Chapter 123: A Fight You Can Never Win

TL: LittlePeach

After our brief reunion, we headed deeper into the ransacked restaurant.

Inside was a wine cellar standing wide open, and most of the wine that had once filled its shelves had already been looted indiscriminately by the thugs, leaving it almost completely bare.

Click.

Maximilien felt along the wall and opened a concealed cabinet hidden inside one of the wine rack drawers.

“Got quite a lot in there.”

“My acorn stash. Gotta keep it well stocked if I want to make it through the winter, right?”

The first thing inside the cabinet to catch my eye was a sniper rifle hanging on the wall.

A Heckler & Koch G28E.

It was the weapon Maximilien, the sniper of Chernobog Team, had treasured like an extension of his own body.

“How the hell did you get this into Italy?”

“Had it shipped by a very expensive courier. Turns out there isn’t much you can’t do in Italy these days if you have enough money. Guess that means corruption’s gotten pretty bad.”

Even while living as a chef, he apparently hadn’t neglected maintaining his guns. The barrel gleamed from a fresh coat of oil.

Leaving the rifle alone, Maximilien carefully pulled out a wine bottle lying beneath it.

“I did think it was strange that those thugs suddenly cleared out. Never imagined it was your handiwork, Sunny Kick.”

With practiced hands, he drove a corkscrew into the cork.

Pop!

Glug, glug, glug.

Even in the darkness, wine of a brilliant hue filled two glasses.

“You’re having a drink, right?”

“Do you even have to ask?”

The label read Monfortino, one of Italy’s finest wines.

Clink.

The two wineglasses touched lightly with a clear ring.

Gulp.

“Damn, this is really good.”

“I’ve been saving it for ages. Bought it when I first opened the restaurant. I was planning to drink it when I closed the place....”

“This your only bottle?”

“I’ve got a few more. Still, don’t drink too much. You might get drunk.”

“You know I’m a heavy drinker.”

“Honestly, that was just an excuse. It’s too good a wine to sacrifice to a bottomless pit like you.”

Now that our eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, we quietly regarded each other as we drank.

Maximilien gave a lonely smile and shrugged.

“I don’t know how much Bella told you when you met her. How much do you know about what’s going on with me?”

“Just enough. A few things are nothing more than guesses I pieced together from the circumstances.”

“Guesses.... How far did you get?”

There were roughly three surface-level facts I knew.

First, Maximilien had quietly handed his restaurant over to the neighborhood thugs threatening him, then dropped out of sight.

Second, the person who had hired those thugs to seize the restaurant was the owner of the building.

Third, that landlord had also disappeared without paying the thugs the money he had promised them.

‘Though it feels like there are still a few things I don’t know.’

There were too many questions for it to be otherwise.

Put bluntly, the Maximilien I knew wasn’t some weakling who would drop out of sight because he was scared of a dozen or so neighborhood punks.

Especially when he had a gun hidden in his cabinet.

Which meant there had been another reason for him to disappear.

“I heard from the thugs occupying this place that the landlord hired them to kick you out, then vanished without paying them. Did you track down the landlord and kill him?”

At my blunt question, Maximilien let out a dry laugh as he sipped his wine.

“Way off. Why would I kill my own uncle?”

“Uncle?”

“The owner of this building was a man named Mateo. He was a really good person. I hadn’t known him for all that long, but we were close enough that I called him Uncle without a second thought.”

As Maximilien gently swirled his glass, a shadow of melancholy seemed to pass over his face in the darkness.

A hint of coldness crept into his eyes.

“Uncle Mateo gave me this place without asking for a single cent as a deposit. And you’re telling me a man like that hired thugs to kick me out? That’s ridiculous.”

Maximilien’s voice simmered beneath the calm.

In contrast, the wine’s fragrance spread quietly through the cellar, rich enough to feel almost perversely at odds with his tone.

“As soon as I heard that ridiculous story, I tried calling him. His phone was off. So that night, I sneaked into his house, and he was nowhere to be found. All that was left were bloodstains on the floor.”

The part of the story I hadn’t known gradually began to reveal itself.

There was no trace of a smile left on Maximilien’s lips as he raised his wineglass.

“From then on, I’d finish work at the restaurant and investigate in secret every night. Eventually, I found out a Mafia family was involved.”

