Chapter 96: Chapter 93: Dismantling a Society

Eve didn’t even spare a glance at the outside of the compound as she strode towards the door. She was raiding one of the Society’s high-security bases, and she wasn’t going to waste time gawking. The door was, of course, locked, but that didn’t stop her; a few swift kicks were more than enough to blow it off of its hinges.

That triggered an alarm, of course, but that was easily silenced with a spell. What was more immediately threatening was the squad of soldiers that were beyond, though they seemed somewhat disoriented. Between that disorientation and the traces of residual magic she could sense on them, she was supposing that the alarm she had triggered had teleported them there with their gear equipped.

Their leader rallied quickly, raising his gun. “Hands up, you’re on priv–” He began to shout an order, but stopped when he saw who Eve was. She had transformed herself so she looked like Lilith again, and she imagined her presence was rather intimidating. Though, they really should have expected her to be coming. Yes, this base was supposed to be top secret, but did they really think she wouldn’t know?

Eve just rolled her eyes. “Out of the way.” She said. “I’m not going to hurt you if you don’t resist.”

The guard captain instead fumbled with his weapon, reaching into his utility belt for what could only be anti-Perfect Chimera bullets.

“Yeah, no.” Eve said, raising a hand and casting a spell that would rip the man’s belt from him and bring it to her. It didn’t work at first, there being some sort of enchantment on it that prevented it from being moved magically, but all she had to do to overcome that was pour in a little more Mana and overload the spell.

The utility belt flew into her hand, and she rifled through it, withdrew the magazine that held the anti-Perfect Chimera bullets, and teleported it to the dungeon. “None of that.” She said. “And that counts as hostile action.” She punctuated that last sentence by spearing the man through the stomach with a tentacle, then glared at the rest of the guards. “Any other objections?”

There was a long silence, and none of the other guards moved a muscle. “Thought so.” She said. “Put down your weapons, now. Refusal to do so will be counted as hostile action and I will defend myself, understood?”

The guards hastily placed their weapons on the floor, and Eve nodded approvingly. “You there, in front.” She said, pointing at a random guard. “You’re going to lead me down to the sealed parts of this place. If I find out that you’re taking a circuitous route or otherwise causing delays, I will be very cross. So, come here, I have a lot of things to do, and my time is limited, so let’s get on with it.”

The woman she had pointed to shakily stepped forward. “I…don’t know my way around the depths of this place.” She said. “Our unit works security on a lot of sites and only patrols the upper floors. But…the stairs down are three doors down that hall, on the left.”

Eve sighed and rifled through the woman’s mind. When she saw that the woman did indeed have knowledge of a few more floors below the current, she heaved another sigh. “And below that?”

“I –”

“Zip it, I’m reading your mind, there’s no point in lying.” Eve said flatly. “Like, seriously? Is your loyalty that strong? What cause are you fighting for? All the Society wants nowadays is power, and if you want that you’d be a lot better off listening to my instructions.”

“But –” All kinds of thoughts rose to the surface of the woman’s mind, of her family and what would happen to them. Eve wasn’t exactly convinced by just that, so she intensified her search, drilling down into the woman’s brain and trying to figure out if she was trying to lie. The process wasn’t exactly a pleasant one, and it cut the woman off mid-sentence.

Eventually, Eve gave yet another sigh. “Fine. In deference to your family, I’ll let it go for now. I took what I wanted anyway. You all stay here, I’m sending the Adjudicators in, and they’ve been given your number and description. If any of you are missing, you will be hunted down and taken in for punishment, understood? I’ve placed a teleport block on you, so there won’t be any excuses about being teleported away to deal with another incident.”

She strode up to the woman she had picked out and neatly severed her keycard from the lanyard it was attached to. “I’ll be taking this.” She said. “You’re not going to need it anymore, anyway. Just have one of your squad mates help you get your stuff.”

She then left the guards where they were, heading further down the hallway to where the stairs down were. As she went, she couldn’t help but wonder why the Society kept all their important stuff underground. Yes, back in the day it had helped keep the true extent of their facilities under wraps and out of the public eye, but this facility was a new one, built out in the wilds of Haven.

