"Worthless scum," a monstrous figure intoned from amidst the flames.

In the flickering light of the fire he'd just caused, much of his visible body was a dull, angry shade of pink covered with dark purple armor roughly equivalent to a codpiece, breastplate, and vambraces.

A sinister blue light lit up on his chest, revealing upon it a logo that read "SHIBUYA" and then the number 12 under it.

It should have been silly, Mitsuki thought. Like some guy in a rubber suit. But the eerie twitching Mitsuki could see from the multitude of feelers reaching out from either side of his clearly inhuman face… honestly made her kind of want to throw up.

"A real Kaijin…" Akagi breathed.

"Mew look like a giant bruise," Yumeria noted with cautious concern. "Is your boss meowstreating you?"

The Kaijin forcefully swept an arm across his chest to point at the human trio, generating enough wind pressure to spontaneously extinguish the electrical fire surrounding him. "How dare you profane my boss's honor, you sow?! In her name, you can expect a defamation suit from my lawyers!"

Yumeria stepped back in alarm, as an equally alarmed Mitsuki's jaw dropped.

"Meow?! But I didn't assert anything!"

"Isn't that kind of escalation extreme?!"

Akagi shook his head, stepping up between the Kaijin and his female cohorts. "It's no use talking with a guy like this; there's nothing left to do but fight!"

Intentions declared, Akagi repeated the transformation pose he'd devised on the spot back at Secret Base and aimed Aoi-tan feet-first at their enemy as Yumeria matched it with perfect unison while Mitsuki's hurried fumbling made her lag a second behind.

"Juu Mousou!"

"Juu… Mousou."

ZUKYUUUN!

A peppy jingle rang out from the MMZ as Aoi-tan's backpack arsenal folded and condensed around her, until it very much looked like a toy handgun.

A blindingly bright sigil combining the kanji for "Hi" and a stylized "A" appeared under each of the trio in their respective colors – red, blue, and yellow – before a spiral of sparkles rapidly flew up from it to cover them in color-coded latex armor.

The first thing Akiba Blue noticed after her transformation was the unmistakable warmth of sunlight on her armor, muted by faintly but unexpectedly cold air on the cloth parts of her suit.

Then she opened her eyes and was struck by the magnificent view from high on a literal mountain, snow capped peaks looming in the distance above and around her. A shockingly blue sky extended in every direction, marred only by the occasional wisps of cirrus clouds. "What… what the – is this even in Japan?!"

…oh, right. The old man said before that this stuff just happens in Sentai.

Turning in place to drink in the new landscape, Blue was surprised in spite of herself when she spotted the Kaijin and his Nazi stripper commander hanging out on a crag beneath, both of whom quickly caught sight of her as well.

"If we were Megaranger," Red declared with a thumb at himself, "I'd be Kenta!"

Turning to face the enemies below, he gave a one-two punch before entering a bastardized Seigan stance. "I'm Akiba Red!"

Oh crap, am I seriously gonna have to pose, too?!

Adopting a basic karate stance with sure footing and one hand forward to guard, Blue had never felt more cringe in her life. "Um… I'm Blue."

"I'm Yellow, so… Oh! I'm Akiba Yellow! Okay, so back in the summer after TGS, I was actually super super hyped for Dragonball Xenoverse and got a decent little boost in followers on social media when I ran some DB classic-style Bulma cosplay for about a week–"

"That's enough of that," the stripper commander spat from below, slashing an arm through the air in irritation at Yellow's energetic little rambling dance. "Anyone with functioning eyes can tell that just from looking at you all!"

Red immediately countered the enemy commander's interruption with one of his own! "SILENCE! It's posing time!"

"Oh, right, the pose!"

Yanked back onto the group wavelength, Yellow quickly whispered into Blue's ear instructions for the team pose she and Red had come up with while waiting for her outside the arcade – They spent their prep time working on a pose?!

"PAIN IS POWEERRRrrrrr….!"

