Free Web NovelChapter 580: Moving Gears In Actions
Clone 1 and Rikilda landed back in the arena they had flown out from, with every eyes on them.
They didn’t say anything but the expression on their faces already told Clone 1 much, if not all of what they are thinking.
Bethan walked towards them, shaking her head.
"I thought the red dragons were crazy battle junkies and that Rikilda was on the extreme end of the case, but you are even worse," she said.
"I had no idea when I lost myself I the spar. It was just that interesting," clone 1 said.
"Don’t mind her. She won’t understand how good it feels for one to exert their body to their heart content," Rikilda scoffed. freēwēbηovel.c૦m
"You can say that after you’re done healing your broken hand. Must you always take it to the extreme. It was only supposed to be a light spar. Why did you take it so serious to the point of even taking your original form? If the elder hadn’t stopped you, you would definitely had continued even in your current condition," Bethan said, her voice rising slightly with each words, and at the end, she was practically screamed at Rikilda.
"Sheesh. Why are you acting like my mom?" Rikilda asked, cleaning her ears, like she didn’t want to listen to Bethan anymore.
Bethan saw Rikilda’s reaction and growled in frustration, before turning to clone 1.
"You too. Why didn’t you stop the spar when you saw that it was already going too far?" She asked.
"I saw no reason to. She wasn’t gravely hurt to the point of being at death door and consideringthe fact that she’s a dragon, I believe that she could handle herself," clone 1 replied.
Bethan sighed in frustration at his words. She knew that he was right about everything he said and she had actually not been worried about either of them, but she was nagging because she cared.
She just hope that they understand that. She looked around and saw the eyes on them.
"Let’s leave here and go somewhere else. The both of you have attracted a lot of attention," she said.
Rikilda and clone 1 nodded. Clone 1 reached to Bethan and she grabbed his hand and Rikilda’s, and they vanished from the arena.
They appeared in the Eldwood Forest, not far off from where they had left. Bethan turned to Rikilda immediately.
"Go and recover from your injuries. I don’t want to see you until you have achieved that," she said.
"I already plan to do that. I will be going to my lair," Rikilda said, then turned to clone 1.
"I really enjoyed the spar. Let’s do it again next time and truly go all out then."
Clone 1 said nothing, as he simply smiled.
Bethan shook her heard, choosing not to say anything as it would change the mind of the two battle junkies.
Rikilda seeing that clone 1 hadn’t opened refused, smiled and took his silence as a silent agreement. She leaped into the air, then transformed instantaneously into her dragon form and flew away.
Bethan and Clone 1 watched her fly away, then turned to look at each other.
"You also have to recover," Bethan said, and clone 1 shook his head.
"Not really. It’s only just a mere bruise," he said.
Bethan’s brow raised in interest, as she observed his injured arms and saw that they were starting to heal and would heal completely in a few minutes at most.
"That’s strange. I clearly felt traces of multiple laws in Rikilda’s attacks. Destruction, Consumption, and Dominance. There’s no way that injury will heal as fast as it’s healing now, unless...," she said, paused and looked at clone 1 carefully, with a look of suspicion.
"Are you telling me that you or your original body can now control laws? Or assert some forms of controls on it? But that shouldn’t be possible?" She said.
"Actually, now that I think about it, after you started using sword aura, Rikilda’s attacks didn’t have much of an effect on you. What sort of law did you imbue on your sword aura? Wait... Is that even possible? Imbuing laws into sword aura. That’s something that’s only possible in the cultivation universe. Was that sword intent that you used?" She asked, eyes wide in realisation and filled with complicated emotions.
Clone 1 simply smiled, choosing not to reply.
"I will be taking my leave," he said, waving at her. fгeewebnovёl.com
"Wait. Don’t go. I have so many que—"
Clone 1 vanished, without allowing her to complete what she wanted to say.
"—stion I want to ask," she muttered the complete sentence in a low voice.
She stared at the spot where he had vanished from, for a while, before sighing.
"I thought he was just a little interesting due to how unique he is. But it seems like there’s a lot more in play that probably only those at the top have an idea about. Is the entire Cosmos about to be turned upside down?" She muttered to herself.
She gave a tight smile, before vanishing from the spot.
***
Back on Earth.
It had been approximately 48 hours since the President gave the directive.
Carol Reeves had not slept.
She had gone from the Oval Office directly to her car, called her deputy before the building’s doors closed behind her, and had the first field office on the phone before she reached the highway.
The problem with the 72-hour window wasn’t the evidence. The files Marsh had given her were the most comprehensively documented criminal package she had seen in twenty-two years at the Bureau. Financial records going back a decade. Private communications. Specific figures with dates and transaction trails.
It was the kind of documentation that took years to build through standard collection and had arrived in a folder the President, had slid across a desk without explanation.
The problem was simultaneity.
