As Gregnok stood in my open doorway with his massive shoulders literally rubbing up against the doorframe on both edges simultaneously, I motioned for him to take a seat in the reinforced chair that I'd had commissioned specially for his massive frame.

Even with its titanium-reinforced structure, the frame groaned under his massive, muscled bulk.

"So, Gregnok. How are things?"

"Great!" Gregnok boomed, in his cheerful baritone voice.

I shuddered inside, but kept any external signs of my irritation from my expression. His cheerful nature was just one thing on the laundry list of reasons he wrong for this job.

Firstly, nobody wanted to hire a happy-go-lucky assassin. They wanted someone mean. Someone terrifying, or mysterious. But cheerful? Smiling?

Fuck right off with that shit. Nobody wanted that.

In fact, the only reason he was even still here was that he produced. Consistently.

Gregnok had never failed to kill a target, ever. He even managed to reach and kill the 'unkillable' targets, like Guido Salducci, the city's mob boss. Salducci was once thought to be untouchable, in his fortified mansion surrounded by heavily armed and armoured guards. Many had tried before Gregnok, and all had failed. All of them had tried to sneak onto the property through various different (and ingenious) means to accomplish their missions. Some didn't get much further than the fence line perimeter. Others got to the outside of the building before meeting their end. Some even managed to make it into the mansion proper before being killed, but none had gotten past all of his layers of defense tech.

That is, until Gregnok.

Gregnok is... different. Nobody knows how it came to pass (even Gregnok), but for some reason, he is invulnerable to physical injury. Blades, bullets, energy weapons, poisons, radiation... you name it, he's immune. The only thing that's had any effect on him that we can observe is the aging process. He gets older with the passage of time, and one day will die from old age just like anyone else. But until that day arrives, he is a literal walking tank with no weakness.

He's also... not particularly bright. He does what he's asked most times, without question or reservation. As long as you give him positive reinforcement after missions, he's happy to go forth and obliterate, frequently for much less compensation than most of his cohorts. Which is why, when he came into our guild several years ago looking for work, I saw an opportunity. I mean, what kind of assassin guildmaster wouldn't want an invulnerable tank in his back pocket just in case of an emergency? I would have been an idiot to not take advantage of having him on the payroll.

Or, that's what I thought at the time. Unfortunately, hindsight is 20/20.

The first mission I sent him on should have been my warning sign for us to part ways, but I was wearing rose-coloured glasses and justified the carnage he'd caused as 'not his fault'. He'd been ambushed going into a contract to take out the leader of a local drug cookhouse. The client had intentionally underreported the number of suspected people inside in order to negotiate a lower rate with me. If anyone but Gregnok had gone, they likely would have been deader than my ex-wife's libido, but because it was Gregnok... he survived.

The drug den enforcers, did not. Nor did the cooks. Or the house, for that matter.

Luckily, the police investigation attributed the house explosion to a drug cook gone bad... which technically speaking, was accurate. They wrote the whole thing off with no further investigation and saved us from an expensive coverup job.

As I said, I thought that the whole thing wasn't his fault. Gregnok didn't know what he was walking into, and panicked. While he did overreact a bit, he technically completed the job as requested. And as an added bonus, I was able to threaten the client with Gregnok paying him a visit to his house if he ever lied to me again about a job's difficulty, which was nice. The client voluntarily even paid me a 'bonus' as appreciation for me not having Gregnok delimbing him like an overcooked, oven-roasted chicken for lying and putting my crew at risk.

The next couple of jobs went OK, but they were isolated and in remote areas, so that was to be expected. But the jobs that followed... were less quiet.

Gregnok did not believe in stealth. He believed in brute force application, in judicious amounts. So when someone came to us with 'difficult' or 'impossible' jobs that none of my other men could handle, the only one left was Gregnok. And Gregnok did not believe in picking locks, sliding open windows and sneaking around to find his target, or not setting off alarms.

Gregnok believed in smashing things until they stopped twitching. Then finding something else to smash.

A good analogy my bookkeeper once made was that most of my men were sniper rifles. They had a bullet with someone specific's name on it, and they eliminated those targets only. A few others were more like hand grenades, they were basically addressed 'to whom it may concern'. If there was a little collateral damage, so be it.

But Gregnok? He was a flamethrower. One with 'Dear area residents...' painted on the fuel cans. You knew he would be burning down the entire neighbourhood, no matter where he went. You pointed him in the direction of what you wanted to go away, patted him on the shoulder, and ducked behind cover to wait until the explosions and screaming stopped.

It was because of this, he caused us to have a certain... reputation. When you needed something dead that absolutely nobody else could get to, he was your last resort. But you hired him with the understanding that it would not be resolved subtly, by even a demented definition of the word. When Gregnok made an appearance, it made national news as some sort of 'disaster' or 'gang war', every time. Those coming to hire us and make use of his service were desperate.

