K E N I C H I
The Time Our Main Character Got Stuck On A Bus
Dinner had not really gone badly, but it hadn’t been great either. Kenichi hadn’t gotten much of a chance to talk to Fumika after making such a big show to her little sister, and ultimately it seemed like with everything that had gone on--I mean geez, when you really thought about it it felt like this one day of school had somehow taken multiple weeks to come to an end--he might have to just let the fluffy ahoge get some sleep and do the same himself.
So after dinner he headed back to his dorm room, and since he hadn’t gotten the chance to go to the gym he figured he would settle with some plain old pushups and situps before bed. He hadn’t ever had trouble sleeping after exercising, though he usually preferred to do it before dinner since he didn’t like working out on a full stomach. But given everything they had done today--his arm, the one he had Jet Smashed with, was starting to feel sore despite Nurse Kiwi’s healing because there was only so much a Quirk could do even if technically all the muscles, bones, and skin tissues were “fully restored”--so he figured he could afford to take it easy.
And just before he started that workout, he decided to check his emails. Figuring out how his school account would work wasn’t too hard, and then he checked his personal mail out of habit.
“ARE YOU FUCKING WITH ME!?”
He shot up from the desk chair, sending it tumbling backwards. He practically dove onto his bed, tearing into his luggage, until he found his oversized (and frankly overpowered) flip phone of the type the Japanese liked presumably because they weren’t fond of the smartphone company Pear promoting sweat-shop labor in China. He hit his speed dial, then began frantically pacing around the room.
His mother answered after the second ring.
“Kenichi, before you start take a deep breath and hold it.”
The barometric pressure in his room dropped a by several PSI.
“Your father is fine. He just has to stay so they can run some tests and get him re-fitted. The police have already gotten all our information and they are handling it--there’s even a local Hero, you know, Decaman, working on it. It was just a random car-jacking. Some two-bit Villains looking for a getaway ride. They rushed us as we came out of the store, they went for your dad because he was holding the keys. They broke his leg and roughed him up a little bit, but he’s seen way worse days. Do NOT freak out.” The door to Kenichi’s dorm room flexed outward slightly as he released his breath.
“Can I at least come check on him?”
“Kenichi, I only wanted you to know so that...so that, well, you’d know. There’s literally nothing you can do here, and I know how gung-ho you get. It wouldn’t do anyone any good. You just started school.”
“But…” Kenichi knew he was desperately reaching, “But what if it wasn’t entirely random?! Villains are going crazy these days!” He had to actually blink for a minute--Tomorrow was going to be Friday, which meant today was Thursday, so yesterday would have been
Wednesday-- “Remember yesterday, at like 1 in the afternoon, there was that breaking report about a bunch of villains barging into UA!? Like some kind of big team of them!? What if these guys are part of a bigger organization like that, or what if they come after Dad cause he saw their faces, or what if they were actually--”
“Kenichi, hold your breath.”
The door rattled as it was sucked inward.
“I know that you want to be a Hero, sweetheart, and I know you are worried to death about your dad all the time. But you cannot do anything here. And you are not going to be able to be everywhere at once, or save everyone all the time--you are going to have to learn that and accept that, or you are never going to make it at that school. And you have to trust your dad too--he’s been through a lot, but he isn’t helpless just because he’s lost a few things. All that energy of yours can’t be bound up in one place like this, you’ll make yourself sick thinking about it all the time.”
“Then...at least let me swing by? Just for my own peace of mind?” The blue haired boy bit his lip, though of course his mother couldn’t see that. He heard her sigh.
“Alright. But no patrolling the hospital, no all night vigils, and certainly no beating up any delinquents loitering around the parking lot. You come by, bring your father some fruit or something, and then you go right back to school, okay? Come early and you might only miss homeroom, maybe lunch at the worst.”
It was Friday, April 7th. The school facilities opened at 6 AM, but the classes wouldn’t start until 8:30; despite this, many students were up early to work out or whatever it was they wanted to do in the mornings.
Kenichi was on a bus, heading to a hospital. It wasn’t Hosu General, but another one across the district lines closer to where Kenichi lived before he had come to the dorms.
His school uniform had been traded out for a pair of basketball shorts, a hoodie that had for some reason had its sleeves ripped off (or was it designed that way at the store? Why would people pay for clothes that came to them ripped or with holes in them?), and a pair of bulky, bright red shoes that were so detailed they could probably win their own popularity contest or something. He sat in that particular hunched over manner, hands laced together over one’s chin, that tells you they are dealing with some heavy shit and will probably react with vitriol if you give them shit about how they’re blocking the seat next to them or just bother them in general. So no one did.
He had sent Yoshida-sensei an email basically explaining the circumstances--”My parents were the victim of a carjacking yesterday and my dad got hurt, I should be back by this afternoon at the latest.”--and hoped that a family medical emergency would be enough to not get him in deep shit for missing school already when it was only the second day.
He got off a couple of stops early, because he needed to go into a store and get a fruit basket, although he basically had to just buy the fruit and a basket separately because at this ungodly hour of the morning no gift shop would bother being open so he had to resort to a 24-hour grocery/department store. So it was a short shopping trip, then several minutes of walking to get to the hospital.
Plenty of time to be noticed.
“I’m tellin’ ya, it’s him.”
Huge, compound eyes like those of an insect reflected the light of a street lamp across the street from Kenichi. The boy never noticed, or if he did he didn’t think anything of it, as even though the other person had their own sweater’s hood pulled up (a fashion statement that has always been synonymous with “up to no good” if there’s no actual inclement weather) they were carrying shopping bags of their own in one hand, using the other to talk on their cell phone, and headed in the opposite direction. The blue hair had no idea that compound eyes could see from nearly every direction at once.
“Nice, Katchi! I didn’t think he’d come this quick!” The other voice on the phone was followed by a loud belch. “Ya think we should go for it now?”
“Not yet.” Katchimushi, Katchi for short, stopped at a crosswalk directly opposite the store Kenichi had just exited, though by now the boy was almost out of sight. “Wait til he leaves the hospital. His parents are probably expecting him if he’s coming this early, if he doesn’t show up they might suspect something. But if we wait til he leaves, we have as much time as it would take him to show back up at the school before anybody suspects anything, and by that point we’ll have covered our tracks.”
“Hey, that’s pretty smart!” Another belch. “I knew those League of Villain dummies were wrong for not lettin’ us join! That face-palm weirdo’s got a lot to learn when it comes to bein’ a leader!”
“The best revenge is livin’ well, Chuck.” Katchi said. His voice had a slight distortion, so it wouldn’t be odd to say that he buzzed with quiet laughter. “When we make our own group, we’ll be way more successful than them! So what if they infiltrated UA--they just got their asses kicked by All Might like everyone else!”
“Right!” Belch. “Your idea to pick a less-known school like Komei, and just ransom their weakest lookin’ kid, is way better!” Chuck’s belches were now replaced with what sounded like someone pouring an entire bag of chips into their mouth and then continuing to talk, though Zeroth chose not to use his usual accent-style dialogue because it would be illegible. “I almost feel sorry for this kid though, ya know? All he does is breathe real hard--that’s a useless Quirk no matter how ya look at it. Maybe even worse than ours!”
“Chew with your mouth clozzzed, Chuck.” Katchi growled. “And get ready.” The bug eyed man closed his phone, crossed the street, and headed in the same direction as Kenichi.
Yes, his plan was way better than that dumbass League’s. They wanted to “overthrow the era of peace?” Strike fear in the hearts of the people? It all sounded good on paper--it had
really sounded good to him and his buddies--but when you actually thought about it, it was dumb. It was a good thing the League had turned them down, cause they were dumb! He totally didn’t just want to make himself feel better--Chuck had just said himself that Katchi’s ideas were way smarter! Yeah, dumb lofty ideals like that didn’t get you anywhere. If you wanted cars, houses, women, power, and most importantly
money, well, you had to
make money. And ransoming a kid from a Hero School--he had to have well-off parents, right, cause otherwise how would someone with a power as dumb as “super breathing” have gotten into Hero School?--would be just the thing!
Where the League had messed up had been not paying attention to the actual kids. Their whole plan was based around infiltrating the school, but they had no idea what the students could actually do. The news kept it hush-hush cause the kids were unlicensed, but word on the street and the darknet was that most of the league’s cronies hadn’t even lasted long enough for All Might to show up and ruin their day. And then of course there was the fact that they had picked UA, one of the most secure facilities in the country.
