Cassandra had never believed in the supernatural. She had never believed in ghosts, zombies, vampires, or whatever other stupid renowned beings that people whispered about. Most of the so-called creatures of the night had only been invented in the last century or so. Expecting them to have existed since time millennium was something of a far stretch.

Even so, her boss must have been such a believer, when he continued to make her go out and visit all those places with the so-called sightings. In a way, it might have been fair. The first sighting had involved a break-in of sorts. One of the old warehouses with medical supplies had been raided. Nothing of worth was taken but a few pills.

The only real evidence that somebody had broken in was the open door out the front, the few missing medical work, and an oddly silent alarm. That alarm had been supposed to alert just about everything and everyone around it in a ten-kilometre radius, yet there had not been a word out of it. The technicians didn't know what had been going on with it. The code had worked just fine. It had… gone on strike? Even so long after the fact, those words had seemed so foreign in the context of it. It had been called anomalous.

And her boss had taken it in every wrong way possible, taking it as an apparent sign from the league of devils themselves. Through a few mandates, every alarm in the whole city had been geared to the police station, made to send a simple signal every minute. Whenever one of the alarms would fail to send in a signal, the boss would be alerted, and Cassandra would be sent out to investigate.

Damn it, did she hate that fact. How many times had it been now? A little over twenty, at the very least. Each had made her come up empty-handed, nothing to show for it. Hours had been wasted over going the grounds. Never had so much of a blade of grass been pressed down. Cassandra was sure of it. She had checked more times than she was proud of.

Being fully honest, she had had a small interest in the case herself. A silent alarm, not working as it was supposed to? Sounded fun, sounded interesting and sounded like something that had a reason behind it. By the current time, the latter point had been swallowed right back down.

For everybody’s eyes and interests, Cassandra thought there to be nothing. The first had been a fluke, an error in the machine happening as somebody robbed the warehouse. Looking through the alarm models, all the silent ones had been from the same manufacture and had been issued in the same years. A faulty production line, with a bug that only manifested after a specific time. An easy answer to everything. And… her boss had denied the chance of it all, rejected the idea within a second of her putting it in.

The only reason that she was even bothering to check all the locations out properly was that she was just so damn perfect. Even if some stupid orders came down, she followed them with the dignity that a cop needed to have, while showing the precision that all others would only hope to ever gain. It would change when she got promoted. Until then… she had to follow along.

Still… it did get very annoying. Looking around, again and again, knowing there was nothing to find. It all seemed so pointless! Just rolling the rock up on the hill, just so that she could see it fall right back down to the ground. And screw the anecdote that came with that story! That idiot had no idea about happiness.

Jared, that appeaser of all, had excused the boss for his actions. The man had it in his sights that the order perhaps had come down from above, that another branch had catched wind of the mysterious happenings. Maybe there was another case like it. Maybe the boss had been ordered to send somebody out each time. Who really knew? It wasn't like she had been told. Communication might have been important and one of the police values on paper, but few of them actually remembered that fact. Transparency was apparently not that important to many. Yet another thing she would change up.

“How long more until we get there?” Cassandra asked, getting bored with all her innocent nagging at her superiors. Everything she thought might have been true, but it was only true to her. And… they would not be good to set out in the wild. She had to be Cass, the wonderful and utterly flawless police officer.

That was the persona she had out in the open, the one she had cultivated for over a year. If she continued to think all those thoughts of rebellion, revolution, and redistribution of power, mainly to her but whatever, then there were no chances of promotion for her. People did not like it when somebody wanted to switch up the powers, even if it would benefit everybody. People were stupid like that. Cassandra just had to accept that, and that was exactly what she had done since the start, her true intentions never really being shown off to the others. They wouldn't understand. She wanted the police to be glorious again, to have the image of protectors, of guardians that they once had. She wanted kids to want to be them, for adults to praise them, and for the elderly to love them. That was her dream, and there was nothing that would stop her from having it.

“Thirty seconds before it comes into sight,” the automation happily supplied, no different from the tone used a few hours earlier. Honestly, why had they not made any variance? It would have been so much better if they at least tried. Cassandra knew she had made that complaint so many times, but it was just so annoying to talk to a robot with pre-programmed answers. “I would advise that you begin preparations.”

“And I would advise that you heed my request about staying quiet until asked.” God, she hated those things. When allowed to talk, it would blabber its mouth out her ears. It would just talk and talk and talk, no ends in sight. Most of the words had no point, no real end to them. It would just use verbal speaking to fill the void of silence, never really figuring out that silence was the one thing it was good at being.

