New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Chapter 1069: Breakthrough



In the car, miles away from there already, Kujaku was trying to figure out a way to let her clients know where they were headed without letting their pursuers know.

She couldn't wrack her brain hard enough to find a way that they would figure out until Violette came up with a plan that might work.

"Since we are still on the highway, I could mark the road where we turn for the few first hundred meters. This would give Alexander and Kary a way to follow us or our general direction."

Kujaku looked at her with a frown.

"We can't afford to stop and let you mark the new route. Plus, how would you mark it so our pursuers can't follow us?" she asked, thinking this was a bad idea.

"You don't need to stop. I can mark the way from inside the car. And unless the people following us can see mana as well as Alex can, I doubt they would catch on. This is the best we've got. They'll figure it out with this alone, I'm sure."

Kujaku wasn't confident about her assertions, but they had little choice since Sakura was already slowing down to change roads. She had already held the highway for a long time, giving more distance between her and the other vehicles, but they needed to switch routes now.

"We can try your way," Kujaku conceded, seeing the coming ramp.

Violette grinned and nodded, ready herself mentally.

She pictured the simplest shape she could think of in her mind that would allow Alexander to understand what way to go, and, as soon as they started driving along the new road, tagged the first three hundred meters directly on the pavement underneath the car.

To the average eye, nothing would appear. But this would be clear as day to someone whose mana vision could detect the simplest of changes in mana types.

With three triangles pointing in the vehicle's direction, Alexander couldn't miss them. And with the mana being tweaked to Violette's signature, there would be no confusion.

Kujaku waited for Violette to do something, but only watched as the little girl closed her eyes before smiling and reopening them.

"There. It's done."

Kujaku barely felt the girl's mana flare up, and she couldn't feel anything beyond that, making her wonder if she was lying. But the others seemed to accept her claim without qualms, their trust unwavering.

"I hope this works. If not, we'll have to hope they reach our destination without our help and don't attract too much attention while doing so..."

Jin-Sil looked at Kujaku mockingly, but kept her comments to herself. It would be in poor taste to call her unprofessional when it was Alexander's call to use himself and Kary as bait for their pursuers.

Nonetheless, she knew she wasn't the only one to blame the woman for her failure to cover their six. It was her job to ensure they were covert, and she had failed.

Even Kujaku felt responsible for this without saying so out loud. She rarely, if ever, fucked up, and now she had monumentally.

With the knowledge that the Neo-Future Syndicate was on their ass, she would have to revise a few of her plans. Revisions which would have saved them to begin with, if she had known they were tailed earlier.

Her gaze hardened as she realized this could have been avoided if her subordinates had given her the reports sooner. This was a fumble on their part.

Had they followed the training her clan had drilled into them for years and reported the discrepancy between the reports of the spies and the spotters, she would have tried seeing their tail sooner, and might have been able to ditch them without resorting to such barbaric methods.

Now, they were missing two of their protective targets; she felt pissed at herself and her men.

'I'll have to make sure they get a refresher course in protocol and pain,' she growled internally.

But, for now, she could only hope that this trick that Violette pulled would be enough.

***

Far away from them, in the mountains of Germany, a man was observing a dark room through a camera feed with an infrared filter. His face was glued to the screen, and he grinned as he observed a single lamb walking around in the dark.

A figure suddenly blurred across the camera, and the lamb disappeared.

"Light up the room, slowly, like usual. Drown out any darkness in there," he ordered, still grinning.

"Yes, sir!" two men barked, pushing levers before them slowly.

As they did, cracks appeared in one of the room's walls, and sunlight entered the room. Before long, the room was wholly drowned in sunlight; the sun rising directly across from the large blast windows behind the reinforced steel blinds.

Waiting to hear any screeches or howls, the man grinned even wider when he heard naught but silence.

"He's ready. We finally succeeded," he whispered, pride in his voice.

The cameras switched off their infrared filter, and the room feed lit up, showing the grey metal walls covered in tear marks and splattered blood, some of it long dried, some muchn/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

fresher.

But in the back of the room, a single boy, hunched over a bloody lamb.

The boy suddenly turned to face the camera, his red eyes vibrant in the morning sunlight, as he wiped his mouth with the torn sleeve of his shirt.

