"If I remember correctly—" Iaian's voice dropped into the focused register he used when pulling from memory rather than guessing "—the smoke is coming from the direction of the seafood market. The one we were heading to."
The Hero Association's emergency broadcast cut in before anyone could respond.
"Urgent alert: Bizarre attack reported at E-City Seafood Market. All heroes in the vicinity, please respond immediately. Residents, cease shopping and evacuate the area at once. This is not a drill. Repeat—"
The broadcast continued looping. Iaian was already moving.
His armored form crossed the distance between the food stall road and the market street like something had been released rather than something that had started running. The armor—heavy enough that most people couldn't have jogged in it—moved with him like a second skin after years of exactly this.
Behind him, the sound of two pairs of footsteps: Okamaitachi and Bushidrill falling in without a word, the argument they'd been having two minutes ago already forgotten. Some contexts cancelled everything else. This was one of them.
The scene Iaian arrived to first was the kind that didn't fully assemble itself in the brain all at once—it came in pieces, each one worse than the last. Bodies in the market lanes. Overturned stalls. Ice from the shattered cold storage unit spread across the cobblestones, already beginning to melt at the edges where it met blood. The Frozen Fish Monster in the center of it all, both frozen swords swinging in lazy arcs, laughing at something only it found funny.
Iaian's face went grey. His hand found his sword hilt.
"Okamaitachi, Bushidrill!"
Okamaitachi and Bushidrill turned to him in the same instant, the banter gone, the A-Class aura settling over them like armor clicking into place.
"I'll draw its attention from the front. You two get the civilians out."
Neither of them argued. Okamaitachi peeled left, Bushidrill went right, and they were running before Iaian finished the sentence—two vectors aimed at the pockets of survivors still frozen in the lanes, still not processing that they needed to move.
Iaian watched them go for exactly one second.
Then he lowered into the starting stance for Iai Draw Slash — weight forward, knee bent, hand wrapped around the hilt at his hip — and let everything else go quiet.
The Frozen Fish Monster tracked Okamaitachi and Bushidrill's movement with the cold patience of something that had already decided how this was going to end. Its dead fish eyes, intelligent in ways that made them worse rather than better, followed the two heroes splitting toward the crowd.
"A hero?" The voice came out like the inside of a freezer. "Finally!"
It let them take three steps before it moved.
The frozen sword dropped from behind toward Bushidrill's back—no warning, no declaration, just the practical attack of something that understood the value of eliminating one problem before the others noticed.
"Drill, above you!"
Okamaitachi's shout and drawn blade arrived simultaneously. Bushidrill's training did the rest: his hand went to the drill-bladed hilt on instinct, the spiral sword came up, and the frozen mackerel blade hit it hard enough that both of his feet carved parallel grooves in the cobblestone as he was driven back nearly ten meters before the momentum bled out.
His right arm went numb to the elbow.
The Frozen Fish Monster's follow-through pulled it fractionally off-balance. Okamaitachi's sword aura hit its scales from the side in the same moment — a clean, precisely angled strike aimed at exploiting exactly that gap.
The blade left a faint white line on blue-black scales that were the color of deep water.
A single white line.
Okamaitachi lowered her sword slowly. "...That's solid."
"Very strong," Bushidrill confirmed from ten meters back, shaking sensation back into his sword arm and already moving toward the crowd. "Iai — be careful. This is Demon-level at minimum."
Iaian had already arrived at that conclusion. The exchange had told him everything that mattered: the reaction speed, the raw strength behind that sword, the way the scales had shed Okamaitachi's flying sword technique like water off a tile roof. What Atomic Samurai could end in one casual stroke was a ceiling that Iaian could only approach by going completely all-out.
Demon-level. He filed the assessment away and adjusted his strategy accordingly.
Quick victory: out. Hold the line and buy time: in.
He glanced sideways at Okamaitachi and Bushidrill working through the lanes, moving civilians, creating distance between the monster and the people who couldn't protect themselves. A minute. Maybe two. He needed to give them that.
The Frozen Fish Monster was still laughing somewhere behind the pillars and overturned stalls.
Iaian found it in the geometry of the market — the gaps between structures, the angles of approach, the way the ice-slicked ground would affect footwork — and moved.
If the scales stop Okamaitachi's flying technique, the body is the target. Get inside the guard. Make it count.
He went from still to full speed without the intermediate steps. The Iai Draw Slash was built exactly for this — a technique that existed in the gap between standing and having already struck, designed to cover distance and deliver force in the same motion. The supporting pillars of two stalls cracked as the blade's trailing energy passed through them. The monster was thirty meters away, then twenty, then the space between them was simply closing too fast to be meaningful.
The Frozen Fish Monster heard him coming and turned its head.
Their eyes met.
Iaian with a swordsman's fixed, tunneled focus — one target, one strike, everything committed.
The monster with the flat, patient expression of something that had already decided how this ended.
The Frozen Fish Sword came up and caught the Iai Draw Slash with the unhurried ease of a man stopping a door that's been pushed too gently.
Impact. Iaian felt the force travel back up through his blade, through his grip, through his arm to his shoulder.
Enormous.
He was already moving — redirecting the energy into a backward flip, landing on the collapsed roof of a fish stall, putting three meters of altitude between them. His breathing was harder than he'd like it to be.
The monster raised its second sword and brought it down across the street below. The cobblestones split open along a crack that ran thirty meters without stopping.
Iaian had been somewhere else before the blade reached his previous position. That was the margin they were working with: not power, not defense, but the reflexes and footwork that Atomic Samurai's training had drilled into them until the body moved before the brain finished processing the threat.
We cannot win this.
The thought was cold and clear and exactly as useful as it needed to be. We can survive it. And we can buy the time Okamaitachi and Bushidrill need.
He reset his stance on the stall roof and found the monster again in the market below — calculating, adjusting, looking for whatever angle gave him another thirty seconds.
Then he looked toward Okamaitachi and Bushidrill and their progress with the civilians.
Then he looked back at the monster.
The spot where it had been standing was empty.
The temperature dropped.
From directly above came a voice like scraping ice on metal.
"Being distracted in battle—"
The cold hit his scalp first. Then his shoulders. A bone-deep, penetrating chill that had nothing to do with the weather — the ambient cold of something whose entire biology had been built around absolute zero, now positioned between Iaian and the sky.
"—is a death sentence."
The twin swords came down in a crossing arc.
"Didn't your master teach you that? Die — MUHAHAHAHA!!"
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