The air in the gated estate didn't just feel heavy; it felt curdled. As Yoshi stepped forward.
Slowly, several figures emerged from the periphery. They weren't the standard thugs of the Okinawa underworld. These men carried a silent, disciplined weight, their faces obscured by matching white masks that looked like flat, unexpressive porcelain. They moved with a synchronized dread, forming a loose semi-circle that forced Yoshi to a halt.
Then, from the center of the formation, a man stepped into the dimming evening light.
He was dressed in a crisp, dark green bomber jacket with a flare of purple fur at the collar, but it was his face that arrested Yoshi's attention. He wore a flat, black mask shaped like a plague doctor's. Every movement he made was fastidious, bordering on obsessive, as if the very air he breathed was a personal insult to his cleanliness.
Beside him, held by a firm, gloved hand, was a small girl.
She looked like a fragment of a dream that had turned into a nightmare. She wore a simple, drab brown cardigan over a white undershirt, her small frame slumped as if the weight of her own existence was too much to bear. Her hair was a matted, pale grey, and from the side of her forehead, a small, blunt horn protruded. She didn't look up. She didn't even seem to be breathing. She was just a hollow vessel, shaking in a rhythmic, silent terror.
Yoshi felt his spatial awareness spike, a cold hum in his marrow, but before he could collapse the distance, a voice tore through the silence from behind him.
"Yoshi! Get back!"
Yoshi glanced back briefly, his brow furrowing. Akira Furuhaya was sprinting toward them, his gaunt face pale, his eyes wide with a detective's panic. Koichi was trailing behind, still looking sickly and pale from the spatial jump.
Yoshi wondered how the detective had tracked them so fast, but he didn't have time to ask. He turned back to the man in the mask.
"Are you the doctor?" Yoshi asked, his voice a flat, dangerous rasp.
The man in the mask didn't answer him. His yellow eyes moved past Yoshi, locking onto Akira with a sudden, jagged intensity. He saw the detective, then his gaze flickered to Koichi, who was struggling to stand. A low, wet hiss escaped the man's mask, a sound of pure, visceral disgust.
"Filth," the man muttered, his voice muffled but dripping with venom. "Trailing their rot into my clean room." He clicked his teeth, a sharp, rhythmic sound. "Kagawa... that old bat. She led them right to the threshold."
"Who are you?" Akira demanded, his voice trembling as he reached the perimeter of the masked men.
"There is no time for this," the man in the beak mask said, ignoring the question. His gaze stayed on Akira, a look that told Yoshi he felt the man was too dangerous to let linger. So he knows his quirk! "Especially not with an 'Information Threat' standing in the street."
He reached down, his fingers gripping the small girl's shoulder. She let out a tiny, broken whimper.
"Eri," the man growled.
The girl looked up, her eyes wide with a paralyzing, biological fear. The man reached up with his free hand and pulled a glove off with his teeth, exposing a hand that looked as though it had never touched a speck of dust in its life.
"Activate it," he commanded. "Now."
Yoshi tilted his head, his mind racing to calculate the threat. The girl? What is the girl?
Suddenly, the small horn on the girl's head began to glow with a sickly, incandescent light. It wasn't the green sparks of Midoriya or the obsidian ink of Yoshi's own power. It was a golden, swirling radiance that felt like the sun was being dragged backwards. The light began to bleed from her skin, enveloping her and the man in the mask.
The man reached out and clasped her hand, his fingers locking with hers.
"Lock it," the man whispered.
Yoshi's vision shattered. For a heartbeat, he felt a sensation of being pulled through a straw, a horrifying, reverse-gravity that tugged at his very soul. The world turned into a blinding, white-hot void where time and space were being unmade and restitched.
Snap.
Yoshi blinked.
He was sitting on the edge of the small wooden table in the humid hotel room. The hum of the air conditioner was a dull roar in the silence. Across from him, Makoto was mid-sentence, her pen hovering over her notebook.
"...because it's a controlled resource," Yoshi heard himself say, though his voice sounded strange to his own ears, like a recording played from a long way off.