“The Mafia?”

“The Avinante Family. They squeeze every business around here dry through loan-sharking.”

The hand gripping his wineglass trembled.

“They’re vicious bastards. They borrow huge sums at low interest from some commercial bank, then lend the money out to people around them as private high-interest loans. Once it looks like someone can’t repay them, they leave the debt sitting for a long time and eventually swallow the collateral whole.”

It was a classic Italian Mafia racket.

Most of the time, they struck up acquaintances, acted friendly, and blended naturally into the neighborhood like any other residents.

On the surface, they were just the friendly young men next door.

Then someone would borrow a little money because they needed cash in a hurry, and a few months later the Mafia would suddenly demand payment on the interest and order them to transport drugs or run money-laundering errands, casually trampling their way into the lives of ordinary people.

“And if it looks like the debtor is going to repay everything properly, they secretly kill them. Then they dump the body and let the interest pile up for a good long while. Eventually, they treat it as though the person simply disappeared, invoke their rights as creditors, and buy up the collateral tied to the contract for next to nothing.”

A truly vile scheme that operated just as readily in daylight as it did in the shadows.

Maximilien’s voice was thick with murderous intent.

I could tell he was barely steadying his breathing, clinging to the fragrance of the wine lingering in his glass.

“Uncle Mateo borrowed money from them for a little while because he wanted to expand his business, and in the end, he fell victim to them. They sent those thugs to my restaurant to clear out tenants like me who might become a nuisance later.”

With that, everything I hadn’t known was finally laid bare.

Now that every piece fit together, our conclusion naturally arrived at one thing.

Revenge.

But before that.

“I’m sorry.”

“May God watch over Uncle Mateo’s soul.”

We raised our glasses to honor him.

For a while, neither of us spoke. We simply sipped our wine as silence lingered amid its deep fragrance.

“Anyway, that’s when I closed the restaurant and dropped out of sight. I was trying to locate their base.”

“And you smashed your phone because of Bella?”

“Yeah. Whatever else happened, I wanted to keep my little sister from getting mixed up with Mafia bastards at all costs. You know the kind of work she does. Digging through other people’s phones and all that. So I didn’t really have a choice but to destroy it.”

Maximilien drained the wine left in his glass, then finally failed to hold back a bitter laugh.

“But I never dreamed that little brat would actually manage to recover the phone I smashed. And I sure as hell never imagined she’d happen to answer your call, Sunny Kick, at exactly that moment.”

You really never knew what strange twists human connections might take.

Then, as though something had suddenly occurred to him, he glanced at me.

“But why were you calling me in the first place? Knowing you, you wouldn’t have called just to ask how I was doing.”

“You remember Nikolai, right?”

“Nikolaev? How could I forget that knucklehead bastard? The moment he saw Bella’s picture, he started pestering me to set him up with her, and he almost got his ass blown off by my sniper rifle.”

“Hahaha. Yeah, that happened.”

The memory made a snicker slip out before I realized it.

Back then, I’d had my hands full trying to restrain team members who were running wild like a bunch of monkeys.

I still vividly remembered losing it myself, grabbing an RPG warhead that happened to be lying on the ground like a club, and joining the rampage.

“Anyway, Nikolai’s sister runs a PMC in Russia now. It’s called Slavia Security, based in Vladivostok. The company’s been growing so fast lately that they’re short on manpower. He asked me to reach out to the old Chernobog Team members.”

“What position would I get?”

“Probably tactical advisor. I assume the pay would be in line with industry standards.”

“Hmm.”

Maximilien rubbed his chin in thought as he listened.

His longtime dream had always been to retire from mercenary work and open a restaurant in Naples.

Now, after all this time, someone was asking him to pick up a rifle again. It was only natural that he’d have mixed feelings.

“...All right. Once I finish my revenge, maybe leaving all this behind and going somewhere far away wouldn’t be so bad.”

After a long silence, Maximilien murmured quietly.

His gaze drifted into the distance.

“I was already fed up with this neighborhood anyway. Uncle Mateo died such an unjust death, and even the restaurant I dreamed of was trampled into the ground.... Naples isn’t a place I have any reason to cling to anymore.”

His unwavering gaze soon turned toward me.