– before Yellow then rushed back to Red's other side to save him from dragging out the impromptu team motto, and performed the team pose sequence in near-perfect synch with him while Blue was awkwardly left to follow along from watching them.

Right heel to knee height, clap my ankle, come out of a twirl with a right high knee raised to the left, right arm fully extended with the left raised back over my heart facing outward, close with a personal pose…

Red had adopted a shoulder-width stance and threw his arms out wide in a pose that someone more knowledgeable in Sentai history would have recognized as heavily inspired by the franchise's very first Red, Akaranger.

Yellow, meanwhile, had bent to the left towards Red with one hand on her knee and was waving cutely with her right hand.

"HIKONIN SENTAI–!"

I already did one stupid pose, do I really have to do another?! …I guess it's not like I have anywhere else to go if these losers get rid of me too.

Blue thought back to when she made a wrecking ball explode with her fist, and with a quiet sigh crouched with one foot behind her as a brace, lowering her center of gravity and prepared to meet any attack.

"AKIBARANGER!"

"...ger," Blue awkwardly muttered on the heels of Red and Yellow's passionate team introduction, thrusting one hand forward as if to catch an incoming punch.

And then the very instant the sound left her lips, a small technicolor explosion sounded off immediately behind the trio!

"Wh-what the?!"

"OMG, that's so cool!"

"Hey c'mon you two, what about our pose?!"

AkibaRed spared only a second for AkibaYellow's excited cheering at the plume of red, blue, and yellow dust spreading through the air before briefly checking on AkibaBlue's shaking form.

"When the heck did those pyrotechnics get behind us?! Who put them there?!"

"It's no big deal," Red explained with a thumbs-up and a hearty pat on the back. "Gratuitous cool explosions happen all the time in Sentai!"

Down on the crag below, the Nazi stripper coughed and hacked as she frantically tried to wave plumes of yellow dust out of her face. "Hikonin…? You mean to say you're not even real superheroes, just some bootleg knockoffs?!"

"Don't call us knockoffs," a visibly agitated and clearly defensive Red snapped as he turned to face her, the distance between them making him look every bit as small and insignificant physically as he was materially. "We're gonna be official someday! Anyway, just who are you guys supposed to be?!"

With a sinister smile, she produced a business card from her ample cleavage and casually flicked it to the Akibarangers, where in a complete defiance of all probability it miraculously found its way into Blue's grasp.

Blue, for her part, stared in confusion at the card as Red and Yellow closed in to read it over her shoulders. "...is it Bee?"

"It's B," the stripper clarified. "As in Blatantly Evil Guerilla Marketing Firm B!"

With an athletic high kick just to flaunt her ability to do so, the stripper lowered her boot onto a rock and then leaned forward, casually emphasizing her bust. "I'm the Chief of the Redevelopment Department – Malshiina!"

Next to the newly-named Malshiina, her Kaijin accomplice proudly strode forward. "And I'm the Chief Section Clerk: Shibuya Seitaka… Awadachisou…"

The Akibarangers and even Malshiina turned towards the humanoid abomination in surprise as he trailed off, apparently struggling to remember his own name in its entirety.

"Higenaga… Aburamushi!"

Blue turned to Red and asked, "Do they all have names that long?"

"Not really, it's a kid's show so names are usually pretty short and easy enough to remember…"

"Sows and bastards," Shibuya Seitaka Awadachisou Higenaga Aburamushi snapped, "the lot of you! For daring to slight my honor so, expect a series of lawsuits come morning!"

"Can he even do that? Nobody even said anything bad!"

"Meoooooow," Yellow wailed, "as long as he can prove any damage to his reputation, it doesn't matter if we say completely normal stuff even if it's true – the legal system will take his side anyway!"

Blue, still in many ways an innocent high schooler at heart, made a double take at the revelation. "That's really messed up!"

