The brilliant flash of the Assembly shattered, violently dragging his consciousness back into reality.
O5-6 Twilight opened his eyes with a sharp intake of air.
The cold, seamless black stone and the grand tridecagon table vanished completely, replaced by the dimly lit, cramped backroom of Franky Franklin’s tobacco shop.
The smell of cheap cigars and stale paper washed over him as his gloved fingers twitched against his temples.
He held his head as he tried to sit up.
“Whoa, whoa! Easy there! Don’t push yourself up too fast, Loid!”
Franky’s anxious face suddenly leaned into his field of vision.
The bushy-haired informant looked completely unraveled, waving his hands frantically as he screamed in pure panic.
“Man, you totally scared the life out of me! One second, we’re talking about intel drops, and the next, you suddenly drop straight to the floor! You were completely unresponsive!”
Loid massaged his temples, instantly suppressing his physical disorientation.
His highly trained instincts overrode the lingering daze.
“How much time…” Loid’s voice was hoarse, sharp, and businesslike.
“…how much time has passed since I collapsed?”
“How much time? You’ve been completely out for like six hours!” Franky yelled back, pacing across the narrow backroom.
“Six hours, Twilight-san! I was about to look up a black-market doctor or pack my bags to flee the country! I thought someone finally managed to poison you!”
Loid didn’t answer right away.
He casually rolled his wrist to glance at his watch.
The hands pointed exactly to 10:58 PM.
It was almost midnight.
“Look, man,” Franky sighed, running a hand through his messy hair as he leaned against a crate of tobacco.
“You’ve been pushing yourself way too hard lately. Managing that fake family for Operation Strix, running circles around the Secret Police, and dealing with WISE’s endless paperwork… your body finally reached its limit from how exhausted you were. That you collapsed, if you were not breathing, I’m probably already out of the country by now.”
Exhaustion, Loid thought, a calculating edge sharpening behind his eyes.
So the foundation masks our physical absence as a sudden coma.
He smoothly slid his legs off the cot, standing up and straightening the lines of his suit with absolute precision.
He turned a piercing gaze toward his informant.
“Franky. Do not spread word of this to anyone. Nobody at the agency can know that I lost consciousness here.”
“Yeah, yeah, like I’m an amateur,” Franky grumbled.
“But seriously, you should take a break.”
Loid reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
The device looked identical, but it carried a dense, additional weight, humming with an imperceptible current.
He unlocked the screen and tapped the new icon app.
The application dashboard instantly displayed the first official message Yuki had pinned to the forum directory.
Loid nodded slowly to himself, locking his screen.
The UTC+8 timing was a classic piece of counter-intelligence.
It covered a vast geopolitical swath of Asia, keeping the leader’s exact location completely off the radar.
“I have work to do,” Loid said flatly, turning toward the hidden exit door of the shop.
Franky scratched his head, letting out a long, heavy sigh of pure exasperation.
“Are you kidding me?! I just told you that you’ve been pushing yourself too hard, and you’re already running out to do another midnight run? At least rest until morning, you workaholic!”
But just before the mechanical latch clicked completely shut, a faint whisper drifted back through the gap.
“Thanks, Franky.”
The door closed, locking.
Left alone in the backroom, Franky blinked at the empty exit, a soft, helpless smile breaking across his face as he shook his head.
“Tough guy,” he muttered, turning back to his desk.
Outside, standing in the cold midnight air, Loid Forger opened his dashboard once again, his eyes locking onto the pulsing yellow beacon coordinates mapped directly over a public market in Berlin.
He flipped his collar up, his silhouette dissolving into the shadows.
The ghost of Westalis was officially on the hunt.
…
Following the precise location in his phone, Loid arrived at the designated coordinates in Berlin.
He stood across the street, his sharp eyes instantly registering a tactical hurdle.
The market hall housing the merchant stalls was entirely locked and closed for the night.
To secure the anomalous asset without alerting local law enforcement or alarms, he needed a quiet point of entry.
Loid smoothly turned on his heel and slipped into a pitch-black, narrow alleyway nearby.
Working with practiced, blinding speed, his hands moved in absolute darkness as he altered his posture, swapped his jacket, and adjusted a micro-thin facial prosthetic from his hidden kit.
Within a single minute, he stepped out of the shadows as a completely different individual, a mundane, unassuming local night-watchman.
After a swift, casual lap around the perimeter to gauge the security, Loid chose his target.
The back doors of the structure faced a desolate, unlit alley entirely devoid of bystanders or surveillance cameras.
He slid into the rear alley, pulled a set of high-grade lock-picking tools from his cuff, and knelt before the mechanical lock.
His fingers moved with master-level muscle memory.
Click.
Click.
