Chapter : 294

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"Next," she said, her voice flat and emotionless. It was not a taunt. It was simply a statement of fact, the way a machine announces that it is ready for the next input. And it was terrifying in its absolute, mechanical certainty.

Risa watched from her defensive position near the elevator, her green eyes wide with a mixture of awe and disbelief. She had known the 13th Unit was formidable, but seeing them in action was something else entirely. They moved like a single organism, each part supporting the others in perfect harmony.

"They're incredible," she whispered to Sayma, who was standing beside her with a small, proud smile on her face. "I've never seen anything like it."

The augmented soldiers kept coming, but the 13th Unit did not back down for a single second. Each wave of attackers was met with fire, earth, and steel, and each wave was repelled with ruthless efficiency. The executive lobby was becoming a war zone, and the Benjamin Group was losing.

Iris watched from the center of the formation, her role not as a frontline fighter but as the strategic core of the team. She called out adjustments, identified threats, and directed the flow of battle with the instinctive authority of someone born to lead. Every decision was calculated. Every command was precise.

---

Meanwhile, Ken Eliot casually strolled through the chaotic crossfire.

Bolts of magical energy sizzled past his head. Augmented mercenaries crashed through walls on either side of him. The floor shook with the impact of Laxmi's fire and Zinia's earth magic. And Ken walked through it all with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, humming softly to himself.

A mercenary spotted him and charged, metal fists raised. Ken sidestepped without looking, and the mercenary stumbled past him and crashed into a decorative pillar. Ken didn't even break his humming.

Another mercenary, one with speed augmentations that made him a blur of motion, appeared in front of Ken with a blade drawn. Ken leaned to the left, and the blade whistled past his ear by a fraction of an inch. He leaned to the right, and a second slash missed him entirely.

"Excuse me," Ken said politely, stepping around the bewildered speedster. "Important business to attend to."

What no one in the room could see, because Ken was very, very good at hiding what he didn't want people to see, was the magic he was weaving as he walked. Three spells, cast simultaneously, without a single word of incantation, without a single hand sign, without a single visible indication that anything supernatural was happening at all.

The first spell was his signature Knockback ability. Every time he seemed to casually stumble or sidestep, he was actually teleporting the heaviest, most dangerous mercenaries into walls, pillars, and each other. To the observers, it looked like they were simply losing their balance in the chaos.

A three-hundred-pound augmented soldier suddenly found himself launched backward into a glass partition with a spectacular crash. A lightning-wielder was abruptly standing in the wrong place and got caught in a crossfire of his own ally's electrical blast. It looked like bad luck. It was anything but.

The second spell was Body Power Sealing, an invisible field that drained magical enhancements from enemy fighters within range. One by one, the mercenaries' augmentations began to flicker and fail. The metal arms lost their luster. The electrical powers sputtered and died. The enhanced muscles deflated.

The mercenaries looked at each other in confusion. Their expensive augmentations, the enhancements that had cost millions of Bel and years of surgical procedures, were simply turning off. Like someone had flipped a switch inside them that they didn't know existed.

One mercenary, a woman with strength augmentations that had allowed her to bench-press a carriage, found herself unable to lift her own sword. Another, whose eyes had been enhanced to track targets at incredible speeds, was suddenly seeing the world in normal, sluggish motion. The Body Power Sealing spell was systematic and ruthless.

"My arms!" the metal-limbed soldier shouted, staring at his now-dull, powerless appendages. "What happened to my arms?!"

"I don't know!" his partner yelled back. "My speed is gone! I can barely jog!"

The third spell was the most subtle and the most devastating. Perfect Hypnosis, cast across the entire executive floor, creating an illusion that made the corporate executives watching from their offices perceive the 13th Unit as an unstoppable, ghostly army of spectral warriors.

The illusion was multi-layered and incredibly sophisticated, affecting each observer's perception individually. Some saw ghostly knights with blazing swords. Others saw shadowy assassins emerging from the walls. All of them saw far more enemies than actually existed, and all of them were terrified.

Panic spread through the executive floor like wildfire. Corporate vice presidents who had never faced physical danger in their lives were suddenly cowering behind their desks, convinced that an army of spectral warriors was coming for them. The illusion fed on their fear, growing more vivid and more terrifying with each passing second.

To the terrified executives, the six members of the 13th Unit appeared as a legion of shimmering, ethereal soldiers, their numbers multiplied tenfold, their weapons blazing with otherworldly light. It was a psychological weapon more powerful than any physical attack.

The executives screamed and fled their offices. Assistants dove under desks. The Vice Director's smug smile evaporated as he watched his carefully assembled mercenary force collapse into chaos. The augmented soldiers, stripped of their enhancements and haunted by ghostly apparitions, were falling apart.

"What is happening?!" the Vice Director shrieked, his composure shattered. "Why are their augmentations failing? Why do I see an army?! There are only seven of them!"

The battle was over in less than five minutes.

Laxmi stood in the center of the lobby, breathing hard, her hands still wreathed in fading flames. Zinia lowered her arms, the earth settling back into solid marble. Naomi sheathed her daggers with two sharp clicks. Around them, thirty of the Benjamin Group's finest mercenaries lay groaning on the floor.

Ken strolled up to the group, still humming, and stopped beside Iris. He pulled one hand out of his pocket to brush some dust off his sleeve. "Well, that was a nice morning walk. A bit loud, but the scenery was interesting."

The Vice Director stumbled backward into his office, his plump face ghost-white with terror. He fumbled for his communication crystal, but a dagger suddenly embedded itself in the wall inches from his hand. Naomi's throw had been deliberate.

"I wouldn't," Naomi said calmly.

The Vice Director sank to his knees. His expensive suit was rumpled, his perfect hair was disheveled, and his smug smile had been replaced by the expression of a man who had just watched his entire world collapse around him.

"You... you can't do this," he stammered, his voice shaking. "We have lawyers. We have connections. We have..."

"You have nothing," Iris said, stepping forward with the cold authority of Imperial justice. "Your mercenaries are defeated. Your augmentations are gone. And your crimes are about to be exposed to the entire Empire."

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