Level B-5 of the Grand Imperial Hotel was now a high-end graveyard of twisted metal. The acrid stench of cordite choked the air, mingling with the heavy, copper reek of fresh blood and spilled gasoline.
Red emergency lights pulsed with a sluggish, almost cardiac rhythm, casting long, grotesque shadows over the slaughtered Sabushi soldiers.
Amidst that slaughterhouse, time seemed to freeze.
"Complete the mission, boy. I'll take care of him." Akira said to Kai.
The boy hesitated, but he had no other choice but to follow her orders, so he kept staying hidden.
Akira crouched behind the bullet-perforated hood of an armored Mercedes. Her fingers, usually as steady as a surgeon's, moved with a frantic, uncharacteristic tremor.
She was recalibrating the optics of her short-barreled sniper rifle, racking the bolt to ensure an armor-piercing round was chambered.
She knew with absolute certainty that facing Jin in close-quarters combat was suicide, since he wasn't just a soldier, but an entity. A master of blades who elevated CQC into a macabre art form.
A few meters away, Jin advanced with agonizing slowness. His twin curved blades dragged along the concrete floor, emitting a metallic hiss that made her skin crawl.
"Did you really think the flames of Singapore could devour a Dragon, Akira?" Jin's voice was crystalline, eerily calm, entirely devoid of exertion. It echoed through the concrete pillars of the garage like a death knell.
Akira didn't answer immediately. She checked the magazine of her backup sidearm and slipped it into her drop-leg holster. "I watched you burn, Jin. I saw the roof of that complex collapse onto you. No one survives an inferno like that."
Jin paused, tilting his head slightly. His flawless, almost unscarred face looked like carved obsidian beneath the strobe lights. "Pure, magnificent luck," he whispered, almost like a prayer. "The floor gave way a split second before the shockwave could incinerate me. I was thrown through the lower windows and plummeted into the harbor. The sea was freezing. Saltwater flooded my lungs and my open wounds. I felt a kind of agony that would have shattered your mind, Akira. But do you know what kept me breathing while I sank into that black abyss?"
Akira gritted her teeth, resting the rifle barrel on the car's hood, hunting for Jin's face in the crosshairs. The red reticle danced slightly. Her hands were still trembling.
"You," Jin breathed, his tone softening into a morbid, twisted confession. "I was so deeply sorry I couldn't be near you these past few years. I missed you, Akira. Remember how much I liked you? I had a devastating crush on you. You were one of my most brilliant students—so cold, so untouchable. We were perfect together."
"We were assassins, Jin!" Akira snarled, her voice cracking with suppressed emotion. "And I was never interested in you. You were a monster, a sadist who got off on torturing his prey. I told you back then, and I'll say it again: my first time will be with someone I love. Not some psychopath with a god complex."
Jin sighed, a sound heavy with feigned disappointment. "Love is for the weak, my dear. And you've clung to that weakness. That is why your hands shake, and that's also why your brother is dead."
His words struck a raw nerve. The ghosts of the past, the trauma of Singapore, the crushing weight of survival, and the death of her brother—it all crashed down on Akira in a single instant of vulnerability.
She pulled the trigger.
The sniper rifle roared, spitting a muzzle flash into the dark garage. The .300 Blackout round, forged to punch through ballistic steel, shrieked through the air at lethal velocity.
But Akira's mind was fractured. The shot, which would normally have been infallible, drifted by a millimeter. Jin didn't even need to dodge fully; he merely shifted his neck with a fluid, almost bored motion. The bullet kissed his cheek, severing a lock of raven hair before shattering against the concrete pillar behind him, erupting in a cloud of dust.
Jin touched his cheek. He looked at his fingertip—spotless. He smiled. A smile that promised absolute, unadulterated violence.
"You've lost your touch, Akira. That's unfortunate."
In a fraction of a second, the inertia shattered. Jin lunged forward. He wasn't running; he seemed to glide across the asphalt with the unnatural grace of an apex predator.
"Kai!" Akira screamed, vaulting up and scrambling backward, firing another blind shot that hit nothing but air. "The plan is burned! Take the service stairs, get to Level B-6, and grab that fucking drive! Now! Move!"
Kai, who until that moment had been huddled behind a pillar, his pistol still smoking from the soldiers he had just slaughtered, looked at her. His wide blue eyes were torn between the absolute "Void" of his lethal conditioning and the deeply human instinct not to abandon the only person shielding him.
"Move!" Akira roared, turning and sprinting down the parking aisles.
Kai nodded. He spun and dashed toward the heavy fire door leading to the lower stairs. He shoved it open, letting it slam shut with a heavy thud, creating the perfect illusion that he had fled downstairs.
But, in reality, Kai hadn't descended.
The moment the heavy door sealed behind him, his breathing flatlined. His heart rate plummeted. The repressed conditioning, reawakened by the flashbangs and the stench of death, seized total control.
