Forbidden Heat

Reiner – Educated Guess

Boldly, I dragged a chair over and sat down at the desk opposite him. He glanced up from the papers

that he was reading to take a look at me. Without saying a word, his gaze returned to the papers in

front of him. I considered the fact that he hasn’t chased me out of his room a big leap of improvement. This text is property of Nô/velD/rama.Org.

My curiosity started taking over and I found myself leaning forward across the desk to get a look at the

papers that were in front of him.

They looked like stats and data on something that I didn’t quite understand. The report on the desk

next to his hand had photos of people on it next to table filled with text in various fields. It looked like

information and profiles of people. Apart from that, I couldn’t make out anything at all and I still had no

idea what Reiner was working so hard at.

“Knight…what are you reading?” I asked softly.

He didn’t reply and as time went by, I figured that he probably didn’t want me to disturb him. However,

there were so many reports that I couldn’t imaging Reiner going through all of it by himself. If only he

would tell me what he was trying to do or what he was looking for then perhaps I could help him, and

we’ll get it done faster if we worked together.

“What are you trying to figure out?” I asked.

To my surprise, this time I got an answer.

“How to save lives…” Reiner muttered without looking at me.

How to save lives? What does he mean by that? Will reading these papers somehow help save lives?

“What do you mean by that?” I asked with interest.

“You tell me. If you can figure something out, I’ll let you help out with my work,” Reiner said as he

placed a pile of documents on the table in front of me.

My eyes widened at his sudden change in attitude before falling on the large pile of paper in front of

me. How to save lives? If there are clues somewhere in these reports, then I’ll be sure to find it. Just

you wait and see…

Reiner and I focused on the documents in front of us as we silently read through. The documents that

he handed me were stats and reports on different people. After reading through a few, I began to get

the picture of what was going on from the data. Basically, the death rate of agents that were sent out on

mission have risen over time. That meant that more people died and were dying. Of course, I knew that

that wasn’t good.

If my educated guess is correct, then Reiner is trying to find a way to decrease the death rate for

agents that went on missions. I glanced up at Reiner to see him still busily going through the reports. I

wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but I believed that I had a better understanding now for the reason

why he was working so hard.

Charles’ words came back to me when he talked about his job. I think he did mention something about

the importance of people working well together as a team and trusting each other to increase their rate

of survival on missions. If a team member was not trusted or did not work in sync with the team, he or

she could put the team in grave danger. My face grew numb as the seriousness of the situation that

Reiner was handling hit me. If he doesn’t get this right, more people are going to die.

“Knight…are you trying to find a way to decrease the death rate for agents? Based on this data, the

survival rate has been going down, right?” I asked as I pointed to a report that he had handed to me.

“That’s right. More agents are dying, and we can’t let things continue like this,” Reiner replied before his

blue eyes looked straight at me.

The seriousness in his gaze froze my body in place and whatever words that I had prepared to say

died right on my tongue. Instead of saying anything more, I just nodded and shifted my focus back to

the various other reports in front of me.

There’s got to be something here that will help us figure this out. Reiner is looking for something, and

although I had no idea what that was, I felt like I would know immediately if I found it. If the increase in

death rate is a problem, then we probably should find the root cause for that before we find a way to

solve it. Is the cause somewhere in these documents?

“Have you found anything?” I asked after a few hours had gone by.

“I think so but nothing conclusive yet,” Reiner replied, sounding tired.

“This might sound like a wild guess but perhaps the increase in death rate has something to do with the

nature of the mission that has changed over time. You see, up until a few years ago, most of the

missions were individual based. One-man-show type of missions. Then after that, missions that require

agents to work as a team to complete them increased sharply,” I began stating my hypothesis.

Reiner stopped what he was doing, and I could tell that he was listening with interest to what I was

saying. Perhaps he didn’t think that what I was rambling about was just a bunch of nonsense after all. I

sucked in a breath to steel my nerve before going on with my hypothesis.

“It might be the case that agents that were used to working alone on solo missions found it hard to

adapt to working as a team on team-based missions. Working in a team is probably more difficult

because the team must work in sync and also trust each other for the mission to be successful.

Therefore, if this is an issue then it is possible that more missions would fail and there would be more

casualties leading to the hike in death rate over time,” I said as I looked straight at Reiner.

--To be continued…