Thursday morning started like all others.
Three boxes, a warehouse address in Edogawa, cash on delivery. Sho read it out over the phone in the same flat tone he used for everything.
"Receiver's name is Togashi," he said. "He's done business with Oda before. Smooth both times."
"But," Kai said, because there was clearly a but.
A pause that lasted exactly long enough to confirm it.
"Word is he's been having cash flow problems lately. Keep your eyes open."
"You're telling me he might try to walk with the boxes," Kai said.
"I'm telling you to keep your eyes open," Sho said, and hung up.
Kai looked at the phone for a moment. Then he pocketed it, checked the knife was where it should be, and went to pick up the boxes.
* * *
The warehouse was a twenty-five minute train ride east, a squat concrete building at the end of a service road that backed onto the river.
The kind of sketchy place that existed to store things without anyone asking what kind of things.
Kai arrived at noon with the three boxes stacked on a handcart he'd borrowed from the depot, which had felt like the practical solution and also like the kind of thing Sho would have told him to do if Sho were the type to tell people things.
Togashi was already there.
He was a broad man, late thirties, with the particular thickness across the shoulders that looked more like the effect of a quirk than through natural muscle.
His hair was cropped close and his jacket was expensive in the way that things were expensive when someone had money but not taste.
He looked at Kai the way people looked at things they were deciding the value of, quick and calculating and not particularly interested in what the thing thought about it.
He had one man with him. Big, standing slightly behind and to the right, hands loose at his sides.
"You're Oda's," Togashi said. Not a question.
"I'm the delivery," Kai said. "You've got the cash."
Togashi smiled. It was the kind of smile that had been used before to soften things that weren't soft.
"About that," he said. Kai's eyes narrowed, a feeling of unease washing over him, maybe the passive skill he had unlocked randomly was actually working.
Kai had the boxes off the handcart before Togashi finished the sentence. Not because he'd decided anything, just because keeping his hands busy gave him something to do while he waited for the rest of it.
"I'm a little short this week. I'll get Oda the cash by the end of the month, he knows I'm good for it."
"I'm not a credit service," Kai said. "Cash on delivery means cash on delivery."
"Kid." Togashi's voice shifted, the warmth going out of it the way warmth went out of things that were never warm to begin with. "You don't want to make this difficult."
"You're making it difficult," Kai said. "I'm just standing here." He grew alarmed as his senses cautioned him.
Togashi looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded at the man behind him.
The man's quirk activated before he moved. His skin shifted, hardened, took on the dull grey sheen of poured concrete from the neck down, and the air around him changed the way air changed when something very heavy entered it. He stepped forward and the floor felt it.
Kai took a step back cursed his luck, and assessed the situation in front.
Some sort of metamorphosis, into a concrete or maybe other, harder materials. Full body, fast activation, no visible weak points from the front.
The man was large to begin with and the quirk added mass on top of that, slow the way large things were slow but with enough force behind each movement to make slow irrelevant if he connected.
The warehouse was open but not open enough, concrete pillars every eight metres, low ceiling, the river access door behind Togashi.
The handcart was between them.
The man grabbed it and threw it aside like it weighed nothing, which it practically didn't for him, and closed the distance in three long strides.
Kai moved, cutting sideways toward the nearest pillar and using it to redirect the first swing, concrete fist connecting with concrete column in a crack that shook dust from the ceiling.
He got a hit in at the back of the man's knee, the one spot a hardening quirk usually left soft because the joint needed to flex, and felt nothing except the impact traveling up his own arm like he'd hit a wall.
The man barely registered it.
He turned and swung again and this time Kai didn't move fast enough. The blow caught his shoulder and spun him sideways into the pillar, and for a second the world went sideways with it, bright and ringing and wrong.
He caught himself against the concrete, got his feet under him, and looked up at the man coming toward him again and felt something cold settle in his chest.
He wasn't winning this.
Not straight. Not without something.
His mind scoured for a way, then a reminder followed by him activating Quick Feet.
The shift was immediate. Not dramatic, no light, no sound, just the sudden sense that the space between him and the next moment had compressed, that his feet knew the floor better than they had a second ago.
The man swung and Kai was somewhere else before it arrived, not far, just enough, and this time when he moved toward the exposed back of the knee he was already at the next position before the man finished turning.
It wasn't power. It was timing, and timing was the thing you needed when power wasn't available.
He hit the knee from the inside this time, leverage rather than force, and the man's leg buckled. Not broke, not with that quirk, but buckled, and the man went down to one knee and that was the moment.
