Solo patrol was weird.

To be clear, Kei was never completely alone, because Isobu took up a lot of headspace and usually drank in the sights and sounds of city life with the air of someone who knew the clock was ticking away. Sooner or later, they'd both be back in Konoha and the newness would be gone. But when it came to physical bodies, Kei just wandered around city rooftops until she found trouble or something worth observing. It was inefficient in a world of security cameras and public transit, but it gave her time to think.

And it meant she was pulling Batman-esque schedules without the benefit of either a support network or a shitload of gadgets. Or a day job that allowed her to sleep through the entire shift. Woo.

I cannot bypass the human need for sleep for you.

Don't I know it, Kei thought.

She'd once again stolen another person's appearance—Nara Shikane this time—and put an unmarked mask over the false face. That was about the only change.

Kei hadn't come back to Hosu City until now. Stain's run-in with Obito and Kakashi had initially convinced her she wouldn't have to.

Isobu rolled his eye. Wishful thinking.

She didn't do a lot of number-crunching during her day job (either as a student or a shinobi), but many other people did. Reading news reports and chatting with her teammates revealed a few useful scraps of conjecture. While running across rooftops without teammates, anything helped. Even a mental review sheet.

It is not as though anything in the city can be a threat to us.

True. But it should be a rule that I don't end up somewhere alone and just end up talking to myself for three hours.

You could try talking to me instead.

Don't I always? Still, Kei came to a crunching stop on rooftop gravel to rest, think, and see what else she could find.

First of all, the security breach that let Stain loose again was almost certainly the work of the League of Villains. While the organization seemed to have a whopping two whole field agents, the suspect pool was pretty shallow to start with when teleportation was so rare. Thanks to his power and judgment, Kurogiri was vital to their operations. It was just that his utility was also why the heroes hadn't tracked down the fledgling organization and given the beatdown of a lifetime.

Second, Stain was a serial killer with a known modus operandi and a now-publicized Quirk. While her boys had brought him down with little effort, most heroes didn't have Quirks specifically suited for fighting someone who could kill at their leisure immediately after drawing their enemy's blood. Several heroes running around Musutafu weren't even passable fighters by Kei's standards. With UA right there, she had to wonder if they became complacent over time. It was a state of affairs that Stain seemed to take as his personal bugbear, if the crime statistics she'd read were accurate. And then people died.

Third, news reports followed the Hero Killer with truly ridiculous focus. There was a hero otaku culture written into the blood of the society, and it came with a corresponding villain-focused counterpart. Kei figured that if at least one world could have serial killer fanclubs—Hannibal Lecter being a premier fictional example—then there were probably plenty of stooges. While she found the entire concept personally distasteful, the information made tracking Stain's movements easy in broad strokes.

At least it told her he was still in Hosu City. That was still something.

On top of everything else, his stabbing incidents generated a level of paranoia among the hero populace that Kei found more annoying than anything. It was hard to be a masked loon running loose across rooftops and the like if the heroes suddenly started looking up more often.

If not for this area's ballooning population, even that wariness would not be a factor. You would have already beaten this human into submission.

The Tokyo Metropolis had millions of people living in it. Finding a specific person in that kind of haystack hadn't magically become less of a pain in the ass since Kei's teammates found Stain the first time.

You seem bored, commented Isobu.

I am, Kei replied. She sat down on top of a rooftop air conditioning outflow and pulled out a kunai to pry stones from the soles of her boots. While the scritch-scritch noise joined the general buzz of city life, Kei pointed her thoughts toward Isobu. It's just really weird to be on cleanup duty like this. I mean, I know the principal couldn't ask us to do anything a second time, but…

Battlefield cleanup was once one of your duties, said Isobu. This could hardly be more onerous.

That was more than four years ago. This is now. It remained the worst single responsibility of Kei's Third Shinobi World War experiences. Events had it beaten by a country mile, but those were entirely different.

Isobu sighed. You could attempt a street-level patrol in disguise, rather than continuing to extend your suffering.

…I could. Kei glanced around to make sure no one was in immediate view, then slipped off the side of the air conditioning unit. A quick leap had her over the side of the building and sliding down brickwork to the alleyway below, and she replaced her full disguise with a new one: Sensei, but in city-appropriate civilian clothes.

Look, it didn't have to be original. Her disguises rarely ever were. And it was still a lot easier to get around cities at night as an adult than as a teenager.

Wandering around the streets was more visually stimulating than rooftops were, at least. At nine-thirty, the streets were less congested than they were during peak commuter hours. It gave Kei a better view of the heroes on patrol, the salarymen out to find a decent bar, and potential trouble spots as normal people would see them.

Isobu sent a general impression of unease.

Kei noticed. Does the city bother you?

Does it not bother you? Isobu's chakra shifted. Beach stone flew. The view is different from the ground. The sheer number of human bodies—

"—so creepy, isn't it?" said a man's voice from the nearest bar. He, and his grunge-era counterpart, appeared to be on a smoke break. "I mean, I know heroes have masks a lot, but why haven't we heard of these new ones? Most heroes have marketing and agencies."

"Fuck if I know, man," said the other. "They seem like they're multiplying."

Kei wandered closer, keeping partly to the shadows. There was a trick to seeming like one wasn't eavesdropping was to have a phone out and keeping eyes fixed firmly on the screen while scrolling. She had internet access via her phone, but it seemed like listening to incidental conversations worked out more often than not.

"All these sightings—might as well be trying to spot a tsuchinoko," said the second guy. "It's the animal masks that throw me off."

