"Big Gold, easy, easy! Stop rushing me! Opening a portal for you takes a bit more mana, understand? Let me get ready."
Watching Kong roar while stretching both arms straight out, foolishly striking a little-bird-in-flight pose, Bella hastily opened the teleport and sent Kong back to Skull Island.
\\\*
The whole fight, start to finish, had added up to just over ten minutes—not quite fifteen.
After Bella returned Kong to Skull Island, the fallout began to ferment.
And it was enormous! An Italian city had been destroyed. Although there were no 'human' casualties in the city for now, the image of Kong seated in its ruins and roaring had still been captured by the military satellites of more than ten nations.
Bella's plan was simple: deny it to the death! Insist flatly that Kong had never once left Skull Island. If you're so capable, go arrest Kong and take his statement—torture him, even—and see whether he pays you any mind.
Monarch was promptly hit with inquiries from several governments. What's going on? How did your gorilla end up in Italy? The Italian government is scared out of its wits, don't you realize?!
Monarch hurriedly queried Skull Island. A few researchers screwed up their courage and went to look, only to find Kong fast asleep, snoring like thunder. They rushed back to report: Kong had not left the island!
Was there a second giant gorilla out there in the world? To a gorilla, all humans looked alike—and honestly, humans had the same trouble with gorillas. Without a close, careful look, you couldn't tell one from another at all.
After a round of bickering, the Italian government could only trot out a gas explosion as a cover story and swallow the bad luck.
Bella called 006 and told him to have Weyland-Yutani's weapons factory prepare silver bullets. Going to war with the entire vampire race right now was far too rushed—a great deal of groundwork had to be laid first.
"How many?" 006 asked.
Bella ground her back teeth. "As many as you can make! And open up the synthetic production line for me. Full-scale synthetic production."
006 pressed, hesitant. "How many synthetics do you want? There has to be a figure. I need to line up funding and marshal resources."
"Make ten thousand to start!"
Know yourself and know your enemy, and you win every battle. Bella needed to gather more intelligence and find more allies before she could decide whether her next target was a single vampire, the Camarilla, or the entire vampire race.
Collecting the Darkhold's knowledge was only a side benefit; the real point was to root out the hidden threat.
Bella felt her karmic tangle with vampires ran genuinely deep. Round and round they went, and in the end the two of them always managed to crash back into each other.
\\\*
Bella didn't linger in Italy. From Aro's memories, she had at last learned the name of that Russian oligarch: Andrei Sator.
On the surface this man was a banker; in the shadows he seemed to be an informant for British intelligence; and at a deeper layer still, the fellow apparently also handled the collection and sale of certain nuclear materials. A very complicated person.
Bella didn't know him. The two had never crossed paths in any way—no grudge, no grievance. She had no idea why he'd made an enemy of her, but she followed the leads and tracked him all the same.
The Albanians, the demon Ruby, the Volturi vampires—and at the end of the chain, this Andrei Sator.
"Martial-aunt, is there anything you need our help with?" Bella had been teleporting so frequently across Britain, France, and Spain that she'd naturally alarmed the guardian of the London Sanctum. He came to negotiate with her, his face pained, hoping she'd cut down on the teleportation. In just these two short days, tracing magical residue, they'd already followed the trail to Bella's location five times—an enormous drain on their time!
"Sorry, sorry, I'll leave right away!" Bella knew she was causing them grief, and she was embarrassed about it.
These days quite a few demons had crossed into the material plane. Over in the Americas, the Winchester brothers were on a killing spree, and with the hunter organization pitching in, the situation there was relatively stable. Here in Europe there were the more traditional Church forces—but the Church really wasn't up to much anymore, and much of the time it was the London Sanctum doing the actual demon-slaying.
With Bella teleporting day after day, the London Sanctum kept mistaking it for demons breaching the boundary, and the two sides had blundered into several misunderstandings.
As it happened, Andrei Sator was leaving London, so she seized the moment to follow—though this time, to spare the London Sanctum's feelings, she left the teleportation alone.
"Off to Korea again? How does this guy move so fast?" With the Brotherhood's resources mobilized and no shortage of leads to analyze, Bella had traced a path from Britain to France, to Russia, to India—and the last several leads all pointed to this Andrei Sator entering Korea, meaning to head north into North Korea.
Andrei Sator was extraordinarily cunning—cunning to the point of seeming divinely aided. Time and again he'd slipped her pursuit by the thinnest of margins. It was frankly unbelievable!
Bella had reduced how often she teleported, but she hadn't stopped entirely. Even so, relying on divination and teleportation, chasing him from Europe into Asia, she still hadn't caught him—and had let the man reach Korea. It defied all reason.
She strongly suspected this Andrei Sator possessed some means of glimpsing fragments of the future. There was simply no other way to explain how he always managed to leave first, every single time.
Bella had barely arrived in Seoul when word came: Andrei Sator had already left North Korea and was now preparing to go to Busan, and from there fly to Pakistan.
She had no choice but to scrap the trip north, board a train, and head south to Busan once more.
\\\*
Bella wore her hair in a single ponytail, sunglasses perched on the bridge of her nose. Through a concealment spell, her face differed somewhat from her true appearance.
February in Korea was a touch chilly. She wore a knee-length trench coat with a satchel slung over her shoulder and, like any ordinary passenger, boarded the KTX 101 train from Seoul to Busan.
Chinese, Russian, Japanese—she basically knew all the languages of Korea's neighboring countries. But Korean she truly didn't know; the only word she remembered was "seumnida."
Fortunately there were plenty of English speakers here too. The intonation was a little odd, but communication was no trouble.
Once the train pulled out, Bella took out a map and began studying Andrei Sator's route, trying to work out the pattern and purpose behind his movements.
Britain, France, Russia, India, North Korea, Pakistan—was there something in these countries drawing him? Did they share anything in common?
Bella was thoroughly puzzled. Andrei Sator seemed swaddled in fog, strange through and through, inside and out.
Hm? She suddenly noticed the little girl in the seat across the aisle watching her.
The girl looked about seven or eight, fair and clean, hugging a yellow-spotted backpack, her eyes jet-black—and right now she was sizing Bella up with a curious stare.
"What? Never seen a foreigner before?" Even with a bellyful of frustration from chasing Andrei Sator, Bella wasn't about to take it out on a child, so she said it with a smile.
The little girl shrank into her collar, and after a great deal of effort, finally managed to squeeze out one word of English: "Hello."