Interstellar Age

Hideaki was lying face down in a pool of his own vomit. Evidently, he had partied past his limits the night before. Unlike Erich, who had the lion’s share of the man’s maids, he only had one woman in his bed who was equally passed out. 

When Erich saw this he reacted with revulsion, before grabbing a hold of a bucket, where he poured some water in it, before tossing it on the man’s face. Hideaki and his maid instantly awoke in fury, as the man grabbed hold of a nearby gun and pointed it wildly in Erich’s direction, which he simply disarmed, before scolding the man for his actions. 

“Oi, wake the fuck up. It’s already well past noon!” 

Hideaki was in an even worse state than Erich and was quick to moan and groan as he tried to remember what happened the night before. 

“Urgghhh….. Where the fuck am I?”

Erich simply scoffed before throwing some clean clothes at the Oni man, who was in charge of one of the largest crime syndicates in the Great Oni Empire. While further scolding the man for his own stupidity. 

“We’re at your place. You were supposed to introduce us to the anarchists, so hurry up and set that up for us!” 

Hideaki slowly made his way out of the bed, as if he were an actual zombie, where he somehow managed to dress himself. Once he had done so, he reached over for his holo communicator and dialed in a few digits. Eventually, a holographic image of a hooded man appeared, who simply scoffed at Hideaki before commenting on his appearance. 

“You look like absolute shit! What the fuck did you do last night?” 

Hideaki was in no mood to hear this and grew rapidly frustrated as he shifted the conversation to a more important topic. 

“Never mind that! Are you chuckle fucks still lacking a proper supplier?” 

The hooded Oni raised his brow in curiosity before asking the immediate question that came to his mind. 

“Don’t tell me the Ronin are offering to take the Lutharian’s place?” 

To this, Hideaki scoffed before pointing to the other figure in the hologram, and explaining the situation. 

“Fuck no, like hell. I’m getting involved in your little rebellion. But these guys are with Splinter. Surely you have heard of them? They want to make a profit from all this chaos, and have volunteered to set you guys up with the gear you need. Don’t worry about their identities, I have already vetted them. So do you want to meet up, or not?” 

The hooded Oni took one look at Erich, and when he did, his eyes widened in disbelief. Erich could immediately tell something was wrong, but before he could mitigate the damage, the anarchist pointed at him and screamed at the top of his lungs, as if he had seen a ghost.

“You! You’re supposed to be dead! I was there when you died! Hideaki, this man isn’t with Splinter! He’s the Matriarch of the Kondo Dynasty’s alien lover!” 

Hideaki was not in the right state of mind to properly understand what this anarchist was talking about, and simply spoke one word which conveyed his confusion!” 

“Huh?!?!”

Hideaki then looked over at Erich, who appeared as calm as can be, especially after he shrugged his shoulders and suggested that this anarchist had mistaken his identity. 

“He must have me confused with somebody else. There are a lot of mutants in the Empire. I might happen to look like one of them.” 

While Hideaki believed this to be a reasonable explanation, the Anarchist was insistent and called out Erich’s bullshit with critical detail. 

“Oh, no you don’t, you fucking bastard! I used to be a member of the Royal Guard before that bastard Kenji ordered his aunt’s death. I was there the night you were both killed. At first I thought this so called Empress who had come out of hiding was an imposter, but if you’re alive as well, as that means, the Germanic Star-Empire has the ability to bring people back from the dead! Fucking hell, she really is the Empress, and she has sent you to silence me, hasn’t she?”  𝓞𝒱𝓵xt.𝑐𝒪𝓜

Hideaki stood up from his seat in disbelief. If he still had his gun on him, he would be pointing it at Erich’s head right now while demanding answers. Instead, he lifted a sword off the wall and unsheathed it, while holding the blade to Erich’s neck. There was a look of fear and uncertainty in his eyes as he began to interrogate Erich. 

“Who the hell are you?”

However, in the next moment, a gunshot resounded throughout the manor, waking all the maids up in the process. When Erich looked over at Hideaki, he saw that there was a bullet hole in his head. As he fell to the floor, dead on the spot.  Erich immediately heard Mirage’s voice through the ringing in his ears when she called out to him. 

“Our cover has been blown, just our fucking luck! Change of plans, I am sending a priority message to Ghost now. Our immediate objective is to capture this anarchist and extract him back to the Empire for interrogation. Erich, leave no witnesses!” 

Erich looked around to see the fearful expressions of the Oni maids, most of which he had slept with the night before. He sighed heavily before reaching into his waistband and pulling out a pistol, where he then pointed it at the most beautiful of the women. With a bitter smile on his face, he shook his head before saying the last words these women would ever hear. 

“Sorry girls, from where you’re standing this must seem like an 18 karat run of bad luck, but the truth is, the game was rigged from the start…”

Having said this, Erich pulled the trigger repeatedly, until all the women who once attended to their now deceased master joined him in the grave. After doing so, Mirage began to manufacture explosives from household items and placed them around the villa.

Seeing as how the owner and his servants were now dead, they needed to make it look like an attack from a rival gang, and thus after no more than half an hour, Erich and Mirage left the building before detonating the bombs within. 

The explosion turned any evidence of their misdeeds into ash, along with all the bodies left behind. Once this task was completed, Erich and Mirage departed from the villa’s grounds in a stolen hover car. 

While Mirage was driving, Erich quickly asked her what the hell her plan was, because as far as he could tell, they had no idea where these anarchists were hiding. 

“What the hell are we going to do? Our cover is blown, our contact is dead, and we have no way of knowing where these Anarchists are hiding!” 

In response to this, the blue-haired beauty simply scoffed before lecturing Erich about his own stupidity. 

“Maybe instead of standing there like an idiot with a blade to your neck, you should have used your NeuroLink to hack the holo communicator and trace the location of the call? Luckily for us, I’m not an absolute moron! I know exactly where these damned anarchists are, but we don’t have much time.

As we speak, they are likely packing up their shit and removing any evidence that they were ever there.  Ghost and the others have dispatched their security detail and will rendezvous with us at the location.”

When Erich heard this, he sighed heavily in relief. He was still green to this covert operations stuff, and didn’t even think about doing what Mirage had said. Luckily for him, he had an experienced field agent by his side, who covered for his failures. However, before he could thank her, she glared at him with her crimson eyes, and posed a question which chilled Erich’s spine. 

“So… You’re the Oni Empress’s bitch, are you? No wonder you couldn’t tell me who your Oni lovers were. I bet she’s been hiding out in Teutonia this entire time! So that means what? The other girl is her niece? How the hell did a scumbag like you manage to get yourself two royal lovers?” 

Erich simply scoffed in response to this. He had no real answer. Even if Mirage had deduced the identity of his two lovers, he was still not permitted to admit it. Thus, he shifted the subject when he noticed how flustered the woman by his side currently was. 

“You’re jealous, aren’t you?” 

It was Mirage’s turn to scoff at this time, but Erich could see by the look in her eyes that he had hit the nail on the head. And thus he broke out into a wide grin as he taunted the blue-haired beauty over her conflicted feelings. 

“Haha, I’m right! You are!”

Immediately Mirage glared at Erich with a murderous gaze before posing one simple question that shut him up. 

“Do you want to die?”

With this said, the remainder of the journey to the Anarchists’ hideout would be one of awkward silence.