PATH OF THE STAR HUNTER

“You seem rejuvenated, did you have a positive dream?” Seeing the obvious good mood Desmond woke up in, Sophia felt a little curious about it so she couldn’t resist asking about it as she started to prepare breakfast.

“Not exactly, maybe I just felt the air a little bit cleaner today,” Desmond commented with a friendly smile as he prepared to help Sophia with breakfast.

Sophia found the comment somewhat odd as the air in the city was considerably less pure than the air in the country but she quickly pushed the subject to the back of her mind.

Little did Sophia know that Desmond’s comment spoke volumes about what he did the night before, as in Desmond’s mind the city of Kars was now slightly cleaner after he did the city a favor by cleaning up some of the scum that was in it.

Minutes passed as Sophia and Desmond helped each other in the kitchen and soon breakfast for four was placed on the table to be greeted by the mischievous pair of girls who failed to hide the candy they kept in their pretty cheeks.

Slightly smiling but exasperated, Sophia scolded her pretty daughters a bit before they all sat down at the table to eat, during breakfast the conversation continued with Sophia making a few comments about what brought Desmond to town: “I must say that I did not expect to see you so soon, less in these circumstances”

To which Desmond responded with a faint smirk, “Its mid-autumn and mutated beast attacks are becoming less frequent as many beasts are still in the habit of wintering; so it’s the perfect season for the army to put in some extra effort to prepare senior officers ahead of winter training for recruits.”

Sophia nodded as she placed some fruit in her mouth and once she finished swallowing, she commented, “I know, somehow the calm of winter and autumn has been a relief for us human beings, even if the season spring ends up becoming a carnage. At least we have a couple of months off to prepare, it’s just that I didn’t think that this year we would have an officer as young as you directing one of the training programs”

.....

As the pair had commented, the seasons still had a strong grip on the mutated beasts’ life cycles, perhaps an instinct too deeply ingrained; Whatever the case, the human beings had learned to take advantage of every moment they could relax their military effort.

In the case of country F as well as other countries, it was quite a practical custom that as the mutated beast attacks began to become less frequent in mid-autumn; the government took advantage of the situation to strengthen its chain of command.

Due to various factors, the number of officers within the army was always in deficit which always resulted in problems or strategic failures in large-scale military efforts, this was, even more, the case given that at least half of the existing military officers had their position due to their personal strength so they did not meet the highest standards in military prowess.

Therefore, every autumn when it became possible to temporarily withdraw many of these officers from the front, in all the big cities in country F, courses, training programs, and training were organized to increase the quality of the army’s commanding officers as well as encourage the promotion of new officers.

Unfortunately, this program was only entering its third year in force, so the results, although promising, we’re still far from being good enough to fix the problem in the short term; it simply couldn’t be helped as society was only in its fifth year of recovery after the year of darkness and chaos that followed the day of awakening.

Whatever the case, Desmond’s reason for being in Kars City and the reason he gave for being in Kars City were different, while on the one hand Desmond was planning to annihilate the biggest gangs in Kars city ??to steal their funds; Desmond, on the other hand, had volunteered to be the one to lead the interrogation techniques training program.

In fact, part of the reason Desmond waited a few days before coming to Kars City to put his plans into motion was that he was waiting for the full-scale military training period to begin while he prepared in advance the content of the training program that he would be in charge of after having sent the application to the military headquarters in Kars to apply for the position.

Luckily for Desmond, people trained in special interrogation techniques were few and far between, after all only certain special forces squads and certain intelligence agencies had such skills in their arsenal and they were rarely available to deliver such training programs.

In addition to all of the above, Desmond was making the most of his current situation by earning a great deal of military merit for giving said training program and even took the time to enroll himself in some of the training offered to enrich his military resume.

So Desmond spent the next two weeks acting as a docent and instructor in the interrogation techniques training program for at least a dozen lieutenants and captains from Kars City or nearby towns.

As soon as he finished acting as an instructor, Desmond immediately attended the military all-terrain vehicle handling training course as well as the training course on defensive methods and strategies style to deal with beast tides; the first was just a secondary course that Desmond who wasn’t particularly skilled at driving found interesting and the second was one of the required theory courses that Desmond would have to take if he ever wanted to move up in the ranks.

