Chapter 27: A Breakthrough?
According to the intelligence file, Phantom was hiding inside Smelting Plant No. 7.
The plant had been abandoned since the Old Era. In the dark outskirts of Oluson, it squatted like the corpse of some rusted giant, half collapsed and half forgotten. The blast furnaces had long gone cold, standing in silence like rows of black tombstones. Overhead, broken conveyor belts and corroded pipes twisted through the gloom, casting tangled shadows that made the entire place look like a maze built by ghosts.
Kyle lowered his voice.
"Stay sharp. Anyone who supplied Black Bone for this long is not going to be simple."
Baron took the lead with his shield up. Eileen and Loyi stayed in the middle. Hodell and Sasha moved along the flanks. Their footsteps were kept as light as possible, but even then, every sound seemed to echo too far in the empty workshop.
After a cautious sweep of the outer area turned up nothing, Kyle gave a new order in a low, clipped tone.
"Spread out a little, but stay within support range. Loyi, expand life detection. No one acts alone."
The silence grew heavier.
Then Loyi's detector let out a faint beep.
He stopped at once and lifted the device. "There. Near the shelving racks. Weak life signal."
Baron did not hesitate. He surged forward like a battering ram with legs, shield leading the way.
Ahead, beside a row of rust eaten metal shelves, a blurry human figure stood motionless in the dark.
Then everything changed.
The moment Baron closed the distance, that figure stepped forward and passed directly through the heavy shelving rack in front of him as though the metal were smoke.
Baron's eyes widened.
"What the hell?"
He had already committed to the charge. He slammed into the rack with a violent crash, and the entire thing folded sideways under the impact. Rusted parts and scrap metal rained down with a clattering roar.
Phantom slipped through the collapsing mess like a wraith. The short blade in his hand flashed once, angling straight for the exposed side of Baron's neck.
Hodell's pupils tightened.
Too fast.
Too strange.
This was not magic.
Clang.
A second blade crashed into Phantom's strike from the side, knocking it away in a burst of sparks. Sasha had arrived just in time, her timing so precise it was almost unnatural.
Phantom clicked his tongue, then leaned back and sank into the side of a corroded machine. His body blurred, then vanished.
The workshop fell dead silent.
Only breathing remained.
Eileen's voice trembled. "What was that? Illusion magic?"
Hodell shook his head.
No. He had felt the energy shift too clearly. There had been no illusionary distortion, no layered mana pattern, no caster's echo. That thing was real.
Baron dragged himself away from the fallen rack and touched the shallow cut on his neck. His fingers came away red.
"Damn it," he growled. "What kind of freak uses a spell like that?"
Loyi was already manipulating his detector, his face drawn. Kyle's expression had gone completely cold.
Unknown abilities were always the worst thing to face in a fight.
Hodell spoke before anyone else could spiral into guesswork.
"It's not magic. It's an Esper Ability. Something close to phasing through solid matter."
That made everyone's expression change.
Kyle reacted instantly. "Tighten formation. No gaps."
The team snapped into a tighter combat arrangement. Baron's, Sasha, and Hodell formed a triangle at the front, protecting Eileen and Loyi in the center.
For a moment, nothing moved.
Then Phantom struck again.
He emerged from a rusted pillar on Balun's left with half his body already committed to the stab. Balun's shield was still coming around, but his instincts were monstrous. He rammed his shoulder straight into the pillar instead, jolting Phantom's position just enough to spoil the angle. The blade scraped across his side armor instead of slipping between the plates.
Before Phantom could retreat, Sasha's short sword came snapping toward his wrist.
He dissolved back into the pillar a heartbeat before she could take the hand off.
Kyle's eyes sharpened. "He has to become tangible to attack."
A voice came from overhead.
The next moment Phantom dropped from a broken vent like a hunting bat, three enchanted darts spinning from his fingers toward the center of the formation.
Eileen and Loyi.
Hodell threw up a hand. A brilliant ray of white energy swept through the air and blasted the darts away before they could burst.
But those had only been bait.
Almost at the same instant, the steel plate beneath Sasha's feet turned blurry. Phantom erupted from it at an angle no one should have been able to come from, short blade driving for her ribs.
"Below!" Hodell shouted.
Sasha pushed off the ground at once, light as ash in a draft. Phantom's blade passed under her, and she slashed downward in the same motion. Steel met steel with a hard crack.
Phantom withdrew immediately, slipping back into the floor and vanishing again.
Hodell exhaled through clenched teeth.
This place was a playground built for the bastard.
A workshop full of metal surfaces, broken machinery, pillars, ducts, cabinets, plating, pipes. To Phantom, it was not an abandoned plant. It was a hundred doors and a hundred escape routes.
Phantom attacked again and again, never in the same way twice.
He came from a pile of broken gears at Loyi's feet.
He slid out of a furnace casing and slashed at Eileen's staff hand.
He rose waist high from behind Baron's shield like a shark breaking the surface.
He appeared behind Hodell twice and from above him three times.
Every time, the team barely held him off.
Then Loyi slammed a metal disc onto the ground.
An invisible pulse burst outward.