No, the first thing to do was find out who was at Komei. That was easy in this age of social media. He just had to look up pages for Komei, and find out who had shared or liked or checked in, or do a search for public profiles and filter through them for any statuses bragging about making it in or passing the exams.Then it was a matter of doxxing any kids’ names he found until he could pull up where they went to middle or grade school at. Those schools were just for general education, after all, they didn’t have Hero Programs and thus no need for raised security. A little amateur cracking--and really it wasn’t hard, most places never bothered to even change the default password from something stupid like “admin1” or “master” because in this “era of peace” everyone was complacent and lazy and stupid unlike him--a little amateur cracking, and he could just scan the entire roster from the last few years.
That was how he had found Kenichi. Short, scrawny looking, and a Quirk called “Hyper Ventilation” that just said he had “increased lung capacity.” True, general schools might not go super in depth with Quirk explanations because those weren’t important to them like they were to Hero schools, but really how many creative uses could there be for that? Oh, he could hold his breath a long time in the pool? He could blow balloons up really big? Please. The only way a kid like that could get past those exams to get into a Hero school would be if his parents were greasing some palms. That’s what Katchi would have done, so that was obviously the most logical thing.
Doxxing Kenichi until he found his address had been easy too, since it turned out his dad was some slightly-famous reporter/photographer who had been all over the world til he got his dumb ass blown up in one of those third world shitholes. Then all Katchi had to do was what he was best at--watching. He had watched until he saw an opportunity. They made the attack look like a carjacking, but put the guy in the hospital. And what good son wouldn’t come see his dad in the hospital? That forced Kenichi to come out of Komei--their group didn’t even
have to infiltrate! Eat an entire bag of dicks, Shigaraki! But now there wouldn’t be any pro-Hero teachers, or any high tech security--just one kid with a useless quirk, and Katchi’s buddies.
Katchimushi rubbed his hands together, in that devious way like a fly that has just landed on a steaming pile of shit.
***
Kenichi walked through the waiting room to the nurse’s desk. He only saw two people in the waiting room, but then again it was early and this was just a general hospital, not the ER. One of them kind of reminded him of Donny--a fat older guy, maybe even shorter than Kenichi, with a kind of Danny Devito air about him--as he made a sandwich out of two pieces of vending machine bread with different fillings and a couple of takoyaki in the middle. The guy then proceeded to take a big, messy bite, and unlike Don-kun he made it look pretty damn disgusting as jelly and bean paste covered his chin. The other guy seemed fairly normal, for whatever standard in this post-superpower world counted--he was tall and sort of muscular, but you could tell he had dad-gut. He also had four arms, which couldn’t seem to coordinate well enough to let him properly make whatever “gangsta” pose he was attempting, the ones where you kind of spread out on the seat and intentionally look slouchy. Other than the fact that they almost seemed to be trying to attract attention, Kenichi didn’t really make note of them aside from how odd their behavior seemed.
Since he was family, even though it was early they let him head back. He had texted his parents on the way over so he already knew they were awake, and walked in with a light knock on the door.
“Hey, there’s the breakfast express. Pretty fast for coming all the way from Komei.”
Kenichi’s dad grinned as he sat up in the hospital bed. Yoshida Nobuyuki was a tall man, something his son hoped to inherit one day, and he had that sort of look one might expect of a “grizzled reporter,” with the five-o-clock shadow, glasses, and short yet somehow roguishly messy hair. It was several shades darker in color than Kenichi’s, a blue that could have passed for black. Yoshida Hotaru, Kenichi’s mother, still seemed to be lightly dozing on the couch in her usual choice of modest dress and light jacket. She had always been the homemaker, and had the tired look of one who has been giving around the clock care. Her own hair, long and a shade or two lighter than her son’s, looked a bit frazzled.
“Hey, Dad.” Kenichi’s face finally relaxed. “How’s the leg?”
“I dunno, lemme check.” His father threw back the blanket, and looked down at a long-healed stump where his knee had once been. “Nope, still gone.” He shook his head at his son. “They’ll probably have a new one ready for me today. I asked them to put a machine gun in it this time.”
“Why not a missile launcher?” Kenichi put the fruit basket down on the table and hiked one of his knees up to his chest. “Like Cyborg 004!” They laughed quietly so as not to wake his mother just yet, and Kenichi pulled up a chair.
“So...it was really just random, huh?” he said, looking his father in the eye. It was a little bit awkward from this angle, because he was on the same side as the patch. Nobuyuki turned his head so his own eye could meet his son’s.
“Yup. Just one of the things we live with in the world of Quirks, son.”
“So...nobody from like, back in your reporter days? No crime boss you outed, no warlord you spied on, nothing like that?”
“Ha! I wrote stories for the papers kiddo, I wasn’t Solid Snake.” He reached out to pat Kenichi’s shoulder with a hand that had been horrifically scarred along the back of the palm and up the forearm at some point, though now it was light and pink and didn’t make people stare so much. “But that’s all it was, so far as we or the police know. And I can’t see any reason it’d be different--with that League of Villains all over the news, there’s bound to be a lot of criminal activity over the next little while. Lots of small time punks will be looking to take advantage of the chaos, or get their own names in the hat.” He grinned again and held up a thumb. “Once they get me a new prosthetic, we’ll be good to go. I told your mom she shouldn’t even bother you about it.”
“Well...maybe.” Kenichi scratched his nose. Now that he had seen his father in person and knew they weren’t hiding an injury or something off the edge of a video-call, he was starting to feel a little silly about the way he had rushed down here too. “It’s just…”
“Kenichi.” Nobuyuki’s voice got a little more serious, and the grip on his son’s shoulder got a little firmer. “I know I’ve worried you and your mother a lot. I know, as traumatizing as that bomb was for me, it’s been just as bad on you in a different way. But I am not the one you need to protect.” He took his hand away and lay back on his pillow. “You’re training to be a Hero now. And you’re going to be part of a whole new generation of Heroes. So the ones you need to protect will be those who stand alongside you, and those who come after you.”
“Dad you aren’t that old, stop raising death flags.”
“Ha! That kind of sappy cliche doesn’t even make for good news ratings anymore! But seriously, Kenichi.” Even though he only had one eye, Nobuyuki could give quite the glare when he wanted to. “You’re reaching a point in your life where you are going to leave your mother and I behind. Not that you’re gonna stop caring or seeing us all together, but you will have your own life. Your own friends, your own priorities. You don’t have to worry about me all the time, and you sure don’t have to drop everything that’s going on just cause I’ve stubbed my artificial toe. So let this be the last time, okay?”
Kenichi bit his lip and looked down at the ground, nodding through a choking lump in his throat.
“Focus on school. Focus on your training. Leave me, and your mother, in the hands of capable doctors and capable Heroes. We aren’t helpless--we raised a shitty brat like you, didn’t we?” He winked, although it was kind of hard to tell with just the one eye.
“Don’t curse, dear.” Hotaru yawned and stretched as she got up to go hug her son. “But he’s right, Kenichi. You can’t run off every time something happens with your father anymore. There are more important things ahead of you now.”
“Like tests, I guess. And homework.” The blue haired boy managed to smile as he patted his mom’s arm around him.
“And girls! Ya seen any cute ones?” his father crowed as Hotaru shot him a glare.
“Um, well…”
“HOLY SHIT, HONEY LOOK AT THAT BLUSH--”
“STOP CURSING IN THE HOSPITAL!”
Kenichi’s face had been turning red, but now it went almost as blue as his hair as his mother’s arm reflexively tightened when she yelled. Yoshida Nobuyuki had the Quirk that was closest to his son’s, a form of lung-filter of sorts--one reason he had chosen to go around the world to places like the Middle East and China was that, no matter the sandstorm or the smog, he could always breathe fine. He could even breathe underwater to an extent, but he was essentially drinking it at the same time so once his stomach--or bladder--got full he had to come up. But Hotaru’s Quirk had been one of the inspirations for how Kenichi chose to use his own. Essentially, she had voluntary control over her adrenal glands. She couldn’t use any superhuman levels of strength, really, but she was an excellent athlete even in middle-age, and when she got angry, well…
But once Kenichi had disentangled himself from her chokehold, he stood up and walked to the window.
“Well, I mean, it’s not like there’s really anything
there, yet. It’s only been a day.” he said over his shoulder. “But...but yeah. I’ve seen some girls...a girl. And I’m meeting a lot of other cool people. And I’m making friends.”
“Good.” his father said. “That means you have at least one other person besides us that you want to protect.”
Kenichi looked over at the couch, where his parents’ belongings sat. Even though his father reported from home now, long years of habit meant that he always had his camera with him. Looking through the lense of it reminded Kenichi of looking a certain fluffy ahoge girl in the eye, almost as if he could see her reflection in it. He clenched a fist and grinned.
