Commander, The Summit (4)
Senator Garron had been in an excellent mood that morning.
Two years ago, the commander of some nobody PMC had wrecked the plan of a lifetime. And as if that weren't enough, that brat of a vice president had started baring her claws at his political career. The thought of stuffing both of them in a single stroke had the corners of his mouth climbing toward his ears.
A great deal of that good fortune belonged to the benefactor who had approached him about a year ago.
She was the one who had swollen his private troops from barely a single squad to a force of five. She was the one who had helped him slip the vice president's murderous stare. She was the one whose schemes had slowly restored a political voice that had been as good as buried. And she was the one who had dug up the date of the summit with the Commander — a date known only to a handful of senators.
A woman painted black from her clothes to her skin, so accommodating toward him it bordered on suspicious.
Had she been anyone from political circles — or even just some military acquaintance with a thread of connection to him — he would have distrusted her on sight. But a man who held his senate seat through nothing but personal combat prowess and raw connections had never possessed the capacity to tell a gift from a trap. Whatever she offered, he swallowed it on schedule, unable to tell honey from poison.
Matching that substandard intellect, today's plan was simple to the point of stupidity. With a reliable force, a flawless scheme, and his own charisma, he would seize the summit hall in a single sweep. Then he would squeeze the Commander who had humiliated him, and in the end drag every last one of them to bed to slake even his basest appetites.
Of course, Senator Garron had not the faintest idea that the skyscraper served as something close to sacred ground for Berta — nor that the "military operation" he was staging was, in truth, no different from a coup.
Ironically, of every plan he had ever hatched, this one had the highest chance of succeeding.
Naturally, it never stood a chance.
What is this...?
It had all gone smoothly. He had followed his benefactor's advice and refrained from harming Berta's own people guarding the hall. He had taken the top floor — where those two women were holding their frightened little summit — without spilling a drop of blood. He had even indulged in a few pleasant images of the ones standing guard at the door, imagining how they would taste alongside the rest. Everything had been in his favor. Everything had been good. He had been so lucky he could have sworn the heavens themselves were taking his side.
And yet.
And yet...
What in the hell is this supposed to be?
"GYAAAAAH—!!!"
Senator Garron stared at the slaughter unfolding in front of him, unable to accept it as real.
If the forces had been even remotely equal, at least he wouldn't have felt cheated. If the Commander herself had taken the field, he might even have understood — the tactics that woman used were bizarre no matter how many times he turned them over in his head.
So why?
They were being torn apart. Berta's proud soldiers. They were falling. The personal guard that was supposed to carry him to the top. It was crumbling. His entire plan.
And the most impossible thing of all was that every last bit of it was the work of two people.
Goddamn it...
He clenched his teeth and tried to take the measure of the enemy. The hoodie brat tearing through the battlefield with a dagger in each hand was manageable. The way she slipped through that chaos and stabbed around the vitals with surgical care was no amateur's work, but that was all it was. Her speed was irritating — there and gone, almost too fast to catch with the eye — but if he ate a few scratches and grabbed her, that would be the end of it.
The other one, though...
If I fight her... I die.
He had met those deep green eyes only once, and in that instant his whole body had locked as if it had turned to stone. The feeling that came with it was unmistakably a prey animal's — terror, dread, the knowledge of being hunted. She was empty-handed. No gun, no vest, none of the kit his own troops carried, not even the daggers the brat was holding. And still she took everything with her body — bullets, blades, even wild haymakers — then seized whoever was flailing at her and put them under with a single, precise blow. She was so fast he couldn't even track her. All she left behind were green afterimages.
This could not continue. The last time, a swarm of accomplices had given him a crack to wriggle through. This time they would strip him of everything.
With a crisis that threatened not only his senate seat but his life, that peculiar survival instinct of his kicked in once more. The ornament perched on his neck — which had been little more than a paperweight through all his useless years — not only hunted for a way out, it started running the numbers on every angle it could find.
And at the last possible moment, it produced a solution.
"If you never need to use it, all the better... but take it with you, just in case."
Right before he left, his benefactor had pressed a strange sphere into his hands and called it insurance. It would guarantee one person's escape, she'd said. If things looked truly dangerous, he was to use it to run.
At the time he had sworn he would never need it. Now, though...
"..."
The thought had no sooner formed than Senator Garron reached into his coat without a shred of hesitation. A moment later, a dense black light swallowed his body whole.
"...He ran?"
The result was so hard to believe that the question slipped out of me before I could stop it.
A numbers disadvantage? That hadn't meant anything then and it didn't mean anything now. We'd swept up everyone at the bottom of the building and everyone at the top — and we'd lost the one person who actually mattered?
How did he slip out? Was that even possible?
"...Sorry."
"I'm sorry... I'm really sorry..."
Lucy and Shien hung their heads, looking as if they might cry, like they couldn't bear to meet my eyes.
