The world outside the penthouse had gone dark, but within the vault of mana-glass, every surface shimmered with anticipation. The walls were transparent, impossible to shatter, but tonight they felt as thin as skin. In the center of the living room, the holo-table projected a wireframe of the Lancaster facility: a blue-lit labyrinth, its security nodes pulsing with the slow, deliberate confidence of old money and newer, hungrier software.
Ellen Lee stood nearest the table, expression carved from winter. She handled each item with ritualistic precision: mana-dampening cloak unfolded and smoothed; disruptor field checked, then double-checked; blade unsheathed and sighted along the edge, measuring for any imperfection. Her movements were precise enough to shame a machine, but there was nothing mechanical about her. The slight hitch in her breath as she calibrated the fire glyphs, the way her thumb traced the scar at her wrist—these revealed an inner turbulence no armor could hide.
Hazel Fujiwara perched on the lip of the sunken pit, her knees tight to her chest. She wore her comms headset askew, glasses flickering with a cascade of magical overlays. Six virtual screens hung before her, each displaying a different flavor of chaos: leyline fluctuations, encrypted police bands, low-res drone feeds from Sombra and Lockwood. Her fingers danced in the air, weaving glowing sigils—pauses, reversals, then corrections as she rewrote firewall after firewall to keep the outside world from eating their mission alive. Every few seconds, she glanced sideways at the others, as if expecting a reprimand or an ambush.
Owen Dagger circled the table, all kinetic tension and restless calculation. His body was built for violence, but his mind ran colder and faster than any algorithm in Nueva Arcadia. He flicked through the holo-table's layers, isolating guard rotations, marking fallback routes in scarlet, then running the simulation again. Every time he cycled the breach, he found a new flaw—a forgotten camera, an unexpected line of sight—and his jaw clenched tighter with each run.
Jane Navarro presided from a low chair, her presence the center of gravity for the whole room. She wore a white shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled to the elbow, revealing the blackened scars of a dozen old burns along her forearms. She sipped from a coffee mug, the steam rising to half-hide her jaguar eyes. Jane didn't speak unless necessary; her authority lived in the way she marked every shift in the team's rhythm, the way she leaned forward a little more when Ellen's hand shook, or the way her gaze hardened when Owen muttered about "impossible odds."
They worked in near silence, broken only by the hum of the security system and the low, regular pings from Hazel's console. Outside, the city ran on the usual diet of neon and predation. In here, every moment felt like the last calm before the dam burst.
It was Hazel who broke the silence. "Mana's spiking in the west blocks. Feels like someone's doing a hard sweep for illegal flow. Not city cops—this is Nexar-level volume." Her voice had that up-an-octave edge it got before things went fully to shit.
Ellen didn't look up from her checks. "Standard pre-holiday lockdown?"
Hazel shook her head, eyes flicking between readouts. "No. They're rerouting comm traffic off the regular grid. Ghost signals, airwave jamming, total lockdown around Sombra. That's not a holiday. That's war games."
Jane set her mug down, the sound louder than it should have been. "How does it hit our window?"
Hazel tapped a control, overlaying the district's pulse atop the Lancaster schematic. "If they keep expanding, we lose exfil from the north, and every fallback west of the canal is fried."
Owen stopped pacing. "That's not an accident. Someone knows about the job."
Jane let the words hang, then turned to Ellen. "You see anything else in the gear?"
Ellen checked the status on the disruptor's mag-cell. "Nothing extra. Everything's tight. But if they're running anti-mage, we'll have to go cold until we're inside."
Hazel's hands hovered, then dropped to her lap. "I can spoof the sensors for maybe four minutes. After that—"
"We won't need four," Owen said, voice flat. "We either hit the vault or we're dead."
The holo-table blinked, then flashed red. Owen's personal terminal buzzed. He moved to it, scanned the screen. For a moment, his features twisted with recognition, then something more brittle. He thumbed a quick unlock, and the message displayed across the table in a blocky, hesitant font.
