Amelia was a merciless taskmaster, and she was not pleased with me at the moment.

I guess that's what I got for letting myself get shot. I tried to point out that it had been necessary, just to ensure I got the other guy down, too. She showed no interest in any of my excuses.

At least she didn't follow through on her threat to remove all my limbs until I was healed, so… yay? I guess I should have been thankful that she had so many mercenaries to take her frustrations out on. Otherwise, who knows what she might have done to me.

Our plan had worked flawlessly. Coming home after a day of revelry, the mercs had not expected to get attacked inside their own HQ, by their own defenses. We had set those defenses to be as minimally lethal as possible, yes, but they were still more than enough to take out large numbers of drunk and disorderly mercs.

About one-third of the idiots had died during the encounter, most of them when Amelia lost her patience and unleashed the turrets fully.

She had been trying to kill the man I was pretty sure was Mela's brother. Thanks to his cybernetics, though, he'd been fast enough to pull off bullshit like dodging bullets. I'd only been able to hit him because of my Clairvoyance skill. The turrets, obviously, didn't have that skill. They also didn't care where their bullets ended up.

And 'where they ended up' was mostly inside the bodies of all the mercs passed out on the floor. The paralyzing anesthetic we'd pumped through the building's sprinkler system had made the goons easy targets.

But the majority had lived. And since we needed only half the mercs, at most, for what we were planning… well, neither Amelia nor I felt particularly bad.

Not with the life these mercenaries had led.

Being associated with Amelia's father was bad enough. Worse yet was the reason why they were associated with him. Apparently, regular bloodshed was just not enough for this lot. Neither were 'boring' jobs like security or whatever.

Oh no, they had to get into human trafficking before they really hit their stride as a mercenary company.

What's not to like about a little flesh trade, right? It was easy and safe when you targeted people in the slums, seeing as those people couldn't fight back hard enough to save their lives. Literally.

Of course, just to ensure their own security a bit better, the mercs stayed away from gangers and went straight for the most vulnerable, with special emphasis on people who had recently ended up in the slums. Long-time slum dwellers would probably run away at the mere rumors of the mercs' approach. But a poor family who had lived in the outer district until recently? They might even be convinced to follow willingly when promised 'employment opportunities.' The mercs would bag 'em, tag 'em, and ship them off to buyers in more affluent areas of the city.

It was an odiously effective strategy. And it was working. From what Amelia could tell after rifling through the mercs' documents, their earnings were off the charts.

They had expenses, of course. The largest involved transportation and bribes. Someone had to let all those unauthorized folks into the richer city districts, after all. The mercs paid people to fix the victims' IDs and to look the other way. Sometimes, that payment was in the form of credits. Other times, though, the mercs would just give their contacts a portion of the 'merchandise.'

So, yeah, neither Amelia nor I had much sympathy to spare for the scum. If anything, the ripper took perverse joy in cataloguing the many gruesome injuries and lost limbs the mercs had incurred during our ambush.

And those were… many.

You could set turrets to target people 'non-lethally', but that mostly meant taking out limbs so they couldn't run away or attack. And with the caliber those turrets were using, it didn't take too many bullets to shred right through a limb, detaching it in spectacularly bloody fashion.

I was honestly a little impressed that two-thirds of the mercs had made it. But then I took a look at all the info Amelia was gathering about their injuries, and I realized that most of them had some manner of cheap cybernetic already. That tracked. Even a cheap cybernetic could be an improvement over a flesh-and-blood limb, though it wouldn't allow a person to pull off half the bullshit Mela's brother did.

Regardless, we had secured a bunch of mercs with relative ease. Or, rather, Amelia and our drones had secured a bunch of mercs, after she patched me up and put me on forced bed rest.

Thankfully, Melania was able to handle most of the patients that came to our clinic. Amelia could still pop in to tackle any especially tricky cases, but for the most part, she was free to focus on our newly acquired mercenaries.

She was steadily working her way through them. The first pass took her close to six hours, just patching up the most major injuries of those who would die without her.

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It would have taken longer if she hadn't been accompanied by the drones who used to work as medics for the company. They were among the rare personnel we had programmed the turrets to avoid at all cost. Amelia knew how invaluable they would be in the aftermath of our victory.

Once that first pass was done, and Amelia had taken a break just to hover over me anxiously, she moved on to step two of the process.

Brainwashing.

The eldritch cybernetics inside both Amelia and me were truly incredible. Her father had taken credit for them, but the real genius belonged to Amelia and her mother. They had contributed more than Amelia's 'daddy dearest' ever had.

And the cybernetics those two women had worked on were as useful as they were dangerous.

Weird eldritch corruption? Check. Induced mental instability? Check. But hey, you got special skills out of it!

And in Amelia's case, 'special skills' meant 'incredible ripper skills.' She could shift her hands and even individual fingers into any number of surgical tools, manipulate flesh like putty, and heal wounds so fast that only the most advanced meds could match her pace.

