Here it is... ππ
+++
The call ended.
Rumi Usagiyama, AKA: Mirko, Japan's Number Five Hero, the Rabbit Hero, the woman who had been reprimanded by the HPSC three times and wore each reprimand like a medal of honour..... stood in the middle of her private gym, holding her phone in one hand, staring at the blank screen.
She was quiet for three seconds.
That..... was a new record.
Then she threw herself onto the gym floor, spread her arms wide, stared at the ceiling, and screamed.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THAT SPARKY?!?!?!"
Her voice boomed through the gym.
She lay there, staring at the ceiling, her chest heaving with irritation. Her rabbit ears twitched rapidly.
"'Let's get some food together,'" she repeated in a mocking imitation of Indra's calm baritone. "'It's on me.' WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?! IS THAT A DATE?! IS THAT A BRIBE?! IS THAT JUST FOOD?! WHAT IS IT, YOU FUCKER?!"
She kicked her legs against the floor.... two times. Like a child throwing a tantrum, except the child in question could kick through reinforced concrete.
Then she stopped. Took a breath. And launched herself to her feet and dashed to the mirror on the far wall.
Rumi Usagiyama stared at her reflection. She was wearing gym clothes β a sports bra and compression shorts, both dark grey, both soaked with sweat from the workout Indra had interrupted. Her body was full of muscles,
She flexed her arms.
"FUCK YEAH, I LOOK GOOD!!!!!!!"
The mirror agreed. It had no choice... poor guy.
She held the pose for a moment, admiring herself with the complete lack of self-consciousness that was either her greatest strength or her most terrifying quality, depending on who you asked.
Then she dropped the pose and sat down on the gym floor, cross-legged, her chin resting on her fist.
Thinking.... real deep.Β
Rumi Usagiyama did not think often. Not because she was stupid.(She is)
Jokes aside...s he was sharp, intuitive, faster at reading a situation than most analysts with twice her experience. But she preferred to operate on instinct.
Thinking led to doubt. Doubt led to hesitation. Hesitation led to getting hit.
But right now, she needed to think. Not about the mission but about something else entirely.
Which led her to a conclusion.... a VERY horrifying conclusion. Her eyes widened.
"WAIT," she said out loud, to nobody. "Arranged marriages are common in his country, right?!"
She pulled out her phone and typed furiously. Google. "Indian arranged marriage customs." Scrolled... Read.... Scrolled more.
"'Families often arrange matches based on social standing, professional compatibility, and...' BLAH BLAH BLAH WHO CARES ABOUT THAT!!!!!!!"
She threw the phone down.... again.
Took a breath... then picked it up.
"There's no way that bastard already has someone, right?"
She stared at the screen. At Indra's contact page. At the absence of any information about his personal life, because the man was a vault. No social media. No public appearances outside of hero work. No interviews about anything that wasn't related to quirks or international security.
"RIGHT?!"
She threw the phone down again.
Then picked it up again.
Then threw it down.
Then picked it up.
"UGHHHHHHH!!!" She flopped backward onto the floor, arms spread, ears flat. "THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?!"
The ceiling offered no answers.
She lay there, breathing, and let her mind do the thing she usually didn't let it do.
She went back..... back in time.
Where did it even begin?
Years ago. She had been nineteen. A rookie hero. Fresh out of the agency circuit, already making a name for herself as the most aggressive, most reckless, most effective close-combat fighter to come out of Japan in her generation. She had a provisional license, a growing fan base, and absolutely zero respect for anyone she hadn't personally fought.
Then the invitation had come from the Asian Hero Support Association. AHSA. President Ming's organisation, AKA: the independent, continent-spanning network of heroes and support personnel that operated outside the control of any single government. They ran training exchanges, inter-agency collaborations, and what they called "development intensives" β week-long programmes where young heroes from across Asia were brought together to train, spar, and learn from each other.
Rumi had been invited as Japan's representative. She had accepted because the word "spar" was in the description.
She had arrived at the AHSA training facility, which was a compound hidden somewhere in the mountains of Southeast Asia, with one goal: to beat everyone.
And she had.
Day one, she had dismantled three Thai heroes in under a minute each. Day two, she had taken on a South Korean specialist in close-quarters combat and put him through a wall. Day three, she had fought a Vietnamese hero with a density-manipulation quirk and cracked his defences with a single dropkick that the instructors later measured at three times the force of a car crash.
By day four, she was bored. Nobody could touch her. Nobody could keep up. She was the strongest person in the building, and the building knew it.
Then the instructors had pointed to a boy sitting in the corner of the training hall.
He was her age... nineteen, maybe twenty. Dark-skinned, lean, unremarkable in every visible way. He was sitting on a bench with his legs crossed, scrolling through his phone.
"Indra!!!!" the instructor had called him and turned to Rumi with a smile. "Try him."
