Illusion Report

There’s probably no other city in the world quite as convenient as Blackmoor City.

At one-thirty in the morning on the 16th, Fu Tailan was behind the wheel of a recently rented car, pushing hard down the interstate.

Westley’s imminent death would detonate like a bombshell — every faction imaginable would swarm around it, combing every inch for answers. There was no way he could just casually hail a cab to Westley Manor in the dead of night.

Even if his future self had an alibi for the 16th, it wouldn’t matter — and knowing himself, there was an eighty percent chance his future self wouldn’t have anything that convenient to begin with.

The problem was that the Upper State Manor sat well outside Blackmoor City’s limits, which meant there was no way to approach through the Nest.

The Nest and Blackmoor City overlapped perfectly — same area, same boundaries.

Fu Tailan had never verified this himself, but he’d heard it from more than one Hunter: the city limits marked on any map were, in reality, the edges of the Nest.

Stand at the boundary inside the Nest and look outward, and all you’d see was a darkness so dense not a single thread of light could pierce it — solid as a wall, sealing the Nest shut from every direction like a room with no exits.

He didn’t know whether anyone had ever been curious enough to step into that darkness.

But if they had, they certainly hadn’t come back — no one, to this day, knew what that darkness actually was, or whether it had any edge at all.

Just looking at the way Westley had been jumping at shadows told Fu Tailan everything: the security around Westley Manor, inside and out, would be far beyond anything ordinary. If he could have approached through the Nest, he’d have been able to slip past every checkpoint Westley had set up. But that wasn’t an option.

Which meant it came down to Fu Tailan himself, two guns, and the three Illusions he’d just pulled from the Morgan Family, against whatever gauntlet Westley had laid out for him.

Oh — and a box of pizza on the back seat. And the pair of eyeballs wedged in the gap of the glove compartment lid.

He supposed he ought to be grateful that his Nest dissociation disorder had chosen such a critical moment to produce something relatively mild and non-lethal as far as "hallucinations" went.

It was only a pair of eyes, after all — staring at him out of the dark through a crack in the glove compartment. They sat there quietly, behaved themselves, didn’t cause a fuss. Considerably better company than whatever had been scrawling text on the Nest stationery. Not a bad travel companion, honestly.

"What do you think," Fu Tailan said, addressing the glove compartment, "if someone had unlimited wealth and resources most people couldn’t even dream of — what kind of security would they set up?"

The eyeballs didn’t move.

"You don’t know either?"

They rolled twice, then settled back on Fu Tailan.

"Fair enough. Neither of us has ever been in that position, so we don’t really know what options are even on the table. People have a hard time imagining things they’ve never seen. Let me come at this from a different angle."

Specifically: what would be the worst-case scenario for an intruder.

"Worst case — Westley knows the moment anyone makes a move against him. But that’s unlikely, practically impossible. If he could read intentions in real time, he wouldn’t need security at all, right? Isn’t that right, Little Eye?"

The eyes stretched wider at the corners, the eyeballs bulging further out of the shadow — as if making a point of proving they weren’t small.

"Next worst case after that... let me think."

Driving alone was dull work; saying his thoughts out loud helped him organize them.

"No way to get close at all. Or rather — get close and you’re exposed. Get exposed and you’re dead."

He kept his eyes on the road ahead, speaking as he turned things over. "The manor will run a whitelist. Only people on the list can enter the grounds or even get near the perimeter. And even then, anything like explosives or firearms — there’s no way any of that gets through their defensive line. That kind of screening, armed personnel and drones could handle on their own. But beyond that, they’ll almost certainly be using Illusions too."

Without glancing over, he reached out and snapped the glove compartment shut — the fingers that had been quietly creeping out were caught off guard by the slam. Whatever was in there made a sound that might have been a yelp of pain, or might not have, but either way the fingers retreated.

The eyeballs temporarily abandoned their ambition of climbing out, retreating into the corner of the glove compartment, fixed tightly on Fu Tailan.

"Say there’s an Illusion that can detect hostile intent within a certain radius and trigger an alert. Or one where the moment you step inside its detection range, your position is immediately fed to every guard on site — while you yourself have no idea you’ve been made. That, without question, would be the worst possible situation for anyone trying to break in.

"Right? Like, I’m all fired up, about to scale the fence, I look up — and every drone overhead already has its gun zeroed in on me."

The two eyes drifted closer together until the eyeballs were pressed side by side.

"Hey now, you’re flattering me — don’t lay it on that thick, you’re making me blush."

Fu Tailan decided they were complimenting him on his thoroughness.

"Assuming worst case, then... I can talk my way past people well enough. But how do you talk your way past an Illusion? Oh — time to get off the highway."

Less than an hour’s drive left to Westley Manor.

Fu Tailan took the exit ramp and had barely pulled onto the surface road when a patrol car parked along the shoulder immediately fell in behind him, lights flashing to signal him to pull over.

"Officer," Fu Tailan said, rolling down the window. "Was I speeding?"

The cop’s tone was easy, unhurried. "Sir, it’s pretty late. Where you headed?"

"Home."

Fu Tailan tilted his chin toward the road ahead. Thirty minutes in that direction sat a wealthy residential enclave where property values were steep enough to make you instinctively respect the dogs that lived there.