He paused, a sharp, momentary vertigo spinning his world. He reached up, his fingers scratching the back of his head. He felt... empty. Like he had walked into a room and forgotten why he was there.
"Okinawa is a satellite," he continued, his brow furrowing as he tried to catch the thread of the conversation. "The old lady was... she was..."
He stopped. He couldn't remember what he was going to say. He couldn't remember why they were talking about a satellite.
"Yoshi? You okay?" Koichi asked from his side, looking perfectly healthy.
"Yeah," Yoshi muttered, his obsidian eyes darting around the room. "Just... lost my train of thought. What was the last thing we were saying? About the doctor?"
Akira sat on the edge of the bed, his gaunt face set in a mask of sardonic disappointment. "We were discussing the scale of the operation, kid. You were saying how the Commission might be involved. Try to keep up."
Yoshi nodded slowly, but the "nasty feeling" remained, a ghostly residue in his heart that something had just gone horribly, irreversibly wrong.
Miles away, in a bunker beneath an estate, the man in the mask stood alone. He breathed in the sterile, filtered air, his memories of the encounter, of the boy with the obsidian eyes and the detective tagging along perfectly preserved. He looked down at his gloved hand, then at the girl sleeping fitfully on the floor, her horn now small and dark.
The world moved forward at 4:00 PM a strange occurrence happened that only he could ever remember.
___
To Kai Chisaki, the world was not a grand and beautiful society, it was a festering wound.
He remembered the early days, the cold shadows of the Yakuza, the Shie Hassaikai, when the name alone commanded a specific, leaden silence in the streets, even if only for a year.
That era had been eroded by the rise of the "Hero," or at least it was still just barely hanging on by then, because of the profession built on the flashy, sickening exhibitionism of quirks.
The Yakuza, once the architects of the underworld, had been reduced to a footnote, a pitiful collection of "old-fashioned" men clinging to a code that the modern, quirk-obsessed world found quaint. To the public, they were relics, or just movie characters, to Chisaki, he was the only one who understood that quirks were a biological plague, a "sickness" that had dismantled the natural order of humanity.
He looked at the League of Villains with a visceral, skin-crawling disgust. They were loud, chaotic, and as diseased as the heroes they fought, a group of children playing with fire in a house already made of paper. He wanted to sanitize it all. He wanted to reset the world to zero.
Then, he had found the girl.
She was a fragment of a nightmare, a biological anomaly with an ivory horn that leaked a power so potent it defied the laws of physics. Chisaki didn't see a niece or a child when he looked at her, she was a chemical solution.
Her quirk "Rewind," a way to strip a human back to their base components. He got to work with the clinical precision of a butcher-turned-scientist.
Initially, his goals were pure, total eradication of the quirk factor. But the biology was stubborn. He figured out how to suppress a quirk, how to lock it away for twenty-four hours, but it wasn't enough. It was a temporary bandage on a terminal illness. To fund the deeper research, to build the infrastructure of his cure, he had to do the one thing he loathed, he had to contribute to the sickness.
He created Trigger. It was the complete, hideous opposite of his ultimate goal, a drug that amplified the quirk factor to a point of explosive instability. He distributed it overseas first, testing the markets in Thailand and Malaysia, watching the chaos unfold from a safe, sanitized distance. It was only a few years ago that he brought the trade home to Japan, flooding the streets with the very filth he intended to eventually wash away.
But even the drug trade was insufficient. The "Father", the Boss who had raised him, was "out of commission," a vegetative casualty of his own refusal to see Chisaki's vision. Chisaki was desperate. He had to upscale. He had to find a market that didn't just have needs, but had influence.
He became the "Doctor."
He hated the touch of others, the invisible swarms of bacteria, the greasy film of human contact, but he forced himself into the role. He turned his attention to the mutants, the "Heteromorphs" who had been marginalized since the beginning.
The Yakuza had always maintained ties to those communities, during the Great Purge sixty years ago, the Yakuza were the only ones who saw the mutants as a market worth touching. They had sold them drugs to dull their pain.
