The air outside Commander Elara's personal lab was still, sterile, and humming with a quiet, intellectual energy.
It was a stark contrast to the storm of emotions that was currently brewing within the Commander herself. She floated beside Noah, her arms crossed, her eyes a mixture of profound annoyance and a grudging awe.
"It just… disappeared?" she grumbled, the words a low, frustrated hiss. "An entire mountain of one of the rarest, most conceptually dense materials in all of existence, and you're telling me it just 'disappeared'?"
Noah, now clad in a sleek, white-gold, tight-fitting body wrapping that did little to hide his glorious, muscular figure, simply shrugged.
His Aegis of the Architect was in its inactive form, a beautiful, intricate necklace of white and gold that rested against his clavicle.
"That's what it looked like to me," he said, his voice a mask of infuriating, deadpan innocence.
