The electric hum of the emergency lights was the only constant sound in the stairwell of the Grand Imperial Hotel.
Every three seconds, the red neon pulsed, painting the raw concrete walls the color of fresh blood.
Hina Ishikawa stood on the first-floor landing.
Below her, Riku Matsuda lay unconscious against the cracked glass—a pathetic reminder of a past she was systematically tearing to pieces, while above her, forty-nine floors of hell separated her from Sabushi's penthouse. And from her freedom with Kai.
She took a deep breath, the cold, stale air filling her lungs. She tightened the strap of the heavy black duffel bag slung over her shoulder.
Luigi Morsuno's frozen head shifted inside with a dull thud, a dead weight anchoring her to her macabre mission. With her right hand, she drew her silenced Glock 19; her left held her combat knife in a reverse grip. She was a double-edged weapon, ready to mow down anything standing between her and her target.
"I'm coming, father," she whispered, with almost no emotion in her voice.
The heavy, uncoordinated footsteps echoing from the second floor had led her to believe Sabushi had deployed the heavy artillery.
She expected the Yakuza's elite guard, the conditioned hitmen of Project Requiem, silent and lethal assassins like the ones she knew back in her days.
Instead, when she kicked open the heavy fire door to the second floor, she was met with a scene that made absolutely no tactical sense.
The second floor housed the hotel's luxury restaurants and tea rooms. The door opened into a long corridor lined with rice paper and bamboo screens, and waiting for her there were about fifteen men.
But something was irreparably wrong.
They weren't wearing Kevlar tactical armor or ballistic masks.
Instead, they wore crumpled civilian clothes, cheap windbreakers, stained sweatpants, or wrinkled office suits.
Their postures were hunched, uncertain, and the weapons they gripped—small-caliber handguns, aluminum baseball bats, even kitchen knives—trembled visibly in their sweaty hands.
"T-T-That's her!" one of them screamed, a heavyset man with a loosened tie and eyes wide with sheer terror. "The boss said whoever brings him her head goes free! Kill her!"
Hina didn't move immediately. Her analytical mind, forged in years of contract killings, processed the threat in a millisecond. There was no military discipline in their eyes or the cold void of the assassin.
There was only blind, animalistic desperation.
The heavyset man fired. The shot erupted with a deafening roar, unsuppressed, but his aim was so abysmal that the bullet buried itself into the ceiling two meters away from Hina, raining down plaster and dust.
Instinct took over, but Hina's cold calculation was tainted by a strange hesitation.
'These guys,' Hina thought, 'They are just meat shields.'
Sabushi wasn't trying to stop her with military force; he was trying to slow her down with morality, forcing her to drown in the blood of ordinary people to reach the summit.
Hina slipped sideways, dodging a second volley of bullets fired blindly by a kid who couldn't have been older than twenty.
She moved with the fluidity of a shadow cast by the red neon. Instead of aiming for the head, Hina lowered her line of fire.
Pfft. Pfft.
Two silenced shots. The first shattered the kneecap of the heavyset man, who collapsed to the floor screaming in agony, dropping his gun. The second bullet punched through the younger boy's shoulder, spinning him around before he crashed through a paper screen that tore under his weight.
She made sure not to hit lethal spots.
Three men, charging with baseball bats, ran at her screaming, fueled more by panic than courage.
Hina didn't waste bullets.
Instead, she used the black duffel bag like a flail, swinging it with devastating centrifugal force. The dead weight of Luigi's head slammed dead-center into the first man's chest, cracking his ribs and knocking the wind out of him.
Before he could fall, Hina used her momentum to grab the second man's arm, twisting it into a lightning-fast joint lock that popped the bone with a nauseating crunch, then shoved him into the third.
In under twenty seconds, the corridor was a carpet of men groaning, weeping, and writhing on the fine hardwood floor.
Hina walked among them, her tactical boots making zero sound. No one tried to stop her. Those still conscious recoiled, crawling away from her as if she were the incarnation of Death itself.
'Why?' Hina asked herself through gritted teeth, pushing the door to return to the stairwell. 'Why is Sabushi using civilians? Despite his cruelness, he never dared to hurt innocents.'
