Chapter Two: Better Investments
"No, don't," she requested, embarrassed. "I don't-"
"Don't what?" Asante asked her. "Don't want to show me these risqué garments of yours'? But they look good on you."
"Hirazuki-san, no, don't-" But she gave in quickly enough as he began to disrobe her, pushing her back onto his apartment bed.
Ritsuko, watching the security camera and viewing Asante engage in his usual post-mission ceremony, thought: My God, does he ever stop?
The young woman he was with was Harada Eri, a nurse working at a local general hospital. She lived alone, and had treated Asante one day in lieu of an available physician. He had taken her virginity and ever since she had been his lover, regularly used and abused by him.
Ritsuko didn't condone such behavior, but had been forced to put up with it. Since Yuge had been promoted to Captain, he'd left their squad years earlier, and now Asante had been partnered up with Lieutenant Morita, now in his 40s and much less adept at practical law enforcement (yet he never failed to berate Asante for failing to be promoted). Ritsuko was now 29, her 30th birthday lingering on the horizon. She was unmarried and had no boyfriend or even lover, so she was regularly berated by the administrators for her tendency to bury herself in her work.
Unpleasant as it was to watch Asante take some young woman nearly every night, it was part of her job now. Tokken knew Asante was a loose cannon and intended t keep him pacified, with Ritsuko monitoring his progress and regularly reporting back to them. She didn't much care for Asante's utter disregard for the importance of love and compassion in a relationship, but was nonetheless grateful to him. He'd covertly defied orders to bring her a prize.
Turning her attention away from the security camera, Ritsuko smirked. "Are you awake now, Gendo?" The man with glasses only nodded from behind the glass. "Would you care to explain what you were doing in the Antarctic?"
Gendo smiled. "There was a UN compound set up beneath the ice sheet. I came to recover the research there."
"Liar," Ritsuko snapped. "Why did the Russians accuse you of trying to detonate it?"
"You didn't let me finish, Dr. Akagi," Gendo replied in his suave, direct manner. "You remember the key failure from 2000, don't you?"
"Only in that it convinced my mother to kill herself," Ritsuko snapped.
"That wasn't the reason she killed herself," Gendo replied. "She did that because I didn't return her twisted affection for me."
"Don't flatter yourself," Ritsuko told him, hastily changing the subject. "What were you trying to find down there?"
"In 2000, after the failure of the project and the departure of the research team, I insisted that we resume investments, pooling resources away from the current defense budget spending and towards continued research on replicating our find out there," Gendo explained. "The old men decided the formation of Tokken was a better investment."
"What were you trying to find?" Ritsuko repeated.
"The Lance of Longinus," Gendo answered simply. "Or, more accurately, the second version of it. The spear that could pierce God himself."
The next morning, Asante stepped into the Tokken Shinjuku office, where he was immediately ushered to a meeting with the administrators.
"We don't normally start you on another assignment so soon, but the man in charge has requested your presence," an administrator told him. "Your old commanding officer Captain Yuge asked for one of our official conscripts, and you're the only one in the country at the moment."
"Yuge?" Asante asked with a snort. "What does he want me for?"
"Just backup, if he should need it," another administrator replied. "Today you're supposed to meet his subordinates." Papers shuffled about. "Imari Kurumi and Ichikawa Aki. Both are going to be investigating (name) University later today."
"I went to that school," Asante pointed out. "And Imari-san was one of my classmates."
"That is just good providence," an administrator grunted. "You'll be meeting later with Vice-Chancellor Oshima, once you've had an opportunity to meet your new teammates."
"What about Dr. Akagi and Morita-senpai?" Asante asked.
"Lieutenant Morita has been hospitalized," another administrator answered. "He was in a traffic accident."
Though Asante thought it might've been proper to show concern, he honestly didn't care that his partner had been hurt. "Very well. Where is Imari-san now?"
"She's making a stop by the bank with Ichikawa. She's probably in civilian dress. Would you like some photographic identification-?"
"I'll know her," Asante replied. He turned and exited, much to the old men's displeasure; he continued his rather juvenile tendency to ignore formalities and honorifics.
He found the bank less than half-an-hour later, but was immediately prevented from entry by a group of police officers, and walked over to the nearest one. "Detective, what's going on?"
The detective -Yamanishi Naoko- asked: "Who are you?"
"Lieutenant Hirazuki, Tokken," he replied, hastily pulling out his badge. "I have reason to believe two of our agents are in the facility."
"We're not sure,' Yamanishi answered. He turned to examine something a patrolman gave to him. "If you'd like-" He stopped in midsentence upon seeing Asante having apparently vanished entirely, right in the middle of a group of police officers.
In actuality, Asante had just sank into the ground and propelled himself past the police barricade and inside the building, passing by a single masked gunman guarding the door. Inside, he found bank tellers and clients alike engaging in all sorts of unusual sexual acts, but he kept his attention strictly on locating these two women, and continued further back through the bank, towards a bathroom stall...
...in time to see a tall, long-haire woman snap one of the masked gunmen's necks, grinning lewdly. While Asante had no objection to seeing women kill men, he found it unusual that this woman apparently had a fully functional -by virtue of the fact it was erect- penis.
That, and, based on the structure of her thick brown hair and the facial features, she was also Kurumi Imari.
Damn, Asante thought. That's hot. Freaky. But hot.
Meanwhile, back at Tokken headquarters, Dr. Nagamine had finally had enough, and spoke to the administrators with a very clear goal in mind.
"A field test?" one asked. "Now?"
"Yes, sir," Nagamine replied. "Under controlled conditions. In a district not currently undergoing our investigation."
"The purpose being...?"
"You asked me to show results," Nagamine answered. "I'd like a chance to do so."
"We're pooling a lot of resources into another situation at the moment," an administrator stated rather gruffly. "We may not have the manpower needed to contain it."
"Zarathustra will obey my commands," Nagamine assured. "I have faith in him."
"Very well. Draw up the scenario and report back to us once you've decided on a time and place, Doctor."