The Deepest Prison (1)
Well, now. This is an interesting mission.
The Black man in silver-white alloy gear looked over the people inside the wooden building and smiled with an easy warmth.
Sekou Mamadou.
Known in the American Pro League by the nickname Viper, he had once been a hunter who ranged the vast savannas of Africa. The wild he had moved through demanded a particular set of virtues: the patience to wait out prey, a body that handled terrain as if it were his own, and above all a thoroughness that never relaxed until the quarry's breath was cut for good. On top of that came fluency with a wide array of weapons, the tracker’s eye for a trace that lasted only an instant, and a gift for setting traps that closed a throat from somewhere unseen.
In that sense, Sekou Mamadou stood at the peak of every one of those fields.
So we each have to save a different person...
The ten warriors gathered here had each been assigned a different VIP. Rescuing one’s own target might get in someone else’s way—or their routes might overlap until they had no choice but to go for each other’s throats. The escape routes would be few, and the clock gave them only forty-eight hours. In the end, this was a brutal race wearing the mask of a rescue.
Sekou Mamadou put on his usual good-natured smile and opened his mouth.
“Those NAA bastards are vicious, I’ll give them that. Cramming us into a shoebox like this. They want us at each other’s throats the second we start?”
His rough voice rang against the wooden ceiling. What came back was nothing but a cold silence.
Ten Pro Warriors. Men who had seen every kind of hell in their own fields already had their hands on their weapons, quietly taking one another’s measure. Sekou shrugged, as if he were enjoying the killing air.
“Don’t get so tense. You checked the mission, right? Our targets are all different anyway. Get lucky, and we might clock out without ever crossing blades.”
“......You’re not wrong. No point burning ourselves out from the jump.”
“A Zero Extraction right at the start doesn’t do anyone any good.”
Cynical agreement followed the cheerful joke he had tossed out, and the air, drawn tight as wire, finally slackened. Watching their wariness thin, Sekou lifted the corner of his mouth in private satisfaction.
This was the kind of mission he trusted himself with most. The ten of them were rivals—and, the moment they had to punch through a fortress prison’s defenses, potential allies as well. In a situation like that, Sekou always played the same strategy.
Secure one solid ally.
Hmm... who should it be.
His gaze drifted slowly across the room and stopped.
In one corner stood a man in a demon mask, giving off a vicious chill. Kaito and Liang Wei went over to greet him, but he cut between them without a single word and headed outside. An arrogant attitude, as if their reputations were beneath his notice. Sekou curled his lip. Men like that were perfect for watching your back—the type who didn’t mix emotion into the work and simply finished the job. To a hunter’s eye, he was a very attractive candidate for a hunting dog.
He’ll do.
Sekou decided fast. He followed at once, and in a quiet alley he called the masked man to a stop.
“Hey. Hold up.”
The moment his voice reached him, the air froze cold. The man halted and half-turned, and a low metallic sound leaked out from between the folds of the pitch-black robe.
Shrrk—
A razor edge of wariness closed around Sekou’s throat, but Mamadou didn’t so much as blink. He raised both hands with his usual shameless face.
“Whoa, whoa. I’m not here to fight. How about a temporary alliance—just until we break into the prison?”
Red light flashing behind the demon mask raked him up and down. Mamadou didn’t dodge the look. He added, confident as ever:
“I might be more help than you think. I’m pretty strong. Oh, and for the record—I’m Viper.”
A taut silence filled the alley. At the end of a stare-down where blood would not have been strange if the answer was no, the demon mask gave a short nod.
Affirmative.
...Huh. Look at that.
A reaction so terse that even Mamadou, who had made the offer, was a little thrown. But the weight in that small movement was anything but ordinary.
The type who talks with a blade instead of his mouth. This is going to be exhausting, isn’t it?
The bleak mask, the presence breathing out cold, and a personality with nothing wasted. Mamadou clicked his tongue inwardly. The man in front of him fit the nickname Demon to a frightening degree.
Viper was a man who talked a great deal.
“That mask, though. Does it breathe in there at all? Out on the African savanna, wear something like that and your face cooks in no time. Not that the weather here is quite that bad, mind you.”
“See this axe? Aerospace-grade titanium alloy. I can pop a bunker door with it like a can. Cost me a fortune. A man ought to use his tools, don’t you think? I snuck a look at your sword—pretty nice. Some master make that for you? Ah, you don’t have to answer. Looks like a blade with a story. Swords like that are picky about their owners.”
