New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Chapter 1043: Smuggler Network



Alex looked at the tiny woman, whose compact figure and close-knit facial traits made her look like a mole, albeit a better-looking one, and he frowned.

The woman looked at the others, still waiting in the room, and barked.

"What are you guys waiting for?! Do you want to get to your plane or not?!"

Heads spun in Kary and Alex's direction, and Kary nodded, giving them the ok.

She wasn't sure about the situation either, but with how David had confidently stridden into the corridor, she imagined he knew what he was doing.

Alex pushed into the corridor behind his friends, leaving Kary as the last one in.

She looked at the woman, eyeing her carefully, and the woman lost patience again.

"Last call. If you don't get your ass inside this passage, I'm leaving you behind, carrot top," she growled.

Kary smiled at the woman, her hair flaring up a bit, making the woman jolt back slightly.

"I'm going. Calm down, will you?" Kary asked, walking past the woman as the temperature rose around her.

The angry little woman gulped as Kary walked past her, keeping her mouth shut. Then, she rushed to the only door in the room and knocked on it four times quickly before heading back to the corridor and pressing a button.

As she did, the wall slid back into position, and the room was once again empty.

From outside, the security officer rose from his seat again, walking to the room swiftly.

He entered, looked at the position of everything in the room, correcting some things that had been moved, like a chair and the table, before giving it one last glance and nodding to himself.

Then, he walked back to his desk, pulled the footage to the room from the moment the door had opened to the moment he had closed behind him after repositioning everything, and scrubbed it clean.

He replaced the missing footage with some of the day before, when the room was empty, making sure to change the time stamps before logging everything back to normal.

For any regular person who would watch the doctored footage of the questioning room, it was as if no one had ever entered it.

The second officer looked at the footage one last time, making sure everything was perfect, before smiling.

"Easy money."

They laughed together, attracting the attention of the nearby people, but were promptly ignored as they waved a tablet around as if they had just watched a hilarious video on it.

The smoothness in their movements was all too practised, and if Alexander had seen this, he would have been none the wiser if he wasn't part of the deception.

Meanwhile, the woman ran to catch up with David in the corridor, which went straight for a while before turning many times, making it hard to judge where one was in relation to the rest of the airport.

"Stop wandering mindlessly, asshole!" she barked at him as she caught up to him.

He chuckled before looking down at the short woman.

"I'm not. I can tell this corridor doesn't end where I want it to. But I can also tell when we pass hidden paths. I'm going exactly where I need to go," he said, halting before a wall panel.

The woman looked at him with narrowing eyes.

"Have you been here before? No. I would remember you. How do you know where the paths are?" she asked, her tone becoming venomous.

David smiled at her, keeping his mouth shut. He wasn't about to tell her he was tracking the high-density mana crystals on the private plane.

Seeing that the man wouldn't answer her question, the woman clicked her tongue angrily before pulling out a small device from her pocket.

With a few taps on it, the wall before David suddenly slid back to the side, revealing a hidden path.

"This will lead you directly to the hangar where your plane is parked. When you get to the end, push on the wall twice lightly and stand back. If you get caught leaving the hidden paths, you are on your own," she said before leaving in the direction they were travelling.

David kept smiling at her before he walked into the hidden path.

Everyone followed behind him, and Cory walked up to David.

"How are these corridors hidden from the rest of the airport? Wouldn't they show up on schematics?"

David looked at him from the corner of his eye, chuckling lightly.

"How could they? They aren't in the airport."

Cory frowned at the answer.

"But we came into them from inside the airport. We should still be inside it, no?"

Jin-Sil giggled at his confusion.

"Did you not notice the slight incline? We are already underground," she explained.

Cory's eyes went wide. He hadn't noticed the incline in the path, as it was ever so slight.

"Woah..."

David chuckled at his amazement and kept walking forward.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

"The first part of the corridor, the straight path, was an old service tunnel that the airport condemned a while back after it almost collapsed. It wasn't long before some smugglers re- opened it for their own business.

"Now, they use it to smuggle in merchandise of all sorts, including people. They dug an entire network under the airport just for that," David explained.

Most of it flew over Cory's head as his mind stuck on the smuggler's part.

"This is so cool," he mumbled, his eyes glowing in amazement.

David chuckled to himself.

'That kid is so easily entertained. I hope he stays this way, even once things start becoming glum. We'll need that attitude if we want to survive through this...'

His thoughts wandered to his past life, visions of his friends dying and himself being chased around Montreal's ruined streets, clouding his mind.

The smile on his lips diminished slowly until his usual gloomy expression replaced it.

Alex felt his mood swing, even without seeing his face, and knew David was spiralling into thoughts he shouldn't. So he did what any good friend would.

He threw something at the back of his head. In this case, it was a small volcanic stone he had found inside the dungeon.

As it flew over the others and nailed David in the head, he turned around with an angry

expression.

"The fuck was that for?!" David growled.

Alex grinned at him, pointing behind David.

"We are here. You were about to slam into the wall," he replied with a shit-eating grin.

David turned his head and saw the wall, then calmed down.

"Right. I knew that," he lied, calming down.

Alex winked at him and acted like nothing had happened. This irked David, but he knew he had

done it with good intentions.

Bending down to grab the stone that Alex had thrown at him, he saw it was a worthless piece of black rock and almost chuckled at Alex's squirrel-like tendency to grab useless shit.

"I'm keeping that, asshole," he called out, showing him the stone before pocketing it.

Alex didn't even bother replying, making David shake his head.

"Alright. Into the hangar we go," David said, lightly pushing the wall twice.

He waited a moment before the wall slid to the side, revealing the inside of a hangar where

their private plane awaited them.

It was almost a welcome sight to them, like getting home after a long day at work.

"Ahh, home sweet home," David joked.

But it resonated deeply with all of them. Finally, they could relax.