Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

”Their intelligence is going through us from here on.”

”Understood, sir.”

With that the junior officer turned toward his terminal and began drafting.

The senior officer walked to the wall display, where the last captured frame of the woman, beautiful, red-haired, smiling, mid-gesture, still hung on the panel.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he pulled up the archive interface and marked the frame for secure preservation. Every fragment of imagery.

Every scrap of sensor data. Every audio recording, however fragmented. All of it was going into the classified vault and, from there, up the chain to whoever at national command was going to be handling the analysis.

He did not delete the recording. He was, in the specific way that career operators were, a man who understood that the correct response to an event this far outside standard operating parameters was to preserve every piece of evidence and let the analysis run wherever it needed to run.

Whatever the woman was, whatever the convoy had encountered, whatever the incident meant, his job was to report it, cleanly and fully, and let the people above him decide what to do.

He turned back to the operations room. ”Get me a manual radio relay. Redundant channels. I want a courier plane on standby the moment weather permits. We’re going to be moving hard evidence out of this facility in physical form as well as by uplink. Nothing about this incident lives on this base alone.”

The room began to move. Whatever came next, it was going to be for national command to decide.

Back at the Spirit Pool site, Camilla returned to Stan’s side.

She materialized on the polar ice a few paces from him, her hair drifting in the wind, her expression composed. ”It’s done.”

Stan looked at her.

He had spent the intervening minutes standing in silence beside the convoy. Whatever he had been thinking about, he had not yet resolved. His face still carried the same quiet cold it had worn since she had killed the scientist.

But he nodded once. ”Thank you.”

She waited. He did not offer more than that.

She accepted the small distance without comment.

The polar wind pushed at their backs. The endless white plain stretched away in every direction, unbroken to the horizon in every direction Stan turned his head. Somewhere in the accumulated exhaustion of the past several hours, the werewolves, the inheritance, the trials, the pact with the Void Sovereign, the beating of Elder Fang, his revenge and all that, Stan’s body was finally beginning to register that it had not slept in what was, by any honest measure... days. In truth, it had been scarcely two days, but so much had happened in that short span of time that it felt far longer. Stan could feel the accumulated exhaustion settling into his bones.

He needed to go home.

Anyways, Camilla looked at him and said, ”It’s too bad I don’t get to taste human blood. Anyways, I’m ready to sign your blood contract.”

Hearing her, Stan smiled. He had already bought the Blood Contract Technique from the System for 5 System Points and knew what to do.

He summoned a sheet of paper before slicing his thumb with the Fang Dagger. Using his blood, infused with Qi, he wrote down the terms of the contract.

Camilla’s expression turned serious. She manipulated a drop of blood out of her thumb and pressed it onto the paper.

With that, the contract was signed.

The terms were rather unique and somewhat complicated, but she didn’t mind. She felt they were reasonable. More than anything, she wanted to know how long Stan intended to keep his mask on.

Camilla glanced sideways at him and said with a smile. ”When dealing with those toys, my senses spread wide and I could see the ocean outside this frost place is bigger than I imagined, how did you get here?”

Stan considered the question. ”By plane.”

”By what?” She tilted her head. ”What is a plane?”

”A flying vehicle. Modern engineering. Fast, large, capable of transcontinental travel.”

”You mean a vehicle that can fly like a bird?”

”Something like that. It doesn’t flap. But it flies.”

”Interesting.” She turned the word over slowly, like she was tasting it. ”Interesting.”

”You’re curious, aren’t you.”

”I have been asleep for a very long time, cultivator. Everything is interesting.”

”Fair point.”

”And you are going to retrieve it now. This plane.”

”That’s the plan.”

Camilla laughed, the same low, delighted laugh she had produced when he had explained the same trick to her earlier in the cave. It carried, this time, a slightly different quality. There was more warmth in it. More genuine appreciation. The kind of amusement a person only produced when they had accepted, on some deep level, that they were going to enjoy the company of the person making them laugh for the foreseeable future.

She was filled with curiosity...

Stan didn’t mind her gaze as he willed the plane into existence.

The Bombardier materialized on a stretch of relatively flat, wind-packed snow perhaps fifty meters from where they stood. Its polished fuselage caught the low polar sun in long mirror-bright reflections along its side. Its landing gear settled into the compacted snow with the soft, muted crunch of thirty tons of engineered aircraft finding new solid ground. The whole craft appeared in the polar air with the casual instantaneity that Stan was, slowly, becoming used to.

Camilla did not move for a long moment.

She stared. Her red eyes tracked the length of the fuselage from nose to tail. She catalogued the sweep of the wings. She looked at the twin engines mounted at the rear, the raised T-tail, the small blinking navigation lights at the wingtips that had begun their patient rhythm the instant the aircraft had drawn breath in the real world.

”...This,” she said slowly, ”is your bird.”

”This is my bird.”

”It is enormous.”

”It’s on the smaller end for its class.”

”There is a larger class?”

”Yes, there is a much larger class.”