"Tom, here’s your dose." Selina sat at the instructors’ table and casually slid a transparent glass vial toward me. "This time I managed to get my hands on something genuinely nasty from the CIA’s classified reserves. According to the specs, it’ll kill you within minutes after it reaches the esophagus."
She leaned down and dropped a heavy leather medical bag onto her lap with a dull thud.
"If the [Trainer] glitches and your readings start crashing, I’ll bring you back. The resuscitation kit’s ready," she assured me, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose.
"Thanks for the concern, Selina, but I’m confident in my abilities." Without hesitation, I uncapped the vial and drained it in a single swallow.
A dense bitterness spread through my throat, followed by a sharp chill. It felt as though I had swallowed three shots of extra-strong coffee mixed with mint all at once.
[Warning! Familiar has been exposed to a toxic compound!]
[Warning! Without intervention, irreversible failure of the Familiar’s vital systems will occur in 15 hours]
"Heh." A short, cynical chuckle escaped me.
"What’s it saying?" Selina asked sharply, her fingers tightening around the handle of the medical bag. She was obviously waiting for the first symptoms.
"The System claims your top-secret ultra-lethal cocktail’s going to spend fifteen whole hours trying to conquer my body."
"I see." Selina let out a loud breath and leaned back in her chair with obvious relief. "That means your immune system and gastrointestinal lining have already restructured themselves to meet the new density standards. Ordinary organic poisons just don’t affect you anymore."
"Not enough restructuring if this crap still’s got a theoretical chance of pushing things into necrosis," I muttered.
I folded my arms on the table, rested my head on them, closed my eyes, and issued a familiar internal command to my body through sheer mental effort: isolate the toxin, break it down into harmless fractions, and develop a permanent defensive marker.
In the silence that followed, while an invisible chemical war raged inside me, I once again replayed my entire history with Selina in my head. Only a few days had passed since that night in her apartment, yet here we were sitting together and speaking in our usual professional rhythm as though that ridiculous contraceptive setup had never happened.
And for that businesslike neutrality, I owed a great deal to my emotional suppression function. If I had snapped back then with ordinary male ego, started lecturing her, or simply slammed the door behind me while dragging along a trail of unspoken resentment, that would have been the end of it. By now we would either be sworn enemies or separated by such an impenetrable wall of awkwardness that any talk of joint progress would have become impossible.
Cold calculation allowed me to move the fact of personal betrayal into the category of a routine commercial dispute with an unreliable contractor. Losses documented, claims filed, operations continuing.
Selina had not brought up the subject of children again since then, but I knew her personality far too well to believe she had given up. Women like Professor Langstrom did not discard approved plans.
To be honest, I was waiting for her next move myself. The prospect of fatherhood did not scare me. I had long since passed the age when men turned pale at the word "responsibility" and feared that a child would ruin their lives.
This would be a legally structured process stripped of romantic nonsense. There had been a sensible idea in one psychology book I read back during my office-worker days: "People get together based purely on hormones and fairy-tale love until about age twelve. After that, consciously or subconsciously, a person evaluates a partner according to social status, reliability, financial stability, and overall comfort."
From that pragmatic perspective, Selina was the perfect partner for launching a high-quality startup. A leading Corps engineer with the rank of major, almost certainly the owner of some prestigious international science award, and ever since we turned our joint pharmacological experiments into a streamlined operation, her finances had become more than solid.
The only unpredictable factor was what kind of mother she would become. That was exactly why I needed a strict and detailed contract with clearly defined custody shares. If some brilliant plan formed in her genius mind involving our child spending years inside a sterile containment box as a long-term laboratory specimen, I needed ironclad legal grounds to take the child away through the courts and raise them myself.
"Done." I lifted my head and stretched, working the stiffness out of my neck after the brief nap.
"Don’t rush off yet." With a practiced motion, Selina pulled a sterile empty syringe from the bag. "I need a fresh blood sample for analysis."
