Sponsored chapter! Thanks again to Luoyuan for another Ko-fi!! 🥰🥰🥰
Eno fought back the restless agitation of the little life in his belly, backhandedly used his dagger to slice away the frozen thorns in front of him, and moved forward step by step.
RM-788 is a planet with small and large purple thunderclouds in the sky all year round, where even ghosts don’t fly in, and frosty forests on the ground, making it an extremely harsh place to live in. It took him nearly a month to get here, even though the identity chip Ivan had given him was highly privileged and allowed him to travel unimpeded between star routes.
Following the card’s instructions, through this vast frozen forest, he would reach his destination.
Exhausted from the day’s walk, Eno leaned his back against a thick tree trunk to rest. He had been in this forest for a week and had no idea how long it would take him to get out. Growing impatient, Eno opened the packet on his back, took out a compressed nutritional biscuit, mixed it with some snow water and chewed it.
He rubbed his belly guiltily, and his cub kicked his belly affectionately, as if sentient, in an effort to respond to his presence. The little one was four months old, and Eno even regretted coming out at this time, even though the pregnancy wasn’t showing yet, but looking at the situation, he might have to go see Ivan with a big belly, and what if Ivan threatened him with the baby then?
But he had to come, on the one hand he had to know the truth, and on the other he didn’t want to put Martin in danger. For the first time in his life, he wanted to protect someone so much, more than his child.
Above his head, thunderclouds converged with a loud rumbling sound. Eno climbed up a tree to get some clean ice and put it in a thermos cup to wait for it to melt. Luckily the ice in this place was fresh water when it melted, otherwise he would have been out of water.
There weren’t many compressed biscuits left and Eno figured there might not be enough to last him until the end, thinking he would try to kill an ice beast tomorrow to make jerky. There was nothing else he could do, after all, he never thought he would be forced to be a wilderness survival expert one day, and he had few wilderness survival skills other than a few books he had read as a child when he didn’t want to study properly.
The only creatures that lived in this forest were ice beasts, ice blue in colour and somewhat like the grey wolves you normally see, only bigger. They move around the forest in packs, feeding on each other when no foreign creatures enter. Eno had read about these creatures before he arrived and knew that they were very powerful in packs. He had only been lucky enough to encounter a few alone, but not a real pack.
There is no day or night on this planet, nor is there a difference in the weather; there are always dark purple thunderclouds in the sky and cold wind on the ground. Eno took a thin blanket from his travel bag and covered himself with it, leaning against a tree, ready to take a nap before leaving. His terminal had run out of power and he had lost track of time, sleeping for a while and walking for a while, relying only on a wayfinding compass to make sure he was heading in the right direction and not much else.
He hadn’t closed his eyes for long when he suddenly felt an eerie silence around him, which was chillingly cold. Eno opened his eyes in surprise, but everything around him was as usual, as if nothing had happened.
Knowing the power of the beast herd, he did not dare to take it lightly, so he climbed up the tree with his blanket in his arms, sat down against a thick branch and watched the situation below with bated breath. After a short time, a dozen ice beasts leapt out of the frozen bushes and surrounded the tree, watching him intently.
Eno was terrified and repeatedly shouted in his head to calm down and stay calm. Hiding in the trees was not a permanent solution, these things were tree climbers, and even though he was very good at the sport, he did not think he could outrun them. He drew his dagger from his bag and held it in his hand, his mind going over the fighting techniques Martin had taught him before he finally made up his mind.
His eyes clouded over with blood the moment he leapt from the tree, and with a swift motion he stabbed an ice beast through the throat. The icy blue blood that spurted out inspired the beasts to swarm and almost swallowed Eno whole.
The sharp claws dug deep into the flesh and the air was filled with the fishy sweet Omega pheromones. Carefully guarding his lower abdomen, Eno swung his sword and slashed in defiance. The moves he had worked out in practice with Martin were becoming clear in his mind, the daggers slashing deep into flesh and pulling a splash of flesh and blood, staining the white frost-covered tundra with brilliant colours. Gradually he broke out of the chaos, kicking over a broken ice beast and gasping for breath to confront the eight remaining ones who were also panting.
Wild beasts do not know how to retreat unless you are more aggressive and desperate than they are. The ice beasts are intelligent by nature, and Eno’s brazen appearance only deterred them for a few seconds before the lead one grabbed the ground with his forepaws and let out a low, long, beastly cry from his throat, leading the pack towards Eno again.
Eno knew that he could not retreat, and that there was no place to run, so he had to lead the fight. He dodged one ice beast’s lunge, thrust his dagger into the chest of one with his backhand, and then was thrown to the ground by a third ice beast, hitting his head directly on the ground, causing his brain to go white with pain.
The blade caught on the salivating fangs and he kicked the ice beast away from him, staggering to his feet and rejoining the melee. But he was alone, and he had been wounded earlier in the fight, and his strength was running out. Eno’s wrists became weak and he could barely hold his dagger.
