Chapter 239: Meeting (5)
Merlin smirked. "Give me a few more weeks. I’ll have the vocabulary down."
"Don’t you dare," she said, mock-glaring. "You already disappeared for months, woke up in a hospital, then come back and start talking about boardrooms. I can barely keep up with what you’re doing anymore."
Merlin’s gaze softened. For all her teasing, her eyes betrayed the worry she tried to hide. "I’m just... figuring things out," he said quietly.
Victoria studied him for a moment, then sighed. "Fine. But at least eat something before you start plotting corporate domination."
He chuckled. "I’ll try."
They sat like that for a while, simple, unguarded silence. The warmth of the apartment wrapped around them, soft and domestic, a world away from glass towers and scheming executives.
But Merlin’s thoughts didn’t rest. Not fully. Not tonight.
—
When Victoria finally went to bed, Merlin stayed up in the small study corner near the window. The city stretched below, lines of traffic like veins of red light, rain tapping faintly against the glass.
He powered on his datapad. Dozens of unread notifications blinked across the screen: financial reports, investment updates, meeting summaries. But one stood out, an encrypted message, no sender ID, timestamped less than five minutes ago.
He opened it.
"Mr. Everhart,
You’ve earned a glimpse.
Attached is a file. Access once. Delete after reading.
— D.C."
Attached below was a single encrypted document labeled:
[PROJECT ARCHIVE: Sable Nexus]
Merlin frowned. The name didn’t exist in the novel. Not once. He’d memorized every page, every subplot involving Invoke, and nothing called Sable Nexus had ever appeared.
He hesitated, then opened it.
The holographic projection unfolded, lines of text and diagrams spilling into the air above his desk. Weapon blueprints. Prototype schematics. Notes written in terse, clinical shorthand.
And at the bottom, one chilling line of data:
Core Design: Unknown Source. Non-human Origin.
Merlin’s blood ran cold.
He scrolled further. The file contained fragments, partial translations, runic diagrams, notes about instability and cross-dimensional energy signatures. Words like "extradimensional contamination" and "sentient response patterns."
’This... this shouldn’t exist here,’ he thought, pulse quickening. ’Invoke shouldn’t have anything like this. The novel never mentioned alien tech. Not once.’
He leaned back, breath shallow, the soft hum of the datapad loud in the silence.
’Did Damien show me this on purpose? To test me? Or to see if I’d panic?’
He closed the file quickly, fingers moving fast. Within seconds, the hologram dissolved. The message vanished. Deleted without trace.
The reflection of the dark screen showed his own face again, steady, but his eyes burned with questions.
’Invoke has something the novel never wrote about,’ he thought. ’Something beyond their world. Beyond this world.’
The air around him felt heavier. Almost like the same pressure that had hung in the labyrinth, faint, otherworldly, wrong.
He rubbed his temples. ’If Damien Cross knows about this... then the game I just stepped into isn’t business.’
His datapad blinked again, a new message, unencrypted this time.
Regina Hale: We’ll meet tomorrow at noon. R&D floor, restricted sector. Don’t be late.
Merlin exhaled slowly. "They really don’t give me time to breathe," he muttered.
He powered down the pad, leaned back in the chair, and let his eyes drift toward the skyline. The rain had started falling harder, streaking the windows with silver.
Somewhere down there, in the depths of Invoke’s research floors, secrets older than this world were being turned into weapons.
And somehow, a teenage outsider, a reader born from another world, now owned eight percent of it.
He closed his eyes.
"...Leverage," he whispered. "Fine. Let’s see how far it goes."
The night stretched long and quiet, filled with the hum of the city and the weight of new shadows.
And when dawn finally broke, gray and cold, Merlin was still awake, eyes open, golden irises catching the first light.
—
The sky was pale when Merlin left the apartment.
The rain from the night before had washed the city clean. Pavement still gleamed wet under the morning light, and the air smelled faintly of ozone and iron, a metallic tang that reminded him of lightning storms and something sharper.
Victoria was still asleep when he slipped out. He’d left a note on the counter: Breakfast’s in the fridge. Don’t worry, it’s not another hospital trip.
He almost smiled when he wrote it. Almost.
The ride to Invoke Tower was silent. The driverless cab cut through the morning traffic smoothly, weaving between trams and hovering couriers. Merlin sat back, watching the city shift from residential calm to the sharp lines of the industrial district, the domain of glass, steel, and ambition.
When the car stopped, the building loomed over him like a monolith. Invoke Tower. Its mirrored surface caught the sky, reflecting a version of the world that looked too perfect to be real.
Merlin adjusted his tie, dark gray, understated, and walked through the entrance.
