Obsidian Sun did not harbor failures, and they absolutely did not forgive anyone who inflicted such catastrophic losses upon the organization.
Over the years, he had climbed to this rank on the back of a flawless record, delivering perfect results for The Overlord on every single mission.
But this time...
He had lost.
Lost thoroughly.
Lost pathetically.
He couldn't even scrap together a plausible excuse to save his own skin.
The worst part? His one hundred and thirty billion dollars had only bought him the rights to claim Specimen Fourteen.
Specimen Fourteen was still under the ship's jurisdiction.
Until the final transfer was executed, the asset didn't truly belong to Obsidian Sun.
It meant he hadn't even managed to successfully staunch the bleeding.
The Raven stared at the looming silhouette of the port, his complexion draining of all color.
Arriving at Whitecliffe Harbor wouldn't be his salvation.
It was far more likely to be an execution.
The sheer terror of his impending judgment twisted his anxiety into a venomous, all- consuming hatred for The Panacea.
If it hadn't been for her, Specimen Fourteen would never have been exposed.
Their hidden base on Project Zero-Transit wouldn't have been annihilated.
The crew would never have discovered their smuggling pipelines, and the crosshairs wouldn't be trained solely on Obsidian Sun.
He wouldn't have vaporized one hundred and thirty billion dollars, and he would still be the undefeated operative of the syndicate.
He wouldn't be locked in this pathetic room, completely stripped of the power to even decide if he lived or died.
That single woman had driven him into a dead end through sheer force of will.
She had weaponized his every contingency plan against him until everything completely unraveled.
The Raven despised her.
He wanted nothing more than to tear her apart with his bare hands.
But the more his hatred burned, the more painfully aware he became of his own bleak reality.
He didn't have the luxury of thinking about revenge right now.
He needed to find a way to survive. He needed a way to salvage this apocalyptic failure.
And right now, there were only two chips left on the board that could turn the tide. The first was Specimen Fourteen.
He had to guarantee the transfer went smoothly. He had to deliver Specimen Fourteen back to Obsidian Sun without a single scratch.
As long as the asset survived, their years of foundational research would be preserved.
Only then would he have the right to even beg for a chance at redemption. And the second chip...
The Raven's gaze drifted slowly to the words "The Panacea" on his screen.
As much as she was the architect of his demise, he had to admit that the very woman he wanted to slaughter was ironically the only person who could save him.
How perfectly mocking.
But he didn't have a choice.
Because The Panacea was simply too valuable.
That woman had halted Specimen Seven's berserker rage with a single command.
She had hijacked Specimen Fourteen's override protocols like it was a game.
Against her, the intricate command infrastructure Obsidian Sun had spent millions developing hadn't even held up for a second!
She had dismantled every masterpiece of strategy he had ever devised.
Even the panicked decisions he made to recover from her attacks had merely played into her next trap.
He had faced formidable opponents over the years, but no one had ever backed him into such a desperate corner.
The Panacea was the first.
And it was his first time tasting such absolute, humiliating defeat.
Because of that, he knew better than anyone that her value vastly exceeded her skills as a top-tier apothecary.
Her understanding of the Obsidian Augments ran impossibly deep.
Flaws that required Obsidian Sun
hundreds of trial-and-error tests
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isolate seemed completely transparent to her the moment shë glanced at the telemetry.