The answer was a cold blade twisting in her gut.
Easy.
Sabushi knew the new Hina, and he knew that loving Kai had made her human, distancing her from the apathetic monster she once was.
He wanted to dirty her hands again; he wanted to prove to her that, to get what she wanted, she had to revert to the psychopathic killer he had created.
'You'll always come back to me, Hina. You can't run away from your destiny forever.' Those were the words that Sabushi had repeated since she was a child.
The climb from the third to the fourth floor was a choreographed massacre, a meat grinder of despair.
On the third floor, the lights were completely blown.
Hina found herself in a maze of administrative offices, swallowed in darkness, illuminated only by the lightning flashes of the storm, which was beginning to rage outside the hotel, and the muzzle flashes of enemy fire.
Here, the men were more numerous and slightly better armed. Pump-action shotguns, Uzi submachine guns held in trembling grips.
Hina was forced to dial up the lethality because she couldn't afford to take a hit, not with Akira and Kai relying on her on the lower levels.
She then took a deep breath and became a ghost.
She used the sound of their own shaking footsteps to track them in the dark.
When a man opened fire with a shotgun, obliterating a row of computers and glass desks, Hina materialized from his blind spot.
She severed his wrist tendons with a clean slash of her dagger, disarming him, then struck his temple with the butt of her pistol, sending him into a coma.
But when three men ambushed her from a conference room, opening fire with coordinated desperation, the mercy vanished.
Hina immediately responded with lethal efficiency with three shots in rapid succession.
Three black holes dead center in their foreheads. The bodies dropped in unison.
As she stepped over the corpses on the fourth floor—a wellness center whose white marble walls were now redecorated with arterial spray—Hina's breathing began to grow heavy. Not from physical exertion, but from the crushing psychological weight of this senseless slaughter.
There was no honor in these deaths. There was none of the tactical challenge she felt when facing rival gangs.
She still had the sensation that she was moving through people who had nothing to do with Sabushi.
When she kicked open the door to the fifth floor, the metallic stench of blood mingled with stale cigar smoke and antique velvet.
The fifth floor was the Grand Imperial's private casino—a vast, once-opulent hall now sporadically lit by red emergency strobes and the flashing LEDs of slot machines kept alive by auxiliary generators.
Roulette and blackjack tables were overturned, repurposed as makeshift barricades.
Here, the air was electric. The second Hina's boot hit the luxurious floral carpet, all hell broke loose.
"Shoot her! Don't let her through!" a desperate voice shrieked from behind the mahogany bar.
A hail of lead poured toward her. Bullets pulverized a pyramid of crystal glasses, raining razor-sharp shards everywhere. Slot machines exploded under the crossfire, vomiting cascades of gold and silver coins that chimed against the floor in a macabre soundtrack.
Hina dove behind a massive, mirror-clad marble column. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a single second.
She counted the sounds, memorized the reload rhythms and realized that there were six of them.
All armed with semi-automatic pistols.
Zero tactical training; they were blindly emptying their magazines in sheer panic.
The moment she heard the signature click-click of three weapons running dry simultaneously, Hina broke cover.
She was an angel of death dressed in gray and black. She slid across the coin-covered carpet with lethal grace. She fired two shots on the move, dropping two men trying to reload behind a craps table.
She didn't kill; she aimed for the legs and shoulders, neutralizing them with surgical precision that rendered them harmless but breathing.
A third man lunged at her from behind a pillar, wildly swinging a red fire ax. Hina didn't even raise her gun. She side-stepped, evaded the clumsy cleave, and brought the edge of her hand down hard on the back of his neck, striking the vagus nerve.
The man folded like an empty sack, instantly unconscious.
A fourth tried to sprint toward the escalators, but pathetically tripped over his own feet, smashing his head against a metal step and knocking himself out.
Hina stopped, her smoking gun pointed at the floor. The casino had fallen dead silent, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the occasional clink of a coin dropping from a gutted slot machine.
She was about to holster her weapon and head for the stairs to the sixth floor when she heard it.
A faint, broken sound. Weeping.
