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If Hitoshi never saw bird spikes again, it would be too soon.
He was one hundred percent sure that the person who had drawn up his route today was neither Dad nor Aizawa-Sensei but was instead someone much more sinister and sadistic who was still working through his own trauma of training with Grandpa Aizawa. Or perhaps Dad had actually just outsourced the assignment to Grandpa Aizawa. That actually made sense.
Hitoshi glanced from the route sketched on his phone to the gap between buildings ahead of him.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered.
A stray pigeon, the only thing anywhere near him, took off with a startled coo. Hitoshi idly tracked its path – you never knew which birds were real birds and which were government drones – but most of his attention was on the last stage of his arduous journey.
After four hours of running around the city leaping between rooftops, climbing the outsides of buildings, and swinging via capture weapon from one side of the street to the other via towering fifty-story buildings, Hitoshi’s capture weapon was more holes and fraying ends than whole fabric.
Bird spikes, man. They worked on more than just birds.
The state of his capture weapon meant that he’d have to be careful which parts of it he put his weight on.
Hitoshi eyed the distance between him and the beginning of the final swing. He was about thirty stories up at the moment, which meant he’d have a pretty narrow margin to swing down to his eleventh-story balcony from this far away. With a fortifying breath and one last check of his capture weapon, Hitoshi took four swift, ground-eating strides and leaped off the edge of the building.
For an instant, he was in freefall. Then his capture weapon unraveled from around his neck, shooting away to latch onto the corner of the building. He swung in a broad arc, waiting until he almost reached the top of his airtime before flinging his capture weapon to his next pivot point.
He just barely made it onto the balcony, stumbling slightly as he hit the ground and retracting his capture weapon seconds before it yanked him backwards off the edge again. Hitoshi huffed, tiredly coiling the capture weapon around his neck. He had to admit, that was the first time he’d taken that particular route to the balcony. He was never going to do it again – especially after spending four hours running aimlessly around the city – but it was at least a new experience.
Hitoshi unlocked the balcony door and shoved it open. He tugged his capture weapon over his head and flung it onto the back of a kitchen chair before doing anything else, glad to be rid of the dirty, slightly damp, sewer-smelling fabric. Then he slid the balcony door closed behind him and locked it again.
Dad had a stack of half-graded assignments spread over the kitchen table, and the chair Hitoshi had tossed his capture weapon onto was half pulled out from the table, so Dad had probably stepped away for something. Considering the fact that Hitoshi could smell rice cooking in the kitchen, it was probably to make food.
Hitoshi didn’t bother to take his shoes off as he made his way farther into the apartment. Apparently, after enough instances of people coming home from patrol and passing out in the ganken – or Dad coming home from patrol directly through a window instead of ever making it to the ganken – they’d given up on keeping shoes off in the house. Shoes were banned in carpeted bedrooms and the office, but general living spaces were free game.
Now that Hitoshi had the experience of running around on rooftops for several hours himself, he could understand the sentiment. His limbs felt like lead, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to stand up again if he crouched down to take his shoes off.
“Despite your best efforts,” Hitoshi called to Dad in the kitchen, “I have made it home alive!”
Dad wasn’t in the kitchen. Hitoshi frowned, stepping all the way into the room. There were faint grimy footprints on the clean tile floor that definitely hadn’t come from Dad, and despite the rice cooker being almost halfway done, there were no other scents of food in the kitchen. A slightly closer look revealed three neat spots of blood on one cabinet.
“Congratulations,” Dad’s voice filtered through the half-open living room door, sounding far more tired and in pain than usual. It couldn’t have been that bad, then, if he was still around to make snarky comments. Did he cut himself maybe?
Hitoshi pushed the living room door all the way open, mouth open to ask what was wrong.
Seven people with dark clothes and dark expressions were arrayed around the living room. One had a bloody knife in hand and another – with a quite extreme heteromorphic raccoon Quirk – had blood all around their muzzle and dripping down their chin. Dad was on his knees in the center of the room, hands tied behind his back and then lashed to a chair behind him. He was shirtless and his upper body was covered in angry splotching that Hitoshi was sure would turn into a marbling of ugly bruises in a few hours. He was also bleeding from several places, stab wounds and what looked like bite marks of different sizes.
