“HAI!”
With one final kick to the chin, the last henchman that stood in Chun-Li’s path was sent careening through the air, with blood spilling out of his month as he flew. Crashing down hard onto his shoulders, the man let out a groan and fell into unconsciousness, joining the dozen or so other men and women wearing his S.I.N. uniform that had fallen at the hands of the Interpol detective. Once she was sure that the man wouldn’t be any more trouble, Chun-Li let out a sigh and looked down at a wet spot on her blue qipao.
“…that’s just great,” Chun-Li said dejectedly as she looked at the red stain on her trademark outfit. “I was hoping to make this a clean mission, and I now I’ve got a blood stain just from dealing with foot soldiers.” Turning away from the blood and looking at the pile of unconscious bodies that she had accumulated, the young woman frowned as she carefully stepped over them. “I’m better than this: I should have been able to subdue them all without even one drop of blood.”
Though the disappearance of her father years ago prompted Chun-Li to pursue a career in law enforcement as a full-time venture, Chun-Li’s true passion lay in the martial arts and the ideals that lay behind them. For many fighters, martial arts were a way to pursue selfish gains such as fame and fortune. For others, it was a way to pursue darker ambitions like revenge. For Chun-Li, the martial arts was a way to fight for her altruistic ideals and to spread its word to the rest of the fighting world, even the unsavory types like the people she had just dispatched.
Through strength, learn gentleness, and through gentleness, strength would prevail.
It was a principle that her father told her countless times during her training, a stark contrast to what his friend Gen would tell her during the occasions he would assist in her education as a fighter. Through that principle, Chun-Li matured into a kind-hearted woman with a strong sense of justice, and through that strong sense of justice she became a police officer just like her father before her. Even though his disappearance led many to believe that she had pursued the position of detective out of a need for vengeance, eventually they saw the truth.
Chun-Li pursued the position of detective because she did not want what happened to her father happen to others. Evil was a disease, and those infected by it were merely patients suffering from the disease. By becoming an Interpol officer, Chun-Li would identify the root of evil, and by severing the root the infected would be cured. That was why she was here in this inhospitable metallic hall, where machines of a highly advanced and almost alien nature served as the backdrop in her latest quest to cut out what she deemed to be a “root of evil.”
Deciding that she had enough of a rest, Chun-Li reached for her headset and pressed the button next to her ear. “I think I’ve found the room, inspector,” Chun-Li said quietly as she looked at the machines that hummed quietly as they radiated an eerie purple glow. Ever since her first encounter with Bison, the man she personally held responsible for the disappearance and eventual death of her father, the Chinese martial artist was quite uncomfortable around anything that glowed purple. Most anything she found something that did, it was associated with a dark and terrible power that belonged only to fiends and demons, from Bison himself to the renegade warrior Akuma. “I’m in the room that was marked ‘Experimental 13-P.’”
“…understood. I am finishing up now.”
Hearing her partner’s voice acknowledge her intel with a cool matter-of-fact demeanor, Chun-Li reached for the miniature camera placed on her qipao and tapped it once to begin recording what she found. The machine that caught her attention had an aura of dark energy that made a chill run up her spine, confirming her belief that whatever the machine was for, it was most certainly for evil purposes. Her instincts told her to destroy it before it could do any more harm, but part of being a detective meant that following your first instinct wasn’t always the correct choice.
When Chun-Li accepted this assignment from Interpol headquarters, the chief requested that she be assigned a special partner for this case. Ever since the demise of her former partner and close friend Charlie, the young woman had been hesitant to accept partners when dealing with the treacherous Shadaloo and its subsidiary S.I.N. However, when the chief told her who her partner would be, Chun-Li’s fears of losing another partner were slightly alleviated, for the partner she was working with had an advantage over most of her criminal opponents.
Chun-Li’s partner was someone who the world at large believed to be dead.