Red took the moment to stand between his comrades and their overly hostile enemy, brandishing his MMZ. "We'll just have to defeat you here and now, Shibuya Seitaka Awadachisou Higenaga Aburamushi! Until there's not enough of you left to file a suit!"

Malshiina answered the unofficial Sentai's challenge with a diabolical laugh, before raising an arm to the sky. "We'll just see about that – Wage Slaves! It's time for our hostile takeover!"

In response to the summons, almost half a dozen salarymen leapt into view from… possibly somewhere, Blue suspected.

Each of the so-called Wage Slaves were carrying improvised weapons that could have been quickly bought from a local hardware supply store, ranging from lengths of pipe, to a snow shovel, and even a piece of lumber. Though they lacked a common uniform, instead seeming to represent a variety of occupations, the Wage Slaves were united in appearance through a blank white plastic mask with a comb-over and eyeglasses drawn onto it… the soulless stare of which unnerved Blue more than she would have cared to admit.

Is that what it's like to be an adult?

"Overtime," one of them said as he – it? – menacingly twirled his shovel like a baton.

The one with the piece of lumber nodded, before the six Wage Slaves all tensed up at once and lunged with a collective battle cry that made up for its emotionlessness with sheer desperate volume. "Overtime!"

"Screw this," Blue swore in frustration that definitely wasn't only a cover for slowly-rising short-term panic and long-term existential dread. "I'm going for it!"

And before either Red or Yellow could hold her back, Blue had raced to the group of Wage Slaves!

The two remaining Akibarangers shared a brief horrified glance at each other, before startling themselves and chasing after her. "Crap, we've gotta back her up!"

"Meow, wait for us!"

In the time it took for Red and Yellow to make even three steps in their teammates' direction, the conflict was already becoming a scene of bloodless carnage… with Akiba Blue at the center of it, as she sent one Wage Slave flying with a kick to the face, ducked under a flying shovel, and elegantly roundhouse kicked another two across their chins, sending them spinning to the ground with anguished cries of "Overtime!"

"...she's kitty good," Yellow noted. "Think we'd do more than just slow her down?"

As the pair of standing Wage Slaves were beginning to realize that Blue knew how to fight, she grabbed one on the stomach and twisted, and practically turned him inside-out with a savage flip that saw multiple rotations and ended with the Wage Slave landing face-first with a sickening thud.

Awkwardly scratching his helmet's faceplate, Red couldn't help but agree. "Probably not…?"

Wasting no time as the shovel-bearing Wage Slave disarmed himself in fright, Blue hopped up and caught its head between her knees before immediately twisting back and driving its skull into the ground with a savage hurricanrana.

Staring at her own hands and at the field cleared of enemies around her, Blue couldn't help but laugh in exhilaration. "Everything comes so much more easily! Like I can do any move I want just by thinking about it!"

"Don't get cocky, Blue!"

With a platonic hand on Blue's shoulder, Red emphasized his warning with a solemn nod. "Mooks like them are just warmups compared to the likes of Shibuya Seitaka oh to hell with it, if he's gonna sue us anyway then we're just gonna call him Shibuya from now on!"

"Hmph! Approach me, then, if you've got the guts!"

Shibuya confidently thumped his chest, eager to tear his foes limb from limb and then sue their estates into oblivion for reputational damages… only to step back in fear as Red got the whole team to point their MMZs at him.

"Wh… guns are only supposed to be pointed at poor people!"

In unison, the trio of Akibarangers pulled back the hammers on their MMZs…

"Alright team, it's finisher time! MOE MAGNUM!"

LET'S GO~!

…and depressed their triggers as a massive fireball formed at the end of each barrel in time with an enthusiastic recorded cheer from Aoi-tan, before the massive shots raced towards Shibuya with lethal intent –

"OVERTIME!"

– only to smash in futility against the barely-conscious Wage Slaves that had thrown themselves into the ballistic path to protect their boss, with the ensuing explosion still sending Shibuya flying for several feet.