Hina turned slowly, her ice-cold grey eyes sweeping the red-tinted gloom. The sound was coming from behind an overturned luxury blackjack table near the massive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the burning city.
With measured, silent steps, Hina approached. She flanked the table, weapon raised, ready for anything.
Curled in a fetal position on the floor was a man, probably in his forties.
He wore a suit that was once elegant, now torn and caked in dust.
His hands, convulsively clutching a crumpled photograph, were slick with his own blood from crawling over broken glass.
He didn't even have a weapon.
He was only shivering so violently that his teeth chattered.
"Little Yuki..." the man sobbed, his wide, unblinking eyes staring into the void, blind with terror. Tears carved tracks down his filthy face. "I'll come home... I promise. Daddy's coming home. He just has to... he just has to pay the debt..."
Hina froze. The scene hit her chest like a sledgehammer.
Yuki. The name echoed in her skull, a ghost of innocence in a rotting world. Maybe it was just a coincidence that she shared the name of the righteous police chief, or maybe it was just the name of a little girl who was about to become an orphan.
The man finally registered Hina's shadow looming over him. He looked up. When he saw the gray parka, the tactical boots, and the barrel of the suppressed gun pointed squarely at him, he let out a choked whimper, like a beaten dog. He desperately tried to scramble backward, his bleeding fingers clawing at the carpet.
"Please... please, don't kill me," he begged, his voice cracking into a pathetic falsetto. He held up the photograph as if it were a magical shield. It showed a smiling little girl with braids. "I have a daughter. She's only seven. I didn't want to do this... I didn't want to fight!"
Hina slowly lowered the weapon, but her gaze remained carved from stone. "Who are you? Why did Sabushi fill the lower floors with civilians instead of his own men?"
The man swallowed hard, cold sweat beading on his forehead. "D-debts. The casino... I lost everything at roulette two months ago. I borrowed money from the Kobayashi Dragons sharks to try and win it back. Ten million yen. They took my house. They threatened to... to take my wife and daughter and sell them."
The man broke down into uncontrollable sobbing, burying his face in his bloody hands.
"Last night," the man continued through his weeping, "Sabushi's men rounded us all up. The debtors, the junkies, the desperate. They locked us in here and handed us weapons. They said the Empire would be attacked. Sabushi made an announcement over the PA system. He said, 'Bring me the head of the girl in the gray parka, and all your debts are forgiven. You will be free men.' It was the only way... the only way to save Yuki!"
Hina ground her teeth together, a furious, dark, and unstoppable rage boiling in her gut.
'He wouldn't have accepted my death. He was literally sending these poor people to death to take care of their debts and... to test me.' Hina thought.
Sabushi was a sick genius. He wasn't trying to exhaust her physically. He was trying to break her psychologically.
He wanted her to realize that every step toward him required destroying innocent lives, desperate fathers, and people who were victims of his own empire of terror.
If Hina slaughtered them all, she would still be the irredeemable monster Sabushi had always wanted her to be. If she hesitated and died, he won anyway.
A hidden message to say "You can't change your nature, and you can't change the way you arrived at the top, my beautiful daughter."
"Sabushi is a liar," Hina said, her voice as cold and sharp as ice. "Even if you had killed me, you would never have gone back to your daughter. The Kobayashi don't forgive debts. They recycle them. They would have killed you just to avoid paying the bounty."
The man looked at her, his eyes brimming with absolute despair as the inescapable truth of her words set in. He dropped the photo and bowed his head, exposing his neck in a gesture of total resignation.
"Then do it," the man whispered, closing his eyes. "Kill me. At least my life insurance will pay out something to my wife."
Hina stared at him for a long moment. In her mind's eye, she saw Kai.
She remembered when he came to look for her when Naomi was kidnapped, and how he didn't run away after seeing her stabbing the fake boss. He was ready for everything, just to help her, like the man in front of her.
Then, Hina smiled for an instant, realizing that she wouldn't let Sabushi tear her apart from the inside.
With a fluid, lightning-fast motion, Hina crouched and struck the man with an open palm at the base of his neck, directly on the carotid sinus.
It wasn't a lethal blow, but it was precise and powerful enough to instantly sever the blood flow to his brain for a fraction of a second.
