The morning sun brightened Grefort City and exposed what the night had hidden.

When Cell 7 first entered Golden Eagle’s base, the floodlights, armored vehicles, and armed escorts had stolen most of their attention.

Everything looked sharp and controlled. It was enough to intimidate them, but not enough to let them understand the gravity of the place they had entered.

Then daylight broke their assumptions.

The base was no longer a simple survivor camp. It was an entire army that had taken root in a decrepit industrial sector, forcing civilization to start breathing again

Soldiers patrolled the streets in organized groups. Guardian APCs rolled through cleared lanes with their turrets moving in slow arcs.

Farther back, the Hellhammers had returned to their nest, silent for now, as if last night’s artillery barrage had been nothing more than routine work.

To Hans’s soldiers, it was normal.

To Cell 7, it was insane.

Lucie slowed down without realizing it.

The power-generating towers stood ahead of them like industrial towers. Heavy cables ran along reinforced walls, with machinery that looked too fictional to belong in a collapsed city. Even from a distance, she could feel the energy coming from them.

Real, stable power.

This pressure is too intense! She inwardly screamed. It almost feels comparable to a nuclear power plant!

Her fingers curled slightly.

"Are these what made this place lively again?" she muttered.

Lucie glanced at the escorts. These people were not mute, but they had no intention of speaking to them anyway.

It was as if they were programmed to never speak to strangers.

Lucie’s attention drifted toward the rotating dish rising above several nearby structures. Last night, she had felt something pass through her, inspect her, and move on as if she had been no more than another object inside its range.

She had felt it once when the Guardian APCs returned to base last night, then again near the peak of midnight.

Seeing the structure responsible for it in daylight did not make the memory less terrifying. It only made everything worse for her.

The dish turned slowly above the base, calm and patient. No alarm sounded. No visible beam swept across the streets. Yet Lucie could not shake the feeling that every breath she took had already been counted.

Jannik noticed her expression. "Lucie, is there something wrong?"

Lucie hesitated, then shook her head. "It’s nothing."

Jannik and the other agents took note of her refusal to speak. Perhaps the presence of their escorts pushed back the words stuck in her throat.

As their route opened toward the center of the industrial sector, their attention was pulled toward the massive construction-like complex sitting at the heart of the base.

At first, Genevieve thought it was merely another large facility. Then her prolonged stare began to understand its shape.

A wide foundation of segmented steel plates spread across the ground like the opened shell of some enormous machine. Reinforced walls rose from it in layered sections, locking around a central fabrication core. Thick industrial pistons braced the lower frame, while folded gantries, construction racks, and armored housings lined its sides like dormant limbs.

Above everything, an articulated construction arm rested at an angle, its joints folded but not asleep. It looked like both equipment and a weapon at the same time.

Cell 7 slowed down.

"Lead," Jannik gulped. "Do you have any idea what that is?"

"I..." Genevieve was at a loss. I also don’t know what it is, yet you ask me? Do you think I am omniscient?

Every Cell 7 member realized something.

Golden Eagle was shrouded in deep mystery. They could not even begin to explain those power-generating towers, or a structure that looked like a Barracks yet somehow not, or the facility with the rotating dish.

And now this? What was this? What was Golden Eagle planning exactly?

"Lead," Vivian’s breathing hitched. "Golden Eagle might be... an old-blood too."

Genevieve’s brows furrowed. If that was the case, offending him earlier was too grave of a mistake.

Yet how could they know?

The man did not introduce himself properly. He did not flaunt himself like the Shearmans, nor did he carry the earth-shattering presence of the Asters and other old-blood families.

And here he was, flexing one strange structure after another with no explanation.

The soldiers’ behavior, their almost-perfect synchronization, and their silent discipline had already dumbfounded Cell 7.

By that point, Vivian’s old-blood suspicion did not sound ridiculous. The mere thought of it was frightening.

Genevieve had seen old-blood families move before. She had seen the arrogance of people born into secrets, the careless confidence of those who knew the world had hidden rooms built only for them.

But Golden Eagle did not feel like that. Instead, he hid behind a codename, an army, and structures no one in Cell 7 could properly identify.

Maybe even Cell 12 could not identify it.

No wonder Young Star-Blood and that Shearman stayed with him, Genevieve thought.

She took a deep breath and forced the nervousness down. Worrying about what she had done would not change the past.

She would rather focus on what came next.

Just as their shock died down, two soldiers in dark special-forces uniforms approached from one of the side streets.

Cell 7 frowned at once.

Was Golden Eagle trying to silence them after seeing these structures?

Jannik looked around and realized that the escorts did nothing.

While they were preoccupied with their own caution, one of the special-forces soldiers leaned toward the escort leader and murmured something too low for Cell 7 to hear.

The escort leader gave a single nod.

"Squad, we have new orders. Move out."

Then the original escort team detached from Cell 7 with mechanical smoothness.

Lucie frowned. "What’s going on?"

The special-forces soldier turned toward them.

"Golden Eagle will meet you shortly."

Genevieve studied him. "Where?"

"Only Agent Courbet will meet him first."

Several members of Cell 7 stiffened. Before Lucie could speak, the soldier continued.

"Before that, you should have breakfast."

For a moment, none of them seemed to understand the word. Did they hear incorrectly?

"Pardon?" Genevieve furrowed her brows. "Can you repeat that?"

The DASF unit looked at them like idiots.

"I said, you should have breakfast. Commander’s orders."