The rubble still smoked three days after the villain attack.
Kentaro Suzuki picked his way through the debris field that had once been Shibuya's east district, his tablet balanced in one hand while he photographed structural damage with the other. The International Disaster Relief Coalition had deployed him to Tokyo within twelve hours of the incident—standard procedure when a Quirk-related disaster crossed the threshold into "catastrophic infrastructure failure."
What wasn't standard was how his chest tightened every time he saw a chunk of concrete that should have crushed someone.
"Suzuki-san."
Ken looked up from his damage assessment to find a woman in a hard hat and high-vis vest standing beside what remained of a traffic light. She was compact, professional-looking, with tired eyes that suggested she'd been working the same brutal hours he had.
"Tanaka Yuki, Seismic Solutions Engineering." She extended a gloved hand. "I understand you're coordinating the international relief assessment?"
"That's right." Ken shook her hand, noting the firm grip and the faint scorch marks on her vest. "You've been here since the attack?"
"Six hours after. Had to wait for the all-clear from Endeavor's agency." Her mouth tightened. "A lot of good that did. Half these buildings are going to need complete demolition, and the other half..." She gestured at an apartment complex that lay at a forty-five-degree angle. "Well, let's just say whoever designed these didn't account for seismic Quirks."
Ken followed her gaze, his enhanced vision automatically cataloging every crack, every stress point, every place where the building might collapse. "Any casualties in that one?"
"Miraculously, no. Witnesses say some kind of speedster got everyone out before it started falling." Yuki pulled out her own tablet, scrolling through photos. "Though the timing was weird. Security footage shows people evacuating a full thirty seconds before the building actually got hit."
"Lucky guess by the hero?"
"Maybe." She didn't sound convinced. "Or someone with a precognitive Quirk was in the area. The problem is, none of the registered heroes on scene that day have anything like that in their files."
Ken kept his expression neutral, though internally he winced. He'd been sloppy—too worried about getting people out to worry about the timeline. "Could have been a civilian. Lot of people have minor precognitive abilities that never get registered."
"True." Yuki tapped something into her tablet. "Still, I'd like to interview them if possible. Understanding how they knew could help us design better early warning systems."
Not happening, Ken thought, but he nodded anyway. "I'll add it to my report. The Coalition has contacts with most of the local hero agencies—if there was an unregistered hero operating in the area, we might be able to track them down."
"Unregistered?" Yuki looked up sharply. "That's illegal."
"Technically, yes. But in disaster situations..." Ken shrugged. "People do what they have to do. As long as lives are saved, most agencies look the other way during the cleanup."
"Hm." She made another note. "Well, regardless of who it was, they did good work. I've been in this business for eight years, and I've never seen evacuation patterns this clean. Usually there's at least some panic-related injuries, people getting trampled, that sort of thing."
Ken felt an unwelcome flush of pride, quickly suppressed. "The Japanese disaster response training is excellent. Very orderly culture."
"Maybe." Yuki glanced around the destruction, then back at him. "You mentioned you coordinate international responses. How often do you see Quirk-related disasters like this?"
"More often than I'd like. Climate change has made natural disasters worse, and when you add Quirks into the mix..." Ken pulled up a map on his tablet. "Last month it was mudslides in the Philippines triggered by a geokinetic villain. Before that, wildfire in California that a pyrokinetic lost control of."
"Must be depressing work."
"Sometimes." Ken looked at the apartment building again, thinking of the family of four he'd carried out in the space between heartbeats. "But you see people at their best too. Civilians risking their lives to help neighbors. Heroes working past exhaustion. Engineers like you volunteering to work disaster sites pro bono."
Yuki blinked. "How did you know I was volunteering?"
Shit. Ken's enhanced hearing had picked up her phone conversation with her boss that morning—something about "taking personal leave" and "the company can bill me for the equipment."
"Lucky guess," he said weakly. "Most consulting engineers I work with are either government contractors or volunteers. You don't have the look of a government contractor."
"What look is that?"
"Less... passionate, I suppose. More bureaucratic."
She laughed, a sound that was surprisingly warm given the circumstances. "Fair enough. Though I should warn you, my passion tends to involve a lot of very boring structural analysis and building code violations."
"After three days of coordinating relief supplies and arguing with insurance adjusters, boring sounds pretty good."
"In that case..." Yuki gestured toward the tilted apartment building. "Want to help me figure out why a structure rated for magnitude 7 earthquakes fell over when hit by what was essentially a very localized magnitude 4?"
Ken glanced at his watch. He had seventeen more buildings to assess before his official shift ended, and then he'd planned to spend the evening doing high-altitude reconnaissance for any structural damage the ground teams might have missed.
"Lead the way," he said instead.
Ken followed Yuki around the building's perimeter, watching her examine stress fractures with the focused intensity of someone who spoke fluent concrete and steel, hmm, engineers. She was taking measurements and photos while maintaining a running commentary that was technical analysis and frustrated muttering.
"See this?" She crouched beside a section where the foundation had cracked in a distinctive zigzag pattern. "This isn't earthquake damage. Earthquakes create horizontal shearing—this looks more like the building was picked up and dropped."
Ken knelt beside her, careful to keep his expression neutral despite the uncomfortable accuracy of her assessment. "Could the villain's Quirk have caused that kind of force distribution?"
"The preliminary reports said he was some kind of earth manipulator, right? Caused localized seismic activity?" Yuki ran her finger along the crack. "But look at the debris pattern. If he'd attacked from ground level, we'd see more damage at the base, less at the upper floors. Instead..."
She stood and pointed upward. "The worst structural damage is between the third and fifth floors. Like something caught the building partway up and twisted it."
Ken's throat felt dry. He'd grabbed the building at the fourth floor when it started to fall, using his strength to slow its descent while X-ray vision guided civilians to safety. He hadn't realized how much force he'd had to apply.
"Maybe the building was already compromised from previous tremors?" he suggested.
"That's what I thought initially." Yuki pulled up a series of photos on her tablet. "But I've been comparing this to the other structures in the impact zone. The ones that took direct hits from the seismic activity—they failed in predictable ways. Foundation damage, load-bearing wall collapse, textbook stuff. This one's an outlier."
She scrolled to an aerial shot taken the day after the attack. "And then there's the debris field. Everything's contained within a forty-meter radius of the building's original footprint. For a structure this size falling at this angle, we should be seeing scattered debris across the entire block."
Ken studied the photo, seeing his own rescue work mapped out in settling patterns and impact craters. Every decision he'd made in those crucial seconds—where to catch the building, how to control its fall, which direction to deflect falling chunks of masonry—all of it was written in the landscape like a signature he hadn't meant to leave.
"You think someone intervened," he said.
"I'm starting to wonder." Yuki tucked her tablet away and looked up at him. "The evacuation timing, the controlled collapse pattern, the debris containment—it's like someone with incredible strength and perfect timing was managing the disaster in real-time."
A radio crackled to life on her belt. "Tanaka-san, this is Matsumoto. We've got another anomaly at the Hachiko Plaza site. Can you take a look?"
Yuki grabbed the radio. "What kind of anomaly?"
"Blast crater analysis isn't matching the villain's presumed Quirk strength. The math doesn't work—either he was holding back significantly during his attack on the business district, or someone was mitigating the damage somehow."
Ken felt his stomach drop. The plaza had been his first priority—dozens of civilians in the open with nowhere to take cover. He'd moved between them and the worst of the shockwaves, absorbing impacts that would have been fatal.
"We'll be right there," Yuki said into the radio. She turned to Ken. "You still interested in boring structural analysis?"
"..." He paused. "...Yeah."
----------------------