Cessera deftly avoided guards and workers alike as she navigated the streets of the strange city of New Brasilia. From their last communication, the assassination squadron had told her everything had been going fine and she was good to proceed. It was actually just a cover for her own operation: stealing the miraculously effective gunpowder formula used by the ruler of the province. While the governor was busy either dealing with the assassins or dead, she would sneak into the facility where they produced it and grab samples and any documentation she could find.

  The gunpowder facility was far outside of the city itself, and she had to hike down a long paved road accompanied by carts of barrels. At one point she peeked into a barrel, and found a massive amount of gunpowder grains inside.

  The facility itself was a large collection of medium-sized buildings and warehouses. In the middle, a group of men carried a huge metal monstrosity out of a shack onto a large metal platform. She had no idea what it could be, but it didn’t really matter as long as the facility was empty of workers.

  The Southern Empire of Lamarc was desperate for new weapons. They were beset on all sides-the Veskayans from the south, the eldritch monstrosities from the Great Barrens, and the Federation to the east. A working gunpowder formula could turn the wars around. Once rumors of “thunderstaves” and “weapons of sulfuric magic” that matched the prophecies had reached them, they’d deployed Cessera and her team of spies to steal the formula.

  She checked the buildings one by one. The first few held myriad machines or vats of dough or chemicals, but eventually she struck paydirt. Only a few guards patrolled the area, which she easily avoided.

  The building she wanted was a huge warehouse of hundreds if not thousands of barrels, all filled with the explosive powder. Quickly breaking open a single cask, she scooped a bottle of the powder into her spatial satchel.

  ———

  The bodies of the other assassins were laid on the large operating table in a row. Bariyon, using the self-designed magical implements in his hands, carved runes into both the bodies and the table around them. He, as a lich, could use necromancy to gather snippets of information on a target from a corpse. Kyle was still going to interrogate the live one, but this may prove easier.

  Kyle had dug out 6 basement and sub levels beneath his manor. Some were for storage of particularly important nanofabricated materials, others for magical proceedings like this one. Kyle also dedicated two floors to his newly established secret police-the Legio Securitas. They would grow and someday need their own building, but that would be enough for a while.

  Steeping back from the table with a flourish, Bariyon activated the runic array. “Voila! You can interrogate them for 2 minutes, maybe more.” As one, the bodies eyes shot open. Kyle asked his first question.

  “Who sent you?” The bodies answered in a bit of a chorus, where one would say a few words and then be followed by the next. “We were sent by…” “…the Southern Empire of Lamarc…” “…to steal your gunpowder formula.” Kyle was confused. “Why try to kill me then? That has nothing to do with gunpowder.” “It’s a dist…” “…raction.” As one, the bodies stopped glowing and closed their eyes.

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  “CRAP! Everyone get to the gunpowder facility; perhaps we can still catch the other agents!” Bariyon commented in a bored tone, “That wasn’t as long as expected, I must be getting rusty. Have fun, kiddos! Play nice!”

  As one, Kyle and his guards sprinted out of the bunker, up the stairs, and out the door of the mansion into the streets towards the gunpowder factory.

  ——

  Kyle and his men arrived at the gunpowder facility and found only confused workers busy connecting the factory to the power grid and removing the old steam generator. The spies were nowhere to be seen.

  “Spread out; they can’t have gone far!” Kyle and his men checked everything. One of them found a disturbed barrel, inside of which a scoop of powder was clearly missing. Hundreds more guards were summoned to the area, and they spread out along the main roads and plains.

  Kyle’s Thunderhead drones also watched the area, but they found nothing until almost the last minute. A group of three suddenly appeared out of a thicket of trees, riding horses.

  ————

  “Did you get a sample?”

  Cessera walked up to the small campfire, where her two compatriots waited. One was a stereotypical high elf woman, Fendra, and the other was a human man, Alistair, who was also her lover. Quickly rousing her horse from its grazing, she answered, “Yes, I got a sample, and some notebooks as well.”

  “Wonderful. Our spymasters should give us some time off after this, I swear.” Cessera sarcastically responded to Alistair, “As if. Ernst is heartless, he’s probably already got a mission lined up for us after this one.”

  The three unroped their horses and rode out of the thicket onto the road it bordered.

  At once, the elf, Fendra, stopped cold. “Someone is watching us. Only my detect intent charm activated, nothing else. They must have magic stronger than my own, if that was the only charm activated.”

  “We ride, then!” Cessera took the lead, and the three galloped north on the road to the nearest teleportarium. Although the Veskayan empire presented a unified front to the world, each governor was barely allied to the next one. The investigation would stop the minute they crossed provincial borders.

  ———

  “Shit! They’re getting away…” Kyle raged internally, as none of his men could hear through his helmet unless he wanted them to. The moment he spotted them from the drone, they immediately galloped north at full speed. “More magical bullcrap… how else would they know I was watching?”

  Aside from the death or capture of the whole first team, the operation had been mostly flawlessly executed. They’d gotten away with the gunpowder in the end.

  “This is why I need a secret police. To stop crap like this…”

  Without a mechanized unit or a motorcycle division, only Kyle himself could possibly catch them. However, they had magically noticed his drones, so they might be able to get through his armor and hurt or kill him if he went alone. Who knew what was possible.

  Kyle decided to go ahead with the full on mechanization of his forces. Motorcycle units, trucks and officer cars, more tanks. And the best part? All of it would be magically powered. He and Bariyon had drawn up a theoretical engine that could take donations of mana from those riding the vehicles and also from the ambient environment.

  If efficient enough, oil would be needed only for manufacturing and vehicle production could become incredibly cheap, as using metal presses to make perfect runes was easy. A new age was dawning upon Lindus-the age of the armored automobile.