The screams and roars and other sounds of violence from within the interrogation room lasted maybe 5 minutes at most, before the cessation of the former shortly thereafter ended the latter two. Another minute or two later, the door opened again. Interrogations had been known to get messy before and the interrogation room was designed and stocked with that in mind, and as he stepped out of it Keitaro was already wiping copious amounts of blood out of his hair and off of his face and hands with a towel. His clothing though, was probably ruined, as no amount of washing was likely to get them completely clean again. Keitaro was panting slightly, and were it not for the look of gruesome satisfaction on his face (and, of course, all the blood), he might have looked like nothing more than an athlete who'd just finished up a good game.
The guards elsewhere in the main area of the detention center had seen things not too different from this before, and were well-practiced in minding their own business as interrogations were undertaken. Ordinarily, this sight wouldn't have fazed Kanako very much either, but an unpleasant sense of discomfort was again making itself felt at this new and out-of-character image of Keitaro. She hoped the feeling wasn't apparent in her expression as her eyes met his.
"Let's get the team ready. We should head out immediately," Keitaro said, flatly and with no emotion other than determination, as he quickly exchanged his blood-soaked clothing for a fresh set he'd brought with him from his and Kanako's room.
"Alright. But ..."
Keitaro stopped dressing and looked over at her. His facial expression quickly convinced Kanako that what she was going to say should probably wait until she and Keitaro were alone.
"Nothing. You're right. We should move quickly, there's no telling when the enemy will move their headquarters."
Keitaro nodded shortly once, and then as soon as he had finished putting on fresh clothes, the two of them walked silently together to one of the conference rooms, where they paged their teammates. As they sat down next to one another at the head of the table to wait for them, Kanako spoke.
"Before we do this, there's something I'd like you to keep in mind," Kanako said softly as she turned her head towards Keitaro. Keitaro met her gaze, and his expression was still blank save for an unmistakable look of determination.
Kanako took a deep breath before continuing. Under different circumstances she would have left the matter alone until Keitaro had better regained his center, but because they were about to potentially head into combat, she felt it necessary to speak her mind now.
"I'll be honest. I'm worried about you. I won't lie to you and say that I understand what you're going through right now. I don't. But I do understand that you want to avenge Mutsumi and the destruction of your home. Remember that ultimate vengeance will be winning this war, and the only way that will happen is if we keep our cool and use our heads. Before we brief the team and head out, I want you to promise me something."
Keitaro knew where this was going, and it really wasn't something that he wanted to hear. But he also knew both that Kanako was right and that her concern for him was absolutely genuine, so he forced down the reactionary irritation that had risen at her words and did his best to calm himself down.
"And what's that?" Keitaro replied after a moment.
"Promise me that you won't do anything irrational while were out there. You will bring no justice to any of your friends or to yourself by harming our war effort by acting out on emotional impulse. Or even worse, by getting yourself killed. Remember, our mission for the time being is reconnaissance and we should not engage the enemy except in self-defense. When the time is right, you and I will personally lead our full force against them, and that will be the time for your revenge. Not now. Are you with me on this?"
For the first time Keitaro was aware of the way Kanako's words took some steam out of his runaway emotions. This realization surprised him, but only for a moment. Kanako had been one of very few people in Keitaro's life who had always had an innate ability to comfort him when he was upset. Keitaro took a deep breath.
"I promise," he replied, simply but sincerely.
Kanako smiled at him, but before she could say anything else the first of their teammates came through the door.
It took no more than 20 minutes for the entire team to arrive at the conference room, and the meeting itself was a relatively short affair too. Kanako played the part of the recording from the interrogation where the prisoner spoke of the location of his headquarters and aspects of its layout and defenses, and then Keitaro explained that they were going to scout out the site, get a feel for it and the area around it, track the enemy's movements if they should leave, and figure out the best way to attack once the forces necessary had been amassed. Dismissing the team with orders to be ready to move out in one hour, Keitaro and Kanako were again alone in the conference room.
"Let's get Rikyo and Gennai on the line and tell them what's going on," Keitaro said, after the very short moment of silence that passed after the last of the troops had left the room.
Kanako just nodded, and hit the speed dial button on the intercom for Gennai. Keitaro picked up the phone and dialed Rikyo's number, and then linked the phone line into the intercom system. After a couple of beeps and rings, both leaders answered almost simultaneously.
"Rikyo here." "This is Gennai."
"Good evening, sirs. This is Keitaro and Kanako Urashima," Keitaro said, doing a slight facial double-take as he realized how he had addressed Kanako and himself. "We have an important update for the both of you."
