The Kitaguri-gumi's primary residence was not modest.
The compound sat in the city's northern hills behind three walls and a gate that had never been locked because the gate had never needed to be locked. Nobody came here uninvited. Nobody uninvited left. The distinction mattered in the specific way that all Kitaguri-gumi distinctions mattered — quietly, permanently, without appeal.
Gonzo had walked through that gate his entire life. He had walked through it as a child who did not yet understand what his family name meant. He had walked through it as an adolescent who understood precisely what it meant and wore that understanding like armor. He had walked through it, two hours after the Cosfiesta footage hit forty million combined views, with the particular quality of a man who knows what is waiting on the other side and walks anyway because there is no other option.
The inner hall was large. His father made it larger.
Hideo Kitaguri was not a tall man. He was not a particularly imposing man in the way that men with large frames are imposing. He was broad across the shoulders, grey at the temples, and possessed of the specific stillness of a person who had not needed to raise his voice in many years because the world had learned to listen without it.
Today was not one of those days.
* * *
"Do you understand," Hideo said, "what you have done?"
His voice filled the room without effort. It was not theatrical volume — it was the volume of a man who had decided, for the first time in a very long time, that the situation required it. The two senior lieutenants standing at the room's edge did not move. They had the posture of men who were deeply committed to becoming furniture.
"Five times," Hideo said. "Five times you have moved against a single PPO. A single man. One man with a combat knife, a bat, a knuckle duster and a cold beverage habit. And five times the result has been the same — our resources expended, our operations compromised, and our name attached to footage that the entire country has now watched."
Gonzo stood with his hands at his sides. He had learned, very young, that folding them behind his back read as insolent and clasping them in front read as weak. Hands at the sides. Chin level. Eyes on the wall just above his father's shoulder. He had learned this at seven years old. He had not forgotten it.
"The parking structure footage," Hideo said, "has three hundred million views. Three hundred million. The troll operation — our troll operation, Gonzo, staffed with our people and funded with our money — is now the subject of three platform investigations and a cosplayer community fundraiser. The Cosfiesta operation has produced a name. Pixel Guard. I am told that name is trending."
He was not told. He had been monitoring this himself since the footage first appeared. He said it the way he said everything — as a statement of fact delivered at volume, which was more devastating than shouting because it left no room for the other party to believe the speaker was emotional rather than correct.
"Pixel Guard," Hideo repeated. "He went to Cosfiesta in a cosplay to protect cosplayers he is not contracted to protect, neutralized our embedded associates in front of six thousand witnesses, saved a rival cosplayer, and received a public thank-you that unified the entire community against our position. And you —" he paused, the pause carrying the particular weight of a man selecting a word he has decided will be permanent "— you helped him do it. Every move you made handed him the stage."
The room did not breathe.
"The Kitaguri-gumi does not become content," Hideo said. "We are not material for viral clips. We are not background scenery for some ex-mercenary's legend. We have operated in this city for forty years. We built systems that the corporations now profit from. We laid the infrastructure. And now your name — my name — is attached to five successive failures against a man who retrieves his coffee after a fight."
He stopped.
The stopping was worse than the speaking.
Gonzo said, carefully: "Father, please, I ask for one more opportunity."
The silence was long enough that one of the lieutenants shifted weight almost imperceptibly and then stopped.
"One," Hideo said. "One more opportunity."
Not a question. A boundary with dimensions.
"And Gonzo."
Gonzo met his father's eyes for the first time since entering the room.
"Do not give him another stage. Do not create more footage. Do not hand him material." The voice had dropped, which was more dangerous than the volume had been. "I want him gone. I want NovaCorp destabilized. I want it done in a way that leaves nothing for thirty-one thousand cameras to film. Am I understood?"
"Understood," Gonzo said.
He walked out of the room with his hands at his sides, his chin level, and the specific clarity of a man who has been handed his last chance and has already decided exactly how he intends to use it.
* * *
[ 08:14 — Vex Laine's apartment, NovaCorp residential floor ]
The wall was still unhelpful.
