My Milf Conqueror System novel Chapter 179

Chapter 179: The Queen’s trap

[Jake’s POV]

The white gas poured from the ceiling vents in thick, heavy cascades, pooling on the floor and slowly rising like a toxic tide. Through the lenses of my tactical goggles, the red emergency lights gave the fog a sinister, bloody hue.

I stood near the center of the vault, my assault rifle raised, watching Darius work.

He wasn’t trying to breach the titanium blast door at the entrance. He was at the far back wall of the vault, pressing the last three blocks of high-yield C4 directly against the reinforced concrete.

"The blueprints Katarina provided showed a structural weakness here," Darius said, his voice muffled and metallic through the rebreather mask. He molded the explosive putty with calm, terrifying precision. "This wall backs up to the primary elevator shaft for the subterranean levels. If we blow it, we can access the cables and climb out of the kill box."

"And the ledgers?" I asked, looking around at the thousands of black leather-bound dossiers containing the darkest secrets of the European elite.

"We set the thermite on a delayed fuse," Darius replied, inserting the detonators into the C4. "We blow the wall, we step into the shaft, and we trigger the fire. The thermite will burn the ledgers to ash, and the explosion will consume the toxic gas."

It was a desperate, suicidal plan. If the C4 didn’t breach the concrete, we would be trapped in the vault when the thermite ignited, roasting us alive in a four-thousand-degree inferno.

But we didn’t have a choice. Isabella Vane had played her hand perfectly.

"Set the timers," I ordered.

I moved quickly through the rising fog, activating the delayed fuses on the thermite charges we had placed at the base of the mahogany shelves. Thirty seconds. That was all the time we had to blow the wall and get out of the room before the vault turned into a crematorium.

"Charges set!" Darius called out, stepping back from the concrete wall. "Stack up!"

I sprinted to the back of the room, pressing myself flat against the side of a heavy wooden bookshelf, shielding my body from the blast radius. Darius stood beside me, the remote detonator in his hand.

"Blow it," I growled.

Darius squeezed the trigger.

The explosion was catastrophic. The shockwave hit me like a physical wall, knocking the breath from my lungs and shattering the bookshelf I was using for cover. A storm of splintered wood and pulverized concrete filled the air. I shook my head, fighting through the disorientation, and looked at the back wall.

Darius’s C4 had done its job. A jagged, smoking hole, roughly four feet wide, had been blown completely through the reinforced concrete. Beyond the hole was the dark, cavernous expanse of the primary elevator shaft.

"Move!" Darius roared, grabbing my shoulder and hauling me toward the breach.

We dove through the jagged hole, tumbling out of the vault and onto the heavy steel roof of an elevator car parked on the sub-level.

We had barely cleared the threshold when the thermite charges inside the vault ignited.

It was a sudden, violent eruption of pure, blinding white heat. Through the hole in the concrete, I watched as the mahogany shelves, the leather dossiers, and the toxic gas were instantly vaporized in a roaring firestorm. Isabella Vane’s leverage over Europe was gone. Reduced to absolute ash.

But we weren’t safe yet.

The heavy steel cables of the elevator shaft stretched upward into the darkness. Above us, the muffled, rhythmic thud of heavy artillery and automatic gunfire echoed through the mountain.

Katarina Volkov had hit the front gates. The surface war had begun.

"Climb!" Darius ordered, slinging his MP5 over his shoulder and grabbing the thick, grease-slicked elevator cables.

I grabbed the cables beside him, my muscles screaming in protest as I hauled my body weight upward. The physical enhancements from the System gave me the strength of three men, but the exhaustion of the freezing swim, the firefight, and the explosion was beginning to take its toll.

We climbed in absolute darkness, the only sound the distant roar of the battle above and the crackling inferno of the vault below.

Suddenly, the elevator shaft was flooded with harsh, blinding white light.

Massive halogen floodlights, mounted to the walls of the shaft, snapped on simultaneously. I squinted against the glare, looking up.

Fifty feet above us, standing on a steel maintenance grating that crossed the shaft, were six of Isabella’s Tier-One PMCs. They were looking straight down at us, their assault rifles raised, the red dots of their laser sights dancing across my chest and Darius’s back.

We were caught like rats in a drainpipe.

A speaker mounted to the wall of the shaft crackled to life.

"I must admit, Jake, your sheer refusal to die is becoming genuinely impressive."

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