“Yeah. I do.”
***
He spent a little more time visiting with his parents, and his mother went out and bought him a couple of breakfast croissants from WacDonald’s (funny how those seemed to be popping up everywhere). But eventually they told him to get going or they’d have an orderly throw him out, and he couldn’t miss anymore school, and yadda yadda. So it was probably about ten thirty or so as he left the parking lot of the hospital and looked up the nearest subway on his phone. He might get there faster if he just took a taxi, but he didn’t think he had enough cash for that. And waiting for a bus might put him too late getting back to school--
“Hey, uh, scuse me!”
Kenichi turned to see that squat, balding guy from the waiting room approaching him. That guy was still here? Had he been waiting to visit someone, or had an appointment last this long?
“I, uh, was uh...um. Oh, oh yeah.” The guy wiped his sweaty forehead with a napkin--which Kenichi noticed had the WacDonald’s logo on it, along with several grease stains. “I was just visitin’ my grandma, but I don’t live around here. Can you tell me how to get to, uh--” The man’s stomach rumbled, though not in a way that sounded particularly healthy to Kenichi. “Oh boy…”
“To...the subway station?” Kenichi started to offer. “Are you feelin’ alrigh--”
The man belched in Kenichi’s face. But it sounded more like a thunderclap, and the force of it--along with a few more drops of spittle than anyone would have been comfortable with--actually bowled the boy over.
“DUDE WHAT THE FU--”
Before Kenichi had gotten both feet under him, a sudden blow slammed into the side of his ribs. He hadn’t been prepared for it, and without meaning to he exhaled in a sharp gasp. The blast of air returned the favor to the man who had burped, but even as he went down another fist slammed into the back of Kenichi’s head, and then a third into one of his kidneys. A fourth hand gripped his shoulder and spun him around, then two of them clenched into an axe-handle and clocked his chin hard enough to clatter his teeth. He went down--but he wasn’t out.
He pushed off from one knee and headbutted his attacker in the gut. It drove the man backwards--but he had one set of arms to help him hold Kenichi back, and another set to slam two elbows into the back of the boy’s head. This time when he went down, Kenichi didn’t get back up.
***
Kenichi came to suddenly, but he didn’t move. For one thing, he couldn’t move very well in the first place--he could feel a seat belt across his shoulders, but also his hands tied behind his back and his ankles crossed. It seemed like duct tape rather than rope, but it was really thick and covered his fingers as well so he couldn’t worm around and peel it off. A bag had also been thrown over his head at some point, but the material was breathable--it just made the air feel warm, and the cloth was rough on his face.
The car was moving. And it seemed like there was someone sitting to his side, as well, though he couldn’t really see that well through the sack. He clenched his teeth, then snarled.
“Who the fuck are you guy--”
“HOLY SHIT!” yelled three pairs of voices, and the car swerved nauseatingly before coming back under control.
“Jezzzus that scared me!”
“Why didn’t you tell us he was awake!?”
“I didn’t know!”
“Where the hell are we going?”
“Back to that abandoned place we found, rememb--HEY!” The one with the buzzing voice realized Kenichi had thrown his two cents into their shocked banter. “You shut the hell up! Don’t try anything funny if you know what’zzz good for you!”
“Is that a side effect of your quirk, a legitimate speech impediment, or are you just fuckin’ retarded?” the blue-hair shot back. Two sets of fingers dug painfully into his side and collar.
“He toldja ta shut it!” growled a deeper voice.
So the one with four arms is in the back seat with me. Sounds like the buzzy one is driving, so burpee must be in passenger seat. Kenichi wrinkled his nose under the sack. But there wasn’t a lot he could do with this. He could break his bindings easily enough even with his air intake limited by the bag, but there wasn’t really enough room to fight and he risked causing the car to crash.
What would a smart hero do? Someone who could do more than just fight or be a meathead like me?Could he...slam against the door hard enough to open it, and roll out of the car? Yeah! That’d be an easy way...wait. Stop and think just one more step. If he rolled out of the car...Where were they, anyway? On a mountain? Near a river? Was there other traffic? No. He couldn’t do that one, he didn’t know what he’d be rolling into or if the car was going fast enough to smear him on the road. Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t even drive a car! What was he supposed to do if he did manage to knock them all out?
He wriggled around a little bit, but he couldn’t feel his phone pressing against his leg in his pocket. So no real way to get a message out. Unless...the window? Surely if they were on a road, a passing car would see that there was someone with a bag over their head in another vehicle, and would think that was suspicious enough to call the cops over! Right?
It seemed like, for the moment, waiting would be the way to go. At least he could eavesdrop on their conversations…
“Did you guys ever see the news?” Sounded like the belching one. “If Decaman shows up, can we just surrender? I don’t wanna get plastered all over the wall.”
An accurate assessment, Kenichi figured. The local neighborhood hero he’d grown up seeing around as a child had a Quirk called Factor 10--he was a bit like a lower level All Might, being roughly 10 times stronger, faster, and more durable than the average human being. Offensively that made him like a gorilla moving at the speed of a drag racer, but his Quirk had effectively topped out. Unlike some folks who could multiply their abilities by activating their Quirk, Decaman’s quirk basically
was being ten times stronger--no matter how much he worked out, he couldn’t break that wall, and he had to be very careful when shaking hands or anything else because he could never
lower his strength below that tenth factor either. As a result, many villains who faced him got seriously hurt. And Kenichi didn’t feel sorry for them one bit.
That thought made him realize something. Had he lied to his parents back there?
They think it’s all about protecting people. And, I mean...I do. I don’t want the people I care about, or anybody who doesn’t deserve it, to get hurt. I wanna help them.“That’s why we’re heading so far out. Decaman isn’t on the level of national heroes, and he holds back a lot cause for all that muscle he’s a big puzzzy.” spoke up the bug-man over Kenichi’s thoughts. “He won’t go far outside the city limits, and we’re going way pazzt that.” The bluette felt his jaw clenching again.
But these kinds of guys...Villains...They deserve it. They DESERVE to get hurt. They don’t deserve to breathe the same air the rest of us do!The reason Decaman held back so much was because he was kind. Kenichi had seen him bend trees to get lost cats, and jump nearly a story high to catch a flyaway balloon. He might have been just a local hero, but he had won the hearts of his people. And time and time again, Kenichi had seen the news reports where a Villain got away, or managed to hurt Decaman, because he had held back to avoid killing them. These pieces of garbage couldn’t see kindness. They just saw weakness, and they would always take advantage of it. So it wasn’t worth offering to them.
“What about the cops?” Four arm speaking up. He didn’t sound like the brightest bulb in the shed, as his words drawled a little and not just in that rural country-boy accent.
“Ever since Heroezzz took over, cops are nothin’. They wait for the capes to find someone and bring ‘em in, and then all they do is paperwork and gumshoe shit. When was the last time you heard about the cops in an active chase around here? Hell, they don’t even make an arrest unless they’re a hundred percent sure they can convict--they look like they have a good rap on paper, but tons of stuff goes under their nozzzezzz.”
The tape crinkled as Kenichi clenched his fists. But he knew the bug-man had a point. He was probably the only one out of this trio who wasn’t dumb as a brick.
“Why are you bastards doing this!?” Unable to hold it back, he finally had to speak up. Immediately one of four arm’s hands clamped down on his shoulder, but he heard the bug-man laugh. After building his courage, the burpy one laughed too.
“Don’t piss yourself, kid. Long azz your folks bring us the money, we won’t kill ya. Just take a nap or something, when we get to the hideout maybe we’ll grab you something to eat.”
“Oh, oh can we make a quick stop now? I kinda want a soda…”
“Dammit Chuck, no we cannot stop right now! Besides, if you drank a soda we’d have to ride all the way there with your head hanging out the window, and if you belched somebody off the road we’d draw more attention!”
As four arms piped up about being kind of hungry too, the three devolved into an argument. Kenichi sat back and listened--the bug-man was called Katchi, Chuck apparently couldn’t control when his belches erupted, and the four armed guy was named Shirou. For someone who claimed to be so smart and who went into long winded explanations about everything, Katchi seemed to miss the forest for the trees--he had come up with this complex plan to kidnap and ransom Kenichi, but he had missed the fact that every one of his crew had given their names away and Kenichi had seen two of them close enough to remember their faces.
