“You’ve got one coming at your three o’clock in five.”

“Copy that, J-Hope,” I whispered. Crouching lower on the ceiling beam, I carefully slid a dagger into each hand, keeping my eyes on the double doors to my right. Three… two… one.

BAM!

The doors slammed open as a man sprinted through them. The poor guy was already sweating up a storm, his breathing heavy as he ran. Stopping a few feet away from my patch of ceiling, he glanced back at the swinging double doors. Seeing no one behind him, he doubled over, coughing as he held onto his knees.

J-Hope’s gravelly voice crackled in my earpiece again. “He’s alone. Finish him.”

Perfect.

I flicked the first dagger at him with a whoosh and he looked up, surprised. Seeing the dagger, he rolled away in a flash, narrowly missing it as it buried itself in the cement floor. I could hear him huffing as he struggled to his feet again and I smirked.

This was going to be easy.

I jumped to the floor behind him, careful not to make a sound. He was already looking up at the ceiling a few feet away from where I had been.

“Looking for me?” I asked.

He leaped into the air and whirled away from my voice, tripping over himself as he tried to escape. His eyes wide, he backpedaled towards the doors in which he came.

“J-Hope,” I whispered.

“Already on it.”

The double doors locked shut with an audible click! as the guy rammed his back into them. He turned away from me as he clawed at the door, looking for any hole to escape into. In this light, I could already see that he had taken quite the beating. His clothes were shredded in certain places and there was blood seeping from his back.

“Going somewhere?” I said calmly, twirling a dagger between my fingers.

The guy spun around at my words and gave me a hard glare. “I’ve heard about you and what you do. Don’t even try. I won’t talk. I won’t!” He suddenly coughed and bent over, clutching his stomach. I watched as he hacked up blood onto the gray floor before looking back up at me.

“Talk and I won’t hurt you. You look bad,” I offered. I might have been making promises I couldn’t keep, but blood was blooming on his shirt like red poppies on fast forward mode.

The man scoffed and took a step towards me, blood dripping out of his mouth. “You want to play nice, huh? I’ll show you nice.” He suddenly sprinted towards me and I whipped out a dagger, letting it sail until it grazed his shoulder. He stopped running, startled.

“You missed,” he sneered, sudden confidence flowing through him.

“I was playing nice,” I shrugged. “But if you really want to get dirty…” I unsheathed another dagger from within my boot and threw it swiftly, watching as it stapled one of the guy’s feet to the floor.

His eyes widened and he howled with pain as he weakly yanked at the knife handle. “You !”

I shrugged in response as I walked over, careful to keep myself at least five feet away. “Talk. You guys are smuggling a pretty large amount of narcotics, especially for being out-of-season.”

Even in his pain, the guy let out a menacing laugh. “You think I’m going to talk? Better kill me than try and get answers.”

“If that’s what you wish,” I sighed. His eyes widened as I took another dagger from my belt and sunk it into his other foot, now forcing him to remain rooted in that spot. He let out another howl of pain as blood spurted out of his foot. I tried hard to keep a blank face, though I desperately wanted to vomit at the sight of all that blood.

Deep breaths, deep breaths.

For a trained agent, you’d think I’d be better with this kind of stuff.

I covered my gag with a croaked “Talk.”

“Hound… H-Hound,” the guy was squeezing his eyes shut as he grasped fruitlessly at his other foot.

I crossed my arms. “I can’t hear you.”

“Hound!” The guy yelled.

What?

I heard the sound of J-Hope typing through my earpiece. “Hound is a rumored underground mafia group consisting of high-ranking officials that hold various positions in the economy,” J-Hope explained through the earpiece. “I guess they’re not so much of a rumor, though.”

“What are they doing?” I demanded from the guy. He squeezed his eyes as he bit his lips, kneeling over to try and free his feet. I walked over and lightly kicked one of his feet, watching with a calm expression as he yelped and clutched his leg. “I said, what are they doing?”

“The p-people… they’re building up f-forces to t-t-take th-the government,” the guy stuttered.

“How?”

He squinted at me through his pain-hazed eyes and placed his hands on his knees to stop himself from falling over. His breath was coming out in ragged gasps and sweat dripped off his forehead. I almost felt bad.

But a mission was a mission.

“An heir,” he finally breathed. “One of them has a s-son that will s-start the infiltration of the g-government’s p-”

“You need to evacuate. Reinforcements are arriving,” J-Hope’s voice sudde