Chapter 70

“Haaah...”

Pinned flat against the bed, she trembled beneath his weight.

“Want to visit our island sometime?”

For a split second, the thought of being worked to death on a salt farm flashed through her mind, but Lieutenant Erabelle Vermilion quickly nodded, gritting her teeth against the sensations rising through her.

Commander Dezeb Avganis laughed softly and brushed a light kiss across her closed lips.

“You like the sea.”

Then he began talking about all sorts of things. He sounded calm, almost deceptively so. Yet his skin was still hot wherever they touched. His gaze had gone dark and heavy... and Erabelle could barely string one thought together.

“Anywhere you want to go? Anything you’ve been wanting to try?”

He caught her trembling earlobe between his teeth, then dragged his tongue slowly down the nape of her neck, never once stopping his questions. It only scattered her thoughts further.

At least she didn’t pass out.

The late-night snack, however, ended up being postponed until the next day.

“Why did you order pineapple pizza?”

She even skipped the Center, though that wasn’t the real problem.

The problem was that he kept running a fever on and off.

“It was twenty-five percent off.”

Erabelle looked at him with faint concern, but he wouldn’t even let her bring it up.

“That damned money.”

His arm was hot.

And that arm stayed wrapped around her the entire time like a boa constrictor.

***

“Seventy-nine again.”

Aries Cider considered placing a bet on how much longer First Officer Ol—who had gone deathly pale under Dezeb’s stare—would survive, then glanced at the data on the screen and found himself genuinely impressed.

This wasn’t some bakery machine. How did she manage to score exactly 79 every single time without gaining or losing so much as a point?

That was a talent in itself.

They had been monitoring her progress so they could raise the difficulty, or even change the scoring criteria altogether, if she ever showed signs of nearing completion.

Apparently, there was no need.

“Give me that.”

Dezeb took the cigarette from Aries’s fingers, put it between his own lips, and flicked his empty hand impatiently.

Aries handed over the pad he had been reading.

[...There’s an error.]

Erabelle was staring at the scoreboard and talking nonsense.

[There’s an error. An error! How does it make any sense that it’s 79 every single day?!]

Watching her pick a fight with the scoreboard, Dezeb clutched his stomach and burst out laughing.

It wasn’t that funny.

Apparently, though, he found her temper absolutely hysterical.

His laughing eyes remained fixed on the screen. Those pitch-black eyes barely even blinked.

Aries felt sorry for Erabelle.

He had thought so countless times before, and now he thought it again.

Thick, sticky blood clung beneath Dezeb’s feet.

The leather sofa beneath him had been reduced to a wreck. Humans lay tangled together around it, among them high priests of Sanctuary.

The Upper Plane was at war.

At least, Sanctuary believed it was.

In truth, it was closer to a massacre.

Even their justification was laughable.

For violating Molin City’s rights, Dezeb had already paid an enormous amount in damages. The planetary god of Molin City had been satisfied with the settlement.

Sanctuary, however, had decided otherwise.

Their impatience was understandable.

The Rift threshold was not merely approaching.

It was accelerating.

“The Rift is expanding. At this rate, the collapse will probably become visible within a few months.”

“Must be eating you alive.”

Dezeb sank back into the blood-smeared sofa, staring at the pad with apparent indifference.

“Once it becomes visible, it’ll be too late to act. If you’re going to do something, it has to be before then.”

“True.”

The answer was mild.

The Dogs, however, moved as though they were walking across thin ice.

Dezeb was close to snapping.

Only a few months remained before the threshold was reached, and even that time was shrinking rapidly.

“You still haven’t expanded the freezer?”

Virgo Hag was struggling with the wall-mounted processing tanks when Dezeb, still looking at the pad, frowned.

The building they owned on Capital Satellite 2017S could no longer be expanded.

It was in a better position to draw attacks than the flagship, which was why they were using it in the first place, but the processing tanks connected to the underground freezer beneath the parking lot had run out of room.

Limbs were sticking out everywhere.

Trash that could not even be repurposed as modules continued to pile up.

“We did. This is what it looks like after the expansion.”

“Then expand it again.”

“Should I have the processing team connect a gate directly to the incinerator?”

The rare resources required to install gates were limited even if one searched the entire cluster, so until the civil war they had been classified as strategic reserves.

But the situation had changed completely.

“Do it.”

After curtly ordering them to clear everything out as quickly as possible, Dezeb called Erabelle.

