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Kane Akihiko prostrated on his knees in the cold, dank warehouse, and tried his best not to piss himself.
Outside the moon was an angular silver crescent, panning its hard light through the iron lattice slits of the warehouse windows. The cold of the concrete fanned through Akihiko’s thin slacks. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled knots, his heart rammed like a rabbit’s in the cage of his ribs, ba-bump-babumpbapump, fast and frenetic, fit to burst.
Akihiko did his best to not let his fear leak into his expression, even if it was a task of herculean proportions. His captors appeared like the type to scent fear.
Smuggle the AK-47s, they said. It will all go smoothly, they said. Those damn Russians. If Akihiko survived this, which was looking unlikely, he was going to file a blacklist.
Akihiko had always been careful in his work. That care was what made him so desired in the high-risk business of illegal weapons trafficking, and also the key to his continued survival. On paper, the Russian’s proposition had been dangerous, but well-organized and high-paying enough to justify the operation. The most difficult part, smuggling the AK-47s into the country, had proceeded without problem, and afterwards the protection detail drafted into land transport was first grade. A dozen professionals and two armoured trucks, including a trailing convoy of security personnel from the Balour company.
Akihiko had thought it a touch overkill, but the Russians had insisted.
And now he knew exactly why the Russians had insisted.
Two men. The entire convoy had fallen apart, annihilated in explosive force and body parts by only two men. It was not a formation that should have died to such meager numbers and in a matter of terrible heartbeats. And yet, and yet.
With what Akihiko had witnessed, could they even be called men?
Certain rules existed in the Japanese underworld. People you did not cross. Organizations you did not touch. This was not because of any Gajin notion of honor or politeness; underworld ruthlessness being the same no matter the nation. It was simply a matter of self-preservation.
The Russians—they had been warned—whose territory had they decided to infringe on, fucking bastards—
When you steered out of your lane and into the deepest dark, the abyss sent clean up crews after you.
Each tap of dress shoes heels on the cement floor elicted an echo more terrible than any gunshot.
“So, are we going to do this the easy way, or the hard way?” came the amused, cajoling voice.
Akihiko's fingers dug deeper into his thighs.
The first of his two assailants strolled unperturbed circles around him like a shark scenting blood. He was young and carelessly handsome, dressed in the uniform of a security guard, bullet-proof vest over a form-fitting black shirt, eyes the rusty red of dried blood underneath a blonde fringe. The smile on his face was like that of a fox.
The trail of sweat dripping down Akihiko's neck felt terribly vivid against the cold.
“I will offer you all the information I have on my employers, if you spare me,” he said carefully.
The fox smiled wide, a flash of perfect white teeth.
“So, you know how this works. Very good! Torturing you would have given me some obnoxious stains to deal with.”
He spoke with a teasing drawl, as if telling a joke, but the eyes that considered Akihiko as a trifling amusement were dead as winter soil, red as the youkai of myth. They were the eyes of a man who would not care a fuck-crap about taking Akihiko’s life, as it had taken other lives.
The professionals never cared.
Fear sizzled up Akihiko’s spine in a fresh rush. His muscles clenched. He bit down hard so as to not let his teeth involuntarily chatter. Fuck.
“How about we begin with your phone, neh?”
Akihiko nodded. His hands trembled minutely as he reached into his back pocket and retrieved his burner. There were only a few contacts and messages in its limited history, all pertaining to this job. He slid it across the concrete floor and recited his password.
The Fox holstered his gun to pick up the phone and start rapidly sliding through its contents. In theory this made him much less of a threat: attention distracted, weapon momentarily disengaged. Akihiko still had a small knife in his boot alongside a larger one hidden underneath his suit jacket. And though he preferred to avoid it, he was learned in close combat.
In practice, it was all pointless. The second spectre of Akihiko’s looming demise stood slouched against the warehouse all, and his gun was very much in hand.
