"Someone put your and Patty's names on the dark web."
Lady tapped the screen. "A fool just accepted the contract not long ago. I happened to be nearby handling some private business, so I saw the alert and swung by to check on the situation."
Sephirot frowned slightly and looked at the phone screen.
It was a blurry screenshot from a surveillance camera, clearly showing him and Patty.
He stared at the animatronic bears in the background for a few seconds, his expression turning strange.
Wasn't this the very pizza parlor they were sitting in right now?
Who took the photo?
The first suspects that flashed through Sephirot's mind were the owner or the employees of this establishment.
However, with his current perception and intuition, if there were anything wrong with this place, he should have sensed it the moment he stepped through the door a few days ago.
Sephirot's gaze darkened as he sank into memory.
A few days ago, right after he finished off the Ogre on the highway, old Jack and his family had dropped them off in this small town.
The photo seemed to have been taken a few days back, right after the Ogre incident, when he brought Patty here to eat.
Could the bounty have been posted by the organization monitoring the Ogre?
After all, he had found a high-tech camera inside the Ogre's heart.
But when his eyes scanned down to the bounty amounts below, he immediately dismissed that theory.
Sephirot: 50,000 US dollars.
Patty: 100,000 US dollars.
"?"
Sephirot looked at the screen and fell into a momentary silence.
At this moment, he felt deeply insulted.
Was this a joke?
Would an organization capable of installing that kind of high-tech gear inside a monster be so stingy as to only pay fifty thousand US dollars for a professional hit?
If they truly wanted to silence him, shouldn't they have sent special cyborgs or a fully armed special ops team to scrub the site?
What frustrated him the most was that he was a wealthy man who had just come into twenty million US dollars, a Devil Hunter with the Sparda bloodline.
Why on earth was his bounty half the price of Patty's, a defenseless young lady?
These paupers weren't just underestimating his combat prowess; they were insulting his very character!
Sephirot looked up, glanced at the equally bewildered Patty, and rubbed the space between his eyebrows. Recalling details carefully, he said, "On our way here... we don't seem to have encountered any assassins."
His tone carried a hint of helplessness.
"That's strange. Assassins who can take these missions are vetted by guarantors; it's impossible for them to take a contract and not act on it."
"Could something unexpected have happened?"
Lady was also somewhat puzzled.
Hearing this, Sephirot instinctively looked over at Alessa.
Alessa had just finished the last French fry on her plate. Noticing Sephirot's gaze, Alessa blinked expressionlessly. She nonchalantly swiped a fried chicken leg from Sephirot's plate and began to nibble on it with practiced innocence.
Watching Alessa's harmless act, Sephirot felt he had guessed the truth.
It was likely some bottom-tier assassin who, while trying to approach the town for a mission, blundered straight into the Otherworld and was unceremoniously kicked to death by Alessa's monsters.
After all, what kind of strength could an assassin enticed by a measly 50,000 US dollars possibly have?
He stopped dwelling on the matter and asked instead, "So, how long do you plan on staying in Los Santos this time?"
Like Trish, Lady was a phantom, constantly roaming the world to handle various commissions and rarely staying at the Agency for long.
Add to that the fact that Patty usually had school and lived in her own upscale apartment.
In that massive Agency, it was typically just Sephirot and Dante staring at each other, worrying over piles of pizza boxes and bills every day, trying to figure out how to scrounge up enough money for the electric bill.
Seeing his lack of concern, Lady didn't bother bringing up the bounty again.
She had dealt with Dante for far too long; she knew exactly how hard it was to kill anyone in this family.
According to the rules of the Black market, if an ordinary assassin failed a mission, the contract would be automatically frozen unless the employer increased the price.
With Sephirot's current strength, he was more than capable of handling such minor nuisances.
"I'll probably be here for a few days." Lady put her phone away and took a sip of the ice water the waiter had just delivered.
"I mainly came back to Los Santos because I took a commission. Plus, there's an old acquaintance of yours involved."
"An old acquaintance of mine?"
Sephirot was puzzled.
Lady set down her glass and nodded. As if remembering something, she smiled and said, "Do you remember that unlucky exorcist from a few years ago? The one you pointed at and told he would definitely die of lung cancer in the future?"
"Cough... *hack*..."
Sephirot, who happened to be drinking Cola, choked immediately. "Constantine? With his personality, why would he ever put out a request?"
Back when he used to follow Lady around on commissions to gain experience, he had crossed paths with Constantine once.
At the time, Constantine's mental state was poor; he looked exceptionally depressed, as if the trivialities of life were crushing the life out of him.
When Sephirot first met him and saw the way he chain-smoked one cigarette after another, his first words had been:
"Bro, making everyone breathe in your secondhand smoke like that... you're never going to Heaven after you die."
