Chapter 31 Part 1

No one knew that in the second-floor restroom, a hapless father and son duo were enduring repeated torment. Even if they did, the most they’d offer was a mocking “serves them right.”

Inside the elevator.

Dustin blocked Hastur with one arm, staring him down intently while keeping his hand firmly on the button. “Just a little longer.”

“I can’t let you two stroll out there and swagger into the banquet like this.”

Dustin’s expression was a tangle of conflict, torn between his sense of duty and his loyalty to his feelings. It left him feeling like he was being roasted alive over an open flame. His voice tightened unconsciously, dropping low from the strain on his nerves.

“What you stole was the ‘Connacht’! Adolf might blindly follow orders without question, but I can’t. At the very least, tell me why you took the ‘Connacht’? Does its mere existence threaten your safety?”

“……?” Hastur had just started furrowing his brow in confusion. “I thought Adolf already explained it to you?”

Dustin: “……No? He only told me what would happen next and what I needed to do at each step.”

Hastur: “……??”

G8273 raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, his face caught somewhere between amusement and exasperation. “Looks like your new employee’s not cut out for playing messenger.”

He turned to Dustin. “To answer your question—no.”

“Under normal circumstances, when Hastur and I aren’t injured, the ‘Connacht’ couldn’t inflict any real harm on us. But for humans? That’s a different story.”

“You’ve probably seen Hastur manipulate time by now. In fact, this is already our third time loop reset.”

“In the first round, someone activated the ‘Connacht’. The explosion froze half the planet solid—icicles even pierced the ozone layer.”

“……” Dustin stood there stunned, speechless. His hand slipped off the button without him even noticing. Only when the elevator doors slid open and the noise from outside flooded in did he snap back to reality. He slammed the button hard, ignoring the furious curses from the people outside as the doors shut again. “Half a planet frozen? The ‘Connacht’??”

How was that even possible? It sounded way too fantastical… uh.

Dustin stared at Hastur and G8273 in front of him. After being choked by the fantastical yet utterly real truth for a few seconds, he managed to say:

“But the ‘Connacht’ is just a missile Cornelius built seventy years ago! Cybernetic bodies didn’t even exist back then! How did Cornelius create something capable of wiping out half a planet seventy years ago?”

Hastur wanted to know too. “We can ask Adolf after the banquet’s over. He says he has a way to make the ‘Connacht’ self-destruct—straight from Cornelius himself.”

“??”

Dustin looked even more incredulous. “How is that possible?? Cornelius vanished fifteen years ago, and before that, he was under tight company watch as a top research talent.”

“I scanned Adolf’s skeletal structure. He’s twenty-one or twenty-two at most. How could he have crossed paths with Cornelius? It’d be weird no matter the timeline.”

“……” Hastur and G8273 fell silent in unison for a few seconds, then leaned in to whisper:

“Adolf’s only twenty-one or -two? I figured he was at least thirty or forty. Why’s a twenty-something human got hair that white?”

“Could be premature graying. Happens to humans. You can’t judge age just by hair.”

“……Ahem!” Adolf’s voice finally cut in over the earpiece, sounding rather ghostly. “I’m still here.”

“And you’d better let those people outside the elevator in. They’re starting to suspect thieves who stole the ‘Connacht’ are hiding inside. Someone’s about to force the doors open.”

“—?!”

Dustin yanked his hand back in a flash.

Hastur glanced up as the elevator doors slowly parted, locking eyes immediately with a cannon barrel glowing brighter red by the second.

Without a second thought, he lunged forward, grabbing the enemy’s wrist with one hand and clamping onto the scorching barrel with the other. He wrenched it upward.

Boom—

The electromagnetic cannon fired straight up into the ceiling above, redirected by force along its barrel.

Hastur’s flimsy cotton glove burned to ash in an instant, but his face remained impassive as he shook off the white smoke still curling from his hand. He pinned the dumbfounded enemy’s wrist and forced the barrel downward.

“Got a short fuse, huh? What if you blast Lancer Vincent inside and get nabbed as some threat-mail sender?”

The blast drew a huge commotion—the entire hall fell deathly silent. Up on the second floor, heads poked tentatively from the hole in the ceiling to see what was going on. Seconds later, whispers erupted.

“Didn’t they say Lancer Vincent discovered the missile theft while fooling around with some guy? How come three dudes pile out of the elevator? Which one’s the one Lancer’s shacking up with?”

“Definitely not that tall one! That moveset, that aura—would he waste time messing around with some spoiled brat?”

“Then it has to be the gray-haired guy next to him. Gotta admit, he’s got some looks.”

The “got some looks” Dustin: “???”

What the—no! What did any of this have to do with him?!!

