Kale slips deeper behind the crates, where the loading bay noise turns muffled and thin. Ahead, a maintenance terminal flickers against the metal wall, its network port exposed like a cut vein.
The Courier stays near the corridor mouth, keeping watch while the biometric gate seam narrows behind them. Far out in the bay, forklifts hum on their rails, blind to the breach.
Kale Kaotic Veyl
Local interface. Better than a dead drop.
Kale jacks in. The terminal shudders, then the screen floods with layered access text, half of it scrambled, half of it waking under his intrusion.
A line resolves first, then another, enough to make the pattern clear, security override authorization, executive tier, old timestamps buried under fresh masks.
One log fragment catches and holds. It names a containment transfer tied to the same night his friends died, then points deeper into the facility, toward an internal audit node.
The Courier
You seeing that too? That trail goes somewhere real.
✓ Quest Accepted
Extract the encrypted data trail
“Kale quietly extracts and copies the encrypted data. Before disconnecting he searches for any additional information connected to his friends death and any other people being exploited by the corporation. He copies anything useful and checks the data to determine the next step of the investigation.”
SUCCESS (Superb Hacking, rolled +1)
Kale isolates the packet, copies the decrypted cache, and ghosts the trace into his own shard before the terminal can cough up a warning.
More lines bloom in the file, transfer codes, executive signatures, and a buried appendix tagged worker relocation, health compliance, unpaid retention.
Kale Kaotic Veyl
This is the trail. And it is bigger than the night his friends died.
The audit node resolves into a facility map, then a second anchor, a medical wing access log with names redacted and payment holds attached to them.
The Courier
You got something real. Tell me that glow means we can move, because those guards are not relaxing.
Outside the seam, the gate keeps narrowing, and the distant patrol shifts its attention toward the corridor mouth.
Kale has the data now, but the next step sits between the closing exit and whatever the logs just exposed.
Reach the medical wing access log
Quest Complete
Extract the encrypted data trail
+ New Item Acquired
compact storage shard