The two had become acquainted because of that smart-aleck remark.
"The request didn't come from him; it was the Los Santos police."
Lady's smile faded, and her voice dropped lower. "Recently, a madwoman has appeared downtown, killing people everywhere. Her behavior is very bizarre... or rather, narcissistic?"
"Before she kills someone, she always forces them to answer whether she is beautiful or not, before finally murdering them brutally."
"The police are at their wit's end and had to seek outside help. Constantine and I both took the case. How about it? Do you want to come take a look?" Sephirot's gaze tightened as he listened to the description.
Asking if she was beautiful before killing?
This sounded suspiciously like the urban legend of the Kuchisake-onna from the neighboring island nation.
Weren't such legends usually handled by calling a barber, or simply answered with some nonsensical, irrelevant response?
Or was this another serial killer with a screw loose, intentionally mimicking urban legends to commit murder?
There were plenty of such fanatical psychopaths out there.
They usually hid in some remote farm or basement, founded their own cult, and then carried out crude murders under the guise of Gods.
Thinking of this, he immediately felt like refusing.
Firstly, it felt a bit boring, and secondly, he didn't want anything to do with Constantine.
That man was a literal harbinger of misfortune; if you became his friend, then congratulations.
You basically had one foot in the grave, and it was only a matter of time before he came looking for you.
Just as Sephirot was thinking of an excuse to decline, a familiar notification pinged in his mind again.
[Ding!]
[Triggered Side Quest: Truth of the Urban Legend]
[Task Description: Serial murders in Los Santos are fermenting in the shadows. Behind the bizarre execution methods, there seems to be some ancient psychic ritual involved.]
[Task Objective: Assist in uncovering the truth behind the serial murders.]
[Task Reward: 500 Points.]
Watching the system message pop up in his vision, Sephirot's eye twitched slightly, and he swallowed the refusal that was already at the tip of his tongue.
Cough... but then again.
Since there was a system reward as a baseline, this deal wouldn't be a loss.
Though 500 points sounded like a pittance, every little bit counts.
Completing this mission would be another solid... small step toward the goal of saving up 10,000 points to exchange for the devil sword Alastor.
He could also use this to expand his connections within the Los Santos authorities and the exorcist circles; perhaps he could even pick up some other commissions. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
As for the commission fee, it was trivial.
Official task offers were always stingy, and what's more, Lady was the one who brought this task.
She spent most of the year on the move, and the ammunition consumption for those heavy weapons was definitely an astronomical figure.
Her current financial situation probably wasn't great either. Even if she offered the bounty, he wouldn't take it.
"Alright, when do we leave?"
Sephirot agreed readily.
Lady rolled her eyes at him and stretched languidly, completely disregarding her image.
Her tight white shirt rode up with the movement, revealing a sliver of her flat, slender waist. This caused a few men at the neighboring table, who were stealing glances while eating breakfast, to stare wide-eyed with greasy, greedy looks.
"What's the rush? I finally managed to make it back for once. Naturally, I'm going back to the Agency to sleep comfortably for two days first."
As she spoke, she slammed a large-caliber handgun heavily onto the table with a backhand motion.
Those men immediately recoiled like frightened quails, lowering their heads to wolf down their breakfast.
(Translated by yourtl.app)
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TL NOTES — CROSSOVER GUIDE
Some references in this chapter come from source universes that may be unfamiliar to some readers. The notes below provide the context needed to understand them without leaving the page.
CHARACTERS
Constantine — John Constantine, an occult detective and exorcist from the DC/Vertigo comic series Hellblazer, later adapted into a film and a TV series. A cynical, manipulative, and perpetually unlucky British man who chain-smokes his way through encounters with demons, angels, and everything in between. He has made deals with forces on both sides of the divine divide, giving him unique access and unique enemies. His defining trait — beyond the trench coat and the cigarettes — is that everyone who gets close to him eventually suffers for it. He has lung cancer from decades of smoking, a fact Sephirot references bluntly at their first meeting. The author's note clarifies this is Constantine's standalone plotline and will not expand into the broader DC universe.
CONCEPTS
Kuchisake-onna — A Japanese urban legend, literally "Slit-Mouthed Woman." The spirit of a woman with her mouth cut open from ear to ear, who roams the streets wearing a surgical mask. She stops passersby and asks: "Am I beautiful?" Answering no results in immediate death; answering yes causes her to remove the mask, reveal her mutilated face, and ask again — with the same lethal outcome either way. Traditional countermeasures in the legend include answering "average," throwing candy or money to distract her, or mentioning a barber (a detail Sephirot references directly). The serial killer described by Lady matches this pattern precisely.