The guards recognized him now. They didn’t ask questions, only nodded and let him pass. His ID flickered green as he scanned it, and the elevator doors slid shut behind him.
He pressed the button for R&D: Restricted Level 5.
The descent wasn’t long, but it felt long. The air grew cooler, drier. The hum of mana lines running through the tower became louder here, like a pulse beneath the floor.
When the doors opened, he stepped into a different world.
The R&D floor wasn’t like the boardroom’s polished luxury. It was sterile. Practical. Rows of reinforced glass partitions, flickering monitors, and mechanical arms suspended from the ceiling. Engineers and analysts moved with silent precision, most wearing white coats lined with faint runic seams.
And in the center of it all stood Regina Hale.
Her dark hair was tied back, not a strand out of place. Her suit jacket was off, sleeves rolled to the elbows as she studied a floating hologram of a weapon schematic. The lines of light traced something sleek, like a rifle, but not quite. Too intricate, too alive.
When she noticed him, she spoke without turning.
"You’re early."
Merlin stepped closer, eyes scanning the projection. "Habit."
"Good. You’ll need it." She flicked her wrist, and the hologram shifted, zooming into an unfamiliar core mechanism pulsing faintly with blue energy. "Do you know what this is?"
He studied it. The energy signature was strange, not mana, not any affinity he recognized. It pulsed irregularly, almost as if it was reacting to being observed.
"...No," he said finally. "But it’s not natural."
Regina nodded once. "It’s not."
She gestured for him to follow, leading him past the rows of sealed glass chambers. Behind each pane were prototypes, blades, drones, armor, all faintly humming with mana signatures. Some pulsed faintly; others were completely inert, like sleeping predators.
As they walked, she spoke.
"Invoke’s power doesn’t come from the board, Mr. Everhart. It comes from here. From what we build, what we discover. Everything the city fears, and everything it pays for, starts in this floor."
Merlin listened, his eyes tracing every flicker of light. "And the file Damien sent me? Sable Nexus?"
That made her stop.
Slowly, she turned to face him. Her eyes, usually cool and calculating, sharpened. "You saw that?"
"It found its way to me."
For a moment, the air between them thickened. The hum of machinery filled the silence.
Then she sighed. "Of course it did. Damien always did like his games."
"So it’s real?"
Her voice lowered, almost a whisper. "Real enough that it’s been sealed under seven authorization keys. You shouldn’t even know it exists."
Merlin met her gaze. "You think I don’t know what I’m walking into?"
"I think," she said, stepping closer, "that you don’t yet understand what Invoke really is."
He didn’t flinch. "Then explain it."
She studied him, a long, quiet look, like she was measuring more than his words. Then, finally, she gestured again, leading him into a smaller chamber.
This one was circular, its walls lined with crystalline panels. At the center, suspended in containment fields, floated a small cube of metal, matte black, no seams, no markings. But even from a distance, Merlin could feel it. A pulse. Slow. Rhythmic.
Like a heartbeat.
Regina spoke quietly. "Recovered five years ago from an excavation site outside the northern territories. The readings didn’t match any known material. Its mana field doesn’t decay. It absorbs resonance, adapts to it. We’ve been trying to decipher its structure ever since."
Merlin stared at it. The cube’s faint hum seemed to press against his chest, syncing for a moment with his own pulse.
"Does anyone else know?" he asked.
"Outside the board?" Regina shook her head. "No. Officially, it doesn’t exist. Unofficially, it’s the reason Invoke’s ahead of every competitor. Every weapon prototype you saw out there, every efficiency leap, every new alloy, all traced back to this."
"And you’re still experimenting with it."
"Constantly."
He turned his gaze back to the cube. "And you have no idea what it actually is."
Her lips tightened. "...No."
For a moment, silence filled the room. The hum of the cube seemed louder here, almost like it responded to conversation. Merlin could feel something else, too, faint threads of affinity energy brushing against his senses, but distorted. Twisted.
Lightning. Wind. Even space. They all felt... rejected.
He took a step closer. "May I?"
Regina hesitated, then nodded once. "Careful."
Merlin extended his hand toward the containment field. The air shimmered faintly, mana pressure thickening. When his fingers neared the barrier, the cube pulsed brighter, once.
Then the world shifted.
For a split second, his vision split into two, one showing the room, the other showing something behind it. A vast, endless darkness, and in that darkness, countless points of light blinking like eyes.
And then, as quickly as it came, it was gone.
Merlin staggered back, breath catching. The lights of the chamber flickered once, stabilizing a second later.
Regina was beside him instantly. "What did you do?"
"I—" Merlin shook his head, trying to steady his breathing. "I didn’t do anything. It... reacted."