Five minutes later, father and daughter had gotten through the first wave of reunion and moved on to the practical problem in front of them.
Honestly, now that Lara had her father back, the urgency she'd felt about rescuing Lu Ren had quietly diminished. If it came down to a choice between her dad's safety and getting Lu Ren out, she'd let Lu Ren take his chances. That wasn't cruel—it was simply how the math worked. One was a stranger. The other was her father.
But her conscience and her own instincts wouldn't let her back down. Lu Ren had come to help her. She wasn't the kind of person who walked away from that.
She was going ahead with the rescue.
"Lara, these people are vicious. Stay here—this young lady and I will handle it." Richard Croft made a sweeping offer.
Bella stood to one side and said nothing, observing.
From what she could see, Lara's father was a capable academic and a seasoned explorer—but his combat ability was genuinely limited. Seven years on this island, surviving by staying hidden, said everything. If you dropped Lara in his position, she'd have dismantled an entire elite unit in the first week.
For the purposes of this rescue, Richard Croft was dead weight. Bringing him along would slow them down.
"I can handle myself just fine," Bella said. "You two take this time. I'll go alone."
"Out of the question."
"Far too dangerous!"
Father and daughter spoke in unison.
After a fair amount of back and forth, they settled on the obvious answer: all three would go together.
Lara made the practical call: her father was a scholar and an explorer, not a soldier. He almost certainly had no combat background worth counting on. She handed him the pistol.
The Croft family fortune might have been seized by outside parties, but Richard Croft was still, at his core, a billionaire—and billionaires generally knew how to fire a gun.
The three of them set off northward. Bella led. Lara and her father followed. Richard's seven years of playing hide-and-seek with the armed faction had given him an intimate knowledge of the local terrain. Under his guidance, they quickly reached one of the faction's outer perimeter camps.
The faction had taken over a village belonging to the island's original inhabitants and turned the surrounding land into an excavation site. Deep pits dotted the landscape in every direction. Getting large equipment onto the island was nearly impossible—the faction had been forced to rely entirely on manual labor.
It was from Richard that they finally learned the name.
Trinity.
An ancient military order with a singular obsession: uncovering the hidden powers of the earth. And Trinity had deep historical ties to the Knights Templar.
"The Templars reached the height of their influence in the fourteenth century," Richard said. His clothing was wrecked, but his delivery was composed—the easy fluency of a man who'd spent a lifetime with these texts. "Their military reach was enough to determine who sat on European thrones. When Philip IV of France accused the order of heresy and burned Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the stake, a faction within the Templars refused to go down with the order. They split off and founded Trinity."
Bella knew this history well. She also knew something Richard didn't: that the Assassin Brotherhood had worked quietly from the shadows to push Philip IV into moving against the Templars in the first place.
She asked: "So Trinity is the fanatic wing? Something like Arnaud Amaury—the Crusader abbot who commanded the Sack of Béziers?"
Richard gave her a surprised look. She knows Arnaud Amaury?
"You're right, Miss Swan. If my research is correct, Arnaud Amaury was a Trinity operative. Some of their ammunition casings today still carry the phrase attributed to him..."
He paused. Bella finished his sentence: "'Kill them all, God will know his own.' So Trinity is an organization of fanatics."
Fanatics or not, they had conviction—and conviction kept people fighting.
The three of them moved through the river valley and arrived at the edge of Trinity's camp.
It was chaos.
Mathias had found Trinity's military commander on Yamatai and delivered Himiko's location on a silver platter, volunteering to serve as guide. Trinity had responded immediately, mobilizing weapons and explosives and moving the bulk of their forces toward the tomb.
Which left the camp shorthanded.
Lu Ren seized the moment. He rallied the captive workers, and they grabbed weapons, used their numbers as an advantage, and threw themselves at the remaining Trinity soldiers in a desperate brawl.
This was the scene Bella's group walked into.
Lara raised her bow. She hesitated for a moment—the reality of killing still hadn't become routine for her.
Then she watched her father raise the pistol and shoot a man dead without blinking.
She let go of all hesitation and put an arrow through a soldier carrying a submachine gun.
Lu Ren led the workers in a full uprising. Some grabbed weapons from the fallen. Others swung whatever they could find—shovels, hammers. Even the rich kid Bella had planted as a sleeper agent snatched up a thick wooden club and beat an enemy soldier over the head with it. He'd been forced to dig dirt all day. He was angry too.
"My friends were taken into the underground tomb. I'm going after them." Bella gave the short version and moved. Arin had been shadowing Trinity's main force in secret and had already located the tomb entrance. Trinity's soldiers were locked in battle with the Stormguard warriors right now.
"I'm coming with you." The running, the fighting—it had woken something up in Lara, the restless instinct that had driven her into exploration in the first place. She introduced Lu Ren and her father to each other, then vaulted into the passenger seat of a jeep Bella had found in the camp. The two of them drove northwest, away from the camp.
If Trinity had done anything useful in seven years, it was the road network they'd ordered the workers to build between their camps. The jeep moved smoothly enough across the crushed gravel.
They crossed a riverbank, skirted a stretch of muddy swamp, and came around to the far side of the mountain range. There—the entrance to the underground tomb.
Lara's archery was excellent. Enemy soldiers fell to her arrows the entire length of the route.
As they drew closer to the tomb, something shifted in Bella's perception. The storms encircling Yamatai Island had a source—and it was here. These were Himiko's forces. But there was something else tangled in with them, something she couldn't immediately place. A ghost-current. Its signature felt faintly familiar, though she couldn't put her finger on where she'd encountered it before.
They followed the trail of Trinity's fighting—wreckage, fallen bodies, scorch marks—moving quickly, until they plunged into a WWII-era Japanese military installation built directly into the mountainside.