The Fallen Merman

When Rimbaud was putting on the police uniform, he raised his arms, and the moisturizing bandages on his body made a tightening sound as he stretched. The round fishtail connected to his thin and lean waist rolled on the wavy edge of the fish tank.

When he turned around, he saw bare-chested Bai Chunian sitting cross-legged on the bed playing with his phone while hugging a pillow. 

The alpha had an old scar on his chest. It was a full 20 centimeters long, spread from the chest to the side of his waist. Because the injury was too heavy, plus the infection after stitching, it left a very deep mark, and even some parts of the scar was bulging. It looked very ugly, so much so that whenever he was drying himself after showering, he’d unconsciously hold a pillow in front of his chest to prevent himself from seeing it.

Bai Chunian noticed that a gaze seemed to fall on him, so he looked up, just in time to meet Rimbaud’s eyes.

Rimbaud stared at the scar for a short while, then turned his head and continued wearing his police uniform in silence, buckling the leather vest strap.

The air in the bedroom seemed to have solidified into a block, otherwise how could it be so difficult to breathe. The phone wasn’t so fun anymore all of a sudden. Bai Chunian lowered his head and stared at the bed sheet in a trance. After a while, he pulled out a new black undershirt from the bedside cabinet and put it on, raised his head, and gave a smile to Rimbaud, “Is it ugly?”

Rimbaud turned his back to him, quietly fastening his buttons and ties.

Suddenly a pair of hands came up around his waist, pressing his back against the alpha’s hot chest. The temperature passed on through the moisturizing bandages, and his body heated up with it.

Bai Chunian hugged him from behind, his lips lightly pressed against the side of his neck that was exposed outside the bandages, and teased softly, “You’re so cold.”

Rimbaud didn’t seem to be in the mood to be intimate with him, and even struggled twice in resistance. 

Bai Chunian relied on alpha’s strength and size to clasp his hands from behind. He revealed his canine teeth near the omega’s fragile and sweet back of the neck glands, and tentatively took a nibble.

Rimbaud looked back at him with somewhat complicated eyes. As if the scar reminded him of a memory, his attitude suddenly became more indescribably cold and estranged.

But the more the omega looked at him with this kind of eyes, the more annoyed Bai Chunian felt. He had long served as a tactical commander in various teams. Controlling each team member quickly from body to mind was his strong point, but it was also his occupational disease. Not being able to completely control a person made him very impatient.

“Why don’t you say something?” Bai Chunian’s grip on his wrist grew stronger and stronger, at first just to make the omega calm down and speak obediently. But as Rimbaud struggled harder and harder, Bai Chunian couldn’t help but bite the back of his neck, where the skin on the omega was so delicate that the alpha’s sharp canine easily scratched it. 

The moment the alpha’s strong pheromone was injected into the glands, Rimbaud’s body was forced to soften, flopping helplessly onto the bed. Bai Chunian bit two rows of blood-oozing teeth marks on the merman’s glands. The spicy alcohol-flavored pheromone burrowed into the glands and reacted with the mark cells, forming a lion-shaped emblem on the surface layer of his skin. The mark was temporary and would disappear when the pheromone injected into the gland was all consumed.

Bai Chunian turned the somewhat exhausted merman on the bed over to face him, propping his hands on the bed to gaze at the omega’s slightly opened and closed lips.

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Rimbaud waited quietly, waiting for the alpha to let go. Then he got up, lifted his backpack, stood with his tail supporting his body on the edge of the bed, raised his hand, and pressed it to Bai Chunian’s head, patting him.

Then without a word, he left Bai Chunian’s apartment, leaving a few faint lightning bolts on the doorknob. The merman flashed by, causing the lights in the apartment corridor to flicker in and out as they short-circuited.

The home became as cold as usual again.

Bai Chunian was bored lying on the edge of the fish tank, stirring the glowing jellyfish in the water with his hands. He originally wanted to sleep, but sleepiness was all but gone, so he simply took a Coke and nestled into the living room sofa to watch a horror movie. 

On the coffee table, there was a very delicate box. It used to contain a watch that Uncle Jin gave him on the Chinese New Year. Now there were two pearls and a few bluefish scales inside.

The horror movie played one after another, but Bai Chunian had been keeping his eyes on the watch box, lost in thought. Finally, at almost two in the morning, he took away the cigarette case on the coffee table, sat in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, holding a cigarette and dialed a call with a cigarette in his mouth.

“Boss, are you asleep?”

President Yan: “Speak.” 

