Day 1
MON Safehouse
*bzzzzt* Hey girls, Smith here! Just wanted to let you know we're en route to deliver the package, so you'd better be decent and make yourselves look presentable! Toodles! *click*
The streets of Okayama-ken
Kyosuke Keita looked out the car window. It was a beautiful morning. The cityscape was bustling and full of life, the people were all marching happily along to the tune of their everyday lives, and the sun was rising bright and cheery in the sky, just like always. So why were his thoughts so dark, stormy and turbulent? Simple. A dead man. He was a dead man.
"How the hell did this happen...?"
He thought back to how this had all started. He was just trying to keep his head down! Do a good job! He thought that maybe if he put in a few extra hours at the forensics lab he could earn a few brownie points, but instead he'd gotten caught up in a case involving the extraspecies mafia, and now they were trying to kill him! Someone! Someone was trying to kill him, Kyosuke Keita! Someone very powerful, very mean, and very, very well-armed. The thought of it made him sick to his stomach.
Now he was in protective custody, on the run from literal monsters from a fantasy novel who'd already tried to kill him once by blowing up an entire laboratory full of people. His life was in danger, and what had he even done? Run spectrographs on a few dud lab samples and just happened to figure out something he shouldn't have? How? How had this happened?! How was he supposed to have known?!
Deadened to it all after the fiftieth time he'd asked himself these questions, Kyosuke just kept staring forlornly out the car window, watching unfamiliar street signs and buildings fly by. So far from home... Somehow, all he could think of was "what was he going to tell all his friends and coworkers?" How was he going to cover this up? This could follow him for the rest of his career. The rest of his life, even! Assuming he even had that long to live…
The college sophomore sighed. It’s over. Just end it. Kill me now.
All joking aside, Kyosuke thought about the people he might be able to call for some encouragement, to calm himself down. Not lawyers or anything. Just, y’know, people. Special people. He’d been told that in times like this it was good to get back in contact with family and old friends. A person could usually fall back on their family for support and encouragement during times of stress, but he didn't have something as convenient as that. He lived alone, far away from his father, and his brother. His mother had died long ago, and he didn't know any of his relatives, or whether any of them were even still alive. That, and all his classmates had stopped talking to him after they found out what kind of people he'd gotten involved with (not that it mattered when they were all more than a city's width away). Right now, he was all alone, with no one to support him. Except for...
Except for her... he thought as he looked across the car at the woman in the driver's seat.
Ms. Smith. Bureaucrat. Government agent. Cultural coordinator. Possible American expat? He still couldn't tell.
Whether she was supposed to be helping him or not was a mystery to Kyosuke, considering she was the one who'd gotten him into this mess to begin with, but she was certainly taking his misfortune well either way, humming along to the newest song by ANM48. Reaching for her travel mug with the words “Serious Gourmet Shit” emblazoned on it in English lettering around a parody of the Starbuck’s logo, she took a sip and immediately spat it out the window, sticking out her tongue and pouting.
“Ech, it’s cold!” she whined in stereotypical “fake cutesy” behavior.
Is she… really a government agent? Kyosuke wondered. He couldn’t help but feel a little concerned for his future.
"Ummmm... Hey Smith?" he asked. "Where are we going?"
He didn't receive an answer though. He frowned. "Smith... Mis. Smith... Smith-san!"
"Hm?" she said, only now paying attention to him. "What is it, Kyo-chan?"
"Uhhh..." Kyosuke stuttered. He'd told her not to call him by that embarrassing nickname. "D-Do you know where we're going? I've asked you before but you've never said anything, and this looks way out of the way. Are we in Okayama prefecture right now?"
"Of course I know where we're going. What, you getting homesick already?" Smith asked teasingly. "I thought you were more of a man than that, Kyo-chan~"
Caught off-guard by the government agent's flirtatious behavior, Kyosuke blushed. "I wish you'd stop calling me that..." he mumbled, but Smith either didn't hear him, or chose to ignore him.
"It's a safehouse, designated property of Monster Ops: Neutralization," she said, suddenly becoming very serious. We're using it as our base of operations for the time being. You'll be safe there. Protected. At least until this whole thing with Boss Kairou blows over."
"And... how long will that be?" Kyosuke asked tentatively.
"Who knows! Could be never!" Smith said, far too cheerfully.
Kyosuke's face was drained of all color, and he went white with shock.
"... I think I'm about to have a panic attack, Smith-san..."
