Free Web NovelEleanor von Schwartz walked down the center of the long corridor, her military boots clicking crisply and evenly against the stone slabs.
This was the Underground Storage Area of the Royal Knights Academy.
The temperature was at least ten degrees colder than on the surface.
Today, she wore the Imperial Army's deep blue winter service uniform; the golden embroidery and hexagrams on her epaulettes occasionally glinted in the dim light.
The military belt around her waist was cinched tight, outlining her tall, straight figure with sharp precision.
Her dark hair wasn't loose as usual, but was instead gathered into a low bun at the back of her head, secured with a black hairclip.
This was her habit when handling official business, saving her the trouble of hair falling and obstructing her vision. free𝑤ebnovel.com
Her ice-blue eyes looked exceptionally cold under the corridor lights.
It wasn't intentional.
It was just that this place wasn't suitable for any superfluous expressions.
The Underground Storage Area was located even deeper than Margaret's underground classroom, which had already been reduced to ruins.
One had to go down three more levels, pass through two cast-iron gates that required different levels of authorization to open, and traverse a two-hundred-meter-long passage sloping downward at fifteen degrees before reaching the area.
If the seal on the underground classroom was a wall, then the seal here was a fortress.
The walls on both sides of the passage were no longer ordinary grayish-white stone, but a type of dark gray, nearly black ore. The surfaces were polished extremely smooth and felt ice-cold to the touch, like iron in winter.
Every three meters, a palm-sized copper plate was embedded in the wall, its surface covered in dense, intricate patterns.
They belonged to the same system as the patterns on the iron door of the underground classroom, but were more complex and refined, with the spacing between lines almost indistinguishable to the naked eye.
These copper plates were not decorations.
They were nodes of the sealing array.
Each copper plate was connected to the entire storage area's piping system via copper tubes inside the walls. Flowing through the pipes was a specially treated diversion medium—capable of carrying and conducting the residual fluctuations of Return Power, guiding them to the outermost dissipation layer of the storage area, where they would be neutralized silently, like a river flowing into the sea.
The entire space was quiet to the point of being oppressive.
There was no hum of machinery, no hiss of steam pipes; even the sound of air flowing was absorbed by some mechanism.
All that could be heard were one's own footsteps and breathing.
And one's own heartbeat.
This silence was designed.
The core philosophy of the storage area was simple: isolate all external interference while preventing anything inside from leaking out.
Sound, temperature, scent, and fluctuations of Return Power—all were locked within this airtight space.
At the end of the passage was the third gate.
This door was thicker than the previous two, its cast-iron surface covered in a dark silver alloy coating. Twelve copper plates were embedded around the door frame, arranged in a symmetrical pattern. In the very center of the door was a palm-sized indentation, at the bottom of which was an extremely smooth piece of black ore.
Eleanor stopped and pressed her right palm against the ore.
A faint golden ripple rose from the surface of the ore, spreading outward from her ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) palm, flowing along the copper plate patterns on the door frame, and finally converging at the four corners of the door.
A dull mechanical sound rang out.
The gate slowly slid open to both sides.
Behind the door was a large circular hall.
The dome was about eight meters high with a gentle curve, its surface also covered in dense copper plate patterns, like an inverted spiderweb.
The hall was about thirty meters in diameter, and the floor was the same dark gray ore as the passage, polished enough to reflect figures.
In the center of the hall was a circular platform, raised about half a meter above the floor, surrounded by a low brass railing.
In the middle of the platform sat a—
Eleanor's gaze lingered on the object for a split second before moving away.
Six sentry posts were evenly distributed around the platform.
Each post was manned by two fully armed soldiers wearing the Imperial Army's standard combat uniforms, but the insignia on their epaulettes did not belong to any publicly listed unit.
What hung at their waists were not standard-issue sabers, but a type of short-handled, wide-bladed special weapon, with patterns also carved into the blades.
Twelve people.
Three shifts.
Twenty-four hours a day, uninterrupted.
These were Eleanor's people.
The unit she had taken over along with her status as a special envoy from the Army General Staff—no unit number, no base, no public chain of command.
They were responsible only to Eleanor, and Eleanor was responsible only to a certain person in the General Staff Department.
Two guards also followed behind her, their steps steady, maintaining a distance of exactly two paces.
The one on the left was Paul, and the one on the right was Jonas—familiar faces.
"Report the situation."
Eleanor's voice wasn't loud, but in this quiet, nearly vacuum-like space, every syllable was as clear as if carved in stone.
Paul immediately spoke, his pace steady: "The internal state of the storage area is normal. The number three copper plate array experienced a brief power fluctuation on the day of the explosion, peaking at seventy-three percent of design capacity for approximately four seconds. The engineering team has completed repairs, and all nodes have returned to full-load operation."
Eleanor nodded slightly.
Seventy-three percent.
The energy from Pavela's explosion had penetrated the seal of the underground classroom, punched through the foundation of the main teaching building, blasted a twenty-meter-diameter crater into the ground—and then continued to conduct downward, still forcing the storage area's protective array to bear a peak load of seventy-three percent after being attenuated by two layers of isolation structures.
"Perimeter situation."
Jonas took over: "In the past week, perimeter monitoring recorded three abnormal approaches. The first was in the early morning of the third day of the last month. Two unidentified individuals attempted to enter the underground area from the abandoned drainage pipes on the east side of the academy. They were intercepted by perimeter sentries and handed over to the Gendarmerie. Interrogation results showed they were remnants of the Children of Dawn, with unclear objectives, suspected to be a probing action."
"The second."
"On the evening of the fifth day of the last month, a set of professional-grade observation equipment was discovered outside the academy's west wall—a steam-driven long-range optical telescope equipped with a recording device. There were no markings on the equipment, but the manufacturing craftsmanship and parts specifications highly match the standard reconnaissance equipment of the Usar military. The equipment has been recovered and is undergoing detailed analysis."
Eleanor's pace did not stop.
She walked slowly around the central platform, her gaze scanning every sentry post, every wall, every copper plate.
"The third."
Jonas's tone grew subtly heavier: "On the night of the sixth day of the last month, the authorization verification system of the storage area's first gate recorded an unauthorized access attempt. The credentials used belonged to a third-class clerk in the academy's logistics department. The clerk himself claimed to have been in his dormitory all night, with roommates as witnesses; it is suspected the credentials were duplicated."
Eleanor stopped walking.
"The precision of the duplication?"
"Extremely high. If the verification system hadn't been upgraded with a dual-verification protocol three months ago at your request, this attempt would likely have passed through the first gate."
Eleanor pondered for a moment.
Three factions.
Three different methods.
Three different directions.
The remnants of the Children of Dawn were the crudest—barging in directly through the drainage pipes, as if using their bodies to test the reaction speed and coverage range of the defensive line.
The observation equipment from the Usar direction was more patient, not rushing to enter but first gathering intelligence to figure out the layout of the academy's surface buildings, patrol routes, and personnel deployment patterns.
And the third—
Forging authorization credentials, precisely targeting the first gate of the storage area, choosing to act at night, and preparing an alibi for the original owner of the credentials in advance.
This wasn't a probe.
This was a rehearsal.
