“Looks like you chose to take your time,” Shamim, the only female team leader of the group, leading team Charlie which was the second to arrive, jokingly taunted the mission leader after he and his team were the last ones to arrive, thanks to them having too many people to shoot down and enemies to take out on their way compared to others.
Andrew upon hearing the taunt, just brushed it off while ignoring them as he passed by them and took the lead as he instructed, “Secure the door”
Upon receiving the orders, the soldiers removed the equipment they had brought with them in their backpacks and started assembling it. When they were finally done assembling it, the equipment looked similar to what might seem like a door frame with an opening at its center. With the equipment now assembled, they placed it behind the broken closed door and powered it on.
The moment they powered it on, the frame expanded and affixed itself onto all the four sides of the door frame, securing itself onto it to the point where unless it was not powered off, it wouldn’t be budging even a centimeter from the place it had been secured at.
Following the latching process, they saw something that they normally wouldn’t have been able to see if their headgears weren’t etched with runes. They saw the frames that were making the machine had started glowing, revealing some words which they couldn’t match anything they had seen or anything they knew of, were etched, glowing in white, before they sensed a subtle vibration which was followed by the appearance of an energy field which started covering the door and all the outside of the entire building, making sure that no sound could escape from the inside and be heard by anyone outside the building.
“Let’s begin,” Andrew declared, jolting the soldiers who had been surprised for the first time ever since they had gotten out of the pods a few months ago, however, with what they had witnessed today, they had a deep down feeling that what they had seen with their eyes wasn’t just some high-level technology shit that simply appeared like a magic, rather, this was truly a full-fledged magic.
Andrew’s words snapped their focus back to the mission. From the moment the building was covered with what they were told as an experimental energy shield, they knew that they had about half an hour at max before the energy on the frame ran out. So, within this window, they had to finish taking over the entire underground bunker, extract the leadership and come out of it.
“Move out,” Andrew commanded.
The moment those words came out of his mouth, the soldiers turned serious once again and started following along the corridor that was leading inside. At the start of the second phase of the mission, Athena asked her mother for help. And as a result, at the moment, the entire Esparian radio control towers and internet cables were taken under her control which was accomplished thanks to the diligent hard work of their spies, who had already infiltrated Esparia and managed to connect quantum USBs into Esparia’s communication infrastructures, bypassing the data transfer limitations which had been impeding Nova from having the entire world’s internet under her control.
However, for the time being, these limitations had been released as long as it is inside Esparia, albeit for a short time till the energy on those USBs waned away, causing them to self-destruct if not retrieved since they won’t be capable of facilitating the quantum teleportation process to allow her to have an unlimited access after they had no energy left within them to even operate, hence they were activated from the very start of the second mission and not during the time when the soldier jumped from the planes.
Upon reaching the end of the corridor which didn’t have any other opening, Andrew moved aside, leaving an opening for Shamim to pass him. Shamim just punched the wall in front of them, revealing that it was a false wall and was hiding an opening behind it.
The soldiers behind the line wasted no time as they surged through the now punctured wall, traversing the breach and entering a slightly expansive room that had a heavy metal door within, which when closed could only be opened from inside, while also a group of soldiers could be seen on the other side of it.
This door would then lead to another hall that had an elevator at its end. This elevator will send them deep underground where they will have to shoot a few people to complete the second phase of their mission.
The soldiers removed another device, this time from Shamim’s backpack. This device looked like a slightly oversized puck that was the size of a dinner plate. Placing it in front of the robust metal door, Shamim pressed the button to power it up. After that, along with the other soldiers, Shamim stepped back, raised their guns and started aiming at the soldiers behind the heavy door before taking a deep breath to concentrate.
As the device’s countdown neared its culmination and hit zero, their headgears modulated the amount of light it was augmentaly displaying to the soldiers, who couldn’t see using their normal senses thanks to their headdress covering their eyes, the reason? The answer was given just a few microseconds later–
FWOOOOBOOOOMMBRRRRRRR– was heard or maybe that was what they imagined it sounded like since the explosion that happened in front of them hadn’t released any sound despite having carried an explosion that obliterated the entire heavy metal door into liquid metal.
As to why no sound had been produced from the massive explosion and only light was seen coming from it.
The reason lay in what had happened in the scantiest fraction of a second –0.000003 to be precise, before the puck-like bomb had denotation. A shield materialized from within the device, delicately and perfectly calibrated to allow for it to be able to pass through the openings between the door and the walls that were holding it, completely encapsulating the door moments before the explosion followed which was now contained within it.
Nonetheless, the first explosion by itself wasn’t powerful enough to shred the door into lava given the amount of explosives that were within the puck-like bomb, however, that task was left to the runic shield to accomplish.
This runic shield bounced both the shockwave and the explosion from the bomb, reflecting it right back at the door before they were once again returned back to the runes. This was carried out repeatedly, with the shockwaves getting weaker and weaker, the more they bounced due to their energy being converted into heat rapidly, with the increasing hit than being used to destroy and melt the gate at the center of the shield.
With all of this happened in less than a quarter of a second, a fast enough period to allow for the shield which had its rune destroyed, managed to redirect the shockwaves and explosion before it fizzled out just microseconds after all the shockwaves were turned into heat which melted the door, not giving the soldiers on the other side enough time to even comprehend and react to what the heck was happening before they ‘accidentally’ died of a ‘bullet in the head’ disease.
The Eden special forces soldiers remained unfazed coming off the magical scene they had just bore witness to, they weren’t fazed by what they had just witnessed, not because they had experienced it and knew it would happen that way, but rather, it was because the headgears they donned, forced their brains to continue maintaining the same calmness they had before such magical event occurred in front of them by blocking the production of certain hormones that were needed for the soldiers to even get surprised.
Of course, this was done with the knowledge of the soldiers since they knew that it was of paramount importance to maintain the highest composure during the second phase of the operation.
With the soldiers on the other side now dead, the Eden soldiers continued to move through the corridor after jumping through the molten iron in front of them, reaching the elevator door, whose elevator was now at the underground level so that the people below could access it faster if they needed to leave the bunker.
This time Alex assumed the lead and put his armor-covered hand as he slightly pried open the elevator doors and when a slight opening revealed itself, he put his second hand in and forcefully pried the elevator door fully open, revealing the opening that had wires at its center.
Without hesitation, Alex jumped into the opening, closely followed behind by the other soldiers who let their bodies become the sacrifice to the heralded force of gravity as it transported them and brought them gradually closer to their mission’s objective. Hinting at their first-ever international covert mission to have a successful ending.