"Ah come on, cheer up!" she said, patting him on the back. "Being in protective custody isn't so bad! They give you free food and housing! You even get your own case manager, and since those shitty tightwad penny pinchers never give us any more goddamn money, we're going to get to spend a lot more time together! Now doesn't that make you feel better, Kyo-chan? Spending time with a beautiful older woman? A lot of boys your age would kill to be in your position!"
"Now I think I'm gonna throw up..."
MON Safehouse
After some fresh air and two stops to empty his panicking stomach all over the side of the street, they finally pulled up to the safehouse, a new but so far unfinished and unfurnished studio apartment, large for its size but still rather small for something that was supposed to hold five plus people.
"You good now, Kyo-chan?" Ms. Smith said, still patting him on the back.
Kyosuke coughed, his mouth still sour with bitter anxiety bile. "Yeah, I'm feeling much better now. Thanks, Smith-san."
He wiped his mouth off on his jacket sleeve. How long had it been since he'd last had an anxiety attack like that? Two days in and this "trip" to the country-side was already ruining him.
"By the way, Smith-san?" he asked. "I've been curious about this. Ummm... what kind of people are these MON guys? You haven't told me anything about them. They must be amazing, right? To go up against extraspecies criminals with such scary abilities... you know I saw an orc flip a car on the news once, right? A car!"
Smith faltered, her cheeky demeanor breaking for a second. She adjusted her sunglasses.
"W-Well, they certainly are interesting, I'll say that much. Hopefully not too interesting though..."
Meanwhile, a pair of slit eyes stared at them from afar...
In a dark room located somewhere in Japan, an old-fashioned spin-dial telephone started to chirp, its news ill-boding by its very nature. You see, nothing good ever happens in dark rooms. When you're in a dark room and something happens that isn't sleeping (or sexy sleeping), it's always, always gonna be a bad thing. Take my word for it.
Well okay, maybe not a bad thing necessarily. It could be just an average, uneventful, middle-of-the-road sort of thing. Those sorts of things can happen too, I guess. But it's usually a bad thing, and it's never gonna be a good thing! That's just not the way the world works. Especially not when a massive meaty hand picks up the receiver and says in a thick foreign accent, "Is it done?"
"No boss," a gravelly voice on the other end of the line said. "But we got 'em in our sights. It's just..."
"It's just what, Saul? Don't tell me I have to remind you what I had to do to poor Perkins when he messed up. You do remember, right? Or was the bacon supreme omelette I treated everyone to back in March too subtle for your lizard brain to comprehend?"
"N-No, Boss Kairou. I'm hearing ya loud and clear. It's just that Smith bitch is with him, and you know wherever she is those MON chicks aren't gonna be far behind. I mean, a human is one thing, but I don't want to go starting a fight with any ogres, you know?"
The voice in the dark room sighed. "You always were a coward, Saul. I'm surprised you still even have that tail."
"So what do we do, boss?"
The large, bulky figure of Boss Kairou took a puff from his cigar, a gesture so corny for a mob boss that you swear you'd laugh if you didn't know just who this man was. Exhaling slowly, he rubbed the cigar out on an ashtray sitting just a few inches to the left of the phone.
"Doesn't matter. You put more holes in that place than a miniature golf course, or it's curtains for you regardless. I don't want to see that kid's face again except in the obituaries, you hear me?"
The lizardman gulped. "G-Got it, boss."
Boss Kairou nodded. "Good. Don't worry about MON. They haven't gone anywhere. Right now it's just Smith and the kid, and there isn't a single zombie, doppelganger, ogre or cyclops within fifteen kilos of you. So take 'em out. And remember, I'm counting on you, Saul."
The phone hung up. Miles away, the doors to a black car with tinted windows were flung open.
"Uh-oh," Smith said, noticing the car.
"'Uh-oh'? What is it, Smith-san? Is something wrong-"
"Kyo-chan, get down!" Smith said, tackling him just as a group of lizardmen carrying submachine guns piled out of a black car and started opening fire.
"W-W-Whaaa-" Kyosuke tried to scream before he found himself lying underneath Ms. Smith, smothered and trying only to breathe. He felt incredibly embarrassed, being so close he could smell the coffee on her breath and the cheap detergent she used to clean her suit. But before he could say anything, bullets pelted and then ripped through the car's bulletproof glass, knocking the windows into the car. That changed his feelings entirely.
What is this? What is this?! What's going ooonnnnn?!?!
Ignoring the wriggling and struggling Kyosuke, Smith reached into her back pocket for her cellphone.
"Girls," she said, calling a number she had on speed dial. "We could use your help here, pronto!"
