Rakna smiled bitterly and erased the theatrical display of blood. There was no point in even trying to scare her. This probably wouldn’t even work on anyone he knew. Perhaps except Allan who’d just tell him something like ‘Sure. If you don’t want to, don’t. Blood is icky anyway.’

He sighed and changed his sitting position with one knee up and his arm resting on it. Ceres was patiently watching and waiting for him to continue.

“If every story must start somewhere, then this is the appropriate place,” he suddenly said and all of the landscape around them faded away apart from the Céraiste field. Instead, the two of them found themselves inside a house with their bodies being oddly transparent.

“Illegal traffic across China. Three different spots altogether that are always connected by one sort of transit or another.”

Ceres trembled as she suddenly heard an unfamiliar voice.

She looked around and her eyes fell on the figure of an elderly but powerful-looking man. He was standing in front of a large digital screen where a map was displayed, showing routes, pictures, and written records. She also spotted a young boy at his side, looking at the map.

“Out with it, old man,” the boy spoke with a terrifyingly callous voice. It was filled with suppressed hatred and impatience. Listening to him felt like blades scraping your skin. “Is this related to Flood and what are they trafficking exactly?”

“All clues point to Flood’s involvement,” the older man responded with a huff. “As for the nature of the traffic, it’s only a conjecture, but I’d say liquid Eion of high purity. I have noticed fluctuations in the supply worldwide.”

The young Rakna frowned heavily. “Where the fuck are they getting it from?”

“Where every criminal gets their stuff; the black market. When humans want something, you can be sure that law doesn’t mean crap to them,” the old man snickered. “Well, it would have if I was still at the reigns of Aurora. Haze and Jin are getting sloppy but I can’t blame them. I was the main deterrent force. That’s why I started to hunt Flood down and found you along the way.”

“…you said three sites, where do we start?” The boy inquired.

“I’ll take the two that are closest to each other. You take the last one. Since you’ll be alone on this one, be careful. I won’t be close to you to save your skin and Allegro isn’t done yet.”

“Zip it, old man. I don’t need your saving.”

“We’ll see. If they have about two hundred men combined in my two sites, I should be able to clean them up and join you in about two hours with the jet if it’s necessary.”

Ceres blinked in shock as she heard a human say he could take out two hostile positions with an average of a hundred guards within two hours. It was also the same for the young Rakna shown in the memory before her. How could he confidently target something like that on his own?

“I understand who that man is… but you as well… were you really human?” She couldn’t help but ask and the present Rakna snorted.

“We were. But the old man could become superhuman at the slightest intake of Eion while I also used serums developed by him to temporarily increase my physique,” he replied. “But more than that, we had skills and resources. That was more than enough.”

Ceres was silent for a moment. “How old were you during this… operation?”

“13? 14? I’m not sure. My memories of that period are fuzzy,” Rakna admitted with a shrug and pointed at the images. “Focus. It’s moving on.”

She did as he said and quietly watched as the pair left the house on bikes and headed to a hidden and remote abandoned factory that they clearly used as their private hangar. There were rows of vehicles inside and amongst them, flying contraptions of high quality were parked.

“How-”

“Money, lots of money and connections,” Rakna answered before she could finish. “My uncle would then go and build or improve equipment on his own. He told me that he had had decades of free time to steadily bulk up his armory and equipment long before I met him.”

As he spoke, the memories, or rather the dream he was artificially making, forwarded to a section where he was heading to his objective in a black jet, during the night and alone. After a while, the auto-pilot kicked in and the aircraft slowed down. The bottom thrusters were triggered and the ones at the back were turned off for a swift but soft vertical landing in a clearing.

Rakna exited it dressed in a Kevlar and metal-plated outfit that was obviously leagues below the quality provided by Allegro. He walked to the back of the jet and opened a compartment from which he grabbed a pair of odd knives with spear-shaped blades and a thick handle. He whirled them and attached them to his belt.

He then reached for a mask made out of metal alloy, a far cry from Scherzo, but still one that lit up when he put it on and gave him night vision. Back then, it still served him as a defense and scouting equipment. Arimane had always given him reliable armor due to his weaker physique.

He put his hood up afterward and left the jet behind with a small briefcase in hand. When he was about ten meters away, he pressed a button in his pocket and the jet’s hull became translucent. He ran into the nearby forest at a speed that would put athletes to shame.

Within five minutes, he spotted a bungalow belonging to the small town marked on his map. The augmented reality of his mask showed him where the most likely location of Flood was. It was on the other side of the town from his current position, not fully on the outskirts but close to it.

