Chapter [5]

Light placed his thumb under his chin, the musings of an assured philosopher; his countenance suggested that he had a frighteningly large surplus of material he could draw from but that he had the confidence needed to know exactly what to say.

"Consider this," he began. He walked a few steps, the smoke trailing his gait, thin wisps in a still and silent room.

Just those few steps gave the impression that he wasn't a frantic criminal desperately attempting to avoid capture, but a man in complete control of his surroundings.

"Consider how much I'm worth. Someone like me, anyway. I'm the greatest mind on the planet. My body, my perfect, fit, and adept container of my brain, is the zenith of evolution. Wouldn't you agree? I mean, how else was I able to make it so far? How else did I go from being some bored, bourgeoisie intellectual to this, Kira, master and conqueror of Earth? I've done more in my twenties than anyone has ever done over the period of their whole lives, greater than the Ramses and the Bonaparte's and the Alexanders that came before me."

'So how much would I be worth?" He said.

He began to gesticulate as he paced. "Fifteen million? Twenty five? Fifty? Something like that, I'll bet. Just think of all the people that could make use of me: S.H.I.E.L.D., F.B.I., Hydra, maybe even Latveria." Light paused, considered.

"Not that I would work with any of those bent pigs or fanatical pissants, you understand. If anything, they would be honored and privileged to work for me. And I, being the just and forgiving deity that I am, would be happy to overlook their past 'moral lapses', so long as they contribute to my rule of course. I'm not running a charity here, you know."

"Eventually, I began to think about just what course of action I was to take if you irritating insects ever caught up with me," Light said.

The shadow behind him, projected onto the screen, a juggernaut demon, seemed to stand up straighter and prouder (That shouldn't be possible Near noted feeling his heart begin to tug painfully) "I began to think about who I could trust and who I could control in a worst case scenario. About who could best serve my interests. About what I could do to insure your collective demise. About who could help guarantee that Kira's legacy will never end."

"Is there a point to all this, Yagami?" Near snapped.

"The point?" Light asked.

This time his mouth had contorted itself a monstrous smirk, eyes burning with a reserve of power reserved for the black hearted and the soulless.

Kira had taken off his mask and shown his true face. "The point is that you never had any chance of winning this. Oh, also, just incidentally, you're all surrounded by ninjas."

A loud kashunk was heard, and everyone but Light turned to see the source of the disruptive noise.

Lidner gasped, Ide turned white, and Mogi uttered a choked, "No!", but the scene remained the same: the front end of a katana sword sticking out the center of Matsuda's chest. Blood tricked out of his mouth, a stupefied, wide 'o', and his eyes bulged with excruciating terror as they turned about to see his attacker.

The expression on his face said more than any words that his tongue could produce: This is most certainly the worst case scenario, and we're all most certainly screwed.

He was right.

Amidst the agony, Matsuda somehow noted with only faint surprise that his attacker was indeed a ninja.

The scene struck him as surreal and abstract, made murky and intangible by the fact that he had never once considered the idea that his death would be caused by one.

Most people didn't die by ninjas, and they were rare nowadays of course, assassins employed largely by the wealthy and the powerful.

Yet all the same, there stood a man dressed vastly in black with a red cloth belt, his face masked but for his eyes.

It was this man, this ninja that held the hilt of the sword, and with same strange sense of delirium, that same dreamy sense of watching art house films he couldn't understand in the classy theater with his dates, Matsuda realized that the man's glaring eyes looked like brown chestnuts.

"Yagami, you mother-" Matsuda began.

The ninja interrupted Matsuda by slashing his blade upwards, slicing through the flesh like a hot knife through butter, striking horizontally through the neck.

Matsuda's severed head fell to the ground, eyes wide, mouth agape, his last moments of life an utter disillusionment.

The head rolled a few inches towards Light, and he kicked it like he would a soccer ball. Perhaps due to unholy miracle, the head flew and struck Mogi in his.

