Chapter 22

The 41st Division ran hundreds of clandestine teams. Four hundred and two, to be precise.

Lieutenant Erabelle Vermilion processed supply requisitions for ninety-two of them each week—an average of nineteen a day. That meant clearing six to seven orders an hour, a pace she usually churned through in under two hours flat, thanks to her sheer efficiency. If she lagged... well, there went her lunch.

On the days she finished on time, she spent her meal break running errands for the Dogs. Afternoons were reserved for the supply depot.

There, she would receive the morning’s logistics reports from the deputy squad leader and direct the crew on how to sort and pack crate after crate against itemized forms.

While the squad handled the manual labor, Erabelle cross-referenced the deputy’s ledger against the order she’d logged the day before. If anything was missing, she drafted a supplemental requisition and shot it straight to the supply officer.

By the time the paperwork was squared away, the crates were sealed.

Next came the regional network check. If the feed was clean, she brought up Miro to dispatch the supplies directly to the field units. If the network glitched, she filed a report to Command.

That was the basic daily grind.

Every quarter, she also had to conduct a full physical inventory of the warehouse and reconcile it against the ledgers.

A minor delay meant working late; a real snag meant an all-nighter. Any new task—no matter how trivial—guaranteed overtime or another sleepless shift.

Erabelle was far busier than she let on.

Spirit license holders with a Transport specialization were a rare commodity. Exactly as she had boasted two years ago in the Imperial Garden, she made herself indispensable.

Under that crushing workload, she made no secret of leaning on every pharmaceutical available just to stay functional. She displayed all the signs of a mild dependency, paired with a complete, casual apathy toward her own physical decline.

She practically lived on Imperial medicine.

To her, the Empire’s high-grade pharmaceuticals were a miracle cure-all, and she popped restricted substances like everyday energy supplements. Anyone else taking them that recklessly would have ended up in a body bag.

To top it off, she craved heavily spiced, bottom-shelf instant food, and considered the ice-cold can of beer at the end of the day the undisputed high point of her existence.

Well, second only to James.

...Maybe I should just toss the whole lot.

Commander Dezeb Avganis was having serious second thoughts.

The stash of DVDs Erabelle had tucked away contained well over seventy limited-edition discs.

With a haul that large, she probably had the distribution schedules memorized. She only went for good-looking actors, so her tastes weren't exactly hard to decipher...

“You go wild in bed with me, and then pine after other men?”

It was absurd.

Dezeb let out a heavy sigh into the mirror. Living with him, yet still making eyes at men on a screen...

Alone in the empty house—Erabelle had already left for her shift—he showered and brushed his teeth while staring at his reflection, admiring the gorgeous Level-13 shell he inhabited.

The bathroom shelves were immaculately bare. At first, he’d taken it for immaculate organization.

It took a couple of months to realize the truth: there simply wasn’t anything to organize.

Erabelle Vermilion loathed cleaning, so she simply refused to bring objects into the house.

She relied on single-use products for everything, allowing her to purge her trash in a single sweep.

She had even bound a minor auxiliary spirit strictly for waste disposal. It served as her literal, living garbage bin.

When Dezeb first figured that out, he’d been floored. He’d spent weeks wondering why she always carried her empty beer cans into the bathroom.

Then he caught her summoning the spirit right over the tile, feeding it everything. Apparently, that was standard practice for licensed Transport users. You’d never guess unless you witnessed it yourself.

“I’ve been had.”

He muttered bitterly, placing his rinsed pink toothbrush into the holder next to her gray one.

The entire house was styled in monochrome grayscale. As it turned out, that wasn't an aesthetic choice—it just hid dirt better.

Erabelle Vermilion always picked the path of least exertion.

She framed it as pure efficiency. To Dezeb, it was laziness, pure and simple.

For all her mountain of duties, her core nature was fundamentally idle. In her private life, everything was boiled down to speed and convenience.

Coexisting under one roof had exposed quite a few of her quirks. And the more he learned, the firmer his conclusion became: the woman was an absolute weirdo.

Stepping out of the bathroom, Dezeb reached a final verdict—he was going to throw every last DVD into the trash.

Or maybe keep them for her posthumous display.

Either way worked for him.

***

“The laundry service is dropping by this afternoon. Want me to hand over your uniform too, Lieutenant?”

“It’ll probably take four days or so.”

Commander Dezeb Avganis was no “nice guy.” He was a man soaked in violence to the very marrow of his bones.

Yet there was no denying it—he made life remarkably easy.

He was adept at domestic chores.

Naturally fastidious, he enjoyed working with his hands, an inclination that carried over into housework. He was simply the sort of man who preferred staying active.

