She sat through the entire car ride in silence, soaking up his information while never taking her attention off her cigarette. She flicked it out the window when they were almost there.

Leyla had only been to Jersey a handful of times, and for good reason. The place even smelled revolting. She stepped out of the car and smoothed out her clothing before taking the proffered elbow. She immediately adopted a familiar attitude toward him, keeping close to his side.

"You do talking. My accent make me stick out," she told him. "Beside, is not unusual, woman keeping silent."

Jirou smirked. "Have you met a typical Jersey woman? They are impossible to shut up." They pressed on, walking along the sidewalks arm in arm. It was a strange feeling having a woman on his arm, and felt a bit awkward to Jirou. He seldom went on dates, mostly because his lifestyle didn't typically make for good dinner conversation, so it was a new experience for the Asian mercenary.

He had intentionally parked a couple blocks away. Firstly, to ensure they would not arouse suspicion,and secondly to make certain no harm befell his car. The distance from their destination to their transport wasn't far, he could easily cover it in a dead sprint in no time. He only hoped that Leyla would be able to keep up if they had to bail.

The address belonged to an old harbor office. The stereotypical kind you see in every Hollywood blockbuster. Jirou and Leyla walked slowly, feigning interest in each other as they hid in plain site to stake out the building.

There was only one entrance at the front of the building, a single orange light hung above it. There might have been a couple doors along the side, but in the terrible lighting it was difficult to tell. The two of them passed the front door, the frosted glass window obscured their view to the inside, though from the lighting, it didn't seem like there was anybody on the other side. The man would be expecting friendly company, which meant his guard was probably down.

Jirou looked around for any sort of surveillance equipment, but could find none. This was going fairly easily, but Jirou was not about to let his own guard down so easily. He tried the door knob first. Completely unlocked.

"You have got to be kidding me." he opened the door slowly, and gingerly. The last thing he wanted was for a squeaky door to alert their target that he had visitors, friendly or otherwise. He stepped through the doorway and motioned for Leyla to follow him inside. They could hear footsteps approaching them from around the corner. Jirou couldn't risk using his abilities at this point. It would draw too much attention to them, and would probably scare away their prey. Thinking quickly, Jirou rounded the corner, intentionally bumping into the source of the footsteps.

"Oh, thank god we ran into somebody. You wouldn't happen to have a phone around here would you? Our car broke down a couple streets over and we've been trying to find a place to call from."

Much like the two Russian's from before, this one was also just as big and burly, except instead of a beard or being clean shaven, this one possessed a well trimmed mustache with long black hair. His accent was just as thick as the others, though he seemed a bit slow.

"Why you come here for phone? You know who run place here? You go now..." Jirou turned to Leyla and motioned for her to come over, before turning back to the burly Russian.

"Please, could we just use the phone, it won't take us long. We just need to call a wrecker."

The place was about as disreputable as they came, and it nearly made her roll her eyes. Just because you're a criminal doesn't mean you can't have some taste. She scoffed at the unlocked door--morons--and followed Jirou inside the building.

Leyla was pleased with his cover-up. The boy thought well on his feet. She could definitely be in worse company. As Jirou distracted the man with talk of needing a phone, Leyla moved to his side and reached out a hand toward the Russian. "Is just a phone," she told him, letting her power slide across the gap between them. She had to aim carefully so as not to catch Jirou in the crossfire.

The Russian was about to argue with them when his expression fell sort of slack, then morphed into a grin. He laughed quietly, eyes closing. He shuddered and stepped back so he could lean against the wall, the smile never leaving his face. She'd given him a good dosing. She patted the big lug's chest playfully.

"We go find that phone now, yes?" she said to Jirou, cocking her head to the side with a smirk.

As Leyla worked her magic on the Russian thug, a grin slowly made it's way across his face. While he wasn't still one-hundred percent sure how her power worked, the stupid ecstasy induced coma across his face told Jirou enough to have a basic idea. He nodded his head in affirmation and they proceeded to find the man that had tried to have them both killed.

