I don't know how long I spent freaking out in my office after the Management hung up. The sheer number of ways I could wind up dead from this fiasco were legion, and it was simply too overwhelming for me at the moment. Olivia might pick me up just outside the station and I get dragged off for life imprisonment. Another assassin might show up and get the better of me. Lisa might never come into her power and the Management pulls the plug on me for real. I fail my primary mission involving the Kuats and the Management cuts me loose. Jasvinder makes a reappearance to tie up loose ends.

And those possibilities are just the ones from the top of my head. My brain was cooking up far more lurid possibilities for sampling.

Damn it. Damn it! DAMN IT!

I need to get a hold of myself. Becoming reckless or desperate is the first step on the road to getting myself killed. First things first. My watch tells me its close to eight pm now. I need to get out of the station before anybody gets suspicious. I shut down my equipment and toss my Operator's jacket over the hook on the wall. After spending a minute or two getting my office in order, I join the last of the staff in shuffling out of the station. No one gives me a second glance. No one knows.

Good.

I walk to the staff parking area and get into my car without further ado. Firing up the engine, I drive away from the compound with a sigh of relief. Alright, I am in the clear for now. But what to do next?

A brainwave hits me and I dig my mobile out from my trouser pocket. I had assumed that Jasvinder had gone on the run. But what if he is planning to mess things up for me? As the senior operative, he would be privy to most of our planning, sometimes in far more detail than myself. Jasvinder might try to throw a wrench into these plans out of spite or for the sake of principle now that he has decided to go full native.

I pull up Sunflower Orphanage's number from the phone's list of contacts and hit the dial tab. I hope its not too late. The line buzzes briefly before it is picked up by the other end.

"Hello?" an elderly woman's voice answers, "Sunflower Orphanage." Great, this must be the orphanage's Matron.

"Yeah." I answer, "Is Reina around?"

"Who is this?" the Matron asks, a tone heavy with suspicion. Crap, I had forgotten that Lisa's host is a young girl. A grown man calling her at night was the very definition of suspicious. I can still save this situation though.

"Its her Uncle Don." I say as patiently as possible, "Tell Reina that I need to talk to her urgently about something private."

"Please wait." the Matron says and I hear her calling for Reina. I also hear a shift in the background noise, as if it had suddenly grown much closer to the phone. The Matron must have put me on speaker so that she can hear the conversation.

"Mm?" a girl's voice chirps, "Reina here."

Lisa had better be doing that childish anime voice as an act. I can't reveal the truth while the Matron is listening in. Let's hope Lisa is sharp enough to pick up on my hints.

"Reina? Its Don." I say, "Did Jas try and contact you today?"

"Uncle Don! Hi! Hi!" Reina prattles, doing that saccharine sweet tone again, "No, I haven't heard from Uncle Jas. What's wrong?"

"Reina." I drop my voice a few octaves to indicate how serious the matter is, "If Jas comes looking for you, do not go with him, no matter what he says. OK?"

"Uh, OK?" Reina now just sounds bewildered.

"If Jas contacts you," I continue, "inform me immediately. Immediately. And also, do not remain alone with him. Do you understand?"

"What happened to Uncle Jas?" Reina replies, in a surprisingly adult tone. Good. That means she's taking what I'm saying seriously.

"Your Uncle Jas had a mental breakdown." I explain as gently as possible, "He's not himself and might become violent."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Oh. OK." Reina's voice is subdued, accepting my clarification, "Reina won't go anywhere with Uncle Jas and will tell Uncle Don if she knows where Uncle Jas is."

"Wonderful." I breathe a sigh of relief. Jas had not gone after Lisa yet and with luck, this warning should be enough to keep her safe should Jasvinder try in the future. Now for the other issue at hand.

"How're you feeling Reina?" I ask solicitously, "Is your fever down yet? Growing stronger?"

"Mmn. No." Lisa's back to using her anime voice again, "Reina still feels sick and weak. The Matron told Reina that the fever has broken already, but Reina's body doesn't feel any stronger."