But there were still five ice beasts left, and he was in such a mess that he could hardly stand. Desperation washed over him, and with his last strength he pounced on one of them, plunged his dagger into its throat, and closed his eyes, ready to resign himself to fate.
He was already too tired, but the pain he had imagined did not come. There were a few harsh gunshots in the air, and as Eno slipped into unconsciousness, he felt in a trance as if he smelled a familiar, reassuring whiff of Alpha pheromones.
Eno woke up to find himself in an empty camp, covered with a thick blanket and a heater placed next to him, providing him with a steady stream of heat. He sat up and an Alpha sitting a short distance in front of him immediately came around and greeted him warmly: “Hello, my name is Logan.”
Eno scanned him back and forth warily for a couple of moments before speaking: “Eno. Who are you people?”
He wondered in his mind if the prison was here to take him back, and the next moment he heard Logan say: “We’re the Silver Cross Legion, here to investigate an Inhuman rehabilitation base.”
Hearing the name Silver Cross, Eno was shocked and said hesitantly: “So… who’s your commanding officer?”
Remembering his boss’s instructions, Logan immediately put on a serious expression and said: “Major General Drake is still in a meeting, so you’ll probably need to wait for him for a while.”
“Major General Drake has been found?!”
Logan said seriously: “The Major General has been on a secret mission and will not be made public until this base investigation operation is over, so please keep it quiet.”
Eno nodded knowingly, slightly relieved, and turned his head to shrink back into the blanket. His wounds were already bandaged, luckily none of them were very deep, and with his good constitution and the healing medicine specially used by the Federal Army is constantly healing his wounds, and it won’t take long for him to recover.
Eno was still feverish, dizzy as hell, and fell asleep again in a daze. When he awoke there was a new man beside him, Drake sitting beside him gazing deeply at him, the emotions in his eyes were deep and complex, obscure.
It had been nine years since he had seen him, but the starry-eyed, sword-browed Drake was still as handsome as he remembered. Eno breathed a long sigh of relief when he saw that he was safe and sound. He subconsciously moved away from Drake and greeted him in a subtly detached tone: “It’s been…a long time.”
Drake: “……”
Eno’s appearance obviously returned to his initial attitude towards him, which made him feel at a loss instead. He really wanted to tell Eno that he had been in this hellhole for three days with his men in order to find him, and had scoured almost every inch of the frozen forest before he had found traces of Eno walking through the vast frozen woods and chased him all the way here to save him.
God knows how nervous he was at that moment. If he had come even half a minute later, he might have only been rewarded with a pile of broken bones. Drake didn’t care to be mean to him now, he just wanted to take Eno into his arms and rub him properly to soothe his own fear of almost a month.
With a guilty conscience, he gave himself a sufficient dose of pheromone inhibitors while Eno was sleeping, and was going to see Eno’s reaction to him before a showdown, and before Eno left, he also took away the inhibitor Martin gave him at that time to give himself a shot before he left. So now he could only sit awkwardly a metre away from Eno, wondering how he could explain without upsetting Eno.
After much deliberation, it seemed like a life-giving question, and Drake sighed ruefully. The situation was urgent, so he decided to put romance aside and get down to business: “I’m here to avenge Lea’s death, and we have enough evidence. What about you, what are you doing here?”
Without hesitation, Eno replied: “Me too.”
“That’ll do.” Drake said, “How about we exchange information with each other?”
Eno fell into a deep silence after hearing Drake’s account.
Duke Kersi and Irene had confessed to almost everything, whom he had always suspected, loved him so much that he would not hesitate to steal the most precious research results from the laboratory to save him, but was discovered and threatened by his assistant Viktor. Unwilling to shift the direction of the lab’s research for the Inhumans, Ivan is brutally murdered, with Viktor taking his place and signed a marriage contract between Eno and little Kersi, so that it would be easier to observe Eno, the experimental subject who was personally implanted with gene fragments by Ivan.
He was supposed to have a happy and fulfilling family, with everyone in the family loving him so much.
Tears filled his eyes and rolled around twice before finally rushing down. Drake leaned over to pat his shoulder and whispered, ”…My condolences1what he says is 节哀 (jié āi), which means to restrain your grief..”
However, his hand was deliberately avoided just as it landed on Eno’s shoulder, only to feel the cold chill of the fabric. Eno’s distant and guarded look broke his heart, and with a million words stuck in his throat, Drake finally had to go back to his tent in despair and send a Beta medic to look after him.
They couldn’t move forward immediately, because the border of the frozen forest was not far ahead, and beyond the frozen forest was a vast stretch of snow-capped mountains. Viktor’s experimental base was built at the foot of a snowy mountain, and the view was too vast. They could only stay here for now and see if they could mix up an electronic eye to get in when the next group of children entered the base in seven days.
Eno listened quietly as he finished talking about the commando’s current situation and asked, very curiously: “An electronic eye? Can you show me?”
It wasn’t a rare thing, and Drake said to try to accommodate Eno’s needs, so the medic quickly asked Logan for an electronic eye. Eno held the tiny monitor in his hand for a while before slipping it into his pocket and telling the medic he wanted to go for a walk.
