The pressurized cabin of the charter plane was filled with a low, droning hum that seemed to vibrate in the very teeth of its passengers. Outside the small oval windows, a sea of gray clouds churned, lit from above by a cold, uncaring sun.
Koichi Haimawari sat in his seat, his legs twitching rhythmically. He looked down at his hands, watching the faint, translucent shimmer of energy coating his fingertips. "It's back," he whispered, a mix of relief and dread washing over him. "Twenty-four hours on the dot. I don't feel... heavy anymore."
"Good," Akira Furuhaya grunted from the seat across the aisle, his eyes buried in a stack of decrypted files.
"Where exactly are we landing, Makoto-san?" Koichi asked, looking toward Makoto Tsukauchi, who was staring at a tablet screen with a haunted expression.
"Osaka," she replied, her voice strained. "Specifically around the Shin-Sekai district. It's become the de facto cultural hub for the heteromorph community over the last few decades. It's... accepting. I lived there for a few years after graduation."
Koichi frowned. "How does a mutant sanctuary help us find a man like Overhaul?"
Akira looked up, his gaze sharp and cynical. "The Yakuza are old-school. When the 'Purity' movements started decades ago, families around then like the Shie Hassaiki and other families didn't turn their backs on mutants, they recruited them. They gave them a sense of belonging in exchange for muscle. If Chisaki is hiding, he's hiding in the one place where a bird-masked psychopath and a group of 'impurities' blend into the background."
Koichi nodded, his face hardening. "Then we find him. We find him, we pummel that group, and we get that kid." He suddenly slumped, hitting his head against the headrest. "God, listen to me. Breaking and entering, unauthorized quirk use, conspiracy... I'm a walking penal code violation. I should have reported this to the authorities weeks ago."
"The 'authorities' are currently busy still scrubbing the blood off their hands, Koichi," Yoshi Abara interjected from the back row. He was leaning back, his eyes closed, his spatial awareness trickling out like a sonar pulse. "Reporting this now would just get us a one-way ticket to a hole in the ground. Besides, we're the 'bad guys' now. Might as well enjoy the lack of certain responsibilities."
Makoto let out a soft, sharp intake of breath. She turned her tablet around, showing them the breaking news bulletin, the severed head of the hero Lithos in the center of an Osaka plaza. "Kaito Ishida," she whispered. "He was only nineteen. A UA graduate."
A heavy silence fell over the group. The tragedy of a young life ended so surgically felt like a cold hand on their collective throats.
"Look at it this way," Yoshi said, his voice devoid of its usual snark. "If heroes are getting slaughtered in the streets of Osaka, it's going to force the shadows to move. Overhaul won't like the heat. He'll pop his head out eventually. One dead graduate might be the bait we need."
Akira and Makoto shot him looks of pure, jagged horror. Yoshi raised his hands defensively, his eyes remaining cold. "Right. Bad joke. My bad."
"We're beginning our descent," Akira noted, glancing at the flight path. "We should have found another way. The Commission has eyes in every hangar. There could be agents waiting for us before the wheels even touch the tarmac."
"Getting to the mainland fast was the priority," Yoshi countered, standing up and stretching. "Makoto-san worked miracles just getting us on this bird without IDs. Besides, Koichi is taking a lot more risk than the rest of us."
"Yeah," Koichi muttered, "with a growing criminal record and all."
Then, the air shifted.
Yoshi's eyes snapped open. He noticed it first, the three rows of passengers in front of them. For the entire flight, they hadn't moved. Not a cough. Not a rustle of a newspaper. Not even the rhythmic rise and fall of a chest in sleep. They were perfectly, hauntingly still.
"Heads up," Yoshi said, his voice dropping into a combat register.
The rows of passengers turned simultaneously. It wasn't the fluid motion of human necks, it was a synchronized, mechanical swivel. Their faces were waxen, their eyes unblinking glass. As they turned, the "flesh" of their features seemed to melt and harden, revealing the hollow, cream-colored plastic of professional mannequins beneath their clothes.
"Staring problem?" Yoshi asked cheekily, but his body was already coiling.
In a blur of motion, Yoshi flipped backward over his seat just as a sharp, ivory-coloured lance erupted from the chest of the "passenger" in front of him, piercing the upholstery where his heart had been a millisecond before.
Koichi scrambled to his feet, blue energy flaring around his boots. Akira reached for a concealed sidearm, and Makoto backed toward the cockpit door. The "people" in the cabin were shedding their disguises now, dozens of mannequins, their limbs elongated and ending in spear-like points, clicking as they stood up in the cramped aisle.