Vex had been looking at it for forty minutes. She had looked at it before sleeping, in the dark, when it was less a wall and more an absence of answers. She was looking at it now in the grey morning light coming through the window she had not opened because opening the window required making a decision and she was not currently in a position to make decisions.
The General Mara cosplay was on the rack by the door where Zara had hung it after making the final seam corrections three days ago. The KV-7 holster was at the correct angle. The epaulettes were reinforced. Everything was exactly as it should be.
She had won the Cosfiesta title. The crowd had lost composure during the draw. She remembered the exact pitch of the sound — six thousand people arriving at a single moment together, which was what she had been working toward for three months. The thing she had told herself was the only thing this event was about.
She had been standing in the wings watching Red Skulloman carry Aurora clear of a falling beam and it had not been about the Cosfiesta title at all.
She knew his movement from the parking structure footage. She had watched it sixteen times. She had seen the fourth and fifth sequence clearly enough to recognize them across a crowd of six thousand, at twelve meters, in low light.
Knowing who he was had not been the hard part.
The hard part was the moment he set Aurora down behind the column and said "Stay here" and walked back into it. The way it had never once occurred to him not to. The way it simply never did.
She had told him not to do it alone. In the corridor, weeks ago, she had said those exact words.
He had gone alone to Cosfiesta anyway. In a Red Skulloman cosplay. After three days of solo practice at five-thirty in the morning that nobody knew about, because he had not told anyone and had not needed to, because that was simply the kind of person he was.
She had said don't do it alone and he had gone alone anyway and it had worked and the fact that it had worked was, somehow, the most aggravating part of the entire situation.
Vex pulled her knees to her chest and looked at the wall and did not think about why it aggravated her.
The not-thinking was getting harder to maintain.
She was aware of this. And it was infuriating.
* * *
Gonzo Kitaguri did not go back to his office.
He went instead to the rooftop garden on the compound's east wing, where the city spread below him in the early morning haze and the sounds of it — distant traffic, a train, somewhere a vendor setting up a stall — arrived small and manageable from this height. He had done his best thinking here since he was nineteen. The garden had not changed. He had.
He sat down and did not think about the meeting. He had made a mistake. Five mistakes. He had been indirect when the situation required a different approach, and being indirect had handed the target a platform, a name, and a community that now circled him like a wall.
He thought about Kai Reuben. The persistent fly whose been bothering him for a long time now.
Not with fury. Fury was the contaminating variable his father had correctly identified. He thought about him the way he would think about any problem — resources, vulnerabilities, angle of approach. One man with a knife. An apartment. A sister who streamed. A director who valued him. A group of girls who had become, through a series of increasingly improbable events, something close to a family.
That family was the one thing his previous approaches had never touched.
He then thought about Anifest.
The Annual Animu District Festival had been running for three years in the Animu District — the Emperor's territory, six blocks of accumulated history and the loyalty of people who had been protected long enough that the protection felt like geography. Mangakas. New anime premieres. Cosplayers from across the country. Every major corporate talent would attend. NovaCorp would attend. The Emperor's people would be active, present, and watching.
His father had said: do not give him another stage.
Gonzo looked at the city below him and understood something that five failed attempts had made very clear.
The stage was not the problem. Every stage they had set, Kai Reuben had used better than they had. The parking structure. Cosfiesta. The troll warehouse. Each time, they had handed him a venue and he had turned it into content.
The answer was not another stage. The answer was something the cameras could not turn into content. Something that left nothing behind when it was done. Nothing to unify around. Nothing to make viral. Nothing to remember.
Gonzo had spent five operations thinking about how to hurt Kai Reuben.
He spent the next hour thinking about something more permanent.
He thought about what happens to a protection officer when everyone he is protecting is gone at once.
He thought about what happens to the Emperor's network when the district it has spent a decade guarding ceases, in the space of a single night, to be something worth guarding.
He thought about Anifest. The crowds. The venues. The mangakas and the premiere screenings and the cosplayers from fourteen cities, all concentrated in six blocks on a single evening, their attention on a stage and their backs to everything else.
