Author's Note: You probably don't want to read this if you're a fan of Finn.

The truth is never taken
From another.
One carries it always
By oneself.
Katsu!
—Tetto Giko

He was the spoiled scion of an American Senator: rich, connected, powerful — but too stupid to know the danger of insulting an oyabun's son in public.

For this, he would die.

The Sumiyoshi-kai dispatched a little brother to Master Kazuo's dojo. He stood stiffly in the center of the floor, a ball of tension as out of place in the stillness of the dojo as a fifth leg on a horse. Master Kazuo sat crosslegged on the floor, and in the corner knelt his most trusted shinobi, the rarest of rarities: a kunoichi and a gaikokujin.

Woman. Foreigner. The labels mattered little to her as she knelt on the floor with her arms outstretched before her, supporting the weight of a bō staff across her wrists. The little brother's arrival had interrupted her practice session, much to her annoyance, but it also presented opportunity.

The little brother's eyes flicked over her with fear disguised as disdain. He couldn't have been older than sixteen.

Master Kazuo read the offer and grunted. "It will be done."

"By her?" The little brother's tone skirted near the edge of impoliteness.

"Do not trouble yourself with the details. We will complete your task in the way we see fit."

Master Kazuo dismissed the little brother with a nod, and stillness returned to the room. "Brittany?"

The muscles in Britt's arms and shoulders burned hot with the weight of the staff, but she willed herself motionless by pushing the pain into the endless empty void where nothing lives. "Yes, master?"

"Prepare yourself. And be careful, there's more to this that it seems."

The target lived in a compound in the Roppongi district. Britt watched him for weeks, studying his habits and his interactions with others. She quickly tired of his casual racism and his inflated sense of entitlement.

Unsurprisingly, he rarely strayed far from the nightclubs and restaurants popular with foreigners. It made him easy to track, and Roppongi was the one place in all of Tokyo where Britt didn't have to work to blend in. It was as simple as wearing the face of just another gaijin tourist looking for a good time.

On the day of the job, she reviewed the plan and triple-checked all of her equipment. She spent an hour practicing blade katas and another hour meditating in the garden outside the dojo. And as she dressed in loose fitting black trousers and shirt, she sent a prayer to Inari asking that her blades be silent and swift.

She watched the compound until the target and his girlfriend returned home. Everything was in place, and she slipped the black hooded mask over her head. She would make no mistakes.

It was trivial to bypass the security around the compound and scale the outer wall. The target's girlfriend was another American, a singer named Rachel Berry, and whenever she was in town, his evening routine became a lot less playboy and a lot more mundane. The bedroom light switched on at 10pm, right on schedule. She would have three minutes to enter before the target returned to the bedroom and seven minutes after that to finish the job before the girlfriend came back to join him.

Britt flexed her fingers around her climbing spikes and leaped up the wall. The rough stone was an easy climb, and she set the bypass into the window track and used a pick to pop the lock. Then she was in.

The target was right on time, and he barely had a chance to close the door and turn around before Britt was moving to meet him from behind, her blade flashing white metal as she cut a smile into his throat from ear to ear. His last breath ended in a sad, wet wheeze, and a pungent smell filled the room. It was always this way with Death.

Then the bedroom door opened unexpectedly, and a black-haired woman stepped into the room. "Finn—"

The woman was too far away for a knife strike, but Britt was well prepared. Her fingers found the metsubushi hidden inside her sleeve, poised to deliver the blinding package of metal shavings directly into the woman's eyes, but her mind played an interrupt — black hair — and her hand stopped. This was not Rachel Berry.

Time lengthened like the weft on an endless loom. The woman's eyes widened with fear and her mouth gaped like a koi, preparing to shout, or scream, and Britt was on her in an instant, knocking her out with a single blow from the heel of her blade.

Britt memorized the woman's face: the high cheekbones, the full lips, the dark eyes framed by perfect eyebrows. She was beautiful, and innocent, and in the wrong place at the very worst time and because of that Britt was expected to kill her.

Feelings were Death. They were for normal people. They were supposed to keep pain company in the endless void so Britt could be the perfect killer, but as she studied the woman's face, she felt something splinter inside, and instead of using her blade to end yet another life, she reached out and touched a fingertip to the woman's cheek.

She was the first person Britt had touched without killing in years.

Britt knelt on the wooden floor of the dojo.

"Master Kazuo, I have failed." She brushed her robe aside, exposing the hilt of her katana. "I did not kill the witness. My only wish is to die."

His hand stopped her before she could pull the blade. "Child, do you think me a fool?"

"No, master."

"I'll not waste your talents for the sake of some worthless American."

The assassination of the Senator's son was the top news across Japan within hours, and before the sun had finished rising, Britt's contacts within the Metropolitan Police delivered all she needed to know about the mystery woman.

Inspector Yoshida: "Did you see the assailant?"
Ms. Santana Lopez (translated): "Yes."
Yoshida: "Can you describe them for me, please?"
Ms. Lopez: "No."
Yoshida: "No?"
Ms. Lopez: "They knocked me out before I could get a good look."

Santana Lopez had seen her, of that Britt had no doubt, and likely well enough to know that she was a woman and a gaijin. But Santana had lied to the police. Why?

Britt would have to find out.