Dark Knight

Ambush

It was just past midnight when Rin Nanase cut through the sleeping city, the Nanase mansion a pale memory behind him. He drove toward downtown with the ease of someone who had clocked miles behind the wheel—half an hour to Nanase Tower, an empty highway, nothing but the low hum of the engine and the distant glow of the skyline ahead.

The drive was smooth until it wasn’t.

There was a sudden, savage blast beneath the rear of the car. Fire and metal screamed, and the world tipped. The vehicle lunged upward, flipping forward in a slow, violent arc. For a beat Rin was airborne—lights, sky, the ceiling of the world—and then the car slammed back down onto its wheels with a terrible, grinding impact. Smoke spilled from the crumpled undercarriage; the scent of burning rubber and ozone filled the air.

Rin grunted, face ramming against the steering wheel, breath coming harsh and shallow. The seatbelt slackened as he unclipped it. Instinct took over: he opened the door and dove clear just as a massive truck—its trailer stenciled with the Nanase Corporation logo—came hurtling toward the wreck. Tires screamed. Time slowed; the truck struck the right side of his car with a bone-jarring crash and finally halted.

Rin rolled across the asphalt and came up on his hands, chest heaving. Smoke and the sharp tang of metal filled his nose. He watched the truck’s rear doors sigh open and four figures step down, each moving like a single, practiced unit. They wore black jackets and trousers, hooded cowls shadowing their faces. Light sandals whispered on the pavement. Each carried a small blade; on every chest, a thin circular emblem glinted—an ink-black sigil that read as a brand.

They ran at him.

Rin pivoted on a right foot, fists up. Training braided itself into motion—the eight years of sweat and discipline begun at ten years old, a single-minded curriculum of strikes, grapples, and evasion learned to feed one terrible purpose: vengeance. He met the first attacker as the blade lunged for his torso. Rin stepped off-line, deflected the arm with his forearm and slammed a round punch into the man’s ribs. The blow was blocked, but Rin didn’t stop—he drove a knee into the attacker’s midsection and shoved him back.

The second came in with the blindness of massed assaults; Rin hooked his leg in a sweeping arc, a 360-degree low kick that toppled the man like a struck tree. Before he could rise, the third lunged—knife aimed at the heart. Rin seized the wrist, twisted, and used the man’s momentum to send him crashing into the second attacker who thudded against the pavement.

Movement blurred—breathing, impact, the small arithmetic of combat. Within minutes the four lay groaning on the asphalt, knives skittering away. Rin stood, chest heaving, palms bleeding where steel had nicked him. He scanned them—faces hidden beneath hoods—then heard the voice that made heat and ice trade places inside him.

“It’s been quite a long time, my foolish little brother.”

Rin’s eyelids flicked. He turned slowly. Moonlight pooled on a figure in a similar black garb—this one unmasked. Long black hair framed a face he’d known from childhood nightmares: Yuusuke Nanase. Five years older, twenty-three, the man Rin had spent eight years sharpening himself to meet—Yuusuke, the name that still echoed with the weight of blood.

“Yuusuke...” Rin murmured, a sound fragile as glass.

“You’ve grown,” Yuusuke said, cool and detached. “Just as expected. You can handle multiple opponents.”

“Why?!” Rin’s voice was a snarl. There was no reasoning left in it—only raw accusation. “Are you here to finish what you started? To kill me like the rest of our family?!”

Yuusuke’s lips curved into something like amusement. He did not move to strike immediately. He let the question hover in the cold air. “You don’t call. You don’t message. You don’t look for me. How else was I supposed to get your attention?”

Rin’s fists clenched until his knuckles whitened. All the hours, all the drills, the loneliness and the iron resolve—this was what it had been for. Hatred sharpened his focus. “I will kill you,” he said. “I swore to mother and father—”

“Can you kill me when you’re busy running the company?” Yuusuke interrupted, low and scornful.

Rin launched himself forward like a thing with no patience for words—a bare-fisted charge, a first strike intended to break through Yuusuke’s composure. Yuusuke caught the punch with casual efficiency, stepped aside from an uppercut, and drove his knee into Rin’s midsection until the boy’s breath burst out of him. A fast elbow cracked against Rin’s jaw. The world blurred.

Rin staggered, tried to throw another strike, another attempt to close distance. Yuusuke was a machine—economical, cruel. He blocked, pivoted, punched. Blow after blow landed on Rin’s ribs and face; some were deflected, some found their mark. The older brother’s voice was a constant, cold annotation.

“You are weak. Pathetically weak.”

Rin tried to rise. Blood smeared the corner of his mouth. Every movement pulled a hot sting through his limbs—bruises blooming like dark constellations beneath his skin. He remembered that night—six years old, the house gone—and the oath he had taken. He tried to push up, to drag himself back into the fight.

“Stay down.” Yuusuke’s boot planted hard in Rin’s back and pinned him against the asphalt. The cold smell of pavement filled Rin’s nostrils. He wrenched, felt his strength running out. His jaw ground with the effort to speak through the grinding pain. “I swore to mother and father that I would—” he managed, each word a splinter.

“Show me,” Yuusuke said, and then his foot hammered into Rin’s spine in a final, decisive stomp. Pain lanced through him and the world fractured into white.

Rin’s eyes fluttered. The last thing he saw before darkness closed like a curtain was Yuusuke’s silhouette—tall, unrepentant—standing over him, the Nanase emblem on the truck a dark witness behind the man’s shadow.

When he went under, the city’s midnight hum washed over him—distant, indifferent—and somewhere far off, Nanase Tower waited, lit and patient, unaware that the heir it expected was being broken on the roadside.