Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 251

Chapter 251: Beneath The Surface
‘Since the Lady of Crimson directly controls various associations, and many of her subordinates are spread out in these organizations, it is most likely for most of them to crumble if the lady were to die and her faction to end up disbanded.

And that means… I just have to kill her.

Quite a simple mission isn’t it?’

Hans asked ironically.

He was now inside an alley in the middle of the city, and he had gotten his phone back.

Hans opened up the device and looked through his messages, he then clicked on the unknown number that had contacted him a few hours earlier and searched for something in their chat.

‘Here It is… the underground map’

That was the first problem, the crimson lady, both in Rome and in Naples, had decided to build her base underground.

The tunnels underneath both cities didn’t belong to the modern era but were instead relics of the past, aging way back to the Roman Empire, this made them a hassle to explore because of their reduced dimensions and low visibility.

They were also not the most stable tunnels in the world.

‘ last time I went underground….’

Hans thought about the gate raid in San Diego, the crumbling of all the tunnels, and his barely successful escape.

He immediately commented:

‘Yeah… it was something along that way’

“Let’s just hope that it won’t end up like that”

Hans said with a worried smile.

In the meantime, he began heading for the nearest entrance to the tunnels.

After a good five minutes of walking, during which Hans always kept his hands in his pockets to avoid any pickpocketers, he finally arrived at his destination.

In front of him were some iron bars, measuring up to his belly, and those bars surrounded the whole place in front of him, which was a pit dug to give a new life to the ruins that previously lay below the ground.

As written in the report, the entrance was disguised as a public attraction, somewhere among those walls there was a staircase made out of stone leading down to the underground city of Naples.

Hans cast a stealth spell on himself and then jumped inside the pit before beginning to search for the staircase.

It took him a little over a minute, after all, the highest of the walls was barely two meters tall, and there weren’t any ceilings, so it was easy to spot it.

It was about two and a half meters (8 feet) wide and two meters (6’5) long, Hans peeked over the hole and saw the stairs, and how steep every single step was.

The steps were barely ten centimeters (four inches) each, and every step went down three times its width.

Hans turned around and went down the flight of steep stairs, taking every step carefully, to avoid falling down.

At that moment he remembered something, when he first visited Naples when he was a kid, the underground tunnels weren’t like this, yes there were a lot of steps and they weren’t exactly easy to pass through, but they weren’t so steep, it simply didn’t belong to the ancient Romans building style, it was a tunnel made with the sole purpose of gaining access to the underground facilities of the Crimson Lady’s faction, the stone around him also seemed to be pretty well kept and uncorrupted by the passage of time, in a few words… that place was a fake.

That tunnel had been placed there to gain easier access underground, while the ruins on top of it were probably a well-built fake.

After all, who would ever expect the crimson tyranny to hide under a historical building? And who would ever go in and search for an entrance inside that pit?

Hans did not care much about it, but he understood a bit of the crimson lady’s way of doing things just by discovering that.

The nine entrances of the underground tunnel system were organized in a circular shape and, supposedly, in the middle was positioned the central hall, in which the Lady of Crimson could be residing.

The inside of the underground hadn’t ever been seen, even by the night market, the outer parts of the tunnels were tracked because they had used a spell to do it, but a barrier covered the inner parts of the ‘circle’ so it was impossible to determine anything else.

As for infiltrating the place to find out, Emma had no intention of risking her life or her subordinates, and if they were caught as they mapped the place, not only would they lose their lives, but the crimson lady would also probably change hiding spots, making all the efforts they had put into tracking her location go to waste.

Hans had been walking for more than a couple of minutes, the humidity in the air was high, and the temperatures reached as low as five degrees Celsius (40 Fahrenheit).

He was venturing deeper and deeper underground, every once in a while the road was made out of a couple of steps which brought him even deeper.

It had been a couple of minutes since his phone had stopped working, luckily he had memorized the tunnels’ layout and had no use for the map anymore.

The whole place was pitch black, but sensing his surroundings with mana he had no problem finding his way.

After walking for another while, he saw something on the floor.

It was a sliver of something extremely beautiful that he hadn’t seen in a while… light.

Following the light led him to a tunnel, and then to another, and then to yet another until he finally tracked down the source of the light.

He was walking down a tunnel, just as tight as the others, about two meters (6’5) in height and a little more than one meter (3’3) in width.

At the end of the tunnel was an L-shaped turn, and just behind it seemed to be the source of the light he had been following.

‘If I remember correctly… this is…’

Casting his stealth and carefully peeking from behind the wall, Hans observed the road ahead.

The source of the light came from a torch hanging on a wall.

A guy was sleeping right beside it, sitting on a little wooden stool with his back leaning against the cold stone wall.

Just underneath him, stacked under the stool, were some other torches, he probably had the job of keeping them lit.

But what attracted Hans’ attention the most was a veil of mana that stood between him and all those things, it wasn’t thick or hard, and it seemed like it would’ve been easy to pass through.

Its use lay in something else.

‘I see… it’s almost built like the sound spell I idealized a few hours ago… but it blocks… mana.

Mh… it makes sense, that must be why they weren’t able to figure out the topography of this place only by using spells.’

Hans immediately thought that it checked out with what he knew.

Other than that, the mana inside and outside of the barrier were different.

Luckily it didn’t seem like the barrier’s effect was implemented everywhere inside of it, otherwise Hans wouldn’t have been able to cast a single spell without breaking the barrier.

There was something amiss… a guard sleeping, and a barrier easy to break through…

‘I see!…

This whole place isn’t made to keep outsiders out… but to notice them when they decide to enter.’

The other effect of the barrier is tracking whoever enters it…

Hans spread out his mana careful not to overstep his boundaries and break into the barrier, but onlyanalyzing it…

It was built with a sensor that worked like the one he used before creating the spell {mapping}.

‘Let’s see… maybe I could modify my stealth so that I would be able to pass unnoticed… sigh… all this just to reach a room which will probably be empty, there isn’t even a guard here, are we sure it is the den of one of the most dangerous evil organizations?’

…

As he thought those words and got to work creating a spell he could use, somewhere else, quite an amount of hassles were blocking the path to his mates’ mission.

Rome—underground tunnels…\

‘Pant… pant…’

‘Pant… pant…’

The heavy panting of a couple of people could be heard, Emma, Gianfranco, and six other elite members of the Italian defense team were standing grouped together.

Standing on the frontline, fighting against the incoming enraged enemies, were the members of the Italian defense team.

“Stay still I’ll take it from here”

Gianfranco said as he tried to step forward and surpass the six of them.

Emma raised her hand and stopped him.

“Don’t you see that they’re doing it so that you can preserve your strength? And with your body, it’ll be more difficult to fight in this tight space”

The old man thought about it and then scoffed:

“They’re risking their lives to get us through this place… also… why the hell are there so many people in here?! We must’ve killed at least a hundred of them!”

Emma touched her chin and thought about it…

‘It is strange… Why are there so many people here?

…

Are you in the same situation as us?…

Hans’