Helluva Boss: ''Helluva Human Kid''

Ch.107 - Balin's First IMP Mission - Gone Wrong

As Balin continued crawling through the vents of the Sapphire Queen, trying to find Loona and the rest of the I.M.P crew after hearing about how the cruise ship's restaurants was poisoning passengers and guests with goods smuggled onboard by an agent.

The boy tried sniffing out the scent trail for the nearest play area to come out of first, but kept on glitching in and out.

Suddenly, he started to slip about with every couple of crawls.

"Huh?"

The first slip he felt, he had stopped to see what it was with his super sight. But he couldn't see anything, yet.

Balin kept on crawling with a few more slips and stops until he looked around again, to soon see that the vents were now crawling with some goopy-feeling stuff.

He then turned off his sense of super sight, and began sniffing it rapidly like a curious puppy for him to soon realise, it was actually welding grease stuck to the metal.

"Ewwww!" the boy moaned in disgust, before he accidentally loosened his grip and started slipping down the slope.

Luckily, he was able to catch the side walls with his paws and the pads underneath his feet.

"What is this stuff?" he thought to himself anxiously.

Balin continued trying to climb through the vents with more slips than ever, almost getting close to sniffing out a trail and trying not to make any sounds.

...

But unfortunately, as the kitchen staff listened closely, that wasn't the case.

"What the fuck is that??" one of the kitchen chefs exclaimed hearing the scampering. "Are those rats?"

"Of course not." the agent replied, as he examined the activity before figuring it out. "Holy shit. We're being caped! I knew I heard voices in there!"

"Me too!" one of the chefs called with two fingers unknowingly over the agent's head.

"Find them!" he ordered as he stormed through the kitchen, grabbing a walkie-talkie and turning on the thermostat. "Then deal with them."

"How?" asked the head chef.

"How do you think?" The agent then turned around with a flabbergasted expression. "Do you remember watching this heart-warming movie where a shark gives limbs to the disabled?"

"Uhm, what movie...?"

"JAWS!" barked the agent ominously as he left. "Now chop chop! Literally, our diners are hungry."

...

Balin was now struggling to hold onto the openings of the vents as the welding began to melt due to the heat building up in the vents.

"No, no, no, no! Loona! Mr. Blitzø!" he shouted. "Where are you?! I'm slipping!"

Finally, as some dirt from the metal got into Balin's eye, he couldn't hold his grip any longer and fell through the vent like a waterslide, causing him to scream until he made it out onto one of the multiple decks of the ship outside.

The little boy rubbed his head in pain before getting on all fours and shaking some of the sticky welding off him.

Panting heavily after that, he saw a sign that read 'Strictly, No Pets Allowed!' with a piece of the logo from the UK reality series 'STRICTLY Come Dancing.'

Balin quickly got on his hind legs to see two paw prints made out of dirt, then quickly tried to rub them away with his hands, which made it look worse. Seeing this, he then got back into his normal form and wiped them away with a little more spit, which only worked a little.