"Wow...." Rina had finally managed to calm down over the remainder of the car ride, but was flabbergasted when she saw the plane that was waiting for her. A 'super jumbo' A380 was waiting for her in the private jet terminal at LaGuardia Airport, since there were no private airports in New York that could handle a jet of that size.

"When and where did he even buy it?" she asked in surprise, as she knew that it took some time for a custom plane to arrive.

[He bought it from Transaero Airlines, a Russian company. They were having some financial difficulties and were forced to sell some of their Airbus A380s. He got two of them,] Ava answered after requesting the information from Nova, who allowed access to it as it wasn't a huge secret. The news just wasn't publicized, like most things about Aron.

As Rina was talking to Ava, a ramp lowered at the end of the jet, revealing its massive cargo hold. The cars the group had driven to the airport made their way up into the hold and the ramp lifted, sealing the entrance.

"I don't think a commercial airplane has cargo ramps like that, do they?" she asked, pretty sure that the planes Aron had bought were certainly modified after the purchase. But the timeline still didn't add up; whether they were special orders or modified post-purchase, the jet would still require several months to be completed.

[They were sent to Avalon Island for modifications.]

Hearing that, Rina knew the plane in front of her wasn't one that Aron had bought from the Russian company at all. His purchase might just be a smokescreen, so people wouldn't be asking where he had acquired the plane.

"He's finally acting like a rich person," she said with a smile as she realized that Aron had bought two planes with a price tag of more than $100 million each, just so he could build similar-looking jets and people wouldn't ask where the hell he found them.

And she was right; the planes that landed at Avalon Island were nowhere to be found. They had immediately been sent to the atomic printer for scanning and decomposition into their component atoms before a new plane with advanced tech replaced them. From the outside, the only apparent modification was the paint jobAron's jets had gold stripes with the initials ARN on the tails of the massive planes.

The plane Rina was boarding could go head-to-head with fighter jets and survive while maintaining its operational capability. It could also fly for basically forever, as it was powered by a miniaturized fusion reactor that provided more electricity than it would ever require. The excess electricity was run through runes that converted it into mana, which was fed into the engines to generate enough thrust to outrun anything it didn't want to fight. The key word there is 'didn't want to', not 'couldn't', as there was nothing on Earth that could threaten the powerful hybrid Magitech jetliner. Aron had even further reinforced it by engraving a massive shield rune that covered the entire superjumbo jet, turning the whole thing into an impregnable flying fortress.

"Please." The driver of Rina's car gestured for her to board the plane so they could begin their journey.

As Rina walked up the stairs to the plane, she asked, "Aren't we going to wait for the rest of you?"

"No, their stay's been extended so they can investigate who was behind the attack. They'll join us in Eden later," the woman respectfully answered.

"Oh, that's good then."

Although the exterior of the plane had impressed the Rothschild daughter, the inside was even more impressive. Despite being luxurious, there was no sense of tasteless nouveau riche extravagance in it. Instead, the decor had a certain dignity and gravitas to it.

After onboarding everyone who was going to Eden, the plane taxied to the runway, having paid a premium to jump the line and take off after just a short wait, causing the commercial flights to have a slight delay in taking off.

...

"Where am I?" Terry asked as he opened his eyes and found himself bound to a chair. Another person was similarly bound in front of him, but his vision was blurry, and he couldn't tell who it was with certainty. All he could tell was that their head was bowed, as if they'd fallen asleep sitting up.

But although he couldn't see their face, he had a hunch as to who they were; their wavy hair reminded him of his girlfriend.

The moment he thought about her, he finally remembered everything that had happened.

He had been watching as the mission went tits up. Things had started out well; they had successfully bribed an inside man and placed ambushes on every route leading away from the Rothschild compound that Rina could have taken to go anywhere. But somehow, their target had anticipated the ambushes and neatly avoided them, then turned around to fight once the situation had turned in their favor. So one of two possibilities was true: either they knew where the ambushers were, or they were lucky.

And after having seen how easily their target had mowed down the hired mercenaries that lay in ambush, Terry didn't think luck had anything to do with it. He had spent $20 million for nothing!

He would even have suspected that they had been betrayed, except he'd taken precautions against that. Every group of ambushers was hired from a different mercenary company, and none of themnot a single onewas privy to the whole plan. They all had different instructions and were multiple independent parts of a whole that didn't know each other at all, so betrayal was an impossibility among impossibilities!

Although he was shocked by the skill displayed by that bitch's guard detail, he hadn't been afraid. The video stream he was watching from the comfort of his command post had been routed through so many VPN servers that there was even a two-second delay before the video even arrived.

The two of them had thought themselves perfectly safe, as they had faith in the security of their command post (which was just a fancy way of saying "Katrina's basement"). Nothing should have happened to them due to the paranoid fixer's security surrounding her house in a two-kilometer radius, which should detect any intruders with plenty of time for them to escape through a tunnel.

"Looks like our security was useless," he said when his memory reached the point where he had been knocked unconscious by an unseen attacker. His overconfidence in Katrina's security measures had resulted in them being caught so off guard that he hadn't even realized they'd failed until he woke up tied to a chair.

"How're you doing?" Footsteps clicked against the floor from behind him, then he saw a man come into focus in front of him. It was someone he would never have expected to see in a thousand years.

"You seem to have failed your mission," said a man who looked no different from Arieh Rothschild.

'Oh shit, my fear came true,' he thought as he eyed Katrina, who was in front of him. She had assured him that no such thing would ever happen.

"What excuse do you have to give me?" asked Arieh as he took a seat in a chair.

'I'm pretty sure that there wasn't another chair in the room, or maybe I was just so focused on how we got here that I didn't pay much attention to where "here" actually was. Yeah, that has to be it.... There's no way he could've just materialized a chair out of thin air, right?' Terry thought as his brain went into overdrive, trying to come up with explanations for the weirdness that had happened during the mission. He was sure that if he said everything exactly as it had happened, Arieh wouldn't believe him. Hell, he wouldn't have believed it himself if he hadn't seen it live with his own eyes.

'Yeah, that's right! I have the footage, so I can use it as an explanation... but for that to work, I need him to not have destroyed anything in the command post when he was capturing us. How the hell did he even reach us without us knowing, though, anyway?'

Question after question appeared in Terry's mind, as the more he answered, the more surfaced.