians had a bit more luck, apparently. Graves stood up and approached. “Captain. We can discern enough of the glyphs to hazard an estimate, though not the whole.”
Cole scratched his chin. “Well, it’s more than we’ve got. Let’s hear it.”
“I should judge the rite was wrought for a being of no small order – at least Level Sixteen, by the fashion of its design. What, precisely, was summoned, I cannot say from what remains; yet the level alone gives sufficient cause for concern.”
Even if it didn’t seem like much, just knowing the enemy’s threat rating was critical – especially considering it confirmed the possibility of a Vampire Lord.
On paper, they had the manpower to handle one. After all, Cole had taken down K’hinuum with just Mack and Elina at his side, before Miles and Ethan had even regrouped with them. On top of that, their current loadout included two Level Eighteen Slayer Elites in Graves and Vale, either of whom could likely go toe-to-toe with a Vampire Lord on their own.
However, there was no telling if K’hinuum alone was the ceiling here. For all they knew, there could be something further up the chain pulling the strings, or a larger garrison sleeping somewhere in the compound that they simply hadn’t stumbled into yet.
Although they could probably get away with pushing in blind, it wasn’t the smartest decision they could make, nor the most pertinent to their mission, for that matter. As much as some of the guys might enjoy it, gathering intel and staying out of trouble took precedence over cleaning house.
Cole was almost inclined to simply pack up and dip, but they did have one last opportunity to check out. If the port’s subway connected to the harbormaster’s offices the way the NYC subway connected to Rockefeller Center and other office buildings, they had a route that bypassed the cultists crawling on the surface. If the path existed and the security on it was thin, they could push in and scour the place for intel. If not, they’d retrace their steps through the Aberrants and let the Royal Navy handle the base.
“Alright.” He turned to the room. “Before we head back, we should check if there’s a way into the port authority building from here. If the route doesn’t exist or the patrols are too tight, we don’t have to commit.”
Cole led everyone back upstairs and regrouped with Mack and Ethan. Once he’d brought them up to speed, they moved out.
They returned to the main walkways, away from the tiny maintenance corner. After finding a directory, Graves took them through an archway that Cole had clocked on the way in but hadn’t really paid much attention to. The route past that was fairly haywire: hallways went off in every direction, with signs at every junction – a real labyrinth. If not for the Celdornians’ translation skills, Cole probably would’ve called it a day at the first turn.
The farther they walked, the more the corrupted miasma faded from his senses. The whole port district was going to carry that taste for a while, of course, but it eased up enough that he could finally take a full breath again.
Eventually, the corridors opened into the station’s central hall – a space whose sheer size rivaled any major international airport terminal Cole had ever set foot in. Even in its decay, it was grand enough that he just had to slow down and admire it.
The ceiling was just the start, reaching at least five stories high and adorned with frescoes that somehow retained their vibrance. Similar to the original concourse, spiral columns ran the length of the hall in two rows, bases and capitals carved with detail that had cost skilled labor and serious civic money both. One wall carried the remains of a long row of ticket windows, while dusty couches sat across from them, most of them still intact.
Cole felt a certain type of way, staring at these remnants of a civilization once flourishing, long lost. Wistfulness? Longing? No, the Germans had a word for something exactly like this – Sehnsucht. It represented the longing for something you’d never actually had, which was the only longing that fit a hall like this.
He would’ve liked to stay there a bit longer, take it all in. But he couldn’t let the depressive atmosphere bog him down; they had a job to do.
Graves had gone over to a signboard at the far end and started reading. After a moment, he turned and pointed at an archway on the east side of the hall.
“This way, Captain. The passage leads directly to the port authority, some few hundred feet along, I should think.”
Cole nodded. “Alright. Let’s check it out.”
They moved up the area. Within a few minutes, what had started as footprints in the dust and the occasional bit of litter had given way to distant voices.
They followed the sound to the end of the concourse, where the port authority opened up through a row of tall archways cut straight into the wall. Graves paused under the central one long enough to translate the lettering above it: Ostreva Port Authority.
