Clearly intending to turn his frustration into appetite, after sitting down, Tom didn’t stop eating. It was like a starving ghost had taken possession of him. In no time, he single-handedly wiped out two refrigerators’ worth of food. If the cold storage hadn’t had enough stock, everyone would have been forced to order takeout for the next few days.

But he was relatively easygoing. Before long, he had already gotten familiar with everyone. Holding a bottle of alcohol and gulping it down nonstop, whenever he talked about his past experiences, he became animated and expressive. Battles in the Central Lands, deep incursions into the Empire, prison breaks in the Federation—all of it sounded impressively real given the detailed descriptions. Even though the names clearly sounded fake, at least the experience felt genuine.

Dirty work or hard work, he had done it all. In his words, this kind of protection job was basically a vacation. 

After all, these days, money was hard to earn without connections. For large groups of mercenaries, it was even harder. If you didn’t care about dying, you could at least make enough money to fund your funeral, but sometimes the real skill was figuring out how to stay alive long enough to actually get paid.

Guarding an oil...