He took out his phone and made three calls. No specifics on any of them — only that a meeting was needed, that it would include the three names he specified, and that it would take place somewhere that did not appear on any organizational chart.
When he was done he sat for another few minutes with the city below him.
He did not feel fury. He felt the cold clarity of a man who has finally stopped reacting and started thinking.
Kai Reuben had turned every indirect approach into a legend.
Gonzo intended to make sure there was nobody left to tell it.
* * *
[ 08:47 — NovaCorp residential corridor ]
Zara had been up since five in the morning.
She had run twelve kilometers along the residential building's upper track — four more than usual — and then stood under the shower for seven minutes staring at the tile grout with the focus of someone who was very carefully not thinking about something else.
She had tried to make sense of what she was feeling three different ways. None of them had held.
It's professional concern. Reasonable. She was ex-military circuit, he was her former ranking rival, of course she paid attention to how he operated. That explanation lasted until she replayed the moment outside Yuki's apartment — Sera saying "please, be careful" in a voice that had nothing professional in it, and Kai pausing before he nodded — and she realized that what she felt watching that exchange was not professional anything.
It's just habit. She had spent eight months tracking his movements. It made sense that she would keep noticing him. But that explanation fell apart somewhere around hour six, when Vex's face at the Cosfiesta confrontation — the way the denial cracked visibly in real time — produced a sharp, unpleasant feeling in Zara's chest that had no logical source.
It doesn't mean anything. That one had lasted until thirty seconds ago, when she passed Ami's door and heard humming.
Ami hummed when she was planning something. Zara had learned this over the past six weeks, during which Ami had decided — without consulting anyone — that they were friends. Zara had not agreed to this. She had become Ami's friend anyway. This was simply what Ami did.
The humming was cheerful and deliberate and it produced in Zara a feeling she did not want to examine.
She went to the kitchen instead.
She sat down at the counter and was honest with herself for about forty-five seconds, which was longer than she had managed in the past three days.
She was jealous.
That was the truth of it. She had been circling it from every angle for three days and it was the same answer every time — plain, unglamorous, sitting in the middle of her chest without any interest in being explained away. She was jealous of Sera because of what happened in the corridor. She was jealous of Ami because of the rock. She was jealous of Vex for reasons she could not fully name, except that she had watched Vex's face at the confrontation and felt something that was definitely not indifference.
She had spent eight months tracking him across three countries using his sister's public event schedule as a map. She had arrived. She was here.
His attention was on three girls who had known him for months.
She understood that this wasn't his fault. His protection went where the work required it — that was simply who he was. She knew that. She had always known that. It was one of the things she had admired about him from a distance for the better part of a year.
Understanding it did not make the feeling smaller.
She poured herself a glass of water. She drank it. She looked at the counter.
At some point she was going to have to have an honest conversation with herself about what exactly she had been chasing for eight months, and why, and what she planned to do about it now that she had caught up.
She was not ready for that conversation yet.
The humming from Ami's room continued.
* * *
[ 09:02 — Ami Sato's kitchen ]
Ami Sato was making tamagoyaki and she was doing it with intent.
The intent was not primarily culinary. The tamagoyaki was good — she had been making it since she was twelve and her grandmother had corrected her wrist angle forty or fifty times before it became automatic. The cooking this morning was something to do with her hands while she thought.
She had told him.
On the rock at the beach resort, with the ocean below them and the last of the evening light going orange over the water, she had told him about the bullying and the almost-quitting and the way Sera and Vex had shown up. She had braced for the Kai Reuben version of empathy — efficient, acknowledged, moved on from. She had catalogued that pattern across six weeks of observation and could have predicted it within reasonable margins.
She had not predicted "From this point forward, I'll protect you."
She folded the egg. She was smiling and she knew it and she had decided the knowing did not require any action.
He had meant it completely. That was the thing about him she had understood on day one, when she had said "I like you" and he had said "noted" and she had found it adorable before she even knew why. He did not say things he did not mean. He did not perform feelings he did not have. The easy, pleasant expression he wore at work was something he had built deliberately — she had figured that out early — but when the real one appeared in the gaps, it was worth every minute of waiting for it.