Multiple names in separate jurisdictions, means separate sets of attorneys who would be contacted the moment any one of their clients learned what was moving. If even one got wind before the others were contained, the phone calls would start and the window would close.
She had built the operation around that single constraint.
Separate field offices, each briefed independently, none aware of the others. Each team operating on the same timeline, the same arrest window, with communication running directly to her deputy rather than through standard channels.
The confirmations came through across the following hours in sequence, each one landing in the operations center without drama — a location confirmed, a team moving, a target in custody. Clean acquisitions, each one. No prior contact. No legal counsel present at the moment of arrest.
One target had been harder, because of their congressional relationships that was deep enough that two allies had made calls to the Bureau before the arrest team reached his office. His attorney had been contacted and he knew something was moving.
She authorized a pre-dawn execution and the team went in at 4 AM.
He was home and in custody by 4:09.
She called Marsh when the last confirmation came through.
"All targets acquired," she said. "Within the window."
A brief silence on the other end.
"Thank you, Carol," Marsh said.
Reeves set the phone down and looked at the operations center — the agents at their stations, the feeds still running, the documentation being processed and prepared for filing.
Twenty-two years. Cases that took months and sometimes years to reach this point. This had taken under forty hours across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
She did not know where the files had come from. But she had a guess on it and had decided somewhere around hour twenty, that she was not going to find out.
***
Calloway’s contribution had been quieter and less visible, which was how he preferred it.
His role had not been arrest. His role had been containment, which meant ensuring the operation remained sealed while it ran, monitoring the targets’ communications for anything suggesting compromise, and making certain no external actor became aware of the arrests before they were complete.
He had also run a parallel task Marsh had not assigned but that he had undertaken anyway, because two decades in intelligence had taught him that the most important question was never the one he was asked.
He had also spent forty hours attempting to identify the source of the documentation with the need of understanding what he was dealing with.
The financial records were not sourced from any collection system he had access to or knew of. The communication intercepts used encryption formats no domestic agency had on record as compromised. The secondary addresses, the flagged assets, the property records — each verified against both public record and classified databases and checked out completely.
Whatever had assembled this documentation had access to everything. Not selectively. Not through a specific vulnerability or targeted collection effort.
But everything.
He sat with that conclusion for a long time. Then he wrote a single line in his personal notes, encrypted, stored offline.
The source and the company are the same thing. Don’t pursue.
He closed the file and went back to work.
***
Briggs spent the forty hours managing the downstream consequences.
Several of the targets had defense contract relationships. Others had congressional allies sitting on oversight committees. When the arrests began moving through the news cycle — faster than anyone had hoped, one arrest leaking before the final target was secured — the calls started.
He answered the ones he had to and redirected the ones he couldn’t avoid.
His position was simple and he held it without variation across seventeen separate calls: credible intelligence had been received, the Bureau had acted on it, documentation would be made available through appropriate legal channels as the cases proceeded. No further comment.
Some callers were reasonable. Some were not. He treated both identically.
The congressional noise had a ceiling, and the ceiling was the documentation itself. Nobody wanted to be the representative defending someone whose crimes were recorded that comprehensively. The noise subsided faster than the arrests had.
***
Chief Justice Vance had said the least in the Oval Office and had the most to process afterward.
Her role in the operation had been explicitly limited — she had been informed, not instructed, and she had acknowledged the distinction clearly. What arrived on her docket would move at the speed the evidence and process permitted.
But she had spent the forty hours reading the documentation that Reeves had digitized and distributed, and the legal picture it presented was not complicated. The cases were built. The documentation was comprehensive. When the filings arrived, the courts would not struggle with them.
What she sat with, alone in her office on the second evening, was a different question.
The source of the documentation had not been disclosed. She had not asked a second time. She understood what Marsh’s non-answer had meant and she had filed it away, as it it wasn’t relevant to the proceedings.
What she could not file was the scope of what she had read.
She had spent thirty years in law. She understood what it took to build documentation of this quality. She understood the infrastructure required, the access required, the time required.
None of it matched any timeline or institutional capability she could account for.
She closed the files at midnight and sat with the quiet of her office for a long time before going home.
***
Secretary Briggs had already covered the defense and congressional dimensions. Reeves had the criminal cases moving. Calloway had sealed the intelligence perimeter.
That left the question nobody in the room had asked aloud.
What happened after the window closed.
Marsh sat alone in the Oval Office at hour forty-six.
The arrests were complete. The cases were filed. The noise was subsiding faster than she had expected.
She looked at her desk and thought about the note she had found in her hand when she returned to this office two days ago.
You can’t resign from office and you can’t die before the 72 hours deadline has elapsed. I will bring you back to life and things are going to be much worse then. Your time starts now.
What was left was for the individuals to be brought to trial, have a customary hearing and be sentenced to death.
She wasn’t going to risk her life for those she wasn’t even familiar with. They should blame themselves for crossing Liam Scott.
