The air in the narrow hallway of Makoto's temporary stay was already stagnant, but it fractured into a violent, localized shockwave as the space between atoms collapsed. Yoshi materialized in a sharp exhale of displaced pressure, his hand still clamped like a vice around the collars of Akira's coat and Koichi's teal hoodie.
Makoto was standing by the door, her shoulder bag slung over her arm, her fingers on the latch. She gasped, nearly stumbling back as three people suddenly occupied the space she was about to step into.
The silence lasted only a second before the physical cost of the jump hit. Koichi collapsed to his knees, his hands slapping against the linoleum as he began to vomit with a rhythmic, agonizing intensity. Akira wasn't far behind, leaning heavily against the wall, his face a translucent shade of grey as his equilibrium tried to find its way back to his body.
"What the hell?" Makoto shouted, her voice shrill with a mixture of terror and confusion. "Where did you, why are they...?"
Yoshi stood in the center of the wreckage, his breathing perfectly steady, his obsidian eyes cold. He didn't look at his companions, he looked at his own hands, which were shaking with a fine, phantom vibration he couldn't explain.
"Complications," Yoshi said, his voice a flat, tired rasp.
Koichi wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes red-rimmed and burning with a desperate, frantic energy. He forced himself up, his legs still trembling. "We have to go back. Now. We can't let them get away."
Yoshi turned to him, his brow furrowing. "Go back where? To fight the Number Three hero? You can barely stand, Crawler. Hawks will have you plucked and gutted before you find your feet."
Makoto's eyes widened at the mention of the name. "Hawks? You ran into Hawks? Here?"
"It doesn't matter about him!" Koichi yelled, his voice cracking. "The gang...the ones with the masks. They left in a car. A black, low-profile sedan. It must have been electric because it didn't make a sound, but I saw it pulling out from the side of that estate while you were busy with Hawks. They had a little girl with them, Yoshi. She was unconscious. They were dragging her around like a piece of luggage. She didn't look right."
Yoshi stared at him, a flicker of genuine confusion crossing his face. He had been there. He had scanned the street. He didn't remember a car. He didn't remember a girl. But the way Koichi spoke, the raw, bleeding sincerity in his voice, made Yoshi's head ache with a sudden, sharp spike of déjà vu.
"It's too late," Yoshi said, his voice hardening to hide his own confusion. "And it's too risky. Hawks was there. He wasn't there for an arrest, he was there for an execution. He tried to take Akira's head."
Akira finally pushed off the wall, his breathing shallow. He looked at Yoshi, then at the floor. "He's right. Hawks wasn't just patrolling. He was protecting that gate. He was acting as a vanguard for whoever is in that 'clinic.'"
"That can't be true," Koichi whispered, his hands balled into fists. "Hawks is a hero. He's the Number Three of the whole damn nation. If you'd just let him talk, Yoshi! If you hadn't attacked him the second you saw him..."
"He was going to kill Akira!" Yoshi bit back, stepping into Koichi's space. The spatial distortion around his fingers began to hum, a low, predatory sound. "I didn't 'attack' him. I intercepted a murder. Your hero wasn't reading the detective his rights, he was plucking out his jugular."
"I noticed," Akira muttered, his eyes dark. "I'm not usually one for praise, but the kid was faster than my own death. I didn't even see the feathers until they were an inch from my throat."
Yoshi bristled at the mention of it, but he forced his focus back to the problem. "We already suspect the Commission is tied to this 'Doctor.' If the Commission is in, then every hero with a collar, Hawks included, is working to protect the assets. You go back there, you aren't fighting a villain. You're fighting the State."
Koichi's teeth ground together so hard the sound was audible in the quiet room. "I don't care," he growled. "I'm not letting a child be stuck in such an environment when we already suspect terrible things to be going on. I'm going after them."
Yoshi let out a sharp, jagged sigh of pure annoyance. "You are too idealistic, Hero. It's disgustingly stupid. How are you going to follow them? You have no tracker, no lead, and a celestial predator in the sky waiting for you to poke your head out. Do you really think you can fight Hawks and whatever guards that man has if it comes down to it? Do you honestly think you can win?"
Koichi didn't answer. He just stared at Yoshi, his eyes burning.
"And if you did go after them," Yoshi continued, his voice dropping into a register of cold, clinical reality. "Would you give your life for it? Right now? In an alleyway in Naha where nobody would ever find your body?"
"Yes," Koichi shouted, the word slamming into the room like a physical blow. "I would. I would gladly lay down my life because that is what a hero is supposed to be prepared to do! That is the job, Yoshi! You don't weigh the cost of your own skin when someone else is screaming in their own!"
A long, suffocating silence followed. Makoto looked at the floor. Akira watched the two of them with a weary distance.
Yoshi shook his head slowly, a look of profound, weary disgust on his face. "Maybe you're right. Maybe a 'hero' should be prepared to die. But look at it from this "kid's" perspective, the girl. If you charge in there with your chest out and your heart open, and you die in front of her... what does she have left? She watches her only hope get slaughtered by the people who own her. She loses the last spark of belief she has. She goes right back to her handlers because the 'hero' showed her that freedom is just a death sentence."
