The rain seemed to intensify, matching the furious thrum in Mika's ears. Her katana had barely been re-sheathed, and now it felt like she was being verbally skewered. Her fists clenched, knuckles turning bone-white, and a dangerous spark ignited in her eyes.
"Arrogance?" Mika hissed, taking another step forward, closing the distance between them until their chests were almost touching. Her voice was a low, dangerous growl. "I'm the one who put a hole through that Cryptid. My skill speaks for itself, Kei. Or are you just going to 'grade' us from the sidelines, Overseer?" Her voice dripped with disdain for the new title.
Vivian, ever the pragmatist, intervened before Mika could do something regrettable. She placed a firm hand on Mika's shoulder, her grip a silent warning. While Mika's pride bristled, Vivian's mind was working overtime, trying to piece together the implications of this abrupt and unwelcome mandate. Kei's words stung, but his information was undeniably accurate.
"He's not wrong about your temper, Mika," Vivian conceded softly, but her eyes, still fixed on Kei, were sharp. "But let's be clear. We've earned our rank. We understand the Chairwoman's concerns, Kei, especially with the younger recruits. But to assign an Overseer to us—Count Ranks who have consistently delivered—it suggests a fundamental lack of trust in our judgment and abilities."
Kei simply sighed as he turned to look at Vivian. "You're no different, Hunter Vivian. You are supposed to be the analytical mind of your team but when your intellect was needed on how to deal with that Cryptid, you provided nothing."
Vivian's calm demeanor, usually an unbreakable shield, wavered for a split second. A muscle in her jaw twitched, almost imperceptibly. To have her tactical acumen questioned, and in such a dismissive tone, struck deeper than any physical blow.
"I didn't 'provide nothing'," Vivian replied, her voice taut, laced with an unusual edge of offense. "We've never encountered an Arachnoid of that specific subspecies before. My priority was containing its mobility and ensuring civilian casualties were zero while I assessed its weak points. It wasn't 'nothing', Kei. It was standard threat management for an unknown Cryptid." She paused, her silver eyes glinting under the streetlights, a stark contrast to his own. "The difference is, you already had the intel. We didn't."
"Unknown? That Cryptid's information is plastered on every text book and Cryptid database that you all have access to. Don't give me that excuse Hunter Vivian. It makes you look petty." answered Kei, his voice lowering into a dangerous undertone.
The low, dangerous undertone in Kei's voice seemed to hang in the air, a chilling counterpoint to the relentless rain. The insult struck Vivian like a physical blow, stripping away the last vestiges of her composed facade. Her jaw tightened, and for a fleeting moment, her hazel eyes flashed with genuine fury..
"Petty?" Vivian's voice was a barely controlled whisper, laced with an intensity that startled even Mika. "I know the Hunter Association's Cryptid databases, Kei. I've memorized every entry relevant to our sector. The Grade 2 Arachnoid: Jumping Spider, as you classified it, was not listed with the detailed structural weakness you cited in any public-access manual or even our secured Count-rank files." She stepped forward, ignoring the puddles splashing around her tactical boots. "Are you calling me a liar, Overseer? Or is it that the Association has decided to withhold crucial information from active Hunters?"
Mika, whose temper had been barely restrained, finally snapped. Her katana, still half-drawn, clattered back into its sheath as she shoved Vivian slightly aside, stepping directly into Kei's space again. "Don't you dare call her petty!" Mika's voice exploded, raw and untamed. "Vivian is the smartest person I know, and she practically lives in those damn archives. If it wasn't there, it wasn't there! Who are you to question her competence, you just-appointed paper-pusher? You want to talk about incompetence? How about the Association not providing us with up-to-date intel if it's 'plastered on every textbook' in your world?"
Reina, sensing the escalating tension, shrank back slightly. She murmured, her voice small. "I don't remember seeing a jumping spider in our field guide, either. Just generic arachnoids." Her wide, innocent eyes darted between Kei and her enraged teammates, confused by the sudden, heated argument over textbooks.
Kei simply enumerated the book page and where it can be found within the digital database with a detached expression.
The detailed enumeration hit them like a splash of ice water, colder than the rain still pelting down. The sheer specificity—page numbers, database pathways, classification codes—was overwhelming.
Mika's furious momentum stalled completely. Her mouth, open to deliver another scathing retort, snapped shut. She looked from Kei's indifferent face to Vivian, her eyes wide with a mix of shock and utter mortification. Her temper, for once, was silenced by pure, unadulterated embarrassment.
Vivian's eyes, usually so steady, widened fractionally. Her hands, which had been ready to defend her expertise, faltered. A cold dread seeped into her. She fumbled for the comms unit on her wrist, her fingers surprisingly clumsy. With a series of rapid taps, she brought up the digital Hunter database interface, her brow furrowing in intense concentration. She navigated through the menus Kei had rattled off, her analytical mind struggling to process how she could have missed something so fundamental.
"No... no way," Vivian muttered under her breath, her voice barely audible over the patter of the rain. Her fingers flew across the holographic keyboard projected from her comm, following Kei's precise instructions. The pages loaded, and then, slowly, agonizingly, the data appeared. Detailed schematics of the Grade 2 Arachnoid: Jumping Spider, common behaviors, and yes—its vulnerable ventral plating. It was all there, exactly as Kei had described. A heavy, sickening wave of realization washed over her.
Reina, meanwhile, had pulled out her own wrist-mounted tablet, her brow furrowed in concentration. She scrolled frantically, her eyes scanning the digital pages. "Oh! Oh, it is here!" she exclaimed, a faint blush creeping onto her cheeks. She looked up at her teammates, then at Kei, her expression a mix of awe and slight shame. "Viv, Mika... I think we might have skipped that chapter."
