My first mission was supposed to be boring.
Shiu said it like he was doing me a favor.
I would follow Daichi through Yokohama, watch how he worked, carry whatever equipment he handed me, and keep my mouth shut unless someone asked a question. No contact with the target. No fighting. If anything changed, I was supposed to leave before I became another problem Daichi had to drag home.
Insulting. That's what it was.
After the judgment trials, I figured I'd earned more than standing at the end of an alley with a radio glued to my ear.
Shiu didn't see it that way.
"You're there to watch." He didn't even look up from his desk. "Try learning something before you decide you've already mastered it."
That was the plan.
Lasted twelve days.
Shiu called me into his office after dinner. Smoke had pooled against the ceiling despite the open window. A map of Yokohama buried his desk. Photographs, train schedules, addresses, notes in Daichi's cramped handwriting.
He pointed at the chair. "Sit."
I did.
A photograph slid across the desk.
Guy in his twenties. Dark hair hanging over one eye, caught turning toward the camera mid-motion. He looked annoyed more than scared.
"Kenji Mori," Shiu said.
"What'd he do?"
"Enough to make three different groups want him dead."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
He tapped one of Daichi's notes with two fingers.
"Mori's got information he wants to trade for police protection. Might involve the clan, might not. Client doesn't feel like finding out."
"So they put a bounty on him."
"Three."
"And we're taking it because."
"Money."
Usually that's where Shiu's patience for questions ran out.
I studied the marked addresses. Three apartments, three districts.
"His quirk?"
"Phase Shift. Passes through solid objects for a few seconds."
"How many seconds?"
"Twenty. Thirty if he's rested. Less if he's hurt, distracted, panicking."
"Weapons go through him too?"
"If he sees them coming."
"Restraints?"
"Same problem."
"Then how are we bringing him in?"
"We're not."
The room went dead quiet.
Shiu leaned back.
"Surveillance job's off the table. Mori surfaced early, client wants him gone in three days."
"Daichi's doing it?"
"He'll be nearby."
"And me?"
He didn't answer right away.
Didn't need to.
"You want me to kill him."
"Yeah."
Just like that. Like he was asking me to pick up milk on the way home.
I'd heard the word before. Kill. Eliminate. Neutralize. The instructors rotated through whichever one made the lesson sound cleanest that week.
The diagrams were always simple. Black bodies, red arteries, joints labeled and numbered.
None of those bodies had names.
Kenji Mori did.
"This was supposed to be observation."
"It was."
"That's not the same job."
"No."
Shiu ground his cigarette into the tray like it owed him money.
"Mori's got photographs of some older operatives. He knows what clan muscle looks like."
"And I don't."
"You look fifteen."
"I am fifteen."
"Exactly. Nobody sees a kid buying a drink and thinks assassin."
I just stared at him.
"You can get close," he said. "You read patterns fast. Your evaluation says you're ready for fieldwork."
"Your evaluation."
"I wrote it."
"Doesn't mean you believe it."
He looked at the map instead of me.
"I believed you were ready for the job we planned."
He pushed the photograph closer.
"This one's uglier."
I waited for him to snatch the file back.
He didn't.
"How do I confirm it's him?"
"Photograph. ID. Something biological if the client wants to be difficult."
"And if he phases?"
"Break his concentration."
"How?"
He gave me a look like I'd just asked where the floor was.
"That's what we've been teaching you for ten years."
I reached for the file.
His hand slammed down over it.
"Toji."
I looked up.
"This is the first person you're going to kill."
"I know."
"No. You know how the sentence sounds."
His fingers didn't move off the folder.
"You do the job first. Whatever your head wants to do about it happens after. You stop halfway because Mori suddenly looks like a person, and he goes through a wall. Maybe he comes back with a gun. Maybe he grabs the clerk. Maybe he finds Daichi."
"I won't freeze."
"You don't know that."
I almost argued. Almost.
He'd been saying that to me since I was five.
You don't know that.
"Fear. Guilt. Disgust." He kept going. "None of that makes you weak. Letting it choose the moment for you, that's what makes you dangerous."
He lifted his hand off the file.
"Can't do it, leave. Call Daichi. He'll finish it."
Somehow that offer felt worse than the assignment itself.
"I'll do it."
Shiu looked like he wanted to say something else.
He just nodded instead.
...
Daichi met me outside Kyoto Station in a gray coat, newspaper tucked under one arm.
