It was meant to be a clean hit. A safe hit. A milk and honey hit. But then again, they never are. They always seem that way at the start. But there always seems to be....complications. Difficulties, the type you don't see until they're staring you in the face. The type of instance you can't foresee, you can't prepare for. But one that, against all odds, happens.

Ever since I was young, death had been like a lover to me. I've known her every inch, every facet of her being. It sounds pretentious, I know, but that was how it felt sometimes, and the money, the cars, the women, the clothes.....THey were her gifts for being faithful to her. Now I was leaving that lover. Hanging up my guns for the last time. Hoping to seek a wholeness outside her embrace But first I had some debts to work off. And this little job.....it was a way of paying off two of them, with a little something extra to sweeten the pot.

No-nose Shisen was a man I owed a debt to. From back when he was Big-nose Shisen. It was the type of debt you can never truly repay. But he was giving me the chance to do just that, and settle another debt in the process. The other type of debt. The type that gets repaid by a bullet. A hood by the name of Chu Weng. My ex-partner. The one who left me full of bullets in the kowloon street. And now he was back, with some sort of backing from the mainland. Powerful backing. And he was taking No-nose's territory slice by slice. He wanted me to speak to Weng. Just me. And a bullet.

I stepped into the bar, orange light of the lanterns diffused by the play of cigarette smoke, the clatter of tiles from the gamblers tables. I walked slowly across the room, the cold feeling I always got in my gut before a kill drifting away with each step. Every sound is amplified. The world seems to be moving in slow moition. A gamblers tile clicks down. *click* another step. I head towards the back room. A solitary gurad looks up, eyes widening as he recognises me. I watch him move his hand to his coat. My hand moves faster. The browning slides from my jacket and speaks a single word. A single dot of red appears on the mooks forehead. He falls to the ground, eyes wide. Naturally, this calls a bit of attention onto me. Also produces a lot of screaming, grabbing of money and running.

Some of them had different idea's though. Three of Wengs thugs stood from the tables, nasty little smg's drawn, a fourth grabbing a shotgun from behind the bar. I headed towards the door to the back room, dropping to roll behind a table, coming back up with a second pistol in my hand and the mooks in my sights. My guns speak short, sharp sentences of smoke and lead, Weng's men falling under their arguments. Of course....our conversation had drawn some attention from the back room. Amid the sudden silence was the sound of a hand on the doors handle. I turned and fired twice, bullets ripping through wood and into whoever was behind.

I gave the door a solid kick, knocking the corpse of a man with a gun in his hand out of the way. And in that room were two figures. Weng, smiling faintly at me, unarmed behind a low table, and a tall slim man in a pale blue suit, looking kind of like a northern mainlander. "Ken" he chuckled "Somehow I knew you'd come" he spread his hands on the table "Who sent you? Lo? Tsien? Shisen?.....he smirked "No....maybe not Lo. Definetly not Tsien" I brought up the gun. He kept smiling "Shisen then. He doesn't have the same ..... connections I do. He doesn't know" I pulled the trigger. He kept smiling.

Imagine the inside of a gun. Just behind the bullet. Imagine the bullet firing. Follow it through the air. Slicing through, heading for the smiling face of Weng. Then imagine it being picked out of the air a few seconds before it strike home, by a tall slim man in a pale blue suit. Imagine my suprise. Imagine my further suprise when the man flicks his fingers, sending the bullet towards me with a faint whirring, striking my chest, feeling thing inside me tear. Being shot always hurts. This hurt more for some reason. Weng spoke "Goodbye...Kenny" He stood from his table, the freak in tow and headed out the door.

I felt a warm numbness creeping over my body. My enjoyment of this was spoilt by a little voice at the back of my head screaming "You're dying!" A smirking, nasty little voice. I didn't want to listen to it. But then I heard another voice. A female one. An offer "Do you want another chance Mr. Tsao? A chance to make good on your life." There was no hesitation. As the blackness crept in I mad my reply "Yes" And then the darkness overtook me.

I was reborn in the greyness of the netherworld. Over the months...the years....I couldn't tell, I was shown the truth. The truth of the world, of reality, of the secret war. I was finally shown the best way to make good was not to hang up my guns, but to better pick their targets. And now...I fight this war.