She had put her head on his shoulder. He had not moved away.
She had said out loud on that rock: "This is bad, Kai-kun, continue this and I might end up falling for you."
Might. She had been using that word for six weeks as a kind of cushion between herself and the truth of it, and she was aware this morning, folding tamagoyaki at nine in the morning with the smell of the ocean still in her memory, that the cushion was gone.
She plated it.
She thought about how to get him to notice.
The problem was not that he was unobservant. He was the opposite of unobservant — he could clock a security risk at fifty meters and track fourteen people at once and he had spotted the problem pillar at the Helios showcase before anyone else in the building. He noticed everything. He just sorted the things she wanted him to notice into a category labeled something like "not relevant to the job" and quietly put them aside.
She needed to change which category she was in.
She thought about this the way she thought about her craft — practically, with patience, the same way she had kept entering competitions until the work got impossible to ignore. She had won two awards she hadn't entered for. She knew how to be undeniable.
She picked up her phone. She opened the KOG. She started typing.
* * *
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👁️ KAI OBSERVATION GROUP
Members: MikaDrops · SUNNY · Iron Rose · SERA · Noctis
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SUNNY · 09:11 AM
good morning everyone 😊 i made tamagoyaki
i have been thinking about how to get someone to notice me
strategically
Iron Rose · 09:12 AM
no.
SUNNY · 09:13 AM
you don't even know what i'm going to say
Iron Rose · 09:13 AM
i know exactly what you're going to say. the answer is still no.
SUNNY · 09:14 AM
zara-chan are you in the kitchen
Iron Rose · 09:14 AM
i am not in the kitchen.
SUNNY · 09:14 AM
i can hear you pouring water
come eat something. you've been running since five.
Iron Rose · 09:15 AM
…
SUNNY · 09:15 AM
👀👀👀
MikaDrops · 09:17 AM
GOOD MORNING EVERYONE
i have an announcement
please direct your attention to the following
Noctis · 09:18 AM
if this is the clip again i have seen the clip.
MikaDrops · 09:18 AM
it is not the clip
it is what i am DOING with the clip
SERA · 09:19 AM
Mika. What have you done.
MikaDrops · 09:19 AM
nothing yet technically
i am BUILDING something
i need everyone to understand that the name Pixel Guard
is going to mean something
and i am the only streamer in the country who knows exactly who it belongs to 😇
Noctis · 09:21 AM
noted.
SUNNY · 09:21 AM
MIKA-CHAN
SERA · 09:21 AM
…tell me first.
MikaDrops · 09:21 AM
always 😇
* * *
[ 09:23 — Mika Reuben's room ]
The page had been in draft for seventy-two hours.
She had built it carefully — not the way someone builds something in a burst of excitement, though it had started that way. She had found the clip three days ago, sat with the evil grin for forty minutes, and then opened her laptop and started thinking like a strategist.
MikaDrops had forty-three thousand subscribers. She had built them through genuine care for her audience and a camera presence that several commenters had described as "terrifying in a good way," which she had pinned. She understood that an audience was a relationship, not a number.
She also understood, having grown up watching her brother operate, that you do not deploy an advantage before it is ready.
The Pixel Guard page was ready.
She had built it as a project under the MikaDrops umbrella, not a separate identity. The clip was there: forty-seven seconds of pre-event interview filmed by a content creator with four thousand subscribers who had pointed a camera at Red Skulloman and asked for a name. The audio had a slight echo. The image quality was imperfect. The thirty-one thousand cameras at ArcLight Con had produced cleaner footage — but those had caught a different moment.
This clip caught something none of the others had.
Not the knife deflection. Not the parking structure. Not the Cosfiesta rescue that forty million people had watched.
This clip caught Kai Reuben, unprompted, with nothing at stake and no reason to perform, saying a name that was not his.
"Pixel Guard."
