Kogami stopped on the half-finished stairwell, listening at the door that separated him from the second floor, just in case the object of his search was on the other side. He didn't hear anything, but he waited an extra few seconds just to be sure.

A voice in the back of his head that sounded an awful lot like Ginoza told him sharply that there was absolutely nothing to hear, that there was no one in this building, and that he was wasting his time. Kogami ignored it, which was easy enough to do with all his practice ignoring the real version of Ginoza.

Kogami, Kagari, and Ginoza had been called out to Shinjuku for a routine hue check, after the street scanners had flagged someone's crime coefficient. They'd split off a little to try to find the potential threat, but hadn't turned up anything. Kagari had gotten bored, and Ginoza had gotten annoyed, and Kogami had gotten a feeling. He'd seen an empty building under construction, work apparently halted for the day, and something had seemed…off. A door half-open, an absence of the usual construction tape, maybe a broken window…. He didn't bother trying to figure out exactly what, just messaged Ginoza and Kagari that he was going to check something out and headed inside.

Kogami flexed his fingers and opened the door as silently as he could, noting a wrapper on the floor as he did so. Could be from a messy construction worker, sure, but he remembered all the agonizing videos they'd played in school about "a clean mind is a happy mind" probably better than most, and he knew ingrained habits were hard to break.

Kogami pushed the door all the way open, and something above him shifted.

He was fast enough to look up, which meant he got a really good look at the bucketload of water heading straight for his face. He was not fast enough to move out of the way, or close his eyes in time, which meant that he found out very quickly that it wasn't water. It was acid.

Kogami couldn't help the strangled sound of panic as he fell to his knees, his hands automatically coming up to rub at his eyes. His eyes were already burning, watering so badly that even with his eyes closed he could feel tears streaming down his cheeks and mixing with the acid on his skin. He coughed, feeling the burn of something at the back of his throat, and spat onto the ground. Had he swallowed any? It was definitely possible, and if he hadn't initially, he could easily now if he wasn't careful.

He could tell himself that all he wanted, but "careful" felt a long way out of reach at the moment. It was hard to keep his mouth shut when his eyes were tearing up so badly his nose was getting clogged, and it felt like he couldn't breathe. It was hard to keep quiet when his entire face burned worse than the most vicious sunburn he'd ever gotten, and every time he touched it he made it hurt more. And it was really hard to keep calm when he finally managed to wrench his eyes open and he realized that he couldn't see anything at all. His vision was a swimming mess of blurry outlines and vague colors. Even what little he could see wasn't useful - the substance had seared his eyes so badly opening them for even a second or two made them burn and water.

"Damn," Kogami whispered. His throat stung, but he could talk, so that was something.

He needed to calm down, and he needed to think this through. This was no time to panic. Of course, that was easier said than done at the best of times, and this was very far from the best of times. Already, he could feel the hair raising on the back of his neck, his heartbeat speeding up as adrenaline flooded his body.

The thing was, construction workers didn't just leave buckets of acid hanging around on top of doorways. Anyone would know that. So if there was a bucket of acid on top of a doorway at this particular construction site, the only logical explanation was that this was a trap.

Was it a trap for Kogami specifically? No, that seemed to rely too heavily on coincidence. It wasn't like Kogami had actually gotten the tip-off about the raised crime coefficient. That had just gone to the MWPSB investigation queue, and been routed to Division One in a way that not even Kogami fully understood. Besides that, the only reason Kogami was here was because he and Kagari had been the Enforcers on shift, and it seemed unlikely that some random criminal would have the Division One Enforcers' schedules memorized.

Also, why would someone want to target specifically Kogami?

So it was probably pretty much a hate crime, a trap designed to spring on whichever member of the MWPSB was unlucky enough to be sent into the building to investigate.

Of course, that didn't really help Kogami, because whether or not the trap had been designed for him, he was the one currently trapped in it. This wasn't the time for profiling.

