Noir Fan Fiction ❯ Red and Black ❯ A Remnant of a Pilgrimage ( Chapter 14 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Red And Black - By Kirika
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The fourteenth chapter. You wouldn't believe how many times I listened to Salva Nos while writing this part.

- Kirika

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Chapter 14 - A Remnant of a Pilgrimage


It was the dead of night with the hour well past twelve, it having become deeply immersed in time's darkest, most sinister stretch during Mireille and Kirika's hunt across the city for the false Noir. A moonless sky enclosed the assassins in a black dome above, the few visible weakly twinkling stars hanging overhead ineffectually trying to shine through a thick spattering of murky charcoal cloud cover that seemingly absorbed their light with ease; the dark scoring dominance over its counterpart, a result so reminiscent of real life. On the street below the one-sided struggle where Mireille and Kirika stood unbroken quiet reigned; there were no faint whooshes of the occasional car travelling down a distant road, no muted calls of late-night revellers leaving dance clubs finally closing their doors, nor was there even the repeated chirps of nocturnal insects to break the hush. It was just the quiet--the silence--as if there wasn't another soul alive in the world bar the two young women, the dead of night living up to its name.

The already low temperature had dropped too as the hour had progressed, the air degenerating from a mere unpleasant chilly that cooled the skin to a biting icy that threatened to numb it. Frozen hands akin to those of a corpse stroked swirling patterns across Mireille's bare midriff, teasing goose bumps into puckering as they passed. The muscles of her stomach stiffened at the touch of the freezing winds turned caresses, but she didn't let them bother her, not even making the slightest move to close her gently flapping coat around her body to attain extra warmth. It was cold like the inside of a meat locker, cold like a morgue… but it was just another distraction to Mireille that she easily ignored, and a minor distraction at that. In truth she thought the grim atmosphere and the frosty temperature along with it rather appropriate considering what had taken place thus far this night, and considering what was about to. All that was missing were the wisps of roiling fog hovering over the road in front of her and Kirika before a classic gritty backdrop of a film noir would come to life.

Mireille smiled, a smile as cold as her surroundings. A film noir. How appropriate indeed. The black skies, the quiet, still ambiance, the freezing air--they were the perfect conditions, the perfect setting for one of those types of movies. And Mireille and Kirika were the perfect if somewhat atypical protagonists, both poised for what looked to be the climatic scene where they met their nemeses at last for the final, decisive confrontation that spelled certain doom for one side. They were the lone executioners out for themselves, symbolising Death itself--Death in two halves--coming, coming to claim their detested adversaries in a hail of bullets. And now after stalking the gloomy nighttime streets in dogged pursuit of their prey, cardboard cutout bad guys dead by the dozen behind them, they had arrived at their final destination for the supposed ultimate showdown. At the end of the trail. At the end of their involvement with Soldats. Tomorrow this… divergence… from Mireille and Kirika's prior lifestyle would be merely an unpleasant memory, one to be forgotten, disregarded as if it had never happened. It would be a happy ending for them, a moderately rare thing in a film noir. Still, those endings did sometimes occur where the antiheros somehow despite their dark existences found peace and contentment, much like when Mireille and Kirika had found it following the shootout at the Manor. Those protagonists, however, customarily paid for their joy in the blood of others, but seldom was that blood innocent, just like in this instance. For freedom from the machinations of Soldats, for a life of relative solitude with her partner, Kirika, Mireille saw the deaths of two more murderers on top of countless others already slain by their hands as a cheap price she was gladly willing to pay. Ryosuke Ishinomori and Vincent Hsu would be dead by dawn; she swore it. The vendetta she had against them for being partly responsible for dragging her and Kirika back onto the black path would be satisfied in the only way it could be--with violence and bloodshed resulting in death. Their deaths.

The deserted street where Mireille and Kirika were situated in was dimly lit by old, black cast-iron lampposts lining either side of the road, their circles of light spread out a foot or two apart from each other with shadows filling in the gaps. It was there in those shadows that the pair of assassins lurked, scrutinising the building on the opposite side of the street with calculating eyes.

The contact Mireille had phoned whilst departing Simon's decrepit abode hadn't appreciated the very early wake-up call or being dragged out of bed, but nevertheless had dug up the address for 'Albert Laroque' within twenty minutes… although the time could have been shortened if she'd forgone grumbling about the hour during the first five minutes of their conversation. From the slums to the suburbs Mireille and Kirika had then journeyed, the acquired address pointing to a residence in an upper-class and quite exclusive district of Paris, a welcome change from the capitol's less than savoury locales. Yet while the potential threat from the common hoodlum was greatly reduced in such an environment, there were other dangers to watch out for. In Mireille's experience the exceptionally rich regularly saw themselves as a superior breed than others, haughtily believing that they were above the perceived 'lower caste' of people and the laws that governed them. Hence, they sometimes liked to make their own rules--if any--with their hired security guards who safeguarded their assets and persons--who tended to be little more than semi-straight gangsters with dubious morals oft cases--partial to shooting first and asking questions later, secure in the knowledge that their wealthy and typically influential employer would deflect the ensuing flak from the authorities a lead-filled body would bring. Justice blinded for a Euro or two. Mireille wasn't criticising the last fact, however--far from it. She herself had paid off more than one law enforcement official to look the other way in her lifetime, and would do it again without a second thought if called for. Like those affluent members of high society with superiority complexes, she was rather thankful that the law was only as strong as the people who upheld it. But the difference was Mireille never forgot that she wasn't above it. Regardless of what one believed of the law, at the end of the day it would still judge your actions all the same… if you were caught, that is.

However, by the looks of the mansion Mireille and Kirika were currently scoping out there were no aforementioned sentries to contend with. True, it was one of the largest houses--or rather, estates--in the district, but not a guard was in sight. The Corsican expected the nightshift to be smaller than the dayshift, but she at least thought a doorman of sorts would be by the front gate entrance even at this late hour. She had her suspicions as to why this was of course, ranging from the absent guard simply answering a call of nature to him or her having been brutally slain--the top choice for the moment, taking into account that Ryosuke and Vincent apparently had an interest in this particular property--yet none she wished to accept as concrete without further investigation. For all she knew the guard watched over his post from a distance, maybe even from an elevated position with a high-powered rifle. *That* would be a nasty surprise. One could never be too cautious in this business; your life was on the line, after all; your most precious possession.

Well, in *theory* your most precious possession, Mireille amended with a sardonic smirk as her eyes darted surreptitiously to her diminutive colleague beside her. The blonde naturally held her own life in high regard, but if she had to choose between it and Kirika's, the subject became… hazy. Sure, Mireille wanted to live for as long as possible--who didn't?--but if it came at the cost of her partner's continued existence….

Mireille closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again they had returned to the mansion. Her growing sentimentality was going to get her killed someday, her brush with death or at least severe bodily harm at the Metro station a few days ago a forewarning of the potential catastrophe awaiting her. She was grimly aware that there was barely if any room for it in the life of a killer… not that she had the slightest inclination to curb it at all in spite of that understanding. Love. Mireille wondered if it were really a blessing and not a curse instead. But whatever it was, she knew she couldn't be without it, or specifically not without Kirika's love. The woman's heart had a taste for it now; it was used to its warmth. For it to be cast back into the cold… Mireille doubted whether it would survive the shock intact.

Mireille marshalled her straying mind's faculties back to her pressing task, focusing her attention on the place she and her partner would likely be infiltrating in a few minutes. Looking at the building and its surrounding land, she was sure she and Kirika had the right Albert Laroque. When in doubt, always follow the money and the bigwig who had it. Usually they had links--be they direct or indirect--to some nefarious activity or activities. Petty drug infractions, hardcore arms dealing--essentially anything that made them wealthier or provided illicit pleasure. Or both. In addition Mireille didn't believe individuals like Ryosuke and Vincent would have business with Albert Laroque the grocer who lived a boring life in a duplex with his wife and two children. It was common sense. Whatever the false Noir's reasons for visiting Laroque's estate, it had to be on the shady side, possibly with murderous ambition. The blonde couldn't fathom a mundane cause for them to do so, especially since they had gone so far as to kill Simon and everyone who had been with him at the time in his basement, all in an effort to cover their tracks. Ryosuke and Vincent were foreigners in an unfamiliar country; what other grounds could there be but on a business affair?

Laroque's estate was quite vast, spanning at least two hundred square metres. A three foot high light grey brick wall enclosed the compound, with a sturdy fence of jet black iron bars capped with wicked arrowheads protruding at least seven feet out of its top face, their motif not unlike the nearby lampposts' in the street. A lawn of well kept, lush, dark green grass covered most of the estate's interior, with a handful of neatly arranged circular flowerbeds sprinkled here and there in a orderly fashion creating the illusion that the house it surrounded was a chateau in the countryside rather than a mansion in the city. Most of the flowering plants inside the beds had ceased to bloom however, the close onset of winter to blame for their now barren look. Nevertheless, the conifers present still thrived, the small ones on the edge of the flowerbeds and the tall ones bordering the outside of the estate's unfriendly fence as green as ever. Yet without the bright colours of flourishing blossoms the interior of the estate with its gardens appeared dull, dreary, all greys and greens and blacks. Of course it was nighttime, but Mireille suspected that even in the day light hours it would seem bleak, perhaps even bleaker.

A gravel road of slate-grey stone chips lit by flanking short bollard lamps extended out from the main gate and merged into a small roundabout in front of the mansion, another flowerbed--although larger--filling its centre. The two-storey house itself sat approximately in the heart of the grounds, constructed of the same hefty and aged bricks as the estate's wall. It was difficult for Mireille to make out fine details through the murk of the night, but she did note that the building was designed in the classic old-fashioned style reminiscent of many a rural land manor of yesteryear, its sole exceptions its windows which had been modernised--framed in white they were, and tall and slender, plus arched at their zenith--and the inclusion of a garage beside the right side of house, likely the abode of numerous luxury cars.

No lights shone from the expansive house; it was drenched utterly in darkness, for all intents and purposes asleep for the night. It was the ideal time for guests disinclined to announce themselves to visit, guests like Ryosuke and Vincent… and guests like Mireille and Kirika. The false Noir were probably flitting through the mansion's gloomy corridors like malevolent spectres at this very moment if the Corsican and her partner had gotten their facts right, but soon two more spirits would join them in their haunt, spirits who rattled no chains nor wailed their presence. While houses slumbered, the silent ghosts reigned supreme.

Plumes of mist fleetingly clouded the air in front of Mireille's face with her every breath--as soft as those breaths were--and the cold of the dead night was beginning to permeate to her very bones. She clenched and then unclenched her fists slowly, her ten fingers turned ten icicles aching as fresh hot blood was pumped into the numbed flesh. She and Kirika had tarried long enough in this winter's chill. Rubbing out their two distorted mirror images should serve to warm them up nicely.

Mireille turned away from the sight of Laroque's residence to Kirika, for one to inform her that they were to venture inside the estate's grounds momentarily, and for another because she was curious as to how her petite and lightly clad partner was coping with the cold so far. Kirika's arms and legs were completely bare owing to her sleeveless top and short skirt; an average girl of her slight build would be practically shivering and chattering her teeth by now. Yet, as Mireille had predicted from observing her on numerous other frosty nights, her diminutive but consummate partner in the business of dealing death didn't appear to be affected by the wintry weather at all. Kirika stood perfectly at ease on the pavement beside Mireille, her doe eyes glued to Laroque's estate as she carefully scrutinised the environment, totally unfazed by her bitter cold surroundings. Even her warm breath was virtually non-existent in the frosty air, hardly a wisp forming in spite of the considerable difference in temperature between the two.

Mireille wondered if Kirika intentionally suppressed her breathing as an act of stealth, or if it was an unconscious act that had been drilled into her during her less than cheerful childhood. Probably the latter; Kirika's entire childhood was sadly a tragic tale of abuse. Mireille's own childhood wasn't exactly a model for others to admire either, what with losing her parents and brother and having to abandon her home at a young age, but compared to her partner's it had been pure bliss. At least the blonde had had her uncle to look after and love her, but Kirika had had no one but Altena and her combat instructors who were doubtless not disposed to bestowing affection upon their charges.

Perhaps it was of no wonder then that the girl had fallen head over heels in love with Mireille. The woman was the only real person to ever show her even a shred of warmth, and considering that that warmth hadn't been that warm at all in the beginning was a testament to the extent of the maltreatment the young assassin had endured. Kirika herself had told Mireille in her farewell letter that she had been incredibly lonely until she had met her, that she had been relieved and excited when she had learned that Noir was a name for a pair of assassins. Indeed, it should be of no surprise that Kirika clung to the Corsican so fervently, and that she held her in such high esteem--Mireille's love was the first and only love Kirika had ever known. Such weighty responsibilities the girl put on the blonde's shoulders. Still, Mireille wouldn't have anyone else bear them. She cherished those responsibilities, and felt proud that she had been chosen to carry them… if a little nervous as well. Regardless, she would endeavour to be a first love worthy of Kirika, and one entitled to remain the only. Mireille would do her best to imbue the remainder of Kirika's life with the love that had been missing from her childhood, and in doing so perhaps make up for the past years of cruel mistreatment. Heaven knows the girl had earned it.

On a sudden and irresistible whim, either brought on by her prior introspective thoughts, simply to get Kirika's attention, or a combination of both, Mireille reached out and stroked the back of one finger down her partner's left upper arm, and learned that while the cold didn't seem to touch her mind, it did clearly touch her body. Kirika's skin was as chilled as Mireille's was, and a field of tiny goose bumps prickled the Corsican's finger as it proceeded towards the darkhaired girl's elbow.

Mireille smiled faintly at the ticklish sensation as her eyes followed her finger's gentle course. So Kirika was human after all. And the poor girl was as cold as she was, even if the stoic assassin didn't acknowledge it.

Kirika gave a start as soon as the woman made contact with her arm, and immediately turned her head to favour her with a quizzical look. Mireille merely continued to smile that fond smile however, undeterred by the expression and more importantly by the realisation of just what she was doing. Only a scant couple of days earlier she would have been quite uncomfortable touching Kirika in such a manner, no matter how innocuous a brush on the arm was. But while she still she had to restrain herself from pulling back her hand as if she was doing something improper, it was a fight easily won. Kirika needed the attention, needed the affection. She needed the love--Mireille's love. Yet Mireille couldn't help questioning her own motives. True, she wished to no longer neglect her other half and prove to the girl that she cared for her, but… but it wasn't only Kirika's desires she was satisfying.

