The international commander looked at Damien Vance in absolute shock and awe.
The commander slowly lowered his weapon and gave a sharp hand signal to his men.
The commander said to the soldiers, “Lower your weapons!
Fall back to the choppers!”
Within two minutes, the international soldiers scrambled back into their aircraft.
The massive black helicopters lifted off into the dark night sky, their blinding searchlights disappearing into the clouds.
The lawn became quiet once again.
Evelyn Vance let out a massive sigh of relief, her body trembling from the sudden release of tension.
She looked at her husband, completely amazed by his absolute corporate dominance.
“Damien…
you did it.
You destroyed the Sterling family in a single minute.”
Damien Vance wrapped his arm around her waist, but his face did not relax.
He said to Evelyn Vance, “The external enemy is gone, Evelyn.
But the war is not over.”
They walked quickly back inside the mansion and descended into the underground command bunker to check on the security logs.
But the moment the steel doors slid open, a loud, high-pitched red siren began to blare violently through the room.
The giant monitors on the wall were no longer blue.
They were flashing with a terrifying, violent crimson light.
An elite tech guard turned around from his computer terminal, his face filled with absolute panic.
The guard shouted, “Mr.
Vance!
We have a catastrophic security breach!
Someone bypassed our biometric firewalls from inside the mansion!”
Damien Vance’s voice turned dangerously quiet.
“What did they take?”
The tech guard stammered in fear, “The digital safety codes…
the encryption keys for the Genesis Core under the Ross estate…
they have just been completely downloaded and sent to an untraceable external server!
The thief deleted their tracking log, but they used an internal security badge!”
Evelyn Vance gasped in horror, looking around the high-tech bunker.
Damien Vance looked at the empty security station near the back of the room.
His eyes turned into cold pools of deadly ice.
He noticed that one of his most trusted inner-circle guards—a man who had stood by his side for five years—was completely missing from the room.
There was a traitor hidden directly inside the Vance family mansion, and the keys to the world’s greatest energy secret were now out in the wild.
The numbers on the wall shutter blinked aggressively.
00:55…
00:54…
00:53..
Director Thomas laughed hysterically, his voice echoing off the reinforced metal shutters.
Director Thomas said to Damien Vance, “You are trapped in a tomb of your own making, Damien!
There is no way out of this penthouse!
We will all burn together, and the Shadow Council will still claim the Genesis Core!”
Evelyn Vance stared at the numbers in absolute panic.
Evelyn Vance said to Damien Vance, “Damien, the clock is dropping too fast!
The steel shutters are too thick for us to break through!”
Damien Vance did not answer immediately.
He let go of Director Thomas’s tie, leaving the traitor collapsing against the glass window.
He dropped to his knees beneath the massive glass desk and forcefully ripped away a decorative mahogany panel from the central frame.
The internal computers inside the desk sparked with bright blue electricity.
Damien Vance looked at the thick structural wiring beneath the desk.
He knew this high-rise building perfectly because Vance Enterprises had designed its foundation ten years ago.
The floor directly beneath this heavy executive desk was not solid concrete like the rest of the penthouse.
It was a reinforced, double-layered pane of high-tensile glass designed to look down into the luxury VIP maintenance suite on the floor below.
The digital timer on the wall hit 00:45.
Damien Vance stood up quickly and pointed to the structural steel bolts locking the glass floor panel to the building’s frame.
Damien Vance said to Captain Leo Chang, “The blast shutters on the windows are reinforced steel, but the floor anchors right beneath this desk are vulnerable.
Shoot the structural anchors immediately!”
Captain Leo Chang did not hesitate for a single microsecond.
He raised his heavy tactical rifle and aimed it directly at the base of the desk.
The heavy bullets struck the steel anchors with incredible force.
Sparks flew everywhere, illuminating the dark red room.
The high-tensile glass floor beneath the desk began to spiderweb with thousands of white cracks.
Director Thomas’s laughter stopped instantly, his eyes widening in sudden horror as he realized what Damien was doing.
Director Thomas said to Damien Vance, “No!
Stop!
You will kill us all!”
Damien Vance ignored the traitor completely.
He turned around, wrapped his powerful arms tightly around Evelyn Vance’s waist, and lifted her off her feet.
Damien Vance said to Evelyn Vance, “Hold your breath and cover your face, Evelyn!”
Damien Vance raised his heavy leather boot and smashed it down with immense power onto the fractured glass floor
The entire glass panel shattered into a million tiny crystals.
Damien Vance, Evelyn Vance, and Captain Leo Chang plummeted straight through the gaping hole, dropping twelve feet down into the pitch-black maintenance suite below.
Just as their bodies hit the lower floor, the penthouse level above them exploded with an earth-shaking roar.
A massive shockwave of orange fire and black smoke blasted through the hole in the ceiling, scorching the air.
The maintenance suite was filled with thick, suffocating grey smoke.
Alarms were blaring loudly from every wall speaker.
Damien Vance stood up instantly through the falling debris, coughing from the dust.
He checked Evelyn Vance quickly, making sure she was not injured from the fall.
