“Hello? Jason?”

  Odette called out into the tent as she entered. Stacked from one end to the other were sizable metal crates and packages. Some were piled so high they touched the canvas ceiling.

  Another young face popped out of the rows of boxes, clipboard in hand.

  “Madam Veron? What are you doing here?”

  Jason had bags under his eyes and was in the same SCR uniform he had been wearing all day.

  “Hello Jason, Tom told me you were on duty. Can I see the small parts catalogue?”

  “Is this regarding the department’s project, Madam? The Special Creature Research department?”

  Odette’s eyes wavered. She hadn’t heard about any project going on at SCR, but that was beside the point. He should know very well that the answer was no. She was from IDS, after all, though perhaps he had gotten confused since she had been made a temp there for the training.

  “No, this would be for…an ancillary project.”

  Thinking about it now, she very well couldn’t say it was for IDS and then have Caleb take the credit again. The whole point was that it served as her ticket upward.

  “Well then I’m sorry to say Madam, but the depot’s policy is not to lend out any items or machinery unless it's been approved by the department.”

  ‘Since when?!’

  Odette’s stomach dropped to the soles of her feet. More bullshit.

  “Oh, is that right?”

  Odette looked over Jason carefully, analyzing his features. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would let her slide on this one.

  By the way he spoke, from his rigid performance in the lab training to how he had handled the associates on the tour, Odette had the impression he was as straight-laced and square as they came.

  “Then I’ll just have a look around for now. Maybe something will come up for the team’s secondary evaluations next week?”

  If the young lab tech found disagreement with that, he didn’t show it. Jason just nodded before retreating to the corner of the tent where the shift officer’s desk was.

  Odette watched as he sat down and got back to the book he was reading. An instructional manual for laboratory equipment, she noticed from the side cover.

  ‘At least he’s normal enough to not watch over me.’

  Odette scratched her neck. With the news that she wasn’t allowed to take anything from the depot came a significant challenge.

  ‘It’s like as soon as I cut through a bit of red tape, I’m back to being bound again.’

  But she didn’t want to head back when she had come over here with the plans in hand, there had to be a way. She needed this.

  Because if all of her time was spent training others, and she made no additional distinctions for herself, Odette knew her performance would head in an unfavorable direction.

  When review came, combined with the scorching report that Caleb was sure to write now, any reward would be unjustifiable, let alone a promotion to head researcher.

  So she had a choice.

  Odette faced toward the seated Jason, her eyes closed in contemplation.

  Images swirled through her mind. Faces. Lukas’ was there of course, but he wasn’t alone.

  His situation was uncertain, yet so was her own. Both rested on Odette’s achievements in the next few weeks, and both still laid under the thumb of the Republic’s brass.

  ‘If I have to look every time before I leap, there will always be people ahead of me.’

  But didn’t Odette have the same ambitions as those people? What separated her from her superiors?

  Were they smarter? More accredited? More experienced? More politically savvy? No, that wasn’t the case, at least not for all of them.

  ‘Everyone ahead of me in my field has only one thing in common. They’re all willing to do whatever it takes.’

  In the past, her obedience had guaranteed the safety of her brother, but did that still hold true? No. She still couldn’t reach him, even today. As hard as it was to swallow, his situation was now grey, and she didn’t even know why, or who was responsible.

  So could she still trust the Republic to keep its word? Could she trust Sam? Should she?

  ‘No. But even if the terms of our agreement are no longer held, by making myself stand out here I can still force them to take action.’

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Odette opened her eyes, reaching a decision.

  With a feverish motion she glided down the rows of boxes, before silently digging into multiple and taking out small parts.

  Electronics, wires, glassware and bladed components. Her design struck a balance between her two fields of study: the organic and the not. She grabbed what she needed all while keeping a close eye on Jason, to make sure he was still unaware.

  They might find out tomorrow morning, but she wouldn’t get suspended from the site, even if she was caught with stolen machinery. The worst they could do was demote her, perhaps even detain, but that wouldn’t happen.

  Instead, when they saw the fruit of her design, a half-decade old thesis breathed into life, they would be forced to promote her achievement.

  She was sure of it.

  …

  Hundreds of miles from Odette’s location, a whirlpool was currently brewing in a cave deep underwater.

  Above an opened hatch of solid steel, a mass of tentacles was currently suspending its convergent point: an elongated, bipedal humanoid daemon with slate blue scales.

  Justin popped his neck, panning around the interior of the cenote with a grin. All around him, water was circulating in vast waves, being pushed just by the force of a single tentacle.