But they were headed somewhere outside of Decaman’s usual patrol route, well away from the city. They were headed to a warehouse. And they didn’t intend to kill him--truth be told, Shirou was probably the only one that job could fall to if it came down to it, as neither of the others were strong enough. Shirou only had the strength of a regular person himself, but having multiple limbs and what felt to Kenichi like some street-fighting experience made him the most dangerous. Which was probably why Katchi seemed to treat him better compared to Chuck--Kenichi could tell there was a history here, probably a trio of schoolboy delinquents who had never grown out of it and whose Quirks, brains, or personalities sucked too much to let them ever consider being Heroes, or even worthwhile members of society.
But ultimately all this thinking, trying to be a “smart” hero, was driving him crazy. It was just wheels within wheels. He wondered if Fumika would have had this much trouble coming up with something…
***
Though Kenichi didn’t know it, once enough time had passed without a text or call, his mother decided to check in with the school to make sure he had returned and that his partial absence would be excused. When they figured out Kenichi had never returned, the authorities were immediately notified--both around Komei and in the district where Kenichi had disappeared. But, with the League of Villains’ infiltration of UA fresh in their minds, the staff of Komei knew they had to minimize the amount of exposure to the students and local citizenry. It wasn’t just about preserving their reputation as a school or trying to get a leg up on their competitors--for copy cats to appear after the League’s stunt meant that the Villains responsible probably wanted the same things they always had--to be famous. Even if they were in jail, if their faces had been all over the news, all over social media, and all over the internet, then they had what they wanted. People would have noticed them, acknowledged them, would immortalize them. They didn’t have the lofty ideals of tearing down the era of peace brought about by All Might, they just wanted others to look at them and say “hey, they’re supervillains too!” So Komei was not going to give them that satisfaction.
Another reason was that, if an alert was immediately raised, the villains would probably hear of it before any rescue party could reach them, since there was still a great deal of organization to go through. The Komei staff couldn’t be heavily involved, since school security would have to be raised--without drawing too much notice from the students--and they would have to focus on the children who were still in their care. Local heroes would have to be gathered, the best team picked for the situation, and they would all have to be briefed on Kenichi’s particulars and whatever they could pick up on the Villains responsible. And of course the police would have to be involved, but because the different districts were under different jurisdictions there was a lot of red-tape that had to be cleared.
Then there was the actual investigation. The time Kenichi left, which bus he used, where he got off, how long he was in the hospital...Footage from traffic cameras and CCTV within a kilometer radius of the hospital would have to be checked, but from the time Kenichi left the school to the time he was reported missing at the very least, which would be a huge workload even with a few techie heroes involved.
They would, of course, eventually find the images of Chuck and Shirou present when Kenichi entered the hospital. At first it wouldn’t be suspicious, because Katchi had told them beforehand not to be incredibly obvious. When the nurses had gotten suspicious of their loitering, they had told them that they were waiting on family to show up before they went to visit a sick grandmother. That was good enough for the first pass, and before any nurse got suspicious enough to ask them any questions like the names of their relative, or what room they were in, Shirou went to the bathroom and Chuck left to get breakfast. Out of sight was out of mind.
But when Kenichi left, Katchi would be seen--from behind, with his hood pulled up--passing by the windows in the hall from outside. He and Kenichi had passed each other (for the second time) without the bluette noticing, and as soon as Kenichi reached the waiting room Katchi had pulled his phone and ordered Shirou to follow him after a ten-count. So when the two of them left the hospital so closely together, with the four armed man obviously intent on the boy in front of him, that would be the first real red flag.
From there it would be backtracking to an earlier point in the cameras, to find where Shirou had come from and who he was. From this they would identify the vehicle--and the plates would match the same one stolen from Kenichi’s parents, which would form a link and provide more details on the Villains as Nobuyuki and Hotaru had both given statements describing the people who had attacked them. Shirou, of course, had been the one to break Nobuyuki’s prosthetic leg. From there it would be a search for that vehicle on the road network, and a background check on Shirou and the other one who had been seen with him in the hospital.
One dot became connected after the other. But drawing the lines took time, and manpower. And the whole time, the kidnappers were getting further away…
One in seven homes in Japan is uninhabited, at least according to studies from several years ago. The Quirk booms might have changed that the way they changed everything else, but the side effects of such a thing wouldn’t overturn themselves so fast. As the birth rate declined, and younger generations moved to the cities for work while the older folk eventually passed on, there came to be a “Ghost Town” phenomenon. Rural towns, particularly those in the mountains and other places that had always been a bit isolated from the metropolitan sprawls the country was known for, had been abandoned entirely in some cases, and left to return to nature. But the infrastructure was still
there, just badly in need of repair--houses still stood, though their roofs might leak and their boards might have started to rot, and roads were still traversible if a bit overgrown in places.
For Villains with a bit of self-sufficiency know-how, and a way to get all the way out there, these ghost towns made the perfect hideouts. Katchi and his buddies had originally only come out here on a dare from their school pals one night, a test of courage. But as they got older, they started thinking it was like their own personal little town. Now the old farm house was filled with their trash--old beer cans, bags of chips and other snacks, an old gas generator they had nicked from somewhere and some of those bright lights they had stolen once from a construction site. There was furniture too, moth eaten and rat chewed, but functional.
They had leashed Kenichi with an old set of chains from some former farmer’s tractor winch--across both shoulders and around his waist, a harness of sorts, and looped the other end around some big, exposed iron pipes in the wall. They gave him a blanket and a pillow, and every once in a while they brought him a plate of some cheap convenience store food or tossed him one of the snacks they had bought. But Katchi gave the other two specific instructions not to talk to him any more than they had to.
“You don’t want to develop any kind of relationship with him.” the bugman buzzed. “On an individual level, it’s almost impossible to not get friendly with someone after you spend enough time with them and talking to them. I don’t want any of us making some dumb move cauzzze we pity him--remember, he’s one of those lucky bastards who gets everything they want! And guyzzz like us who dezzzerve what he gets for free, we get it all taken away from us!”
Kenichi actually wasn’t sure if he could break the old pipes or the chain. He could make himself very strong, but tearing the pipe out of the wall or pulling the chain links apart was a different kind of strength. He’d be fighting the leverage of the walls, and the floor, and maybe even the ground underneath the shack where the pipes went down into the earth. And if he just tried to lunge his way out like a dog on a leash, he might give himself severe whiplash. Between getting beat up again by Shirou when he tried to make a break for it as soon as they opened the car door--he had broken the tape almost instantly, but before he could get the bag off Chuck had slammed the door against him. He had pushed away and stumbled out, but by that point Shirou was on him and Kenichi still couldn’t see to fight--between getting beat up again, getting little food, and just plain not knowing what to do, the bluette had ended up just settling down for the night and hoping that someone would come for him.
But he hadn’t slept well by any means. His mind had been running a thousand miles an hour...and at one point, he actually found himself tearing up.
He was not really the Main Character, was he?
It had always been a joke, of course. He didn’t think he was more important than anyone else, or that the world revolved around him. But he wanted to be a Hero, and you needed a lot of stuff for that--you needed courage, you needed brains, you needed to be cool under pressure, you needed to be patient, you needed to be wise, you needed to be strong…
And Kenichi didn’t feel like any of that. A Main Character, even the really dumb or goofy ones, would have been able to come up with a plan. They would have been good enough at fighting, or smart enough, or strong enough, or tricksy enough, to get themselves out of this. But he wasn’t. He was a short, 14 year-old boy who had just entered high school. He could fight in a street brawl, he had a decent Quirk, he felt like he had good instincts. But the world of adults was a scary one, and he had been put in a situation where none of his gifts were good enough and his flaws stood out all the more starkly. And Katchi had made himself clear the next morning.
He started by hitting Kenichi with the crowbar out of the blue.
“Listen up, and don’t say a fucking thing.” The man’s compound eyes were incredibly disturbing up close--the rest of his face was still human, but those huge black spheres took up a third of his head and made it look like he had no forehead at all. “Your parents don’t know if you’re alive or dead. All they’re gonna know izzz that the best chance of getting you back is giving us what we want. We did a good job covering our tracks, so no one izzz gonna find you out here. Nobody!” He slammed the crowbar down next to the boy, and Kenichi reflexively flinched--which was what Katchi wanted.
“If I see you trying anything, if I think you’re gonna give us ANY trouble, I’m gonna fucking beat you to death. Your parents will give us the money, we’ll tell them where you are, we’ll skidaddle, and they’ll come find your fucking body with a caved in skull. We win no matter what YOU do, so do what we fucking tell you! Got it?”
Kenichi drew a sharp breath through his nose and just glared at the Villain. Katchi hit him in the ribs this time and the boy doubled over.
