Mist had dispatched a total of three killers to kill them. If there were more, then they hadn’t shown themselves yet. However, three was enough to cause significant casualties among Stanley’s group.
But now?
First it was Laton, then it was Tyers. When the body of the third and final killer, Blue Phantom, was dragged into the light, Stanley had no choice but to admit that he had made an error in judgment.
In fact, Ji Feng had spoken with Stanley and hinted that he shouldn’t underestimate Cillin too much. He just hadn’t taken his advice to heart. After this incident, Stanley was pretty sure that Ji Feng himself had underestimated Cillin and his squadron. His advice would’ve been much more forceful otherwise.
“What the meow happened to this place?!” Wheeze exploded the second it saw the wrecked training grounds. Although the A Squad would be paying for the damages, no one liked coming home and seeing their territory in ruins, much less a cat.
“I’m so happy to see you, sir cat!” Mogas immediately ran over to comfort Wheeze while explaining everything that had happened up until this point.
Every A Squad member spun around the second they heard the nickname. Their eyes were filled with deep curiosity to say the least.
Wheeze’s nose twitched once before it leaped down from Cillin’s shoulder. It then ran up to the warped door that had been blown in a while ago and gave it a sniff. A flick of the ear later, it raised its paw and swiped it aside as if it weighed no more than a dead leaf, when in fact it was heavy enough to flatten most people like a pancake.
The A Squad members couldn’t help but let out a gasp of surprise. Mogas was telling the truth after all. They already knew that the cat was special from its profile, but they didn’t know it was this special.
Wheeze did not care what the humans thought of it. Its focus was on the object trapped beneath the block of metal just now.
There was a crushed corpse beneath the metallic door, but that wasn’t what the cat was looking for. It was the device he was holding that had caught its interest.
Wheeze picked up the device with its paw before tossing it into Cillin’s hand, saying, “There’s something about this device.”
Czedow took a look at the device. He hadn’t paid it any attention or picked it up during the clean-up because it was damaged and useless. He hadn’t expected Wheeze to seek it out at first notice.
“What is this?” Cillin asked.
“I don’t know,” Wheeze shrugged while shaking off the bloodstains and debris on its paw, “I just felt that it’s rather special.”
“That’s the device the Navigators used to shut off the starship’s systems,” interrupted Stanley when the opportunity to inject himself into the conversation finally showed itself.
Cillin shot Stanley a glance before passing it to Czedow. “Show this to Xi Mu and the others later.”
“Got it,” responded Czedow while thinking that it should speak with Wheeze about its ability to identify valuable items without having to rely on machine language or signals. Clearly, he was inferior to Wheeze in this regard and could use an upgrade.
On a side note, Czedow had already dealt with most of the problems in the training grounds and the starship itself, so Cillin didn’t need to waste his energy on them.
“Vice admiral Stanley, I believe we should speak again when this matter is fully behind us,” Cillin looked at Stanley and said.
“I think so too,” Stanley responded. The man still didn’t know how he should treat Cillin, but he definitely recognized the need to have a proper conversation with the commander after this whole fiasco. There were simply too many things they didn’t know about the Eleventh Squad. How Vanguard as a whole should treat the Eleventh Squad was also something they needed to address as soon as possible.
But of course, that conversation wasn’t going to happen right away. After all, they were still in the middle of a war. Once the comms was restored, Stanley also needed to speak with the main force and find out how everyone including the higher-ups who were targeted by Mist was doing.
While Stanley was attempting to contact the frontlines, Cillin sought out Mogas’ group for a conversation. Specifically, he wanted to speak with Pango because he was the one listed on Mist’s hit list. Pango didn’t hesitate to confess his background as there was no longer any point in hiding it.
As it turned out, Pango was Ji Feng’s son, but his mother wasn’t a member of Vanguard. She was a Merciless. Merciless was in possession of two “Spell” star map fragments back then. The third one was in Ji Feng’s hands, and the fourth was somewhere else. After Merciless had obtained the last fragment, Pango’s mother betrayed Merciless and took all four fragments for herself. She then located Spell with Ji Feng’s help.