Silently, he cracked the door open a millimeter, slipped out like a phantom, and scaled the wall into the overhead ventilation grate, vanishing into pitch blackness.
He couldn't leave Akira alone.
Kai was also attached to her for the time they spent together.
He crouched in the dark, eyes locked on the scene below, observing and calculating every micro-movement.
Below, the hunt had begun.
Akira moved with desperate tactical precision. She was hunting for a dead end, a chokepoint to force Jin into a straight line of fire—her only chance to leverage the rifle. She vaulted the hood of a wrecked sedan and slid beneath a ruptured water pipe, the freezing spray soaking her hair and blurring her one good eye.
But Jin was everywhere.
It was like a cat playing with a mouse, and the skill gap was abysmal, terrifying. Every time Akira planted her feet to aim, Jin vanished behind a concrete column, only to materialize ten feet closer.
"You're too slow, Akira!" Jin's voice echoed from her right.
She spun, firing. Shattered glass. No target.
"Too predictable!" The voice dropped from above.
Akira snapped the barrel up, but Jin was already dropping from the roof of an armored van. With a vicious, snapping kick, he tore the rifle from her grip. The weapon launched through the air, clattering across the asphalt thirty feet away.
Akira didn't hesitate. In a heartbeat, her right hand drew her combat knife while her left whipped out the sidearm. She fired three rapid shots at point-blank range.
Jin didn't flinch. He used one curved blade to parry Akira's forearm, redirecting the muzzle flash into the ceiling, while his other blade carved a vicious arc. Akira blocked the strike with her dagger; the impact was so devastating she heard the bones in her wrist groan. Orange sparks violently illuminated their faces in the brutal clinch.
It was a macabre waltz. Akira attacked with feral desperation, aiming for the throat, the ligaments, the heart, but Jin absorbed and deflected every strike with microscopic movements, not even breaking a sweat.
His twin blades moved like direct extensions of his mind.
He sliced her cheek, then he traced her flank, parting the tactical fabric and drawing a thin line of blood—lethal little warnings.
"Is this it?" Jin whispered, their blades locked inches from their faces. His hot breath brushed her skin. "Years of training, and you still fight like a terrified recruit against me. Your greatest enemy is your heart."
With a fluid shove, Jin blasted Akira back. She staggered, gasping, blood dripping from her face and side.
"Hina would have slit my throat three times by now," Jin continued, his smile stretching into a grotesque mask of sadistic amusement. His voice echoed, and in the vents above, Kai's fists clenched tight at the sound of his beloved's name. "I thought her dear sister was stronger than that! I thought there was a reason Sabushi kept you breathing. And yet... look at you. You're weak. I liked you so much, Akira. What a pathetic disappointment."
The words were pure, injected venom. Being compared to Hina, being degraded by the very man who had annihilated her old life—it shattered the final wall of Akira's rationality. Blinding, feral rage took the wheel.
With a desperate scream, Akira launched herself forward in a reckless, fully committed lunge, aiming the dagger dead at Jin's heart.
It was exactly the mistake he was waiting for.
With a half-step pivot, Jin let Akira slice nothing but empty air.
Before she could recover her footing, Jin dropped one of his blades.
His free hand snared her wrist, twisting the joint with bone-snapping torque until the knife spilled from her trembling fingers. In one seamless, continuous motion, he swept her legs out from under her.
Akira slammed into the concrete back-first, the air exploding from her lungs in a choked gasp.
Before she could twitch a single muscle, Jin was on top of her. He pinned both of her wrists above her head with just one of his massive hands, crushing his dead weight against her chest to paralyze her completely.
Akira thrashed, an animalistic snarl tearing from her throat, but it was utterly useless. She was trapped beneath a mountain of muscle and sheer lunacy.
"L-Leave me! Don't you fucking touch me with those disgusting hands of yours-!" Akira said, trying to break free from his grip.
Jin leaned over her. His black eyes drilled into hers, utterly saturated with a sick, suffocating possessiveness. There was zero affection in that stare—only pure, intoxicating dominance.
"There's no need to resist, Akira. We have plenty of time." Jin whispered, his voice raspy with dark lust and cruelty. "If I cannot have your heart, I will take your pride."
And then, he took it.
Jin smashed his mouth against hers in a violent, crushing, and entirely non-consensual kiss. There was no passion, only absolute subjugation.
It was a calculated act of psychological violation, designed to shatter her to her core, to prove that her struggles, her vows to save herself for love, meant absolutely nothing against his brute force.
His free hand clamped onto her jaw like a steel vise, forcing her mouth to yield to the brutal invasion—a sickening desecration of her very soul.
His teeth ground against her lips, splitting the delicate skin, forcing the hot, coppery taste of her own blood down her throat.
Akira clamped her good eye shut in a rictus of sheer revulsion and paralyzing helplessness.