Were they trying to make the building’s footprint smaller, so it was harder to spot from above? It wasn’t like being underground made things significantly more secure, it was easier than ever to dig things up or move through the ground, though…she supposed it was also easier than ever to build stuff underground, so it was probably a moot point.

She soon reached the stairs downwards, and swiped the keycard she had stolen to open up the door, then began her descent. The keycard likely wasn’t going to work below a certain point, but it saved her the trouble of kicking in every door on her way down.

She didn’t encounter many people on her trek through the compound, and the ones she did fled immediately. She briefly considered chasing after the first few, but decided that they weren’t worth her time. They were likely just grunts, and she didn’t want to chase every single one down to make sure they weren’t important. Still, just to be safe, she read the surface of their minds to make sure there weren’t any obviously important people among them, then went on her way.

Two floors down, her keycard stopped working, and she had to break down the door again. She could have done it with magic, too, but she didn’t want to waste any Mana when she wasn’t fully sure of the extent of the defenses that were prepared below.

She was about to bust it down when something stopped her. As per Raphael’s teachings, she had been keeping up some extra senses any time she was away from home, ranging from the mundane to the supernatural, and the one that let her sense Mana was nagging at her. It was somewhat obfuscated by the spellwork on the door, but there were definitely people on the other side, waiting.

An ambush, then. That suited Eve fine, she just needed to keep an eye on them while she prepared. They were almost certainly wielding anti-Perfect Chimera weaponry, most likely bullets. The Society seemed to have a fondness for those; Eve supposed because they took a lot less material, and because more people knew how to use guns than knew how to use a sword. And shooting a gun probably seemed like it’d be more likely to succeed than getting into close combat with a Perfect Chimera and then successfully injure them. That was incorrect, of course, but Eve doubted the Society had a good grasp of just how out of their league she had become.

Well, this was a good opportunity to show them. She finished her preparations, then activated the magic circle she had drawn. The door burst off of its hinges, and the stone, metal, and other material of the building around here tore free from its place, closing around Eve and forming a protective shell.

There was the muffled sound of gunfire followed by bullets plinking off of the bubble, but it hardly mattered; she had roughly a meter of material between her and them, and it was magically reinforced –

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A bullet punched through the stone shell, narrowly missing Eve. Right, the magical reinforcement barely mattered, as anti-Perfect Chimera material generally had some form of antimagic built in, and a properly tricked out gun augmented by Skills could probably pierce her protection.

Plan b, then. She focused briefly, and the protective shell exploded outwards towards her assailants. That was just a distraction, though, as she used the moment of clear sight she was provided to teleport behind the firing squad, directly in the path of her own attack. She felt some attempts to stop the wave of building material in its tracks, but they were easily overwhelmed by her stats and sheer quantity of Mana.

It was around then that her assailants began to notice that she was no longer there, but it was too late for them. She held out her hands, the world around filling with a dizzying array of seemingly impossible shapes as she turned Horrid Fascination, Aura of the Arbiter, and Zoan’s Barrier on at full tilt, accompanied by a heavy magnification of gravity, just for good measure.

The firing squad was stopped in its tracks, and the wave of building material swept over them before flowing around them, coating each individual person in a layer of material that gave them just enough room to allow them to breathe, but not enough to allow for any significant movement.

Eve used this to force each person to the ground, then melded the material with the floor they were lying on. “Did you seriously think you had a chance?” She mocked. “Do you have any idea what combat with a Perfect Chimera is actually like? Or did you think that those bullets alone would be enough to level the playing field?”

“I–” Someone began, but Eve cut them off.

“I don’t actually care. Just be glad I’m feeling merciful today, because this would have ended way worse for you if I wasn’t.”

