“Nah, man…”
He gasped at what he’d just realized.
The man before him was trying to realize a dream that the people of Lylat had failed to achieve for a hundred years, despite their best efforts.
“Look, I’m telling you this for your own good. Just drop the whole thing.” Isaac’s tone was stern. “That shit won’t work. Not here. If one word gets out about what you’re doing, Nike will—”
“Oh, I know. I’m not planning on drawing any attention. And I’m gonna silence everyone who could rat me out.”
The young man folded up the document, slipped it into his pocket, and gave Isaac a cheeky smirk.
“That means none of you are leaving this room alive.”
The four men, Isaac included, all stared at him in shock.
The jovial smile on the young man’s face had been replaced with a pointed glare. “What, you guys thought you were safe? Dunno if you forgot, but you’re a bunch of corrupt aristocrats who’ve been living large off the royal family’s hand-me-downs, too.”
With a light “Hup!” the youth hopped to his feet and kicked his leg to send his shoe flying straight up. A gun tumbled out from its sole, and he nimbly caught it. Despite all the wine he’d been drinking, he didn’t seem tipsy in the slightest.
Isaac went pale. “S-someone kill this—!”
“That’s not gonna work. Not with my brother on the job.” The youth shrugged. “If you see someone with shabby clothes, you can usually guess that they’re poor, right? My brother can do the same thing, just a hundred or a thousand times more precisely than most people. Your guards are all in his pocket.”
Isaac couldn’t comprehend the words he was hearing.
What the youth was describing was basically a superpower. Anyone who could pull off a stunt like that could buy people off with ease. It would be trivial to dig dirt on anyone they wanted.
“Your luck ran out the day us brothers set our sights on you.”
The blond youth aimed his gun and grinned.
“So you gotta tell me—how much longer should I keep playing along with this game?”
There once was a pair of twins who did some covert ops in the Lylat Kingdom.
One was a master gamer—“Soot” Lukas.
The other was a fortune teller—“Scapulimancer” Wille.
Those twins were Inferno’s backbone, as well as Klaus’s de facto older brothers, and back when they were alive, they went on a rampage there.
Despite the smug bravado “Soot” Lukas displayed against the Vigean manager, his combat instincts were awful, so he struggled quite a bit in the ensuing fight. All his point-blank shots missed, which gave Isaac and his men time to gather their wits and return fire. Both sides ended up running out of bullets, and between the poison needle hidden in his wristwatch, the wires tucked in his sleeves, and the mini crossbow tucked in his shoe, Lukas’s raw resource advantage allowed him to narrowly eke out a win.
Once he finished the men off, Lukas wiped the blood from his cheek. “Dang, those guys were strong. I dunno if Klaus could’ve beaten them.” Then he quickly searched their base and snatched up the valuables and a little something extra.
After changing out of his bloodstained clothes, he nonchalantly strode out of the building and melted into the city as it enjoyed a peaceful weekend night.
From there, he traveled along a prearranged set of back alleys to rendezvous with his younger brother Wille.
A man with the same face as his gave him a casual wave. “Hey there, Lukas.”
“Hey, yourself. I see you made it out of Watteau’s mansion without too much trouble. Good going.”
“Of course I did. The man isn’t exactly an expert in inspiring loyalty. All I had to do was get the guard a cute girlfriend, and he let me stroll right on out. You had a rougher go of it, I assume?”
“Nah, it was dead easy. Those guys were no match for me.”
“And yet you showed up awfully late to our meetup.”
“You say such cruel things to me. I’m gonna go cry now.”
As Lukas slumped his shoulders, Wille frowned.
That was because he’d spotted the girl standing behind Lukas. She was wearing a flimsy dress. She looked to be in her pre- or early teens. Her hair was blond, albeit a lighter shade than his brother’s. Her clothes were as thin as a negligee and offered just as little modesty, so Lukas had given her his jacket to wear over them.
“Who’s the kid?”
“They had her locked up. To use as merchandise, probably.”
The girl was the little something extra he’d found at Isaac’s base. Based on her outfit, they must have been planning on selling her to someone.
“…And you brought her with you?”
“I couldn’t just leave her there. If I did, some nasty aristocrat would’ve snatched her right up.”
The girl’s name was Suzie. She didn’t have any papers.
“So I decided to hire her as our servant.”
“There you go, making decisions on your own again…” Wille let out an exasperated sigh, but he didn’t actually have any strong objections. He crouched down to meet the girl’s eye level. “I’m sorry that my brother’s such an idiot.”
“Rude.”
The twins’ back-and-forth earned them a small smile out of Suzie. “No, I’m glad he found me…” It would appear that she didn’t have any problems with Lukas’s decision, either.
When they asked her for details, they learned that she used to live in an orphanage. Her good looks ended up working against her there, as the orphanage director sold her to Isaac. That was when her documentation was destroyed.
Rather than go back to the orphanage, she preferred to stay with Lukas.
“C’mon, what’s the harm? No sense letting an opportunity go to waste,” Lukas said with a shrug. “It’ll probably get dangerous for us to go out shopping before long. We can pay Suzie a handsome salary to do it for us.”
Upon her hearing that, Suzie’s shoulders twitched.
Seeing her reaction, Wille grinned in delight.
The girl had a sharp head on her. After watching and listening to Lukas, it had taken her no time at all to guess what the twins were up to.
“…You shouldn’t.” Suzie’s voice trembled. She grabbed at Lukas’s sleeve in distress as she made her impassioned plea. “Nike will kill you! Everyone knows it. If you do bad things, Nike will come for you. You mustn’t disobey the king!”
Nike was like fear personified. Even children who didn’t go to school had heard of her.
The king held absolute power in the Lylat Kingdom, and she presided over his mighty Genesis Army intelligence organization with an iron fist. She defied all limits on what a spy could be, and she held control over the police, the military, and even the courts.