470 Chapter 470: Mission Accomplished (1/2)

”Oh, that's great!” I felt a surge of relief. Sort of, because I still dreaded going down to the damned sewers again. That place was like hell. ”Thanks for telling me. I'll go down there and wipe them out this time.”

”Well, actually…” the lieutenant gave me a strange look. ”You already exterminated them.”

”Huh?” I gaped at him. ”How? I didn't even know where the nest was, to begin with…”

”Um…” the military officer cleared his throat. ”Well, the fire you triggered down in the sewers…it spread pretty rapidly and burned out the entire sewers, as I said earlier. The flames reached their nest and incinerated all of them, including their young. We found nothing but corpses. There were a few survivors, but they had been so severely injured by your flames that they weren't able to get very far. Some of them died from their wounds after dragging themselves across the burned sludge. Others…well, my men slew them when we came across them during the investigation.”

He then placed a hand on my shoulder.

”I'm just here to inform you that your mission has been completed. To give you confirmation that you have wiped out the Cyclops Rats.”

I stared at him dumbly for a few moments, waiting for the information to sink in. Then I took a deep breath and nodded.

”Thank you, sir.”

*

So there was nothing more I could do except go home. The first thing we did was stop by a hotel to wash up and take a long, warm shower, while also sending our clothes to the laundry in the basement. Then I returned to my room – we each had our own rooms – to spend the rest of the night.

Fortunately, this was a hotel under the Stuart family. I wasn't sure if readers still remembered Stewart Stuart from like four hundred chapters ago, but he was Adrian's uncle who was in charge of the chain of hotels under the Stuart Corporation. Thanks to connections, we were given hotel rooms free of charge, paid for by the Stuart family. Though I was a little hesitant, practicality ruled over morality and I acquiesced to Adrian's insistence that we accept the hospitality of his family.

It helped tremendously that we had basically spent the day in the sewers just yesterday, and I really, really couldn't stand the stink. Ugh.

Now that I was in the hotel, I decided to write up and submit the full report to Headmistress Taylor, which was standard procedure for every mission. What, you think people just carry out missions and receive rewards? Just like that? Nah, we needed to write an after-action report and submit it to our superiors. Too many web novelists were out of touch with reality, and didn't know how actual military operations or otherwise worked. You simply did not just do a mission, and then claim the rewards. You obviously needed to submit a report and answer whatever questions your superiors might have upon reviewing it.

For now, we could take it easy. I guess.

When evening came, we had dinner in the restaurant located at the lobby of the hotel. It was quite the posh setting, which made me feel out of place, but Adrian insisted that it was fine. Then again, nobody seemed to care. There were a few uncles and aunties dressed in singlets, shorts and slippers, or casual dresses and slippers, and nobody paid them any mind. Honestly, the whole attire thing was overrated, so if you ever read a web novel where the waiters and waitresses mocked and refused to serve a customer just because he ”looked poor”, or have all the other customers inside a restaurant trash-talk the main character for no reason other than his appearance, you know for sure that the writer had never been outside of his home, and was relying on unrealistic tropes and clichés that he stole from other webnovels. Look, while there definitely were elite clubs and high-class restaurants that demanded a certain dress code, not every damned hotel or bank or jewelry shop or whatever store the webnovelist decided to stereotype features salespeople with that sort of attitude, and even if they did think that, they knew better than to voice such thoughts out loud. Most salespeople had the attitude of ”if the customer can pay, we don't care how he/she dresses.” Also, most people had better things to do than to trash-talk the main character. Nobody was that stupid to trash-talk someone in public, and then gang up on him to drive him out of the establishment for no reason other than he was the main character. I know the webnovelists were trying to do the whole ”don't judge people by their appearances” moral of the story, but they did it in such a contrived and retarded manner that it was much harder to interpret the relevant message because the readers simply couldn't suspend disbelief at how idiotic every character (and this included the main character) was acting in the story.

Hell, it would be an insult to characters to call such…things characters. They were caricatures at best.

Anyway, I was saying that nobody cared about our attire, and we took a small table at the side, near the windows. It was a buffet-styled restaurant, so we basically picked up a huge white plate, choose from a massive variety of dishes laid out across the tables, and eat as much as we wanted.

Now that we were actually eating a proper meal, I realized just how starved I was. Come to think of it, I hadn't actually eaten much since yesterday, probably because the damned sewers destroyed my appetite. We had a bit of rations, but that was it. Thanks to that, I had managed to work up a massive appetite today, and practically gorged myself on whatever I saw.

”Phew…”

White rice. Chicken curry. Singaporean satay. Fish sautéed in bean sauce. Beef rendang. Chilli crab. Laksa. Sushi. Sashimi. Char kuay teow. Fried rice. Herbal chicken soup. Corn soup. Porridge with condiments. Jellyfish. Stir-fried cabbage. Broccoli with abalone and mushroom. Ice cream (of course it had to be mango flavored). Red bean soup. Cakes.

Yeah, I ate all of that over several rounds. It took me a couple of hours to go through everything, but somehow I managed to devour whatever I scooped up onto my plate.

”Whoa…Brother Richard, I didn't expect you to eat so much.”

Adrian's eyes were wide. I knew why he was surprised. I looked so skinny, yet somehow I could eat so much. It was a trait that more than a few people had remarked. But I couldn't help it. No matter how much I ate, I just never grew fat. It was almost my superpower.

”Isn't that good?” Melina asked as she sliced a cake in half with her fork, watching me wistfully. She only had a fraction of what I had in terms of main courses, but she had several times the amount of dessert that I had. When I glanced inquisitively at her and her plate of cakes and sweets, she merely shrugged innocently.

”We women have another stomach for desserts,” she explained without a trace of irony. I raised an eyebrow skeptically, but didn't pursue the matter. I realized over the long course of my life that it was useless to argue with a lady.

Adrian, on the other hand, had about half to three-quarters of what I had, and he already looked defeated, sprawled across the table and heaving. He looked at me somewhat enviously.