After a minute of taking pictures of her surroundings, the automated door to Chun-li left opened to reveal her partner. Chun-Li’s associate was a slender Japanese woman in crow-printed white-and-black clothing and a dark blue scarf that blew behind her as she walked into the air-conditioned lab. With her short black hair reflecting a fraction of the purple glow coming from the machine Chun-Li was inspecting, the woman slowly approached the machine without the slightest hint of apprehension.
“…you can sense it, right?” Chun-Li asked her partner as she reached out to touch the machine. “That overwhelming evil aura coming from this machine…how can you reach out and touch it without wanting to jump out of your skin?”
“Machines are not evil, detective,” the older woman replied quietly as she slowly removed her hand from the humming machine and took a step back. “It is the monsters who use them for dark purposes that are evil. As long as you tell yourself that, there is nothing to fear from it.”
Turning around to see the pile of bodies that were still groaning in pain, the woman folded her arms and let out a sigh. “I apologize for not being able to assist you in dispatching these men. If I was with you, you wouldn’t have had to needlessly risk your life to secure the area. I am a very poor partner, it seems.”
Even though Chun-Li addressed her as one of the highest ranks a police officer could gain in “Inspector,” Jun Kazama had not worked in the field of law enforcement in over twenty years. The last time she did so, she was sent to arrest the then-current head of the vaunted Mishima Zaibatsu. Instead of doing so, however, she instead fell to her target’s charms and the two conceived a son. When Kazuya was seemingly killed at the hands of his father Heihachi, Jun was forced to raise their son alone in the forests of Yakushima while abandoning her duties as an officer.
When Jun Kazama was believed to be slain while protecting her son from the vampiric entity known to the press as “Ogre,” her son Jin spiraled down the path of darkness and hate until he eventually fulfilled his dark heritage and became the current leader of the Mishima Zaibatsu. It wasn’t until Jin declared war on the world, with Kazuya returning from the shadows to become the leader of rival G-Corporation and fight his son, that Jun decided she had spent enough time licking her wounds and return to the public. After helping Chun-Li foil a Shadaloo plot, Jun resumed her duties as an officer and continue the never-ending fight against evil.
But despite what Jun said, Chun-Li held Jun in very high regards even with the certain uneasiness she felt around the Japanese woman. Like Chun-Li, Jun combated evil mostly on the whims of her father whom she lost at a young age, though Chun-Li was usually creeped out by how Jun would continuously say how her father’s ghost dictated most of her life up until meeting Kazuya. Even if Jun’s near-death experience had numbed her to the world around her, one thing that Chun-Li could trust was her strong sense of justice and sincerity.
“Now that we’ve found this thing, we need to figure out a way to disable it,” Chun-Li said as a grin came over her face. “I don’t suppose we could just unplug it from its outlet. Something like this probably doesn’t operate on an AC Adapter.”
Chun-Li chuckled a bit at her joke, but predictably Jun didn’t find anything to laugh about. From what she learned from Lei Wulong, the last Interpol detective to collaborate with Jun, Jun’s sense of humor was more esoteric than most other people. By “esoteric,” he meant that if there was something that Jun found amusing enough to laugh about, Lei hadn’t found it yet. Such a shame, a woman as good-looking as her always looking so sad and serious, Chun-Li thought with a frown as she watched Jun walk around the machine looking for some kind of wire. I would have liked to have met her when she was my age: I imagine I could have figured out a way to get her to smile.
“…I have found something.”
Jun’s curt statement caused Chun-Li to walk over to Jun’s side of the machine where she looked at a thick wire that was running from the machine. Following Jun’s gaze to the wall where the wire led, Chun-Li let out a sigh as she watched the wire run through the wall to a different room. “Ai-ya…we finally found this machine and now we have to go to another room to find out where the power is coming from? I was really hoping we could be done with this already: this place gives me the creeps.”
“A mere machine causes you to become uneasy, detective? You, who have stared evil in the face many times over and struck down the fiends just as many? How very disappointing…”
A third voice echoed throughout the room, somehow even more foreboding and chilling than the machine they were inspecting. Chun-Li had heard the voice many times before and knew who it belonged to. Even though Bison was the most recognized head of Shadaloo, there was a secondary commander to the dreaded organization that took up the reigns in Bison’s brief absence. But even though Bison intended for him to be nothing more than a figurehead until his return, the commander decided to branch out on his own and came into conflict with Bison when he sought to reclaim his title.