Her hands were shaking, but she nodded her head to signal she was okay.
Captain Leo Chang recovered quickly, holding his weapon high as he kicked open a heavy metal emergency door leading to the rear maintenance stairs.
Captain Leo Chang said to Damien Vance, “Mr.
Vance, the fire suppression system on this floor will only hold for two minutes!
We must move down the emergency fire exit right now before the structure collapses!”
They sprinted down the dark, concrete stairwell, their footsteps echoing loudly against the walls.
They ran down twenty flights of stairs until they reached the dark, wet alleyway behind the corporate skyscraper.
Rain was pouring heavily from the night sky, instantly washing the white dust from their expensive clothes.
A secondary, heavily armored black Vance SUV was already waiting in the shadows of the alley, its engine purring quietly.
Captain Leo Chang threw open the heavy passenger doors.
Damien Vance and Evelyn Vance scrambled inside the back seat, and the SUV instantly accelerated out of the alley, disappearing into the rainy city traffic.
Inside the quiet, dark cabin of the moving vehicle, the atmosphere was incredibly heavy.
Evelyn Vance looked down at her left hand, which was still bleeding slightly from the small cut they had used for the bioscanner.
She pulled a clean white handkerchief from her pocket and wrapped it around her palm.
Evelyn Vance turned her head to look at her husband.
Her voice was shaking with a mixture of terror and confusion.
Evelyn Vance said to Damien Vance, “Damien…
what Director Thomas said back there…
He said Old Master Vance is the leader of the Shadow Council.
How is that even possible?
We went to his grand funeral five years ago.
I saw the entire city mourning him.”
Damien Vance stared straight ahead at the rain splashing violently against the tinted glass window.
His jaw was clenched so tightly that the bone looked sharp.
He looked down at his own bleeding palm, his eyes filled with a terrifying, dark realization.
Damien Vance said to Evelyn Vance, “The funeral was a carefully engineered deception, Evelyn.
Five years ago, my family told the media that my grandfather died in a sudden chemical fire inside our advanced energy laboratory.
Because of the nature of the accident, the coffin was completely welded shut and sealed before the burial.
Nobody was allowed to see his body.
I believed them back then.
But it was all a massive lie.
He did not die in that fire.
He went deep underground to protect his identity while he built the Shadow Council from the shadows.”
Evelyn Vance let out a sharp breath.
Evelyn Vance said to Damien Vance, “If your own grandfather is leading the monsters who want to steal the Genesis Core, then we cannot trust anyone in the Vance empire.
He knows all your security protocols.
He knows your moves before you even make them.”
Damien Vance reached out and gripped her hand firmly, his voice dropping into a deep, icy tone.
Damien Vance said to Evelyn Vance, “He might know my security protocols, but he does not know how far I am willing to go to protect you, Evelyn.
We are going to the one place where his secrets began.”
The armored SUV drove away from the bright lights of the city center, heading deep into the isolated, forested hills on the northern outskirts.
After thirty minutes of driving through the torrential rain, the vehicle pulled up to a massive, dark estate hidden behind tall stone walls and overgrown iron gates.
It was the abandoned Vance Ancestral Villa.
This was the exact house where Old Master Vance had spent the final three years of his public life before his alleged death.
The SUV stopped at the edge of the dark stone driveway.
Captain Leo Chang raised his weapon, his eyes scanning the pitch-black windows of the old mansion.
Captain Leo Chang said to Damien Vance, “Mr.
Vance, this property has been completely abandoned for five years.
My sensors are not detecting any active security guards, but the internal power grid was suddenly activated ten minutes ago.”
Damien Vance stepped out of the vehicle into the pouring rain, holding a black umbrella over Evelyn Vance as she stepped down.
They walked slowly up the cracked stone steps toward the giant double oak doors of the villa.
Before Damien Vance could even reach out his hand to touch the old iron lock, a loud mechanical click echoed through the quiet night air.
The massive, heavy oak doors slowly swung inward on their own, opening wide into a grand, dark foyer.
Suddenly, a soft, warm yellow light hummed to life from the crystal chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling.
The sudden light illuminated the grand entrance hall.
Hanging directly in the center of the main wall, above a wide marble staircase, was a giant, magnificent oil painting of a powerful older man with piercing, intelligent dark eyes and a ruthless smile.
It was Old Master Vance.
Evelyn Vance stepped inside, her heart beating rapidly against her ribs as she looked up at the painting.
The house felt like a beautiful, golden trap.
Suddenly, a crisp, static sound cut through the silence of the mansion as a hidden intercom speaker inside the walls activated.
A deep, gravelly, and powerful old voice echoed effortlessly through the grand hallway.
The voice sounded exactly like the historical audio recordings Damien had listened to since his childhood.
The voice said over the intercom, “Welcome home, Damien.
I knew a simple penthouse explosion wouldn’t be enough to kill my favorite grandson.
You have grown much stronger since I last saw you.
Come to the central study, both of you.
Let us talk about the true purpose of the Genesis Core.”
The intercom went completely dead, leaving the grand villa in total silence.