Mireille was… attracted to Kirika. Goodness knows the lithe assassin was vastly skilled in the art of murder, far surpassing the Corsican's own ability, but she was also… well, put frankly, a very adorable girl. Mireille had tried not to acknowledge the fact, tried to distance herself from Kirika the person and simply view her partner as Kirika the assassin, but that was one battle she had slowly lost, and, in retrospect, had been bound to lose. She loved the girl with all her heart, and with that love came the longing to express it. Physically… intimately.

If Mireille looked at it rationally she knew it was a natural thing, a natural progression of a blossoming romantic relationship… but unfortunately when it involved Kirika the rational part of her mind rarely was given voice. It had taken Mireille a while to realise--or perhaps more correctly, decisively address--the genuine root of her… hesitation, the woman supposed one could call it, to touch Kirika affectionately, but it was all too clear to her now. It was funny how after all the arguably appalling things she had done as a killer for hire, taking the last remaining innocence of a teenage girl would give her pause. However, it wasn't as if Mireille was without morals or compassion. A killer she may be, but she was still a human being regardless of what anybody else thought. Kirika had been thrust into a life that few her age had been--or should be--subjected to, a life where innocence died a swift death. The things she had seen, the things she had done; all had stripped her of what it meant to be a child, stripped her almost bare of her innocence. Yet against all odds, a surprising amount of Kirika's naivety had survived the abuse, mostly attributable to her lack of schooling on everyday subjects and also undoubtedly to her self-preserving choice to repress the ghastly events of the past though the birthing of a second persona. Included in that subsisting naivety was her innocence regarding love, or rather the physical aspects of it. At least Kirika had that much of her innocence left, a fact that Mireille was exceedingly thankful for. In that regard she was untouched, pure and--the blonde was absolutely certain--virginal.

However, this posed as equal a joy as a predicament for Mireille. Part of the woman wanted to keep Kirika the way she was now forever--cute and clueless--but another simply *wanted* her. Mireille ached to touch Kirika, to hug her and kiss her as a lover would; it had been that yearning which had prompted her to caress the oblivious girl during her sleep, the only time she'd had the courage to do so. Pathetic she knew, but she just couldn't help feeling that her desire was wrong. In the slightest touch she read a carnal craving lurking behind it, regardless of her true intent. Kirika was just so… so… so *innocent* in that respect; it was like she was taking advantage of her youthful partner. Mireille didn't think she even knew what a lesbian was!

Still, in spite of her reluctance to touch Kirika, Mireille was deeply aware it couldn't be avoided, regardless of what she wanted to do. Kirika needed her love, and she would have it. All of it. What that entailed exactly the Corsican didn't quite know yet, but the one thing she did know was not to push their relationship forwards with a heavy hand. Kirika was emotionally fragile in certain respects including this one--as most people were Mireille supposed--and she had to be treated like a fine china doll. Moreover, Mireille herself wasn't exactly keen to rush things either. Truth be told she was still finding her feet in all of this, the woman nearly as inexperienced as Kirika in the matters of the heart. Nevertheless, they would find their way. Together.

Mireille casually let her hand drop when her finger reached halfway down Kirika's arm, and then raised her eyes to make contact with her curious partner's. "It's quiet," she said, casting her gaze back to the mansion for a moment and electing to not respond to the introverted girl's questioning countenance.

"Mm," Kirika agreed, enticed into looking back at Laroque's house briefly by Mireille's like action and in turn apparently forgetting about Mireille's stroking finger, just as the crafty blonde had planned.

"Then why don't we get out of this cold, hmm?" Mireille suggested in a light voice, her smile broadening a little and becoming a shade encouraging.

"Mm," Kirika mumbled again with a nod, although no smile brightened her face. Not that Mireille had expected one to appear. Killing people was nothing to smile about, not to Kirika at any rate. Maybe Mireille had overlooked a small piece of another innocence still alive in the girl. Sympathy for her victims was something that had died long ago inside the Corsican assassin--if it had ever been there at all--yet it seemed to still endure inside her kind-hearted partner. At one point in time Mireille had looked upon Kirika as something akin to a monster, but sometimes she wondered whom the real so-called 'monster' was between them; the born and bred assassin with a warm heart, or the assassin born of circumstance with a cold one.

Without further ado Mireille and Kirika stepped off the footpath and crossed the brightly lit street, their heads warily turning both left and right as they checked to make sure it was empty, more to ensure that no one was around to espy their impending actions rather than to certify that the road was safe to traverse. They approached the estate's front gate--the sole entrance to the compound--as nonchalantly as possible, simply two people out for a late night--if freezing--stroll. Mireille felt edgy under the glare of the streetlights like an insect under a microscope, vulnerable and in the open, at the mercy of those beyond the lights. The shadows of the world were where she felt most comfortable, where she belonged.

Unluckily the road wasn't the only place that was illuminated; the estate's gate was situated in just the right spot to be flooded from all sides by the light from the streetlamps, and if that wasn't enough it even had its own lights shaped like box lanterns mounted on the front face of both pillars where the gate's hinges were affixed. Mireille so disliked operating out from under the cover of darkness, especially during nighttime assignments when a figure darting through pools of light in otherwise murk was all the more noticeable. However, while the abundance of light revealed the woman and her partner's presence to anybody who cared to look their way, it did also serve to reveal to the pair that something ahead was amiss.

Mireille and Kirika stopped in unison before the gate, blue and brown eyes drawn to the stone pillar on its right. Concealed amongst some thick foliage draping over the sides of a plant pot that was sitting atop the rectangular column was a twisted shaft of metal, the remains of a strut. And on the ground below it was the device it had been tasked with holding up--a small security camera, one designed for discrete surveillance. Except that this camera had been crushed into a lump of barely recognisable black plastic and grey steel, as if--judging by its ruined prop--it had been torn violently from its perch and then scrunched into a ball like nothing more than a piece of scrap paper, before being unceremoniously discarded to the ground.

"Mireille," Kirika said softly, attracting the blonde's attention.

Mireille turned to Kirika and saw the girl gesture with a crooked finger at a row of tall conifers lining the fence on the right hand side of the front gate. At first the Corsican was puzzled at what was so interesting about a string of bushes, that was until she noticed the slumped figure lying obscured in the shadows behind their broad branches. She approached the still form, and after gingerly pulling back the springy plant life hiding it, saw that it was of a man dressed in a dark suit with a noticeable bulge where his full gun holster rested on his ribs; the uniform of an expensive hired guard. He lay on his side with his back against the wall enclosing the estate, and was clearly quite dead. With the conifers out of the way the light from the nearby streetlamps rushed to conquer the newly uncovered terrain, and consequently exposed the dreadful trauma the man's body had sustained, giving support to the aforementioned belief.

The guard's torso was covered in still wet blood that glistened dully in the light, the result of what Mireille believed to be numerous stab wounds if the slit-like rips in his shirt and suit jacket were anything to go by. However, there was also a very thin, dark red line across his throat from ear to ear coupled with some surrounding bruising, plus his tongue was lolling obscenely out of his mouth, like he had been strangled. Mireille was familiar with the latter injuries; it was the product of a swift and brutal garrotting with a fine instrument, probably a razor sharp wire of some sort possessing a high degree of tensile strength. Not the most pleasant fashion in which to leave this world.

The ultimate cause of the ill-fated sentry's demise was anybody's guess, however, even the murderers'. The stabs seemed nasty and surely had struck several vital organs--by the looks of it, predominantly the heart and lungs, the prime targets to instil a definite death by knifing against one's victim--and the blood loss was tremendous, but the garrotting appeared to have cut deep and perhaps had severed the man's windpipe on top of strangling him. Death had come for this man along four different routes, but all equally as deadly; he had never even stood a hair's breadth of a chance. Ryosuke and Vincent certainly were efficient--if vicious--killers. But then in this business there was little distinction separating the two.

"I guess this means we have the right address," Mireille commented dryly as she allowed the conifers to snap back into place, before turning back to Kirika. By the damp appearance of the blood the blonde could tell that the guard's wounds hadn't been dished out too long ago. It confirmed that their targets were still in the area, or to be more precise, in Laroque's manor. Fortunately Mireille and Kirika had not arrived here too late.

"Mm…" Kirika murmured, her eyes flicking to the mansion for a moment before returning to the Corsican.

Mireille's gaze found the mangled wreck of the surveillance camera once again, a light frown on her brow. It was strange that no one had come to investigate the sudden and ferocious destruction of the camera, nor the disappearance of the estate's forefront guard. There had to be a manned security station somewhere on the grounds or in the mansion itself if there was a camera; it would be rather pointless if nobody was watching the monitor it was linked up to otherwise. And as for the guard, while Ryosuke and Vincent may have dispatched him in a silent manner to not immediately alert his comrades in the vicinity, one of the other sentries must have eventually noticed that he was missing from his post for a worrying length of time.

Whatever the reason for the apparent lack of response, it was evident that security for Laroque's estate was fairly tight--lax response times notwithstanding--but really no greater than one could envisage for your average affluent and mistrustful family's posh home. A team of armed guards and a network of cameras were nothing Mireille hadn't encountered before, nor easily overcome without breaking a sweat. Guards could be avoided, misled with distraction, bribed, sweet-talked, knocked quietly unconscious, or just killed outright; and as for cameras their fields of view could simply be evaded until the individuals staffing the contraptions' other ends were taken care of. A security camera without human eyes behind its electronic one was merely an empty threat, a maimed tool. Nevertheless, that electronic eye did tend to have an infallible memory as a cohort, but of course that was switched off or forcibly purged if necessary after the cameras' operators had been similarly contended with, although perhaps in a more permanent fashion than the machines.

Mireille had seen it all; coded keypads, infrared alarm lasers, retina scans. And regardless of how complex a security system was there was always a way to bypass, or better yet disarm it, as the blonde had discovered during the course of her chosen vocation. With the knowledge she had gained she could make quite the tidy profit as a cat burglar if she were so disposed to a career change. Being a professional *and* an adept contract killer incorporated most if not all of the skills of a thief and a spy put together. Breaking and entering, the art of disguise, subterfuge and misdirection--if one wished to be a truly consummate assassin then these talents and more like them were required to be added to one's repertoire. After all, assassination targets were prone to surround themselves with a great deal of protection. Seldom a sniper rifle on a rooftop or at an open window was sufficient; it was the reason why such a method was labelled as amateurish.

Mireille lifted her head from the smashed camera and walked a few steps to the left side of the gate, before looking back over her shoulder at Kirika, the soft curve of a small, almost playful smile once more on her lips. "Let's tread lightly and keep the noise level to a whisper, okay?" she instructed with a light-hearted lilt. The woman turned around fully, and then drew her loaded Walther P99 from its holster, her left hand retrieving its companion piece--a silencer--from under her coat a moment later. "People who have their sleep disturbed do have a propensity to wake up cranky," Mireille went on as she securely attached the silencer to the end of her pistol. "And noisy late night callers are apt to invite considerably greater ire from them." She hoisted her gun upright in her hand and arched an expectant eyebrow at her counterpart.

"Understood," Kirika said, grasping the hint. She abided by her partner's 'suggestion' and pulled out her Beretta from her skirt's waistband behind her back, a silencer following from under the garment that was quickly fastened to the weapon.

Mireille nodded in approval, and then turned her head back to the gate. The black iron wrought structure was blessedly unlocked and even a tad ajar, meaning that she and Kirika didn't have to scale its tall bars to gain entry. It wouldn't have been especially difficult for the nimble duo, but two young women climbing over ten foot spiked rails in the middle of the night while haloed by the light of streetlamps wasn't exactly subtle and was better to be steered clear of. However, Ryosuke and Vincent had obviously already breached Laroque's security and had had the--albeit unintentional--courtesy to leave their access route open. It should simply be a matter of tracing the false Noir's footsteps until Mireille and Kirika caught up to them, the majority of the dangers having been already neutralised by tonight's first intruders into the estate. Or so the blonde hoped. Judging by the aggressively trounced security measures at the front gate, Ryosuke and Vincent were not loath to use lethal force against anything that stood in their path. Mireille trusted that they had continued in the same fierce style throughout their infiltration.

"With any luck those two will have cleared the entire way for us," Mireille remarked, voicing her thoughts for Kirika's benefit, even though she was certain the darkhaired girl had parallel hopes. But there was no harm in sharing one's feelings, particularly when on an assignment of sorts… and particularly these days, when Mireille was championing open and frequent communication between herself and her reticent partner. True, they had their own unique manner of conversing during 'business hours'; an instinctive one that was far beyond the level of mundane verbal communication, but when it came to personal feelings after hours they were both clearly inept at expressing themselves. It was Mireille's aspiration that that would change soon, but until then in her view every little bit helped.

Kirika merely mumbled her concurrence in her traditional fashion, but then Mireille hadn't expected much more. Change didn't happen overnight, even during a long night like this one.

Mireille slipped through the open gate and inside the compound--her introverted partner in tow--and instantly deviated from the illuminated gravel path leading to the mansion and onto the pitch-black section of lawn on her left instead, glad to be out of the light that laid her bare and back in the safety of the shadows' shroud. She then paused there in the murk, crouched low in the dewy grass with Kirika next to her, the pair delaying their approach for a few seconds to give their eyes time to adjust to the darkness.

As Mireille's night vision gradually kicked in, she slowly made out a handful of dark shapes scattered haphazardly across the grounds, predominantly in the left expanse where she and Kirika presently were. It didn't take the assassin long to realise that the silhouettes were in fact the bodies of more guards, put to death as Ryosuke and Vincent had stormed through. There had to be greater than half a dozen dead men lying about under the cloudy night's sky, their final resting place looking like the spot where they had originally fallen. No effort at all had seemingly been made on the false Noir's part to drag the carcasses into a secluded corner of the estate and suitably hide the evidence of their incursion. It was an act of either sloppiness or arrogance, but Mireille already knew the answer to that one. It would seem that Ryosuke and Vincent held nothing save contempt for their victims, impending and otherwise. In any case, the blonde now understood that people *had* been sent to investigate the abandoned front gate, it was just that none of them had lasted the distance there. Ryosuke and his partner had evidently utilised the pall of darkness covering the compound to their extreme advantage and systemically slaughtered them all on a first come, first kill basis. Mireille doubted whether any of the sentries had even seen their end coming.