Yoshi stepped closer, his obsidian eyes unblinking. "What is the point of dying for someone if your death only makes their cage feel more permanent? In a world this divided, there isn't just someone standing around to pick up after you. If you go, the light goes with you."
Koichi looked at Yoshi for a long, agonizing minute. The anger in his face didn't fade, but it changed. It sharpened into a terrifying, immovable certainty.
"You would," Koichi said softly.
Yoshi froze. "What?"
"You'd pick up after me," Koichi said, his voice steady. "I'm certain of it. That's why I'm not afraid to go. Because I know that if I fall, you won't be able to just walk away. You're the one who saved Akira. You're the one who can't help but look at the rot and want to cut it out for whatever reason."
Yoshi looked at him with a dumbfounded, almost panicked expression. "You're delusional. Why do you think that? Why are you so certain of someone you barely know?"
Koichi didn't answer with words. He slammed his hand against the wall by the entrance, a sharp crack that punctuated his resolve. He reached for the door handle and threw it open. The humid night air rushed in, smelling of sea-salt.
He stepped out into the dark, the door slamming shut behind him with a finality that left the room in a cold, ringing silence.
Yoshi stood in the center of the hall, his hand still vibrating, his mind racing through a thousand calculations that all came up with the same answer, Koichi was going to get himself killed.
Akira looked at the door, then at Yoshi. "He's a fool," the detective whispered.
___
The sun was beginning its slow, humid descent over the East China Sea, painting the sky in shades of bruised orange and dusty gold. On the main coastal road leading out of Naha, a violet blur tore through the heavy air.
Koichi Haimawari was no longer the boy who slid through the narrow, trash-strewn alleys of Naruhata. He was taller, broader, his movements honed by years of professional sidekick work in the gleaming skylines of America. But as he pushed his palms against the scalding asphalt, the sparks of his Slide and Glide quirk hissing like a nest of vipers, he felt like that amateur vigilante again, clinging to a sense of justice that the world had outgrown.
Left-right-left.
His hands and feet moved in a rhythmic, high-speed crawl, his body barely inches off the ground. He was pushing sixty miles per hour, then seventy. The wind roared in his ears, a chaotic symphony that drowned out the rhythmic crashing of the waves against the seawall.
There was only one main artery out of this part of the island, a long, secluded road that stretched across the bridge toward the mainland. If the black sedan was heading for a port or a private airfield, they had to be on this stretch.
Why are you doing this, Koichi? The question pulsed in his mind with every thrust of his quirk.
He did it because it was the right thing to do. He did it because a hero's license wasn't just a piece of plastic in his wallet, it was a weight on his soul. He did it because he couldn't stand the thought of that little girl, the one with the matting grey hair and the eyes of a trapped bird, being dragged back into the dark while her abusers drove off into a sunset they didn't deserve.
It brought back the bitter, jagged memories of Naruhata. He remembered the feeling of being too slow to save Pop Step from her own heart. He remembered the feeling of being outmatched by Number Six, a monster of speed and malice who had mocked the very idea of a "nice guy" hero. Back then, he had reached a state of near-transcendence, a peak of speed and flight that had earned him the name Skycrawler.
But ever since that final, blood-soaked night in the streets of his home, that peak had been a ghost. Captain Celebrity had joked about it over expensive burgers in New York, quirk analysts had studied his readings and shrugged. "You're healthy, Koichi. You just haven't run into a need for it yet. The human body is efficient, it doesn't give you the fire unless the house is burning."
Isn't the house burning now? Koichi thought, his teeth gritted so hard his jaw ached. Isn't a child's life worth the fire?
He pushed. He demanded the speed. But his quirk remained steady, a high-functioning hum instead of the reality-shattering roar he needed. He was fast, yes. He was an international professional. But he wasn't the Skycrawler. He was just a man in a teal hoodie chasing a car he couldn't see yet.
He could almost hear Yoshi's voice in the wind, that flat, clinical rasp. Yoshi and Akira were probably sitting in that humid room right now, looking at the door and shaking their heads. They probably thought he was an over-emotional child throwing a tantrum, a hero who would tire himself out and come crawling back before nightfall once the reality of his failure set in.
Maybe they were right. Maybe his idealism was a sickness. But it was the only thing he had left in a world where his favourite hero, the Symbol of Peace and his light was fading and his government was up to the shadiest of business that even he may be participating in.
The clock on his HUD struck 4:00 PM.
The light changed. For a fraction of a second, the world felt… thin. A shiver of déjà vu raced down his spine, a phantom sensation of a conversation he didn't remember having. But he didn't slow down. He leaned further into the slide, his fingers scraping the asphalt until the friction began to char his gloves.
He was gaining. He could feel the atmospheric wake of a heavy vehicle ahead, just beyond the next rise in the road. He felt a surge of desperate, foolish hope. He was going to find her. He was going to be the hero.
And then, the sun vanished.
It didn't set. It was blotted out.
