Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Prove yourself.”

Kai couldn't help it. It was just two words, barely even a sentence, and yet the message kept looping in the back of his mind and distracting him despite his best efforts to stay focused on the decrepit, winding mountain road and that infernal storm whipping the rain against his van.

At any second, a tree branch could break off and crash onto his windshield. It also didn't help that the wipers were hardly able to keep up with the downpour obscuring his view. A shock ran through the van as it hit another hidden crack in the road. It really was impossible to tell rain puddles from overflowing pot holes by this point. Crawling along at a snail's pace was his best chance to safely make it up the mountain. He'd hate to get stuck in the middle of the forest.

Yet, no matter the circumstances, if Pops sent him on a job, Kai would go. No complaints. No questions asked.

He wasn't even all that surprised that he'd been sent out to a remote hotel in the mountains. The only thing that was different this time was that the text he'd received didn't just contain the usual information about when and where his service was needed, but also one short sentence, plain as it could be:

“Prove yourself.”

From the instant he'd read it, Kai had suspected a deeper meaning behind those words, if only because Pops had never attached a message like this. To be honest, Kai calling him “Pops” was a bit of a far stretch already. He didn't know his name, he'd never met the man, and had never spoken to him directly. Technically, he didn't even know if Pops was a man or a woman.

What he did know about this mysterious stranger, however, was that he was the only person in Kai's miserable life that truly respected him, and that had seen potential in him. Pops was the whole reason Kai had been able to start a business of his own. As a man in his early twenties with an insanely dangerous quirk who'd almost spent more time in juvenile prison than at school, he never would've made it this far by himself, no matter how intelligent he was or how much he had taught himself.

Kai didn't care that Pops was – undoubtedly, yet unproven – the head of a criminal organization. He owed him greatly for finding his place in this quirk-obsessed society, and he would repay his debt in full.

The van jolted again as Kai hit a fallen branch, bringing his mind back to the more pressing matter at hand. He gritted his teeth, hoping that he would reach the hotel before the road became completely impassable.

After what felt like an eternity, the terrain ahead finally leveled out, and a parking lot, as well as an old, two-storied building with a pitched roof came into view. It had been erected on a cement platform that was built into the slope of the mountain. The only road to and from the building was the one that had led him here. A literal tourist trap for people from the far West who loved hiking. Out here, a single landslide could cut them off from civilization.

Since the downpour continued unabated, Kai picked an empty parking spot close to the entrance, and chose to first go and see whatever he was dealing with. He wasn't keen on unloading any of the equipment from his van in this insufferable weather, especially if it turned out he only needed his quirk to get the job done.

Sighing to himself, Kai adjusted his cloth mask, pulled the collar of his work jacket over his head, and got out. He crossed the distance in a haste and managed to reach the canopy in front of the entrance without getting soaked completely.

“Shit weather, huh?”

Kai only noticed the man standing next to the double-doors as he lowered the collar of his jacket.

The blonde stranger with the stubble looked to be something past thirty. He was dressed mostly in black save for a beige-colored jacket, and was casually smoking a cigarette.

“Yeah,” Kai just said and entered the building, if only to get away from the stench of the smoke.

The hotel's lobby was modest and slightly run-down. Determined not to stay any longer than needed, Kai headed to the reception counter, where a man was filing some paperwork.

The clerk greeted him with a much too cheerful smile. “Oh, hello Sir! What can I do for you?”

“The name's Kai Chisaki. I was called in to clean room 203.”

His request was met with a confused look. “To clean? Excuse me, sir, but the man from room 203 already checked out. I admit, our own cleaning staff hasn't done the rounds yet, but they will soon, and I dare say they are doing a decent job.”

Kai glanced at the board hanging on the wall behind the reception desk. Judging by the number of missing keys, at least five people were currently staying at the hotel. More than he had expected, given that the time of year and weather.

“I've got a reputation for being more thorough than most,” Kai explained. “For some people, normal standards of clean don't do.”

The reception clerk squinted his eyes at the logo on his work jacket. “Overhaul?”

So you can read. Congrats. Kai bit back on the sarcasm in the nick of time. “It's the name of my company,” he said instead.

“Where's your equipment?”

“In my van. I want to see what I'm dealing with first in case I don't need it.”

A spark of realization lit up in the clerk's eyes. “Ah, I get it! You've got a permit to use your quirk at work, right? That's neat. What's it do? Is it something like Wash's?”

This guy was decidedly too cheerful for Kai's taste, but he preferred to get into the room by legal means, and that meant he needed to convince the reception clerk to hand him the key. With a quiet sigh, he pulled the glove off his right hand. Even without touching, he could tell by the scratches, dents and faded stains of ink, as well as the overall discoloration of the countertop, that it had seen a lot of use and very little care over the years.

“It doesn't make things shiny and sparkly, if that's what you're expecting,” Kaid said and placed his bare fingertips on the wood. He sent his power through the countertop like a wave, disintegrating and reconstructing it as it went along, with enough precision to restore only the wood while pushing out all the dirt, grime and grease from years of people rubbing their grubby forearms and hands against it.

It was disgusting. Of course it was, and quite frankly, Kai hated touching things with his bare hands.

It only took him a second or two to rearrange all the undesired particles and gather them in one spot, ready to be removed with a single swipe, which left the wood of the countertop in pristine condition and Kai with an itch crawling up his forearm.

Cautiously, the clerk ran a hand over the surface. “What'd you do?”

“I pushed out all the grime. You're welcome.” By using a small disinfectant spray from the pocket of his jacket, Kai cleaned his fingers before putting the glove back on. “Just so you know: I don't do free demonstrations every day. Now, what about the key to room 203?”

“Oh, right.” With a slightly absent-minded expression, the reception clerk fetched the key from the board and dropped it into Kai's gloved palm. “Here you go. Don't forget to return it.”

Uttering a less than half-hearted “Thanks” in response, Kai finally headed for the staircase in the back of the lobby and began his search for the room with the designated number.

Out in the hallway of the upper floor, a man passed him by. Or, more precisely, the chatty guy who'd greeted him at the entrance. Except this time, he was too preoccupied with something on his phone to spare Kai more than a glance.

Kai stopped and looked back after the man, feeling rather than knowing that something was off about him. How had he missed the guy entering the lobby and going up the stairs before him? The staircase had been in his field of view all throughout his conversation with the reception clerk.

After a moment of contemplation, Kai pushed the thougth from his mind. He must've been too focused on the countertop when he had used his quirk, and besides, he had an important job to get to.

As he stood in front of room 203 and unlocked the door with the hotel key, Pops' message replayed in his mind once again. Hopefully, he wasn't expecting Kai to prove himself in cleaning. He'd been called to a crime scene with half a body splattered all over the walls by another client before and he'd refused to take another job like it ever since. There was a limit to how far he was willing and able to wrestle down his own disgust. Just because he was good at cleaning up after criminals didn't mean he enjoyed dealing with mushy human remains.

The door opened with a clack and a light push, and Kai found himself standing in front of a perfectly ordinary, normal standards of clean, hotel suite decorated in the way people from the West liked it. It consisted of a small and orderly living room with an arrangement of an armchair and a couch around a coffee table on a white, deep-pile carpet, and two doors on either side leading to the adjacent bed- and bathroom.

Once he had closed the door behind himself and taken another step into the living room, Kai could already make out what other people with an untrained eye likely missed: The faint circular stains of some liquid on the table that told of two people having had a drink in this room, the imprints in the carpet that reported a second armchair to be missing, and a grey hair on the couch cushions. All of which were traces of the people who had met here just recently.

Kai let out a small sigh of relief. Whatever crime had gone down here wasn't the overly messy kind at least. A look through the open doorway to his right into the bedroom revealed no more additional clues. The bed had been made and the curtains drawn. As he continued to wander about the living room, however, a few barely noticable drops of a dark substance on the carpet below the coffee table stood out to him.

He had a pretty solid suspicion even before he knelt down to inspect them further. The main power of his quirk was to destroy and re-create, but to control what was destroyed and how it was recreated required an understanding of the individual particles or cells a thing was made of. That analysis came as a side-effect of his quirk, and paired with his self-taught knowledge of chemistry and biology, made him something of a walking forensics lab.

A touch of the carpet confirmed the suspicion. The drops of reddish-brown were indeed dried blood, and they were scattered around the imprints of the missing armchair in a very fine and easily missable pattern.

“A not quite clean enough murder then, hm?” Kai said to himself, kneeling on the carpet as he put his glove back on.

“Please help me.”

The voice was so quiet and high-pitched, it had almost more in common with the squeak of a mouse than a human's voice.

To Kai's left, the bathroom door opened by a crack and a small girl in a red dress hesitantly poked her head out. Her hair was white and long, her red eyes big and wide, and her mouth set into a wobbly line. She was clutching a deep green plush bunny in her hands. There was also a small, pale yellow horn growing on the right side of her forehead, possibly a mutation related to her quirk.

Kai was, by his own estimate, the absolute worst with kids, and generally avoided them, but even he could tell she was about the age of a preschoolera, all alone, and possibly very frightened. Not that he cared much about the latter.

A nosey little kid at a crime scene was the last thing I needed. Sighing, he rose from the carpet. “What're you doing here? Where are your parents?”

The child took another hesitant step out of the bathroom. She looked at the floor to her feet. “I was with my grandpa,” she said, still in that very quiet voice.

“And where is he?”

“H-he fought with someone. They … they shot him.”

She's a witness. That's even worse. Pops wasn't expecting him to dispose of her, right? Maybe he could just discredit her. She was just a preschooler, after all. They lied all the time.

“How would you know that's what really happened?” Kai asked.

“I saw it”, she claimed, eyes wide.

“You probably saw that in a movie. People don't just shoot people,” he lied, because really, people killed other people all the time. They just tended to use their quirks for it.

“No, I really saw it! Please, you have to believe me! Y-You saw something, too, right?”

“I saw a drop of blood. No one dies from losing a drop of blood. It doesn't have to mean anything. Your gramps probably just left.”

Something about that statement made her gasp as if that were a worse outsome, somehow.

This won't do, Kai thought to himself, seeing how she was still standing there like petrified. I need to get her away from here or I won't be able to start on removing the evidence. Can't take her to the police, though. He sighed once more, deeper this time. I'll have to charge Pops extra for the trouble she causes me. “Listen, is there someone I could call for you?” he asked. “Your mom, dad?”

Staring up at him, the girl just shook her head.

“What about an uncle? Cousin?”

Those big, red eyes simply kept fixating him.

“A neighbor? A friend? Is there anyone at all?”

Still no response.

Kai flinched inwardly. He hadn't thought anyone could have a social life worse than his, least of all a kid. Actually, were kids that age supposed to have a social life outside of their family?

“There was this man once …,” the girl suddenly began. “He had a white coat and white hair.”

“Does this guy have a name or a number?”

“Uhm …” She raised the plush bunny in front of her face like she was trying to hid behind it.

“I don't know why I even bothered to ask.” Kai felt his stress level rising as he took out his phone. He'd have to try and call back the number from which he received the order. The chances of Pops or one of his men picking up was quite slim, and if they picked up, there was a possibility they wanted the girl dead, but then at least he could argue and make her their problem, not his.

He hit the call button, and, to his surprise, another phone started ringing in the adjacent bedroom. Coincidence? Like Kai would believe in such a thing. When he went to investigate, the girl followed him hesitantly.

The ringtone led him straight to the bedside cabinet. Stashed away inside the top drawer was a number of smart phones of various age and make, including the one his call had connected to. The name on the screen read “Overhaul”, proving that the owner of the phone had been in contact with Kai before. He was almost certain the phones belonged to Pops, because the message he had received had been written in a very specific and concise style, but that didn't even begin to explain why these phones had been left behind.

Kai ended the call and picked up the other phone, wondering what to make of it all. During his short career cleaning other people's homes, he'd come across countless clues and pieced many untold stories of crimes and mishaps back together for none other but himself, but this felt different. Almost personal, in a way. None of his jobs ever had something to do with Pops. With his men, sure, but not with Pops himself.

“Uhm …,” the little girl piped up, standing by the end of the bed. “My grandpa always did this.” She mimicked tracing a simple pattern on her plushie.

“Did he, huh?” Kai held out the phone to her. “Here. You do that, then.”

As requested, she repeated the motion on the screen before handing it back to him, and once the phone was unlocked, Kai began to look through its contents for a contact or a message, anything that would give him some indication on why the phone was still here, who it really belonged to, or what he was to do with the girl. It took him only seconds to open the latest messages that had been sent from the phone, and what he discovered made his breath falter.

Not only did he find back the exact same orders he had received from Pops in the past, but numerous others, all of which contained a location - often just coordinates - and the same or a similar mysterious sentence like the one that had reached Kai last. They had been set to be send out automatically in regular intervals, and all except the last one had been cancelled manually. In fact, another message was scheduled to be send to his contact in fifteen minutes unless Kai stopped the reminder now.

That was a dead man's switch. Pops' dead man's switch, most likely.

The implications of it caused his breath to falter.

First of all, the only person who had believed in Kai's value as a human being was very likely dead. Or as good as dead. Either way, Pops hadn't been able to get to his phone in the past hours and that meant something had happened to him.

Secondly, and most importantly, he had chosen Kai out of all people to figure out what happened and why. Not his men. Kai.

Thirdly, that message did not call for Kai to prove himself in removing evidence, but to use his sharp mind to uncover the crime. Earlier versions of Pops' message even read “Do the right thing” and “Prove your skills”.

And last, but not least …

“Mister …?”

The feeling of small fingers wrapping around his bare wrist send a hot shiver through his body and jolted him out of his thoughts. By reflex, Kai slapped the girl's hand away. “DON'T touch me!”

She stumbled and fell, and immediately crawled further away backwards, clutching the plush bunny to her chest with one hand. “I'm so sorry! It won't happen again!”

“It better not!”

His anger was momentary, yet burned like the sudden outbreak of hives on his skin. He scratched manically at the spot. This! This was why he hated kids. Their disrespect for personal space. Touching everything with their grubby little hands. It's what had cost that other kid back at the orphanage an arm and landed him in juvenile prison.

But then again … this girl wasn't like that other kid. She was Pops' granddaughter.

Kai took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure.

Having been chosen to find Pops' assailant was both an immeasurable honor and a shock, knowing it might just be the last job Kai could ever do for the man who'd so generously supported him from afar. And if that job entailed looking after Pops' possibly precious grandchild for a while, then so be it. He could do that. Pops would have wanted it.

Kai pocketed Pops' phone and turned back to the girl. “I'm sorry … about knocking you over,” he said, adopting a softer tone.

She did not look convinced, and rightfully so, because Kai was not feeling very sorry.

He changed the topic with a quiet sigh. “Did you see them? The person who shot your gramps?”

It took her another moment to snap out of the shock his sudden outburst had left her in, and for the first time since he'd met her, a glimmer of hope shone in her eyes. “You believe me?”