“I SAID, DO YOU GOT IT!?”
“F...fuck you.”
Katchi started laughing. Kenichi looked up in surprise--and then flinched again when the crowbar stopped right in front of his face.
“Nice going. Act tough so it looks like I haven’t intimidated you, try to make me lozzze control so I’ll be angry and mess up, give you an opportunity to escape.” Katchi grinned, but the expression looked extremely unnatural given that his eyes did not crinkle or otherwise show emotion to go along with it. “But you’re scared shitless, little boy. That’s all you are. A scared little boy. And we know it now, don’t we?” He poked Kenichi in the cheek with the crowbar, then stood and walked away.
What was the most mortifying was that the Villain had thought more about it than Kenichi had. He had only insulted Katchi because he had too much pride and he hated the idea that they were stronger than him and that he, their prisoner, was helpless.
***
“Hey.”
“Shut up.”
“I gotta--”
“I SAID SHUT UP!” Chuck slammed the crowbar down on the floor, but then Katchi slapped him in the back of the head. The squat man had been following Katchi’s example from that morning, but it was clear it was just because he wanted to feel big and bad. He didn’t have Katchi’s brains and wasn’t as good as Shirou in a fight--his Quirk was powerful, each belch having enough force behind it to rattle eardrums or send someone flying depending on how big it was, but he couldn’t control when he burped, or how powerful each given burp would be. It all just depending on what his stomach felt like that day and what he ate. Which was a lot.
“What, brat?” The bugman didn’t even look up from the card game the three were playing, although with 360 degree vision he didn’t really have to.
“I gotta use the bathroom.”
“That’s why we put the bucket over there.”
“Unless you wanna smell my shit until you dump it again, I think we should at least use the woods.”
“I’ve taken a lot of shits in my life. Yourzzz isn’t anything special.”
“Then I guess you won’t mind if I drop deuce right here on the fucking floor?”
“Go right ahead.”
“Katchi, man, just let the kid shit in the woods.” Shirou whined. “That’s gonna be fuckin’ nasty and I’m the one who always has to clean up.”
“You realizzze he’s gonna make an escape attempt once we get him out there?” Katchi did look up from his cards now, but only to emphasize what he said to the four armed brute. “He probably doezzzn’t even need to use the bathroom.”
Kenichi groaned and let out a long BRRRAAAAAP from his back end that could have rivaled one of Chuck’s belches.
“...Christ, alright. One of you is bad enough.” Katchi used Chuck’s shoulder to push himself off the ground and motioned to Shirou while he took the crowbar. “But if he makes any move at all, I want you to dislocate one of hizzz knee caps.”
Katchi stood over the boy menacingly while Shirou unlocked the padlock keeping the chain fastened to the pipes. He held the leash in two hands, put one on the back of Kenichi’s neck, and held the other one in a loose, threatening fist. They marched him out around the back of the house and into the woods a little ways.
Kenichi had learned as a youngster how to use his Quirk to swallow air and make himself fart. He had thought it was hilarious until the girls in grade school had started making fun of him for it. But under the illusion of bad cramps, he walked slowly and took deep breaths. The passing of air in and out of him ruffled his hair.
“We didn’t bring any toilet paper, so you’ll have to make do with leavezzz. Careful it’s not poison ivy.” Katchi smirked. “Stop here, Shirou.”
He had picked the spot well. There was a small clearing without many trees, so Kenichi couldn’t run between them to tangle the chain or use them to hide. No water or damp spots, so no mud to slip them up in or throw into their eyes.
“Dig a hole to cover it up with.” Shirou said. “I don’t wanna see any more than I have to.”
“Watch him. He might try to throw dirt to blind us.” Kenichi cursed the bugman--how was he so thorough in the ways that mattered and so stupid otherwise? As he got down on his knees and started scrabbling in the dirt with his hands, he tried to think.
Going one step further wasn’t working. He needed to be smarter. If...if Katchi expected him to do something…
It wasn’t that he was truly helpless. The bugman just seemed to try and predict everything to the point of being paranoid. And what really pissed Kenichi off was that he was always so smug about it, in that “I’m right, I’m right!” way, and he would just laugh…
An idea clicked in Kenichi’s head.
He finished digging a hole, and squatted down over it. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts...then looked up at the two villains with a glare.
“Can ya at least not watch me like some kinda perverts?”
“Yeah yeah. Just hold on to that chain tight, Shirou. This’ll be his break if he’zzz gonna try it.”
Kenichi grunted. He wiggled a little bit, just to make the noise of ruffling leaves. They stood with their backs to him.
He pushed off with both feet, one big lunge as he tried to grab the chain and yank it out of Shirou’s hands. Immediately the other two arms came down to take up the slack, but before either side could win the tug-of-war Katchi struck at Kenichi’s hands. He let go to avoid having his fingers broken, and then Shirou gave a twist with his whole body to yank the boy back towards them. Immediately Katchi began laying into him--but Kenichi grabbed the crowbar just as it slammed into his ribs, using his weight to hold it down while he punched the bugman hard in the gut. Katchi gasped, but didn’t let go of the crowbar, and kicked Kenichi hard in the shin. The boy yelped and went to one knee, just as Shirou closed in.
Two of the four arms began to punch him over and over, even as Kenichi curled in on himself and tensed his shoulders. Blows rained down over his head and back until he was driven to the ground, curled in a fetal position. Katchi hit him with the crowbar again.
“See, you stupid little fuck! I knew what you were up to!” he coughed. Kenichi could tell he wasn’t the type used to getting hit. “I had your fucking number from the start!” One more hit, but this one was more to vent than to really hurt the boy. Katchi took a deep breath and turned away, waving the crowbar lackadaisically. “Pick him up, we’ll make it so he can’t run once we get back to the--”
Katchi had it all figured out. He knew every move Kenichi was going to make, and Kenichi kept making the exact moves he knew he was going to. So why worry when everything was going to plan? Kenichi had tried to escape, he had been beaten down. He had failed.
And Kenichi had planned to fail from the start.He hadn’t used any of the oxygen he had been storing up this whole time, he had let them stop him and hit him and focused on trying not to let them really hurt him or knock the breath out of him. Katchi had relaxed and turned away. Shirou had to hold the chain in one hand, because it would take three to really hold Kenichi while they carried him back. He knelt down on one knee.
Kenichi jerked his head off the ground and blew sharply into his face. It was like having an air compressor spray you, and if it sprayed you directly in the eye it was going to be quite the distraction. The four armed man instinctively spluttered and covered his face with one hand. Kenichi started moving--
fast.
As Katchi was turning the bluette had already yanked the chain out of Shirou’s hands, and he turned and whipped it around just as Katchi raised the crowbar. Metal and metal clanged, and the bug man’s weaker grip let go. Shirou came to his feet with a roar, but Kenichi jumped straight up and slammed his knee into the bigger man’s chin. As Shirou fell back the bluette landed in a crouch.
“JET HUNTING!”
In a straight line he shot for the trees, kicking up a cloud of dirt and leaves in his wake as Katchi dove for him and grabbed a handful of nothing. But when Kenichi made it into the forest, he didn’t immediately run for it.
Because now it’s MY turn, dammit!He reached around to his back and started fiddling with the knot in the chains. He had taken some time when they weren’t watching him as closely to try and figure out how he would untie it if he ever got the opportunity, but still his fingers were fumbling, and he couldn’t see what he was doing--
“CHUCK, GET YOUR ASS OUT HERE! SHIROU!” Katchi’s eyes flashed as he grabbed up his crowbar and started running at Kenichi. Shirou soon outpaced him, being generally more fit and having a longer stride. The chains clinked together but Kenichi just couldn’t get it--
Shirou took a big swing with the upper right, and Kenichi ducked and brought both hands out from behind his back. The lower left came around in a hook, but the bluette slapped it away and threw a punch of his own at Shirou’s solar plexus. The other two arms crossed each other, but as oxygen-doped blood filled his body Kenichi’s fist sent the bigger man stumbling back two steps. As Shirou struggled to recover his balance Kenichi tried to kick his feet out from under him--it bent Shirou at the knees but in the process almost tangled up the young hero’s foot. Katchi swung the crowbar again, and if it hadn’t been for the chains absorbing part of the blow across Kenichi’s back it might have knocked him down again. The blue hair turned to face his tormentor.
This time Katchimushi looked into
his eyes, reflected over a hundred times. And the bug-man started to realize he might have been wrong about this kid.