To the surprise of everyone but himself, Desmond achieved extraordinary results in both courses, taking a Hollywood movie-worthy urban driving test and a perfect score theory test in the second course.

The name Desmond Astryd ceased to be unknown to low ranking officers within the city of Kars and even some higher-ranking officers made a note of the name being quite impressed by the prowess displayed by Desmond; that was, even more, the case when said officers learned that Desmond even at such a young age had acted as an instructor in one of the rarest training programs.

Sophia being a captain whose position was mainly administratively ended up hearing a lot about Desmond’s exploits while she was in the office and somehow she felt a bit proud of him; She is similar to an older sister who boasts to her friends how adorable and intelligent her younger brother is.

But neither Sophia nor the rest of the army ever suspected that Desmond was also the subject of another story that was sweeping through the city of Kars with the force of a gale.

During the last two weeks, the underworld in the city of Kars had received a strong shock that had even uprooted its foundations to such an extent that it ended up becoming easy prey for the military.

With four of the top five gangs in the city having their top ranks assassinated and their fortunes plundered, followed by a few middling gangs disappearing overnight, the underworld of Kars City was in total panic.

The military of the city of Kars, like a shark that smells blood, did not hesitate to mobilize a couple of elite units to carry out a large-scale cleanup in the city, thus uprooting almost all the criminal forces that remained in the city.

At the same time, the military seized a gigantic amount of funds and weapons that had somehow come into the hands of the gangs, the amounts were quite alarming since they were almost close to ten percent of the city’s annual military budget.

The percentage may seem small but one has to know that the number of funds allocated to the army each year was gigantic, this also led the military to search quite energetically for whoever attacked the gangs before because that person had taken with them a considerable part of the hidden funds of said gangs.

On the other hand Desmond the person in question, was not at all satisfied with his harvest so far, because despite having been the one who did almost all the work of annihilating the gangs; it was the army that took not only the credit but also the funds for which he had come.

As it turned out, Desmond’s lack of understanding of gangs and criminal organizations led him to believe that they kept all of their funds in their main operations centers, which turned out to be untrue.

The gangs kept their wealth in all kinds of secret vaults and warehouses scattered throughout the city and only kept a medium amount of funds in their base of operations for daily deals.

This led Desmond to do all the dirty work just to take a minimal amount of funds with him after each job, of course, this amount was still a fortune of colossal proportions for ordinary people and was more than enough to cover the expenses of Desmond’s plans but he was still upset at how the military took all the fruits of his labor.

Perhaps it was his bad mood that led Desmond to want to attack the criminal organizations of the city one last time, the day before his departure. From what Desmond had investigated, the place he planned to attack was a secret warehouse belonging to the most powerful gang in the city where they kept their best wares as well as a considerable amount of funds.

Annoyed and slightly impatient, Desmond didn’t think too long before deciding to attack the place on the night of his fifteenth day in town, the resistance was much higher than Desmond had faced so far but it was still something he could handle.

Navigating inside the abandoned building that served as a warehouse, Desmond was looking for the place where the funds were kept following the instructions of one of the poor devils he tortured upon arrival.

Soon Desmond came to a set of stairs leading down to a sturdy-looking reinforced steel door, excitement flashing in Desmond’s eyes for an instant before he cautiously pried open the vault only to find himself with a completely different scenario than what he was expecting.

There weren’t piles and piles of esper crystals or briefcases full of credit tokens, what was in the room was just a group of frail women looking dirty and pitiful, a wave of gifted masculine scent filled Desmond’s nostrils as soon as he opened the door, from the haggard appearance of the women and the emptiness in their eyes Desmond knew exactly what had happened here and the bloodlust Desmond felt at that moment wouldn’t be sated until he ripped the last of the bones out of the bastards who did this.

Desmond was even thankful that this entire warehouse was a trap designed to lure him out for an ambush later, a fact he realized a few minutes ago; thanks to that Desmond could kill all the motherfuckers who own this warehouse.