If the Fox was the spokesman, then the other was …. Akihiko darted his eyes sideways.
The monster. Shinigami. Reaper. Akihiko felt like he was losing both his mind and his wits, with the way they conjured up flashes of folklore as analogies to make sense of what the actual fuck had happened.
Two men. Only two, and one of them had barely moved---
(They had been driving down that black and winding midnight road…
In recollection the sequence of events pieced together like the shattered fragment of a mirror. Zero to hundred. Everything quiet and in good order before it became apocalyptic in the span of a heartbeat.
There was no warning. One moment they were rolling down the smooth asphalt of the highway. The next—
KABOOOOM—
Light and sound and heat and the blinding sudden flash as
“Get down, GET DOWN!!!!”
vertigo as his vehicle tail-spun at a hundred twenty kilometers an hour— the ear-splitting CRACK-SHHK CRACK OF glass shattering. Bellowing, machine gun firing. Throwing himself down down, just in time— shit shit shit-- the driver in front shot straight through the leather upholstery of his seat—
Chaos. Tires screeching voices bellowing, adrenaline pumping pumping, elevated pulse and breath and ambush the sticky, metallic scent of blood and
“Shoot him back you fucking idiots! It’s just one guy, shoot him – SHOOT HIM!”
Akihiko threw himself outside, ears ringing, his skin blistering. The wreckage of the two supporting convoys lit the landscape with their fiery metal conflagrations. Gasoline-smell, burnt-human smell. He drew his handgun from its holster. Where was the—
Assailant.
The Balour mercenary who had been sitting beside him, who had similarly just crawled out of the bombed-out explosion of their vehicle, went down with a gurgle and a shower of brain and bone. He was close enough the hot coppery spray pulped against Akihiko’s face. Akihiko flinched.
He shot, aim steady despite his palpitating heart, but the assailant wove between the ricochet of bullet fire as if he were more wraith than man, a flash of steel and shadow and reflected streetlight in the roiling, seething, dark. Backup from the front three vehicles were picked off man by man. Akihiko had just ducked behind a crumpled and twisted car door for cover when --
The second of the armoured trucks detonated in an explosion of light and sound and sound.
Steel melted. The car right behind the truck melted. The asphalt melted. Acrid gasoline smell, eyes burning, ears ringing ringing, gasping, gasping what in the wORLD—
There had been people in the truck. More security guards, all dead.
Fuck fuck fuck.
The survivors crawled and fell and staggered out, four of them, ash-covered and grim faced, Akihiko included. Shaking hands and gasping mouths and wild eyes – find the assailant, the assailant. The frontmost truck, mostly unscathed, screeched to a halt, and its trunk door grated open. The security team who had been inside poured out, gratifyingly combat-ready, with their bullet-proof vests and ballistic helmets and machine guns.
They cornered the assailant in the square formed between smoking ruins of the second truck and the concrete wall of the highway. It was, to Akihiko’s consternation, a single person bestride a motorcycle. Faceless, the bruised reflections of Akihiko and his team glinting off his opaque helmet visor. His suit was pristine, not a cut or scratch or spill of gasoline.
The fight was eight against one.
It ended very, very quickly.
The man stepped lightly off his bike, posture nonchalant, and pulled out a long curved knife.
He tore through them like the harvest sickle through tender stalks of rice. So fast there was nothing but a blur of purple and the arc of blood under the harsh white glare of the streetlamps. There was nothing human in his movements, so swift and fluid: he was a machine, a demon, a nightmare walking. It was eight against one but it might as well have been eight against an army or eight against an act of the Buddha. He ducked and wove beneath their blows as if his body were liquid instead of flesh, his knife ripped straight through unprotected jugulars to sever heads from spines.
The gun in his hand fired with supernal aim—one bullet, two— its cold metal kiss as Akihiko lay gasping and sweating on the ground in a pile of bodies and offal— no NO NOT like THIS –
Footsteps.
