He pulled it Sunday morning.
He'd told himself tomorrow the night before, and tomorrow had arrived grey and cold with nothing in it except the hotplate and the water stain on the ceiling and six hundred and seventy-six points sitting in a balance he hadn't touched.
He made coffee.
He wrapped his ribs, which had mostly finished knitting but still caught sometimes when he twisted wrong. He sat on the edge of the futon and looked at the interface for a long moment.
Then he opened the uncommon gacha.
The wheel looked different at this tier. Larger, more detailed, the segments rendered in deeper colours that the system's flickering aesthetic made look like something seen through water.
It spun with more weight to it than the common pulls had, the way a heavier door swings differently from a light one even when the hinges are the same.
Then it started glitching.
Not the small stutters of the common pulls, frame skips and minor judders. This was worse.
The wheel lurched sideways mid-rotation, the whole interface tilting like something had knocked it off its axis, and the colours bled into each other at the edges and the progress bar in the corner dropped two full percent before catching itself.
The result box at the bottom filled in slowly, dragging, each letter arriving like it was being pulled through something resistant.
DRAW: QUICK FEET
Increases host movement speed by 20% for the duration of activation.
DURATION: 5 minutes. COOLDOWN: 10 minutes. STAMINA COST: moderate.
WARNING: Ability output degraded due to system instability. Original parameters exceeded current binding capacity. Forced deactivation will occur at duration limit regardless of host preference.
Kai read the warning twice.
Forced deactivation. Not he'd get tired and it would fade, not a gentle taper. The system would simply close the ability at five minutes whether he was in the middle of something or not.
He thought about what that meant practically, about being twenty percent faster mid-sprint and then abruptly not being, and made a note to never activate it at the top of a staircase.
He felt the ability settle into him the way the threat assessment had, not a sensation exactly, more like a new word added to a vocabulary he hadn't known he was building.
Something waiting at the back of his awareness, patient and coiled, ready to be used.
He stood up and tried it. There was no ethereal sensation.
The room was too small to feel much. Four steps to the wall, four steps back, and at twenty percent faster that was over before it started.
What he did feel was the quality of it, the way his feet found the floor differently, lighter and more certain at the same time, like the half-second between deciding to move and actually moving had been quietly shortened.
He made it to the wall and back and the ability was still running and he stopped and stood there and breathed and noticed that his breathing was slightly harder than it should have been for eight steps.
Stamina cost. Moderate, the system had said. He'd need to find out what moderate meant across a longer distance before he trusted it in anything real.
He waited out the five minutes. At four minutes and fifty seconds something shifted in his awareness, a tightening, the system gathering itself, and at five minutes exactly it closed like a door being shut firmly from the other side.
Not painful. Just sudden and complete, and then the ten minute cooldown sat in his abilities tab like a grey bar counting down.
He stood in the middle of his small grey room and thought about the word forced.
The system didn't ask. It gave him things and it took them back on its own schedule and the warning had been informational, not apologetic.
Whatever he'd inherited, it had opinions about how it was used, and the glitching wasn't just damage, it was the sound of something trying to give him more than it currently could and failing at the edges.
He wondered, not for the first time, what it had been before it broke.
As he put away his cup off coffee his mind drifted back to the system, A thought lingering, asking him what it was.
"A quirk?" No it was confirmed that he was quirkless, not to mention he wasn't even the person the system was meant for.
"It can basically serve out quirks." He muttered glancing at Quick Feet. Sure it wasn't anything powerful, but it was only an uncommon pull.
Kai could only imagine what the Legendary pull would offer.
Monday came quick.
He got dressed, pocketed the knife. He dialled the number Oda has given him, on the burner phone he had received from the gatcha.
He had a job to start.
* * *
Sho met him at a convenience store two blocks from the Koto ward building, which Kai took to mean that the building wasn't a regular meeting place, just somewhere Oda had chosen for the introduction.
Sho was leaning against the exterior wall with a coffee can and the expression of someone who had been awake for a while and had made his peace with it.
