Kaina forced herself to ignore the crying as she marched through the shattered remnants of the luxurious marble building.
They'd stormed the lobby of the Monoma Bank with over a hundred men, all armed with guns that far outmatched the service revolvers of the scant few guards on duty. A few of them had seen the wisdom in surrendering when they realized how utterly outmatched they were. Those men were now huddled against the far wall with the other hostages: the tellers, managers, and customers who'd had the misfortune of coming to the bank on this particular day. As for those who'd tried to fight…
Kaina glanced at a particularly gruesome bloodstain on the polished marble wall, and grimaced.
She didn't enjoy this. She'd seen plenty of death, as a merc. Had dealt out more than her share of it, too. But it was one thing to kill a man who had a gun in his hands and no compunctions about shooting you if he got the chance. She'd readily admit that it was another to see men who were just doing their jobs cut down gleefully by two-bit thugs with rifles they barely knew how to use.
Pushing the useless thoughts out of her mind, Kaina found Dabi where she expected to: in front of the enormous, three-foot-thick steel door of the vault.
"Nagant," he rasped around his glowing cigar. "Got news for me?"
Kaina nodded. "The building is ours," she reported. "The cameras are cut, and the alarms are disabled."
Dabi nodded. "The backup alarms?" he asked. "I'd rather not bring the entire Monoma House Guard down on our heads the moment we crack this thing open."
He jerked a thumb at the massive vault, and at the small team of men huddled around the door, centered on a thief they'd found who had been more than eager to lend his laser-cutter quirk to the task in exchange for a double share of the loot.
Kaina raised an eyebrow. "Who do you think I am?" she replied.
Dabi smirked. "There's the Nagant I know," he chuckled. "Anyway, go ahead and sit tight for now. They're almost through."
His prediction proved accurate; within minutes, a cry of success slipped from the men's throats, and the great vault door ground open with the screech of metal.
The men rushed inside, greedily grabbing at the vast wealth that literally spilled out of deposit boxes and crates in the central repository for the Monoma banking empire. Gold bullion, currencies from all nations of the world, jewelry and ancient treasures, priceless artworks, and more, all seized, pawed at, swapped gleefully between laughing thugs.
Dabi, though, strode past all of it, Kaina at his heels. "Five minutes, men!" he reminded them. "Take whatever you want; anything you can grab is yours, so long as you get it out in five minutes!"
The answering howl of victory must have tasted sweet to these street thugs and hired guns; to Kaina, it sounded crass and meaningless. She'd never thought much of men who killed for money.
And yet, here she was.
She followed Dabi deeper into the great vault, past unimaginable riches that interested neither of them. At last, they found their objective: a nondescript section walled off from the rest of the vault, filled not with gold and jewels, but with boxes and boxes of papers and documents.
"Do you know what this is, Nagant?" Dabi asked, looking over them.
Kaina shook her head slowly.
"This," Dabi told her, "is the most sacred treasure of House Monoma, the thing they value most highly: their secrets. At their core, nobles are just like any old businessman: they're practically anal about their records. Every treaty, every transaction, every government bribe, every dirty deal…they track all of it, going back decades. Centuries. And they keep it all right here. Every single secret House Monoma has."
Kaina's eyes widened. "God," she breathed. "If we stole this—"
"We'd have enough dirt to bring down the whole damn nobility," Dabi agreed, blue eyes glowing with hate. "There's enough secrets in here—experiments on human subjects, atrocities, corruption, depravities you can't even imagine— to start a revolution a hundred times over."
And then, once Kaina understood the magnitude of what was in front of them, Dabi raised his hand, and filled the room with scorching blue fire.
Kaina stumbled back, eyes wide with shock. "What're you doing?" she demanded.
Dabi turned to her. "Isn't it obvious?" he replied. "We're not trying to bring the nobility down ourselves, remember? I want to make them tear themselves apart."
Kaina came to a halt. Slowly, her mind put the pieces together. "We could never take all of this," she realized. "But by burning it…"
Dabi nodded approvingly. "We don't need any of it," he told her. "Who cares about which ministers can be bought, or what fucked-up shit the Great-Great-Granddaddy of House Monoma got up to? But if we can make them think that it was stolen, and by a group that they'll assume was too numerous and too skilled to not be funded by a rival House…"
"They'll assume their darkest secrets are now in the hands of people who want them dead," Kaina whispered. "God. They'll go on the warpath."