“As it turns out, your gramps is my Pops,” he explained, then paused. “Okay, that sounded a lot less weird in my thoughts. Let me try again. I never actually met your gramps, and I don't know his name, but he helped me find my way in life, and I'm deeply indebted to him.”

She stood back up from the floor. “So you'll help me, yes?”

“Pops entrusted me with getting to the bottom of what happened to him, so yeah, I guess I'll help you.”

A timid smile formed on the girl's face.

“Don't get excited just yet,” Kai said. “There's a lot of work to do. Now, did or did you not see the person who shot Pops?”

The smile fell away, and she shook her head, looking sorry.

“Just Pops being shot, then?”

He got a nod in response.

It took mere moments for Kai to come to the conclusion that he'd have to investigate around the hotel to find more clues, and that meant he needed time. Time he did not have, because the culprit had already begun to cover up their tracks. The hotel clerk had said Pops left already and that couldn't be true. “Do you have any idea when that shot happened?” Kai asked the girl.

“Oh, yes!” She ran back into the living room to point at a wall clock, and Kai followed her. “It looked like this!” she said, imitating clock hands with her fingers.

“A little less than three hours ago, huh?” He cast a glance at the rain prattling against the hotel's windows.

That was a lot of time for the assailant to get away. But then again, that infernal downpour had been going on all day and it might have discouraged them from making the trip down the mountain. If he could freeze operations around the hotel before the storm ceased and the culprit in question got away, he might still catch them. And Pops better was still alive when he did, because Kai was in the mood to rearrange all their bones into barbed wire for laying their hands on that man.

“Come. I've got an idea.” He went over to the door to the hallway, opened it, and held out a hand to the little girl.

She stared at the gesture in disbelief and confusion.

“It's okay,” he said, sighing once again with emphasis. “You can touch the gloves. That's why I'm wearing them.”

Her entire face lit up a little as she ran up to him and lightly grabbed hold of his fingers. “Thank you, Mister.”

“My name is Chisaki.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chisaki. I'm Eri.”

“Do you also have a last name, Eri?”

“That's grandpa's name, right? He's called Mr. Hassai.”

Chapter Text

It turned out, with what limited information Kai had and the little girl called Eri could give him, that her grandfather had been Haruka Hassai, head of the Shie Hassaikai Yakuza clan. Actually, all she had to offer was a name and Kai had figured out the rest by himself. After all, he had suspected his Pops to be the leader of an underground organization, and possibly an honorable one, for a long time. Not to mention that he'd learned quite a few things about the happenings away from the public eye during some of his more questionable jobs.

And now, all evidence, sparse as it were, pointed at Pops having been attacked and either murdered or captured by someone who'd done a decent job at cleaning up after them.

When Kai returned to the reception desk with Eri in tow, the clerk was talking to a brown-haired hotel guest in a loose shirt who had brought a number of suitcases to the lobby with him. “Not a word about your gramps,” he instructed Eri in a hushed voice. “I'll do the talking.”

“Are you sure you want to leave while this storm is still raging on, Mr. Saeki? The road can get very difficult to navigate in this weather.”

“That may be, but I can't stay on holiday any longer or I'll lose my job.” The hotel guest leaned onto the counter and drummed his fingers on the wood. Besides the fact that he was rubbing grease and sweat back into the counter top, Kai also noticed that the man's digits were ball-jointed like the limbs of a doll.

“I highly recommend you stay,” Kai joined the conversation.

“Hm? What's that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, it's you, Mr. Chisaki!” The reception clerk turned to him, still sounding much too cheerful for Kai's taste. “You're done already? Are you here to return the room key?”

“No, I'm here because I made a troubling discovery,” Kai began. “I found traces of a new H1N1 influenca variant in that suite. Possibly a highly contagious strain, too. These viruses don't normally last this long outside of a host. It's very likely the disease has spread around the hotel already.”

Anger mixed into the initial confusion on Mr. Saeki's face. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Do I look like I'm joking?” Truly, Kai was not capable of looking any less serious.

The hotel clerk's annoyingly good mood finally faltered. Worried looks went back and forth between Kai and the guest. “Are you saying we should put the hotel under lockdown?”

Kai did not get a chance to answer before complaints were flung his way.

“That's outrageous,” Mr. Saeki said. “Who are you, even? You can't just detain people because you think someone came down with a new type of flu.”

“Do I take it correctly that you're planning to walk away from here and willingly endanger your life and that of others, Mr. Saeki?” Kai's poignant question earned him an angry scoff in return.

“Oh no! The old man from room 203!” the reception clerk exclaimed all of a sudden. “He's already left! Someone needs to track him down.”

“Did you actually see him leave?” Kai asked.

“Uhm, now that you mention it … No, I didn't,” he said, seemingly surprised by his own answer. “He just left the room key and a note on the countertop.”

“Can I see that note?”

“How's that of any importance?” Mr. Saeki asked while the hotel clerk rummaged through the paperwork on his desk.

“Here it is.”

The piece of paper he handed to Kai was rather small, the stroke hasty and the message fairly short. It read: “Please send a bill with any outstanding costs to my contact and they shall be paid duly – Haruka Hassai”.

Kai passed it on to Eri. “Do you recognize the style of writing?”

She looked long and hard at the note before shaking her head.

No surprise here. Unlike the hotel employee, Kai would not be so stupid to believe Pops had written that note himself.

That short exchange between the two caused the reception clerk to lean over the countertop. “Hey there, little one,” he said, looking at the girl with an expression of worry. “Weren't you with Mr. Hassai yesterday?”

“The old man wasn't here by himself?” Mr. Saeki wondered aloud. “Well, if he's infected that must mean she is, too.”

Kai scoffed at his remark. “She's no more or less infected than any of you are.”

Really, in Kai's eyes, they were all infected. Everyone, including himself. It just wasn't the flu they carried, but a heinous genetic disease whose symptoms had come to be known as quirks, and celebrated the world over like it was something to be proud of. To him, this disease, incurable as it was, was more akin to a curse.

The sound of heels on floor tiles interrupted their ongoing conversation.

“Sheesh. I can almost hear you all the way from the lunch room.”

That slightly annoyed voice belonged to a woman about ten years older than Kai. She scratched at her temple as she walked towards the reception, ruffling the bangs of her long, purple and pink hair. “Okay, does someone want to tell me what's going on here?” she asked. Her eyes held that distinct expression of someone who'd grown weary of the world and all its demands. It only gave way to a brief look of surprise when she noticed Eri standing next to Kai.

“Lady Nagant!” At the sight of her, a broad smile reappeared on the reception clerk's face.

Meanwhile, Kai was just glad his mask hid his grimace. Out of all the quirk-afflicted people in this world, he despised none more than heroes. The stronger their quirk, the more entitled they felt to cast judgement upon others. Often violently, too. And Lady Nagant, a woman born with a quirk that turned her right arm into a rifle and hair she could knead into bullets of any shape she desired? Of course she would kill on the job, no matter how clean and proper her public image made her seem.

Those high boots and the almost casual outfit she was wearing instead of her hero costume could not fool him into thinking she was any less dangerous than usual. Why would a top hero come all the way out here, to the middle of nowhere, if not to go after a villain?

The rational part of Kai's brain told him it was far too early to start a list of suspects. The less rational part had put Lady Nagant on the top of that list already.

He had the right intuition from the start to keep Pops' disappearance a secret. If the heroine caught wind of it, she could easily use her authority to lock him out of the investigation, and even choose to frame someone if she felt like it.

“Listen to this,” Mr. Saeki said to the heroine. “This guy claims he's found traces of some new illness and wants to put the entire hotel under lockdown.”

She gave Kai a scrutinizing once-over. “And who are you? The public health department?”

“More like your local forensics expert.” He took a business card out of the pocket on the inside of his work jacket to present her. “The name's Kai Chisaki. My quirk's suited to extract the smallest particles, up to components of cells.”

“I see. You own a cleaning company,” she said with a chuckle and cast another glance at Eri. “And it's take-your-kid-to-work day, huh?”

Everything about her demeanor, from the phrasing to her tone of voice, told Kai she was expecting him to lie. And he would, just not in such an obvious way. “I was asked to look after her until she can be picked up by her guardians.”

She raised an eyebrow at his answer. “Uh-huh. And that's why you're here? To babysit her?”

“No, one of my clients asked me to have a look at a suite in this hotel.”

“Room 203,” the clerk added. “But the guest has already left.”

That seemed to throw her for a bit of a loop. “Wait, he left already?”

“Yes. Someone ought to find him.”

“Alright,” Lady Nagant said. “I'll get in touch with the authorities, ask them to send someone over to check Mr. Chisaki's findings and see if your missing guest returned home. Until then, no one leaves the hotel.”

Mr. Saeki gasped. “Are you serious?”

“I'm afraid so.”

Kai had no idea why she went along with the lockdown so easily, but it would suspend operations around the hotel as he had planned. “Thank you,” he said to the heroine, offered Eri his hand again and turned to leave.

She held him up on the spot. “Where are you going?”

“Back to take a sample.”

“I don't think so.” Lady Nagant held out her hand and prompted him with the gesture to drop the room key into her open palm. “That hotel suite is off-limits from now on. To everyone, including you, and, especially, her.”

Kai complied begrudgingly. “Fine.”

She turned to the hotel clerk next. “Can we lock the exits? At least until I have some official instructions from the authorities in charge?”

“Yes, of course. I'll get the keys right away.”

Mr. Saeki looked on in consternation.

“For your own safety, I suggest you return to your room, Mr …?”

“Saeki. Hiroto Saeki.”

“Mr. Saeki.” The hero's firm nod ended any counter argument before it even began, and when Mr. Saeki grabbed his luggage to walk back to his hotel suite, Lady Nagant turned to Kai with a hand on her hip. “Mr. Chisaki, I'd like you and the girl to wait at the lunch room. I'll have a word with you later.”

“Sounds to me like you're planning an interrogation,” he remarked, and earned himself a sly smirk in return.

“Just some questions. We'll see how it goes.”

“As you wish,” Kai replied.

Let her try to interrogate him. He could dodge the questions. There was a reason Pops and him had kept a professional distance. He could always say he had no idea who his client really was. Besides, for now, he had little other choice but to comply with her instructions unless he wanted to draw even more attention to himself than walking around with someone else's kid in tow already did.

Kai led Eri back the way Lady Nagant had come, through an open doorway into the lunch room next to the lobby.

It was mostly empty, as would be expected at afternoon, save for a man drawing a can from a vending machine. A very familiar-looking blonde man in a beige jacket. Okay, now Kai was slowly starting to believe his eyes might be playing tricks on him.

“Excuse me?”

When the stranger turned around to him, there was not a trace of recognition in his eyes.

“Is there a specific reason we keep running into each other?” Kai asked him bluntly.

“We do?” He looked confused for but a moment before his attitude shifted. “Oh, yeah, I remember! You're … that guy,” he blubbered awkwardly. “We talked about … uh …”

“The weather?”

“The weather, right.” The stranger cleared his throat and took on a more leveled tone of voice. “Yeah, no idea why we keep running into each other. I'm waiting for a friend of mine to show up at this place. You haven't seen him around, have you? Light grey hair, round glasses?”

“No.” And Kai really didn't care about any of that. Wishing he never started the conversation, he made a dismissive gesture. “Forget I ever asked. It's not important.”

“Whatever you say, man.” The stranger opened the can, took a sip and walked on out of the room.

Kai still noted his appearances around the hotel as suspicious. Well, here's another one to add to the list.

A light tug on his fingers brought his attention back to Eri at his side.

“Mr. Chisaki?”

“What is it?”

She was looking at the vending machine stuffed with snacks, then back at him. “Can I have something?”

He sighed quietly. “You're hungry?”

“Grandpa ordered breakfast for us, but that was so long ago, and I was afraid to leave the bathroom after he was gone.”

“Okay, that is a long while,” Kai concluded. And a perfect opportunity to obtain more information from her before Lady Nagant came back around with her own questions.

When he stepped up to the vending machine, he didn't bother to ask her for her preferences but immediately began to look for the least messiest snack available. Chocolate could melt, cookies left crumbles everywhere. “You're not allergic to apples, are you?”

“Momma used to make apple bunnies for me,” she said.

“I take that as a no.” With a few coins and a couple of button presses, a plastic bag containing dried apple slices fell down into the output tray. And while he was already at it, he grabbed a bottle of water for himself. It was going to be a long day, after all.

Despite of them being the only people in the lunch room, Kai picked a table at the far end to minimize the risk of people listening in on accident. Eri hopped onto a chair, and he was about to sit down opposite of her when he noticed a folded newspaper on the seat. Even though he only picked it up to put it on another table next to theirs, he couldn't avoid to glance at the headline.

“Detnerat Prototype Stolen”

And the picture below featured that hook-nosed jerk-face of a quirk supremacist, the CEO of Detnerat, at a public press conference, presenting some kind of gauntlet. His image to the outside was as clean as it could be, but the ideology he stood for made Kai's skin crawl just thinking of it.

Kai chose to quickly stop that train of thought in favor of his stress level, and unscrewed the top of his water bottle. Meanwhile, Eri began to nibble at a dried slice of apple. He had to hand it to her for being quite careful with the snack. She had even sat her plush bunny neatly onto the chair next to her.

Kai took a gulp and when he set the bottle back down, he found the little girl staring at him with big, curious eyes.

“What?”

“You have a nice face, Mr. Chisaki.”

Oh, right. It's because he had to pull his mask down to drink. “Flattery won't get you anywhere,” he remarked.

“How do people know you're smiling when you wear a mask?” she asked.

“I don't,” he replied simply. “Smile, I mean.”

Her eyes fell back on the apple slices in front of her. “Oh.”

“Oh?” he mimicked her.

“I'm sorry.”

“About what? That I don't smile? Don't be silly.” He pulled the black cloth mask back over his mouth.

“I thought maybe you don't smile because something happened that made you sad.”

“I'm not sad. I just don't have much reason to smile.”

When she met his eyes again, she did not look convinced by his explanation at all, and somehow, Kai hadn't been prepared for that reaction.

He had not been lying, or so he had thought. His childhood and teen years had been far from great, and his current situation was only somewhat better, but whether or not that meant he was permanently sad or miserable was a can of worms he didn't really want to look at, let alone open. This was just what his life was like. It's as simple as that.

“Why don't you tell me about your gramps?” he changed the topic. “Why did he come here with you? Does he not travel with bodyguards?”

“I don't know,” she replied, absent-mindedly picking up another apple slice.

Kai was starting to get frustrated with their conversation when Eri continued.

“Grandpa didn't want me to come with, but there was that super big and scary guy who said he'd look after me. I got frightened and I ran after grandpa, and I hid in his car. When the car stopped, we were here. The man who drove grandpa's car found me but grandpa was not angry. He let me stay with him, but said I must hide if there was a knock on the door to our room.”

