The name that he was given was Tsuboi, he didn't have any first name or last name, most likely a code name than an actual person, whoever Tsuboi was, they sat one level above the crew from the alley, which meant they weren't the full culprit of what was going on.
That alone told Itsuki several things.
'The crew in the alley didn't know who hired them directly. They only knew Tsuboi. Tsuboi presumably knows whoever is above him, but probably not much further than that. Which also means it's not some typical gang, more like an information network. Compartmentalisation. Each layer only knows the layer immediately above it, so that if someone gets picked up and talks, the damage is contained. Organised crimes are always the hardest to deal with.'
He had also been given an address. A logistics company in the warehouse district on the eastern edge of the city, the kind of business that looked as innocent as a flower. Paid their taxes on time and gave no one any reason to look twice. So it was strange to see that it was a checkplace where payment was collected.
That was enough to start with.
He spent three days watching the building before he went anywhere near it.
Not from the same position twice.
The first day he passed it on foot during the afternoon rush, wings folded tight against his back so the silhouette read as a slightly unusual but not remarkable middle schooler in a gakuran. He noted the entrance points, the camera positions on the exterior, the rhythm of who came and went and at what times. The second day he watched from a rooftop two streets over with his wings functioning as extended sensory organs, picking up movement and sound from a distance that would have been impossible for anyone without a substitute for eyes and ears. The third day he said nothing to anyone, told his parents he was going to Shinso's, and went back to the warehouse district at six in the morning before the city had fully woken up.
'Three days is the minimum. Less than that and you're filling gaps with assumptions. In Beirut there was a handler who liked to say that assumptions were just mistakes you hadn't made yet. He was annoying about it but he wasn't wrong.'
What he had confirmed over those three days: the building ran a genuine logistics operation as cover, trucks in and out on a regular schedule. But there was a secondary pattern underneath it. Every two days, at irregular hours that didn't match any shipping schedule, a small group of two to four people entered through a side entrance that wasn't on the public facing floor plan.
They were always carrying something and they never stayed for longer than forty minutes, the people who worked with the legitimate side of the operation never saw the secondary group.
More importantly: twice during his observation he had seen one of the men from the secondary group meeting with someone outside a pharmacy three blocks away. The pharmacy stocked quirk suppressant medication, made for those whose quirk was… troublesome and they couldn't control.
But the man wasn't buying anything, he was talking to someone who worked there, briefly, he stoof there acting like it was some sort of small talk but Itsuki suspected it was something else.
'Quirk suppressants have a legitimate medical market and a significantly larger illegitimate one. If you want to move a product that interferes with quirk function at scale, you need either a pharmaceutical contact or a manufacturer. A pharmacy worker is too small to be a manufacturer. But they could be a procurement point, someone pulling product off legitimate stock in small enough quantities that it doesn't flag. Or they could be a testing point, someone confirming that a batch works before it goes further up the chain.'
He had seen enough of the world to recognise the shape of something without needing to see all of it. This organisation dealt in quirk suppressants, ran compartmentalised, and used real businesses as cover for their dirty crimes.
On the fourth day he went in.
✦ ✦ ✦
The side entrance had a keypad lock and a camera positioned to cover the door. The camera was the easy part — he came in from above, landing on the roof in the dark with his wings at minimum size, moving slowly enough that the air pressure change wouldn't register as anything unusual to someone listening from inside.
The keypad was a four-digit code and he had watched someone enter it from two streets away on day two with his wing-assisted vision reading the finger movements.
Inside was a corridor, then a staircase going down, then a room that was larger than the building's footprint suggested, which meant it extended under the neighbouring property as well.
'Subterranean extension and those are not cheap whatsoever, whoever is funding this is probably a bigger crime-boss than I expected, and if they have this across multiple buildings then it makes it even more scarier.'
He moved through the corridor slowly, keeping close to the wall and making sure his wings were fully folded. The sensory range they gave him meant he could feel the presence of people.
Any displacement in the air he could sense, the same with the vibration of footsteps through the floor, he also had trained to pick up a particular quality of sound that told him how many people were in a space and roughly where they were.
Two people in the room at the bottom of the stairs. One near the far wall, one closer to the centre.
He took stock of what he had come for. Against the wall of the corridor were shelves with crates, several of them sealed and labeled with shipping codes that didn't correspond to anything that he had seen before, most likely illegal.
One crate near the bottom had been opened and resealed improperly, the lid slightly misaligned. He crouched and looked at what was inside without fully opening it.