Dabi's eyes seemed to glow brighter than the fire starting to lick up the walls of the vault. "Exactly," he hissed. "They won't know what was stolen. They'll have no choice but to assume the worst. And they'll throw every resource they have into ensuring that their rivals are destroyed before they can use that information. And the Monomas have a lot of resources to burn."
"It'll be war," Kaina breathed. She'd grown up around nobles. She knew what that word meant. "You're going to start the biggest bloodbath Japan's seen in centuries."
Dabi just chuckled. He turned away from the growing inferno as smoke thickened all around them, stalking back towards the vault door with smoke swirling in his fists. "That's the idea," he confirmed.
Something sickly bubbled in Kaina's chest. She knew where that blood would come from. It would come from the men and women in the House Guards, the servants and the functionaries sworn to the powerful families who would do so little of the bleeding themselves. It would come from the innocent civilians trapped between militaries who cared little for those who they did not protect. It would come from people who were like the person she had been, once.
"All this for Titan?" she asked. "It can't just be for him, Dabi. It wouldn't be worth it."
Dabi paused, then, in the open entrance to the vault, which was burning steadily now; gold and jewelry swallowed up by the fires, priceless art left to burn. All of it, fuel for his hate.
"Tell me, Nagant," he rasped. "Are you familiar with the phrase "Killing two birds with one stone?" I've got a whole lot of birds to kill. This way, I only need the one stone."
With that, he turned away, as he and Kaina were forced to leave the vault, which was now producing so much smoke that it was filling the grand lobby, all marble and gleaming metal.
The radio on Dabi's belt squawked, and Kaina heard Miruko's voice on the other end.
"All the men and their loot are outta the building, boss," she reported. "All that's left are the hostages. What do we do with them?"
Kaina watched Dabi's eyes as he responded. They did not hesitate, did not blink, did not look away from the raging flames.
"Don't leave any witnesses," he commanded. "They can't know who attacked them. You know what that means, Miruko?"?"
"Aye-aye, boss," came the voice of the remorseless killer on the other end. The radio cut out, and Dabi strode away, long ragged cloak drawn tight around his dead skin grafts.
Kaina closed her eyes, blood running cold and the pit of her stomach sinking down. She took a deep breath, tasting the smoke in the air. There was nothing she could do. There was no point protesting. She'd seen worse than this before. She'd done worse than this before.
She still flinched when she heard the gunshots anyway.
Izuku's mind was racing as his driver wove through the streets of Tokyo.
Dabi, the deadliest merc the West Coast had ever seen, the man who'd been Izuku's first friend in America, the man he'd killed with his own two hands, had been Touya Todoroki.
In hindsight, he should have known it. A fire quirk that powerful, held by a man who refused to give his family name? Him being in America had always been odd; with his skills, he'd easily have been a candidate to found a new noble house.
Unless, of course, he'd already been slated to inherit one of the greatest of them.
There were other things, too, other connections that Izuku's reeling brain kept putting together as he stared numbly out the window. Dabi's obvious skill and training with his quirk–he was every bit as capable with it as Shoko was with hers, judging by the training routine he'd seen her go through. His dyed hair. And most of all, those eerie, piercing blue eyes–the same eyes as Enji Todoroki, filled with the same deadly menace as Shoko's left eye.
He should have known. He should have realized that he'd–
That he'd killed Shoko's older brother. God. He couldn't imagine what she would do if she learned the truth.
Frankly, he still wasn't sure of a lot of things about Shoko Todoroki. Sure, they were in the very early, tentative stages of actual courtship now, but Izuku held no particular illusions about how easy or enjoyable that process was going to be. Frankly, he considered the long, tangled, fraught nature of it a bonus in some ways; he couldn't imagine Shoko, or her father, agreeing to a quick marriage, and so long as the courtship continued, he could point to it to assuage his father's questions about how his search for a wife was going. Izuku felt a little bit guilty about that–about using Shoko that way–but he really had no illusions that she wasn't also using him in a quite similar way.
