"Eh? How."

"Look at your foot."

Looking down as Dax asked her to, Alice found she had stepped on a mock up of an anti personnel mine and once more failed the test.

"... s.h.i.+t."

"Should we take it from the top again?"

"Yes please."

"Okay then, back to basics."

Swiping his hand to the side, Dax reset the virtual practice field and returned to an entirely white s.p.a.ce together with Alice for the nth time.

"I'll ask once more before we review: Do you-"

"No."

With an instant reply, Alice once more declined to quit as she had done time and time again, leaving Dax to continue teaching her with a warm smile on his face.

"Okay then, let's do some quick formation tests."

Tapping a menu which appeared on his wrist, Dax sp.a.w.ned a number of drones around Alice. Hardening her determination, Alice slightly lowered her centre of gravity as she took a rifle of a nearby drone's back and checked the charge on it before inserting a magazine and chambering a round.

"Ready."

"Advance."

With a single command, the drones around Alice set off into a sprint, leaving Alice in the middle to do the same, or get tackled by one of the 200 kilo drones.

"Contact front."

While being surrounded by drones might sound like one of the safest places on a battlefield, but in reality that couldn't be further from the truth.

"Hostile rear!"

"Eh?-"

Not able to react in time Alice slammed into a drone in front of her as it suddenly stopped in place, then she was shot right in the face as the drone turned around to engage the confirmed hostile contact to the rear.

"And you're dead, again. This time by friendly fire no less… Let me show you something."

Returning to the urban battlefield simulation once more, Dax walked up next to Alice.

"Okay look ahead, what do you see?"

"Um... Debris, half destroyed buildings and walls?"

Expecting she was answering in an incorrect way, Alice almost started flinching as she backed a half step away from Dax.

"Yeah, that's entirely correct."

"Eh?"

"What? I asked you to look and you looked. Now for the arguably more important questions, where is the cover? What're the blind spots and kill zones? How and where would you set up an ambush?... This is how I see it."

Manipulating the simulation once more, Dax made the dull battlefield turn completely white before different bright colours were a.s.signed to different parts of it.

"Do you see it?"

Looking at the now coloured terrain, at first, Alice only saw noise, but when she put into context what Dax had talked about it suddenly snapped into place and made sense.

"I do! Is this how you see the world?"

Realizing that each colour represented different tactical attributes like cover, ambush locations and kill zones, Alice now started looking at the world around her in an entirely different way.

"Kinda, at first it was training I received from my mom, then it eventually turned into a habit and now it's just something that's constantly on my mind. This makes it a lot easier to make split second decisions right?"

"It really does!"

Seeing how Alice was almost jumping with enthusiasm, Dax's hand naturally found his way on top of her head as he ruffled her hair.

"Okay then, that's enough training for today. Try and have what I taught you in the back of your head until we do this again."

"Bu-"

"No buts. It's already been 6 hours since we started, although your real body is resting, your mind is not. Too much of this kind of sim training and your mind will start to decay."

Sending Alice out of the simulated s.p.a.ce as he saw the conversation as over, Dax took a little bit of time to himself before leaving too, waking up where he left his physical body.

"... Those sure are some lovely stars…. Wait, what the f.u.c.k did I just say?"

After returning from his deep cover operation inside the Empire Dax had decided to carve out time in his day to spend with the girls doing whatever they wanted, and while Solaris and Lilly had chosen something Dax would vaguely categorize as the so called, mythical phenomenon known as a 'date', Alice had chosen to spend her time with Dax being trained as an orbital marine.

(I still can't understand that Alice wants to spend time with me by training like that… I guess I need to take her a lot more seriously, but that is kind of hard when she's Alice.)

Every time he trained Alice Dax was reminded about her confession, how she wanted him to seriously consider her feelings after she had caught up to him and Terra. After that bold statement, Alice had spent most of the hours she was awake being trained by Lux and had made great progress, partly because of her body which had been greatly enhanced doing her recovery period, but also due to her extremely steadfast determination.

"Oh well, time for work."