"Planning to synthesize a universal antidote for the agency boys?" I looked at her skeptically while rolling up the sleeve of my uniform shirt. "Why’d they need protection from their own secret weapon?"
"Things happen, Tom." She adjusted her glasses while preparing the tourniquet. "Some operative on assignment might mix up the ampoules or accidentally drink from the wrong glass. We’re obligated to minimize risks and save government personnel."
"And if you officially process that antidote through a defense contract and add it to every field agent’s mandatory medical kit, your patent could generate some very respectable dividends. Am I right?"
"Well, that’s part of it." Selina gave a faint smile and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear with an expression of perfect innocence.
The blood draw followed the usual routine, quick and without unnecessary theatrics.
"See you here after dinner," I said, pressing an alcohol swab against the crook of my elbow.
"Mmm, Tom, there’s no need to come to the lecture hall tonight." For a fraction of a second, something very faintly resembling girlish embarrassment flickered across Selina’s face. "Come straight to my dorm after dinner."
I stopped and frowned, feeling that dull irritation begin rising inside me again. "Selina, are you starting this again? I think I made myself perfectly clear. Until we meet with independent lawyers, there’ll be no discussions about children."
"I remember every clause of our agreement perfectly well, Tom." She proudly lifted her chin, returning to her usual commanding tone. "You, on the other hand, seem to have only a very vague understanding of your own obligations."
I did not ask for clarification. Instead, I mentally dove into my memory palace. I began rapidly flipping through all our previous conversations containing the words promise, guarantee, or agreement.
And damn it, I really did stumble across one very specific clause that I myself had brought up.
"You’re serious?" I asked, resurfacing from the depths of memory barely a second later.
"Absolutely serious. You promised you’d use [Special Command] on me for, ahem... maximum pleasure generation." A faint, uncharacteristic blush appeared on her cheeks. "Consider it an important stage of our joint scientific research."
"Purely scientific, huh."
"And don’t get any extra ideas, Tom," she added sternly after noticing my skeptical look.
"Wasn’t planning to."
"A promise’s a promise, so do your job," Selina declared firmly, drawing a hard line under the discussion. "Take some responsibility for once."
"I don’t know." I paused, deliberately putting an expression of deep doubt and analytical conflict on my face. "We never discussed a specific deadline. Maybe in a couple of years, once I’ve got an opening in my schedule, I’ll find some time for you."
Selina immediately puffed up and pressed her lips together in annoyance. Yes, admittedly, that was pure childish trolling on my part, but I simply could not resist. She was acting so demanding, as though we had signed a service contract and I had missed every deadline on it.
"Actually, I’ve got a surprise for you," she said suddenly, switching tactics and narrowing her eyes with a sly look.
"What kind of surprise?"
"I can’t tell you because it’s a surprise." The devious woman gave me a light, intriguing smile and winked. "Your present’s in my room. Come by tonight and you can pick it up."
"We’ll see how things play out," I replied vaguely before turning around and leaving the classroom.
***
During the practical S-Power reserve manipulation session, the thing I had been methodically working toward over the past few days finally happened. The moment Master Smith deactivated the general suppressor, Sam immediately locked onto me with his gaze.
"Tom, step forward," the instructor ordered. "You can head to the dojo."
"Hold on, what’s going on?" Ted immediately perked up, whipping his head around. Genuine curiosity mixed freely with a teenager’s instinctive desire to derail the lesson. "Why’s he the only one? What about the rest of the platoon? What kind of special treatment’s this?"
"Tom’s training process requires complete privacy due to its specific nature," Sam replied with a dry, preprepared explanation that clearly left no room for argument. "Besides, he’s already demonstrated a high level of self-discipline in practice, so I can trust him to train independently."
Ted opened his mouth, clearly preparing another round of teenage protests, but the sergeant standing nearby gave him such a heavy look, one practically promising extra duties, that the boy instantly deflated. Meanwhile, I wasted no precious time and headed deeper into the complex at a brisk pace toward our beautiful, fully isolated windowless dojo. Privacy was the greatest possible resource for performance optimization.