But the real money, the kind that bought a man immunity from the law, came from the "Pure."
Politicians, retired heroes, and high-ranking officials within the Hero Commission began to seek him out. They didn't come to arrest the "Doctor", they came to buy a few more years of their own relevance.
As soon as Chisaki started getting more daring and using Eri, the money started coming ini.
Chisaki realized that the "Golden Era" was built on a foundation of men who were terrified of their own mortality. He offered them the ultimate prize, revitalized youth. Using the girl's quirk as a biological engine, he could rewind the clock on a human body.
The money from the first operation alone was enough to fund the Hassaikai for two lifetimes. He had conducted nine operations so far. He was obsessed with the symmetry of it, Kagawa was supposed to be the tenth. He hated odd numbers. They felt unfinished.
He stood now over Mrs. Kagawa, who lay blindfolded on the cold surgical table. He didn't bring Eri in. Instead, he began to speak, his voice a muffled, clinical rasp behind his mask.
"Listen carefully, Mrs. Kagawa," Chisaki said, his gloved fingers hovering inches above her. "You are about to witness the true peak of my work. Most people think of time as a river we all float down together. But I have found a way to step out of the current."
He leaned closer, his yellow eyes sharp behind the beak of his mask.
"The girl, Eri... her power is 'Rewind.' It can turn an old body into a young one. But two years ago, I discovered something more. When I use my power to break a person down into their base atoms at the exact same moment she 'rewinds' them, I create a 'Time Lock.' It's like a video game, Mrs. Kagawa. I can set a 'Save Point' for a specific area."
He tapped the table, the sound sharp in the quiet room.
"Think of it like a tape recorder. I can hit 'rewind' on a single person or a small group. I reset their bodies, and their brains, to exactly how they were two hours ago. Because I am physically unmaking and remaking them, the memories they formed in those two hours are erased. They don't just forget; the time they spent simply never happened to them."
He paced the side of the table, his movements fastidious.
"Two hours ago, in the street, you led a detective and a hero to my door. They saw me. They saw my face. So, I used the girl. I clasped her hand, activated the 'Lock,' and I reset them. Right now, as we speak, they are back in their hotel rooms, or wandering the streets, completely unaware that they ever met me. To them, the last two hours are a blank space they won't even notice is missing."
He stopped at her head, his gloved hand hovering over her brow.
"Only I remember, Mrs. Kagawa. I am the only one who keeps the truth of the reset. And you... you were the reason I had to use it. You were the security breach. You wanted a do-over, didn't you? You wanted to rejoice in your youth."
Kagawa trembled under the blindfold, her lips parting in a silent gasp of intrigue. "So... I will be young? Like the others?"
"I am going to give you the most absolute do-over possible," Chisaki murmured, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly cold register. "I am going to rewind you until the version of you that betrayed my location no longer exists. I am going to sanitize this mistake."
He stretched out his hand and touched Kagawa's forehead.
The sound was a single, wet snap.
In a heartbeat, the woman on the table ceased to be a person. She became a spray of red mist and a collection of biological components that Chisaki instantly vaporized, leaving nothing behind but the faint scent of iron and the sterile silence of the room. The tenth operation was over before it began. He had broken the symmetry, and the thought made his eye twitch with irritation.
He stepped away from the table, reaching for a bottle of high-concentration sanitizer. He was annoyed. He had been tracked by a boy who looked like a middle-schooler, a sidekick in a teal hoodie, and Akira Furuhaya, the man who should have died in the Vault. It was a mess. A smudge on his pristine world.
But as he scrubbed his gloves, he felt a cold surge of solace. He wasn't a street thug anymore. Through his work with the elite of the Commission, he had bought a brand of protection that the law couldn't touch.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sleek, encrypted phone. He dialed a number that wasn't in any public registry, a direct line to the heart of the "New UA" administration.
The line clicked open.
"Yeah," Chisaki said, his voice a low, vibrating threat. "It's the Doctor. We have a complication in Naha.
Furuhaya is here, and he isn't alone."