Ideally, Kogami's next step would have been to rinse off his eyes and face, but he didn't have any water. He couldn't tell how much damage the acid had actually done to his eyes, but that would be a problem for later - it wasn't like there was anything he could do about it right now anyways.

The next thing after that would be finding a hiding spot, as defensible of one as he could. Ideally, he could avoid getting jumped by whoever had set the trap until he figured out a way to somehow contact Ginoza without being able to see.

He spat onto the ground a few more times, just to be as certain as he could that he hadn't swallowed any of the acid. Then, he braced himself, and got to his feet.

Kogami hadn't gotten a chance to look at the room he was entering before he'd been blinded. Now, he had no idea where he should be trying to get to, or what obstacles might bar his way. He needed to put as much distance as he could between himself and his current location - if he was trying to hunt someone, the first place he would check would be the trap he'd set up.

Unfortunately, Kogami didn't think he could make it very far. He only made it a few feet before he tripped over something unseen, squashing down his sound of alarm as he managed to catch himself. His reflexes were good, even without his sight, but he didn't want to rely on a shaky combination of luck and his remaining senses. Sooner or later, he would fall, and the further he tried to get, the more likely he'd end up near stairs, or an unfinished part of the building, and that fall would be bad.

So Kogami dropped to his hands and knees. Part of his brain, once again the part that sounded like Ginoza, insisted that this was humiliating, and that he should feel ashamed. The rest of him just really wanted to survive, and as always, that part won out.

Kogami started crawling across the floor, feeling the space in front of him with his hand as he moved. This was easier: he could find potential snags with his hands rather than his feet, and in a worst case scenario, it was less far to fall. He wished that he could tell what tracks he was leaving behind. It would be almost comically pathetic if he'd done all of this, only to lead the suspect right to him.

Eventually, Kogami's questing hand hit a wall. He went to close his eyes to think, then realized they were closed already, and squeezed them tighter reflexively. He hadn't been on this floor, but he could vaguely remember the outline of the lower floor. The doorway across from the stairwell had been set far back in the left hand side of the wall, so if the layout here was the same, Kogami should be able to put the wall to his right and follow it to the doorway.

That was if the layout was the same, or if he hadn't gotten himself turned around, or any other amount of unknown factors. Still, he had to pick a direction, and "left" was as good as any.

Kogami put his right shoulder to the wall and started crawling. To his vague surprise, he did indeed reach a door, or at least a doorway. It was open (or perhaps unfinished), so Kogami cautiously crawled through.

Now, in a completely unknown setting, without even the layout from the previous floor to follow, Kogami felt the adrenaline kick up a notch. He forced himself to pause, crouched on the floor, listening for any sounds that might indicate where his hypothesized pursuer was waiting.

He didn't hear anything, apart from his own heartbeat in his ears.

Which side of the door would the hinges be on? If he could find the door itself, he could hide behind it, which was probably the best idea for a hiding spot he'd had so far. It wasn't like he could actually check how well-hidden he was. But even concentrating as hard as he could, he couldn't remember learning much about doorways - either the default way that they opened, or any possible exceptions to that. And now that he'd found a wall with a door, he didn't really want to risk crawling around searching for the door. He was afraid he would lose the wall altogether.

If he got out of this, he resolved to spend at least an hour researching doors. He was never going to be caught in a situation where his door knowledge was lacking again, not if he had anything to say about it.

Kogami nestled himself up against the wall, hoping he was at least somewhat hidden. He still didn't hear anyone following him. This seemed as safe a place as any to rest for a moment - at least his back was up against the wall.

Now that he'd found at least a somewhat defensible position, he really needed to message Ginoza. Even if he wasn't being hunted, he didn't think there would be any way for him to find his way out of the half-constructed building by himself. He had already made his way up a set of stairs…no, two sets of stairs, and there was no way he was making it back down again. And even if he did, what would the use be? He wouldn't be able to blindly stumble his way back to Ginoza and Kagari.