The person on the other side was obviously woken up by the incoming call. He spoke with a nasal voice, and there was another person’s sleeping breathing on the pillow, sounding very close.

Bai Chunian: “Give me back my armory access, I have a job tonight.”

President: “I didn’t give you a mission.”

Bai Chunian: “An escort mission is always fine, right? Rimbaud went on duty in the middle of the night, and the police department didn’t assign him any other co-investigating police officers.” 

President: “The Alliance agents and the Alliance Police Department are two different departments, you need to submit an application and other approvals if you want to work together.”

Bai Chunian: “Then unseal the garage and my deposit, okay? Rimbaud didn’t even sleep for the three thousand yuan bonus, I want to take him for a motorcycle ride to eat a big dinner out.”

President: “Armory permission is open, you can take a gun.”

Bai Chunian was just about to hang up the phone when the president called out to him. 

“Xiao Bai.”

“Hmm?”

“You liked each other at the beginning because there were only the two of you in the observation box. So you can’t force him to get out of the cage with still the same unswerving feelings for you. You can’t treat him as your private object, whether it’s a friend or a lover, don’t be too obsessive or you’ll end up hurting him and yourself. You’re still young, you will understand later, but I don’t want you to wake up with a broken heart at that time. Because that kind of situation is obviously avoidable.”

“…Okay.” 

From the phone, Bai Chunian heard the sleeping alpha next to the president woke up. The two were so close to each other that even the sound of breathing was audible. Uncle Jin’s voice murmured against the microphone, “If he likes you, let him pursue you. Don’t care so much… you little alpha aren’t that vulnerable.”

Uncle Jin took the phone half-asleep and half-awake, and explained to Bai Chunian, “Your accounts are blocked to avoid anyone from getting a lead on you. You’ll be unblocked in a couple of days. I’ll have an assistant send your allowance tomorrow. If you call again in the middle of the night, I’ll break your leg. That’s it, I’ll hang up.”

“Oh.” Bai Chunian laid down on his back, a little relaxed from the previous anxiety. He looked at the ceiling on the sofa for a while, then got up, stepped on the slippers and slid slowly to the bedroom, found the second column of the third line of wallpaper pattern on the wall, and pressed his palm on the pattern.

The pattern lit up frame by frame, and a scanning screen appeared under Bai Chunian’s palm. The scanned fingerprint glowed green to confirm passage, and the entire bedroom wall rose silently from the bottom upwards. 

Behind the wall was a space of about ten square meters, filled with various types of pistols, rifles, micro submachine guns, sniper rifles, shooter rifles, and high-precision snipers, all neatly hung on four sides of the weapons rack. The bottom of the bulletproof glass cabinet in the middle held RPG, grenade launcher, and flamethrower. Locked in the middle were scopes from low to high magnification and with different functions. And the uppermost layer were swords, daggers, and melee weapons equipped by the famous troops of various countries.

There was a wooden picture frame poked on the glass counter, without a bit of dust on the frame. The picture was taken when Bai Chunian first joined the Alliance’s secret service team. The president was raising his head giving him the golden Freebird medal representing the identity of an agent. Uncle Jin was also there that day, so there were the three of them in the picture.

Bai Chunian picked a German HK417 shooter rifle and leaned in front of the glass cabinet to load accessories and bullets. Because the president only allowed him to bring a gun, it was more practical to choose a firearm that could be used for both long-range sniping and fully automatic shooting.

Red Maple Mountain was located in the neighboring city, it took about two hours by car. It was called a mountain, but actually, it was only a hilly area with a slightly-higher terrain. It was named after the maple trees that grew red in all seasons, and this mountain was not in the suburbs, but in the southwest of the urban area. The surrounding buildings weren’t rural fields, but high-voltage power poles, and some polluting factories almost all placed in the vicinity. The whole mountain was usually shrouded in noise and thick smoke, so much that no one noticed that someone built a cabin here, except for the factory employees, but they didn’t take it seriously. 

“Several excavators came a while ago, and I thought it was a material dealer who came to get the soil.” That was what people said. “When I went back a while later, there was a new pyramid-like cabin built there.”

It was only four o’clock in the morning, the sky was still very dark. It was the time when people were most sleepy and relaxed. Dark clouds hung overhead, a light drizzle had been falling all night.

Rimbaud sat on a high-voltage power line, his fishtail wrapped around the wire for balance, his eyes downcast as he looked down at the triangular pyramid cabin built between two hills. Blonde hair dripping against his cheeks, drops of water trickling down his chin to the fishtail, the weather was rather comfortable for Rimbaud.