Despite his exhaustion, Hitoshi’s mind churned as his training kicked in. He analyzed the situation automatically, taking in his resources – very little, other than an intimate knowledge of his surroundings – and the potential risks – incredibly high, to himself and Dad – and tried to come up with a reasonable course of action.
He didn’t get a lot of time.
The one with the knife stepped forward, a grin stretching his face and a deadly glint in his eye, and Hitoshi made his choice.
“…aaaand, I’m leaving again,” Hitoshi decided. He rapidly stepped back, trying to close the living room door as quickly as possible to get out of line of sight of the man he belatedly recognized as Byouki Memai. That was a name and face that Hitoshi wasn’t supposed to know, but he’d been snooping through Dad’s work files as stealth training.
Unfortunately, he was just a bit too slow, although Byouki wasn’t the one who reacted.
The one with the heteromorphic Quirk leaped forward with a wild hiss, and Hitoshi yelped and scrambled away just in time for them to slam into the door jamb, recovering far too quickly and scrabbling wildly on the kitchen tile like a cat on linoleum.
Hitoshi lunged away from their claws, vaulting over the kitchen island to reach for the knife block.
“Why is this my life!” Hitoshi managed, yanking the chef knife from the knife block and flinging it haphazardly at the raccoon person.
For once in his life, Hitoshi managed to actually hit the thing he was aiming at, and the raccoon person let out a hair-raising shriek while Hitoshi fumbled for another knife.
“You’re asking me?” Dad asked shakily from the living room.
“Yeah, that’s my bad-” Hitoshi’s next throw missed, and the raccoon person moved faster than should have been possible for someone their size. He cut himself off with a curse and leaped out of the way, just barely clearing their striking claws.
“Who even are you people?” Hitoshi asked, trying to mentally brace himself to catch half a dozen minds in Brainwash at once.
“Don’t pick fights you know you can’t win,” Dad scolded hoarsely.
“Oh, you’re one to talk,” Hitoshi retorted automatically, but he had to acknowledge the point, at least in his own head. He was dead tired and he could barely hold his own against this one feral raccoon-person. Even if he caught most of the others in Brainwash, he would then have to keep fighting while also holding several people under his control.
He needed a weapon, an ally, or an escape route.
The kitchen knives – especially now that the chef knife was gone – would not make particularly useful weapons, since Hitoshi was barely trained in knife fighting and he was pretty sure the raccoon-person’s claws were longer than any of the remaining halfway-useful knives.
His only potential ally was currently on his knees surrounded by enemies and bleeding from several injuries already. Hitoshi could probably get him free if he tried hard, but it would likely put them both in a worse position than they already were.
Which meant he needed an escape.
The balcony or front door would take too long to open; the raccoon-person would gut him while he was fiddling with the lock. But the living room window was open.
Without his capture weapon, jumping out the window would be borderline suicidal. Which meant that Hitoshi needed to get down the hall to where he knew for a fact Dad kept an extra capture weapon.
Dodging the raccoon-person one last time, Hitoshi kicked the living room door open and bolted through the living room, moving fast enough that no one had time to react before he was in the hallway and out of eyesight.
His footsteps felt slow and heavy and all his limbs felt like lead, but he made it to the master bedroom and threw the door open before his pursuers – two of them now, since a tall blonde man had joined the raccoon-person – caught up. He darted into the room, flung the closet door open, and managed to yank the capture weapon off the hook just in time to snag the blonde in a loop of capture weapon and fling him wildly away. He crashed through one of the pillars of the four-poster bed and Hitoshi winced slightly but kept moving.
The raccoon-person went after him next, but Hitoshi just had to flick the end of the capture weapon at them to jostle the knife still buried in their ribs. While they were distracted by that, he darted out the door again.
Almost before he entered the living room, Hitoshi looped one end of the capture weapon around Byouki’s eyes. It was a move he’d attempted exactly once on Dad before deciding it was more trouble than it was worth. Mostly because Dad had used the move to steal Hitoshi’s capture weapon right out his hands and use it to – once again – thoroughly thrash him.
