The tunnel continued on and on. Isaac lost track of the time - when perhaps an hour had gone by after their conversation about the afterlife (and perhaps to get their minds off the lingering taste it left in their mouths), Reed abruptly declared that this was “fucking boring” and proceeded to regale Isaac with the plots of movies she had seen.

These weren’t normal movies. These were ones from before the Unleashing.

“Hold on,” Isaac cut in. “How could you see movies from that long ago? You can only see movies in the cinema, and they’re definitely not playing movies that old.”

Reed gave him a smug look. “I’m a Reed. We have access to things beyond your mortal plane of understanding. The people from back then had a way to play movies at home. They had their own little movie screens in the comfort of their living rooms. And today, only the Reed family has such a device that can do something like that in the entire world. It takes up the size of an entire football field, but I basically grew up in that room.”

She grunted as she pushed down on her handlebar - Isaac was pretty confident he himself was doing the heavy lifting now, but considering the beating Zou Mei put her through, he was willing to cut her some slack. “Anyway,” she continued. “The movie ends right where it started. The two gangsters have some lunch in the same diner from the start of the movie, so they end up getting entangled with the two robbers who stuck it up before the opening credits. But the gangster with the afro, he doesn’t take any shit. He says he wants his wallet back, and the stick-up artist is like ‘how do I know which wallet is yours?’ And you know which wallet is his? It’s the one that says Badass Motherfucker on it-”

An explosion boomed above them. Fortunately, it came from the surface, and only sent dust and dirt down onto the handcar. The muffled explosion was followed by a few others.

“We must be below Four Eagles now,” Isaac realized. “The State Police are besieging it.”

Reed eyed her scabbard. “Well, that makes two of us.”

A few minutes later, while explosions rolled above ground, the tunnel opened up as it reached its end. The handcar emerged in a large chamber lined with concrete as the pair brought it to a halt. Only a few scattered crates and a ladder to the surface provided them with company in the otherwise untouched chamber.

“This leads right into Dai Hong’s office,” Isaac reminded her. “So, we might end up stumbling upon the command center of the whole operation.”

Reed leapt down from the handcar. “Think Babs is in there?”

“She very well could be.” He tugged uncomfortably at his collar. “Do you think we’ll have to kill her?”

Reed paused and looked off to the side. “We have to stop her, that’s for sure. If that means killing her…then we gotta kill her.”

Isaac didn’t like it either, but they didn’t travel all this way just to talk it out with her - they talked back at the base. The only thing that mattered now was stopping her for good. Isaac hoped to bring her to justice, but Babs herself often said that sometimes, death was the equivalent of justice. He would see what happened when he got to her.

The sounds of battle seemed closer now. Isaac led the way up the ladder, Reed following behind. At the top, he found a hatch covered in Zhanghai characters. His fist lit up with Rddhi, powered by the bracer, and reached for the handle. That’s when they heard the gliders. The first Zhanghai junior officer burst into the room, landing on his feet, sword in hand, scanning for targets. Right when he noticed Isaac and Reed, a sound wave slammed into his face, breaking his goggles and sending him skidding across the ground. An entire squadron followed him up.

“You better hurry,” Reed muttered, dangling from the ladder with one hand while she flung more sound waves at the opponents.

The metal hatch felt cool to the touch. He worried about a potential password to the security in place, since Dai Hong hadn’t told him one, but his fears were unfounded. The hatch was just a lock, and the bracer itself was the key. Crimson flooded from his palm, filling the characters with their glow. After a moment, the hatch hissed open, steam emerging and covering the two cadets.

“Let’s go!” Isaac yelled as he clambered inside. Reed sent out one final sound wave and followed him over the top. Right after she made it through, he closed the hatch shut and planted a palm on it; energy drained from the hatch, back into his palm, until the last spark disappeared. More steam hissed as the opening now sealed itself shut. Swords banged on the metal from below, but to no avail.

With a sigh of relief, Isaac took stock of the situation. They found themselves in a similar-looking storage room with a lone door on the other side. Beyond it lay Dai Hong’s office itself. With bated breath, the two took up positions on either side of the door, Reed ready to slam a sound wave inside as soon it opened. Isaac powered up his hand, filling in the familiar Zhanghai characters, until the door hissed open.

An elongated guitar wave rushed through. No response came.

The two cautiously crept inside, ready for a fight. Instead, they found themselves in another storage room. Another lone door awaited them; this time, they approached it slowly.

Dai Hong must’ve built multiple doors here to increase the secrecy.

Pipes ran along the walls. Light fixtures glowed white. They took up the same positions. When Isaac opened the door with his bracer, Reed slammed a sound wave forward, only for it to return right to her. The Arts in her ears negated her own attack, and she then gave a tired look at the piece of metal blocking their way.

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“A door that leads to a wall,” Reed observed. "Excellent."

“Hold on.” Isaac took a knee and examined the floor. He found a loose tile in the doorway and removed it, revealing a pile of white charms. When he eyed the metal again, his face dawned in realization. “This is an illusion. Or rather-”

When he put a hand on the metal, sure enough, it was real. But when he pressed on it, it slightly buckled. The metal could move, but only to the left, so Isaac slid it over. Behind it, just as he guessed, was the familiar black miasma of an illusion. The usual red sparks and yellow imaginary numbers floated from it. After a deep breath, Isaac stepped through it. He found himself in yet another storage room, but when he glanced back at where the doorway would be, he only found solid wall. Reed emerged through it - the entrance to the passageway was disguised as a simple room full of crates, the door itself disguised as normal wall.

“A door that leads to an illusionary wall,” Reed corrected. “No wonder the junior officers didn’t find it.”

