Hunters Chapter Three
Happy Belated Valentine's Day!
Chapter One -- Chapter Two
Three - Searching
Present Day
Minho entered the darkened room slowly, carrying two giant cups of coffee, both Americano. He reached the main chair where a tinted glasses wearing Kibum was clacking away and set the cups down next to the elder man.
“I brought coffee,” he announced softly.
“Thanks,” the sitting man responded, reaching over and taking a sip out of the nearest cup without looking away from the screen once.
Rolling his eyes, Minho grabbed a chair and pulled it close, relaxing into it and letting one foot rest on his other knee.
“Kibum.”
His only answer was a slurp of the coffee as Kibum drained the first cup.
“Kibum.”
The tall man watched as the elder man smacked his lips before grabbing the second cup.
“Kibum!”
“What?!” the elder man snarled as he wrenched off his tinted glasses and spun around.
Minho looked at him quietly for a moment before asking, “How far have you gotten?”
Kibum took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Nowhere. I’ve checked the data over almost ten times. I’ve checked the sources again and again, and it’s all from in-house. I’ve checked their information against all public records and everything pans out perfectly into what it says it was; a one man mission. All you gotta do is get into the main server hub and hack two files. No guards, no cameras. Just a simple alarm system,” the slender man recited tiredly.
Minho watched his face, studying Kibum’s hands as he talked. It was the first thing he had learned about the elder man when they had met four years ago. If one wanted to know how Kibum felt, it wasn’t in his eyes, but in the way he clenched and fisted and shook his hands as he talked.
It was how Kibum was clenching his hands tight enough to have his veins bulging out that had Minho reaching forward to rub Kibum’s arm.
“Kibum, it’s not your fault.”
The slender man scoffed as he threw his head back, breathing heavily.
“I was put in this team because I’m the best hacker the government has. And I was just played,” he hissed through his teeth. “And Jonghyun-hyung nearly died because of me.”
Minho sighed, standing up and moving behind Kibum to rub his shoulders, the muscles as tense as rock under his hands.
It was the one thing about Kibum that drove them all crazy. He had a habit of taking mistakes too seriously and carried the world’s weight in guilt on his shoulders. Even Jinki, who himself had serious guilt bearing issues, felt the hacker was too harsh on himself.
“Come on,” Minho commanded, pulling Kibum out of his seat. “You’re not going to find anything right now, you’re too stressed. Let’s go and get something to eat, and save Jinki-hyung from having to cook.”
Kibum managed to chuckle at the not so subtle jibe at the eldest man’s lack of cooking skills.
--
Jinki was currently on the phone, listening to his commander yell at him as he tried to stir a pot of noodles.
“This is unacceptable, Lee! Kibum should’ve been able to find out that this wasn’t as cut and dry as we had interpreted.”
Stabbing the chopsticks into the mass of noodles, Jinki stepped back from the stove and began to pace.
“We didn’t put this team together to make mistakes, Lee. You knew that walking into this. NIS can’t take another scandal like this or we’ll be back to being taken over by those pencil pushers in the legislature, just like 1995.”
To Jinki’s surprise, Kibum and Minho entered the kitchen, the former heading straight for the pot of noodles while the latter came up to stand by him. He could see the tension in Kibum’s back as he began to stir the noodles and play with the heat of the stove. Feeling enough was enough, Jinki spoke.
“Sir. I understand. It won’t happen again. This was just some one getting lucky and we’re already on it.”
“Be sure there are no mistakes this time, Lee. And inform Kim he’ll need to come in for assimilation if anything happens.”
Jinki’s lips flattened into a thin line at the threat before he answered an affirmative and clicked off the phone, chucking it onto the nearest countertop. He rubbed his forehead with two fingers, pressing right against the tense nerves over his eyebrows.
“What did the commander have to say?” Kibum asked without turning to face him.
Jinki knew better than to sugarcoat it.
“He’s threatening you with assimilation should anything go wrong again.”
Minho’s face darkened as expected while Kibum didn’t react; still focused on the noodles. The threat of assimilation was something that lingered on any agent’s mind. The innocent word was essentially an ending to their lives. They all knew it. Once Kibum was forced in for assimilation, he would be discharged with dishonorable conduct and left with no chance of making a living anywhere in Korea with that on his record; or he’d be jailed for the rest of his life, accused of betraying Korea.