The voices became audible as they approached the threshold, coming from above. Judging from the slack tone, the cultists were none the wiser. After confirming the basement area was empty, Cole snuck in with the others.
He crept up the stairwell far enough to get eyes on the ground floor. It was expansive, organized around a reception area that was equidistant from their present stairwell, a set of elevators to the right, and an escalator to the left that led to some sublevel.Two cultists stood at the front doors with their backs turned to them, working through some conversation about Elnoirian cuisine. Lazy though it may have seemed, their carelessness wasn’t unfounded. After all, why would any cultist expect infiltration this deep into demon territory, let alone through a sealed subway?
He let them be and moved the team up to the second floor.
Fortunately, with the rest of the building just as lightly occupied, they climbed with impunity. The few cultists present passed by on other floors as distant footsteps, oblivious as their comrades below.
They breezed upward, Celdornians keeping pace, until finally running into their first obstacle on the fifth floor. They were on track to reach the executive offices when voices ahead made him stop short. He signaled the team back before easing up to the nearest corner to peek around it.
Two guards stood posted on either side of the door leading to the executive suite, yapping with the same slackness as the pair downstairs. Inattentive as they were, they still weren’t so blind as to miss a group of people walking straight at them.
They wouldn’t stay there forever, obviously. But without any read on the enemy’s rotations, was it really worth sitting around waiting for a gap? Fuck no.
Better to look for a bypass first. Cole left Miles watching the corner and had the others sweep the nearby offices. It didn’t take long before each of them came up with the same find – a ventilation shaft running along the ceiling, big enough to move through in a crouch. Given each of the larger rooms had one, it stood to reason that the system extended to the offices ahead.
Cole pulled the team to a restroom, then addressed them. “Garrett, you’re first. I’ll go last.”
Ethan boosted himself up to the panel, popped it free, and pulled himself inside. The shaft was deep enough that Cole could hear him shuffle a few feet in before settling. The others followed in turn until only Cole remained in the office. He took one last look around to make sure they were clear, then climbed up after them.
The shaft was comically large by American standards – bigger than a shaft had any right to be, and therefore an egregious security liability. Then again, maybe everything really was just bigger in Istrayn.
He pushed the thought aside and kept moving.
Two turns later, they dropped down through another panel into an empty corridor. Graves pointed them toward the harbormaster’s office a few doors down.
Cole heard movement through one of the office doors as they passed. He held up a fist, then crept up to the door and peeked inside. He counted three cultists: one sorting papers at a desk just beyond the door, and two more near a window across the room, complaining about ration distribution. None of them were armed. Mack and Vale would take the pair by the window. Cole would handle the clerk himself, with Miles on the door.
Cole never took pleasure in these things, but damn was he efficient at them. He came up behind his target, juicing up his arm for a stronger thrust, then cast a barrier over the man’s mouth as he drove his knife up under the base of the skull. He cast a second barrier over the wound to keep the blood off the floor while easing the body down with his free hand. Mack and Vale handled their targets with similar efficiency.
They dragged the corpses behind separate desks and into the kneeholes, out of sight from the doorway. Not perfect, but enough to buy time if someone glanced in from the hallway. Cole wiped his blade on the clerk’s robe before sheathing it.
“Move.”
They cleared the remaining distance to the harbormaster’s office without further contact. Like with all the other doors, this one was unlocked, courtesy of the cultists’ false sense of security. Cole posted Mack and Ethan at the corridor, then brought everyone else inside.
The office was about what he’d expected. A heavy desk dominated the back of the room, positioned to face anyone walking in, with filing cabinets along one wall and a tall window behind the desk that looked out over the quay. Maps and notice boards covered most of the remaining wall space, layered over each other in the haphazard way of a working office that nobody had bothered to organize in years.
“Alright, everyone,” Cole said. “Take your pick. I’ll get the main desk. Garrett, you still got battery on your phone?”
Miles checked it. “Yeah.”
“Alright, you’re on picture duty.”
