"Hey, have you heard the latest net-rumor?" The young man seated with his friends was someone that to even to an experienced eye had all the hallmarks of a nerdy Otaku as one of his party smiled.
"You mean the one about that one idol website?" He asked with a perverted grin before it flicked into confusion as the one who had spoken up shook his head, "Eh? That's not what you wanted to talk about?"
"Not this time dude. I got this off the #Chan boards; apparently there's a secret website where you can pay to have someone perform a crime for you!" He glanced from side-to-side, "The rumor goes that you pay any amount of money you want, and you will receive a choice of crimes you want committed based on how much you want to pay."
"Dude, that sounds like a total rip-off," One of his friends spoke up, "No way there's a website that lets people commit crimes using a proxy, it's just there to take your money." There as a pause as they all stared at the original speaker who started looking around shiftily, "You didn't..."
"You know that break-in at that snob Himura's mansion?" He suddenly spoke up, "I ordered that." He accessed his phone and then his emails, sliding the phone over to the rest of the group who took a look.
Thank you for your purchase on The Black Network. Please watch the news or check your newspaper to see if your purchase was successfully accomplished.
They all looked at him, and he met their gazes, "It cost me forty-thousand Yen and agreeing to their terms of service, which included not telling the police." His friends' jaws
dropped at those words.
Meanwhile, as other students ignored the antics of the school nerds, a red-haired girl in a different school uniform exited the main building and spotted them before checking her phone, where a photograph was displayed.
Nodding to herself and pulling up the scarf around her neck to create a mask over her lower face before walking over to the group of young men, checking their faces as she approached against the photograph on her phone before she looked up and spoke up, "Kuniyuki Isobe-san?"
The young man who was receiving his phone back noticed his friends were staring behind him and the light, musical voice caused his eyes to widen as he took a breath to calm himself while his friends smiled encouragingly at him. He turned around with what he hoped was a friendly smile, "Yes? How can I-"
In the space between his friends taking their eyes of her to encourage him, the girl had pulled a large pistol from her bag and aimed it squarely at the young man's head, "You violated the terms of the agreement and attempted to alert the police to the existence of the Black Network."
She pulled the trigger and the Desert Eagle bucked in her hand with a
boom that echoed across the school and Isobe's head vanished in a cloud of red as brain and skull matter before the pistol whipped up to the other three young men.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Students screamed and ran as the girl picked up the now-dead Isobe's phone and walked away from the near-headless corpses of the four students. Her path shifted and she headed towards the high wall surrounding the school grounds, her light steps picking up speed as teachers were informed and frantic phone calls made as the walk turned into a jog.
The sound of police reports over the earpiece in her right ear prompted the jog to become a run, a dash towards the wall but her breathing and heart-rate were steady and calm as the pistol was returned to her bag and beginning to fill her vision was the wall surrounding the school.
With a short, sharp 'Hup!' the girl
jumped and sailed over the wall in an artful flip, landing in a three-point crouch before smoothly rising and turning.
The man that had stopped at seeing a girl flip over a solid concrete wall and land in front of him simply stared as the girl shifted her gaze to him before turning and sprinting across the street to vanish into the alleyways of Tokyo City.
As the police arrived and witness statements were being taken while an ambulance took the bodies away, the girl was already discarding her uniform for more casual clothing while the school bag was slipped into a large backpack as she zipped up a motorcycle jacket and slipped a helmet on.
The black Ducati Diavel roared to life as she gunned the engine and began zipping through the streets of Tokyo, a city that was already beginning to feel the pain of a sudden, nation-wide and dramatic increase in violent crime, corruption and worse.
Elsewhere, as the local news began to pick up the story of the multiple homicide, another woman was walking towards the headquarters of a gang called 'The Empty Eyes' with a large carrying case in one hand, her bountiful chest barely kept in check by her white dress shirt under the long coat draped across her shoulders while eyes hidden by sunglasses regarded the gang member standing at the door with cold humor.
The door guard on the other hand, was openly leering at the woman as she casually tossed her long, blonde hair and spoke with a smile that didn't meet her hidden eyes, "Is Ichiro in?"
"Yeah, he is, but why are you going to see that loser?" The door guard smiled, nearly drooling visibly as his eyes undressed her, "I could show you a better time that Ichiro, baby."
"Well, I was going to get to you later, but I suppose I could do you first." The woman hummed thoughtfully she took a step forward, "Yeah, why not? And you're right, this will be fun."
The guard was about to celebrate bagging this babe when something prompted him to speak his mind, "Uh, hey, why do you want to see Ichiro anyway?"
The woman smiled and before the guard could say anything more, her hand flashed up and he felt them
tear through his throat, spraying blood across the ground as he clutched his throat, desperately gurgling as he stared at the woman, who held up a gloved hand with several throwing knives clutched between them.
"To do that."
Kicking the dying guard to lay him out on the ground, the woman casually stepped over him and entered the building as the man bled out behind her. Now inside the building, she placed the carrying case on the ground and pressed the buttons on the electronic lock.
With a soft
click the case popped open partially to allow the woman to open it fully and remove a katana in its decorated lacquer sheath, followed by a P90 submachinegun that she calmly fitted with a suppressor while loading a magazine that had a piece of blue tape on it.
Attaching the submachinegun to a carrying loop, the woman calmly began walking up the stairs. As she ascended, she heard a man shouting down the stairs while she continued climbing, her high heeled boots making a distinct clicking sound.