Kenichi’s empowered fist, red veins running up and down his arm to pump his muscles full, smashed into Katchi’s face. Blood spurted under the bluette’s fingers, and he couldn’t help a wild grin. Getting faster every minute, air whistling as he drew it in through his nose, he slammed Katchi in the ribs next. The idiot must have never been in a fight, as he immediately put his hands over the place he’d been hurt--leaving his jaw wide open. A heavy straight made a loud THUD, and Katchi’s knees gave out on him.
“BRRRAAAAAAAAAAAP!”
The shockwave burp hit Kenichi like a hurricane wind, tossing him backwards into a tree. He slid down and hit the ground with a thump, unable to get his legs under him in time. He pushed off quick as a wink, but Shirou wasn’t being idle anymore either. Four arms started to throw wild punches one after the other, focused only on making contact
somewhere to keep this kid off balance…
Chuck started chugging the soda in his hand, patting his chest to keep himself from choking as it went down so fast. He noticed Katchi crawling on the ground towards the crowbar.
“Katchi, are you okay?!” The squat villain ran to help his friend up, but bug eyes waved him away drunkenly.
“Get away, you might burh...anytime…” One hand held his pounding head while the other pushed him up onto his knees. Everything felt like it was spinning. “He’zzz...doin’ somethin’...maybeh like...Gran T’rino?”
Kenichi finally managed to block one of Shirou’s punches, and even though it felt like one eye was going to swell shut he delivered his own with a shout. Rage, adrenaline, and his doped up blood filled him with power, and there was one other thing.
He wanted to hurt them.
“Hey, don’t look so glum!” He had said, a little louder than he meant to. He had put a hand on her shoulder without thinking about whether or not she minded the infringement upon her personal space. He had given her a thumbs up and a happy grin. “It was a spar, a really good one at that! I was worried about hurting you too, but that’s just one of those things--I mean, you wouldn’t go to a Judo club and expect to not get thrown on your head every once in a while, right?”This was not Komei Hero School. This was not a spar. These were not his friends that he wanted to test himself against, while holding back because they were friends. They were Villains. And he wanted to
hurt them.
That last punch doubled Shirou over and sent him to his knees. The four armed man had to use all of his upper limbs to hold himself up while he vomited. Kenichi didn’t even wait for him to finish before he threw a roundhouse kick--like the one Fumika had used on him what seemed like forever ago, though with more raw athleticism than real technique. His foot slammed into the side of Shirou’s head so hard the man’s neck gave a dangerous sounding pop.
“God fucking damn you, brat!” Something tugged at Kenichi from behind. He looked and saw Katchi, holding the chain in both hands and sitting down so he could plant his feet and really put his back into pulling it. Kenichi was too strong now to be pulled down by the likes of him--but when he saw a reflection of something moving in one of the villain’s multifaceted eyes, he turned just in time to put up his guard.
“BRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!”
This was the worst one yet, a blast that actually turned visible in the air like some sort of special move in a video game. Chuck’s belch hit Kenichi like...like…
”JET SMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!”
“HARUKAZE...HAMMER!”He crashed through several of the lower limbs in the canopy, narrowly avoiding getting skewered more than once as he tumbled. He still came out of it covered in splinters, cuts, and bruises, but he even managed to land on his feet, crouched in a three point stance. He was sucking in more air, but as deep as his breaths were they were getting faster, and faster--he was hissing each breath so fast that, between his teeth, his saliva was starting to foam over his lips. His limbs, from the finger and toe tips up to the elbows and knees, had turned bright red. Veins running up from them went under his clothes and emerged out of his collar, criss-crossing up to his face where they formed tiger-like stripes.
And just like in the finale of the battle with
her when had used up all his power to meet all of hers, his heart and lungs couldn’t keep up with the rapid circulation of oxygen through his veins. He wasn’t venting enough of the carbon dioxide. He could feel a dull throbbing in his head. His eyes were bloodshot.
The red bolts all over him began to turn black.“He’zzz on the ground after that one! Shirou, fuckin’ kill him if you have to!”
Kill him if they had to?
They hurt his father. They hurt him, dragged him all the way out here. They were Villains--no one wanted them, no one needed them! HE was going to be the one that kills THEM! Because he was going to stop them! He was going to destroy evil!
Because he was going to be a Hero! Because he was going to be the best at Komei! And...and because…
Her ahoge had been drooping lately. She seemed quieter than usual. She hadn’t been saying much to him. Her sister said that was because she was arrogant, but he thought that was some kind of misunderstanding.
He had seen her tugging her hair when she was frustrated. She didn’t think her Quirk was all that great, even though she was way smarter and better with it than he was with his. That was the whole reason he had tried to be smart this whole time, wasn’t it? Because he knew a smart type like her would always be better than a brawny dumb guy like him. She would probably have handled this whole situation better--but the thought of lowlifes like this coming anywhere near her made him even angrier. Yeah. He had said that corny line to her sister, hadn’t he?
"I'm one'a those loudmouth-types of main characters who rushes into stuff even if it's none of their business! Even if she ignores me or gets mad at me, I'll still come runnin' anytime she needs help!"
And if he was going to help her…He was going to be a Hero, the best at Komei. He was going to destroy these Villains and go back.
Because she’s waiting on me!“JET BLACK--”
Shirou came at him swinging three heavy branches and a rock. Kenichi pushed off from his runner’s stance.
“WILD HUNT!”
Jet Hunting was based off of Gran Torino’s signature style of movement, using extreme speed and agility to bounce off everything in one’s environment and create an unpredictable pattern of attack. It was just as evasive as it was offensive. But Kenichi knew, ever since the first time he had done it by accident, that once his veins started turning black he didn’t have a lot of time left to fight. So the Jet Black series focused on one thing only.
Ending the opponent.
He shot
into Shirou, not away from him. But he was so much faster that it didn’t matter--those four arms were upraised, getting ready to swing, when Kenichi barreled into the man’s guts fist first. Kenichi felt his fist--clenched so tightly his knuckles were popping--strike the soft solar plexus, sink down to the muscle underneath that had reflexively hardened in resistance...and then sink further in.
Shirou vomited again, but this time it was blood.
Kenichi flew past him, snapped out one arm to dig his blackened, claw-like fingers into the ground. Having an anchor point let him drift, fast and furious, in a half circle before he immediately launched at the Villain again, continuing the Wild Hunt.
“JET BLACK: FALCON SWORD!”
Like Jet Hawk, he leaped through the air and used his arms like a clothesline--but with this much speed and power behind them, and an extra-exaggerated swinging motion, they were more like blades than wings. Shirou had raised two of his arms to try and block. Kenichi felt the two bones in each forearm snap. The mutant Villain tried to scream through a mouth still full of blood.
He turned a flip and landed on the side of a tree, then pushed off once again to come straight down on top of the four armed victim.
“JET BLACK: PEREGRINE DROP!” Jet Eagle was like your typical Bruce Lee style flying kick. But at a vertical angle, this attack came down with the whole body’s weight plus gravity, a crushing stomp. Shirou was driven flat into the dirt, ribcage cracking and neck whiplashing. When the dust cleared, Kenichi wrenched his heel just a little harder down on the man’s spine, eliciting a choking cry of pain.
“Get the fuck off him!” Katchi swung the crowbar in both hands recklessly--what else could he do!? He was all out of ideas, all his plans were falling apart, and now one of his friends might have just been killed by this, this--
“JET BLACK: HELL HOUND!” Jet Hound was one punch driving in a straight line at high speed. Jet Wolf was a whole Jojo-style barrage. And this was the motherfucking Fist of the motherfucking North Star.
Right hook to the jaw. Katchi’s lip spurted blood. Left jab once, twice, to the face--his already smashed nose was broken, then his eye socket cracked. Right straight across the chin--one of his teeth chipped. Left upper--the vertebrae in the back of his neck popped.
“RRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHH!!” Kenichi’s blows were so fast it looked like he had more arms than Shirou, or even that Dulga girl back at Komei. And Katchi could see every one of them coming, thanks to those freakish eyes, but he couldn’t react to a single punch. He watched them come in from multiple angles, then simply felt each reverberating impact until, at some point, he lost consciousness.
Kenichi wouldn’t let him drop.
He caught him by the scruff of his shirt as the bug-man started to fall, and dragged him back for three more. He shovel-hooked him in the lower ribs, breaking the floaters and picking the man up off the ground despite their nearly six inches of height difference. He just kept going--
“STOP! WE GIVE UP, WE GIVE, PLEASE STOP!”