Shit. Textbook rejection symptoms. That means Lisa most likely failed to absorb the blood serum Jas administered yesterday. I will give her a few more days, but odds are Lisa will need more doses of the serum to unseal her power package. This is the exact situation I had feared. Not only do I need to scrounge up serum to maintain my own powers, I now need to support another mouth as well. Just in time for the Yellow Rose investigation to ream me in the ass.

What's that saying? When it rains, it pours?

The shit's pouring down on my head now alright.

"Alright. You rest up Reina." I respond, "Uncle Don will go visit when he has time."

Lisa gives me a cheerful anime girl farewell before hanging up. OK, that's one problem down. And I have just the solution for another. Without any hesitation, I throw my car into a u-turn, cutting across the empty street and head towards Jasvinder's clinic.

....

Many junior operatives get confused with the difference between the harvests and the blood serum. I know that from personal experience. They will always ask during training why harvesting is necessary when our powers are triggered by the serum. What junior operatives don't really understand is that harvesting and the serum are two sides of the same coin.

True. The blood serum is what allows an operative to awaken his powers in this dimension.

True. Blood serum is the 'mana' an operative uses when he fights. Without it, we can't activate our unique powers and trump cards in battle.

And this is the part many operatives get wrong. They believe that blood serum makes us stronger. It simply does not.

The mistake stems from a flaw in perception. Operatives awaken their trump cards and go on to train as Auxilia. This process obviously makes their power level rise. The operative concludes that the rush of strength they experience whenever ingesting the serum compounds on itself, adding to their vanilla Auxilia powers. The physical sense of being faster, stronger and better can be overpowering.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Our powers are beyond the boundaries of this dimension. Therefore they do not add to the abilities of an Auxilia. When both sets of powers are used together, they don't merge, since they are fundamentally incompatible. What happens is a substitution of sorts, where the operative power set overwrites the relevant Auxilia ability. The serum does nothing for a host's base stats, so to speak, despite what your body would tell you. It is merely a catalyst.

A catalyst for unleashing our true natures.

During training, we were told by the Management that the power package represented potential in its purest form. An operative theoretically could accomplish anything with the power package. But a person's individual vision is by nature limited. Our minds are not capable of grasping infinite possibility and turning it into reality. So when we do receive infinite possibility, our minds dumb it down to an understandable level to prevent itself from going insane.

Its no surprise then that power packages usually take their form from the media the operative is most familiar with.

And this leads on to why the harvests are so necessary. Not only do the harvests yield the raw material needed for the serum, a fact conveniently ignored by some bleeding hearts, they provide us with the one thing that can strengthen our unique powers.

Lives.

Life represents potential superimposed against reality. A rich man could die poor. A ugly freak could marry a supermodel. All unlikely. But all possible. Potential outcomes. Potential futures. Whenever an operative takes a life, that potentiality is cut short and consumed. Infinity added upon infinity. We absorb what the deceased was and what he could become. We grow stronger by becoming more than what we originally were.

We Experience growth, not just personal, but outright metaphysical.

We level up.

.....

Jasvinder had managed to keep producing serum without needing to go on harvests. Most probably by using his connections as a doctor. I don't have that privilege. But I might be able to profit from whatever Jasvinder might have left behind. Jasvinder had does Lisa with the serum in his office. That means there is likely to be more serum stored somewhere there. Or at the very least the components for me to craft a fresh batch.

I park my car a block away from the clinic and continue the journey on foot. I don't want the militia getting any camera footage of my car loitering around the area. I doubt Jasvinder is hiding out in his place of business, so it should be safe enough. The real challenge is finding the serum. It would almost certainly be hidden away from the clinic's staff and patients.

I begin to close in on the vicinity of the clinic and can see a line of yellow police tape set up around a large crater just outside. The fight against the assassin was not difficult per se, but I had to go all out. That crater was the result. Just as I am about to preen at how bad ass I am, I notice two figures walking about inside the crater itself. One of them is a young woman who keeps her hair long and draped over a shoulder. No idea who that is.

But I recognize the other person who stands hunched over, poring over the crater with a fine toothed comb.

Its Olivia.