Chapter 320: Guerrilla Tactics

The two masses of light above the port bore down on him simultaneously.

This time, the two Virtuosos were done testing the waters.

Golden light cleaved down from the horizon, illuminating half the sea.

Furnace fire surged from the port, burning outward across the water.

The two forces closed in, pincering the ship from front and back.

The mummy stood at the bow, spreading its arms toward the sun.

Beneath its feet, the mirrored surface of the indigo seawater surged upward to meet the golden light.

The core concept of the "Mirror": you reflect me, and I reflect you.

A portion of the golden light deflected off the mirror and shone straight back onto the Virtuoso of the Solar Tradition.

The Solar Virtuoso's golden light wavered slightly.

The furnace fire reached the bottom of the ship.

The deck beneath the mummy began to smoke.

Richard used "Name" to read the flow of the furnace fire.

He couldn't read its full trajectory, but he could track its endpoint.

He left a mark on that endpoint and carved in a disruption symbol.

The furnace fire tied itself into a knot at its very tip.

This didn't sever the flow, but it forced the Virtuoso of the Hearth Fire Tradition to waste a few seconds untangling it.

This was all he could do on the open front: stall them at all costs.

On the hidden front, the shadow received his signal.

With the golden light and furnace fire both drawn toward the port, a blind spot opened up in the city's sensory network.

The shadow emerged from a fork in the sewers.

It climbed out of a drainage ditch and darted rapidly along the shadows of a narrow alley.

People were in the alley—a few sailors, fresh off the docks, looking for a tavern.

One wore the uniform of a Levant merchant ship; having been ashore for less than half an hour, he still reeked of the sea.

The shadow slithered up from the soles of his feet.

The "Mirror" reflected everything about him.

His name was Yassin. Twenty-seven years old, a Levantine, and a deckhand on the three-masted schooner Silver Gull.

He had already passed the first sweep of golden light upon entering the port. A completely clean, ordinary person.

Replace!

The shadow slipped into Yassin's body.

This substitution was entirely different from the first.

The shadow clone crawled in personally, fitting perfectly from the inside out like slipping on a set of clothes.

It wore him seamlessly; there was not a single gap between the shadow and Yassin's shell.

Even if the golden light swept over him again, it would only illuminate an ordinary Levantine sailor.

Yassin—or rather, Richard—rubbed his eyes, feigned drunkenness, and staggered out of the narrow alley.

Wave after wave of roaring booms echoed from the port.

It was the clash between the mummy and the two Virtuosos out on the sea.

To ordinary people, it sounded like muffled thunder.

The sky over the outer harbor had churned into a chaotic smear of indigo, gold, and dark red light.

Half the city was rushing toward the port to watch the spectacle. No one paid any mind to a single Levantine sailor walking in the opposite direction.

The sleeper agent played his part at this exact moment.

Third-Class Customs Clerk Muhammad Fahd.

He arrived for work at seven o'clock every morning to stamp papers in his south-facing office on the second floor of the customs building.

He verified tax forms for imported goods, affixing the proper stamps and signing his name where required.

Muhammad himself had absolutely no idea he was a sleeper agent.

Eleven years ago, a middle-aged merchant had bought him a cup of coffee at a cafe in the Port of Alexandria.

There was nothing laced in the drink. It was just a regular cup of coffee.

But during their twenty-minute chat, that merchant had lightly traced a mark onto Muhammad's etheric layer.

It was the kind of mark that Minor Adepts and below could never detect.

Even Major Adepts and Virtuosos would have to inspect him closely to notice anything amiss.

Wearing Yassin's identity, Richard stopped outside the customs building, but he made no move to replace Muhammad.

Replacing a customs clerk would certainly grant him access to the port, but a clerk's clearance ended at the docks and the tax building.

More than half the city separated the tax building from the museum.

He needed Muhammad for something else entirely.

Yassin walked over to the side entrance of the customs building and tapped on the window.

