Michael led the way back to the sitting room.
Not for the first time, Momo considered his actions, her eyes darting towards every doorway while her mind worked through the mystery of the man in front of her. All five of their attackers had been encased in thick stone, all of which was being dragged effortlessly along the corridor with one of his hands. The other was resting on the wall as they walked, and she had the sneaking suspicion that hand had something to do with the floor repairing all the damage that had been done to itself as soon as they walked past it.
He didn't second guess himself, or wait around to see if she was following. If there was concern there, it was invisible, which she found herself appreciating far more than the idea of him fretting over her. His gait was steady, setting an example that she tried her best to follow, even with the occasional shuddering step whenever a noise she didn't immediately recognise echoed from somewhere else on the estate.
Were their families alright? What about the staff that lived with them, or the families that they had in the servants' wings? How many were being killed in a bid for her Quirk?
How many were dying for her?
Despite her gaze bouncing across the corridor, she'd stopped being able to see it at some point. Her hands felt clammy, drenched in sweat and grime from the kitchen floor despite the house being at a pleasant temperature. She tried to take a breath, her lungs suddenly burning, and the anxiety was immediate once she realised that she couldn't get any air around the lump that had grown in her throat.
You are panicking, her brain was right, it almost always was, but that didn't mean her body would always listen. Take a breath, ground yourself. Michael is here. You are safe.
Air whistled through her teeth in a shrill whistle. None of the oxygen reached her lungs. One of the suited men, the faceless ones that had done nothing but stand around and be felled by her in one swift moment, grunted out a chuckle at whatever expression had overtaken her face.
Suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder, and she reacted.
The lipids in her fist flashed as she swung a wild haymaker, completely at odds with the methodical and calculated style she'd been teaching herself. Brass knuckles grew from her skin, fashioning themselves into blunted dragon claws along her fingers and on a collision course with whatever assailant had grabbed her.
She'd be missing some skin after this, and whoever was on the other side would need to reset their nose, but she was finding it difficult to care all that much.
The hand on her shoulder didn't even flinch as the pro hero inspired weapon slammed directly into the face of its owner. The knot in her chest loosened a little with the impact, some of the pain shifting from her throat to her arm and taking with it enough of the obstruction to let a desperate gasp of air through.
"...Ow." Michael's voice came out flatter than his face now was. The warmth that was radiating from his hand felt like slush compared to the conflagration that was now spreading across her cheeks and down her neck. The brass knuckles were slick with his blood as they slipped from her fingers.
Despite the mortification, her chest felt fine. None of the breaths she was heaving had to fight to get down to her lungs. The dread that had been building up within her mind and weighing her shoulders down had disappeared with a single sweep of her arm.
Or perhaps, with a single touch of his hand.
"You have one hell of a right hook, you know that?" If Michael was in pain, he was doing a fantastic job of hiding the fact. His free hand pinched the bridge of his squashed nose, and with a shimmer of rising heat, his face was back in its perfect order. Not even the blood that had been pooling in his mouth had been left behind, swept away with the brush of a hand.
"You used your Quirk on me."
"Yes, I did." The blatant confirmation should have shocked her, but it didn't. If there was anything she'd learned during the fiasco this day was turning out to be, it was that Michael Wise did not play coy. Confronted with a blatant accusation of breaking the law and his only response was 'yes', all for the sake of regaining her lost comfort.
He'd already turned away from her before she could decide whether she wanted to attempt to keep the conversation going. Momo watched as he walked over to the group of trapped kidnappers, trying to not take too much vindictive glee as the man who had laughed over her predicament was suddenly faced with a hand that could have encased his entire face and crushed it like paper. If Michael did have a direct link to her mind, then he was very pointedly ignoring that intrusive thought as he grabbed something from the man's ear between his thumb and forefinger, bringing it out into the light for all to see.
It was his earpiece. Or at least, an earpiece. Momo didn't want to consider the alternate possibilities if it wasn't actually his.
"I have a little friend right now, sweeping through every single one of these in the area and pulling every tiny bit of detail she can from their recordings. If what she finds isn't up to my standard…"
The effort he'd put into being quiet was half-hearted at best, and Momo could certainly hear everything he'd said, seeing as she'd been doing everything in her power, short of using her Quirk, to hear what was being said. There was no effort in what he did next, however, as the earpiece went from between his fingers to resting in his palm.