No, as much as he hated to admit it, he very much needed help. And the only way he would get help at this point was to ask for it.

Experimentally, Kogami cracked his eyes open and peered at his watch. That was a mistake. He got less than a second of blurry vision before his eyes started watering so badly he was blind again. The burning was so intense it almost made him gag, and he couldn't bite back a very small whimper. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he registered that his salty tears were leaving stinging tracks down the raw skin of his face. If his face hurt that bad, he must look really pretty terrible. He ghosted a hand across his cheeks and eyes, trying to assess the damage, but all he could really tell was that the acid had made his eyelids swell.

Okay, so he wouldn't be able to look at his watch to message Ginoza. But that was fine. Kogami messaged Ginoza about a thousand times a day - it was his personal mission in life to annoy the man, after all. He must know where to click, even blind. It would be like…muscle memory. Yeah.

Kogami put his head down and tried to stop thinking about the situation and let his instincts take over. He pushed….something, which was a good sign, probably. The adrenaline (combined with the pain, although he didn't want to admit that) was making his hands shake, and he wasn't sure that he'd be able to click the right buttons, even if he remembered them correctly.

It would be nice if he could use the voice function of the watch, which he could access without pressing anything, but that wasn't an option. If he made any sound at all, he might as well be jumping up and down and yelling "hey, come and kill me" to whoever else was in the building with him.

Kogami accessed what was probably his messaging thread with Ginoza, although he couldn't quite remember whether he'd been two or three clicks away. As stupid as he felt over that, he had to admit that even he couldn't have been expected to predict this exact situation.

Still, it looked like if he got out of this, he would also be memorizing specific functions on his watch. Kogami tapped the bottom of the screen, where the keyboard would appear if he'd actually managed to find his chat with Ginoza, and was pleasantly surprised to feel the haptic feedback of the letters beneath his shaky fingers. He shouldn't have worried so much after all - of course he could annoy Ginoza even blinded and on the run. Quickly, Kogami tapped out "In trouble, come find me" and before he could overthink either the message or the user interface on his watch, hit send.

Ginoza stalked through another block of the happy, healthy citizenry littered around Shinjuku. There was no sign of anyone with a crime coefficient above regulation levels, and additionally, no sign of Kogami. The Enforcer hadn't shown his face since messaging Ginoza that he'd wanted to "check something out," and while Ginoza hadn't really cared to stop him initially, he was starting to wish that he had.

The thing was, Ginoza always managed to forget just how annoying he found Kagari until he was in the field with the younger man. Kogami could be more intensely irritating, yes, but at least he was (mostly) good at his job. At least, he was good at fieldwork. So far, since they'd arrived in Shinjuku, all Kagari had done was follow him around talking about some kind of "video game."

"And then, I beat my high score, but it wasn't that big of a deal, because my high score wasn't very good," Kagari blathered on. "I bet I can beat it again the next time I play, if I just kill-"

He was mercifully interrupted by the sound of an incoming message on his watch.

"What's that?" Ginoza said quickly. Anything to stop the relentless chattering.

"It's a message from Ko," Kagari said.

"Well, where is he? Is he coming back soon? And why did he message you instead of me?"

"Hmmm," Kagari said. "It's hard to tell, but I think he's getting ramen."

"What?" Ginoza snapped.

"And he probably messaged me because I…like ramen more than you do? How am I supposed to know when he's coming back?"

"Why would he be getting ramen?" Ginoza was annoyed - he was typically tolerant of his enforcers getting food or doing a few personal errands while he had them out anyways, but he wanted them to at least ask. "This isn't…this isn't a field trip. He's supposed to be working a case."

"Well, I don't know why Ko's getting ramen, but does that mean we can get ramen? I could go for some ramen. I love ramen."

"We are not getting ramen. The dining hall at the MWPSB serves ramen on a fairly regular basis."

"Awww, come on. That ramen isn't as good. Have you even had it, Gino? It tastes nothing like the ramen you get at a restaurant."