"Strange environment in Sombra. Heavy police presence. Nexar Dynamics everywhere. Something big happening." It was signed only with a single glyph—a stylized mouse.
Ellen's eyebrows rose a millimeter. Jane grunted. Hazel's eyes went wide.
"Is that—?" Hazel started, but Owen cut her off.
"Yeah," he said. "That's Mouse."
Ellen moved closer to the table, her movement feline, predatory. "Do we believe him?"
Owen watched the blue lines of the message swim in the air. "He's never lied. Not to us. And he's got no reason to start now."
Hazel reached out, her hands trembling as she summoned another set of feeds. "Confirming... yes. Street-level in Sombra is nuts. Nexar's got full tac squads, armored mages, even a couple of drones in gridlock. There are firewalls up I've never even seen before. They're scanning everyone. Even the dumpsters."
Jane inhaled, the air whistling through her teeth. "So either they're onto us, or they're onto something bigger."
"Or," Ellen said, a hint of humor in her voice, "they're onto nothing, and we just get caught in the crossfire."
Hazel's glasses flared as she tried to open another channel. The colors on her screen stuttered, then froze. "They just locked down my backdoor. That's not possible. I ghosted it myself."
Owen considered, then double-tapped the message from Mouse, running it through three separate decrypts. No embedded malware, no signature beyond the kid's usual paranoia. "If the environment's that hot, our whole op is at risk. We go in, we're not coming back."
Jane's lips pressed together, the old scar on her chin whitening. "We adapt. That's what we do."
Ellen started to re-pack her kit, but slower this time, eyes flicking to the city outside the glass. "So who burned us?"
Hazel looked up, panic and curiosity mixed. "Maybe nobody. Maybe it's a power shuffle. Or maybe—" She stopped, unwilling to say it.
Owen finished for her. "Maybe someone wants to see if we'll take the bait. Or if we'll improvise."
The silence was heavier now, but more focused. The four of them leaned in, every muscle and neuron primed for the new uncertainty.
Hazel's fingers worked the air, drawing sigils to try and crack the next wall. "If we wait too long, they'll lock down the target, too."
Jane's voice was a low growl. "Then we don't wait."
Ellen, calm again, zipped her bag and checked the blade one more time. "If we go early, we beat their prep. If we go late, we walk into a kill box."
Owen reset the holo-table, clearing the overlays until only the bare bones of the Lancaster vault remained. "Two hours. We hit it before the next guard cycle."
Hazel was already scanning for alternate escape routes, her hair damp with sweat. "There's an unmarked service conduit off the east side, but it runs right past a Nexar substation."
Jane nodded, the decision already made. "We'll take our chances. When the world goes off script, you run your own."
The prep accelerated, every movement sharp, efficient, and a little desperate. Ellen locked down the last of the gear. Hazel ripped through the last firewall with a trembling flourish, then killed her console, shoving it into her bag. Owen ran the plan again, this time marking every possible point of failure. Jane stood, shoulders squared, and regarded the team as if taking mental inventory of what she was about to lose.
As they moved to the elevator, the city below erupted in a latticework of red and blue lights—emergency beacons, gunship strobes, and the flicker of uncontrolled magic. Sombra District was alive with the kind of violence you couldn't contain, only hope to survive.
In the vestibule, Ellen leaned close to Owen, voice so soft only a wolf would hear. "You think the kid's okay?"
Owen didn't answer right away. He let the question float, as if afraid an answer would break the fragile pact holding them all together.
"He's smart," Owen said finally. "And he's not alone. Not tonight."
The doors shut, and the team descended into the city's heart, toward a future that no longer cared for plans.
Above them, the penthouse blinked to dark, a ghost of four shadows left in the blue afterimage of the holo-table.
In Nueva Arcadia, you never saw the hand that tipped the scale until it was already crushing your throat.
