Answering God's Call - Chapter 16

On top of protection, now consideration.

It was absurd. After securing the belt tightly so it wouldn’t slip, Tatyana erased the ridiculous word the moment it surfaced in her mind.

“For now, just emergency treatment to get us through….”

Confirming that less blood was seeping out than before, Tatyana let out a small sigh of relief. If she’d known this would happen, she would have at least carried some basic medicine on her.

It was her first day on the job, and she’d only set out for a simple investigation. Who would have expected to run into a grenade and an explosion? Just then, as if telling her to stop fussing over his wound, Ruslan called out to her.

“Sister? We’re a bit too close.”

“I know.”

He wasn’t talking about the distance between her and Ruslan.

The distance between them and the ones tailing them had noticeably closed. As Tatyana turned her back to shield Ruslan, checking the magazine and loading her gun, the massed shadows in the alley split apart all at once.

As her gaze scattered along the four directions the shadows split into, one of the elongated shadows fired at them. The bullet narrowly missed, biting into the alley wall and scattering small fragments.

Letting out a breath like a whistle, Ruslan murmured calmly, “Looks like they have no intention of taking us alive.”

“Obviously. Father, stay behind me.”

No sooner had she finished speaking than Tatyana raised her pistol and aimed at the dimly glowing streetlight. She pulled the trigger, and with a sound like compressed air bursting, the streetlight shattered.

It was a night with no bright moon.

In an instant, everything went pitch black. As the alley sank into a darkness like stillness itself, even the sharp presence lurking nearby seemed to freeze for a moment. It was the reaction she wanted.

Focusing on her other senses, Tatyana stared into the dark and fired toward a point. The moment the suppressed shot rang out, the sound of someone collapsing with a stifled groan echoed.

Taking cover behind the streetlight, Tatyana whispered quickly and quietly, “Father, keep your head down. If you die, I’m really leaving you behind.”

“How cold. Can’t I go to the safe house first?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Who’s the cold one here?”

I shouldn’t even bother talking. Before their eyes adjusted to the dark, she had to deal with them first.

“Do you have spare magazines?”

“…Enough.”

In truth, she had dropped the extra magazines she’d grabbed when she jumped down from the terrace earlier. The rounds loaded in her pistol were all she had, and even that wasn’t full, but Tatyana didn’t bother saying it. What she had was enough.

“Do you need cover?”

“In this darkness? What can you even see?”

“No chance. I can barely see your face.”

Then what are you going to cover?

Swallowing a hollow laugh, Tatyana lightly closed her unfocused eyes. Because her whole body was soaked, she could feel the cool night air brushing over the hand holding the gun and the loosened tension at the back of her neck in vivid detail.

Irregular breathing that lingered briefly at the edge of her ear before fading, the sound of a shell casing rolling after striking a shoe heel, the faint scent of gunpowder, even the unique body scent each person carried….

It all felt as if it were being drawn before her eyes, but among it all, the clearest was Ruslan behind her. Not just his steadier breathing than before and the clean scent that carried no trace of blood even when soaked, but also the steady heartbeat that did not lose composure even in this situation pressed in on her senses as if taking hold of them.

Normally, she would have felt irritation first in a situation where she had to move while paying attention to someone else, but Ruslan wasn’t like that. Rather than finding his presence bothersome, it almost felt as if it was telling her not to worry because she wasn’t alone.

Strange. Deliberately ignoring the growing sense of his presence, Tatyana grasped the positions of those pinned in the darkness and the distance between them all at once. She reached her hand back and gripped Ruslan’s arm tightly once before letting go. As if telling him to wait here for a moment, firmly.

She felt Ruslan behind her lean against the broken streetlight pole. At the same time, lowering her body loosely like a short-distance runner, Tatyana kicked off the ground and shot forward like a released spring.

Before the opponent could even take a stance to counterattack, she closed the distance. Pulling her clenched fist far back, as if storing power, the punch she unleashed was fierce and clean.

With that single blow, the man standing closest with a pistol aimed at her flew like a paper airplane and slammed into a utility pole.