But Byouki did not know how to use a capture weapon, and it was a very successful move on him. Hitoshi made it through the living room bouncing between the villains like a pinball, flinging them away without locking into close combat with any one opponent.
Hitoshi leaped onto the windowsill, quickly shouted, “Borrowed your extra capture scarf, thanksDadbye!” and flung himself out the window.
As soon as he could manage, Hitoshi was on the ground again. His aching muscles burned from just that short unexpected jump, and he desperately wished he could go back home, take some painkillers, and collapse on the couch. Unfortunately, if he did that he would be unlikely to get up again, and Dad needed backup as soon as he could manage.
There was another apartment complex across the street from theirs which had been deemed the emergency shelter. One of Dad’s work colleagues from the Mind Over Matter agency lived in apartment 316 on the third floor, and Hitoshi had heard both Dad and Pops remind Eri over and over that, if there was an intruder in the apartment, she was to go to Backtrack’s place.
Hitoshi trudged through the lobby, ignoring the askance look he got for being sweaty, bedraggled, wearing a thick scarf in the middle of unseasonably warm weather, and – he only realized later – having a few spots of blood flecked over his face. He considered the stairs for a long, soul-searching moment before giving up and walking to the elevator.
It opened with a too-cheerful ding and Hitoshi traded places with a middle-aged woman with leaves growing in her hair. The elevator was, fortunately, fast, and he was stepping off on the third floor only a moment later.
Hitoshi knocked three times on the door of apartment 316 and waited tiredly for footsteps to echo from inside the apartment.
“Hello?” A man’s voice came from inside as the door cracked open only a few centimeters. “Who is it?”
“Are you Shinkirou Koutaku?” Hitoshi asked instead of answering.
“Yes, that’s me, who are you?” the man demanded.
“Shinsou Hitoshi,” Hitoshi said, “I was wondering if my sister Eri showed up here.”
“’Toshi-nii-san!” Eri gasped from the other side of the door, and Hitoshi let out a silent sigh of relief. At least she was safe.
There was the sound of a chain lock being undone and then the door swung open. Hitoshi had to do a double take as he took in the man on the other side of the door. He was tall and whip-thin, with short black hair and solid gold eyes with no visible pupils or sclera. Hitoshi had seen a picture of him before in Dad’s files on Shinkirou Ontaiki, the Intel Hero Backtrack, but there was something different about seeing him in person.
Despite his face looking the exact same as in the photo, it seemed more aesthetically pleasing when standing in front of him. His metallic golden eyes caught the light at just the right angle, and the few strands of black hair that were out of place somehow made him look just the right amount of tousled. Hitoshi was not attracted to men and Shinkirou Koutaku was both already married and easily a decade his senior, but there was still something about the man that made Hitoshi want to declare his undying loyalty and dedication to him.
After that brief mental hiccup, Hitoshi reminded himself that Shinkirou Koutaku’s Quirk, Luster, made everything he touched with all five fingers seem more valuable, worthwhile, and desirable. Apparently, that applied to himself as well.
Eri had also not been spared from Luster, and Hitoshi almost melted into an overprotective puddle as she appeared behind the corner with her unikitty doll in hand.
“I apologize for the intrusion,” Hitoshi said with a bow, “Is Backtrack-san home?”
“Not at the moment, no,” Shinkirou said, glancing down the hallway, “why don’t you come inside?”
“Thank you,” Hitoshi agreed, stepping into the genkan and toeing his shoes off.
“Eri-chan said your apartment had been invaded,” Shinkirou said cautiously.
“Yes, that is the reason she came here,” Hitoshi said, “We’re sorry to bother you.”
“Oh, no, of course not,” Shinkirou hurried to assure him, “anything I can do to help. Can I get you tea? Snacks?”
“Tea would be lovely, thank you,” Hitoshi said and made himself a mental note to bring Shinkirou something in return once this whole situation blew over. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to call for some backup for my dad.”
“Of course, of course,” Shinkirou said, “I’ll have your tea in only a moment.”
Hitoshi offered him a shallow bow and turned to Eri. “Did you already call Midoriya?”
