The MILFs Club: Special Delivery for my Aunt

Chapter 245: Chapter 245: The Price of Redemption

"I don’t think we’re alone," said Alexander, his eyes widening as the weight of Marcus’s question settled over him. "I assume there must be plenty of other beings out there in that vast space. Are you... are you trying to tell me that...?"

"Exactly," said Marcus, blowing a ring of smoke that slowly drifted across the luxury office. "There is something bizarre happening inside this organization. I told you once before that the people who taught me the business were murdered, right? Well, I’ve always had my deep doubts about that. Those guys were stronger than me. They were lethal fast, and possessed a sense of danger anticipation that borderline on precognition. It should have been impossible to ambush and kill them so easily. Plus, I never actually saw their corpses. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain power level in TMC, they send you somewhere else. To do what? I don’t know, but they ship you out."

"I can understand what you’re saying," said Alexander, rubbing the back of his neck as he tried to process the cosmic scale of what Marcus was implying. "But what the hell does any of that have to do with Aria?"

"Regenerating your crushed body after that ambush cost me an expensive medical token," said Marcus, his voice dropping into a harsh, deadly serious whisper. "You have no idea how grueling it was to obtain it. I got it by accident as a special reward, but to earn it, I had to infiltrate a heavily fortified base in the Middle East and assassinate a foreign politician without leaving a single witness. I almost died a hundred times over that weekend, and my entire reward was just one single pass to the TMC medical wing for an outsider. You are barely a rookie agent right now, Alexander. If you were a veteran, you could simply request the medical services, they would quote you a price in internal credits, and you’d pay it. The same exact thing applies to Aria. If you want TMC to treat her, you need a token to bring her in."

Alexander felt the air leave his lungs, his gaze snapping back to Marcus.

"However, for a low-level guy like you to secure one of those tokens right now..." said Marcus, pointing his cigar directly at Alexander’s chest. "You will have to march straight down into the deepest pit of hell and crawl back out just to earn a single pass. Do you honestly think Joseph Kingsley didn’t ask? Or that Evelyn didn’t offer tens of millions of dollars for a private treatment? To the people running TMC, normal currency is worthless, but your life has value to them. So tell me, Alexander. Are you sure you are ready to sell your soul just to get that token?"

"Of course I am going to do it," said Alexander, his answer cutting through the air without a hesitation.

Marcus took another slow drag of his cigar, his eyes narrowing through the smoke.

"Is Aria really worth that much to you?" asked Marcus, shrugging his shoulders slightly. "I mean, she’s not ugly, but she’s definitely not the most—"

"Do not finish that sentence," said Alexander, his voice dropping into a deep growl.

His eyes flared red once again, his entire demeanor shifting from zero to a hundred in a single second. The murderous aura radiating from his body was so thick that the temperature in the luxury office seemed to drop instantly.

"Take it easy, take it easy," said Marcus, quickly raising his hands in a defensive gesture. "I’m not saying it to mock you or her. It’s just that I actually worry about you, man."

Alexander slowly forced his breathing to stabilize, though his fists remained tightly clenched against his knees.

"If you seriously want to help her, you need to rank up as fast as possible," said Marcus, leaning back against his desk. "Right now, I hold the rank of an Orange Agent, and I’m very close to reaching Red. My internal access level is Yellow, which is just one tier below what you need to request high-tier reward missions. To even get a shot at a medical token, you need to be at least a Yellow access level. What level are you right now?"

"White..." muttered Alexander, his voice tight.

"Haha! Damn, this is going to be complicated," laughed Marcus, shaking his head with a grimace. "It’s a shame that I can’t just power-level you through this. You’re simply too low. If I drag you along on my personal missions, the system won’t grant you any rewards because the gap between our ranks is way too massive. And honestly, I don’t know a single soul at your current tier. Your best bet is to go talk to Stephen. If anyone knows the rookies inside out, it’s him. He might be able to hook you up with some interesting assignments."

Marcus walked over to his desk, extinguishing his cigar in a crystal ashtray before turning around to look at Alexander with a sharp glint in his eye.

"Remember this structure, because the system doesn’t spell it out for you," said Marcus, holding up three fingers. "The fucking missions give you standard money. The field missions—assassination, sabotage, and raw destruction—give you Agent Rank. And the secret missions, the ones involving highly dangerous stuff like stealing corporate data or espionage, give you Access Level points. But there is a massive loophole."

Alexander leaned forward locked into Marcus’s words.

"The fucking missions are always targeted at highly powerful, influential women," whispered Marcus, a dark smirk spreading across his face. "Investigate them before you go in. Gather any scrap of intelligence on them and upload it. On top of that, when you officially close out the mission, the system allows you to write an extra report. If you fill that section with anything useful you learned while you were inside her house or her bed, it counts. For example, if you glimpse a private invoice on her nightstand and report that Jane Doe paid a bill for thirty-five hundred dollars to a shell company, that single detail will grant you Access Level points. The juicier and more sensitive the data, the more points you rake in. An old veteran passed this exact trick down to me a long time ago, and it’s how I climbed the ranks so fast. But you have to compromise your morals to do it. If you truly want to save Aria, this is the only path you have left."