"Well, actually…" the lieutenant gave me a strange look. "You already exterminated them."

"Huh?" I gaped at him. "How? I didn't even know where the nest was, to begin with…"

"Um…" the military officer cleared his throat. "Well, the fire you triggered down in the sewers…it spread pretty rapidly and burned out the entire sewers, as I said earlier. The flames reached their nest and incinerated all of them, including their young. We found nothing but corpses. There were a few survivors, but they had been so severely injured by your flames that they weren't able to get very far. Some of them died from their wounds after dragging themselves across the burned sludge. Others…well, my men slew them when we came across them during the investigation."

He then placed a hand on my shoulder.

"I'm just here to inform you that your mission has been completed. To give you confirmation that you have wiped out the Cyclops Rats."

I stared at him dumbly for a few moments, waiting for the information to sink in. Then I took a deep breath and nodded.

"Thank you, sir."

*

So there was nothing more I could do except go home. The first thing we did was stop by a hotel to wash up and take a long, warm shower, while also sending our clothes to the laundry in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Then I returned to my room – we each had our own rooms – to spend the rest of the night.

Fortunately, this was a hotel under the Stuart family. I wasn't sure if readers still remembered Stewart Stuart from like four hundred chapters ago, but he was Adrian's uncle who was in charge of the chain of hotels under the Stuart Corporation. Thanks to connections, we were given hotel rooms free of charge, paid for by the Stuart family. Though I was a little hesitant, practicality ruled over morality and I acquiesced to Adrian's insistence that we accept the hospitality of his family.

It helped tremendously that we had basically spent the day in the sewers just yesterday, and I really, really couldn't stand the stink. Ugh.

Now that I was in the hotel, I decided to write up and submit the full report to Headmistress Taylor, which was standard procedure for every mission. What, you think people just carry out missions and receive rewards? Just like that? Nah, we needed to write an after-action report and submit it to our superiors. Too many web novelists were out of touch with reality, and didn't know how actual military operations or otherwise worked. You simply did not just do a mission, and then claim the rewards. You obviously needed to submit a report and answer whatever questions your superiors might have upon reviewing it.

For now, we could take it easy. I guess.

When evening came, we had dinner in the restaurant located at the lobby of the hotel. It was quite the posh setting, which made me feel out of place, but Adrian insisted that it was fine. Then again, n.o.body seemed to care. There were a few uncles and aunties dressed in singlets, shorts and slippers, or casual dresses and slippers, and n.o.body paid them any mind. Honestly, the whole attire thing was overrated, so if you ever read a web novel where the waiters and waitresses mocked and refused to serve a customer just because he "looked poor", or have all the other customers inside a restaurant trash-talk the main character for no reason other than his appearance, you know for sure that the writer had never been outside of his home, and was relying on unrealistic tropes and clichés that he stole from other webnovels. Look, while there definitely were elite clubs and high-cla.s.s restaurants that demanded a certain dress code, not every d.a.m.ned hotel or bank or jewelry shop or whatever store the webnovelist decided to stereotype features salespeople with that sort of att.i.tude, and even if they did think that, they knew better than to voice such thoughts out loud. Most salespeople had the att.i.tude of "if the customer can pay, we don't care how he/she dresses." Also, most people had better things to do than to trash-talk the main character. n.o.body was that stupid to trash-talk someone in public, and then gang up on him to drive him out of the establishment for no reason other than he was the main character. I know the webnovelists were trying to do the whole "don't judge people by their appearances" moral of the story, but they did it in such a contrived and r.e.t.a.r.ded manner that it was much harder to interpret the relevant message because the readers simply couldn't suspend disbelief at how idiotic every character (and this included the main character) was acting in the story.

h.e.l.l, it would be an insult to characters to call such…things characters. They were caricatures at best.

Anyway, I was saying that n.o.body cared about our attire, and we took a small table at the side, near the windows. It was a buffet-styled restaurant, so we basically picked up a huge white plate, choose from a ma.s.sive variety of dishes laid out across the tables, and eat as much as we wanted.

Now that we were actually eating a proper meal, I realized just how starved I was. Come to think of it, I hadn't actually eaten much since yesterday, probably because the d.a.m.ned sewers destroyed my appet.i.te. We had a bit of rations, but that was it. Thanks to that, I had managed to work up a ma.s.sive appet.i.te today, and practically gorged myself on whatever I saw.

"Phew…"

White rice. Chicken curry. Singaporean satay. Fish sautéed in bean sauce. Beef rendang. Chilli crab. Laksa. Sus.h.i.+. Sas.h.i.+mi. Char kuay teow. Fried rice. Herbal chicken soup. Corn soup. Porridge with condiments. Jellyfish. Stir-fried cabbage. Broccoli with abalone and mushroom. Ice cream (of course it had to be mango flavored). Red bean soup. Cakes.

Yeah, I ate all of that over several rounds. It took me a couple of hours to go through everything, but somehow I managed to devour whatever I scooped up onto my plate.

"Whoa…Brother Richard, I didn't expect you to eat so much."

Adrian's eyes were wide. I knew why he was surprised. I looked so skinny, yet somehow I could eat so much. It was a trait that more than a few people had remarked. But I couldn't help it. No matter how much I ate, I just never grew fat. It was almost my superpower.

