Next was the camera in the corner of the living area. Simple enough to take care of. I hopped onto the back of a couch pressed into the wall, sneaking along the curved ledge up under it. Then I gave it the same treatment as the camera up on the second floor. I flicked the three of diamonds up, blocking the camera’s lenses and taping it into place.

It wasn’t the most subtle way of disabling a camera, but it would do until the morning. By then, they’d have bigger problems to worry about than the blocked cameras; namely, their empty vault.

I took a moment to ease the excitement pounding in my very soul, loosening back up and chilling out significantly. I was in the home stretch now. The most difficult part would be the initial entry into the vault since I didn’t know what kind of internal security they had.

With the cameras taken care of, I could move on to the next stage of my master plan safely. Before that though, I approached the vault and looked it over. Seeing it through the camera in the bear and seeing it with my own eyes were two entirely different things.

The vault stuck out from the wall slightly, the round door protruding even more so from the thick reinforced walls. It would be a pain in the ass to get into it through brute force, so it's a good thing I had alternative measures.

I took my bag off my shoulder and pulled out eight small anchor points. They looked like four-sided arrowheads, only sized up by several times with small electrical pieces stringing in between the prongs. Each of the prongs also held cylindrical wafers on their tips, looking a bit similar to the inside of a headset.

I tossed four of them out. They each aligned with the wall midair, stabbing into the wall all around the vault. As soon as the sharp point hit the wall, they activated with a near-silent mechanical hum and popped into the wall as if magnetized.

I tossed the other four out, anchoring them to the couch on the other side of the room so that the vault was contained in its entirety by the eight anchor points. From there, I pulled out a device from my bag. It looked roughly like a data slate with several additional handles and antennae attached to it.

I tapped around the screen of the Sonic Suppressor. Nothing changed. It wasn’t until I left the area of the Sonic Suppressor and tossed a Scouter into it that I was assured of it working. The Scouter made zero noise as it slammed into the wooden floor.

So far so good. Really, the plan was going off without a hitch so far. Nothing felt better than my plan coming together so flawlessly. Well, almost nothing. Getting my sweet, sweet loot would be even better.

Once I was satisfied, I moved over to the vault and pulled out my modified Tapper. It was easy to glue it to the wall. It wasn’t the strongest bond, but it would hold temporarily. I put one of the vault cards into its hand and moved over to the other.

I didn’t have time to set up the system on my wrist to control this too, so I had to pull out my phone and activate the device. I watched it, carefully following its motions on the other card reader as I swiped in time with the device. The readers blinked green.

From there, I moved on to the slightly more difficult part of cracking the safe. I reached into my bag, rifling around in it for a few moments before I found what I was looking for.

It was a stethoscope, though three chest pieces dangled from it. Each of them was modified slightly and had additional suction cups wrapped around the metal bits. It was a rather cheap creation of mine, thrown together last minute as I researched Mount Knock's vaults.

Originally, it would’ve been nice to get some actual vault-cracking tools, but the really good ones were expensive and hard to get. This thing—let's call it a Listener- no, that name was taken… How about a Hearer? Hmm… whatever… anyway, it was based on a real device. It wasn’t nearly as effective as the real deal since I just slapped it together, but it would still work for my purposes.

Mount Knocks, at the end of the day, was a clothing brand. Their vaults were more status symbols than anything, and as such they were more focused on aesthetics than actual security. That being said, they were still a branded item that the company proudly promoted. They had all the common workarounds to prevent people like me from getting in. Too bad common workarounds had long since been worked around.

I threw on the headset and set up the suction cups. It took a bit of knocking around, listening to the reverberations inside of the vault carefully before I found the right spaces. Eventually, I got all three stuck in the right places.

From there, it was as simple as listening in while I twisted the dial. For an inexperienced safe cracker, the three different audio cues would blend, merging into something that would be impossible to distinguish any clues from.

To me though? I could hear the faint grinding and clicking of the internal mechanisms as they moved, mapping out the internals with each sound. Even the slight differences between the three suction cups helped me figure out how everything was set up even without seeing it.