Now that was surprisingly useful information. Eri had not been meant to be at the hotel, or to be there when Pops met his mysterious attacker. The hotel clerk had seen the little girl before, probably at check-in, but it was very likely that the culprit Kai was after had not known about her at the time of the crime. They were bound to find out about her, however, – if they hadn't already, – and that in turn meant she could be the attacker's next target.

Kai made a mental note that he could possibly use Eri as bait.

He skipped on the question whether she knew who Pops had been meeting at the hotel, or why. There would have been no reason for Pops to share such information with his very young grandchild. “I'm guessing there was a knock on the door. Can you tell me what happened next?”

She thought about the answer to his question for a moment. “I was in the bathroom at the time, so I stayed there and was quiet like grandpa asked me to. Grandpa greeted someone. He offered that someone something to drink, I think?”

“The other person didn't talk?”

“I don't … I'm not sure. I only really listened when grandpa got loud and upset. 'm sorry.”

Stop apologizing. Being sorry won't change anything. Besides, Kai had not expected very detailed information from a preschooler in the first place. He gestured for her to continue. “Keep going. What happened next?”

“I looked through the key hole, and that's when I saw it.”

“The shot?”

She almost seemed to shrink into herself as she nodded.

On a very rational level, Kai knew that the event she witnessed must have left a mark on her, yet still felt frustrated by her inability to talk about it as if she were withholding the information on purpose. He tried to be a little more understanding.

“Come on. You can do better than that,” he encouraged the little girl. “Did you see the weapon? What did it look like? Where was Pops when it happened? If you want me to find who did this, I need you to remember. This is the most important part.”

Under his expectant look, her frown deepened and her whole body visibly tensed. “I … There was … Grandpa sat down. No, he … stumbled into a chair, I think?” Her breathing quickened as she clumsily chained sentences together. “And … There was a silver pipe with a funny piece at the end? And a flash. It wasn't very loud. But then grandpa was drooling red, and he looked very, very scared of a sudden. And pale.”

Crap. That sounded a lot like the shot had been fatal. Pops had been murdered then, just like Kai had feared from the start. But he could, and would, catch the killer. Knowing that Pops had entrusted him with this task gave him all the confidence he needed and then some.

“I was so very scared, too, and I couldn't breathe, so I hugged Mr. Deku! Like this!” Seemingly as a measure to steady herself, Eri hastily grabbed the plush bunny off the chair next to her and pressed it to her chest. “And then I sat behind the door. I waited and waited and waited.”

Kai didn't care about the toy in the slightest, but if it helped Eri to calm down, it had some use, at least. Even while she was still talking, Kai had already begun to contemplate what kind of weapon had been used.

A silver pipe, she said. Could she have seen a fancy support item, or the muzzle of a rifle with a silencer attached at the end? But shooting a man at point-blank range with a rifle was overkill, wasn't it? The bullet should've pierced both Pops' chest and the furniture, and ultimately gotten stuck in the wall or the floor. But that didn't happen. Or did it? Kai had hardly begun to inspect the room when Eri had shown up.

What he knew for certain was that the attacker had removed both the body and a very likely blood-stained chair from the room, and that alone could not have been easy. There weren't a lot of people around the hotel, but there were people, and neither the chair nor the body would've been easy to move without anybody noticing. He was wrecking his brain, trying to remember if the carpet or floor had shown signs of the armchair having been dragged across.

Lost in thought, he propped his elbow on the table and only just managed to stop himself from touching his own face with his gloved fingers.

“Did you hear anything after the shot happened?” he asked Eri.

“Steps,” she replied. “Then the door, then lots of silence, then the door again, and then I heard you.”

“So no scraping sounds, banging, crashing, squeaking? Anything heavy being moved?”

She shook her head tentatively.

That was not a lot to go on. At this point, Kai needed to take into consideration that the culprit had a quirk that aided them in the murder somehow. But what kind of quirk was he looking for? A firearm, like Lady Nagant's? Something that muffled sounds? Something that could make objects disappear? Perhaps an illusion of some kind?

He glanced past Eri at the open doorway between lobby and lunch room, then at a second flight of stairs that connected the lunch room with the upper floor. The heroine seemed to be taking her sweet time doing a tour around the building with the reception clerk.

“I think I ought to have another look at that room,” Kai concluded. If Lady Nagant caught him walking around, he could still make up an excuse on the spot.

“But that lady took the key, no?” Eri asked, looking worried. “We can't go back in.”

He allowed himself to smirk briefly beneath his mask. “My quirk can do a whole lot more than extract particles.”

Chapter Text

The staircase that connected the lunch room with the second floor led Kai and Eri into a hallway with doors to more hotel suites on one side, and large, almost floor-to-ceiling windows on the other. Whereas the view of the city in the distance might've been breathtaking at any other time, at this particular moment, the windows offered little more than the dreary sight of the unabated downpour and treetops bending in the wind.

While walking, Kai had pulled Pops' phone back out and was scrolling through the lists of messages and contacts, looking for further information. It seemed, however, as though Pops had used this phone exclusively for external contacts, such as Kai's cleaning company, a car workshop, a laundry service and tailor. People Pops would have kept at least an arm's length away from his actual work, just like Kai.

Even if they did happen to know more than him, they had probably been paid to keep their mouth shut. Because, in the end, if Kai was being completely honest with himself, then Pops funding his enterprise hadn't been an act of altruism, and it hadn't been just a reward in recognition of Kai's skills, either, but a means to ensure his loyality to the Shie Hassaikai in a roundabout way.

“What is that, Mr. Chisaki?”

“Hm?” When he looked up from the phone, Eri stood with her face and hands pressed to a window. The horn on her forehead made a soft clonking noise as she tilted her head to look at something below the hotel, on the slope of the mountain.

“There's something in the bushes,” she said. “It'll get all yucky outside.”

Kai stepped up to the window to try and look down the side of the building, but unlike her, he used the sleeve of his jacket to cushion his forehead and not touch the glass directly, because that's one of the yucky things little kids did.

There was, indeed, something lying in the bushes near the basement level of the hotel or perhaps even further down, at the foundations of the platform the hotel had been built on. The terrain down there appeared to be quite muddy and very steep. Because of the odd angle and the rain obscuring his view, Kai couldn't be completely certain, but judging by the overall shape of the object, it had to be a piece of furniture.

“Are you seeing it?” Eri asked. “What is it?”

“It looks like a chair,” Kai replied. More precisely, its design would match the one of the missing armchair from Pops' hotel suite if a discoloration of the backrest due to a large bloodstain was taken into account.

“How did it get there?” she kept asking.

“That's one of the key questions, isn't it?” Kai replied, squinting his eyes and tilting his head in an attempt to make out more details.

Suddenly, a scream pierced the silence in the hotel.
A woman's scream. From somewhere downstairs.

To Kai, it meant one of two things: Either the attacker had struck again, or someone had stumbled upon a much messier crime scene than the one Kai had been called to. Whatever it meant, however, he had to act fast to get there before Lady Nagant did and took charge of the situation. Without a second thought, Kai ran back to the nearest staircase.

“Mr. Chisaki!”

There was a thud behind him. Kai stopped abruptly.

Eri had stumbled and fallen while trying to run after him. The legs of a preschooler were simply too short to match his pace.

“I don't have time for this,” he grunted, went back, grabbed Eri by her arm and dragged her with him.

“No, Mr. Chisaki! Wait! Mr. Deku -!”

The fact that she had dropped her plush bunny was the least of his concerns in this instant.

A muffled sound of splintering wood. Then a second scream.

It allowed Kai to further pinpoint the location it originated from.

As he rounded into the corridor with the hotel rooms on the first floor, the door to room 103 was wide open and a cleaning cart stood in front of it. A panicked older woman wearing an apron and rubber gloves ran out. She was deathly pale and shaking, as though she had seen a ghost.

“There's a man right outside the window!” she shrieked. “A dead man!”

Damn! Is it Pops' body? Am I too late? Kai let go of Eri, slowed his steps and tried to maintain a facade of calm despite of his heart pounding in his chest at the thought of finding Pops dead. “Call the police,” he instructed the woman. “Go!”

She nodded shakily and ran.

He didn't actually want the police involved in this, but he would have a minute at best before Lady Nagant would come running to close off the crime scene, and he needed to have a look first. Sending the hotel's own cleaning lady her way might buy him a couple of extra seconds for every word she exchanged with the heroine.

Kai entered hotel suite 103, which, judging by number and relative position, had to be just below of 203. A knocked over vacuum cleaner laid on the carpet between the armchairs and couch of the near-identical living room. The windows of this suite, just like the ones one level above, faced the ascending terrain and thus, the forest. There, haphazardly sprawled across the lower branches of a tree growing right next to the building, hung the body of an old man dressed in a blood-stained and rain-soaked kuro montsuki with a gunshot wound in his chest. His skin was pale, his eyes lifeless, and the mouth still open as if to gasp for air.

At the sight, a feeling of cold dread washed over Kai. It can't be. Is this …!?

The half-shriek, half-gasp that Eri uttered before her breath seemed to falter completely was all the confirmation he needed to know that this man was, indeed, her grandfather. And he was very much dead.

“Put your hands over your eyes,” Kai instructed Eri. He had his emotions under control, but he didn't need her any more traumatized than she was already. “Whatever you hear, don't look.”

Kai approached the window. Broken off twigs indicated that the body had dropped further down the tree, onto the lowest branches, just seconds before, as if they had suddenly given way under the body's weight.

What an undignified final resting place. Kai had to get him down from there. If not for his investigation, then because basic decency demanded it. He reached out for the window's handle and pulled, only to discover that the window slid open no wider than a crack, barely wide enough to put a hand through. What the-?

If all the windows around the hotel were secured in the same manner, then how did the body get outside? Or the chair from before? Time pressure forced him to shelve that question.

Kai pulled the glove off his right hand, placed his fingertips on the glass and scratched on the surface. His quirk shot through the material in front of him, disintegrating the window, the tree branches touching the window, and even parts of the tree itself. In a matter of mere seconds, and with a little imagination to guide the process, Kai's power allowed him to reassemble the glass and wood into a crude construct beneath the body. It slid down this makeshift ramp while the wind whipped the rain about Kai and into the hotel suite.

As soon as the body hit the floor of the room, Kai closed the gaping hole in the side of the building by breaking the construct back down and restoring the previous shape of the window and tree. The noise of the rainstorm subsided, and he could hear Eri whimpering quietly behind him.

The furniture in the room likely obscured any direct view of Haruka Hassai's dripping wet corpse, and when he cast another glance back at her, she was covering her eyes with both hands. Even so, common sense told Kai that no child could bear being in the same room as a recently deceased relative for long.

“Eri, why don't you stand watch outside?” Kai suggested. “Keep an eye on the corridor and let me know when someone's coming.”

She did not lift her hands. “Mr. Chisaki … My grandpa, i-is he …?”

“Stand watch, Eri,” he repeated more firmly. If there was any way to avoid it, he did not want to have to deal with a child's mental breakdown.

Thankfully, she turned around and walked out.

Kai seized the chance to take a good look the dead body.

Drenched and disheveled, with a deep red bullet hole in his chest where the heart should be. The face twisted into a grimace that reflected nothing but the horror of imminent death. Only his age, tall build and the formal clothes still spoke of the authority and power he had once possessed, befitting of a Yakuza boss.

To think that this man used to be his Pops, the only real supporter Kai ever had, even if they'd kept a professional distance. As he knelt down next to the body and the realization sunk further in, Kai felt his heart grow heavy in a way it never had before.

“I'm sorry we have to meet like this,” he said, despite all reason telling him that the man was long gone. “I should've arrived sooner.”

Kai's quirk could mend bones and flesh as easily as it had put wood and glass back together, with a mere touch of his hand and an image in mind. It could also, very likely yet untested, bring the dead back to life, but not this late. Not when the blood had already clotted and tissue begun to decay. Not when the brain had been deprived of oxygen for hours.

He took a deep breath but the weight on his heart did not lift.

Sound of footsteps echoed through the corridor outside.

“Mr. Chisaki, it's the lady hero and the woman with the funny gloves!” he heard Eri shout.

There was no more time for a thorough investigation. He had to act now.

“For you, Pops.” Kai gritted his teeth and put his bare right hand directly over the dead man's gunshot wound.

The feedback was instantaneous. Hives erupted from his hand upwards, all over his lower arm. Touching a dead body felt wrong on so many levels, and Kai had to force himself to suffer through it. Not to focus on the disgusting bits – of which there were many – but the overall structure of the wound and what it could tell him about the weapon that had been used and how it had been used.

In what little time he had, Kai managed to gather two important pieces of information: First of all, the bullet had penetrated Pops' chest from front to back and taken his heart apart along the way. Secondly, there was a small object wedged inside the hole, about the shape of a twisted cone.

“Step away from the body!”

Kai retrieved the object from the wound and pocketed it at the same as he rose back to his feet. When he held up his hands in defense, he had taken out the disinfectant spray instead. Not that applying it would help much.

There was no blood on his hands, but his entire right arm was itching and burning all the way to the shoulder, and half a dozen alarm bells rang in his head. He fought with the urge to scratch and struggled to retain a mostly unfazed appearance. Really, at this point he was tempted to disassemble his own arm to subdue the allergic reaction. The pain would be excrutiating but at least it wouldn't last as long.

“The body. It was in the tree when I saw it,” the cleaning lady said, standing in the open doorway and pointing at the window.

“I took it down with my quirk,” Kai explained. “I couldn't just leave the old man up there.” Against better judgment, he found himself scratching at his arm through the sleeve of his jacket. Seeing how the heroine didn't seem to insist on him keeping his hands up, he went on to disinfect his hand. It did silence a few of those alarm bells, at least.

Even without looking, he could feel Lady Nagant boring into him with her glare. “Tampering with evidence is no trivial offense, Mr. Chisaki.”

“Calm your horses, Lady,” he replied and walked out from behind the couch. “What I did was in the best interest of the crime scene unit. That rainstorm would've kept washing off any hints and traces.”

“That's not for any of us to decide,” she claimed. “I don't care if you have the qualifications of a medical examiner, – until the actual police arrives to conduct an official investigation, I am legally bound by the HPSC to maintain the status quo.”

What she didn't say right there was, that, of course she had the authority to arrest anyone at any time she liked by labeling them a villain, and being born with the wrong quirk would be plenty to earn that title.

The heroine turned to the cleaning staff. “Go and gather everybody in the lobby. No one is to leave until I say so.”

Still with a frightened look on her face, the older woman left.

At the same time, Eri hesitantly entered the room again. Her eyes were glistening wet and red-rimmed as a result of her crying.

Lady Nagant took a deep breath, and resumed to glare at Kai. “Okay. Time for answers, Chisaki.” Her tone of voice was sharp. “I let you off the hook before, but you better start talking now. Why are you here? What're you doing with the granddaughter of the Shie Hassaikai boss? And why did he turn up dead?”

Oho. Would you look at that. She knew exactly who the old man had been. “I already told you, I came here because I received a tip from a client.”