"Of course," said Rikyo.
"We've uncovered a strong lead on the location of the foreign vampire headquarters. We are preparing to go to this suspected site even as we speak to confirm or deny the validity of the lead. If our information is correct, we will need the bulk of both our forces to destroy the enemy invasion force in its entirety once and for all in a manner that presents both the greatest chance for success and poses the least risk to our people. We will contact the two of you again from the field once we know for sure one way or the other, but if this is indeed the real thing, then we will need to recall the troops that are protecting our various outposts at once to deal with it."
Kanako listened with a raised eyebrow as Keitaro spoke to both his and her superiors in this manner that sounded almost commanding. But the silence from the other end of the intercom didn't last long enough for her to think much of it.
"Good work, you two. Please contact us the moment this lead is confirmed or denied," Rikyo said to Keitaro and Kanako, and then he addressed his vampiric counterpart. "How long will it take you to marshal your troops, Gennai?"
"I'd say two nights, tops."
"Oh dear ... why is your army still on vacation? Didn't anyone tell you that we're at war? What are my people supposed to do while we wait for yours to catch up?" Rikyo's grin almost seemed to make itself visible through the speaker. This was quickly matched by an audible chuckle from Gennai.
"Beware, old friend - during the course of this war your people might accidentally discover that Japan is a lot bigger than that little hole in the ocean that you call an island, and then you might just catch them spreading out a bit too."
Both leaders let out another short chuckle, and then Gennai addressed Keitaro and Kanako.
"Do the two of you need anything from us to facilitate your reconnaissance operation?"
Suddenly Kanako got an image in her head of Keitaro requesting whatever forces the two leaders had readily available, and she quickly thought to head that off.
"No thank you, sirs. Our team is quite adequate as it is for this purpose," she said, a look from Keitaro seeming to confirm Kanako's suspicion of what he had in mind.
"Very well then. Anything else for the moment?" Gennai asked.
"No sirs," Keitaro interjected, his voice going back to something unreadable.
"Then stay in touch, and the best of luck to you. See you when you get back," Gennai said, and then the faint beep of the closing of his intercom line was heard.
"You two look set to become legends in your own time. I'll look into setting you guys up with your own private island when this is over," said Rikyo, and then his line beeped closed too.
Keitaro was motionless and silent as Kanako slowly reached over the table and clicked off the intercom unit.
"The team should be ready within the hour. Let's go get ready ourselves," she said softly.
Keitaro just nodded, and the two of them made their way back to their room.
Neither Keitaro nor Kanako found anything to say as they dressed themselves in their armor and collected their weapons of choice. Only as they were about to leave their room did Kanako speak up.
"Don't forget your promise. Both as your professional partner in war and as a person who cares about you on the personal level, I expect you to keep your word," she said as she reached for the doorknob.
Keitaro seemed somewhat subdued by that time, and without any clear sign of resistance, he said simply, "I haven't forgotten."
With that, they left their room and headed down to the ready room where their team waited for them.
The briefing was short and to the point, not that there really was much of a point to make. They were to head to a known location, see if their enemy was there, watch and observe them if they were, and turn around and come home if they were not. With that, they filed out into the same black SUVs that they had used before, and drove out to the site.
Keitaro was out of his vehicle almost before it had even come to a complete stop. The urgency had returned to his demeanor, and much to Kanako's chagrin it was proving infectious to the rest of the team. Most of them were still riding high on their previous victory anyway, and no one other than Kanako knew anything about what had happened to Keitaro's home and his friend.
"Alright troops, this is just like before. Fan out, check out every building. Everyone stays in constant communication, and anyone finds anything, you let the rest of us know last night. Right?" Keitaro said, addressing the ranks of the team as everyone gathered around the trunks of their vehicles and rearmed themselves with the weapons and armor that did not lend themselves to carrying and wearing on the person while riding in a car.
"Yes sir!" "Roger that!" "You better believe it!" Came the assortment of enthusiastic replies from the team members. Kanako's concerns about Keitaro sticking to the mission profile were obviously returning, but she did not wish to say chastise Keitaro in front of the team.
Kanako chose her words carefully. "Don't get too excited, boys and girls," she said, doing her best to sound nonchalant as she tucked her carbine neatly underneath her cloak. "There will be no ass-kicking tonight. The enemy should never know that we're here until we return with the cavalry. Anyone fires a single shot tonight, and it had damn well better be life-or-death, because otherwise it will be more death than life for the one who blows our cover." She made sure that her tone of voice was less threatening than were here words, but was still serious enough to let them know that she meant business. She aimed a subtle glance at Keitaro as she spoke, but he was looking around at the immediately surrounding buildings and streets and did not notice. Only as the trunks of the vehicles slammed shut when everyone was fully equipped did Keitaro speak again.
