Chapter 4

Jolie pushed herself off the ruined carpet. The mechanical voice in her head chimed again, more urgent this time.

[System Alert: Energy dissipating. Do you wish to absorb? ]

"Absorb," Jolie whispered into the dark.

Instantly, she felt a violent, rushing sensation. A torrent of raw, crackling energy was being siphoned directly from Aloys's unconscious body, traveling down the vines and flooding into her palms.

The exhaustion that had been crushing her bones vanished. Her stamina fully restored in a matter of seconds.

A translucent blue interface materialized in her field of vision.

[Arborgenesis Proficiency +500]

[Sylvan Soul: Basic Healing Attribute Unlocked]

Jolie's lips curled into a sharp smirk. She looked at the terrifying General pinned to the wall not as a threat, but as a massive, walking battery.

She walked over to him. The faint starlight caught the sharp, aggressive angles of his face. He was devastatingly handsome, but Jolie didn't care about his face. She cared about his pockets.

She reached out and patted down his torn military shirt. Her fingers brushed against a hard lump in his inner pocket. She pulled out a heavy silver ring engraved with a complex military crest. A spatial storage ring.

Drawing on the original Jolie's memories, Jolie knew these rings were locked with a mental signature. But Aloys was unconscious, his psychic defenses completely shattered by the feral state and the neurotoxin. Jolie pushed a sharp spike of her newly leveled mental energy into the ring, violently shattering his temporary seal.

She projected her consciousness into the storage space and gasped.

It was a treasure trove. Piles of high-tier monster cores glowed with raw power, sitting next to a stack of untraceable, bearer-bond credit cards.

Jolie didn't hesitate. She grabbed the entire stack of credit cards and a handful of the brightest, highest-quality cores, shoving them deep into her own pockets.

As an afterthought, she unbuckled the sleek, black military-grade stealth communicator from his wrist. It had anti-tracking tech. She needed it.

Her looting complete, Jolie looked at Aloys. His shirt was shredded, his chest bare. With a flick of her wrist, she commanded the vines to adjust his posture, leaving him bound in a highly humiliating, spread-eagle position against the wall.

She turned her back on him and walked straight to the suite's central control terminal. She pulled a microscopic hacker chip from her hairpin-a rare, black-market tool she had secretly purchased just days ago with her meager savings, a desperate last-resort measure she had planned to use to escape the Pennington estate-and jammed it into the console.

Her fingers flew across the holographic keyboard. She bypassed the hotel's basic firewall and accessed the security mainframe. She isolated the footage from the VIP elevator and the top-floor corridor for the past hour.

With a single keystroke, she permanently shredded the data. Every digital trace of her and Catina entering the floor was wiped from existence.

Jolie moved to the suite's dressing room. She found a spare black uniform meant for the hotel's cleaning staff. She stripped off her torn dress, pulled on the uniform, tied her hair back, and slipped on a surgical mask and a cap. She looked like a ghost.

She checked the clock. Three hours until dawn.

Jolie ignored the main door. She walked to the service corridor attached to the suite and pried open the heavy metal door of the laundry chute.

She summoned a thick vine, wrapping it around a structural pipe, and used it as a rappelling rope. She slid down the dark, narrow shaft, dropping dozens of floors until she hit the soft pile of linens in the basement laundry room.

The basement was empty. Jolie slipped out the back loading dock and into the damp, garbage-filled alleyway.

A beat-up hover-shuttle used for hotel procurement was idling near the dumpsters, the keys still in the ignition.

Jolie hopped into the driver's seat, slammed the door, and punched the accelerator. The shuttle shot out of the alley with a screech of repulsors, leaving the Sovereign Grand Hotel far behind.

As she navigated the dark, neon-lit streets of the lower city, her heart rate finally began to settle. She was rich, she was free, and she had power.

Suddenly, the military-grade communicator she had stolen from Aloys let out a deafening, high-pitched siren. The screen flashed a violent, blinding red.

Jolie slammed on the brakes. The shuttle skidded to a halt in the middle of an empty intersection. She stared at the holographic projection hovering above her wrist.

[Commonwealth Mandated Pairing System Alert: Your new mandated partner has been confirmed. Name: Keanu Robertson. Please report to the registry within 24 hours. ]

Jolie stared at the name. The original Jolie's memories provided the context instantly. Keanu Robertson. The most feared assassin in the Shadow Sector. A man who had literally torn his last three mandated wives to pieces.

Jolie gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. "Son of a bitch," she cursed into the empty cabin.