Paris; the home of Mireille Bouquet and Yūmura Kirika (local time: 1:11 PM)…
"Chloe?"
Hearing her name called out, Chloe — in the wake of her being allowed to live beyond the Manor of the Soldiers, the girl had been allowed to regain the use of her full name, Chloe Laetitia Fiori — smiled as she gazed on the blonde Corsican assassin currently seated at her work desk, laptop computer before her, tea in hand. "Kirika?" the assassin with the deep lavender hair and the dark grey eyes pleaded.
Mireille nodded in the direction of one of the two bedrooms in the apartment; while the place had been badly damaged during Noir's battles with les Soldats, it had been easily repaired and restored with help from new friends the deadly assassin duo had made before their final confrontation with Altena at the Manor. Remembering that, the Corsican could only shudder as she felt her bond-mate awaken and sense her other lover close by. Before Chloe could head off, Mireille then asked, "How are they?"
Chloe stopped, and then she sighed as she reached up to gently undo her green cape. "They are proceeding well. Their skill frightens me, but they are also seeking to raise themselves beyond what they were made to be by the Agency."
Mireille breathed out. "Make Kirika happy."
Chloe blinked, and then she turned to head off…before stopping. "Mireille?"
The blonde assassin gazed up at the other woman. "Chloe, I won't pretend to understand why is it I'm willing to let you have sex with my future wife, but given that you two were raised together at the Manor under Altena until she finally sent Kirika off to Japan, you share a bond that is quite unique. So just accept it as is. Besides, the day you endure your time of the month…" — she rather liked the Avalonian slang term for the powerful urge to bond that bioroids like them experienced when they met someone who was quite compatible — "…you'll probably want to devote all your attentions to that lucky girl whenever you meet her. Now go have some fun, okay?"
Chloe nodded as she headed off. Mireille watched her go, and then she sighed as she scanned her laptop screen. "The things we've all been through," she mused…
The French Pyrénées, near the Pic de Néouvielle, four years ago…
"Who are you?"
Mireille blinked on hearing Kirika's voice, and then she looked up to see someone in solid black seated atop the ruined archway of the ancient Greek temple that had been incorporated into the ancient property of the Manor of the Soldiers. As she tried to ignore the pain in her cheek — which was fading as the regenerative enzymes in her new body got to work in repairing the wound — she then gazed up at Kirika, who was glaring at the intruder with those lifeless eyes. Lifeless eyes that indicated that whatever deep brainwashing the people here at the Manor had used on her was fully in control, suppressing whatever human soul had always been within the heart of the young Japanese woman she now had to admit that she loved move than Life itself.
"Mireille," the stranger then said. "The pocket watch."
Kirika blinked in confusion as Mireille slipped her free hand into her pocket to draw out the pocket watch that bore on its cover the symbol of the Two Maidens of Death. Flipping it open, the Corsican winced on hearing those soft chimes that had haunted her life for so long, and then she jolted on hearing a gargled intake of breath from Kirika. Looking up, she watched in morbid fascination as the icy neutral look her partner had melted into shocked confusion mixed with a horrid realisation as memories that had been buried deep within her brain began to surge forth to flood her soul.
"You remember now, do you not?" Moroboshi Negako stated. "When Altena sent you and Chloe forth to eliminate Mireille's family, her mother elicited a promise from you."
Kirika blinked. "Yes…"
"What was that promise?"
Tears began to appear. "I…I was…"
Mireille's jaw dropped. What promise? Negako hadn't said anything about that.
"What was that promise, Kirika?" Negako pressed.
Kirika blinked, and then she turned to stare at Mireille with eyes that now ached with an overwhelming guilt, screamed to the Heavens for forgiveness…
A forgiveness she knew deep in her blood-drenched soul that she did not deserve.
"I…I…I was…to take care of her…"
Mireille gaped. Her mother had made Kirika promise THAT?!
"And how is killing Mireille going to honour that promise?" Negako then asked.
Kirika jolted as if she had been stabbed with one of Chloe's knives, and then she gazed at the Beretta M1934 .380 ACP pistol in her hand. A shudder then raced through her before she straightened herself, her hand raising the pistol to her head…
"NO!"
The young Japanese assassin was knocked down by a screaming Mireille, the pistol being flung aside as the Corsican wrapped her arms tightly against her to restrain her. Feeling that, Kirika screamed out, "NO! MIREILLE, PLEASE! LET ME GO! I DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE! WHY ARE YOU STOPPING ME?! I DESERVE TO DIE! PLEASE…!"
"IF YOU KILL YOURSELF, KIRIKA, YOU KILL ME TOO!"
Silence.
More silence.
Still more silence.
And then…
"I found your letter," Mireille then sobbed.
Kirika jolted, and then she shuddered. "I don't deserve you…!"
"I don't care!"