A single, agonizing tear of white-hot rage and blistering humiliation leaked from her eye, sliding down her temple to shatter on the freezing concrete.
The assault didn't last long. Akira writhed and bucked frantically, convulsing in horror until Jin finally took a 'rest,' pulling his face away.
Akira violently turned her head and spat onto the ground, emptying her mouth of every drop of saliva. Her stomach violently churned with a nauseating, bile-rising disgust, and her skin crawled with the phantom weight of his touch, making her want to tear her own flesh off just to feel clean again.
Jin merely chuckled, wiping his mouth. "You're so much prettier when you squirm..."
High above, in the pitch-black maw of the air duct, Kai saw it all.
His wide, unblinking eyes reflected the grotesque scene playing out under the red neon lights. The sound of Akira's suppressed, gagging breath and Jin's muffled laughter drilled straight into his skull.
And in that exact microsecond, something inside Kai permanently snapped.
It wasn't a nervous breakdown. It was a detonation.
The image of Akira—the woman of ice, the infallible sniper who had guided him, joked with him, and promised to protect him all this time—reduced to a humiliated toy crushed under the weight of a monster, triggered a catastrophic chain reaction in his fractured psyche.
Then, new memories hit him like a tidal wave of battery acid.
He was back in the "White Room." He saw the blood coating his tiny childhood hands. He heard his instructor's voice echoing in his skull: "Weapons do not feel pity, Kai. Weapons do not weep for fallen comrades. Weapons simply eradicate the threat. Empathy is a chain. Sever it."
Kai blinked for a fraction of a second. When his eyelids fluttered open, the terrified boy who used to hide behind Hina had been vaporized out of existence.
The "Void" was no longer a defensive reflex. It had become a weapon of mass destruction.
A current of absolute, glacial euphoria flooded his veins. He felt zero fear toward Jin. He felt only the clinical, surgical necessity to extinguish his biological functions.
He dropped from the vent with the terrifying, silent grace of a panther, his boots hitting the concrete without a singular sound. The shadows of the garage seemed to slither and wrap around him, bowing to their new master.
His pistol was dry, and there was no time to reload, so he lowered his gaze.
Sprawled at his feet was the corpse of one of the elite operatives he had butchered minutes prior.
Strapped to the dead man's chest was a tactical rig housing two long military combat knives, their carbon-steel blades blacked out to prevent glare.
Kai crouched and slid them from their sheaths with two crisp snicks. The weight of the metal in his hands was flawless, intimate, and almost reassuring.
But there was still one variable left to correct. The reinforced tactical clothes he was wearing were too bulky. It restricted his shoulder mobility and slowed his speed, and to slaughter a Dragon, he needed to be faster than the wind itself.
With a slow, chillingly deliberate motion, Kai brought his hands to the zipper at his collar.
The sound of the zipper tearing open was sharp, jagged—a metallic screech that violently ripped through the suffocating air of Level B-5.
Down on the floor, Jin paused.
He slowly lifted his head, his pitch-black eyes narrowing at the dense shadow where the noise had originated.
Akira, with her chest heaving in frantic, panicked gasps, wrenched her face toward the sound, spitting another mouthful of tainted blood.
From the absolute darkness, Kai stepped into the bleeding red emergency light.
He shrugged off the black tactical hoodie, letting it drop to the floor into a pooling slick of blood.
He was left in nothing but a dark, skin-tight shirt that perfectly outlined the wiry, hyper-compressed muscle of his frame.
His bone-white hair seemed to radiate its own spectral light, a ghostly halo violently clashing with the pitch-black abyss of the garage.
In his hands, the twin military knives were locked in a lethal reverse grip.
There was zero hesitation and zero fear in his stance.
His face was a frozen mask of total, terrifying apathy, and his icy blue eyes—once so expressive, so haunted—were now dead-locked on Jin with the agonizing intensity of an apex predator that had just isolated its prey.
"Brat..." Jin whispered, deeply amused. He slightly loosened his crushing grip on Akira. "She told you to run away. It seems that survival instinct isn't exactly your strong suit."
Kai said absolutely nothing. He slowly twirled the heavy blades in his hands, the black steel whistling faintly as it cut the air—the overture to a bloodbath.
"I guess that's your answer, right...?" Jin said, in an almost amused way.
"K-Kai... p-please... run..." Akira whispered, with tears falling from her single eye.
The boy tilted his head slightly to the side, studying Jin the way one might analyze a cockroach right before crushing it under a boot.
And then, with a voice that no longer sounded remotely human—a voice built of razor blades and glacial ice, dragged straight from the very bottom of the psychological hell his grandfather had built inside his mind—he spoke a single, fatal word:
"Get up."
The close-quarters slaughter between the Dragon of Sabushi and the Requiem Victim was about to begin, and Level B-5 was not going to be large enough to contain the blood that was about to be spilled.