As they made their way through the office, he leaned over and whispered to Leyla "Nice job back there. You're power's not too shabby either." he had to admit, they had been working remarkably well together, though he still wasn't about to let his guard down.

He could hear boisterous laughter coming from what looked to be the main office. The frosted glass windows of the office room matched those on the doors around the building. While aesthetically they were a nice retro touch, tonight they were a deadly detriment to their prey. The lack of lighting in the harbor office forced Jirou and Leyla to approach carefully, so as not to tip over a trash bin or bump into a chair, but the bright yellow glow emanating from the head office room guided them towards their target. He wouldn't even see them coming.

Jirou extended his arm outwards, signaling for them to stop. He looked at his partner, giving a reassuring nod and then motioning towards the pistol in her purse which she had stolen earlier that evening before turning his attention back to the office room. He listened carefully to try and figure out how many people to prepare for. The light from the office against the frosted glass cast blurry shadows of the room's contents. I could make out a few plants and a desk, and what looked to be two other occupants in the room, laughing and conversing with somebody on their cellphone.

Walking up to the door, he casually knocked before flashing Leyla a Cheshire sized grin. He heard the same familiar voice from the earlier phone call say something in Russian, which Jirou could only assume meant "Come in." Without wasting anytime, Jirou strolled through the office door.

"Well aren't you a sight for sore eyes? I never thought I'd see you again after our friendly little game." he exclaimed with a catlike grin. There before them sat the disgruntled fat man from their game earlier that night, with a much more leaner henchman standing next to him. The fat man's skin and his face suddenly grew pale as the blood drained away, while his knuckles turned white as he clutched the phone in his hand. He pointed at Jirou and Leyla, his mouth agape, though no sound came out.

Jirou strolled up to the corner of the desk and immediately struck the mob-boss's would be bodyguard in the throat, dropping him to his knees as he clutched his now crushed wind pipe, but before he even touched the ground, Jirou grabbed the man by the back of the head and delivered a powerful knee to the henchman's jaw, the sound of chipped teeth and choking breaths were all that escaped the mans mouth as he fell to the floor, clutching his throat. Jirou casually took a seat on the corner of the man's desk, a foot resting on the grounded thugs face.

"What's the matter? I thought you'd be happy to see us again. You sounded so happy over the phone. Oh... You must have been expecting somebody else, am I right?" Jirou pulled out a deck of cards from his pocket and began to shuffle them in front of the fat man. "Sadly, you're friends won't be able to join us for this game, but that means more fun for you."

Jirou looked over his shoulder at Leyla and then back to their target. "I'm sure you remember my partner in crime, don't you?",Jirou stopped shuffling, stood up, and pivoted on his right foot, grinding his heel into the still choking Russian's face as he stood next to the portly Russian, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder. "Now don't worry, I'm not here to kill you. I just thought I'd stop by to make sure we don't have another issue like that again, ok?" He turned and stood next to Leyla, making sure to step on the maimed Russian's face once more for good measure. "I can't say the same for her, though."

>>"Nice job back there. You're power's not too shabby either.

Leyla smirked. "It come in useful."

The layout of the building reeked of overconfidence, which was a deadly sin for a criminal. She took stock of the hallway layout in case they needed a quick getaway. There was a hallway past the main office where more might be lurking, but the exit that way was a straighter shot and opened to a less populated area.

When they walked into the office, she watched with a cool approval while he demolished the spare in the room.

>>"Now don't worry, I'm not here to kill you. I just thought I'd stop by to make sure we don't have another issue like that again, ok? I can't say the same for her, though."

Leyla shrugged and glanced down at her nails. "I want kill you," she agreed. She pulled the gun out of her purse and kept it on hand and visible, though she would prefer to get up close and personal for this. "Your man get blood on my favorite jacket. I have problem with you." She gestured toward him with the gun.

Chuzhoi put his hands on the desk, visible. "You do not want to get on my bad side," he warned them in a growl. "You don't know what you're getting into here, but it's bigger than both of you."