The alarms began as a polite chime—then, in under a minute, mutated into a high-frequency wail that bled through every surface. Hazel jerked away from her console, ears ringing, as the penthouse's windows pulsed with an emergency overlay: swaths of crimson flooding across the city's map, little warning icons metastasizing along every arterial route.
On the wall, the main display seized control of itself, force-playing a newsfeed: shaky drone-cam footage of armored Nexar Dynamics teams kicking down the doors of Sombra tenements, dragging out Feran and human alike, rifles and wands drawn. Somewhere in the background, a building's top three floors burned, smoke pouring upward to merge with the city's already cancerous sky.
Ellen tried the main comms, got nothing but static. She shifted to the backup, then the third line—every channel came back jammed or silent. Even the internal signal between their team's earpieces crackled with preemptive defeat.
Hazel was already trying to hack the grid, her hands shaking. "They've got a citywide lockdown. Not just the Sombra lines—Crystal, Financial, even the Underground is sealed off. All transit, all digital, even the food delivery bots are dark."
Jane paced in front of the main screen, every muscle in her shoulders wired tight. "This isn't a sweep. This is an extermination."
Owen's focus was on a secondary monitor, where he'd mapped their planned routes for the heist. As the city's overlays updated, his highlighted escape paths bled red. "They're corralling everyone toward the water, then tightening the loop. We can't get to the target, and if we did, we'd never get out."
Hazel flicked through feeds in a panic: a cluster of teens beaten to the ground by armored police, a riot in Sombra already choked out by gas grenades, a luxury maglev overturned and burning at the edge of Lockwood. "This wasn't supposed to go down until tomorrow. It was supposed to be gradual. They advanced the timeline, or they found out about us."
Ellen tried the comms again. Still nothing but static and the whine of citywide panic.
On the newsfeed, the anchor's mask-perfect face reappeared, voice honeyed and cold. "Breaking news—joint Nexar-Police operation has resulted in the collapse of the Sombra Syndicate, one of the city's largest criminal organizations. Please remain indoors as public safety teams restore order—"
Jane stabbed the mute, nearly breaking the remote. "They just wrote an entire population out of the city's script. Do you know how hard it is to kill a syndicate in one night?"
Owen double-tapped the tactical overlay, zooming in on the Lancaster megaplant. Around it, the icons for private security multiplied, concentric rings forming a siege. "All that noise out there is just to distract from the real play. They're not just clearing Sombra—they're fortifying everything that matters."
Hazel's voice cracked. "They're deploying mages, too. Real ones. Look—" She brought up a spectral analysis, and the penthouse display glowed with lines of mana, all of them flowing east and uptown. "They're using leylines to scan, jam, and disrupt anything that doesn't match the city's DNA. If we light up, even a little, we're dead."
Ellen, eyes fixed on the skyline, picked up a faint, sickening vibration in her hands. The anti-mage fields had activated: a low, persistent pressure in the bones, a taste of iron on the tongue. She touched the edge of her blade, feeling its wards sputter, then fail.
"They're running suppressors," she said. "I haven't felt a blanket like this since—" She stopped, the memory sour.
Owen knew it too. "Nexar's deploying military-grade. They want this over by dawn."
Jane raked a hand through her hair, scanning for options. "We can't reach the target tonight. Not alive, not even dead." She looked at Owen, then Ellen. "Any way to pivot? Any opening?"
Ellen's jaw flexed. "We'd have to go through three lockdown points, past at least two kill teams. Even if we got in, we'd be trapped. Unless—" She caught herself, eyes flicking to Hazel.
Hazel finished the thought, voice dull with shock. "Unless we go invisible. No magic, no tech, nothing. Ghosts."
Jane turned, her presence gathering the team. "We've done worse."
Hazel shook her head, chin low. "Not against this. Not when they're expecting us."
For a moment, the alarms dropped to a lower, more mournful tone—a city in shock, then in silence. The penthouse was sealed off, every digital feed a reminder that the world outside had changed forever in under five minutes.