Of course, there were a lot of red herrings mixed in there. Vault makers, especially high-end ones, loved adding teeth to their mechanisms to make more noise to obfuscate the right sounds. Even those could be clues though with the right know-how.

It took a while, about fifteen minutes, before I twisted the dial for the last time and a louder, stronger click resounded throughout the stethoscope device. I took it off and threw it back into my bag.

I stepped back and grabbed the large wheel in the center of the vault. Without the mechanisms stopping its motions, I easily twisted it, sliding the locking bars out of place. Of course, the much larger mechanism made quite a bit of noise, but the Sonic Suppressor kept anything from escaping its boundaries.

My heart pounded in my chest as the wheel clicked into place and the door lurched slightly. Pure excitement coursed through me as I pulled on the door’s handle, easily opening the vault and allowing me to see my loot-

It was empty. No, not entirely empty, but far emptier than I would’ve liked. In my head, I had this grand image of money, loot, and treasure thrown around and piled everywhere similar to the Neo-Joker’s vault.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Instead, I entered a space that more closely resembled a museum than anything. Four pedestals stood in the pure white vault, each holding items within a glass case. The back wall of the vault held the pièce de résistance. The painting, hanging in an elaborate golden frame, was the item Cristoph bragged about the most when I talked to him.

It was a painting made almost a hundred and fifty years ago named Future Expanse by an artist under the name of Octaeon. Now, normally art was hard to put a price tag on since it meant different things to different people. Becoming a world-famous artist was even harder, most never reaching such a state until long after their deaths. Regardless, it was usually hard to tell what and why exactly a piece was so expensive.

The same couldn’t be said for Future Expanse. It wasn’t the most expensive painting, but it was fairly popular thanks to its ‘prophetic vision’. Future Expanse depicted a massive city skyline surrounded entirely by the desert. Although some features were off, such as specific buildings, the painting was almost a one-to-one depiction of Aythryn City. It depicted a person standing far in the distance overlooking the city in all its horrible splendor.

At first glance, it wasn’t all that impressive. And then the realization strikes that the painting was originally finished a hundred and fifty years ago back in nineteen thirty-nine. The thing was painted during the Second World War, and yet it almost perfectly depicted the city.

I looked at Future Expanse for several long moments, the pounding in my heart sending rushes of adrenaline through me. I could literally feel the history in the painting. Every brush stroke was made with purpose, all of them pulling together to make the beautiful painting before my eyes.

It almost felt disrespectful that it was locked up in some corpo's vault. I was practically a saint for liberating it from this place and bringing it somewhere it could be appreciated.

I shifted my gaze to the other four objects on display. Two of them looked like masks of some kind, one twisted into a feral frown and the other a destitute grin. Both were made out of some kind of wood from the looks of things. I didn’t recognize them, though they could probably fetch a fair price.

One of the other items was a silver sculpture of a man, though it looked like it was done by a five-year-old. It was probably some famous sculpture or something, though it was fairly ugly. Definitely an item to sell.

The last was a hatchet, though it was ancient-looking. The head was seriously tarnished, though it had tribal engravings all along the surface. It was rather wicked-looking with several sharp prongs and odd blades sticking out like feathers. Hmm… it’d probably look good in my stash.

Before grabbing anything, I walked around the vault and checked the area for additional security. All four of the glass cases were locked tightly down, each of them set up with sensors that would detect if the case was removed.

I also noticed small white stickers with the item's descriptions. Apparently, the two masks were from a tribe of Cwalin, the long-extinct indigenous people of the Cwalu continent. The hatchet was supposedly a Cwalin chieftain's at some point long, long ago. And finally, the statue was a sculpture called Vater by Walker Lukaras, a rather famous sculptor from the early two thousands. I noted each of the items down. Actually knowing what they were put me in a far better position to sell them.

It was rather easy to get around. I pulled out a crumpled-up duffel bag and the glass cutter from my bag. I easily went around and cut large circles into each of the cases, giving me just enough room to withdraw the items held within.

