Nighteye Agency, Tokyo, Japan
The phone was ringing before Mirai even entered his agency.
That, in itself, was rather odd. Officially, there was still an hour before his agency was set to open its doors. Unofficially, the old landline phone taking up space on the reception desk was more of a prop than anything. Another piece to sell the image he'd cultivated as a regular salaryman in the world of investigative heroics he'd pushed himself towards. He couldn't even remember the last time the pre-Quirk relic had even made a noise.
It hadn't even picked a good day for it, considering the temperature had spiked even higher than meteorologists had been anticipating.
He wasn't alone in his confusion. Ever the diligent worker, Juzo stood behind the desk, clicking his mandibles quietly. Mirai had worked with him long enough to know that his centipede-themed sidekick was absolutely baffled.
Cautiously, as one would a bomb, Juzo lifted the receiver. The shrill ringing stopped, replaced after a moment by the sound of laboured breathing. A far cry from the telemarketers Mirai had been expecting, as he gestured for Juzo to hand him the phone.
"Hello?"
The breathing spiked. Beneath it, the tinny hum of an engine rumbled through the small speaker.
"Is this Sir Nighteye?"
Eyebrows that were typically dour furrowed even further. Mirai didn't recognise the speaker, and from a small glance towards where Juzo had picked up another landline to silently listen in, he didn't either.
That eliminated any of their usual informants, and the opening of the conversation implied that it wasn't a law enforcement officer either. At least, not one that was calling with the permission of their department.
"Yes, can I ask who is speaking?"
"Is this line secure?"
Ah, it was going to be one of those phone calls. The sort of phone call that was going to ruin his day, his week, and quite possibly his month. The last time it had been one of those calls, it was half a year of dismantling a human trafficking ring. The time before that, All Might had lost his stomach.
Whatever this was, Foresight had yet to see fit to warn him. Hopefully whatever it would have shown him, if anything, avoided a tragedy.
"Of course it is. Now speak."
Another deep, shuddering breath. Whoever was on the other side of the phone, they sounded young. Possibly younger than his intern.
"Alright, look, I'm a member of the Shie Hassakai, but I want out."
The ice that settled in Mirai's veins at that moment felt somewhat similar to when he'd first seen All Might's wounds, perpetuated by a man that was perhaps almost as dangerous as his old mentor's archnemesis had been.
Kai Chisaki. Overhaul. The power to reconfigure reality at a touch. A Quirk like that could have brought humanity to a brand new era of innovation in an untold amount of manners. Instead, it was being lorded in the sewers of humanity for creating drugs and indoctrinating those that society had failed.
If Kai Chisaki's quirk was the most dangerous part of him, then his charisma was a close second. Everyone who worked close enough with the man to even know his organisation's name were zealots for his cause. Even for Mirai's investigation, in its infancy as it were, the behaviour he'd discovered was… disturbing.
Which only raised the question of what was yet to be discovered, if it would drive even those Chisaki preyed on away.
It was one of those calls, alright.
The plastic phone in Mirai's hand creaked ominously. The only thing that stopped his fingers from shredding through it was a light on his reception computer blinking to life. A new email, which he was already navigating to by the time his suspicious new source was speaking again.
"These fuckers are crazy. I know your agency has been investigating us, so I'm sending through everything I've managed to get together on 'em. Heroes, cops, the fucking military, I don't care, but someone needs to bring these whackjobs in."
The files were immense. Larger than what the email provider typically allowed at once. That was a question that would have to come later, and Mirai set about decrypting them. Amateurish work, with obvious flaws but no subtle ones. Professional but trying to appear less skilled? Had he perhaps been supposed to pick up on the quality? Was it a clever ruse or a simple error?
Mirai truly did hate these calls.
"If this is a joke, it is not funny. Everything I've found on your group suggests reverence for your boss. Why betray him?"
The first file came through clean. While the servers of his office combed the others, Mirai let the contents of that one fill his screen. The notes scattered around the document were small; some looked handwritten while others were typed, all gravitating around a formula that Mirai likely wouldn't have been able to identify, if he wasn't intimately familiar with what he was looking at.
Trigger. He'd been given the development notes on Trigger from the source, except there seemed to be… more of it. Components that had been missing from the results his own labs had managed to extract from users and street level raids. Several of the changes didn't even make sense, as though elements themselves had been ripped apart in ways that all of Mirai's expertise in chemistry could only construe as impossible. To do that would require equipment that was still in its theoretical stage of development…
Or a Quirk that could manipulate down to the atomic level.
"Fuck." Mirai muttered under his breath, switching to English for the word. Everything he learned had come from All Might, after all.
For a moment, he could have sworn he heard a snort come through the phone. By the time he was paying it proper attention, however, the noise and any evidence of it had disappeared.
"Look, there's this kid here. Her name's Eri, Chisaki says she's his. The stuff they're doing to her… it's in the files. Just hurry, we're not gonna be at that address much longer."
The engine, that low humming that had accompanied the phone call, came to an abrupt stop. Voices, two of them, could be heard in the distance, and before Mirai could interject, could find a way to keep the phone line from cutting out, the child on the other end breathed one final sentence to him.
"For fuck sakes, just hurry."
"Wait-!" A dial tone was Mirai's only response. Suppressing his initial instinct to groan, he pressed the phone back into its cradle, pushing it to the side to give himself more room to work. The second file had been decrypted, and if the first one had been large, this one was simply gargantuan.
'Eri', the title said. The name of the child the caller had mentioned. Trepidation curling through his stomach, Mirai opened the file, selecting the first thing in the long list that greeted him. Some were more pictures documents, some contained only text, but most of them were videos.
He clicked the first one.
This… this was on par with seeing All Might after his battle with All for One.