The man's eyes shot wide for a heartbeat, then his muscles completely slacked, and he slumped forward, unconscious on the casino carpet, his breathing slow and steady.
"Sleep," Hina whispered. She picked up the photo of the little girl and carefully tucked it into the pocket of the unconscious man's jacket. "When you wake up, the police will have surrounded this place. You will be alive. And your debt will die today, right alongside Sabushi."
Hina stood back up, feeling a microscopic, almost invisible sense of relief expand in her chest. She had held onto her humanity. She had made a choice the "old Hina" would never have made.
But the Grand Imperial Hotel was not a place that forgave mercy.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
The sound of a slow, rhythmic applause, dripping with sarcasm, echoed through the vast, ruined casino. The sound seemed to bleed from the shadows near the VIP bar entrance.
Hina spun around, snapping her gun up and tracking the source of the noise, her heart suddenly kicking into a frantic overdrive. Her survival instinct, which had remained dormant against those desperate civilians, instantly reignited, screaming danger.
"What a touching scene. Truly, I almost shed a tear. From ruthless assassin to the Florence Nightingale of debtors. How far you've fallen."
The voice was high-pitched and childish, yet saturated with a sadistic, lethal undertone that clashed disturbingly with its playful cadence. It smelled of artificial strawberries and gunpowder.
Hina's body twitched in alert and her eyes widened. She recognized that voice almost instantly.
A figure stepped out of the shadows.
It wasn't a terrified debtor, nor a suited thug.
It was a girl. She sported a distinctly tomboy, punk-anarchist aesthetic: an oversized black leather jacket heavily studded with pins and chains, a torn fishnet shirt that revealed faded scars and tattoos, baggy cargo pants, and heavy military combat boots. Her hair was short, messy, dyed a toxic neon pink, framing a pale face dominated by two massive, deranged eyes. She loudly chewed a piece of gum, blowing a pink bubble that popped and stuck to her lips before she reeled it back in with her tongue.
Hina felt a sliver of solid ice slide down her spine and her eyes widened. Her mind reeled, desperately trying to stitch together two images that had no right to coexist.
'No...' she thought.
The pink hair. The bright smile.
The girl from the park. The first one who had approached her, welcoming her into that group of innocent strangers just to make her feel normal, and also the one who had stolen her first boyfriend.
It was her.
As soon as Hina met her eyes, another image appeared in her mind.
A top-secret mugshot Sabushi had shown her years ago. The photo of a ghost, a scholastic urban legend. The photo of a criminal that was plastered across government and Interpol most-wanted lists. A ruthless hitwoman who worked for the government's shadow echelons, A serial killer who didn't murder out of duty, but for the pure, simple pride of watching the light extinguish in people's eyes.
Aiko Nakamura.
The one famous for the legend of her death, along with Shota, in Kai's school, long ago.
Now she was alive, right in front of her eyes.
"My little girl, it's been so long!" Aiko chirped, throwing her arms open in a theatrical, friendly gesture, while a manic, psychopathic predator's smile severely distorted her once-cute face. "I was really hoping you'd make it up here! Those softies on the lower floors were getting so boring to watch!"
Hina tightened her grip on the Glock, her knuckles turning bone-white. The revelation hit her like a runaway freight train. The group at the park, her desperate search for normalcy, the hope of making civilian friends... it had all been a farce. A gargantuan lie orchestrated just to keep an eye on her.
"Aiko," Hina whispered, her voice heavy with a hatred that bordered on absolute madness.
"In flesh, blood, and murderous intent!" Aiko sang, slowly drawing two razor-sharp karambits from her jacket sleeves, twirling the finger rings with hypnotic, lethal agility. "You know, Sabushi was so mad when the media started talking about you. He sent me here to make sure you don't cause any more trouble. And besides... I couldn't possibly miss the chance to dismember my bestie!"
Aiko tilted her head, her giant eyes narrowing into two lethal slits as her murderous aura violently saturated the casino air, making Hina feel almost like the prey in the room.
The true Gauntlet had just begun, and the fifth floor was about to transform into a slaughterhouse where mercy would find no quarter.