He'd learned a little more of the game than he'd let on, after all.
And yet he still had absolutely no idea what Shoko would do if she learned why Touya was dead. She was cold and amoral, certainly, and her disdain for her father dripped off of every syllable whenever she spoke about him, but when she'd talked about her siblings, Izuku had heard genuine love in her voice, the kind that was impossible to fake. She might very well demand vengeance for her brother–and aside from the fact that Izuku had zero desire to see whether Enji Todoroki's training made her a match for him, and the fact that he was increasingly accepting his own… interest in her, he didn't particularly want to have to explain to his father why House Todoroki had declared war on them and plunged all of Japan into chaos.
In short, he was fucked. Very, very fucked.
It was then that Izuku was abruptly jarred from his whirling thoughts by the shrill chime of the limousine's in-built phone ringing. With a shake of his head, he thumbed the button to answer, almost before he'd processed the sound.
"Hello?" he asked.
His father's voice answered him quickly. "My boy," Toshinori said; his voice sounded heavy, worried, and yet curt and businesslike. That made Izuku nervous. "Where are you?"
Knowing that his father's tone was one that left no room for games, Izuku replied promptly, "On my way back. The evening was…cut short."
He tried not to think too hard about why, or about what would happen with Shoko after tonight. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to face her again, not without remembering the way Dabi's eyes had bulged horribly as he died.
Despite Izuku's worries, though, Toshinori didn't ask for more details like he'd feared his father might. Instead, he said, "Good. I'm afraid that the night will be considerably longer."
Izuku's unease grew. The tone of Toshinori's voice was dark and heavy, distracted—and he could hear sounds coming from the background of wherever Toshinori was, the rushed, barking orders of professionals faced with a crisis. "What happened?" he asked.
"An explanation will be forthcoming once you're home," Toshinori told him briskly, which told Izuku just how grave the situation must really be, for his father to sound so distracted. "For now, tell your driver to get back here as fast as possible. The Guard is active; they should let you through the roadblocks without too much trouble."
Izuku's eyes went wide. "Roadblocks?" he repeated. What the hell had happened while he and Shoko ate dinner? "Father, what's going on?"
Toshinori sighed. "Nothing good, son," he replied. "Your escort just reported in, they should be overhead now. Get back here, and come to the command center. It's going to be a long night for all of us."
"Escort?" Izuku thought. Toshinori hung up with a click, leaving the question Izuku had been about to ask to die on his lips; luckily, it was answered a moment later when he heard the thrum of rotors overhead.
Eyes wide, he craned his neck out the window, until at last the limousine turned a corner and the lean, predatory profile of a helicopter gunship bearing the crest of House Yagi on its side appeared from behind a building, shadowing Izuku's vehicle's every move with deceptive ease, rocket pods and chainguns glinting in the dying light of sunset.
A chill went down Izuku's spine as the limo picked up speed, matched effortlessly by the gunship as they shot through the city and the rapidly-emptying streets.
That was when he knew something very bad had happened. Something earth-shaking.
He leaned back in the seat, and closed his eyes as the chopping of the helicopter's rotors filled his mind with memories.
By the time they reached the Yagi manor, Izuku was on a hair-trigger.
About five miles outside Musutafu proper, they'd started hitting the roadblocks Toshinori had mentioned. Black-clad and helmeted men bearing the Yagi crest had stopped the car, and though they'd quickly recognized the Heir and saluted crisply as they waved him through, Izuku had seen the modern assault rifles held tight and low in their arms as they'd approached, and known full well that they meant business.
Passing through the city itself was eerie; clearly spooked by the military activity, the civilians of what was in essence Yagi's personal fiefdom had gone to ground. Streets were abandoned, office buildings empty. The escort chopper shadowing them was joined by two more identical craft, their sharklike shadows passing over the quiet city that seemed to be holding its breath, braced for the next punch.
At last, the limo climbed into the hills surrounding the city, and pulled into the long gravel driveway of the manor. Izuku's eyes widened as he stepped out, and promptly stared down the barrel of a tank cannon that had been tracking the limo since it appeared out of the trees.
