"What do you mean, Irina?" Karasuma demanded coldly, harshly. "Explain to me in detail what happened."
"I mean what I said: someone tried to kill me," Irina repeated, the calmness in her tone could only be managed by the years of experience she had. "I may not technically be an assassin anymore, but I know one when he stalks me from the women's association and wraps a wire around my neck. You didn't think wearing a scarf in this hot weather was just a fashion choice, did you Tadaomi? I thought you were more observant than that."
"You do take a lot of liberties when it comes to your sense of style," her husband allowed.
"Why doesn't that sound like a compliment?"
"What can you tell me about the man who attacked you?" Irina frowned, but didn't object when he reoriented the conversation back to the more important topic.
"He was about 180 centimeters, give or take a few, well over two hundred pounds, and heavy set, like a wrestler, quick on his feet. He was Asian, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't Japanese, when I hit him, he cursed in Korean, and people typically revert to their native tongue under duress, so we can tentatively assume Korea's where he's from. I didn't get a clear look at his face, but he had dark olive skin and black hair. I know that doesn't narrow it down much."
"Is there anything else? Did you manage to leave a mark on him maybe?"
"Don't you always tell me not to leave any marks?" she said slyly, placing her right hand on his chest and stroking up to his shoulder.
"Irina, now is not the time. This is serious." He removed her hand. but didn't let go of her wrist after doing so. "If you were targeted by an assassin, we need to know why, and who hired him. Please, Irina." Her breath caught at the look in his eyes, not the severity and determination that was always there, but the underlying worry.
"I'm afraid not. I honestly barely managed to get out of the wire he was strangling me with..." Her free hand reached up to touch her scarf, remembering the feeling. Karasuma loosened his grip on her right wrist and slipped her hand into his, lacing their fingers together to comfort her. "You know I'm not exactly a heavy-hitter—my specialty is infiltration. I did manage to get a solid elbow to his stomach, but even if it did bruise, that's easy to hide. I tried to flip him onto his back, but he was too heavy, and I didn't have the leverage. If someone hadn't passed by and made him back off, I don't..."
She stepped forward, pressed right up to his chest, leaned her ear against his pulse-point on his neck. She didn't cry. She was strong, and she was used to death, brushed up against it almost every day, though usually not quite that closely. Still, she needed to hold close him, her life, whose arms wrapped around her and held her silently until she almost fell asleep right there.
"It's getting late," Karasuma said, and she hummed in response. "We should get to bed."
"Carry me," she muttered, and without a word, he slid an arm under her knees and carried her princess style to their bedroom. "I'm so glad I picked a strong man like you... 's nice to be carried around so easily."
"Yeah," Karasuma agrees. They don't say 'I love you', but then, they rarely do. Irina may speak several 'love languages', Italian, French, but she thinks her husband's is her favorite. To carry her to bed was enough of an 'I love you', just like answering him seriously and with as many details as she could give was, just like complimenting his strength, just like the worry in his eyes, and gently entwining their hands together. Neither of them said 'I love you', but they both saw it clear as day, and that was enough for them.
After that day, Karasuma kept a slightly closer eye on his wife, using his authority to keep her close to home for a while instead of the overseas jobs she was usually assigned to. He didn't go so far as to give her a security detail. She could handle herself, and she would probably just give them the slip at the first opportunity, so it wasn't worth it, but he did have a bracelet made that she could use to send him a single if she was in danger.
About six days after the attempt on Irina's life, Karasuma got a phone call. His eyebrows knit together when he read the caller ID, but he knew this person wouldn't call without good reason.
"Fumei, what's up?" he asked. "I thought you already finished fixing the security system, so why are you calling?"
"Hey Agent Karasuma, you're on speaker 'cause my hands are occupied," she told him, which was uncharacteristically polite for the girl, whom he knew to be crass and uncooperative. That and the lack of profanity raised his suspicions, and he signaled one of his coworkers to trace the call. "Anyway this isn't about your digital security, it's about Ritsu."