The trail of corpses was a beneficial if macabre sight to Mireille, sketching an even clearer path for her and Kirika to follow. And follow it they did without a sound and at a swift pace, their pistols ready to be brought to bear against any surviving guard who made an unexpected appearance and threatened to compromise their stealthy infiltration. Mireille was a bit concerned about the presence of dogs on the premises as well, but thankfully there appeared to be no troublesome and generally vicious canines wandering around, or else they were tied up in their kennels somewhere, snoozing away like their owners in the mansion. Guard dogs were harder to deal with than their human counterparts; they had the habit of sniffing out a trespasser regardless of where she or he secreted themselves. The animals couldn't be reasoned with like human beings either; money and sex appeal counted for squat, and they held unwavering faith in their noses and instincts to not be deterred by misdirection… well, unless that misdirection involved masking one's scent, which was tricky to do and more bother than it was worth. Mireille found it much simpler to just shoot any inquisitive dog that detected her scent and wandered too close, then subsequently their handler a split second later depending on their proximity. A lost mutt was written off with significantly less concern than an actual person.

The disjointed, gruesome trail of limp-limbed bodies led to the west wing of Laroque's residence, and vanished around a corner of the building. Mireille and Kirika stuck close to the manor as they traced after it, the barren flowerbeds bordering its outer walls as much space as they would allow between them. Up this close the blonde assassin could see that a layer of moss or lichen coated the lower bricks of the house, while a thick covering of ivy and other viny plant life climbed trellises fastened to the walls, their tendrils stretching all the way to the second floor windows and if left to grow unchecked could very possibly reach the gutters if not the roof proper. If Mireille and Kirika had wished to they could probably use the trellises as a ladder and enter the mansion via an upper floor window. Although they didn't, it was still worthwhile to make note of--if they required a quick escape route while on the second level they could always clamber down the side of the house with relative ease and speed.

The two female assassins rounded the corner cautiously, wary of possible threats, before immediately discovering a set of steps that led to a side entrance to the manor, a couple of trashcans neighbouring it. As they moved closer they saw that the alternate entrance's door was wide open, but with only more darkness spilling outside. Ryosuke and Vincent had no doubt entered Laroque's house through there.

Mireille and Kirika placed their backs to the mansion's wall, heedless of the flowerbeds now, before edging nearer to the side entrance, the Corsican at the point as usual. She poked her blonde head carefully into the doorway and took quick stock of the interior, her sharp gaze darting this way and that, covering all angles. The doorway opened into a kitchen as old-fashioned as the exterior of the house, but it appeared well equipped with the occasional modern appliance discreetly positioned in amongst the outdated here and there, and was also in immaculate condition--Laroque must have hired hands, Mireille surmised. There wasn't a single bloodied corpse sullying the floor either, which did work to the spotless room's advantage. Dead bodies did have a tendency to spoil any décor.

The coast clear, Mireille signalled to Kirika that it was safe to proceed with a brusque wave of her hand, and then after bounding atop the uppermost step slinked inside the kitchen, her Walther's sight focusing on an open doorway ahead while she favoured a closed one to her left with a watchful eye. Kirika tagged along behind the woman, her own gaze momentarily zipping all over the room as she took in her new surroundings. It then finally settled on the hallway viewable through the open door in front of them, where Ryosuke and Vincent's unsightly trail resumed with gory grandeur.

If Laroque did have hired hands, then his maids were definitely going to have an unpleasant time cleaning the halls in the morning. Mireille's blue eyes left the closed door alone and moved back to the open doorway to join Kirika's, where she had noted during her first perusal of the kitchen that yet more guards lay massacred in an adjoining short corridor that terminated at a shut door, a corridor which also crossed perpendicularly with a second. Pale, diffused light produced from an unknown source shone from the latter hall's left and muted though it was, it was just enough to permit the woman and her colleague to distinguish the passages' deceased inhabitants in superior detail than they had with the sentries' likewise departed fellows outside, the corpses' faces being painted an eerie and appropriate deathly white.

Men in suits were sprawled on the floor and slouched against the walls in all manner of arrangements, and large amounts of their blood soaked the luxuriant carpeting with dark stains and not to mention their once clean and crisp clothing as well. As Mireille and Kirika crept into the corridor ahead of them and to the intersection with all due prudence, they saw that the grievous injuries inflicted upon the guards were the cause of such major haemorrhaging. Their wounds were chiefly localised to the neck and throat areas, and the Corsican observed that there was evidence of the garrotting she had seen on the guard at the gate on a few of the luckless men. Others had had their throats slit or stabbed with savage intensity, their arteries ruptured and the slash or thrust deep, oft cases to the bone. A couple of sentries even had their heads bent at nauseatingly odd angles, their necks obviously broken, likely with sheer brute force--a simple but rather inelegant method of killing that was beyond Mireille's own physical capability, not that she would be one to adopt the crude technique. There was also the sporadic guard who had received punctures with a blade to their back instead of their throat, with the noticeable intent to pierce a lung considering where it had been plunged. Not a single gunshot wound was to be seen, although there were a few handguns strewn about, the dropped firearms of the sentries who had managed to pull their weapons from their holsters before meeting the Reaper.

All in all, the carnage wrought along each of the two hallways was an impressive feat for what it was--so many slain without an apparent alarm being raised or even a retaliatory shot fired. Mireille deduced that by concentrating their attacks to the throat and neck, Ryosuke and Vincent had prevented their quarries from screaming or from making the slightest sound above a liquid gurgle, and hence thwarted the stricken guards from warning their comrades. The blows to the lungs had probably created a similar affect; as soon as air from the outside had invaded the breached organs merely continuing to breath would have been more than enough challenge for the victim. Still, it must have been very hard for the false Noir to actually inflict the silencing wounds to each guard before he could cry out, especially if more than one were alerted to their presence at the time. Ryosuke and Vincent had surely butchered the men with a speed and efficiency on par with Kirika's. A false Noir they may be, but it would seem that they did have the skill to merit the title. However, Mireille was not concerned. It wasn't as if she and Kirika were pushovers. And, after all, they had been the true Noir. A copy could never surpass the original, and an imitation had even less of a chance.

The hallways themselves where Ryosuke and Vincent's achievements were put on grisly display were in the same vein as the kitchen and the mansion's exterior; an archaic motif straight out of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was as if Mireille and Kirika had stumbled back in time somehow and right into a traditional manor house of that antiquated period. Oil paintings of people dressed in the customary attire of the past hundred to two hundred years hung on the walls together with correspondingly styled renditions of landscapes of Europe long ago lost to modernisation. Placed intermittently along the length of the hallway's walls were ornaments consisting of magnificently crafted vases and statuettes to name a couple, exhibited on small pedestals befitting the era they stemmed from.

Collectively the value of the objects in the corridors alone had to total in the hundred thousands--a grand fortune indeed. Any art dealer or thief would be downright ecstatic to get their hands on even one of the masterpieces Mireille saw; she was sure that the splattered blood marking some of the antiques would not deter them in the least. And it could probably be cleaned off rather easily, and without so much as a thought to how it got there given by their new owners. Albert Laroque was unmistakably an exceptionally rich man, with his security precautions clearly warranted. Maybe Ryosuke and Vincent weren't here for an assassination at all but in fact to pilfer a few choice artefacts. Mireille didn't honestly believe that, however it was still a possibility, albeit a slim one. She wouldn't know the false Noir's true intentions for definite until she actually came across them, and even then perhaps not. Ryosuke and Vincent wouldn't be alive for very long after the meeting, of course. And the Corsican wasn't the type to grant her targets any last words.

Mireille stopped in the middle of the crossroads dividing the hallways, Kirika mimicking in accordance to her older partner's action. The blonde assassin cast her eyes down the left span of corridor, where she had glimpsed an interesting sight in her initial cursory glance of the area that she had performed before she and Kirika had risked advancing further. At the end of the corridor was the origin of the pallid light that streaked weakly into the passage. A door stood wide open there, baring a room that's purpose was immediately obvious. Inside were a pair of guards--quite dead, naturally--one face down on the floor bleeding from his throat and the other sitting in a computer chair, his chin on his chest with the rest of his body just as slack. And in front of that man was a desk with a dozen television monitors stacked atop one another in three rows, no doubt the control centre for the security camera network set up around the manor. The equipment looked out of place in a house that was a tribute to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; a cubbyhole of modern technology in an antiquated world. However, the technology at the moment was about as effective as it would have been if utilised in that old era. All the monitors' screens displayed a noiseless snowstorm at night, black and white static in a never-ending tumult. Ryosuke and Vincent had evidently taken out the surveillance system, and in one fell swoop disabled all the cameras throughout the estate. It favoured Mireille and Kirika as much as it did their enemies, though; there was no need to worry about being captured on film whilst tiptoeing around the house.

The trail of bodies the young women had been using to direct them to their prey more or less concluded at the ghastly scene of mass murder at the corridors' junction, but both assassins espied a faint glow of light coming from the tiny crack formed between an ajar door and its doorjamb to their right, near the far end of the longer hallway. Like nighttime insects to a lamppost's light, Mireille and Kirika were attracted to it, stealing down the passageway towards the door, their pistols suddenly held just a little tighter in their ready hands.

Ryosuke and Vincent, their distorted reflections--they were near, very near. Mireille could practically feel it, like some sort of sixth sense; a sensation of inexplicable anticipation, although it was neither exciting nor uneasy, just… an impression of something up ahead. She was sure Kirika felt the same thing. It was the innate instincts of an assassin at work, an intuition that similarly forewarned one when an assailant was just around the corner or an unseen gun sight was being trained on them from afar. Mireille was sure the foundation of the strange sense was based squarely in logic rather than in some sort of Zen-like awareness, the feeling doubtless the product of external stimuli ignored by the conscious mind and instead analysed by the unconscious, such as sights and sounds just on the brink of perception. Regardless of the feeling's descent, the fact remained that the false Noir was very likely beyond that door; the Corsican was almost positive that they were. This long night was drawing to its conclusion. The lone executioners--Death--had arrived; let the final scene of this film noir commence.

Mireille and Kirika halted outside the door, close enough to perceive the intricate wood grain stylised on its varnished surface. The woman looked at her shorter partner for confirmation that she was prepared, though it was a superfluous gesture. As soon as her blue eyes locked with Kirika's brown, she knew by their stanch appearance that the darkhaired girl was ready--she was *always* ready. Though resolute the young assassin's gaze may be--hard even--it was not cruel or unfeeling in any way. Unwavering determination is all that existed in the orbs' still depths. Kirika was a girl with a gun and with the full intent to use it, yet a girl she remained--she had no penchant for murder in spite of the number of lives she had taken and her aptitude for it. A cold-blooded killer she was not. And never would be, if Mireille had her way. And never would be… again….

Mireille exhaled calmly and then held her next breath, before she suddenly burst into the room behind the door, shoving it completely open with her left shoulder as she strafed swiftly inside, bringing up her Walther in her right hand. Kirika sprung through the doorway a fraction of a second after her, sticking a metre away from the Corsican's side and brandishing her own firearm. It wasn't a stealthy entrance by any means, but Mireille had elected to charge in rather than creep inside to maintain the element of surprise indefinitely. She believed the sneaker approach would have been less effective and potentially treacherous; Ryosuke and Vincent quite possibly would have heard their entrance--virtually silent as it would have been--and then Mireille and Kirika's advantage over them would have been forfeit. Perhaps the woman was overestimating the men's abilities, but to underestimate them would be to invite danger. Therefore Mireille had decided to simply dash inside the room. It was noisy, but should catch the room's occupants unawares, regardless of who they were.

Mireille took in the surroundings of the room in a mere instant, but only a small part of her attention was dedicated to the chore. It was clearly a library or an exceptionally well-resourced study furnished in an identical theme as the rest of mansion, with ornate shelves packed almost to capacity with countless books lining the left and right walls from one end nearly completely to the other. A third and fourth set of shelves equally stocked with texts roosted above their mates on roughly four-foot wide hardwood balconies, each accessed by a stepladder constructed of the same material. They stood tall enough to touch the high ceiling of the rectangular library, much like the matching array of shelves below them that scraped the underside of their perch.

The tomes that made their home in the library were arranged in an orderly fashion on the shelves, not a speck of dust to be seen coating a single binding, and most if not all were bound in leather covers dyed in sombre hues; the trappings of classic books or very old ones, likely the second when taking into account the other rare and priceless items that resided on the premises. Mireille mused whether Laroque had amassed all these artefacts and ancient texts out of an interest in those fields, and that what she had been seeing while she and Kirika had traipsed through his house's halls were pieces of his collection. It would explain the sheer volume of items on display.

A few small round tables with accompanying cosy-looking chairs and a couple of two-seater sofas with cushions were present in the middle of the room, presumably placed there for readers to avail themselves of and relax in respectively while pouring over a book penned during a time long ago. There wasn't a book lying out of place on any of the brilliantly polished and finely crafted tables currently however, the majority of the tomes nestled away comfortably in their spots on the bookshelves. Yet there were some glaring gaps in amongst the texts sitting on the many shelves, several of them quite thick suggesting the removal of a number of books.

The missing tomes were accounted for where the greater bulk of Mireille's attention was focused; past the room's décor and towards a bulky dark oak desk and red wine coloured leather chair at the far end of the library, which were situated in front of a huge window made up of a trio of thinner ones with arched white frames, the central window the tallest of the three. Irregular, jumbled piles of books taken from their original resting places were assembled on the desk, numerous scattered across it, one or two even deposited seemingly without a care on the floor. And hunched over the stacks of tomes with their backs to Mireille and Kirika were two men, both sifting through the literary mess obviously in search of a specific title. One picked out and examined the contents of individual books with meticulous exactitude, while his companion rummaged around the heap with contrasting frenetic impetuousness, occasionally tossing books aside in frustration. The false Noir, Ryosuke Ishinomori and Vincent Hsu, just as Mireille had predicted.

A lamp on the desk provided illumination for the duo's labours, its light having been what had lured Mireille and Kirika to their location in the first place. It gently saturated the library in a soft orange glow akin to the setting sun, the twilight casting elongated shadows on the bookshelves and ceiling, the silhouettes of Ryosuke and Vincent the tallest of them all. Giant, distorted images of the killers stretched out from their feet, the limbs spindly and spider-like, warped to otherworldly proportions--more like monsters than men. Perhaps it was a glimpse into a form of mirror, the dark reflections of corrupt souls. Mireille wondered what her shadow-self looked like. She didn't check.