“Erabelle, get ready. We’re eating out. Come downstairs and I’ll pick you up. It’ll take about... forty minutes.”

He glanced down at himself and added a little extra time.

“Decide what you want to eat.”

Erabelle answered lightly that she would.

Dezeb smiled again at her image on the screen, his finger tracing a lazy figure eight.

A pitch-black shadow flashed beneath his feet and spread outward as he stood.

“Fourth floor. Eighth floor. One hundred and twelfth. Clean them up.”

Something cold enough to freeze the blood swept through the entire building, then vanished as though it had never existed.

Ignoring the Dogs trembling behind him, Dezeb headed for the shower.

He had thought dealing with it himself might improve his mood.

It hadn’t.

Now washing up would only waste more time.

“...”

He thought of Erabelle patting him last night even while she herself had been trembling.

A laugh escaped him again.

“...A ceremony in the cool autumn would be best.”

If she actually fainted, he would simply lock her in the bedroom for a week.

After changing into clean clothes, he headed for the flagship’s Center.

He had deliberately told her an arrival time about fifteen minutes later than his actual estimate, so she should still be inside getting ready.

Humming under his breath, he stepped into the Center.

The entire place fell deathly silent.

Only a tiny number of senior staff and their direct subordinates had ever met the master face-to-face.

The younger Dogs, suddenly confronted with calamity itself, went rigid with shock.

Erabelle was the most startled of them all.

Hearing her little heart pounding as though it might burst, Dezeb smiled faintly.

“Erabelle, did you decide what you want to eat?”

***

The weather was brilliantly clear.

Life at the Center had become brilliantly clear as well.

Ever since the day Dezeb had suddenly stormed into the Center, everyone had begun treating Erabelle with absurdly exaggerated respect.

No one dared give her work anymore.

Instead, they cut off all her customers, handed her a card, and imposed a minimum spending requirement.

She was required to spend 1,000,000 cp every week.

Her monthly salary was 3,000 cp.

Erabelle panicked.

In search of emotional stability, she went to a bookstore to stock up on Blu-rays, DVDs, and magazines.

Her collecting habit had slowed somewhat after the injury, but following Dezeb’s visit to the Center, it exploded all over again.

Still better than buying hair-loss medication.

Should I just buy gold bars and bury them under the bunker...?

1,000,000 cp was an absurd amount of money.

Being expected to spend roughly 333.4 times her monthly salary in a single week was enough to send her soul drifting out of her body.

Gold bars genuinely seemed like the answer.

They were liquid assets, so if trouble arose later, she could react quickly.

And if prices rose, she could sell them for a profit.

Gold.

Definitely gold.

Ah, she could buy other highly liquid metals, too.

Looking at the faces of her favorite celebrities helped settle her nerves, and once she calmed down, good ideas started coming one after another.

“Whoa. Jackpot.”

Then she spotted a gossip article.

“Talk about moving up in the world.”

To be fair, the magazine racks were plastered with similar headlines, so avoiding them was practically impossible.

Erabelle stared at headlines such as Shocking Marriage Between Future Marquess and Count’s Common-Born Foster Daughter and blinked in amazement.

“But is that even possible?”

In this world, nobles and commoners were genetically different.

Not completely different. There was still a shared range of “compatibility.”

But there was one crucial distinction.

Commoners could not pass ranks on to their children.

Even if someone was lucky enough to be born with a high-grade signum, that blessing ended with them.

That was precisely why adoption was so common.

An adopted child could never infringe upon the rights of a biological heir.

The limitation was written into their body from birth.

What a rotten world.

Still, given all that, even if someone had officially been registered as a foster daughter, could a person like the future marquess really marry her—

Wait.

The Vermilion foster daughter?

That’s me.

What?

Her hands trembling, Erabelle snatched the glossy magazine from the rack.

***

[Love that Beat Status!]

[Officially Acknowledged! Bombshell Interview With Insider]

[“We’re seeing each other well...”]

“Let’s exchange signums soon.”

The memories she had barely managed to suppress surged back all at once.

Under normal circumstances, that alone should have been enough to trigger gastrointestinal distress.

But it didn’t.

This was exactly the sort of situation that should have left her doubled over with stomach cramps a dozen times already.

Yet lately, she had been far too healthy.

Why...?

Erabelle swayed where she stood.

Why is this happening...?

It felt like watching a house burn down, only to realize halfway through that it was your house.

“Mmm... ngh...!”

Dezeb pressed one large hand firmly against her prone back and complained.

“Spacing out again.”