Owen looked at his team, then at the city, then back at his team.
"We adapt," he said. "We always do."
Outside, the city howled, a thousand fires blooming in the dark.
Jane hit the table so hard the holo-display flickered, blue shadows strobing across every face. "This is a goddamn setup," she spat. "We're supposed to walk into the Lancaster Vault while the rest of the city gets hosed down? No chance. Someone moved our window up and didn't bother to tell us."
Ellen nodded, already pulling up the external feeds on a secondary screen. "Statistical probability of this being random is less than point zero one percent. Our hit was predicted, and they planned this as a cover." She tapped through the overlay, fingers leaving faint heat prints on the poly-surface. "Every route we mapped is either blocked by drones or has overlapping magical suppressors. Even if we ghost it, we get tagged and bagged within two clicks of the target."
Owen looked at his own terminal, where the old routes blinked red in a rhythm that felt like a countdown. "We can still breach. We split into two pairs, go through maintenance tunnels. They're old, pre-grid, probably off the surveillance net. If we time it with the third shift handover, we can get inside, maybe even use the lockdown as a shield."
Jane shot him a look that would have melted lesser men. "You want to improvise against a warzone? With suppressors up, half our kit is useless, and the rest is borderline suicidal. Even if we get in, we don't get out."
Hazel hadn't moved since the alarms started. She stared at the city through the polarized glass, eyes dry and bright. "We were outplayed," she whispered, so low only Ellen caught it.
Ellen leaned in. "What are you thinking?"
Hazel kept her gaze fixed on the chaos outside. "They didn't just collapse Sombra. They collapsed us. All of this—every warning, every signal—was to make sure we couldn't move. We're not the main event. We're just a subplot to whatever Nexar and Taira and Lancaster are cooking."
The word "subplot" hung in the air like a curse.
Jane paced the length of the table, hands clenching and unclenching. "So we hole up. Wait it out. See what survives the night, then hit the target when the dust settles."
Owen bristled, arms crossed. "That's a retreat. We don't do that."
Jane snapped back, louder than the sirens outside. "We do if it means we live to try again." She swung her glare around the room, pinning each of them in turn. "We're no good to anyone if we get erased in the crossfire."
Hazel's fingers twitched, calling up the locked-down comms again. "Even if we wait, it might not matter. They're isolating every Feran-run safe house and black site. Even if we're not on a list, the fact we're not moving makes us suspicious."
Ellen met Jane's gaze, the two women holding a silent conversation built on years of violence and compromise. "Best move is to blackout," Ellen said. "Full quiet. Make ourselves boring. Wait for the real play."
Jane looked at Owen, challenging him to argue.
He didn't. Not really. "We prep the fallback. If they breach, we hit the panic tunnels and scatter. Meet up at the Sombra canal in twelve hours. If not, we stay dark."
Hazel nodded. "Agreed. But we have to assume they're coming for us."
Jane exhaled, long and slow, the anger leaving her like blood from a wound. "Mission aborted," she said, the words ugly in her mouth. "Everyone stay put. Get ready for siege."
They moved as one, every gesture sharp and purposeful. Ellen reset the magical alarms, splicing in a cascade of countermeasures that would fry the sensors on anyone trying to hack the door. Owen swept the penthouse for bugs, then ran a passive scan for aerial surveillance. Hazel flicked through every known city feed, eyes darting, searching for any sign of an incoming threat.
Jane went to the bar, poured herself a double, and downed it without ceremony.
The city outside was a living nightmare. Fires in Sombra, tracer rounds sparking over the rooftops, the sound of drones hunting through back alleys. Inside, the penthouse felt like a tomb: too much air, not enough hope.
Hazel's comm pinged—a single, low-priority ping from a hidden contact. She opened it. The message was two words, burned into the feed in simple black text: "Stay down."
She didn't say anything. Just nodded to herself, and to the world that now contained her.