Cole pulled the chair out and started working through the desktop. The first stack of papers conveniently turned out to be logistics manifests, neatly columned, with shipment manifests and destination ports listed across the top of each page. The cultists must’ve produced these, since they were all written in Celdornian. A vast majority of the recent entries went to some place called Liraeus, with scraps for anywhere else. The cross-reference to Celdornian ports, by contrast, had been crossed out repeatedly and overwritten with the same destination.
That was pretty big news – almost unthinkable, really, given the cultists had been going at it since they first got isekai’d to Celdorne. On its face, that should’ve been good news, since fewer cultists at home meant less pressure on Cole’s operations there. But cultists didn’t redirect resources from an active front for nothing.
Liraeus, if Cole recalled correctly, was a major port city in the Elnoir Republic – a collection of loosely aligned city-states out east. The Elnoirians ranked second only to the Aurelian Empire as far as Rhogan power went, with most of the continent’s client states scattered in the buffer between them.
On top of that, all the eastern powers weren’t just geographically removed from the demonic frontier; in their minds, demons were a threat their ancestors had crushed long ago, and whatever residual problem remained was Celdorne’s to contain. As such, the kind of robust countermeasures Celdornian cities relied on simply didn’t exist out east.
He stacked the documents in a temporary pile for everything deemed useful, then continued digging.
The next folder yielded correspondence and operational reports, all of it referencing Elnoir in some form. The letters were largely a wash, since they were all written in the ciphers typical of espionage. The reports were a different matter, written in plain Celdornian for command consumption. One name came up repeatedly: House Melovicus.
Cole didn’t recognize it, but the context implied infiltration of some kind. Mimics were the obvious solution, though it could just as easily have been the old-fashioned kind – placement of assets, cultivation of sympathetic elements within the house’s ranks, that sort of thing. Or both, honestly. The report didn’t exactly elaborate enough to narrow it down.
The next document was a single report on Aurelian political structure – basic information gathering, by the looks of it. Whatever the cultists had in mind for Aurelia was clearly still early-stage, nowhere near the burgeoning presence the Elnoir files implied.
Cole flipped through the rest of the desktop for anything else on Elnoir or Aurelia, but came up empty. He stacked the three documents into a folder from one of the desk drawers and slid it into his pack. With the desk exhausted, he moved over to a cabinet near the window to keep looking.
That was when something outside the window caught his eye.
He stepped over to it and looked down at the quay. Below, a cargo wagon had come to a stop directly below the building, hitched to a Nevskor that had stopped pulling and instead decided to sniff the air. The handler beside it seemed pretty pissed, tugging at the reins before smacking the beast with his sword’s scabbard.
The Nevskor didn’t budge. Well, it did, technically, but not in the direction its handler preferred. And certainly not in the direction Cole preferred, seeing that it had started sniffing toward their building.
“Guys, pack up. They might be on to us.”
While the others gathered what documents they could, an imp emerged from somewhere off to the side and approached the handler. Within a few seconds, it read the situation and started barking orders to figures further down the quay. The reaction rippled outward from there, with cultists and lesser demons alike beginning to converge on the building.
Cole turned away from the window. “Fuck. Yeah, we gotta go.”
“How shall we proceed?” Graves asked.
Cole considered the vent for about half a second before discarding it. The shaft had taken them too long to traverse coming in, and going back through it would basically be shooting themselves in the foot.
“Fuck it, we’re going out the front,” he said. “Vale, it’s your time to shine.”
Vale stepped past him without a word. Cole and the others followed behind him and moved up the corridor toward the suite entrance, revolvers already drawn.
Before they’d even reached the doorway, two ice spikes materialized outside it and impaled the guards through the skull. Both bodies dropped forward in dull thuds.
Following that little demonstration, the team poured out behind Vale and made for the stairwell at the far end of the floor. Leveraging physical enhancement magic, they leaped down flight by flight. They’d made it to the second floor when the stairwell door on the ground floor banged open, followed by the hurried cadence of cultists shouting orders.
Cole halted and glanced at his team. “Get ready. Don’t go loud unless we need to.”