Hiro darted home and was delighted to see the house lights above the café extinguished. It meant that Aunt Cass was still asleep and he could get in unnoticed. He stepped up to the door of the café and carefully unlocked it with his key, making sure not to cause too much noise at the risk of waking Cass and having to face his truancy head-on. The door opened smoothly and quietly, allowing him to slip in without so much as a squeak from neither the door nor his sneakers. There was no way he'd get in trouble this time around.

It did, however, mean that he lost a few good boy points with her for not coming downstairs for dinner. He could earn them back, though, if he was actually a good nephew and not some vigilante chasing down a worm trail using a giant nurse android made into a high flying heroic spectacle. Come to think of it, Hiro couldn't justify one reason that he'd earn good boy points back for stuff like this except for Cass's genuine generosity.

"It's almost one in the morning," Cass spoke from behind Hiro and forced him to freeze in his place. She was sitting behind the counter of the café, eating her own pastries to pass the time when Hiro reached the stairs and entered her field of view while remaining clear out of his own. Hiro winced at himself. He definitely wasn't going to earn back those good boy points.

"Aunt Cass, I was just…" Hiro took a breath and held it for a moment. Just what? Investigating his friend's death? Exploring the world of gooey slithery things?

Cass pinched the bridge of her nose. Hiro noticed that he tended to do it, too. He probably picked it up from Cass. "Hiro, if we have to deal with the bot fighting thing again…"

"No, Aunt Cass," he shook his head. "No, I'm out of bot fighting for good."

"Then where were you all this time?" Cass stood and knelt to Hiro's height, her eyes pleading in the darkness.

Hiro blinked a few times while he thought of an answer that wouldn't erupt in more deduction of his standing with his aunt. "I was with GoGo."

Cass bit her lip and swallowed. GoGo was mature. Protective. If he was with her, he was safe. But that didn't always hold true, what with everything she'd seen on the news about supposed heroes and the freakish events they seemed to bring with them. Kreitech was devastation with a luckily low number of casualties. The events of the past month, however, have killed people where she, like many other San Fransokyans, believed the professionals could do a better job. The police department, the fire department, and, at times, the hospital were all being bypassed in a sprint to be heroic. Luck wasn't heroic to Cass, though.

"Next time," Cass sighed as she crossed her arms, "at least have her walk you home. It's dark and dangerous this late. I don't want you getting hurt."

"I know," Hiro nodded.

Cass started up the stairs ahead of him and stopped mid-stride, looking down to him while gripping onto the handrail, as if she'd seen the ghosts of her past dance in front of her eyes. Of course, the realization that the wonderful work that Tadashi did at being Hiro's parent would no longer be a crutch upon which she knew she could rely. Tadashi was gone. He'd been gone for a little while but it still never quite settled with her.

"You're my only family left," Cass whispered.

Hiro's brows pinched at the center of his forehead, a pit growing in his chest. He knew when Cass was about to cry. It was something in her voice, a break of pace and breath where her words barely escaped the tip of her tongue and fluttered lifelessly down to the floorboards. Hiro took the bottom step of the stairs and wrapped his arms around her waist to pull her into a soft hug of reassurance. The kind of hug she'd give him. She deserved to feel that kind of comfort.

"I know…"

Wasabi curled his lips back into a grimace as he swabbed samples of the fluid nastiness that coated the sidewalk enough to freeze over in winter. The night was starting to turn into early morning and people started roaming towards their places of business, opening for the day or stopping to get breakfast beforehand. The benefit of the morning, however, was that stepping deeper into the alleyway to remain out of sight and inconspicuous met more light entering the dark crevice which was a small comfort for the man.

He palmed a phial and placed the cotton swab inside, sure to coat the inside of the glass with the transparent goo. Once he was satisfied with the sample – and thoroughly disgusted with the scene – he corked the tube with a rubber stopper and stood, brushing his knees free of dust on the way up. As light started to enter the alleyway, more of the slime was visible than from earlier that night. Based on the agility that the creature possessed in GoGo's description of her fight, Wasabi thought it was much smaller than the slime trail revealed to him, now.

