Persona 5: The Delinquent and his lover: Full Edition

Checkmate. Part 1

Kouzo got out of the car and took a long breath. The asphalt plant's air, with its coal and tar smells that many people found so foul, always gave the man a sense of coming home. It had been in this place where so many of his missions ended, with the disposal of a body in a way that no cop or investigator would ever find.

The thugs that he had brought to the meeting got out of the car as well. "You!" Kouzo said, pointing to the smaller man. "Get the furnace going. You, get the body out."

Most people believe that the best way to dispose of a body is to pack it in a drum, fill it with cement and dump it in the sea, but Kouzo, the Closer, was not like most people. He had learned pretty quickly that in order to leave no trace behind, the best way was to turn it into asphalt. Mix it with tar and gravel and heat it until any sign of human life, including DNA would disappear.

Stupid kid. I wish I knew what street you're gonna end up plastered in... I'd spit on it every day.

Kouzo watched as the thugs threw the body into the furnace with a smile. He then remembered something.

"Hey, you still have his gun, right?" He asked the bigger thug.

"Yes sir."

"Ok, dump it in too. Make sure to take the magazine out first... Don't want the bullets popping out and waking everyone up."

The thug took out Akechi's gun out of his pocket and removed the magazine. Kouzo noticed that the man's face went pale.

"What's wrong?" Kouzo asked.

"S-sir.... This isn't a gun!"

"What do you mean it's not a gun?"

"The magazine... It's not a magazine... It doesn't have any bullets. Look!"

Kouzo looked at the thug's hands. Instead of a normal magazine, he could see some sort of device with several microchips on it. He immediately called for the other man to come closer.

"Look at this. So? You're the expert... What the hell is that!?" asked Kouzo.

The smaller man moved towards a better lit place inside the plant, with Kouzo closely following him.

"As far as I can tell... It's a repeater." He said looking back at Kouzo. When he understood from his expression that the Closer didn't know what that was, he continued explaining. "It's a device used to receive wireless transmissions, store them, and send them, Sir."

"I still don't know what the fuck are you talking about." said Kouzo, getting angrier and angrier.

"I-I think... I think the kid planned for the event that he was caught. He disguised the repeater inside of the gun, so that if we found the microcamera on his hat, this would serve as a backup. The camera wasn't streaming the video to the internet... It was sending the feed to this thing. Or maybe it was doing both, I-I don't know."

Kouzo was beginning to understand, and he didn't like what he was hearing. "But you said, with those disrupter things you set up in the warehouse, that there was no way for anything in there to make it outside."

"Y-yes sir, but we're not in the w-warehouse anymore, are we?" said the thug, clearly nervous.

Kouzo grabbed his forehead and tried to control his temper. "So you're saying, the video got uploaded somewhere!!?"

"I-I think so... A-And... Well, this t-thing has a microphone too. A pretty good one at that. It probably r-recorded everything that was said, even after we destroyed the c-camera."

Kouzo looked at the man for a second, and then hit him straight in the jaw, making him drop to the floor. He looked at his wristwatch. Forty minutes had passed after they'd left the warehouse. He remembered Akechi's words.