The two men shivered at the sight of those red eyes, having seen them all too often in the camera lens before they tore up an unsuspecting animal or another. Even when they looked like normal human eyes, aside from their peculiar colour, these were the eyes of an apex

predator.

They could feel their skin crawl with just the empty gaze he gave the camera.

On the other hand, the man felt nothing but pride in this boy and himself for succeeding in something his ancestors had been trying to achieve for over a century.

"The first Van Helsing day-walker male... I did it... The syndicate will have no choice but to give me a position at their leaders' table now..."

The boy tilted his head as he looked outside the window, the sun a sight he had never seen before without experiencing extreme pain.

Walking toward the window, he put his hand on it, experiencing the heat from the astral body

on his skin for the first time in his life.

"Hot... But dry... Not like blood. Like it."

His words were weirdly articulated, like a three-year-old learning to speak, but strangely, they carried a clarity that betrayed his actual age.

His body, which was developed enough to see some muscles through the skin, looked closer

to a young teenager than an actual child.

The boy turned his head back to the camera, a smile appearing on it.

"Outside. I want outside."

His hand was pushing on the window, and in the control room, a flickering red light appeared

on the screen.

"Sir. The boy is applying extreme force to the blast windows. If he keeps pushing on them, he might crack them. Do we engage the restraining measures?"

The man looked at them with a furious gaze.

"No. Let me talk to him."

Pressing a button before him, he activated the intercom.

"Christoph. Could you stop pushing on the glass, son? We'll let you out soon. But first, we need to run a few tests, make sure that being outside won't harm you, okay?" the man said

softly.

The boy tilted his head, still pushing against the window.

"Papa? Outside. Please?"

His gaze lit up, and the two men at the console suddenly felt dizzy, their eyes glazing over.

Seeing them reach for the release button on the central console, the man in the back activated a command that cut the feed to the central console.

'Unbelievable. His hypnotic gaze is already strong enough to affect people through a screen. This is... Incredible,' he almost jubilated, before clearing his mind of the thought, and

focusing on his child.

"Not yet, Christoph. We must ensure the sun won't burn your skin in direct contact. That glass still filters a large amount of UV rays, and we don't want it to harm you. Do you understand?"

The boy's gaze saddened, but he retracted his hand from the glass.

"Outside soon?" he asked, his gaze pleading.

"Yes, son. Outside soon. Once we are sure the sun won't hurt you, we can explore the mountains together; what do you say?" he offered, trying to appease the child.

He could feel the hypnotic gaze prying against his mind. Luckily for him, he had a high resistance to it, and it couldn't control him, like it had the two men below him.

The boy walked away from the window, a smile on his lips.

"Okay. Hungry. More food?" he asked, pointing at the drained lamb.

The older man chuckled before pressing a button on his console.

A trap door opened in the room, and another lamb was brought up on a rising platform. The

animal immediately felt the predatorial gaze land on it and bleated in panic.

But the sounds didn't last long, as the boy practically teleported on it, latching onto its neck

and starting to drink voraciously.

The bleats weakened in seconds before silencing altogether, replaced by a sickening suction

sound and rapid gulping.

'So hungry. I hope this calms down as we school him into acting human. At least he isn't rabid anymore,' the old man thought, cutting the feed before him.

The two men were still in a daze at their control terminal, and the old man clapped his hands

to snap them out.

They shook their heads and turned to look at the man.

"Sir? What happened?"

The man waved dismissively.

"Doesn't matter-no more camera feed for the foreseeable future. Only sound. If he asks for

more food, send it to him, but time the intervals. I want a timetable arranged before tomorrow. If the intervals seem to be shortening, call me.

"In the meantime, I have some meetings to attend to. No video, do you understand?" he

ordered, looking them in the eyes.

"Yes, sir!"

"Good. Relay the instructions when the shift change arrives. If there is a fuck up, I'll send you

into the pen with the boy. Make sure your replacements understand that as well," he threatened, before rising from his chair and leaving the room.

Shivers of fear ran down their spines as the thought of being alone in the room with that...

thing... pervaded their minds.

As a precaution, the men covered the screens with anything they could find. They weren't keen

on discovering whether the threat was empty.

They cared about their lives too much to tempt fate.