Hello everyone and welcome to the penultimate installment of the Acolytes of Chaos Saga. This series takes place concurrently with the previous story, Kingdom Hearts V: Balance of Power, so aside from a few mentions in the beginning and ending chapters Sora, most of the Avengers and 95% of the existing Kingdom Hearts cast will not be appearing at all. The focus of this fic will be about Vanitas and his team of C.I.N. agents and Coalition Army Troopers teaming up with S.H.I.E.L.D. and the remaining Avengers to fight the Hellfire Club and the Unchained Legion on Earth. There will be no other worlds featured in this story besides Earth, just to make this clear.

Now for those of you who haven't gotten all caught up yet, go read all my previous Acolytes of Chaos fics so you'll understand what's going on, because I'm not wasting a third of the word count recapping every major plot point you need to know. Go on, get out of here.

Everyone else all caught up? Good. On with the show.

Chapter 1: Bon Voyage:

Hawaiian Islands – Pelekai Household

October 8th

"Why do I get the feeling that they have the easy job?" S.H.I.E.L.D. Deputy Director Phillip J. Coulson asked rhetorically as he watched the sleek crimson spaceship disappear into the clouds above as Sora, Nick Fury, Jake Long, and six of the founding members of the Avengers Initiative headed off into Earth's orbit on their journey to bring the brunette Keyblade Master home. Cruising around space like the Serenity would be pretty nice right about now, Coulson thought dryly to himself as he stood on the porch of the Pelekai household. Although he had intended his question to be rhetorical, it seemed that he had been overheard.

"Because you have a perfectly functioning survival instinct," Vanitas snarked as the deputy director of the Coalition Intelligence Network came up the stairs to the porch. For a moment, the two spies simply stood there in silence, looking up at the sky as if the departure of some of their respective worlds' greatest heroes was an ominous warning of things to come. Down the stairs, the two agents could hear the buzz of conversation as operatives of S.H.I.E.L.D., C.I.N., and the Society of Advanced Cultural Knowledge casually made their way back to the house.

Nani had invited them all to stay for dinner, but while both Coulson and Vanitas appreciated the gesture, they both knew that they had to get everyone back to the Playground so that they could plan their next move. Although they had not talked much in the past week, both men were keenly aware of the fact that they had a long fight ahead of them. Between the Hellfire Club and the Unchained Legion, there were a plethora of malevolent forces on Earth that needed to be rooted out and eliminated. Maleficent's Cabal isn't anything new for us though, Vanitas thought as he looked over to where everyone was emerging from the bushes surrounding the path leading up to where Jumba usually parked his spaceship. It's the Unchained that concern me.

Neither deputy director said anything as their respective agents walked towards the house. The decision to allow them a few more minutes of rest and calm before the real work began went unspoken between the two. Cloud and Zack were casually discussing life in Radiant Garden with Rinoa, while Even was engaged in an impenetrable bubble of scientific technobabble with Fitz and Simmons. Violet discussed superpowers with Daisy while Agent May walked stoically towards the stairs. Without prompting, the veteran S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent climbed the stairs and joined her co-worker on the porch.

"So what's our next move?" she asked. Right to the point as always, Coulson thought with an amused mental chuckle. He looked over at Vanitas, but the dark Keyblade wielder nodded his head in May's direction. It's your world, you take the lead, the unspoken meaning of the gesture said. Coulson nodded before he started to explain what they had so far.

"Daisy's started analyzing the data Vanitas' team has recovered from the Unchained base on Morag," Coulson began. "We haven't been able to get much besides the coordinates Fury's little crew is using. That said, Agent Romanov gave us the coordinates of a safe house she used during her days with the Legion that should still be secure. Hopefully we can get some answers there. Beyond that, we start adjusting our sweep of world news for anything that screams "Maleficent"." May nodded in acknowledgement before announcing that she was going to prepare the Quinjet for takeoff.

"Guess it's time to get this show on the road," Vanitas remarked wearily as the two deputy directors headed down the front steps to address their respective teams. He, S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Maria Hill, and S.A.C.K. leader Peggy Rogers, had made announcements to their respective agencies about the three-way collaboration going forward. Everyone understood, and the three agencies were all getting along well enough so far.

"Alright, everyone," Coulson called out. "The fun and games stop today. As of right now, we are at war. The Hellfire Club has allied with the straggling remnants of HYDRA, and are attempting to expand their influence to add Earth to their would be interstellar empire."

"Not only that," Vanitas added, trading off with Coulson over who would address the group. "But a new enemy has entered the fray. The Unchained Legion. For those who've never heard it before, every living heart in this universe returns to Kingdom Hearts after a person dies. Their soul passes on to the afterlife, but the heart is purged of darkness and sent back out into a newborn body. All memories of the previous reincarnation are erased, but there's a process known as Unchaining that allows one to recall all memories of their past lives and retain them for all future incarnations, for all intents and purposes making them immortal."

"We have known of the existence of Unchained for roughly half a decade," the Key Bearer went on. "But we have recently learned that they are far more numerous than we initially believed. There are apparently enough Unchained to form an army, and they've organized themselves towards an as-yet unknown purpose. Our mission is to find out what they want and figure out how to defeat them." Once Vanitas finished speaking, Coulson ordered everyone back to the Quinjet so they could return to the Playground. They had work to do.

