Ogata's brother is nothing like Ogata.
Where she is compact and precise and uses words the way a good engineer uses materials — exactly as many as the structure requires and not one more — her brother Ogata Hideo is a large, rumpled man who fills a chair. His office is on the third floor of a building in the south district.Legal consulting, the frosted glass on the door still says, though the consulting Hideo does these days sits in a wide grey band between legal and not.
He looks at my business card for a long time.
Not because the card is impressive. The card is not impressive. It is a white rectangle with 'Yami Consulting' printed on it in a font I chose because it looked serious, and my name, and a number for the prepaid phone I bought last week for three thousand two hundred yen out of what remained of the earnings. Hideo holds it like he is reading something written between the lines.
"My sister says you're not small-time," he says.
"Your sister is generous."
"She isn't, actually. That's what makes it interesting." He sets the card down. "What do you have right now?"
I tell him. Not everything but I tell him the category: operational and administrative records from defunct or suspended companies, some containing hero-adjacent data. I tell him the quality: primary source documents, unredacted. I tell him what I've been getting for them through existing channels and let the number speak for itself, which it does, loudly, because Hideo's eyebrows move in a way that confirms what I already knew about my margins.
"Teruo," Hideo says, like the name is a mild inconvenience.
"Among others."
"Teruo charges forty percent minimum and tells people it's thirty. Has for years." He folds his hands on the desk. "I charge fifteen. Flat. I don't renegotiate after the fact and I don't adjust the sale price before I report it."
Fifteen percent. I run the number against the last three jobs while he watches me not visibly run the number. The difference is not small. On the insurance manifests alone, fifteen percent instead of Teruo's creative accounting would have left me somewhere above forty thousand rather than the sixteen I actually walked away with.
"Why fifteen?" I ask, because a rate that low has a reason and I want to know what it is before I agree to anything.
"Because I'm not building a career on your margins," he says. "I'm building one on volume and longevity. You bring me clean material consistently, I make fifteen percent of something reliable instead of forty percent of something I have to squeeze out of scared people once."
It is the most honest explanation of a business model anyone has given me since I started doing this.Even though I'm skeptical I decide to trust it, provisionally, the way I trust everything — contingent on evidence, subject to revision.
"I also have something else," Hideo says. He opens a drawer. Produces a folded paper — a floor plan. "Building in the west administrative district. Former city planning office. The post-war reconstruction committee stored preliminary zoning models there before they moved to the new site. Nobody collected the backups."
I look at the floor plan. Zoning reconstruction models — the preliminary ones, before the official plans get published — tell you exactly where the city is going to rebuild and where it's going to leave as rubble. That information is worth money to developers, to landowners, to anyone trying to get ahead of the post-war property curve.
It is also, technically, public information that hasn't been made public yet. Which is a distinction that matters legally and is irrelevant practically.
"How much?" I ask.
"Fifty-five thousand. Maybe sixty. I have three buyers who will move on this fast."
I take the floor plan.
The room above the repair shop costs five thousand a month and has one window that faces a wall and a radiator that makes a sound like someone tapping on pipes from inside the building.
"Something is better than nothing"
I move in three days after the meeting with Hideo, carrying everything I own in the bag I also use for jobs, which means unpacking takes approximately four minutes.
I stand in the empty room and look at the four walls and the one wall-facing window and the tapping radiator and I feel something I don't immediately have a name for.
Then I identify it: it's the absence of forty-two people breathing.
Quiet. My own quiet. For the first time in two months.
I sit on the floor because there is no furniture and I stay very still in the quiet for probably ten minutes before I remember there are things to do and stand up again. I buy a secondhand mattress that afternoon from a man selling household items out of a van two streets over. Eight hundred yen.
That night, alone in the room above the repair shop with the radiator tapping its irregular rhythm, I make a list in my head.
What I have: one room, one prepaid phone, fifty business cards minus the one I gave Hideo, a scanner, a new buyer who charges fifteen percent, and a floor plan for a job that should net me somewhere around forty-seven thousand yen after Hideo's cut.
