Chapter 137: I Could Play With This Waist For A Year... Wait?

Since you decided to leave Goldenglow here, your operational objective had to shift. It wasn’t just about resolving Susie’s immediate crisis anymore; it was about completely eradicating the threat posed by Duke Beihman—the old aristocrat whose shady conversation she had accidentally overheard.

Otherwise, who knew when the mysterious, magnetic pull of plot convergence might bring him back to burn down her barbershop again? Rhodes Island operators had already shown their faces at Green Spark and even taken direct action. If anyone wanted to settle the score later, that ill-fated barbershop would be the first target on the chopping block.

You had to consider how to bury this matter permanently. For example… by silencing the victimizer?

Up ahead, Muelsyse and her flow forms were sweeping through the unlucky pursuers like a tempest scattering autumn leaves. She twisted the thugs into a towering, slender water tornado. After spinning them up, down, left, and right dozens of times like a high-speed tumble dryer, she retracted her hand with a satisfied hum. The dozens of grown men were violently ejected, hitting the pavement like discarded sacks of flour.

“Doctor, I did well, didn’t I?”

Meeting her eyes—as clear and brilliantly bright as a pristine lake—you began to seriously wonder if there was some sort of innate bloodline suppression between a Columbian high-tech monopoly executive and a veteran Victorian factory owner.

Referencing the national archetypes hardcoded by Hypergryph, the difficulty level for Muelsyse to crush this old noble was akin to a son beating his father. Specifically, a strapping thirty-year-old son who worked construction and pulled in eight grand a month, beating his deadbeat father who lay in a nursing home with a catheter after gambling, abusing his family, and drinking away his youth.

When you have a dragon flying right in your face, it’s mathematically impossible to lose!

Rhodes Island, a humble pharmaceutical company, was already suffering from severe indigestion after swallowing that massive Kazimierz order. But, much like a hardcore completionist who had painstakingly cleared the fog of war across the entire map, you couldn’t just waste the leftover EXP. You signaled your mouse… ahem, no, you signaled Muelsyse to farm the remaining mobs so this trip wouldn’t be a total waste.

“Muelsyse, come here.” You patted the empty space on the bench beside you.

Though she didn’t quite grasp your intent, she obediently dropped her watery tumble dryer, rinsed the blood and grime off the pavement with a splash of clean water, and sat down.

“Doctor, is there anything else you need me to do?”

“Uh… nothing much. Just giving you a quick intelligence brief on this city. Or rather, a recap?”

Muelsyse blinked, stunned. Was he about to reveal the city’s hidden history? A secret underground passage? Had he been hoarding crucial lore this whole time?

“It’s nothing major. Just that these guys are Duke Beihman’s subordinates. They’re trying to block the passage of the ‘Infected Medical Insurance and Labor Hour Limitation Act.’ To pull that off, they plotted to stage a fake Infected riot to assassinate Councilman Angst, who’s pushing the bill forward. They accidentally got caught by this Feline lady beside me, so they tried to silence her. Oh, right, the reason the Duke is so paranoid is that he embezzled a massive amount of funds, creating a severe financial deficit. If he’s audited, he’s dead. Also, his son is currently cowering behind that mobile base vehicle over there.”

You paused, taking a breath. “I’ll leave the rest for you to decide.”

Muelsyse was practically moved to tears.

This was called ‘nothing major’? This was perfectly aligned operational granularity! It was as if an angel had descended from the heavens to hand her a strategy guide!

She had suffered enough from the insufferable riddlers at Rhine Lab—all the vague avoidance, the dismissive sighs, the constant refrain of ‘you’re too naive, Muelsyse.’ There were far more people mocking her idealism than actually doing any real work. If everyone were like the Doctor, speaking with absolute clarity and packing actionable intel into every single sentence, how glorious would life be?

Such a long string of sentences, and not a single wasted syllable. Why be so modest and call it a ‘recap’? This was a straight-up AFK farming walkthrough!

