My Milf Conqueror System

Chapter 179: The Queen’s trap

[Jake’s POV]

The white gas poured from the ceiling vents in thick, heavy cascades, pooling on the floor and slowly rising like a toxic tide. Through the lenses of my tactical goggles, the red emergency lights gave the fog a sinister, bloody hue.

I stood near the center of the vault, my assault rifle raised, watching Darius work.

He wasn’t trying to breach the titanium blast door at the entrance. He was at the far back wall of the vault, pressing the last three blocks of high-yield C4 directly against the reinforced concrete.

"The blueprints Katarina provided showed a structural weakness here," Darius said, his voice muffled and metallic through the rebreather mask. He molded the explosive putty with calm, terrifying precision. "This wall backs up to the primary elevator shaft for the subterranean levels. If we blow it, we can access the cables and climb out of the kill box."

"And the ledgers?" I asked, looking around at the thousands of black leather-bound dossiers containing the darkest secrets of the European elite.

"We set the thermite on a delayed fuse," Darius replied, inserting the detonators into the C4. "We blow the wall, we step into the shaft, and we trigger the fire. The thermite will burn the ledgers to ash, and the explosion will consume the toxic gas."

It was a desperate, suicidal plan. If the C4 didn’t breach the concrete, we would be trapped in the vault when the thermite ignited, roasting us alive in a four-thousand-degree inferno.

But we didn’t have a choice. Isabella Vane had played her hand perfectly.

"Set the timers," I ordered.

I moved quickly through the rising fog, activating the delayed fuses on the thermite charges we had placed at the base of the mahogany shelves. Thirty seconds. That was all the time we had to blow the wall and get out of the room before the vault turned into a crematorium.

"Charges set!" Darius called out, stepping back from the concrete wall. "Stack up!"

I sprinted to the back of the room, pressing myself flat against the side of a heavy wooden bookshelf, shielding my body from the blast radius. Darius stood beside me, the remote detonator in his hand.

"Blow it," I growled.

Darius squeezed the trigger.

The explosion was catastrophic. The shockwave hit me like a physical wall, knocking the breath from my lungs and shattering the bookshelf I was using for cover. A storm of splintered wood and pulverized concrete filled the air. I shook my head, fighting through the disorientation, and looked at the back wall.

Darius’s C4 had done its job. A jagged, smoking hole, roughly four feet wide, had been blown completely through the reinforced concrete. Beyond the hole was the dark, cavernous expanse of the primary elevator shaft.

"Move!" Darius roared, grabbing my shoulder and hauling me toward the breach.

We dove through the jagged hole, tumbling out of the vault and onto the heavy steel roof of an elevator car parked on the sub-level.

We had barely cleared the threshold when the thermite charges inside the vault ignited.

It was a sudden, violent eruption of pure, blinding white heat. Through the hole in the concrete, I watched as the mahogany shelves, the leather dossiers, and the toxic gas were instantly vaporized in a roaring firestorm. Isabella Vane’s leverage over Europe was gone. Reduced to absolute ash.

But we weren’t safe yet.

The heavy steel cables of the elevator shaft stretched upward into the darkness. Above us, the muffled, rhythmic thud of heavy artillery and automatic gunfire echoed through the mountain.

Katarina Volkov had hit the front gates. The surface war had begun.

"Climb!" Darius ordered, slinging his MP5 over his shoulder and grabbing the thick, grease-slicked elevator cables.

I grabbed the cables beside him, my muscles screaming in protest as I hauled my body weight upward. The physical enhancements from the System gave me the strength of three men, but the exhaustion of the freezing swim, the firefight, and the explosion was beginning to take its toll.

We climbed in absolute darkness, the only sound the distant roar of the battle above and the crackling inferno of the vault below.

Suddenly, the elevator shaft was flooded with harsh, blinding white light.

Massive halogen floodlights, mounted to the walls of the shaft, snapped on simultaneously. I squinted against the glare, looking up.

Fifty feet above us, standing on a steel maintenance grating that crossed the shaft, were six of Isabella’s Tier-One PMCs. They were looking straight down at us, their assault rifles raised, the red dots of their laser sights dancing across my chest and Darius’s back.

We were caught like rats in a drainpipe.

A speaker mounted to the wall of the shaft crackled to life.

"I must admit, Jake, your sheer refusal to die is becoming genuinely impressive."