  ‘If I can deliver this much force with just one augmented tentacle, then what could all of them do together?’

  Justin hummed to himself, contentedly monitoring the progress of his body after having given it the same treatment as the back of his hand. From head to toe, he was now lighter, more resistant to heat and pain, and able to glide through the water faster thanks to the hollow pores of his outer skin, which now could store and express air like miniature jet engines.

  He dared to think it would make him as fast as the slimes had been, so he had finally emerged from the sealed storage room.

  ‘I don’t know how long it's been since I started, but I’m sure that red little bastard hung around.’

  It was still here somewhere, in these caves. Justin had held onto that feeling ever since going in.

  The more he thought about it, the more he realized it wouldn’t have left. Not when it was unlikely to find whatever was in these salt crystals elsewhere. It wouldn’t so easily abandon its food source, if that's what it was. The slimes seemed to be drawn like flies to it, after all.

  Justin opened up his system for the first time in a while.

  [Stage Quest: Acquire 2 or more Talent(s)]

  [Time Left: 22:17:59:34]

  [Progress: 1 / 2]

  [Completion Reward: Random Reward Selection]

  [Punishment for Failure: Level Lock]

  ‘What the hell? How’s it already been a week?!’

  His focus had been on checking the experience to go to the next level, after having been pushed almost to twelve from the blue and green slimes, but the stage quest screen caught his eye with the time left it displayed.

  Nearly a week had already passed!

  Justin deflated. Time had really gotten away from him, it seemed. Though he obviously hadn’t spent it all in the storage room, his experimentation had still taken up the bulk.

  Obtaining his first talent had been a fluke, but Justin’s best bet was still going after the red slime for the second. Even if that was untrue, he couldn’t have it moving independently while he was down here with the starfish from the standpoint of security.

  It's kind had already proved to be too capable of combat to allow it that much.

  “Moving up. On your right.”

  “Recognition!”

  Justin gave a mental wave to the starfish as he ascended past it. With his body rebuilt, it was now time to find his opponent.

  Instead of looking for an exit to the caves this time, finding a red gelatinous blob amidst an expanse of crystals wouldn’t be as hard.

  He hoped.

  …

  But an hour later that hope was squashed.

  ‘Has it truly left, or am I just terrible at finding things?’

  Justin had felt like he was sweeping over a snake’s burrow with each pass he made through the cave system, goading it to bite him while his back was turned.

  Even that would be welcomed though. His intention was for an open, or at least decisive conflict with the red slime in order to end it once and for all.

  But so far the search had been just as productive as looking for an exit was. At least an exit that wasn’t eight hundred feet up a rocky shaft.

  ‘Forget the needle and haystack, they should update it to a slime in a crystal cave.’

  Was his own ability the problem? No, Justin had enough physical attributes that influenced awareness. It was the environment that was impeding him.

  It was simply too dark to identify anything entrenched within the cave walls, as it had been the whole time he’d been down here.

  ‘But…if I can solve one problem with my new talent, why can’t I solve another?’

  He would just have to make sure not to lose track of time on this go.

  Justin emerged from the water at the entrance cave, landing on the rocky platform there. Above him, a dim light fell from the exposed sky, but he paid no heed to that and instead considered his razor-sharp claws.

  Flaying himself piece-by-piece had been far from pleasant, but digging out his own eyes?

  That was one of the few external areas that still wasn’t resistant to pain, in fact it could be said to have been a bit of a weak point.

  ‘Well, if I’ve learned anything from the starfish then I better get rid of it soon.’

  With a gasp, Justin reached into his head, grasping around the hard spheres halfway into his skull with all five fingers.

  They were hardened from the evolution, giving them a degree of defense that was appropriate for a late E-Grade daemon, but they weren’t enough.

  SNAP

  [Health: 8 / 15]

  With a pull, Justin disconnected them from his nervous system. His health fell tremendously. But yanking them out in one moment, he thought about their replacement in the next.

  Thankfully he didn’t need to have a degree in biology to make the most of his talent, but for his eyes he was thinking something specific.

  ‘I remember once, a salesman at a port outpost tried to convince me to get a long-range scanner for the ship. Said we’d be able to see a grain of ledurite on the surface of a star with it.’

  As a mercenary that hadn’t held any appeal on him, as he had been more concerned with camouflaging the ship and making it easier to maneuver away from mission sites, but the salesman’s words had stuck with him all these years later.

  Thermal sense, that’s what the current situation called for.