"Immensely. It's... liberating. There's no hesitation anymore." Saeko held up her sword, the firelight catching a line of dark blood along the flat. "It's clean."
A shadow was cast over Saeko's face, like a bridal veil. It suited her. The firelight made her seem more otherworldly than usual.
She lowered the sword.
Whatever had been behind her eyes a moment ago—that particular brightness, the one that arrived with bloodshed and seemed to find it genuinely agreeable—receded back to wherever it normally waited.
"We should check the house." She said, looking at the estate.
"Yeah." Tysone readily agreed.
He left Hayashi where he was, but he took the man's katana and the sheathe he had attached to his belt. The sword was a good quality one, could handle flames, and would likely have a better destiny in someone else's hands. "Here, you take this." Tysone handed it to Saeko. "It's a good weapon. Keep it."
"Thank you." Saeko accepted the sword with an approving smile, her fingers curling around the hilt. She tested the balance with a quick flick of her wrist.
They walked towards the main house, their steps echoing on the stone.
The main building was three stories of old money turned into a squat. The ground floor smelled of cigarettes and instant noodles and the particular unwashed quality of men who'd decided that basic hygiene was pre-apocalypse thinking. Someone had torn a chandelier out of the ceiling and replaced it with a string of orange work lights that gave everything the color of a convenience store at two in the morning.
Kohta swept the first floor with Miku providing cover.
"Clear." He said at the hall's end.
Miku was already poking through a cabinet near the wall. "They have actual coffee beans in here. Like, a whole bag."
"Take it."
"Obviously."
The second floor yielded three men who'd slept through the fight entirely—two passed out drunk against a wall, one genuinely unconscious from something pharmaceutical.
None of them were evolved.
Rei zip-tied their wrists with practiced efficiency and left them sitting propped against the hallway rail.
They'd wake up cold and hungry and free of their former employer's influence, which was about as good as it was going to get for them tonight.
The third floor was a locked room that turned out to be Hayashi's personal space, which was conspicuously more comfortable than anything his people had been given. A proper bed. Canned goods stacked in a corner. A small safe bolted to the floor that Takashi found behind a wooden panel that had been badly remounted.
"Can't open it without the combination." Takashi frowned.
"Kohta." Tysone called out.
"On it." Kohta crouched down, put his ear against the dial, and closed his eyes with the intense concentration of a man listening for a heartbeat.
After thirty seconds he started working. After two minutes there was a click.
Inside: a handful of cores. Small ones, all Rank 1, rattling loose in a velvet bag like marbles. A folded map with locations marked in red pen. A personal radio, military-grade, wrapped in cloth. And a photograph, the old-fashioned printed kind, laminated, showing a younger Hayashi in formal dress next to a woman and two children, somewhere green and ordinary.
Tysone picked up the radio first.
"Military band." Kohta said, leaning in to look. "Pre-set channels." He didn't say anything else.
Tysone pocketed it and handed Kohta the bag of cores. He picked up the map and studied it for a moment, then folded it again and tucked it inside his jacket.
The photograph he left exactly where it was.
"The names he gave me." Tysone said quietly. "Akagi crew east side. Iron Watch, ex-cops." He looked at the map through the jacket fabric as if he could feel the red marks. "And whoever was hunting them."
"He stopped himself before the third one." Takashi said.
"I noticed."
Was it Black Label then?
It could've been.
...
Downstairs, Takashi and Rei had found the basement.
It wasn't as bad as it could have been, which wasn't the same as not being bad. Seven people. Four men, three women, ranging from a teenager who couldn't have been older than sixteen to a man who was probably sixty. They'd been fed. None of them bore obvious injuries.
Takashi had gotten the door open and stepped back to give them room and a clear view of the courtyard and the gate beyond it, neither of which required any additional explanation about what had happened.
Rei crouched in the doorway. She spoke quietly, gave them the basics, told them nobody was going to hurt them, asked if anyone needed medical attention.
The teenager was shaking. The sixty-year-old man put his hand on the boy's shoulder and kept it there.
Nobody needed immediate medical attention. One woman had a healing cut on her forearm that had been neglected rather than treated. Rei made a note to have Shizuka look at it when they got back.
"You can come with us or you can go your own way…" Rei said, empathetically. "We've got room. We've got food. We're not in a perfect situation but we're an honest one."
The sixty-year-old man looked at her for a long moment. "What do you want in return?"
"Whatever you're good at and willing to contribute." She met his eyes. "That's the whole deal."
He looked around at the others. Most of them were already looking at the open door and the night sky beyond it the way you look at something you'd given up expecting to see again.
They spent another twenty minutes working through the estate's storage.
Kohta and Mai handled it as a team, which was an interesting combination that turned out to be extremely efficient because Mai's organizational instincts and Kohta's equipment knowledge complemented each other without producing the kind of arguments that sometimes happened when two strong personalities worked the same task.
"Fuel." Kohta announced, rolling out a drum from a side shed. "Forty liters, maybe. Diesel."
"There's a medical kit in the kitchen that hasn't been opened." Mai was proud of her finding. "Still sealed."
"Take it."
"Duhhh..."
They found two working radios of a consumer grade, a hand-crank flashlight, three sleeping bags, and a box of road flares. There was also a chest freezer that had stopped functioning weeks ago but still contained frozen food in a state that might be technically salvageable depending on who was doing the assessment. They left it.
The weapons rack in the main hall had been picked over but not cleaned out. Four blades of varying quality, two more rifles with half a box of ammunition each, and a crossbow that someone had clearly bought before all this thinking it would make them cool, had then learned to use passably out of necessity.
Miku picked up the crossbow and held it at arm's length. "Dibs."
"You don't know how to use a crossbow." Kohta pointed out, pushing up his glasses.
"I'll learn." She looked at it from a different angle. "It's quiet. That's the whole point."
Kohta opened his mouth and then closed it.
Should he also use it?
He figured bullets wouldn't go far in this evolving world.
...
Tysone walked the courtyard a final time.
The oil-drum fire had burned down to embers. The string lights buzzed over nothing in particular.
He counted bodies. For information; certainly for sentiment.
Fourteen. Of those, maybe four or five had evolved. The rest had been ordinary men who'd made ordinary bad choices and lived long enough after the world ended to make them worse.
That made him wonder about the Rank 1 cores Hayashi had kept stashed. Maybe he was doing what Tysone was, prioritizing trustworthy individuals before anything else.
It'd be too easy to simply hand them out willy-nilly when everyone in this world could be a savior or a traitor at once.
He thought about the photograph upstairs. The green ordinary place. The two kids.
He was very good at not thinking about certain things when they would get in the way. This was one of them. He filed it and moved on.
Saeko fell beside him on the third pass.
"Done brooding?" She asked, almost with a touch of teasing.
Tysone huffed.
"I wasn't brooding. I was counting."
"You count slower when you're also brooding." She looked straight ahead. "It's a tell."
He let that go.
"The map." She tilted her head. "There were locations marked near the coast."
"I noticed."
"A port facility, maybe. Or a naval base." She paused. "That would explain a military-grade radio."
"It would." He stopped walking. "Hayashi might've been smart enough to know where resources were concentrated and connected enough to get access. That means whatever was left of an organized structure, he had at least one contact in it."
Author's Note:
If you're enjoying the story and want to read ahead or support my work, you can check out my P@treon at [email protected]/LordCampione. But don't worry—all chapters will eventually be public. Just being here and reading means the world to me. Thank you for your time and support.