The sound of someone being struck by a fist, bones breaking, organs rupturing, and bodies colliding with something and collapsing rang out in the darkness without delay. She could feel the disturbance spreading around them.

Confirming the opponent’s death through the absence of breath and the complete stop of the heartbeat, Tatyana immediately turned to find her next target.

Who should she go for next? The one who had been shot earlier seemed to have narrowly avoided a fatal spot and was moving slowly. Firing once more in that direction, a thick smell of blood rushed into Tatyana’s lungs.

Turning her back on the vivid stench of blood, Tatyana launched herself toward the place where she could hear breathing trembling in panic.

***

What just happened?

Narrowing his eyes as much as he could and knitting his brows, Ruslan stared blankly at the corpses, or those on the verge of becoming corpses, that Tatyana dragged through the darkness.

Two in her right hand, two in her left. Tatyana was dragging four men in total by the scruff of their necks. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating from blood loss. It was strange enough that she was dragging four grown men like torn sacks of flour, but what was even more bizarre was Tatyana’s completely calm face.

So I wasn’t seeing things wrong.

“Father, do you recognize any of them? I don’t.”

Pulling his body away from the streetlight with difficulty, Ruslan used his eyes, now adjusted to the darkness, to examine the ones Tatyana had brought. After checking the faces of the dead and the one barely alive, Ruslan twisted his brows.

“I don’t recognize any of them either.”

They were truly unfamiliar faces. Answering briefly, Ruslan examined the corpses in the now clearer view.

One had died instantly from a single punch that ruptured his organs. One was dead from gunshots to the chest and head. One had his limbs broken and was in shock. The remaining one had his jaw and both shoulders completely crushed….

Dead or alive, every single one of them was in a miserable state. On one hand, seeing the result of movements made with pure efficiency and no wasted strength, Ruslan watched Tatyana, who began searching through the dead men’s clothes and pockets first, with a peculiar look.

Are all agents from Lubyanka like this?

After pulling out and checking a motel key, a few bills, cigarettes, matches, and magazines, Tatyana pursed her lips as if there was nothing of value. She hadn’t expected identification, but once again, there was nothing that could connect them to the Cherkubo Gulag or its survivors.

Pointless. Since they had set a bomb in the house with the intent to kill whoever came, anything important wouldn’t have been easy to find, but it still felt like something had been snatched right in front of her. Swallowing her disappointment, Tatyana sat the two men, who were gasping as if on the verge of collapse, side by side and pointed at the two corpses she had tossed aside.

“You saw your friends die.”

“…Uh, th—”

“If it hurts, you don’t have to force yourself to speak. Just nod. I left your necks intact, didn’t I?”

As if she would snap even their useless necks if their answers displeased her, Tatyana gently wrapped her hands around the backs of their necks.

“Military Intelligence Directorate?”

“….”

“Military Intelligence?”

“….”

“Federal Security Bureau?”

“….”

She listed the foreign intelligence agencies of Lubyanka, Lytton, and Dochen in turn, but the two unidentified men only kept shaking their heads. Tatyana and Ruslan glanced at each other.

None of them?

“If it’s none of those, then the one with a working tongue should answer.”

“Me, mer—”

“Mercenaries?”

Only then, as if she had hit the correct answer, the two men nodded at the same time. That didn’t ease her frustration. Tatyana held out a wet photograph. It was a picture showing Rebecca West’s profile.

“Did this woman hire you? To deal with anyone who came?”

“….”

“Answer quickly. Our priest might collapse.”

“…?”

Me? Watching Tatyana’s outdoor interrogation, Ruslan lifted a brow. He had only just managed to steady himself by leaning against the streetlight, so why was she suddenly turning an innocent person into a critical patient? There was someone actually in critical condition, after all.

Though his limbs were broken, the mercenary whose neck was intact stared carefully at the wet photograph, then frowned deeply. It seemed difficult to recognize her with only a dim side profile in the dark.

“Mid to late twenties, early thirties. On the tall side, average build. A mole on her left eyebrow and another on her chin. She speaks with an eastern Lytton accent.”

At Ruslan’s explanation, the mercenary nodded urgently as if shocked. So they were mercenaries hired by that woman….