At the clamour of Mireille and her partner's dramatic and abrupt entrance, the hitmen immediately ceased their rummaging, although their subsequent reactions varied in tone rather significantly. Vincent spun around to face the opposite end of the room and its new occupants a scarce instant after Mireille had crossed the doorway's threshold, an extended switchblade with an edge of about four inches long gripped between his bared teeth, and a feral, maniacal grin splitting his features as a result. His amber eyes matched the ferocity of his grin, burning with a fierce intensity somehow made deeper by the understated light of the room, reminiscent of how a feline's eyes sparkled in places of low illumination. However, upon sighting Mireille he blinked, his eyes losing their glint and his grin no longer quite so crazed. Instead Vincent's expression became nigh on a leer of a lecherous old man… that wasn't that much different from the previous look, the blonde dryly reconsidered.

Ryosuke on the other hand didn't even bother turning around to greet his foes. He straightened to his full height and lowered his arms slowly to his sides at Mireille and Kirika's arrival--as if he had all the time in the world--and settled on merely looking over his right shoulder in the young women's direction, his pale profile exhibiting an utter calm and composure in spite of being taken by surprise and put at a potentially deadly disadvantage. There was contempt also; his one visible violet eye smouldering coldly with it through his white bangs while the thin compaction of his lips wordlessly spoke of distaste at the unwanted interruption.

Mireille noticed that clasped in Ryosuke's right hand was a length of piano wire, either end fastened to a black plastic handle. It was the kind of wire used for anything but inside pianos, with it's lightweight and non-metallic composition making it a handy tool of murder that could pass through metal detectors uncontested and be carried effortlessly on one's person. If Mireille were ever inclined to take a literal 'hands-on' style to the fundamentals of her job it would most certainly be one of the instruments she would employ. It appeared that Ryosuke thought on a similar vein to the blonde assassin; it was clear that he was responsible for the garrotting marks on the throats of the guards seen earlier, and, while on the subject, that his associate Vincent laid claim to the knife wounds. But as for who snapped the odd sentry's neck, it could have been either of them. Or even both.

While their responses for the most part differed, one particular thing was mutual amongst both Ryosuke and Vincent--neither exhibited any trace of fear whatsoever. The fact didn't unnerve Mireille however; it simply meant that the men were not trifling poseurs like so many other people who inhabited the underworld. But the woman had known that for quite some time now, ever since she had exchanged fire with one half of the false Noir in Le Grand Hotel Inter-Continental. Pretenders who merely talked big but were in reality just small fries would not have been able to accomplish the feats of the kind Ryosuke and Vincent had. What's more they were supposedly well known in the underbelly of Japan's society and were allied with Kaede--the sharpest thorn in Soldats' side presently--to boot, with one of the men her brother no less. With skill came reputation, and Ryosuke and Vincent were not for want in either.

"Caught in the act red-handed," Mireille remarked sardonically in a cool and self-assured voice as she moved further into the library, repositioning herself to the rear of the mini lounge running down its centre--a spot better suited to imparting cover in the event of a firefight. Her pistol's sight remained steady on the immobile Ryosuke's back as she sidestepped carefully away from the room's doorway, Kirika's Beretta imitating the woman's Walther as she followed the blonde's lead, except that its target was the man's shorter companion, Vincent, and his chest. "I never knew you two were such avid book lovers that you would resort to petty burglary."

Mireille had been tempted to simply blaze away with her handgun at Ryosuke and Vincent's defenceless backs as soon as she had seen them, yet despite that near overpowering compulsion she had somehow managed to stay her hand… for now. While a scant couple of days earlier this week she would not have hesitated for even the smallest sliver of a second at blasting several 9mm Parabellum rounds the false Noir's way, now, after the men's prior behaviour tonight, her curiosity was grudgingly piqued. People had died, people who had been assets to her trade… as vulgar and trivial as Simon and his associates had been. Still, Mireille wanted explanations as to why they'd had to give up their lives, and, in relation to that answer, she was confident she would also learn why the false Noir were more or less ransacking a well-to-do man's library in suburban Paris. Moreover, she was *not* a mindless tool of Soldats or Breffort's unquestioningly carrying out their bidding with blinkers on, and nor was Kirika; they both had their own free will to handle matters as *they* pleased and always would. Desperation to stop the deterioration of her close relationship with her partner had fuelled the Corsican's passion to slay Ryosuke and Vincent immediately during their last confrontation, but this time with a more level head on her shoulders and lighter heart in her chest the woman could regard the situation with a judicious mind. It was another troubling reminder of why sentimentality had no place amid those who lived by the gun.

Vincent cautiously reached up to his mouth and removed the switchblade from between his teeth, his rich amber eyes shifting warily from Kirika's raised weapon to Mireille's, knowing that to provoke them with aggressive movement would cause bullets to fly and people to die--namely him. "If it isn't babe and brat," he then drawled with a snide smirk as he lowered his arm with the same earlier degree of prudence, his broken French dripping with mocking. "Took you long enough. You know your crispy predecessors were lot better at finding us."

"Perhaps," Mireille replied icily, her expression just as frosty as her tone. But only for an instant. The next moment her face brightened, easily schooled to cordiality attributable to frequent practice, a faint taunting smile teasing her lips upwards. "Yet I must say your sloppy handiwork in the shop off Rue de Prony was most helpful in pointing us in the right direction," she then retorted haughtily to the triad affiliate, although her eyes stayed firmly on Ryosuke, trusting unconditionally that Kirika had the other man well in hand, just as the girl likewise trusted that she had the tall hitman restrained.

Out of the corner of her eye Mireille saw an angry sneer flash across Vincent's face before his own features were disciplined, the demeaning lopsided leer resurfacing. So she had struck a nerve. Interesting. It appeared that Vincent was indeed a hothead as the Corsican had suspected from his deeds--or more to the point, from the extent of the butchery inflicted upon his victims--thus far, albeit a hothead with his temper under tight rein. However, there were always methods to slacken those reins or even loose them outright, and it appeared that Vincent possibly drew on killing as an outlet for his rage--the period when he himself let his control wane, voluntarily or not. Small, seemingly inconsequential details like this on a target had proved useful to Mireille in the past; every facet of a hit's personality regardless of how minor had the potential to be used against them, be they actual character traits or behavioural habits. A professional assassin gathered these little gems and utilised them as they could, turning that late night cigarette break in an alley into a death sentence for their target, one markedly faster than the sluggish ravages of cancer.

"Soldats…" Ryosuke suddenly uttered in a soft whisper as he tilted his head back towards the ceiling, his profile taking on a distant look while the lid of his sole visible eye sagged lazily. "Their veins indeed run deep and long, the very world the body of the beast. Where there is no such thing as coincidence… just ever watchful eyes." His words, while somewhat cryptic and more than a little poetic were expressed in perfect, flowing French--a huge improvement over his partner's meagre ability in the language. In addition they sounded as if they were spoken primarily to himself, the black clad man temporarily oblivious to his company in the library with him.

Nevertheless, Mireille did not miss Ryosuke's observations on the global, ancient, and secret organisation. That he--and by association Vincent--had admitted knowing of the existence of Soldats out loud bestowed extra credibility to the soundness of Breffort's briefing on Kaede and her pseudo Black Hands that had taken place weeks ago in his office. While it would have been unlikely if Ryosuke and his counterpart had not been aware of the clandestine group, it was still comforting to know for sure that they did. One never could tell with Soldats. They weaved deception like a spider weaved a web--intricate and ensnaring, with escape an extremely difficult if not impossible prospect for the captured fly. But in contrast to a spider's web, the fly rarely realised when it had been caught in the network of threads. And that was where the real danger lied, a danger Mireille was all too conscious of.

Vincent favoured Ryosuke with a sidelong look for a fleeting moment before his eyes snapped back to Mireille and Kirika again, along with the pistols levelled in his and his comrade's direction. "Yeah," he agreed, although the Corsican assassin didn't believe he truly comprehended the white-haired man's statements, "and they hire young, too. On top of usual Soldats dogs and now Soldats bitches--as pretty as they are--" He inclined his head Mireille's way, leering at her wantonly as he licked his upper lip in what he probably thought to be an enticing manner. However all it enticed was the bitter taste of bile to fill the back of the blonde's throat. "--We have a cute Soldats puppy!" Vincent snickered and grinned condescendingly at Kirika, but the stoic--or was that naïve?--girl merely stared back at him blankly, unaffected by the jibe.

"You'd be surprised at just how young," Mireille said without emotion, her veneer of geniality gone not due to the barbs--although they didn't best please her, either--but due to the foul memories they invoked. She knew very well at exactly how young an age Soldats was willing to pluck their recruits from. A childhood destroyed with the murder of her parents and elder brother, another corrupted by the abhorrent deeds she was forced to perform--and both children owning their torment and loss of innocence to the twisted machinations of a heartless woman belonging to the organisation. Oh yes, Mireille was intimately versed in how low Soldats could sink in the age of choosing their 'followers' and in their morals, if the group even had any principles of decent merit to start with.

"But despite what you think, we are *not* members of Soldats," Mireille continued with emphatic insistence, her voice stern and brooking no mistake. She wasn't strictly lying per se; neither she nor Kirika were part of the society. While it could be said they were working for Breffort, a prominent follower of the worldwide group, it was by their own decision; Mireille preferred to perceive it as working for themselves, with their goals happening to coincide with Soldats'. 'Dogs' they were certainly not.

"Oh?" Vincent said with exaggerated curiosity, lifting an inquisitive eyebrow and pulling a face to complement it. "Then, why you come after us? Besides the obvious…." He winked mischievously at the beautiful blonde and leered at her yet again, as if some perverted attraction to his ego had brought her before him and Ryosuke. Sure, Vincent's remarkably good looks could have also been considered as a lure, but in this case the adage 'beauty is only skin deep' couldn't have been more spot on.

"Why do you think?" Mireille snapped, frowning slightly. A strange sensation of anxiousness started to creep into the assassin's chest from somewhere deep down below, an unpleasant tingling progressively flooding the area slowly that seemed to cause it to constrict with increasing tension, as if an invisible hand were pressing down on her breastbone. "You stole something of ours," she went on undaunted regardless, ignoring the odd and troubling feeling. "It may not be something we like, or even want, but it's ours nonetheless." The woman's voice lowered to a grim timbre, a dark cloud passing over her eyes. "It's a name *earned*, not given, nor taken." Mireille's expression then darkened to mirror her gaze, recalling her own folly and ignorance in dubbing herself and Kirika as Noir without any genuine knowledge of the full significance of the name. "And its price…. The Black Hands are called as such for a reason; only through both parties staining their own black with grievous sins can they be truly worthy of it."

Mireille heard Kirika shift her weight uneasily, a subtle rubbing of a shoe sole on carpet. The girl understood, perhaps even understanding better than she. A designation earned through violence and murder, through showing no pity, no remorse. The Eternal Darkness… Mireille mused whether Noir were christened that because its two halves resided always in shadow, the light having shunned them for their immoral transgressions. Noir, the Black Hands, the Eternal Darkness… so many names yet all with identical undertones, identical meanings. It was no wonder Mireille despised the title and its connection to her and Kirika so much.

Ryosuke and Vincent merely looked at Mireille for a few moments, before the older gangster bowed his head, his stark white hair hiding his face from view. "I see," he spoke softly and in his native Japanese tongue, once again his words apparently for his own ears, "so that was her motive. Hmph."

Mireille wasn't sure whether or not Ryosuke was aware she could comprehend every single word he was murmuring, but she deliberately didn't react to the statement in any way. Feigning ignorance was a typical and widely used technique of lulling a careless individual into a false sense of security, and consequently enticing her or him into making a slip-up that could then be employed against them. Furthermore, there was very little sense in freely giving information to those you didn't trust without receiving anything in return. 'Take as much as you can and give only what you must'. Wise words to live by… that is, unless one happened to be involved in a romantic relationship with a cute, but introverted, Japanese girl. But naturally significant others were exempt from the axiom.

As could be expected, Kirika--Mireille's aforementioned 'significant other'--didn't respond to Ryosuke's words either, but with her distinctly Japanese features it was a marvel he didn't realise that at least she understood him. Perhaps the man simply didn't care who heard him, be they friend or foe. It certainly would fit his profile of being supremely arrogant. At any rate, Mireille wondered whom 'her' was referring to. Ryosuke's sister, Kaede, perhaps? She was the only female the blonde knew who had links to the black clad killer.

Ryosuke raised his head, his visible violet eye swinging around to favour Mireille with a piercing Cyclops glare. "So Noir stands before us," he declared in a louder voice than his previous though without fanfare of any sort, obviously not very impressed being in the presence of a purported legend. But to Mireille, it could have been as if he had bellowed the words from a high cliff top. The peculiar anxiousness that had been steadily building inside her was suddenly recognised as what it really was--dread, and dread well justified, now. In concert with that insight the tightness in her chest seized her with full force, the unseen hand on her breastbone a vice-like pressure that she believed was on the verge of crushing her. She felt queasy, her stomach churning all of a sudden like an ocean assaulted by an unexpected storm, once calm currents rudely unsettled by its fierce winds.

Ryosuke and Vincent did not know the faces or the real names behind Noir; they never had--until now, that is. Mireille cursed herself for her foolishness, both past and present. It had been a gamble accepting Breffort's mission, a gamble whether Ryosuke and Vincent knew her and Kirika, the identities of the authentic Black Hands. But apparently they had not. It had been a gamble lost, and where the stakes were high indeed. However, when up against a house of Soldats' like the dice always came up showing snake eyes--this particular house always won in one form or another. It was a fact Mireille had been aware of as a result of her prior dealings with the organisation yet had elected to disregard anyway, letting her fears over her and her partner's quiet life possibly being shattered sometime in the future if they didn't act to fog her judgement, and in turn allow herself to be manipulated. Sentimentality yet again to blame, and all evidently unnecessary. Hunting the men who had adopted the ancient title of Noir, forsaking a life which had up until that point been peaceful ever since the events at the Manor, compelling a reluctant and emotionally scarred Kirika to take up arms once again--all of this could have been prevented if the Corsican had simply stuck by her vow to never again be caught up in Soldats affairs, instead of permitting her heart to overrule her brain. Now that peaceful life was most certainly shattered by Mireille's own doing, with backing out of Breffort's mission bordering on impossible. She and Kirika were now forced to see it through to the end, their faces having been revealed and now marked by their quarry.

Mireille's countenance registered her distress for only a second despite the magnitude of her horrible realisation, the woman quickly recovering herself although internally she remained perturbed, to put it in the lightest vein. It was senseless dwelling on something that couldn't be changed… no matter how much she wished it to. Her and Kirika's assignment was virtually at its conclusion anyway; they had Ryosuke and Vincent at their mercy. She took solace in that. It would all be over momentarily.