"We're…definitely not getting ramen…."

"Come on," Kagari whined, clasping his palms together and looking at Ginoza with pleading eyes. "You would be the best Inspector ever. Pleaseeee…."

"Stop it!" Ginoza gestured with frustration, and then wished he hadn't. "You and I aren't getting ramen, and Kogami isn't either. I'm going to call him now, and I'm going to figure out what's going on here."

Ginoza realized he and Kagari had stopped walking practically in the middle of the sidewalk, and he pulled Kagari into the shadow of a doorway before clicking on his watch. He double-tapped on Kogami's name to call him.

The call rang. And rang. And rang.

By the third ring, Ginoza was frowning. It wasn't like Kogami to take so long to answer when they were actively on duty. It wasn't like Kogami to actively run off somewhere while they were on duty either, but since that had clearly already happened, Ginoza could only assume that Kogami was now ignoring him.

The call rang until Kogami's voice on his pre-recorded message announced that he wasn't able to answer right now. It didn't bother to apologize for missing the call, or offer to call back. Ginoza had heard the message before, but he hadn't noticed how annoying that was until now.

Silently seething, Ginoza ended the call. He didn't bother to leave a message. Kogami knew damn well what he was doing, and he wasn't going to give the enforcer the satisfaction of hearing just how irate he'd made his inspector.

"So can we get ramen or not?" Kagari asked.

"Not," Ginoza snapped. "Or do you want to share Enforcer Kogami's punishment?" He took some amount of pleasure in the way Kagari's eyes widened.

"Um…what is Ko's punishment?"

"I haven't decided yet," Ginoza said darkly. "But the longer he takes, the worse it's going to be."

Kogami tried to control his breathing and conserve his movement as much as possible. It was hard, since adrenaline was still coursing through him, making his heart pound almost audibly in his ears. But if he wanted any kind of advantage at all, he needed to stay silent. So he breathed through his nose and ignored the burning sensation in his eyes and mouth, waiting.

Until his watch rang. Loudly.

Kogami startled, flinching away from the noise in the silent building. He stabbed at the watch, trying to silence it, but he couldn't remember where the "end call" button was, since it wasn't exactly encouraged for enforcers to reject calls from their inspectors.

The call rang itself out, and Kogami was left shaking in a noiseless atmosphere that seemed suddenly threatening, rather than encouraging. Did he hear footsteps, or was that just his own overactive imagination? Kogami shrank back against the wall, feeling its solidity against his shoulder blades.

"I can see you, you know."

Kogami's breathing stopped, and for a second the only sound was his heart racing in his ears. It was a man's voice, and it was coming from in front of him. On Kogami's side of the wall. He'd known that he might not succeed in hiding properly, or gaining any sort of advantage, but the cold dread of being cornered took hold anyway. Kogami's quarry had found him first.

There wasn't much he could do. He couldn't run - that would be useless in his current state, and all it would achieve would be exposing his back. He couldn't dodge, either. Kogami had good hearing, but not that good. He didn't think he could triangulate where an attack was coming from in time to get out of the way.

He used the rough plaster wall to pull himself to his feet - the absolute last thing he wanted was to be trapped crouching down. He would probably have to take the first attack - if it was a punch or even a kick he should be able to handle that just fine, and if he was about to be shot with a gun or something, there was nothing he could do about that in any case. Once he'd taken a hit, he would at least know where his assailant was, and maybe he'd get lucky and have some other information about them too.

Kogami heard the muffled sound of footsteps on unfinished flooring. To his left, he was pretty sure. He whirled, heart still thundering in his ears. There was a faint whistling, and some instinct told Kogami to block. He got his arm up just in time for a solid metal stick to smash into it.

The pain was immediate and overwhelming. If Kogami hadn't already been blind, he was pretty sure his vision would have shorted out. As it was, he stopped processing sound for a second. His knees went shaky and almost buckled.