Didn't say hello. Handed me a ticket and walked inside.
I followed him onto the train and sat across from him.
"Read the file?" he asked, not looking up.
"Yeah."
"What color were Mori's shoes in the station photo?"
"Brown."
"Black."
I pictured it again. Dark trousers. Scuffed leather. Pale mark across the toe.
"They were brown."
He lowered the paper. "They were."
"You lied."
"Checking if you'd let me."
He raised it again like nothing happened.
I kept staring at him. "You and Shiu enjoy that too much."
"He says the same about you and patience."
"He should find a hobby."
"You are his hobby."
He went over the check-in schedule on the ride. No radios unless something went sideways. I'd leave coded messages at two phone booths and a station locker.
"You find him," Daichi said. "Learn his routine. Don't jump the first chance because waiting bores you."
"I know."
"You've never waited on someone who might kill you."
"I've done surveillance training."
"You followed instructors who got to go home after."
He folded the paper.
"He sees you, he might bolt. Suspects you, he lays a trap. Knows you're there, he comes through a wall behind you."
"I understand."
He looked at me over the top of the page.
"No. You understand what I said. We'll see if it sticks."
I turned to the window.
"You two are exhausting."
"He says you're worse."
"He's right."
By noon we split up. I didn't see Daichi again until it was over, on purpose. If I could spot him, Mori probably could too.
I found Mori before sunset.
Yokohama gave him too many faces to hide behind and too many places to vanish into. Train stations spilled into packed shopping streets. Apartment buildings sat close enough that he could phase through half a dozen walls before anyone figured out where he'd gone.
Three safe houses. One above a shut-down tailor shop. One behind a dental office. One tucked near the edge of a shopping district.
He checked behind himself without ever turning his head. Store windows. Parked cars. The dead screen of a vending machine. Sometimes he'd stop at a crossing just to see who stopped with him. Once he walked into a station and walked right back out the same door less than a minute later.
Paranoid. Good instincts. Not good enough.
Daichi trained me for exactly this.
I never stayed behind him directly. Crossed streets before he did. Swapped jackets in public restrooms. Let crowds swallow me and spit me back out past him. When he stopped short, I was already stopped: tying a shoe, reading a sign, waiting on someone who didn't exist.
At nine, I left the first message.
Three sites confirmed. Target alive. No contact.
Daichi's reply came the next morning.
Don't rush because you got lucky early.
I read it twice, folded it, and shoved it in my pocket.
Second day, Mori left the tailor shop, phased clean through the neighboring wall, and came out of a parking garage on the other side.
I was already on the roof across the street.
He looked right at me.
I was just some maintenance kid with a repair bag and grease on my hands, parked next to the AC unit.
He believed it. Kept walking.
By evening I had his preferred apartment pegged. The place near the shopping district had better locks and worse sightlines, but he slept there more nights than not. Smoked on the fire escape past midnight. Left the window cracked when the room got warm.
Easy way in.
Terrible place to attack. Too many walls.
At nine, he walked four blocks to a convenience store. Instant noodles, canned coffee, cigarettes.
Next night, same thing.
Same store. Same time. Same brand.
His quirk made him careless in exactly the wrong places. He trusted the walls enough to stop watching his own habits.
Everybody's got something they go back to.
Third morning, I scoped the store myself.
Two cameras, both feeding a recorder in the back room. Night clerk was an old guy who buried his nose in a paperback whenever nobody needed him. Rear door opened onto an alley that split toward the station one way and a taxi stand the other.
Bought a water. Clerk barely glanced up.
That evening I left the last message.
Target expected 21:00. Cameras local. One civilian clerk.
Daichi's answer came through the locker.
Observe. Do not act if conditions change.
Not permission. Not a no, either.
I got there two hours early and watched the street from a restaurant across the road.
8:58. Mori showed up.
Hands in his pockets. Eyes flicked over the restaurant window as he passed.
I dropped my eyes to the tea.
His reflection slid across mine.
The store bell rang.
I counted to twenty. Paid. Crossed the street.
He was in the back, holding two noodle cups side by side like it was the biggest decision of his week. Picked one, frowned, put it back.
I slipped into the next aisle.
Hands steady.
He carried his food to the register, asked for cigarettes. Clerk turned to grab them off the display behind him.
I pressed the device in my pocket.
The lights flickered.
Both cameras died.
Mori noticed. His head started turning.
Too late.