"Noir?" Vincent said in disbelief mixed with derision, looking askance at Mireille and Kirika while he smirked scornfully. "You mean there is actually a *real* Noir? And *these* two are it? Seriously?" He talked in rapid-fire but faultless Japanese rather than in the French he frequently mangled, reverting back to a language he was more accustomed to in his incredulity.

"Of course Noir is real," Ryosuke replied in a bitter cold tone as his dark ringed eye flicked to his partner, also lapsing back into Japanese. "*She* wouldn't have had us assume the name, otherwise." The tall hitman's lone visible eye then found Mireille once more, before he at long last turned around to face her and his other adversary full on, the expression on his gaunt visage grim and his pitiless violet gaze boring into the blonde's own blue. "Who better to remove us from the picture than Europe's supposed greatest assassins?" he concluded in French, seemingly for his Corsican enemy's sake.

A short peep of a gasp was suddenly emitted from Kirika, cutting the tension that had been steadily escalating between Ryosuke and Mireille, and causing their hard shared stare to be disrupted as the former participant turned his eyes to the source of the interruption. "Langonel's Manuscript…" the lithe girl whispered in surprise as she angled her head slightly to the side, breaking her absolutely rigid, motionless stance for the first time since she had entered the library; reminiscent of statue being revived from its petrification. Her eyes strayed away from Vincent and to Ryosuke instead… or more accurately, to the book he held in his previously obscured left hand.

"Langonel's…?" Mireille half-repeated in amazement, by some incredible exertion of willpower managing to keep her gaze from deserting her designated target and instead gawk wide-eyed and open mouthed at Kirika next to her, wondering how her colleague recognised the text. To the blonde the tome in Ryosuke's hand looked like any other in the library; bound in brown leather cracked with age, and thick comprising of hundreds of pages, their edges discoloured to a pale yellow over the many decades. But admittedly she had never actually seen a copy of the book where Soldats' and Noir's origins were documented despite her and her partner's fervent search for it in the past--all they had unearthed was that all copies were allegedly destroyed, which was clearly an erroneous belief now. Yet in truth Mireille had forgotten all about Langonel's Manuscript ever since she had let Kirika leave her side and return to the Manor and Altena's 'care'. Her priorities and thoughts had been focused on a different, much more important matter than a mere book back then.

"Hey, you found it!" Vincent exclaimed in jubilation and still in Japanese. He grinned happily at his companion, the broad smile causing him to appear more like a beautiful woman than ever. "Does this mean we can go home now?"

"I'm afraid we can't allow that," Mireille declared sternly in French as she lifted her gun a tad higher for emphasis, spoiling the triad member's elation. But the blonde was feeling quite a bit better herself, her earlier restlessness somewhat alleviated. If the purpose of Ryosuke and Vincent's being in Paris was to retrieve the apparently sole surviving copy of Langonel's Manuscript, then it was safe to assume that the men indeed did yearn to become Noir. Which meant that they would eventually get it into their heads that the true Noir would have to be rubbed out before they could be considered as the genuine article. Perhaps then it wasn't for nothing that Mireille and Kirika had decided to embark down the black path once again. At least it was a little consolation for the sacrifices they'd had to make. She did still feel guilty however, but she had done so ever since Breffort's briefing. She doubted that sentiment would dissipate any time soon, even after Kirika had laid down her gun to rest once again.

Ryosuke and Vincent looked at Mireille in surprise, although the emotion was more noticeable in the latter man. The Corsican assassin was aware of what she had allowed to let slip--she understood Japanese, or enough to comprehend its spoken form at any rate. But it was of no consequence, taking into account that in the following minute the gangsters would have both ceased to breathe.

"You speak Japanese?" Ryosuke said, obviously taken aback by the revelation despite his taciturn disposition. He glanced at Kirika for a moment, and then returned his gaze to Mireille. "I suppose I can understand why. Strange to see a Japanese girl of her age paired with a woman like yourself, and going by the name of Noir. You must have an interesting story to tell."

"Not one you'll ever hear," Mireille said with menace. She still talked in French, preferring to use that language to communicate with outsiders while here in France. It was the first time she had encountered anybody who had spoken in Japanese to her since meeting Kirika in Japan, and it did not sit well with her. Japanese was the tongue she and Kirika used as a private means of conversing with each other and to segregate strangers from their own little world. But if those strangers knew that language, then it was as if Mireille and Kirika's world was no longer so private, no longer so sacred; that the world consisted of more than just the two of them. Yet another reason to kill Ryosuke and Vincent, to kill the interlopers in her and her partner's private lives.

"Wait a minute, you mean to tell me you speak Japanese?! Both of you?!" Vincent cried, either not hearing Mireille's threat--no, promise--or simply ignoring it. "I thought the brat was raised here or something and only knew French! Damn it, I was struggling with that stupid language for nothing!"

"Are you sure you want to do this here?" Ryosuke inquired carefully of the blonde assassin, blocking out his comrade's whining. "Guards still roam this place."

"Yes," Mireille insisted, aware that he wasn't looking to avoid a fight, only to avoid one happening here. She and Kirika had tried to slay him and Vincent; it was not something one of Ryosuke's--or his partner's--character forgave or forgot easily. Just like Mireille did not forgive them. "You interfered in our lives… and I--we--want that book." Her desires for the tome were somewhat of an afterthought, although serious nonetheless. She didn't know how she and Kirika had overlooked Laroque's copy of Langonel's Manuscript residing in their home city of Paris during their hunt for the text--however, the Paris copy was supposed to have been lost in the fires of World War II--but regardless, she believed it would be best if it was in their possession. The book was related to the legend of Noir, after all. Maybe it would be even better if it were destroyed like all of its fellows, so nobody else Soldats follower or Noir aspirant could read of its words and attempt to establish another pair of Black Hands.

"Then we have a problem," Ryosuke replied, slipping his piano wire into his right coat pocket, though keeping his hand in plain sight throughout. His body tensed as he prepared himself, his shoulders straightening, his muscles strengthening.

"Yes. We do," Mireille stated simply. And then she pulled the trigger of her Walther P99. The already set striker was launched forwards into the gun, generating an explosive discharge that in turn propelled a 9mm Parabellum round out of its casing and down the silencer-extended barrel, straight at Ryosuke's chest--and all within the blink of an eye.

The bullet slammed into the upper left side of the gangster's torso, where his heart beat beneath the flesh and bone, and the impact caused him to jerk in the direction of the shot. He retained his footing however, and in spite of the by all rights mortal blow his face remained remarkably impassive, with scarcely a hint of a furrow in his brow.

Mireille, undeterred by Ryosuke's stoicism, rapidly followed up her first shot with another, and then another and another, sending two, three, then four muted slugs into his body. Yet each shot was only met with another flinch from the white-haired killer and a dull thud against his jet-black overcoat--no howls of pain, no spurts of blood; just aloof defiance, the man's expression almost mocking contrary to its detached veneer, as if challenging the blonde assassin while silently laughing at her unproductive efforts.

It took less than a second for Mireille's astute mind to comprehend why her bullets weren't affecting Ryosuke as they would a normal person, and consequently why the several shots she had fired at the man when she had initially clashed with him at the hotel hadn't fazed him. His overcoat was bulletproof. Mireille suspected it must be fashioned with more than just mainstream Kevlar, however. The stiff, nigh on unyielding manner in which the garment moved suggested that underneath the reinforced mesh of tough fibres dwelled a layer of interlocking plates, either hard baked ceramic or perhaps even stronger but heavier iron or steel, although if that was the case the overall weight of the overcoat must inflict a tremendous burden on the wearer--Ryosuke would have to possess a robust musculature hidden beneath his clothes to just stand upright. On top of the Kevlar and protective plates the black outer material of the overcoat had been treated with some sort of protective compound, giving it a glossy sheen that could easily be mistaken for the lustre of burnished leather to the untrained eye. On the whole, Ryosuke's overcoat could be equated to a modern day suit of armour--and him a black knight, in more ways than one--offering true resistance to gunfire unlike standard 'bulletproof' vests. But while it was a notable illustration of ingenuity, it wasn't anything Mireille hadn't seen before. She recalled an equivalent tactic having been used by one of Altena's enclave at the Manor, except that particular follower had worn what had looked like an actual breastplate from medieval times under her robes.

In spite of his protection, Mireille believed that it still must hurt Ryosuke a great deal to be shot. The armoured exterior and interior of the overcoat would decrease a bullet's velocity considerably, but his body would still be left to endure the remainder of its kinetic energy, which would certainly be no small amount. Indeed, there was a good chance his slender and athletic build belayed an immense brawn.

But for all of the defence Ryosuke's overcoat granted him, his head remained uncovered and open to attack. Obviously sensing Mireille's intentions, Ryosuke swiftly raised his forearm to protect his face--his movement a blur of black--at the exact moment the woman redirected her aim to that vulnerable spot. Two rounds pounded into the intercepting limb and a third struck the centre of the gangster's open palm, the gloved hand closing into a fist after the hit.

Mireille held her fire then, the end of her pistol smoking but with naught to show for it. In answer to the temporary ceasefire from the blonde, Ryosuke relaxed his taut posture a tad and straightened himself to a more upright position, standing once again at his full height. As he did so he lowered his arm slowly from over his face and to his side, his fist opening to drop the squashed remnants of a 9mm Parabellum slug to the floor.

"Impressive," Mireille remarked dryly as the bullet bounced along the carpet by the snow white-haired killer's feet, noting that her target's gloves were outfitted with similar elements to that of his overcoat. She imagined that sustaining a punch from his armour-plated fists would not be advisable. "Now this time catch one in your teeth."

Ryosuke didn't respond to the sarcastic comment, at least not verbally. Instead he suddenly burst into motion with a speed that verged on inhuman, comparable with the likes of Kirika and Chloe, his weighty overcoat plainly no hindrance to him. He reached into his coat with his free hand in one fluid movement before Mireille even had a clue he *was* moving, and in the next instant a huge gleaming metal object was drawn from inside the garment's dark depths. Ryosuke angled his body so it was side-on to the Corsican in a flick of rigid black Kevlar, and levelled the object squarely at her chest with deliberate slowness in contrast to his prior alacrity. As such, Mireille was provided with a good look at the object--at the gun.

Ryosuke's firearm was the largest handgun Mireille had ever laid eyes on, its sheer size putting all Magnum variants to shame. Yet this pistol--hand-cannon more like--was definitely not of the .357 or .44 family, although it did share a vague resemblance to a heavily modified .44 Magnum revolver. Instead it screamed of a custom model and make which had to be independently commissioned.

The gun was crafted in gleaming silver metal of the purest quality, polished until it was akin to a mirror, the reflections on the weapon's surface crisp and clear. Its handle on the other hand was black rubber and contoured for a sure grip. It was a revolver, a six-shooter by the looks of it, but the bevelled cylinder was drastically longer than a usual firearm of its type. Whatever calibre of ammunition the pistol took was positively not the standard handgun fare.

In addition to the pistol's elongated cylinder, its the barrel had been lengthened and weighted underneath with a rectangular block of metal, no doubt to counter the hefty mass of the rest of the gun and sufficiently balance it for accurate use. On the bottom edges of both sides of the counterweight Japanese characters had been neatly etched in ebony, however what it said was a mystery to Mireille. She suspected too from its total size and heavy appearance that the magnitude of the pistol's recoil had to be formidable; it would need a strong and steady hand to handle effectively, something Ryosuke no doubt boasted especially if his armoured coat was made up of metal plates.

Mireille kicked the round table in front of her over onto its side and immediately ducked down into a crouch behind it, its outer edge not even having hit the floor before she was seeking shelter from it. Barely an eighth of a second later a monumental boom resounded around the library as Ryosuke fired his unique weapon, and Mireille could have sworn she had felt something scrape over her head and cause her blonde hair to flap as she had dropped into her defensive position. Moreover, the din of the blast was so loud she was certain that it'd had the potential to actually rock the study's books in their shelves and rattle the window. It was now of little surprise why Ryosuke had opted to use piano wire to dispose of his portion of guards rather than his gun. There was no silencer in the world that could mute his pistol's roar, not without the device being blown apart after a single use and unleashing the weapon's bellow anyway.

Looking at the deep bullet hole that had been gouged in the wall across from the tall gangster as a result of his wayward opening shot, Mireille also ascertained that Ryosuke's handgun was responsible for turning Ezza's face into mincemeat and for the violent evacuation of his head's contents. Normally telling two bullet holes apart was difficult to say the least, even for someone with a practiced and sharp eye reminiscent of Mireille's, but with Ryosuke's gun it was a lot less tricky simply due to its handiwork being distinctly larger than any other pistol's… and twin to a rifle round's. The Corsican wondered if her black-garbed adversary had tailored his pistol to take rifle ammunition. The evidence thus far did point to that conclusion.

Mireille gritted her teeth and quickly bowed her head, covering it with her free hand for added protection as a second boom rung out and a chunk of the table she was using as a shield abruptly flew over her. The chunk careered off towards the back wall and collided with a vase sitting on a stand against it, smashing the once fine and valuable ornament to worthless pieces. The table was obviously no match against the power of Ryosuke's custom pistol; while its base was made of dense wood that helped to keep it stationary, its actual top was light and flimsy. Hiding behind it was about as effective as using a sheet of paper for cover. It would be smart for Mireille to relocate before the gangster's next shot took off her head instead of another bite out of the useless table.

Using her free hand as a prop, Mireille rolled deftly away from the table at the same time a bullet from Ryosuke's gun tore straight through its surface in an explosion of splinters--right where the woman's lower back had been an instant before. Relieved to have escaped sure death for now, she completed her roll on her feet behind the arm of one of the sofas that was near the table, and then fell onto her left side, her Walther clasped in both hands and her countenance a picture of fierce concentration. Casting her eyes under the sofa and through its elaborately curled wooden legs, she espied Ryosuke's feet and shins just visible in between the front opening of his overcoat. She lined up his right foot in her pistol's sights without hesitation and then fired a handful of shots, hoping that besides his head the other parts of his body uncovered by his coat and clad in normal clothes were also vulnerable.

To Mireille's displeasure and progressively mounting concern, her bullets ricocheted harmlessly off Ryosuke's boots in a series of sparks, the sole evidence of her well-placed shots the fresh scuffs and nicks marking their black leather surface and adding to the myriad of others already present, no doubt mementos from previous gunfights. Apparently his boots were fortified with armoured plates like his overcoat was, and unfortunately they climbed high enough to protect his shins. It looked like headshots were the only plausible means of killing this troublesome foe--no easy task when considering his lightning fast reflexes and his readiness to draw on them to shield his face when called for.