Muhammad looked up.

"Sir, my tax form was stamped incorrectly."

Yassin spoke in the Albion Language with a thick Levantine accent, passing a crumpled piece of paper through the window.

Muhammad took it and gave it a glance.

There was, in fact, a crooked stamp on the paper.

"I'll need to re-stamp this. Come with me."

Muhammad led Yassin through the side door into the tax building, down a long first-floor corridor, and out through the rear doors.

The rear doors opened into an alley in the port's warehouse district. The far end of that alley marked the start of the museum's logistics route.

Muhammad had absolutely no idea what he was actually doing.

Out of pure habit, he led Yassin down his daily shortcut from work, perfectly bypassing every trap and sensory node along the way.

Muhammad stopped at a fork at the end of the alley and handed the newly stamped tax form back to Yassin.

"All set. Be more careful next time."

"Thank you, sir."

Richard now stood at the entrance to the museum's logistics route.

His second sleeper agent was stationed just inside.

Saeed, the night watchman for the port's western warehouse. Today, he had been temporarily reassigned to help move cargo at the museum's loading bay.

With the incident at the port, the museum had beefed up its security. Short on manpower, they pulled a few workers over from the warehouse.

Saeed bore a mark as well.

One drawn seven years ago. It was fainter than Muhammad's.

Richard ran into Saeed at the loading bay, squatting on the steps and smoking a cigarette.

"Sir, what's going on out there?" Yassin asked, gesturing toward the port.

Saeed blew a smoke ring. "Who knows... Some say a warship misfired, others say it's a military drill."

In the time it took to exchange that single sentence, Richard read the entire layout of the museum's logistics route straight from Saeed.

Which keys opened which doors, when the corridor guards changed shifts, and where the etheric monitoring lines lay.

Normally, he would have had to replace people layer by layer and infiltrate level by level just to piece this information together.

Now, two sleeper agents had handed it all right to him.

Richard chatted casually for another moment, then headed into the museum.

Back on the open front, the mummy was still stalling for all it was worth.

Caught in the pincer attack, the Black Soil River merchant ship flying the tattered vulture flag finally disintegrated.

Its sailors suffered a wholly undeserved calamity, burned into smoking skeletons.

The mummy had no time to worry about ordinary people. It stood upon the snapped keel, resting its feet directly on the seawater.

The mirrored surface held firm beneath it, keeping it from sinking.

The golden light closed to within a hundred yards.

Beaming down from the zenith to the water, the light sealed off this small stretch of sea.

The furnace fire flanked from the other side, its heat waves forming a slowly advancing wall of magma.

Pincered from both sides, there was nowhere left to run.

Controlling the mummy, Richard made a decision.

It stopped retreating.

The mummy shattered the mirrored seawater beneath its feet and plunged headfirst into the ocean.

The golden light struck the surface, penetrating three meters deep. Below that lay only a murky green darkness.

Golden light did not illuminate water. This was explicitly written in the Papyrus.

The Solar Tradition's power shone upon the heavens and the earth, but with the sea's surface manipulated by the Virtuoso of the Black Soil River, the golden light could not pierce the depths.

The furnace fire tried to pour into the water.

But the ocean naturally smothered its conduction of heat.

The sea churned, billowing thick clouds of white steam.

The mummy sank dozens of meters beneath the waves, suspending itself in the darkness.

A mummy did not need to breathe. It only needed ether.

Though the concentration of ether dispersed in the water was low, it was enough to keep the mummy from dissipating.

The two Virtuosos waited on the surface for about a quarter of an hour.

Richard sensed a shift in the two masses of light.

The golden light began to pull back toward the port, and the furnace fire retreated with it.

They had no intention of wasting time on a mummy hiding underwater.

To them, as long as this vessel didn't enter the city, it posed no fatal threat.

Rather than struggling against a rock resting at the bottom of the sea, they were better off recalling their power to fortify the city's defenses.