"BOOM, BITCHES!" Light roared, arms spread out in triumph.

From the beams of the warehouse the ninjas fell, silent, quick, precise, a directed whirlwind of glinting steel and ebony cloth.

For a moment, it didn't look to the detectives like there was a number of armed individuals leaping from the ceiling with murderous intent; it looked more like the inception of some amoral natural disaster, getting ready to sweep them all away.

A romantic and glorious past opened before their eyes, and the heat of the moment held them still like the eyes of a tiger.

Then an arrow fired by a ninja and his bow exited through the back of Ide's left eye and all bets were considered off.

The detectives began firing, a similarly destructive wave of bullets erupting from the barrels of their firearms.

The air became leaden with the smell of dull gunpowder, and the dark of the room lighted up briefly and precipitously with each frantic pull of the triggers.

"I should've known!" Rester roared, firing his pistol as quickly as he could.

It didn't do him much good: Rester was an excellent marksman, but the ninjas were running inhumanely fast, moving in and out of the shadows so quickly that it was becoming difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Finally, he pointed the barrel at Light's smirking face: the god in the form of man responded by crossing his arms and slightly widening his grin, as if the great deity was amused by the display of such a primitive tool. "If we go down, I'll be bringing you with me, you twisted son of a-"

Rester's tirade against Light was cut short abruptly short: a ninja, hooded, emotionless, serene, bashed the right side of Rester's face in with an enormous kanabō. In the past, Light may have been moderately repelled by such grotesque savage.

But now, the sight of a spiked club colliding into another man's face, the tearing of his flesh, the dislodging of his eye, the severance of his tongue, with all the ultra-violence confronting him, Light could only see the rising of a delicious soufflé.

Gevanni, his neck lopped off from the rest of his body via a kusarigama chain-sickle.

Mogi, the top of his head crushed in by an iron nun-chuck. Lidner, her heart penetrated by the stabbing of a naginata, gorgeous face crumpled into an expression of utter agony as she coughed blood onto the head of the unfazed ninja.

"Yagami! Call them off!" An irate voice barked from behind Light.

The prideful deity glanced over his shoulder with a controlled, subtle look of mild vexation.

Aizawa, his face red and perspiring, his nostrils flaring, his eyes burning maliciously with black fire, held Teru captive: the last remaining KTU detective tightly held an arm around Mikami's shoulder, and the other arm pressed a .45 ACP into the side of his forehead.

A small fire of indignation began to flicker within the cold confines of Teru's icy demeanor.

It was the look of a priest of royalty incensed that such an inferior infidel would dare accost him in such an egregious manner. "Call them off, or I blow the freak's brains out! See if I won't, Light!"

"This is a grave transgression that you're committing, blasphemer," Teru said, face composed like granite. "Beg for mercy at the feet of the Kira, and perhaps He will be forgiving enough to grant you a painless death."

"You shut your mouth!" Aizawa roared into Teru's ear.

Teru cringed at the outburst but then quickly reacquired his usual sneer of disdain. Aizawa turned back to Light: "Do what I say, Light! Now!"

"Aizawa, please, you're only making this harder for yourself," Light said.

The look of irritation subsided and was replaced by a grin so infuriatingly smug that Aizawa began to tremble involuntarily. "There's no need to panic. I mean, you're dealing with a just and merciful deity here! Stand down now, and I'll let you OD on vicodin."

"Screw you, Light, you friggin' sadist!" Aizawa shouted. "You're not getting out of this one! Not again! Not this time! I don't care how it goes down, but-"

An agonizing shard of pain quickly flared inside Aizawa's stomach and cut his outburst short.

Had not Aizawa not been distracted by the excruciating distraction, he would have probably recognized that not only had Mikami struck his stomach into his stomach, but he had yanked his gun from his holster less than a second afterwards.

Likewise, the stunned detective was too busy gasping for air to notice the foot crashing into his right cheekbone.