Chapter 13

Honestly, lasting a month—maybe a month and a half—was already impressive. Even women far more beautiful than Lieutenant Erabelle Vermilion rarely made it past two weeks.

Commander Dezeb Avganis had a vicious temper, and the Dogs had never seen anyone get involved with him without eventually setting it off. Even the most debauched among them—Virgo Hag—was better by comparison. Dezeb had a habit of turning his partners into patients.

“How many days has it been?” Dezeb asked suddenly.

“Three days, sir,” Ori answered.

“Three days, and she already has a stomach ulcer? Wow... I’m getting soft.”

He sighed in exasperation once more.

“What’s it gonna take to get our dear lieutenant to loosen up a little? Ori, find me the data on photonic passive networks with bypass connections. Send it to me under auxiliary clearance.”

“Why not just lighten her workload a bit?” Ori suggested.

“She’s that busy?”

“She’s drawing the highest bonus pay in the entire division.”

“Oh, really?”

He had known she was diligent, but apparently she was even more devoted to her work than he had thought. Dezeb was still mildly impressed when the client for the current operation approached.

“All finished already?”

The woman had a soft, pleasant air about her. She had hired them to destroy a rival company’s production line and retrieve the design for a new spell disk.

It was a Transform Disk—an upgraded version of the one the Dogs currently used. It could temporarily alter a person’s physical form, with a 2% increase in duration and a 1.5% improvement in resistance to dispelling and detection. Not a bad product at all.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, holding out her hand. “I didn’t expect to meet the boss of the infamous Dogs in person. You’re even more handsome than I imagined.”

Dezeb suddenly wondered whether any manufacturers were developing better cognitive-interference disks. If they were, jobs like this might become a little less irritating.

“You’ll be discussing the details with me,” Ori interjected, stepping between them.

But the woman ignored him completely.

“You look like you need a woman,” she said, letting her gaze drift slowly down to Dezeb’s belt. Her eyes lingered there in a way that left no room for misunderstanding.

“Ah.”

Sexual harassment, huh?

Dezeb caught her outstretched hand and yanked her toward him, pressing the muzzle of his gun to her temple.

The woman merely smirked, apparently unafraid. She clearly assumed he wouldn’t dare kill a client.

“I have a healing-class support license, you know,” she said with a coy smile. “And my ship is nearby...”

At that, the gun shifted slightly.

If she’s got support slots, she’s too valuable to waste.

The rifle stock slammed into her upper teeth. Her eyes bulged with fury and realization.

“Ghhk—!”

Dezeb placed the severed head inside a cryogenic container, cold vapor curling from its mouth. Then he fired several rounds into the still-twitching remains.

“Still overheats way too easily.”

“I’ll forward this to the lab,” Ori said. “I’ll include the Transform Disk design with the report.”

Now that the client was dead, they would have to clean up the mess to preserve the Dogs’ reputation for reliability.

“I don’t know why people with support slots are so damn hard to find. If they weren’t, we might actually have some room left in the freezer.”

Lighting another cigarette, Dezeb added casually, “Oh, and on your way back from the lab, pick up some beer. Our dear lieutenant’s tastes are... pretty cheap. Got anything good for ulcers? Oh, wait—that injectable, Six-A?”

Ori replied that while Six-A was highly effective for the stomach, it had been pulled from the market over concerns about liver damage.

“Tsk.” Dezeb clicked his tongue. Guess I’ll have to wait a little longer before I can get her properly adjusted.

***

You’ve got to be kidding me.

7 p.m. Dezeb returned to Erabelle’s apartment, this time carrying a large paper bag stuffed with a box of beer and other groceries. The moment he stepped inside, he spotted her sitting at the dining table, preparing to give herself an injection.

“Is that... Six-A?”

“Yes... It’s very effective for gastritis.”

Everything else scattered across the table looked equally dangerous. Dezeb regarded the array of syringes and vials with mild curiosity. Erabelle, however, seemed far more concerned about him barging into her apartment again than about the potentially lethal drugs in front of her.

“Um, s-sir? How did you get my house code...?”

Dezeb raised an eyebrow.

Why is she even asking? Sure, it was biometric, but at the end of the day, it was still mass-produced technology. There was no way she actually trusted that crap.

Or... is she asking why I bothered memorizing it in the first place?

“It’s not like I can time every visit to match your off-hours,” Dezeb said casually.

“...Yes, sir.”