She could also brainwash people into obedient drones that answered only to her. And anyone else she authorized, of course.

That's how our numbers slowly swelled, one merc at a time. Starting from the drones we had turned in our clinic, then expanding to the medics, before swelling into the entire surviving company.

Amelia didn't touch Mela's brother. I asked her not to, out of some weird sense of… something. I didn't even know what.

But Patch Six? The illustrious leader of the mercenary company we now owned by proxy? Oh, yes. He was ours.

And after two days of Amelia practically sitting on top of me every free minute she got, trying to keep me from 'doing something stupid', I was finally allowed out of bed so I could get my hands on that asshole.

"Watch it, mister," Amelia hissed as I went down the stairs, perfectly fine and under my own power, thank you very much! "Don't want you to take a tumble. If you somehow fall just right and manage to break your neck after everything, I'll fucking —"

"Amelia, I'm fine! Just look at me! I don't know why you insisted on keeping me in bed for so long, anyway. You healed me in, like, fifteen minutes. Max."

I really was walking just fine. Better than fine, actually. One of the skills my Unseen Stalker cybernetics gave me was Grace. As the name implied, I moved as sinuously as some predatory animal now. The skill had leveled up to 3 recently, and its effect had increased from something subtle to something definitely noticeable.

I knew that from how Amelia watched me swagger through a room. She seemed to find my butt mesmerizing all of a sudden, which I definitely wasn't complaining about.

More importantly, the skill enabled me to hide the fact that I was a little dizzy.

"I insisted on it," she snapped, "because your ass is so corrupted that you've got Shadow Runner eldritch tar flowing through your veins instead of blood, and you lost a ton of it! I'd have been perfectly fine if you had normal blood so I could hook you up to a transfusion. Or the weird synthetic borg blood! I can get that, too. But nooo, you just had to be special, didn't you?"

Her grumbling made me flush a little. Because, well, fair. It probably was the tar loss causing the dizziness.

Amelia saw my clamming up for the victory that it was. She gloated and teased me the whole time as we left our little ripper clinic and made our way to the HQ.

We were moving super stealthily, of course. Took the back entrance and everything. Fear our powers of subterfuge!

Technically, we could have stayed in the HQ once the most urgent messes were taken care of, but neither Amelia nor I actually felt comfortable doing so. The merc HQ was foreign. It smelled as bad as you might expect from a building that housed a bunch of mercenaries. Plus, we'd just recently killed or maimed a bunch of people there.

It wasn't exactly a location I'd describe as 'homey.'

I wouldn't even be visiting the stupid place if not for the fact that Patch was being held there. More importantly, so was Mela's brother. I could order the former to visit me in the clinic, but the latter? Not only was he missing a couple of limbs, but he was also unlikely to cooperate unless Amelia gave him the lobotomy treatment.

Entering the HQ, we walked quickly past the silent, dead-eyed zombie mercenaries who obeyed my petite lover's every word with utter devotion. She had stationed a few by every exit and ordered them to act as normal as possible when we weren't around. Apparently, in their minds, that meant they should revert to drone mode the second we showed up.

It was honestly more than a little eerie. People who looked normal, who had been chatting with each other just a moment before, had all life leech out of them as soon as Amelia and I came within a certain distance. They just… went blank. Like puppets someone had decided were done playing their roles for the time being.

"We should talk to Patch first, you think?" I asked quietly as we moved through the building.

"Yeah, that sounds best. We can get some info on my father, and on the guy you're so interested in. Really, should I be jealous?"

I rolled my eyes. "Yes. Totally. The guy who tried to kill me, and whose throat I almost blew out, is totally going to sweep me off my feet and carry me into the sunset. What? What are you giving me those eyes for? Oh come on, Amelia! I didn't mean 'blow out' that way! You were there! You had to put his throat back together after I shot him!"

My lover ignored my indignation in favor of giggling like the menace she was, but the merry sound cut off when we reached the meeting room she had ordered Patch into before we came over.

Two drones stood guard in front of it, just in case, even though Amelia's brainwashing had yet to fail once. They blankly ignored us as the door retracted into the wall, giving us free entry into the lavishly appointed space.

"Honestly. Your minions aren't even bowing when I walk past them," I complained. "What's up with that?"

I was trying to distract her, but she just smirked.

"Really? Really? Now you want my zombies to treat you special, too? Am I not enough for you?"

I grumbled and groused under my breath, but it was mostly to hide how uncomfortable the sight of Patch made me. In the time since I'd last seen him in person, the man had lost both of his legs and his right arm, so… I guess he couldn't have visited us at the clinic, even if I'd wanted him to.

For a brief, morbid moment, I wanted to ask Amelia how in the world all the newly crippled mercs were managing things like hygiene and the other regular daily tasks, but I thought better of it. Instead, I focused on the blankly staring mercenary captain.

I finally had the chance to get some answers, and I was going to be damned if I wasted it.

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