A Greeting Answered

Aguilar recognized KK.

Or rather, it would have been strange if an assassin of his caliber had failed to recognize KK.

Everyone knew this world-renowned young man, hailed as another living legend. A large portion of the jobs he took leaned toward security and protection, from Arakawa Sesen, once the young master of Arakawa and now its Chief Executive Officer, down to ordinary gang bosses. His completion rate on every protection job was one hundred percent. In other words, whether it was a regular assignment or a protection detail, he had never failed.

Aguilar, meanwhile, was synonymous with one hundred percent successful assassinations. Within the assassin world, they were like two sides of a coin: Aguilar was the spear that could pierce anything, while KK was the shield nothing could break—though everyone knew KK's spear was sharper than anyone else's.

During internal meetings at the Cuban Group, executives loved comparing the two to inflate their own worth. But behind closed doors, the Group had long issued a death order to every "Aguilar": abandon any job involving KK immediately. Do not even attempt it. To preserve their "one hundred percent completion rate" brand, they had even gone so far as to silence clients who discovered, after hiring them, that their target would bring them into conflict with KK.

The legend of the "spear and shield" had always circulated through North America's underworld, and countless people looked forward to their showdown. But Aguilar knew the truth—their kind, these "brand representatives," simply could not afford the cost of confronting KK head-on. If KK killed him today, the Cuban Group's carefully crafted myth of murder would collapse in an instant.

After all, if KK took down an Aguilar and said that Aguilar was Aguilar, no one would deny that person was Aguilar. At that