The Incubus System Chapter 1254. We Knock
The Incubus System Chapter 1254. We Knock
She closed her eyes.
Then her lips curved into that wicked, cruel, delicious smile that made mortals confess sins they hadn’t committed.
“Got the lab.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Eastside industrial. Level-four mana seals, government cover.”
I clicked my tongue. “Of course it’s government cover. Can’t have illegal holy-weapon research in a penthouse suite, can we?”
Syntyche tilted her head. “Sounds claustrophobic.”
“Sounds like a trap,” I muttered.
To be honest?
Despite spending nearly my entire life in the human realm—schools, jobs, random government forms I never filled out properly—I was only just beginning to realize how wildly unfair the infrastructure gap was between humans and their government elite.
Regular people had basic stuff—demon alarms, panic rooms with reinforced doors, maybe some salt barriers from a shady online store. The kind that could hold back a minor demons for five minutes, tops.
But the military? The real ones?
They had holy-forged warding relics. Mana-sensitive field traps. Seals built with divine fragments. And of course, they’d modified them. Augmented them with mortal tech. All shiny on the outside, monstrous underneath.
And now they had Zatan’s weapon.
Perfect.
I stood, rolling my shoulders, brushing a bit of gravel off my coat.
“Let’s pay them a visit.”
Syntyche licked her lips, red eyes glittering like a spider about to web a hummingbird.
The Spyder skittered up my boot and up my sleeve. It paused at the back of my hand and bit.
Not painfully. Just enough to inject information.
I stiffened slightly. A surge of dark-encoded mana flowed into me, and then—
Clarity.
The map of the facility flashed through my mind in sharp detail. Dim halls. Steel doors. Wards upon wards. The lab was buried under thirty feet of reinforced concrete and divine shielding. And at the front?
A thick entrance barrier made of dense holy power.
I opened a portal.
It split the air in front of us like a glowing gash—purple-edged, pulsing with infernal heat.
[You have opened a portal.]
Syntyche followed without hesitation.
And we stepped through.
The air on the other side was sharp with ozone.
Still almost noon, but the skies here were darker—gray overcast, industrial haze curling above us like smoke from a forgotten forge. We arrived on the upper terrace of what looked like an old steelworks repurposed into a secret compound.
Gray concrete. No signs. No windows. Just a single, sealed gate the size of a truck hangar, covered with etched runes that hummed faintly.
My skin tingled the moment I got near.
Holy power. Thick. Heavy. Ancient.
My eyes narrowed.
“I know this energy,” I muttered. “That’s Puriel’s divine mark.”
Syntyche raised a brow. “They stole from an angel?”
“Probably,” I muttered. “They layered it with mortal security. It’s rejecting anything without specific authorization.”
“Which includes you?” she asked with a smirk. “A half.”
I stepped forward.
The barrier pulsed—then snapped with a hard clang of light.
I hissed and stepped back.
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
“Should we blow it up?” she offered sweetly, already forming threads of explosive web in her palms.
I looked around.
There were turrets disguised as pipes. Detection sigils buried in fake moss. Two mana-pulse cannons sitting high on either side, silent but definitely alive.
“Too much military tech,” I said. “We blow this up and it might trigger a cascade fail. Probably set off a lockdown. Or worse.”
Syntyche pouted. “So what? We knock?”
“Yeah.” I smirked. “We knock.”
With a flick of my wrist, I summoned them.
‘Demonic Spike.’
Dark magic swirled at my back and burst outward. A storm of lances appeared, black as night, razor-sharp and humming with infernal energy. They hovered above me in perfect formation—exactly one hundred of them—each twitching like a predator sniffing out prey.
“And what I mean by knock is… Controlled chaos,” I said.
She sighed. “Oh, we’re back to your brand.”
I raised my hand and swung it forward—like a conductor calling down hell.
The lances fired.
They didn’t aim to kill.
They aimed to poke.
To overload the outer mana shell. To knock.
The way a devil does.
-BOOM!
The moment they hit—
The whole front of the building shook.
Light cracked across the surface of the ward like a spiderweb on stained glass. The glowing sigils sparked and dimmed in sections, trying to recalibrate. An alarm began to wail—a low siren that warbled like a dying angel’s breath.
From above, a hatch opened.
And a bridge extended.
The bridge wasn’t unstable by design.
It was supposed to be solid. Industrial-grade. Reinforced mana alloy, polished rails, glowing anchor sigils at each corner. Typical government overbuild.
Except—
It didn’t extend properly.
Not all the way.
Because yeah… that was on me.
The outer gate had just eaten the full brunt of my Demonic Spike barrage, and while it hadn’t crumbled, the blast did partially damage the bridge’s main control. So now?
The bridge extended halfway… then stalled… then jerked forward like it wasn’t sure if it should continue.
The result?
A half-wrecked metal path that stopped three-quarters of the way across, riddled with blast holes and uneven plating.
Below us?
Not an abyss. Not some cinematic bottomless pit.
Just chaos.
Tangled masses of power conduits and glowing pipelines, all snaking beneath the facility like glowing nerves. Each one pumped a different type of mana—dark energy, holy infusion, elemental batteries, divine residue. Some hummed like overloaded neon. Others cracked with little discharges of radiant sparks.
It looked like a magical intestine. If we fell into that, we wouldn’t die instantly—but we would probably get electrocuted, sealed, purified, and possibly vaporized depending on which pipe we landed on.
Syntyche squinted at the damage. “Did you just explode the bridge?”
I coughed. “Technically? I exploded the door. The bridge just… caught feelings.”
She arched a brow. “This is why I can’t take you to museums.” She paused. “Oh wait. You did blow up my museum once.”
“Let’s not talk about it now,” I muttered. “Besides, the bridge is still mostly there. A few holes. Maybe a step missing or two.”
“Missing by several meters,” she said dryly, eyeing the gap at the far end. “And you’re flying. I’m in heels.”