Four thousand subscribers had seen it. The creator had captioned it "this method actor stays in character lol" and moved on. Nobody had connected the Red Skulloman in the interview with the Red Skulloman from the Cosfiesta event, because nobody had been looking for the connection.
Mika had the connection. Mika had the clip. Mika had forty-three thousand subscribers and a camera presence that had been correctly identified as terrifying.
She pressed publish.
The page went live at 09:31.
She put her phone face-down on the desk, leaned back in her chair, and looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone who has started something that cannot be un-started and is completely fine with that.
Down the hall, she could hear Kai making coffee.
She did not think about telling him.
She thought about it for several seconds very hard.
She picked up her phone and opened the KOG instead.
* * *
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👁️ KAI OBSERVATION GROUP
Members: MikaDrops · SUNNY · Iron Rose · SERA · Noctis
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MikaDrops · 09:31 AM
it's live
pixel guard has entered the chat
he just doesn't know it yet 😇
SUNNY · 09:32 AM
MIKA-CHAN!!!!!!!
Noctis · 09:32 AM
…
send the link.
Iron Rose · 09:32 AM
send the link.
SERA · 09:33 AM
send the link.
MikaDrops · 09:33 AM
[link]
SUNNY · 09:34 AM
oh no oh no oh no
oh no this is SO GOOD
Noctis · 09:35 AM
the audio quality is imperfect.
MikaDrops · 09:35 AM
yes.
Noctis · 09:35 AM
it doesn't matter.
the audio quality does not matter at all.
Iron Rose · 09:36 AM
how long until the original clip creator notices.
MikaDrops · 09:36 AM
unclear. i've tagged them.
Iron Rose · 09:36 AM
…you tagged them.
MikaDrops · 09:36 AM
they filmed it. they deserve the credit.
Iron Rose · 09:37 AM
…
noted.
SERA · 09:37 AM
Mika.
What happens when your onii-san finds the page?
MikaDrops · 09:38 AM
i have no idea what you're talking about 😇
SUNNY · 09:38 AM
SHE SAID HIS WORDS
Noctis · 09:39 AM
we have all used his words. do not examine this.
* * *
[ 10:05 — Seraphine Holt's room, NovaCorp residential floor ]
Seraphine Holt put her phone down.
She picked it up. She read the KOG exchange again. She put it down again.
She got up and walked to the window and looked at the city outside and did not think about Kai Reuben for approximately four seconds, which was the longest she had managed all morning.
She had known, for a while now, that something had shifted. It had not been a sudden thing. It had been slow and quiet and she had kept not quite looking at it directly, the way you sometimes avoid looking at something you already know is there because naming it makes it real in a different way.
She thought about the corridor outside Yuki's apartment. She had said "please, be careful" and not realized, until the words were already out, that she had said them in Lirien's voice. Not performing it. Not thinking about it. Just — that was the voice that came out. The one Lirien uses in episode nineteen, when Ren steps in front of her for the first time and she understands what it means.
Kai had paused. Then he had nodded. The same way Ren nods. Neither of them had said anything else.
She sat back down on the bed.
The situation was complicated in a very specific way. She was his principal. That was the word for it, the professional word — she was the person he was contracted to protect, which meant he would put himself between her and anything dangerous because that was what the job required. She did not know if what she felt would look any different to him than the job did. She did not know how to find out without risking what was already there, which was — not nothing. Genuinely not nothing. Two people who had somehow started speaking the same language without either of them planning to.
She looked at Mika's link on her phone.
Pixel Guard.
He had said it to a camera pointed at him by a stranger, with no audience that mattered and nothing to gain from it. Someone had asked his name. And he had said: Pixel Guard.
She thought about Ren Asakura — the noble, selfless idiot who had kept walking toward every threat for three full seasons because it was simply who he was.
She thought about the man who had learned that from a cracked tablet at seventeen and had never stopped living by it.
She knew how she felt. She had known for a while. Saying it out loud — even just to herself, in a quiet room looking at the city — did not feel as scary as she had expected. It felt like something that had already been true for long enough that the saying of it was almost a formality.