Minho took one look at Jinki’s solemn face and understood the eldest man’s expression immediately. Jinki wasn’t going to let Kibum be taken away from them and Minho bowed his head in agreement. Whatever Jinki planned as a failsafe, Minho would follow unquestioningly.
After all, they were a team, and nothing came before that.
--
Taemin yawned as he walked out the lab, rubbing his head and scratching at the dryness on the edge of his neck. He swung around a corner absentmindedly and huffed as he smacked into another moving body.
“Oh I’m sorry!” the young man cried as he caught his unintended victim’s arm before she met with the floor.
The woman looked up at him and gave him a playful smile.
“Luna-shi!” the young man greeted with a grin, as he pulled her to her feet.
“Where’s the fire, Taemin-ah? Nearly had me flat on the ground,” she teased.
Taemin blushed fiercely as the older woman grinned at him. Luna was well known amongst the men as one of the best in her field, ballistics. The only one better than her was Jonghyun, but even he joked that she would surpass him someday. With a final smile and teasing jab, she walked away from the young man, leaving him back to his thoughts.
Taemin had been attempting to reconstruct the bomb that had nearly killed his teammate, but so far, he wasn’t getting any closer. The blast pattern indicated multiple sites of origin, but the forensics team hadn’t found any electrical wiring. Nor had Kibum found anything in the security codes that could be translated into an explosive measure.
Even more strange was the test that Taemin himself conducted. He had wondered if there were dealing with chemical based bombs and tested the sites of origin, but every test turned out benign. No accelerant, no residue of a source combustion, nothing. It was clean and that meant that they were dealing with something they couldn’t track, something new.
Groaning, the youngest member of team SAGAX decided to head back home and see if his teammates had any ideas.
--
“Is he awake?” the man asked the strawberry blonde nurse.
Park Gyuri shook her head as she stood near the door. There were three men in the room and the speaker was holding a gun in his hands, pointed directly at her. She looked down at the ground, trying to keep silent. But she couldn’t help but stare at the object of their desire.
Jonghyun was lying in the bed, sleeping deeply due to the heavy analgesics he was pumped with. His breathing was regular and the only sign of injury were the bandages wrapped around his shoulder and leg.
Gyuri watched as one of the men set down his bag and opened it. The bag was filled with vials, tubes, and needles. He picked one of the needles and attached it to a tube and vial before walking over to Jonghyun and turning his arm over. In silent confusion, Gyuri watched as the man began to take blood from the sleeping agent. He filled one vial, switched to another, and filled it until four full vials were sitting on Jonghyun’s bedside table. Carefully removing the needle, the man threw it back into his bag before adding the vials to it and closing it.
He turned and nodded at the last man who turned to her. Gyuri’s eyes widened as the man smirked, his face changing from assuming and regular to something more. His pupils went white while the rest of his face and he raised a hand, holding it in front of the frightened young woman’s face.
“Goodnight Ms. Gyuri. You won’t see us leave,” he whispered in a haunting voice. “In fact, I dare say you won’t remember any of this.”
His laughter was the last thing Gyuri heard before his fingers contacted the tender skin of her temples and her world went black.
--
A dark haired girl opened her eyes and stared at the men around her. She was practically naked, dressed only enough clothing to protect her virtue. Yet she wore an interesting set of electrical cords and wires around her neck and down her back. They wove down her neck, around her ribs, and under her arms until they reached her back, which strangest of all, they plugged into little holes in her spine.
“Object Jewel, defend yourself.”
The command can from overhead speakers and the girl’s eyes narrowed. She lifted her limbs and smirked as the first of the men surrounding her came at her. Without blinking, the girl dropped into a crouch and closed her hand into a fist, driving it into the man’s groin. She immediately shifted up onto her feet and spun, kicking the man across the face. Another man took his place and was only met by her in a forward head butt. She slammed a palm into his solar plexus and kicked him aside before moving onto quickly and efficiently dispatching the rest of the men.