"Ritsu? What about Ritsu?" he demanded. "Is something wrong?"
"I would say so," Fumei scoffed. "So I take it it's not your guys at the MOD that are trying to obliterate her code right now?"
"What? Fumei, what are you talking about? I need a much clearer explanation of the situation. Now."
"Some hacker is trying to take down Ritsu," Fumei said, and then there was an extended pause where the only thing he could hear was the sound of aggressive, rapid-fire typing.
"Fumei?"
"Sorry, I'm kinda distracted, and I don't wanna fuck up," she said. "Ritsu alerted me when they broke through the first firewall, and I've been coding new and upgraded security programs for her pretty much non-stop for two hours, and my brain is melting."
"What?"
"They're using, like—sorry, I'm trying to think of a way to explain this without all the jargon so you can understand—it's like the hacker equivalent of deadly force," she told him finally. "They're not tapping at the walls to find a door, they're hitting them with a wrecking ball, and you know I've told you before—FUCK! Shit fuck shit fuck!" another long pause, occupied by loud tapping and clicking. "Sorry, what was I saying?
"You were cursing profusely."
"No! Bastard! I was saying, uhhh, oh yeah! I've told you it's a lot easier to break in than it is to reinvent a security system, so I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep them at bay, and the way they're going, I don't think they're just trying to take Ritsu down for a little while. It seems to me like they plan on deleting her code completely, as in, gone gone, and I don't know about you, but I can't let that happen."
"It's odd to hear you caring about anything," Karasuma said, and the woman he'd signaled to a moment before handed him a paper with the coordinates the call was coming from. It was Fumei's house, which meant it was almost definitely her, but his suspicions had all but left him by that point already.
"Oh, stuff it, suit," she said. "Anyway, I thought you might be able to get some of the MOD digital security guys on this to help me, and also, I wanted to ask if I could apply the security program I made for you guys. Say yes, because I'm gonna do it regardless of your answer, I made a copy and saved it to my hard drive, so it's not like you can stop me."
"That's a breach of contract, Fumei, you're not supposed to still have access to that program."
"Eh, the contract only forbids exact copies, I removed a line of code and saved it separately, so technically, it's a completely different program, and I didn't breach anything. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I heard a yes?"
"Yes, do it. We can't let Ritsu go down."
"Damn, right! Ritsu isn't just an AI anymore. She has free will, and that means she's like a person," Fumei said, and it really was so strange to hear her care. She worked so hard to make people think she didn't care about anything. Even though he knew that wasn't true, he hadn't seen this side of her since he first met her, after responding to reports that a child had infiltrated the Tokyo headquarters. "Even if her creators were to put her back online using a copy of her original code, or even her most recent data backup, it wouldn't be her. She's evolved beyond coding and data. She's one of a kind. I'm not gonna let her be killed, even if it means tracking this bastard's IP address and killing them myself."
"That won't be necessary, Fumei, just keep doing what you're doing, and we'll do what we can, too."
"You'd fucking better, Agent Karasuma. I'm trusting you with this." That was a big deal, and he understood that. He wouldn't let her down.
"I know." He hung up his phone and immediately informed their IT and computer engineering people about the situation. This wasn't just some hacker who wanted take a crack at Ritsu. From Fumei's explanation, he could tell that much, that this was a digital assassin.
Fumei missed two days of school thwarting the attempt on Ritsu, but the assassin cracked first. With her help, the MOD tracked them to a motel room in Fukuoka and arrested them. Karasuma didn't even make a report about it when she somehow just walked into the MOD facility without authorization the same day to punch the man in the face. She hadn't slept in three days, and was seeing lines of code everywhere she looked. He told her aunt and uncle to make her stay home for another two days to rest after that, assuring her that Ritsu's would-be killer wouldn't get away with it.