In a flash Kenichi was standing in front of Chuck, a black devil with red eyes--because at some point the blood vessels had burst, and Kenichi’s sclera had gone completely crimson. The boy’s sweat was even starting to evaporate, his breath steaming as his body’s internal temperature rose. The Villain didn’t know it, but Kenichi could barely even see straight anymore.
Chuck gulped air, and tried to make himself belch--Then Kenichi’s hand closed around his throat. With a berserker scream, the bluette spun in place so fast that the wind whistled past Chuck’s ears before his squat, fat little body was thrown with bone shattering force against a tree. His head made a loud, dull sound, and when he slid to the ground he left a trail of blood behind.
Kenichi howled at the blood red, sunset sky, exhaling as his heartbeat thundered in his chest--then he passed out and fell backwards.
***
Early Saturday they had made most of the connections. Hamasaki Shirou had a rap sheet a mile long for stupid shit all the way back through middle school, but he had been given a lot of leniency because of his age. He also had two friends, Kawaguchi Katchimushi and Maeda Chouki, “Chuck” because of his rather vulgar Quirk. They, too, had notable records, though most of it had been expunged from the public stuff after their juvie days. The only good thing was that they had never really gotten violent--vandalism, shoplifting, drugs, theft, and so on, but this carjacking was the very first thing they had attempted where anyone had really been hurt. And it was starting to seem like they knew Yoshida Nobuyuki had a prosthetic leg and had aimed for that to keep him from fighting back, rather than intentionally trying to cripple him.
So why had they kidnapped Kenichi? Most of their crimes were related to money, either getting it through illegal means or stealing it, so a ransom made sense. Had they just chosen the Yoshida family at random? It kind of seemed like it. In fact, a little later that morning, a ransom was sent to Kenichi’s parents via the boy’s own cellphone (unbeknownst to the authorities, Katchi had sent it after that show of threatening Kenichi). But this was where the villains made their final mistake. Katchi had turned off the GPS function on the phone, but everyone these days knows the government has a back door into anything and everything you own. They were able to pinpoint an area somewhere in the mountains, near a village nobody really lived in anymore. Still a lot of ground to search, especially over that kind of terrain, and there was always the possibility that the villains had moved and taken Kenichi with them after sending that message...but they had what they needed now.
The team was assembled, the strategy was devised. As soon as the sun went down, they went in. Under cover of darkness, the goal was to infiltrate the villain’s base and retrieve Kenichi as fast as possible. Only then would they throw on the spotlights and focus on apprehending the criminals.
They almost tripped over them. Hamasaki had to be braced due to neck and spinal injuries and treated immediately for gastrointestinal hemorrhaging, as well as broken bones in two of his arms. Kawaguchi had severe whiplash and two cracked vertebrae, a bad concussion that might have already caused brain damage, and ribs that had been broken so badly they were in danger of puncturing his lungs. Maeda had a skull fracture and a split in his scalp that had been bleeding heavily, but other than that seemed to have gotten off the lightest. Had the rescue team been any later, it was almost certain that all three of these men would have died.
But Kenichi was nowhere to be found.
***
He hadn’t been out very long--just passed out from lack of oxygen. Once he was unconscious and his heartbeat had slowed, he had slowly woken up. He was still groggy, and he hurt all over. But there was very little daylight left...his addled mind could only think of one thing. One person. He had to go back. She was waiting on him.
So he had gotten up. He hadn’t even thought about the phone they’d taken from him, or the car. He had to get off the mountain. Had to find the road. He had to get back. So he did the stupidest thing anyone lost in the mountains can do, and kept moving. Soon he had his air back, but returning to fully functional consciousness just made him aware of his injuries.
One of the crowbar beatings, he wasn’t sure which one, had bruised some of his ribs. One of his tangles with Shirou had blackened his eye, swelling it to the point it was hard to see out of it, and bloodied his lip. Getting thrown around, dragged here and there, and just generally mistreated had left him with sore spots all over. Getting blasted with Chuck’s fucking nasty burps had rattled him down to his bones, and that time he was thrown through the trees had left him with too many cuts and scrapes to count. Most of these had stopped bleeding by now, but there were still a lot of splinters sticking him somewhere along the back of his shoulders and arms.
And then there was the damage he had done to himself. Moving so fast and turning on a dime had strained his muscles and joints to the point that he felt like he had the flu or some kind of early onset arthritis. Hitting those guys wasn’t like hitting concrete or metal the way he had in his match with Fumika, but he had still bloodied and bruised his own knuckles. That arm that he had shattered with his Jet Smash a couple of days ago was bruising up again in a similar manner--some of the repairs Nurse Kiwi had done on him had probably been rendered moot.
Then you factored in not getting the right amount of food or water for a few days, and walking around on a damned mountain for...it had to be an hour or two by now, right? Where was the freaking road?
Finally he had to rest. He didn’t think those guys could follow him--if they did, he’d deal with it when it came to it. He couldn’t go on anymore.
“I’m...coming back.” he mumbled as he slumped next to a tree. “Just...wait a little while longer...Mo...tome...chan…”
A huge man, easily seven feet tall and over three hundred pounds of pure muscle, moved nimbly down the gravel-covered slopes between gnarled trees. He wore a gray, sleeveless jersey with the bright red number 10 on it, tucked into a pair of working man’s blue jeans over a pair of construction worker’s boots. Decaman, the 10th Factor Hero, held one hand over his eyes against the morning sunlight as he searched for the missing boy.
Yoshida Kenichi. He knew that name. Hadn’t seen the kid in a long time, but remembered him. Knew his parents, too. Good people, happy, the ideal family--until the father’s accident. But they were still happy, they’d gotten through those hard times and pulled together the way a family should. Except ever since then, he had always felt like Kenichi was just a little...off.
The kid was one of those high energy types. Happy go lucky, always eager to lend a hand, good hearted, easy to make friends with. But sometimes, when he was alone...when he had no one else to talk to and had nothing else to do but let his thoughts run...Sometimes the boy had a dark look on his face.
Yet Decaman still found it hard to believe he would have done that. The kid was a hero-in-training, after all! Surely the teachers at Komei didn’t tolerate this kind of thing. Then again, someone like Endeavor could end up as the number 2 in the nation…
Those Villains were bad people, there was no doubt about that. They were also barely old enough to be out of college, and had made a lot of dumb mistakes in their lives, but also hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to choose the right path. Decaman believed that some people--not everyone, certainly, but some--needed rehabilitation. They needed to know there was another option out there. If you just wrote them off after the first offense, why should they ever bother trying to be better? Why not just go full hog and do the worst they could possibly do? Those Villains were bad people...but they didn’t deserve that.
Kenichi had no doubt defended himself. To use your Quirk in a life or death situation was not illegal. To defend yourself was not illegal, even if it resulted in the death of your attacker, so long as there was truly no other option and the death was not your intention. But those Villains had been beaten within mere inches of their lives--and at least one of them had been beaten a little more after that. Was it “just because?” Was Kenichi that kind of person now?
He cupped both hands over his mouth.
“YOOOOOOSHIIIIIIDAAAAAAAA-KUUUUUUUUN!!”
“Ow...my ears…”
Decaman whirled, eyes darting until he saw the flash of blue nestled between roots. In an instant he had leaped to the boy, and knelt beside him to assess his injuries.
“Yoshida Kenichi, can you hear me? Can you speak?”
“H...Hey...Long time no see, Decaman.” When the boy looked up at him, Decaman’s big heart melted. Kenichi looked almost as bad as those villains had. That was what convinced him--right or wrong, correct or not. Kenichi had been fighting for his life. This child was not a killer. No, what he had done, he had to have done for a reason.
Kenichi just needed some help, was all.
***
Not all members of the rescue team agreed with Decaman’s assessment.
“From what Komei’s staff has told us, Kenichi is incredibly gifted in physical combat, and his Quirk is far more useful than simple “enhanced lung capacity.” His strength and speed are both formidable--the only one of the Villains who might have posed a real threat to him was Hamasaki, and even he only has twice the strength of a normal human being. That’s also not even in the same capacity as true super strength, he just has an extra set of muscles.”
“So you’re saying he should have put the Villains’ lives over his own!?”
“No, but I AM saying that it should have been very clear to him when he won that fight. There was no need for such excessive force. One of those men may very well be a vegetable for the rest of his life!”
“We don’t know for sure that it was all Kenichi’s fault! What if there was infighting amongst them and he took that opportunity to escape? Or what if he wasn’t necessarily trying to hurt them that badly? We all know that sometimes a punch lands wrong or the person falls and hits their head when all you did was shove them. Until the interrogations are complete and we know more about all sides of the situation, I don’t think we should make any hasty conclusions!”