This pyramid cabin was somewhat similar to the famous Pyramids, only that those Pyramids were four-sided and made of bricks, while the exterior of this cabin was completely covered in high-technology solar panels. From the outside, there was only a simple doorway that looked not much different from an ordinary forest hunter’s cabin. 

Because of a series of disappearances, a cordon was raised around the cabin. But due to lack of police force, before the police officers from the Alliance Police Department arrived, the police who guarded the cabin left without authorization, so there was no one guarding near the cordon.

In the dark woods, a spot of light flashed for a moment, and then went out quickly. It seemed to be the light of a flashlight.

Rimbaud keenly caught this bit of light. His fishtail let go, and he let his body fall naturally. At the moment of landing, he held his body silently with electromagnetic force and slid along the pile of scrap steel on the ground.

Several alphas in camouflage short-sleeves and bulletproof undershirts were dragging a body in a police uniform to be buried in a water pit. The blood trails dragged all the way, but the rain washed them away soon after. 

Few thugs dared to blatantly kill police officers, only these desperate mercenaries would dare to do such reckless foolishness.

Rimbaud was entwined among the maple branches, with his tail wagging in boredom and his cheeks propped up listening to their conversation.

One of the black scorpion alpha was reporting the situation to his employer: “Our men are divided into three squads, now the first two squads are in, a nasty little police officer found us and fired a warning shot at the sky, haha, I shot him in the mouth.”

“So what if I killed a police officer? A bunch of losers, none of them can fight. Even if they send a squad over, they’ll still lose.” 

“The deal is, if we can walk out, then the 10 million bonus promised by the escape expert all goes to us.”

“Hmph, don’t worry. We have no interest in those useless research materials at all.”

Rimbaud wasn’t at all good at eavesdropping. He could hardly understand the rough swear words, much less extract any useful information from it. The best way was to take the gang back to the police station for interrogation.

Suddenly, a ray of flashlight glared on Rimbaud’s eyes. A cunning mercenary on guard duty found Rimbaud’s faint glimmer. He whistled, so that all the mercenaries’ guns were aimed at the merman wrapped around the tree. 

The black scorpion alpha who had just finished debriefing with his employer came over and relaxed his guard when he saw that it was just an omega in a police uniform. He poked Rimbaud’s face with the muzzle of the ACR in his hand, “Look what I caught, a little blond angel with blue eyes. Such a cute little baby police officer works so hard on the night shift, I’m sure you get a lot of money, right?”

Rimbaud frowned: “No, only, three thousand.”

The mercenaries all burst out laughing.

The black scorpion alpha grabbed the collar of Rimbaud’s police uniform and dragged him down from the tree, only to find that the omega was trailing a beautiful to the extreme tail on his lower body. 

The black scorpion alpha let out a gasp, followed by the maniacal laugh of reaping an unexpected fortune, and asked the surrounding mercenaries in a nasty tone, “Wanna have sex with a merman?”

The mercenaries whistled and hooted.

“I’ve seen mermaids in the Tasman Sea when I was doing work in Australia, and while they’re pretty too, I’ve never seen one with a transparent tail that glows like this.”

“You can see your own dick when you fuck him. It’s fucking exciting.” 

Rimbaud’s face was expressionless. He didn’t quite understand what these people said nor did he have a problem with it, except that being carried by the collar and grabbed by the hair was a little uncomfortable.

The black scorpion alpha reached out and touched the fins on Rimbaud’s buttocks, but he didn’t expect that a strong electric current would explode at the moment of contact. And before the black scorpion alpha could even make a sound from his throat, he turned into a wisp of scorched smelly black smoke.

The electricity exploded in all directions with Rimbaud as the center, and the ground seemed to light up with a lightning cobweb. Within a second, all mercenaries who came into contact with the water on the ground fell one after another without any resistance.

A silenced bullet swept past his ear. The breeze that was brought up lifted a few strands of Rimbaud’s blond hair at his temples. 

A mercenary who survived behind him was raising his AK to the back of Rimbaud’s neck. But then a bullet noiselessly entered his skull. His blood spurted, and the mercenary fell to the ground, his gun dropped with a loud thud.

Rimbaud looked up in the direction of the bullet, and saw Bai Chunian sitting on the top of a telephone pole, wearing a black undershirt and shorts, a black baseball cap, and a silenced HK417 on his lap, smiling at him.