Sora Yuno | ゆのそら
"Would yah be havin' a meatball?"
The question from the roadside hawker, spoken in a curiously accented dialect, seemed to elicit some amount of incredulity from his customer, an unkempt, scruffy boy in his early teens, with one hand in a sling and the other holding a long laundry pole.
"You know, I think it's obvious I'm short of funds", said the boy, with a scathingly sarcastic streak painting his voice and his half-smile, as the hawker scratched his (partially exposed) beer belly and guffawed, handing the boy's paint tin back to him, filled with a sweet potato and onion stew sans meat.
For the last two months or so, Sora Yuno, who went by the name "Christopher" during his day jobs in the black market, had been eating more or less the same things; street food of questionable hygiene, or leftovers from restaurants closing for the day. Two meals a day cost him less than two dollars in total, out of the seven or eight he earned daily. The rest would be for storage in the little shack that Sora called home.
Things were made a little complicated a week ago, when Sora, while pushing a cart up a ramp, slipped on a streak of grease and fell backwards, dislocating his left wrist badly. Somebody'd popped it back in for him, but he still couldn't use his arm due to the swelling.
"Yah sure yah not be havin' no meatballs? If yah wants, I charge yah less."
Sora shook his head.
"I don't want to take advantage of you", he replied, this time with a slightly more genuine smile. He took the paint tin filled with the orange-brown stew and headed off.
The black market wasn't the most pleasant place, especially not now that the entire city had been plunged into a sunless darkness. Gangs ran wild everywhere, as did druggies and petty criminals looking to make a quick buck at the expense of others. On more than one occasion, Sora had clobbered unpleasant and questionable individuals seeking to take advantage of him.
Not to mention the hitmen.
Gang members were easy to spot; they behaved with a certain vulgar arrogance. But hitmen... one never knew who a hitman was unless he was famous. Or until he struck.
Sora sat down, placing his pole to one side and pulling the lid off the paint tin, before proceeding to use his good arm to messily drink, straight from the can. With his other hand, still slightly swollen from the dislocation, he clutched his chest as he chugged the bland stew down.
Ever since that incident, his heart would palpitate in a bizarre fashion every time he ate or drank, or when he ran or went up stairs. What exactly had happened wasn't something Sora knew, and, to some extent, was what made him so furious against that man. The other part was that he never got the $10,000 that had been promised him.
Dr Vyacheslav Kirillovich Putin had made a run for it upon learning that he had botched the serum.
Just thinking of it made Sora's veins throb like bursting pipes.
...
The Leper
On the rooftop of the building across from where the boy sat eating his lunch stood a dark figure, clad in black and white, his face obscured by a beaked mask. Atop his head was a top hat, adorned with a black feather, its treated leather shining in the harsh light of the nearby lamps. In his hands was a long rifle with a gigantic scope.
The Leper had, by the time he was in his fifties, built up quite a reputation for himself as a hitman. At that point in time, he had an impressive track record of 96 successful missions out of 99, and as a sniper, had 116 confirmed kills in total.
Of course, none of that mattered when you were going up against a Demi. They tended to have strange powers beyond human comprehension, which at the very best would make a mission very messy to complete and distance oneself from.
Little did the Leper know that the one whom he had just shot from a block away, as well as the one whom he was going to shoot soon, was associated with a Demi, albeit distantly.
Mr Julius Akai and his wife, Mrs Missel Akai, were a pair of cocaine traffickers living in the black market region. Rumour had it that they also did money laundering jobs for a loan shark whose elder brother regularly conducted business with a black market stock broker who gave funding to a gang run by a Demi known as Itzel Fiske, or something along those lines. Didn't matter; the connection was probably too messy anyway.
The Leper had just blown Mr Akai's brains out while he was sitting on the toilet. Based on the intel he had gathered, that was a good way to get Mrs Akai dead as well. According to his observations, Mr Akai never locked the toilet door; he and Mrs Akai were fond of performing certain private activities with each other in the toilet, sometimes up to six times a day, and Mrs Akai tended to come in when Mr Akai was relieving himself of less orgastic substances.
Sure enough, after about an hour of waiting, just as a boy in a sling sat down on the ground opposite the building the Leper was on and began drinking his soup, Mrs Akai opened the door and entered the toilet, oblivious to the fact that, behind the door (where the WC was located), her husband lay stone dead.
The moment she opened the door, she, too, had had her head turned inside out by a bullet.
His rifle still smoking, the Leper stood up, running his white-gloved fingers down the barrel of the rifle in a manner almost amorous in its tenderness, before disassembling it in a matter of seconds, packing it back into his suitcase and heading off the roof, back into darkness.
Just a while ago, he'd received a message from that weirdo Dr Putin, asking him to approach the seedy pharmacist codenamed Doctor M. He needed chloroform.
...
