Chapter 147

Under the shroud of night on the outskirts of Imperial City, the abandoned warehouse loomed like a beast lying in wait within the darkness—deathly silent and ominous.

Seraphina and Freya moved like two ghosts, scaling the exterior wall of the Abyss Bio warehouse without a sound.

"Something's off about this place." Seraphina kept her voice low, a note of gravity threading through her words. Those eyes that usually gleamed with pride now scanned their surroundings with sharp vigilance.

Freya said nothing, only nodding slightly. Her fingertips brushed against the wall, sensing the faint vibrations emanating from within.

"Not standard security." Freya's voice was cold as ice. "Thermal imaging sensors, and... pressure-sensitive flooring."

Seraphina bit her lower lip. She'd nearly stepped on a slightly lighter-colored tile just moments ago. If Freya hadn't grabbed her in time, the alarms would already be blaring.

"What the hell are they hiding in here?" Seraphina muttered to herself, finally revising her opinion of what had seemed like a routine assignment.

The two infiltrated the underground warehouse through the ventilation shaft.

The moment they landed, Seraphina sucked in a sharp breath.

This wasn't a warehouse at all—it was a heavily fortified military bunker!

The entire underground space was divided into countless sectors, each corridor crisscrossed with infrared laser grids. Worse, those laser beams flickered and shifted at irregular intervals, making it impossible to find a consistent safe path.

"Three hundred feet to the left, two human heat signatures on patrol." Freya's voice crackled through the communicator. She'd already pressed herself into the shadows along the ceiling, poised like a leopard ready to strike.

Seraphina held her breath and slipped forward, hugging the visual blind spot along the wall corner. Her movements were feather-light, not even the rustle of fabric against air.

Just as she was about to pass through a laser grid, one beam suddenly changed trajectory, sweeping straight toward her ankle!

Seraphina's pupils contracted. Her body reacted on pure instinct.

She threw herself backward, bending at an extreme angle nearly parallel to the floor, barely dodging that lethal red beam.

"That was too close..." Cold sweat beaded on her forehead, her heart hammering against her ribs.

"Don't lose focus." Freya's voice came through again, carrying a barely perceptible edge of tension. "One hundred feet ahead, pressure plates, and... audio detectors."

Seraphina steadied herself and looked up to see the floor ahead covered in a dense grid pattern, each square concealing precision sensors underneath.

"This security level's higher than most military installations." Seraphina couldn't help muttering under her breath. "What the hell are they hiding that requires this kind of protection?"

The two continued their cautious advance.

At a corner, they nearly collided with a patrolling mechanical guard.

The thing's head was equipped with 360-degree cameras, its scanning range covering the entire corridor.

Freya acted instantly, pulling a coin-sized scrambler from her waist and flicking it with precision into the mechanical guard's visual blind spot.

An extremely faint electrical hum sounded. The mechanical guard's camera display flickered with static for half a second.

Just that half second!

Seraphina and Freya moved like twin bolts of black lightning, pressing against the wall as they flashed past and vanished into the shadows beyond the corner.

Seraphina leaned against the wall, exhaling a long breath. Her back was already soaked with cold sweat.

"This isn't investigating a warehouse—this is walking into the lion's den." She gritted her teeth, her resentment toward Jack deepening by several degrees.

Just then, heavy footsteps echoed from ahead, accompanied by the clang of metal.

"Someone's coming." Freya's voice went taut.

Seraphina immediately pulled herself together, ducking with Freya into a corner stacked with metal crates.

Through the gaps between the crates, she saw a squad of fully armed soldiers marching past.

They wore identical black combat gear, and the weapons in their hands weren't ordinary firearms—they were some kind of electromagnetic weapons emanating an eerie blue glow.

"Their equipment..." Seraphina's eyes widened slightly. She recognized the insignia on those weapons. "That's... military-grade hardware?"

How could an ordinary biotech pharmaceutical company possibly have this level of security and equipment?

Only after the squad had passed did Seraphina dare to peek out.

She stared at the heavy metal door ahead, marked with a blood-red symbol like the gaping maw of some abyssal beast.

"Freya," Seraphina's voice dropped to barely a whisper, carrying a hint of awe she herself hadn't noticed, "I think we should get out of here. If we keep going, we might actually die in this place."

Freya said nothing, only gazing quietly at that door, something heavy flickering in her eyes.

"Keep moving," she said simply.

Seraphina drew a deep breath and nodded.

She knew that once they'd come this far, there was no turning back.

The two became ghosts once more, gliding silently toward that door.

Like true creatures of the night, the two pressed themselves against either side of the heavy metal door without a sound.

Freya withdrew an extremely thin metal probe from inside her jacket, sliding it into the door's seam.

Her movements were delicate to the extreme, as if she were defusing a bomb ready to detonate at any second. With the faintest 'click,' that door—capable of withstanding heavy artillery bombardment—unlocked from the inside through purely physical means.

The door slid open slowly. A blast of cold air reeking of harsh disinfectant and pungent blood rushed out to meet them.

Seraphina and Freya slipped inside. When they saw what lay before them, even these two elite operatives who'd witnessed death and darkness countless times couldn't help but gasp.

This wasn't a warehouse at all—it was a massive underground laboratory so sprawling it felt suffocating.

Except.

The lab was enormous.

And the equipment was so dazzlingly complex that neither of them could make sense of it. Seraphina stared at those screens glowing with eerie blue light and the constantly jumping streams of complicated data, her scalp prickling.

"What do we do now?"

Seraphina asked.

Freya didn't answer, only using her camera to photograph all the equipment here, along with some of the data.

Freya's movements were lightning-fast, the micro-camera's shutter perfectly silenced.

In mere seconds, those complex blueprints, flickering data streams, and bizarre specimens in cultivation dishes were all captured onto the storage card.

Just as Freya tucked away the camera, steady, purposeful footsteps suddenly echoed from outside the door.

"Someone's coming!" Seraphina's heart lurched, her face draining of color in an instant.