“You didn't tell me anything so far,” she corrected him. “Who was that client? The Shie Hassaikai?”

“It's an anonymous client I have saved under a nickname.”

“Stop pretending like that doesn't sound shady as hell,” she said. “That lockdown was a ruse to buy yourself time, wasn't it? For what?” Lady Nagant took another step closer. The glint in her eyes spoke of danger.

He chuckled at her attempt to threaten him. One more step, and she'd be the one in far greater danger. “Look at you heroes,” he said. “Acting all high and mighty. Do you truly think I'll be more likely to talk if you're threatening me?”

“Oh, don't worry. I have not yet begun to threaten you.”

An unexpected tug on the hem of his jacket made him glance down.

“Mr. Chisaki.” Eri was standing next to him and looking up at him with a distinct expression of worry.

Kai gestured at her to let go of his jacket. “I suppose it doesn't matter what I tell you,” he kept talking to Lady Nagant, ignoring the girl. “You'll arrest me anyway if you feel like it.”

She raised an eyebrow at his remark. “I have no idea why you have such a low opinion of me, but I promise I'll arrest you if you keep refusing to come clean.”

“I did it!”

Eri's sudden shout interrupted their conversation and broke the growing tension between them. “I asked Mr. Chisaki to help,” she added quickly.

Stupid girl, Kai thought. What're you trying to do?

With a fake smile plastered on her face, the heroine bent down to Eri and tried to calm her. “I know you're just trying to protect him, but I also know that if Mr. Chisaki had wanted to take you home, he would've done so already.”

Eri took a step behind him.

“Oh, now you're accusing me of kidnapping her?” Kai asked.

“Well, are you?”

“No.”

He heaved a sigh in frustration. Kai hadn't wanted to do this, but here he was, sharing a piece of evidence to get out of this situation peacefully. He handed the heroine his private phone and let her scroll through his latest messages from Pops.
“It was a dead man's switch,” he explained. “It seems the message had been prepared in case the man died or went missing, and it has been repeated several times since.” Because he hadn't canceled the automatic sending from Pops' phone in his other pocket in time, but she didn't need to know that.

“Then you are affiliated with the Yakuza.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No. It's like I said. The source of these jobs was anonymous. I have never met the man or his granddaughter before. That's the truth, whether you want to believe it or not.”

“He must think highly of you to contact you from the grave.”

“Perhaps he put my number on accident.”

She returned his phone and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Why even work for anonymous clients?”

“The jobs pay well.”

“I can imagine,” she said. “They made you fudge their crime scenes.”

“I wouldn't know,” he claimed. “I don't ask questions, and I don't get involved in my client's business.”

She looked down at Eri. “Except this time.”

“Except this time,” he agreed.

There was a moment of thoughtful silence between the three of them.

“Did you contact the Yakuza to pick her up?”

Kai rolled his eyes at her. “Weren't you paying attention just now? I have no direct relations to the Shie Hassaikai, only the contact I showed you, and no one is picking up on that end, obviously. I'll take care of Eri until someone comes looking for the old man. If he really was their boss, it won't be long before more Yakuza show up.”

“The weather will hold them up as much as anyone else, I imagine,” she contemplated aloud. “It could take a while.”

“Yea, what a pity.”

He narrowed his eyes, trying to discern what she might gain from being holed up here at this forsaken place. The opportunity to take a shot at Eri? Fudge evidence? For a killer, she asked a lot of questions. Unless, of course, that was part of an act.

“I know something very bad happened to grandpa,” Eri piped up, making another attempt to explain herself while fiddling with a fold of her dress. “And Mr. Chisaki thought so, too, so I asked him to help me find him. Was that wrong?”

“It's good that you asked a grown-up for help,” Lady Nagant replied to her, adding a quiet and very uncertain-sounding “I think”. “But the thing is, Mr. Chisaki wasn't actually allowed to do that.”

“Why?”

“Uh, well …” That innocent question had the heroine awkwardly scratching her head all of a sudden.

“Why, indeed?” Kai repeated, amused by the turn this conversation had taken.

Her strict look was back on him in an instant. “You know exactly why.”

Underneath his mask, Kai smirked at her clumsy comeback.

Ignoring him, Lady Nagant bent down to Eri again. “Now that Mr. Chisaki has found your grandpa, there's no more need for the two of you to go snooping around the hotel, is there?” She straightened back up and put a hand on her hip as she addressed him once more. “Let this be a warning to you, Chisaki. I don't want to catch you searching for evidence again. This matter is to be handled by the police, and the police only.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he replied in an exaggerated obedient manner.

“And to ensure it, I want everyone to stay in the lobby until further notice.” She gestured at the door, prompting Kai to lead the way.

Chapter Text

Fifteen minutes. It had been barely fifteen minutes since Eri had lost her stupid plush bunny, and Kai was already regretting not having taken those two extra steps to grab it off the floor when he still had the chance. Unsurprisingly, Eri was still shaken from when she saw her gramps being shot, and even more so from when she saw his dead body. Not for long, Kai had made sure of that, but it had happened. And without her bunny to hold for comfort, her little hands were constantly trying to grab his jacket, sleeves, hands or the legs of his pants.

Kai kept alternating between scratching at his right arm and shaking himself free from Eri, and really, both of those issues were on him. Because he'd failed to recognize the importance of her plush toy, and because he'd touched a dead body. Him of all people. Touching a dead body. It's no surprise his skin still felt like a thousands insects were crawling all over it.

Needless to say, his mind was plenty occupied with trying to not think of the diseases he might've caught, and then he was trying to solve a murder case on top of that.

“Are you sure?” Lady Nagant's voice broke the silence in the lobby. She was on the phone with what sounded like some government official or a representative of the law, while pacing up and down the reception counter. “I'm just saying I have no special training in this. Okay, yes. I can do that. Is that all you'll need? Great, but you do know I'm doing this alone, right?”

Kai, Eri and Lady Nagant weren't the only ones present. As instructed by the heroine, most of the hotel guests had congregated in the lobby.

Standing near the locked entrance doors were the blonde guy with the stubble who Kai had run into far too many times since he'd arrived at the hotel, and the man with the ball-jointed fingers, Mr. Saeki, who had made a show of doubting Kai's credibility earlier. Pleasant company.

In a chair, by the opposite wall from where Kai stood, sat a woman with blue skin, long, lilac hair and black sclera wearing a fur-lined jacket. She passed the time until Lady Nagant was done with her call by completing some task on her laptop. Kai was almost certain he'd seen her before. If only he could remember when and where … Or rather, if only there weren't so many other things nagging at him.

Lady Nagant sometimes glanced his way as though she needed to keep an eye on him especially. Her suspicion wasn't unwarranted, because Kai wasn't ready to consider his job complete until he knew who'd killed Pops and why. And if his goal was to point the Shie Hassaikai at the culprit or administer some punishment himself, then he better made sure he got the right person.

Looking at the other hotel guests got him to think about the killer's motive. For all the pieces of evidence he'd gathered and questions he'd raised, he had yet to find out anything about the motive at play. The fact that Pops had chosen to stay at this remote location by himself possibly meant that he had expected to be safe up here. But a Yakuza boss was bound to have numerous enemies. Heroes sent to put a quick end to an underground organization, people wronged by Pops' men seeking revenge, rival Yakuza clans or villain groups trying to get rid of the competition, or even one of Pops' men attempting to usurp him. Kai could think of plenty of reasons why someone might've wanted him dead.

His train of thought was interrupted when the hotel clerk and the cleaning lady came running back into the lobby.

“Lady Nagant, we can't find Mr. Tobita and Mrs. Aiba. They were not in their suite.”

“Shit.” The heroine hung up on whoever she had been talking to and put her phone away.

Kai could hear the blue-skinned woman chuckling. “Now this is about to get interesting, isn't it?”

Lady Nagant was starting to look stressed as she turned to the hotel staff. “Leave them for now. I just got new orders and I can't do all of this at once.”

“Uh, excuse me!” The chatty guy raised a hand. “I thought we were called here because of some lockdown?”

“Yes and no,” Lady Nagant replied, took a deep breath, and clapped her hands to get everyone's attention. “Listen up, we got a situation at this hotel. I've already spoken to the authorities to come and look into it, but there's been a landslide further down the mountain and the rescue forces all have their hands full cleaning up the messes the rainstorm caused in the city. Since we're basically autonomous up here, and because … I am here, unfortunately, … we don't get priority.”

A landslide, huh? Apparently Kai wouldn't have needed the ruse with the quarantine after all, he just would've needed to trust those decrepit mountain roads.

“A situation?” Mr Saeki repeated, questioning the importance of the matter yet again.

“A very serious situation,” Lady Nagant emphasized.

“Is it a murder?” the blue-skinned woman joined in. “That would be almost too clichée, wouldn't it?”

“We're ruined. Utterly ruined,” the hotel clerk muttered.

“Well it can't be a quarantine lockdown because you got us all to wait around in the same room,” Mr. Saeki concluded.

“I got you all in the same room because I can't keep an eye on all of you at the same time otherwise,” Lady Nagant explained. “Now then, the officials in charge asked me to collect some data. I need everyone's name, quirk, and approximate whereabouts a three and a half hours ago.”

Kai glanced down at Eri by his side, who was holding onto the hem of his jacket with her index and thumb. On their way back from room 103, Lady Nagant had asked Eri about when she'd last seen Pops alive, and the little girl had shown her the clock hands again. For Kai's taste, this was turning into too much of an official investigation already, but at least Eri hadn't revealed any details of what she'd actually seen at the time.

He didn't bother with trying to pull his jacket out of her grasp again. What with the mysterious object from Pops' lethal wound still in his other pocket and figuratively reeking of decay, he'd better just burn the entire thing later.

The chatty guy startled at Lady Nagant's call for alibis. “Wait, does that mean …!? Are we suspects?”

“No. I mean …,” the heroine sighed again, clearly out of her depth in this scenario. “I'm not allowed to tell. I'm just executing some orders here. Does anyone wanna start or do I have to pick someone?”

Unsurprisingly, no one volunteered.

“What about the staff?” Lady Nagant turned to the hotel clerk and started a recording on her phone.

The man bowed to the gathering of guests. “I'm Takeshi Hayama. My quirk is called Flash Hands. It allows me to move my hands and fingers very fast for five seconds at maximum. I run the reception and the kitchen of this hotel during off-season, together with Mrs. Yudama.”

In what looked like a case of the nerves, the cleaning lady bowed several times. “Good day, good day.”

“Unfortunately, I'm not really sure where I was three and a half hours ago,” the clerk kept going, “but I spent most of the morning and noon at the reception, filing invoices and delivery notes. I only stepped away for a bathroom break once, and that's no crime, right?” He chuckled awkwardly. “I spoke to various people today, so someone will have seen me around that time, I hope.”

Lady Nagant turned to the other staff member. “Mrs. Yudama?”

“I, uh, I … My name is Kanna Yudama. I do the room service and help in the kitchen. My quirk cooks eggs in the palm of my hand.”

The heroine raised an eyebrow at her. “Just eggs?”

“Yes, just eggs. It's not a very useful quirk.”

“Alright. Where were you three and a half hours ago?”

“I was doing the laundry in the basement all morning, and started on the hotel rooms about an hour ago.”

“Mr. Hayama. The two missing hotel guests – When did you last see them?”

“When they went for a hike this morning.”

“But hasn't the storm been going on all day?” Mr. Saeki asked.

Lad Nagant looked a little concerned. “Are you saying they could still be out there?”

The reception clerk held up his hands. “No, no! They came back completely drenched ten minutes after, saying something about being very fast hikers and that they enjoyed their trip.”

Now that had been an awkward lie if Kai had ever heard one.

“They didn't check out and their belongings were still there when we just looked into their room, so they probably didn't go far,” the clerk added.

“I will need you and Mrs. Yudama to keep looking for them as soon as I've finished collecting everyone's statements,” Lady Nagant said, to which they nodded.

“We also have a surveillance system,” the hotel clerk amended hastily. “It doesn't record much, just the lobby and corridors, but I can show you to the server room later.”

“That'd be helpful, thank you. I will probably need to secure those recordings.” The heroine turned back to the guests. “Let's keep going clockwise. Please introduce yourself, Mrs …?”

“Kizuki. Chitose Kizuki, my dear Lady Nagant.” She laughed in a conceited manner. “Though you probably know me better as the head and brain behind Shoowayasha Publishing.”

Ah, so that's why Kai had thought she looked familiar. She was the CEO of that publishing company that kept endlessly re-printing and advertising Destro's disgusting Quirk Liberation ideology. It didn't need to be said that she supported his ideals, just like the Detnerat CEO.

Although Kai had no idea who the current head of the movement was, there were plenty of signs that Destro's Meta Liberation Army had survived the death of their leader by retreating into the shadows of society, and that it had been slowly building back its strength. Unlike the Yakuza, who did not rely on their quirks, were organized and deeply steeped in traditions, the Meta Liberation Army were mere terrorists driven by a need to rule over others with their quirk. They didn't simply celebrate their disease like the limelight heroes, they wanted to remove government regulations on quirks and have their diseased genetics dictate every aspect of society. It was beyond gross. Just thinking about it made Kai feel sick and feverish.

However, judging by some of Kai's past jobs, Pops' men got into a few bloody scuffles with people supporting Destro's ideology. Was there a big enough conflict between the Yakuza and MLA to have resulted in them trying to assassinate each other?

“What's such a big shot like you doing all the way out here?” Lady Nagant kept asking Mrs. Kizuki.

“You know, I've never been contempt just attending board meetings. Deep inside of me still beats the heart of a passionate journalist. Really, this remote place is perfect to get away from all the noise of the city and focus exclusively on my research. Oh, and doesn't this dreadful rainstorm make it so atmospheric?” She smiled. “You wouldn't be up for an interview later, Lady Nagant?”

Kai could see the heroine grit her teeth. “Tch. Do I look like I am?”

“Do you want an honest answer to that?”

“Just move on with your statement. I still need your quirk and whereabouts at the time in question.”

Mrs. Kizuki leaned back in her chair. “My quirk has the fitting name Landmine. It allows me to bestow explosive properties on anything I touch.”

The chatty guy took a quick step further away from her. “Holy crap, you can explode anything?”

That was a true villain's quirk, all right. The kind that could doom a person's entire life. Still, Kai could hand it to that woman for talking about it so easily, even if he found everything else about her attitude to be revolting.

She laughed at the other man's reaction. “Oh, don't worry! The force behind the explosions isn't strong enough to kill. I was at the lunch room all morning, looking into some juicy news reports and responding to corporate mails.” She nodded at Mr. Saeki. “This guy was also there, he would've seen me.”

“Then let's continue with your statement, Mr. Saeki,” Lady Nagant suggested.

“The name's Hiroto Saeki. I came here because my boss demanded I take a vacation. My quirk can shrink inanimate objects to the size of dollhouse furniture, so I work at a small toy company, but I'm not really into that sort of thing. I've been at the lunch room about three and a half hours ago, drinking coffee and reading the news for maybe half an hour or so before I started packing. My vacation was set to end today, but I was held up at checkout.”

