Chapter 403: We Kept the Treasure and Lost the Table

The captain had left three boxes of money behind a pressure trap, which was exactly the sort of arrangement that made Old Mate believe in professional development.

I watched through the service grating while the two guards checked the gauge. The cylinder fed a short nozzle beside the door, aimed across the entry at roughly chest height.

A thin pull line ran from its valve to the door’s inside handle. Opening the door normally would pull the valve, release the stored pressure, and make the visitor’s evening considerably less profitable.

Galaxy Brain followed each fitting as the guard demonstrated it. He even repeated the valve test for his bored friend, and I wanted to thank him for making our robbery accessible to beginners.

[System: Reckon you could crawl underneath, mate, but let’s use the portal before you try arguing with compressed air about your height.]

Lukas stayed by the canal hatch while I watched the guards move away from the entrance. One opened a payment box and counted bundles of notes. The other checked the courier time on his phone, then complained about being made to wait beside a device that hissed whenever it warmed up.

The man deserved a safer workplace. Fortunately, I was about to remove his job, his gun, and the reason his boss paid him.

The service grating had narrow slats, but I could see an empty patch of floor inside and another beside me in the dry passage. Both spaces held ordinary air, lay well within twenty meters, and offered enough room for a modest portal.

I opened Backdoor Bludger beside the table and slipped through, with Lukas close behind carrying rope. Eight seconds later, the portals vanished, leaving us inside with two men who really should have paid attention to their own window.

I began humming as the guard counting money reached for the gun. I hit his wrist with my tail and drove him against the table before he could lift it. The other lunged toward the door, apparently forgetting what he’d attached to its handle.

Lukas caught his sleeve and pulled him backward before he could trigger the trap. He then explained his disappointment with a firm strike that put the man on the floor.

[System: Your mate’s saved a bloke from opening his own front door. Put him up for a bloody community award before the idiot tries it again.]

I am keeping the gun as a service fee. He can leave a review when his wrist works again.

Neither guard had a useful answer once secured away from the valve. We checked their pockets, removed the loose weapons, and photographed the marked boxes with Lukas’s phone before moving them.

The door remained closed until Lukas untied the pull line from its handle. He left the cylinder valve shut, tested the slack carefully, and opened the way into the gallery without turning us into an experiment.

We carried the boxes down to the canal hatch one at a time. They were heavy enough to require the small trolley already stored beside the chamber, which I considered an encouraging sign of workplace consideration.

We strapped the boxes into the hold. Lukas patted the final lid like a proud father, then made the mistake of telling me we had everything we needed.

That was when I noticed the cylinder again, sitting there without so much as a price tag.

At the time, it looked expensive, compact, and insufficiently attached to anyone who had treated me well.

"We shouldn’t leave dangerous equipment lying around," I told Lukas. He pointed at the instruction saying not to touch it, so I pointed at the stolen money and asked when we had become obedient.

[System: Take the boxes and leave, mate. You’re already winning, and I refuse to explain to your girls that you died adopting a kettle.]

It is industrial equipment, not a kettle, and you can apologize when we find out what it sells for.

The cylinder sat unbolted in its cradle, within three meters. Mine Now shifted it onto the clear floor beside me, and its weight landed with a thud that made Lukas close his eyes.

A small wire behind the mounting plate snapped as it moved. We’d seen the front valve and the door line, but the rear of the unit had been hidden against the wall.

An alarm began ringing above the loading hatch.

"Separate issue," I told him as we wrestled it onto the trolley. He asked whether the alarm was celebrating my purchase, and I decided he could push while I supervised.

We reached the skiff before anyone arrived from the street. The cylinder rolled onto the folding table while we released the mooring line, and its damaged mounting collar knocked the valve against the rail.

A short blast of compressed air tore through the table’s edge and shattered the empty tray beside it. The cylinder jerked, Lukas hit its stop lever, and I pinned it against the deck with my body until the gauge fell.

The strapped boxes hadn’t moved, but a corner of our table floated past in the canal. Lukas watched it go, then looked at me with the kind of patience normally found right before a court case.

"I think the table was already showing its age," I said as we cleared the canal.

"I’m writing that on the replacement bill," Lukas replied, keeping us inside the marked channel while shouting started behind us.

[System: There goes the table, you bargain-hunting fuckwit. Next time steal a chair as well and you can furnish the whole canal.]

We reached the watched public dock before counting the haul. After our report, the harbor watch collected the guards we’d left tied in the chamber. We were already away when the scheduled pickup time passed.

The three boxes held twenty-four thousand credits, taking our separate travel account to twenty-eight thousand two hundred thirty. The completed objective added thirty thousand EXP and fifty IP, leaving eighty-three thousand five hundred out of three hundred thousand and one thousand one hundred ninety IP.

Under the false bottom of the final box, Lukas found a folded diagram marked with the old resort seal. It showed a deeper chamber, a pressure key, and channels arranged around a central support.

The drawn channels curved around a center like the core inside me. I stopped smiling when Lukas unfolded the lower edge and read what the royal baths had been built to hide.