Overt Scheme and Troubled Waters

Listening as the distant gunfire gradually died away, He Ao sat by the restaurant's Floor-to-ceiling Window and glanced at the time on his wristband. It was 8:15.

The entire battle had lasted nearly an hour.

"Your burger and cola."

The young waiter placed the tray holding the burger and cola in front of He Ao.

"Thank you."

He Ao nodded and reached out to open the burger box on the tray.

In fact, when he saw that not a single person from the Security Federation had arrived early, He Ao had roughly guessed that they would most likely come as a group.

Just as Kate had wanted to intimidate the Security Federation using Ilo's elder brother, the Security Federation likely wanted to arrive together and put Kate in his place.

That meant they would not come too early or too late. Arriving too early would lack intimidation, while arriving after seven would mean completely tearing off the mask.

So they had probably chosen sometime around 6:50.

And He Ao had left the villa sometime after 6:40.

The data left behind on Kate's mainframe included both the time the request for support had been sent and the support messages it had received.

The Eternal Sect's reinforcements had estimated that they would arrive at around 7:10.

That meant the ten-odd minutes between 6:50 and 7:10 were enough for the Security Federation's people to enter and explore the hall. Whether they discovered the writing behind the hall doors was not actually within He Ao's considerations.

Because those words had not been left for them to see in the first place. They had been left for the Eternal Sect.

Once the Eternal Sect's reinforcements arrived and discovered other people in the hall, along with the corpses of one of us lying there, their first