Chapter 98: A Pitiful Boss
"Aren't you still here too?" Morikawa Shiro let the question hang in the cold night air. "Even though you FBI agents have always strutted around Japan with absolute arrogance, it will not be easy to explain getting caught at an active shootout scene without reporting it to the local authorities first."
His gaze shifted deliberately, gesturing toward the shadows behind the man. "And your companion... I remember her name is Jodie, right? She took a bullet. If you do not tend to that soon, you had better watch out for excessive blood loss."
The distant wail of police sirens began to cut through the silence, but Morikawa Shiro did not spare them a single glance. Calvados had already evacuated the area successfully. With his sniper gone, Shiro had no lingering worries. His entire focus narrowed onto the man standing across from him: Shuichi Akai.
"That is not for you to worry about," Akai replied, his voice a low, steady rumble. "If we are caught by the police, it will be a bit of bureaucratic trouble at most. But you... if you do not manage to escape in time and end up in handcuffs, you probably will not be walking away. The Organization will not be kind enough to stage a rescue mission. Gin certainly will not. Are you sure you should not hurry and run while you still can?"
Akai kept his posture relaxed, but his muscles were coiled tight. He knew he could not keep this dangerous man pinned down here today, and tangling with him any longer was a fool's errand. Jodie was bleeding heavily nearby. He needed to leave this battlefield, check her vitals, and vanish before the flashing red and blue lights swarmed the docks to minimize their trouble.
Morikawa Shiro easily saw through the FBI agent's calculations. Since the Organization members under his watch had successfully slipped away, he had no intention of lingering in this damp, gunpowder-stained air either.
He still needed to track down Vermouth to check on her situation. Someone was conspicuously missing from this chaotic stage. Vermouth had a fatal habit of losing her head the moment she encountered those two specific children. He had better catch up to her, lest she actually manage to fail her mission in the most unexpected, spectacular way possible.
Without a flicker of warning, Shiro launched himself forward.
His leg snapped up in a vicious, sweeping arc aimed directly at Akai's chest. The FBI agent barely registered the blur of motion in time, crossing his arms and bringing his elbow down to block the strike.
A heavy thud echoed as bone met bone. The sheer kinetic force behind the kick sent a violent shockwave up Akai's arm. If his reflexes had been even a fraction of a second slower, he realized that strike would have shattered several ribs into splinters. He held his ground, but the immense pressure forced his boots to skid backward across the asphalt, dragging him several steps away and creating a wide gap between them.
A dull ache throbbed deep in his elbow joint. Under these grim circumstances, Akai's mind flashed to a strangely similar memory. He recalled a kick he had witnessed a little girl deliver on a hijacked bus not too long ago. The mechanics, the explosive burst of power, they felt uncannily identical. The only difference was that the unfortunate bus hijacker had been launched through the air like a broken ragdoll, utterly powerless to resist. Akai, at the very least, possessed the combat experience to block the blow and avoid sharing that hijacker's miserable fate.
'Are young people nowadays all hiding this kind of monstrous physical strength?' Akai wondered silently.
Seeing the man in front of him adjust his stance and prepare to leave, Akai breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Yet, his instinct as an investigator demanded he extract at least one piece of useful intelligence. He raised his voice over the approaching sirens.
"By the way, we have fought for so long tonight, yet I still do not know your codename in the Organization. What should I call you the next time we cross paths?"
Morikawa Shiro paused, glancing back over his shoulder. He felt a mild sense of admiration for the agent. Even battered and pressed for time, the man never forgot to fish for intel.
"We will talk about that the next time we meet," Shiro replied smoothly, his tone giving nothing away.
Hearing the non-answer, Akai rubbed his throbbing elbow. He watched the figure melt into the shadows and muttered under his breath, "But I would really rather not run into you during our next operation against the Black Organization..."
The flashing lights of police cruisers were already painting the distant buildings in frantic colors. Akai wasted no more time. He moved swiftly into the darkness, applied a hasty treatment to Jodie's wound, and half-carried her out of the perimeter long before the first squad car screeched to a halt.
Deep in the surrounding woods, Morikawa Shiro followed the subtle disturbances in the brush left by Vermouth's erratic retreat. When he finally caught sight of her, the sharp crack of a gunshot rang out.
He stopped in his tracks, watching as Vermouth deliberately fired a bullet into her own thigh just to keep herself conscious.
A quiet sigh escaped his lips. He knew Vermouth would never get the better of that little boy. Putting aside the fact that she physically could not bring herself to harm the child, there was a much larger force at play. That boy was the absolute protagonist of this world. Against that kind of invisible armor, Vermouth never stood a chance.