“I didn't ask about your occupation or vacation plans, but I'll take 'em,” Lady Nagant remarked and turned her attention to the next person.

“Oh, uh, me?” The chatty blonde pointed at himself. “I'm Jin Bubaigawara. I'm a nobody, really. With my quirk, I can make up to two copies of anything.”

Hm. That might be a lot more versatile than it sounded at first, just like Kai's own quirk. “Of absolutely anything?” he asked.

This time, there was recognition in the man's eyes when their gazes met. “Well, not anything anything. I need some very precise characteristics and measurements, or all I produce is goo,” he elaborated. “The whole reason I'm here is because a friend of mine asked me to meet him but he hasn't shown up. I've been waiting for him around the entrance all day.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Bubaigawara did pop his head into the lobby a couple of times,” the reception clerk added.

“Did you try to contact that friend of yours?” Lady Nagant inquired further.

“No, not yet. I mean, he's fine, probably. He likes to be kind of fuzzy on the details when it comes to meetings.”

“I'd suggest you try to call him later, make sure he's okay,” the heroine said.

“Yeah, I will.”

What did Bubagaiwara say about his friend earlier? Round glasses, light gray hair? Likes to keep things fuzzy? That description would match someone Kai had met on the black market once, when he'd gone looking for some slightly more specific chemicals to use in his cleaning. No matter how hard he tried, Kai's recollection of that meeting remained surprisingly vague, given his usual sharpness.

As he connected the dots, Kai couldn't help but chuckle to himself.

“What's so funny?” Bubagaiwara asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he replied. That guy was the errand boy of a black market dealer! It just went to prove once more that the tangible filth on the outside was just the tip of the iceberg. People were always more rotten underneath. Figuratively speaking. Mostly figuratively speaking.

“Chisaki, your turn,” Lady Nagant prompted him.

“Alright, alright. I'm Kai Chisaki. I own a one-man cleaning company that's named after my quirk, Overhaul. It enables me to rearrange matter.”

“Didn't you say it lets you extract particles?” Mr Saeki asked, as Kai had almost expected of him.

“That's the same thing, just a different application. I came here by order of a client, but I hadn't arrived yet at the time in question. The reception clerk and Mr. Bubagaiwara saw me walking in. They'll confirm it.”

“What's with all the scratching?” Bubagaiwara asked. “I'm getting itchy just watching. Are you allergic?”

Yes, to people's idiotic questions. Kai settled for a more diplomatic answer. “I'm very sensitive to filth. Which is not to say this establishment would be extraordinarily filthy, it's just that I have a phobia of germs and diseases. You'll have to forgive me.”

Lady Nagant turned off the recording. “I think that's all the statements I need.”

“Aren't you also a hotel guest?” Kai wasn't about to let her get away this easily.

She shot him an annoyed look. “What're you getting at, Chisaki?”

“All I'm asking is; Wouldn't it just be fair to hear your statement as well?”

“Yes please. Let's hear it,” Mrs. Kizuki joined in.

Lady Nagant didn't look pleased to be put under suspicion, but complied reluctantly. “I was sent here on a secret mission by the HPSC, and my quirk, as you all know, is Rifle. Three and a half hours back, I was at my room, making a call. And just for the record, as a hero, I'm not obliged to answer to civilians.”

That'd make her the only one without an alibi besides the cleaning lady, but Kai was in the middle of rearranging his list of suspect and somehow no longer as keen to put her on the top of it.

“Is that all, then?” Lady Nagant asked.

“What about the girl?” Mrs Kizuki kept going. “We haven't heard what her quirk is yet.”

Kai felt Eri's grip on his jacket grow just a little tighter.

“I don't see how she'd be responsible for the, uh, situation,” Lady Nagant argued.

“Well, isn't it true that quirks keep growing stronger in each generation? And if that situation we are talking of would be, say, a missing persons case or an unexpected death, then wouldn't it be neglectful of you not to consider the possibility of a quirk accident? After all, she is just that age, and I'm sure we're all dying to know what her quirk is.”

“Hey, there's no need to put the screws on the little missy, right?” Bubagaiwara said, but Mrs. Kizuki had the heroine convinced already.

The expression in Lady Nagant's eyes grew a lot softer when she turned from the journalist-turned-chairwoman to the little girl. “I know today must've been a very rough day for you, Eri, but would you mind telling us about your quirk?”

The girl was shaking, and Kai would know, because she'd switched from holding onto the hem of his jacket to grabbing onto his leg. He tensed. Some of the previously silenced alarm bells in his head started back up.  “Eri, let go,” he said in a firm tone while wrestling down a more violent reaction in front of this audience.

She didn't listen but kept staring out at everyone else in the lobby from her position half-hidden behind his leg. “I-I don't know,” she said in her high-pitched voice. “I don't know what it does. Momma said … M-Momma said it had made dad disappear. She screamed and she cried a lot a-and … Oh no!”

Great. There were tears gathering in the girl's eyes again, and she was beginning to hyperventilate on top of that. “Eri,” Kai tried again, stricter, but to no avail.

“And there we have it. A quirk accident,” Mrs. Kizuki said, wearing a smug grin.

“W-what if I … What if I made grandpa disappear?”

“No one disappeared, Eri,” Lady Nagant abandoned her position in front of the reception counter to walk up to the girl. She was still two steps away when Eri suddenly let go of Kai and bolted.

“I'm so sorry!” she bawled as she ran, straight through the doorway into the lunch room.

“Well done,” Mr. Saeki said sarcastically to Mrs. Kizuki.

She shrugged. “The papers love big emotions.”

“Goddammit, Eri,” Kai huffed and turned to follow her. “I'll go get her.”

Lady Nagant stepped into his way. “Don't. I'll get her. You stay here.”

For a split second, he was tempted to let her deal with Eri's breakdown in his stead, because surely anyone else would be more qualified than him. But he owed Pops to look after his granddaughter as much as he owed him to solve his murder.

“And who'll keep an eye on them?” Kai argued in a hushed tone and nodded at the other hotel guests. “You know I can't be the murderer because I was called in after it happened. Let me go.”

“I can't. You'll keep snooping around and messing with the evidence. I have to …”

“Stick to your duty? Keep the status quo as you called it?” he guessed. “Would you also jump off a bridge if the HPSC asked you to?”

She flinched at that, just for a moment. He'd struck a nerve.

“So you would,” Kai concluded. “Maybe it's about time you started thinking for yourself.” He tapped his head for emphasis and turned to leave again.

“I want you back in five.”

“I will get Eri, and then I'll retrieve her stupid plush bunny so this doesn't happen again,” he said, making full use of her momentary vulnerability. “Don't expect me back in five.” He could almost hear her growl in frustration behind him as he walked away.

Chapter Text

Eri wasn't very difficult to find. The sounds of her sobbing and crying led Kai to the outermost corner of the lunch room, where she was sitting on the floor beneath a table with her back to the wall and her face buried in her knees.

One of the few things he'd never quite understood was the term “ugly cry”. Children's cries were always ugly, and unfortunately something of a regular occurrence, as far as he remembered from his time at the orphanage. He wasn't keen on dealing with this mess at all, but someone had to, and he would be a fool to let one of the potential murderers near Pops' granddaughter.

Kai strode up to the table at his usual pace. “Hey, Eri.”

No reaction.

“Do you want to talk?”

A very muffled “Nu-Uh” was the only response to that, besides more sobbing.

“Okay.” Another sigh escaped him as he looked around. “I suppose I have to do the talking, then.”

Kai shrugged off his work jacket, hung it over the nearest backrest and sat down sideways on a chair at the table Eri had chosen as her hiding place. He doubted a kid could be talked out of crying, but it's all he had to offer. It had to do.

“Going off of what you said before, I take it that you were too young to really understand or remember what happened when your quirk activated,” he said, not looking at her. “Your father got badly hurt, or died, even, your mother was horrified, and then what? Did she force you onto Pops?”

“It's all my fault,” she uttered between hiccups. “And now grandpa …”

Eri's mourning, all right.

That strange feeling tugged on Kai's heart again. He rubbed the spot on his chest through his dress shirt, trying to will it away before he was starting to convince himself he was going to have a stroke or something.

Pops had been precious to them both. Although Kai wasn't sure how he felt about the loss – sad or angry or confused, or simply as if someone had pulled a rug out from under him – he knew he would be able to move on. He was grown-up and self-sustaining. Eri, however … With Pops gone, and assuming her mother didn't want her back, there was a considerable risk she'd end up at an orphanage, and didn't that sound disturbingly familiar?

“Pops didn't die because of you,” Kai said, remaining factual. “You know that. You saw him being shot.”

“But d-daddy …,” Eri whimpered.

“Whatever happened to your father isn't your fault, either. It's the fault of your quirk.”

Out of the corner of his eyes, he spotted her lifting her head, sniffling. Snot and tears were running down her face. Gross.

“Quirks are a disease,” he continued. “An infection that's passed from one generation to the next and that keeps getting worse every time. If you had a cold and no one told you which precautions to take, how'd you know not to sneeze on your dad?”

“I'm s-sick?” Hiccuping, she tried to wipe her face with her hands, which only made it worse, really.

For his own sanity, Kai focused back on the far wall of the lunch room. “Sadly, yes. Most people are.” And you and I suffer from an especially bad case of the infection, it seems.

“B-but then. How do I get better?”

“I don't know. There is no cure. If there was, I would've volunteered for testing.”

“Why?”

“Because, you see …” He took a deep breath and held it. There were words he was tempted to say, in just that moment, but they weren't meant for her or anyone else to hear.

There was a boy once. He never knew but always assumed that one or both of his parents died to the emergence of his quirk, at a time when he was too young to comprehend or remember any of it happening. As a result of their death, he had been raised at an orphanage, a place he'd abhorred, because it was full of other children and adults who wouldn't keep their distance, who told him not to make a fuss and not to act so sensitive. Fact was, that children were especially susceptible to diseases, and when children lived like rats, many in a small place, someone was always sick.

That “ quirk accident ”, as it had been called in court later, hadn't been an accident. It had been the logical consequence of the circumstances. He hadn't been at fault. They didn't heed his warnings.

Kai gritted his teeth, unable to speak his mind and yet at a complete loss for something else to say. He didn't like the way Eri caused him to reflect on his past. What was he to tell her? Some generic bullshit like “Don't turn out like me”? Like that would do anything to prevent it.

“I'm not good at this.” He huffed in frustration. High time to change the topic. “Look, Pops was important to you, wasn't he?”

“He didn't smile, and didn't have much time for me,” Eri explained, “but he was always nice. He didn't yell like momma did when daddy disappeared.”

“Well, Pops was nice to me too,” Kai said. “So we should honor him by finding whoever fired that shot, but in order to do that, I need you to stop crying.”

She sniffled. “What if my quirk makes you disappear?”

“I'm confident that won't happen so easily.” After all, Overhaul was more powerful and versatile than most other quirks. Whatever her quirk was, he could likely undo its effects. And if she really had zero control over it and it was as dangerous as it sounded, he could always temporarily take her apart to stop her from using it.

“And what if I sneeze on you?”

“Okay, well, that'd be fifteen times as bad as touching me, and it could cost you your life, so don't.”

There was a moment of silence.

He hadn't scared her with the threat, had he? It was the simple truth. Kai reached for a stack of napkins on the table and passed them down without looking, as a peace offering of sorts.

It was accepted. After some rustling and more sniffling, Er eventually crawled out of her hiding space. Her face was, well not exactly clean, but dry, even if still flushed red from her crying.

“I'm not crying anymore, Mr. Chisaki,” she stated, kneeling on the floor in front of him and looking up. “I wanna help.”

Seeing how he'd thought this to be a near-impossible task mere minutes ago, Kai felt like restoring Eri's mental and emotional stability had been quite the achievement. Satisfied as he was with his accomplishment, he might even have smiled underneath his mask. “Let's review what we know so far, shall we?”

Eri nodded with a determined look. It's not like she could contribute much, but why spoil her fun?

“Pops was shot about three and a half hours ago, with a silver firearm that was equipped with a silencer and had enough power to pierce his chest. Taking the position of the body and the fine spray of blood on the carpet into account, I should have seen a bullet hole in the floor if there had been one.”

Eri nodded again.

“The attacker then removed Pops and the chair he had been sitting in from the crime scene, by tossing the body out of the window of the room, and the chair out of the window on the other side of the building. The body got stuck in the tree, but in some way that I wasn't able to spot it when I was in that room.”

“I saw the chair,” Eri pointlessly added.

“Now, before the body and chair went out the window, the attacker hid something in the bullet wound.” Kai took another napkin from the table and reached into the pocket of his jacket that still hung over the backrest. The object he retrieved had indeed the shape of a twisted cone, just like he had sensed through the use of his quirk. It was also made of a very unique, purple and pink material.

“It's just like the hair of the lady hero!” Eri gasped. “Did she shoot grandpa?”

“No,” Kai said. “This proves her innocence.” While it didn't feel much like a surprise at this point, it did create a number of new questions.

“Huh?” The little girl blinked at him in confusion.

It had been pretty obvious from examining the body that the projectile had exited the wound. It couldn't have gotten stuck, which meant in turn that this bullet had been inserted postmortem. It was nothing but a sloppy attempt to frame Lady Nagant.

Continuing further along this train of thought, the culprit must've known Lady Nagant would be at this hotel at roughly the same time as Pops, and they must've had a means to collect one of her bullets. If the intention had been to frame her, however, why plant the evidence so obviously? The only plausible explanation Kai could come up with was that something hadn't gone to plan for the killer.

“Looks like I did Lady Nagant a favor by removing the bullet from the crime scene,” Kai said to himself, scoffing.

Actually, he'd already latched onto a new prime suspect while Lady Nagant had collected everyone's statements. There was only one way the murder could've gone, and one always had to take into consideration that people lied. Especially this shady bunch.

At the sound of footsteps nearing the lunch room, Kai wrapped the bullet into the napkin and put it back into the pocket of his jacket.

“Now isn't that adorable?”

The Shoowaysha CEO sauntered in, and Kai's mood soured instantly. “Mrs. Kizuki.” Eri crawled closer to his chair, ready to hide from the woman.

Mrs. Kizuki smiled. “A stranger soothing a crying child in a selfless act of kindness.”

“You give me way too much credit.” Kai stood up, grabbed his jacket and gestured for Eri to get off the floor. “What do you want? Shouldn't you be back in the lobby?”

“It seems our heroine is a little swamped, what with her making calls, collecting data and looking for lost hotel guests. I volunteered to check on you.”

“I'm afraid that wasn't necessary.”

“Oh, but it was,” she said and took another few steps closer. “You see, I am under the distinct impression that you know more about that situation than our heroine does, and I was wondering if you'd be up to some questions.”

“That's really too bad, because you see, I'm not in the mood to talk.”