Mireille inwardly cursed her failure to inflict any harm upon her enemy up to now and wiggled on her stomach behind the couch before climbing to her feet, her back to it. She kept low, however, rising only to a crouch as more gunfire--three shots to be exact--from Ryosuke came her way, the high calibre rounds making short work of the sofa's plush padding. Little bits of fluff were ejected in a spurt as each slug ripped through the piece of furniture from front to back, the perforating shots narrowing missing the blonde assassin by pure luck alone.

With Ryosuke's pistol emptied of its small load of ammunition, Mireille decided to take the opportunity to return fire and perhaps drive a bullet into his skull while doing so. She whirled around to face the man, peeking cautiously over the back of the sofa with her gun raised ahead of her. She observed the hitman standing on the other side of the couch shove Langonel's Manuscript inside his overcoat while he flipped open the cylinder of his weapon and shook out the golden expended casings to the floor, before replacing them one by one with rounds retrieved from a pocket of his coat with his then free hand. The woman noticed that the bullets he took out were 7.62mm NATO rounds, normally used in assault and sniper rifles such as the Heckler & Koch G3 series and the NDM-86 Dragunov. The sight proved her earlier deductions as correct; Ryosuke indeed was firing rifle ammunition from his custom pistol.

As soon as Mireille popped her head out from behind the couch Ryosuke spun around so that his back was facing her, and covered his head with his left arm. The blonde fired a burst of 9mm rounds at him, aiming for his head, but all they struck were his bulletproof arm and high collar of his overcoat. Evidently not appreciating being interrupted while reloading his weapon, with a flick of his wrist Ryosuke slammed the partially replenished cylinder back into its home in the pistol and then reached around his body and stuck his gun past his left ribs, its barrel directed behind him at Mireille. The Corsican assassin whipped her head back behind cover--as poor as it was--and then dropped flat on the floor on her stomach as a series of booms resonated off the walls of the library, before more stuffing from the ravaged sofa drifted softly onto her back.

Mireille ejected the spent clip from her Walther P99 and hastened to replace it with a new one, envisioning that Ryosuke was doing much the same except a single bullet at a time. Events were not exactly ensuing like the woman would have preferred. She had expected Ryosuke and Vincent--a self-proclaimed Noir--to be challenging opponents, but this was tough even for someone as experienced as her. She could hear the cacophony of a shootout between two different models of Beretta's--one spitting muffled rounds, the other uninhibited--taking place in the right hand side of the room across from her, indicating that Kirika was exchanging fire with Vincent but as of yet had failed to kill him. Obviously Mireille's partner wasn't faring any better than her.

Mireille slid a full magazine into her pistol and pulled back the slide, chambering the first bullet. She then rose to her knees, preparing to take another stab at striking Ryosuke in the head. Hardly a minute had passed since the opening shot had been fired, but that had been long enough in her mind. If what Ryosuke had said was true not all of Laroque's nightshift sentries had been slain. Some of the survivors had to have heard the firefight currently underway in the mansion's library, and not to mention the sleeping members of the household too, including Laroque himself; Ryosuke's gun was loud enough to wake the dead, let alone living people slumbering in the middle of the night. Mireille had to eliminate the violet-eyed killer post-haste, before the situation deteriorated further with the arrival of the estate's guards.

******

"Catch, kid!" Vincent yelled the instant Mireille had stopped talking, hurling his switchblade in an underarm throw at Kirika.

Kirika had fired her Beretta M1934 at the precise moment she had heard Mireille's Walther P99 go off, the brusque sound a cue for the girl to commence her attack against Vincent while the blonde similarly dealt with his partner. So close were the two shots that they had been virtually indistinguishable from one another, nearly in sync.

However, in spite of this swiftness Vincent had reacted before Kirika. Not necessary because he had sharper or faster reflexes than her, but simply because his actions were unrestrained, the man following no one's lead. The gangster had not even bothered to wait for hostilities to be initiated by Mireille before he had acted with lethal intent. As soon as her closing words had left the blonde woman's lips, Vincent's knife had been flying end over end through the air, just a tiny fraction of a second sooner than Kirika's squeeze of her pistol's trigger. But that infinitesimal discrepancy was enough to alter the outcome of what should have been a straightforward execution.

In response to the blade sailing unerringly her way Kirika was forced to twist her flexible body aside to dodge it, the weapon spinning past her neck and lodging itself deeply in the wall behind her with a 'thunk'. As a result of her instinctive evasion her aim was spoiled, but only by a small margin, no more than a couple of millimetres. However it was a sufficient amount for Vincent to take advantage of. As his right arm stretched outwards and tossed the switchblade from his hand, he skewed his body to one side, the combination of Kirika's delayed shot and slightly disrupted aim causing her 9mm round to skim harmlessly by his stomach, the bullet instead tearing a hole in his suit jacket, it fluttering open with his movement. In the same motion Vincent dexterously drew a Beretta M92F Elite from a holster strapped underneath his jacket with his left hand, and then fired a string of shots at Kirika across his body immediately after the gun had cleared its resting place.

Kirika dived to her right to avoid the incoming fire that instead dotted the back wall with a constellation of holes, and answered the rapid barrage with her own deluge of bullets as she soared sidelong through the air, her Beretta wielded solely in her right hand while the incline of her left limb helped to stabilise the trajectory of her near horizontal leap. Vincent, not to be outdone, bounded nimbly backwards into a dive of his own, all the while blazing wildly away with his own model of Beretta in a single hand, his right arm employed in an alike fashion to his younger assailant's left.

The two combatants had launched themselves in opposite directions and in disparate manners; Kirika flying a few feet above the floor on her right side, while Vincent travelled parallel to her on his back. 9mm slugs whizzed a whisker by both parties' limber forms as casings rained down from their respective Berettas, supple muscles bending with amazing shows of flexibility as both contorted themselves in just the right way to allow a bullet to slip past them and leave their body unscathed. It was as if Kirika and Vincent were evenly matched, neither girl nor man successfully attaining an edge above the other. But then suddenly the deciding factor reared its head in an audible click that could be heard even above the commotion of the fierce duel.

The slide of Kirika's pistol snapped backwards, signifying that an expended clip now resided within the weapon, the once effective tool of murder reduced to a worthless lump of metal. Her eyes widened slightly and her heart skipped beat, but it wasn't out of fear, at least not exactly. It was more out of unease at the implications of the empty gun. Without the ability to return fire Kirika's life was put in greater jeopardy, doubly so in this aerial duel with Vincent--to be pressed onto purely the defensive would mean her opponent's aim was no longer hindered by him having to elude her shots, which consequently meant that the chances of her failing to dodge the subsequent bullets from him grew significantly. And Kirika couldn't die yet--not here, not now. To do so would place Mireille in abject danger, outnumbered by two skilful foes desiring her death--the odds of her partner surviving without her dedicated support were not in the blonde's favour. Kirika had an oath to uphold and a penance she eternally, vainly, sought to achieve. She wasn't allowed to die yet, nor did she want to, not while the woman she loved still lived. She *had* to protect Mireille.

Vincent's Beretta Elite, with its larger magazine capacity than Kirika's pistol, continued to fire at the suddenly defenceless girl, but as the hail of lead streaked towards her a strange feeling settled over her, a sort of… resolute calm. It was the best she could describe it--a gritty clarity, a resolve that told her that she would not falter, would not fall; it soothing her worries. It was like the feeling she had experienced at the Manor and more recently during the infiltration of the late Millet's headquarters; an unwavering confidence that she wouldn't let Mireille down--wouldn't let Odette down--and that no one could stand in the way of her honouring her pledge. However, it was more… refined… somehow--stronger, clearer. Not by too much, but enough for the change to be readily noticeable.

Kirika's widened eyes narrowed, their brown depths becoming hardened, determined once more. As the half a dozen bullets neared her at a breakneck velocity, it was as if she could actually pick them out, actually *see* them fly towards her, and in turn infer their upcoming routes through the air. She twisted and turned her lithe body this way and that, neatly skirting each one by at least a full inch, a considerably greater degree than her previous endeavours. Bullets flew under her, bullets flew over her, but not one of them touched her.

And then the darkhaired girl's flight waned, as did her enemy's, both required to end their strafing dives with their airborne duel in an apparent tie. As Kirika's right shoulder hit the floor she popped the depleted clip from her Beretta and pivoted on the joint, manoeuvring her body so that her redirected momentum threw her into a backwards roll. While she spun head over heels she plucked a new magazine from one of the two black ammunition pouches strapped to her left thigh and slotted it into her gun. An instant later Kirika was back on her feet and nestled in the small nook between the left most bookshelf on the right hand wall and the open door of the library's entrance. She then raised her handgun up to her face and calmly pulled back its slide with her free hand, setting a bullet into the weapon's chamber and preparing it for the next duel with Vincent.

In the meantime, Vincent finished his dive in a similar style to Kirika's. When his upper back touched the floor he tucked in his head and legs to his body and rolled backwards, ending up in a crouch behind an armchair near the middle of the room. Fortunately, the line of sight offered to him from his position of cover was not of a sufficient angle to see the diminutive girl, the side face of the bookshelf she was standing behind bestowing her with adequate--if slender--shelter.

The midair dance of death with Vincent had lasted a scarce handful of seconds, but from Kirika's perspective it had felt longer, as if time itself had slowed down, as though it had been stretched out for just those few moments. She wondered if the sensation had something to do with that other feeling she had felt. But despite the lengthened sense of time during the duel Kirika wasn't sure if she had managed to hit Vincent. She didn't believe so, however; for his dozen or more shots at her she had only fired six in retaliation, and she was pretty certain the spry gangster had succeeding in evading them all just like she had his. Their duel had been a draw.

<Do you see now why one must not hesitate during a mission? Every second is precious, and talk is not to be wasted on the dead.>

Yes, Kirika saw what her delay in shooting Vincent had cost her. She had lost the advantage she'd had over him when she and Mireille had burst into the room, and consequently had made it much more difficult for herself to kill him now that he was on his guard and better armed. Yet the delay had been unavoidable. Kirika had behaved as guided by Mireille's actions, deferring to the worldlier assassin's lead and letting her make all of the important decisions, the girl comfortably knowing that her faith in her older and wiser partner was not misplaced. It was the method in which the pair had always operated on, and Kirika was not about to alter it now. She felt more at ease with Mireille showing her the way; it felt… right. Mireille always took the point, Mireille always did the talking, Mireille always made the choices. That was just the way it was, and Kirika was happy with that. Well, perhaps not so much with her love opting to be on point all the time--it was a hazardous position, with the woman being the first to experience any incoming attack--but it was probably for the best anyway since Mireille had to know what was ahead of them in order to make her smart decisions. The taciturn girl didn't feel left out or under appreciated; she was simply more suited to the actual combat aspect of their trade and Mireille was aware of that. Kirika wouldn't know the first thing to say or do if given her partner's role.

The unwarranted thought appropriately dismissed, Kirika refocused her mind on current, genuine troubles such as the two enemy assassins she and Mireille were trying to slay, or rather one in particular. With her back pressed up against its side, the lissom girl risked a peek around the corner of the bookshelf… and almost caught a bullet with her face.

"Come on, brat!" Vincent hollered in what Kirika could tell was a derogatory tone as he fired upon her location with his pair of Beretta Elites, one held in each hand. The petite assassin quickly pulled back her head as hot lead hammered into the old texts arranged on the bookshelf behind her, shredding through leather covers and aged paper both and likely making the tomes unreadable. "Come out and play!" the darkly dressed hitman yelled, pausing in his attack only to shout the taunt before firing over the back of the armchair he was using as cover at Kirika's position once again, slugs sporadically striking the bookshelf and section of wall near the library's doorway every two or three seconds.

Kirika, immune to Vincent's jeers--primarily because she didn't understand why what he was spouting was deemed as insulting or goading--simply ignored them for what they were to her--meaningless ramblings. She passed her gun from her right hand to her left, thankful for her ambidextrousness when using firearms gained from her smart decision to learn the skill after an enlightening but painful experience in Sicily many months ago. Her spot behind the shelf on the right side of the library made employing her pistol in her usual right-handed fashion impossible, unless she strayed from shelter which she was most certainly not about to do without good reason. However, due to her talent of being able to proficiently utilise her gun in her left hand as though it were sported in her right, Kirika merely had to switch grips rather than seek out cover more conducive to her dominant hand.

Kirika, having committed Vincent's general position behind the armchair on the other side of the room to memory from the earlier glances she had stole at him, reached across her slim waist with her left hand and poked the silenced barrel of her Beretta held in it around the corner edge of the shelf, her quick mind calculating the elevation in which to tilt the weapon in order to have the highest chance of hitting her target. Satisfied with her estimation, the girl then fired her pistol three times seemingly blindly at Vincent, but in her mind's eye she saw the scene behind the bookshelf along with the bullets' predicted paths as if she were really peering around it.

Kirika's shots, aimed on educated reasoning alone, were rewarded with a surprised yelp from Vincent and an abrupt cut off to the erratic gunfire from his dual Berettas. The diffident but incredibly skilled assassin envisioned him ducking behind the armchair to take refuge from her trio of rounds, instead of him actually being hit by one. It was a possibility of course, but she knew the likelihood was remote.

With an apparent opening to go on the offensive now imparted to her by way of Vincent being forced to retreat from his former aggressive stance, Kirika whirled around and leaned out from behind the bookshelf, bringing up her gun and setting the armchair in its sight. She noted that the chair had two bullet holes defacing its intricately patterned fabric cushion covers near the top of its wooden frame, indicating that at least a pair of her blind shots had come close to their mark dwelling to the rear of the piece of furniture.

Kirika's foe had obviously anticipated her push for supremacy in their battle, and countered by sticking one of his Elites over the back of the armchair and firing madly yet blindly in her direction, an advanced tactic much like the one the girl had employed against him only seconds before but with a great deal less discipline. Thus, Kirika was compelled to dart back into cover once again to avoid the onslaught, failing to get off a shot of her own… not that there was anything to aim at besides Vincent's blazing handgun. It was a stalemate; both combatants trapped in their respective locales with the lone available option to take turns pinning the other down until one of them ran out of patience or ammo. Kirika was sure she could outlast the gangster in both respects if circumstances had been different, however as it was she was under a strict time frame that was fast worsening as every second passed, and which could end at any moment. The present environment was simply not favourable to a long drawn out fight.