Once they were in the air, Coulson contacted Peggy and asked her to send a team of S.A.C.K. agents to the coordinates the Black Widow had provided. An hour later, Shego, Lady Sif, and Neku Sakuraba made their way through the station Underpass in Shibuya, Tokyo. Neku had been surprised when the coordinates of the Unchained's stash were located along the Shibuya river. Which can only mean two things, the orange haired team thought to himself as he led the Asgardian and Inhuman into the River. Either the proximity of her safe house to the River is pure coincidence, or she left it there deliberately. Either way, did Josh know about this?

While Neku had come to forgiven the enigmatic "teen" over the years, he was well aware that he had an almost pathological inability to give a straight answer. Joshua had opened up more around his friends, but he could still be an evasive, manipulative bastard at times. Hopefully he's in a more straightforward mood today, then, Neku thought as he led his fellow S.A.C.K. agents down the River. Since he was one of those most familiar with the Reaper's Game and the Shibuya UG, he was given command of the mission.

Eventually, they arrived at the Dead God's Pad, where Joshua spent his time when he wasn't busy with his duties as the Composer. Neku looked down at the tracker in his hand. The coordinates were an exact match, making the likelihood of this being a coincidence almost zero. Which means that Black Widow's safe house is somewhere in Josh's room, Neku concluded. Before he could instruct Sif and Shego to spread out and search the room, the door leading further up the river opened to reveal the angel himself.

"Hey, Neku," he greeted in his usual smug tone. "What brings you here?" Shego and Lady Sif hung back and let the two friends discuss the issue themselves. They had been briefed on the existence of the Composer and the Reaper's Game when they were each made aware of the Society, but since their main reason for being on this mission was to protect Neku in the event that they were ambushed by Unchained or other Enhanced individuals, they each took seats on the couches along the walls of the room.

"Apparently one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tops agents is secretly an immortal Keyblade Wielder," the teen explained. "She gave the S.A.C.K. coordinates for a safe house, and they led us here." Neku refrained from continuing the discussion further, waiting to see whether Joshua was feeling like being straightforward today or if he was going to play mind games. To his surprise, Josh just sighed.

"I figured this would happen sooner or later," the blonde angel remarked as he motioned for Neku and the two women to follow him toward the door leading to his closet. "I should have called and asked her to come move her stuff a decade ago." Joshua flipped open his phone and pressed a button that summoned several meticulously labeled boxes from the back shelves of the cavernous storage space. "Here you go. It should all be labeled. Good luck sorting through it." Sif and Shego each grabbed two boxes and started carrying them out to the tunnel entrance where they would signal Gordon that they would need to make multiple trips. While they started a bucket brigade since there were more boxes than the three of them could carry on their own, Neku had one more question for his angelic friend.

"Why exactly did you let an interation spy and immortal Keyblade Master dump her stuff in your closet anyway?" Neku asked, curious but doubtful he'd actually get a straight answer. He was surprised when the angel blushed.

"Immortality tends to leave a relatively small dating pool," Josh mumbled, hoping that nobody would hear him. Unfortunately, (for him anyway) Neku did hear the comment. A joyful smirk spread across his face. Shiki and the others aren't going to believe this, he thought to himself as he proceeded to grill Josh about his love life.

Cloak and Dagger is going to be a different animal from other fics in the Acolytes of Chaos saga. Where The Xehanort War was written to feel like an actual Kingdom Hearts game, Connected Worlds and Balance of Power were adventure stories, and the rest were just lighthearted fluff to fill in the time skips, Cloak and Dagger is going to feel like a condensed season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. mini-sodes. This story is going to be 21 chapters taking place over the course of a month.

There's going to be very little connection to the story of KH5 besides expanding on things that happened on Earth while Sora and the Avengers were gone (revival of the Huntsclan, etc.) and showing what was happening on Earth while Sora and Kairi were looking for each other. I'm going to attempt to post about three chapters per week, and my goal is to have this story finished by Thanksgiving at the latest so that after Thanksgiving I can start on Kingdom Hearts VI and have that finished by New Year's. With all that out of the way, sit back, relax, and enjoy the penultimate ride of this long, winding story my brain's been coming up with.

I haven't actually played TWEWY until recently, so some of my information on Joshua is retroactively inaccurate and based on information I could dig up on the franchise and my own theories and assumptions. Since KH depicted him with angel wings and his own manipulative nature made me question how much of what he and Mr. H told Neku about his backstory prior to the reveal that he's the Composer, I came to the conclusion that he was older than he looked and simply preferred his fifteen-year old appearance because that's the form he was most comfortable with, and what he and Mr. H say about his backstory in the game before the reveal was misinformation to keep anyone from figuring out he's the Composer.

Not a lot happens in this chapter, and that's intentional. I wanted this to be a chance for everyone to take a deep breath before we plunge into the meat of the plot. And yes, I did just have Coulson quote Nick Fury's line from The Avengers right there.