Knife in the Dark

C.L.O.U.D.

Adrianus beat me down, scampering into the lounge room, where a fight was underway. Katana was standing there, holding a blue bucket over the kid's head. He was suffocating him, but in no way was the kid going down without a fight, in this case, kicking and flailing and yelling, doing everything in his power to try and get Katana off of him, but like the rest of us, Katana had been trained to deal with people and their attacks, easily avoiding any attack from the suffocating boy. I yelled at Katana, who let go of the bucket, allowing the boy to breathe, all the latter did was charge at Katana, who simply used a Koshinagi technique on him and had him sprawled on the floor.

"Why were you killing him?" After all this time, I never thought I would say that, but I did, I suddenly felt like I needed to stand up for this kid, as I had murdered his father. I was taller than Katana by half a head, so I could be imposing if I needed to, and no way was it going to be the other way round, that's for sure, almost as much as daylight.

Katana pointed at the kid, still lying on the floor. "This kid attacked me, I was doing nothing wrong and he came out of the blue and attacked me! He should be glad Xavier was in my room, otherwise he would have been ripped to shreds." He kept his voice amazingly steady, not even hinting at his recent fight.

I looked down at the boy. "Is this true? And what is your name, in case this comes up in court, which it may." I tried to lighten the mood, but from the way people were acting, I had just made it ten times worse that it would have been.

"Domovoi, and yes, but that was only because of what I know about him, because of what I know about all of you." He straightened, with a look liked someone possessed, he found his gun and simply said. "But you aren't going to be told by me," and shot himself right at the temple, from such close range, he was unable to survive.

The two of us stared at the dead body, as the others raced downstairs, wondering why there was a gunshot. They all stared in disbelief at the body of Domovoi on the carpet, blood spilled out of his head, and the bucket lay upturned to one side. We all looked at each other in turn, not sure what to say, after all, he had information we needed, there was no way we were going to be able to retrieve such information, unless we either captured and tortured a soldier, who would probably not know it on top of kill themselves before they were captured, or we went all the way back to where we had been brought up, now probably swarming with guards, fight our way in to look for what? We had no idea what to look for, all that we knew was it had something to do with us, and no doubt the missions or a particular mission we went on.

Voulge made us all come back into reality, asking us to each go and find a job to help clear up the dead body, which turned out to be most effective, who knew that highly skilled and trained assassins were good cleaners? It was all done in about ten minutes, with the blood even cleaned off the carpet. We then all sat down and pondered what the kid said, wondering if it was simply a way to trap us, or if he was being honest. There was also the question of how do we get the information, and where would it be, but most importantly, what is inside that someone was willing to kill themselves to protect, which is a large waste of life for the simple fact of guessing. We spent a full hour debating on the topic, which was ironic from the fact that debating was one hundred times less time effective than simply doing it, but Rapier reasoned that most of those times we needed a plan, it was more difficult than simply helping throw out a dead body.

"There is no doubt that C.L.O.U.D will own a copy of the documents," Loch mumbled. "But I have no intention of going back there to knock on their front door and ask them, because we will throw a pretty mean welcome home party, and you all know how much of a party person I am." If anymore sarcasm could be used in a single breath, I'm sure Loch would have done so.

"I agree with Loch," said Raven, standing up, "there is no way I'm going in there, no matter what we could find in there." Her voice vicious, as if already tasting her enemies' blood in her mouth. Her eyes were bloodshot and her mouth was practically drooling. I would have called her rabid if I had wanted to be leveled 150 metres into the ground