What came after the saying of it, she did not yet know.
She was going to need more time.
She accepted this with the patience of someone who has decided the thing she is waiting for is worth it.
* * *
[ 11:00 — NovaCorp Talent Division, Director Chantal Voss's office ]
The Anifest organizers had sent their response at eight forty-seven in the morning. Chantal had read it at eight forty-eight, and then read it again — which was not something she normally did, because she read things correctly on the first pass. She had read it a second time because the first time she had hoped she was wrong.
She was not.
The ban was still in effect. Aurora's public retraction — "controlled force, applied correctly in defense of others, is necessary" — had unified the cosplay community and generated more goodwill toward NovaCorp's security operation than Chantal could have bought at any price. It had also, the organizers noted with the polite precision of people who knew the note would be unwelcome, been issued after the official review period had already closed.
The ban applied to the Cosfiesta Summer Circuit and all affiliated events.
Anifest was an affiliated event.
Kai was sitting across from her desk. He had arrived at ten fifty-eight with a coffee — at the right temperature, she noticed without meaning to — and settled into the chair with the easy stillness of a man who was not particularly worried.
She had stopped being surprised by that. She had not stopped finding it difficult to account for.
"The ban holds," she said. "Anifest falls under the Cosfiesta affiliation. They were polite about telling us. They were wrong to be polite about it — Aurora's retraction was public and the original grounds don't stand anymore — but polite means process, not a wall. I've filed the appeal. It will take time we may not have."
She had the Anifest event program on her desk. Three days. Mangakas with new volumes. Premiere screenings. Cosplayers from fourteen cities. Every NovaCorp talent attending, the whole industry in six blocks of the Animu District for seventy-two hours.
It was also, she did not say aloud, exactly the kind of concentrated target that their current problem with the Kitaguri-gumi made very uncomfortable. She did not say it because Kai already knew, and saying it would not help either of them.
"Best-case on the appeal?" Kai asked.
"Two weeks. Anifest is in ten days."
He was quiet. She watched him look at the event program the way he looked at everything he was working through — not reading it so much as mapping it, moving through it like he was already inside the space. The same way he had stood at the northeast pillar of the Helios showcase for forty seconds while everyone else walked past it.
"Then I'll think of something," he said. "I always think of something."
No bravado in it. No performance. He said it the same way he would say that a door was unlocked or that an exit was clear — a plain fact, already set aside, attention moving to the next thing.
Chantal looked at him.
Something shifted in her chest. It had been doing that with increasing frequency since the parking structure footage, and she was aware of it, and she had it very firmly under control.
What struck her — and she was not inviting this thought, it arrived without being asked — was what the words actually meant. Not reassurance. Not bravado. He was telling her that the work she had spent years building — the safe space, the contracts, the industry standard NovaCorp had decided to be — was something he intended to protect. Not because the paperwork said so. Because his code said so. And his code, as far as she had observed, did not have an exception for when things got complicated.
She kept the lid on it. She was good at that.
"I know you will," she said.
Her voice was steady. Her expression was what it needed to be.
He nodded and looked back at the program, already somewhere else in his head.
She let him think.
She opened her laptop and processed four emails. She did not think about the two seconds after he had spoken — the small, unguarded moment before the professional expression reassembled itself, there and gone so fast she might have imagined it.
She processed a fifth email.
She was, she noted, extremely committed to this fifth email.
* * *
By noon, Gonzo had made seven calls.
The three names were confirmed for the meeting. The location was set — a restaurant in the far south of the city with no cameras and a private back room that had been used before for conversations that required neither.
Between calls, he had spent forty minutes with a map of the Animu District.
Six blocks. Three main venues. Eight secondary locations — cafes, hobby shops, the open courtyard where the premiere screenings would run under temporary structures. The Emperor's people were woven through all of it. Every shop, every back room, every information channel. He had been keeping the Kitaguri-gumi out of that district for years through sheer accumulated presence, the kind of protection that does not announce itself because it does not need to.
Gonzo had always respected that about him. The Emperor did not make content. He simply made himself impossible to move around.