As if to validate her point, Kirika began to detect frantic shouts echoing through the doorway originating from down the hallway outside the library, the other guards of the estate having surely heard the violent disturbance in this part of the house and in their investigation had now stumbled upon their dead comrades littering the corridor. Time was up. While the darkhaired girl believed she and Mireille could beat back any armed force that tried to enter the library--especially this mansion's lightly equipped and seemingly poorly skilled guards--Vincent and Ryosuke were still up on their feet which complicated things, placing the young women between two hostile fronts, one with power in numbers, and the other with noteworthy expertise. However, Vincent and Ryosuke were put in much the same problematic situation as Kirika and Mireille, and they had the additional motivation to escape with Langonel's Manuscript, stealing the book the apparent reason why they had invaded Albert Laroque's home. Kirika assumed that her partner would opt for them to chase after the fake Noir if the men attempted to flee as it was the wisest decision, and she knew her intelligent love was apt to make those.

Kirika, with her back to the bookshelf's side face, bent forwards a bit to check on Mireille on the other half of the room and also warn her of the approaching threat, while being careful not to lean out too far and become a clear target for Vincent who continued to send a frequent spattering of lead her way. She had been hearing thunderous 'boom' sounds throughout her duel with Vincent, and as she cast her eyes to her partner's location, she discovered their source.

Ryosuke sported a big silver revolver in his right hand--of a type Kirika was not familiar with despite her extensive schooling on all kinds of firearms--and was currently occupied with blasting at a sofa with it. The sofa itself had endured thorough abuse, its fluffy innards bulging out through multiple gashes sullying its surface, akin to viscera threatening to spill from ruptured abdomens. And Mireille was pinned behind that eviscerated couch which clearly afforded her with limited if any protection from Ryosuke's gunfire, yet somehow the angelic woman was holding her own anyway. Still, the scene set Kirika's nerves on edge and caused a tension in her chest, the suddenly anxious girl having to restrain herself from immediately leaping to the blonde's aid and recklessly into Vincent's line of sight. Not that she wouldn't have despite the torrent of fire she would have had to dash through, but there was a simpler and less perilous way in which to relieve the pressure from Mireille.

"Guards are coming!" Kirika cried, aware that Ryosuke and Vincent as well as Mireille would hear her warning… and act on it.

As she had hoped, Ryosuke ceased shooting at Mireille and lifted his smoking pistol vertically upright, before his head snapped to the open library doorway, his violet gaze staying unswervingly fixed to it for a few moments. An alarm suddenly went off then, the appropriately timed piercing wails that reverberated around the house granting credence to Kirika's words. It was evidently enough for Ryosuke--he turned sharply to his shorter partner who remained crouched behind the chair, firing merrily away with his Berettas.

"We are leaving!" he informed Vincent in a harsh voice--almost a snarl--prompting the other man to hold his fire and look up at the black-garbed hitman.

"Damn!" Vincent vehemently complained. "Just when it was getting interesting!"

Just then the sound of footsteps reached Kirika's ears, pulling her attention back to the outside hallway. She saw a shadow blow past the crack in between the door and the doorjamb it was hinged to, and impulsively lashed out with a fierce kick using her right foot, striking the open library door in front of her and sending it swinging into a guard's face, the unlucky first to arrive on the scene.

The guard screamed as his unexpected assailant--the door--smashed unforgivingly into his face, the impact strong enough to crush his nose into pulp. Kirika heard him stagger backwards--likely clutching his ruined nose--and then she kicked the door again as it bounced off his face and back towards her, this time causing it to shut tight instead of disfiguring someone on the other side.

Kirika turned quickly away from the door and looked around the corner of the bookshelf, just in time to catch sight of Ryosuke bound off the desk at the end of the room and hurl himself through the huge window to its rear, the man angling his body so that his shoulder and side took the brunt of the collision. Glass shards and pieces of white painted frame fell like confetti in his wake with the whole lower half of the window virtually destroyed, the gaping hole creating a portal into the darkness of the night; a portal that Ryosuke used to vanish into its murky embrace.

Mireille, who had been firing round after round at Ryosuke from her spot on her knees stooped behind the battered couch throughout the hitman's race for freedom, fumed at her seemingly ineffective shots and at his escape, her expression incensed with brow deeply wrinkled and grinding teeth bared.

"Later, brat! It was fun!" Vincent farewelled to Kirika, flashing her a roguish smile over his shoulder before he followed in Ryosuke's footsteps, hopping atop the desk in a single leap and then diving headfirst through the gap in the window made by his partner's departure seconds before.

As Vincent jumped on the desk and dived through the air, Kirika emptied the remainder of her clip at him with controlled, paced pulls of her gun's trigger. She hoped to fatally wound him or at least cripple him before he disappeared from sight so that her and Mireille's imminent pursuit of him would be easier. There was a click of a door opening behind her as she fired, the telltale noise notifying her that the guards were about to try to enter the library again.

Kirika waited for a full second to pass so that the lead sentry had time to cross the threshold of the library's entrance, and then without looking--without even so much as thinking--her leg struck out behind her at a flawless horizontal angle--the slender but well-muscled limb perfectly perpendicular to the floor--and once more kicked the room's door with devastating force into a guard's face, eliciting a pain-wracked howl from him and delaying his and his comrades' entry yet again. The kick was over in a flash, her foot returning to the floor so quickly it was as if it had never left to begin with. And all the while the girl's concentration remained on shooting the fleeing Vincent.

Mireille, seeing that an already busy Kirika was holding Laroque's guards at bay all by herself with only her leg no less, rushed to assist her partner. The woman threw herself along the length of the couch she was behind and landed on her side on the floor, the upper half of her body extending past the sofa's end and thus causing her eyesight and with it her gun sight to be in line with the library's entrance. As the previously booted door rebounded off the front guard's now bloodied features and revealed both him and his companions crowding the darkened corridor beyond, Mireille let loose with a series of shots at the group, her Walther replacing the room's door as a much more deadlier means of preventing the unwanted company from breaching the entryway.

Kirika could make out the screams of the dying to her rear as Mireille covered her back with ruthless precision, and the girl allowed herself to dispense with the possibility of threats coming from behind for the time being, having total faith that her love would keep her safe while her attention was elsewhere. However, her attention was not diverted for long. As the hollow brass coloured casing of Kirika's fourth and final bullet intended for Vincent tumbled to the carpet, the man himself disappeared into the darkness on the other side of the library's broken window, joining Ryosuke in shadow. She wasn't certain if her last ditch effort to shoot him had been successful--he hadn't exhibited any signs of being struck during his escape--but in the hazy, chaotic intensity of close quarters combat it was often hard to gauge a hit without physical indicators such as a cry of shock and pain, or the spreading of blood on clothing, or the most obvious; a sudden lifeless body collapsing to the floor. For all Kirika knew Vincent might have passed into the night as a corpse.

Kirika turned her head to Mireille on the floor as she expelled the empty magazine from the bottom of her Beretta's handle, quickly swapping it with a full one. The blonde looked up at her, after just firing the last round from her own weapon herself, and their eyes locked. Kirika could tell what her partner's wishes were before the woman even voiced them.

"After them!" Mireille shouted, sliding her body across the floor and back behind the cover of the sofa. And not a moment too soon. With now nothing to dissuade their advance or to hold them in check, the guards gathered outside the doorway returned the bombardment the assassin had used to thin out their ranks with treble the force, metallic slugs scouring their ragged trails in the slice of carpet where she had once lain.

Mireille scrambled to her feet and reloaded her pistol whilst on the run, Kirika matching her pace for pace on the other side of the room, the small lounge dividing them on their dash towards their mutual goal--the window and the protection of the dark. Meanwhile sentries poured into the room behind them like a raging flood, the riotous black currents spitting lead froth in their direction. Bullets whistled by Kirika's head and crisscrossed between her pumping legs, the guards' abysmal aim or perhaps their fast moving target responsible for the misses, or maybe a blending of the two. Glancing over to Mireille, she saw that the woman was similarly besieged, and the shorter, slimmer girl worried about her continued wellbeing, that tight feeling in her chest waxing and waning as each round flew past her love, narrowly missing her slim but mature frame. Suddenly Kirika was hardly conscious that she was being shot at too.

"Don't hit the books! Mr. Laroque will be furious!" someone cautioned in a yell above the clamour of innumerable gunshots. Abruptly the thick spray of fire being delivered upon Mireille began to ebb, and Kirika felt her anxiety recede in tandem; the less beleaguered her love was with incoming bullets, the less her chest felt constricted.

As Kirika and Mireille neared the window their paths came together--the young women side by side once more--and each used an armchair at the end of the lounge as a springboard to propel themselves onto the desk in front of the library's window. They leapt in harmony and landed in harmony, their respective right feet touching the top of the desk for the mere fleetest of moments before they dived headlong off it, aiming for the hole in the window. However, during their finishing jump their actions differed, demonstrating Kirika and Mireille's divergent styles as assassins.

As Mireille passed over the windowsill, she twisted around so that she was gliding through the air on her back, her pistol held in the vicinity of her crotch. Clutching it in a grip comprising of both right and left hands, one to hold the weapon and one to steady it, she looked down her body--it near parallel to the library's floor--and along her gun's sight, targeting their pursuers and teaching them with a string of lethally accurate shots that it would be intelligent to let her and Kirika go without a fuss.

In the meantime, after ensuring with a quick look that neither Ryosuke nor Vincent were sneakily lying in wait for her and Mireille on the other side of the window, the more agile Kirika simply let herself tumble into the beginnings of a somersault, but for the notable disparity of omitting to bend her knees at the customary moment to complete the manoeuvre. As a result, she sailed through the window upside down with her back leading her midair trip and her legs stretched out, her supple form in the shape of a topsy-turvy 'L'. Pinpointing her and her partner's foes effortlessly despite viewing the interior of the library the wrong way up, Kirika then levelled her Beretta in her hands--the limbs almost in line with her legs--at the guards and proceeded to mirror Mireille's aggressive act, doing what she had been trained to do for most of her young life--purge the world of sinners. But that was the very least of her motivations, hardly even a motivation at all; defending Mireille was what provoked the girl to pull the trigger of her gun. That sinners died as a consequence of her oath was just a natural happenstance. After all, only those who dwelled in darkness would ever try to do the woman harm.

When the remains of the window frame and the brickwork of the mansion surrounding it entered Kirika's field of view, she tucked in her legs and at last followed through with her somersault, allowing her momentum to push her head up and her heels down. Once her feet hit the ground she automatically dropped into a crouch to absorb the force of the fall from the first storey window as well as the leftovers of her leap's energy, her landing a perfect one that would make any gymnast proud.

Mireille's landing outside the library's window was not as graceful as Kirika's, but was still more or less a smooth one. She flew out the window on her back, continuing to fire at the guards through it until her aim was obscured by the manor's wall as gravity dragged her down. Her back eventually hit the ground, that wide area of her body and the soft grass beneath it together helping to reduce the severity of the impact. She then skidded along it for a second before managing to lift up the lower half of her body and redirect her momentum to thrust her into a reverse roll, which she then stopped once she was upright by digging her feet into the hard soil underneath the estate's lawn.

It took only an instant for Kirika and Mireille to realise that they were on the left flank of Laroque's mansion--the kitchen side entrance about twenty metres away--although it took a little longer to realise just where Ryosuke and Vincent were. Kirika could only see two fuzzy outlines getting smaller and more indistinct with every passing moment moving across the pitch-black compound and heading in the direction of the fence adjacent to the street in front of the estate. The hitmen's dark attire made it hard for her to follow their movements, the girl repeatedly losing and having to find the silhouettes again as they persisted in blending into the gloom, and she imagined that Mireille had the same problem. On top of that the young women had only just came out of a lit room and into total darkness; their eyes hadn't had a chance to adjust to the abrupt change in illumination yet. As a consequence of these impediments they had to endure it would make trying to shoot Ryosuke and Vincent most difficult indeed. But before Kirika and Mireille could even attempt to do so they would first have to lessen the wide gap separating themselves and their enemies first, as the men were out of range of their pistols' stings.

Wasting no time, Kirika and Mireille bolted after the fleeing shadows, heavy gunfire from the guards swarming the smashed window nearby seeing them off. Fortunately, as with Ryosuke and Vincent, the dark worked to their benefit even without wearing black clothing, its shroud camouflaging their movements and effectively protecting them from the deadly hail.

As the assassins closed in on Ryosuke and Vincent and subsequently on the iron wrought fence the gangsters were running towards, Kirika heard shouts from the mansion now behind her and her partner, the animated sounds clear and easily distinguishable above the still ringing alarm that was, incidentally, detectable even from the outside of the building; the muffled shrieks of a violated and outraged creature. She spared a look over her shoulder at their source and witnessed more men dressed in black business suits spilling out of the manor's now brightly lit front entrance and rush into the compound. They carried flashlights as well as their handguns, the tools' bright round beams dancing in the field of black blanketing the estate's grounds as their operators moved. Some guards circled around the house while others spread out across the lawn, obviously searching for the intruders that the alarm still raged about--or in other words, Kirika, Mireille, and their quarry. Mireille had been right; people who had their sleep interrupted late in the night did not wake up happy.

Kirika's gaze was pulled back to the sights ahead of her by the sudden subdued noise of Mireille's Walther P99 discharging in a rapid burst beside her, its muzzle flare as well as its roar contained by the silencer fitted to its end. Looking once again in the direction of the fence, the girl immediately spotted two figures scaling the enclosure, their black swathed forms standing out in stark effect against the light from the streetlamps on its opposite side. Ryosuke and Vincent had reached the fence, but in doing so had exposed themselves for the world to see… and for bullets to find.

Kirika quickly raised her weapon and joined Mireille in assailing the men with gunfire, squeezing off her remaining four shots without hesitation, knowing that the silencer attached to her own pistol would similarly veil its use and hence keep their position a secret from the angry guards' eyes. But the assassins' concealment would not last for long. Rounds from Kirika and Mireille's guns ricocheted off the bars of the fence while Ryosuke and Vincent nimbly climbed up them like human spiders, momentary but bright orange sparks igniting from each missed shot. If the guards hadn't already noticed the men hanging in the middle of the air under the glaring light of the streetlamps, the shrill noise of lead glancing off iron in a mini fireworks display was bound to attract their attention.