"You're on time," he said.
"I'm always on time," Kai said.
"You also have a burner phone." Kai was surprised that the man knew the information, he had likely tried tracking it.
"How?" He continued on.
"I have my ways." Kai left it at that.
Sho looked at him for a moment, then pushed off the wall and started walking. Kai fell in beside him.
The first job was simple. A storage unit in a facility on the edge of the ward, a combination Sho gave him verbally and didn't repeat, three boxes moved from one unit to another two rows over. No markings on the boxes. No explanation of contents.
Kai moved them without asking and noted that they were heavy for their size and made no sound when tilted, which told him dense and either padded or liquid-packed, and that was as far as his curiosity took it.
When he was done Sho locked both units and they walked out and that was the job.
"That's it," Kai said.
"That's it," Sho said.
"I moved boxes."
"You moved boxes that needed moving by someone Oda trusts and nobody knows yet." Sho dropped his empty coffee can in a bin without breaking stride. "That's the job for now. You build up to more."
Kai thought about that. It made sense as a structure, give the new person tasks that cost nothing if they turn out to be unreliable, see how they carry themselves, move them up when they've demonstrated something worth moving up. He'd have done the same.
"How long until more," he said.
"Depends on you," Sho said, which was either genuinely informative or a non-answer dressed up as one, and Kai decided it was probably both.
They walked back toward the station in a silence that wasn't uncomfortable. Kai had noticed that about Sho, that he didn't fill quiet with noise the way most people did, didn't use words to manage the space between them.
It was a quality Kai recognised because he had it himself, and he found it easier to be around than he expected.
At the station entrance Sho stopped.
"Wednesday," he said. "Same time. I'll send the address."
"Right," Kai said.
Sho went through the gate. Kai watched him go and then stood there for a moment on the pavement with the city moving around him in its usual indifferent way, commuters and school kids and a man walking a small dog that was trying very hard to go in a different direction.
FEAR POINTS +3
Three points from somewhere in the crowd, someone who'd glanced at him and found something in the glance they didn't like. He didn't know who. He hadn't been trying. The system had just caught it the way it always did, quietly, without asking permission.
He turned up his collar against the cold and headed home.
* * *
Wednesday's job was different.
Not dramatically. On the surface it was the same kind of thing, a location, an action, no unnecessary details. But this time Sho wasn't with him.
Sho sent the address to the burner phone at seven in the morning with a single line beneath it.
Collect. Bring to the drop point. Don't open it.
The collection point was a ramen shop that hadn't opened yet, a shutter pulled most of the way down with just enough gap for a person to duck under.
Inside, a man Kai hadn't seen before was waiting behind the counter with a small package wrapped in brown paper.
He looked at Kai, looked at Kai's face specifically, long enough that Kai understood he was being checked against something, a description or a photograph or just the particular shape of someone who'd been vetted.
Then he slid the package across the counter without a word.
Kai pocketed it and left.
The drop point was a locker at a train station twenty minutes away. Kai put the package in, locked it, photographed the locker number with the burner phone, and sent it to Sho. Three minutes later a single character came back.
Good.
Kai looked at the word for a moment. Then he pocketed the phone and went to find something to eat, because it was nearly noon and he hadn't had breakfast and the package had been lighter than the boxes, lighter than almost anything, which meant it was either very small or very valuable or both, and thinking about that too carefully on an empty stomach felt like a bad idea.
He found a seat at a counter noodle place two blocks from the station and ordered without looking at the menu, because the menu had pictures and the pictures all looked the same when you were hungry enough, and ate while the lunch crowd came and went around him.
FEAR POINTS +8
Someone at the counter. He didn't look up to find out who.
Six hundred and seventy-six minus five hundred plus whatever he'd accumulated since Sunday.
He did the math without thinking about it, the way he did most things, and the number sat in the back of his head alongside the ten minute cooldown and the weight of the boxes and the particular quality of the silence in the ramen shop before it opened.
He finished his noodles, paid, and went home through the long way.
Old habits.