The House Guard, it seemed, had been mobilized.
More than a dozen armored vehicles had been drawn into a tight semicircle around the front of the Yagi manor, their turrets traversing back and forth across sweeping fields of fire like lumbering Jurassic beasts. Tanks, APCs, and lighter infantry fighting vehicles, a motley, mismatched collection purchased from arms dealers and the downsizing militaries of once-strong nations, but well-maintained and manned by trained, capable men who sat atop their vehicles with wary, watchful eyes. Another flight of helicopters passed overhead, their rotors shaking the treetops in the pitch-black night.
And in the center, flanked by men in full body armor, Nighteye at his side, stood Toshinori Yagi, his grip on his cane tight and the look in his eyes at once alert and very, very old.
"My boy," he said. "Welcome home. I need you to come with me; you're needed in the war room."
Izuku may not have completed the training to join the House Guard, but he knew an order when he heard one. So much for a warm welcome.
The "war room," as it turned out, was a bare reinforced concrete box driven deep into the bedrock beneath the manor, outfitted to withstand a siege. The central room, filled with maps and monitors, was already full when Toshinori entered, Izuku at his heels.
The men around the table saluted or nodded in respect as their lords took their own seats; most were high-ranking officers in the Guard, including their leader, Nighteye, whose eyes were as cold and disdainful as ever as they regarded Izuku. There were a few others, as well, including an utterly plain, nondescript man named Naomasa who Izuku was fairly certain was Toshinori's spymaster.
When everyone was seated, Toshinori began, "Thank you, everyone, for assembling so quickly. The Guard did an excellent job, mobilizing on such short notice. Nighteye, anything to report?"
Nighteye shook his head. "No, my lord," he said. "We have the city secured. Nothing enters or leaves Musutafu without our say-so. All House Guard units are activated and at their stations."
Toshinori nodded. "Excellent, Nighteye," he said. Nighteye showed no reaction to the praise beyond the tiniest duck of his head. "Now, for those of you–including my son–who are still unaware of the reason I put the Guard on a war footing so abruptly, allow me to explain."
Toshinori clicked a button on the table in front of him, and the monitors in the room lit up, displaying images of a building on fire, some clearly taken from news reports, and others from grainy security cameras.
"Approximately two hours ago, the main branch of Monoma Bank was attacked by more than a hundred armed men," Toshinori said, sending a chill down Izuku's spine. "They overpowered House Monoma's defenses, and set fire to the building. We believe they also breached the vaults, which makes this appear to be a robbery–but as the fires have, as of now, consumed essentially the entire building, it will probably never be known what, if anything, was stolen. Of those inside the bank, including bystanders, there appear to be no survivors."
A click from Toshinori made the images shift, from grainy cameras showing vans pulling up in front of the bank and unleashing hordes of men, to the burnt-out husk of the once-great bank, still being sprayed with water by firefighters. Another click brought up images of body bags, lined up in rows. Izuku felt his fists clench.
"As far as we know, the attackers have now escaped," Toshinori continued, "But not long after the attack became clear, House Monoma activated their own House Guard.
Another click, and this time the monitors filled with more pictures and videos of helicopters and troop transports, and even a few message transcripts that seemed to be internal House Monoma communications. It seemed Toshinori's spies were, just like his House Guard, the best in the business.
Toshinori paused, and nodded to Naomasa, who began to speak. "As far as we can tell, they're calling in everything they have," the plain man said. "They're even reactivating old equipment. Whatever they're doing, they clearly consider it existential."
Another man scoffed. "Of course they do," he said. "If those attackers got into the vault, they've got every secret House Monoma has ever tried to hide. Whoever did this has everything they could ever need to destroy the Monomas by now. They're scared shitless."
Toshinori nodded. "And that brings us quite neatly to the most concerning question: who attacked them?" he asked. "A hundred men and enough firepower to burn the whole building down to cover their tracks is beyond the means of any normal gang. The simplest answer is that this is another House, of course. Most of the Great Houses are mobilizing, too, or at least increasing their readiness. They're preparing."
Naomasa spoke up. "Which is why I don't trust that angle. It's too easy to frame somebody that way, and send them off to attack someone else."