"What the hell is wrong with you lunatics?!"

Quickly scurrying back to his feet, smoke wafting off his body just from sheer convection, Shibuya looked at the fading patches of fire that used to be his subordinates and immediately dismissed them as irrelevant to the business at hand. "Using your finishing move that early's cheating!"

Blue paused, and looked up at Red. "...is it? Are we supposed to be fighting by rules or something?"

Red shrugged, not willing to admit that he'd mostly just been overeager to see if his Finishing Move idea would even work at all. "Ehhh…? Don't worry about it, Blue."

"And that's another thing," Blue all but snapped. "Stop calling me by my color. You can use my name…"

"Don't be a fool! After transforming, we refer to each other only by our color! Anyone who knows anything about Sentai knows that much!"

Yellow nodded enthusiastically in agreement with his point, and Blue made sure they both knew how much of an unnecessary nuisance this was by rolling her entire head along with her eyes.

"Ever since Fiveman, without a doubt…"

Quickly losing the adrenaline high she'd been enjoying seconds ago, Blue sharply turned Red back from his musings to face her and gave him an annoyed pointer finger. "I'm starting to get sick of your dumb trivia–"

"Meow, he's coming for us!"

The squabbling pair of Sentai quickly turned to Yellow and turned their gaze to see where she was pointing, just in time to watch Shibuya deck Red in the helmet with a leaping haymaker with such force that the sheer wind pressure from his fist knocked Blue and Yellow over like bowling pins.

As Yellow scurried back to her feet, she quickly looked in the direction of Shibuya's punch… and found that the side of the mountain had cratered around Red's groaning form, with a spiderweb of cracks spreading out from it in every direction. "What cat-astrophic power!"

Blue rolled onto her knee, surveyed the environmental damage, and when she turned back to look at Shibuya… no Kaijin was standing there, but a faux-polite navy-haired girl in a martial arts gi a few years younger than her.

Damn monsters…

Her hands clenching into fists in the mountain dirt, Blue shook her head and blinked away the apparition to see Shibuya sneering smugly at the two of them. "Tch… you two just don't know anything about fighting," she growled. "Follow my lead!"

Suiting words to action, the transformed teenager charged at Shibuya with a kick to the knee… only to have him turn and block it with his armored thigh as he promptly caught Yellow's fist in the same motion.

Blue immediately went to capitalize on his distraction with a punch to the throat, only to watch in dread as he effortlessly deflected her attack, spun her around, and grabbed her shoulder.

"Pathetic!"

As if being manhandled so easily weren't already humiliating enough, Shibuya saw fit at that moment to send Blue stumbling into the dirt with a literal boot to the ass and quickly gave Yellow the same for good measure.

"Oof!"

"Meowch!"

As Blue crawled back to her knees and Yellow pitifully rubbed at her aching butt, Red finally emerged from his crater and rushed to check on the pair. "Are you two okay?!"

"This guy hits like a hammer," Blue growled, remembering the way he'd driven his boot into her like a nail. It's like that same damn day all over again…!

Blue braced herself, preparing to weather the inevitable stream of berating insults that would come her way for being so handily knocked around in front of her peers –

"You two take a second and try to recover your strength; I'll see if I can't pay him one back for ya!"

"...eh?!"

Blue could only stare in slack-jawed shock as Red charged at Shibuya with a quick flurry of jabs, as if he thought he could make up for lack of skill with sheer volume. "Mess around with MY comrades, will you?!"

As the punches cascaded against his raised arms like mere raindrops on a skyscraper, Shibuya couldn't help but laugh in his contempt. "Comrades?! What lofty language for worthless, ugly parasites that stain the pride of society with your very existence!"

Realizing that speed wasn't working, Red tried changing to power and leveled a kick with everything he had – only for it to impact against Shibuya's waist with no effect at all and immediately be captured at the knee.

