Nightfall – Eastern District, Guild Licensing Bureau
From the outside, the building looked innocuous. Three stories of white stone, vine-covered columns, and the faintest glimmer of protective enchantments. It even had a welcome mat—enchanted to bite anyone with overdue paperwork.
Beneath that charming façade, however, lay half a dozen detection wards, two rune-sealed vaults, a pair of anti-teleportation sigils, and one suspiciously passive snack golem that definitely watched people eat.
"Alright," Damian whispered from the alley, eyes glowing faintly as he reviewed the floor plan in his mind. "Window of opportunity: twelve minutes. Distraction team in position?"
Riven's voice crackled softly through Kael's improvised comm-crystal. "Inside already. One guard's unconscious, the other's debating the ethics of dragon milk in the breakroom. Give me three seconds."
Mira looked nervous.
Kael patted her on the shoulder. "Relax. It's just a government building. In a high-magic surveillance state. Guarded by paranoid bureaucrats with fireballs. What could go wrong?"
Entry
Using the forged apprentice IDs and a mind-numbing "inspection scroll" Kael had designed (complete with grammatical errors to seem authentic), they entered through the employee side door. The enchanted sigil scanner blinked once… twice…
Then beeped green.
Inside, the Guild branch was everything Mira had promised: marble floors, floating paperwork orbs, disillusioned junior mages hauling glowing crates, and enchanted potted plants that whispered judgmental things if you walked too fast.
Damian led them straight past the central kiosk, nodding coldly at a tired elven clerk who didn't even lift her eyes from her animated notepad.
So far, so good.
As planned, Riven had engaged a junior staff group in the records wing, posing as a "compliance enforcer from the Rune Taxation Office." He was currently giving an impromptu—and entirely fake—audit on scroll inventory mismanagement.
One intern was crying.
Another was taking notes.
A third had gone for coffee and hadn't returned.
Meanwhile, Kael slipped into the utility closet and jammed a copper spike into a scrying relay node, muttering a string of hex-commands in Binary Mage.
Mira watched, impressed and slightly terrified. "You speak… ward protocol?"
Kael shrugged. "Kinda. I reverse-engineered their firewall during lunch."
They reached the enchantment registry vault with five minutes to spare.
The vault door was sealed with a nested sigil-lock: a triple-layered glyph circle with rotating elements that shimmered with reactive mana.
"Okay," Mira whispered, pulling out her forged sigil scroll. "This should spoof the first two locks. But the third is… uh, experimental."
"You mean untested?" Damian asked.
"I mean I found it in a ruin, and it was screaming when I took it."
Kael clapped his hands. "Great. Field testing."
They placed the scroll.
The first lock clicked.
The second flared and fizzled—false alert.
The third?
The third flared blue—then shifted to a deep, unsettling crimson.
"Oh no," Mira whispered. "That's not on the sigil chart."
The vault didn't explode.
But the walls began whispering.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Disembodied voices murmured secrets in ancient tongues. One voice sounded suspiciously like Kael's high school chemistry teacher.
Then the floor beneath them rippled.
"Oh crap, oh crap—"
Too late.
They dropped.
They landed in a hidden sub-vault, surrounded by glyph-marked books, floating chain-bound tomes, and a glowing orb suspended in a containment field.
"What is this place?" Mira gasped.
Kael dusted himself off. "Looks like… the Guild's forbidden archives. Classified enchantments. Blacklisted spells. Arcane deep storage."
Damian stepped toward the orb. "This wasn't part of the plan. But it might be more valuable than the entire registry."
Before they could analyze further, a click echoed from the wall.
A door opened.
And a young intern stepped through—carrying a sandwich, blinking in confusion, and staring at the group like she'd just walked into the worst team-building exercise of her life.
"…you're not supposed to be here," she said.
Riven's voice came through the crystal. "Guys? Security just tripled. I think they found my clipboard."
Kael sighed.
Damian reached for his emergency escape rune.
Mira turned to the intern. "How do you feel about switching careers?"