Spell was identical to God’s Tear in the sense that it was also a consumable drug. But unlike God’s Tear, Spell contained a set of genes that granted its user a special ability.
Spell made Pango’s mother much stronger than she used to be, but not even her new strength could protect her from the whims of fate. During a mission, her spaceplane strayed into an unusual electromagnetic storm and encountered all kinds of bizarre accidents such as a sudden solar eruption, an ion storm and more. She had had to give it her all to save Ji Feng and a couple Vanguard higher-ups. The incident wouldn’t be life-threatening if she was at her peak form, but she was seven months pregnant at her time.
In the end, everyone in the spaceplane survived the crisis, but Pango was born prematurely, and his mother would never open her eyes again. She had used her last bit of strength to protect him. Considering the circumstances, few people thought that Pango would survive even after putting him in the best nurturing capsule they could get their hands on, but the child turned out to be way stronger than they expected. The first time Pango cried, he had destroyed the capsule around him. Later, Ji Feng and his colleagues would find out that his mother’s genes had been successfully passed down to Pango. The baby hadn’t just inherited his mother and father’s already high-level genes, he was also the bearer of the Spell genes.
As Pango grew older, the two sets of genes in his body gradually merged into one. As Pango had been born with the genes, his “affinity” was way better than his mother’s so to speak. His mother had never managed to combine more than one-third of her genes and the Spell genes before she passed away. On the other hand, Pango had reached the same level when he was just ten years old.
Ji Feng treasured Pango and went to great lengths to keep his existence a secret. Yin Wushe had told the truth when he said that Ji Feng had many children, but few of them had ever received much affection or attention from dearest daddy. Pango was a different story though. Be it for broader or narrower interests, Ji Feng couldn’t afford to lose him no matter what. The higher-ups who owed their lives to Pango’s mother had also done their utmost to maintain the secret. Barring exceptional circumstances, Pango wasn’t just going to succeed his father as the next admiral, he was going to be stronger than his father as well.
On the surface, Pango looked like an amicable person. In reality, he was a lot more stubborn than he looked. From the moment he grew to perceive the world, Ji Feng had not succeeded in changing the boy’s mind even once. It was also why Pango had joined the Eleventh Squad instead of other “stronger” squadrons. Ji Feng had been reluctant to accept the boy’s decision when he learned about this, but having learned his lesson after years of failure, he chose to manipulate things behind the scene so that Kong Rujia, Ruan and the more capable younglings of the group would be assigned to the Eleventh Squad. His plan had only partially succeeded though: he couldn’t have anticipated that only four people would remain in the Eleventh Squad when all was said and done.
At first, Ruan and the others were unaware of Pango’s background either. Later, Ji Feng contacted them so they would not slip up and reveal what should not be revealed. It was also why Cillin had not been able to detect anything out of the ordinary during his previous conversation with them.
Cillin didn’t care if Pango was Ji Feng’s son, if he would become Vanguard’s admiral in the future, or if he was the bearer of Spell genes. He only cared about the Eleventh Squad’s wellbeing. So, he gave the group two choices. One, they could part ways with the Eleventh Squad peacefully. They would be comrades of the same hunter regiment, but they would be family no longer. It was only natural.
Two, they could remain in the Eleventh Squad, but the Eleventh Squad had their own way of doing things. This was something they had been taught since the day they joined the Eleventh Squad. In the Eleventh Squad, Cillin was the de-facto leader and the decision maker. When he wasn’t around, the deputy commander would assume his responsibilities. They were free to consult with the commander, the deputy commander or anyone they trusted within the Eleventh Squad about anything, but they must never skip over the Eleventh Squad to accept orders from someone else, not even if the order had come from Ji Feng himself.
It sounded like a dictatorial decision, but the Eleventh Squad was hiding too many secrets, most of them powerful and deadly in equal measure. If the squadron wasn’t of one mind, then their future troubles would be endless. It was also why Cillin hadn’t told Mogas’ group some of the Eleventh Squad’s greatest secrets.