His face-feelers wriggling with sadistic joy, Shibuya yanked Red off his foot and made a show of spinning for a full ten rotations before finally flinging him head-first into a tree. "A stain that will now be wiped clean!"

As a clearly dizzy Red struggled and failed to stand again, Shibuya stalked towards him, taking the time to gleefully savor his foe's helplessness…

"Bash!"

…only to stop cold as a rock hit him in the back between his shoulders, followed with a series of repeated blows punctuated by the same desperate shout. "Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash!"

Faintly irritated, Shibuya turned on his heel to find Yellow standing behind him holding a rock the size of her chest over her head.

The two stared at each other for half a second as Yellow realized with dread that her attacks had had absolutely no effect, before she promptly panicked and tried bludgeoning him in the face with it. "BASH! BASH! BASH! BASH!"

Impatiently swatting the boulder out of her hands, Shibuya smacked Yellow to the ground and then kicked her into the air in front of him like she was a skateboard.

And before Yellow could even begin to start falling again, Shibuya punched her in the spine straight into the crater Red had made earlier, this time causing enough additional damage to shatter the rock around Yellow and send her tumbling through it.

"Hmph… useless woman. An insult even to scum–"

"YOU SHUT THE HELL UP!"

Shibuya turned towards the yell and was immediately met with a fist to the teeth and a knee to his armored groin… which as a Kaijin based on parasitic microorganisms, caused him no pain or discomfort whatsoever.

Sobbing in rage and frustration, Blue kept pounding Shibuya with everything she had, only for him to boredly punish the barrage with a leg sweep that sent her to the ground.

Casually hoisting Blue up by the ankle, Shibuya idly blinked when her suit's miniskirt flipped up to reveal a white bear print on its underwear. "Stupid child," he scoffed.

Blue couldn't win. Couldn't even hurt him.

Even in her helpless state, Blue kept swinging in futility, refusing to admit that she couldn't win.

Even if it was hopeless.

Even if trying to overcome this fiend that kept toying with her was as insane as fighting Japan itself.

"KNOW WHEN YOU'RE BEATEN!"

And with so much force that it seemed like a whole nation was behind it, Shibuya kicked Blue away like she was nothing more than a toy as she skipped across the ground and eventually ragdolled to a stop.

"Meow…"

Weakly climbing to her feet and leaning heavily on the piles of rock surrounding her, Yellow had officially run out of ideas and turned her attention from Shibuya back to Malshiina. "Are mew really okay with your subordinate being so rude to other women?!"

"Am I okay with…? Pffft… Ohohohohohoho!"

While Malshiina haughtily cackled behind her hand like a baroness, Red had almost managed to convince the world to stop spinning around him. Shakily getting to his feet, he took stock of the situation. We're all getting our butts handed to us… Blue and Yellow look like they barely have anything left to give… and though I tried inspiring Blue with nakama power, even that still wasn't enough! C'mon, think! What am I missing?! Could it really be that, after finally becoming a Super Sentai Red, my destiny is only to fail as a successor and get my team killed against the very first opponent?!

As soon as her laughing fit subsided, Malshiina leaned forward with a sneer. "You're my enemy, you idiots! What do I care if your feelings get hurt?!"

Ah, she'd had some momentary concerns when Akiba Blue had so easily taken out the Wage Slaves on her own, but they had been more than laid to rest with the overwhelming smackdown her subordinate had proceeded to lay on the entire trio afterward.

Indeed, Malshiina had been so drunk on the sadistic thrill of watching the Chief Clerk obliterate this lame uppity attempt at resistance that she'd barely noticed anything else!

…like how the air up on this mountain was so much colder than the nocturnal streets of Tokyo they'd all been in just minutes prior, for instance.

And no sooner had the thought even begun to register in Malshiina's diabolical mind than a freezing gust of wind blew down on the battlefield from higher up on the mountain, washing over her abundance of exposed skin and robbing her of any further heat.