My arm looped around his throat. Other hand locked behind his skull.
Yuki taught me the difference between crushing a windpipe and cutting the blood to the brain.
One's loud.
The other doesn't give a person time to understand what's happening.
He came apart in my arms, not literally, but close. My sleeve sank halfway into his shoulder. Cold bled through where flesh should've been.
Then his legs buckled.
Quirk failed.
Solid again, all his weight dropping into me.
The noodles hit the floor.
The clerk spun around.
His book slipped out of his hand.
Mori clawed at my forearm. Heel cracked against the counter. He tried to phase one more time and my grip slid loose as his body blurred at the edges.
I clamped down before he could finish.
His hands stopped fighting.
Started searching instead.
My sleeve. My wrist. The back of my hand. Anything he could grab.
Then nothing.
I lowered him behind the counter.
The clerk stared at both of us, one hand hovering over the alarm button.
"Don't."
His fingers shook.
Mori was out cold.
I could still feel his pulse.
That was the moment. Right there. I could've let go.
He'd wake up. Phase through the floor. Disappear into the city like he always did.
Daichi would call it hesitation.
Shiu would get why.
The client wouldn't care either way.
I held on.
The pulse slowed under my arm.
I counted, because counting beat looking at his face.
Ten.
Twenty.
Thirty.
His shoe scraped the tile once.
I didn't ease up.
When I finally let go, his head lolled against my arm.
No breath.
Some cheerful jingle kept playing through the ceiling speakers like nothing had happened. Like the store hadn't just watched a man stop being a man.
The clerk made a sound like he was choking on his own throat.
I checked Mori's neck.
Nothing.
"You saw him collapse," I told the clerk.
He shook his head, fast.
"You saw him fall. Figured seizure. Cameras cut out when the lights flickered."
"I saw you."
Barely a whisper.
I stepped closer.
For one second, just one, killing him too made perfect, clean sense. One witness turns into zero witnesses. Simple math.
Then I clocked the photo tucked in his fallen paperback. Him, a woman, two kids. One perched on his shoulders, yanking his hair, everyone mid-laugh.
I looked back at him.
"You're alive because you weren't part of this."
His breath came too fast, too shallow.
"Don't make yourself part of it."
I went through Mori's pockets, took what the client wanted.
Hands didn't shake once.
Before I left, I set the fallen noodles beside his hand.
That bugged me later. The scene didn't need it. Maybe I just wanted him to look less like a body and more like a guy who'd dropped his dinner.
Out the rear door. New jacket. Washed hands. A route I'd never once used during surveillance.
Daichi was waiting at the second station, same newspaper he'd carried out of Kyoto.
I sat at the far end of the bench.
"Done?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Proof?"
I slid the envelope between us.
"Problems?"
"One witness."
"Alive?"
"Yeah."
He turned a page like we were discussing the weather.
"Why?"
"Wasn't part of it."
"That's not always enough."
"It was tonight."
He folded the paper shut.
"He see your face?"
"Clearly."
"And you walked away anyway."
"Yeah."
I braced for him to tell me I'd blown it.
He stood up instead.
"Then remember him."
I looked up.
"Police find you because he talks, remember you chose that. He keeps quiet, gets to go home to his family, remember that too."
The envelope disappeared into his coat.
"The choice doesn't go away just because you left the store."
Three hours later I was alone in a carriage heading back to Kyoto. Daichi changed trains outside Nagoya. Said separate returns raised fewer questions.
I think he just wanted me alone with it.
The carriage was nearly empty. Some office worker asleep a few rows up. An old couple murmuring by the far door.
My reflection stared back at me in the window.
Looked exactly the same.
That pissed me off, a little. Like my face owed the rest of me an explanation and wasn't giving one.
Kenji Mori walked into a convenience store for noodles and cigarettes.
I wrapped my arm around his neck and held it there until his heart gave up.
The train just kept rolling like none of that mattered.
I ran the whole operation back. Cameras disabled. Identity confirmed. Clerk alive. Nobody followed me.
There were cracks, though. Clerk saw my face. I moved inside a public store. Mori had just enough warning to try phasing.
I picked apart every mistake until there was nothing left to pick.
My hands started shaking somewhere past Nagoya.
Started in my fingers. Crawled up through my wrists, my forearms. I pressed both palms flat against my knees.
The carriage felt too warm all of a sudden.
Breathing drills. Slow in. Hold. Slower out.