Having spent years at Rhine Lab without ever hearing a plain, straightforward directive, Muelsyse finally experienced the sheer joy of ‘setting up the macro and going AFK.’

“Don’t worry, Doctor!” She patted her chest vigorously. “With this information, if that noble Beihman still dares to cause you any trouble, I’ll personally rush over and drown him until he apologizes to you!”

She then reached over, grabbing your shoulder and patting it with equal enthusiasm. “Sigh, if only you were at Rhine Lab, we would be the best of friends!”

You let out a deep, soulful sigh of your own. “Sigh… if I were at Rhine Lab, that would be truly wonderful. Kal’tsit would finally be a polite cat!”

The trip to Sami, which was supposed to be a quick twenty-minute adventure, had been violently derailed halfway through. You were inexplicably dragged into that ancient castle for half a month, and when you finally emerged, your GPS was completely fried. It was hard to imagine the sheer, murderous aura Kal’tsit must have radiated when she saw the red dot symbolizing your location suddenly go offline after remaining perfectly stationary for two weeks.

Especially since you were currently hauling a carload of people from the Crimson Troupe. Now it looked fantastic; anyone with half a brain would assume your silent disappearance was because you were secretly colluding with your old Babel acquaintances, and that Bacchus had painstakingly borne you three children—wait, spit that out—left you three apprentices who carried his shadow.

But what must come, will come. Even if you wanted to run from this impending doom, this small border town in Victoria no longer offered any excuse to stay. As for Susie… forget it. It was best not to go back and scare the poor girl again.

On the drive back, the GPS finally flickered to life, and your terminal broke free from the ancient castle’s inexplicable communication jamming. You stared in absolute despair as the notification chimes rang out in a continuous, deafening staccato. The call failure records from various operators instantly stacked up to a glaring red “99+.”

The most recent messages were from Saria.

[Doctor, Kristen seems very eager to meet you, but out of personal bias, I hope you remain vigilant. My own experiences are not enough to serve as your reference.]

[Doctor? I heard from Kal’tsit that you went offline, but she hasn’t issued any search-and-rescue missions for you…]

[Doctor, do not worry when you see this message. Muelsyse seems to have found clues related to your whereabouts, and I am currently tracking her to find you.]

It’s over…

The vehicle was now carrying two utterly heartbroken individuals. There was the Doctor, who maintained a facade of cold, calculating indifference but internally wanted to dig a hole and die rather than face the music. And then there was Phantom, who had suddenly regained his icy, lethal assassin demeanor, while desperately fantasizing that everything that had just happened was merely a hallucination.

The two sat in the back seat, one on the left, one on the right. Their faces were as cold as frost, their terrifying auras fully unleashed, dropping the air pressure inside the cabin to suffocating levels. One was rapidly swiping through his terminal as if monitoring a global crisis, while the other had shadows surging around him, looking ready to embrace the darkness and slaughter a small army.

In reality, you were frantically typing out copy-pasted apologies to every single operator: Sorry!

And Phantom was desperately trying to communicate with his shadow, begging to be trapped in a hallucination. The moment he remembered how he had woken up, sworn to the person who rescued him and a perfectly normal Feline girl that he was a literal cat, and even pawed at her head, he felt that his new life was already over.

Could he just hit the reset button and wake up all over again? This time, he swore he would be perfectly elegant and gentlemanly to leave a flawless impression on the Doctor!

In a forgotten corner of the city where no one was paying attention, another mysterious convergence of timelines took effect.

Two rare Terran street thugs, who had clearly yet to abandon their base, low-level desires, excitedly surrounded a tall, slender woman. They leered at her with lecherous grins.

“Hehe, look at these legs, this waist, this figure! Let me get my hands on her, I could play with this for a year!”

Saria, who had rushed all the way here only to be abruptly surrounded by these two idiots, slowly blinked.

“?”

Who are they talking about? Me?

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent! 🙇‍♂️):

Massive thanks for reading and supporting the operation!]