Watching this pathetic scene unfold, Morikawa Shiro actually felt a rare pang of genuine sympathy for the Boss.
He did not count himself among the traitors, simply because he had never joined the Organization with an ounce of sincerity to begin with. But looking at the rest of the roster? Rum was constantly spinning his own treacherous webs. Gin was surrounded by incompetence. Factor in the sheer number of undercover agents swarming the ranks, and now even the highly favored, deeply relied-upon Vermouth was harboring divided loyalties.
That old man truly was a failure of a leader. His empire was a sinking ship full of rats.
Still, Vermouth had her uses. Morikawa Shiro had no intention of leaving her here to die in the dirt.
Vermouth finally dragged her gaze away from the unconscious little boy, her senses catching the subtle shift in the air. She whipped her head around, her eyes widening as a figure materialized from the gloom. Before she could react, a small glass vial sailed through the air toward her.
"Is this the potion from the deal?" Vermouth asked, quickly recovering from the shock of his sudden appearance. She stared at the familiar liquid sloshing inside the glass. It looked exactly like the mysterious substance Kaeya had handed over to Gin. She knew exactly what kind of miracle it contained.
Without waiting for Cointreau to answer her habitual question, she popped the cork and downed the liquid in one swift motion.
A warm, tingling sensation immediately flooded her leg. The jagged edges of the gunshot wound began to knit together, the bleeding slowing to a halt. However, because Cointreau had deliberately provided a low-grade variant of the potion, the injury only improved to a functional state. She could walk on it, but it was a long way from a full, painless recovery.
In this specific situation, it was actually perfect. The lingering, sharp pain radiating from her thigh would act as an anchor, keeping her mind sharp and conscious without completely hindering her mobility.
Morikawa Shiro stepped closer, his eyes dropping to the small figure lying motionless on the ground. He took in the sight of Conan Edogawa. The boy's clothes had been sliced open by a dagger, and the sticky electrodes of an ECG monitor had been violently torn from his chest.
Shiro raised a single eyebrow, a dry smile touching his lips. "It seems someone really suffered a big loss tonight."
He had anticipated this exact outcome for a long time, so he did not bother wasting breath mocking her failure. Instead, he shifted his focus to the logistics of their escape.
"Since you have a car right there, and seeing the miserable state you are in, I will not talk about dealing with this kid. Just hurry up, dump this brat, and let us drive away."
As he spoke, he reached out, gripping the handle of the car door, fully intending to drag the unconscious Conan out of the passenger seat and toss him onto the cold earth.
"Wait!" Vermouth blurted out, her hand shooting forward to stop Cointreau's movement on pure instinct.
She met his flat, unreadable gaze and felt a cold sweat prickle the back of her neck. She forced herself to maintain eye contact, scrambling for a logical excuse. "I am worried there is something wrong with this car. There might be an eavesdropping device planted inside, or a hidden tracker. So, it is better if we do not take this car to leave..."
Cointreau stared at her. He knew perfectly well that Vermouth cared deeply for this little boy, but he had never expected her maternal instincts to reach the point of worrying about the kid catching a cold while lying out in the open at night. He was half-tempted to ask her if she genuinely considered herself the boy's mother.
But Cointreau did not care enough to interrogate her flimsy reasoning. Walking instead of driving did not have much of an impact on him anyway. He was not the one bleeding, and he was not the one who would have to limp through the woods on a wounded leg.
He had already provided the potion to treat her injuries. That was more than enough charity for one night. She was out of her mind if she expected him to be kind enough to offer his shoulder to support her as they walked.
"Heh..."
A cold, mocking laugh slipped from Cointreau's lips. He slammed the car door shut with a heavy thud, turned his back on her, and walked away into the darkness. If Vermouth still managed to get herself caught under these favorable conditions, then she possessed absolutely zero value, and he would not waste another second trying to help her.
Watching Cointreau vanish into the trees without a single backward glance, Vermouth found herself entirely speechless. She looked down at her ruined clothes and sighed. No matter how you looked at it, she was a great beauty. Why did every single man she encountered lately seem to lack even a shred of basic chivalry?
Not long after Vermouth finally limped away into the night, the quiet hum of an engine broke the silence. Dr. Agasa's car rolled to a stop nearby, having faithfully followed the tracker signal emitting from Conan.
The old inventor rushed out of the car, his heart pounding, only to find Conan sleeping soundly, a warm coat carefully draped over his small body to ward off the chill.
Fortunately, Cointreau had already left the area and did not stay to witness this touching scene. If he had seen the lengths Vermouth went to protect the boy, he likely would have been rendered completely speechless by her blatant favoritism.
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