SSS-Class Profession: The Path to Mastery-Chapter 206: A Familiar Incident

The phone buzzed again in my hand. I hadn’t let go. Anthony’s voice crackled through the speaker, sharp now, alarmed.

"Boss, you still there? What’s going on?"

I brought the phone back to my ear. "Anthony, start triangulating my location."

"You’re using a burner, Reynard. There’s no GPS data. You didn’t want to be tracked."

"Figure it out," I said through clenched teeth, my voice low, fast, steady. "This is an emergency."

There was a beat of silence. Then: "Understood. I’ll find a workaround. Give me a minute."

I didn’t have a minute.

I pushed off the wall and started walking down the narrow passageway of the jet. The girls had heard my outburst, their heads poking out from their seats, startled, confused. Alexis started to speak, but I held up a hand without slowing. freēwēbnovel.com

"Rey—"

"Not now," I said. Not unkindly. Just... focused. There wasn’t time.

My thoughts were unraveling in sequence, one deduction bleeding into the next. I tapped into the Detective job, letting it run wild in the background.

We were at a private airstrip. Minimal staff. Controlled manifest. The jet was sabotaged at the last minute, not with a bomb or something high-tech. Instead, it was mechanical. Something subtle. Something that wouldn’t show up immediately but would kill mid-flight, an engine malfunction. And if they’d gone that route for the arranged plane, there was a reason.

Low traceability. Easy to replicate.

I turned another corner in the corridor, passing the galley.

Whoever sabotaged the original jet knew that once it was discovered, security would lock down the field. They wouldn’t have a second chance. So they had to act then. Sabotage all jets on the tarmac... or just one more.

This one.

I reached the cockpit door.

And suddenly everything slotted into place.

If you needed to sabotage a plane quietly, without setting off alarms, you wouldn’t rig it to explode. You’d make it look like a fluke. An engine failure. If you knew the arranged jet was compromised, and the group you were targeting switched at the last second, you’d have only one chance left to make sure the backup was also doomed.

Unless you were already on the plane....like a pilot.

I opened the cockpit door.

Empty.

No pilot. No co-pilot. Just two vacant seats and the soft, unbothered hum of onboard systems running in perfect rhythm. For a second, I just stood there, staring into the stillness, letting it wash over me like cold water. Something was wrong and not in a chaotic, panicked way. That was what made it worse. Everything was too clean. Too deliberate.

Where is the pilot? I asked myself.

I stepped inside, two long strides to the console. My eyes scanned the controls, every screen, every dial. All of it, steady. No turbulence corrections. No manual overrides. No hands on the controls because none were needed.

Autopilot engaged.

I didn’t need to guess why. A human pilot making sudden course changes could be flagged in satellite logs, tracked, questioned. A human pilot abandoning ship mid-flight would cause immediate alert. But an autopilot on a scheduled flight path? That was invisible. A plane flying by the book didn’t raise questions especially not from above. No deviations, no detours. Just a quiet, obedient drone soaring across the ocean.

I turned around and that’s when I saw it.

On the left wall, just above the emergency comms panel, a small hatch was open. Not fully, but enough. The latch glinted under the cockpit lighting, barely catching my eye. The compartment meant for high-altitude parachutes had been accessed.

One chute was missing.

The release door itself was closed.

Tightly sealed.

No trace of tampering. No visual indicators. No emergency lighting, no pressure warnings, no alarms. I stepped closer and ran my hand along the edge.

Automated.

He’d programmed the hatch to open and reseal itself once he jumped. Just a brief cycle that was fast enough to leave unnoticed, slow enough not to trip onboard sensors or flight monitoring systems. No breach lights. No oxygen drop. Not even a whisper of decompression.

A silent exit.

I took a shaky breath as the weight of it settled.

The pilot didn’t have to sabotage the engines right away. That would be too obvious. Instead, he let the autopilot do the work give the illusion of routine, lull us into safety. All while he slipped away and the engines slowly deteriorated from usage and with him no longer being on the plane, I could only reach one possible conclusion on what will happen next.

And just like I had expected—

The alarms began.

They weren’t loud. Not at first. But they were sharp and rising. The cabin tilted slightly under my feet. My balance shifted forward.

I looked through the small side window of the cockpit. Black streaks of smoke were pouring from both engines. Twin trails of failure, stretching out into the night sky.

