SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 876: Only Way Out

Rhosyn made it four hundred paces back through the yards before she realized she couldn't cross them. There were soldiers on the loading floors, not many, but enough to make the open ground useless.

They stood in pairs near the ends of the gantries and beside the lamp posts, facing outward instead of searching. Anyone crossing the yards would be seen from three directions before they made it halfway.

Rhosyn stayed behind a loading building and watched for a few seconds. None of the soldiers moved. They already had their orders.

She turned back and dropped into the overflow runs beneath the yards. They weren't made for people. They carried excess water when the locks were under pressure, so they were dry now but wouldn't stay that way once the tide changed.

The main channels were wide enough to walk through, but they ran away from the freight plaza. The smaller connectors cut across the right direction, so Rhosyn took those instead.

The first one was barely wide enough for her shoulders. She turned sideways, lifted both arms above her head and forced herself through, scraping concrete on one side and rusted supports on the other.

Halfway through, the pipe narrowed further. There was no room to turn around, so she kept pushing until something sharp caught across her back and tore through her clothes.

Rhosyn didn't stop. She forced herself through the last two metres, dropped into the next channel and kept moving.

Folding wouldn't help here. She needed open space or somewhere she could see clearly enough to arrive, and trying to fold through solid concrete was not something she intended to test.

So she crawled through the connectors instead. It took eleven minutes, and losing those eleven minutes bothered her more than the cuts on her shoulders or the blood on her back.

She came out into a maintenance sump below the freight plaza with water in her boots. By then, the forty minutes she'd calculated earlier was already becoming impossible.

The plaza above was lit, which was the first thing that felt wrong. The freight lift operated at all hours, so there should have been loaders, tally clerks and crews waiting for cargo.

Instead, the offices around the yard were dark and the cargo stacks sat where they'd been left. The lift itself was still moving, empty, going up and down as if the plaza were operating normally.

Rhosyn stayed in the mouth of the sump and counted thirty-one soldiers. They were spread across the plaza in a loose ring, covering the alley mouths, the gaps between the cargo stacks and every passage leading into the yard.

They weren't guarding the lift. They were guarding the ways to reach it, and that made the plan clear. 'They closed the other two crossings and left this one open.'

The freight lift was too important to shut without drawing attention from half the port, so they hadn't closed it. They had left the lights on, kept the lift moving and put thirty men around it instead.

From outside the plaza, everything would still look normal. Anyone who escaped the lower passages, though, would eventually have to come here because there was no other quick route out of the second ring tonight.

Rhosyn looked across the soldiers again and found one man who didn't fit with the rest. He stood farther back near the base of the lift housing, with no weapon in his hands.

Everyone else watched the ground-level approaches. His eyes kept moving above the cargo stacks, checking the open spaces between the platforms and the empty air around the lift.

Rhosyn watched him for several seconds before she understood. He was watching the places where someone using folds might appear. 'He knows what I can do.'

Either somebody had told him about her ability, or he had seen something similar before. Neither possibility helped.

Thirty-one. She could fight them, and she probably could win, but that wasn't the part stopping her.

Every soldier she injured down here became another problem for Trafalgar later. Four men in a passage were already difficult enough. Thirty more, with no Myrrhvale witness and no official order anywhere near the plaza, would be much harder to explain.

She could try to fold past most of them, but one man was already watching where she would land. She could turn around and go back through the overflow runs, but the other exits were on the far side of the ring.

That route would cost even more time, and the tide would turn in less than an hour. Once it did, those channels would start filling with water.

Rhosyn checked the time again. Forty minutes had been the best version, assuming the freight plaza was normal, the lift was clear and nobody stood between her and the upper levels.

None of that was true anymore. She had been counting since leaving the north passage, and twenty-six minutes were already gone.

Trafalgar was somewhere behind her with Rhavel and close to twenty soldiers. She was still on the same level, and every route she had tried had already been prepared for.

Rhosyn looked toward the lift and considered the choices one last time. She could wait and hope the soldiers moved, but they had clearly been placed there for the night.

She could retreat and lose another twenty minutes looking for another route, assuming the overflow channels stayed dry long enough. Or she could go through the men in front of her and deal with what came after.

There wasn't a good option left, only the fastest one. Rhosyn adjusted her sleeve over the cut on her arm and checked the blood on her back with one hand.

It was still bleeding, but not enough to slow her yet. She looked over the plaza again: thirty-one soldiers, one man watching for folds and one working lift behind them.

Rhosyn stepped out of the sump and into the light, walking far enough that there was no point pretending she hadn't been seen. The nearest pair noticed her first, then the next, and within seconds heads were turning across the plaza.

Weapons started coming free, but nobody rushed her. Rhosyn kept walking and watched the man near the lift housing instead of the soldiers spreading out in front of her.

He lowered his gaze from the space above the cargo stacks and found her almost immediately. Unlike the others, he didn't look surprised.

"There she is," he said, and the soldiers around the plaza began to move.