Lieutenant Erabelle Vermilion seemed to decide that she might as well go through with the injection. She moved with the calm, detached grace of someone who had long since resigned herself to every injustice life could throw at her. With practiced ease, she slid the needle into the crook of her arm. Clearly, this was far from her first time.

Dezeb leaned against the table and watched her.

“That stuff has side effects, you know.”

“If I take it with Tentorium-B, it’s fine.”

Before he could say anything, Erabelle held up a second ampoule.

Oh, not bad.

It was a hepatoprotective drug, typically prescribed to patients with liver problems. Of course, it came with side effects of its own. All banned drugs did.

“What about brain damage?” Dezeb asked.

“For that, I take GABA-C,” she replied, immediately producing another vial.

She could make a living selling this stuff, Dezeb thought, folding his arms as he studied her.

Erabelle seemed to interpret his silence as permission to continue.

“And then I take a muscle relaxant, and finally a sedative. Once all of that’s in me, I’m good as new...”

As she spoke, she reached for a can of beer, the motion so smooth and natural that she had clearly planned to drink it immediately after the injections. The can had been sitting beside the vials all along.

Dezeb reached out and gently pushed her forehead back with two fingers, stopping her before she could grab it.

Her wide, light-brown eyes stared up at him, frozen in place. He smiled warmly.

“You are not fine, Lieutenant. That’s an impressively textbook case of drug abuse. Keep this up and you’ll kill yourself.”

“I’m being careful to match everything to my condition,” she replied.

Dezeb ignored the nonsense and swatted the beer can out of her reach. Her eyes followed it with unmistakable longing.

“Gastritis, stomach ulcers, and a diet straight from hell—and you’re telling me you’re being careful? Are you careful in your dreams, too?”

He caught the faintly wistful look in her eyes as they followed the now-distant beer. A mischievous impulse seized him. Dezeb picked the can back up, cracked it open with a crisp crack, and raised it to his lips.

The corners of Erabelle’s mouth drooped.

Matching her expression with a sly grin, Dezeb chuckled. Didn’t she hate injections?

“These are all banned substances. Where’d you get them?”

Nothing like this had shown up in the audits. It made him wonder whether she had a private supply route of her own.

After taking a long, satisfying sip, he asked the question. Erabelle answered in a deflated voice.

“I bought them from the infirmary.”

It was a well-known secret within the unit.

Their division’s infirmary sold banned substances as casually as candy from a vending machine. The base pharmacy did the same, of course, but the infirmary carried higher-quality stock, and they even threw in a free blood screening. Welfare, in its own twisted way.

“Really? You shouldn’t be able to get these two there.”

Dezeb picked two particular ampoules from among the scattered vials and stood them upright on the table. Those were exclusive to a certain faction.

“I got those from Section 59.”

Dezeb blinked, genuinely caught off guard.

“They don’t sell to individuals, do they?”

At that, Erabelle Vermilion smiled. It was the same familiar, professional smile she wore during briefings. Dezeb set down his beer and took the seat across from her.

“I’d really like to hear this.”

“Uh... It’s really not a big deal.”

She leaned back slightly, unconsciously putting more distance between them. Dezeb felt a faint sting of disappointment.

Come on. I’m being so nice here, and she’s still trying to get away from me?

“Not a big deal, huh?” he repeated, tilting his head.

She flinched. Her instincts were sharp—Dezeb had to give her that. She was exceptionally good at sensing danger. She always stopped just before stepping on a landmine. Always changed direction at the last possible moment.

But avoiding one mine didn’t mean the path she chose instead was safe. That was her problem.

Sometimes, if you wanted to be truly safe, you had to accept a little damage and step on the mine anyway. This sharp-eyed woman had yet to understand that.

If she had, she wouldn’t have played along when he joked the night before about “getting closer.” She would have backed away instead of agreeing.

“I helped them with some tax work,” she admitted.

See? Not even a moment’s hesitation. Dezeb propped his chin on one hand, a grin tugging at his lips.

“Taxes?”

“Yes. They injured a tax consultant in a fit of rage... So, in exchange for helping them straighten things out, I received a few medications.”

“These?”

He rolled the two ampoules from earlier between his fingers.

“Yes. Just small quantities for personal emergency use. They agreed without much trouble.”

Erabelle said it cheerfully, but something about it bothered him.

Everyone took side jobs for extra money, but he hadn’t expected that from her. Erabelle had always struck him as almost excessively risk-averse. He hadn’t been receiving detailed reports on side work like this, so hearing her explain it so casually caught him off guard.