The drop was supposed to take fifteen minutes.
Sho had sent the address Friday night, a convenience store three blocks from a middle school in Chofu, package to be left in a specific locker in the public storage bay outside the entrance.
Straightforward.
The kind of job Kai could do half asleep, which was approximately the state he was in when he arrived at eight in the morning on a Saturday with the package tucked inside his jacket and his collar turned up against a wind that had decided overnight to mean business.
He found the locker. He put the package in. He locked it and pocketed the key and that was supposed to be that.
Then someone crashed into him from behind.
Not hard enough to knock him down, just enough to send him sideways a step, and he turned around with his hand already moving toward the knife before his brain caught up with what he was looking at, which was a kid about his age with silver-white hair and the build of someone who'd been doing push-ups since he learned what push-ups were, currently trying to catch a basketball that had gotten away from him and was now bouncing toward the road.
The kid caught it, turned around, and looked at Kai with an expression of complete uncomplicated apology.
"Sorry about that," he said, loudly, the way people talked when they'd been raised to project. "Ball got away from me. You good?"
Kai looked at him for a moment. His hand had stopped moving. He put it back in his pocket.
"Fine," he said.
FEAR POINTS +0
Nothing. Which was either because the kid was unusually composed for someone who'd just crashed into a stranger, or because whatever the system read in people, this one didn't have anything underneath his expression that contradicted it. What you saw was apparently what was there.
Kai found that faintly unusual.
"You're not from around here, huh? I'm Tetsutetsu," the kid said, because apparently they were doing this. He stuck out a hand. "Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu."
Kai looked at the hand. Then at the face attached to the name.
"Your parents named you that on purpose," he said.
Tetsutetsu blinked. Then he grinned, wide and entirely undefended, like the comment had delighted rather than offended him.
"Yeah they did," he said. "It's a good name. Strong. Make sure you remember it."
"Right," Kai said, and shook the hand, because not shaking it at this point would have required more effort than it was worth.
"So when'd you come from Japan, also which country did you live in before, do you go to school around here?" Tetsutetsu asked in rapidfire, tucking the basketball under one arm with the ease of someone who'd been carrying things under his arm his whole life.
"3 Years ago. The States and No." Kai said.
"Cool. You're Japanese is really good for someone who's only been here for three years." He praised, "Just passing through?"
"Something like that."
Tetsutetsu nodded, apparently satisfied with this answer, which told Kai either that he was incurious by nature or that he'd been raised not to pry, and given the straightforwardness of everything else about him it was probably the latter.
"I go to Nabu Middle," Tetsutetsu said, jerking his head toward the building down the road. "Saturday practice. Coach makes us come in even on weekends, which I personally think is great because more training is always better, but some of the others complain about it."
"Good coach," Kai said, mostly to have said something.
"The best," Tetsutetsu agreed, with the total conviction of someone who meant it completely. "You train at all? You've got the build for it."
Kai looked at him.
"Not formally," he said.
"Self-taught?"
"Something like that."
Tetsutetsu studied him for a moment with the frank assessing look of someone who had thought seriously about physical capability and applied that thinking to everyone he met.
It wasn't unfriendly. It was just honest in a way that most people weren't.
"Huh," he said. "Well it shows. Whatever you're doing it's working."
Kai had no response to that, which was a feeling he didn't often have.
He settled for a small nod and took a step back, the universal signal for this conversation is ending now that worked on most people.
Tetsutetsu was not most people.
"You heading toward the station?" he said. "I'm going that way too. Practice doesn't start for another twenty minutes."
Kai considered his options. The station was in fact the direction he was going.
Saying otherwise would require either a lie or a detour, and the detour would add fifteen minutes to a walk he already didn't want to extend.
"Sure," he said, in a tone that communicated his enthusiasm clearly.
Tetsutetsu didn't seem to notice, or didn't seem to mind, which amounted to the same thing.
He fell in beside Kai and they walked and Tetsutetsu talked the way some people breathed, steadily and without apparent effort, about practice and his coach and someone named Kendo who apparently had opinions about his footwork that he was still processing.
"She's not wrong," he said, with the rueful honesty of someone who'd had time to think about it. "She's almost never wrong, which is annoying. You know the type?"
"Not personally," Kai said.
"She goes to my school. Class rep. One of those people who's good at everything and doesn't make a big deal about it, which is somehow worse than if she did." He paused.
"I mean that as a compliment. She'd probably know I meant it as a compliment, which is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about."
Kai said nothing. He was listening, which was different from engaging, and Tetsutetsu either couldn't tell the difference or had decided it didn't matter.
They reached the station. Tetsutetsu stopped at the entrance and shifted the basketball to his other arm.
"You going in?"
"Yeah," Kai said.
"Cool." Tetsutetsu stuck out his hand again, which Kai shook again, because apparently this was just how the kid operated. "Good meeting you. What was your name?"
"Kai."
"Kai," Tetsutetsu repeated, like he was filing it somewhere reliable. "Cool. Maybe I'll see you around."
He turned and headed back toward the school at a jog, basketball tucked under his arm, already absorbed in whatever came next. Kai watched him go for a moment.
The interaction had lasted approximately twelve minutes. In that time Tetsutetsu had crashed into him, introduced himself twice, walked him to the station, talked about his coach, his footwork, and a girl named Kendo who was apparently very competent and very annoying about it, and shaken his hand on arrival and departure like they were colleagues concluding a meeting.
Kai went through the gate and stood on the platform waiting for the train and thought about the zero fear points.
Not because it mattered, it was twelve minutes with a stranger he'd never see again, but because it was notable.
Most people, when faced with Kai looking at them directly and saying very little, found somewhere else to be. Tetsutetsu had just kept talking.
Either the kid had no self-preservation instinct whatsoever, or he genuinely hadn't found anything to be wary of.
Kai wasn't sure which of those was more disarming.
The train came. He got on and found a seat and looked out the window at the city going past and thought about footwork and class reps and the particular exhausting quality of people who were straightforward without trying to be, and then stopped thinking about it because there was nothing useful in it and he had other things to do.
He was fairly good at stopping thinking about things.
He almost managed it this time.