Beyond the glass windows, Manhattan's high-rises stood in dense rows. Sunlight cut past the edges of the buildings, casting vast shadows.
Lucian withdrew his gaze and was about to tell the returning Simona to organize the materials for their next step when the skin on the back of his neck suddenly twitched.
An extremely faint ripple drifted through the air.
The sensation was very strange, like a fine needle quietly piercing a hole too small to see in a smooth piece of cloth.
After mastering Kamar-Taj's spatial arts, he had become acutely sensitive to anomalies of this kind.
"Boss?" Simona asked quietly when she saw him pause.
"Step outside for now."
Without another unnecessary word, Simona withdrew, gently closing the door behind her.
Lucian was alone in the office. He closed his eyes and extended his perception outward along that tiny disturbance. Its source was not in Vought Tower, but in Brooklyn's old industrial district across the East River.
The disturbance did not seem to have been caused by powerful human intervention. There were no traces of magical runes, nor any magnetic interference from a technological device activating.
Space itself was simply wrinkling.
Lucian wasted no more time. His figure flickered, leaving an afterimage where he had stood.
Several short-range teleportations took him through walls and open sky, covering several kilometers before he landed steadily in the shadows of an abandoned container terminal.
Rusted metal cabinets littered the terminal, and foul-smelling wastewater pooled on the ground.
The disturbance was three meters directly ahead.
Lucian walked over and carefully examined that seemingly empty patch of air.
To the naked eye, light refracted slightly in that small area, like heat rising from an asphalt road in summer. But to his perception, it was a narrow fissure roughly half a foot long.
Beyond