In no time at all, the heavy bolt slid back seamlessly.
Loid quietly slipped inside the dark building, closing the door behind him with an almost imperceptible snap to secure his exit path.
The interior of the massive market hall was a labyrinth of silent, shrouded merchant stalls.
Instead of risking a flashlight, Loid relied entirely on the pale silver moonlight streaming through the high, arched windows.
He glided through the shadows like a ghost, his boots making no sound against the concrete floor as he effortlessly dodged stacked crates, loose display tables, and anything else that might create a noise hazard.
As he closed in on the center of the yellow beacon, he pulled out his phone.
Loid quickly slipped the device beneath his shirt, letting the fabric muffle the light emission.
Leaning over the counter of a dusty, antique flea-market stall, he used the dimmed screen to pinpoint the exact location of the item.
There, resting inside an unlocked glass display case full of mundane iron relics, was a primitive, dangerously smooth blade crafted from dark obsidian.
It was SCP-034.
After confirming the location, taking the item was easy.
Loid slid his hand inside the glass display case, carefully grasping the cold hilt of SCP-034 without touching the razor-sharp blade.
He slipped the weapon securely into an inner pocket of his coat and retraced his steps, exiting the building through the back alley exactly the same way he came in, locking the door silently behind him.
With the asset secured, the practical spy immediately shifted his focus to testing its documented properties as he walked toward his next destination.
Instead of taking a secluded route, he deliberately chose a busy avenue packed with late-night pedestrians and intoxicated patrons staggering home from local pubs.
Moving through the crowd like a ghost, Loid smoothly closed the distance behind a severely drunk passerby.
In a fraction of a second, with a fluid swipe of the obsidian blade that defied human reaction time, he shaved away a square inch of skin from the leg.
The drunk man staggered to a halt for a brief moment, patting his leg with a confused groan as drops of blood welled up.
Loid smoothly ducked into a pitch-black, dead-end alleyway to evaluate the anomaly.
Pulling the piece of flesh from the blade, he pressed it firmly against the back of his own hand.
Instantly, a profound, unexplainable biological reaction rippled through his body.
His muscles shifted, his bone structure rapidly condensed, and his vocal cords reshaped themselves in a matter of seconds.
Loid pulled a small pocket mirror from his suit jacket and caught the pale moonlight.
Staring back at him was the exact, identical face of the drunk man from the street.
“Test. One, two, three,” Loid whispered.
The voice that echoed in the dark alley was no longer his own calm, clinical tone; it was the raspy, slurred cadence of the local citizen, perfectly matched in pitch and frequency.
Loid’s mind immediately began calculating the parameters.
The Foundation file specified an operational limit, one hour of perfect transformation per square centimeter of donor skin.
Judging by the tiny fraction of flesh he had harvested, he had exactly an hour before his true features would return to normal.
He stepped out of the alleyway and began walking briskly toward his house, his internal clock ticking down with mechanical precision as he mapped out his pace to ensure the transformation would wear off the exact second he reached his front door.
…
As Loid closed the final distance to his apartment building, the precise biological timer concluded, and his features smoothly snapped back into his true, sharp visage.
He adjusted his tie, preparing to slip back into his mundane role as a mild-mannered psychiatrist.
Suddenly, a sharp, urgent vibration pulsed against his chest.
Loid immediately yanked his phone from his inner coat pocket.
His sharp eyes narrowed as an aggressive warning was plastered on the screen.
Loid’s breath instantly hitched in his throat.
He clicked it, and it brought him to the live map of the radar, his heart hammering against his ribs with a rare, cold dread.
The blinking beacon wasn’t a block away, or even down the street.
The coordinates were pinned right over his own apartment unit.
The anomaly was inside his home, with his family.
Abandoning his calculated, casual pace, Loid erupted into a full, silent sprint.
He bounded up the concrete stairwell of the apartment complex three steps at a time, his gloved fingers frantically scrolling through the live phone data.
He reached the landing, slid his key into the brass lock with a fluid, blinding flick of his wrist, and pushed the front door open.
The apartment was pitch-black and dead silent.
There were no sounds of a break-in, no signs of a struggle from Yor, and no spatial disruptions in the living room.
Yet, the screen of his device was practically glowing with the white dot for investigation, the tracking radar pointing its digital compass further down the narrow hallway.
Loid glided across the floor mats without making a single fraction of a sound, his hand resting instinctively on the cold hilt of SCP-034 hidden inside his jacket.
He followed the pulsing green ring of the anomaly detector past the kitchen, down the dark corridor, until the beacon locked at a distance.
He came to a halt directly in front of his daughter’s bedroom door, Anya.
***
Author’s note:
What do you think Loid will do from here?…
hehe…
Welp, sorry, I know it’s not funny…