The goo's reflection of light glimmered on the walls from the ground to the rooftops of the buildings around him. GoGo had said that it seemed to just keep moving, no matter how much she cut into it. There were tons of animals that did that kind of thing. Lizards could remove and regrow whole limbs with ease, as could an octopus. However, in his admittedly limited experience with scale-y/slime-y creatures that can regenerate parts of their body, Wasabi knew that those severed limbs couldn't move on their own once they were separated. Something made the creature that GoGo fought different from them.

Worms.

Wasabi shivered and shuddered as the word, alone, brought slippery images of filthy dirt riddled with writhing red specimens of pure grossness. They were a whole different kind of disturbing thing spawned by the animal planet. The stuff of nightmares. But GoGo called them worms. What makes them any different, for say, from other worms in the fact that they could be cut in half and both sides would wiggle and creep him out?

But worms capable of killing someone like this?

Wasabi looked to the concrete between his feet for a long while. What were the last words he said to Fred? There were so many words thrown around in that final fight of theirs. So many insults. It made Wasabi sick with himself for not being a better friend and trying to help
Fred instead of simply giving up and leaving. There was so little that had to be done to prevent this from happening to him. Anything. Even a text of apology could have spurned on a totally different universe where Fred was here and well and… alive.

He turned around and looked at the body. It hadn't moved since they looked at it hours ago and, in the new light, Wasabi saw much more than he saw on Baymax's night vision enhanced scans. GoGo probably saw it, too. All the blood that showed up as just dark spots on the pictures had dried into their places in Fred's suit. Wasabi looked at where the head was supposed to be. A maroon mess of flesh stretched out from Fred's thin neck. Wasabi actually wished there was something there. A head with a face with eyes to close.

Looking at the suit, it had taken some serious damage during the fight. The arms were heavily scorched and the claw like fingers were melted shut. Color started to fade on the suit's torso and the colorful paint elsewhere was cracking. God knew how long he had been there before GoGo found him. Seconds? Days? A month? Wasabi reached for the suit's torso and jumped backwards with a squeal as a static shock jolted his fingertips. He had heard somewhere that bodies store up energy like that, since there is no way for it to be released. Looking at his fingers, Wasabi felt nothing but regret.

"I'm sorry, Freddie."

Wasabi took a deep breath and looked up to the rooftops again, rolling up his sleeves and revealing the green arm bucklers that housed his plasma induced beam blades. He crossed his arms and rested his hand on the release levers that were tight to his wrists. With a fast motion, Wasabi threw the switches and the green light of the blades illuminated the alleyway, stretching outward from his hands and arching together at a point.

He took a step towards one wall and jumped up to it, stabbing the blade into the wall with a hum and pushing away from the wall to plant the other blade in the building opposite of him. Like this, he jumped from wall to wall to wall until he was at the terrace of one of the buildings. The light started to shine into his eyes and he carefully clicked the visor attached to his headband down to cut the glare.

As he climbed onto the roof of the structure, Wasabi's eyes widened in awe and fright. The goo trail that lead from the street didn't just climb up the walls with the creature, but had to have followed it as it moved from rooftop to rooftop, splattering its glistening translucence onto every building all the way out to the river and, if Wasabi's eyes didn't play tricks on him, onto the San Fransokyo bridge.

Wasabi flicked the blades off with his thighs and reached for his phone, quickly searching the addresses of the stranger events that occurred in the last two weeks. The peculiar drowning on Hanada. The car crashes that plagued Kumiko street and Viro circle. The fire on south Minami. Everything was within sight of the rooftop Wasabi stood upon and each one had sticky shimmers radiating the morning sun's glow.

He jumped when his phone started to vibrate in his hands and GoGo's face appeared on the screen. He tapped the little green call symbol and hold the phone up to his ear.

"GoGo?" Wasabi heaved a deep breath. "We have a much bigger problem than we thought."