Mika felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. The arrogance Kei had just accused her of felt like a lead weight in her gut. She had been so certain, so righteous, and he had just debunked her, Vivian, and Reina in front of them all with cold, hard facts. Her initial fury began to twist into a mortifying, incandescent shame. She couldn't even meet Kei's gaze, instead glaring at a rain-slicked puddle at her feet.
Vivian slowly lowered her arm, the holographic screen vanishing. Her face was pale, stripped of all color by the revelation. The crushing weight of her failure, her core competence as the team's strategist, was palpable. She had always prided herself on being meticulously prepared, on knowing every possible threat. Yet, here was an Overseer, a total stranger, proving her wrong in the most public and humiliating way. Her carefully constructed composure cracked, leaving her exposed and vulnerable.
"How... how could we have missed that?" Vivian whispered, her voice strained, a raw question directed more at herself than at Kei. Her usual certainty was gone, replaced by a profound self-doubt. The silent implication was clear: if they missed this, what else had they overlooked?
Kei's eyes moved as they locked on to Reina who is currently flustered. "And you, Hunter Reina. You always play around when you fight. Expending unnecessary stamina and wasted movements."
Reina, who had just been sheepishly confirming the database oversight, felt her face flush even darker. Her cheerful demeanor, which had barely survived the previous revelations, now flickered like a dying flame. She wasn't one for heated arguments, but the direct criticism, following the undeniable evidence against Vivian and Mika, landed hard.
"Wasted movements?" she echoed, her voice losing its usual bubbly lilt. She looked down at her hands, then back at Kei, a small frown forming on her lips. "But... but I thought it made me quicker! More agile! Sometimes I gotta dodge, and then, you know, spin to get the right angle for a hit!" She gestured vaguely with her hands, trying to demonstrate her style. Her explanation, however, sounded thin even to her own ears under Kei's unflinching gaze. The joy she usually found in combat, in the fluid, powerful movements of her gauntlets, suddenly felt cheap, inefficient, wrong. Her shoulders slumped ever so slightly, the last remnants of the group's lightheartedness deflating entirely. "Is... is that really so bad?" she finished, her voice barely a whisper, a stark contrast to Mika's earlier roars of defiance.
Mika, still reeling from her own humiliation, shot a glance at Reina, then back at Kei. Her earlier rage had cooled into a simmering, wounded pride, and seeing Reina so deflated only stoked it. She still wanted to lash out, but the weight of the undeniable evidence—the database for Vivian, and now the critical assessment of Reina's style—kept her rooted. The feeling was a poisonous mix of shame, anger, and a grudging, unsettling respect for Kei's brutal accuracy.
Vivian remained silent, her mind racing. The meticulous strategist had been found wanting, and now her team's individual strengths were being dissected and dismissed with surgical precision. The realization that they were indeed "in much worse shape" than Kei had anticipated, and that he was disturbingly correct, was a bitter pill to swallow.
"As of right now, you're defective weapons. Liabilities to the Association."
Being dismantled verbally was one thing but being called liabilities by a man in a fancy suit was the last straw.
The silence that followed Kei's declaration was deafening, a vacuum in the midst of the relentless rain. It wasn't just an insult; it was an absolute demolition of their identities, their purpose, their very worth as Hunters. The air crackled, not with residual Cryptid energy, but with pure, unadulterated outrage.
Mika, whose temper had been boiling beneath a thin veneer of shame, finally erupted. A guttural snarl tore from her throat, raw and animalistic. Her katana, which she had so recently re-sheathed, was out in a flash, its polished blade gleaming menacingly as she pointed it directly at Kei's throat. Her hand trembled with the force of her rage, the hum of her Aura a dangerous tremor.
"Defective... weapons?" Mika's voice was low, dangerous, a growl ripped from the depths of her soul. Her entire body shook with fury. "We are not things for you to grade, you cold-blooded stranger! We are Hunters! We put our lives on the line every single night, we protect this city from horrors the likes of you could ever comprehend! You think a few data points on a screen makes you qualified to judge us, to call us liabilities?!"
Vivian's breath hitched, her face draining of all color, leaving her features stark against her dark hair. Her eyes, usually so analytical and controlled, blazed with a fierce, almost terrifying intensity. Her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides, knuckles bone-white as if she was trying to hold herself back from launching forward. She stepped closer, her gaze locked onto Kei's with an intensity that rivaled Mika's, a cold, hard fury replacing her earlier hurt.
"You have no right," Vivian said, her voice dangerously quiet, each word an icy shard chipping away at the silence. "You have no right to come in here, observe us for five minutes, and tear down everything we've built, everything we are. We may have made mistakes, we may have missed a file, but we are not defective. We are dedicated, and we are effective. This isn't just about 'casualty rates', is it? This is about you, 'Overseer,' flexing your newfound authority and belittling the people who do the actual fighting."
Reina, the vibrant, energetic heart of the group, looked utterly shattered. Her lower lip began to tremble uncontrollably, and her wide, innocent eyes, usually so full of sunshine, welled up with unshed tears, glistening in the harsh, reflected light. She hugged herself tightly, her shoulders slumping, her entire posture radiating profound vulnerability. The words "defective weapons" seemed to echo in the damp, industrial air, crushing her spirit entirely. She couldn't even manage a retort, simply stared at Kei with a look of wounded disbelief and heartbreak.
The three idols, celebrated by millions, stood broken and seething under the indifferent judgment of one impassive man in a fancy suit, their pride not just stung, but utterly eviscerated.
"Point that blade away if you don't want to get hurt, Hunter Mika."