Ellen sat at the edge of the table, hands resting on her knees, breathing slow and even. Jane finished her drink, then started another.
Owen paced the perimeter, watching the skyline with a soldier's fatalism.
For the first time in years, UMBRA had no plan but to survive the night.
The city howled on, uncaring.
The night pressed in, thick as syrup, soaking the penthouse in blue-black silence. The city outside was a circuit board of violence: fires burning up the flanks of glass towers, gunships prowling between buildings, their floodlights spearing the lower districts in surgical arcs. From thirty floors up, the city looked less like a home than a failed experiment.
Owen Dagger watched from the edge of the mana-glass, his own reflection superimposed over the chaos. Below, police lines flickered, drones arced between rooftops in tight geometric patterns, and everywhere, the emergency lights pulsed—red, blue, the color of warning. He watched, eyes hollow, as a Nexar gunship hovered over a block near the canal, its weapons pods open and live.
"This isn't about Sombra," he said, voice low enough to vanish into the glass. "It's about control. Always is."
Behind him, Jane poured another measure of whiskey, the amber liquid perfectly level as it filled the glass. She leaned against the bar, elbows planted, eyes fixed on the surface. She didn't look at anyone as she spoke.
"They knew the job," she said. "Not just that we'd do it, but exactly when. Even the city's backup comms went dead the second we called the op."
Ellen sat at the table, blade in hand, passing a cloth along its length in methodical, loving strokes. Each time she finished a pass, she lifted the blade to the light, checking for flaws or fingerprints, then started again. The repetition was its own kind of prayer.
"Could be the Lancasters," she said, never pausing in her work. "Could be Taira. Or maybe someone bought out both. We've made a lot of enemies."
Jane's laugh was short and bitter. "I'm starting to think we're the only ones who ever play fair."
Hazel hunched over her station, eyes raw from hours of blue light. The feeds had stopped updating minutes ago—most of the city's net was blacked out, save for a few state-sanctioned propaganda channels. Still, she kept scrolling, looking for the one anomaly that might make sense of the rest.
She found it, not in the feeds, but in a single, sharp alert. The sound was different: high-pitched, crystalline, a note that shivered the bones and set the hairs on her arms standing.
Hazel's head snapped up. "Got something," she said, barely more than a whisper.
The other three converged around her, their tension crackling in the air.
On Hazel's main screen, a message flickered—a block of text, encrypted in a format that shouldn't have existed. Jane read it first, eyes scanning the lines, then going wide.
"No coincidences," Jane read aloud. "Move."
Owen stared at the text, the weight of it settling somewhere under his sternum. "That's a command line," he said. "Not a warning."
Hazel's hands trembled as she tried to parse the origin. "It's coming from inside the grid. Not the city net, not even from the regular mana feeds. It's… somewhere else. It's piggybacking on the blackout."
Ellen frowned, wiping her blade on her thigh. "Is it a threat?"
Hazel shook her head, the tremor more obvious now. "I think it's a lifeline. If we don't move, we're already dead."
Jane looked at the team, a chill passing through her as she realized what the message meant. "They want us to jump. See if we can fly."
The four stared at the message as it pulsed on the screen, insistent, louder than any alarm.
Owen looked back at the city, at the siege unfolding below. "We've been on someone else's leash the whole time," he said. "All that matters now is who's pulling it."
Jane set her glass down, steady as ever. "Then we pull back."
Hazel closed her eyes, listened to the signal, and for a brief, irrational second, wondered if Mouse had survived. If the message was his, or if it was the thing that finally got him.
Ellen slipped her blade into the holster, checked the lock, and stood. "If we go, we go quiet. And we don't come back unless we win."
Jane bared her teeth in a tired smile. "Agreed."
The city howled outside, but inside the penthouse, the team was silent—watching the message blink, and blink, and blink, until the next move became obvious.
No more waiting. No more playing by rules they didn't write.
They would move.
And whatever waited at the end of the leash—win or lose—they would face it together.