I hadn’t planned any protective measures for the four pieces, unlike the painting, so I just wrapped each of them in bolts of fabric and tossed them into the duffle bag.

The painting proved to be a bit trickier to extract. At least, at first glance. The thing was lined with vibration sensors, so even the lightest touch would set them off. At least, that was the plan. Whoever set them up was a massive failure though. Instead of drilling through the back wall and wiring it all together, the lazy idiot just ran the wires down the wall and into the floor.

It was an easy weakness to exploit. At first, I planned on just cutting the wires and disabling the sensors like that. Thankfully, I checked the lines before doing that, picking up a faint electrical pulse. It was probably set up with a fail-safe to activate the alarm if the pulse was disrupted.

It would’ve been an issue, but I’d actually done some research on how to deal with such a thing after running into it at the Neo-Joker’s warehouse last time. Since the wires were so cleanly exposed, it was a rather simple fix.

Surprisingly, the easiest way to get past such a sensor was to just directly overload the device and fry it. I rooted around in my bag and pulled out one of my Scouters. I popped open its case and pulled out the wires, connecting it to the circuit before activating the thing. A small buzz rang out from beneath the floor.

I checked the lines one more time, finding them dead. I easily cut the wire to the sensor before finally retrieving my precious loot. The painting came off the wall rather easily, though I left behind the bulky frame. Unlike the other stuff, I actually came prepared for the painting.

First, I pulled it off the wall. Stretched canvases were a bit of a pain to work around, but not impossible by any means. I retreated back into the living room and borrowed a blanket before laying it out on the vault’s floor.

With a soft surface down, I placed the painting face down onto it. I went around the back of the canvas where it was stapled into the wood frame and carefully pried out each of the staples. It was a bit difficult at first, but I got used to it fairly quickly. Once the painting was detached, I wrapped it in glassine paper, a special kind of paper I bought in advance to prevent anything from harming the painting. I then shoved it into a painting tube and tossed it into my duffel bag.

That just left the frame. The frame wasn’t the painting’s original. The original had been replaced by synth wood at some point, and had simply been stapled together just like the painting. It was equally easy to pull out all the staples and disassemble the frame into a bundle of ornate planks which I promptly secured in my duffel bag.

With my loot gathered, I backed out of the vault swiftly. There was no reason to stick around anymore. I gathered up my Sonic Suppressor, any clues left behind, and of course the teddy bear. Just as I was about to crack open a window, I froze up.

I smacked my helmet lightly, feeling dumb as I backtracked to the vault. In the middle of the space, right where the painting once sat, I pulled out my calling card and activated it. Neon-blue holographic fire arced along the edges of the silver card, casting a faint illumination over the blue moon in the middle. I took a bit of the adhesive from the tapper and applied it to the card, sticking it right in the middle of the frame.

I eyed my card in deep satisfaction. I don't know what it was, but something gave me a deeply pleasurable thrill every time I marked the heist as mine. A sort of possessive happiness that I just couldn't put into words. Was I okay? Mentally? Hmm...

I finally exited, picking up my stuff and locking the vault behind me. I headed for the window. It was easy enough to cut through with my glass cutter, though the rushing wind and high pitched whistle was a bit distracting. I shifted the Sonic Suppressor over, silencing it.

Once I got a sizable hole, I activated the Drop Chutes, grabbed the suppressor's parts, and glanced back toward the apartment. The howling wind was loud enough that those upstairs were starting to move around, something I completely overlooked when planning this. Note to self, wind can be quite loud at high elevations.

I stepped out onto the faux balcony. Now or never, Shiro. My gaze drifted down past the flyer traffic-

Something in my stomach dropped.

The ground looked so- so different from a hundred and twenty-ish floors up. Instantly I felt a burst of nausea in the back of my head. Was this really such a good idea-

A particularly strong burst of wind caused a harsh vacuum in the living room. Standing as close as I was, I couldn’t even resist as it sucked me out into the open sky.