Eri nodded solemnly. “He said he’ll ask around and try to find some others for help.”
Hitoshi took a brief moment to be glad Midoriya hadn’t decided to come on his own. Then, he pulled out his phone. Denki lived pretty far from his family, and usually didn’t go home over the weekends. If Midoriya was contacting potential backup, his first choice would be the Izucrew, obviously, since Todoroki never went home over the weekends and Uraraka, Tsu, and Iida did so only rarely, but his second choice, once he got those four, would be Bakugou. And Bakugou, much as he loathed to admit it, would bring the Bakusquad.
Ergo, Hitoshi could call Denki to tell him the correct address and then still have plausible deniability when Dad got upset at him for leading the hellions directly to his home.
“Tea, Shinsou-san,” Shinkirou reappeared right as Hitoshi was hanging up, bearing the promised tea and a plate of assorted pastries, both of which Hitoshi gladly accepted. He was parched and starving from his run around the city, and he would not reject the slightly lopsided but absolutely delicious cranberry muffins Shinkirou was offering.
“I’ll get out of your hair as soon as I can,” Hitoshi promised between bites of muffin, “I only ask if you would be willing to let Eri stick around a bit longer, just until we can be sure the area is clear of threats.”
“Of course!” Shinkirou agreed. “Anything I can do to help.”
“That is much appreciated,” Hitoshi bowed again, quickly pulled his shoes back on, and slipped out the door, texting Denki the meet-up location as he went. He still felt a bit like he was wearing training weights on all his limbs, but the tea and pastries had gone far in putting the featherlight readiness back in his step.
By the time Hitoshi made it to the apartment complex’s front door, he could already hear the familiar ‘pop-pop-pop!’ of Bakugou gearing up for a fight. There was also the unmistakable crackling of One For All and Kirishima’s excited – but constantly just a bit too loud – voice.
Hitoshi stepped out onto the street and found not just the Izucrew and the Bakusquad, but also almost every member of Class A. As far as he could tell, Ojiro was the only one missing, and the majority of them had at least one or two pieces of their Hero costumes on, mostly the small-but-important pieces that Yaoyorozu had learned to make. Hitoshi suddenly felt underdressed.
“Shinsou!” Midoriya called, and the whole crowd of them all turned towards him. Ugh. “Eri called me for help and Denki said you’d meet us here, what’s going on?”
“Great question,” Hitoshi sighed, “come on, let’s walk and talk.”
He glanced both ways then started across the street, the whole hoard of them following behind him like alley cats followed Dad. Or reporters followed Pops.
“I got home about fifteen minutes ago,” Hitoshi said in the short, to-the-point style of an incident report, “and found seven obviously hostile strangers in the apartment. Aizawa-sensei was at the center of the group, immobilized, blindfolded, and with several visible injuries, none of which looked life threatening.
“One attacker I recognized as Byouki Memai, who Eraserhead has been investigating for several weeks. He’s average height with chin-length dark hair and relatively large eyes. His Quirk, Dizzy, is line-of-sight based and allows him to disrupt the inner ear of whoever he’s looking at. His organization is focused around the fabrication and distribution of Trigger, and it is quite likely that he and his allies are all under the influence of said drug.
“The moment I made myself known, I was attacked by someone with a full-form heteromorphic raccoon Quirk. I injured them with a chef knife before cutting through the living room and down the hall to the master bedroom to retrieve a weapon. There, I was set on by the raccoon-Quirked individual as well as a tall blonde man who likely had some form of strength enhancement Quirk. I disrupted the two of them just long enough to get past them and out the living room window, which has likely now been closed.”
Midoriya nodded seriously, and Hitoshi could already hear people passing his report down the line in low whispers. When he glanced behind him, every face that looked back at him was set in a hard, bordering on furious expression.
“Up these stairs to the eleventh floor,” Hitoshi said, turning forwards again. “Apartment 1104. The living room is the third room on the left, and there was one guard on the inside of the front door.”
“I can handle that,” Midoriya volunteered.
“Alright.” Hitoshi took a deep breath to steady himself, wrapped a hand around his capture weapon and stepped to the side to give Midoriya the stage. “Let’s go.”