'We can't win.'
A single glance had told her as much: neither she nor Tatsumi stood a chance against this one.
Her eyes dropped to the dead guards' hands.
The two guns were still there.
The girl — Akame — turned to take in the pair of strangers who'd appeared out of nowhere, holding them in her gaze a moment.
And her own face registered in theirs.
'She's… cute?'
Of all the thoughts to have first, what surfaced in Tatsumi's mind was that this girl was so cute, so pretty... and then — so strong!
Seryu, by contrast, had worked herself up to a fever pitch, blood well and truly pounding.
"The wanted criminal — Akame!" she shouted, every trace of her earlier caution gone, and threw herself forward.
"You've got some nerve, murdering people in the Capital — I'll bring you down right here!"
"Haaa!" Seryu's fist rocketed out.
Akame didn't so much as blink.
She shifted her feet a fraction, expression unmoved, and slipped calmly aside from the punch that split the air where she'd stood.
Whiff! Whiff! Whiff!
Punch after punch met nothing but empty space, so Seryu feinted — pretending to overbalance mid-swing — then planted both hands on the ground and brought a great spinning heel-kick crashing down.
A training dummy would have lost its head to a blow like that; no living body could have taken it.
And yet all Akame did was thrust her scabbard out to meet it, stopping the terrible kick cold and scattering every ounce of its force.
"Who are you?" Akame studied the girl who'd come at her out of nowhere, sparing a glance for the dumbstruck Tatsumi off to the side.
"You two aren't targets."
'Hm?'
Seeing that Akame wasn't hitting back — that she could turn the attacks aside without effort — Seryu's thoughts went straight back to the guns.
She edged a couple of steps toward the corpses, then rolled in a flash, vaulting clean over the bodies, hands sweeping the ground so that she came up with a pistol gripped in each.
"Oraa! Take this!"
Seryu leveled both guns at Akame and hosed the whole area down.
Akame's face stayed as blank as ever.
As the twin tongues of muzzle-fire came spitting toward her, she swayed nimbly to one side, then the other, then sprang high, landed well out of range, and bolted without a backward glance.
"Running, are you?" Seryu tore after her at once.
But something about it struck Tatsumi as off.
He'd caught the girl's murmur a moment ago.
'Not targets?'
Was that why she hadn't struck back?
Those two men with the guns had been utterly powerless against her — she'd killed them without a thought, which meant she could just as easily have killed Seryu.
But she hadn't lifted a finger to.
'She isn't fleeing at all — she's carrying out what she came here to do!'
"Wait — Seryu!"
Tatsumi raced after the two of them, chasing the pair a full two or three kilometers without a break.
'Just how rich is this family?! Their place is enormous!'
As he ran the winding paths, screams and the clash of slaughter reached him from every side — not just his left and right, but from every direction at once.
Which meant the killers weren't only that one girl.
...
Twang—!
Something too faint to make out gave off a small tremor, carried back along threads all but invisible to the naked eye, to the hands that worked them.
Standing among his comrades, Lubbock spoke up suddenly. "Akame's on her way over."
Mine was first to answer. "Too slow. Why's it taking her so long this time?"
"Slurp." Leone ran her tongue over one clawed hand, puzzling over it too. "Right? A pack of small-fry like that couldn't hold Akame up this long."
Lubbock's face flickered. "Hang on — there's someone behind her. Looks like they're on her tail."
"Hm?" Bulat folded his arms across his chest and worked it through. "Mm. Imperial Police, I'd bet. That noise earlier was their signal — seems we've been made."
And right in the middle of all this back-and-forth, a figure dropped down into their midst.
"You're late!" Mine snapped at her at once.
"Sorry." Akame glanced around, and finding one comrade fewer than they'd come with, asked,
"Where's Sheele?"
"Tch. Got herself lost again, obviously. Works out, though — she can have all the targets inside the mansion."
"By the way…"
"What now?"
"There's a lot of them coming."
"Hah?" At Lubbock's words, the members of Night Raid turned to look past Akame — and there, a man and a woman came into view together: Seryu and Tatsumi.
...
The instant Tatsumi saw the cluster of people around Akame, he skidded to a halt and grabbed Seryu by the arm.
'This is bad — they've got us badly outnumbered!'
"Tatsumi?"
"Get a grip, Seryu. Take a good look."
The girl's eyes went forward, and in a single glance she took in the others standing alongside the wanted Akame.
From every one of them she felt a pressure that was, frankly, no lighter than what she'd felt off Akame herself.
"Night Raid… huh." A bead of cold sweat slid down Seryu's forehead.
She would see justice done — but she wasn't about to throw her life away on a fight she was so plainly going to lose, one she'd rate herself under a one-in-ten chance of winning.
'What do I do—'
And just as she was turning it over, a voice both familiar and steadying cut through the night.
"Well, well, Seryu — that's my girl! First one to track them down, no less."
The man's voice was followed by the rustle and tramp of many feet.
Seryu spun around, joy breaking across her face, to find her master and her fellow officers had arrived.
"Master!"
'Eh? Master?' Tatsumi looked in astonishment at the hulking man striding up at the head of a whole company of soldiers.