Suddenly, a knife lanced into the rock close to the Corsican's leg. "Get away from her, Corsican!" a strange voice barked out from nearby.
Mireille sighed as she drew her weapon — on seeing it, Kirika blinked on realising that the bulky weapon WASN'T her partner's preferred Walther P-99 9 millimetre Parabellum — and aimed up into the sky. "Target: Chloe Fiori. Light stun."
"Target: Chloe Fiori. Light stun," a strange computerised voice repeated.
Chloe blinked as the weapon discharged a ball of energy that soared up into the air…and then she gaped as the shot literally SWUNG AROUND in MID-AIR right for her head! Crying out in considerable fright — she had NO idea what type of weapon the Daughter of Corsica had — the assassin then leapt into the air to dodge the oncoming shot.
It was no use.
As Chloe cried out as the bolt slammed into her side, overwhelming her as the slight disruptive charge overloaded her nervous system, she then fell down…only to be caught in mid-air by the strange woman in the black martial arts uniform that had clearly come with Mireille to save Kirika from the final ritual to make the Japanese girl and her childhood friend the True Noir. As Kirika gazed at the dark-haired woman with eyes that seemed to suck in all light despite the dark brown she could see at the edges of her irises, the woman then gazed on Mireille. "Is she hurt?"
Mireille reached up to gently touch Kirika's face. The latter then blinked as she sensed something flood her mind for a second — said something accompanied with images of HER as if they had been taken by a camera held by Mireille at the time said images were captured — before that feeling faded, leaving only a flood of warmth that she had no choice but to believe was the Corsican's love for her. "She's fine, Negako," Mireille stated as she helped Kirika up. "What do we do with Altena?"
Negako gently placed Chloe down on the ground, and then she effortlessly disarmed the woman before she reached into her pants pocket to draw out what looked like a normal flip cell phone. "Moroboshi to Meinyak," she called into it after opening it and tapping a control. "Lock in on Chloe Fiori's life signs and beam her aboard, Otako. Proceed as I instructed you. Yūmura Kirika will be following her shortly."
"Right away, Negako-sama," a voice called back in Japanese as Kirika watched with both confusion and concern as Chloe literally DISAPPEARED in a shower of light.
"Mireille…?" Kirika began as she stared hopefully at her partner.
"Kirika, use this."
Kirika turned as a pistol contained in a brown leather holster flew her way. Snaring it, she then reached in to draw out the very same type of weapon Mireille now had. "What is this thing?" she asked as she looked at her partner.
"It's called a Lawgiver. And it's a loaner; Negako is expecting it back," Mireille stated. "It has five hundred energy rounds in the magazine. See the slider here?" She indicated a red bar slider on the left side of the hull right over the trigger. "This is the power lever. Slide back, it's a less powerful shot. Slide forward, it's more powerful. Anything over Setting Twelve is a kill shot." The slider had sixteen hash marks over it; Mireille's was now set to Setting Eight. "You want to do the fancy stuff like I did to your friend, just call out 'Target,' name the target and identify what level of shot you want; the onboard computer does the rest."
Kirika nodded as her thumb slid the power lever all the way to the front. "I'm ready."
"Are you really?"
She looked up to see Negako gazing knowingly at her. "Negako-san…?"
"Kirika, becoming Noir in the eyes of les Soldats means that you are the Mistress of Death," the ninjutsu grandmaster stated. "But just because you may desire to BE Noir does NOT mean that Eternity HAS to take a surcharge of souls in the final ritual."
The young assassin blinked, and then she looked down at the alien — and it had to be an alien; no weapon like THIS existed anywhere on Earth according to the records les Soldats possessed! — weapon in her hand. A glance to Mireille, and then she looked once more at the Corsican's Lawgiver. Setting Eight. With that, she took a deep breath as she slid back the power lever on her own weapon to match it. "There's been enough death," she whispered as she looked up at her partner. "Mireille?"
"Let's go finish this," the Corsican stated…
Mireille perked on hearing the doorbell ring. Getting up, she walked over, her empathic senses reaching out automatically to determine what was on the other side of the door. Quickly sensing a familiar presence, she smiled before unlocking and opening the door. "Hello, Angelica! What sort of wonderful things did you bring today?"
"Hello, Mireille. I just brought some cake I made," Angelica Toni said as she walked into the apartment, slipping off her shoes before she followed the Corsican into the living room. As the former cyborg assassin that once worked for Italy's Agenzia di Assistenza Sociale looked around the room, her grey eyes then narrowed as she glanced towards Kirika's bedroom. Fortunately, the door was closed, but Angelica's own empathy was quick to sense what was happening in there. "What is WRONG with that girl?!"
