After an hour of flight, the aircraft crossed the border and glided smoothly into the massive hangar buried deep inside the mountains at the Romania division.
The cabin doors opened slowly, and the smell of machine oil and crisp mountain air rushed in.
Jake stepped out and looked up at the medieval castle that had been completely rebuilt into a sci-fi steel fortress. The shock on his face was impossible to hide.
A tactical holographic map flickered across the enormous domed ceiling. Countless researchers in white coats and fully armed soldiers moved between sections.
Rows of heavy armored vehicles and exoskeleton mechs stood in neat formation in the staging area. The sheer industrial weight of it all was enough to make any armed force think twice.
"Welcome to Starfire Pharma's European core." Sherry led the group onto a transparent elevated walkway. "Don't go rubbernecking. Some of this stuff is way above your clearance right now."
The elevator rose silently. Piers, carrying the still-unconscious Chris on his back, was wheeled away by a team of medical staff toward the isolation treatment ward on the lower level.
Jake, meanwhile, was "escorted" by Sherry and Becky, one in front and one behind, into a private elevator heading to the castle's top floor.
When the heavy solid-wood doors, carved with elaborate patterns, slid open on both sides, Jake held his breath.
The hall was extravagant beyond anything he'd seen. Beyond the massive floor-to-ceiling windows stretched an endless range of snow-covered Eastern European mountains, the sunlight reflecting off the snow in a cold, blinding glare.
In the center of the hall, a man sat casually on a wide leather sofa, swirling a glass of wine as red as blood.
He looked young, but those dark eyes were so deep they seemed to swallow light, carrying a detached indifference like he'd already seen through every mechanism the world had to offer.
Beside him stood a cold, striking noblewoman nearly three meters tall, wearing a black velvet gown.
She was elegantly bending to refill his wine, every movement radiating a jarring contrast of haughtiness and deference.
Jake swallowed hard. He'd crawled out of piles of corpses in Edonia more times than he could count and never flinched at even the most savage mutants.
But the instant he laid eyes on Ryan, a suffocating pressure from somewhere deep in his gut made his heart skip a beat for no reason he could name.
"Have a seat, Jake Muller." Ryan didn't turn around. His voice was flat, not a ripple in it. "You can call me Ryan. Or Boss."
Jake took a deep breath, forced down the unease, and pulled out the devil-may-care attitude he'd worn like armor in the mercenary world.
He strolled over to the single-seat sofa across from Ryan, dropped into it, and propped both feet up on the edge of the expensive coffee table.
"Money's confirmed received. You Star Fire people are a hell of a lot faster than those government pencil-pushers." Jake raised an eyebrow. "Since I took the money, I'll do the job. So what's the deal, Boss? When do we start drawing blood? How much a day keeps you happy?"
Ryan let out a quiet laugh. He set down his wine glass, turned around, and regarded the red-haired young man with a calm gaze.
There was no hostility in that look. Ryan didn't call out the bluster Jake was hiding behind. He just continued evenly: "How much blood, R&D will tell you. If you cooperate, I'll throw in a piece of information about your father."
"...You know my father?" Jake's hand twitched visibly.
Ryan walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and stood with his back to him.
"Get the job done first. You'll find out when the time comes."
...
Meanwhile, several hundred kilometers from Romania, in the city center of Edonia.
A fine, relentless night rain washed over the severed limbs littering the streets, tamping down the sharp stench of blood.
Ada stood motionless in the shadow of a towering clock tower, wearing her signature red blouse and black leather pants, melting into the darkness.
Rainwater slid off her black umbrella. In her hand was a compact frequency scanner bearing the Star Fire logo.
The red waveform on the screen pulsed in a steady rhythm, pointing precisely toward an abandoned European-style theater two blocks away.
The intelligence Ryan had provided was absurdly thorough. It saved her from wandering around blind, and went far beyond that: internal floor plans of the theater, mutant troop deployments, and the target's patrol route down to hourly intervals.
Ada put the scanner away and raised a high-magnification night-vision monocular, peering through the curtain of rain to lock onto the theater's second-floor balcony.
Beneath the theater's peeling neon sign, several fully armed J'avo with insectoid features already spreading across their faces bowed respectfully to a woman.
The woman had a face almost identical to Ada's own, wore that eye-catching red scarf, and had the same black bob cut.
Even her posture, the careless coldness in her gaze, was mimicked to perfection.
That was Carla Radames. Simmons's masterpiece, built with every resource he could pour into her. The architect of this entire disaster.
Ada watched her own "reflection" standing in the halo of light, and the corner of her mouth curled into a smile that was cold and dangerous.
As a lone wolf who'd spent her career operating in the gray, having someone steal her identity to destroy the world was hands down the biggest insult of her professional life.
"So that's the girl called Carla. A pathetic, sloppy imitator." Ada murmured, her voice dissolving into the wind and rain.
She knew that Simmons, the twisted psychopath, had destroyed a once-brilliant researcher to feed his sick need for control.
Pitiable as that was, anyone bold enough to run around causing havoc under the name "Ada Wong" had better be ready for the real thing to come knocking.
Ada tossed the umbrella aside and drew her custom grappling gun from her waist, aiming at the distant theater rooftop.
Her long legs coiled and launched her forward with the grace of a butterfly, out of the clock tower's shadow in an instant.
"I don't care whose puppet you are. You stole someone's face and used it to do ugly things. Time to pay up."
A faint hiss of compressed gas, and Ada's silhouette became a red blur, vanishing into the endless night rain.
The game of truth and imitation between two deadly roses had finally begun in earnest, here among the ruins of Eastern Europe.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]