The Art of War

The Nine Situations

Since Yukine left the street and entered the building, which the assassin claimed as basis for himself, only a few minutes had passed. Straightforward Yukine left behind the entrance and the complete first building and headed for one of the possible hiding places of their target.

While moving forward Yukine tried to stick as closely as possible to the tactics he had learned during his training. He attempted to secure the open factory building thoroughly as he moved through it. Every small sound made him jump inside and increase the grip on the pistol.

The large hall enabled a quick progression for Yukine and it was easy to spot an enemy. However he knew that he was easy to spot, too. Yato's assumption that the assassin probably hide in only one of two buildings, didn't reassure Yukine's nerves in the least.

Behind every corner he feared an attack and Yukine felt how his shirt stuck unpleasant to his body due to cold sweat. Whenever he felt slightly save he loosened his grip on the weapon. His hands already started to hurt from strain.

Then he entered one of the buildings with the possible hideout. Instead of only moving through the ground level like before, Yukine began to systematically clear all rooms. The emergency escape plan at every level helped immensely.

Slowly he walked through some rooms that appeared to have been used as a laboratory. A few bottles with skulls and flammable symbols were scattered around. Some were old and the labels were barely readable, others seemed rather new.

Yukine continued through the long room. Row after row he walked past workbenches and his bad premonition got worse with every step he took.

In an office area, separated from the lab with glass sliding doors, he found several files. The design of those paper wrappers was familiar, but Yukine couldn't remember where from.

Driven by curiosity Yukine read through the content of the uppermost files, which were branded as 'finished' with a red stamp. The data to the different persons was all well known to him. It was about their victims.

This couldn't be. Yukine closed the file in his hand and looked at the familiar looking wrapper. Hadn't he held the same kind of wrapper only recently? It was exactly the same kind they used at the precinct for their case files.

It had to be a coincidence. Those folders were probably used by hundreds of companies and not solely by the police. This was just a huge accumulation of coincidences.

Hurriedly Yukine set down the file in his hand, what probably looked more as if he threw it away because he had burned his finger on it.

Yukine grabbed for his gun, which he had laid on the desk for reading the files, and left the officer area. Immediately his eyes saw a few objects of interest on the workbench closest to the office.

There a few glass bottles stood around that didn't matched the other chemical bottles. Those brown bottles had handwritten labels.

At closer inspection Yukine realized he wasn't able to decipher the labels. It weren't Kanji. However his English skills from school also told him, that it wasn't this language, too. If he had to take a guess, he would have spontaneously said Latin.

Careful he set down the bottle in his hand with unknown content and put his now free hand back to the grip of his pistol.

Yukine moved on one row of benches and discovered a glass apparatus. His eyes wandered over each individual element, but he wasn't able to make sense out of the assortment of flasks and connections between them. An elongated piece of glass appeared to be hollow inside with connections at its beginning and end. For water? Yukine suspected that it was used for cooling.