That meant that people avoided us like the plague, unless they had no other choice whatsoever. Because once Gregnok went to work, there was no hiding anything. You just tried to distance yourself from the events that unfolded and make sure you had a pre-established, rock-solid alibi in case the cops came calling. Because they would definitely be calling once Gregnok did his... thing.

I blinked, trying to bring myself back to the reason I'd brought him in here in the first place. As I looked up, he was still grinning like an idiot.

"So, I was wondering if you might be interested in a mission that's a little... unusual."

"Unusual?" he parroted back.

"Yes, Gregnok. You see... I love your work. You're great at smashing what needs to be smashed."

"Yes!" he boomed. "I am great at smashing things!"

"That you are," I echoed carefully. "But unfortunately, sometimes your smashing can be too... enthusiastic. And you smash things that you shouldn't."

Gregnok's expression fell. The poor lump looked like I'd kicked his puppy.

"Is Gregnok in trouble?" he asked timidly.

"No, buddy, you're not in trouble. But like I said, you're great at smashing things... and I was wondering if you might want to help a friend of mine with smashing things for a bit in a new place?"

"Are you sending me away forever?" Gregnok said, suddenly panicking.

"No! Not at all, buddy!" I said in my best soothing voice. "You'll always have a home here! I just wondered if you'd like to help a friend of mine for free for a bit, that's all. You know, go somewhere new, smash a whole lot of stuff, then come back home when you're all smashed out. What do you think?"

The panic faded from Gregnok's face and a small smile crept back to his lips. "Lots of smashing?"

"Lots of smashing," I said, smiling back at him. "And you don't need to be careful either. Smash everything in sight. What do you think?"

"That sounds AWESOME!" he boomed again. "Your friend doesn't mind me smashing everything?"

"No, he doesn't," I replied. "In fact, Mr. Zelenskyy would love you to smash as much as you possibly can. What do you say?"

"I say YES!" he said giddily.

"Awesome," I said, sliding a ticket to Ukraine across my desk to him. "Better start packing, bud. You're going on an adventure!"

As he stood up and picked up the tickets, a huge grin beamed over his face. He turned to walk out, and bumped the doorframe, bending the steel slightly on his way out. I heard him humming a jaunty tune as he went out into the office, making the rest of the assassins stare in confusion.

I hope he smashed as many Russian tanks as possible. Frankly, we could use the good PR in the assassin community.

The cat looked at the shrouded body, sitting in the open grave. It was small, much smaller than it had been even a decade ago. But then, as he had come to understand about humans, they often shrunk in their old age. This one was no different.

Inside, he felt a peculiar emotion that he wasn't terribly familiar with. At first he thought it might be anger, but then realized that wasn't it at all. He was familiar with anger, this had a distinctly... different feeling.

Was he hungry? No, that wasn't it either. Besides, hunger wasn't an emotion. The human had kept telling him as much, even though the cat didn't agree with him on that point.

He knew the emotion, but it was hard to remember what it was. It was almost like... part of him wanted to jump outside his body and run away. He felt a strange sort of pain inside, and didn't like it one bit. He turned to his compatriot, who was standing silently beside him, staring into the grave.

"Hey, Plastic Percy. There's something wrong here. I'm feeling something and I don't know what it is."

His friend turned. "Are you cold? I could get you a jacket."

"No, numbnuts," the cat replied. "Not like, a body feeling. Like an inside feeling. Something ain't right."

His friend stared at him for several seconds quizzically, unsure what to make of the comment.

"It's like... part of me is hurting. And I don't know why. I just want to make it stop."

"Ah," the compatriot said, turning back to the grave. "I believe you are experiencing something called 'sadness'. You are upset over the death of our friend."

"I am?" the cat asked. "That doesn't make a lick of goddamn sense!"

"On the contrary," his friend replied. "It makes perfect sense. He was our friend, and now he is gone forever, surrendered to the Earth. It is also significant that he was the last human being in existence, after all."

"Pfft, he was only barely one at all," the man on the other side of the grave said dismissively. "If you ask me, he was more of a walking garbage disposal than a man. He would eat foods that might kill an actual human. I should know, I watched him do it, like some kind of piranha deliberately trying to commit suicide itself by gorging itself to death.

"Oh shut it, smeg-for-brains," the cat snapped at him. "He wasn't that bad, for a human."

"No, he wasn't," the other compatriot agreed, picking up a handful of dirt and throwing it onto the body below.

"So... this pain?" the cat asked. "When does it stop?"

"I do not know," his friend replied. "It may never stop. Or one day you may just wake up and stop thinking about it. It's hard to tell."

"Oh, wonderful," the cat muttered. "So his last trick from the grave is to make me miserable. Figures."

He leaned over the grave, pointing a finger at the corpse. "You're just doing this to me because I tried to eat your fish. Thanks a lot."

"We shall miss you, Dave Lister," his friend said sadly. "You were the finest human being alive."

"He was the only human being alive," Rimmer quipped. "The very definition of 'victory by default'".

"At least he was alive, you glorified walking mannequin," Cat quipped.