The driver’s door to the first, unharmed convoy, swung open. Polished shoes tapped out. Akihiko’s vision was dazed from both the eye-watering smoke and his pounding concussion but he thought he saw the moon and firelight reflect off pale blonde hair.
More convoy survivors? No. That wouldn’t solve anything—
“We need at least one of them alive,” tsked the Fox with the dead red eyes, stepping lightly behind the reaper, Akihiko thought, deliriously, the rEAPER— “Aiiiyah, what a mess. Knock him out for now, Rei.”
The terrible, faceless helmet turned. Akihiko saw his own trembling, terrified gaze in its reflection.
The handle of the knife swung down, instead of its blade.
Darkness. )
There were always rumours, about assassins so skilled they seemed superhuman, who you could hire if you had the right connections and could afford their price. Bogeymen, conversely, who would slit your throat and burn empire to cinders, if you crossed them.
Akihiko never thought he would meet the underworld’s whispered spectres.
Underneath his helmet, the Reaper had a face after all: severe featured, with dark hair pulled back tightly from his scalp into a tail. He had spoken not once since blitzing into the warehouse in a screech of dust and tires, instead leaning against the wall with his boots kicked up against the front wheel of his motorcycle like a bored and irritated sentinel as his partner did all the talking.
The Reaper, unlike the Fox, did not emanate the same pants-wetting, mind-numbing aura of amused, stalking menace – the implication that he enjoyed toying with his prey. That didn’t make it any better. Akihiko had seen him butcher eight men in about as many seconds. He looked ready to kill Akihiko at any moment too, if only this entire conversation would hurry up and be done with.
Murderous intent was only ever a tangible force in children’s comics but if there was anyone who could manifest it physically in the real life, Akihiko suspected it was this man. He certainly felt paralyzed under that furious gaze.
Inch by inch, the moon panned its icy light in latticed bars over the cold concrete. Akihiko’s burner phone was inspected, prodded at, and faningled with, before it was summarily pocketed.
The Fox asked for the names of the suppliers too, about the operations of the Russians, about any future plans Akihiko had been appraised of. Akihiko gave as much detail as he could. There would be retaliation, if he survived, but when he thought of the way the two men – one man—had slaughtered through through that entire convoy as easily as a housewife might dice an onion he and could not justify doing anything else. If these men decided to take on the Russians… well, they wouldn’t be posing a problem anymore.
“Well,” said the Fox, after the long, long list was delivered, “at least now we know who the fuck is butting in on our weapon’s trade.”
The Reaper shifted. Akihiko, hyperaware of him in the background like a fieldmouse aware of the rearing snake, flinched.
“We done?” spoke the Reaper, for the first time. He had a low and cool voice, edged and cutting.
The Fox made a so-so gesture.
“Ehh, still gotta deal with the entire Russian roach collection we apparently have going on.” He sighed. “Ah, the glamorous life of a city-cleaner.”
The Fox dusted off his slacks and stood, slipping Akihiko’s phone into his suit pocket. Not that Akihiko had been expecting that returned. The Fox fished what appeared to be his own smartphone from his pants, and then began tapping on its surface with an irritated look on his face, paying Akihiko no more heed.
Akihiko licked his dry, chapped lips. His heart, with its rabbit’s beat, palpitated in his ears.
“I gave you the information. Will you spare my life?” he asked.
The Reaper snorted. Akihiko tensed. The Fox, raising his eyebrows, considered Akihiko what that perpetual sordid amusement again. Those dead red eyes looked at him and saw nothing of worth at all.
“That’s not how things work in this business,” the Fox said. “And you know it.”
The night was cold, the moonlight bright.
(Stay into the abyss too long, and it released its hunting hounds, with their blood eyes and impossible swiftness, their mouths full of knives and lead.)
Akihiko’s mouth was dry, his hands were trembling. His heartbeat roared in his ears.
The Reaper raised his gun.
Akihiko heard more than saw the killshot.