The transition from the humid, salt-slicked streets of Naha to the interior of the clinic was like stepping into a tomb. The heavy steel door groaned shut, cutting off the rhythmic sound of the ocean and leaving Mrs. Kagawa in a thick, artificial silence.
The guards, silent and looming, guided her through a series of narrow, windowless corridors where the only light came from flickering, recessed strips in the ceiling. They took her groceries, the bags she had clutched like a lifeline, and set them by the entrance of a final, lightless room.
"Wait here," one of the men grunted.
The door clicked shut, plunging her into total darkness. Mrs. Kagawa stood still, her breath hitching in her throat. Her spine felt like a column of rusted iron, each vertebrae grinding against the next with the agonizing friction of dry millstones.
The pain was a constant, screaming presence, it radiated from her lower back, sending white-hot needles down into her hips and turning every step into a calculated risk. She had lived in this skeletal cage for twenty years, her body slowly ossifying into a shape of permanent misery.
Then, a voice drifted from the gloom, crisp, young, and terrifyingly clinical. "Follow the light, Mrs. Kagawa."
A single, brilliant surgical lamp flickered to life at the far end of the room. She hobbled toward it, her cane clicking rhythmically on the polished tile. There, bathed in the sterile glow, stood a man. He was dressed in a pristine, white dress shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms that were unnervingly still. A dark, plague-style doctor's mask covered his face, and his gloved hands were held away from his body, as if the very air around him were contaminated. He didn't look at her, he was hunched over a desk, reading over a stack of handwritten notes with a focus that felt predatory.
"Sit," he commanded.
She lowered herself into a hard, plastic chair, a hiss of pain escaping her thin lips.
"Tell me why you are here," he said, his muffled voice devoid of empathy.
"My back, Doctor," she gasped, her hand clutching her side. "It's as if my bones have forgotten how to hold me. It's my spine. I wake up screaming because the nerves are being crushed. I just... I want to move. I want to walk to the market without feeling like my body is going to shatter into a thousand pieces."
The man turned his head, the yellow lenses of his mask catching the light. "Get up. Walk to the table."
She obeyed, her legs trembling under the strain. She climbed onto the elevated padded table, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gulps.
"The procedure will be instantaneous," the man said, stepping toward her. He moved with a strange, avoidant grace, making sure his clothes didn't brush against the edge of the furniture. "When we are finished, you will leave. You will speak to no one, not the police, not a hero, villain and not even your neighbours. I despise these menial tasks, but every biological reconstruction provides necessary data. Close your eyes. Count to ten."
He reached out, his gloved hand hovering over her lower back. Mrs. Kagawa squeezed her eyes shut, her lips beginning to form the number one.
He touched her.
The world detonated. Mrs. Kagawa felt her entire being, every nerve, every cell, every drop of blood, instantly disassembled. It was a tremendous, reality-warping agony that lasted for a fraction of a second, a billion microscopic hammers shattering her spine into dust. She felt the void of her own existence, a horrifying suspension of life.
And then, just as quickly, the world slammed back together.
The heat of the pain vanished, replaced by an icy, rushing sensation of renewal. She let out a deep, shuddering breath that sounded like a sob. The grinding was gone. The needles in her hips had evaporated. The weight of twenty years of gravity had been lifted from her soul.
"How do you feel?" the man asked, already stepping back and reaching for a bottle of sanitizer.
Mrs. Kagawa sat up. She didn't groan. She didn't wince. She swung her legs off the table and her feet hit the ground with a solid, healthy thud. She stood, and then she walked. She strode across the room, her movements fluid and unencumbered.
A smile broke across her face, a wide, trembling expression of pure, unadulterated glee. "I feel... amazing," she whispered, her voice cracking with joy. "I feel buoyant. It's as if my blood has turned into champagne. I am lithe! I am free!"
She rushed over to her bag near the door, her hands shaking with excitement.
"The payment was accepted at the door," the man said, his back already turned as he returned to his notes. The equivalent of four million yen had been in her envelope, the price of a spinal fusion that no public hospital would perform on a woman of her "mutant-leaning" ancestry, at least not that low. "You may leave the way you came."
Mrs. Kagawa stopped. She didn't turn to the door. Instead, she reached deeper into her bag and pulled out a small, ornate wooden box and an official-looking cheque.
"Doctor," she said, her voice dropping into a reverent, desperate whisper. "I have heard... of a different surgery. A special one."
The man froze. He slowly tilted his head, his bird-like movement sending a chill through the room. "The reference mentioned it?"
"She didn't have to," Mrs. Kagawa said, her eyes bright with a new, hungrier fire. "I saw her. A woman who was my age, walking with the gait of a girl in her twenties. The slow, gradual restoration of her youth... I want to rejoice in my spring again, Doctor. My family is gone. I ended things poorly with my husband, my children... I want a do-over. I want to walk into the world as a new woman."
