The pool of blood flickered white with each muzzle flash. Thick, sulfuric smoke and treated wood dust clogged the air of the corridor, blotting out the light from the Tokyo streets below. A split-second lull in the firefight was replaced with a new chorus of gunshots. One bullet tore through the corner, narrowly missing a dark-haired girl with squared bangs that was crouched there.
She jerked her head back behind the cover of the reinforced concrete column. Splintered wood and plaster dust splashed against the navy blue of her uniform as a second shot passed. She leaned forward, trying to peer down the hall with her SIG-Sauer held up next to her cheek to be ready the moment that she needed to fire.
Just before she could raise her weapon the barrage of gunfire became heavier and she was forced to take cover. "How many bullets do they have? I don't think they've stopped firing more than five seconds." The dark sheet of Misuzu Gundou's hair didn't move as she spoke. She wasn't a first class Lycoris yet, but she had the steely nerves of one.
"Someone should radio DA, tell them that this is way more than a light armament." Marin Kitagawa's uncertainty showed in the quavering of her usually confident tone. She was kneeling with her left thigh flush against the wall a short distance behind Misuzu with her HK P30 near her side, the barrel of the gun was still warm from the last volley of shots she had fired.
Marin brushed the blonde and pink ombré hair away from her cheek with her clean hand, her other was clutching their third squad member, Hayase Nagatoro, by the shoulder where a small bullet or piece of shrapnel had torn into her body trying desperately to staunch the bleeding. Nagatoro, for her part, was hissing a string of curses under her breath with her gun gripped tight in her hand. The blood that had started at her wound had managed to fill the gaps between Marin's fingers and run down the length of Nagatoro's own arm to the wrist.
"How's she?" Misuzu asked right as she chanced some return fire during one of the rare lulls.
"Um, well, she's dealing with the pain her own way," Marin replied.
"Where is that blonde idiot," Misuzu sneered before looking to Marin and correcting herself. "I mean my blonde idiot."
They had been dispatched in a team of four, typically DA had a First Class Lycoris with a single Second Class or maybe a couple of Third Classes deployed under her. In this instance they had a pair of First-Class-Second-Class duos in the field together for what was meant to be a rogue gang thing. The four of them had come expecting to have to ward off a few ex-Yakuza, the type who typically didn't want trouble.
What they had gotten was this instead.
A scream followed by an uncontrolled bout of gunfire meant that Gundou had managed to find a target. But she was blind firing and couldn't be sure if he was dead or just injured.
Plus, there was no telling how many were down there; guns had been a real problem in Tokyo ever since some madman had hidden thousands all over the city and passed them out to every deviant and lowlife that he could find with their hands out.
"This is the problem with Nishikigi; she saves the city by killing one guy and vanishes. Meanwhile we're stuck here chasing down every heavily armed punk in the prefecture," said Misuzu.
"It stopped?" Nagatoro muttered.
Misuzu and Marin paused; the gunfire had gone silent shortly after Gundou's last shot. The three of them remained pressed into cover against the corner listening to just the sound of their own breathing and the night breeze billowing through the tarps that lined the scaffolding erected around the building.
"You only hit one," Marin whispered. "It couldn't have been just one guy doing all of that."
"They may have retreated?" Misuzu didn't sound confident. "Maybe they dragged their comrade away to treat him."
"Just get me on my feet," Nagatoro said. She grunted in pain as she tried to shrug Marin's hands away, but at least that meant that she still had movement and feeling in that shoulder. "Come on, we have to move before…"
Marin let out a low hiss to quiet them, but even before that Nagatoro had noticed the same sound as Marin and stopped speaking. There was a subtle, but steady buzz in the air. It was quiet, but seemingly only because it was further away.
"Do you hear that?" Misuzu practically mouthed the words.
Marin nodded. "Is that inside here with us or?" she whispered.
The sound intensified until it was a mechanical whirring being channeled to their end of the hallway from where the shots had been fired.
A drone.
It would stop and rotate, they could tell by the red beams of light scanning the hall and panning around along with the slight deviation in the noise that its motor made. There was little chance that the shooting at the end of the hall had come from one armed man and this drone—the patterns of the reloading, the sound of other voices, there had to be more people somewhere.
Gundou's pistol rang out as she slipped out of cover to loose two quick shots. The first one pounded into the drone just left of a circular area that looked like a camera, but before the second one could find its mark, the device banked hard to one side, lifting itself at an angle to avoid being hit.
Misuzu tucked her body further behind the cement column that was under the wall just as the drone returned fire, the elongated hum of the gatling gun echoed down the hall dying down when it didn't find its target.
"Okay, that's got to be automated," Marin said.
"You think?" asked Misuzu. "We certainly can't stay put."
