"Showtime."
The doors opened.
Hanae had exactly one second to register what she was seeing before the world became noise and fire.
Six automatic rifles. Professional stance. Pre-sighted angles. Someone had done their homework.
The muzzle flashes were like camera strobes in the darkness—brilliant, rapid, wrong. Not the sharp crack of handguns but the sustained roar of full-auto fire, the sound a chainsaw makes when it bites into hardwood. The air inside the elevator didn't just fill with bullets—it became bullets, became a solid wall of lead moving at 900 meters per second.
The gold-tinted mirrors exploded. Not shattered—exploded. Each pane detonating into a million glittering fragments that hung suspended for a heartbeat before the pressure wave from the gunfire sent them spinning inward. The elevator became a snow globe of razored glass and violence.
The wood paneling splintered into sawdust. The control panel sparked and died, buttons rupturing like popped blisters. The gentle jazz—still playing somehow, some circuit still functioning—warped and distorted as the speakers took rounds.
It was a kill box. A metal coffin engineered to turn flesh into paste.
Jiro had planned for men. He hadn't planned for this.
"Takeshi." Hanae's voice cut through the roar like she was asking him to pass the salt. She didn't flinch. Didn't duck. Just stood there watching death approach at 900 meters per second.
"OSU!"
Takeshi moved with a speed that physics should have forbidden. He didn't look for cover—there was no cover, just three square meters of mirror and death. Instead, he reached down and grabbed the unconscious guard they'd dragged into the elevator, the one Reina had put to sleep in the lobby.
The man weighed maybe ninety kilograms. Takeshi hoisted him one-handed like a riot shield.
THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK.
The body danced. Each impact jerked it in a different direction, physics and flesh fighting a losing battle against kinetic energy. Blood misted the air—not spurting, not flowing, just atomizing into a pink fog that mixed with the white smoke of gunpowder. The smell was immediate and overwhelming: copper and sulfur and something burning that might have been cloth or skin or both.
Takeshi roared—not pain, not fear, just raw exertion—bracing his shoulder behind the corpse. His feet dug through the expensive carpet into the metal floor beneath, finding purchase. His legs were shaking with the effort of standing against that sustained pressure, bullets hammering the dead man's body like rain on a tin roof.
"Reina." Hanae was lighting a cigarette now. The flame from her gold lighter was perfectly steady even as a bullet passed close enough to her ear that she felt the heat, close enough to sever a single lock of hair that drifted past her face in slow motion.
"Wheeee!"
Reina didn't block. She liquefied.
As the bullets chewed through the upper half of the elevator—systematic, professional, exactly where center mass should be—the small woman in the Gothic Lolita dress dropped. Not ducked. Dropped. Her spine seemed to disappear, her body pressing flat against the floor with the boneless grace of something that had never had a skeleton to begin with.
She slithered. Actually slithered, hands and knees moving in a pattern that was more serpent than human, sliding through a growing pool of blood and pulverized glass. The shards should have shredded her palms, her knees, any exposed skin. She didn't seem to notice or care.
She passed under the cone of fire. Slipped through the gap in the opening doors like smoke.
The mercenaries—six men in full tactical gear, arranged in a perfect semi-circle formation that spoke of professional training—didn't see her. They were tracking the big target, the cleaver-wielding giant. They were shooting at chest height, head height, the standard engagement zones.
They weren't looking down.
It was the last mistake any of them would ever make.
Reina popped up in the center of their formation like a jack-in-the-box from hell. She was inside their minimum engagement distance, too close for the rifles to track, a blur of black lace and matte steel that caught the hallway lights and drank them.
"Barcodes!" she giggled, voice bright and cheerful like she was greeting customers at the convenience store.
Her left karambit hooked into the point man's inner thigh with surgical precision. She didn't slash—that would be wasteful. She hooked the blade into the femoral artery and yanked.
The curved blade did what it was designed to do. Sank deep, found the vessel, and tore it out with a wet sound like pulling a root from muddy ground.
The man's leg stopped working instantly. Just stopped, the signal from brain to muscle severed along with the artery. He collapsed, and his rifle—still firing because his trigger finger was locked in a death grip—sent rounds into the ceiling. Acoustic tiles exploded into white dust that drifted down like snow.
Blood didn't flow from his leg. It sprayed. Arterial spray, pulsing with his heartbeat, painting the white walls in a Jackson Pollock of red. He had maybe forty-five seconds before unconsciousness. Two minutes before death.
Reina was already moving.
She used the falling man as a springboard, one foot planting on his shoulder as he went down. She vaulted over the second guard in a move that would have looked beautiful if it wasn't so terrible.
Mid-air—actually airborne, both feet off the ground—she drove her right karambit down into the gap between his helmet and his Kevlar vest. The sweet spot. The place where armor ended and soft tissue began.