Deciding not to think too much about things he didn't know the answers to, Dax got up on his feet and stretched his body before he started walking towards the monster hunters guild in the middle of the night. The very second Dax sat foot outside of his compound he was surrounded by a pair of Reaper drones which acted as his escorts and kept away any angry and drunk monster hunters now out of a job because of him. As Dax's new defensive system had started being brought online, the demand for monster hunters with their highly specialized skill set and bad reputation sharply declined in need, but even before that the very profession had mostly been made obsolete by his hand.  By undercutting them in cost with better effectiveness using drones to s.n.a.t.c.h up and complete contracts with bribes and other means before they became available to normal monster hunters, Dax had effectively killed off the trade single handedly before transforming it into something else entirely. Instead of dealing with monster populations and escorting merchants the name of the game had been switched to gathering information and mapping remote regions, something Dax needed far more than a paramilitary force which answered to no one but themselves. While he could do most of those things himself with satellite flyovers and drone surveillance, Dax found it nice to have throw away a.s.sets with plausible deniability attached to them by nature, especially with the task he had entrusted to the guild this time.

"h.e.l.lo, I've come to see the branch leader."

"O-of course, follow me."

Entering the hunter's guild in the middle of the night, Dax surprised the drowsy receptionist which manned the counter at that time of night solely to welcome Dax in case he visited at that time.

"The guild master has been awaiting your arrival."

"Thanks, that would be it for tonight, go get some rest."

Handing the receptionist a few coins for her troubles, Dax entered the office of the guild leader without knocking.

"Do you have the report?"

"Ah, yes it's been prepared. Good evening Mr Dax."

The guild branch leader was a person recently appointed by a group of people higher up in the food chain after the last branch leader had made the unfortunate choice of opposing Dax, as such she knew full well that she needed to stay friends with him to keep her head, consistently it was the same person that the guild first had sent to get into contact with Dax, the woman with no expression or presence.

"Then let's get to it, show me the substances."

"Certainly."

Showing Dax into a room adjacent to her office, the branch leader presented Dax a table filled with vials containing different kinds of substances.

"In our search, the guild has found a total of 91 different substances commonly in trade in the Empire's black market, these include opioids, sedatives and different fungi."

"And have you identified the pipelines too?"

Examining the different vials in great detail, Dax prompted the branch leader to continue the report.

"Yes, we have. Although discovering the precise points of origin is considerably harder than we first would have imagined."

"Well, that's to be expected. If they were easy to find they would have been shut down already. I just need the approximate area's of interest."

"That's relatively simple then. First, there are the domestic producers which there are dotted throughout the central area, they seem to be responsible for about 60% of the market supply."

"60%... That's a lot. Most likely some sort of government oversight and or corruption involved in that then, you can exclude those. What about any fringe elements?"

"Of the remaining 40% There are two major pipelines that stand out, first is the northern syndicates which are suspected of supplying numerous of the more severe compounds as well as slave-"

"And the other?"

The very second Dax heard the mention of slaves he immediately cut off the branch leader, while someone with links to slave trading might be good for what he needed, Dax had no intentions of doing something like that.

"... It's an unknown player in the eastern part of the empire, while we haven't been able to pin down the area of production and distribution it seems like they're grouped around the As'li desert."

"The As'li? Interesting… What do they produce?"

"Only two substances. The first of which is a type of sedative and hallucinogen called heat stemming from a mix of unidentified plants, the second is an opioid of completely unknown origin which is named dust."

"Show me them."

Taking interest in an element which managed to survive in the honour bound and highly disciplined As'li society which produced people known throughout the world as bounty hunters and skilled a.s.sa.s.sins, Dax made the branch leader show him two vials.

"Tell me more about these two compounds."

"Both are highly addictive in nature with steadfast consumers, but there doesn't seem to be that much of it anywhere."

"... Okay, good job. The payment will be here tomorrow."

After asking a few more questions Dax left the guild as he contacted Lux over the ICI network.

(I've found it.)

(Nice, when are we deploying?)

(In a year or so, make sure everyone is ready at that point.)

(Everyone?)

(Yeah, everyone. It's time to create a beachhead.)