The sleeve of his suit jacket actually ripped open, the muscles in his forearm proving too much for the tight material as his hand closed into a fist and he squeezed.
The squeak that left Momo's mouth unbidden was thankfully hidden beneath the wrenching of metal, the popping of destroyed electronics, and the louder, much more embarrassing shriek that the man who'd held a gun to her face let out.
The mangled scrap that was left behind on his palm after he relaxed his fingers was unrecognisable. At least until that familiar haze of heat started to rise from his skin, and it stitched itself back together into a pristine earpiece.
"...You'll be the first one I ask."
Threat finished, Michael slid the earpiece into his pocket, his sleeve stitching itself back together in the process. With one hand, he hefted the huge stone and all five people encased into it onto his shoulder, ignoring the groans of pain and protest as it shrunk down to a point that must have been uncomfortable for the people trapped within.
The good person within Momo wanted to protest the treatment, in spite of past actions, and negotiate something less torturous. The slightly less virtuous, yet still good person rationed that this treatment was the least of their reparations due.
Then the sensible person within Momo pointed out that Michael was the only one who could change what was happening to them, and he seemed like a vindictive little shit who didn't care that he was in her house, so what power did she have, really?
Her steps felt a little lighter as she followed behind the concentrated ball of death and misery, and the stone of his back, all the way to the sitting room.
"Who do you work for?"
Father was using his intimidating voice, Momo noted, her eyes darting about to take in the entirety of the room even while her footsteps sped up. Various people, some in suits, others in ill-fitting suits, and more still in various darker shades of clothing, were lying on the floor. The occasional groaning and developing bruises were all the evidence she needed to figure out how they got there.
The man father was speaking to, only a few years older than her in appearance and clad in a suit that was far too large, sneered in a fashion that was nowhere near befitting his circumstances. His arms were being held behind his back by the Wise's driver, the man Michael had called Matsumoto. Despite the occasional wriggle in an attempt to escape, his movement had been reduced to such a degree that when Matsumoto let go with one hand to take a sip from the teacup that had been balanced on the captive's head, he didn't slip away so much as an inch.
The sneer only seemed to widen when Momo walked into his sight, even as she ignored him completely in order to fall into her mother's open arms on the other side of the room. She hummed into her hair, much the same way that she had always done when Momo was younger and her advanced studies were overwhelming her, and the small cloud of tension that had managed to cling to her back finally melted away.
"None'ya." The captive's voice was grating to a degree that didn't feel natural. Even with just those two words, Momo could tell that his English was rough.
"The None-ya Business?" Father's face darkened. Michael made a strangled noise from behind her, despite not being bothered in the least by the weight of all five men that had attacked them. "You villains poison my daughter's early teenage years, and now have the audacity to attack us in our home!?"
Not for the first time, Momo mourned the fact that Father had neglected to learn English to the same degree as Mother and herself. She could at least appreciate Matsumoto's stonewalled expression and the sneer twisting Richard's face as he looked down upon the man, giving no hint that he'd even understood the joke as he rhythmically slapped a rubber chicken into his hand, a soft 'honk' drifting from the toy with every strike.
She didn't even think to ask. These people were obviously insane, but her parents were alright and it was at least partially thanks to them, so she couldn't have cared less.
Someone walked past one of the windows overlooking the front gate, another person slumped over their shoulder. Momo glanced up at them, only to do a double take as they disappeared from view. Richard was outside in the yard, wearing a military helmet that covered his eyes completely. The somewhat unhinged grin gave away the identity though, and she didn't have enough time to wrap her head around what had happened before a second Richard walked past the window.
Followed by a third, and then a fourth. One of them was holding a plunger, she noticed, strapped to his hip like a sheathed sword. Another had two yotsudama cues strapped to his back. Now that she was paying attention, she could even see one with an entire office chair hanging down over his head like a bizarre shadow.
What on earth…?
"Dad's Quirk. He calls it 'Toy Soldiers'." Michael's deep voice from right beside her tore a strangled squawk from Momo's lips. Still in her mother's arms, she whipped her head back around, just in time to see him attempt to cover up the amused tilt of his lips at her reaction. "He'll have the whole estate covered by now. All his soldiers can fight just like him, and I don't think I've ever seen a better fighter."