If he had it right, Seryu had mentioned her master was the captain of the Imperial Police — the man they called Ogre the Demon.
Seeing him in the flesh, Tatsumi understood the name at last.
Between the pressure rolling off the man and that savage face, "demon" was no exaggeration whatsoever.
'Still — as an ally, that's about as reassuring as it gets!'
Ogre stalked forward and called out to the little group standing there like spectators at a play.
"Yo. You'd be the two-bit thieves who've been kicking up a fuss in the Capital lately — Night Raid, or whatever it is you call yourselves?"
He drew the long sword at his hip. "You brainless crooks — running into me tonight means your number's up. Move! Put these idiots down where they stand!"
At Ogre's bellow, the Imperial Police ripped their weapons free and charged straight for Night Raid.
Seeing just how many of them there were, Mine rounded on Lubbock, thoroughly put out.
"Oi, Lubbock, what gives? Some garbage barrier this is — you didn't catch this many coming?"
"Huh?! I literally just said it, okay?! You lot are the ones who wouldn't let me finish!"
"Hey, hey — can we not squabble over dumb stuff right this second?"
"Ogre the Demon — so he's shown himself." Leone fixed her stare on Ogre behind the wall of soldiers, her face gone hard.
"He's the target of our next job, as it happens." The wretched state their client had been left in surfaced in her mind all over again.
And the moment Akame heard that Ogre was a target, something in her snapped awake.
She closed her grip on her blade and shot forward.
"Hey! Akame — don't tell me you're planning to take them all on by yourself?"
Mine grumbled a "honestly," then hefted her Roman Artillery, Pumpkin, and swept fire across the front line.
The Imperial Police carried nothing but swords and light armor — and the armor only covered the torso and joints at that.
Guns were far too costly to issue, so Ogre had never bothered to consider them.
If men died, he'd simply recruit more since there was no shortage of people clamoring to join the Imperial Police these days.
Any coin that might have gone toward better gear, he spent instead on his own amusements.
Against a Teigu's fire, the officers went down in rows, like wheat before the scythe.
And anyone who closed to arm's reach was no match for Akame in the slightest — her figure blinked through the crowd, and a single horrifying slash sheared six or seven men clean in half.
Even without a one-hit-kill demon sword, no one was surviving wounds like those.
Watching his men fall so fast, Ogre's rage boiled over.
"What in the hell are you all doing?! There's only a handful of them!"
He drew his own sword, exploded forward at tremendous speed, and came at Akame's back for an ambush, a slash loaded with everything he had crashing down.
Akame twisted and slid out from beneath the blade.
Then, before she could even face him again, Ogre hauled up one of his own subordinates and flung the man body at her.
"…To the grave," Akame murmured, turning to cut the soldier in two at the waist.
By then Ogre was on her.
He hacked at her over and over, and Akame seemed to be forced onto the defensive, catching each stroke on her demon sword, ceding half a step of ground every time she blocked.
'That guy…' Tatsumi's brow knit as he watched Ogre.
The man had just hurled his own soldier out to die.
Sure, it looked like the girl called Akame had done the killing — but wasn't the one who'd truly killed him Ogre?
'Is he actually a good person at all?'
Under Ogre's assault the rest of the officers finally found their nerve and closed in a ring around Akame.
With swords bristling in from every angle, her room to move shrank to almost nothing; a single careless step and she'd be run through.
"Got you now, girl!" Ogre gave the order. "Kill her!"
And at last a flicker crossed Akame's blank face.
Her eyes went keen and cold, killing intent bursting off her all at once.
No one had time to see a thing — only a frigid glint that flashed across their sight.
When it faded, the whole ring of men who'd hemmed her in an instant before toppled every which way.
Ogre's own hand went with them, severed clean off.
"AAAAGHHH!!" But it wasn't the loss of his hand that had Ogre terrified — it was the curse of that demon sword!
Akame was known to half the Capital by now, and the fact that her blade carried a killing curse-poison had long since become common knowledge.
Staring at the blood jetting from the stump, Ogre set his teeth and, with his own sword, hacked his entire forearm off in a single stroke.
"DAMN it all—!" Ogre bellowed, reeling back several steps, barely holding his great bulk upright on the point of his sword.
"Master!" Seryu couldn't stop herself from wading in.
She rushed forward with the same fists and kicks as before — no threat to Akame in the least.
"The situation's changed. As of now, you're a target too."
Ogre was a mission target, which made the Imperial Police under him targets as well — and this girl was one of them, Ogre the Demon's own pupil at that.
There was no reason to let her go.
Akame raised her sword, poised to bring it down—
And at the last possible instant, a figure threw itself between them!
Cling!
Tatsumi braced his sword up in front of him, catching Murasame's edge with barely a hair to spare.
A heroic-rescue entrance like that had Lubbock letting out an appreciative whistle and... a small pang of envy underneath it.
Pulling off something like that was surely on every boy's list at least once!
Leone, though, took one look, realized who it was, and clapped a hand flat over her face, unable to bear watching it.
Of all the rotten luck — the country kid she'd scammed not six hours ago had somehow ended up crossing blades with Night Raid's ace assassin.
This poor boy couldn't catch a break to save his life!
She had to stop Akame, and fast — before she cut the innocent kid down!