Chapter 600: The Noodle Shop
Ethan was completely bewildered, his clothes rumpled, his thoughts a mess. A sudden chill brushed his leg, and when he looked down he realized his knee was soaked. He must have been a beat too slow when he’d jumped off the table, because some liquid—he couldn’t even tell what it was—had splashed over him.
When he glanced back at Amber, her whole body was still convulsing, jerking as though caught in some invisible current. The air reeked of a strange, acrid odor that made him instinctively shrink away.
What the hell... He hadn’t done anything! He’d only slapped her a few times to bring her out of it.
"Ahem... strategic retreat is the best policy," he muttered under his breath.
He raised his hand, and his single-soldier combat mech responded at once, flying into place behind him. With a chorus of mechanical whirs, the machine folded itself around his body until he was sealed inside. Ethan’s form vanished, and a faint rush of air slipped out through the jagged hole in the reinforced glass.
"Hello... Amber? Ethan? Are you still there?" Melody’s voice carried on from Amber’s discarded phone, stubbornly calling their names.
At last, Amber stirred. It felt like forever before she managed it, but slowly she blinked herself back to awareness, eyes glassy and dazed as she stared up at the ceiling. Melody’s persistent voice finally pulled her further awake. She struggled to push herself upright, reaching down for the phone, but her knees buckled and nearly gave out beneath her.
"Ethan..." she hissed his name between clenched teeth, but there was something else in her voice too, an emotion she herself might not have recognized.
By then, Ethan had already made his way across the city to the first site of Lyla and Astrid’s Shadowstrike mission. It was an unremarkable office building, ordinary enough to vanish in the sprawl of the business district. In a place this busy, Lyla couldn’t have simply stormed her way inside.
Ethan took his time, climbing to the top floor until he reached a private office. Inside, the room was in chaos—papers scattered, furniture overturned. He counted the space, checked corners. Seven people had been assigned here. Yet there were no bodies.
That made no sense. Astrid’s team would have eliminated them, but they wouldn’t have been able to spirit the corpses away. Ethan had even considered contacting allies from the Noble Eight Lineages or the neutral Ninth Division to clean up afterward, though he hadn’t gotten around to it.
Which left only one explanation: someone else had already taken care of it. The Dissenters must have dispatched their own people to sweep the scene.
With that thought, Ethan turned on his heel and left. If the Dissenters had been here already, the place was nothing but a dead end.
He walked out into the daylight without calling on his mech. Instead, he let his feet carry him down the street toward a modest little restaurant where Kiara had last been spotted. The place was barely a five-minute stroll from the office building, too close to be coincidence.
Like most eateries tucked near office towers, the shop was simple, carved from the ground floor of an old residential block. The signboard announced noodles, nothing more, nothing less—the kind of quick stop workers favored on their lunch break.
Yet at noon, peak hour, the shop was strangely quiet. Ethan had half-expected to find Amber’s people posted here, keeping watch. But after scanning the street and the diners inside, he spotted no one suspicious.
He considered calling Amber for answers, then quickly thought better of it. The memory of her convulsions was still too fresh. Worse, he’d had to duck into a restroom earlier just to change his pants; the ones he’d worn reeked with that odd smell. It hadn’t been urine, he knew that much, but he didn’t want to think too hard about what it might have been.
Shaking off the thought, he found himself a table. A moment later, a little girl appeared from behind the counter. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, with chubby cheeks and a smile as bright as summer sunlight. In her small hands she carried a menu almost comically large for her size, which she carefully set in front of him.
Ethan’s gaze wandered past her for a moment, catching sight of the kitchen. A burly, bearded man worked behind the stove, his arms steady as he tossed ingredients in a wok. Flames roared high, licking at the sides as though eager to devour the food.
"Sir, what would you like to eat?" the little girl asked softly, her clear, sweet voice pulling Ethan back to the table.
"Just give me your signature fried noodles," Ethan said with a smile.
"Okay! Do you want the large portion?" The little girl tucked the menu under her arm and, halfway back to the kitchen, twisted around to ask again.
"Yeah, large portion," he replied.
She nodded seriously and disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later she reemerged, arms trembling as she balanced a huge plate of steaming fried noodles. Stretching up on her tiptoes, she slid it onto Ethan’s table.
Ethan made no move to help, just watched her with a curious expression.
"Isn’t this a bit much?" he murmured, taken aback. This was Crescent Isle, not the Great Northeast. The portion sizes down south were supposed to be stingy; he’d heard a so-called large portion here was barely two-thirds of what a northern restaurant called small. Yet here sat a platter big enough for two men.
The little girl’s eyes crinkled into cheerful crescents. "Mm-hmm, our place is very generous!"
Ethan frowned. Something about that didn’t sit right. How could a shop with portions this generous still be nearly empty at lunchtime?
He tried a bite, chewing slowly. His face twisted. "No wonder business is so poor... these noodles aren’t that good," he muttered under his breath.
The flavor was flat, too salty, the texture heavy. But Ethan wasn’t someone to waste food. Growing up in an orphanage, and later scraping by under harsh conditions, he’d learned to eat what was in front of him. Besides, he was starving. Since returning from the General’s Tomb, he’d barely eaten more than a strip of dried meat. Celeste had once tried to cook for him, but Director Vaughn had interrupted, and at the Whitmore estate urgent planning had left him no chance. By now, hunger gnawed so deep he’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
So he kept eating, mouthful after mouthful.
Meanwhile, the little girl slipped back into the kitchen. The smile drained from her face as she stepped over a body sprawled on the floor. Without hesitation she went to the corner, lifted a ladle, and filled a small bowl with seaweed and egg-drop soup from a pot. It was the sort of free side dish every modest noodle shop served.
She set the ladle aside, then gently brushed her fingertip against the rim of the bowl. A white speck slid from beneath her nail and dissolved into the soup with barely a ripple. The broth shimmered faintly, releasing an aroma even richer than before.
"Sir, have some soup," she said as she set it down, her eyes once again curved into lovely crescents.
Ethan caught himself staring at those eyes, holding his gaze a beat too long. For just a second, the girl stiffened under the weight of it, then she turned quickly back toward the kitchen.
"Gracie!"
The door opened and three men came in, calling out casually as though they were regulars.
Ethan’s eyes flicked toward the girl. She had taken only a few steps, then stopped and turned back with another bright smile.
"Uncle, what would you like to eat?" she chirped.
"Geez, I thought Gracie had gone deaf. Two large meat noodles, one egg-fried noodles!" one of them said with a laugh.
At the table, Ethan picked up the soup bowl. His lips curled faintly as he tipped it back and drank it down in a single swallow.
Just then, the girl appeared again, balancing a tray with three bowls of soup. She froze mid-step when she saw Ethan’s empty bowl. Her smile slipped, her face tightening in an instant.
Those soups had been meant for the three newcomers. But now, after seeing Ethan drain his, she set the tray down on the nearest table instead, her expression unreadable.