"...and sp-p-peaking of feelings," she stammered out through chattering teeth, "I've no further purpose in b-being here! You, there! Shib-b-b-uya…" His name really is obnoxiously long, there's no way I could get through it all in this weather! "...Aburamushi! I'm leaving it up to you to finish off th-th-these otaku scum!"

Shibuya sagged in momentary disappointment at his boss not bothering to even attempt using his full name, but gave her a respectful salute as she stomped off, shivering so much it almost looked like a jig… neither of them catching the way that Akiba Red had perked up like a hound in response to its master's whistle.

Turning back to the battered Akibarangers, Shibuya cracked his knuckles with a chuckle at the savagery he could now unleash without the need to be considerate of a lady in attendance…

…only to pause when he realized he wasn't the only one laughing. "Delirious with terror, are you?"

Resting on one knee as he looked over Blue, with Yellow at their side, Red dramatically turned to barely glance at Shibuya. "...she said it!"

"Huh?"

"Meow?"

"What?"

With Malshiina nowhere to be seen, Red proudly stood up to his full height and flipped his scarf back over his shoulder where it belonged. "She said the line!"

Blue looked between Yellow and Red in complete bafflement as Shibuya began to advance, only to halt abruptly at the sight of Red holding his hand up.

"Listen close," he explained with a dramatic wave, "when the enemy commander in a Sentai show says something like, "I'll leave the rest to you"... that's the signal for when the enemy loses!"

To drive the statement home, Red punctuated his declaration by giving Shibuya a pointer finger so hot-blooded that, if it were recorded on video, would have spontaneously warped the footage to show up as a dramatic and hyper-stylized freeze-frame!

"Wha– no, that can't be!"

Blue turned to Yellow, who nodded energetically in confirmation.

For a brief moment, Shibuya looked away in doubt raised from Red's sheer overwhelming confidence… before shaking himself out of it and charging at him full-tilt. "Time to silence your wretched voices once and for all– hngh!"

Without being moved so much as a millimeter, Red stopped Shibuya in his tracks with a backhand, before bowling the Kaijin over with a clothesline from hell.

Tumbling end-over-end, Shibuya panted with terrified confusion as he got back to his feet – just in time for Red to send him flying again with a dropkick! "And that's for talking shit about my team!"

In the split-second before gravity took hold of his form, Shibuya let out an internal sigh of relief when he saw Red crouch to one knee – only for his proverbial stomach to sink like a lead balloon as Blue and Yellow immediately used Red's shoulders as a springboard to leap high in the air…

"DAMN RIGHT YOU HAVE CLAWS FOR CONCERN!"

"EAT THIS, YOU ASSHOLE PIECE OF SHIT!"

…and blast him with a unified diving kick that sent him crashing with a scream into the next mountain over!

Struggling to pry himself free from the crater he'd made, Shibuya wasn't having much better luck wrestling with the utter agony his world had become. "Im… impossible! WHERE ARE YOU GETTING ALL THIS POWER FROM?!"

"It's so weird," Blue admitted with a laugh as she dropped to an easy landing. "I can't really tell that anything's changed, but… I feel great now! Like there's no way we're gonna lose to this guy!"

Yellow, re-energized to full capacity, pulled her female teammate in for a one-armed hug. "Mew're starting to catch on meow; specs don't have anything to do with anything!"

"Yellow's right on the money," Red boasted with an audible grin. "There's no such thing as consistent power levels in Sentai!"

As Red's declaration echoed up and down across the entire mountain, Shibuya could only stare at the trio before a savage cough racked his body, and with uncomprehending horror he saw something wet, purple and sticky on his hand. "Is… is this blood? Do I have blood?"

"Alright you two, let's go! FINISHING MOVE!"

As the three Akibarangers closed ranks, for a brief second the entire world seemed to disappear until only a platform remained beneath them. Almost instantly, a walkway extended from their platform to where Shibuya lay half-submerged in his crater, blindingly white tubes across it at their end as a giant red kanji for "HISSATSU" emerged atop it in front of them.