The jet dipped.

Not violently at first. Just enough for my body to register that something was wrong. A slow, sickening pitch forward—the kind of tilt that shouldn’t happen in a plane like this. And then came the sound.

The scream of the girls echoed down the corridor like a crack of thunder.

But I didn’t move.

Not yet.

Because I couldn’t.

Not physically. Not mentally. My feet were rooted to the cockpit floor, my hands hanging useless at my sides. My eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing the present anymore.

I was back.

Back on Mars.

The mission. The impact. The heat bloom from the control console. The smell of scorched polymer and liquefied metal. The screaming of the station’s hull as it tore itself apart. The way the fire moved, fast and hungry. How it licked the edges of the viewport as I plummeted. Alarms that didn’t stop. Oxygen warnings that didn’t matter. My identities shouting and talking with each other due to months of talking to myself.

It wasn’t memory. It was reliving. A full-body hijack.

And then, like a dam cracking, my job took over.

Detective (S-Rank).

It didn’t soothe me.

It flooded me.

An instant surge of cognition—hyperawareness so sharp it was blinding. Every fragment of data stabbed into my skull like shrapnel. No filter. No delay. Just everything, all at once.

I felt the hull vibrating—6.7Hz. Subtle, almost imperceptible, but rising. Metal fatigue setting in.

I heard the alarms—the pitch modulation fluctuating at 4-second intervals, signaling dual-engine failure, not one.

The air inside the cabin was growing hotter by the second. 2.2 degrees higher than when I entered. The scent of burning fuel mixed with synthetic wiring—jet A-1 combustion, not full ignition yet, but close.

The tilt increased—2.4 degrees. No, 2.8 now. Nose-down attitude growing exponentially.

My eyes flicked to the console, tracking digital logs that hadn’t even fully rendered yet.

Last human interaction: 17 minutes, 43 seconds ago.

Hatch deployed: 3 minutes, 12 seconds ago.

Parachute disengaged. Autopilot re-engaged. Cover-up interval: 14.7 seconds.

It was seamless. Too seamless.

I started laughing.

Not because it was funny. Not out of irony or madness or even fear.

It was reflex.

My body’s desperate attempt to bleed pressure. A mechanical reaction to the suffocating crush of clarity. My lungs spasmed. My breaths came in short, rapid bursts—hyperventilation masquerading as laughter. Each exhale was a blade across my throat.

I was drowning in knowledge.

And knowledge, I realized bitterly, wasn’t always power.

It was happening again.

Just like Mars.

Same helplessness. Same clarity. Same inevitable, calculated descent into death. Back then, all I could do was survive the impact.

But now—

Now I heard them.

Behind me.

Alexis, yelling something, voice sharp, commanding, but laced with panic.

Sienna, crying—quick, shallow sobs that tore through me harder than any alarm.

Camille, swearing up a storm, kicking something metal, her rage a thunderclap of denial.

And Evelyn who was steady, trying to anchor them all, shouting over the chaos. Giving instructions, even blindfolded. Trying to stabilize the cabin. Trying to save us.

They were all grabbing at whatever they could—walls, rails, each other—as the plane shook harder. The sound of bodies slamming into metal. Of bags flying open. Loose equipment clattering across the aisle. A storm building inside the jet.

My jet.

My responsibility.

And there, in the center of it, frozen, laughing like a man at the end of the world, was me.

Until I saw them.

Not memories.

Not ghosts.

Them. Here. Now. Alive.

My girls.

The ones who trusted me.

The ones I dragged into this war.

The ones I loved.

Something cracked.

My lungs finally expanded. Not a shallow gasp, but a breath that was real, present and controlled.

Then another.

And then—I stopped laughing.

The data was still there.

The tilt was still increasing.

The fire warnings were blinking faster now.

But I could see again.

I could feel my body.

And I knew exactly what I had to do.

I turned away from the window, from the past, from the fear.

"System," I said aloud, voice firm, breath steady.

The screen in my vision blinked to life.

"Activate Special Skill: Full Profession Sync."

[Skill Activation Confirmed]

The moment hit like a switch being flipped.

Every muscle in my body aligned. Every job fused. Every skill connected.

And I ran.

Foll𝑜w current novℯls on fre𝒆web(n)ovel.co(m)