And after a long wait, we are back with a new arc, which I have titled as: Lo, This Monster!
Itsuka Kendo is feeling lost and alone. Ever since she was kicked from U.A., she's been lost as to her purpose, not helped at all by the black mark on her record means that she no longer has a possible future in her sight due to no one in the job market wanting a reject or dropout from U.A., leaving her confined to the Kendo family home for most of her time.
However, she did find satisfaction in helping out the Spider-Gang whenever she could, and decided to take up an offer by her uncle, Kendo Rappa and his current employer, Gang Orca on loan from Mirko, to help investigate the stashes of trigger that had been hold up at the warehouse not too long ago, where they had come from, and who they were being supplied to.
Gang Orca simply needs someone outside of the system that he can trust to help her look into things. Recent events have proven that trust amongst heroes is a hard thing to come by nowadays.
Soon enough, Kendo and Rappa would begin looking into a medical company that was supposedly part of this trigger operation, and they begin looking into its owners. At first, they don't find any leads, as their criminal records are clean. However, they soon find a lead in how the records of the owners are much too clean to be genuine, and begin connecting the dots through the surplus drugs being stored within the building. Surplus supplies that hadn't been recorded in the paperwork.
So, they decide to investigate the surplus, with Kendo investigating their supplier, operating under a fake name and identity by the name of Julia Carpenter, and posing as a young high school girl looking at future career paths. Heading into the supplier's main headquarters, she is able to sneak into the main warehouse where the medical ingredients and drugs are shipped off, and makes note of one of them loading up the van to the suspected medical company with an extra box.
Soon enough, the surplus is moved off, and Kendo and Rappa follow it to its destination. During this time, we get a lot of insight into Kendo and Rappa's relationship, and we see how Kendo's family has some deep roots in old Japanese traditions, and that Kendo has always felt like she had to look out for her younger siblings in the face of her strictly traditionalist mother and father, instilling within herself a distrust of authority and a desire to not conform to it, hence her willingness to go along with the rescue of Peter Parker and further vigilante actions. It is also revealed that she blames Rappa for leaving them behind in their home with her mother and father, as he had once been the voice of reason against them and their need to conform to everything, in his own way, but had eventually left to pursue his endless love for fighting, leaving Kendo to bare the brunt of parenting her siblings whilst her parents ordered them about into lifestyles that they had no choice in.
And here is where we get to Kendo Rappa, as we begin to see into his own way of thinking. As it turns out, he operates on a form of morality that is different from regular people, only respecting that and those that can provide him with a fight and nothing, and no one, else. But it's not entirely his fault for his thinking this way; it's his quirk's. As it turns out, his quirk, of course, allows him to dish out punches at a rapid pace, but it also effects his mind, manipulating his personality around it and filling him with an insatiable need to battle others using said quirk because of it, hence why he eventually left the Kendo family home. The thing is that Rappa does feel guilty about leaving his niece behind, but due to his quirk's constant need to battle others, he had been given no choice but to leave, lest he accidently explode one day and turn his fists on the likes of Kendo and her younger siblings. Theirs is a strange relationship, a parallel to Peter and his Uncle Ben, only this one is strained and somewhat damaged, the two parties unsure of what to do or where to go with the other.
The two of them are eventually able to track down the surplus medicines going to a hero agency fronting as a charity organisation, and they find a lab underneath. A veritable factory, where dozens of people are working, under the guise of a minor hero by the name of Mr. Plastic, to create entire crates worth of trigger (the same stuff that was being stored in the warehouse from an earlier arc) and ship them off to other hero agencies across the local area.
But before they can report back, the two are discovered by Mr. Plastic's goons, and are forced to fight their way through them. However, Rappa ends up getting lost in the fight thanks to the manipulations and violent demands of his quirk and becoming just as much of a danger to Kendo as he is to Plastic's goons.
However, Kendo does something that she didn't know was possible.
She is able to talk him down. Not fight him, not knock him out into submission. She is able to talk him down from his rage, something that no one else is able to do, and bring him back to his senses (think Black Widow calming down the Hulk. All 'Sun's going down, real low' type of stuff).
But, of course, not before they trash the base and Mr. Plastic and his goons as well.
Soon, Gang Orca and his sidekicks arrive to lock up Mr. Plastic and his crew, and thanks both Kendo and Rappa for a job well done, though he laments that he can't let Kendo take the credit for her efforts due to it compromising his own reputation and trust from the public, on top of it being sort of illegal.
Kendo simply smiles and says that she wouldn't have wanted it anyway, and leaves with her uncle in tow, ready to take a swing at finally rebuilding their familial bond.
Sorry that this arc took so long to come out! I've been busy building up my backlog, and I've been trying to build up on the arcs that I want to tell, and, well, that and post-holiday fatigue and a slight hint of writer's block. I'm sure you all know how it goes.
Thank you WaqStaquer on Ao3 for suggesting using Gang Orca in this story (see, this is why I need reviews and comments. They help me to remember things that I need to include). Originally, it had been Mirko who had assigned Kendo and Rappa their mission, but upon reading his comment, he had been able to convince me to use Gang Orca instead, as he seems like a much more logical choice to put into this kind of situation and this kind of arc.