Isabella’s voice echoed down the shaft, calm, aristocratic, and dripping with dark amusement. She wasn’t angry that we had escaped the vault. She was entertained.

"Tell your men to lower their weapons, Isabella," I shouted up the shaft, my voice echoing off the concrete walls. "The ledgers are gone. Your leverage is ash. The war is over."

"The war has just begun, Mr. Hart," Isabella replied smoothly. "You destroyed my physical records. A painful loss, certainly. But did you really think a woman who controls the European Central Bank would leave her entire empire vulnerable in a single room?"

My blood ran cold.

"I have backups, Jake," Isabella whispered over the intercom. "Digital fragments. Encrypted drives hidden in safe houses across the continent. It will take me months to rebuild the network you just burned, but I will rebuild it. And while I do, I am going to make sure you are not around to interfere."

"You’re not even in the mountain, are you?" I realized, staring up at the mercenaries.

A soft, elegant laugh echoed down the shaft.

"Of course not," Isabella said. "I am sitting in a secure chalet fifty miles away, drinking a very excellent vintage of Bordeaux and watching you on a live feed. I knew you would come for the ledgers eventually. I just needed to make sure you didn’t leave."

She had played us. She had sacrificed her own vault, her own physical ledgers, just to lure me into a kill box she could control from a distance.

"Kill them," Isabella ordered her men. "And bring me his ring."

The mercenaries on the grating above opened fire.

"Swing!" Darius roared.

We kicked off the concrete wall, swinging wildly on the heavy steel cables. A hail of bullets shredded the air where we had been hanging, sparking violently off the concrete. I let go of the cable at the apex of my swing, launching myself toward a narrow maintenance alcove built into the side of the shaft. I hit the metal grating hard, rolling to absorb the impact, and brought my rifle up. Darius landed in a similar alcove opposite me.

We had cover, but we were pinned down. The mercenaries above had the high ground, and they were laying down a relentless, punishing barrage of suppressing fire that chewed through the metal grating of our alcoves.

"We can’t stay here!" I shouted over the deafening roar of gunfire. "They’re going to drop grenades down the shaft!"

"Then we go up!" Darius yelled back.

Darius stepped out from cover, exposing himself to the mercenaries above, and raised his MP5. He held the trigger down, unleashing a continuous stream of automatic fire directly up at the grating. The sheer volume of fire forced the mercenaries to duck back.

It was the only opening I was going to get.

I launched myself back onto the main elevator cables, using the System’s enhanced strength to pull myself upward in massive bounds. "He’s moving!" a mercenary shouted, leaning over the grating. I drew my combat knife and hurled it upward with lethal precision. The blade buried itself deep into his throat. He pitched forward over the railing, plummeting past me into the dark abyss.

I reached the underside of the maintenance grating.

I grabbed the metal mesh, hauled myself up, and swung my legs over the railing, landing directly in the center of the remaining five mercenaries.

They scrambled to bring their weapons to bear, shocked by the sheer speed of the assault.

I relied on raw close-quarters combat. I drove my elbow into the faceplate of the nearest guard, using his staggering body as a human shield as the man next to him opened fire. I pushed the body forward, drew my sidearm, and fired two rounds into his chest. Darius breached the grating a second later. He grabbed the nearest mercenary by the vest, lifted him off his feet, and slammed him headfirst into the concrete wall.

The last two mercenaries broke. They turned and sprinted for the heavy steel door leading out of the shaft and into the upper levels of the fortress.

I raised my sidearm and dropped them both before they could reach the handle.

Silence fell over the maintenance grating, broken only by the heavy, ragged sound of our breathing and the distant, muffled explosions of Katarina’s surface assault.

I stood up, wiping a smear of blood from my cheek. My muscles were screaming, my lungs burning with exhaustion.

I looked up at the security camera mounted in the corner of the shaft. The red recording light was still blinking. Isabella was still watching.

I walked over to the camera, staring directly into the lens.

"You can hide in your chalet, Isabella," I said, my voice cold, absolute, and dripping with a promise of violence. "You can rebuild your network. You can buy a new army. But you are never going to sleep soundly again. Because I am going to burn every piece of your empire until there is nowhere left for you to hide."

I raised my pistol and shot the camera, plunging the shaft back into darkness.

"Let’s get out of this mountain," I told Darius.

The trap had failed. The Queen had missed her shot. Now, it was time to make her pay the blood price.