A massive, sweeping shadow stretched across the asphalt, moving faster than Koichi's top speed. It swallowed the violet sparks of his quirk, plunging the road into a sudden, artificial twilight.
Koichi's head snapped up, his breath catching in his throat. High above, a pair of immense, crimson wings were silhouetted against the bruised orange of the sky.
The Number Three had returned.
___
The reinforced steel door of the clinic buckled. Yoshi kicked it in.
The trio stepped into the dark foyer. Makoto lingered at the threshold, her eyes scanning the road they had just come from. "I should have chased after him," she whispered, her voice tight with a guilt she couldn't quite suppress. "Koichi... he's too earnest for this. He doesn't know when to stop."
Akira didn't look back. He moved with a detective's predatory slouch, his eyes fixed on the shadows of the hallway. "It's too late now. Focus, Makoto."
"He went after them because that's just what he is," Makoto said, a small, sad smile touching her lips. "He's the kind of man who believes that if he runs fast enough, he can outpace all the bad."
They moved deeper into the building. The interior was a jarring contrast to the rusted, salt-cracked exterior. It was a dark, underground office complex that bled into a series of surgical suites. The air was cold, filtered, and smelled overwhelmingly of high-grade bleach and ozone.
"It's spotless," Yoshi muttered, his obsidian eyes darting over the gleaming tile. "Immaculate. It's like a temple of hygiene."
He thought of Mrs. Kagawa. They had called her estate from a burner phone on the way back, the gatekeepers had confirmed she had left over an hour ago and hadn't returned. The math didn't add up.
Yoshi stopped in front of a heavy mahogany desk in the center of a darkened consultation room. He turned to Akira. "Well, Detective? Start licking things. We need a lead, and I'm not waiting for a forensics team that isn't coming."
Akira's face twisted in a look of profound, visceral disgust. "It's not 'licking,' Yoshi. It's a sensory audit. And I despise doing it in places like this. Everything here is so sanitized it tastes like a chemical burn. There's no soul in bleach."
"Then find one," Yoshi said. He reached over the desk and pulled a pen from a centered, dustbin-like holder. It was an expensive, gold-nibbed fountain pen, placed exactly in the middle of the blotter. Yoshi held it out. "This. It's the closest to the center. Whoever runs this place uses this to sign the death warrants or invoices."
Akira sighed, a ragged, tired sound. He took the pen, his fingers trembling slightly. He looked at the gold nib for a long moment before slowly, tentatively, pressing it to his tongue.
The shock hit him instantly.
Akira's eyes rolled back, his body stiffening as the "CHEW" quirk bypassed the bleach and found the residue of the hand that had held the pen. He didn't just see a name, he felt a philosophy. He felt the cold, obsessive need for purity, the weight of a traditionalism that had been sharpened into a weapon.
He pulled the pen away, gasping, a thin trail of dark ink staining his lip. He looked at Yoshi, his expression one of staggering alarm. "You need to get to Koichi. Now."
"Don't order me around," Yoshi snapped, his hand already beginning to glow with a spatial hum. "What did you see?"
Akira leaned against the desk, his breathing shallow as he reached out to touch other items, a lamp, a stapler, a paperweight, desperately trying to piece together the fragments of the man who had sat here. "The group... they call themselves the Shie Hassaikai. They're Yakuza, Yoshi. An old-school syndicate."
Yoshi let out a short, dry laugh, the sound echoing mockingly in the sterile room. "Yakuza? In this era? What are they going to do, threaten us with a tea ceremony? The age of the syndicates ended when the quirks appeared."
"Don't be a fool," Akira hissed, his eyes wide as more memories flooded back from a leather-bound notebook he had just tasted. "This isn't a street gang. The man in charge calls himself 'Overhaul.' He's turned the Shie Hassaikai into a biological powerhouse. He's the architect of the international drug trade, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore. He's the one flooding the streets with a mass amount of drugs and one of them is called Trigger."
Akira wiped his mouth, his face pale. "He's sanitized this place so well it's hard to get a clear image of his face, but the name... Overhaul was even spoken in the Akagura Vault. He's the evolution of that old tradition. He has ties to the mutants and..." Akira paused, his voice dropping into a terrified whisper. "And the Commission. He's been revitalizing the 'Old Guard' for years."
Akira grabbed Yoshi's shoulder, his grip desperate. "If he's as dangerous as these memories feel, Koichi... He's going to run head-first into a man who can kill a human being with a touch."
Yoshi went still. The sarcasm died in his throat, replaced by the "nasty feeling" that had been haunting him since the street. He looked at the door, then back at Akira. "Alright. I'm leaving."
"Teleport!" Makoto urged. "Go straight to him!"
"I can't," Yoshi said, his voice flat. He looked at the walls, sensing the spatial locks and the heavy, lead-lined shielding of the bunker. "I can't teleport when all exits to my target are blocked. I'm walking out the front door."
He turned to Akira and Makoto, his obsidian eyes flashing with a rare, protective intensity. "Go back to the stay. Pack your things. Move to a different one under a different name. If the Commission is tied to this man, this room could be a safe space for an ambush. Stay safe. Stay hidden."