As cruel as it sounded, leaving people in the captivity of the Numerological Compact for 'just a little bit longer' might have been the right choice. After all, if they had been suffering for years, what was another one or two?

Aside from the additional lives that would be lost, of course. People were cycled in and out of their devices all the time. They had no regard for those who were weak, simply making up for them with further numbers.

There was another risk that made Velvet want to act as quickly as possible. Now that she had seen the particular arrangement of people in this place, she could see how they might continue to cause further trouble for the Scarlet Alliance. New versions of the virus that could hit just as soon as they thought their networks were stable again. Or possibly they would take some other route.

It wasn't impossible that they could amplify the insights of any cultivator. Velvet was surveying various documents as she considered her options. For a project this large, it was impossible to entirely sanitize what was available, and it appeared that there had been some intention to create something of the sort. Whether this was it or it only functioned for the single purpose was unclear. Somewhere there might be a final report, but she would have to know where it was. Otherwise it involved accessing every isolated computer and reading every document scattered about.

Ten Thousand Scrolls had its limits. Even if every scrap of data was placed in front of her in a digestible arrangement, it could take Velvet days to read it all. Weeks, even. Every moment she risked getting caught, or at least some aspect of her intrusion discovered. That would place both her and the current prisoners at risk.

So Velvet had several problems that compounded together. She did need to retrieve as many documents as she could. Given some time, she could likely pile everything of relevance into her storage bags, though whether certain computer systems would remain operable was another question. And a thorough dismantling would be obvious, which would mean killing everyone who entered the area.

That would take longer as well as provide them opportunities to engage some sort of self-destruct mechanisms which the Numerological Compact hadn't been shy about before. Then everyone would be dead, much of the data would be destroyed, and Velvet would be… probably fine. But it wasn't her personal safety that was the issue. She would likely survive anything short of the destruction of the planet, and even that might not be enough depending on the method.

Her time as an infiltrator had taught Velvet to take advantage of opportunities as they arose. Ultimately, she knew she couldn't linger. Either she had to leave quickly and come up with a plan, or act decisively. It wasn't a matter of seconds, but she also couldn't develop a complex plan.

When the moment came, her plan was over the top foolish. Hopefully a few small tweaks could make it more feasible. But she couldn't miss the opportunity in front of her. An Augmentation, a strong one that had dangling threads of connection to the local facility. Her name probably appeared in some of the documents, but Velvet hadn't seen it. She could guess who was responsible though.

This woman needed to die. It took Velvet only a short assessment to confirm that. If she had been an unwilling test case, killing her wouldn't have been productive. But the woman seemed free to do as she pleased, and was quite confident.

Velvet was waiting for her in the center of the facility. Then, the entire place disappeared.

-----

Elder Dzana was gone. The small contingent of Hardened Crown guards were of no use, obviously. How could they be? They were only good for fighting, and even then they were barely functional as meatshields.

Elder Ogsar would have to handle the situation on his own. He had to. Because if he didn't, his life was forfeit. The Numerological Compact owed too much to far too many different sects in the Exalted Quadrant to not bear fruit. Technically, it could be said that they had succeeded. Project Apocalypse worked. Probably. At least, it seems that damage to the connected networks of the Scarlet Alliance had begun before Everheart's thing happened- spreading also to what limited computers the Exalted Quadrant kept.

They had known the risks, of course. They simply thought their security sufficient. But now it was too late for that. At least Project Apocalypse had been kept on internal networks. It had all been fine.

And now one of the main facilities was missing. The actual proof of concept, the one working example. And Elder Dzana.

Ogsar just stared at the empty pit in front of him. He was supposed to be doing something. But what could he do? It was gone. All at once. Teleportation… the Scarlet Alliance was known to have highly developed spatial abilities. They surrounded their entire territory in distortions. They teleported between systems regularly, but only a relatively small number of traffic that could fit on their solar platforms.

How had they done this? It was more than impossible. Yet the evidence was in front of Ogsar's eyes. It was gone. Nothing but dirt was left. He stretched out his hand. In front of him should have been a wall. He felt nothing but empty air, and a gentle breeze.

What happened?

It had been a quarter of an hour now, and he hadn't gotten beyond that step. Where would he even start? He swept his senses down to the bottom, as if the entire facility had somehow fallen into the earth. Certainly, much of it had been buried underground but it had extremely sturdy foundations.

He dropped down. A sense of vertigo filled him as he fell. He simply couldn't process what had happened, so a simple fall of a few hundred meters put him off. The dirt at the bottom was nicely compact. Dust was still drifting down the sides of the pit. Chips of stone, beyond the edge of the facility.

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How?

He would understand if he felt a Domination cultivator appear. Even a determined Augmentation cultivator might have been able to pulverize the facility, but could they steal it away? Not in an instant.

