N-A-A Page 140
Page 140
"Bang! Bang!"
Two faint, muted gunshots rang out.
The two men next to Chishima Saori fell to the ground with a thud.
He is clearly a highly skilled athlete who has undergone rigorous training.
"A radical cleanup squad!" Chishima Saori's expression changed drastically. She rolled to the side and hid behind a large wooden crate.
The scene instantly descended into chaos, with gunshots, shouts, and the sounds of objects colliding all mixed together.
Yuki Takada and Miwako Sato were also caught up in this sudden firefight!
They quickly sought cover. Yuki Takada gripped his baton tightly, and Miwako Sato pulled out her pepper spray, but in the face of real guns and ammunition, these proved utterly ineffective.
"Takada! Sato! Get down right now!" Matthew's urgent shout came through the communicator.
Almost simultaneously, several muffled thuds came from the entrance of the storage room. Matthew's team descended like divine soldiers, bursting into the room and engaging in a fierce firefight with the two radical cleanup team members and the remaining guards of Chishima Saori!
Bullets flew through the air, striking the wooden crates and walls, sending debris flying everywhere.
Yuuki Takada tightly shielded Miwako Sato, hiding behind a huge stone sculpture. He could feel the vibrations from the bullets grazing the sculpture.
Matthew and his team possessed exceptional tactical skills and quickly overwhelmed their opponents.
One member of the cleanup team was killed, and another, seeing that things were not going well, threw a smoke grenade and rushed towards a hidden door deep in the storage room in the chaos. Seeing this, Chishima Saori followed without hesitation!
Chapter 180 Chase After All
“They’re trying to run!” Miwako Sato shouted.
"Chase them!" Matthew made a quick decision, leaving two people to handle the aftermath and ensure the safety of Takada Yuki and the other two, while he led another team member to chase after them.
Yuki Takada and Miwako Sato exchanged a glance and immediately followed. They couldn't let Saori Chishima, this key figure, slip away!
Behind the hidden door is an even narrower, darker passage, seemingly part of the Louvre's ancient underground structure, filled with dampness and a musty smell.
The passage was winding and twisting, and at its end, one could faintly hear footsteps and panting.
The group quickly gave chase and soon arrived at a relatively open underground space. It looked like a storage room behind an abandoned underground chapel, with mottled stone walls all around and some rotten wooden boxes scattered in the center.
Chishima Saori and the surviving member of the cleanup team were trapped here; they had nowhere to escape.
The cleanup team member pointed his gun at Matthew and the others who were chasing after them, his eyes filled with madness.
Chishima Saori was pale-faced, leaning against the wall, clutching a small USB-like object tightly in her hand.
"Hand over the stuff!" a member of the cleanup team shouted at Chishima Saori.
"Don't even think about it!" Chishima Saori gritted her teeth. "This is my bargaining chip to save my life!"
Just then, another strange movement occurred!
The seemingly intact stone wall on one side of the underground space suddenly emitted a deep rumble and slowly opened inward, revealing a brightly lit, modern, technologically advanced secret room behind it.
A middle-aged white man, dressed in a well-tailored suit and with his hair neatly combed, emerged from the secret room accompanied by a burly bodyguard.
He clapped his hands, a calm smile on his face that suggested he had everything under control.
"Wonderful, really wonderful."
He spoke in fluent French, then switched to slightly accented Japanese, “Chishima, my dear colleague, Mr. ‘Messenger,’ and… a few uninvited guests.”
His gaze swept over Yuki Takada, Miwako Sato, and Matthew, finally settling on the USB drive in Saori Chishima's hand.
"Let me introduce myself. I am a member of the Twilight Foundation's board of directors. You can call me... Mentor."
The man smiled and said, "Thank you all, especially you, Chishima, for helping me find the last piece of the key. Now, please hand it over to me."
Chishima Saori and the member of the messenger point cleanup team were both stunned; they clearly hadn't expected the person called "Mentor" to appear here.
"You... how did you get here?" Chishima Saori's voice trembled.
“I have always been here,” the mentor said gently. “Your actions and your struggles have all been under my watchful eye. The internal struggles are merely a necessary process for the treasure to surface.”
He looked at Yuki Takada and the others, and said coldly, "As for these friends from the East, and the members of the EU group, your involvement has brought some variables, but it has also accelerated the process. Now, the show should come to an end."
His bodyguards raised their guns and pointed them at everyone present.
The situation has taken a turn for the worse!
Yuki Takada's heart sank.
This so-called "mentor" is the real mastermind. All of them, including Chishima Saori and the radicals, seem to have become pawns on his chessboard!
Just at this tense and almost suffocating moment, an unexpected incident occurred, in a way that no one expected!
The cleanup team member known as the "messenger" suddenly turned his gun not on the mentor, but on the bodyguard next to the mentor!
At the same time, he shouted into the communicator: "Action!"
"boom!"
The bodyguard fell to the ground immediately.
Almost simultaneously, several ventilation openings at the top of the underground space suddenly opened, and several stun grenades and smoke grenades were thrown in!
A blinding flash of light, a deafening roar, and thick smoke instantly filled the entire space!