No, All Might had been a hero for decades. He'd known the danger, and deep down, Mirai had too.
This was worse.
"Hey Sir! What do you get when you cross a- whoa!"
Ah, Kaoruko, his second sidekick. Fifty-five minutes early and with a brand new joke to tell. It was a shame that he didn't have the time to enjoy it. Mirai barely spared her a glance, his fingers a blur on his keyboard as the video finished playing out.
"Code Limited Edition." He said, and both his sidekicks froze. For all of a second before they were suddenly a flurry of activity. Juzo, in the middle of cataloguing the visible differences between the regular Trigger formula and the one that had been emailed to them, leapt to his feet. Within a heartbeat, his phone was in his hand, opening a line of communication to every hero agency in the area. Bubble Girl was already sprinting back through the front doors, rushing back to where they'd all parked their cars. It was unfortunate, but she would have to chauffeur Mirio for this one, seeing as he was supposed to be on his break.
Code Limited Edition. The worst of the worst case scenario. Get all hands on deck while Sir Nighteye fast tracked a warrant. Get police and hero presence like it was the beginning of the end. Like that time where Mirai lost the online bidding war for that pristine All Might Classic 5th anniversary edition with Push to Play American National Anthem figurine, except less a nerd being dramatic and more actual emergency.
Whoever this mystery caller was, they may have just started a war in the Roppongi district.
But how could Mirai call himself a hero if he wasn't willing to go to war to save a little girl?
"And so the final piece falls into place."
I pulled the phone away from my ear, taking a chunk of hair with it. Apparently they'd managed to combine while I was making the effort to sound off balance and scared. Shaking the phone out of habit didn't dislodge it, so eventually I settled for prying it off with my fingers. Even after weeks I still wasn't very used to having a Quirk, especially one this invasive for everyday life.
Hopefully soon enough it wouldn't be an issue.
Once I was convinced all the hair had been removed from the phone, I let it drop carelessly to the ground. The one Mineta had owned was probably a puddle of tar in what used to be his house. This one, an older model that still needed to be flipped open, existed purely to draw just the right amount of attention to what we were about to do.
The same couldn't be said for the clump of hair. Eventually, I ended up stuffing it in my coat's pocket, wanting nothing more than to just discard it away with the phone. Leaving evidence that obvious behind would sully the image I was trying to build for myself, though. It would be hard to be dead when your living genetic material was showing up after you'd been cremated.
"We done here?"
I turned around, meeting the masked face of my driver. His clone was busy sorting through the trunk of the car, numerous pieces of equipment painting an elaborate picture on the car's roof. Numerous canisters of pink gas rattled around a few insulated masks, some knives, and a very sharp shovel. You know it's a good plan when you need to sharpen your shovel for it.
"Everything's in place. We'll be setting off in…" I pulled my third phone out of another pocket. This coat really was a lifesaver; it was surprisingly difficult to find something with an abundance of pockets in the children's section, "two minutes and forty-five seconds."
My driver ("Ey, call me Jin!") shot me a thumbs up as I walked around the car, towards the trunk. Jin's clone seemed to be having some trouble unpacking the bazooka. I still hoped from the bottom of my heart that we wouldn't need it, but if Jin wanted to spend some of his paycheck in advance, that wasn't any of my business. At least having a rocket launcher in my corner was doing wonders for cancelling out any of the anxiety I'd been feeling going into this.
Him giggling uncontrollably when I asked him where he even got it from let that anxiety creep back in, but at least he was on my side here.
Ducking carefully under the clone's fumbling attempts to load the damn thing, I ran my hand along the bottom of the trunk. The alleyway we'd holed up in wasn't privy to much of the rising sun, but no matter how deliberate that might have been, it didn't make it any easier to see in the low light. A low profile would be essential, however, seeing as we were literally within eyesight of a compound that housed the Shie Hassakai faction of the Yakuza.
After a moment of searching, I found what I'd been looking for. A small box that had been safely tucked away in the back corner. Pulling it out, I once again ducked as the clone swung the bazooka around to test his aim, hurrying out of the splash zone even as I tore the box open.
Inside were two earbuds. One for myself and one for my driver. His clone had complained briefly about being treated like a second class citizen, seeing as we hadn't gotten one for him, but he was easy enough to pacify when I told him he could play with the armada we'd gotten just in case Chisaki was hiding a tank.
After all the preparation I went through to get here, I wasn't taking any chances.
Tossing one to Jin, I pushed the other one up to my ear, looping the attached cable around the helix of it and planting the other end into my sticky hair. It was probably obvious to anyone looking that I was completely new to wearing these things, but I probably couldn't look sillier if I tried normally anyway.
"This is Vitaceae. Are we good to go?"
After a moment, the earbud crackled to life. Thankfully it did so quietly. So quietly that even through the distraction, I could hear the stealth drone we'd attached a camera to take off from the mouth of the alley.
"La Brava here. Gentle is in position. Target is following the schedule as predicted. All vents are open and they still haven't noticed their systems for detecting foreign intoxicants is down. We can launch in 30 seconds."
Man it was nice to have someone around who knew what they were doing.
"Good. Authorities should be on their way. Average response time to this part of town is eleven minutes, so I'm giving us eight to get in and out. No fucking around, clear?"
"Clear."
"But of course."
"Good. Twice, grab the shovel." This was it. Dead or alive, I was doing this. I took a step forward, and even with my diminutive weight, I still managed to crush the phone I'd discarded under my boot. "Gentle, deploy it. La Brava, circulate it."
The rasp of the shovel against the hood of the car sent shivers up my spine. It may as well have been the tolling bell for the Shie Hassakai.
"Time to steal us a Quirk… and a kid."