Osgar was sick and going in circles, both with his thoughts and motions. There had to be a solution, but he had nowhere to start. He should tell someone to help him figure it out. But… if they couldn't, he would just look more foolish. But he needed it. He couldn't afford to be seen as ineffective. Dzana was gone. She was too important. He had to get her back. The facility. Revenge, maybe. There had to be a trail.

He flew up to the edges, digging out some dirt. It was all so surreal. He couldn't figure it out.

-----

"Your subordinate is being a real pain," Velvet commented to the woman in front of her. Dzana, apparently. Saved her the trouble of looking it up.

She currently had a void blade in her gut, but she wasn't dead. She was, however, thoroughly restrained and not terribly long for the world. Velvet just needed her as an example to mimic energy if it became necessary.

Disappearing a facility was way easier than moving it. But that one guy kept wandering through the air even though his energy senses were picking up all of the pertinent information. He shouldn't need to move through the missing facility.

Tricking his body and mind into believing he was actually moving around precisely as he pictured was difficult, but at least Velvet could focus on him. Everyone else had the decency to rely on their long trained energy senses. If there was nothing there according to them, why would they get closer?

It wasn't really gone yet. They just couldn't perceive it. However, Velvet was working hard to make sure that it would be gone. While managing the troublesome elder, Velvet was also severing the edges of the facility from everything around it. She wasn't a specialist in lifting heavy things, but if she thought of it as a ship it felt quite reasonable. In theory she could shove around a planet, though her energy wasn't precisely suited for that.

A single battleship? Reasonable. Less than the size of a city, because people were tightly compacted. No space for them.

The facility's formations were freaking out, because they believed they had lost connection to the rest of the world. They had, but not because they weren't physically adjacent. Velvet simply wasn't letting anything flow. Tricking formations should have been easy, but they weren't people. Thus, they were harder for her to understand.

She just had to keep them under wraps until she could get out of the system. Velvet was fairly certain she had chosen one of the bad plans, but now she was already committed. And this Dzana woman had to die.

"How many other facilities do you have like this?" Velvet asked.

The interrogation was mostly pointless. The woman would know she was dying. It wasn't easy to convince a cultivator that their recent memories were fake, and Velvet didn't have such a complex setup. Illusions wouldn't help.

"Hundreds."

But she could still pick out lies. Velvet was fairly certain there were one or two more, but it couldn't be much more than that. Having the woman lie to her directly was convenient, at least. If she refused to say anything, that would be it.

"Who has the most in their territory?"

Velvet was barely interested in the answer. She had most of her focus on other things. Like the stupid elder poking and prodding things still. Convincing him he wasn't running into solid material was the most annoying. At least he hadn't tried the doors. He should have remembered where they were.

Breaking dirt and rock was not as simple as it was made to sound. People looked down on tasks that were 'dumb labor', but Velvet knew better. After all, her dumbest friend was involved with that very thing. But just because Durff was dumb didn't mean he was stupid or ineffective. He was dumb because he was too straightforward and naive. But it worked out for him, didn't it?

Velvet had seen him mine void ore- notoriously difficult, and done without energy. Surely she could break apart a bit of dirt without tools. It was just creating force while keeping up the illusions that was difficult. At least she was geared towards impossible perception points now. She didn't have to manually form all of the false reality. People would naturally believe an empty space on a planet was full of air, instead of nothing. So if they saw nothing, all she needed was to add a bit of light.

If this one guy would stop touching the building.

Velvet's plan was to pick it up. Yes, one of the rejected plans from earlier. But all of the people were here, and the facility was sturdy. It would survive into space. Then she could hold in any necessary atmosphere and keep it moving. The best option would be getting the support of those she was carrying, but… that wasn't going to be easy. Releasing them from their bondage carelessly could result in mental shock, a sort that could spread through their connections and kill everyone.

It wasn't the worst end. But since there were better options, Velvet really wanted to get them out.

If that elder was alone for like one second Velvet could kill him. Half a second. A few milliseconds, maybe. But then what would she do about the sudden disappearance of aura? She couldn't play it off like the whole facility disappearing. It would be obvious she was still around.

Fine. He would be allowed to live, for now. Besides, the way he was dumbly poking the same section of space over and over was a fairly easy illusion at the moment. But he might have just been trying to get her off guard.

Did Velvet have to carry the whole foundation? Probably. It was kind of stuck to some bedrock, so it would take some work to separate it without breaking it. It was a good thing small distances didn't matter to Domination cultivators. Velvet could attack people hundreds of kilometers away. Something less than a single kilometer was effectively touching her, unless she had to use a void blade. Then she had to actually stab people most of the time.

If Velvet was successful, she was going to make sure to find the other facilities and do the same thing- but better. Because mysterious disappearances would really mess with the Exalted Quadrant, far more than a few people dying.

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