From outside, someone shouted. One of the suited men was beginning to glow an unhealthy shade of pink, ignoring the screams of others dressed like him. Rapidly, his skin began to flash to red and back again, his body bulging asymmetrically with every vacillation. Momo felt Mother grip her a little tighter as the screams outside gained in volume, so much so that even the men in the room were beginning to take notice.
Michael stepped forward, his hand paused halfway through withdrawing a laptop from within his suit jacket.
He needn't have worried.
With speed that was usually reserved for those with that specific supernatural power, one of Richard's toy soldiers had closed the distance. The weapon in his hands was, of all things, a potted plant that resembled a palm tree, the pliable trunk of the tree gripped in both hands and the pot somehow not spilling any of the dirt within even though it was being held upside down.
With the might of a scorned father whose precious relaxation time had been interrupted by other people being annoying, the pot came down upon the flashing man, striking with a sound not too dissimilar to the one time she'd witnessed lightning hitting the front lawn.
Somehow, both the pot and the tree held together admirably. The same couldn't be said for the flashing man, his skin returning to its ashen hue after he'd stopped rolling across the lawn in a heap. The toy soldier sneered, the expression ridiculous with the army hat covering the top half of his head, and spat off to the side before walking over to collect the poor bastard he'd just sent packing.
Michael stepped back, shaking his head. A tap on the wall beside them had a section of it peeling away, providing a table for him to place the laptop upon. As soon as the lid was raised, the screen was immediately filled with various windows popping up, programs that she recognised as software diagnostics mixing with web browsers, and some other things that were quite similar to classified documents that her family's own servers held.
They were buried under more documents before she could get a good enough look at them. That didn't seem to phase Michael any, his fingers typing a steady rhythm over the keyboard as if the ever-shifting tides of open windows was all by design. For all she knew of him, it very well may have been.
"So, you had a rebellious phase?" Michael's words, in a tone so pleasant that she might have believed it didn't even disrupt the air in front of it, took a moment to register in Momo's abused and overheated brain. The second they did, she brought her hands up to groan into them, the sentiments only growing stronger once she heard her mother's muffled laughter. The older woman had stepped off to the side, closer to one of the corners in the room, but the bit of added distance did little to muffle the noise.
"I had a rebellious two days." The grit teeth did nothing to bite back the shame. Michael's fingers were moving quicker now, tapping away at the Latin keys faster than she'd ever managed. "It was awful."
The look he shot her from the corner of his eye was far too amused. At least audibly, he allowed her to cling to what little dignity she'd managed to retain throughout the day. The room fell into relative silence, disrupted only by the tapping of computer keys so rapid that it sounded much like rain hitting the windows, and the honking of a rubber chicken as it was applied liberally to another man's body.
There was a good reason she was focusing on Michael, and not the other men in the room… Wait, not like that!
…Okay maybe a little bit like that, but that was a perfectly valid reaction to close exposure for the first time to a handsome man within her age group that had helped her in a time of great peril-!
"The security detail was hired out from a Detnerat company?"
"Ah, yes." Mother always had known best. Seeing her darling daughter spiralling, she offered her support in the form of a hand resting against the small of Momo's back, bringing her out of her head enough to focus once more on the conversation taking place. "Rikiya recommended them to us personally after hearing our plight."
Rikiya, that name sounded familiar. She could see it clear as day; a kind face with a very prominent nose and equally sharp haircut, accepting a cup of brewed tea with a smile that turned his eyes upwards at the corners.
He'd complimented her skills, her intelligence, her Quirk. He was quite friendly with father as well, in the few times he'd found time to visit the estate.
If her time around Michael had taught her anything, that meant he was about to say something that would ruin the happy memories entirely and bring cold reality back in.
"I take it he didn't mention that all the employees are also members of the Meta Liberation Army?"
"The what."
Ah yes. Momo nodded sagely, even as Mother's comforting hand turned into a clawed fist that bit into and through the back of her dress. The fact that she didn't hit skin when the layers were close together was just another mystery of parenting.
There it was.