Entering

[ASG2: The Garden 1]

GV looked up at the hotel that the sniper had told him that held the group that now had Joule. It was simply called 'Hotel Au79' and from what he could read about it online it was very posh, the kind of hotel that CEOs and other important guests to the city would stay in. It had 79 floors and each floor had eight suites and a few other rooms. Discounting the ground floor meant six hundred and twenty four different rooms that they could be keeping Joule in.

He wasn't about to leave it to luck though, he had already tried to find their computers using the same hack that he used to find Ars but they were more careful in this case and he couldn't pick them up. He was however able to get a list of names and faces.

He couldn't just stroll in without attracting attention so instead he leaned against the wall of the hotel and felt around inside with his powers. Ranged hacking was hard but as long as he could install a backdoor he could start hacking from his phone.

After creating a back door he could exploit, GV pulled up a list of guests and ran a check to see if any Aves members were booked as having the room. When he didn't get a hit he knew they were either using someone else's room or a fake name. In either case it made tracking harder.

Using his back door he accessed the camera archives. It was entirely possible they teleported Joule into their room and so he wouldn't be able to watch the halls for her, he could however watch for the other members of Aves.

The lobby was the camera he decided to watch. It was relatively busy though so he broke the video down into quarters and watched each in fast forwards.

There they were, two members of Aves could be seen. One could be seen leaving and later entering again while the other hung around in the lobby and spoke with some girl that he didn't have any information about.

The girl's face was obscured most of the time from the cameras. He could see her big nurse's hat though. Someone else from the underworld perhaps here to take care of Joule while she was kept unconscious?

Regardless he was able to follow the progress of the Aves members back to their room, floor 12 suite 6.

There weren't any helpful fire escapes for him to jump up this time. He wondered about what they would do in a fire but that wasn't important. He touched the wall and his power felt the metal that was holding this massive structure together. He would have to climb.

His power grabbed on and created an electromagnetic force to hold his hand to the wall, or rather to the metal inside the wall. He raised his other hand and stuck that to the wall too. He wasn't on the road side of the building so he would have a little time. With his hands like this he could climb the wall easily if not quickly. It would take him over five minutes to climb to floor 12 and that was five minutes in which he could be spotted.

He didn't want to wait, if Joule was still here it was unlikely Gensei Kihara would wait around before taking her. If he did climb now he would be in plain view, it was still bright out after all.

He looked around and noticed that the building behind him, the one adjacent to the hotel was seven floors tall and had roof access. From that roof he could jump to around floor eight of the hotel and he would only need to climb the last few meters.

Plan made he headed to the roof and prepared to jump. He took a few breaths as he was going to rush this as fast as he could.

He leaped and used his ability to grab on to the wall near the corner of the hotel. If he had been a meter to the right he would have crashed into a window, had he been a meter to the left he would have missed the side of the hotel entirely and would have been forced to grab for dear life to the back of the hotel.

He began climbing quickly, hand over hand, to the 12th floor. He had looked it up via his back door earlier but the suite he was climbing next to right now was unoccupied. He gave the window a zap to disable it's security and took one of his knives from his belt. The window was reinforced so a small smash wouldn't break the entire window.

The knife's bottem smashed into the glass but it didn't break. He flipped the knife around to try and get a better angle to smash and struck the glass again in the same place. That opened a hole. He struck again a little lower and then again a little lower than that. After about a minute he had opened a hole he could fit through right next to the wall he was hanging on to.

He climbed through the hole, his coat protecting him from glass cuts, and stood up inside suite 3. He made his way over to the door into the hallway and listened for a commotion. Upon hearing nothing he quietly opened the door and walked out into the hall.

Gensei Kihara was thinking. He studied the girl as she was plugged into the small pod that would allow him a look at how she ticked.

He had a lot of experience with neurophysiology but even he didn't know everything. Like this girl for example, she was likely a clone like those created by project Radio noise. Physically she was around thirteen to fourteen but he could see the signs of accelerated aging in a few spots. If he had to guess he would place her actual age at ten on the high end or around five on the low end.

More curious was her ability. For most espers, their brain's parietal lobe was larger than the average person. This was not always true, Espers of a lower level sometimes lacked this trait but most high level espers he had studied had it. The parietal lobe is typically responsible for some of a person's sense of touch along with their ability to understand spaces, read, write and mathematical abilities. All features that many abilities take advantage of.

This girl however had a normal sized parietal lobe even though she was meant to be a level five candidate. It was quite a mystery.

A quiet alarm went off in his pocket. It seemed that the electromaster had come for her. It was annoying that he hadn't been able to tidy up his loose ends today and thus allowed clues that the boy could follow. Regardless he needed to leave now.

It was a pity to lose Aves now but the girl was more interesting. A telepath potentially on the same level as mental out without the enlarged lobe? He would need to study her more. He left his suite on the 64th floor and headed to the elevator. Behind him, his security loaded the girl into a large box. In there she would be taken down as cargo and loaded into a van that could take her to one of his labs.

End of chapter.

If I got anything about the brain wrong, I'm sorry. This is what I got after a few minutes of googling