Chapter 40

Dozing on the couch, Bond receives a premonition showing nothing but darkness and concludes he is doomed, first imagining a Project Apple scientist arriving to kill him. His farewells go poorly: Anya shuts her door to finish homework, and Yor, having run out of dog food, announces she will cook his dinner herself since Loid is out working. Bond now pins the deadly vision on Yor's cooking, and after picturing her fury should he refuse the meal, he lands on a plan: if Loid returns early, Loid cooks instead and the future changes. The dog works the lock open and escapes into Berlint, leaving Yor bewildered.

Tracking Loid's scent through the city, Bond finds him staking out Born Industries, where his assignment is to lift a sample of Gerrulimus, a freshly developed truth serum, with no time for his usual impersonation groundwork. Bond refuses every order to go home and instead guides Loid along a route empty of people. Recalling the company's suspected involvement with Project Apple, Loid assumes the dog wants payback against the researchers who experimented on him and his fellow subjects, and lets him tag along.

Inside the laboratory, packed with specimen lockers, Bond foresees the staff returning, Loid holding them off, and himself being ordered to flee. Distressed, he warns Loid into hiding instead. Loid plants a note claiming the Gerrulimus has already been stolen, and when the staff open the locker to check, the pair drop on them from above and knock them out. Sample in hand, Loid heads home ahead of schedule, and Bond's new vision, Loid at the stove and Yor relieved at his safe return, sets him barking for joy.

Bond misreads an all-black premonition as his own death and runs away from home to change the future he fears.

Loid infiltrates Born Industries to steal the truth serum Gerrulimus, with Bond's foresight steering him past patrols and into a successful ambush.

The mission wraps early, Loid handles dinner, and Bond's grim vision resolves into a happy one.

Mission 40 spans 25 pages in Volume 7 within the Imperial Scholars Mixer Arc, adapts into Episode 27, and features Bond, Anya, and Yor on the cover.

Endo later clarified that the black spread Bond and readers interpreted as death was only ever meant to show the dog unconscious.