She rolled her eyes as one of the people on the ground tried to cast a spell, but all she had to do in response was constrict the ground around the woman. “I wouldn’t if I were you.” Eve said. “You’ve got even less of a shot against me with magic than with those bullets. No. I’m not out of Mana because I tore through the wards on the building material, not even close. I’ve got more than you can even imagine. So, stop resisting or I’ll actually have to hurt you.”

Eve walked away from the firing squad, and when she was sure she was out of line of sight, broke into a run. They knew she was here, and though she had already placed a teleport block on the area, she didn’t want any of the higher ups digging themselves in any deeper than they were.

Fortunately, there weren’t any more ambushes. Whether they had used up their soldiers or were just trying to gather everyone for one last stand in the basement, it didn’t really matter, Eve just had to dismantle whatever was thrown her way. She descended the last couple of floors, and soon found herself in front of the final set of stairs.

This door was far more reinforced than any of the others had been. It was clearly some sort of panic shelter for a situation like this, and actually posed a somewhat significant obstacle. She mulled over her options for a moment, then decided there was nothing for it but to dispel the wards on the door. With the sheer number of them it would really eat into her Mana, but her other options simply took too long.

So, she reached deep into her reserves, spending almost three quarters of her Mana to nullify all the enchantments on the door, then just kicked it down like all the others. Inside she found a cowering man, one she recognized as one of the leaders of the Society that had supposedly retired.

“Well look who we have here.” She said. “Awfully strange to find a ‘retired’ leader in one of the Society’s secret bases, wouldn’t you say?”

“H-how did you find out about this place?” The man whimpered. “Only our most loyal people knew about it, and we refrained from discussing it where people under your watch could hear!”

“I have my ways.” Eve said. In truth, it was Judy who had located the base, leveraging her swarm to listen in to meetings that had been thought safe. From there it had been relatively simple to figure out the exact locations of the bases that had been talked about, and Eve imagined that if there were any bases she didn’t know about, she was about to learn of them all.

“So, what do you have to say for yourself?” She asked. “And don’t give me that ‘they asked for it’ crap, you and I both know that’s not true.” Eve was answered with silence, so she continued on. “I guess we’re skipping straight to the mind reading, then. That’s fine with me, it’ll save some time in the long run.”

The man began to speak, but he wasn’t saying anything important, so Eve just ignored him and began looking through his memories. As she had expected, there was a lot of…miscellaneous wrongdoing. Embezzlement, casual abuse of subordinates, the odd murder…it was abundantly clear that this man was no better than a thug that had received power.

What was more interesting were the ties to governments that her search revealed. It seemed that many world powers had surreptitiously provided the Society with funds or material, though to what end Eve wasn’t sure. She’d have to dig into it more, but…were they trying to test the waters and see what her wrath was like?

But that was a question for another time. Right now, she needed to finish her interrogation, if it could even be called that. Still, that didn’t take too long; she found the Society’s true motive for the frontier town incident after only a little more prodding.

As she had suspected, they thought they could take her down. That all they needed was one lucky bullet and it would be over. They were willing to make huge sacrifices for this, but they just…completely misjudged her strength. It was almost comical how wrong they had been about her; none of their top brass had been in any sort of position of power during the war, and that was the last time Perfect Chimeras truly went all-out in view of the public.

Even then, it was hard to grasp just how much of a divide there was if you weren’t fighting against them yourself. Yes, the change in the system was supposed to shrink that divide, and to an extent it had, but the main issue was that Lilith had been able to claim the abilities of both Mai and Errus, abruptly vaulting her forward in terms of power, far more than could be expected.

“Alright, I’ve seen enough.” Eve said. “You’re guilty. I’m taking you back to a cell in my dungeon while I decide what to do with you.” She wanted there to be some sort of…karmic punishment, but she also couldn’t think of one on the spot, so she decided to pass the responsibility for that over to Lilith.

She grabbed the man and teleported him to a cell, then teleported back to the dungeon herself. She had to take some time for her Mana to regenerate, so she figured she might as well check up on her kids and make sure they weren’t being too much of a handful. One quick check with Nuwa revealed their location, so she set off with the intent of regenerating not only her Mana, but her mental stamina as well.