“I'd make it worth your while,” she offered. “And, like any good journalist, I keep my sources secret.”

She's willing to bribe him, huh? Maybe he could twist the deal to his favor by gathering information from her instead. “Why don't you tell me first what you're really doing here? I might be more willing to talk, then.”

Mrs. Kizuki shrugged. “I honestly don't know what you're expecting to hear from me. I already gave my reason back at the lobby.”

“I was just thinking that someone with a paycheck like yours could easily find a much better accommodation in a place just as remote as this. With much nicer weather, too.”

“Have you considered that maybe I just don't like fancy establishments?”

“You don't strike me as the type.” Neither her get-up nor demeanor were very modest. “Did you know Haruka Hassai?” he tried another question.

Her facial expression remained unreadable. “I've never heard that name before.”

“But you've seen the old man who'd been staying at this hotel until today?”

“I don't think we ever ran into each other,” she said. “Now, why don't you tell me why you're speaking of him in the past tense? Did the old man die recently? Is that it?” His fleeting anger at his careless choice of words must've been visible in his eyes because a smug smile returned to her face.

“I can assure you that I know no more about it than you do,” Kai replied and pressed a hand to Eri's back to usher her towards the staircase. “You'll have to excuse me, but I still need to go and get Eri's plush toy.”

“You're a sharp one, Mr. Chisaki,” Mrs. Kizuki said as they walked away. “I do hope you know how valuable your knowledge is.”

“I know how dangerous my knowledge is,” he thought to himself. If the MLA had had a hand in the murder, then Mrs. Kizuki might have been trying to find out how close he was to solving the crime and whether he needed to be dealt with.

Thankfully, she didn't follow him and Eri up the stairs.

Back in the upper floor corridor, Eri's deep green plush bunny should've been easy to spot on the floor. Theoretically. But there was no plush bunny.

“Where's Mr. Deku?” the little girl asked, running a few steps ahead.

There weren't any pieces of decoration or furniture behind which the toy could have fallen, and Kai quite clearly remembered Eri stumbling in the middle of the corridor. The logical conclusion? “Looks like someone took him,” Kai said.

Eri turned back to him with a gasp. “Mr. Deku was kidnapped?”

“That's … Yes, you could say so.”

She turned back to him with big and pleading eyes. “Will you help me find Mr. Deku, Mr. Chisaki?”

“No need to ask. I'm already on it.”

Lucky for her, Mr. Deku's kidnapper might also be Pops' murderer. At least, if he were a villain trying to get close to a child, offering them their favorite toy would be one way to do it. While the murderer waited for an opportunity to make their move, all he could do was to keep following the trail of evidence.

Kai took a step towards the window and looked down the side of the building again. The armchair was still down there, and still an important piece of the puzzle. If the actual projectile used in the murder didn't get stuck in the floor, and didn't get stuck in the body, either, there was only one other place it could be.

He tried to open the window. As expected, it opened no wider than a crack, just like the window in room 103. Of course, he could use Overhaul to break the glass open, but his quirk wouldn't reach far enough down to lift the chair inside. Whether he liked it or not, he'd have to go outside and face this insufferable weather to retrieve the evidence.

“You know what?” he said to Eri, purely rhetorically. “Maybe there's a door in the basement that leads straight to the chair. And while we're down there, we can try to have a look at those surveillance recordings as well.”

Chapter Text

While Kai and Eri made their way down the stairs, the voices of Lady Nagant and Mrs. Kizuki echoed through the empty hallways of the hotels.

“I don't remember giving you permission to walk off,” Lady Nagant said.

“No? I thought you were done taking statements,” Mrs. Kizuki replied. “After all, you let that cleaning guy go.”

“I had to let him go because he arrived too late to be involved in what I'm dealing with here. And because someone needs to look after that poor kid, obviously.”

Mrs. Kizuki chuckled. “Well, you probably don't need me to tell you this, but that man's hardly the child-comforting type.”

“I came here to find you, not to have my decisions questioned. Now, would you please return to the lobby?”

It sounded like the MLA supporter was being told off for removing herself from the group of people Lady Nagant had been trying to keep an eye on, which was good for Kai, because as long as someone else was having a discussion with the heroine, she couldn't try to keep him from his alleged “tampering with the evidence”.

If only she knew that his tampering had kept her from being framed for the murder …

Of course, Kai could tell her, but she'd likely continue to hinder his investigation anyway. Heroes weren't meant to solve crimes or to let them be solved by some unauthorized civilian. Unless Lady Nagant really took Kai's earlier remark regarding the HPSC to heart – which looked very unlikely – there was no way she'd help him out.

On a side note, Mrs. Kizuki was absolutely spot-on about him not being the child-comforting type. Also, much too perceptive for Kai's taste.

The main staircases in the lobby and the lunch room lead no further down than the first floor, and with what Mrs. Yudama had said about doing laundry in the basement, Kai figured that the lowest floor of the building was restricted to the hotel staff. On the first floor, behind an unassuming door with no sign or number next to it, he discovered a hidden flight of stairs.

The basement was all cement from the walls to the ceilings and dimly lit due to the lack of windows. Faded stains of dirt and the dust bunnies on the tiled floor spoke volumes about the hotel staff's overall standards for cleanliness. Neon tubes buzzed overhead while Kai and Eri walked through the hallway, looking for a door to the mountain slope outside.

“… but we haven't been able to capture a lot of footage so far. Are you sure this will resonate well with my viewers?”

That muffled voice of a man that drew Kai's attention came from one of the many unlabeled doors in the basement.

“There's someone here,” Eri said in a whisper.

She was right, and whoever was here clearly hadn't been accounted for during the gathering earlier. More suspects, potentially? Kai moved closer to the door to listen in on the conversation.

“Don't worry, Gentle!” a young woman replied to the man. Her voice was bright and cheerful. “Once I've copied those files, we can still shoot a dramatic exit outside. It'll look great after editing!”

“Ah, yes, I see! Gentle Criminal braving the storm to put an end to this shady business! You are a genius, La Brava!”

“Thank you, Gentle!” she squealed in child-like joy, just as Kai pressed down on the handle.

The instant he pushed the door open, all premature celebration ended abruptly. Two shocked faces stared back at Kai upon entering the room: One of a man with white hair, a well-groomed beard and mustache, dressed in a high collared black suit with long coattails, and the other of a young woman that was barely any taller than Eri, wearing her long, red hair in high pigtails and a similarly formal but somewhat less exaggerated outfit. She was sitting in an office chair at a narrow desk in the back of the fairly small room, in front of a set of monitors and a keyboard that connected to the server rack behind her.

“Gentle!” she exclaimed in alarm at Kai's entrance.

The expression on the man's face turned stern. “Have no fear, La Brava.” With a grand sweeping gesture, he straightened his posture. “I, Gentle Criminal, shall protect you!”

“But, Gentle, we've been discovered,” La Brava argued. “What if he runs to call Lady Nagant for help?”

“I can buy us time with my quirk,” Gentle Criminal added in a more sincere tone without taking his eyes off Kai. “I hate to ask, but please hurry, La Brava.”

The short woman nodded at him and turned back to the computer equipment with renewed focus. Her fingers practically raced across the keyboard.

Despite of Gentle Criminal's fighting stance, or … whatever that pose was supposed to be, Kai wasn't exactly afraid of him. Wary, sure. He'd be an idiot not to be wary. But those two wanna-be villains didn't radiate a lot of a danger, and with a quirk like Overhaul at his disposal, there wasn't a whole lot Kai had to fear in the first place. He met the black-rimmed eyes of the man who called himself Gentle Criminal with his own, calculating look.

“With your quirk, huh?” Kai repeated. “I wonder what that does. Is it a defense mechanism? Or do you plan to attack me if I take another step?”

“Why don't you come closer and see for yourself?” Seeing how Kai had Gentle Criminal with his back to the wall, that challenging look on the man's face could only be a show of feigned confidence.

If Kai had to place a bet, he'd bet on Gentle Criminal relying on some defensive measure. But Kai had never been one to gamble, and that meant he wasn't taking any chances misjudging the quirk of a complete stranger. In a swift motion, Kai threw the disinfectant spray from the pocket of his jacket at the man.

It bounced off a near-invisible membrane between them, and Kai caught the spray bottle in his hand again with ease.

Gentle Criminal looked surprised, if not mildly concerned, by Kai's feigned attack, and rightly so.

Because if that was all that his quirk did, it was hardly a match for Kai's. With a small chuckle, Kai took the glove off his right hand and reached behind him. By touching the doorframe, he rearranged the material of the door and frame to fuse them together and block the exit. He could feel Eri's eyes on him, questioning what he was doing.

“Not very smart of you to enter a dead end with no plan of escape,” Kai said to the two villains.

Gentle Criminal tensed visibly. The realization that had struck him was written plainly on his face. Kai wasn't locked in with him and La Brava. He and La Brava were locked in with Kai.

With a pushing gesture towards the invisible membrane, Gentle Criminal seemingly reinforced it, even if Kai couldn't actually see his quirk being applied. “Gently Barrier!”

Giving the move a name didn't make it any more effective, either.

As tempting as it was to roll his eyes, Kai instead stepped forward and held out his hand until his fingertips met the invisible membrane. Aside from its odd texture, it wasn't even all that disgusting to touch. During the disintegration of the matter, the analysis confirmed that the membrane consisted of nothing but air in a mostly solid state due to a quirk that had caused the molecules to form an artificial bond with each other. Funnily enough, Kai couldn't apply his quirk to gases or liquids under normal circumstance, because they simply couldn't take or keep any shape he tried to force them into. If the gas had an elastic property that bound the molecules, however, he could break or reshape those bonds.

As not one, but several membranes between them crumbled and reverted into normal air, a look of terror formed on Gentle Criminal's face.

“You have thirty seconds to explain how you are involved in the murder, and why,” Kai said, keeping his hand up.

Gentle Criminal gasped. “A murder?”

La Brava, too, swiveled around on the office chair. “There's been a murder?”

“We have nothing to do with a murder,” Gentle Criminal tried to assure him.

“My Gentle would never …!” La Brava began, but Kai cut her off.

“Then what are you doing with the surveillance recordings? Stop wasting my time and talk.”

With the pressure on them rising, Gentle Criminal gritted his teeth and took a proper fighting stance. “I'm sorry it has to come to this,” he said. Determination born from desperation showed in his eyes. “I usually abhor violence, but if you have no intention to let us go peacefully, you'll leave me no choice. Will you lend me your support, La Brava?”

“Gentle, no, I can't …” La Brava replied, her tone of voice wavering. She wasn't looking at Kai, but at Eri peeking out from behind him. “Look! If you fight in this small room, she'll get hurt.”

All of that determination in Gentle's eyes fell away at the sight of the little girl, leaving only an expression of despair. “Y-You're right,” he stammered and took a step back. That look of utter defeat lasted but a moment or two before a spark just as fierce as before, yet somehow different, manifested in his eyes again. Gentle Criminal balled his hands into fists so firmly, Kai could hear the material of the man's gloves being strained. “That leaves me with only one other option!”

Unable to read this sudden shift in demeanor, Kai tensed. Did that wanna-be villain have some hidden ace up his sleeve? Some special power reserved for only the most dire of situations?

All of a sudden, Gentle Criminal clapped his hands together, lowered his head and bowed deeply before Kai. “Please, if you must arrest me, let La Brava go at least!” he pleaded. “She is just a fan that I have roped into this!”

The tension dropped off Kai instantly, and he lowered the hand he had held out to either threaten them or defend himself. “Are you kidding me? Do I look like some hero or government agent to you?” He huffed, irritated by the mere thought of being mistaken for a hero. “I'm here for answers. Not to arrest you,” he clarified.

Gentle Criminal raised his head again to look at him with skepticism but kept his pose otherwise. Both he and La Brava really didn't bother to hide their emotions at all. They weren't much of a threat, nor real murder suspects to consider, – in fact they didn't seem like very competent criminals to begin with, – but given the circumstances under which they'd run into each other, Kai had to play it safe and seize control of the situation.

“How about this?” Kai put his glove back on, hoping they'd get the hint that any idea of fighting was off the table. Not that it had ever really been on the table to begin with. “Why don't you explain to me what you're doing here, and I'll consider forgetting we ever met.”

“You'd do that?” Gentle Criminal asked, still perplexed, as he straightened back up.

Thankfully, La Brava skipped the pointless rhetorical exchange. “We were looking for proof that this hotel is a hotspot for black market deals,” she said. “The plan was to sneak into the hotel and then Gentle would expose what's going on here online.”

Having seemingly recovered some of his confidence, the man in the villain costume resumed the pose he'd taken when he'd put up the first barrier and gestured to himself with a broad smile and another grand gesture like some actor on a theater stage. “May I properly introduce myself? My name is Gentle Criminal. Like the great villains of the past, I, too, will leave my mark on history. Me and my wonderful assistant, La Brava, are on a mission to punish this establishment for housing criminal activities.”

“Gentle, you are so cool!” La Brava squealed at his theatrics.

And Kai felt exactly nothing about any of this, except maybe how utterly pointless Gentle Criminal's act was and how much of his time was being wasted because of it.

“Yeah, I get it,” he just said, hoping to cut the play short.

Clearly, Gentle Criminal was another case of misguided Hero Syndrome. People who took the stage because they thought they could do whatever they wanted just because they had a quirk. But, to Gentle Criminal's credit, his quirk was rather mediocre, and Kai had seen much worse cases of affliction. Which wasn't a coincidence, because according to his theory of the disease, the strength of the quirk was inextricably linked to the severity of the syndrome.

“As far as we know, black market dealers are meeting with their clients here,” Gentle explained further, stroking his beard. “We think the staff are in on the deals, too.”

“I don't think so,” Kai replied. “Maybe someone higher up in the hierarchy is in on it, but that clerk and the cleaning lady are too dense to notice much about anything around here.”

“Mr. Chisaki, that's not a nice thing to say,” Eri said in her timid voice.

“The truth is rarely nice, kid,” he replied to her and directed his attention back at La Brava. Despite of her childish emotional reactions to Gentle, she seemed like the more capable of the two. “Did you find anything in the recordings?”

“I'm still copying the files,” she said. “I plan to run an analysis tool on them after we've left.”

“That murder you mentioned,” Gentle Criminal said. “You're investigating it?”

Kai didn't like having to answer questions in return, but he supposed he could trust them to some degree, since they seemed so harmless. “I'm something of an acquaintance … No, rather a friend, of the victim. And this little girl is Eri, the victim's granddaughter.”

“I see.” With a hand over his heart, Gentle Criminal bowed down to Eri. “I'm sorry about your grandfather, little lady.”

Eri looked up at Kai, then at Gentle Criminal. “Why are you sorry?” she asked the villain, looking uncertain despite of the genuine concern written across Gentle Criminal's features.

“It's just a figure of speech. Don't read too much into it,” Kai said and turned back to La Brava. “Would you mind showing me the footage of the corridor in front of suite 203 about 3.5 hours ago?”

