Chapter 102: Found you
Most Hunters stopped looking for Fin days ago. Gone cold. Another rogue vanished, written off.
Not him.
He stood where Fin’s energy signature had spiked, then winked out. A week hadn’t erased everything. Faint traces lingered, like ozone after lightning. He knelt, pulling a device from his worn coat. Cylindrical, dark metal, humming faintly.
He held it low over the pavement. Needles flickered behind scratched glass.
’Weak resonance,’ he thought. ’Sealed tight.’
He packed the device away. Stood up. He already been to his apartment. Empty. Clean, almost sterile, except for faint residue near a repaired door.
He accessed the Guild archives too. Incident reports, Fin’s minimal mission history, Hana’s team data. All thin threads.
But combined with the residual energy here... patterns emerged.
He walked back towards the mouth of the alley, stopping beside a stack of overflowing dumpsters. He opened a battered case that looked like it held cheap tools. Inside, nested in worn foam, were precisely machined components.
He assembled them quickly, efficiently. A tripod. A focusing lens array. A receptor dish threaded with fine, silver wire.
He positioned the tripod carefully, angling the dish towards the spot where Fin vanished. He connected it to the cylindrical device from his coat, then to a small, rugged datapad. He powered it on. The screen flickered, displaying complex waveforms, scrolling numbers.