The Doctor turned fully now. "That process is far more complex than simple bone-setting. It requires... rare materials. It will cost significantly more than the pittance you brought today."
Mrs. Kagawa placed the cheque on the desk. "This is my life savings. Twenty million yen. My husband left me even more in a secret account that is still being processed by the lawyers. I will bring every cent. I will contribute everything I own to the 'cause' if it means I can be young again."
The man looked at the cheque, then back at her. The air in the room grew heavy, charged with the weight of a secret that could dismantle the world. He reached out with a pair of silver tongs, picking up the cheque and examining it.
"Twenty million is a start," he murmured, his voice sounding like a predator who had just found a new hunting ground. "You are to wait. You will be contacted when the process is ready. Do not come back here until you are summoned."
"Thank you, Doctor," she whispered, her eyes wet with tears of a dark, desperate hope. "Thank you."
___
The speaker on the stealth recorder crackled with a final, static-heavy hiss before falling silent. The audio of the heavy steel door slamming shut echoed in the humid Okinawa air, leaving Yoshi and Koichi standing in a narrow, shadowed alleyway, the weight of what they had just overheard pressing down on them like the atmospheric pressure before a storm.
Koichi stood flabbergasted, his mouth slightly agape, his fingers still clutching the receiver as if it were a live wire. "A spell for youth?" he whispered, the words sounding absurd even as they left his tongue. "Biological restoration on that level... it's impossible. It's a fairy tale."
Yoshi, by contrast, didn't look shocked, he looked hungry. His obsidian eyes were narrowed, his mind clearly performing the rapid, cold calculations of a tactician. "It's not a spell, Hero," he said, the title dripping with its usual acidic sarcasm. "It's a market. Think of the logistics. Think of the sheer volume of yen a person would pay to claw back thirty years of their life. That man's bringing in a new gold rush."
"But the cost," Koichi said, shaking his head. "He said he needed 'materials.' What kind of biological preparation allows for a total cellular reset? We're talking about rewriting the human genome in real-time."
Yoshi shrugged his shoulders, a movement that was dismissive yet tense. "I don't know. But I want to find out. If someone is selling the fountain of youth in a concrete box in Naha, they aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They could be funding an army with the desperation of the rich."
Koichi straightened his posture, his professional instincts finally catching up to his shock. "This is too big, Yoshi. This is a national security threat. I need to report this. I have to transmit the audio to the IHA and the Commission immediately."
"And then what?" Yoshi's voice was a low, dangerous rasp. He stepped in front of Koichi, blocking his path. "Look at the state of the country. The news is screaming about the 'Harvest,' UA is in a bunker, and the Number One hero is a vegetable. There is a massive net of rot pulling Japan under right now. If you add this to the pile, it becomes another classified file on a burning desk. It gets buried. Or worse, the Commission decides they want the 'spell' for themselves."
"It doesn't matter!" Koichi countered, his voice rising in frustration. "It's the protocol. We log the evidence, we file the report, and then the specialists get around to it when the crisis permits."
Yoshi let out a sharp, mocking laugh, parroting Koichi's tone with cruel precision. "'When the crisis permits.' You're a sidekick, Hero. A foreign asset on a leash. Do you really think they'll let you stay on the case once the 'real' heroes arrive? You'll be sent back to patrol beaches while some suit from Tokyo takes your recorder and your credit. Do you honestly think you can just let things go as they are without seeing it through yourself?"
Koichi opened his mouth to argue, but the words died in his throat. He looked at the recorder, then at the distant, reinforced clinic. He thought of the woman, Mrs. Kagawa, walking out of that room with a desperate, terrifying hope in her eyes. He let out a long, deep sigh that seemed to drain the colour from his face.
"No," Koichi admitted, his shoulders slumping. "I can't. This feels... incredibly wrong. Bypassing the chain of command like this is how people lose their licenses. But I'll carry on. We'll investigate. But," he pointed a stern finger at Yoshi, "I don't want you acting on your own. No more planting devices without telling me. No more disappearing into the crowds."
Yoshi rolled his eyes, his expression curdling into a look of pure annoyance. "I'm completely fine. I don't need a chaperone."
"You don't look it," Koichi said softly, his gaze lingering on the boy. He paused, searching for the right word, his eyes tracing the sharp, guarded lines of Yoshi's face. To Koichi, Yoshi didn't just look tired, he looked spirit-spent, as if his soul were a flickering wick in a vast, cold room. "You look... unmoored, Yoshi. Like a boat that's lost its anchor and doesn't even care where the tide takes it."
The boy stiffened, his obsidian eyes flashing with a brief, volatile spark of anger.
"Someone as young as you," Koichi continued, his voice dropping into a gentle, paternal register, "shouldn't even be doing things like this. You shouldn't have to listen to the sounds of people's desperation to look like he is livening up."
