Vows and Bullets
Chapter 120: Dark Cell (Part 1)

Chapter 120: Dark Cell (Part 1)

[Music Recommendation: "Play with Fire" feat. Yacht Money by Sam Tinnesz]

I would admit... If I was in the position of one of the kidnappers right now, being threatened by Agent Helios, I would tremble myself.

In fact, I already was. It was as if the air turned so heavy and scary in a blink of an eye. Cold sweat and shivers traveled my body as I looked at him. His helmet was on, so you couldn’t see his expression, but his voice... his stature... his simple movements that weren’t really slow, but it appeared slow because your whole surrounding would slow down once faced with danger—everything was something else.

How? How could he pull off such an intimidating and domineering aura?

I couldn’t believe all this time I was treating him like an equal—thinking I could surpass him or match him somehow.

But how wrong I was.

I had never seen everything there was with him.

Yeah. I had seen nothing yet.

Trembling from head to foot, the remaining kidnapper slowly put his gun down. His countenance looked like he had lost all hope. And with shaking lips, he said...

"I-I... surrender."

He then let go of the child, and Agent Helios took him in his arms and gave him to me. Soon, our backup from Mythos arrived and captured the rest of the kidnappers for interrogation. Those tasked to pretend as the kidnappers and be spies replaced the real ones, including a young child who was also a trained Mythos agent to pretend as Min-Su.

There were engineers from Mythos as well who replaced the car tires that I shot earlier and cleaned the spots with blood, putting the car back to how it looked earlier. Everything happened in just a few minutes. After that, the spies went on their way, pretending to be the kidnappers and the fake Min-Su. For the rest of us, we all headed to the nearest Mythos base.

According to the plan, after rescuing Min-Su, we would keep him in custody in the Mythos base for three days. His parents were already notified about it, and they agreed to cooperate. They couldn’t come to visit their child, but they could call him, with guidance from Mythos, for security.

"Agent Selene, Agent Helios," one of the Mythos captains who led the team that assisted us, called us. "We received word from Assistant Chief Athena to hand this over to you."

He gave us a black tablet bearing the logo of Mythos.

"It can be unlocked using your biometrics. It’s already been registered. Assistant Chief Athena said you two would know what to do."

That’s right. For the duration of that three days, we were supposed to monitor everything that was happening within the base of the enemy—the base where those kidnappers were supposed to go.

The spies from Mythos had a tiny camera on their clothes that would serve as our way to see what was going on inside the enemy’s lair. And the tablet that was handed to us would be the monitor we could use to access those cameras. They were both linked together, and since Agent Helios and I were the ones in charge of this S-rank mission, only we had access to the tablet.

"Thank you, Captain," we replied and saluted him.

Without further ado, we left the still sleeping child Min-Su in their care and headed out. We drove back to the forest where we were earlier and swapped back without stand-ins who pretended to be us and did a little beach date.

Once done, we went straight back home and to the basement to set up the tablet. We mirrored the display on the huge monitor we had in the meeting room and set up the audio so we could hear everything clearly. By the time we were done, the spies we sent were already inside the base of the enemy.

"How very smart of them to put their lair in this location," Agent Helios said as he tinkered on his laptop.

He probably already checked the GPS in the spies’ cameras to check where they were. So fast as always.

"Where are they?"

"It’s not even on the map—the public one, that is."

"Ha-ha," I chuckled. "As expected of the longest running syndicate, there is. If they managed to hide that information from the public, I wonder what else could they have hidden."

"Everything else we don’t know," Agent Helios shrugged. Turning to the monitor, he said, "Would you look at that? So many children."

Hearing that, I quickly turned to the monitor to see. My goodness! There truly were a LOT of children out there! Not just tens or twenties—they were probably hundreds in number!

"What the..." I blurted out in my anger. "Why in the world do they need that many—"

I was just asking that, but then I noticed that not all of the children looked as neat and proper as Min-Su. Most of them weren’t even clothed properly, and their skin looked dirty. They were all locked up in prison cells, and their innocent eyes peered from the darkness, perhaps curious if there was another victim like them.

There was a separation between the cells where the children were locked up—one looked fancy and filled with children who looked rich like Min-Su; the other was filled with normal children or worse... they might have been street children. Children that had no parents, or in a family with no means of living, or were simply abandoned in the streets like orphans.

Aside from the children, the whole dark place was filled with armed men guarding each cell where the children were. Some of the men gave almost inedible-looking food to the children, while the others sprayed water on them as if trying to bathe them all in one go—like pigs in pens! How maddening!

The more I saw the situation, the more my heart broke, and my anger rose within me. Along with that were the thousand of things my mind started to think about what could be the possible reason why they captured so many children.

Dark thoughts they started in my mind...

Until those dark thoughts turned out to be reality...