“Those sentries over there—you see them? Look at the stride. Textbook. But in three minutes the one on the left is going to yawn. I guarantee it. Want to bet? Well, a bet needs stakes, and you won’t talk, so that’s a problem. We’ll just say I won, and you can buy me a drink later.”
Through all that endless chatter, I never once opened my mouth.
On an ordinary day I would have played along and slipped into the conversation. I preferred a joke to silence, and ease to constant wariness. But I was in no mood for it now. Ever since I had seen the man in the photograph, my mood had sunk straight to the bottom.
Lee Jong-hyuk.
A junior who had come in a class behind me, and the partner who had shared life and death with me in China. And... he was dead. During Operation Fallen Flower. Trying to save me.
Stupid kid.
I had told him over and over that an agent must never let emotion take the wheel. He never listened, and the price I paid was a debt I would carry for the rest of my life. Maybe it was because this mission’s target had a face like his. I felt as if I had gone back to that cold stretch of years when I had no feelings at all.
A fool who couldn’t even tell where he was supposed to die.
Expressionless, I walked Rasgrid and gathered information. What I needed came down to three things: the interior layout of Tartaros and the size of its garrison, a way out of the fortress, and the flight route after that. Fortunately, I had been trained, professionally, in how to collect information and how to pick the clues that mattered out of the noise. The complaints drunks let slip in shabby taverns, the quiet deals of back-alley brokers, even the small patterns in the guards’ movements—I sifted the fragments I needed out of Rasgrid’s clamor with careful precision. Add in what the man called Viper brought back, and the map that had been a blur began, little by little, to come clear.
“The targets we’re supposed to extract were taken by inquisitors in Antares a week ago. Antares is the imperial capital of the Tessara Empire.”
“There’s an entrance near the eastern barracks. About a hundred guards posted there full-time, but the problem is the barracks sitting right beside it. Practically speaking, you’d better be ready to fight thousands.”
“The place is huge—big as if they’d picked up the Hassan II Mosque and set it down whole. Thirteen blocks in all, and they hold people by the thousands. Not for reform. A tomb aboveground, where they lock you up until you rot.”
“The walls are high, and there are watchtowers everywhere, so sneaking in won’t be easy. Lucky for us, there are two emergency routes. I got that straight from the man who designed the prison. One’s a passage for bringing in food. The other’s a secret corridor the nobles built so they could run if a riot broke out. Shame I couldn’t get anything on the noble side.”
Hearing that much, I had to ask one question.
“He wouldn’t have given up a secret like that so easily.”
A voice gone cold slid out of my mouth, and Viper broke into a short laugh, as if he had been waiting for it.
“Finally talks. I was starting to think you were mute. Nothing to it. Cut off an arm and a leg, and he sang. Begged me to kill him while he did it.”
There wasn’t a shred of guilt in Viper’s voice. It was closer to the pure pleasure a hunter feels after he has run his quarry to ground. I didn’t frown at the cruelty. I audited, once more, how far I could trust what he had brought back. Information squeezed out of a man while his limbs were coming off was, at the least, unlikely to be a lie. The survival instinct is the most honest motive a human being has.
“So.”
I turned my eyes and traced the shadow of Tartaros’s outer wall.
“Three entrances in all, and all we know are the main gate and the supply passage?”
“Pretty much. The one who designed the secret corridor went into shock and died before he could open his mouth. Pity. I should have handled him a little more gently.”
Viper shrugged and shifted his grip on the axe.
“But the supply passage isn’t bad either. A provision wagon goes in every dawn. Security’s tight, but at least the door opens. So—feel like showing off that can-opener technique?”
Instead of answering, I stared at the hologram photograph floating in the air beside me. When I lost Jong-hyuk in Operation Fallen Flower, I had learned something. The most dangerous thing for an agent isn’t emotion. It’s uncertain information. What I held now was incomplete. The supply passage might be an obvious trap. But time was not on our side.
“We go in through the supply passage. Using the wagon is too much risk. We take the sewer under the outer wall and infiltrate behind the supply depot.”
“Oh, bolder than you look. A sewer? I hate ruining good clothes.”
Viper grumbled, but he killed his footsteps and followed me. And so we began preparing the infiltration in earnest.
