The Reincarnated Hitman

"So," a man with neatly combed brown hair and a moustache said, "what am I looking at?"

The man wore a navy blue jacket with a white shirt beneath. On his neck hung an ID card that identified him.

Senior Investigator Michael Owens.

"Nothing makes sense," one of the forensic officers muttered as he walked to the investigator. "he’s missing an arm, yet there’s no blood around."

The officer then looked around the crime scene before continuing, "It seemed as if he didn’t struggle in the least bit, but his Pragma in the air says otherwise."

Michael silently listened, but his brown eyes never stopped scanning the crime scene.

He had been called in early this morning due to the death of a hero, Torque.

Detective Riley was sent out of the city last night, so he was summoned in her place...but that didn’t mean he was any less of an investigator.

Well... aside from the fact that he didn’t have a Factor.

"The crime scene was deliberately tampered with," Michael suddenly cut the forensic officer off before walking towards the wall.

He leaned his head to the side, confusing the other officers. They had expected him to look at the body first, but he didn’t.

After a few seconds of observing the wall, he turned to the others and said, "I need a pair of dumb eyes."

This confused the officers even more, but the newbie officer walked towards him, and the two started staring at the wall for a couple of minutes longer.

"Now then," Michael asked the girl standing beside him, "tell me what you see."

"A wall?" The newbie responded as honestly as she could.

"Look closer," Michael said.

Try as she might, the newbie saw nothing different about the wall...that is, until her eyes moved to the rest of it.

"T-the paint," she finally realized.

"Exactly," Michael said with a smile, "the paint’s newer here than on the rest of the wall."

He then turned to the wall that led to the outside before pointing at it, "It’s the same for that one."

He then finally looked at the newbie and asked, "What do you think that means?"

She silently thought about it for a while before saying, "They’ve been replaced."

"Bingo," Michael nodded with a small clap, "which means that this crime scene had been cleaned up before we arrived, and everything you’re currently finding is something being deliberately left behind."

He then turned towards the Forensic officer before asking, "And what group do you think is responsible for such a thorough job?"

"..." The forensic officer looked at the body of the hero with a frown as he answered, "The Cleaners."

The Cleaners were a grey market group specialized in making sure that a scene was spotlessly cleaned of every bit of incriminating evidence.

For the right price, of course.

"Exactly," Michael said again, "which means that this was most definitely a commissioned hit rather than a villain attack."

The Forensic officer placed a hand on his chin before muttering, "Even if we know that the Cleaners were involved in cleaning this place, it’s not like we can get any information from them."

He was right; as much as the Cleaners weren’t an HA- or government-recognized group, it wasn’t as if they could openly go after them.

And even if they could, the chances of them getting information from the group were basically zero.

Even Michael knew this.

"We don’t need to, though," the Senior Investigator said with a smile, "all we need to do is look for someone who hates Torque enough to hire a hit on him."

He finally looked at the body before saying, "And our man seems pretty good with a blade, which, judging from the size of his wounds, is probably a katana."

The Forensic officer nodded in agreement; after all, even the cut on the hero’s arm was too clean to have been done by someone random.

Michael then turned back towards the door and muttered, "I’ll leave filing everything to you guys; I’ll go get something to eat in the meantime."

The officers watched as he left without looking back.

"Is he always like that?" The newbie asked.

"Mostly," the Forensic officer replied, "but this case didn’t pique his interest; otherwise, he’d have stayed for much longer."

"I see," she muttered as she looked at the exit the man had just walked out of.

***

Meanwhile, Michael’s expression changed the moment he walked out of the building.

For the past few weeks, he had been investigating Richard Cross’s death, with little to no success.

Whilst the man seemed to have died from a normal bullet, the mercenaries had died in strange ways.

Especially the bulky man.

Every scan showed that he had died from poisoning, but not a single trace of poison was within his body.

For a while, that investigation was a dead end, until today.

His gut feeling was telling him that the two cases were related, and it had hardly ever been wrong.

With a sigh, he put both hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky.

At first, he thought that Richard’s death was the doing of some vigilante hunting people the HA hadn’t dealt with yet.

But now he was certain that this person was a mercenary for hire, which was a lot more dangerous than a vigilante.

After all, Vigilantes still held some sort of hero code, but a mercenary was only interested in how much they were being paid.

So he had to deal with this before it got out of hand.

"I feel a damn headache coming," Michael muttered before letting out another exhausted sigh, "let’s just get something to eat."

***

Liam, unaware that he had appeared on yet another radar, looked at the face of the person above him.

Radiance...or rather, Olivia.

Her brown eyes were locked with his grey ones with a single question in both their minds.

’How did we get in this situation?’