Watching the Omegas collapse was an eerie experience, almost like an avalanche going downhill, the raids gained momentum and speed as time went on. But the military-style weapons and tactics I had seen were nowhere to be found and none of the Powered made an appearance, either. That allowed the Police and the League to sweep them away with minimal casualties, but there were a few. One of them, was sadly Detective Kendall, who got shot during a raid, taking multiple bullets, wounding her leg and putting her out of commision for a while.

I wanted to help her, but sadly, the cell-growth drug Galatea and I were researching in the bio-lab seemed to be a failure. It worked to grow tissue, so it might be a solution for food-production but the problem was that it worked too well. The drug needed to be purpose-made, according to the DNA of the recipient, which was not too problematic, but it also needed to be administered with no margin of error into exactly the right spots, or it would partially get into the circulatory system and would cause unpredictable growth somewhere in the body, possibly causing vascular constriction or blockades and growths similar to cancer.

That made it a failure for its intended purpose but the idea to use it to grow meat in a tank might be something to be explored at some point. It was unlikely to be useful for now, as the drug was resource-intensive to make, but maybe in the future.

But if I was unable to help Detective Kendall, maybe I would be able to find out who was behind the Omegas, or at least find a trail towards them. It seemed that the Omegas themselves were only scapegoats, used for a purpose and now discarded. It might be simply a false-flag operation by one of the pundits that was riding the wave of outrage, but to create and foster a street-gang over multiple years, only to discard them, for a small, political gain seemed to be a long shot. There had to be some bigger, more important goal behind them, something that they might have already achieved and now, thanks to my involvement, they were no longer useful and in the process of being discarded.

That would made sense, assuming that the ambush was supposed to stoke the flames of public outrage, simply by killing a lot of police-officers, followed by a decisive campaign against them propelling the leaders of that campaign forward. It made some sense. That left the question of the military trained operatives I had encountered, people with such training did not grow on trees and I doubted that contracting mercenaries for such an operation was feasible. There were better ways to influence public opinion with the amount of money needed for something like that.

With the disappearance of the dangerous elements, there had to be a change in their behaviour. Sadly, the massive police-raids made the old models next to useless, but I tried to use them anyway, looking at low-probability areas, places that had been on the list of possible locations but had been discarded as unlikely.

The amount of data I was looking at was massive, as basically every area had been on the possible-list at one point before being discarded and I had little to no useful criteria to eliminate anything, I was basically looking over the data and hoping that I had some sort of inspirational insight. Calling it a long-shot was being charitable.

That is, until I came upon my nightmare. A peaceful, small house, at the edge of suburbia, luckily without a dog and the fencing facing the street was wrought iron, instead of white picket but it looked just too wholesome and too cliché, it made my skin crawl. What caused a small twitch in my paranoia was that the house itself was quite well concealed, thanks to some bushes in the garden and hedges around some of the property. Without any logical reason, I asked Galatea to look closely at the property before I returned to my random searching in a haystack, hoping to be pricked by a needle.

“I think you found a homosexual house-sharing group.” Galatea told me, two days after I had asked her to look into them.

“Why do you think so?” I asked, before looking at the data she gave me.

There was only one name on the mailbox, but three males were coming and going regularly, sometimes together, but there had been no other guests. To Galatea, the combination of secrecy and withdrawal hinted at a clandestine relationship, the involved persons made it homosexual.

It took me a moment, to realise that I had seen all three of them before and I had to stop myself from smacking my own head when I made the connection. The three guys were the three frat-douches that had tried to drug Sophia, a few months back, when we had been out, dancing.

I had never consciously made the connection between them and Fleetfoot who had attacked me right after, going by the old adage that once could be a coincidence, so when no further data pointed to them, I had not thought about them further. Asking Galatea, she pulled up the images made during that night and ran her regular image-comparison filter, only to get the result that they were not the same persons.

“Can you use the filter that we used to change my appearance? Remember, we made plastic inlays to slightly change my features in order to fool facial recognition.” I suggested.

She pulled up that filter and started to make possible changes to the faces we had seen at the suspicious house. The result was quite impressive, using simple prosthetics and a little makeup, the three turned into the three frat-douches we had seen at the club.

“I think that deserves a house-visit, do you agree?” I asked Galatea. If there was a link between them and Fleetfoot and the Omegas, maybe I could find something that allowed me to pull out an extra thread or two, maybe even follow the thread back to their backers.

“Yes, I think so. Why don’t you ask Sophia if she will join you? With the current climate, it might be useful to have her watch your back, especially if you go in stealthy, without your armour.” Galatea suggested.

She was right, I had beaten Battlemaster once by surprising him, but I somehow doubted that I would be as lucky again so having backup was essential.

I explained my plan to Sophia who seemed happy to join me, so shortly after midnight, we headed out, avoiding streets, instead sticking to dark alleys and concealed passages as we went. Luckily we were not heading into the poorer parts of town but towards the suburbs, so we were mostly able to avoid major roads and similar places that might get us spotted. If we wanted to get into the poorer parts of town, we probably had to stick to the few sewer-connections I had scouted out, something I wanted to avoid if at all possible. Getting the smell out, would be a major undertaking, maybe even impossible.

Despite the increased police-presence, we managed to get into the neighborhood without being detected. Anath agreed to wait nearby, hiding in a dark corner, while I was approaching the house. A drone in the area had confirmed that three heat-signatures were in separate rooms towards the back of the house, probably asleep. My plan was to go in, sneakily look around, hopefully finding something. Maybe I could find a computer and allow Galatea to crack it, maybe there would be some sort of office, our operation was a rather long-shot once more.

Looking at the house, I realised that there was something interesting about the place. Few people had security cameras all around the place, watching every corner of the property. Watching them closely and moving carefully, I managed to avoid them and get close enough to the one watching the door to connect my gauntlet, and thus Galatea, to it. The internal security was better than expected, according to her, and she only managed to loop it for a short amount of time before the programming would detect that something was wrong.

On a timer, I hurried to pick the lock, luckily that one was only a high-end, but otherwise normal, lock and by now I was quite good at lock-picking. Inside, Galatea connected to the security panel and hid my entrance from the alarm-system.

By now, my curiosity was definitely at a peak, there had to be something quite interesting here. After looking around in the front area, I moved into the hallway towards the living room, when I saw something definitely worth checking out.

Why on earth would anyone have a solid metal door, leading towards what I assumed was their cellar? And why was it locked from the upper levels, as if to make sure nobody could get out?

There was a key in the lock, so I picked it and made sure that the door could not fully close on me. And I walked down the stairs, curious what I would find at the bottom of the stone stairway.