The temperature dropped hard, and a cold wind cut at the skin as if it meant to bite. Rasgrid was a city that looked as if a typical medieval European landscape had been lifted and set down whole. Faint gaslight wavered uneasily over narrow, winding alleys paved in rough stone, and at the center of it all sat a central square, wide to the point of grotesquerie. The people crossing that square were extremes of one another. Nobles in clothes heavy with brilliant embroidery showed themselves here and there, while the poor, patched in rags and chewing dry crusts of bread, littered the streets. Woodsmoke hung acrid in the air, tangled with the reek of strong liquor and the smell of a meat stew so loaded with spice that the gaminess had been buried.
We watched that scene and waited, and at last a deep dark settled over the city.
“We start.”
I murmured it low and pulled the robe’s hood down deep.
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
An alarm bell tore the stillness apart.
“Intruders! Everyone, assemble!”
“Seal the gates and activate emergency protocol! Not even a rat gets out!”
“Three intruders—everyone, check your weapons!”
The crash of heavy armor and rough shouting whipped through Rasgrid’s night air. The guards, moving as one, had their eyes on an outer watchpost where smoke was rising. Three intruders had appeared there. Thor, Sterling, and Kaito Tanaka—participants in Match 6—had tried to break through.
Watching that chaos from a corner of the market, Go Tae-min and Viper began to move in earnest as well. The two of them slipped into the sewer like shadows. Go Tae-min took the lead.
Let’s see what this hunting dog can do.
Following behind, Viper leisurely adjusted his grip on the axe.
The sewer was deep and wet. Go Tae-min pushed on through filth that rose to his knees. He paid no mind to the stench or the foul feel of it. In his head there was only the layout, and the distances. Two hundred meters northeast.
He stopped without warning and pressed himself to the wall. Beyond the passage, light wavered.
Thud. Thud.
Two patrolmen.
Viper came up beside Go Tae-min, fingers playing over the axe’s edge. A wordless signal that he would take this himself. Instead of answering, Go Tae-min reset his grip on Waldstein. The lantern light drew closer.
“......I told you. I’ve had a bad feeling all day.”
“Shut up. They broke through over there, so we check this side twice as hard.”
The guards hadn’t even finished speaking. Go Tae-min launched himself out of the shadow. His left hand clamped the lead soldier’s mouth shut, and in the same instant the sword punched clean through the throat. There was no scream. Not even the sound of air escaping. At the same moment Viper’s axe came down on the crown of the soldier behind him.
Thock.
With a dull, grinding impact, both corpses sank limp into the filth. The torchlight wavering over the blood spreading across the surface guttered out.
“Not bad, friend.”
Viper whispered it as he shook the blood off his axe. Go Tae-min didn’t answer. He searched the soldier’s clothes and took the ring of keys. Two shadows melted back into the dark.
Fifty meters left to the supply depot entrance.
A moment later a heavy iron door, shut fast, came into view, and three soldiers standing guard in front of it. Go Tae-min drove off the floor without hesitation. Before they noticed him, he had to close even one more handspan of distance.
“Who goes there!”
Go Tae-min burst out of the dark drenched in blood, and the soldiers cried out and drew their swords. In that instant, vivid red trajectory lines drew themselves across his eyes.
Pathetic.
The lines the soldiers made were crude beyond comparison with the trajectories that old man had drawn. Unlike the old man’s lines, which had looked like an unavoidable death, their sword-paths were sloppy. Go Tae-min tilted his head just enough to let the first soldier’s blade slip past. In the same motion he cut through the man’s nape, and without stopping drove his sword deep into the second soldier’s chest.
“Ghk... kuhk...”
The last one, mad with fear, swung his sword wildly—a crude, brainless cut sweeping in from the side. Go Tae-min dropped low, almost rolling along the floor, and slid in under the arc. In the instant the blade passed over his head, Waldstein rose vertically from beneath the soldier’s jaw toward the crown.
Shlick—
With a sickening sound of flesh parting, the last soldier toppled backward. In a heartbeat the whole space was painted red. The raw smell of blood mixed with the damp underground air and stabbed at the nose. Go Tae-min shook the dripping sword off as if it were nothing. The whole sequence had taken a little more than a second. Swift, and exact.
Watching that chain of movements from behind, Viper’s eyes narrowed.
I’m going to have to run the numbers again.
Try to put a leash on this one, and his own wrist would come off first.