Mori's hands moved across my wrist again in my head. Searching.
My stomach turned over.
He never attacked me. Not once. That's the part my brain wouldn't let go of.
Sure, he was dangerous. Sure, people would kill for what he knew. Sure, his quirk made arrest a nightmare.
None of that changed what happened in that store.
His back had been turned.
I crossed an aisle and killed a man because Shiu handed me a folder and some stranger offered money for it.
Training got my body through the motion.
Nothing got me ready for how ordinary he felt while he was dying.
Warm.
Breathing.
Scared.
Then not.
I got back to the barracks past midnight. Night officer took the evidence, wrote completed next to my name like he was checking off laundry.
"First one?" he asked, not really looking up.
"Yeah."
He glanced at my face for exactly one second.
"Drink some water."
That was it. That was the whole thing.
I made it behind the barracks before I threw up. Knees hit the pavement, one hand slapped the wall for balance. My stomach kept trying long after there was nothing left.
The scrape of concrete under my palm was easier to think about than the store.
Once the nausea let go, I sat back against the wall.
Waited to feel guilty.
Waited for the horror. The grief. Some voice screaming that I'd crossed a line I couldn't uncross.
Nothing showed up.
Just a hollow space under my ribs and the taste of bile in the back of my throat.
My father would've understood that emptiness perfectly.
The thought just arrived. Uninvited, like it had been standing outside waiting for the door to open.
Jinya used to look at me like something in me had failed to grow in.
Maybe he'd been right. Just for the wrong reason.
Shiu found me later. Didn't hear him coming. One second I was alone, the next he was lowering himself down beside me, lighting a cigarette off a cheap lighter that took him three tries.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
Eventually he held the pack out to me.
I shook my head.
"Good." He didn't even look over. "Terrible habit."
"You've got three packs in your desk."
"That's how I know."
I stared at the ground between my knees.
"Clerk saw me."
"Heard."
"I left him alive."
"Yeah."
"Was that stupid?"
"Maybe."
I looked over at him.
He just shrugged.
"You want certainty, go work in accounting."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one you're getting."
"He had a family."
"Most people do."
"I almost killed him too."
"But you didn't."
"I thought about it."
Shiu's eyes drifted toward the dark yard beyond the fence.
"You're gonna think about worse things than that."
"That's supposed to help?"
"No."
He took a drag.
"It doesn't get easier."
"Everybody says it does."
"Everybody says whatever gets them through breakfast."
"How many have you killed?"
His jaw tightened, just barely.
"Stopped counting after twenty."
"When?"
"About fifteen years back."
"So how do you live with it?"
"I wake up."
"That's the whole answer?"
"Most days."
He flicked ash toward the pavement, watched it scatter.
"You shove it somewhere until you've got time to actually look at it. Sometimes it climbs back out while you're eating breakfast. Sometimes some stranger in a crowd's wearing the same coat and it wrecks your whole afternoon."
I looked down at my own hands.
"I didn't feel anything. In the store."
"You were working."
"I don't feel guilty now, either."
"You threw up hard enough to wake half the barracks."
"That was just my body."
He gave a short laugh, almost a bark. "And what exactly do you think your body's hooked up to?"
I didn't have anything for that.
He crushed the cigarette out.
"You killed Mori. Don't dress it up in nicer clothes."
I turned to look at him.
"The report will, though. It'll say the target was eliminated. Client'll say the matter got resolved. Daichi'll write that you completed the objective with one uncontrolled witness."
His eyes didn't move off mine.
"All of that can be true at once."
He paused.
"You still killed him."
The hollow space under my ribs got heavier.
"Was it clean?"
"No killing's clean."
"Mission officer called it clean."
"He meant you didn't leave blood all over the walls. That's it. That's all he meant."
He pushed himself up off the ground.
"Get some sleep. Debrief's at eight."
I stayed put.
He took a few steps, then stopped.
"Toji."
I looked up.
"This ever stops bothering you completely, tell me."
"Why?"
"So I know not to send anybody into a room alone with you."
He walked off before I could figure out if he was joking.
I stayed behind the barracks until the sky started going gray.
At fifteen, I finished my first field assignment.
The ledger needed exactly one word for it.
Completed.
Kenji Mori walked into a convenience store for cigarettes and instant noodles.
He never walked back out, because I followed him in.
There's no cleaner word for what that actually was.
I murdered him.
...
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