“Not at all,” she replied, and Kai walked past Gentle Criminal over to the desk in the back of the room.

Eri, as always, followed him.

On the computer screens, plenty of windows were open. Some of which showed footage from around the hotel, some of which looked like logs or code Kai couldn't make sense of. Judging by how fast she was navigating the software, the unusually short woman had to be very apt with the technology. She had pulled up the recordings in question in no time and let them play from the time of the murder at an increased speed so they could go through them quickly. Kai had hoped to see someone coming out of room 203, but the first person to appear in the corridor was Bubaigawara, casually strolling by the door, and almost an hour after the murder, too.

“Is there something specific you are looking for?” La Brava asked.

“Yes, I was expecting someone to have left room 203 around the time I gave you,” Kai said while his eyes continued to scan the footage for any oddities.

La Brava played the video again from around the requested time mark, but again, all that could be seen was an empty corridor. Even Kai's keen eyes could not detect anything off about the footage.

Gentle Criminal's assistant came to the same conclusion. “There's nothing here,” she said, but paused in contemplation. “Wait, I have an idea.” Windows closed and flew back open again as she typed away at the keyboard. “Let me just compare those byte sequences with this tool aaaand …” She hit Enter, making an additional line of white, raw text appear in a mostly black window. “Yes, this sequence was copied.”

“So the footage was altered?” Kai asked for better understanding.

“Yup, and expertly, too,” La Brava confirmed.

Another vital piece of information to add to the puzzle Kai was putting together, and it aligned quite well with how the killer had obtained knowledge of where Lady Nagant would be. Why? Because Kai sincerely doubted that the killer had the resources or skills to be an assassin, have access to information inside of the HPSC, the connections to arrange a personal meeting with Pops, the means to obtain one of Lady Nagant's bullets, and was skilled enough with computer technology to expertly alter video footage in less than a couple of hours after the murder. No, Kai himself was quite the studious person, and even his expertise was mostly limited to biology and chemistry. No one could be skilled at everything. Which meant, by conclusion, that the killer had outside help, and probably not by one other person, but several. All of which had aided the killer, not necessarily to execute the murder, but to prepare it at least.

“It's a bit of a long shot, but I could try to figure out how the data was edited,” La Brava offered, much to Kai's surprise. “Maybe that person left some traces.”

“You can do that? If so, yes, please. I'd be very grateful.”

“Okay, give me a moment to skim all those logs. I'm checking the command history, cache, recently deleted files …”

As far as Kai could tell, she processed all of that information flickering across the screen with raw skill, not the use of a quirk. It was quite impressive, and truly an opportunity he couldn't pass up, even if it meant he ended up owing her and Gentle Criminal a favor. Bonds were built upon giving and taking. That's how the world worked, after all.

“Would you like a cup of tea while we pass the time, little lady?”

When Kai turned around, Gentle Criminal had produced a thermos from his coat and was unscrewing the top.

Eri nodded in response to his question, and Gentle poured the tea into the top of the bottle, but not in the way a normal, reasonable person would. No, in the most absurd way Kai could think of; By holding top and bottle as far apart as somehow possible. And the worst part about it was that he was spilling some, if not most, of the tea on the floor.

No wonder Eri looked very confused.

Kai sighed long and deeply, because the only other appropriate reaction to this idiotic display would've been to smack his own forehead, and sighing was overall better than smearing the germs from his gloves onto his face. “What are you doing?” he asked in a no-nonsense tone.

“It's not exactly easy, pouring tea dramatically,” Gentle Criminal claimed.

“Seriously? All it takes is a steady hand.” There's absolutely no need to create such a mess.

With a challenging look in his eye, Gentle Criminal offered him the bottle and top, and Kai took them, because he had to follow up on his words, obviously. He did what a rational person would do, held the top close to the bottle as he began to pour the tea, then increased the distance while keeping both hands steady. Controlled, calm motions. It really was that easy.

Kai handed the top to Eri. “Here.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chisaki,” she said politely.

“Not for pouring tea,” he replied.

Chin held high, Gentle Criminal shrugged. “Well, anyone can do it like that.”

“It was Skeptic!” La Brava's gasp caught all of their attention. “That's his software. It was brought in on an infected USB stick. I mean, it had to. This server's not hooked to the internet.”

Kai had another look at the screen. The line of text she was so focused on showed the file name “sk3ptic_cleanup_autorun_v1_24_344”.

“Skeptic? Who's that?” he asked her.

“He's a professional hacker I've been trying to get back at for a while now. His stupid, stupid virus deleted some of the best footage of Gentle I ever recorded!” She puffed up her cheeks as if to hold back on that anger she apparently still felt towards the guy. “So far I've only been able to trace him back to a couple of MLA servers, but not to him directly. Either he's working with them or he's hijacked their server farm. I suspect the former because their security is top notch and he's been occupying them for quite some time now.” La Brava swiveled around on the chair to face Kai. “You've heard of the MLA, right?”

“I've heard too much about them recently,” he replied. It hadn't been just a feeling, then. This was evidence of MLA involvement. No hard proof, sadly, but a strong enough indicator for him at least.

Some of the color had drained from Gentle Criminal's face. “T-the MLA is involved in the murder?”

La Brava looked at him and his shock took hold of her as well. “G-Gentle! We stumbled upon something much bigger! We can't go up against the MLA!”

Gentle Criminal grinned awkwardly. “This is too big for us!”

“Much too big!” La Brava nodded while both of them shivered visibly at the idea of the entire MLA coming after them.

“You don't have to concern yourself with the murder,” Kai said in an attempt to get them back on track. “Just stick to your original plan. When we part ways, I'll forget whatever you were here about, and you can forget anything we talked about.” He knew he couldn't expect them to help him with the investigation out of their own volition because there was nothing in it for them but risk and he couldn't offer a whole lot in return. Still, he had to try and make the most of this meeting to utilize that woman's unique skill set while he could. “Until then, could I bother you to check some more footage for me, La Brava?”

“You don't have to do this,” Gentle Criminal reminded her.

“I know,” she said. “But it's no trouble, and if it helps to catch a murderer … What do you need to see?”

“The corridor in front of room 103,” Kai replied.

“At about the same time?”

“Yes.”

Perhaps the murderer had made another appearance on the surveillance recordings that hadn't been altered. That sloppy frame job must've been the result of some mistake, so there was a chance that something else hadn't gone to plan.

According to the footage that La Brava pulled up, no one passed through the corridor in front of room 103 until much, much later when the hotel's own cleaning lady did the rounds.

“There's nothing here,” La Brava confirmed. “It also looks like this footage wasn't altered.”

“What about the part of the corridor with the door that leads to the basement? Whoever came down here before you would've been caught on camera as well. Or did you erase that footage already?”

“Oh no, we'll be using that footage for our own video later,” she explained. “I wasn't planning to erase anything.”

The video revealed another mostly empty corridor, save for Mrs. Yudama coming out of the door with a batch of laundry, and Gentle Criminal and La Brava sneaking in much later. “I'm sorry, looks like a few minutes of the recording were also altered,” La Brava informed Kai.

Maybe he hadn't given it enough thought. Whoever had prepared the software that altered the footage knew the person who inserted the USB had to go to the basement. Not just the murderer exiting the room, but also the cover-up job itself had to be wiped from the recordings.

“Okay, I got one more lead,” Kai said. “Show me the footage from the second floor, on the opposite side of the building.”

She did exactly that.

In the recording, barely fifteen minutes after the time of the murder, a brown-haired man in a loose shirt rounded into the corridor and stopped in front of a window.

“I think I saw this guy around the hotel before,” La Brava contemplated aloud.

The man opened the window by a crack and threw out a small object before closing it again and walking out of view. Immediately, La Brava rewound the recording, paused it at a moment the window was still open and attempted to zoom in on the object. It didn't improve the quality of the video much, but enlarged the image at least.

“What was that?” she asked, squinting her eyes at the screen.

Next to Kai, Gentle Criminal was leaning in as well. “A tiny chair?”

“Doll house furniture,” Kai concluded.

The object perfectly matched the shape of the armchair that was now lying far down in the bushes and mud at the foundations of the hotel, and there was only one person in the hotel with a quirk that could shrink furniture. Hiroto Saeki.

“Doll house furniture?” La Brava repeated. “What's that got to do with the murder?”

Kai ignored the question. “Thank you. That was exactly what I was looking for,” he said and took a step back from the desk, if only because he was starting feel uncomfortable with so many people in this small room breathing the same air as him. “Please keep the footage as it is.”

“I will,” La Brava said.

Not only did that footage confirm Mr. Saeki's crucial role in the murder, it also highlighted, again, the importance of that chair. The projectile stuck inside had to be a damning piece of evidence that led straight to the weapon and its owner, or perhaps, to the company that had produced it.

“Eri, let's go,” Kai said to the little girl and took the near-empty top of the thermos bottle out of her hands to return it to Gentle Criminal.

“What're you planning to do next?” he asked.

“As I said before; don't concern yourself with the murder,” Kai replied, walked over to the door and restored the fused material to its former state. “I'd advise you to leave this room very soon. Lady Nagant will come looking for those recordings as well. If I were you, I'd make sure to be gone by then.” He couldn't help but cast a glance at the floor and scrunch up his nose. “And that tea spill, too.”

Gentle Criminal coughed awkwardly into a fist. “Ahem. Thank you for the warning.” He turned to his partner. “La Brava? Let's pack up.”

“Already on it, Gentle.”

Kai listened for any sounds in the hallway outside before opening the door. No sign of the heroine yet. Standing in the doorway, he turned back once more. “By the way, do you know if there's a door leading outside from the basement?”

“I'm not sure why you'd want to go out into the rainstorm, but the floor plan showed no doors to the outside on basement level,” La Brava said.

No direct way to it, then. But Kai still had some other options to get to the chair he'd have to consider carefully. He needed to secure that projectile before someone else got rid of it. There were too many people involved in this crime. Once that was done, he'd try to confront Mr. Saeki directly and see what he had to say to his defense.

“All right. Thank you for all your help,” Kai said to La Brava and turned to walk away, only waiting long enough to ensure Eri was following him out of the server room.

“Good-bye, Eri,” La Brava said.

Kai could still hear their voices from the hallway as he walked away.

“How much longer do you need, La Brava?”

“Just a minute.”

“I think we better make a quiet exit this time. You were right about this mission. We should've picked something smaller.”

Chapter Text

For the third time today, Kai and Eri had found their way back to the second floor window from which the armchair had been thrown out and where Eri had dropped her plush bunny. And once more, Kai was looking through the window down at the slope of the mountain.

The rainstorm showed no signs of letting up, and he wasn't keen on facing the elements at all, but if the chair wasn't coming to him, then he had to get to the chair. There was simply no other way.

By this point, Kai wasn't all that worried about Lady Nagant catching him snooping around anymore. It'd been a while since he'd last come across her, which had led him to the conclusion that one or more of the hotel guests were hogging her attention full-time.

For the past five minutes or so since he'd returned to the upper floor, Kai had been going through his collection of clues, again and again, trying to string them together in such a way that he wouldn't just be able to pin the crime on the killer but also on the organization who'd planned it. The longer he thought about it, however, the more frustration welled up in him. There was plenty of tangible evidence on the former, yet barely more than indicators pointing at the latter.

Kai knew if he didn't manage to catch the ones who were truly behind the murder, it would continue to irk him forever, like some itch he couldn't scratch.

“Are you okay, Mr. Chisaki?” Eri asked him, snapping him out of his thoughts.

He'd probably been staring out at the rain in silence for several minutes. Kai took a step back from the window. “I'll have to go outside for a bit,” he said while taking off both his gloves. “I need you to stay here, where I can see you. Can you do that for me?”

She nodded. “Will you be gone for long?”

Kai sighed. “I sure don't hope so.”

Him disinfecting his hands before using his quirk was irrational, he knew that, but he also knew he'd have to fight his phobia all the way to the chair and back, so coating his skin in disinfectant felt like some kind of preventive measure at least.

Here goes nothing. Holding his breath, Kai zipped up his jacket and pressed both of his hands to the glass. It shattered into fine dust the instant his quirk activated, and was quickly reassembled into a thick ring around the hole he'd created.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Eri taking a step back as the rain began to pour into the building.

The feeling of raindrops on Kai's skin was annoying, sure, but nowhere near as bad in terms of contamination than, say, touching the floorboards people had been walking across with their dirty shoes. While fighting the pins-and-needles sensation that spread up from his hands onto his lower arms, Kai reshaped the floor and adjacent wall to increase the hole in the side of the building and create protrusions akin to the steps of a hanging ladder on the outer wall below of the second floor. It wasn't exactly the safest way to climb down, but it would do.

“Stay behind a window,” he reminded Eri as he carefully lowered himself over the edge.

“Yes, Mr. Chisaki,” she replied. “Please be careful, Mr. Chisaki.”

During his climb down the side of the building, Kai's senses were flooded with the rain prattling at his back and soaking through his hair, the sight and smell of the dirt and moss growing on the facade in front of him, and the overly analytical input from his quirk that confirmed not only the presence of dirt, moss and mud but also mold every time he had to use it to create more protrusions.

Maybe, just maybe, he was also a little concerned about slipping and falling. Or perhaps that was just because of the moss he hadn't removed from the steps further down. If he would've focused any longer on that, he would've made himself physically sick with the knowledge of every microorganism that lived in the vegetation. The point was, however, even if he fell from this height, – as long as he didn't hit his head and died instantly, he could always use his quirk on himself to heal his wounds.

By the time Kai had reached the basement level, the pins-and-needles itch had reached his upper arms and shoulders. Drops of water ran down his neck and under the collar of his jacket. Along with the growing discomfort, his stress level continued to rise.

Kai let go of the makeshift ladder and dropped the last few feet down.

His sneakers, which had been pristine white up until then, made a squelching sound as they hit the mud. Immediately, Kai was slipping and struggling for balance. He just barely managed to steady himself on the slope.

Which was good. The danger of falling helped to keep his mind focused on the task.

Only a couple of steps separated him from the armchair. The trunk of a dead tree and the bushes surrounding it had stopped the piece of furniture from sliding further down the slope.

Step by cautious step, Kai inched towards it. Although he held his hands out to steady himself, he only grabbed hold on a dead branch when he lost his balance for a moment. Due to the rain, there simply was no telling which part of the earth was still firm enough to step on.

#-#-#

“So the main restriction of Doll Maker is not what it can be applied to, but for how long?” Kaina asked her contact on the phone, just for clarification. “Guess I better have another word with the guy. Thanks for the information.”

“You're welcome, and good luck with handling that incident, Lady Nagant,” the secretary at the quirk registration office said and hung up.

Kaina stepped out from behind the reception counter and glanced around the lobby to take stock of her suspects.

There was Mr. Bubagaiwara in a chair by the entrance, looking about as bored as Kaina was frustrated, Mrs. Kizuki had thankfully chosen to turn her attention back on a story on her laptop instead of pestering her, and …

“Seriously? Are you kidding me?” Kaina complained loudly. “Where is Mr. Saeki?”