But Richard couldn't let them withdraw.

The moment they pulled back, the city's sensory network would be restored.

Yassin—and the substitution in progress—would be exposed immediately.

The mummy launched itself from the water.

The indigo light exploded from beneath the surface, throwing up a tidal wave several zhang high.

The mummy stood upon the crest of the wave.

It lunged directly toward the merchant ships docking and unloading in the port.

Its intent was unmistakably clear: it was going to wreak havoc.

It raised a hand, and the shadows of every ship on the water bent toward it in unison.

The sailors on the decks watched in horror as the shadows beneath their feet twisted and warped. Someone began to scream.

The two Virtuosos were forced to turn back.

The furnace fire spread into a barrier across the harbor mouth, cutting the mummy off from the merchant fleet.

Knowing when to quit, the mummy plunged right back into the water just before the golden light and furnace fire could box it in.

A few waves churned the surface, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

The two Virtuosos had no choice but to maintain the defensive net over the port, waiting for it to show its head again.

Over the next stretch of time, Richard had the mummy swim laterally underwater, prowling from the eastern edge of the anchorage to the western edge.

Then, it launched itself out of the water once more, feigning a mad dash toward the inner harbor from the west side.

Once again, the two Virtuosos were lured over.

This guerrilla tactic repeated itself over a dozen times throughout the next two hours.

The two Virtuosos eventually learned their lesson. They simply laid down a triggered attack field across the water's surface.

If the mummy surfaced, it would face an immediate strike.

Meanwhile, Richard—still in the guise of Yassin—had arrived near the museum.

The booming from the port was growing louder and louder.

The ordinary populace was beginning to panic.

The tax collectors had locked the iron gates at their checkpoints, and a squad of uniformed security guards ran past in the street, blaring whistles.

Chaos. Chaos was perfect.

Amidst the chaos, no one noticed him slipping into the alley directly across from the museum.

The guards on the front steps were distracted by the commotion at the port.

Even the old man reading the paper in the gatehouse put his news aside and stepped outside to look.

Richard first needed to replace someone with legal clearance to enter the museum.

Yassin's face was only good enough for walking the streets.

The museum's logistics route had its own regulars. A Levantine sailor walking through there would be stopped immediately.

But his budget for shells was extremely tight.

Every replacement left a trace on the other side of the veil.

Those traces would automatically connect, forming lines between them.

Richard silently mulled it over.

"Using people as anchors, stringing the true names of the living into a web."

This technique was exactly the same as what those people in the Echo Society did.

Enough lines, and it became a web.

A large enough web... would end up exactly like what happened in the North District of Briston over those twelve years.

Standing inside Yassin's body, he paused for a moment.

He couldn't be greedy with his replacements.

Including Yassin, he could swap bodies five times at most.

Any more than five, and the traces would become too dense and obvious.

Even with those two Virtuosos busy fending off the mummy, they would still be able to trace the anomalies through the web.

Five shells. Yassin was the first, which left him four more chances.

Were four shells enough to get from the street all the way into the Storeroom?

Richard circled around to the museum's loading bay.

Three porters were there, hauling crates.

The commotion from the harbor had left them rattled, their minds completely off their work.

Richard focused on the porter furthest to the left.

He was older, with heavily calloused hands.

The "Mirror" activated silently: George Randolph, forty-two years old.

This porter had clearance to enter the first floor of the museum and the outer corridor of the underground warehouse. Any further in, and his access ended.

Richard waited until George finished unloading his last crate and stepped out from the loading bay to stretch.

He walked up beside George. "What's going on over there? A war?"

George glanced at him.

A single glance was enough for the substitution.

The shadow slipped out of Yassin's shell and slid directly into George's.

By the loading bay, Yassin abruptly froze, as if jolting awake from a deep dream.

He stared at the unlit cigarette in his hand, then looked at George.

George smiled at him.

"What's on your mind, young man? Better hurry back to your ship. It's a mess out here."