The blade punched through the trapezius muscle and kept going, severing the nerve cluster that controlled his right arm. His hand—the one holding the rifle—just opened. No conscious decision, no pain response yet, just the signal being cut.
The rifle clattered to the tile floor.
"Two down!" she chirped, landing in a crouch that somehow managed to look playful. Blood was soaking into her dress, turning the black lace glossy.
The remaining four mercenaries realized their mistake in the way professionals did—quickly, efficiently, already adjusting. They spun inward, rifles tracking down, trying to acquire the small target bouncing between their legs like a nightmare made of frills and steel.
"Now," Hanae whispered.
She'd already finished her cigarette. Was already grinding it out on the elevator floor with her heel.
Takeshi dropped the corpse. It hit the elevator floor with a wet slap, perforated beyond recognition, more holes than flesh.
Then he charged.
It was like watching a freight train derail. All that mass—easily 120 kilograms of muscle and rage and repressed frustration from six years of chopping vegetables—accelerated from zero to ramming speed in three steps.
He hit the two center mercenaries with his shoulder lowered. The impact was audible over the ringing in everyone's ears from the gunfire—a sound like a car crash, like something expensive breaking.
Both men left their feet. Not fell—were launched. Their boots cleared the ground and they flew backward, rifles tumbling from nerveless fingers, traveling three meters before hitting the drywall.
They didn't bounce off the drywall. They went through it.
The wall exploded outward in a shower of white dust and broken studs. The mercenaries disappeared into the office beyond, and Hanae heard the distinctive sounds of bodies hitting furniture, of something expensive shattering, of lungs trying to remember how to work.
Takeshi didn't stop. Didn't pause to confirm the kill. He raised his meat cleaver—that ridiculous, beautiful piece of German steel that he'd kept sharp for six years on faith alone.
The hallway became an abattoir.
The third mercenary tried to bring his rifle around. Takeshi's cleaver came down in an overhead arc that started somewhere near the ceiling. The blade caught the rifle's barrel and sheared through it. Just cut through reinforced steel like it was bamboo, the two pieces of the weapon falling in opposite directions.
The mercenary stared at his ruined rifle for a fraction of a second—long enough for Takeshi to reverse his grip and drive the pommel of the cleaver into the man's solar plexus.
The man folded. Literally folded in half, his body making a V shape that spines weren't designed for. He hit his knees, then his face, and didn't move.
The fourth mercenary got smart. Dropped his rifle—useless in close quarters anyway—and pulled a knife. Military issue, serrated blade, designed for one thing.
He lunged at Takeshi's kidney with the technique of someone who'd done this before.
Takeshi twisted. The blade scraped across his white chef's jacket, parting fabric but missing flesh. He grabbed the mercenary's wrist with his free hand and squeezed.
Bones broke. The distinctive sound of small bones giving up—not a clean crack but a crunching, multiple fracture. The knife clattered to the floor.
Takeshi headbutted him. The mercenary's helmet split. The man inside it split too, going down in a heap.
Meanwhile, Reina was playing with the fifth mercenary like a cat with a particularly stupid mouse.
He was trying to track her with his sidearm, a Glock pulled from his tactical rig, but she was too fast. She'd hop left and he'd track left and she'd already be right, bouncing off the wall, the ceiling, a decorative table that exploded under her foot.
She was laughing. Actually laughing, the sound high and bright and completely insane.
"You're too slow!" she sang. "Too slow, too slow, can't catch the Viper!"
She landed on his shoulders. Her thighs locked around his neck in a move that looked almost sexual until you realized she was holding her karambits in a reverse grip, blades pointing down.
She drove both blades into his collarbones. Not deep—just enough. Just enough to hit the nerve clusters that made his arms stop working.
The gun fell. His arms fell. His everything fell.
Reina rode him down, giggling the whole way.
The sixth and final mercenary—the smart one, the one who'd realized this was fucked from the moment that small woman had slithered under their gunfire—was running. Actually running, tactical retreat, trying to get to the stairwell.
Hanae sighed.
She stepped out of the elevator. Her heels crunched on the carpet of brass casings that covered the floor, hundreds of them, still hot enough that she could feel the heat through her shoes.
Smoke swirled around her suit, clinging to the wool like it was attracted to her. She reached up and straightened her tie, which had gotten slightly crooked during the ambush.
"Takeshi."
The giant looked up from the mercenary he was currently standing on. "Yes, Boss?"
"The runner."
Takeshi's head swiveled. He saw the sixth mercenary twenty meters down the hallway, almost to the stairwell door, almost to safety.
He didn't run after him. He grabbed one of the discarded rifles from the floor, checked the magazine with practiced efficiency, and fired a three-round burst.
The first round hit the mercenary in the back of his right knee. His leg buckled. The second round hit his left calf. He went down. The third round missed because he was already falling.
He hit the floor hard, started crawling, still trying to escape even with two ruined legs because training and survival instinct were still screaming at him to move.