“By the way, Sunny Kick. You’ll help me get my revenge, right?”

“Do you even have to ask? You treated me to wine. I should at least earn the price of the drinks.”

“Heh. I knew you’d say that.”

Smiling softly, Maximilien pushed the cork in his hand back into the mouth of the wine bottle.

“It’d be a waste to finish something this good here. Let’s come back after the revenge is done and drink the rest.”

“Sounds good.”

That was what I said, but I was secretly disappointed.

While I smacked my lips, he carefully placed the bottle back inside the cabinet.

‘I was going to ask for just one more sip.’

Then, at the same time, he pulled out his other half, the G28E rifle.

We were finally ready to set out for revenge.

That was when it happened.

“What kind of fun conversation are you two having in here?”

A chill.

“....”

“....”

Had the wine dulled our senses?

A voice suddenly lashed out at us after approaching without making a sound, and Maximilien and I froze where we stood.

Cold sweat trickled down my spine.

I glanced over.

“B-Bella. How did you get here....”

“How else?”

At the entrance to the dark wine cellar stood a small silhouette that might have been there for who knew how long.

Bella shot me a glare and scoffed.

“I planted malware on Sunny Kick’s phone ages ago. I tracked his location with it and came here.”

“....”

“And thanks to that, I heard every last thing you two were whispering about on my way over.”

She must have already rooted around in my phone before I even shut off the Wi-Fi after meeting the thugs.

It was probably far too late already, but I immediately held down the power button and shut my phone off.

‘That was fucking close.’

At least the NIS satellite phone didn’t have Wi-Fi functionality. That was one small blessing.

Meanwhile, Maximilien was so tense I could practically hear his eyes darting around.

“Uh, oh, er.... Your face looks thinner. Have you not been eating lately?”

“Yeah. Because I was worried about you.”

“W-Well, you see....”

“Thanks for noticing I lost weight. Actually, perfect timing. Do you have any idea how worried I was? Every night was hell because I was terrified the police might call and tell me they’d found your body.... And what was that? Revenge? Russia?”

“N-No, that’s....”

Bella steadily raised her voice, unloading her bottled-up anger one piece at a time.

Then she strode into the wine cellar.

Sniff, sniff.

“Wait. What’s that smell....”

“....”

“That’s Monfortino.”

She had the nose of a bloodhound.

Bella’s eyes began blazing fiercely.

“So you two cracked open the good stuff and drank it without me?”

Her resentment toward the brother who had vanished for days without a word seemed to have been pushed completely aside.

The emotion boiling inside her now was sheer betrayal over being excluded from such expensive wine.

Maximilien recoiled in horror and hurriedly waved both hands.

“W-We didn’t drink it all! I saved some for later....”

“Why, you...!”

“....”

“Hand it over. Now.”

Maximilien seemed utterly powerless against his little sister.

He took out the remaining bottle and respectfully surrendered it.

“I, uh, saved it so we could drink it after finishing the revenge and coming back alive....”

“Oh, really? Don’t say something so unlucky. How dare you set a death flag?”

A sharp observation.

Truth be told, it had been bothering me a little too.

“You might jinx yourselves, so drink every last drop of this first. Then we all leave together.”

“B-Bella? The place we’re going from here is extremely dangerous....”

“Why, you...! Seriously!”

“....”

“What, were you planning to just leave me here all by myself when you went to Russia later too?”

“O-Of course not. I was obviously going to contact you as soon as everything was finished....”

“There you go again! Were you planning to make a fool out of me and disappear without saying a word again? Just try it. I’ll wring your neck myself, got it?”

“Uh....”

“Shut up!”

Her sharp scolding rattled out like machine-gun fire.

The rich fragrance of wine spread between her shrill shouts.

Ratatatat.

“Are those Mafia bastards scarier to you right now? Am I not scary enough? I can go crazier on you right here than those Mafia bastards ever could!”

At Bella’s roar, Maximilien went completely mute.

He glanced at me and sent a wordless distress signal.

‘Save me, Sunny Kick!’

Well, there was only one thing I could do for him.

‘You want me to pull out a grenade?’

‘No! Not that, you crazy bastard!’

Other than that, there really wasn’t much I could do.

They said there were some fights in this world you could never win.

*****

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