--
Behind a screen, a group of three scientists, a young woman, and two men watched the girl. The young woman was silent with a frown on her face.
“She’s good,” one of the men finally commented with a pleased smile.
The woman scoffed. “She’s a machine,” she hissed.
The man turned and then chuckled darkly.
“Don’t like what you see my dear?” he asked dangerously. “Now come on Jessica, one would think you’d be happy to see your baby sister up and running?”
The woman turned to face the man, her face white and eyes red with rage.
“You’re a bastard,” she hissed before turning away and leaving.
--
Jinki poured himself another cup of coffee before returning back to the table where Taemin had spread out all his research along with Kibum’s. The youngest in the team had been staring the papers for the last four hours, trying to draw any kind of similarities and conclusions. Jinki was trying to help by sorting through all the technical data, but it was like shoveling sand. Every time they thought they had a solution, some other piece of data would contradict that.
To his surprise as he reached the table, Kibum had taken over Taemin’s spot and the youngest was currently snoring away on their couch.
“He was drooling over the list of entrances in the complex,” Kibum explained without looking up.
Chuckling softly, Jinki sat down next to the hacker and grabbed another piece of data. It was the mission data. Frowning, Jinki read it again before pausing and staring darkly at one sentence.
“Kibum, did you read this?” he asked.
The hacker looked up from his own set of data exasperatedly until he caught sight of the frown on Jinki’s face.
“What is it, hyung?”
The hacker turned to see Minho standing at the doorway, looking just as serious.
“File buyer,” Jinki read off. “Sòng Qiàn. Does that sound familiar to anybody else?”
-TBC-
(A/N): I'm alive! I know it's been one hell of long time since the last chapter, but here it is. Frankly, the reason it's been sitting so long is because I ran into one hell of a writer's block. I was confused on how to move forward and it didn't help that I couldn't figure out what genre for this to end up as. But it's done with now. From here on out, it's full out my usual style of action/adventure with fantasy/scifi mixed in. I hope you're hanging onto your mice, because this is going to be one hell of a ride! ^^
Leave me a review and let me know what you think!
Chapter Four
Chapter One -- Chapter Two
Three - Searching
Present Day
Minho entered the darkened room slowly, carrying two giant cups of coffee, both Americano. He reached the main chair where a tinted glasses wearing Kibum was clacking away and set the cups down next to the elder man.
“I brought coffee,” he announced softly.
“Thanks,” the sitting man responded, reaching over and taking a sip out of the nearest cup without looking away from the screen once.
Rolling his eyes, Minho grabbed a chair and pulled it close, relaxing into it and letting one foot rest on his other knee.
“Kibum.”
His only answer was a slurp of the coffee as Kibum drained the first cup.
“Kibum.”
The tall man watched as the elder man smacked his lips before grabbing the second cup.
“Kibum!”
“What?!” the elder man snarled as he wrenched off his tinted glasses and spun around.
Minho looked at him quietly for a moment before asking, “How far have you gotten?”
Kibum took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Nowhere. I’ve checked the data over almost ten times. I’ve checked the sources again and again, and it’s all from in-house. I’ve checked their information against all public records and everything pans out perfectly into what it says it was; a one man mission. All you gotta do is get into the main server hub and hack two files. No guards, no cameras. Just a simple alarm system,” the slender man recited tiredly.
Minho watched his face, studying Kibum’s hands as he talked. It was the first thing he had learned about the elder man when they had met four years ago. If one wanted to know how Kibum felt, it wasn’t in his eyes, but in the way he clenched and fisted and shook his hands as he talked.
It was how Kibum was clenching his hands tight enough to have his veins bulging out that had Minho reaching forward to rub Kibum’s arm.
“Kibum, it’s not your fault.”
The slender man scoffed as he threw his head back, breathing heavily.
“I was put in this team because I’m the best hacker the government has. And I was just played,” he hissed through his teeth. “And Jonghyun-hyung nearly died because of me.”
Minho sighed, standing up and moving behind Kibum to rub his shoulders, the muscles as tense as rock under his hands.
