Stairs

In the dark alley between a quaint little ramen shop and a restaurant specializing in Fildenen cuisine on Mystar, Autumn and Fate were spying on the massive department store across the street. The street was filled with people going about their business, none noticing the lethal assassins in the exceptionally dark alley.

This department store, Ricky's Rags, was actually a very high-class clothing store, despite the name. Tom had helped them out by sending the information he got from the Morris job, which showed a very high amount of weaponry, armor, and explosives going toward this department store. Morris had unintentionally done Styx a huge favor because he directly stated in that hidden room's computer logs that he was sending all this to a group of rebels. It just went to show that even shrewd businessmen had shortcomings.

"Our armor only really gives you the option of going in guns blazing," Fate told Autumn. "I can probably ration my Prodigy power's output to scout the place out, but you stick out like a rich kid's Raven paint job."

"I'll just wait here then. Let me know when you find the entrance, and I'll make my way in," replied Autumn. Autumn and Fate then tapped their Ex Ears, establishing a call between them. Fate activated his Prodigy power "Null," jogging to the entrance of Ricky's Rags to maximize his time.

Once inside, he looked around for blind spots away from the eyes of the store's cameras. When he found a few, he went to the nearest one – which was under one of those circle clothing racks – and deactivated his Prodigy power, waiting for his headache to subside. When it became nothing more than an almost imperceptible throb, he activated Null again and continued scouting.

Four more uses of Null and several employee-only rooms later, Fate came upon a suspicious metal door in the manager's office. Extending his senses, he found that behind it was a set of stairs leading down past his senses.

Fate pressed his Ex Ear. "Think I found the entrance. It's in the manager's office, at the back of the store. Leads underground farther than I can detect."

"Mind giving me directions?" Autumn asked. After doing so, Autumn navigated her way in. While she indeed stood out, everyone in the store was wise enough to not say anything. That would change when she tried to enter the employee-only areas though, so she made sure no one saw her enter.

While the cameras would catch her, the duo would have more than enough time to finish the contract before the staff watched the footage later that night. Joining Fate in the manager's office, she glanced at the metal door. "Think your gloves are up to the task?" Fate asked her. She snorted in derision, before placing her palms flat against the door.

While Autumn was doing this, Fate went to work moving the big wooden desk in front of the door, ensuring no one would come in to attack them from behind. For extra measure, he also grabbed the filing cabinets in the room and stacked them on top of the desk using his TK.

Finally, he used his TK to lock the now barricaded door, before snapping off the mechanism. A few minutes later, the door was now a puddle of sparkling liquid metal, revealing a stairway with walls and stairs made of stone. The two assassins gave each other a nod, before entering the passageway. Autumn took the vanguard, due to her obscene power, while Fate walked about five feet behind her, railgun and Jenghang H-6 at the ready.

They walked down the stone switchback stairs for over forty minutes. Every now and then Autumn complained about it, saying things like "who the hell uses stairs nowadays?' and "now I'm looking forward to offing these assholes." The stairs were almost completely dark the whole way down, with only a single light source every five levels. After a grueling five hundred flights of stairs, they came upon another door.

This one was considerably larger, about ten feet in each wide and seven feet tall. Of course, it was still metal, so Autumn used her gauntlets to melt through it after they found it locked. It was also about two feet thick, unlike the previous door, so it took a full twenty minutes to melt through this one.

Autumn grumbled the whole time, and even Fate was starting to get irritated by the ridiculous infrastructure of these rebels. After melting the door, the two entered and arrived in another room. This room had several weapons and armor on racks, containing gunpowder weapons, explosives, tactical and ballistic armor, tools, and many other things. The walls were stone, just like the stairway.

Across from the now-melted door was another door, this one wood. Luckily for them, it was unlocked, so they went through. In doing so, they entered a gargantuan manmade cavern, roughly a mile wide, five miles long, and three hundred feet tall. Inside this cavern were hundreds of shipping crates and containers, Clunker Industrial Mechs, VTOL Bikes, fighter starships, and around two and a half thousand rebels and workers.

One of these workers looked over at Autumn and Fate. His eyes widened, he pointed at the two, and he screamed "ASSASSINS IN THE BASE!" The cavern carried sound extraordinarily well, and the cavern was surprisingly quiet considering the number of people inside (the Clunkers were designed to have quiet footsteps), so the noise echoed throughout the cavern.

Still, the cavern was really big, so it only carried about a mile, but other rebels and workers quickly started shouting the same, alerting everyone in a matter of seconds.

The worker who sounded the alarm first scurried behind a nearby shipping container, and all rebels within the next mile converged on Fate and Autumn's location, guns raised. Autumn looked to the left and let out a groan. Nudging Fate, she pointed to where she was looking. There, set into the stone wall, partially obscured by VTOL Bikes, angry rebels, and random boxes, containers, and crates, was an elevator.