Kei paused, definitely no longer keeping her attention on her phone. Hang on, are there any candid photos…?

A quick search of news sites and…there were a few images. The USJ had been pretty thoroughly mangled by the time Kei had been hurled through the structure, and Kei already knew her V2 cloaked form was considered a random rogue villain not captured in the moment. It was, however, the first time she saw Obito's ANBU mask in any detail except in person.

Scrolling a little more and digging through a few more equivalents of cell phone video gave her more evidence. Blurry images, mostly, but she could make out the profiles of Kakashi and Obito's masks. The captions declared the pictures had been taken during the same timeframe where her boys had been chasing Ingenium.

Over nine million people, and nearly that many cell phone cameras.

Well, shit.

Kei made her way to the train station over the next few minutes, changing disguises twice more before landing again on Genma's form after a mental roulette. The obligatory phantasmal toothpick senbon twitched as she found an alcove and typed out a message on her phone. Her train back to Musutafu wouldn't arrive for a few minutes, so she waited outside for the first announcement.

TMNT-TNT: Your costumes are a no-go. Gonna have to stop.

TMNT-TNT: Back to basics, here.

There was no answer to her half-oblique order, and there wouldn't be for two days. Obito wasn't scheduled to come back for at least that long. Sensei might need him for something, as far as Kei knew, so all she could do was give her teammate a heads-up and cross her fingers.

Once again, the Transformation jutsu was earning its keep. Somehow.

She was getting a lot of mileage out of the simplest tricks in the ninja book.

At least when it came to surveillance cameras. Kei's night vision was at least good enough to catch other shadows in motion. One in particular was a little less subtle than he thought he was. She hadn't gotten a good look yet, but hostile attention kept the hairs on the back of her neck raised. There was a fine line between battlefield hyperawareness and paranoia, and Kei liked to think she knew each side from the other.

Well, there was no reason to potentially get civilians involved in a superpower fight. She'd just have to miss her train.

Kei walked out of the train station and into the nearest dead end.

"Well?" Kei asked the seemingly empty air. She faced the back of the alley as though entirely unconcerned with her new stalker. "If it's a fight you want, let's get this over with."

This particular asshole didn't seem to be the monologuing type. There was a noise Kei would later describe as an artificial rasp, almost like cloth sliding over cloth. As she tilted her head back, coils of cloth whipped through the air like a living thing and surrounded her before she even turned around properly.

Not precisely the attack she'd expected. Unseen under her transformation technique, Kei made the single-handed seal she used as a mnemonic for her chakra scalpels before the bindings tightened and yanked her off her feet.

You could have avoided that.

Kei was in midair by the time she replied, Gluing myself to the ground doesn't seem to work out much outside of sword fights. Besides, she wanted to see where this went.

Perhaps against her attacker's expectations, Kei leaned into the tension on the cloth and ended up landing in a crouch even with her arms pinned to her stomach. She let the senbon fade out of existence and twisted her neck about as far as she could, trying to get a better look at whoever thought she was worth attacking. Or thought Genma was worth attacking, given her current disguise.

Her captor was still a little too backlit to properly see. Probably a guy, though.

"Toga Himiko, you're under arrest." And…that was a very familiar voice.

Kei looked down at her bindings. This was a familiar weapon, too. Kind of looked like that goddamn duct tape scarf she'd seen around a lot lately.

You've gotta be fucking kidding me. She groaned wordlessly in Genma's voice even as she turned and faced Aizawa-sensei, hardly straining against the capture weapon. "Really? Use your Quirk on me and see what happens."

I could—

No thanks.

Then Aizawa-sensei's eyes glinted with red light and his hair stood on end more than anybody Kei had ever seen who wasn't a Saiyan. When his arms weren't busted and if he got the jump on someone like this, she could kind of see how villains would suddenly find themselves on the losing end of a beating. She'd missed most of whatever had happened at the USJ on his end, at least before bleeding everywhere activated the seal.

And on Kei's end, nothing happened.

There was a brief "what the fuck" pause.

Then: "Gekkō?"

"I did say …" Kei muttered as she dropped Genma's form in a theatrical puff of smoke. In her masked form, she concluded in her own voice, "…that I was only using a fraction of my real power. To your face."

The cloth unbound itself all at once so fast that it cracked like a whip in the still air. Kei watched it pull back, thinking automatically of tape measures, and she flexed her armored arms as soon as she was free. At least she hadn't needed to destroy his stuff to get free. That would've been awkward.

More awkward.

If he'd been a villain, it probably would've been fatal for someone. Her curious mood had saved lives and the mission.

Kei didn't know if she was supposed to say something into the silence. Generally speaking, neither ninja nor wannabe-ninja were much for talking. Kei could, of course, but it wasn't like she needed Aizawa-sensei to dislike her more. There was no need to keep digging once already at the bottom of a deep hole.

"The train departing for Tatooin station. Train departing for Tatooin station."

Dammit. Now she'd have to wait another twenty minutes.

"This never happened," Aizawa-sensei said, once Kei finally decided it was probably fine to just fucking leave already. His scarf was coiled around his neck again, Kei was free, and the train was probably out of reach unless she made a scene.

"Agreed," she replied in an equally terse tone.

Kei departed the alley by scrabbling up the walls and over the nearest roof. It wasn't strictly necessary, but leaving like that made her feel better about what had just happened.

A little.

The next day, there was a police report that added the hero Native to Stain's casualty list.

And the one after that, he made his first move into a different city.

Musutafu.