Chapter 5.

I was skeptical, wary of her claims, but I still got out of the car. This time, I didn’t need to carry her. She’d already recovered from whatever Maria injected her with. We’d already been driving around the city for hours while switching out cars. Her recovery time was as expected, far faster than it would have taken a normal person subjected to one of Maria’s experimental drugs.

For anyone else, whatever was in that syringe probably would have been enough to at the very least knock them out for days, or at the worst, kill them, but for Adele, all it did was temporarily paralyze her lower body from the waist down. 

“You’re really alright Adele?”

“Are you worried about me? I don’t mind if you want to keep carrying me on your back.”

“I don't have enough stamina to keep doing that.”

“Are you trying to say I’m fat?”

“Yeah.”

She shot a glare at me that said, ‘I see you’ve chosen death.’

“I’m kidding of course. You’re far from fat.”

“If you weren’t kidding, I would have funneled food down your mouth until your stomach exploded.”

“Haha… please don’t. It doesn’t sound like a joke when you’re the one saying it.”

“Just keep your mouth shut and follow me.”

Dejected, I resignedly followed behind her. We walked further down the sandy area beside the ocean for fifteen minutes before a small isolated dock with a motor boat tied to it came into view.

“This is…”

“Our ride to Shangri-La. A land far removed from society where there will be nobody to interrupt the two of us anymore. There will be no judgemental eyes any longer. It will just be the two of us, with nothing to hold us back. You’ll be free from all your burdens and will only have me by your side from here on out. Like this, I will become the dock that you return to everyday. This way, there will also no longer be any other pesky flies able to get in my way when I want to finally kill you.”

As for the last line she said, I heard nothing of it. Ah, living in denial was such a beautiful thing. Yeah, if I seriously translated from psycho talk, what she really meant was no other pesky flies would be able to get in her way when she wants fuck me. That word could mean a lot of different things after all. The saying could be completed with over, up, sideways, etc. It was truly a word with deep cultural ties.

Seeing how I remained silent, she sent a query my way. “You always wanted to escape from everything, didn’t you? Didn’t you always say how you wanted to experience what it was like to live in isolation from the world and experience life as part of nature? You used to go on about things like that when we were in university, right?”

“I know I said that, but actually doing it and talking about it are two separate matters altogether.”

“Well, you don’t really have much of a choice right now, do you? Who would you rather choose right now? Me or that woman?”

“By the way, I’d suggest to think very carefully about how you answer, I can’t promise you’ll live if you give the wrong answer.”

“Haaaaah. I’d choose you. If I were to choose Maria, I’d see much more death than I’d ever want to see.” Much more than if I was with Adele.

“Hmmmm… what sort of woman is this Maria anyways?”

“She’s a doctor. An insane one. She performs all sorts of illegal human experimentation and clinical trials at the behest of her clientele around the globe. After we broke up-“

“We didn’t break up at any point. We were just spending some time apart to find ourselves. I suppose this one time I’ll forgive you for cheating in my absence, but if you do it again, just remember this…”

Adele’s face got closer, right up to my own, at a crooked angle, her nose nearly touching my own, and suddenly said with wide open unblinking eyes, “I’ll fucking end you.”

I won’t lie, I nearly pooped a little in my pants, but the crisis was quickly averted as she immediately retreated and her expression returned back to normal. “Anyway, continue with what you were saying before.”

Just why am I still interacting with her like she’s normal right now? Even though I was caught off guard just now, I didn’t find her reaction strange or overboard. It actually felt normal… for her at least. Was I the one who’d actually lost his mind here, thinking her response was actually rather tame compared to what I was used to?

“Right… after our time spent in… separation, I went through various events that led to meeting her.”

If I brought up my other relationships with her, who knows how she’d really end me. As such, I didn’t bother to beat the hornets nest like a fool.

“At first I became closer to her as her patient. Our relationship progressed a bit during that time and I developed feelings towards her in my weakened state of mind after a certain traumatic event I’d just gone through at the time. We eventually got more involved with each other, but I was mistaken about her true motives. At some point I inadvertently became one of her experimental test subjects. As her experiments proceeded, and I didn’t die from them, she grew more and more infatuated with her experiments on me until her infatuation took an unexpected turn. We sort of crossed a certain line and I guess I became what you could call, her ‘favorite’ test subject.”

In simpler terms, her lover, romantic partner, or significant other. I naturally didn’t want to call her that in front of Adele lest she rips the vocal cords clean out of my throat in a fit of rage.

“I see. She does sound a bit crazy.”

My eyes shot open wide in utter disbelief. Was this what they referred to as the pot calling the kettle black.

“R-r-right…”

I stuttered it out unintentionally trying my best not to retort.

“So she’s just a looney doctor that does inhumane experimentation?”

“No. She performs these experiments for her various clientele across the globe, both at their request, and also out of pure curiosity. You can’t quite call her a looney, she’s very intelligent and cautious in how she operates. She’s amassed a good amount of wealth and she has very powerful backers. Her cousin’s background is extremely scary. The top dog in the largest illegal trade industries across the globe. She can acquire many test subjects through her cousin’s networks at dirt cheap discounted prices. Oftentimes, even free if her cousin is in a good mood.”

“Oh? Her cousin is that person? I see. I see. So that’s what her identity really is. I know the person you’re talking about now, I never expected her to be that person’s cousin. I’ve never met her, but I’ve of course heard about her. That syringe, it all makes sense now. By the way, from her words, it sounded like you were involved with her cousins as well...” A cold grin formed on her face when her words trailed off to a sudden stop.

I instantaneously broke out into a river of sweat. If things kept up at this rate, I’d die from sweating myself into dehydration.