Mira pressed her back against the canyon wall, listening to the mercenaries below argue over the stolen map. Three years of searching for the Vault of Aldenmoor had led her here, and she refused to let it end in a rocky gorge in the middle of nowhere.
She had always been adaptable — surviving a monsoon in the Philippines with nothing but a tarp, navigating a hostile border crossing using only her wits and a borrowed shepherd's coat. This situation was simply another puzzle to solve.
The map itself was rightfully hers. She had spent months decoding the ancient ledgers, and watching these hired thieves wave it around felt like a flagrant insult — not just to her work, but to every scholar who had devoted their life to protecting cultural heritage. They hadn't earned a single inch of that parchment.
She spotted a ledge above the mercenaries' camp and began climbing.
One of the men below laughed and tossed aside what looked like a crumpled set of papers. Mira's stomach dropped. She recognized those — her original research notes, the ones using the old celestial coordinate system.
"Useless garbage," the man said. "We deprecate anything that doesn't lead straight to the treasure."
He had used the word loosely, carelessly, the way people sometimes did. But his meaning was clear enough, and so was her advantage: he didn't know that her old system held the final key.
Mira smiled in the dark, reached the ledge, and waited for her moment.