"Showtime, troops. Let's pair off and get hunting," he said purposefully. When the two originally separate teams had amalgamated and Keitaro and Kanako had assumed command over the entire lot, the two commanders had made sure that their unified team was well organized. This included establishing pre-determined teams of two and three for just such an occasion, so compliance with his order was immediate and orderly. Naturally, it did not make sense for the two commanders to make up their own pair, so Kanako's anxiety clicked up a notch or two as she and her partner went a different way than Keitaro and his.
The many pairs of scouts did not take much time to disperse. As immortals typically did when operating within cities, the foreign vampires had chosen another warehouse and industrial area for the site of their alleged headquarters because of the minimal human presence there at night. However, this area was rather smaller in terms of square area than was the region they scoured to find the staging area, and as such it did not take nearly as long as it had that time for someone to find what they were looking for.
Stressing the unity between the Japanese vampire and Lycan communities had been a high priority for both races since the beginning, and as such most of the duos were comprised of one vampire and one Lycan. One such pairing had been stealthily making their way between a line of small sheds that separated rows of larger warehouses when they had inadvertently come within a half-inch and a half-second of being spotted by the very enemy they had been hunting. As they silently began to cross in front of one of the sheds to take cover behind another, with considerable dismay they realized that the side of the shed they had just stepped across was cut out and a pair of foreign vampire sentries were seated inside it, calmly sweeping the 180-degree area ahead of them with thermal binoculars. By sheer chance they had both been looking away from the direction the scouts had came from when they stepped into their field of vision, and only by the sheer speed at which they'd assessed the situation and the fleetness and silence of their hasty retreat had they avoided detection with nay an instant to spare. Not knowing if they were already within eye- or earshot of any other hidden enemy sentries or electronic observation devices, the scouts opted not to send any kind of signal and risk being detected. Instead, they noted their location, and retreated exactly the way they'd came, figuring that if they'd already been seen along that route, being seen to leave couldn't do any further harm. Once they were satisfied that they would be outside the range of any electronic counterintelligence, they immediately got on the radio.
"Keitaro! Kanako! This is Team 10, come in! We have made contact with the enemy, over!"
The excited message rang loudly through the earpieces of the named individuals' radio headsets, as well as those of everyone else. Keitaro and Kanako especially felt their stomachs immediately tie into knots, albeit for very different reasons. Keitaro was the first to reply.
"Team 10, what is your location and what is your immediate situation, over?" Keitaro said into his radio as he and his partner stopped walking.
Due to the importance of getting on site as fast as possible, they had not had time to plot out the area into neat little grids as they had on their last reconnaissance mission, and so the scouts of Team 10 had been forced to make note of both their current location and the location of the actual sighting in street names, nearby buildings and other such landmarks. But every team had a GPS device with them that could give directions to a known location and allow them to operate almost as efficiently as if the could have put a grid on the area."Right now we're at the corner of Kissaki Street and Yuka, and the sighting was in the sixth small shed on the outside from the street coming from our direction! The post was clearly designed to not be visible from the street but to cover the less obvious means past that spot, I think they're being much more careful this time! No enemy made any contact with us and we were not spotted by the sentries we found, but given this level of precaution, we may well have been seen by some other lookout or electronic device and not realized it!"
Keitaro's lips pursed in frustrated, impatient indecision. After getting their clocks cleaned so ingloriously once before, it only made sense that the enemy would touch up their security practices a bit and although he admittingly hadn't given the matter too much thought before, he was not surprised. One part of what Kanako had said to him had really stuck though, the bit about it being important not to blow their cover before they could acquire the intelligence they needed to plan a full-scale strike. But then again, Team 10 could have already been spotted for all they knew, and if for fear of being seen they didn't pursue the sighting at all, then that was a guaranteed mission failure. Plus, if their reconnaissance efforts were repulsed by a massive force of foreign vampires, that would at least seem to confirm that an enemy stronghold was in the immediate area, and once the perimeter of the enemy-occupied area was established, Rikyo's and Gennai's forces could lay siege to it and dispose of the invaders whenever a good time came up.
Keitaro's mind made short work of his initial indecision. Pulling out his map, he said into his radio, "I think we should regroup at Team 10's location and concentrate our search in the area of the sighting. What say you, Kanako?"
"Agreed," came Kanako's voice through his earpiece.
"Alright. We'll reconvene there and map out a new search pattern."
A round of "Ten-Fours" came from each team.