Compared to Erabelle, who survived on disposable plastics and instant rations, his daily routines were far healthier. And whenever a household system broke down, he called a specialist without a second thought.

“Bed sheets, duvet, cushions, twelve assorted garments. Is that correct?”

For a variety of reasons, Erabelle had recently begun to feel a quiet, reluctant sense of comfort.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“The bulkier items will take about two days. I’ll bring the rest back tomorrow.”

“Yes, thank you.”

Lieutenant Erabelle Vermilion usually dumped her laundry off with the cleanup details—the very crews assigned to haul away corpses and scrub down operational zones. As she handed over her gear today, her mind drifted. It was becoming a habit lately... but today, her thoughts felt unusually heavy.

The man who had promised to return in four days had arrived precisely on schedule, reeking sharply of antiseptic. That cold, harsh smell of pure ethanol typical of a surgical bay.

An interrogation room, she recognized instantly.

If those four days hadn’t already been spent inside one, they certainly were now.

“Ghh... nghhh—!”

A man writhed across the floor of the adjutant’s office, foaming at the mouth as violent spasms racked his body.

In her two years as Commander Dezeb Avganis’s adjutant, Erabelle had learned one absolute truth: a human throat could make the exact same noise as a pig being slaughtered.

A corner of the adjutant’s office had effectively become a slaughterhouse.

The floorboards, the walls, even the ceiling... everything stank of fresh blood. The wet squelch underfoot, the guttering death rattles—the entire room felt less like a military headquarters and more like an abattoir.

The poor bastard’s mistake had been failing to realize that Dezeb Avganis had memorized the profile of every single personnel member posted to the main building. And by “memorized,” that meant down to the finest micro-behaviors and vocal nuances.

The way a person shifted their center of gravity while striding. The depth of their breath—whether it was abdominal or thoracic. Whether their speech bore the polished cadence of an Imperial officer or the jagged rhythm of a gutter thug.

Dezeb cataloged it all.

No visual disguise tech, perception-warping charms, or bio-mimicry implants could replicate those unconscious habits.

His memory was born of a deep, instinctual paranoia that distrusted everything and everyone—so hoping to slip past him on luck alone was a death sentence.

If he harbored even a shadow of doubt, he verified it immediately.

Stepping into his line of sight was no different than walking into a meat grinder. Sure enough, the intruder on the floor was already shredded to pieces.

All the man could do was squirm like a dying bug, trying to haul his shattered body forward with whatever functional limbs he had left. Even that minimal effort was useless—Dezeb’s heavy boot was planted firmly between his shoulder blades, pinning him to the floor.

Why this scene had to unfold directly inside the adjutant’s office was anyone's guess—then again, bad luck was hardly a rare commodity around here.

Dezeb had returned from his field assignment still wearing civilian clothes and had dropped by to chat with Erabelle when he spotted the man—who was casually holding a supply requisition form.

Erabelle hadn’t picked up on anything wrong. To her eyes, the man was the spitting image of Sergeant Gared.

To Dezeb, he was an outright imposter.

“The real sergeant was discovered in Warehouse B. Based on the lack of rigor mortis in the upper joints, time of death is placed within the last hour.”

Apparently, the intruder had murdered Sergeant Gared and stashed the corpse inside Warehouse B—the exact facility they had finished clearing out just two days prior. Which meant... the whole unit needed to be disinfected all over again.

“We’re only in Year 42, and he’s already knocked out of the running? That’s a twenty-one point deduction. Next time, I’m dropping this unit to a D-grade. Should we open up the interrogation room?”

“Yeah. Open it.”

Twenty-one points? A grade demotion? The exchange made zero sense, yet Dezeb casually kept testing the man’s vital reflexes with a combat knife, indifferent as ever.

Once satisfied, he gave his wrist a sharp flick, driving the blade down.

A high Signum level usually correlated with elevated physical metrics—at least for non-support classifications. For AT-types, the scaling was almost 1:1.

The combat knife sank effortlessly into the solid concrete floor with a heavy, metallic thunk, pinning down right next to the man’s temple. The imposter began to shudder uncontrollably.

Considering how much of his skin remained attached, his terror was entirely rational.

The intruder was a killer himself, but watching that face twist in horror, Erabelle couldn't help a knot of cold dread from forming in her gut. It felt like looking into a mirror.

“Transfer him to the interrogation room. Have the medical team patch up the bleeding.”

“I’ll alert the cleanup crew as well.”

“Yeah. Tell them to scrub this section first. We’re running low on available slots. The freezer’s completely full, right?”

The man was already being handled like cold meat.

“Yes, packed tight. We’ve had to double-stack the corpses, so a few of the ones in the back have likely burst open by now.”