Inside the building, Leon took in the business type at a glance.

Logistics company. Goods stacked along the walls, crates being sealed and labeled, workers moving between shelves with clipboards tucked under their arms. People stood in lines at the front counters, some waiting to receive packages, some to send them out. The operation was clean. Well maintained. Nothing about it looked out of place.

That was the point.

Leon didn’t bother with the line.

He walked straight down to an attendant and stopped in front of her.

"I want to see your manager."

The attendant slowly looked up from the clipboard in front of her. Her smile went from warm to cold in seconds.

She didn’t particularly care for people walking straight to her without packages, without an ID, without any business she could place. Even though this place was a cover, it still ran normal business procedures. The line existed. People followed it.

This one hadn’t.

She looked him over once. No package. No ID. Not a face she recognized.

"The manager is not in today. Can I help you with anything?"

She didn’t step back. She looked him straight in the eyes.

The company ran legitimate operations, which meant the city guard had no reason to come sniffing around. Their location was well hidden from outside organizations. People who walked through that door either had business with them or were regular customers.

This person was neither.

’Troublemaker,’ she thought. ’Or worse.’

She kept her expression steady.

Leon looked at her for a moment.

Then he smiled.

"Yes. Take me to your manager."

His eyes shone with a strange light.

-----

It happened fast. One second she was standing at her counter, the next the world around her had shifted into something else entirely. The light changed. The noise of the logistics floor dropped away. Her heart clenched hard in her chest, a spike of fear she couldn’t explain, coming from somewhere deep and instinctual.

Before she could scream, she felt an arm press against her shoulder.

The illusion broke.

She was back at the counter. The noise returned. Her hands were shaking slightly and she didn’t know when that had started.

Beside her stood an older man, his eyes barely visible beneath heavy lids, a wide smile on his face like nothing unusual had happened at all.

"Good day, Revered one." He bowed toward Leon, smooth and unhurried.

This was a level 3 mage, on the border of becoming a great mage. He wasn’t anywhere close to Leon’s level. But he knew the difference between a great mage and a transcendent being the same way a man standing at the edge of a cliff knows the difference between the ground and the drop.

And that was all the difference.

Leon looked him over.

"You’re the manager of this place?"

"I am."

"You’re pretty weak."

He said it the way someone might comment on the weather. No malice behind it. Just a statement of fact, with a trace of something behind his eyes that made the observation feel more dangerous than an insult would have.

The older man’s smile didn’t waver.

Right now Leon no longer looked like his original body. Thanks to the techniques of the old sorcerer, changing his face had always been easy. A different face needed a different energy to match it, a different way of carrying himself, a different edge in his expression. He had settled into this one naturally enough. Something a little rougher. A little less contained.

It suited the place.

"Haha. This one is a bit talentless." The older man laughed softly, gesturing toward the stairs with an open hand. "Why don’t you come with me to my office so we can talk?"

Leon glanced at the stairs, then back at him.

He started walking.

The older man kept the smile on his face as he fell into step beside Leon, but his mind was already moving in a different direction entirely.

He had to be very careful.

A person like this, if he wanted to, could slaughter everyone in this room. That much was obvious from the moment he had stepped in. The weight of it was still sitting in the air, faint but present, the kind of pressure that didn’t announce itself but settled into the back of the throat all the same.

He had already sent the alert the moment Leon made his move on the attendant. Subtle. A signal passed through a back channel that wouldn’t be noticed by someone scanning the room casually.

A transcendent being from their organization should be on the way.

He just needed to keep things calm until then.

Leon followed him up the stairs at an easy pace, eyes moving across the upper floor without appearing to.

(Already alerted someone. The sweat gives it away.)

He could see it on the manager’s forehead. A thin shine that hadn’t been there when he first appeared downstairs.

Leon smiled to himself.

He really felt at home in places like these.

Everyone skeptical. Everyone measuring everyone else. Layers upon layers of planning running underneath every polite word and easy smile, each person in the room doing quiet calculations about who could do what and how fast and at what cost.

It reminded him of the faceless mercenary company. A lot.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Inside the room

A chair and a cup of tea was already prepared and placed on a chair waiting for him.

At this level cordiality was a massive thing, after all the people they were messing with had the ability to kill everyone they knew at any given time.

"I wonder what has brought this revered one to our humble organization? Is it a mission? Or a cooperation from your prestigious organization" the manager smiled sitting on the chair.

The black dog underworld took a large range of job, not limited to land grabs, exterminations Sometimes small things like guard details.

However most times they would deal with ordinary people in the organizations that wanted to hire them.

But to have a transcendent being here?

It was out of place.