At dusk.
No matter how lively the city-state looked during November, when the National Day Festival was held, no one noticed that deep underground, a super-ancient city was slowly operating.
If one received permission from some unseen authority, one could traverse the long, gloomy road and reach the black palace at the very depths.
"Strange. How did my ID disappear?"
a man muttered to himself.
He wore a pitch-black leather jacket, whose gleaming buttons glittered against the blood-red sky.
Maquire could not figure out how the ID holder from the Imperial Special Operations Division had vanished without a trace.
After ruling out the possibility that he had misplaced it himself, he could only have hung the leather jacket in his office. He rarely let it leave his sight, and no one besides him could open his office. Even Nikola could forget about sneaking in.
But he had no time to consider the matter now. He could only report the loss and apply for a replacement at once. He also dared not make too much of a commotion. A work error like this at such a critical juncture could be fatal for him.
As the only Tier 7 combatant in the Imperial Special Operations Division, no one dared follow Maquire casually. He also possessed the finest counter-surveillance instincts.
Besides, in this isolated underground city, people could enter and leave through the door inside City Hall without anyone knowing.
Maquire strolled toward the end of the underground city-state. A towering castle built from natural black obsidian stood silently in the dark. Its outer walls were inlaid with cold, hard silver trim and decorated with crystal-clear red crystal carvings, which refracted hazy lattices of light in the faint illumination.
The blood-red moon hanging high above the black dome scattered its pure moonlight across