It was the one thing about Kibum that drove them all crazy. He had a habit of taking mistakes too seriously and carried the world’s weight in guilt on his shoulders. Even Jinki, who himself had serious guilt bearing issues, felt the hacker was too harsh on himself.
“Come on,” Minho commanded, pulling Kibum out of his seat. “You’re not going to find anything right now, you’re too stressed. Let’s go and get something to eat, and save Jinki-hyung from having to cook.”
Kibum managed to chuckle at the not so subtle jibe at the eldest man’s lack of cooking skills.
--
Jinki was currently on the phone, listening to his commander yell at him as he tried to stir a pot of noodles.
“This is unacceptable, Lee! Kibum should’ve been able to find out that this wasn’t as cut and dry as we had interpreted.”
Stabbing the chopsticks into the mass of noodles, Jinki stepped back from the stove and began to pace.
“We didn’t put this team together to make mistakes, Lee. You knew that walking into this. NIS can’t take another scandal like this or we’ll be back to being taken over by those pencil pushers in the legislature, just like 1995.”
To Jinki’s surprise, Kibum and Minho entered the kitchen, the former heading straight for the pot of noodles while the latter came up to stand by him. He could see the tension in Kibum’s back as he began to stir the noodles and play with the heat of the stove. Feeling enough was enough, Jinki spoke.
“Sir. I understand. It won’t happen again. This was just some one getting lucky and we’re already on it.”
“Be sure there are no mistakes this time, Lee. And inform Kim he’ll need to come in for assimilation if anything happens.”
Jinki’s lips flattened into a thin line at the threat before he answered an affirmative and clicked off the phone, chucking it onto the nearest countertop. He rubbed his forehead with two fingers, pressing right against the tense nerves over his eyebrows.
“What did the commander have to say?” Kibum asked without turning to face him.
Jinki knew better than to sugarcoat it.
“He’s threatening you with assimilation should anything go wrong again.”
Minho’s face darkened as expected while Kibum didn’t react; still focused on the noodles. The threat of assimilation was something that lingered on any agent’s mind. The innocent word was essentially an ending to their lives. They all knew it. Once Kibum was forced in for assimilation, he would be discharged with dishonorable conduct and left with no chance of making a living anywhere in Korea with that on his record; or he’d be jailed for the rest of his life, accused of betraying Korea.
Minho took one look at Jinki’s solemn face and understood the eldest man’s expression immediately. Jinki wasn’t going to let Kibum be taken away from them and Minho bowed his head in agreement. Whatever Jinki planned as a failsafe, Minho would follow unquestioningly.
After all, they were a team, and nothing came before that.
--
Taemin yawned as he walked out the lab, rubbing his head and scratching at the dryness on the edge of his neck. He swung around a corner absentmindedly and huffed as he smacked into another moving body.
“Oh I’m sorry!” the young man cried as he caught his unintended victim’s arm before she met with the floor.
The woman looked up at him and gave him a playful smile.
“Luna-shi!” the young man greeted with a grin, as he pulled her to her feet.
“Where’s the fire, Taemin-ah? Nearly had me flat on the ground,” she teased.
Taemin blushed fiercely as the older woman grinned at him. Luna was well known amongst the men as one of the best in her field, ballistics. The only one better than her was Jonghyun, but even he joked that she would surpass him someday. With a final smile and teasing jab, she walked away from the young man, leaving him back to his thoughts.
Taemin had been attempting to reconstruct the bomb that had nearly killed his teammate, but so far, he wasn’t getting any closer. The blast pattern indicated multiple sites of origin, but the forensics team hadn’t found any electrical wiring. Nor had Kibum found anything in the security codes that could be translated into an explosive measure.
Even more strange was the test that Taemin himself conducted. He had wondered if there were dealing with chemical based bombs and tested the sites of origin, but every test turned out benign. No accelerant, no residue of a source combustion, nothing. It was clean and that meant that they were dealing with something they couldn’t track, something new.
Groaning, the youngest member of team SAGAX decided to head back home and see if his teammates had any ideas.
--
“Is he awake?” the man asked the strawberry blonde nurse.
Park Gyuri shook her head as she stood near the door. There were three men in the room and the speaker was holding a gun in his hands, pointed directly at her. She looked down at the ground, trying to keep silent. But she couldn’t help but stare at the object of their desire.