Leyla made a 'yap, yap, yap' motion with her hand and sneered at him. "Russians, you always think so much of yourself. Think you still have great empire." She snorted. "You cannot keep empire more than fifty years. Pathetic. Why I should respect your mafia? You only fail like the rest of your kind."

His face turned a brilliant shade of red and he rose from his seat and cursed her out. "You watch your mouth! I'll have you killed by the end of the week!" he bellowed.

She looked over at Jirou with an eyebrow raised. "Such a temper," she commented.

The pure overconfidence of this man was ridiculous. It was no wonder Jirou and Leyla had cleaned his clock at the poker table earlier that night. Jirou cast a glare of warning at him as he stood up from his cushy office chair while his temper flared violently.

"What makes you think we give a damn about what you're involved in?" Jirou's tone was cold and emotionless, and the words snapped from his lips like the crack of a whip. "This has nothing to do with your own personal capital ventures, or your underworld dealings. This is about you and your pathetic attempt to have us killed. You made the mistake of crossing our bad side first. We're simply here to settle the score with you."

Jirou walked towards Chuzhoi again, the bodyguard that lay on the floor was completely quiet now and had stopped breathing minutes ago. The Asian merc stood behind the Russian mobster and grasped him by the shoulders and kicked his seat back underneath him, forcing him to sit once more. A cry of shock escaped his fat mouth before Jirou continued.

"You talk pretty tough for a middle aged man with a pistol aimed squarely at his chest." he patted Chuzhoi on the shoulders before stepping over to the body lying on the ground, which he rolled onto its back with his foot.

"Besides, what makes you think you'll be around to hire anybody to take us out? You don't know who we are, nor do you know where we're from." He looked down at the dead man's blank expression for a few minutes before turning back to Chuzhoi "What makes you think we won't be able to find where your family lives?" He was bluffing of course, he would never target an adversary's family, but the threat was always effective.

Chuzhoi's red faced complexion quickly faded and returned to the pale almost deathlike complexion it held when they had first arrived. "You would not dare!"

Jirou's emotionless and intimidating stare never left Chuzhoi's eyes. "I just crushed your body guard's wind pipe right in front of you without hesitation, and you're questioning whether or not I would kill your family?" Another bluff, but Chuzhoi was too stupid to realize it. Jirou was a professional card player. Bluffing was one of his strongest skills.

Moving towards Leyla, he nodded towards the Russian as if to tell her to get on with it. He leaned out the door to listen and see if anybody else was coming to join the party. So far nobody had decided to stop by, and the man from earlier was nowhere to be seen.

Again, she had to admit that the kid certainly had balls, though she wondered if he knew just how big a hassle taking out family members was. While the target was no doubt already in the line of fire and easily written off by law enforcement, everyone got into a tizzy over some dead toddler.

She stepped forward, the stolen gun leveled at his head. The man started to break down. "Please. Please, I'll give you anything! You want money?"

Leyla walked toward him until the gun was against his forehead. "I make you deal. Give three million, I shoot you in head. Don't, I chop you to bits, start with feet."

He was shaking. "You're crazy! You don't want to do this!"

She stared at him for a thoughtful moment. She sighed. "You're right." Leyla lowered the gun, and the man sagged in relief. However, as soon as the gun was lowered, she whipped out the knife from the side of her boot and jammed it under his chin, to the hilt. He went rigid and then slack all in the same moment.

Pulling the knife out, she glanced back at Jirou. "Guns too noisy," she explained.

As Leyla indulged in her sadistic pleasures, Jirou couldn't help but think back to their little game from earlier that evening. She had been prying at his past in an attempt to gain some sort of advantage during their game. Now Jirou found himself starting to wonder about Leyla's past. What had caused her to be so callous and merciless?

"If we're finished here, then we should get going." he checked the hallway. Still no sign of the thug from earlier. "It's getting late, and I can't stand to be in Jersey all night."