"Leave him," Hanae said. "He's not going anywhere."
She looked at the carnage. Six professional killers reduced to meat and regret in under thirty seconds. The white walls of the hallway were painted red now, a color scheme her uncle clearly hadn't intended.
Reina hopped down from her victim, wiping her karambits on a throw pillow she'd pulled from somewhere. "Aww, Boss. I was just getting warmed up."
"Save your energy." Hanae looked down the hallway that stretched before them. "You'll have plenty more to eat inside."
The hallway had once been beautiful. Hanae remembered it from her childhood—sliding shoji screens, minimalist aesthetic, carefully arranged pottery that was worth more than cars. Her father had designed it to be a place of contemplation, of respect for tradition.
Now it looked like Vegas had vomited onto a shrine.
Greek statues—cheap replicas, not even good forgeries—lined the walls. The kind you'd see in a new-money mansion, classical figures with fig leaves over their genitals. The walls were painted gold. Not tasteful gilt accent work. Flat, garish, spray-painted gold like someone had confused wealth with taste.
The carpet was leopard print. Actual leopard print, the kind that had gone out of style in the 80s and never come back.
The air smelled wrong. Stale perfume trying to cover unwashed bodies. Heavy narcotics—marijuana and something chemical, synthetic. The particular funk of places where people went to forget themselves.
Hanae walked forward. Her shoes made no sound on the tacky carpet.
"Jiro," she murmured, smoke trailing from her lips. "You have terrible taste."
Takeshi and Reina fell into formation behind her. Takeshi was covered in plaster dust and blood—none of it his. Reina's Gothic Lolita dress was soaked crimson, her twin tails matted with gore. They looked like demons from an old scroll painting, yokai following their master through hell.
The first door they reached was vibrating. Hanae could feel the bass through the walls—EDM, the kind with no melody, just relentless hammering beat.
"Open it," she ordered.
Takeshi kicked the door. Not a careful kick. A kick. His foot went through the lock mechanism, the handle, part of the frame. The door exploded inward, hanging on one hinge.
The room beyond was a lounge that had been repurposed into something else entirely.
Dozens of people sprawled on low sofas. Men in expensive suits with their ties loosened, shirts unbuttoned, looking like executives who'd given up on pretending. Women in various states of undress, some passed out, some just vacant-eyed and swaying to the music.
The center table was covered in narcotics. Lines of white powder arranged with care. Pills in candy colors. Bottles of Dom Pérignon sweating in silver buckets.
When the door crashed open, the music didn't stop—it was too loud for that—but the people froze. Turned their heads in slow motion, pupils dilated into dinner plates.
They saw Takeshi first. A mountain of a man outlined in the doorway, covered in dust and blood, meat cleaver in hand.
They saw Reina. A tiny figure in a blood-soaked dress, spinning her knives like batons, grinning like Christmas morning.
They saw Hanae. Immaculate in her black suit, smoke curling from her lips, radiating cold like she'd brought winter into the room.
A lieutenant—young, maybe thirty, expensive suit, white powder crusted around his nostrils—stood up. Swayed. Squinted at Hanae like he was trying to remember who she was.
"Who..." he slurred, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. "Who invited you? This is a private party."
Hanae walked into the room. Her eyes swept over the scene—the drugs, the unconscious women, the waste—and settled on a particular bottle in the ice bucket.
She picked it up. Read the label.
"1998," she said quietly. "Dom Pérignon. Oenothèque vintage." She turned the bottle in her hands, watching condensation drip onto the carpet. "My father bought a case of this the year I was born. He was saving it for my wedding."
She looked at the lieutenant. "You're drinking my wedding gift."
The lieutenant blinked. His drug-addled brain tried to process this information and failed. "What? Who cares? The old man's a fucking vegetable anyway. Jiro says we can take what we want. Says it's the new era. Says—"
"Vegetable."
The word came out flat. Final. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
Hanae's grip on the bottle tightened. The glass groaned.
She swung.
It wasn't a wild swing. It was precise. Measured. The heavy glass base of the champagne bottle—solid, weighted, designed to withstand pressure—connected with the lieutenant's temple.
The sound was distinctive. Not the bottle breaking. The skull breaking. A wet crack like stepping on a walnut, the shell giving way to pressure it was never meant to withstand.
The bottle didn't shatter. The man's head did.
He dropped without a sound. Just stopped being vertical and became horizontal, hitting the floor with a thud that barely registered over the music.
The room erupted.
The women screamed—high, sustained, the sound of people who'd come here for a good time and were drastically revising their expectations. The men fumbled for weapons they'd set down, shoved under cushions or buried under cocaine, fingers suddenly clumsy with adrenaline and narcotics.
Hanae turned her back on the room. Started walking toward the door.
"Reina," she said, voice carrying despite the music. "Clear the trash. Women walk free. Men don't."
"Yes, Boss!" Reina's squeal of delight was almost musical.