His first day as Oda's assistant started at eight in the morning with Sho handing him a folder.
Not a thick folder. Three pages, printed in a clean font, no headers. Names, addresses, amounts, dates. The kind of document that looked like accounting until you read it carefully enough to understand it wasn't.
"Memorise it," Sho said. "Then give it back."
"I don't get to keep it?"
"Nobody keeps anything they don't need to keep," Sho said, with the tone of someone stating something obvious. "That's how things stay clean."
Kai read it twice, returned it, and spent the walk to the Koto ward building turning the numbers over in his head until they were his.
The building felt different now that he was supposed to know what happened in it. Or maybe it was the same and he was the thing that had changed.
The staircase was still narrow. The mountain painting was still half-hidden in cloud. But Sho took him past the first floor meeting room and up another flight he hadn't been up before, into a smaller space that served as something between an office and a planning room, a wide table covered in district maps, a whiteboard with names connected by lines, a window that looked out onto the laundromat's roof.
Two of Oda's people were already there. Kai recognised one of them as the man who'd collected the package from the ramen shop on his second week, and the man gave him a short nod that meant you've been vetted which was different from a friendly nod but was still something.
Sho walked him through the operation properly for the first time.
Oda ran product across three wards, Koto, Edogawa, and the eastern edge of Sumida. The product was primarily pharmaceutical, things that existed in a grey space between prescription and illegal depending on quantity and who was asking.
He had four distribution points, two storage facilities, and a rotation of twelve runners who didn't know each other's names. Above the runners were three coordinators, of which Sho was one. Above the coordinators was Oda.
And above Oda, though Sho didn't say it in those words, there was the question of where the product came from.
"That's where you're going today," Sho said, capping his marker. "Oda will explain the rest."
"Today?" Kai said.
"First day," Sho said, with something that might have been sympathy. "Oda moves fast when he decides to move."
* * *
Oda was waiting downstairs in a car Kai had seen before, a dark grey sedan clean enough to be inconspicuous in any neighbourhood. It was one of the one's he was being watched from.
He got in the back without being told to and Sho took the passenger seat and nobody said where they were going.
They drove for forty minutes, heading south and west, out of the wards Kai knew into a part of the city that got quieter and more deliberate the further in you went.
The buildings here were older but maintained, the kind of old that came from money rather than neglect, and the streets had the particular quality of places that didn't appear on the maps tourists used.
The car stopped outside a building that looked like it handled traditional medicine or antiques, the signage understated and the windows dark.
"You're here to observe," Oda said, without turning around. "You say nothing unless you're asked something directly. You don't react to anything you hear. Understood?"
"Understood," Kai said.
They went inside.
* * *
The man they were meeting was already seated when they were shown in, and he was the kind of person whose stillness had texture to it, not Oda's stillness, which was the stillness of patience, but something with edges, the stillness of something held very tightly in place.
He was young. Younger than Kai expected from the weight of the room around him. Blond hair pulled back, a plague doctor mask pushed up on his head like he'd just removed it and hadn't decided where to put it yet.
His hands were gloved, and the way he held them, slightly away from the table surface, said the gloves weren't for show.
His name was Chisaki Kai. Which was, Kai thought, an interesting coincidence he was going to keep entirely to himself.
Two men stood behind him. Large, quiet, with the specific blankness of people who had been told their job was to be furniture until it wasn't.
Threat Assessment flared inside of Kai, loud and persistent, in a way it had never done before, it was telling him that the situation he was in was extremely dangerous.
He'd learned to calm himself when getting into fights or danger, but something apart from Threat Assessmen, his own intuition was telling him that the man in front was not to be trifled with.
Kai kept his thoughts to himself, acting irrational would only cause trouble, and it wasn't as though thry were here for a fight.
Whatever it was reading in that room, it didn't settle.
Chisaki looked at Oda with the expression of someone conducting an inspection.
"You brought someone new," he said. Not accusatory, just noting it, the way you'd note a change in weather.
"My assistant," Oda said. "He's here to learn the shape of things."
Chisaki's eyes moved to Kai. They stayed there for a moment with the quality of something being catalogued.
Kai met them without expression and without looking away, which was the only correct response to that kind of attention and also the only one he was capable of.
Something shifted in Chisaki's expression. Not respect exactly.
"Interesting choice," he said to Oda, and moved on.
The meeting was brief and precise, likely because both parties already knew what they wanted and were there to confirm rather than negotiate.
Chisaki was developing a product, something pharmaceutical, something that didn't exist yet in any form the market knew about.
He needed distribution channels that were clean, discreet, and already established. Oda had those things.