Small vials, uniform in size, each filled with a pale liquid sealed with a stopper, there was no labelling but they were carefully packed in foam.
'There it is.'
He memorised the shipping code on the crate's exterior, the quantity he could see, and the packaging method. Then he resealed it the way it had been, stood up, and turned to leave. His mission was over, right not was not the time to fight battles.
The door at the end of the corridor opened.
A man stepped through with the unhurried confidence of someone who belonged there and wasn't expecting company.
He saw Itsuki.
Itsuki saw him.
For exactly one second neither of them moved.
Then the man shouted something and everything became considerably less quiet.
✦ ✦ ✦
Two came from the corridor behind him, having heard the shout. One came through a door to the left that Itsuki hadn't fully accounted for, which made him mildly irritated at his blunder. The man who had walked in first was backing toward the far end and reaching for something at his belt.
'I can feel four of them. The two from the corridor are the immediate problem. The one from the left door is secondary. The one reaching for something at his belt is the one I don't want to let finish what he's doing.'
He moved before any of them had finished positioning themselves, he couldn't let them get any sort of chemistry as of now.
The first one from the corridor had a physical enhancement type or at least he thought, the muscles shifting uner the skin was a very justified reason, he threw a straight punch that would have been impressive against anyone who wasn't already moving sideways. Itsuki let it pass his shoulder, brought his own arm around with cursed energy concentrated in the strike, and hit the man in the side of the neck with enough precision that he sat down immediately and stayed there, mouth gaping with drool coming out.
The second one from the corridor had a different approach. His quirk activated with a sound like static and the air around his hands began to distort, a vibration type of quirk, which could be deadly if used correctly but it was in the hands of a drug dealer.
He grabbed Itsuki's left arm.
The vibration hit nastily.
It traveled up his arm and into his shoulder and rattled through his chest cavity and it was, genuinely, one of the more unpleasant things he had experienced in this body. His vision flickered slightly from the resonance.
Above his head, the wheel appeared.
CLICK.
It spun once..
Itsuki looked at the man holding his arm with the expression of a child who had just been told to wash the dishes, detached a feather from his wing with his free hand and pressed the point of it against the man's neck with enough pressure to make the choice obvious.
The man let go.
Itsuki hit him once (in the stomach) and moved on.
The one from the left door had a ranged type — small concentrated projectiles launched from his fingertips, a long distance quirk which made the user virtually useless in close combat. Itsuki closed the gap. A wing snapped outward and redirected the man's arm before the shot released, the projectile hitting the ceiling instead of anything useful, and then the fight was over for him as well.
Three down.
The fourth was the one who had been reaching for something at his belt.
He had found it.
It wasn't a weapon in the conventional sense. It was a small device, cylindrical, the kind of thing you held rather than aimed. He activated it and the effect was immediate. A sort of localised field, that Itsuki felt first through his wings as a kind of dampening, a reduction in the sensitivity of everything they were processing.
His sensory range contracted at a dangerous pace.
The extended perception he had come to rely on without thinking about it pulled back to almost nothing.
'Quirk suppression field. Short range, probably limited duration given the size of the device. So he'll be trying to end this fight as quickly as he can before it wears off.'
Which meant this one knew what he was doing.
He was older than the others, and he moved like someone who was experienced with his plans not going to plan.
He put the device down on a crate to keep the field active and came forward without it, which told Itsuki his quirk wasn't the device and the device was a tool.
His actual quirk activated as he moved, his body shifting, the proportions of it changing in ways that suggested significant strength augmentation.
He hit Itsuki in the ribs with a closed fist and it was a completely different category of impact from anything else in the room.
Itsuki backed away three steps from the force of it, caught himself against the corridor wall, and took stock. Two ribs, probably. The vibration quirk from earlier had already done something to his internal body and this had landed on top of that.
The wheel appeared again.
CLICK.
It spun.
CLICK.
It spun a second time, faster.
The man came forward again and hit him in the same place. Itsuki still felt it, but the damage was significantly less than it should have been.
Something in his body had already started regenerating and repairing the tissues and other damaged parts in his body.
The man noticed.
He hit the same spot a third time trying to see if he was really seeing things right and the kid was really not damaged.
Itsuki straightened up afterward and rolled his shoulder once.
CLICK.
The wheel spun a third time and slowed and stopped.
He looked at the man with a bored expression, one which had been on his face since his birth. The man tried the ribs again.
But Itsuki didn't move back, he didn't move at all instead he found himself moving three steps back.