Leyla laughed at his comment, wiping the blade on the man's shirt, checking to see if any blood had gotten on her sweater. Oh, good. It was clean. She put the knife away, and turned back toward the door. "Yes, I hope I don't need come back here soon. Whole place smell like piss and garbage, yes?"

She pulled open the door and glanced down the long hallway. "We go that way, I think maybe more are there. Up front, just man from before. Which you like? Hard way or easy way?" She flashed him a devilish grin, quirking an eyebrow in challenge.

"Why do I get the feeling that if I choose the easy way out, I'll have to deal with you pouting the whole way back to your place?" He returned the smile, though in his head Jirou was not at all looking forward to participating in a midnight massacre in Jersey City.

Besides, even if he did choose to go for the easy route, Leyla would probably storm off to go on a rampage by herself and would probable end up dead because of it. Jirou was many things and it wasn't uncommon for him to ditch his partners when ever it best suited his own interests, but when it came to women he wasn't quite so willing to let them go alone. Call it a sense of honor or chivalry, or call it him just being a sucker for a cute girl, he couldn't bring himself to let women get in over their heads. Not even sociopathic femme fatals.

Right now, Leyla was probably about to walk into a situation that neither of them was fully prepared to undertake. Breaking into a hideout and taking down a single target was one thing, but snooping around a building just for the sole purpose of going on a killing spree was an entirely different animal. He knew Leyla was fully capable of handling herself, the expert way she handled a knife had left behind more than enough evidence to support that, but what he wasn't so sure of was how many enemies she could handle at once. She only had a pistol with a single magazine and a knife. Plenty to take down a couple targets provided you knew how to actually use them properly, and also assuming that whoever they ran into didn't have anything bigger either.

Jirou fished out a couple cards from his pockets in each hand and began to charge them. As powerful as the explosions were, Jirou knew they were not quite sufficient enough to kill anybody. Disorient and knock out, yes. Outright kill, no. He'd have to rely on Leyla to handle clean up.

"You kick down the door, and I'll administer the shock and awe. After that, the cat's out of the bag"

A grin spread across her face, but never quite reached her murderous eyes. Leyla switched the knife out for the gun again and held it out of her way as her boot slammed into the door just below the knob. The door flew open, and she fired off one shot right away, just to make sure they were taken seriously.

It was a fairly lucky shot and hit a young woman in the stomach. She was topless, and from the look of the situation, she was obviously a stripper or prostitute. The woman clutched her hands over the bullet wound. Her knees buckled. There were three big men in the room, jumping to their feet and reaching for guns.

According to Murphy's law, "Anything that can go wrong, will." In Jirou's experience this law was most certainly true, except he preferred Finagle's variant of "Anthing that can go wrong, will and at the worst possible moment." That moment happened to be now.

When dealing with murderous sociopath's like Leyla, it was always important to brace yourself for the moment they went off the handle and did something completely half cocked and dangerous. He distinctly remembered telling Leyla to simply kick open the door, not to suddenly open fire on every single person within. He didn't say "Kick down the door and shoot the first person you see." he'd told her to simply kick it open and that he would toss in a card, stun them and THEN they would set about eliminating the other thugs that happened to be in the building.

Now, because of Leyla's carelessness they had a half naked woman lying on the ground, slowly bleeding to death through a hole in her stomach, and three obviously perturbed mobsters reaching for weapons.

The Asian sell sword cursed loudly at the sight of the dying woman. He hated having to deal with collateral damage, especially women. It always made things more complicated. Oh how he loved it when a plan started to fall apart.

Jirou threw the two cards he had been charging at the two men directly on his left. Both cards arced across the room and collided with their intended targets. The first struck one of the men in the knee, sending him directly to the ground howling in pain. His knee was probably broken now. The second card hit the other man in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him and doubling him over.

In an impressive burst of agility, Jirou charged into the room, straight for the second target and delivered a powerful knee to the man's face. As he was stood straight up by the force of the blow, Jirou buried his right hand below his opponent's sternum, again driving what ever air he had tried to regain back out of the man's lungs with a forceful punch which sent him stumbling back into the chair behind him.