That would need to change.
The network was made of people. People had weak points — things they cared about, things that could be used. The Emperor cared about the district. The district cared about Anifest. And Anifest was ten days away, which meant ten days to quietly pull threads before the whole event came together in one place.
Gonzo was not going to build another stage for Kai Reuben to perform on.
He was going to dismantle the one that already existed.
Carefully. Quietly. Over ten days, using people and methods that would not produce footage or testimony or anything that forty million cameras could make a story out of. And on the night of Anifest, when the district was full and the Emperor's network was stretched across six blocks trying to watch everything at once —
He put the map away.
The meeting was at eight.
He had ten days.
He thought, briefly, about the one sentence his father had said at the end, after the volume had dropped and the room had gone very still.
"I want him gone."
Not hurt. Not embarrassed. Not handed another stage to perform on.
Gone.
And everything around him with it. The network. The district. The safe space NovaCorp had spent years building, the industry standard it had decided to become — all of it taken apart in a single night, before a man with a knife and a code from an anime could stop it.
Gonzo put on his jacket.
He was his father's son in most ways.
In this way, for the first time, he intended to be.
* * *
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👁️ KAI OBSERVATION GROUP
Members: MikaDrops · SUNNY · Iron Rose · SERA · Noctis
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MikaDrops · 02:52 PM
update: pixel guard page has 340 followers
in five hours
SUNNY · 02:53 PM
MIKA-CHAN
Noctis · 02:53 PM
the original content creator has been notified?
MikaDrops · 02:53 PM
they replied twelve minutes ago. they're very excited.
Iron Rose · 02:54 PM
how long until someone connects Skulloman to the page.
MikaDrops · 02:54 PM
that is a matter of when, not if
the name exists. the clip exists. the Cosfiesta footage exists.
i am simply the only person currently holding all three.
SERA · 02:55 PM
Mika. Does your onii-chan know the page exists?
MikaDrops · 02:55 PM
Onii-chan is currently in Chantal-san's office going over Anifest logistics.
he does not know the page exists.
he does not know that he is the page.
Noctis · 02:57 PM
…
when he finds out?
MikaDrops · 02:57 PM
yes?
Noctis · 02:57 PM
tell me first.
SERA · 02:58 PM
tell me first.
Iron Rose · 02:58 PM
tell me first.
SUNNY · 02:58 PM
TELL ME FIRST
MikaDrops · 02:58 PM
you'll all find out at the same time 😇
that's the whole point of the group chat
Iron Rose · 02:59 PM
the elevator does not get a vote.
SUNNY · 02:59 PM
ZARA-CHAN
Iron Rose · 02:59 PM
that is a completely different context. do not apply it here.
Noctis · 03:00 PM
it applies.
Iron Rose · 03:00 PM
…
noted.
* * *
Kai left Chantal's office at fifteen-twelve.
He took the stairs. He counted four flights without deciding to. The coffee was still at a good temperature, which meant he had timed the morning correctly, which was a small thing but the kind of small thing worth getting right.
He was thinking about Anifest.
The ban was a logistics problem, not a dead end. He had worked around harder constraints than event paperwork. He would go over the venue layout, map the talent schedule, figure out where the gap was between what the paperwork allowed and what the situation required. There would be a gap. There always was. He would find it.
The mission did not stop because the paperwork was complicated. That was not how the mission worked.
He reached the residential floor. He passed Mika's room and heard the sound of very fast typing, which he had learned to recognize as a particular category of activity. He noted it and kept walking.
He went to the kitchen. He set his coffee down. He pulled up the Anifest venue schematics Chantal had forwarded at thirteen hundred and started going through them the way he went through everything — from the outside in, looking for the shape of the problem before he started working on the solution.
He did not think about the look on Chantal's face when he had said "I'll think of something."
He did not think about the two seconds before she had answered him, or what had been in her expression during those two seconds, or what it might mean that he had noticed it and then set it aside.
He did not think about it.
He reviewed the schematics.
He thought of something.
* * *
End of Vol. 2, Chapter 6.