Jonghyun was lying in the bed, sleeping deeply due to the heavy analgesics he was pumped with. His breathing was regular and the only sign of injury were the bandages wrapped around his shoulder and leg.
Gyuri watched as one of the men set down his bag and opened it. The bag was filled with vials, tubes, and needles. He picked one of the needles and attached it to a tube and vial before walking over to Jonghyun and turning his arm over. In silent confusion, Gyuri watched as the man began to take blood from the sleeping agent. He filled one vial, switched to another, and filled it until four full vials were sitting on Jonghyun’s bedside table. Carefully removing the needle, the man threw it back into his bag before adding the vials to it and closing it.
He turned and nodded at the last man who turned to her. Gyuri’s eyes widened as the man smirked, his face changing from assuming and regular to something more. His pupils went white while the rest of his face and he raised a hand, holding it in front of the frightened young woman’s face.
“Goodnight Ms. Gyuri. You won’t see us leave,” he whispered in a haunting voice. “In fact, I dare say you won’t remember any of this.”
His laughter was the last thing Gyuri heard before his fingers contacted the tender skin of her temples and her world went black.
--
A dark haired girl opened her eyes and stared at the men around her. She was practically naked, dressed only enough clothing to protect her virtue. Yet she wore an interesting set of electrical cords and wires around her neck and down her back. They wove down her neck, around her ribs, and under her arms until they reached her back, which strangest of all, they plugged into little holes in her spine.
“Object Jewel, defend yourself.”
The command can from overhead speakers and the girl’s eyes narrowed. She lifted her limbs and smirked as the first of the men surrounding her came at her. Without blinking, the girl dropped into a crouch and closed her hand into a fist, driving it into the man’s groin. She immediately shifted up onto her feet and spun, kicking the man across the face. Another man took his place and was only met by her in a forward head butt. She slammed a palm into his solar plexus and kicked him aside before moving onto quickly and efficiently dispatching the rest of the men.
--
Behind a screen, a group of three scientists, a young woman, and two men watched the girl. The young woman was silent with a frown on her face.
“She’s good,” one of the men finally commented with a pleased smile.
The woman scoffed. “She’s a machine,” she hissed.
The man turned and then chuckled darkly.
“Don’t like what you see my dear?” he asked dangerously. “Now come on Jessica, one would think you’d be happy to see your baby sister up and running?”
The woman turned to face the man, her face white and eyes red with rage.
“You’re a bastard,” she hissed before turning away and leaving.
--
Jinki poured himself another cup of coffee before returning back to the table where Taemin had spread out all his research along with Kibum’s. The youngest in the team had been staring the papers for the last four hours, trying to draw any kind of similarities and conclusions. Jinki was trying to help by sorting through all the technical data, but it was like shoveling sand. Every time they thought they had a solution, some other piece of data would contradict that.
To his surprise as he reached the table, Kibum had taken over Taemin’s spot and the youngest was currently snoring away on their couch.
“He was drooling over the list of entrances in the complex,” Kibum explained without looking up.
Chuckling softly, Jinki sat down next to the hacker and grabbed another piece of data. It was the mission data. Frowning, Jinki read it again before pausing and staring darkly at one sentence.
“Kibum, did you read this?” he asked.
The hacker looked up from his own set of data exasperatedly until he caught sight of the frown on Jinki’s face.
“What is it, hyung?”
The hacker turned to see Minho standing at the doorway, looking just as serious.
“File buyer,” Jinki read off. “Sòng Qiàn. Does that sound familiar to anybody else?”
-TBC-
(A/N): I'm alive! I know it's been one hell of long time since the last chapter, but here it is. Frankly, the reason it's been sitting so long is because I ran into one hell of a writer's block. I was confused on how to move forward and it didn't help that I couldn't figure out what genre for this to end up as. But it's done with now. From here on out, it's full out my usual style of action/adventure with fantasy/scifi mixed in. I hope you're hanging onto your mice, because this is going to be one hell of a ride! ^^
Leave me a review and let me know what you think!
Chapter Four