Once inside, after locking the massive door behind me, I mentally activated the required script:
[Special Command: conduct optimal S-Power training for one hour]
At the very same moment, my consciousness slipped smoothly into a strange half-sleep state. My body shifted into autonomous control mode and began aggressively drawing energy from the surrounding environment. Physically, I saw nothing behind my closed eyelids, yet I understood the algorithm perfectly. My body, operating like a flawless sleepwalker, reproduced every complex combination and kata Sam had personally demonstrated to me with surgical precision. The System extracted maximum efficiency from every breath, optimizing the circulation of S-Power through my channels while steadily expanding my internal capacity.
Exactly sixty minutes later, following the schedule, Sam reactivated the S-Power suppression field across the entire camp perimeter. The energy flow dried up, and I gradually emerged from the hyperfocus state, reclaiming full control over my body.
The moment I stepped out of the dojo, Ted swooped down on me like a hawk.
"Tom, come on, spill it. What were you doing in there for a whole hour?"
"Exactly what Master Smith said," I answered flatly without even slowing my pace. "Individual training."
That improvised interrogation died immediately after that. If I had been one of those fifteen-year-old boys, they probably would have spent the next three days tormenting me with suspicious looks and dumb jokes in the barracks. But my background as a mature, perpetually grim adult created the proper barrier around me. The snot-nosed cadets simply felt awkward and uncomfortable trying to pry into my business.
***
After dinner, I knocked on Selina’s door three short times.
When the lock clicked open, I saw that the professor had decided to change the scenery this time around. No domestic relaxation, no provocative poses on the bed. Standing before me was the classic Major Langstrom: composed, buttoned up to the top, posture flawless.
"I knew you’d come, Tom," she noted with satisfaction as she stepped back and cleared the doorway. Her voice radiated triumph.
"I’m here exclusively for my gift, Selina," I corrected dryly while walking inside.
"You really are predictable and painfully practical," she scoffed while closing the door. "Your present’s in the corner."
At the far end of the room rested a massive wooden military crate. Stenciled across the side were the kind of words that would make any normal cadet stop breathing for a second: TOP SECRET and PROPERTY OF US ARMY.
"Try to look a little less excited, Tom." Selina rolled her eyes dramatically while watching my reaction. "Right now you look like some teenage idiot who caught Santa Claus under the Christmas tree in the middle of the night."
"You got a crowbar anywhere?" I asked while assessing the steel brackets reinforcing the edges. "Or should I pry the crate open by hand?"
"Don’t you dare, barbarian!" she protested sincerely, even stepping toward me. "There’s calibrated, extremely fragile high-tech equipment inside!"
"Equipment for what exactly? What’s it designed for?"
"Oh, I’m not telling you that." Selina demonstratively crossed her arms beneath her chest, blocking the information completely. "My code doesn’t include doing business with men who fail to fulfill their obligations."
"That’s straight-up blackmail, Selina."
"I’m a woman, Tom. And I outrank you." She countered with a faint smirk. "Inside these walls, I can do whatever I want."
"And what if it’s a bluff?" I narrowed my eyes slightly. "What if the box’s stuffed with old boots?"
"I swear on my active laboratory and every ministry grant I’ve got," she said seriously and with unmistakable weight while looking directly into my eyes. "The contents of that crate’ll make you dance with happiness."
Hmm. That was a serious argument. Selina could joke about many things, but she valued her laboratory and status more than her own life. Which meant there really was something valuable inside, not some empty stunt designed to grab my attention.
Wait. Why the hell was I bargaining and turning this into a comedy routine? I was a grown man, and a smart, attractive woman was offering me a top-tier military device in exchange for nothing more than giving her pleasure in bed. For ninety percent of the male population on this planet, that arrangement would qualify as the ultimate unattainable fantasy.
Everything would have been perfect if Selina had not already tried playing games with me before.
It was time for her to learn that pleasure could be achieved in other ways too.