The enchanted light along Phantom's blade flickered and stuttered. His body half phased into a steel wall, only to lag for a fraction of a second. It was tiny, but it was enough to prove something important.
"He can be disrupted by dense energy interference," Loyi said quickly.
Phantom's breathing had started to roughen. He was hiding it well, but not well enough.
Hodell caught that and narrowed his eyes.
Good. So the ghost could bleed.
He could also tire.
But Phantom was no fool. Once he realized the team would not break from confusion alone, he changed tactics. He began using rapid, short distance shifts to create afterimages and false movement trails, muddying the battlefield with a web of overlapping positions.
Hodell's senses were excellent, but his body still had limits. Perception was one thing. Turning that into flawless movement was another.
The workshop filled with distorted impressions, false silhouettes, and misaligned energy traces.
A blur emerged in front of Hodell.
He reacted and shifted aside.
Wrong one.
The real Phantom came out of an iron cabinet behind him, blade already cutting for the back of his neck.
"Behind you!" Kyle roared.
Sasha intercepted again, her blade locking Phantom's with a harsh screech.
Phantom disengaged in a flash and vanished into the machinery once more.
The exchange left Hodell breathing harder than before.
His perception was stronger than everyone else's, but that only meant he noticed more things he did not yet have the speed to answer. Against an enemy this slippery, that was a miserable feeling.
Still, one thing was clear.
Phantom had been testing all of them.
Baron was hard to kill.
Sasha was too sharp.
Kyle was the backbone.
Loyi was troublesome.
Eileen was protected well enough to be annoying.
And Hodell, despite his perception and fast casting, was still the weakest link in terms of direct response once the fight turned ugly.
Phantom had figured that out.
A tense silence settled over the workshop.
Both sides had stopped moving for the moment, but the pressure had only thickened.
Phantom's voice drifted through the steel labyrinth.
"Enough."
It echoed from several directions at once.
"Keep this up and all we get is mutual exhaustion. I'll admit it, you lot are more annoying than I expected. But you still can't pin me down."
Kyle did not relax in the slightest. "Get to the point."
"I can cooperate," Phantom said. "Black Bone. Soul Dust. Their clients. Their backers. I can talk."
Then he stepped partly out of a machine frame several meters above them and pointed directly at Hodell.
"But I'll only talk to him."
Everyone's expression shifted.
Baron barked out a laugh full of disbelief. "You think we're stupid?"
Eileen gripped her staff harder. "Ryan, don't agree to this. He's trying something."
Hodell looked up at Phantom and almost smiled.
Whatever game Phantom was playing, it suited him perfectly.
The organization wanted the man alive or dead. If the team stayed involved until the end, there was every chance Phantom would surrender once he hit the wall. That would be inconvenient. Dead men gave clearer answers sometimes.
He let a thoughtful pause hang in the air, then said, "Captain. Let me do it."
Kyle turned to him sharply.
Hodell met his gaze without flinching.
"If he really wants to talk, this is the fastest way to get answers. And if he's bluffing, he's already burning through what little energy he has left." He paused just long enough to make it sound measured rather than reckless. "I can protect myself."
Kyle studied him.
Then he studied Phantom.
Finally he gave one tight nod.
"Fine. But we stay at the entrance. First sign anything goes wrong, we move."
Baron looked like he wanted to protest, but Kyle's tone killed that thought before it could leave his mouth.
Hodell walked forward into the open center of the workshop.
At the same time, he pushed sixteen unassigned attribute points straight into Agility.
The shift was immediate.
His body felt lighter, sharper, more responsive. Not stronger, not in the crude sense, but better connected. Like his nerves had stopped dragging behind his thoughts.
Across from him, Phantom jumped down from the machine and landed without a sound.
They stood about ten meters apart.
Phantom rolled his shoulder once and gave him a thin smile.
"You've got guts, Mage."
Hodell looked at him with calm, almost lazy eyes.
"The Black Bone Family's Hybrid experiments were influenced by that organization, weren't they?"
The smile vanished.
For the first time in the whole fight, Phantom's composure cracked.
"You…"
Good.
That reaction alone was already worth coming.
Hodell tilted his head slightly. "What? Aren't you supposed to take me hostage and escape? Seems like a better plan than standing there looking surprised."
Phantom's face darkened.
"So you really do know something."
He blurred.
The distance vanished.
In the time it took to blink, he was already behind Hodell, one arm hooking in for the neck while the short blade drove for the kidney.
A clean capture. A perfect angle.
Only it stopped.
His forearm met an invisible layer in front of Hodell's throat. The blade bit into a compact energy barrier instead of flesh.
Phantom's eyes widened.
Hodell's voice came back to him, cool and level.
"Weakness really is a sin."
Phantom jerked away and retreated five meters in a single phase shift. He stared at the barrier still flickering around Hodell's body, disbelief flashing openly across his face.
"That reaction speed… You were hiding it."
Hodell said nothing.
Phantom forced a sneer onto his face, though it no longer looked convincing.
"So what if you can block one attack? In a place like this, I decide where the fight happens."
He began to blur again, body sinking toward the pillar behind him.
That was when Hodell finally moved.
He raised one hand.
.....
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