All five members chose the second choice, though Pango might not be able to stay with the Eleventh Squad forever. The first thing Ji Feng did after Pango had fully merged his genes was to bring him back to the A Squad whether he liked it or not. Pango might be able to delay the call for a couple of years or even a decade, but Ji Feng had to retire eventually. Cillin understood that everyone had their own inescapable responsibilities.
If there was a silver lining to all this, it was that Pango was one hundred percent sincere when he chose and promised to stay with the Eleventh Squad for as long as possible. Since joining the Eleventh Squad, it was like every other squadron in Vanguard had suddenly lost their allure. The Eleventh Squad wasn’t just a happy place to him, it was also a great source of much Hunter and non-Hunter knowledge. Besides, everyone here was ridiculously strong. Even their pets were in a different league, no, in a different Sector compared to most people.
Of course, Cillin wasn’t going to accept them back unconditionally. They would have to go through the “probation period” they had experienced at the beginning again. Mogas confidently declared that he would regain their teammates’ trust one way or another.
When the talk was finally over, Cillin stepped out of the room just in time to see Stanley walking toward his direction with an ugly expression.
Stanley had managed to contact the A Squad, and what he learned wasn’t good news. Two higher-ups were dead, and five were severely injured. Among the injured was one of Cillin’s old acquaintances, Barthes. Thankfully, Songba Leruo managed to escape unscathed, but it was unclear if he was on the hit list in the first place.
“The admiral is hurt as well, so I need to head there right now. We’ll speak after the war is over,” Stanley said.
“Understandable. But before you go, I must warn you to keep a tight rein over your people. Some of the things they’ve seen here are best kept a secret.”
“Naturally. Oh right, that device didn’t look like something the Navigators could come up with,” Stanley said. He was suggesting that there might be an unknown party pushing for this war to happen, and indirectly asking Cillin to inform him if he found anything.
Stanley and his remaining men quickly rushed to the center battlefield at the frontlines. Pango shouldn’t be in danger anymore now that all the threats to his life had been killed, not to mention that the Eleventh Squad had proven themselves to be monstrously strong. Until he had spoken with the admiral, he had no intention in interfering with the Eleventh Squad’s business anymore.
After Stanley was gone, Cillin summoned everyone back to the starship including Xi Kai and the others who had left the battlefield on the spaceplane before.
There were three reasons Cillin hadn’t deployed any robots in this war. First, they only had a limited amount of battle-ready robots because half of them were currently in the middle of an upgrade. The Eleventh Squad would be incurring unnecessary losses if he threw them into battle. Take the robots who had fought the Navigators for example. It was precisely because they were partially upgraded that they were nowhere as dominant as they were during the bout against the Robert Family’s robots.
Second, Vanguard itself might not welcome the robots. Unlike the Free Alliance, most Hunters had their own way of thinking. For starters, they believed that their prey should be hunted by their own hands, not to mention that the war was slanting in their favor right now. It was one thing to deploy them in his own ship, but if he were to deploy them on the battlefield en masse, then he was sure to earn their ire even if he was really doing them a favor.
Third, most Hunters who didn’t believe in robots. They had no problems using robots as cannon fodders, but to fight alongside one and entrust their back to them? Hell no. Naturally, Cillin wasn’t going to make trouble for himself.
“AHHHH! What the fuck happened to my sparring room? How the fuck did they manage to collapse the whole thing?” Cary roared in shock and fury.
“My shooting targets aren’t working either,” Tang Qiuqiu commented with a frigid expression.
“Oh thank god, my indoor garden is still intact,” Sigma sighed out in relief.
Cillin clapped his hands together to catch everyone’s attention before declaring, “When you’re cleaning up your territories later, please tally your damages and losses and compile a list. I will take it to the A Squad and ask them to compensate for everything.”
“Will they pay us though?” Xiao Shang voiced his doubts.
“Don’t worry, I made a deal with vice admiral Stanley when I was handing over the reins,” Cillin said.
“OH— FUCK YEAH!”
