Genetical Cleaners - SV7

III

The headache was unbearable. I hadn't even opened my eyes yet, but I could feel everything spinning around me.

I wasn't lying on asphalt anymore, surrounded by rubble, screams, flames, and corpses. Instead, I was lying comfortably on a soft mattress. I wished that when I opened my eyes, I'd see that nothing bad had happened, all the recruits were alive, Samurai was sitting somewhere alone, picking his teeth with a toothpick, and the mutants never appeared. Unfortunately, I knew that deceiving myself wouldn't change anything. The only upside to this whole situation was one mutant killed by me. I regretted not killing the laser woman, but I had to settle for just one murder.

I heard someone entering the room.

The steps were light but firm. The scent of perfume wafted in the air. It smelled like blooming cherry blossoms.

"I don't recall having a woman in my apartment," I quipped without opening my eyes.

"If it weren't for command, I wouldn't even touch you with a stick," she retorted, approaching some piece of furniture beside the bed. "Besides, this isn't your apartment, or at least not the one you think it is."

"I had a feeling that the springs suspiciously weren't digging into my ass."

I decided it was finally time to open my eyes. Everything was blurry for a moment, but after yawning, stretching, and rubbing my eyelids, I could finally look around the room.

The black-red room of a high-ranking soldier. Just from the colors, I knew I was on the GC campus. However, I wondered what I was doing in someone else's room with a woman I didn't know. This woman stood by something like a dresser and "unlocked" a vial with at least three infographics warning of the harmfulness of the liquid inside. She held a syringe in her mouth, then placed it in the vial and filled it with the liquid.

"I hope you like syringes," she said.

"And where's the 'won't hurt' part?"

"I'm not a dentist. Not a doctor. Just a regular woman, so it will hurt."

She leaned over me, swiftly finding a vein and piercing it, performing her task incredibly quickly and precisely.

When she stepped back, I could finally look at her. She was a very tall, short-haired blonde. She had rather sharp facial features. From her forehead to the left corner of her mouth, she had a large scar. She wore a black shirt tucked into equally black pants secured with a belt. Frankly, the longer I looked at her, the more masculine she seemed compared to some of the Cleaners. I also felt that for some reason, she was scrutinizing me with her almost yellow eyes.

"I got the impression that sticking a needle in someone's vein is routine for you," I bent my forearm a few times to get rid of the irritating sensation. "And can you tell me what you injected me with?"

"I don't know," she glanced at the vial searching for an answer. "Ask at the medical building, although I doubt you'll get any answers from them."

"Okay... Since that's done, tell me what happened when I passed out."

The woman sighed and moved to the other side of the room, then pushed aside a rather large chair next to the desk and sat down.

"You look at me like I'm a fortune-teller," she glanced from under her brow. "They found you in the middle of the rubble with a bloody face. There was no trace of mutants. The corpse cleaners found a camera near one of the bodies, which, after the owner's death, recorded in rather poor quality what happened at the intersection, but you'll have to talk to the command about it. They're summoning you for a meeting tonight."

"Me? What do they want from a recruit?"

"I don't know everything. You'll find out at twenty."

"As if you know much more than I would expect from someone who gives people injections."