Miakahashi walked out of the luxurious bath and sauna adjoining his expansive bedroom. His face was flushed red from a whole hour spent soaking ih, the water kept at a sistently high temperature by puters to sooth his body. He dabbed at his glistening black hair with a towel and sidered his fad his naked body in one of the large mirrors in the bedroom. He looked good for his age. His stomach was reasonably flat and if he held it in, a six pack was clearly disable below a thin layer of fat.
He had spent most of his time ih thinking about Hirayama, the soles and Majeneral Wang. The death of this man was the only way to put a stop to all this nonsense. As for Hirayama, he knew what his adviser wanted most of all. That was why he had kept the man close by and not given him the space to think and plot on how to attain what he coveted most of all.
Takahashi was ner to ambition. He himself had been endowed with more of it than most people and that had seen him rise from nothing to what he was today – the all-seeing eye of Japanese politid head of the most powerful Yakuza gang in Japan. He had seen ambition drive men up the ranks of both politid gang hierarchies and he had watched or been instrumental to their rapid falls from grace. Hirayama, by coveting too much behind that sycophantic servitude, was going to gain nothing.
One of the household staff, the buxom maid who had delivered a stern back scrub, had laid out a sted yukata, which he slipped on and walked towards the mini bar. He poured himself a glass of VSOP and walked towards the doors that gave out to his bedroom baly. Takahashi sipped on his ad slid open the baly doors. It was cold but it was his habit to plate the latest figuration of his exquisite rock gardeed by the garden robots, which crafted ever-ging patterns with the random but totally harmonious plat of pebbles and ishi, or rocks. The robots would sometimes rake designs into the sanded area that would have Takahashi totally speechless with appreciation at the sumi, the balance, of it all. Takahashi was anticipating another robotic masterpiece when a blob risiween the banisters caught his eye.
It took Takahashi a fra of a sed to realize that it was a face, a face so expressiohat it sent a chill right through his bones. A body quickly followed as the man swung himself ly over the edge of the baly and landed just three feet away from Takahashi who had retreated instinctively. He kraight away that this was the ese man from the blown-up photographs he had meticulously studied not so long ago, the same man who had murdered Kenzo Yamamoto.
「What do you want?」 Takahashi asked in rough Mandarin with an air of feigned authority. His brandy goblet was shaking ever so slightly and he prayed that the man in front of him would not notice it. But it was clear the man did, his crest-shaped eyes homing in on the vibrating glass.
「I am here to relieve you of the burden of living,」 the assassin replied in perfect Japanese, causing Takahashis glass to shake even more violently. This man was not Japa he spoke Japah the authority of a native. A thousand sarios crossed Takahashi』s mind but they all ended with the same clusion. He would probably die tonight and the Yamaguchi-gumi would be thrown into disarray. He khis man was not here to collect the laundry. Despite the man』s diminutive size, something told Takahashi that his assailant was not to be uimated. He decided to try deception.
「You doo know