The rain fell in silver needles as the courier stumbled into their hideout, his breath coming in wet, ragged gasps. Blood seeped through the crude stitches sealing his lips—a warning and a message in one.
Amasu caught him before he collapsed, her augmented fingers slicing through the silver wire with surgical precision. The man spat out a rolled parchment sealed with wax the color of dried blood before his eyes rolled back. He was dead before he hit the floor.
Lynn cracked the seal without ceremony. The parchment unfolded like a living thing, its edges squirming momentarily before lying still.
"Third District," he read, voice flat. "Lord Hideo's winter estate. Extraction mission—his personal vault, anonymous."
Hashiba leaned against the rusted support beam, arms crossed. "What's the payload?"
"Does it matter?" Amasu smirked, plucking the note from Lynn's fingers. Her ocular implant whirred as it scanned the elegant script. "Payment is triple our usual rate. Plus whatever we can pocket." She tossed the parchment into their makeshift stove, where it burst into eerie green flames.
Lynn stood abruptly, his longcoat scattering rainwater. "Gear up. Wheels roll in ninety."
As they prepared, Hashiba noticed Lynn checking his revolver with unusual care—loading each bullet individually, his thumb brushing the custom-etched casings. Memory rounds. Hashiba had only seen him use those once before, in the ruins of Old Kurosawa.
Amasu caught his questioning look. "Hideo's no ordinary mark," she murmured while adjusting her whip's tension settings. "They say he collects more than just art."
A crash from the armory made them both turn. Kaito stood over a spilled crate of grenades, his mechanical arm sparking. "Sorry! The new actuator—"
"Leave it," Lynn snapped. "You're on overwatch."
Kaito's face fell, but he nodded. Some jobs required subtlety.
The rain had turned to mist by the time their armored truck rumbled through the District's checkpoints, Amasu's forged clearance codes bypassing each security scan with electronic ease. Hashiba watched the neon-lit streets blur past, his reflection warping in the rain-smeared glass.
Something about this job itched between his shoulder blades.
Lord Hideo's estate rose from manicured grounds like a tombstone—all black marble and sharp angles. The perimeter wall hummed faintly, its surface crawling with anti-climb nanofilaments.
Amasu's eye dilated with a soft click as he inserted some sort of lenses. "Thermals show four at the main gate, two roaming east gardens. All armed with Mk-III shock batons and..." She frowned. "Those look like prototype pulse pistols."
Hashiba adjusted his gloves. "Since when do house guards carry military hardware?"
"Since never." Lynn racked his revolver's slide. "We go silent until the vault. Amasu—alarms. Hashiba—rear guard."
They breached through the west service entrance, where the security system's blind spot coincided with the kitchen staff's smoke break. Amasu's splicer made quick work of the biometric lock, its LED blinking from red to green as she whispered, "We're in."
The kitchen smelled of saffron and spoiled meat. Stainless steel counters gleamed under motion-activated lights that flickered on as they passed. Hashiba's blade found the chef's throat before the man could scream, his body crumpling soundlessly into a walk-in freezer.
"Clear," Amasu breathed, her whip coiled tight around another guard's neck. The man's face turned purple before she snapped his spine with a sharp twist.
Lynn moved like smoke through the servant's corridors, his revolver picking off targets with methodical precision. Two rounds to the chest, one to the head—each shot muffled by the custom suppressor that made the reports sound like books dropping on carpet.
Then the lights turned red.
"Perimeter breach detected," chimed a feminine voice from hidden speakers. "All security to sector seven."
Amasu cursed. "They weren't supposed to—"
The door exploded inward.
Three armored figures filled the doorway, their visors glowing faintly blue. Not ordinary guards—Hideo's personal retinue.
The lead enforcer's voice boomed through his helmet's grill: "Drop weapons and—"
Lynn shot him through the visor.
Chaos erupted.
Hashiba barely dodged the second enforcer's shock maul, the electrified head passing so close he smelled ozone in his hair. He countered with a knee to the gut, feeling armor buckle under the impact. His follow-up elbow strike shattered the visor—revealing milky eyes and scar tissue where eyebrows should be.
Amon's whip shrieked through the air, its monofilament strand bisecting the third enforcer's pistol mid-trigger pull. The severed weapon exploded in its owner's hand, filling the corridor with smoke and the stench of burning flesh.
"Stairs!" Lynn barked, firing upward as more guards descended.
Hashiba took point, his saber flashing in the emergency lights. The first guard died mid-leap, his throat opening in a crimson smile. The second managed to block Hashiba's initial thrust, but didn't see the hidden dagger in his off-hand until it found his kidney.
Amasu fought like a dervish behind him, her whip creating a deadly perimeter. When a guard got too close, her boot knife found his femoral artery in a spray of arterial red.
Lynn provided covering fire, his memory rounds doing horrific damage—one bullet turned a guard's arm to glass, another caused his target's bones to liquefy mid-stride. The corridor became a charnel house of screaming men and unnatural deaths.
At the third-floor landing, they hit resistance.
Twin enforcers in heavier armor barred the way, their gauntlets humming with contained energy. Hashiba barely dodged the first gravity punch—the air itself rippled where the blow landed, warping the steel banister like taffy.
Amasu's whip wrapped around one's leg, but the monofilament snapped against the reinforced plating. The enforcer backhanded her into the wall hard enough to crack plaster.
Lynn fired three rounds. The enforcer's chestplate spiderwebbed but held.
Hashiba saw his opening. He vaulted over the railing, driving both boots into the second enforcer's back. As the man staggered, Hashiba's saber found the weak point at his neck joint. The blade sank deep, releasing a geyser of coolant fluid and blood.
The remaining enforcer roared, charging like a bull. Lynn sidestepped at the last second, pressing his revolver to the man's temple.
The shot echoed through the stairwell long after the body stopped twitching.
"Study," Lynn panted, reloading. "Now."
Lord Hideo's study smelled of sandalwood and paranoia. Motion-sensitive turrets deployed from the ceiling the moment they entered—only to power down as Amasu's splicer overrode the security protocols.
The keycard floated in its vacuum-sealed display, bathed in pale blue light.
"Pressure sensors," Amasu murmured, wiping blood from her ocular implant. "Laser grid. And... is that a neural scanner?"
Hashiba studied the pedestal. The base pulsed faintly, like a sleeping thing. "It's alive."
Lynn ejected a spent casing. "Hashiba. The vial."
From his coat, Hashiba produced the stolen liquid memory—a swirling silver substance contained in glass. He poured it into the pedestal's access port.
For three heartbeats, nothing happened.
Then the display case fogged over, its security systems convinced this was just another routine inspection. The locks disengaged with a series of soft clicks.
Hashiba reached in—
—and the mansion screamed.
Not an alarm. An actual scream, reverberating through the walls like a living thing. The lights flickered violently before settling into an ominous red glow.
Amasu's eye dilated. "That wasn't me."
Lynn snatched the keycard. "Move."
As they ran, the walls began to bleed.
A horrifying shriek bled from the speakers. Two minutes until vault self-detenation.