"Isn't that good?" Melina asked as she sliced a cake in half with her fork, watching me wistfully. She only had a fraction of what I had in terms of main courses, but she had several times the amount of dessert that I had. When I glanced inquisitively at her and her plate of cakes and sweets, she merely shrugged innocently.

"We women have another stomach for desserts," she explained without a trace of irony. I raised an eyebrow skeptically, but didn't pursue the matter. I realized over the long course of my life that it was useless to argue with a lady.

Adrian, on the other hand, had about half to three-quarters of what I had, and he already looked defeated, sprawled across the table and heaving. He looked at me somewhat enviously.

"I have no idea how you managed to fit all that amount of food into such a relatively thin body," he moaned.

"Magic," I replied, without a trace of irony, and then stuffed the last piece of cake into my mouth. I liked the ice cream more, so I rose from my seat to grab another helping of mango ice cream. Sorry, but mango was my jam, if you know what I'm saying.

"Seriously?"

"No, I wasn't being serious." Obviously. I tried not to roll my eyes as I scooped a bunch of mango ice cream onto a bowl, and then returned to my seat. "I used up quite a bit of magic yesterday, so I needed to restore my energy. And the best way to do that is by eating. A lot."

As if to emphasize my point, I pushed my gla.s.ses up with one hand, my lenses s.h.i.+ning, and grinned. Then I stuck my spoon into my ice cream and began to eat it. Well, ice cream was one of the best foods to restock my energy, considering the amount of glucose it provided. So it wasn't as if I was pulling this one out of my a.s.s.

That said, some readers might claim that I didn't use that much magic yesterday, though. Yeah, I did. I had summoned Corvus and maintained the entire flock for hours on end. h.e.l.l, I summoned them the entire night, for eight to nine hours straight, so admittedly that was pretty draining on me. I was fortunate that Corvus was a tiny, low-ranked Constellation spirit that didn't require a lot of mana – I would never have pulled it off with most of my other Constellation spirits. They cost too much mana to maintain their existences in the material world. On the other hand, Corvus was pretty cheap in terms of mana consumption. Even then, it was no joke to maintain their existences physically for almost ten hours straight. And that included the several hours of summoning them while I explored the sewers before camping out in the Shrewsbury neighborhood to watch out for the Cyclops Rats.

So…actually, now that I thought aout it, I did use quite a lot of magic yesterday. In terms of mana consumption, I had spent plenty.

"Oh, that's right." Adrian completely bought what I said with a straight face. Well, it was the truth, and Adrian was intelligent enough to know that I was right. Melina, on the other hand, looked curious as she tried to calculate my mana expenditure, without much success. She had little experience with summoning magic, and thus wasn't sure how it worked. Adrian didn't pay any attention to her and beamed at me. "You've worked hard, Brother Richard."

"Those crows cost quite a lot of mana to summon?" Melina asked, bewildered. "Even though they are so small and have not much combat capability?"

"It's not the quant.i.ty or size, but rather the length of time I summoned them," I explained, and reminded her of the number of hours I spent to keep them in existence. She fell silent and nodded in understanding.

"Oh, so that's why."

"Yeah. That's why I need all this food to recharge!" I ate another spoonful of ice cream and almost swooned over how the sweet mango taste melted across my tongue. d.a.m.n, I love mango ice cream.

Also, this was a rare chance to get a free meal – I rarely had the chance to dine at such restaurants that provided all-you-can-eat buffets, so I was more than happy to devour everything in sight. It had been too long since I last had such a feast.

With that basic need of humanity fulfilled, we then returned to our rooms to rest for the night.

*

"Everything in order?" I asked the two kids as we prepared to check out of the hotel the next day. We didn't bring much stuff – all of our belongings could be squeezed into a single backpack. I never thought I would be staying in Lupin City for any period of time longer than a week, after all.

Adrian and Melina nodded. They had less stuff than I did, because they stowed away without my knowledge, and were less prepared. Nothing to worry about in the end, since we ended up staying for a grand total of three days and two nights, so they didn't really need much necessities and clothing. And the hotel provided them clean clothing for free, since it was under Adrian's uncle.

It was nice to have all these family connections…

"How are we going back?" Adrian asked and he glanced about, as if expecting a taxi to show up and bring us somewhere. "By train?"

"Normally, yeah, but…I've friends here."

"Friends?" Melina repeated with a puzzled frown. I raised an eyebrow at her.

"Did you already forget my friends?"

Before she could reply, they arrived. And in style too, in the form of a huge hovercraft that descended upon the parking lot.

"Hey, Richie!" As the ramp lowered, Redfield poked his head out of the pa.s.senger bay and waved at me. "I figured you needed a lift back home! Since we're heading west, we figured we might as well drop you off at Flandor City along the way!"

"That would be much appreciated!" I called out to him. Then I turned to the two kids, who were gaping at the huge transport in astonishment. Why were they so surprised? This was the same way we got here. Did they think Redfield would abandon me to my own devices after my mission here? Well, come to think of it, it was quite the coincidence that he was heading west exactly on the same day we were slated to leave the hotel and return to Flandor City. Maybe that was why they didn't expect him to show up at precisely this time. Not that I was going to enlighten them on whatever arrangements we had, so I just smiled at them and gestured toward the hovercraft. "All right, guys, let's hop on. We're going home."