Still, the bucket of human ingenuity did have some form of a point. The standard procedure was to know everything about anywhere she would be heading. That meant that she would need a general overview of the floor plans, how the streets looked, and just which corners were perfect for hiding behind. Nothing had yet come to a shoot-out, but knowing where to duck behind was a good idea to get behind. Maybe that was the reason that it was so heavily enforced?

Might have been. Cassandra just knew she could get behind it. Knowledge was power, and she intended to have all of it one day. And she would do it in a smart way as well. While not fully stated, the state expected her to look through the issued floor plans, to use them for everything and everyone. Personally, the woman found that stupid, those plans never taking in anything in the rooms. And on the few occasions they did, trusting them was close to true stupidity.

No, she looked through the cameras. The things that were positioned at every corner in the whole city. Sure, some needed to turn and all, and there were perhaps a couple of blind spots, but it more than helped her get a view of what was actually important. School had taught her to exploit the environment to her advantage, and that was one subject that she had always excelled at it. Even now, as her eyes skimmed over the different feeds, the street angles, the lights, the everything helped her understand just how-

…

What was that? At first, Cassandra thought it was a smudge on one of the cameras, a small fraction of the side having some blurry moving on it. She wouldn't have thought about it at all until she noticed it was the same on the next camera viewing the same direction. And the one after that as well. And the next also.

That certainly made her attention. A visual bug, situated on one specific placement. If it had been up in the air, or on some patch of grass, she could have taken it as a peculiar error with upscaling, yet the place it happened made her wary. Because… it was just about three meters away from the alarm that was supposed to have been weirdly silent. Just under it, in fact. With a narrowing of the eyes, Cassandra began to take the situation a bit more seriously.

“Slow the car. Park close to here. We will be going the rest of the way on foot. Any actions must be done with the priority of absolute silence,” Cassandra ordered, her eyes fluttering around at everything before them. The brain implant was going as fast at it could. Having checked off the height, it was clear that it was some kind of humanoid being obscured by some form of technology. Whether that be an automation or a human, she did not know. Height was under-average, however.

What technology had the ability to obscure people out of sight? She knew of some clothes able to blind everything filming but never had she heard of such… camouflage before. Nothing meant to stop cameras from filming them. Nothing like it sat on the market.

It wasn't ordinary camouflage either. While there might have been the chance of invisibility of the current level working, there was no chance of it being that. Even the shadow made by the humanoid was being blurred. That was something no clothing could have done without influencing the cameras.

Just what was out there? Or who, Cassandra supposed. Somebody was most definitely there. That was different from all the times before. Never before had she seen this. Not once had the same effects come up. The alarms hadn't…

No cameras had been pointed at the entrance, during the first break-in. It had been too far out of the city for the adjacent building to have had anything pointing its way. The technology could have been used then. It was possible that the incidents were connected in more ways than one… Cassandra would have to call it in.

Just like that, a message was sent to her boss. She hardly needed to solidify the idea before the signal had been put out. Police had emergency signals like that. Handy in a pinch, but hardly good for conferring anything more than her current location.

… Looking at the camera, the blur was beginning to move a little to the side. It moved back and forth, never going too far away from the closed entrance or the alarm above it. Now was a good time to note that the blur was at a medicinal shop, something holding the more advanced versions of what had been scavenged during that first round. The people behind it were likely going after the supplies. Why? If they had the money for equipment, they should have had plenty to get a doctor or two. Was it something specific they were looking for? Maybe something that could only be gotten illegally, while still being present in the more expensive medicinal stores… Cassandra had no clue.

She only understood the fact that the figure opened the so-called door inside. A door that was still showing off its status as being locked down. That couldn't have been an error created from time. No chance of it. This was intentional.

And they were moving. There was no idea of how long they would stay inside. Even at the moment, Cassandra had no clue what they were doing inside. The cameras supposed to obey her every wish was not answering her commands. No rejection. Just a straight-up lack of signals. She could have sworn they worked fine just a few seconds prior.

‘We are engaging. You go and flank the back exit. I will go through the main entrance,’ Cassandra stated, already beginning to run. They were still a hundred meters away from the building itself, but that distance could be crossed in no time at all.

She had a job to do, after all. And doing it perfectly was something she always did.

Troy had to hold a hand over his nose to stop himself from sneezing. Just what was with that as of late? Was he getting the sniffles or something?

‘Focus on the task at hand, please,’ Adam helpfully supplied, putting him back to the task at hand. Namely, robbing a store for all good it had. God, he had always wanted to say that.