Illusion Report

Chapter 345: Chapter 299: Dual Perspective: Fu Tailan and Brianna

The defense tower stood rigid against the night sky, its sharp spire jarringly out of place among the lavish estate grounds.

The rotating patrol drones swept overhead just as Fu Tailan pushed open the car door — a swarm of oversized mechanical hornets breaking from their hive, buzzing outward and dissolving into the darkness.

...He was already inside the Illusion’s surveillance perimeter.

The manor knew he was here. What it didn’t know yet was whether he was an intruder — and how long that would last was anyone’s guess.

From this point on, Fu Tailan knew he might need to act at any moment.

A single transmission. A glance. The faintest tremor in the air. Any of it could be the first sign of an incoming attack.

He gripped his backpack straps and deliberately fell back two paces, keeping the other two men in front of him as they made their way toward the security center. Every step felt like moving under the gaze of some vast, inescapable eye.

On the eastern side of Westley Manor stood a small building, separate from the main estate and unconnected to it — mostly quarters assigned to staff and bodyguards. The entire floor below ground had been converted into a security operations center.

As they passed by the manor’s main building in the distance, a cluster of low, dark shapes that had been slowly prowling the grounds suddenly froze in their tracks — then began moving toward the group, one deliberate step at a time.

Pointed ears. Dense, thick fur along a raised spine. Heavy paws striking the ground with each stride...

...Dogs? They couldn’t be wolves, could they?

Fu Tailan swallowed, a vague unease settling in his gut that he couldn’t quite place.

"Hey, Lowell, quit dragging your feet,"

one of the guards ahead called back, barely glancing at him, paying no attention whatsoever to the approaching shadows — shapes that, the closer they came, rivaled the size of full-grown wolves. "Huh? Did you grab a bag on your way out?"

Fu Tailan slung the backpack over his shoulder and didn’t bother engaging. "Walk your walk. Mind your own business."

The man laughed, muttered something under his breath, and turned back around.

One of the dark shapes padded straight toward Fu Tailan. The moment he got a clear look at it, he nearly flinched out loud — and bit back a silent curse.

Westley’s taste really hadn’t changed one bit. Still dragging Nest things into the Human World like it was nothing.

These large creatures — somewhere between dog and wolf — were clearly nothing that belonged in this world. The rest of the body was wolf enough, but the snout jutted forward in a long, unnatural protrusion, easily twenty or thirty centimeters, lined from end to end with narrow, precisely spaced grooves so fine they looked machined.

And inside each of those fur-lined slots was inserted a...

Wait.

Were those memory cards?

Fu Tailan stared at it, frozen for several long seconds — until the creature’s nose wrinkled and it pulled in several deep, deliberate sniffs. That snapped him back. He turned and quickly caught up with the guards ahead. Glancing back, he saw the creature had already lost interest, turning away and padding off into the dark.

What was it even for?

No point guessing. Fu Tailan picked up his pace and shelved the question, following the two men through a series of card-access checkpoints until they reached the elevator. The doors opened — and beyond them stretched a wide, bustling operations floor that looked, of all things, like a call center.

Banks of surveillance screens sat above deep matte-black control consoles, snaking out in long rows, doubling back on themselves, carving narrow aisles between them.

Security personnel in headsets were stationed at each console, apparently assigned to monitor specific zones of the estate. The moment the elevator doors opened, Fu Tailan caught half a sentence: "— 4:42 AM, Prima asleep, position unchanged, no anomalous personnel movement in surrounding area..."

He glanced down at his phone. 4:42 AM exactly.

Prima must be Westley’s call sign.

So every designated zone had someone watching it around the clock — and the protected target’s whereabouts were being tracked and logged minute by minute...

But that wasn’t what stopped Fu Tailan mid-step.

He stood fixed to the spot, staring at the wall directly across from the elevator, several dozen meters away, momentarily at a loss for words.

Projected across its surface was a list of names.

[November 16 — Personnel newly detected within a 10-kilometer radius in the past 30 minutes]

[November 16, 4:42 AM — All personnel currently within a 10-kilometer radius]

The name of "Lowell" — the man he was impersonating — along with the two other guards, appeared plainly on the first list.

Beneath each name were a series of collapsed submenus: personal profile, current location, items in possession... all currently folded shut, with no immediately obvious way to expand them.

Fu Tailan exhaled slowly, feeling a cold sweat prick across his palms.

Lucky.

Lucky he’d replaced someone who had been sent out from the security center itself.

Three internal personnel had left the center. The same three internal personnel had now returned. Nothing about that would raise a single eyebrow — it was all perfectly routine. No one on staff had thought to click through and check the details.

Because if anyone had opened the "items in possession" submenu, they would have known immediately that something was wrong. "Lowell" was carrying several things that didn’t add up. Even if not everyone could identify an Illusion on sight, whoever was in charge of security coordination certainly would have recognized them at a glance.

With a security net this tight... how had Westley ended up dead?

Whatever the assassin’s angle of entry was — how had it even been possible?

At most, Westley had one hour left.

Fu Tailan needed to find that breach before the assassin used it — so he could swoop in and take everything for himself.

