Natasha stood in the center of the training room and pressed the timer.
"Thirty minutes. Hide well. Don't make it too easy for me to find you."
Lin Xiao grinned, turned, and left at an unhurried pace.
Natasha watched him disappear around the corner of the corridor, her arms folded and a cold smirk on her lips. She was annoyed-nine out of ten annoyed. She had planned to put this freak in his place today, but the physical training hadn't exhausted him, the shooting practice hadn't stumped him, and he had even goaded her into some ridiculous bet with just a few words.
But she wasn't going to lose. She had surveillance access to the entire Triskelion. Every corridor, every corner, even every elevator's operating records-she could pull them all up in real time. Hide? Where could he possibly hide?
The timer ticked down to twenty-five minutes.
Natasha walked over to the console and pulled up the entire building's surveillance feeds, the corner of her mouth curling upward.
The screen split into dozens of small boxes, showing corridors, stairwells, elevators, and the lobby in full view. Her gaze swept across every feed, her fingers flying over the keyboard.
Nothing. Anywhere.
There was no sign of that infuriating man in the corridors. Not in the stairwells, not in the elevators, not even at the lobby reception desk.
Natasha frowned slightly.
She dragged the timeline back and found the footage of Lin Xiao leaving the training room. After leaving, he had entered the elevator unhurriedly. The elevator stopped on the eighth floor, and he walked in.
On the eighth-floor corridor feed, Lin Xiao's figure flashed briefly at a corner, then vanished completely. Natasha dragged the timeline back and forth repeatedly and switched between several camera angles, but she couldn't find where he had gone afterward.
Her fingers paused on the keyboard for a moment.
The eighth floor. That was an office floor, and Coulson's office was there. But Lin Xiao hadn't entered Coulson's office-the surveillance footage in that direction showed nothing unusual.
Wait.
There was also a men's restroom on the eighth floor.
Outside the cameras' coverage.
Natasha's expression darkened visibly. She took a deep breath, turned, and strode out of the training room.
The elevator ascended. The floor indicator seemed to change at half its usual speed. Natasha stared at the number, her hands tucked into the pockets of her tactical pants, her fingertips unconsciously tapping out a rhythm. The eighth floor arrived.
Natasha looked displeased and sneered inwardly. You think I can't deal with you just because you're hiding in the men's room? She shoved the men's restroom door open so hard that it slammed against the wall with an enormous clang.
In the innermost stall, Coulson was sitting on the toilet with a newspaper spread in his hands. Hearing the restroom door being shoved open, he frowned and was about to scold the brat who had no respect for public property when he suddenly froze in disbelief.
The person who had entered the restroom was a woman: Agent Natasha.
The newspaper slipped from Coulson's hands. He hurriedly covered his lower half, his mouth opening and closing as he quickly retreated into the stall.
"Agent Natasha?" Coulson's voice changed pitch. "What are you doing-"
Natasha ignored him. She shoved open the first stall door. Empty. The second, empty. The third, empty. She had just seen the fourth: Coulson was sitting inside, pressed tight against the wall in fright.
Every stall checked, and no Lin Xiao.
Natasha stood where she was, her eyes narrowing slightly.
"Where is he?" Her voice was as cold as liquid nitrogen.
Coulson wore the expression of the confused question-mark meme. Natasha frowned at his dumbfounded look, turned, and walked out. Standing in the eighth-floor corridor, she took out her phone and dialed a number.
"Surveillance room. Pull up the last thirty minutes of footage from every entrance and exit of the Triskelion. Locate the target, Lin Xiao. Now."
There was a moment of silence on the other end, followed by typing and mouse clicks.
"Agent Romanoff, the target hasn't left the building. There's no record of him at any entrance or exit."
Natasha hung up.
He hadn't left the building. He wasn't on any floor. He wasn't in the men's restroom.
She glanced down at the timer, then began searching floor by floor, room by room, until she reached the office of Black Baldy, Nick Fury. She frowned and shoved the door open. Startled by Natasha's sudden entrance, Nick Fury hurriedly shut off his computer screen, but sound still came from the computer: "Fuck~ you♂, be good and stand still♂."
"Get out!" Nick roared, his face darkening further.
Natasha opened her mouth, then hurried out. After she left, Nick Fury collapsed onto the floor and smacked his forehead. "My image is about to fall apart..."
The timer let out a short burst of beeping.
Time was up.
Natasha stood in the first-floor lobby, staring at the number that had reached zero, her face expressionless. But anyone looking closely would have noticed the knuckles of her hand gripping the timer turning white at an extremely slow rate.
She opened her phone and dialed Lin Xiao's number.
It rang three times before he answered.
"Hello, instructor." Lin Xiao's voice came through the receiver, sounding as cheerful as if he had just woken up.
"You left the S.H.I.E.L.D. Building. You're cheating." Natasha wasn't asking a question. She was stating a fact.
"No, no," Lin Xiao hurriedly said. "I've been in the building the whole time. I never went outside."
"Then where are you?"
"Go outside the building and look up."
Phone in hand, Natasha crossed the lobby, pushed through the revolving door, and stood in the plaza outside the Triskelion's main entrance.
She looked up.
Someone was sitting on a gargoyle on the exterior wall of the twenty-seventh floor.
With his two-meter-ten frame clad in a dark gray suit and sunglasses perched on his nose, he was leisurely swinging his long legs. When he saw her look up, he waved at her, his smile bright enough to turn every traffic light in Manhattan green at once.
Then he stood and took a step forward off the gargoyle.
He was twenty-seven floors up.
Natasha's pupils abruptly contracted.
That massive figure plummeted with a rush of air, his suit jacket flaring in the wind, his sunglasses reflecting the afternoon sunlight. In less than two seconds, he slammed into the plaza's granite pavement.
Boom! Stone fragments flew everywhere, and several paving slabs instantly fractured into spiderweb patterns. Nearby pedestrians screamed and scattered, while two security guards drew their guns simultaneously.
The dust cleared.
Lin Xiao stood in the very center of the crater he had made, brushed the dust off his suit, bent down to pick up his fallen sunglasses, and perched them back on his nose. Then he stepped out of the crater at an easy pace, as though he had just stepped off a bus that had come to a stop.
He walked up to Natasha and grinned.
"Instructor, I didn't leave the building. You said the search area was the building. The exterior walls count as part of it, don't they?"
Natasha looked at him, the corner of her mouth twitching almost imperceptibly.
"How did you get onto the gargoyle?" Her voice was unnaturally steady.
"I climbed down from the roof." Lin Xiao spread his hands. "The roof is part of the building too. You never said I couldn't go up there."
Silence.
"Oh, right, instructor." As though he had suddenly remembered something, Lin Xiao tilted his head. "While I was enjoying the view up there, I saw you head straight for the eighth floor. How did you know I was on the eighth floor? You even went into the men's restroom and searched stall by stall-"
"Were you spying on the surveillance feeds?" Natasha interrupted.
"No, no. Looking down from that gargoyle, I just happened to have a view through the eighth-floor corridor windows." Lin Xiao's smile grew even more sincere. "When you went in, the door bounced back and nearly hit your heel. It hurt just watching."
A long silence.
Natasha turned and walked away.
"Hey, instructor!" Lin Xiao caught up with her. "That bet we made-"
Natasha stopped, took a deep breath, and was about to roll up her sleeves when Lin Xiao caught her arm, smiling faintly and shaking his head.
"All right, I was just teasing. You're a grown woman. How come you've still got a child's temper?"
"Hey, I'm treating you to dinner tonight. Coming or not?"
Natasha: ...