On the other side of the room stood another door with a small window. Through it, there was a long hallway. They had made it inside the offices. Isaac recalled the carpeted majesty of the Zhanghai tower from Babs’ memories, but this had a more utilitarian look to it, fitting for a hidden, subterranean facility. The walls were merely plain concrete, with metal light fixtures casting a cold glow over it all. Nobody was in the hallway, so Isaac stepped outside, Reed following him.

No enemies fired on them. No cultivators blasted them. They had the element of surprise.

They could either go left or right, so Reed shrugged and went right. The goal was to subdue Babs and disable the Polyphemus superweapon; if Reed’s research from before his Four Eagles mission was right, the facility would’ve been built into a submerged stadium from before the Unleashing. Somewhere down here they would find their objectives. Apparently, they still had a few more passageways to explore until they found Dai Hong's headquarters.

The concrete walls gave way to sheer tunnels carved into the earth. A metallic staircase brought them into a large chamber with a concrete bunker at the back. They finally ran into the enemy - a pair of Zhanghai junior officers fiddled with a broken lightbulb on a wooden beam in the middle of the chamber. Isaac and Reed nodded, then flung ranged attacks at them. Neither missed, and both opponents went down.

They had to move quickly, since their attacks created commotion inside the bunker. Isaac sprinted toward the metal door on its side and kicked it straight open. Inside, he found what must’ve been Dai Hong’s office. The walls were covered with filing cabinets, maps, and charts; electronic equipment filled the long wooden tables; multiple panels and levers were situated below a wide window giving a view further into the facility.

The men and women inside were busy at work serving as the nerve center for Babs’ plan. The sounds of battle from above were even louder here; Isaac could’ve swore he heard tank treads rumbling while their turrets fired. Samurai armed with swords and Restorationists armed with clubs moved to defeat the invaders, but Isaac and Reed, the adrenaline and energy surging within them and honed from the earlier battle, moved faster. She skewered a big guard while Isaac tossed his opponent headfirst into a filing cabinet.

“The facility’s been breached!” a guard screamed into a voicepipe, his warning echoing across the lair. Another guard slammed a fist on a red button; air raid sirens and alarms began to blare, their screeches matched by the noises the guards made when Reed ran them through her sword.

A man in an eyepatch, Rddhi coursing through him, engaged Isaac with a superpowered fist. As they exchanged blows, Isaac recognized the man as Salvatore, the Yellow Knife triad from Babs’ memories. He fought intensely for his leader, his screams and cries and strikes moving their fight towards the table. Isaac, on his back foot, dodged a fist, grabbed a radio, and slammed into his head. With Salvatore stunned, Isaac slammed a fist into his stomach, sending the man crumpling to the ground.

Salvatore led out ragged breaths. With everyone else in the room defeated, Isaac gripped by the collars and threw him into a chair. “Where’s Babs?” he demanded. When Salvatore hesitated, he struck him across the face. Spittle emerged in his lips when Isaac grabbed his chin. “Where’s Polyphemus?”

“Right there,” Reed answered for him, her eyes gazing intently out the window. Isaac dragged Salvatore with him as he headed towards the window.

She was right. The window gave them a prime view of the stadium. It was bigger than anything Isaac had ever seen before, dwarfing anything that could be found in Arcadia. Though the field itself, its grass having long ago given way to the stone foundations beneath, was only the size of a football field, endless rows of empty seats surrounded it. Five hundred years ago, the rows would’ve stretched into the sky, but a solid layer of wooden scaffolding and cement ceiling blocked out the light. Many of the seats had been removed, too, in favor of watchtowers, defensive outposts, research buildings, storage rooms, and electronic equipment. A few tunnels stretched outwards, heading underground toward the stations below the city. Catwalks and walkways ran in mazes near the roof of the stadium.

Polyphemus itself covered nearly the entirety of the football field. Isaac’s eyes widened - it was exactly as Essex had described. It resembled a gun, its long barrel casting an equally long shadow across the ground beneath the floodlights near the top of the stadium. Hundreds of scientists and officers were hard at work on it while welders put the finishing touches on it. Claws, tubes, and cables led upwards from the back of the gun, connecting to the power source resting atop of it. The Heart, with little regard or recognition of who now controlled it, beat steadily, carelessly, its flesh pulsating amid the metal bands.

“The Heart,” Reed mumbled in awe. Several of the tubes were now colored red as blood flowed into the Heart. Whose blood in particular - Isaac didn’t want to know.

He picked up Salvatore by the collars again. “How do we disable it?”

Salvatore coughed out blood and then grinned. “Like I’d tell you. Kallipolis is almost here. I won’t betray it on the day it arrives-”

There was a clash and screech of metal. Dust fell from the ceiling and there were hurried screams from outside when a catwalk fell entirely, slamming into the ground near Polyphemus. A large explosion had torn a hole in the roof; multiple ropes appeared, dangling from the jagged edges of the hole.

The men who slid down them were heavily armed and glared at their opponents with grim eyes beneath their steel helms. Unlike normal State Police, their militarized cousins wore mottled camouflage fatigues in place of proper suits, but they were no less ruthless and deadly. The Armed State Police were here, and rappelled down their ropes in large numbers. Their comrades placed machine guns on the edge of the roof and fired down into the stadium. Bullets whizzed by, slicing through scientists, pinging off Polyphemus, tearing small rips into the Heart, which let out a guttural groan in response.

“Asps,” Reed muttered. A-S-P. Their black uniform resembled the color of the serpent that matched their nicknames.

“We can’t let either the Heart of Polyphemus fall under State Police control,” Isaac exclaimed. “We have to hurry!”