"She's less mature than any of you," Mireille stated as she sat down at her desk while Angelica headed into the kitchen to get some plates and utensils. "Even though you girls were conditioned to forget your past lives when you were turned into cyborgs, you found it a lot easier to handle being normal people again because your handlers treated you all to one extent or another like normal kids when you weren't on missions." Her eyes then fell on the closed door of her fiancée's bedroom as Angelica returned to the living room. "Chloe really never got a chance like that."
"If anyone ever looked at Rico like that, I'd shoot them dead," Angelica stated as she unwrapped her package and began to prepare the cake, a strawberry wine cream type that made Mireille's eyes dance with delight and her mouth water, though she didn't drool; it just wasn't ladylike and she didn't want to offend the younger warrior.
"But what if it was a cute boy?"
Angelica jolted, and then she gulped as her cheeks reddened. "Well…!"
Mireille laughed. The warriors of the Special Welfare Agency's first generation of cyborg assassins — Henrietta Croce, Rico Croce, Triela Hilshire, Claes Johansson, Elsa de Sica and Angelica Toni (all save Elsa and Claes having adopted the family names of their former fratello when they were let go finally by the Agency) — had been transformed into Avalonians around the same time as Mireille, Kirika and Chloe. While it still struck the Corsican as odd that her pure-born sisters in Italy had accepted what the SWA did for the government of the Republic — put simply, if an Avalonian caught someone abusing a child, death was the LEAST of said abuser's worries! — she was impressed that they had been willing to go all out for those girls, not to mention preparing to do the same for the second-generation cyborgs when their service life came to an end in a few years. And because all the girls were young teenagers when they had crossed over — thus experiencing the Awakening immediately afterward — it had been natural for them to gravitate to each other when their times of the month finally came.
But just because they lived as high school students in Paris — they attended a private Montessori school in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the Sixième Arrondissement — they hadn't forgot the programming and training they endured while working for the Agency.
Enter Noir…and the A-Team.
Mireille smirked as she recalled the four remarkable American mercenaries she and Kirika had run into three years ago when the latter group — still working freelance despite Washington finally redressing the miscarriage of justice that had been unleashed on them in the wake of the Second Gulf War — had come to France to help track down some weapons smugglers that were trying to provide some high-tech gear to al-Qā'idah and the Ṭālibān in Afghanistan. Les Soldats had issued a contract for the leader of the team — said person had been judged to be responsible for the deaths of French soldiers trying to help rebuild that shattered country — which almost had the two assassins shooting it out with the former American Special Forces soldiers before their targets found themselves at the epicentre of a rather VAST explosion triggered by a well-aimed sniper shot from a Dragunov SVD sniper weapon. What happened next…
A remote industrial park north of Paris, three years ago…
"Uh…Hannibal?"
"Yeah, Face?" John Smith asked as he puffed on his cigar.
"Was that part of your plan?!" Templeton Peck asked as he nodded to the now-burning warehouse that the A-Team — and Noir — had been scouting out.
The former Ranger and Special Forces colonel took a deep breath. "Actually, no."
"Then who the hell did that, Hannibal?!" Bosco Baracus demanded as he made his M-16A2 rifle safe before drawing the breech back on the M-203 grenade launcher ahead of the magazine of the rifle, allowing the 40 millimetre M-443 dual purpose armour penetrating high explosive round to come out. He then looked over at an equally confused Mireille and Kirika. "Was it either of you?!" he asked.
The Corsican sighed. "Your answer's as good as mine."
Hannibal's headset mike then crackled alive. "Um…Hannibal?"
The former colonel tapped the control by his ear to open two-way. "What, Murdock?!"
"Um…you're seriously NOT going to believe this, but I just spotted a teenage girl on the roof of the warehouse southwest of you with a Dragunov!" H.M. Murdock then stated from the MD 500 helicopter — in actuality, a United States Army MH-6 Little Bird special operations machine that had been hastily re-painted in civilian colours before the A-Team took on this mission — now currently orbiting overhead.
Silence.
"WHAT?!" Hannibal barked out.
"Oh, my God…!"
He gazed at Mireille. "You know about this?"
A nod. "I believe so. Have you ever heard of the Italian Special Welfare Agency?"
All of the A-Team paled. "Oh, Christ…!" Face breathed out. "THEM?!"
B.A. gaped. "Why the hell would those kids be…?!"
"Mireille!" Kirika barked.
Everyone braced themselves as someone came running out of the still-intact front door of the warehouse, running as if the hounds of Hell themselves were after him. As the A-Team and Noir cocked weapons and took aim, H.M. called down from the Little Bird, "Hannibal, the girl with the Dragunov's got a bead on…WAIT!"
"I see it!" Hannibal called back as someone else charged out of the warehouse.