He clicked his tongue and sprinted past the houses and streets fast and silently enough that even the random cats roaming outside only had the time to lift their heads before he was gone. Once he was close to his goal, he climbed to the roof of a building from the alleyway adjacent to it and used his mask to zoom into the distance.

When he saw the target, he scowled and put down the case he was carrying. ‘A nuclear plant? An abandoned one? It’s not a rare sight since Eion but… China shouldn’t have many. They didn’t get rid of their reactors; they reused them. They also weren’t one of the countries to be opposed to nuclear power, far from it. And why was one built here in the middle of nowhere?’ He thought to himself and opened the case, of which the lid also performed as a tablet.

He turned it on and looked for information about the plant through it. He stumbled upon the list of official nuclear plants in the country and frowned.

‘It’s legit... Closed for hazard? Bullshit. There isn’t any attached information. There is no fucking way they would build a plant so close to a town and then close it for hazard-- hah, three months after its construction-- without making a fuss. Does Flood have associates in the Government? Or in this case… Aurora? Might be worth looking into.’

While thinking that, he ran pre-installed scripts and programs coded by his uncle and took control of the surveillance network of the area. He tried to see if there was anything to connect to near the nuclear plant and hummed.

‘Some signal… I can’t see more into it with this setup,’ he thought and started skimming through the surveillance recordings. He quickly found what he was looking for; transports going in and out of town. It seemed to happen every week, in the late evening, with about three to four vehicles every time.

‘That’s huge loads… is it really Eion? Where are they shipped from?’ He asked himself and saved the data into a cloud that both he and his uncle had access to. ‘Anyway, these trucks all head to the west of the plant. In that case… let’s go east.’

He turned off the tablet, got a few items out of the case, and closed it before leaving it in a corner of the rooftop. He stood up from his crouched stance and made his way down the building. He ran around the nuclear plant’s location and approached from the far east. His uncle would have been far more aggressive, but unlike him, he didn’t have the luxury of being a superhuman.

When he reached the edges of the plant, he gave it a simple look-over and confirmed that the small buildings were indeed abandoned. However, the cooling towers, the containment buildings where the reactors are normally in, and the control building were dilapidated, but nearly not as bad as the rest. He also had no angle to verify the interior’s state, unlike the rest.

He pondered and after checking for cameras, he went to inspect one of the cooling towers since it was the closest thing to him and he didn’t want to go too deep into the nuclear plant’s land since that would mean getting closer to the supposed west entrance where there could be actual guards and surveillance.

He examined the tower and the first thing he noticed were the foundations. The material seemed cheap for this kind of edifice. It was probably on purpose so that the damage would accumulate faster and give it a ‘neglected’ look. But for it to not have any obvious structural weakness despite it, meant that the inside was maintaining the stability. In other words; something was in there.

He stepped back and looked at the top. He sighed. “It’s my safest and best bet …” He said to himself with a sigh. “Fucking hell. I should have parachuted if I knew it would be like this.”

He headed to the stairs built to the side of the tower and started climbing them. He made sure that it wouldn’t collapse on itself from his weight and inevitably had to spend more time than he would have liked to. When he got to the top, he peeked inside and scoffed.

It was sealed. And not in a ‘for safety’ kind of way. It was a literal plaque of steel. He vaulted over the edge of the fake chimney and landed on the plaque. He walked to the obvious trap door in the center and crouched next to it. He raised an eyebrow and pulled out a vial with a blue liquid in it.

He poured some of it onto the lock and then ignited it with an electric lighter. Instantly, the liquid burst into blue flames and melted down the lock silently. Rakna opened the entry afterward and after taking a look, jumped in.

He landed on the top of a spiraling perforated metal staircase. He made sure there wasn’t anything of direct danger around him and quietly made his way down. Gradually, a certain smell began to attack his nose; stronger and stronger.

“A silly name,” the present Rakna suddenly said and Ceres, who was engrossed in the amazingly livid memories, was startled. She looked back at her Host and held her breath when she saw the dreadfully empty expression he had.

“The pool of blood. A silly one indeed,” he continued and the memories played out until the young version of him reached the end of the stairs and got to a sort of scaffolding bridge. He looked over the railings and the sight clearly shocked him enough to the point of losing his composure.

Ceres also had a look of utter disbelief and even slight terror. Rakna remained impassive but his lips curled maniacally, neither a smile nor a grimace.

“But sometimes, silly things should be taken literally.”