The Orestes Telegraph Company was a fortress of copper and glass, its rooftop bristling with lightning rods that bled excess mana into the atmosphere. It was the nervous system of the kingdom's modern era, the place where every whispered secret of the nobility was digitized and sent screaming across the wires.
The basement of the Telegraph Company smelled of ozone and hot oil. Massive brass turbines hummed with a low-frequency vibration that rattled Leona's teeth. Kaelen had gotten her past the external perimeter using an old smuggling tunnel, but he had stopped at the heavy lead-shielded doors of the Central Hub.
"This is as far as a shadow goes, kid," Kaelen whispered, checking the charge on his mana-cloak. "Beyond this, the air is thick with detection spells. If you so much as sneeze, a dozen Enforcers will be on you before the sound hits the wall."
"I don't sneeze," Leona said, her voice flat. She was focused on the primary mana-trunk—a pulsing, translucent pipe the size of a tree trunk that ran through the center of the room.
"Good luck. If you're not out in twenty minutes, I'm blowing the tunnel and leaving you to the Duke," Kaelen said, vanishing into the gloom.
Leona didn't blame him. In the world of assassins, loyalty was a luxury paid for in gold or blood. She stepped toward the door, her Mithril Threads extending from her fingertips like sensory whiskers.
She didn't use a key. Instead, she slid a thread into the keyhole and felt for the tumblers. With a delicate pulse of frost, she froze the pins in their "open" position and clicked the door aside.
The Central Hub was a cathedral of data. Rows upon rows of glass-encased punch-cards spun at high speeds, read by flickering beams of blue light. In the center sat a man suspended in a throne of brass wires. His eyes were milky white, and his fingers were fused directly into a control console.
This was High Proctor Valerius, the King's Master Technomancer.
"A little early for the morning shift, isn't it, Assistant Argen?" Valerius didn't move his head, but his voice boomed through the room's speakers.
Leona froze. She hadn't even stepped fully into the light. "How did you—"
"I am the network," Valerius interrupted. "I felt your weight on the floorboards the moment you entered the basement. I felt the drop in temperature your core causes. You're quite a fascinating anomaly. A biological mage using high-grade mithril as a conduit... it's beautifully inefficient."
Leona let her threads drop, no longer hiding them. They shimmered with a cold, violet light. "I'm not here to be efficient. I'm here to return some records."
"The Gray Book," Valerius sighed. "The Duke is quite obsessed with it. I, however, am more interested in the girl who holds it. Do you know what I could do with a brain that processes data as fast as yours? I could map the entire Southern Continent in a week."
He flicked a finger.
The brass wires surrounding his throne suddenly came to life, lashing out like metallic serpents. They weren't just cables; they were energized with high-voltage mana.
Leona leaped backward, her Glacial Filaments snapping out to parry the strike.
CRACK!
The collision sent a shower of blue sparks across the room. Leona felt the jolt travel up her arm, her ice-affinity acting as a natural insulator, but the sheer force of the Technomancer's output was staggering.
"You control the cold," Valerius said, his voice echoing. "But I control the medium!"
He slammed his hand onto the console. The floor beneath Leona began to glow. The very metal she stood on was being magnetized. Her mithril threads, usually weightless, suddenly became heavy, dragging toward the floor.
Modern problems require modern solutions, Leona thought, her mind flashing back to her previous life's knowledge of electromagnetism.
She didn't fight the magnetism. She leaned into it. She dropped to one knee and slammed her palms onto the floor. Instead of a wall of ice, she sent a Pulse of Absolute Zero directly into the magnetic coils beneath the floorboards.
In physics, extreme cold can create superconductors—or, if applied violently enough to unshielded machinery, it can cause a total thermal collapse.
The floor groaned. The magnets didn't just stop; they shattered as the sudden contraction of the metal caused the copper coils to snap.
"Error!" the speakers shrieked. "Sector 4 power loss!"
Valerius hissed, his milky eyes widening. "You... you dared to damage the Hub?"
"I'm just getting started," Leona said.
She sprang forward, her threads weaving into a complex geometric pattern. She didn't attack Valerius directly. She attacked the data-cylinders.
With a flick of her wrist, her threads sliced through the glass casings of the "Noble Correspondence" files. She didn't destroy them; she used her frost to "read" the vibrations of the spinning discs, a technique she had practiced in the quiet hours of the Archive.
"You can't broadcast that!" Valerius screamed, his hands blurring across the console. "The encryption is level-nine!"
"I don't need to decrypt it," Leona said, her eyes turning a terrifying, opaque white. "I just need to freeze the carrier wave."
She grabbed the main mana-trunk with her bare hands. The raw energy surged through her, threatening to cook her from the inside out, but she channeled her frost magic at its maximum output. She turned herself into a biological bridge between the physical and the arcane.
She visualized the Gray Book. She projected the images of the Duke's crimes—the murder of the Archduke, the illegal mithril trade, the bribes.
She didn't send text. She sent memories.
Across the kingdom, every telegraph machine suddenly went haywire. Instead of dots and dashes, they began to spit out sheets of paper covered in frost-etched images. In the capital, in the remote villages, in the military outposts—the truth was being printed in real-time.
"Stop it!" Valerius lunged from his throne, the wires snapping as he tried to physically reach her.
Leona let go of the trunk. She was exhausted, her skin covered in a thin layer of rime-frost. But she wasn't finished.
She looked at the Technomancer, who was now stumbling toward her, his connection to the network severed.
"The library is closed," Leona whispered.
She sent a single thread—a Glacial Filament—straight through the center of the main mana-trunk.
The resulting feedback loop was spectacular. The mana-trunk didn't explode; it imploded. All the energy Leona had frozen suddenly rushed back toward the vacuum she'd created.
The room was consumed by a blinding, blue-white light.
Leona didn't wait to see the results. She dived into the ventilation shaft just as the Central Hub became a tomb of frozen glass and shattered brass.
She emerged into the rain five minutes later, collapsing into Kaelen's arms.
"Did... did you do it?" he asked, staring at the Telegraph building. Smoke was pouring from the lightning rods, but it wasn't black smoke. It was white, freezing mist.
Leona pulled a small, frost-covered glass slide from her pocket—a backup of the Duke's most private files.
"I didn't just do it," Leona panted, a ghost of a smile appearing on her face. "I gave the whole kingdom a bedtime story. And by morning, the Duke won't have a single friend left to hide him."
But as she looked up at the sky, she saw something that made her smile vanish.
High above the city, a fleet of Dread-Airships—the King's personal guard—was turning its prow toward Orestes.
The truth had gone out, but the response was going to be total war.