Bubagaiwara pointed at himself as if asking whether she was expecting an answer from him specifically.

She wasn't. “And Chisaki's still not back yet, either?”

Mrs. Kizuki looked up from her laptop just briefly. “You know I volunteered to help you out.”

“And I still don't want your help,” Kaina said, turned on the spot and strode out of the room with hasty steps, grumbling in frustration.

She was so due for a vacation.

A very long vacation. Ideally, a vacation she never came back from.

How could the HPSC expect her to deal with all of this by herself? She could have sworn she'd turned her back to the lobby just for ten minutes to give new instructions to the hotel staff and make that call to the quirk registration office to verify everyone's statements, and in the meantime, another one of her suspects had fled from the lobby like a chicken from a coop. Kaina never actually had to look after chickens before, but she imagined even chickens would be more cooperative than this bunch of highly shady individuals.

Usually, when she was thinking of taking a vacation, or asking for a raise, it was because of some questionable killing job the HPSC had sent her to. But she'd mulled that dilemma over plenty of times before. Even if the state emptied its pockets – its very deep pockets – no amount of money could buy her a clean conscience. Alcohol to ease the nerves, yes, but that was hardly a solution. And if she'd get all the vacation she wanted, she was better off quitting her job altogether.

Except she couldn't just quit.

All throughout her hero training and even long into her years of work, the HPSC president had emphasized time and again how vital her job was to preserve the peace to the public. She'd believed him long enough, but certain things simply kept happening. Things like arriving at a remote hotel to observe and assassinate a Yakuza boss and finding him standing at the reception with a scared little girl clinging to his sleeve.

Kaina wasn't so stupid to have never thought about the families of the villains and corrupt heroes she'd killed. But thinking about that family and seeing that family made a world of difference.

She'd called her HPSC contact and asked about whether her mission plan had to be changed. The response, as usual, had been no. They'd told her to stick to the plan and shoot the old man when he left the building, and they would take care of any cover-up that was needed. Any moral complications were hers to deal with.

Haruka Hassai had been an old man with a granddaughter. The head of a medium-sized criminal organization, of course, but harmless without his men to protect him. He'd been quirkless, too, born into a generation in which quirks hadn't been as wide-spread as they were in the current one.

So, Kaina had kept pressing the HPSC for a reason why he needed to be dealt with at all. Their explanation, sadly, had been as sound as always. The ongoing fights between the Shie Hassaikai and the MLA were on the verge of drawing public attention, and since the HPSC had no lead on the current head of the MLA, the Shie Hassaikai had to be removed instead. Another vital factor that had played into that decision was the lack of a successor. Kaina had no idea how the HPSC had obtained this information, but Hassai's daughter had cut all connections to the clan, and his son-in-law had vanished from the face of the earth about half a year ago.

Just one death, the death of Hassai, would destabilize, if not collapse, the entire Yakuza clan. And one death was better than a dozen deaths or more that resulted from their fights with the MLA.

Kaina had listened to all of this on the phone, and all she'd been able to think of at the time, was that, when the old man died, the little girl she'd seen became a severly traumatized orphan. Yet despite of this, the HPSC had expected her to shoot the old man while the child was with him. The more she'd thought about it, the more certain she'd become that this was seriously fucked up, and the less she wanted anything to do with it.

Ironically, someone else had completed her mission for her and somehow made everything much worse.

So here she was, at this very second, walking through the many hallways of the hotel for what felt like the umpteenth time and looking for a man who'd lied about his shrinking quirk and a professional cleaner. Or a Yakuza boy. Or both in one person. Really, Chisaki was giving her a run for her money with his constant meddling, and he presented an intriguing mystery on top that, too.

Some seemingly random civilian who'd walked into a hotel for a cleaning job, and out with the grandchild of a dead Yakuza boss, yet claimed to have nothing to do with the clan itself. It didn't get any more suspicious than that. Still, his ruse with the new influenza variant had been of use to her as well, because she'd sensed something was up the moment she'd seen him, and the lockdown had given her time to figure out what. Chisaki had simply beaten her to the discovery of the body, that's all.

Despite of his plain appearance, his eyes betrayed a cold and calculating personality, and when he'd stood up to Kaina the danger radiating off him had almost become palpable. Although she had no clue where that attitude came from, his mistrust of heroes and his boldness to talk back at a figure of authority such as herself had struck a chord with her. She wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps it was a pang of jealousy at the freedom with which he operated, or simply because he'd brought something unexpected and challenging to an otherwise very frustrating job.

Admittedly, it had taken Kaina way too long to fully understand that Chisaki hadn't come to the hotel to remove evidence of the Yakuza's crimes. With eyes as sharp as his, his talent would've been wasted on a job as simple as cleaning or looking after Eri. From their first meeting onwards, he had been pursuing the murder relentlessly.

And, against all protocols, Kaina found that a part of her wanted to let him. Finding the murderer seemed like the right thing to do. Better than herding chickens, at least. And if he went and took revenge for the Yakuza? Well, maybe she was a little tempted to let that happen, too, if only so that the HPSC couldn't turn to her to get rid of the killer instead.

Rubbing her neck, Kaina let out a heavy sigh. She'd really lost all sense of right and wrong over the past years, hadn't she?

The sound of footsteps coming from the upper floor turned her attention to the staircase.

#-#-#

After what felt like a much too risky descent, Kai finally made it over to the armchair. Just as suspected, its design matched the furniture from the hotel suites, and, just as feared, the upholstery had soaked up quite the amount of blood.

Even at a glance and with raindrops running down his face, Kai could tell that the bullet had almost pierced the backrest. Despite of the overcast sky, a glint of silver from within the hole caught his eye. The projectile seemed to have gotten stuck inside of the chair's wooden core.

Seeing how Kai already felt like he could sense every individual microorganism on the skin of his arms, his threshold to get in touch with more disgusting substances, such as a mix of blood, mud and rain, had sunk considerably. Due to his stress level, the hives had already spread to his forehead. It couldn't get much worse.

At this point, Kai just wanted to be done with his task as quickly as possible. Once this murder investigation was over, he could drive back home, take a long and very hot bath, put on a fresh set clothes, and he'd feel like himself again. Unless he caught a cold out here in the rain, of course.

With yet another reason not to linger, Kai dug his fingers into the torn up upholstery surrounding the stuck projectile. It turned out to be fairly easy to extract without the use of his quirk, but temporarily disintegrating the backrest still sped up the process considerably.

He cast a quick glance at the object in his palm. It was shaped to look like a twisted cone, similar to the bullets Lady Nagant used, yet unlike them, this projectile was made of a silver gleaming metal alloy.

All of a sudden, a melody cut through the prattling of the rain and the rustling of tree tops.

His phone was ringing.

Seething with anger, Kai fumbled with the zipper of his jacket until he managed to fish out his phone from the inside pocket and take the call. Which he did for no other reason but to yell at whichever brain-dead moron had chosen to call him at the worst of times. “What!? What is it!?”

“The bunny!” a woman shouted back at him, sounding alarmed.

Sheer confusion overrode his irritation in an instant. “La Brava?”

“I got your number online, b-but that's not important right now! I skimmed the footage of today! That bunny Eri lost; The doll house furniture guy took it! He's – !”

Bullet in one hand, phone in the other, Kai looked up the side of the building.

Eri stood in the brightly lit corridor behind the upper floor windows, just as he'd asked her to, but she wasn't alone. In front of her, Hiroto Saeki crouched down and held out Mr. Deku.

Upon realizing the danger she was in, any and all concern for Kai's own health was forgotten. Kai could not let that man use his quirk on Pops' granddaughter. He'd never get a chance to make it up to Pops if she died!

All in the same motion, Kai pocketed the phone and bullet, then slammed both of his hands down into the muddy earth. It was teeming with microscopic life forms that his quirk tore right through. It didn't matter at this moment.

Using Overhaul, he reassembled all of the earth underneath him to create a rapidly growing pillar that lifted him straight towards the second floor.

The little girl took a cautious step back from the stranger.

“Eri!” Kai yelled over the noise of the rainstorm and the earth moving underneath of him.

Both she and Saeki froze.

The pillar tilted precariously when Kai's quirk no longer reached far enough down to stabilize it with more material. He was forced to jump off, straight through the hole in the side of the building he'd left earlier, and landed on his hands and knees in the corridor, between Eri and Saeki, forcing them apart.

Eri was by his side in an instant. “Mr. Chisaki! Are you okay?”

He was far from okay. Kai was wet, panting, and worst of all, dirty.

“Get behind me,” he said in a huff as he rose back to his feet.

“Talk about making an entrance,” Saeki said, wearing a somewhat surprised look on his face. “There's no need to come jumping through a window, you know? I've only been trying to return the plush bunny to the little missy.”

“You can drop the act right away, Saeki.” Kai wiped the rain from his forehead with the back of his hand. His skin was itching all over. “I know you were hired by the MLA to shoot the head of the Shie Hassaikai, dispose of his body and pin the crime on Lady Nagant. But you didn't know Eri was there until I walked into the lobby with her, so now you're trying to get rid of the only eye witness.”

“That's a fine theory you've strung together,” Saeki remarked. Seemingly unimpressed by the accusations, he took a step towards Kai and Eri. “It's just too bad that you'll have no way to prove any of this …”

Kai tensed further.

“… when I'm through with her!” All of a sudden, Saeki rammed his shoulder into Kai.

Kai stumbled back.

Using that opening, Saeki lunged past him for Eri with his ball-jointed fingers.

But it was already too late.
Not for Eri. For Saeki.

Kai had touched the man's arm with his bare hand. There was a flash of red in the hallway as Kai's quirk shredded the limb up to its socket into individual cells of blood, flesh and bone.

Saeki screamed in intense pain.

However, unlike that time Kai had taken that kid's arm at the orphanage, he reassembled the limb again immediately. It was no mercy, though. Kai purposefully restored the man's flesh as it was before, but left the bones in Saeki's arm as disconnected pieces with sharp edges and angles. As soon as the limb had reformed, Kai grabbed the man's wrist and twisted the arm.

Once more, Saeki howled in agony.

“Who made you kill Hassai?” Kai's anger was fueled by his stress level and intense discomfort. “Who was your contact? Was Kizuki covering for you? Did you bring the software to alter the footage or did she? I'd heavily suggest you start talking right now or you'll find yourself with more barbed wire in place of your bones.”

In a matter of seconds, numerous dark bruises formed under the skin of Saeki's arm. The man gritted his teeth, and yet, despite all the pain, a twisted smile formed on his face.

Kai felt the man's fingers brush him just briefly, and the next thing he knew, Saeki was slipping from his grasp as he rapidly grew to the size of a giant before him. No, wait. It was the other way around! Kai was shrinking!

He'd counted on Saeki being in too much pain to fight back, but Saeki had dropped the plush toy from his other hand when he'd lunged for Eri, meaning he'd been free to use his quirk against Kai.

“Mr. Chisaki!” Eri shrieked.

A shower of ice-cold, mortal fear overcame Kai.

Mr. Deku was lying on the ground next to him, and Eri's plush bunny was no smaller or bigger than him now. A shiver ran through Kai as he looked up and found himself before a literal giant several times as big and strong as him.

Saeki swung out his foot to kick him.

Instinctively, Kai raised his arms in front of his face.

“No!”

That near-deafening scream had been Eri's. Before Kai had fully understood what was happening around him or to him, he'd been plucked off the floor by a pair of hands, carried maybe half a meter away, there was another shriek, and he was abruptly jerked to the side.

With a heavy thud, Eri landed hard on the floor, and Kai, once he had regained his bearings, found himself stuck in her seemingly enormous hands, held sideways. Eri was whimpering in pain. Tears spilled from her firmly shut eyes, and she squeezed Kai so tight, he had trouble breathing.

He could hardly believe what had just happened. The little girl had jumped in to save him and taken Mr. Saeki's kick in his stead. Kai had barely been a decent guardian to Eri, and yet she'd chosen to make that sacrifice for him.

When Kai looked back up, Saeki took a step towards them, holding his severely bruised arm.

“Stupid brat.” The man's voice boomed above of him. “Without you, I would've been long gone.”

The simple fact that being touched all over wasn't anywhere on Kai's list of primary problems spoke volumes about the dire situation he was in. Kai struggled against Eri's grasp. “Eri, let me go!” he screamed at the girl in a half-panicked tone. “Drop me, now!”

“I-I'm sorry, Mr. Chisaki,” she uttered. Eri relinquished her hold on him so abruptly, Kai fall flat on the floor.

He pushed himself back up onto his hands in knees.

At the same time, Saeki lifted his foot to stomp on Eri's head.

Since Kai had direct contact with the material beneath of them, all he had to do was scratch at the floor to disintegrate its upper layer and reshape it into sharp spikes that shot up straight from the ground all around him and Eri.

One of the spikes pierced Saeki's foot.

Yelping in pain, Saeki stumbled back, and Kai's panic level dropped drastically.

Kai's quirk was still active, which meant he could still regain control of the situation. He used Overhaul on the ground again, this time with the intention to create a long row of spikes to pierce Saeki's other foot or leg and immobilize him completely.

Saeki saw what Kai was doing, and quickly took a step back, even though any weight he put on his injured foot caused him to wince.

The line of sharp spikes stopped just in front of him. Along with Kai's body size, the effective range of Overhaul had shrunk considerably. More than Kai had expected.

“Dammit.” Saeki turned and tried to run, despite of his bleeding foot.

Hastily, Kai destroyed the spikes again to run after him. He made it only a couple of steps far before he had to face the fact that his stride was much too short to catch up to Saeki, independent of whether he was limping or not. He had to think of something quick or Pops' killer would get away. Or worse, he might come back with the firearm he'd used to kill Pops, and with Overhaul so crippled in range, Kai wouldn't be able to keep him from shooting.

“Halt!”

Kai froze in his tracks. The voice that rung out through the hallway belonged to none other than Lady Nagant.

As Kai looked back over his shoulder, the heroine was positioned at the far end of the corridor, with her right arm bent back and the rifle extended halfway from her elbow. She was taking aim.

“Shit!” Saeki hastened his steps to try and escape around a corner.

The bang that followed was so loud it left Kai's ears ringing.

Lady Nagant's bullet pierced the calf of Saeki's uninjured leg. The man tripped and crashed to the floor.

“No. No!” He tried to get up, but his leg gave way and he dropped back down. With three out of four limbs injured, just pushing himself up from the floor had to cause him serious pain.

Hastily, Lady Nagant walked past Eri and Kai, put a knee to Saeki's back to pin him down and proceeded to tie his hands together using a sort of binding tape. “Mr. Saeki, you are hereby under arrest for illegal quirk use, bodily harm, and suspicion of murder,” she stated.

“No. I was so close,” the man whimpered with his face to the floor. “Everything was so well-planned. It was supposed to be perfect.”