Midnight Prince: Empire of Sin

Mark was having a headache. Everything was complicated lately for him and after all this time outside of work, he did not expect to come and find himself in such a situation.

He was literally on a bomb that was about to explode.

The two heirs of the Kaminari family.

The Saintess of the Church.

The Heiress of the Hanekawa family.

Finally the student of Bridget Bishop.

The weakest of them, Luvia, was already more than enough for him to feel a heavy pressure on his shoulders and wonder if he should change jobs.

The five together? This was a suicide mission and the first one to die would most likely be him.

'I need to go find my sister.'

His sister had been making weird movements lately and Mark was starting to think that she might have awakened or learned about the supernatural. This was something he had wished to keep from her for years but he guessed that he should have understood that it should have been an impossible endeavor from the start.

What was destined to happen happened and now his sister was talking about going to England to meet some of their extended family.

'Did that woman finally take interest in us?'

He hoped not.

"Mark?"

"I apologize," Mark answered as he woke up from his short trans. He was more tired than he thought if he was making this kind of mistake at work. "Today, I wish to talk to you about our incoming mission."

Mark clapped his hands and a large screen appeared in front of everyone. On the large screen, a picture of a statuette depicting a woman with two wings was shown. At first glance, it looked relatively normal but all those present knew it was anything but.

"I am sure all of you know our mission but I will still do a short briefing, for form sake." He pointed at the picture. "This is our target. Nike. The goddess of victory. Despite her name, she is a relatively minor goddess more seen as a tag-along. She is known for having protected Zeus during his fight against Typhon with her shield and his an emissary of Athena."

A new picture was shown as Diaporama moved and Mark continued. This time the picture showed two Young adults with relatively similar features. A man and a woman.

"The Shadow Twin. The preliminary ranking is Gold. The chances of them possessing a divine weapon are not low so the final Ranking is Executioner. They are not known for their fighting prowess but even so, they are relatively difficult to deal with as they specialize in assassination, Theft, and illusions." Mark chuckled a little and looked at Adam with a knowing smile, "We will leave them to you if it ever happens. There will be a nice bonus for catching or killing those two as they have been a constant pain for us. They, however, are not our main target."

A third image appeared, this time it seemed more like a lavish house in a very wealthy neighborhood. "Le Louvre des Ombres. Held by one of the big shots of the Supernatural Criminal world in Europe. He calls himself…Moriarty."

Adam tilted his head, "Moriarty…As in the villain in Sherlock Holmes novels?"

Mark nodded. Adam was so strong now, that he had forgotten that the boy had only entered the Supernatural world recently. Be it Sherlock or Moriarty. They are both historical figures who truly existed. Their stories are honestly more biographies that were carefully modified to make them more realistic to mortal."

"Oh…"

"The Current Moriarty is thankfully not the mythological figure. But a descendant and a rather powerful one at that. As he was once designed to be the Director in Paris before most of his crimes were brought to light. He is the greatest dishonor to the Hunter Association branch in Paris."

"And he is still alive."

"Yes. Despite all this…He is still alive."

Adam grimaced, as they said, fear the man who grew old in a work where people die young. Adam would beat one life that the association didn't let him live because of the goodness of their hearts. Either he was too dangerous and killing him was thus not worth it or he had some way to threaten everyone into inaction.

The second one seemed rather likely by the look of things.

"Our goal is certainly not Moriarty. Attacking him would cause us nothing but a headache and to be honest, most associations decided to not meddle in this and let Paris suffer. Moriarty generally only active in Europe so it's their problem."

"So, even associations have power and check balance." Tsubasa sneered but Mark simply shrugged, "Everywhere there are humans there will be such a situation. Even the Church is not exempt from this rule. Much less us poor humans."

They looked at Elysia but all she did was smile and keep silent, clearly she had nothing to say and was not interested in trying to defend the church. Elysia knew that Darkness existed in the depth of the Church but she did not completely reject that Darkness. She simply needed to clean those that were too dark.

"Okay. Now that the situation is clear. Let me proceed. Our goal is to get the statuette by any means. Theft, assassination, money, negotiation. You name it. Our initial plan was to buy it at the auction normally but…" He looked at both Tsubasa and Adam awkwardly, "Let's just say the coffer of Los Angeles are getting thin and we need to focus more resources on rebuilding the city and making sure fewer citizens continue to leave. We also plan to hire more independent hunters. All of this is causing problems and so we decided to enter France incognito and simply steal the thing before leaving."

"A heist? This might be interesting."

"Do you think so, dear? With our power set I believe a heist would be pretty boring for you."

"Oh…True."

Adam was slowly learning how to open a gate for teleportation and Tsubasa could already do so. Furthermore, with his power of illusion, he could just walk in and steal before leaving.

Of course, for that, they first needed to know where the goods were kept.

 "This brings me to my last news. For the need to go incognito and because of money issues…We will take the planes. No private jet." Adam initially wanted to say he could bring them here by flying but, remembering how far the distance between France and the USA was…He wisely shut his mouth.

The trips promised to be interesting.

(AN: Hi! I am back, I have been busy working and discussing the publication of Son of the Hero King on Amazon. Now some dates are finalized, if everything works well the pre-order will start during Early to mid-January and the actual date will be set on the 11th of February. This is just a preliminary schedule as I am going to be self-published there are many things I need to do, such as rewriting some of the intrigue. For those who read SHK before, book 1 will have many little changes, and book 2 will have even more all to make things flow better. I honestly hope all of you will be interested in supporting me. I am stressed since I have high stakes riding on this. It would be quite funny if after going through all this to terminate the contract I end up not even selling.

Rant over for SHK. For MP, I decided to do a 5 chapter mass release on the 20th. Hopefully, this will help catch a little the day I missed.)