Itsuki reached behind his back and detached a wing, holding it loosely at his side, and looked at the device on the crate that was maintaining the suppression field. Then he looked back at the man.
"You can turn that off," Itsuki said, "and we can finish this. Or you can leave it on, and we finish this anyway, just slower."
The man looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked at the three people on the floor behind Itsuki.
Carefully, he creeped over to the device and turned the device off.
Then he sat down on a crate and said nothing further, which Itsuki considered a reasonable position given the circumstances.
'Good. Sensible people are so much less exhausting.' Itsuki groaned, he didn't want to fight in the first place.
He didn't interrogate anyone this time.
He had what he came for: the shipping code, the vials, and now he knew that there was someone higher than them, taking them down whilst there was a probability that they were just one of the many dealers was just bothersome.
He left the way he had come in, up the staircase and back through the corridor and out the side entrance into the grey early morning. He sealed the door behind him, descended from the roof to street level, and walked north at a pace that matched everyone else on the pavement.
'Three things confirmed. One: the operation is real and active. Two: the product is some variant of quirk suppressant, non-standard, possibly experimental given the lack of labeling. Three: they have access to suppression field technology sophisticated enough to affect a mutation-type quirk, which means someone above Tsuboi has either developed or sourced something that most street-level criminal outfits don't have. That last one is the one that matters. That's not something you acquire through normal black market channels and I've looked through plenty of them. It's really tiring when you think you've reborn into a new world just to find it just as corrupt.'
He filed his thoughts away.
He changed his route twice on the way home. He stopped at a convenience store and bought two onigiri and ate them on a bench in a small park two streets from his house, letting twenty minutes pass and watching whether the same person appeared in his peripheral vision more than once, and as he saw that no one was following him, he finally decided that it was safe enough to go home.
✦ ✦ ✦
Two days later after school, Shinso fell into step beside him on the walk to the station and they talked about nothing in particular for several minutes.
Complaining about a teacher who didn't particularly like the pair of them, a vending machine on the second floor that had started giving out the wrong drinks, the usual texture of an ordinary Tuesday.
(A/N: TACO TUESDAY!!!)
Then Shinso said, "I've been thinking about UA."
Itsuki looked back at him over his shoulder but kept on walking. "Yeah?"
"The hero course," Shinso said. "I want to try out for it."
"Okay," Itsuki said, "That's nice."
Shinso glanced at him sideways, clearly having expected more than that. "That's it?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know…. Something."
Itsuki thought about what he knew.
The exam was very much rigged, it was designed for offensive flashy quirks, there was no a brainwashing quirk no matter how strong or refined it could score some points on robots. It was most probably the reason in the original, except from his obvious doubt of confidence, had problems entering the hero course even though he was very much smart and capable. It was rigged.
"Well if you want to make it in then I'd say to train your voice," Itsuki said instead. "Your quirk activates on response so the further you can project it without losing precision the more useful it becomes in an open environment."
Shinso replied. "That's actually kinda helpful."
"I know," Itsuki said.
They walked the rest of the way to the station without saying much else
✦ ✦ ✦
He came home at half past seven to find the house quiet.
His mother's voice was present from upstairs, Amane's voice also seemed to be there, Itsuki guessed that it was her bedtime. He took off his shoes and walked to the kitchen.
He poured himself a glass of water.
And…
And….
He drank it.
His father was in the lounge.
Suit on, as always.
His glasses were eyeing up a document in front of him, though Itsuki had the distinct impression that his father hadn't actually read. The lamp beside the chair was on and the rest of the room was devoid of light, and his father was sitting lazily on the chair, lost doing nothing.
He didn't look up when Itsuki passed the doorway, but his head titled, the unconscious adjustment of someone whose hearing had just heard something but was still in the middle of fully understanding it.
Itsuki stopped in the doorway for a moment, confused.
His father turned a page of the document he hadn't been reading.
Itsuki went upstairs.
Neither of them said anything. B
ut as he reached the top of the stairs he heard, very quietly, the sound of his father setting the document down on the table and not picking it back up again.
Itsuki went to his room, sat on the edge of his bed, and looked at the ceiling for a while.
'He's going to figure it out eventually. The only question is whether I get to choose when.'
Itsuki decided that there was no reason to ponder on it anymore and slept.
****
I'VE FINALLY HIT 15k OH MY GOD!!! 7 DAYS OF STRAIGHT WRITING!!!
GIVE ME YOUR STONES PEOPLE!!! I'M ABLE TO GET INTO THE RANKINGS!!! I'M SO HAPPY!!!