He went quiet then, the question he wanted to ask hanging in the air like smoke. Yoshi saw it coming, he could see the pity forming in the hero's eyes, and he hated it more than he hated the heat.
Yoshi let out a sharp sigh and nodded before Koichi could speak the words. "Yes. I don't have parents. I'm an orphan. I live on my own, and I handle my own business. I'm fine."
Koichi nodded slowly, a profound sadness settling into his expression. "In the end, it's my duty to keep the citizens safe, Yoshi. And that includes you. I just... I don't want to see you get hurt in the crossfire of whatever that man in the mask is planning."
The sincerity in Koichi's voice hit Yoshi with a strange, uncomfortable friction. It wasn't the cold apathy of the shadows or the searing hatred of his revenge, it was something foreign, a warmth that felt like a violation of his carefully constructed isolation. He didn't thank him. He didn't even acknowledge the sentiment. He just gave a curt, mechanical nod.
"We should get moving," Yoshi said, turning his back on the hero. "We have the frequency. Now, we wait for the old lady to be contacted again. When the 'Doctor' calls, we follow the money."
___
The humidity of Naha had begun to feel like a physical weight, a wet woollen blanket draped over Akira Furuhaya's shoulders that he couldn't shake off. It had been nearly two weeks since he had touched down on this island, two weeks of pacing the same salt-cracked sidewalks and sitting in the same dim corner of the Blue Reef Bar, waiting for a ghost to show its face.
His patience was calcifying into a sharp, jagged anger. He was a detective, a man who lived by the logic of evidence and the linear flow of truth, but here, he was a man trapped in an incomplete sentence. He looked at his hands, the fingers twitching with a phantom hunger to touch something, to taste something that wasn't a lie. Every morning he woke up with the same third-person memories of his "crimes," and every night he went to bed with the hollow realization that his own brain was a crime scene he couldn't access.
"Dammit," he hissed under his breath, kicking a loose pebble into the gutter. "Two weeks. Not a sign. Not a whisper."
He turned a sharp corner, his mind a whirlwind of frustration, and slammed directly into a woman walking in the opposite direction. Her shoulder bag hit the ground with a heavy thud, and a stack of notebooks spilled across the pavement.
"Watch it," Akira grunted, his old, irritable detective persona flaring up. He reached down to help, but as his hand hovered over a notebook, he felt a sudden, sharp prickle of electricity at the base of his scalp.
The woman didn't scold him. She didn't apologize. She stood perfectly still, her eyes fixed on his face with a look of staggering, unfiltered recognition.
"Akira?" she whispered.
Akira froze. He looked up, squinting at her through the harsh tropical light. She was sharp-featured, with intelligent, weary eyes and hair pulled back into a practical ponytail. She looked like she belonged in a newsroom or a precinct, not on a tourist-heavy street in Okinawa.
"Do I know you?" Akira asked, his voice a low, suspicious crawl.
The woman let out a short, breathy laugh, half-relief, half-pity. "Makoto Tsukauchi," she said, as if the name should be a key. When he didn't react, her smile faltered, replaced by a somber nod. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. You warned me this would happen."
"Tsukauchi," Akira repeated, the name tasting like cold copper. "Who are you?"
"I was your one and only visitor in the Akagura Vault, Akira," she said, stepping closer. "I'm a... researcher, I also work in public relations. I was the only one who bothered to look at the paperwork for your conviction. I came to see you because I thought you were a leak. I stayed because I realized you were a victim."
Akira's mouth wobbled, a rare crack in his stoic mask. He felt a sudden, dizzying rush of vertigo. This woman was a bridge to a past he didn't own. "You visited me? Why? What did I tell you?"
"You told me to leave you alone," Makoto said with a wry, bittersweet smile. "After you gave me one task, you told me that if I stayed involved, the Commission would erase me too. You were terrifyingly certain about it. You said your memories would be 'rearranged' soon, and you needed a failsafe."
"My memories," Akira whispered, his hand going to his temple. "How do I get them back? I've been following my own notes, but I'm hitting walls. I've been at that bar for fourteen days and felt nothing."
Makoto sighed, leaning against a nearby lamppost. "That's because you're looking in the wrong place. You know how your quirk works, Akira."
She reached out and tapped the notebook he had picked up. "The Blue Reef Bar was washed out in a flash flood eighteen months ago. The entire interior was gutted and rebuilt from the studs up. Everything in there is 'new.' There's no history for you to chew on there."
Akira stared at her, the frustration of the last two weeks suddenly making a sickening kind of sense. He had been trying to read a book with blank pages. Obviously he didn't know, how would he?
"But," the lady in front of him spoke. "The instructions you left me did leave something just in case a situation like that happened. In a locker."
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small, tarnished brass key with a plastic tag. On it, in her handwriting, was a locker number for a storage facility near the Naha docks.
"It's under my name," she said, pressing the key into his palm.