Emmett stayed near the edge of the canal. To anyone nearby, he looked like a tourist looking out over the water. He blended in so seamlessly that even when a young couple sidled up beside him, he didn't miss a beat.
The woman held out her phone and gestured toward the canal behind them.
"Would you mind?" she asked in accented English.
Emmett offered a practiced smile, took the device, and snapped the picture in one smooth motion. His mind barely registered the act—half his attention remained on the steady flow of data from the stealth ducks, the other half on the glow of magical wards that danced across his vision. He handed the phone back with a polite nod, the couple thanking him before moving on, none the wiser.
As they walked away, Emmett's gaze dropped once more to the canal. The last of McGuire's stealth ducks had floated into position, vanishing beneath the shimmer of the water.
Meanwhile, Emmett's swarm was closing in. Like Emmett, they were invisible. They moved in ripples and threads too small for the naked eye to catch—flowing between bricks, cracks, and shadows, They coalesced around him, then thin tendrils slipped down the canal's edge, snaking through the water toward the stealth ducks.
McGuire's voice was a whisper over the comms. "Annndddd... the kids are in position. Nice. Already getting some readings."
McGuire's ducks were sending info to the old drawing pad, which was analog, so Emmett couldn't see that info without a workaround. So TINA used a camera on McGuire's suit to send Emmett the preliminary data.
A few minutes later, Emmett's tendrils connected him to each duck, and a new view blossomed in his mind.
At first, the wards looked like a tangled mess—a dense web of glyphs, sigils, and binding threads layered over one another in dizzying complexity. Lines of power crossed and looped, some pulsing with active energy, others dormant like old scars. To most, it would have been nothing but noise. But Emmett ignored his eyes. As he extended his nanite web, patterns began to emerge. Slowly, the chaos resolved itself into structure.
The ducks did their work. As Emmett extended his nanite tendrils through them, gaps in the building's wards began to glow in his perception—faint fissures in the magical latticework that encased the merchant house.
It reminded him of infiltrating McGuire's stronghold. Emmett had used a similar technique then, and felt the way the demiplane there had swayed, thin as paper, threaded through dense wiring and electronics. His nanites had slipped between those layers like water through cracks, bleeding into the real world like the boundaries didn't exist. McGuire's demiplane had been brilliant, but fragile, easy to pierce because of how far McGuire had stretched it.
This was different. The mage-woven demiplane here was thicker, layered deeper, its foundation older and reinforced. But gaps were still present—but tighter, narrower, hidden like hairline fractures in stone.
Emmett had to refine his approach. He wove thinner tendrils, some only a few nanites wide—thinner than a strand of hair—and felt his way through without disturbing the lattice.
At first, there seemed to be dozens of cracks. They wove between the sigils and bindings like an invitation, each one leading into the structure's outer layers. All of them pointed to the same place—the main house.
Clara's voice came through the comms. "Any luck yet?"
When Emmett didn't reply right away, McGuire added apprehensively, "Are the ducks working out alright?"
"Yeah... It's just. All these threads lead into the main house."
Clara replied, "What do you mean?"
Athena added, "Were you expecting to find a hidden passage directly into the vault?"
YOU ARE READING
Mod Superhero
Science FictionFor this cyborg, power is just an upgrade away. Emmett was used to being caught between college and his engineering internship, but when he gets caught between a powerful hero and an even stronger villain, he becomes collateral damage. Instead of d...