"MOE MAGNUM!"

LET'S GO~!

Wasting no time, each of the Unofficial Sentai slid into a dramatic pose – yes, even Blue! – and took aim at Shibuya before opening fire in rapid succession as trio of massive red, blue, and yellow fireballs danced around each other along the walkway, quickly blasting straight through the Kaijin and into the mountain around him as a string of technicolor neon lights spiraled around the entire scene to make it that much snazzier!

"I… I failed! I'M SO SORRY! BOSSSSSSSS!"

As everything around them returned to normal, Red and Yellow dramatically turned their backs on the enemy to strike a cool pose with their MMZs over their chests, while Blue stared at the two in confusion. "Um, what are you two do–"

Shibuya promptly exploded with enough force to knock Blue on her butt and cause even the braced Red and Yellow to stagger in surprise.

"Well," Blue muttered as she stood back up and dusted herself off. "I guess that's the end of that. Now how do we get out of–"

"Not so fast," Red warned her. "After the Kaijin gets defeated, they always come back to life as a giant! And when they do, we beat the crap out of them again with a combining super robot!"

"Huh? But, then, what's the point of fighting him on foot like we did if we have a mecha?!"

With utmost patience, Red clapped his neophyte teammate on the shoulder. "This process, too, is common Sentai knowledge."

Before Blue could attempt to question the matter any further, Red's MMZ beeped with an incoming transmission from Hiroyo. Reconfiguring it back from its gun form into Aoi-tan again, Red listened with glee for the secrets of their super robot that were about to be bestowed to him…

"Actually, we don't have anything like that right now."

"What?! But what are we gonna do if he comes back as a giant?!"

The three Sentai darted their gazes about the area, warily watching everything around them as their paranoia quickly ratcheted up to maximum…

Five minutes passed, and nothing had happened.

No revived giant Kaijin.

"...look," Blue muttered with a sigh, "if he's actually gonna show up then I guess that's one thing – but Yellow and I have school in the morning!"

Gesturing to the empty wilderness all around them for emphasis, she snapped, "We can't just hang around all night! …or day, whatever! Where the heck are we, anyway?!"

Yellow awkwardly paused for a moment as if debating on how she might respond to that, before Red deflated with a heavy sigh of his own. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Professor," he asked into the MMZ, "is there any kind of… I don't know, emergency rapid mobilization you can use for us if he does come back?"

"Hm… you seem pretty motivated," Hiroyo noted, sounding almost impressed. "Alright, I'll make it a priority to devise something like that. In the meantime, it seems like you've won your first battle! You should all make sure and come back to Secret Base sometime next week; we'll celebrate!"

With that, everything around the trio faded into blinding white light, before they found themselves back in front of the hostess arcade. The Lara Croft cosplayer came out and thanked them for saving her workplace, but Nobuo Akagi was too distracted by the strange encounter they'd just survived to handle much more than basic social niceties.

"I still can't believe we're fighting an enemy that defies common Sentai knowledge," he muttered into the night once everyone had gone their separate ways. "Could it really be that we're the first un-Super Sentai since JAKQ?"

While Nobuo was reflecting on the highly unusual status of leading a Sentai team without a giant robot for the first time in the franchise since the early 1970s, Hiroyo Hakase was in her office at Secret Base drawing up the basic principles for a new update patch to the Moe Moe Z-cunes that would suit her new Red's request. "I hope Kobe wasn't too upset about being abruptly isolated from the team earlier today; if I had the budget for it, I'd put that boy on retainer in a heartbeat…"

As her fingers danced a furious tango across the keyboard, a secondary monitor to the side of Hiroyo's main screen displayed smartphone video footage that had been uploaded to the internet. On it, Nobuo, Yumeria, and Mitsuki could all be seen shadow-boxing across the street from a hostess arcade as a bitter-looking man wearing a toolbelt was dragged out from the building in handcuffs by furious police officers…