What I need: to not be someone who gets outmaneuvered by an unplanned stairwell. To not be someone a private security response of eight to twelve minutes can ruin. To not be someone whose only advantage is a Quirk he barely controls that fires when he doesn't want it and sometimes doesn't fire when he does.
To not be someone, full stop, that the world can afford to ignore.
I have forty-seven thousand coming. I know exactly what I'm spending it on.
The city planning job goes cleanly. Three days of preparation, one night in, Hideo's floor plan is accurate down to the fire exit locations, and I am back in my room by two in the morning with the scan complete and exactly zero unexpected stairwells. Hideo moves the files in four days. Fifty-eight thousand total. My cut after fifteen percent: forty-nine thousand three hundred yen.
I sit on the secondhand mattress and count it twice.
Forty-nine thousand three hundred yen. More money in my hand at one time than I have ever held since the jar behind the baseboard, and unlike that money, this money belongs entirely to me. No father with gray-bottle sake and careless hands. No Teruo with creative accounting. No split with Matsuda because I found this one on my own through a channel I built.
Mine.
I put three thousand aside for next month's rent and utilities. I put five thousand in a reserve I do not touch under any circumstances — the number that means I can survive a month with no income if everything collapses. Then I take the remaining forty-one thousand three hundred and I make two phone calls and I walk into two different parts of the city the next morning and I spend almost all of it.
Eight thousand a month to a boxing coach in the south district named Sato who trains people out of a converted garage with a cracked speed bag and a floor covered in rubber mats that have seen better years. He doesn't ask why I want to learn. He asks if I can take a hit. I say I don't know yet. He says "we'll find out" and hits me, not hard, in the shoulder, and I don't fall over, which seems to satisfy him.
Six thousand a month to a karate dojo run by a man named Ishida whose attendance collapsed after the war when his students moved or evacuated and never came back. I negotiate the rate down from ten thousand by offering to clean the dojo floor three mornings a week before my own training. Ishida looks at me for a long time and then says yes in a way that sounds like he is accepting something he already knew was coming.
What remains after first payments and my reserve: eleven thousand three hundred yen.
Enough for food for three weeks if I'm careful. Enough runway to find the next job before the money runs out.
I start training the next day. Sato hits me in the shoulder again, harder this time, and I stay upright, and that is what passing looks like in this particular school.
I see her for the first time four days into training, on an evening when I am walking back from Sato's garage with my left arm aching from a drill he made me repeat until the movement was automatic rather than considered.
She is sitting on the low wall outside a closed convenience store two blocks from my room. Knees pulled up. A paper bag beside her that looks like it holds food she hasn't eaten. Hair in twin buns that have come half-loose. She is looking at nothing in particular with the expression of someone who has been looking at nothing in particular for a while and has run out of other options.
I would have walked past. I walk past most things.
But she turns her head as I pass and our eyes meet for the half-second before I angle away, and in that half-second something in my head says: 'I know that face.'
Not personally. From files. From the post-war commission documentation I read in Hideo's office two weeks ago while he was pulling a buyer contact. A photograph in a villain registry update: one of the League of Villains' surviving members, status listed as 'location unknown, considered low-priority given post-war restructuring of threat assessment.'
Low priority.
I stop walking. I turn around.
She is watching me with the particular alertness of someone who has learned that being noticed is usually the beginning of something bad. Her hand has moved toward the paper bag in a way that suggests the bag does not only contain food.
"I'm not a hero," I say.
She tilts her head. Doesn't move her hand.
"And I'm not interested in turning you in," she say. "I'm interested in whether you're looking for work."
The alertness in her face doesn't disappear but it shifts — changes quality, the way a held breath changes when the threat turns out to be something other than what you braced for.
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she says, with the flat curiosity of someone who has very little left to lose and is therefore not particularly afraid of interesting situations:
"What kind of work?"
I sit down on the wall beside her, not too close, and I think about how to answer that in a way that is honest enough to be believed and incomplete enough to be safe. The city hums its broken post-war hum around us. My arm aches. The paper bag between us smells like convenience store fried chicken that has gone cold.
I am not small-time. I am just broke.