Chapter 137: Intensive Search
At the exact moment the prison boiled like a raging volcano of sheer chaos, filled with roaring chants and thunderous slogans, Lucy and Cain were cutting through the subterranean sectors and lower levels at lightning speed via magical dimensional portals. Moving through sealed corridors, they unlocked further cells, releasing wave after wave of prisoners across the deepest, darkest depths beneath the earth.
Neither Cain nor Lucy had anticipated the existence of a prison of such mythical proportions and massive structural expansion under this military facility. They had initially assumed it would merely be a large temporary holding center spanning eight or nine floors at most, given its outward military nature.
Yet reality proved it was far more than an ordinary military installation... It was a secret security complex extending like the roots of a demonic tree deep into the heart of the earth.
Cain and Lucy roamed the subterranean hallways, searching with sharp eyes for any control room, information processing unit, or diagnostic screen that could reveal the precise detention location of the godfather, "Darren," to reach him and resolve the matter once and for all.
Yet even after sparking a full revolt, liberating hundreds of inmates, storming multiple camera hubs, and breaching the overarching security networks through Lucy—whose magic had gained supreme adaptability and specialization toward modern technology upon attaining the "Truth Level," granting her absolute domain and flawless customization over her magical energy—the riddle remained locked shut. For a magical entity of her caliber, comprehending and deciphering human technology was mere child’s play.
Despite all their effort and evolution, every monitor inside the lower control rooms and major sectors failed to yield a single piece of data or record revealing where Old Man Darren was being held.
At that point, Lucy’s patience reached its absolute limit! She realized that the time allotted to locate Darren—let alone rescue him—was rapidly running out, without yielding a single tangible clue to relay to Cain, with whom she maintained a constant mental link.
Frustrated by this impasse, Lucy seized a high-ranking officer by the throat and activated her specialized technique known as "Heart Touch"... This technique was designed to delve directly into memories... yet she simultaneously activated another layer of sensory illusion.
Through this technique, Lucy directed direct magical waves into the officer’s nervous system, causing him to writhe in agony and scream desperately in his mind, while his physical body remained completely unharmed; that searing pain was merely a savage sensory illusion targeting his consciousness without inflicting actual physical damage.
Her goal with this harshness was to dive deep into his memories and pull out Darren’s exact location... Yet as she probed deeper into his mind, a profound sense of strangeness and suspicion washed over her!
It was somewhat similar to what had occurred previously when she used "Soul Touch"; she encountered a vast, distorted blank space within his mental records, resembling thick, impenetrable fog. It appeared that this officer himself had no idea where Darren was placed, as his memories regarding that specific detail had been completely erased!
Naturally, Lucy could not use "Soul Touch" on him here for various reasons; doing so required extensive time and concentrated energy, and digging through erased memories for this officer might prove to be a useless waste of time with no tangible result.
"Damn it!... Where on earth did they put that cursed old man?!"
Lucy muttered in deep anger and frustration... Although she possessed far more destructive and lethal abilities to wring out the truth, she was strictly bound by a self-imposed rule shared with Cain: refrain from harming the innocent, and avoid excessive force so those unattached to this conflict would not suffer.
Lucy felt that the traditional strategy of traversing floor by floor and searching manually for evidence had become a futile plan that would yield nothing in this critical moment—especially before full military forces arrived to surround the building, at which point they would be forced to abandon the idea of saving Darren unless they were prepared to spill an ocean of human blood!
Suddenly, a bold, untested plan dawned in Lucy’s mind...
Her plan boiled down to summoning thousands of microscopic dimensional portals simultaneously throughout the entire facility, using her magical eyes and divine senses to conduct a comprehensive sweep inside the spaces accessed through those gateways—crafting a cosmic surveillance network far surpassing the cluster of monitors in the room where she stood!
Lucy had never attempted a dimensional invocation on such an intense and massive scale before; the amount of mana and magical reserves required to fuel this network was colossal and catastrophic!
The primary issue was not merely the depletion of her mana, but rather the high probability that this terrifying magical pressure could trigger geological instability or unexpected side effects upon planet Earth itself!
Nevertheless, Lucy steeled her resolve and stood firm in the center of the locked camera room. She verified through her senses that no guards or soldiers were anywhere near her location, then with graceful, fluid movements of her palms, she closed her eyes and unleashed the surge of glowing mana within her body!
In the very next second... countless dimensional portals materialized before Lucy! They were microscopic in size, so tiny that even a human eye could not look through them... Yet Lucy unleashed her divine senses and her elegant purple aura, which took the shape of delicate, hyper-precise ethereal threads that slithered through those tiny portals, covering every conceivable corner!
At that exact instant... thousands of conflicting voices, whispers, and vibrations from every inch of the prison flooded her mind! Overwhelming this sensory chaos was the piercing blare of emergency sirens drowning out all else!
Yet thanks to her supreme divine focus, Lucy filtered out the noise and silenced the clamor, carrying out an intense, deep scan of every single room, cell, and corridor...
Thirty seconds of this violent, exhausting scan passed...
Then Cain’s voice echoed across the mental link: [Lucy... what is your progress? The main army forces are closing in to blockade the building, I believe!]
Lucy could not immediately distinguish Cain’s voice due to the sensory overload crowding her mind, but as his words sank in, tension coursed through her veins and the pressure mounted...
Lucy replied telepathically in a panicked, disappointed tone: [Cain... I don’t think this person is even in this building!... The bottom floor contains a single, completely armored cell, but inside I discovered a massive stash of lethal weapons and explosives instead of Old Man Darren!... It seems he isn’t here at all!]
Lucy hated admitting this bitter reality; the failure of her reconnaissance abilities to locate him meant the collapse of their entire plan and felt logically impossible... How could their arrangements fall apart like this?!
However... as Lucy continued shifting the positions of her microscopic dimensional portals and expanding the range of her sweep... a bizarre and deeply suspicious phenomenon caught her attention!
Lucy noticed a strange, unnatural dimensional rift resting inside this heavily fortified zone—a tear not of her own creation, nor bearing any trace of her magical energy whatsoever!
Tracing the path of that rift and analyzing the faint energy leaking from within it, her eyes widened in absolute shock at what she discovered!
It appeared these humans and security agencies had not imprisoned the old man inside an ordinary concrete or steel cell at all... Instead, they had sealed him inside an isolated environment trapped within a "dimensional rift," hidden away from physical space and reality itself! It was something that would have never crossed Cain or Lucy’s minds had she not deployed those microscopic, dense portals throughout the entire building!