—
Two weeks after Irina's incident, and after receiving similar reports from Nakamura who was still overseas, as well as Takebayashi and Okuda, he had to acknowledge the facts. There was simply no way it was a coincidence. Someone was targeting everyone who was involved in class 3-E seven years ago, and trying to silence them, permanently. There was no way of knowing who it was just yet. They were all being targeted by different assassins, and it would be difficult to uncover who put out thirty separate hits. Who could even fund an endeavor like that?
Despite not really knowing anything about the situation, or perhaps because of that, Karasuma chose not to deliberate any longer and risk putting his former students in danger without their knowledge. As soon as he could, he executed an order to gather all former E class students at the MOD's local headquarters for a mandatory emergency briefing.
Just three days after that, all twenty-eight students of the assassination classroom, along with their two remaining teachers, were gathered in the same place for the first time since their middle-school graduation.
"I'm sorry to tell you this," Karasuma said, once he'd gotten them to quiet down and quit catching up with each other. He knew it had been a long time for some of them, but this was an urgent matter. "But someone is targeting all of us for assassination."
"What?" Kayano gasped. "Someone is trying to kill us?" The mood in the room fell instantly.
"Yes," he confirmed. "Irina, Ritsu, Nakamura, Okuda, and Takebayashi have all already had attempts made on their lives, although thankfully none of those attempts were successful."
"I heard Ritsu was down for a few days," Hara said, "But I didn't realize it was because someone tried to kill her. Is it even possible to kill an AI?"
"An AI can be reinstated with a copy of the original code, but it wouldn't have Ritsu's memories, or the free will she developed as she evolved beyond her programming," Karasuma answered, paraphrasing what Fumei had told him before. "It was actually a very close call when the attempt was made on Ritsu. If it weren't for a girl named Fumei, one of Nagisa's students, we probably wouldn't have been able to protect her."
"Fumei did that?" Muramatsu interrupted incredulously. "I guess I do see her on her computer a lot, but I never realized she had that kind of skill, I kinda thought she was just playing video games. Damn, how about that?"
"Is that why Fumei was out all last week?" Nagisa asked. "I assumed she was sick, but all she said when anyone asked her about it was that it was classified."
"It is classified, but seeing as it's you guys, I think it's safe to tell you... actually, it's necessary to tell you, given the circumstances."
"Is there anything else you can tell us?" Karma asked. He leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up on the table they all sat around. "Any clues or guesses as to who's targeting us or why?"
"Not really, no. Unfortunately, we haven't the slightest idea who's responsible," Karasuma answered, his tone level and professional, even though it was the last thing he wanted to say to this particular group. He desperately wished he could tell them exactly who was targeting them, and that the MOD was mobilizing to arrest them as they spoke, but he couldn't. "As of now, we don't even know if it's a single person, or if it's some kind of organization."
"We can assume that it's someone with some sizable funding, since commissioning thirty assassinations would be extremely expensive," Irina broke in to tell them about what they could extrapolate from the information available. "It would also have to be someone who knows about E class, who we are and what we were involved in. That narrows down the list, at least. There's no guarantee someone who knew couldn't have told someone else we've never even heard of before, but for now, we'll assume that isn't the case unless proven otherwise."
"Irina's right," Karasuma amended, realizing that maybe he had been a bit too pessimistic before. "The Ministry of Defense is still interrogating the assassin who tried to destroy Ritsu, the only one we've managed to capture so far, and meanwhile we're following up on any lead we can."
"Why is this a Ministry of Defense issue?" Nakamura asked. "Why is the government getting involved at all?"
"Ritsu is MOD jurisdiction, as is Irina, and in addition to that... I advocated to take matters into government hands when it came to you. Several of you are government employees, even if you're just low-level employees, like Hazama being a librarian, and Nagisa being a teacher. Most importantly though, you saved the world." He held up a hand before any of them could protest, and he knew they were going to. "Even if you believed he wasn't going to explode, that couldn't be technically proven, so in the eyes of the Japanese government, and the UN, you saved the world, so we can't turn a blind eye when you're being targeted."