“In the meantime, we still have a war to fight, so battle stations, everyone. Xi Mu, I’ve placed that device in your workshop. Please check it and give me a report later.”
Cillin returned to his room after he had assigned everyone their tasks. Thankfully, nothing was out of order as this area had been locked tight.
He opened his communicator and checked out an encrypted message he just received a while ago. It came from Yin Wushe. After he finished reading the message, Cillin notified Czedow to drop the starship’s shields for two seconds. The shields switched off and came back online precisely two seconds later.
Wheeze was sitting around with the Origin robots and discussing how best to maximize the amount of compensation during these two seconds when suddenly, it looked up and around it for a bit. When Czedow gave it the “OK” hand signal, it flicked its ears and went back to compiling the list of damages.
A short while later, Cillin opened the door to the lounge and stepped in. A certain person was right behind him.
“I love your starship’s security measures,” said the stranger while pulling a chair for himself and taking a seat. He crossed his legs and examined the lounge curiously.
“You have no manners, do you?” Cillin asked while Yin Wushe opened a food cabinet and began going through the food.
The stranger was none other than the leader of Merciless, Yin Wushe. On the surface, it was impossible to associate the word “hitman leader” with the man at all. He was the picture of an ordinary middle-aged man.
“Manners are for masochists and self-flagellants.” Yin Wushe grabbed two bags of jerkies and a few boxes of sweet sauce. “Seriously though, you have plenty of good stuff here. I wish I was close enough to the Food King to enjoy such benefits.”
Instead of replying, Cillin watched the white animal Yin Wushe was carrying in his lap. It was the same creature that had shown up during their video calls. Cillin already knew that it was no ordinary pet at the time, but now he could actually feel it.
“Is it a half-cyborg as well?” Cillin asked. The small creature was currently chowing down a sauce-stained piece of jerky Yin Wushe had handed it like a grinder.
“Yep! Its name is Ice Cream, or Ice for short. It’s cute, isn’t it? Hehe!” Yin Wushe declared proudly like a parent boasting about their child.
Ice Cream…
“Ice loves ice cream, so I thought Ice Cream might be a fitting name for it. It agreed,” Yin Wushe said while stroking the little fella’s head and causing it to squint in pleasure.
Now Cillin understood Yin Wushe always carried a box of ice cream with him when he saw him. He had no right to criticize the middle-aged man’s cringeworthy naming sense, but he was thinking how Wheeze would react when it finally noticed the duo going through its food cabinet and eating its food.
“I heard that Admiral Ji Feng was hurt,” Cillin said. There weren’t many people out there who could seriously injure Ji Feng. Even if it was done using some sort of tool, Ji Feng wasn’t the type to fall for such tricks easily.
“He’ll live,” Yin Wushe replied carelessly before asking, “I heard that the three killers Nebelah dispatched to your ship are all dead. Is that true?”
“How did you know?”
Yin Wushe didn’t answer his question directly. “There were supposed to be three more, but we stopped them before they could get anywhere close to your ship.”
It made sense that Mist would have a Plan B after Czedow had regained control of the starship, and the three killers they dispatched hadn’t made a peep after that. In fact, Cillin had been waiting for them to show up, but they never did. Now he knew it was because of Merciless.
Cillin thought for a second before asking, “You knew about Pango, right?”
“What are you referring to, exactly?”
“His mother. You purposely let her steal the starmap fragments, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Yin Wushe didn’t deny this. “She wanted them, so I gave them to her. In fact, I don’t really care about Spell. I just wanted to know if she would betray Merciless.”
She did.
“You can be the strongest person in the universe, but you’ll never surpass the universe. That is the path she had chosen, and so she must bear the consequences—including death,” Yin Wushe said calmly.
It was at this moment Ice suddenly paused its movements and turned to look at the entrance. A few seconds later, the door of the lounge suddenly opened to reveal a cat’s head. Its eyes widened. Wheeze had had a field day compiling the list of damages when it decided that it was time to check up on Cillin and his uninvited guests. That was until it saw this.
Cillin palmed his own face. This is not going to be good.