So far so good. Hopefully Leyla would be able to finish them all off while he kept them occupied.

Jirou took out two of the men, for which she was grateful. Perhaps she should have been a less hasty, but she always was one to get carried away with her killer instinct. The third man fired a shot at her, but she had managed to duck behind the door frame.

She peeked around the corner and fired a shot to the man's leg. He fell to a knee and dropped his gun. Leyla hurried to kick it away from him. She put her gun to his throat and finished him off. As she walked over to help Jirou out with the others, she stepped on the dying woman without even looking down.

Have you ever noticed that odd sensation, you know the one that comes over you in the middle of a fight? Where everything seems to be going in slow motion at first, before suddenly fast forwarding to catch up with real time? We have no control over it and we are simply along for the ride. Our conscious minds have no control over ourselves, though our subconscious continuous to run at full speed. At first, our body acts on pure survival instinct, though after years of experience muscle memory begins to replace that instinct.

Right now, Jirou's body was acting completely of it's own accord as he fought. He paid no attention to Leyla and her little gunfight with the third opponent, keeping his attention and focus on the two before him. The man who's knee he had crippled crawled towards his weapon, a pistol which had fallen to the floor. As he reached for the pistol with his right arm, Jirou brought his foot up high into the air before driving his heel down onto his opponents left elbow, which had been bent at a 90 degree angle to support him as he crawled. The impact from the forceful ax kick dislocated his elbow and drove his forearm into his wrist like a hammer striking a wood splitting wedge.

That would keep him out of the picture until Leyla decided to deal with him.

The second man tried to get up from the chair, but Jirou was two steps ahead of him. He reached into his pockets, gripping and charging another pair of cards. He proceeded to hurl them at the last remaining target, striking him one at a time to the chest in a constant and rhythmic pattern. His target struggled to get to his feet, but the second his backside left the chair, it was immediately flung back into it.

Jirou threw a couple more cards before closing the distance and delivering a full powered spinning back kick to the man's lower jaw, which sent him careening over the side of the chair and onto the floor. Jirou stood facing Leyla for a second. His expression was cold and emotionless, a far cry more dangerous from what it had been during their poker game.

He stepped towards the woman lying on the ground. She had already lost a severe amount of blood, and from the looks of it, it had been a shot to the liver. She would be dead in a matter of moments and would never make it to a hospital in time.

He looked around and spotted the coat she had probably worn on the way there. He reached up, grabbed it and draped it over her torso. There was no reason to make her suffer death completely naked.

Jirou was many things, but he wasn't a monster, nor was he cruel to those who were innocent and suffering. She was in pain, scared, and was crying. Jirou did his best to comfort her as Leyla continued with the clean up. He brushed a strand of hair out of the poor girl's face. Her skin was cold and clammy to the touch. She didn't have long now.

"Sssshhhh..." he cooed soothingly as he tried to calm her. The woman's sobs began to slow to nothing more than whimpers, before there was silence and she was still. Jirou reached up and closed her eyes before standing and waiting by the door, his back turned to Leyla as she worked. He didn't want to watch her have fun. It wasn't his cup of tea.

The clean-up was swift and almost surgical. The remaining two men were pretty well disabled by her companion, so it was just a matter of eliminating them. She brained them both, through the eye. It was fast and didn't splatter as much. Leyla had felt a fleeting high of adrenaline during the kills, but immediately after, her energies sank back into that deep, empty place inside of her.

The mad grin gone from her face, the impassive woman turned back to observe the woman Jirou had been...tending to? She had noticed, but not had time to think on it until now. She understood the compulsion many had to care for others. Rather, she understood that they had the compulsion. The feeling itself she could not fathom. It struck her as weak and off-putting.

Frowning at the graying face of the woman, Leyla cocked her head to the side and tried for a moment to feel whatever it was Jirou had felt. Nothing.

Suppressing a soft bubble of anger, she followed him to the doorway and brushed a hand over his shoulder. "This is fun. I think I am tired now."