The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 177. The Island Had Other Plans. So Did I.

She stopped, and her voice changed to the tone she used when she was being more direct than the way the institution usually framed things.

"I will send an intel check every day at noon and midnight." She said, "Each group must respond to both checks to confirm their status."

"If a check goes unanswered, extraction protocol begins right away."

"No exceptions."

Rex wrote this down. At noon and midnight.

A twelve-hour gap between checks was both comforting for safety reasons and, from a different perspective, a very clear picture of the times when anything that happened on the island would stay on the island.

He filed it correctly.

"Any questions?" Elizabeth said.

There were a few logistical ones. She answered them with the same level of accuracy that she always used for logistical questions.

When the last question was answered, she looked over the groups again with the look that Rex had learned to read as her way of showing that she cared, even though it was through operational thoroughness.

"Come back in good condition," she said. "All of you."

The groups dispersed toward the docks in the morning’s half-light.

The transit ship that Rex’s group was given was a small, sturdy coastal craft with a functional but not very comfortable cabin below deck and enough deck space to move around on.

Two members of the Academy’s field operations team were on board. They introduced themselves briefly and then focused on navigation with the professionalism of people who would rather be good at their jobs than talk.

The taller one said his name was Carr. The other, who moved around the deck with the easy balance of someone who had spent a lot of time on water, went by Doss.

"Wind’s coming from the northeast," Carr said, not to anyone in particular, checking something on the navigation panel. "We’ll have a clean run for the first two hours."

"After that it gets a little interesting."

"How interesting?" someone from Rex’s group asked.

"Nothing the boat can’t handle." He paused. "Probably."

Doss glanced back from the bow with a flat expression. "He says that every time."

"And every time, I’m right."

"You’ve also been wrong."

"Once."

"Twice."

Carr didn’t respond to that. He made a small adjustment to their heading and went quiet again in the way that suggested the conversation was finished on his end whether the other person agreed or not.

Doss came back toward the cabin a few minutes later to check the supply crates that had been loaded near the stern. He moved them with efficient, practiced hands, reading the labels without looking like he was reading them.

"First time on a field deployment?" he said. He wasn’t looking at Rex when he said it, but the question was clearly aimed at him.

"Yeah," Rex said.

Doss nodded once. "Make sure to keep your gear dry."

"Everything else you can figure out as you go." He moved the last crate, confirmed something to himself, and went back to the bow.

It wasn’t encouragement, exactly. But it wasn’t nothing, either.

...

It took just over an hour to cross the sea in calm water.

About forty minutes in, the outer islands came into view. At that point, the scale of them stopped matching the profile data and became something more real.

The one assigned to Rex’s group was much bigger than the average on the outer islands. It came up out of the water, standing straight up like something that had been there for a long time and didn’t really want to be found.

The shoreline was made up of volcanic rock and the thick green of plants that had grown in places where no one had tried to clear them for hundreds of years. Even from the water, you could see the cave system’s outer openings, which were dark shapes in the rock face above the shoreline.

"Hohhhhhhh~!" Talyra made an awestruck noise from the bow, where she had been standing for the last twenty minutes.

She said it with the specific quality of a person who had been imagining something and had now encountered the real version and found it exceeded the imagination. "Oh, that’s actually—"

"More than what the profile said," Aisella said from next to Rex.

"Yeah, it’s bigger," Talyra said. "And a lot more beautiful when you look at it this closely!"

She was right.

The island was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they haven’t been changed by people for any reason other than to exist. It was beautiful at the level where beauty became something you felt instead of just saw.

Rex looked at it with the attention he gave to operational environments: the coast’s potential landing zones, the vegetation’s density and what it suggested about the interior, the cave openings and their relationship to the terrain’s topography, and the water visibility and what it said about the shoreline’s biological richness.

He was doing all of this while looking at something really beautiful, and the two things didn’t conflict with each other.

The transit ship found the cove that the profile had marked as the best place to land, and the crew expertly brought them to shore. Rex, Talyra, and Aisella stepped onto the island’s shore with the feeling of stepping into something new.

The sand under Rex’s feet was dark gray and volcanic in origin. It was warm even though it was early in the morning.

This told him about the island’s geothermal activity and confirmed what Aisella had said about the cave systems.

Talyra turned around once on the beach to look in all directions, her arms slightly out, as if she were orienting herself through a full sensory assessment. Then she turned back with the look of someone who had gotten exactly where they wanted to be.

"Okay~," she said. "Let’s make these three days the best any assessment group has ever had."

"Let’s, in fact, make it the most useful," Aisella said, which was her way of saying the same thing.

"Wait," Rex looked at the line of trees.

"Hm? What’s wrong?" Talyra gets close to him with Aisella while looking at the line of trees.

His Foresight was always running in the background of his mind, and what it was showing him in the next twenty seconds was not the calm forest interior that the profile data’s lack of information had led him to believe.

It was moving. There was a lot of movement at different depths within the tree line, all in a certain pattern of things that knew new arrivals were coming and had been waiting to see what they would do next.

He didn’t have a catalog entry for the movement, which was what the four-year-old survey notes were trying to describe when they ran out of words and wrote, "Creature population: unidentified, advise caution."

"Both of you," Rex said.

The way he said it made both of them turn to him with full attention before he was done speaking. This was the tone he only used when there was no time to build up to it.

Talyra’s bow was off her shoulder in the same motion that she turned.

Aisella’s hands came up in the diagnostic position, reading the tree line with the passive energy scan she ran in field environments.

"There are a lot of them," Rex said, watching the Foresight feed with the calm of someone who had decided how they felt about this situation and that interest was the correct feeling. "They are not hostile yet, but..."

"They’re still assessing."

"How many is a lot?" Talyra asked, arrow nocked, in a level voice.

"More than a dungeon’s worth," Rex said. "And they’re rare."

Aisella’s expression changed in two stages: first, the healer’s stage, which assessed the risk to the group, and second, a different stage that Rex had not seen from her before, resembling the expression Talyra had when she encountered something that exceeded her expectations.

"The survey couldn’t put them in a category because there was nothing in the catalog to compare them to," Aisella said, and her voice sounded like it did when she was working on something she was interested in.

"That means we’re looking at a group of creatures that hasn’t been studied."

"That means the research value of what we bring back from this island," Talyra said slowly, "is going to be—"

The line of trees changed.

The first one stepped out into the narrow strip between the forest and the shore. It had eyes that were much smarter than the eyes of the things that lived in the Thornmaze.

It made a sound that wasn’t a threat display but also wasn’t a greeting.

It was the sound of a choice being made.

"Are you girls ready?" Rex asked them both.

"I’m always ready for challenges!" Talyra said, and her voice sounded joyful.

"Ready," Aisella said, and hers was steady.

Rex looked at the creature at the edge of the trees and at the shapes moving behind it in the forest’s deeper shadows. And then he thought about the three days, the research data, the desire levels, the five thousand energy points, and everything that this island was about to become.

"Good," he said.

"Time to get to work while kicking their asses."