Kyouya is very pissed off that the pineapple just ran away like that. He's been searching for the other teenager for weeks now and can't find him anywhere.

Reborn won't help search, even though Kyouya knows Reborn can find Mukuro, because apparently Mukuro was supposed to be Tsuna's opponent and Kyouya ruined some plan the hitman wrote up.

"I think I'm going to put him into Vendicare," Reborn muses, sitting across the table with a plate of biscuits between them. "It'll give Vongola a bit more leverage."

"What is Vendicare?" Kyouya asks, slowly piecing together the gun Reborn took apart for him.

"It's a prison, but like all prisons these days, it's privately run. By a famiglia called the Vindice." Reborn takes a piece out of Kyouya's hand and replaces it with the correct one. "Odd bunch. They used to follow me around a lot when I was younger, kept asking if any strange men had tried to lure me away."

"Huh," Kyouya says slowly, wiping his hands of oil on the towel underneath the gun before reaching for the next piece. "Young as in baby or…"

"Before the curse," Reborn says. "I think so at least, it's been a long time. I met them a few weeks ago actually, about the Mukuro issue, and they seemed very panicked at seeing my adult form again..."

Kyouya clicks the magazine into place. "Done!"

Reborn is staring off into the distance. "I...need to go check on something."

Kyouya frowns. "No, I have you for the whole day."

"Change of plans," Reborn mutters. "I'll call over someone for you to play with."


[You have been invited to the Hunt. Do you accept?

Yes No]

"Yes...?" Dino drags out, incredibly confused but used to Reborn's weirdness enough that he doesn't question it aloud.

[Friendly fire has been switched off. Attacks from Hunt participants can now cause permanent damage.]

"What-?" Dino barely manages to get out before the screen fades and he's looking straight at a charging Kyouya.


"Tsuna!" Takeshi calls out as he jogs over to the school gates. "Hey, you look a little rumpled today."

Tsuna blinks slowly, clearly dazed. He looks down at himself. He'd mismatched the buttons to the holes, nothing is tucked in, his shoelaces are untied and his tie is just looped around his neck a couple of times like a scarf.

"Oh," Tsuna says shortly. "Look, Takeshi, I'm seeing in like three frames a second right now so if we could not do this until the slideshow is over, that'd be great."

Takeshi laughs and puts a hand to Tsuna's forehead. "Are you sick?"

Tsuna shakes his head. "No, just. Reborn's other student came over and Reborn fucked off somewhere and Kyouya wanted to do a Patrol…"

"I'm glad I skipped that one," Takeshi admits because he had a baseball game on. "How did Ryohei like it?"

"He was just very loud in general, like normal," Tsuna sighs. "Plus, after the Patrol, I got too deep into the meta of Kyouya's gaming ability. Didn't sleep at all last night."

Tsuna sighs again, even heavier. "I don't even have access to Kyouya half the time so all I've got is theories. I don't know how I'm going to ask Kyouya to test things."

"We can just ask him after class," Takeshi offers, slinging an arm around Tsuna's shoulders and leading him off. "You can rest for a bit, and I'll cover you if you want to sleep in class as well."

Tsuna mumbles about the excess time wasted on finishing moves but obediently follows.


"Clearly you do level up or digivolve or whatever," Tsuna says, sitting on the floor of Kyouya's DC office with the rest of his odd group, only Kyouya sitting on the couch. "But it seems slow. I'm trying to figure out how long this game lasts because it seems like a storyline thing judging by the abilities you're still slowly getting. So not Uno, but is it like is it Catan or Talisman?"

"How long does Talisman take?" Dino asks.

"Oh, maybe two to three," Takeshi answers instead.

"Hours?"

"Days. Perhaps 5."

Kyouya doesn't understand but the herbivore is clearly looking for new 'evolution' and so he shows the [Monster] skill.

"Oh," Tsuna deadpans. "So it's like if you crit on a 17 to 20."

Kyouya blinks.

"I hate that ability already, it's shit."

Hayato huffs out a laugh. "The thing I hate the most about the cheat is the background music, like it could come in handy as an early warning system but all I can hear is this asshole." Hayato gestures at Kyouya.

Kyouya vaguely remembers that. He calls up a screen like everyone else in the room and they all manage to find the background music option at around the same time.

"Extreme," Ryohei whispers, eyes widening as threatening piano music begins playing.

Takeshi starts grooving along. "Does anyone else have a theme song?"

"Reborn has a mix of jazz and blues," Hayato says. "But when he starts putting out killing intent, it turns into demonic whispers overlayed on top of each other."

"Great," Dino declares sarcastically. "I love that."

Kyouya turns off his background music in time to clearly hear the minor explosion off in the distance.

Ryohei begins to stand up with an excited shout about fireworks and rushes over to the window.

Tsuna looks over in that general direction rather warily. "That's either something Reborn just did or not something I want to get involved in either way," he explains. "Let's just leave it until alone until it inevitably comes back to kill us all and it's too late to stop it."

Kyouya calls for a pompadour and one obediently steps into the room, having been waiting outside.

"Check where the explosion came from, and tell me if you see the hitman," Kyouya orders.

"Yes, boss. Love you, boss," the DC drawls before ducking away again.


The sound of explosions and falling buildings continues for a while but calms down eventually and the military finally wrestle control of the situation. It totals up to just under sixty people killed, with slightly over twenty-nine million in structural damage.

Kyouya wakes in the middle of the night to seven exhausted but victorious babies tumbling in through his front door.

A few days later, someone named Kawahira visits along with a bandaged baby, both of them looking a little bit banged up. They all disappear into the backyard and come back looking not happy but perhaps relieved.

"What was that about?" Kyouya asks Fon after the two strangers leave.

Skull groans. "That was so easy to fix, like what the fuck. Literally took Verde like three hours to find and make a solution. He already had half the shit lying around!"

Mammon tsks. "This is what happens when people don't share relevant information with me. It took me decades to find scraps and these zombie dicks had all the answers-!"

Fon starts ushering people back to the room the babies have piled themselves into. "Rest for now, we can go back and harass them more later when we're at peak strength."