Rumi had grinned. She had cracked her knuckles. She had walked up to him, stood directly in front of him, blocked his phone screen with her shadow, and said:
"Fight me."
He hadn't looked up.
"Nope."
One word. Right away, leaving her frozen.
Rumi's blood had boiled. She had taken "nope" as a personal insult β which, in fairness, was how she took most things. She had assumed he was looking down on her. That he thought she wasn't worth his time. That he was too good, too important, too whatever to acknowledge the girl standing in front of him with fists clenched and murder in her eyes.
"Get up," she had said. "Now."
He sighed... knowing nothing could have beeen done and stood up, as he put his phone in his pocket and looked at her with eyes that glowed faint blue.
"Fine."
The bell rung.
One second.
That was all it lasted.
One second, Rumi was in her stance, weight on her back leg, ready to launch the opening kick that had ended every fight she had ever started.
The next second, she felt a kick in her gut. It hit her solar plexus with enough force to empty her lungs and reverse her momentum.
The second after that, she was in the wall.
Not against the wall. In it. Her body had punched a Rumi-shaped crater in the reinforced concrete, and she hung there for a full second before gravity pulled her out and she fell to the floor in a heap of plaster dust and wounded pride.
She had looked up from the ground, gasping, clutching her stomach, her vision swimming.
The boy was standing in the same spot. He hadn't moved from his starting position. One leg was still slightly extended from the kick.
He put his hands in his pockets while thunder danced around his body and looked at her the way she imagined a thunderstorm would look at a matchstick.
"Done?" he had asked.
That was how she met Indra.
She had challenged him fourteen more times during the programme. She lost all fourteen. Each time by a wider margin, because he kept finding new ways to embarrass her β flicking her forehead, sidestepping her at the last possible millisecond, catching her kick and spinning her like a top.
By the end of the week, she hated him with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns.
By the end of the month.. which was due to the program extending, she came to respect him. Genuinely. He was the first person she had ever met who made her feel like a beginner again, and some part of her β the part that lived for the fight, the part that craved the feeling of being pushed past her limits β was grateful for it.
By the end of the year, they were friends. Sort of. The kind of friends who communicated primarily through challenges, insults, and the occasional text that read "you up?" followed by "fight me" at three in the morning.
And then that incident had happened.
The memory surfaced, and Rumi's expression changed.
She didn't think about that day often. She didn't let herself.
But it was there. Always there. The day that changed everything between them β the day that took "rivalry" and "friendship" and twisted them into something more complicated, something with depth, something that neither of them had ever talked about because talking about feelings was something that happened to other people.
She sighed.
"Whatever."
She sat up and shook her head. Then slapped her own cheeks with both hands.
She grabbed her phone and scrolled through her contacts. Past the heroes. Past the agencies. Past the sparring partners and the rivals and the people she owed rematches to.
She found the name she was looking for.
Uwabami.
Rumi stared at the name. Her face twisted into an expression of physical pain.
"I can't believe I have to call that snake," she muttered. "Literally. She's literally a snake."
But Uwabami was the best at what Rumi needed. The woman was a celebrity, a model, a media manipulator of the highest order. She knew fashion, she knew cameras, she knew how to present someone to the public in a way that controlled the narrative. If Rumi was going to claim she had been secretly mentoring a fifteen-year-old divine phoenix for the past three years, she needed to look the part.
And Rumi, who owned approximately four outfits and had worn the same hero costume since her debut, did not look the part.
She hit call.
"Rumi? Is that you? Oh my god, did you finally decide to let me style you? I've been WAITING for this call for--"
"Don't get excited, Snaky. I need a favour. And I need it fast."
"...Tell me everything."
***
Meanwhile, in a hospital room far from the jungle, far from the HPSC vehicles, far from the political machinations and the phone calls and the plans within plans, a boy opened his eyes.
The ceiling was white.... like always.
He blinked blankly for a while.
"...What?"
His voice came out rough and scratchy.
He lay still for a moment.. processing. The memories came back and hit him one by one, in order β the fight, the arm, the chase, the neck, the darkness, the garden, the tea, the purple flame, the wings, the judgment, the fall.
All of it.
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he spoke.
"Well... that was quite a day."
A laugh came from his right.
"Hahahaha... I would have to agree with that."
Akira relaxed. He turned his head to the right.
Nezu sat in a chair beside the hospital bed, holding a newspaper in his paws. His black eyes were bright behind the printed page, watching Akira over the top of the headlines with the patient attention of a principal who had spent the last several hours sitting beside an unconscious student, waiting for him to wake up.
He lowered the newspaper.
"We have got a LOT to talk about," Nezu said.
Akira knew it was coming.
He sighed, but nodded.
"Of course we do."
++++++++
Some history between themπππ
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