"Like us," Izuku said suddenly. Heads turned to look at him. "We're the ones everyone is going to blame for this. I humiliated the Monoma heir barely a few hours before their main branch is attacked and burned to the ground? It doesn't matter that we had nothing to do with it, the Monomas will have an easy target to blame, and anyone I scared with my display at the duel will be all too happy to go along with it."
The men around the table glanced around at each other. Toshinori looked impressed–and more than a little proud.
"Well," he began, "For now, here is what we will do–"
"Pardon me, my lord," Nighteye said, surprising everyone. "But are we sure we had nothing to do with it?"
Toshinori blinked, but Nighteye wasn't looking at him–he was looking at Izuku. Behind his glasses, the man's eyes were as cold and icy as ever, but his lip was curling.
Izuku raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?" he asked mildly.
Nighteye met his gaze evenly. "You heard me," he said. "I believe that no Yagi assets were used to attack House Monoma–but can you say the same of those mercenaries you're so fond of? They have no code they adhere to, and they have plausible deniability in a way we simply don't. How do we know they weren't involved?"
Toshinori was silent, and Izuku realized why almost instantly–the other men in the room were doubtless having similar thoughts. If Izuku was going to lead these men someday, he would first have to earn their trust, and prevent doubt and mistrust from taking root.
Izuku's first impulse was anger–Nighteye was insulting his friends, the ones who had saved his life more than once. But he was an old hand at directing and controlling that anger; he pushed it aside and remained focused on Nighteye. True, the loyal servant of Toshinori Yagi hadn't phrased the question particularly kindly, but it was a fair question, asked honestly, and Izuku would have had similar concerns if he had been in Nighteye's shoes.
So instead of shouting, Izuku looked Nighteye dead in the face, and said, "I can say the same of them, yes. I did not order or direct this attack, and they did not participate in it–as far as I'm concerned, my dispute with Lord Monoma ended in the dueling ring. And even if it hadn't, I wouldn't have ordered an attack that killed innocent people over it."
There was a brief pause as Nighteye and Izuku assessed each other, probing and testing. And then, Nighteye gave an ever-so-slight nod, and the corner of his lip twitched.
"Very well," he conceded, turning to Toshinori. "I retract my question, my lord. Please, forgive me for the interruption."
Toshinori smiled, and while it wasn't quite the grandfatherly smile he gave Izuku so readily–it had a few too many canine teeth for that–it was indulgent, and understanding. "You have my forgiveness, Mirai," he said. "But back to how we will respond: from this point until I am satisfied, the House Guard will be on the highest level of readiness we can maintain. If I give the order, I want every unit on a war footing within the hour. Is that doable, Nighteye?"
Nighteye nodded once. "It will be done, my lord," he said. Around him, the other generals of the Guard gave similar gestures of assent.
Toshinori smiled. Turning to Naomasa, he continued, "From this point on, I want your networks focused on finding out who did this, Tsukauchi. Run them down, and give me names. Two devastating attacks so close together is not a coincidence. If this is a House's doing, they will answer to me."
"And if it isn't?" Izuku wondered to himself. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer, judging by the menace in Toshinori's eyes as he spoke.
"And you, my son," Toshinori finished, making Izuku straighten in his seat, "I want you to have your wits about you at the next ball."
Izuku blinked. "Huh?" he asked. "We're on the brink of a war, and they're still holding a ball?"
Toshinori chuckled. "Have you met the nobility, son?" he asked. "They'd be holding balls while the building burned around them. But this is serious. That ball will be the most dangerous event you've been to yet. Everyone will be on a knife's edge–but it's there that you might just learn who your allies are. And your enemies. If war comes, we will need what you learn there, my son."
Izuku…hadn't thought of that before. But it made sense. If he could find the right people there, maybe he could manage to soothe all this over.
And if that failed, he could figure out which threats to remove first when everything went to shit.
He met his father's eyes. "Understood," he said.
To himself, he thought, "So much for retirement."
He'd have to face Shoko's gaze again, one way or another–because she'd be there too, for the same reasons as him.
He just hoped he'd manage to survive the experience.