The slum is appalling. It's never truly day, never truly night; the humidity is unbearable, and the piercing wind makes any comfort impossible.

If Isis's ranking wasn't so low to the point where she couldn't afford her degenerative pills anymore, she probably wouldn't be here today, sinking into these vile and putrid swamps.

But can she really complain? She always managed to swap her rank C missions for rank A ones, effortlessly boosting her ranking without much effort.

Her mission this time was child's play: find the Black Moon pond and implant an elec sphere without attracting attention. This simplicity, mind you, is uncommon in rank A missions.

Although she never truly understood the deep reasons why the Polis leaders persisted in maintaining any diplomacy with the Slum or constantly intervening in these desolate lands, she always carried out her missions with disconcerting ease and without complaint.

Her third-generation GPRadar, which she acquired last week, now allowed her to geolocate the slightest energy source hundreds of kilometers away and optimize her movements to the extreme thanks to the fungal blob technology synthesized into her tool (Among other things). This would make her mission today much easier.

It's true that in the swamps, everything is desolation. Every square centimeter of mud looks the same, and every tree is there only to further weigh down the already too dense and futile landscape... at least, that's what Isis thought, who didn't hold the Sleepers in her heart and gave them too little credit, along with their environment.

Despite her lack of interest in this environment, it still took her no more than a handful of minutes to reach the Black Moon pond. Making sure via her GPradar that no one was around, because ongoing diplomacy dictated that there should be no interference from the vigilantes in the slum. Such missions must not leak out at the risk of triggering a new conflict between the two factions.

Facing the pond, she materialized her sphere by unpinning her corp capsule, thus releasing the energy ball in front of her. She mechanically threw the sphere, a sphere that, in her eyes, had little importance, then waited, out of diligence, for it to sink deeper into the water.

Although her body was still in the slum, her mind was already elsewhere, probably in a sushi bar, contemplating the delicate dishes she would savor tonight.

Before she could even feel the slightest vibrational change in the air or receive a notification from her GPradar, a mortuary mirage had just hit her head-on, and she fell into a hypnagogic state