"So what do you expect us to do about it?" Itona asked bluntly.
"Yeah," Yoshida agreed, "It's been seven years, and a lot of us are out of practice with all the assassination stuff."
"Mostly I just wanted to warn you," Karasuma said. "For the time being, you'll have to be wary and alert. I also want to give you these." He placed a briefcase on the table and opened it to reveal twenty-eight bracelets. "Each of these bracelets is equipped with a panic button that will send a distress signal with the wearer's location directly to MOD servers. From there, we can mobilize anyone in the vicinity, police, paramedics, military, or MOD to go directly to your location. I expect every one of you to take one and wear it at all times until the situation is resolved."
"You want us to wear trackers?" Okajima said.
"It's for your safety," Karasuma insisted. "Irina has already been wearing one. I can't allow you to leave unless you take one of these with you. If you don't take one, you're putting yourselves in needless risk, and you're already in danger."
"We get it Mr. Karasuma," Kurahashi said. "I mean Agent Karasuma. You're just looking out for us like you always have. Thank you." She was the first to get out of her seat and retrieve a bracelet.
"They're not the most stylish things I've ever seen," Nakamura said, taking one was well, "but it could sure be worse, better than just letting some guy try to stab me again."
"It might be tricky to wear this while filming, but I'll do what I can to convince the director and costumers to let me keep it," Kayano said, slipping hers onto her wrist. "My next film's a historical drama, but My costumes are all long-sleeved, so it should be fine as long as I'm careful."
"Oh yeah, what's it about?" Fuwa asked as she grabbed hers.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" Kayano answered.
Without much complaint, they all collected their bracelets and Karasuma explained how they worked and what would trigger them. That done, he allowed them all to leave, and they dawdled for over an hour in the room, talking and catching up with each other, slowly trickling out when they had other engagements, or when they were done socializing. Karasuma made no attempt to chase them out any faster than that. It had been years since he'd spoken to most of them, and he wanted to know what had been going on with them too.
—
"When I hired you all to assassinate these targets, I didn't mean 'at your leisure."
"Those of us who have made attempts all failed," said a deep voice. Whose idea was it to make this a video conference anyway? It wasn't as if any of them were stupid enough to show themselves to a camera, and they weren't exactly working together either.
"Many of us prefer to be methodical, especially when our targets have similar special training as we do," a warped voice said. Most of them had gone through the extra precaution of a voice modulator. "You can't rush this kind of thing. It takes planning."
"Not to mention, one of us has already been caught."
"And he had the most hands-off assignment too," a soft voice pointed out. "He didn't have to be anywhere near his target, but he still couldn't hack it, if you'll forgive the pun."
"The greatest professional hacker in the eastern hemisphere and he was outmatched by a completely unknown element." The patron sighed. "I trust the rest of you have something better to report... Crown, what do you have to report?"
"I've infiltrated the target's workplace," a feminine voice answered. "I don't think anyone suspects anything, but I need to observe the situation some more before I make any kind of move."
"Alright, and you, Grip?" the patron asked.
"I accepted your offer a little preemptively just 'cause I was excited to see it, but I'm actually in the middle of another job right now, huh," replied a low, smooth voice. "I should be wrapping it up soon, and I'll be in Japan a week from now, huh."
"Seriously?" The patron growled, low in his throat, and no one could mistake his displeased tone. "Fine, fine. What about the rest of you. Muskeg, tell me something good!"
"I've familiarized myself with my target's schedule and am making my first attempt in three days."
"Excellent! Finally, someone proactive. Who's next?"
[Hee hoo, we got some plot up in here no~ow! I'm escited for this arc, ngl, and my dudes, it's been a long time coming. Love y'all.
<3 Raaor!]