The rubberneckers were out in force, each playing to their strengths in the fine art of gossip:

“Has to be the gray-haired one—didn’t you see that torn suit pant draped over his arm? Talk about kinky…” Sharp-eyed observer.

“No way. That gray-hair was down in the banquet hall not long ago. The Chief Commissioner introduced him to me—he’s with the Police Station. He must’ve rushed into the elevator after the chaos started and run into those other two!” Well-connected insider.

“So what if he’s Police Station? So what if he rushed in after? Maybe he heard about the cheating and charged in to catch ’em in the act? How else do you explain why he was jamming the button to keep everyone out when all those people wanted in?” Wild imagination at work.

Casual guests scarfed down the drama without a care, chasing thrills. But for those who knew the players, it hit different.

The Chief Commissioner’s face turned green as he shoved through the crowd in a few strides, seizing Dustin’s shoulder. “You said you were heading up to deliver something—what was it exactly?! And what’s with the suit pants??”

Watching the live stream from goodness-knows-how-many districts away, Finnian nearly laughed himself off the bed. “Detective… catching cheaters… hahahaha!!!”

What had Dustin done wrong this time?! Stuck between those two non-humans, forced to play the betrayed lover! And thank goodness he hadn’t tagged along out of pity today.

Nasir, on site, gaped at the farce unfolding before him, his mind crumbling in that instant.

I told you to protect the Second Young Master, not hop into bed with him!! What… these classic lines—why are they coming out of a male bodyguard and male client??

Gossip swept through the hotel like a storm. But at the eye of it all, Hastur and G8273 remained utterly unaffected, each scanning the banquet guests.

Amid the jumble of hormone signals, Hastur picked out one that stood apart. “Someone’s barreling toward us, seething with rage.”

G8273 quickly pulled up surveillance and glanced over, looking exasperated. “……That’s the Vincent father-and-son pair.”

The already chaotic banquet hall erupted into fresh pandemonium. A group parted the crowd like the Red Sea, charging straight up to the pair.

Leading them was Old Hank Vincent, his face ashen with fury, clutching his eagle-headed cane. Without a word, he reared back and swung hard at his unworthy son’s cheek!

Tonight’s banquet was destined to be laced with soap-opera melodrama.

The guests, barely recovered from the shipping wars of romantic speculation, tumbled headfirst into a new pit of family feud. They let out a collective “woo” at the sight.

But the next moment made the gossip even juicier: Lancer Vincent seized his father’s wrist without a shred of mercy, nearly hoisting the old man off his feet!

The guests: “Wow…”

“……” Hastur barely managed to rein in his work-honed instincts, stopping his hand just short of reflexively intervening to save a fellow operative.

As he quickly scanned the surroundings, he caught Dustin’s deadpan stare from afar—”Haha, cover for me. You non-humans have your own ways of handling feuds anyway.” “……”

He should’ve known humans would overthink this stuff. That’s why he’d been extra careful—only to make it worse!

Nearby, Old Hank—dangling like a side of cured meat from G8273’s grip on his wrist—struggled futilely for a few moments. Under the gaze of the packed hall, he finally exploded in humiliated rage: “Lancer… Vincent!!”

When fury peaked, people lost the power of speech—just like Old Hank Vincent right now.

G8273 eyed Old Hank trembling with rage and eased his grip. “I’m starting to regret this.”

Old Vincent nearly toppled to the floor.

Little Hank Vincent, who had watched his younger brother clash with their father without stepping in—whether from some twisted psychology or otherwise—finally moved forward, steadying their father with a furious glare. “Only now you regret it? Too late! How dare you lay hands on Father—”

“……” The AI’s emotionless gaze swept over, and Little Hank Vincent shut up on instinct.

In that instant, the father and son felt like molted cicadas under surgical lights, dissected by scalpels and X-rays.

G8273 furrowed his brows and flexed his wrist, a trace of impatience flickering across his expression. “I mean, I’m regretting the idea that having two people handle the business for me would let me slack off.”

“…” Old Hank Vincent’s face shifted through a rainbow of emotions. Curses were on the tip of his tongue when representatives from the company group surged forward almost in unison, clamping down on Old Vincent’s shoulders.

“Family dirty laundry stays in the family, Mr. Old Vincent. Especially when we’ve got bigger fish to fry than ungrateful heirs—like that missing Connacht.”

You could always find gossip to savor later, but Connachts didn’t come along every day. Who could sleep easy knowing something like that was out there, unaccounted for?

The banquet hall blazed with light, yet the guests’ eyes gleamed like demons lurking in haunted thickets, locked in mutual stares brimming with suspicion and chill detachment.

Even Old Hank Vincent couldn’t afford to throw caution to the wind amid stakes this high. Flanked—or more accurately, restrained—by the two representatives, he was ushered to the far side of the hall.

Whispers rippled through the room once more.

