The service shaft opens into a hidden transfer throat, all humming cables and steel ribs. Above, the hotel room trembles as the synthetic fluid keeps hunting. Below, a Department access panel glows red, waiting for a biometric handoff.
Devlan Mitchel
That panel is their spine. If you can get inside, you can burn the whole network down.
Devlan braces himself beside Sally, pistol up, eyes fixed on the sealed hatch ahead. The air smells of hot metal and disinfectant, and the whole tunnel feels like it is listening.
Doctor Aris Thorne
They will try to route you into a holding loop first. Do not let them isolate your signal.
The access panel flickers, then spits a clean white line across the floor, like a welcoming path. Somewhere beyond it, machinery starts to wake in sequence, one compartment after another.
Sally
The panel is reading for me.
Devlan Mitchel
Sally, this is the last door. After this, they either lose you or you lose them.
The hatch seal gives a sharp metallic click. Beyond it, the Department's core waits in bright, sterile darkness. Sally stands at the threshold, one move from invasion, one move from ending it.
“I step through the open hatch and blow up the core.”
SUCCESS (Great Energy Manipulation, rolled -1)
Sally steps through the hatch and the Department core opens around her in a cold, white chamber of racks, conduits, and pulsing relay spines. Devlan holds at the threshold behind her while Thorne watches the readouts with alarm.
Sally
It all feeds into this room.
She drives both hands forward. A clean burst of energy slams into the nearest spine, and the central bank flashes brilliant, then starts to split with sparks and smoke.
Devlan Mitchel
That is it, Sally. Keep going.
The light race-cascades down the linked columns. Screens blank out, then fill with static as one relay after another dies under the surge.
Doctor Aris Thorne
Yes, that is the routing tree. The extraction line is failing.
A final pulse rolls through the floor, then the whole core drops into darkness. Warning strips flicker weakly, the humming stops, and the sealed machinery goes still.
Behind Sally, Devlan lowers his pistol. Ahead, the dead core sits open and exposed, its network visibly broken.
Quest Complete
Expose the Department's extraction pipeline
New Gift: Infiltration Specialist
The core went dark in a deep, sudden swallow. Alarms died one by one, and the hidden shaft trembled with the first groan of collapse.
Devlan Mitchel
You did it. We are out of time, but we are out.
Doctor Aris Thorne
The network is gone. So is the Department's grip.
Sally
Then let's make sure it stays gone.
Sally climbed from the ruins while the facility folded in on itself behind her. What had been sealed, watched, and weaponized was now only dust and failing lights. She left with the weight of what her power had done, and the hard, quiet relief of having lived through it.