Kai grabbed the back of his collar and got his forearm across the man's throat from behind, full weight, using the angle and the man's own size against him.
The concrete skin made it harder but not impossible, the throat was still somewhat soft, and he held it and held it and waited while the man's hands came up and scrabbled at his arms and found nothing to grip.
Fifteen seconds. Twenty.
The hands slowed.
Kai kept holding until he was sure, then stepped back and let him down. The man stayed down, breathing, conscious, the hardening fading unevenly as the quirk lost focus. Kai's shoulder was screaming. His arm felt like he'd held it in a fire.
He turned to Togashi.
Togashi had not moved. He was standing exactly where he'd been, and the smile was gone, and something had replaced it that wasn't quite fear but was everything fear was made of. His eyes were doing the calculation that eyes did when the math had changed faster than expected.
FEAR POINTS +100
A hundred.
Kai stood there for a moment, shoulder aching, Quick Feet still running somewhere in the background, and looked at that number.
A hundred from Togashi. Far more than any other person before. Infact it was almost double the amount of the previous highest points he had received from a singular person.
The numbers lined up differently when he put them next to each other. Though an idea or an answer of sorts started to form inside his head.
The system wasn't just measuring how scared someone was, or atleast that's what he thought. "It could be something to do with strength." He wondered, the idea had it's merits. The salary man he'd followed had given him barely ten, while the first time he had fought, he had received fourty-seven from one if the thugs.
He filed the information away for some other time and looked at Togashi.
"The cash," he said.
Togashi paid after some convincing.
* * *
He met Sho outside the café, shoulder leaned against the wall, watching passerbys.
"It's done," he said. "Togashi tried to walk. He didn't."
A pause.
"You hurt?"
Kai thought about this honestly.
"Roughed up my shoulder," he said. "Nothing that needs a hospital."
Another pause, longer this time.
"Come along," Sho said. "Oda will want to hear it from you."
* * *
The Koto ward building looked the same as it had the first time. The same ground floor light, the same narrow staircase, the same ink painting of the mountain on the wall.
Oda was at the table with tea already poured, which meant he'd been expecting this.
Kai sat down and gave him the short version. The warning, the arrival, the man with the hardening quirk, the fight that ensued and him roughing up Togashi. He left out Quick Feet, he didn't feel comfortable sharing information on something he didn't quite understand himself.
Oda listened without interrupting. When Kai finished he was quiet for a moment.
"Togashi will be dealt with," he said.
"That's not why I'm here, am I?" Kai said.
"No," Oda agreed. "You're here because I told Sho to bring you in and I want to know how you put down a hardening quirk user without one of your own." Kai cursed in the back of his mind, the man had a quick eye.
"Carefully," Kai said.
Oda looked at him for a moment thinking about something. Then he picked up his tea.
"Go home," he said. "Rest the shoulder. I'll have something for you next week."
Kai stood. He was almost at the door when Oda spoke again.
"You did well," he said, simply, the way someone said something when they meant it and didn't need it to be more than it was.
Kai left without answering, which was its own kind of answer.
* * *
Sho was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
He fell in beside Kai without being asked and they walked the first block in silence, the comfortable kind that had started to develop between them without either of them having decided to let it.
"Sounds like you had a hell of a scuffle," Sho said eventually.
"Yes," Kai said.
"And you're walking."
"Barely," Kai said, which was an exaggeration but not by much.
Sho was quiet for another half block.
"What did you do for the shoulder?"
"Nothing yet."
"There's a place two streets over. Tell them Sho sent you."
Kai looked at him.
"Is that you being helpful or Oda telling you to make sure I don't fall apart on the way home?"
Sho considered this with the seriousness he applied to most things.
"Both," he said.
"Fair enough," Kai said.
He went to the place two streets over. The shoulder wasn't broken, just badly bruised, and the man who looked at it didn't ask questions, which meant Sho had used this address for this purpose before.
Back at Koto Ward, his two acquaintances were having a conversation regarding him.
"Do you believe it?" Sho asked.
"Hm?" Oda asked not knowing what he meant.
"Him taking out someone with a hardening quirk, doesn't make much sense for a quirkless person." Sho continued.
"Kira may not be the brightest fighter, but I doubt a kid like him would be able to defeat him so casually. A shoulder injury should be the smallest injury on him." Sho finished speaking.
"Who knows. I couldn't find medical history about him. Maybe he lied about being quirkless." Oda answered after thinking deeply.
"You think he might cause trouble in the future?" Sho asked.
"Maybe, but he can also be an invaluable asset."