"Ugh," Nagatoro switched her pistol to her off hand. "I'm good to walk," she insisted. By now the blood had dried, it crusted and crumbled off the dark skin of her arm and the handle of her gun.
"Marin, take point; I've got Hayase."
With a nod, Marin helped Nagatoro to her feet and pushed further into the corridor that they had taken cover in. Stacks of cinderblocks were piled against the inside wall and further down there were pipes lashed together with a strap to hold them in a neat bundle. The sound of the air sweeping through the building and the buzz of the drone were the only sounds at first, but there was a hallway that cut through the center of the building in the center of the block of the hall they were in. Someone was shuffling about, just out of view and as Marin reached the opening a tall figure with a black mask covering everything but their eyes stepped into view brandishing a rifle.
Marin grabbed the forestock of the gun before it fired, lifting it at an angle with one hand and pumping two rounds into her assailant's chest causing them to stumble backwards and release the other end of the weapon.
"They circled around!" Marin shouted as she holstered the P30 and brought the rifle up to rest in the divot where her shoulder and chest met. In a blur of motion Marin ejected the mag, checked it and pounded it back into place.
Another man rushed out and he was a bit too fast, even for Marin's reload. Gundou heard the squeak of his boot, but he was too close in the darkness for her to safely fire past Marin. Sliding her hand up into the side of her belt, Gundou slid the serrated combat knife that she kept nestled there out and wove her way between Marin, Nagatoro and the stack of cinder blocks.
Marin made a shocked sound as Gundou's blade flashed out, the silvery edge of the matte black knife glinted in the light from the Tokyo skyline for a split second before it caught the attacker in the neck below the ear.
Though Gundou was small, much smaller than Marin and the man she was attacking, she used her momentum to send him careening toward the scaffolding and the outside edge of the building. He crashed into the safety railing, narrowly keeping his balance while holding the gushing wound at his neck only for Nagatoro to dump four rounds into him and send him tumbling to the city street below.
Usually that would be too blatant a kill, the dirtbag could fall on one of the actual law-abiding citizens, but there were too many of them in the hall for Gundou to reprimand her. She pulled her SIG, gripping it with both hands while keeping the knife jutting out below the butt of the pistol.
Marin dropped into a high kneeling position at the corner and Gundou stepped in behind her, reaching down to tap her shoulder twice with the non-knife hand before slotting it back into place on her pistol's grip. The two of them popped around the corner, sweeping and firing to clear a path. Three more enemies crumpled in the first two meters of the center hall.
"We've got more at the far end!" Hayase yelled. There was no chance of them making it to the far end of this hallway, Gundou thought, not with that drone and more men coming up from behind.
"It's clear here, hurry."
Marin fired a couple of short bursts toward the other end of the hall, not bothering to aim and just hoping to buy Nagatoro some time. To her credit, Nagatoro did fire down the hall pistol sweeping out in front of her as she ran for the hall that bisected the building. There was a rewarding thud as one of the men down there slammed against the concrete floor and his gun clattered across the ground.
The three of them crouched together into the new hallway, Marin recycled the magazine off of another rifle into the one that she had stolen, slapping the side of the gun to make sure that it locked into place as she changed it out.
"These had to have come from that arm's deal," Marin said. "Since when does all of this count as lightly armed?"
"It never has," Nagatoro said. She had found a bit of a diamond in the rough of average firearms these guys were carrying, a silver Benelli M4 shotgun was laying on the floor near one of the bodies with the strap torn where Gundou or Marin had fired through it. She had propped the stock of the gun up against her thigh with the barrel aimed at the floor and was quad-loading shells into it when she asked. "Has DA intelligence always been this bad?"
Marin and Misuzu locked eyes. "Yes," they said in unison.
Misuzu was shaking her head as she brushed her knife through a cloth to clean the blood off of it. "Ugh, where is that squishy bitch?" she muttered to herself.
"That drone is close, we could head up to the end of this hallway—though if they're smart they're going to expect that and let the drone sweep around this way," Marin pointed to the hall they had been in that intersected this one. "And then they'll just catch us at the end of this hall."
"Either we beat them to the end of this hall and BAM! We take them out before they expect it or they meet the drone here and have to double back or chase us."
"Are you going to be able to handle that with your arm in that state?" asked Gundou.
"It'll be fine—for a bit," Nagatoro started. "Look, we don't have time to worry about it now."
The three of them moved up this hall, hoping to be around the corner before these attackers started firing at them and before they were in the opening running from that drone. It was slow, probably due to armor, but it seemed to have no issue shooting back when fired at. Misuzu wondered if that were something that they could use against these guys, but they probably had some control over the thing or protection against it accidentally targeting them.