Both Kirika and Mireille emptied their pistols' already half depleted magazines in a matter of seconds, and with no real results to show for the expenditure. They hurried to reload, their spent clips landing in the grass as they were cast aside and then left far behind, the young women continuing to run onwards. But the break in the attack was all Ryosuke and Vincent needed. The men finished deftly clambering up the spiked bars of the fence in a matter of moments and then jumped down from their pinnacle to the pavement on the other side of the barrier, before taking off down the street and disappearing behind a high hedge wall of a neighbouring estate, neither bothering to look back the way they had come.

It took a further five seconds to arrive at the fence after Ryosuke and Vincent had left Kirika's sight, time that was the equivalent of as many minutes in a chase. Kirika shoved her Beretta behind the back, held in the waistband of her skirt, and then leapt upon the railing, grabbing two bars far up their lengths so that her feet dangled just above the short brick wall below. With her Walther holstered Mireille leapt with her, although she didn't match the height of her partner's jump, instead clinging to a section of fence that was lower than the lithe girl's and utilising the top of the wall as a foothold. The duo then scrambled up the enclosure, the calls of Laroque's men catching sight of them speeding their ascent.

The nimbler Kirika reached the top of the fence first and without waiting for Mireille dropped down to the footpath, drawing her gun from the small of her back as she fell. She landed lightly on her feet facing in the direction Ryosuke and Vincent had fled, her fully loaded pistol at the ready. The darkhaired girl was glad that she was taking the point for once rather than her love. Wading into danger before the woman was something she ought to be doing, and in this scenario the danger was quite great. A common tactic for those being pursued was to set an ambush for their pursuers whenever they escaped their line of sight, and this situation--just like when Ryosuke and Vincent had jumped through the library's window--was an ideal time to put the strategy into practice. Kirika had to trigger any possible trap before Mireille joined her; that way she alone would suffer the brunt of it and as a result the blonde would be alerted to the peril ahead and counter for it as necessary, hence having a good chance of evading injury. With that goal in mind, Kirika ran down the street instantly after her feet hit the ground, hoping to tempt Ryosuke and Vincent into springing any surprise attack they might have planned for her and her love.

But there was no attack, for there was no Ryosuke and Vincent. Kirika slowed her run to a jog, then a walk, and then stopped outright on the footpath, panting softly while her eyes roved about her surroundings, searching for any sign of her and Mireille's enemies. However, all that the girl saw were deserted streets and silent buildings, merely the night itself. It was as though Ryosuke and Vincent had become part of that night, melting into its pall and being spirited away to places unknown. Or perhaps the night had simply reclaimed them, the darkness enveloping them, welcoming its kind home with an embrace. But either way, they were gone; the night would not give them up.

Mireille hopped down from the fence a mere couple of seconds after Kirika, choosing to make her drop to the pavement from considerably closer to it rather than from a ten-foot high plunge as her partner had done. She then ran over to the girl, her pace gradually decreasing until she came to a gentle halt beside her partner, her pistol lowering slowly to her side. Mireille was panting too from their recent physical exertions of sprinting and climbing, although her breaths came a bit heavier than Kirika's, the blonde clearly the more winded of the two.

Kirika was expecting an admonishment from Mireille for leaving her behind at the fence, but the woman didn't say a word as she stood beside her. Moments past, and then Kirika heard Mireille panting die down before she released one long, slow breath; a stream of cloudy air billowing out of her slightly parted lips past the girl's left cheek and rising towards the black sky before vanishing. She turned her head to look at Mireille and saw that she was staring at the empty and quiet streets in front of them, her expression gravely serious with her brow knitted and the muscles around her eyes tight, as though she were in deep thought. But Kirika knew her love wasn't really seeing the streets; the glaze to her blue eyes and stern set of her countenance told the girl that she was contemplating where to go from here now that Ryosuke and Vincent had escaped… with Langonel's Manuscript.

Kirika looked away from Mireille and back to the silent streets, starting to gaze at their tarmac roads vacantly herself. Langonel's Manuscript--the virtual bible of Soldats where the underlying dark principles of Noir's being was inscribed. She didn't know how, but she knew that the copy Ryosuke and Vincent had just succeeded in stealing was the one that she had read from at the Manor. No, she hadn't read for it. It had been that *other* girl--that *other* girl had flipped through its pages, that *other* girl had recited its passages. Kirika's *other* self had been the one under Altena's deceptively benevolent eye that night, not her.

Kirika shivered at the surfacing of memories that weren't hers, suddenly feeling the cold weather for the first time tonight. But then the chill suffusing her body slowly diminished, the girl feeling steadily warmer down her back and around her neck and upper chest. She smiled softly and looked at Mireille once more, suspecting that she was the culprit and was hugging her from behind in an unexpected gesture of fondness. However, once her gaze fell on her love she realised that Mireille hadn't moved a muscle since the last instance she had looked the blonde's way. Kirika's smile abruptly evaporated, the gentle curve supplanted by an impassive flat line while disappoint that her idyllic initial belief was proved false developed within her. But that sentiment was soon eclipsed as she began to feel a little disconcerted by the mysterious warmth, its heat almost akin to… to a presence.

But the warmth faded as quickly as it had manifested, and Kirika was left wondering whether it had even been there at all; if it had just been a figment of her imagination. Yet the cold did not seek to replace it, and she did not feel the bite of the freezing night air again. But another feeling did arise in the warmth's wake, a different one from the first, but one that served to rekindle her disconcert nevertheless. It was a feeling of having been… marked somehow. No… that she always had been marked, and was only now remembering. A sense of foreboding gripped Kirika, and although she wasn't certain of its precise origin it sent shudders through her soul, as if that essence knew something the girl it inhabited did not.

The alarm ringing in Laroque's mansion and the shouts of his armed men behind them urged the pair to make haste and move on, to flee into cover; into safety. Yet Kirika and Mireille did not budge from their spot on the footpath. They simply stood there, each staring into the night and beyond; past its swirling frozen winds, past its black streaking shadows, past its quiet empty atmosphere; and at things only they could see on the very brink of its horizon. At dark things that had come and gone. And at dark things yet to come.

******

In a flicker of shiny ebony Ryosuke darted into an alleyway swallowed by the darkness of the night a few blocks from Albert Laroque's residence, Vin tagging along after him with nearly equal alacrity. The two remained just inside the passageway's entrance, where the prying light from nearby streetlamps did not touch them yet would brand any outsider who ventured close to their position, their telltale shadows sketched on the ground before the assassins' feet. Ryosuke didn't believe their pursuers were still following them however, but one could never be too sure. And those particular young women… they seemed like the tenacious type.

Vin leaned up against a wall of the alley opposite to where Ryosuke stood, his breathing brisk but not hard. Ryosuke knew that the triad member was used to running long distances at an all but constant sprint, with his life potentially depending on his speed--he'd had plenty of practice back in Hong Kong. Vin had related to his Ryosuke many stories of his younger years spent in his birth city over the duration of their association, although the times when he did speak of those gruelling days came few and far between; often only when he was very drowsy or heavily inebriated was his tongue loosened.

Vin, for all his braggart ways was reluctant to reminisce on his life in Hong Kong, but it was to be expected; his old roots were tough, merciless ones indeed, even more so than usual for someone of his disreputable way of life. Tales of when mobs of gangsters armed with all manner of hand-to-hand weapons from crude clubs to wicked machetes and with numbers totalling in the dozens had chased him and his comrades through packed public streets were the norm, the mass assault the equivalent of an assassination attempt in his triad circles. Ryosuke was not unfamiliar with such brazen but brutally effective tactics, but they were less common in the streets of Japan and usually localised to uncivilised gangs of hoodlums with no affiliation to a prestigious yakuza clan of old. In those treacherous situations the only recourse was to flee on foot and find faster transport or a good hiding spot as fast as possible, or else wind up being bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the middle of the road in front of crowds of bystanders. The bonds of brotherhood normally joining men together with ties as strong as those formed with blood were regrettably made thin here, too; any companions who fell behind were left for the pack's bloodlust, lest you be swallowed by the howling horde that swarmed those unfortunates as well. To stay and fight was certainly to die, and attempted rescue of the fallen was suicidal. Sheer numbers saw to that regardless of how skilled one was in combat. As a result, prominent up-and-coming criminals learned to run quick and build up their stamina very early during their careers, with those who didn't more often than not having their rise in their syndicate's ranks cut violently short.

Ryosuke was aware that his partner had scars from his experience in the triads of Hong Kong, physical ones--although none that would detract from his 'beauty'--as well as those of the mental kind. But everybody had scars in one form or another, and they were not an exclusive woe to those individuals who lived their lives in the underworld. Vin was entitled to no pity, just like nobody else was--they were all suffering equally. But unlike those others he had the sense not to ask for it, choosing instead to bear his scars in silence. An admirable trait.

Ryosuke simply stood calmly while Vin quietly huffed and puffed, the ex-yakuza appearing as though he hadn't dashed more than a hundred metres with at least twenty-five kilograms of steel weighing down his body just a second ago. Like his companion, Ryosuke was accustomed to running hard for long distances, but with the exception of being heavily armoured at the time. Not a drop of sweat dampened his brow nor did his chest rise and fall rapidly--he was perfectly composed, perfectly still, his body reminiscent of a statue. Reminiscent of steel.

Ryosuke had deliberately conditioned his body to tolerate all sorts of abuse, seeking to hone his weak flesh to match the strength of the steel that he wrapped it in. For steel was resilient, virtually unbreakable. But flesh was frail and easily damaged. To be invulnerable to all things he had to *become* like steel, and then the swords and arrows of the world would be unable to harm him. However, Ryosuke had yet to achieve his ambition. Tonight he had been shot countless times, and although his coat had protected him, he still hurt. He did not acknowledge the pain, of course--he had at least ascended well beyond that pathetic human need--but his body insisted on crying out to him in spite of his disregard nonetheless. Thus for now the white-haired man was required to don his fortified overcoat--his scales as they had once been called by others in the past--the black garment a substitute for flesh as steel, if an inferior one. But one day he would *truly* embody his old name, a name given to him and one another during his yakuza days--'Kuroi Koutetsu no Ryuu'. Except by then he supposed there would be no need for 'kuroi'.

Ryosuke's forehead creased suddenly as he looked at Vin, his violet eyes that were more in their element in the shadows picking up a dark splotch--darker than the triad member's black coloured shirt--staining the shorter man's right side. "You're hit," he stated simply in an emotionless voice.

"Huh?" Vin said, favouring Ryosuke with a startled look, before following his partner's gaze, dropping his head downwards. "That little brat," he then said as he caught sight of the spreading blood on his shirt, astonishment reigning in his tone rather than anger. He prodded at the wound gingerly, not to see how serious it was, but more like to see if it was really there. "I can't believe it; she actually got me. I didn't even feel it."

Ryosuke made no comment, merely staring at Vin's injury in contemplation. His brow furrowed a little deeper. Noir. His suspicions about Dominique having had them adopt the alias had been confirmed with the pair of 'ancient' assassins showing up in Laroque's library, intent on slaying them. The conniving bitch had planned to use Noir to kill them by provoking the young women's ire with the alleged theft of their name. Ryosuke wondered if the infernal book he and his associate had at last found and acquired for Kaede--or more to be more precise, for Dominique--was even worth anything, or if it had simply been an excuse for them to be sent to Paris, the seeming home city of Noir. But that blonde woman of Noir had wanted it for some reason. Perhaps it was only valuable to her and her Japanese colleague…?

Ryosuke scowled. It would be just like Dominique to think ahead like that, arranging it so that Noir would be ever snapping at his and Vin's heels no matter if the primary objective of her plan was accomplished or not. If Langonel's Manuscript really was important to Europe's greatest contract killers, then they would likely hound Ryosuke and Vin until they retrieved it. And until they killed the two men for taking it in the first place. A very clever piece of foresight indeed, if it were true. But unless Noir was willing to pursue Ryosuke and his partner outside France, then Dominique's possible plan would be for naught; the ex-yakuza aimed to be out of the country by dawn. His sister's trial was a mere couple of days away now because of his and Vin's maddening overseas book-hunting errand. Ryosuke *definitely* had to have Yokohama's soil beneath his boots before then.

Studying Vin's wound as the man continued to spew forth his incredulity at being shot by the 'brat', Ryosuke debated whether Dominique's plotting was actually going to succeed in bringing about the death of at least one of them. It would be… troublesome to have to abandon Vin in Paris if he was too severely injured to travel immediately; finding a new partner with comparative skill to his in Yokohama would be a tiresome ordeal. The bonds of brotherhood were between men were strong, but the bond between Ryosuke and his little sister were stronger. Much stronger. Kaede *always* came first.

"It's not so bad," Vin eventually declared as if sensing the concerns cropping up in Ryosuke's mind. He gave his wound one last experimental poke and raised his head to look at his companion. "I think she just winged me." He then buttoned his suit jacket, concealing the bloodstain, and stared into Ryosuke's piercing violet eyes with his own amber orbs, their depths just as intense. "I can make it," he assured the snow white-haired gangster firmly, knowing that his partner wanted to return to Japan post haste.

Ryosuke simply inclined his head in acceptance. He decided that if Vin's condition worsened before they reached the airport he would leave him behind. It would be difficult to explain a corpse sitting next to him on a plane if the man were to die in transit, after all, and there was no escape when one was thousands of feet in the air. If Vin happened to succumb in the street or even in the airport itself, however, Ryosuke was confident he could slip away and in turn mask any connection linking him to the dead body.

Vin gave Ryosuke a weak lopsided smile. "Good. Then why don't we go pick up our bags?" he suggested. The armoured assassin thought he detected a hint of relief in his voice.

As Ryosuke and Vin walked hurriedly down the streets of Paris, the taller man couldn't help thinking about their recent adversaries. Noir… they certainly were an intriguing pair of individuals. He wondered about their identities, about their lives here in Paris. He wondered how a Japanese girl had met a seeming native-born Frenchwoman, and how the girl had become so talented in the craft of the killer. He wondered how they had 'earned' the designation of Noir, a legendary duo of assassins in this continent. But mainly he wondered if he had seen the last of them.

******

To be continued….


Author's ramblings:

Ryosuke's bulletproof coat was partially inspired by that Russian woman's coat in the Gun Smith Cats OAV.

For a couple of visual aids for Ryosuke's big gun, think about Vash's gun from Trigun, except larger. Or Barry's Magnum from the Resident Evil remake on the Nintendo Game Cube.

As for what Ryosuke's old name translates to… I'm pretty sure you can all work that out yourselves. ^_^

Oh, and may I say how I hate describing furniture and architecture.