Drake had brought an entire commando unit of a hundred men with him, and a large contingent of the Silver Cross was assembled off-planet, ready to sweep the modest asteroid. This professional commando unit was disciplined and orderly in every way, and the standard of Drake’s leadership was evident. The camp’s perimeter wall consisted of a ring of two-metre-high mobile panels, with frozen wood cut down all around to ensure that the ice beasts could not possibly leap in through the trees, which is completely safe.
He had just woken up when it was time for his meal and the soldiers lined up neatly to collect their nourishment, Eno didn’t move, taking nourishment biscuits from his pack and nibbling slowly. After a while Drake himself came over to greet him, handing him a bottle of sweet milk made from powdered milk: “The army takes special care of Omegas, drink it.”
Then he got a good look at the compressed biscuit in Eno’s hand, and hey, it was still chocolate flavoured, as expected of him.
Eno opened the lid to smell the sweet milk and compared it to the bitter snowy water in his own cup, and drank it anyway without a second thought. Drake watched with a fatherly smile as he took a small sip, resisted the urge to reach out and stroke the milk stains from the corners of his mouth, and invited Eno to sit in his tent where Logan and the others were roasting ice beast meat.
Eno’s eyes rolled slowly, and it took half a day for him to say yes. When Drake had gone, he took a bottle of spirits from his pack and went to Drake with it in his backhand, putting it heavily in front of him, shocking everyone.
Eno asked Drake with a grimace: “We’ve eaten barbecue, do you want a drink?”
Drake’s first thought was that this ancestor’s bag looked so light that he had managed to carry a bottle of alcohol with such a small amount of stuff. It’s really smoke from the ancestor’s grave to survive long enough to be found by them.
Then he said dumbfoundingly: “Alcohol is forbidden in the army. We are disciplined.”
“Ok.” Eno said, opening the bottle himself and taking a sip first before turning to the few Alpha’s around the fire, “I’d like a moment alone with Major General Drake, is that okay?”
Under the persistent gossip of Nightingale and Logan, the entire legion now knows that Eno is their new sister-in-law. Several commandos looked at each other, gave Drake a meaningful smile, and ran away in a hurry. .
Drake: “……What’s up?”
“No rush, I’ll have another couple of sips or I won’t have the courage to talk.” Eno took a bite of the beast, which was roasting on the fire, and comfortably feasted on the strong wine, only his eyes were cold, making Drake look alarmed and wonder what he was going to say to him.
Eno didn’t keep him waiting long, and by the time he was half full of wine, as if he had finally concocted the words, he said to Drake with drunken eyes: “I like you, I have since I first saw you when I was twelve.”
He said it so openly that Drake’s brain went blank for a brief moment, and then he saw Eno smiling to himself: “I know you haven’t liked me for a day, and saying these things will only make you hate me more, but I’m going to say them anyway, at least to let you know how I used to feel, otherwise I feel that I’ve liked you for eighteen years in vain.”
“But I’m tired, I don’t want to like you anymore.” He couldn’t help but touch the small his lower abdomen, happy smile, “My second marriage is to a very nice Alpha, although my husband isn’t as good looking as you, he treats me very, very well. I want to love him well, and I’m pregnant with our baby.”
Drake stiffened, his expression as if struck like lightning. He panicked, thinking where’s the medic, I’m going to call the medic and hide his little baby properly.
Eno still felt a little sad at Drake’s impassive expression, but it quickly dissipated like a gust of wind. He got up and said goodbye to Drake with a very indifferent but genuine smile: “So I’ll go along with what you’re doing. Avenge Lea as soon as possible, I’m in hurry to get home, and there are still people waiting for me at home.
Eno turned and walked away, his silent figure blending into the darkness of the sky against the red-orange campfire, like the helpless murmurings at the wall the night before his wedding, but with a little more determination. He no longer wanted the illusions of the past, for real happiness was within his grasp.
Drake watched Eno walk away as the tent behind him was unzipped, revealing the small, delicate face of Nightingale. Nightingale was on fire just hiding inside listening: “Boss didn’t you say you had to come clean this time, are you trying to worry me to death and then inherit our family’s sweet potato field?”
“How can I say ah?” Drake was going crazy, “He just finished saying he doesn’t like me, and he made an empathetic speech. If I jump in and say I’m sorry I’m your husband? How embarrassed would he be? Am I not looking to die?”
Nightingale said coldly, “Then he’ll be even angrier when he finds out later that you’re hiding the joke from him at this time. Either way you’re done for, resign yourself to your fate.”
“Don’t mention this first.” Drake said anxiously, “Where’s the medic, go and get the medic to look at him. In case there’s a problem with keeping the big and the small, make sure you keep my wife ah!!!”
Nightingale silently spat out a word about how it was only four months old, and went off to get the medic. However, he was halfway to the medic when he saw Logan running like a whirlwind towards Drake’s tent.
A bad feeling rose up in Nightingale’s heart and he shouted at Logan: “What’s wrong?!”
“Sister-in-law is missing!!!”