The numbers were discussed. The timeline was discussed. The conditions were discussed, and Chisaki's conditions were the kind that didn't leave room for interpretation, delivered in a flat even voice that made it clear they were conditions rather than suggestions.
Oda agreed to most of them. Adjusted two. Chisaki accepted the adjustments without visible reaction.
Then it was done.
Kai had not said a word. He had also not looked away from Chisaki for more than a few seconds at a time, which he was fairly sure Chisaki had noticed and which he hadn't been able to entirely help.
There was something wrong about the man. Not wrong the way dangerous people were wrong, Kai had been around enough of those to know that particular frequency.
This was different. Something underneath the composure that the threat assessment kept circling without landing on, like a word sitting at the edge of memory that wouldn't come forward.
He didn't know what it was. He filed that uncertainty away and followed Oda out.
* * *
They were twenty minutes into the drive back when Oda spoke.
"Your thoughts," he said, to the window.
Kai considered the question properly before answering, which he thought Oda would appreciate more than a fast response.
"He's careful about his hands," Kai said. "The gloves. The way he keeps them off surfaces. Whatever his quirk is, it works through contact and he doesn't want to use it accidentally."
Oda didn't confirm or deny it.
"The product he's developing," Kai said. "He talked about the timeline the way you talk about something that doesn't exist yet. He's not ready to distribute. He needs the channels set up now so they're in place when he is."
"Correct," Oda said.
"Who is he?"
A pause.
"He leads the Shie Hassaikai. Old organisation. Yakuza lineage, though he's taken it somewhere his predecessor wouldn't recognise." Oda's voice was even, the tone he used when information was being offered rather than discussed. "He's not a businessman. He's something else wearing a businessman's schedule."
"A Villain?" Kai said.
"That's one word for it."
Kai looked out the window. They were back in familiar territory now, the elevated tracks, the rows of closed shutters, the city returning to its usual shape around them.
"Is that a line for you?" Oda said. Not pressing, just asking, the way he asked most things, like the answer was information he'd use rather than a test he was grading.
Kai thought about it honestly.
"Depends on what he's distributing," he said.
"You said no people."
"I said no people," Oda agreed. "That line holds. Whatever Chisaki is developing, it isn't people."
"Then I don't know yet," Kai said. "I'll know when I know more."
Oda nodded once, like that was the answer he'd expected and it was sufficient.
Sho said nothing from the passenger seat, which was its own kind of contribution.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, and Kai watched the city and thought about gloved hands and plague masks and the particular quality of a stillness that had something held very tightly inside it, and didn't come to any conclusions, which felt honest.
* * *
He got home at seven. Made rice, not instant noodles, because Tetsutetsu's voice was apparently living in the back of his head now saying things about eating properly.
He sat on the futon and opened the interface while the rice cooled.
CURRENT BALANCE: 3,247 FP
Three thousand two hundred and forty-seven. The number had climbed steadily over four months of underworld work, small accumulations from people in rooms who didn't show their unease on their faces but apparently couldn't hide it from whatever the system was measuring underneath.
He scrolled to the rare gacha.
RARE GACHA, 5,000 FP. High-tier abilities, significant equipment.
Five thousand. He was at three thousand two hundred and change. Not close enough to pull, not yet, but close enough that the gap had stopped feeling abstract and started feeling like a number he could actually reach if he thought about it the right way.
He thought about Chisaki's hands. The way the threat assessment had flared, seeing something in that room it considered a serious threat to him.
He wondered what a rare pull looked like, Quick Feet had certainly been an incredible pull. It was practically a quirk. The baton was also a useful tool, he had started to keep both the knife and it on him.
He didn't want to severely injure people all the time after all.
Apart from the eventful meeting today, he also thought about the holographic system in his mind.
Who exactly did it belong to before him? What exactly was the system itself.
It was most certainly not a quirk, but it gave him abilitied which were in theory quirks. How exactly it did that, he didn't have the slightest clue.
Kai decided not to give it too deep of a thought, The system no matter how confusing and unknown it was, had most certainly become a valuable gift for him.
It had given strength to some quirkless, sure Quick Feet wasn't exactly the best, but it was something, and it was only an uncommon pull.
'With this, maybe.' He thought vaguely.
Kai decided to stop thinking too much deeply about things, lately thinking too much was becoming a bad habit for him.
Whatever would happen would happen, for now he wanted to rest. Tetsutetsu had invited him to the gym. Maybe he'd get a membership.
He had the funds for it now, and with the current number he was told, he'd also be moving out of the shitty apartment that he was forced to live in.
Kai sat on his futon, grabbing a rice ball. It was warm, which was an improvement.