The television in Gran Torino's kitchen was muted.
This was the old man's default setting for it — the TV existed as information delivery and not as noise, so the sound was off and the closed captions ran across the bottom of whatever program happened to be on, which at six forty-three PM on Day 3 was a news program that had switched to breaking coverage.
Yami was stretching his left shoulder against the kitchen doorframe — the doorframe he'd been introduced to on arrival and which had since become a regular reference point for his shoulder's recovery process — when the ticker changed.
Breaking: Pro Hero Ingenium critically wounded in Hosu City. Suspected Hero Killer Stain believed responsible. Ingenium's condition critical. Police advising all heroes in Hosu district to exercise extreme caution—
He stopped stretching.
The timestamp on the ticker was three minutes ago.
On schedule, the part of his brain that ran the meta-knowledge thread confirmed. Iida Tensei. Hosu. Stain. The other part of his brain, the one that had been tracking the class group chat for three days with the specific attention of someone waiting for a particular input, was already on his phone.
The group chat from two hours ago: seventeen messages, the class's general conversational energy about internship activities. Iida's most recent message was six words.
I'm fine. Focusing on my internship.
He'd written it with correct punctuation and proper capitalization and the complete lack of the abbreviations Iida used when he was engaged in normal communication, because Iida abbreviated when he was comfortable and wrote in complete proper sentences when he was constructing a presentation for an audience. Six words that communicated their own opposite.
Yami typed: Don't go alone.
Sent.
The read receipt appeared in forty seconds. Then: the three dots of someone composing a response. The dots disappeared. Appeared again. Disappeared.
No message arrived.
Gran Torino had appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was looking at the television and then at Yami and then at the phone in Yami's hand with the expression of someone conducting a rapid assessment.
"Hosu," Yami said.
"You knew something was going to happen in Hosu."
Not a question. The old man's voice had the flat quality of someone who had recognized the shape of a thing and was naming it.
"A classmate is going to do something stupid." He looked at Gran Torino. "I need to be there."
Gran Torino studied him for five seconds. Not the assessment of someone deciding whether to believe him — the assessment of someone who had already decided and was deciding what to do with the decision. "Iida Tensei," he said. "Ingenium. That was your classmate's brother."
"Yes."
"And you think Iida is going to hunt Stain."
Yami said nothing, which was its own answer.
Gran Torino moved to the side table where his costume elements were stored with the economy of someone who'd been doing this for forty years and had the process reduced to its minimum necessary components. "Get your gear," he said. "Train's in twenty minutes."
The Hosu-bound train was full for a six-fifty departure — the news had broken early enough that the early evening commuters were sharing cars with people moving toward rather than away from the incident, the specific demographics of people who moved toward things: press, emergency services in civilian clothes, concerned relatives of Hosu residents.
He and Gran Torino sat in adjacent window seats. The old man had his costume's visible elements covered under a civilian jacket and was looking at his phone with the expression of someone reading information with professional patience.
[Passive Training: Suspended — active engagement imminent. Instinct development: +0.3 (from Day 3 training). Current combat instinct rating: Low-Functional.]
He registered this without looking at it fully. Low-functional. Three days ago it had been at mechanical. Gran Torino's method worked, apparently, even when the recipient also had three concurrent bruises and a left shoulder that was filing the day's grievances.
The Hosu skyline was building at the horizon. Not unusual at this distance — any city at seven PM in June had lights, had the specific density of inhabited space making itself visible at dusk.
Except.
The part of the skyline that was wrong was not lights. It was the specific quality of illumination that came from combustion rather than electricity — the orange-red at a frequency that even in peripheral vision registered as fire, not streetlight. And above the skyline, shapes. Not birds. Not aircraft.
He pressed his face to the window.
The shapes on the rooftops of Hosu were moving in patterns that birds didn't move in and aircraft couldn't execute at that scale, and the shape of them against the firelight was the shape that had been etched into the specific fear-memory that his body kept for the category of things that ended him once.
Nomu.
Not one. Three. Possibly more — the visibility and the distance made counting imprecise, but three was the number his count landed on before the train car's windows cracked.
Not broke. Cracked — the specific fracture pattern of glass subjected to a shockwave from outside, the web-spider pattern radiating from the window's left edge that meant something significant had happened at a distance that was closer than the skyline.
The car's occupants had a collective half-second of processing before the train's emergency braking engaged and the lights flickered.
Gran Torino was out of his seat in the same half-second.
Yami was out of his in the next quarter-second, because three dead bodies worth of combat reflex had consolidated his response to unexpected violence into something that didn't require conscious decision.
"The Nomu weren't in any briefing I have," Gran Torino said, which was not a question but had the information request of one. He was looking at Yami with the expression he'd used in the kitchen when he'd recognized that a student had information they couldn't explain.
Yami looked at the cracked windows and the skyline and the shapes moving in Hosu. His hands were steady. He'd registered this fact and filed it and registered the filing and the thing it implied — three deaths in, the proximity of violence didn't produce the physiological response it had produced on the bus to USJ, the cold calculation of how many seconds before impact — and the fact that this was the case should have been alarming and produced instead a very quiet kind of concern that he shelved for a different time.
"The Nomu at USJ," he said. "All for One had more than one."
Gran Torino's expression tightened in the specific way of a person adding a significant data point to an existing model and not liking where it landed. "All for One," he repeated.
"The person who created the Nomu."
The train had stopped. Around them, the car was the specific chaos of people processing an emergency they hadn't anticipated and making varied decisions about it. The emergency PA said something about staying in the cars. Several people were doing the opposite.
Gran Torino looked at him for two seconds. Then: "How do you know about All for One."
Because I watched it happen from a different world, was the accurate answer, which he did not give.
"Stain was League of Villains connected," Yami said. "League of Villains reports to All for One. The Nomu are All for One's resource. It's inference."
Gran Torino looked at him for another two seconds with the expression of someone assessing an inference chain for structural weakness. "That's a longer inference chain than most fifteen-year-olds would make."
"I think about things."
The window crack had spread by another three centimeters while they were talking. Outside, the Hosu streets were visible from the stopped train's position — the specific geography of a district that was not the district where Stain operated in the original timeline, which meant the Nomu had changed the operational geography, which meant the timeline's variables were live.
Iida is in Hosu, Yami thought. Stain is in Hosu. The Nomu are in Hosu. Three separate threats operating in the same geography simultaneously, and the text message I sent had no reply.
He moved toward the train car's door.
"Boy," Gran Torino said.
"I know where Stain operates." He said it directly, because there was no version of this where the indirection served anyone. "Not exactly — but the methodology. Alleyways, isolated heroes or civilians. Iida is looking for him alone, which means Iida is exactly the target profile Stain prefers."
Gran Torino was already at his back, the civilian jacket gone, the costume elements restored with the speed of someone for whom this was not a preparation process but a continuation of an always-ready state.
"Lead," the old man said.
Hosu was on fire. The Nomu were on the rooftops. Somewhere in the alley network below them, a classmate was hunting someone who killed heroes and who had never, in any version of events Yami knew, lost to an angry kid with good intentions and bad tactical planning.
He went through the door and Hosu's June air hit him — the specific quality of a warm night complicated by smoke and the ozone of quirk-use and something underneath both of them, the particular smell of a city where something had gone wrong.
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