Despite having walked all of this time, the corridor running through the center of the building felt longer than any they had seen yet. It couldn't have been longer in actuality, it occupied the same stretch of building as the others on this floor. They jogged, their Lycoris bags jangling as the buckles and straps knocked against the leather, the Saint Slippery's Academy for Girls charm that Marin had attached to the butt of her HK P30 knocked against the gun.
Nagatoro was breathing a little bit too hard and just from that Misuzu Gundou knew they wouldn't be able to keep at this for too much longer.
Just as they got three fourths of the way down the hall their pursuers opened fire behind them. None of the shots hit their mark, but it forced them to take cover. Then the red scanning beam of the drone swept down the hall. The attackers could have caught them in between, pinched down on them, but it didn't seem that they had to. There was nowhere for them to really go and if anyone else had circled around they would be caught soon enough.
"Shit," Marin hissed as she twisted around to fire with the rifle in one hand and braced against her thigh while firing with her pistol to end of the hall with the men in crowded into it.
They returned fire, one of the shots narrowly missing her head as she squatted into cover. But while they were taking their aim at her, Nagatoro loosed three shots from the Benelli. Its report reverberated through the corridor like crackles of thunder. One of the men was lifted off the ground and blood sprayed from him midair as the next shot ripped through him.
"You fuckers are really getting on my last nerve!" Nagatoro growled before Marin pulled her by the back of the shirt down into cover again.
"There's too many of them for that," Misuzu said chiding her.
"We've got enough firepower now," Nagatoro whispered. "If we rush them we could—"
"—all end up holier than Swiss Cheese," Misuzu finished the sentence.
"When has let's rush them ever been a good plan of attack?" asked Marin.
Nagatoro grunted, lowering the Benelli M4 to check the magazine. It was the military grade, if there had been one in the chamber she was looking at five shots left. "We need to do something quick," Nagatoro said. "Either we rush them or they—"
An explosive gunshot rocked the hallway. It was followed by another and another and another. The cacophony of gunfire seemed to warm the hallway and fill the space with an endless stream of sound so violent that Misuzu covered her ears. Nagatoro and Marin covered against the ground with Marin shielding her junior.
There was an explosion to the other end of the hall as something large and metal crashed against one side of the hall. It had to be the drone. In all ten rounds had torn through the corridor before the sound stopped. The gunfire of the men and the roaring buzz of the drone was absent and everything had fallen silent.
It was Marin who raised her head first. She leaned out to glance at the end of the hall where the drone had been and which the explosion had come from to find it clear. Before she could check the other side, a chipper voice let out a loud cheer.
Carol Olston, Misuzu's first class Lycoris partner, dangled from a bright yellow tow strap that had been tied to one of her ankles. She was hanging from the floor above them, rotating and swinging side to side with the .50 caliber Barret M82 dangling from her hands, her skirt had flipped up, only slightly, against the sides of her body. And her red uniform jacket had folded up her back, hanging down behind her blonde hair like a cape.
Marin and Nagator glared at her.
"Did I get them all?" Carol asked.
There were Lycoris who were just doing a job and barely getting by at it and then there were the hardened Lycoris that had honed themselves through years of dedicated training, there were even some who were born with a skill for killing so impressive that it made them rise to the tip top of the roster. Then there was the rarities, probably even more rare than the people born with a special skill, whose brain power was so dedicated to Lycoris work that they were utterly incompetent at anything else.
It was easy to tell which group Carol fit into.
Misuzu Gundou got up from her cover position and strode up to the side of the building where Carol was hanging from the scaffolding. Misuzu holstered her weapon in the satchel that they carried and grabbed the Lycoris's shoulders to keep her from swaying and spinning. "Carol, where were you?" Gundou asked with a stern snarl.
"My period started." Carol had this plain way of saying everything, but Carol's plainest speaking voice was overly saccharine and cutesy.
For a long time Misuzu stood there staring into Carol's face as she hung upside down, still holding her at the shoulders to steady her. Then she released her shoulders, pinched down hard on both of Caro's cheeks as hard as she could and pulled at them.
Marin sighed and turned to move further down the hall to check the rest of the area to make sure that they had taken care of every target, while Nagatoro just radioed headquarters and let them know they were going to need clean-up and a cover story. For as hard as Misuzu stretched her cheeks, Carol just closed her eyes and accepted her punishment.
She had grown very used to this exact thing.
When Misuzu had had her fill she let Carol go and gave her a quick spin to start her rotating again. Gundou spun around and walked back to join Nagatoro and Marin. It took Carol a little bit to realize what was going on.
"You have to cut me down, silly-billy," Carol said. "I'm in charge," she added in the same sweet tone.
"You're the clean-up team's problem now," Gundou turned her wrist over to check her watch. "Their response time is about ten minutes—shouldn't be too bad."