Lonely Thieves

Prologue

That fateful night, she had been working overtime at the office, writing up a report. While looking for some coffee beans, she stumbled onto one of her senior detectives taking a bribe from a member of the Innocenti family. Naturally, she reported it to her superiors immediately. Was she rewarded? Commended? Given a pat on the back?

She was fired. All it took was one word from that crooked detective, and she was gone. They announced that they had found proof of bribery in her desk, and her reputation was completely destroyed. Her parents stopped calling, her boyfriend broke up with her, and her landlord shot her disgusting looks every time she left the house. Nobody listened to her side of the story.
Desperate to get away, she moved to a district far from it all. But even then, she couldn't erase the blemish on her record. She certainly couldn't dream of being a police detective ever again, that was for sure.

She should have hated the idea, especially after all that. But it had always been her dream to be a detective ever since she was a child. Maybe that was why she decided to become a private eye. It wasn't official work, but it at least resembled it.

Still, she couldn't erase the blemish on her reputation. No one wanted help from a detective known for taking bribes. And to be honest, Norah had given up on being a clean, dirt-free detective. On the rare occasion that she was actually given a job, she did whatever was necessary to complete it, whether that meant paying informants or beating up punks for info. She didn't like it, but she was no longer in a position to do what she liked anymore.

She lived like that for three years, always on the verge of poverty. After living like that for so long, clinging to whatever job she could get, her moral fiber had begun to truly degrade. She figured that it would only be a matter of time before she took a job that would destroy whatever was left. Since that was case, why bother hanging on the ledge?

Norah had heard of Night Hunters many times when she was on the force, but she never imagined that she would end up becoming one herself. At first, she had imagined that the jobs they did were all dirty and scandalous, so she was surprised to find that they were relatively tame. Hell, some of them looked like jobs you'd pay the neighborhood kids a hundred redals to do.

She scrolled through the jobs rather halfheartedly until she found a rather interesting job. Steal an emerald necklace from the Hayasaka family... it was rather risky, but also rather lucrative. Besides, how much could a super-rich family like the Hayasakas really care about some necklace anyway?

Norah picked up her gun and checked the bullets. She didn't think she'd need it, but there was no problem with erring on the side of caution. She looked at the news for a bit, checking for anything on the Hayasakas. It looked as if they were having a gala soon to celebrate the Hayasaka Zaibatsu being in business for 150 years. Located right in the Hayasaka mansion... she smirked. Looks like things were finally starting to go her way.

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Capitalism ruled the day in Twilight. The Hayasaka Conglomerate controlled nearly anything under the sun, and whatever didn't belong to them belonged to the Overman Foundation or was under the purview of the Innocenti family. Whether it was a gas station on the street or a business working out of a high-rise office building, one of those three was in control. There was no escaping this fact.

Megumi didn't consider herself to be a principled, righteous person. She didn't believe in "sticking it to the man", to quote antiquated slang, but she didn't necessarily enjoy helping the rich get richer either. That's why she quietly resolved to herself that she would never work for Hayasaka, Overman, or Innocenti. It was a pretty bold declaration, especially since it essentially took 99% of jobs off of the board.

But being unemployed in Twilight was no easy feat either. Everything cost money, and lots of it. Even the most down-on-his-luck taxi driver had no time for someone without a redal to his name. So Megumi had to find some kind of work to make ends meet.

For a time, she did this by dealing in her most valuable skill: stealing. Whether it was something minor like lifting food from a grocery store or something more criminal like stealing a necklace from a jewelry store, she could do it. And she never got caught, although there were a couple of close shaves here and there. And she had to admit, she kind of liked it when her clients looked at her like she was a savior.

But times were changing, and Overman was cracking down on petty crime. Small-time thievery wasn't worth it anymore. But she still had other options when it came to employment: Night Hunting. It was dangerous, but the pay was much better, and she would basically be doing the same thing she was already doing. Plus, she didn't really have anyone that would miss her if she was gone.

A job to steal an emerald necklace from the Hayasaka family. The request didn't really stand out to her, but the payment sure did. She could live the good life for a few years with that kind of money. It was a risk trying to sneak into the Hayasaka mansion, but at the same time, it would feel good to make them look like idiots every once in a while.

She leapt out of bed with the agility only a teenager would have. She decided to take the job. It looked like there was no need to confirm that with the client, so she put away her tablet and walked right out of her apartment. The first thing to do with planning a heist is to stake out the location. The gala was in three days. Plenty of time to get prepared.

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A debt of 10,000,000,000 redals has been assigned to Daryl Haddock.

The red letters remained on the interface, no matter how many times he rubbed his eyes. He counted the zeroes over and over, but the number never changed either.

He shut off the terminal and leaned back in his chair, his spirit crushed. There was simply no way he could pay off this debt, not after also losing his job as a computer programmer. To make things worse, he owed all of this money to the Innocenti family, who were in control of all of the banks in Twilight.

A normal debtor would often make a deal with a lender about how much money they would pay how many times a year. The system wasn't perfect; the lender would often place interest on the amount to be repaid, and if the debtor fell behind on his payments, he could expect a sound beating from the lender's goons. All of that was better than how the Innocenti family did things.

See, owning the banks meant that they had easy access to everyone's accounts, including their debtors. So whenever they had someone who owed them money, they simply went to their account and took out the amount owed. Sure enough, his bank account now reflected a negative number that he didn't even want to think about. What was even worse was that the bank didn't even mind if you tried to buy things with a negative balance. After all, all you'd be doing was increasing the amount that needed to be repaid.

Of course, the Innocenti family were not so charitable that they would just let debtors do as they pleased. Daryl picked at the new accessory adorning his neck, the barely-visible debtor's collar developed by the Overman Foundation. This collar would emit a shock to anyone trying to leave Twilight, as well as an especially excrutiating shock if a year passed without paying off at least ten percent of the obtained debt. As an unintended third effect, people tended to look down on you if you had a debtor's collar.

Even if it was only ten percent, one billion redals was not something that Daryl could scrounge up so easily. Even as a computer engineer, his yearly salary only ever went as high as 50 million, and considering the way he was fired, he could not expect to find a similar job any time soon.
There was no other choice. Daryl never wanted to do anything as dangerous as Night Hunting, but he had no choice now. No job he could find now would manage to even pay half as much. Still, a job that he could do that would pay enough to clear his obligation was a pretty big bar for most jobs to meet.

He scrolled through the available requests, skimming past terrifying-sounding jobs and gruesome-looking gigs until he stopped. What stopped him was not the job title, but the payment. 10 billion redals to steal an emerald necklace from the Hayasaka family. With one job, he could clear his entire debt in one go. Sure, the job was risky, but nothing else on this list paid even close to this. Even if it was risky, he had to try. He'd do anything to get rid of this choking debt, as well as this suffocating collar.