Hastur watched Dustin get dragged off helplessly by the Chief Commissioner for interrogation before turning away. “Analyzing logically, who might want to trigger the Connacht?”

He had just absorbed some Order Value, and the scents of desserts and fine wine still lingered richly in his nostrils. Hastur sidled up to a nearby long buffet table and began picking out treats. “I can only think of two kinds of people.”

“Type one: someone here on site, fearless of death—or even courting it. Type two: someone absent, but dead set on killing everyone present.”

The first might sound like Adolf at a glance, but the man who’d signed a labor contract for Alpha’s sake and forced himself through Introduction to Accounting? No way he’d pick now to off himself.

Type two seemed far likelier, but…

“Too many suspects fit the bill.” G8273 pressed in from behind, champagne in one hand, the other trailing an ambiguous caress along Hastur’s side before half-encircling his waist.

He buried his face in the hollow of Hastur’s shoulder, hiding the erratic flicker of his luminous eyes as he sifted data. His whisper came low, like a lover’s secret.

“Elephants don’t sweat the ants they trample on the march. The grudges these banquet hall bigwigs have racked up outnumber the population of a whole district—scattered worldwide. Give me two minutes.”

Countdown: 1:59.

As a reward, Hastur plucked a water-slicked cherry from the fruit platter, tilted G8273’s chin up with casual ease, and slipped the plump red morsel between those tightly pursed thin lips.

“Dustin, if you can manage it, keep eyes on the room. Missile heist has everyone paranoid about rival groups—they’ll huddle with their own now.”

Dustin, eyeing the scene from the banquet hall’s edge with an expression too complicated for words: “…”

Don’t think it. Don’t dwell. Don’t look. Overthinking would just make it hurt more.

He wrenched his gaze away and focused on the clustering cliques. “Dean, a few groups are heading your way.”

Countdown: 1:55.

The clusters reached Hastur and G8273.

To Hastur’s surprise, they weren’t spoiling for a fight. Their attitudes brimmed with warmth, utterly unconcerned that Lancer Vincent had just publicly shamed Old Vincent—behavior that could get him booted out and stripped of his inheritance.

G8273’s muscular arm tightened around him, nuzzling Hastur’s shoulder hollow like an oversized, clingy housecat while murmuring: “Brush them off.”

If not for the circumstances, Hastur might have snarked about G8273’s glitchy design—eyes glowing every time he cranked up a subroutine. First off, what was the creator thinking? Second, why hadn’t evolution scrubbed that flaw?

Did the luminous flicker mean to an AI what a tail and ears did to a cat? Seemingly pointless vulnerabilities… but secretly indispensable?

Hastur tried tuning out the massive teddy bear plastered to his back, aiming to politely dismiss the newcomers while sneaking peeks at the broader crowd.

G8273’s presence was overwhelming, though. The best Hastur could manage was civility amid the small talk—any real distraction, and tentacles might start poking. “How did we meet?”

“Of course! We’re dying to hear the story!”

Countdown: 1:40.

The lead speaker looked mid-fifties, built like a tank, a chunky pinky finger flashing a golden signet ring. Its face bore an intricately carved palace that looked comically dainty against his bulk.

He introduced himself with friendly gusto: “Name’s Diego Vincent—Lancer’s distant cousin. Never dreamed he’d turn so affectionate one day, let alone snag someone like you. You scream ‘not your average joe’ on sight!”

That explained why this crowd was buzzing around a probably disinherited Lancer Vincent. Case closed.

Hastur’s otherworldly aura had worked its magic—even Old Hank Vincent hadn’t dared swing at his son’s arm candy directly.

Onlookers started murmuring: “Little Vincent pulling someone like that? Doesn’t scream dumb luck…” “Lancer staring down his raging dad, slapping Old Vincent’s face in public—’regret handing you the reins’? Kid might be sandbagging all this time.”

Seasoned operators like them could spot the difference: impotent fury from a spoiled brat versus the quiet confidence of real power.

That sparked some Babylon higher-ups with their own agendas. While company reps “escorted” Old Vincent away, they began offering olive branches to Lancer Vincent—the one gearing up to seize the spotlight.

“…” Hastur, hopeless at love stories, could only stitch together stiff half-truths. “We… fought hard our first meeting. Took two brushes with death to upgrade from ‘immediate brawl’ to ‘you stay in your lane, I’ll stay in mine.'”

Various onlookers tracked the “live-and-let-live” embrace of the boss’s inhuman staffers: “…”

At the orphanage, Ithaqua watched the live feed and screeched like a burst boiler. “What are they doing?! Why is that guy hugging— Mmmph!”

Finnian yanked him back to his dorm for homework. “Eyes off the trash, brain off the nonsense. Your foster dad’s a walking cautionary tale—archenemies don’t act like that.”