"It's alright. These things happen."
I drew the two of them into a gentle hug — they were standing there like a pair of convicts — and asked them what had gone wrong. I'd snapped for a second because that bastard was talking garbage and told them to wreck everybody, sure, but it wasn't as if these two would have just opened a door and waved him through.
"We were trying to pile on the pressure first and then grab him... I didn't think he'd get out like that."
"...Tell me everything."
It wasn't until I heard how he'd escaped that it clicked.
...Yeah. If he had something like that, catching him would've been a nightmare. A reality return stone is pretty broken.
Should I have set the objective more tightly? No. That bastard could smell his own funeral from a mile away — the second he caught a whiff of a real fight, he would've already been backing out of there. It was a lost cause from the start. And since my order had been to subdue, not kill, it would have been even trickier for Shien.
As for what he'd used to get out... it sounded like an artifact.
Don't tell me it's what I think it is...
I let the thought sit for a moment.
So what now.
Honestly, I could leave the rest to the vice president and it wouldn't matter much. Lucy or no Lucy, inside Berta the VP outranked me, and the picture of her crushing that worm — Garron, Barron, whatever his name was — looked a lot cleaner than me doing it. That was why we'd been careful not to leave any trace of poison. If we hadn't needed that, I would've just poisoned the bastard and been done with it.
A spatial teleportation artifact, though...
I wanted to ignore it. It kept snagging on something in my head.
...Yeah. No helping it.
"We're going after him. Get ready."
A hassle. But this, I needed to see for myself.
The sun hung at its zenith, and still a bleak darkness lay over the back alley. For some people it was a place to live. In it, Senator Garron was dragging in breath after ragged breath.
"Hah... hah..."
The expensive suit he'd put on for the occasion had been soaked through with sweat for some time. Alley dust and stench clung to it in layers. He was, against his will, getting a thorough education in filth.
"You look... rather unwell."
A woman came toward him. Head to toe she was wrapped in black, and in the alley's dark she might have been easy to miss — but Senator Garron, a military veteran with first-rate combat instincts, picked her out at once.
The first thing he did, upon being reunited with his benefactor, was grab her by the collar.
"You... you fucking bitch...!"
"The plan was... supposed to be perfect...!"
"Hmm. I never said that, though?"
"Shut your mouth...!"
I never called it perfect, but with conditions like those, failure should have been the strange outcome. What did he do? I handed over that expensive artifact precisely because I thought something like this might happen. I pulled him off the cliff in the first place after the Commander had beaten him half to death — and this is the thanks I get? I already knew, but he's no different from an animal.
"If you'd been more thorough, that goddamn woman would've been in my hands by now!!!"
"Oh my. Blaming someone else, too."
She was right. It was as ugly a round of blame-shifting as it got. Fail, and the first thing you do is go back over why you failed — not skip your own mistakes entirely and start chewing out your strategist. Really, his whole way of thinking was different. Unlike a certain someone.
"While we're on the subject. When you say 'that goddamn woman'... which one?"
"Who do you think?"
She asked it with no real change in expression, even as the pointless stream of curses washed over her. Unlike Senator Garron, who was ranting himself hoarse, she sounded genuinely curious.
He was not a man who answered questions in good faith.
"The Commander you told me to bring. Is there another one?"
"...Ah. I see."
"Because of you I lost my chance to drag that woman to bed. How do you intend to take responsibility for that?"
That was the moment her voice changed.
Senator Garron, too busy vomiting up the rage of his failure, failed to notice. That was the mistake that killed him.
"Ah... so that's what this was about?"
"Don't you change the subje—!"
"Did you forget what I told you?"
Shunk—
Her voice had gone cold, and from the ground at his feet a black spike drove up through his abdomen.
"Ghk?!"
"I distinctly told you to bring the Commander back unharmed..."
"Kh-hk, kkh..."
"I don't recall ever giving you permission to pour your filthy desires all over her."
She clicked toward him, step by measured step, as he clutched the spike through his belly and twitched. He had finally understood that something was wrong, and he tried to say so — but what came out of his mouth was not words. Only bloody foam.
That was the end of it.
"To the Commander? How dare you."
Thuk. Thuk. Thuk—
Those were the last words Senator Garron heard as spike after spike punched into his body. They found only vitals — the head, the throat, the heart — and by then he was no longer a living man.
For a life he had dragged out like a worm, it was a death of almost insulting emptiness. Or perhaps it was the death that suited him best.
"...What a waste."
He'd looked decent enough to use and throw away, so she'd invested once. He'd come in well below expectations. Nothing to show for it but time she couldn't get back. Hands that could help them were rare enough as it was — maybe she'd been too careless in scooping this one up off the street.
Still... it wasn't as if she'd gained nothing.
The woman drew the darkness back around herself and smiled, brighter than she ever had — a smile with not a shred of pretense in it. A smile of pure, rapturous joy.