He was sure his arm was broken where he'd used it to block. He wasn't oversensitive to pain, and if he was in this much, it meant that something was wrong. He wouldn't be able to use that arm again - he doubted he'd even be able to lift it.

The odds had been against him from the beginning. But now, things had gotten very, very dire for Kogami.

"Impressive," the man said. Kogami didn't know what he was talking about exactly - maybe the fact that Kogami was still on his feet. "But things will be easier for you if you just let me do my work. You're not getting out of this."

Kogami didn't have the breath to argue. In a way, he supposed that was good, because he probably would have. Instead, he moved towards the voice, until he crashed into a solid mass. Hopefully, he was now too close for the man to use the metal thing - it felt like a pipe, although without seeing it, Kogami couldn't be sure - as an effective weapon.

If he lost the location of his attacker, he probably wouldn't be able to locate him again. If he couldn't disarm the guy in the next…five, maybe ten seconds, they would break apart, he would swing at Kogami, and Kogami would probably die.

The man shoved Kogami in the center of his chest, just below his throat. Kogami stumbled, but didn't lose his balance. He could still feel the warmth of the man less than a foot in front of him.

And now, he knew something he could use. This guy was probably bigger than Kogami, he had a pipe and Kogami had nothing, and he could see when Kogami couldn't. But he wasn't actually a very good fighter.

Kogami darted forward before the man had a chance to widen the distance, trying to ignore the pain in his left arm that flared with any movement at all. The pipe was far less dangerous at close range, although this guy was enough of an amateur that he might not realize that. Kogami heard his attacker's soft grunt of surprise as he closed the distance between them, and Kogami reached up and to the right of the sound as fast as he could.

His right hand collided with the man's arm, probably trying to bring the pipe down on top of him. Kogami might be blind, but he was still fast, and as soon as he made contact he was already closing his hand around the man's wrist. He yanked the would-be killer off balance, lowering his head with the intent to smash it directly into the man's nose.

Kogami hit something, although from the sudden burst of pain exploding in his forehead, it had been the other guy's jaw rather than the softer and more breakable nose. He staggered, but the other man yelped, and Kogami felt the muscles in the arm he still held relax.

Kogami's hand slid down the guy's wrist to the pipe, which was now held a lot more loosely. He grabbed onto that with all the strength in his right hand and pulled, kicking out blindly as he did so. This whole thing would be a lot easier with his left arm too, but that was hanging uselessly at his side, throbbing in time with every motion.

Even so, he felt something fleshy give as his foot connected with it, and there was another harsh yelp. There was a staggering sound, and Kogami was still holding the pipe, and now there wasn't any resistance on the other end.

Kogami tightened his grip on the pipe and followed the sound of breathing, constantly aware of the distance between him and his opponent. Being armed was better than being unarmed, but that didn't change the fact that he was blind, with one working arm. He needed to end this quickly.

Kogami lashed out with the pipe, and felt the blow as it made contact. The rapid breathing gave way to a scream, and there was a heavy thud as something hit the floor in front of Kogami. Kogami followed the noise, swinging downward with the pipe towards where he hoped the man's head was. Even with his attacker on the ground, this could still end badly for Kogami. The man could have another weapon, or he could reach out and trip Kogami, or he could catch the pipe as it came down and turn the tables back.

Kogami kept swinging until he felt something warm and wet splatter across his face and hands, and he kept going after that until he couldn't hear a sound save for his own ragged breathing. Once that was done, he dropped to his knees. He didn't dare let go of his newly-acquired weapon - he truly wasn't sure if he would be able to find it again, and who knew how many other people could be after him. But he brushed the back of his hand along what was left of the man's face until he had satisfied himself that if he wasn't already dead, he would be soon. No one could survive wounds like that.

Kogami straightened up. He was in much worse shape than before. One of his attackers was dead, yes. But even though he had a weapon, that in no way outweighed his brutally broken arm.

But he would keep fighting. He had to. Somehow, he was going to get out of this.