Chapter Four: Smoke, Spells, and Severance Packages II
The intern stared at them.
They stared back.
Damian moved first. "Mira. Distraction. Now."
"Wait—what do I—"
Kael grabbed a scroll off a nearby shelf labeled "DO NOT UNSEAL—Contains Time Bees."
He ripped it open.
"WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!" Mira shrieked.
A buzzing vortex of shimmering golden bees poured from the scroll, warping time in five-second bursts around them. The intern screamed. Sandwich hit the floor. Somewhere, a wall aged twenty years and crumbled into moss.
"Time bees," Kael said, grabbing Mira's arm. "Surprisingly literal."
"Security's coming!" Riven's voice snapped through the crystal. "You've got maybe thirty seconds before you're boxed in."
"Not an option," Damian muttered. He drew a runic circle on the floor with a quick slash of his blade. "I'm creating a false pathway illusion. It'll give us ninety seconds. Move fast, lie faster."
Back upstairs, the halls were alive with alarm glyphs. Floating surveillance orbs sparked red. Scribes were shouting. Guards conjured weapons out of midair.
"Unauthorized sigil presence in the archive vault!"
"Intruder spellprint detected!"
"Where's my sandwich?!"
The team burst from a broom closet two halls over, cloaked in Kael's distortion field. They looked like a group of mildly confused custodians… until a passing golem turned and scanned them.
"Busted," Riven muttered, then punched it straight in the rune.
The golem toppled with a satisfying crunch. Kael grabbed a fallen mop and chucked it down the hallway—triggering a floor glyph meant for movement detection. A web of magical chains erupted… on the mop.
"Distraction mop," Kael said. "You did good, buddy."
Damian threw down a smoke crystal. "Split paths. Mira with me. Riven, Kael—west hall, then loop to rendezvous."
"What if we don't make it?" Mira asked.
"You will," Damian said. "Or someone's getting fired."
They scattered.
Riven led Kael through the west wing, vaulting over enchanted desks and ducking magical enforcement scrolls that screamed "CEASE YOUR ILLEGAL ACTIVITY!" in increasingly polite tones.
Kael flung a hex-jammer behind them, causing the alarm spells to glitch and chant motivational slogans instead.
"You're doing great! Keep going! Betray your empire!"
Meanwhile, Damian and Mira dodged through the inner scriptorium—past stunned scribes, a collapsing summoning circle, and a very angry flying book that insisted it was "lawfully bound."
"Is this normal?!" Mira shouted.
"Define normal," Damian said, kicking open a window.
Kael and Riven burst through the western courtyard just as guards appeared from the other end. A giant flaming sigil ignited overhead—Emergency Ward Lockdown.
"We're cut off!" Kael shouted.
Riven looked around. "Not yet."
A cart rumbled past—pulled by a confused goat golem carrying crates of experimental muffins.
Riven grabbed Kael, yanked him aboard.
"Now we're baking," Riven shouted, hurling muffins like grenades.
Behind them, the other half of the team made their move.
Damian leapt down from the second floor, cloak flaring as he caught Mira mid-slide along a collapsing banister. They landed in a roll. Mira shot a quick pulse from a stolen scroll, shorting out the lockdown glyph for just a second.
It was enough.
The team reconnected at the alley gate just as the security golems rounded the corner.
Kael punched the exit glyph on the wall.
The stone shimmered—then opened like a mouth.
"Don't stop running!" Mira shouted.
Back at the Hideout
They collapsed back into the hideout, panting, covered in soot, muffin crumbs, and stolen ink.
Damian tossed the glowing orb from the forbidden archive onto the table. "Not what we came for. But it's better."
Kael collapsed into a chair. "We just broke into a magical federal building, unleashed temporal bees, and stole a soul orb guarded by enchantments older than plumbing."
"Yup," Riven said. "Five stars."
Mira looked at the orb, then at Damian. "This isn't over. You know that, right?"
"No," Damian said. "This is just the first move."