"Oi! Jiro! Ichiro told you to guard the fucking door, not grab some slut off the street! Get the fuck back down there you dumbass horndog!" The woman continued ascending, the
clik-clik-clik of her boots making the man shouting even more agitated, "Jiro! Fuck's sake, stop snogging that bitch and fucking-"
She rounded the corner and the man, who had been walking towards the stairs to accost the likely dead man at the bottom, stopped and paled, "Oh shi-"
He didn't get a chance to finish as in a single,
perfect movement the sword left its sheath and
flashed, the woman flicking the blood off her blade to create a splatter on the ground but left the sword out of the sheath as the man stared dumbly as a line of red formed along his neck, and then with slick, wet noises his head slid off his neck and landed on the floor with a thump as blood began to gush out of the stump.
The woman calmly approached the door the thug had come from and with a smile she kicked in the door, tearing it off the hinges as gang members leaped up in shock as the door slammed into one unlucky teenager who was too slow in dodging and the flying metal door flattened him.
Not stopping in her entry, the woman strode on top of the door which elicited a pained groan from the teenager seconds before the naked katana slid through the metal and into his skull with a loud squeal as she wrenched the blade back out and smiled at the men and teenagers gathered around her.
"Is Ichiro available? I'm here to collect his overdue payment."
The gang charged.
"Well now♪"
On the other side of the city, two college-age girls calmly walked down the road towards a large office high-rise, one of the girls carrying a large duffel bag over her shoulder, before entering through the front door and heading into the elevator, ignoring the looks of the suited men and women as the doors closed and one of the girls started browsing the internet on her phone.
"Huh, looks like Hime-chan took care of that cocky nerd who tried to rat us out." One of the girls remarked as she leaned back against the elevator wall while her free hand toyed with her color-streaked black hair. The other, a pale-skinned and muscular girl, simply set the duffel bag down as one of her bangs fell in front of an eye and she brushed the dark-purple lock out of the way.
"Right, I forget you prefer not to talk before you meet with the boss." Her chatty companion mused with an amused grin, "Trying to keep your heart from going all
doki-doki when he speaks to you?" She giggled as the other girl shot her a chilling glare.
Before anything else could happen, the doors of the elevator opened to a dark floor with the only light coming from a network of fluorescent lamps strung up along the walls, creating an eerie atmosphere since the windows were all blacked out.
The two teenagers were undaunted as they walked through the short corridors and past humming banks of servers under the chilled air of industrial air-conditioners on full-blast as the color-streaked girl shivered, "Geez, I should have remembered to wear a bra whenever I come here."
The pale girl snorted as she tapped at a key-pad in front of a heavy security door, waiting for the beep of the magnetic lock disengaging before sliding the door open to allow the two girls entry into a much warmer room where someone, a man dressed casually, was looking over a bank of monitors and occasionally typing away.
The pale girl spoke, her voice rough and husky as though it rarely found usage, "Boss, we have the equipment stolen by the Red Sparrows."
The color-streaked girl nodded as she bounced on her feet, "Yup! And then we burned the
entire fucking building down!" She started giggling madly as the pale girl rolled her eyes while her companion continued, "I think some of them were still alive because we heard screaming as it burned."
The man twirled a hand in a clear message:
Get on with it.
"Right," the giggling stopped as the girl continued, "They hadn't managed to crack the encryption on the client list and their computers had emails from various sources who were offering money for our client list. We also found something else." She glanced at the pale girl who nodded.
"There was an email from Tobioka City, where our backup servers are located." The man stiffened and turned slightly, the light from the monitors shining off his glasses as the pale girl continued, "Someone wanted the Red Sparrows to crack the stolen hard-drives in order to find the IP of our backup servers. We did some independent tracing, and the origin was some proxy email server, but I think someone wants to get in on our business Boss."
The man continued to stare at the two college students before turning back to his screens, "Drop the servers on the work bench and go back to your dorms. There'll be a meeting over the weekend, because this is not something simple. This is a problem."
The girls nodded and the pale girl calmly dumped the duffel bag on a nearby bench before the two walked out after making their goodbyes, leaving the young man to lean back in his chair and sigh.
"Knew things were going to heat up after that terrorist bombing," He muttered as a chat window appeared on one of his screens.
>>Guess what?
Gideon grimaced as he stared at the message.
>>You're going to send me home with a nice paycheck and a hearty slap on the back?
>>Tempting but no. I'd say it's time for you to start spreading those butterflies~
>>Tobioka City is practically a Japanese Gotham, and the Batman replaced by a group of hyper-violent gun-toting vigilantes with a medical fetish/theme.
>>And you are the 'lucky' man who saved several girls from horrible fates, earned their undying loyalty, and started a nation-wide criminal hiring system!
>>Because the other option was starve to death on the streets.
>>Now now, don't be like that. Besides, you would have died if you tried to go the hero route. Couldn't get you any 'Hero-grade' Plot Armour.
>>Of course. So, you want me to go to Tobioka?
>>I'd appreciate it.
>>Gah. Save four lunatic girls and thanks to you, I seem to be contributing to the slow decay of Japan. Moreso.
>>Yes. But you're also controlling it. Trust me, I have a plan to turn this shitty situation around, but to do that I need a villain.
>>Target you mean. I know this setting. I know what happens to the villains.
>>Well, good thing you stick to the shadows then. Go to Tobioka City; you need to in order to secure your backup base anyway.
>>And Gideon? Good Luck.
With that the chat window closed and Gideon sighed, "I'll damn well need it." A mobile phone sitting near the keyboard underneath the computer screens buzzed as it vibrated on the desk and he picked it up to read the SMS with attached image.
"...I honestly do not know why she keeps sending selfies after a job. I mean seriously!"