“I can agree with that, but I think we need to take proper precautions. All I’m recommending is that we detain him until we can come to a decision--”
“He’s not the one at fault here, why are we treating him like he’s the one going to prison?”
“He is not going to prison. Right now he’s en route to the hospital to be checked out. After that, I think we should simply keep him there until a counselor or two can talk to him. He may need that as much for his own mental health as to assuage our worries about his character.”
“...Fine. But only so long as his parents still have a say--I don’t want someone just “deciding” that he has anger issues or something and needs to be doped up or committed.”
“And I don’t want a Hero School to raise a student that could end up becoming worse than the Villains he fights. But 72 hours is all I’m asking--we’ll observe him for that long, check his recovery, and figure out what we’re going to do from there.”
“What about Komei? What’s their stance on all of this?”
“So far, everything is simply being kept hush-hush for the sake of maintaining calm among the student body and the general populace. We can’t afford a repeat of what happened with UA, after all--otherwise people are going to start losing faith in the institution of Hero Schools as a whole. Once proper charges have been filed, we’ll make the report, but we’re going to try to keep Komei’s involvement at a minimum--all anyone needs to know is that a boy was kidnapped, the three villains are in custody, and the boy was rescued. No one needs to know he was a student at Komei, a Hero in training, or anything else besides that.”
“We should probably inform their counselor to keep an eye on the boy as well.”
“Isn’t there also a teacher at Komei who is a former villain herself? Could she possibly have been an influence on him?”
“For one thing, I highly doubt such a thing would happen after a single day. For another, the person you speak of--Akane Mako--is currently teaching their Villain Psychology course. As a rehabilitated person herself, I doubt she would agree with these kinds of extreme methods of heroism.”
“Then it would seem we’ve come to a conclusion about the issue. Decaman?”
“Okay. Let him rest up in the hospital, get someone to talk to him, and figure out his side of the story. If it seems like he has some deeper issues or is headed down the wrong road...We’ll deal with that when we come to it.”
***
Kenichi spent the rest of that day in the hospital--the same room, even as his father had been. Now their roles were completely reversed, something that he and his dad had laughed about before his mother slapped both of them--and then commenced crying and hugging him again and saying that she was sorry.
Most of his injuries weren’t too severe. They simply put a brace on one of his knees, and on his right arm, the smashing one, and then everything else was handled by gauze and bandages and band aids and ice packs. All he needed was rest and time to heal. Maybe an extra day off from school just to be on the safe side. But Kenichi was already worried about falling behind--thankfully he could use his father’s laptop to pull up his school email account and get his assignments from the school’s website.
There was another doctor, but this one wasn’t here to look at Kenichi’s wounds. The bluette thought a lot of the questions he asked were pretty stupid, but as time went on he realized what was going on. They wanted to make sure he hadn’t been traumatized or something by his captors. Reflecting on this, after the doctor had left the first time, actually brought him back to that dark place he had spent the night in up on the mountain. The realization that the adult world was scary. All the things they could have done to him...all the ways they could have ruined him, not just physically but mentally...Thinking about how close he had come to some of that…
But he couldn’t let anyone see. He had to be strong. Had to
get stronger.
He wasn’t sure why he wasn’t allowed to talk to his teachers or try to get in contact with any of his friends. Nor did he understand why his story wasn’t on the news, or why none of them were trying to get in contact with him, either.
“Have you seen enough to make a call yet?”
“Hmm...It’s always possible I’m missing something of course, that he’s a good liar or that he knows just what to say. You can never be too sure. But ultimately? I don’t think he’s as much of a vigilante as you’re worried about. He has a rather black and white view of things, but that’s normal for children. His issues also seem to stem from his father’s injuries, and we certainly can’t blame him for that. That feeling of helplessness, of being unable to protect his father or do anything else about the event, is being projected somewhat. But ultimately, aren’t most Heroes driven by something like this?”
“So you don’t think he’s going to be a danger in the future?”
“I can’t say anything regarding that one way or the other. All I know is that, right now, Yoshida Kenichi is in a mostly-stable state of mind, and is still a growing boy. He will learn. Hopefully, he will learn to be better.”
“...Mostly stable?”
“Yes. I won’t deny he has a few problems here and there. But isolating him isn’t the way to fix them--quite the opposite in fact, in my opinion.”
“...In other words, you think Komei is a good environment for him.”
“Any school would be a good environment for him. Children need friends, they need to live their youth. Kenichi, like many children, wants to rush through his because he feels like he has to grow up now, to fill the shoes his father can no longer wear, and to prevent what happened to him from happening to others.”
“...I see. Well, Decaman will be pleased to hear your report. Thank you, doctor.”
***
“...and if your lighting and camera positioning in both frames is exactly the same, you can layer them over each other. Boom, now there’s a clone of you.”
Kenichi’s tongue poked out of one side of his mouth as he concentrated on the laptop and what his father was showing him. Nobuyuki sat back for a moment and watched his son repeat the process they had just gone through together.
“Have you got to take a video editing course for school or something? Like Hero PR?”
“Nah...see, one of my friends has a quirk that kind of works like a video camera. Make a recording and then project it.” Kenichi snapped his fingers as he successfully repeated the process with a different piece of footage and made another clone effect. “But she doesn’t realize how awesome her Quirk is. I thought maybe if I could give her some ideas about how to use it, she’d be more...I guess confident, in herself.”
“Oooooh?” Kenichi started to sweat as his father’s eye was now uncomfortably close to his face. “So it’s a friend? A friend who’s a giiiiiiiiiiirrl?”
“W-well, yeah, but I mean, I don’t--”
“Is she a preeeeeettty girl?”
“C’mon Dad! I literally
just met her!”
“And you’re already trying to help her out! Aren’t you just da sweetest!?” With an exaggerated waggle Nobuyuki pinched his son’s cheek. Kenichi groaned.
He still didn’t feel like everything was “over.” Not that he felt like the idiot trio would come back--they were done, even if they didn’t turn over a new leaf he was sure they wouldn’t mess with him ever again. But it just...it just seemed like some wound hadn’t quite closed up. Something just felt...off.
Part of it, he realized, was that he already missed his new school. His new friends. And her.
He had seen first hand how weak he was. He knew now that, more than just winning some contest at school, more than just picking up his grades, he had to be
better. He had to take the fire that had been lit underneath him, and engulf himself in it. Just like that wimp at UA that had given him the idea for the Jet Smash--that had convinced him he would have to push his limits to the maximum and even further beyond.
There was going to be pain. There was going to be suffering. The world of adults was scary. But if he gave up, he would lose. If he stopped fighting, he would lose. He had to keep moving, keep putting one foot in front of the other. Because if he stopped to think...it would be like being back there, again. Wrapped in chains, again. Scared, and hurt.
He clenched his fist under the hospital sheets.
Tuesday, April 11th, ~5 PM, School Courtyard
He had to wait in the morning for the doctor to find time in their busy schedule to come sign the stupid piece of paper saying he was good to go. Then he had to wait at the pharmacy to get a dumb prescription filled--antibiotics and a little pain management, although he probably could have just gotten those over the freaking counter. And THEN he had to wait for the police and Decaman to show up and “debrief” him. He wasn’t supposed to talk to the press, he wasn’t supposed to go around bragging about fighting with villains, yadda yadda yadda.
Then his parents wanted to make sure he had a good lunch before he left. That was fine but it was just he had already waited for so long and he wanted to get back and uuuuuuuugh. And since they had their car back now his parents offered to drive him, which was also fine and cheap but slower than the subway would have been. And since he had already missed a little more than half the day his father said they might as well take it easy, so they ended up goofing off and Kenichi finally gave up. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, for sure.
So after the last day of his “adventure,” around five or so in the afternoon, long after classes were over, Kenichi stepped out of his parent’s car. He had a new bag over his shoulders--or rather, new to him, but not really “new.” Inside was a laptop and an old video camera from his father--his new hobby.
A white strip of bandage had been wrapped around his head, at a slight slant so as to cover the heavy bruising and scab over his left eye. A smaller, cross shaped bandage had been applied on the right side of his cheek. Under his blue tank top shirt, another bandage wrapped around his ribs and over one shoulder. He was still wearing the brace on his right arm and his right knee. There were a few other band-aids, just the plain ones, here and there too.
He stepped up to the reinforced door. He held his student ID up to the scanner. The doors slid open, and Kenichi took a deep breath of the Komei air as he stepped onto the campus grounds.
“...Man, why does it feel like I’ve been gone for six months?”