Face pulled up his NVD goggles — with the light aperture controls turned down so he didn't blind himself as the glare from the fire was quite bright — to look. "Oh, Christ! It's Triela!" he called out before tapping his own headset mike. "Murdock! We've got our kiddie friends from Italy's SWA in on this! The sniper on the roof's probably Rico! Triela's running down the guy that just got out of the warehouse! Can you spot any of the others?! Hell, can you spot any of their handlers?!"
"What?!" the former Army Aviation pilot gasped, and then he caught himself. "Just a sec', Face…ah! Negative on their brothers, but Henrietta, Claes and Elsa are bugging out the back door of the warehouse!" Gunfire then echoed in the distance. "Henrietta and Claes're putting down some suppression fire! I think we…!"
"Give them support, Murdock!" Hannibal barked.
"Roger that, Boss!"
"Hannibal!" B.A. called out.
Everyone turned to see the man running out of the warehouse — it was René Mangin, a former French paratrooper captain and Noir's target for this evening; he was the head of this particular operation — get run down by Triela, who tackled him by the legs to send him face-first into the tarmac. As he yelped in pain, the ponytailed teenage Tunisian expat got to her feet and delivered a brutal kick into the man's side, which made him curl in on himself. She then hopped on top of him as she reached over with her right hand — she had fingerless gloves on — to touch his face.
As everyone watched — Mireille and Kirika were quick to sense what Triela was and what she was now doing — Mangin blinked before his eyes went very wide and a scream that could wake the dead erupted from his lips. That lasted for a moment before his breath ran out and his body began to shake with sobs. Triela then got off him before reaching into her jacket to draw out her personal SIG Sauer P-232 pistol. She then looked over somewhere to the A-Team's left. "Welcome to the party, Josephine."
Everyone turned as a pretty girl Triela's age — dressed fashionably in a skirt, blouse and jean jacket, gloves on her hands — walked up, escorted by Angelica, the latter's Steyr AUG ready to fire from the hip. As Mangin looked up, the girl stopped about three metres away before she gazed at her classmate. "Is he the one?"
A nod. "He is."
Mangin blinked before he bowed his eyes. He then jolted as a flash of silver appeared before his eyes, and then he looked up to see Triela handing her pistol to him hand-grip first. Seeing that, he nodded before taking the pistol, cocking it, and then aiming at the side of his head. "Wait…!" Hannibal cried out as he looked over to the girl beside Angelica, and then relaxed on seeing her head turned away by her friend's hand as a single crack! echoed through the night sky.
Silence then fell, which was soon echoed by sobbing as the girl turned to accept Angelica's embrace; Triela had retrieved her pistol and walked over to take her friend's rifle so she could bring comfort to her companion. By then, footfalls heralded the arrival of three other former SWA warriors. "We got them all, Ella," Henrietta reported as she slung her FN P-90 personal defence weapon before she looked over, her eyes widening in surprise on seeing who else was there. "Colonel Smith! Lieutenant Peck! Sergeant Baracus! What are you all doing here?!"
"On a mission to deal with the people you all just shot down, Henrietta," Hannibal stated as everyone relaxed. "As, I believe, our lovely lady companions as well."
The former SWA warriors then gazed on Mireille and Kirika before Triela chuckled. "Noir, too?!" she demanded, which made the members of the A-Team all blink.
"Noir…?"
That was Josephine Raspail; her father Jean-François had been a lieutenant in the Army when he had been killed several months before by Ṭālibān insurgents in Kapisa Province northeast of Kābul. As the A-Team all gazed in admiration at the lovely assassin duo, Josephine then reached into her shirt to pull out a familiar circular pendant before she walked over to embrace Mireille. "The peace of the newly-born…"
"Their black hands protect," the Corsican finished before kissing the girl's forehead.
Kirika then perked before looking south. "Sirens."
"Hannibal, I think it's time we bugged out," Murdock then called down as Rico came running up, her Dragunov at port arms. "The County Mounties are on their way!"
Hannibal nodded. "Head back to the muster point, Captain," he ordered the pilot before he turned to smile at the women around him. "Ladies, would you care to join us?"
"I think that sounds like a wonderful idea, Colonel Smith!" Mireille stated as everyone moved off towards a nearby forest; the A-Team had a van secured in the trees so they could get clear of this as the local police hadn't been informed by the DST not to stick their noses in this due to fears of potential security leaks…
"What?!" Angelica demanded.
Mireille made a dismissive wave of her hand. "Oh, I was just thinking about when we first met up with you girls and the A-Team," she stated. "Remember the argument Claes got into with Face about which was the best bistro in Montparnasse?!"
Angelica laughed, and then she perked as Mireille's computer beeped. The Corsican then tapped controls before an e-mail message then flashed up on her screen. The younger woman was quick to sense the surprise now surging through her host's mind. "What?!"
"It's a contract," Mireille then stated. "From Negako."
Angelica gaped as we…
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Sun, 30 Jan 2011 04:41)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.