Animal Whisperer: Take Back My Life and Love Chapter 435: The Undersea Volunteers

Just as Nancy was about to snap the lid shut, the largest octopus extended a tentacle and gently coiled it around her wrist.

A muffled, slightly aggrieved inquiry drifted from the bin.

"Are you sending us away already?"

Nancy lightly tapped the tentacle wrapped around her arm. "Yes. Didn't we agree? I will take you home as soon as the job is done."

She pointed to the blue and white patrol boat beneath them. "If you ever run into trouble out at sea, just look for a boat like this. You can wave to them for help."

To her surprise, the grip tightened. A solemn observation came from the bin.

"But the bad men haven't been caught yet."

Nancy let out a small laugh. "Catching bad men is a job for the police. It is dangerous for you to get involved."

Several octopuses shifted in the water, their limbs brushing against one another in a display of clear reluctance.

"But we think what you are doing is actually quite interesting."

The largest octopus cautiously peeked out with one eye. "Can we keep following you?"

Nancy was stunned. "Volunteering for overtime? That is a first."

She could not help but tease them. "Squidward from Spongebob would be horrified. He hates going to work."

The bin went quiet for a moment.

Then, the large octopus spoke with a calm that held a trace of loneliness Nancy had not noticed before, a weight inherent to their kind.

"Nancy, we are almost adults. Once we mature, we enter the breeding phase... and after that, there isn't much time left."

The smile on Nancy's lips faded.

She remembered then. Once an octopus fulfills its biological mission to reproduce, its body triggers a programmed cellular decline. Death follows shortly after. It was a brutal yet calculated evolutionary trade-off encoded in their genes. If the parents did not die, they would compete with their offspring for the limited resources of the deep.

After a brief silence, she reached out and gently patted the smooth, cool head of the octopus.

"So you want to do something special with the time you have left?"

Five pairs of deep, intelligent eyes stared back at her through the water.

"Yes!"

The octopuses waved their tentacles playfully in the bin. "We've spent long enough sitting at the bottom of the sea. For our final days, we want to live a little more colorfully! Besides, finding that boat for you was easy. It felt good to actually achieve something!"

Nancy's heart softened. She nodded solemnly. "Thank you for wanting to help."

"Shall we head back into the cabin then?"

As the words fell, the bin erupted into a joyful dance of limbs. Several tentacles even poked through the gaps to wave at her.

…

The latest intelligence from the feline scouts sent ripples through the police force. The mood among the elite trainees and the joint task force was a complex mix of emotions. The good news was that the killers of the Seabed-173 had finally surfaced. The bad news was that the leads pointed back to the brutal Blackshark Syndicate, and the scale of their remaining forces was unknown. Taking them down would likely mean another bloody confrontation.

Since Simon's team had secured the lead, the apprehension operation was naturally placed under the joint command of his squad and the local coast guard. A land and sea pincer movement was quietly taking shape under the cover of night.

Nancy pulled open a car door and slipped into a plain vehicle used for covert surveillance. Officers often spent over ten hours at a time in these cars, never leaving unless absolutely necessary.

The moment she sat down, she saw a familiar silhouette in a dark jacket sitting in the driver's seat.

"Simon!" Her eyes lit up with unmistakable joy. "You're here!"

She had felt that something was missing over the last two days without her brother as her partner.

"I'm here." Simon turned around with a warm smile, handing her a hot drink he had been keeping warm along with a thermal lunch box. "You've been running around all day. You must be exhausted."

Nancy took the food, her eyes crinkling into a smile. "I knew you'd show up!"

Somehow, even though the competition had technically separated them, she had never doubted him. She knew Simon would close the gap at maximum speed to stand beside her at the crime scene once again. He would always be her most reliable partner.

Simon watched her as she lowered her head to take a sip from the straw, the gaze in his sharp eyes softening. "I will always find my way to you, no matter where you are."

Under the patient watch of the police and the silent infiltration of the animal scouts, the opportunity finally arrived late on the third night.

Nancy's headset crackled with Tabby King's voice. "Zermatt is on the move! He is heading for that abandoned warehouse again!"

The surveillance monitors in the car flickered to life, split into two feeds. One came from the camera mounted on Master Crow's chest, capturing the rush of wind against the microphone as he soared through the night.