⚓
The night sky above Hotaru Town was black and starless, as if the heavens themselves had turned their backs on Hardy's domain. Pierre crouched beneath a service grate three blocks from the town square.
This is insane, he thought, adjusting the small glass vial of aqua fortis secured in his jacket pocket. I'm about to crawl through sewers to vandalize a statue because some fictional tyrant hurt a little girl's feelings.
But Mika's face floated through his mind—the way she'd flinched when Alyssa entered the restaurant, the tremor in her voice when she mentioned her father's imprisonment. That wasn't fiction. That was real terror, carved into a ten-year-old's features by months of systematic cruelty.
He could hear the Naval base half a mile away, searchlights sweeping the perimeter in lazy arcs. Pierre could see uniformed figures moving between buildings, their voices carrying on the wind as they coordinated another sweep for the "Red-Haired Menace."