"What?!" For the first time, the instructor's composure vanished, replaced by astonishment and anger.
"It's a trap! We've been set up!" Matthew realized immediately and shouted, "Protect the target! Find cover!"
Yuki Takada instinctively closed his eyes and covered his ears the instant the stun grenade exploded, and pulled Miwako Sato to the ground.
In the chaos, he felt someone rush past him, seemingly targeting the USB drive in Chishima Saori's hand!
Gunshots rang out again through the smoke, mixed with roars and sounds of fighting.
As the smoke cleared slightly, Yuuki Takada opened his eyes and saw a scene of utter chaos.
The tutor had vanished, apparently having escaped from the secret room amidst the chaos.
The "messenger" was locked in combat with one of Matthew's teammates.
Chishima Saori lay in a pool of blood, her USB drive gone.
There was a clear bullet hole in her chest, and her eyes began to glaze over.
Matthew and another team member are cautiously searching their surroundings.
"My USB drive was stolen!" Miwako Sato exclaimed.
Yuuki Takada rushed to Saori Chishima's side and knelt down: "Ms. Chishima! Where's the USB drive? Who did it?"
With difficulty, Chishima Saori raised her hand, pointing towards the secret room. Her lips moved, and with her last strength, she uttered a few indistinct syllables: "...The key is...fake, the real one is..."
She couldn't finish her sentence; her hand fell limply to her side, and her eyes completely lost their light.
Saori Chishima is dead.
The last clue seems to have gone cold.
Yuki Takada stood up, his face grim.
He looked at the open, secret room, which seemed to be empty except for some advanced communication equipment and monitoring screens.
The messenger was eventually subdued by Matthew, but he bit into the poison sac hidden in his teeth and died instantly, leaving no confession.
Ariel Kruger arrived at the scene with reinforcements, and her face turned grim upon seeing the sight before her.
“We underestimated ‘Mentor’,” she said in a low voice. “He manipulated everyone, including ‘traitors’ within his own faction. He took the USB drive, even though Chishima Saori said it was fake before she died…”
“But she seems to want to reveal the whereabouts of the real key,” Miwako Sato added.
Yuki Takada walked to the monitoring screen in the secret room, where the images were frozen on several key locations in the Louvre.
He noticed one of the split screens, which displayed a live monitoring feed of the "Silent Mona Lisa".
The woman in the painting still wears that mysterious smile, sitting sideways, her gaze seemingly piercing through time and space, watching everything that is happening underground at this moment.
Yuki Takada's heart skipped a beat.
A fake key? The real clue—was it never truly separated from the painting itself from the very beginning?
Or rather, the real "key" is not a physical object, but rather a piece of information that has been hidden from public view all along.
He looked at the woman's hand in the painting, pointing in an unknown direction, and recalled the gesture Ariel had made outside the café when they first met, pointing towards the Seine.
The Seine River...
“Miss Ariel…” Yuuki Takada suddenly spoke, his voice carrying a barely perceptible fluctuation, “When you first met us, you pointed to the Seine… Was that really just a casual gesture?”
Upon hearing this, Ariel Kruger's violet eyes flashed with a complex light. She looked at Yuuki Takada but did not answer immediately.
The air in the basement seemed to freeze again; the battle that had just ended seemed to have only revealed a corner of a deeper mystery.
However, this is far from over.
The vortex that caused the incident seems to be slowly moving along with the silent flow of the Seine, pointing towards a deeper and more dangerous unknown.
Chapter 181 A decoy?
Ariel Kruger remained silent for about three seconds.
In those three seconds, thick dust filled the underground storage room, and the lingering smoke seemed to freeze.
Matthew and his team members scanned their surroundings warily, while Miwako Sato's gaze darted between Yuki Takada and Ariel, catching every subtle change in their expressions.
“No.” Ariel finally spoke, her voice low and clear, carrying a kind of candor that had shed some of its pretense. “That wasn’t a casual gesture. It was a test, and also a… hint.”
She walked to the control panel in the secret room, quickly tapped a few keys, and brought up an electronic map of the Louvre and its surrounding area, with the pale blue curve of the Seine winding through the center of Paris.
"Legend has it that the entrance to the Twilight Foundation's treasures in and around the Louvre is not fixed inside the museum building. Its location is related to the water level of the Seine, the angle of light at a specific time, and even the position of certain stars, forming a complex code."
Ariel's finger traced the section of the Seine River near the Louvre on the map.
"The Silent Mona Lisa is considered one of the 'decoders' of the code, but not the only one. The direction of the woman's finger in the painting, combined with Leonardo da Vinci's expertise in mirror writing and steganography, was deciphered by our team as possibly related to a specific observation point on the banks of the Seine."
Ariel turned her gaze back to Yuuki Takada, her expression a mixture of scrutiny and a hint of genuine intent to cooperate: "I imitated that gesture to observe your reactions."
“If you are core members of the foundation, you might reveal your weakness. If you are unrelated, that action will not attract attention.”
“But Mr. Takada, you remembered it and connected it at this crucial moment... This once again proves your extraordinary nature.”