The first problem was getting himself into the manor proper through legitimate means. And that was already looking next to impossible.

Even security center guards on shift had no clearance to enter the manor outside of rotation...

Which meant this identity needed to go. And soon — because it wouldn’t be long before someone started getting suspicious.

Fortunately, he already had someone in mind. Possibly the most ideal candidate for his next switch.

***

"...The guard from checkpoint one still hasn’t come back?"

Brianna rubbed the corners of her eyes. Even in her current strange, difficult-to-define state of being, she still got tired. It made no sense, but there it was.

It was past four in the morning. She’d barely closed her eyes when the security center called to wake her. Half-resident or not, this was too much for anyone to take.

"That’s correct. He’s reportedly been missing for forty minutes. Checkpoint one requested guidance, so we sent out a search team — they’re still en route—"

"Again?" Brianna caught the word the security chief had used.

The head of security wasn’t a Hunter, and had no obligation to report guard matters to Brianna. The only time he came to her — treating her as "Secretary Green" — was when he suspected something might involve the Illusions, and needed her perspective or assistance.

The pizza delivery guy had also vanished without a trace.

Brianna listened, tapping her fingers lightly against the desk.

...Here it comes.

The closer to the end, the sharper the danger.

She knew where the Illusions were now — not that she could ever touch them without Westley’s permission — but would whatever was closing in drag her down with it?

Dying again for a father like that would be absolutely disgusting.

"Making people disappear for its own sake doesn’t accomplish anything."

Especially when the one disappearing was a low-level gate guard. Bluntly put, he wasn’t worth targeting.

Brianna was fully awake now.

She got to her feet. Glancing down, she realized she’d fallen asleep without changing — as if, the moment she’d left the security room, she’d been in too much of a rush to throw herself back into another world, to forget this one entirely.

"The disappearance is just the setup. Making someone vanish and then slipping into their place — that’s the real move. Someone’s been working their way inside."

She couldn’t think of any other reason to make a low-ranking guard disappear — unless it was all coincidence, like the man had wandered off for a smoke and gotten hit by a car.

But at a moment this critical — with all four Illusions gathered — she didn’t believe in coincidence.

"The pattern is obvious. At any given checkpoint, the headcount should add up — but it always comes up one short. Because whoever is taking someone’s place has to get rid of the original first. Once they move on to the next identity, the previous person naturally ends up as a missing persons case. The pizza delivery driver was the first. The guard named Marlo was the second. Going by this pattern, Marlo is almost certainly already dead."

The first search team sent out to look for the delivery driver had come back intact — all three accounted for. That meant whoever had replaced checkpoint guard Marlo had very likely slipped back into the manor among those same three men.

"...Is there really an Illusion that can do that?" the security chief said, hesitant. "Like passing a relay baton — swapping identities one after another?"

"There’s nothing in the Nest that doesn’t exist. Only things you haven’t thought of yet."

"I’ll have those three brought in immediately—"

"Go ahead," Brianna said, snatching a few small cards from the desk and striding toward the door. "But I have a feeling one of them won’t be found."

"I’ll call you back," the security chief said, and hung up.

Brianna walked out through the manor’s side entrance, crossed into the courtyard, and let out a sharp whistle.

"Head Wolf?" she called out, standing on the grass. "Head Wolf, come here a moment."

A minute or two passed. Then a dark shape emerged slowly from the tree line — head low, spine arched high — and padded forward through the night. It moved through the shadows and into the glow of the pathway lights, its coat catching the light with a dim, shifting sheen, like a living, writhing nightmare flowing across the ground.

Brianna looked through the cards in her hand and selected one.

It looked like a card, but felt like bone — more accurately, a fragment of bone. A bone chip.

She had been carrying this chip with her that evening — tonight, rather; it was already the 16th now — when she’d met with Fu Tailan.

She didn’t believe in coincidence.

If the night had passed without incident, she might have been willing to write off Fu Tailan’s earlier call as a misdial.

But looking at everything now... the timing was far too neat.

He had "accidentally" called her while she was on her way to the manor. And not long after she arrived, someone had used an Illusion to quietly slip inside...

"Inside this one,"

she said softly, extending her hand toward the Head Wolf’s nose and sliding the bone chip into one of the empty slots along its snout, "is the scent of someone named Fu Tailan."

The Head Wolf’s mouth slowly fell open. The lips drew back further and further, curling upward — until its expression was an unmistakably human smile.

Fu Tailan’s scent — or rather, what registered as Fu Tailan’s scent to a creature of the Nest — bloomed outward at once, rich and tendriling, clinging to the air in coiling threads like a fog with too many limbs.

It was cold and hollow, its edges flickering with a near-lurid silver-red luminescence. The glow curdled almost instantly, dripping downward, scorching the grass below into thin wisps of white smoke with a faint hiss.

Everyone’s scent took on a different shape when it manifested like this.

Brianna had never quite worked up the nerve to ask what hers looked like.

"...There. Found the owner of this scent." The Head Wolf answered in perfectly articulate human speech. "Fu Tailan is close."

As expected.

Before Brianna could ask her next question, her phone buzzed in her hand.

She looked at the screen. The name read: Fu Tailan.

She straightened slowly.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!