The resulting battle caused him to break away the S.I.N. subsidiary and claim it as his own independent organization. No longer was this voice one of Bison’s many subordinates that he controlled like a puppet. Instead, the source of the voice was his own being, and the evils he committed were his own, and he delighted in them. “Seth…you’re Seth, aren’t you?” Chun-Li said after a moment’s pause. “I heard reports that Juri Han killed you over a dispute for S.I.N. leadership. I guess they were exaggerated.”
“Juri and I have…a mutual agreement,” the voice of Seth replied haughtily as the lights in the room slowly dimmed, making the evil purple glow of the intricately-designed machine become more apparent. “With Bison’s return, I realized that my apparent death would be necessary if I were to continue my ambitions for total conquest. Therefore, I had Juri take my place as the leader of S.I.N. while I plotted my next move. Perhaps the one good thing about being just one of many identical BLECE experiments is that it is remarkably easy to brainwash a substitute into thinking he is me…what a terrible death, to die thinking that you are someone you are not. Heheheh…”
Chun-Li even though Seth, or at least this voice claiming to be Seth, was a relatively recent player in the criminal underworld in comparison to Bison, the detective had read report after report of the terrible things Seth would do as the leader of Shadaloo and S.I.N. Slaughtering animals, kidnapping innocent people, and destroying forests and jungles were just some of the things that Seth had on his dark resume. When she first began investigating, she told herself that he was just a puppet being controlled by Bison, like her friend Cammy before him. Unfortunately, Chun-Li soon became aware of the truth: Seth was his own master, and the atrocities he committed were his own willful crimes.
To Seth, human were nothing more than livestock, useful only for harvesting data and then thrown away into the trash.
Steeling her nerves as she stepped away from the machine, Chun-Li looked up at the loudspeaker mounted near the ceiling high above them and pointed an accusing finger at it. “Seth, you are under arrest for crimes against humanity! Come out here quietly and put your hands behind your head, or my partner and I will find you and put you in your place the hard way. The choice is yours!”
“…HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!”
A terrible laughter erupted from the loudspeaker, so much so that even the stoic Jun turned away from the machine to see where Chun-Li was pointing. “Hahahah…it’s good to see that your ignorance still conflicts with your high intelligence, Miss Li. If I revealed myself to you, then my charade as a dead man would be done. Don’t think I didn’t pay attention to your little camera disguised as a button on your clothes. Exposing myself to you now would cause some…minor problems that I would rather avoid for the time being.”
“Then you leave us with no choice,” Chun-Li said defiantly before turning her head towards the door. “We’ll just have to come up there and find you!”
But just as Chun-Li took a step towards the door, the entire room began to flash red with loud klaxons blaring. Realizing what was happening, Chun-Li was about to bolt for the door, but the doorways closed with a metal slab replacing the white automated door. She and Jun entered the room when it was but a lab, now they were trapped in the room as prisoners.
With the sirens still bellowing, the men and women that Chun-Li had knocked unconscious were starting to stir, causing Chun-Li and Jun to enter their fighting stances as the formerly-defeated underlings rose to their feet and took note of the two women that had given them trouble minutes before. “…so you intend to trap us here while your underlings do you dirty work for you?” Chun-Li said as she prepared to give these men a second lesson. “You disappoint me, Seth: I thought big supervillains like you liked to come up with more creative schemes then that!”
CHUNK
Hearing something activate below her feet, Chun-Li’s eyes widened as she jumped high into the air and avoided what she perceived to be a trap. As she landed several feet away, however, she looked at where she was standing and realized there was nothing there. Then she heard the sound of Jun struggling against something, and it was then that she realized that whatever trap was activated was not meant for Chun-Li. Instead, the coils that came out of the floor were wrapping about Jun like wild vines, binding her legs to the floor even as she struggled to pull free.