A slow, rhythmic clapping drifted from the front of the cabin.
A man stepped out from the galley. He wasn't imposing, he was average height, wearing a sharp, tactical vest over a gray jumpsuit. He had a face that was utterly forgettable, the kind of man who disappears in a crowd of three.
Makoto's eyes widened. "Sato? Junji Sato?"
"You remember me, Makoto-san. I'm flattered," the man said, his voice as flat as a dial tone.
"Hero Name: Stasis-Model," Makoto whispered to the others. "He's a low-rank. He specializes in 'contained' environments. His quirk... he can turn inorganic matter into autonomous extensions of his will."
"A Commission dog," Yoshi spat. "You guys really don't know when to quit, do you?"
Sato looked at Akira Furuhaya, his expression one of mild disappointment. "Akira, you've been leaving a mess everywhere you go. Okinawa, Naha... and now you're bringing nasty rumours back home."
Sato raised a hand, and the mannequins in the cabin vibrated, their plastic joints clicking in a terrifying chorus.
"We can't just call for your execution anymore, Akira," Sato said, his eyes reflecting the cold light of the cabin. "You've likely told them things that can't be unlearned. The truth of Project 46 is a contagion. And when a contagion is found on a flight... the only solution is to burn the entire craft."
He smiled, a thin, hollow expression that didn't reach his eyes.
"Don't worry. The official report will be very moving. A tragic aircraft incident. No survivors. A moment of silence for the lost souls of the sky."
___
The cabin of the charter plane, once a quiet sanctuary of humming engines, had transformed into a claustrophobic slaughterhouse of plastic and porcelain. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and the dry, synthetic smell of heated polymer.
Koichi Haimawari was a blur of neon-blue kinetic light. He was "Sliding and Gliding" along the ceiling and armrests, his boots kicking through the waxy heads of the mannequins with a series of wet thwacks. But for every doll he shattered, the plastic floorboards seemed to bubble and reform, extruding new, spear-limbed horrors to take their place.
Yoshi Abara stood as the center of a chaotic storm. He was the anchor, his features set in a grim mask of concentration. Behind him, Akira and Makoto were pressed against the cockpit door, their breathing ragged.
"Stay behind me!" Yoshi roared.
A mannequin with the melted, half-formed face of a businessman lunged at them, its arm elongated into a jagged ivory spike. Yoshi reached out and pinched the air.
"Ripple Effect: Split."
The space in front of the mannequin folded. The doll's torso was suddenly bifurcated, not by a blade, but by a spatial misalignment. The top half slid away as if it had stepped into a different dimension, clattering into the aisle as a hollow plastic shell. Yoshi followed up with a "Burst," expanding the vibrations in the air to send a shockwave of force that shattered the next three rows of attackers into white confetti.
But he was struggling.
The plane was a pressurized metal tube, and his power was a scalpel made of gravity and distance. He couldn't "Teleport" them out, the "Internal Spatial Shear" was too high. To teleport Akira or Makoto through the vibrating hull of a plane moving at five hundred miles per hour would be to deliver them to the ground as a collection of loose organs. He couldn't even teleport the plane itself, he had no fixed point to "anchor" to without causing a kinetic catastrophe that would pancake them into the earth.
He was trapped in a metal coffin, and the coffin was trying to eat them.
"Yoshi, look out!" Makoto screamed.
A mannequin dropped from an overhead bin, its fingers sharpened into needles. Yoshi ducked, grabbed a stray seat-belt buckle that had been torn loose, and focused. He he "Singularized" the space behind the metal, collapsing the distance between the buckle and the target's head.
The buckle hit like a cannonball, obliterating the doll. Yoshi's eyes darted through the fray, landing on Junji Sato. The hero stood at the front of the cabin, his hands casually in his pockets, his eyes cold as he watched the carnage.
He's the core, Yoshi thought. Cut the head, the body dies.
Yoshi saw a blind spot, a split second where three mannequins collided in the narrow aisle. He flipped over a headrest, his body coiling with predatory grace. As he descended, he grabbed a heavy metal serving tray from a galley cart. He applied a massive "Burst" to its trailing edge while "Splitting" the air in front of its path to remove all wind resistance.
The tray became a silver flash. It moved faster than the human eye could track, a razor-thin crescent of steel fuelled by spatial acceleration.
It hit Junji Sato directly in the throat.
The impact was horrific. There was no struggle, no dramatic gasp. The tray sheared through the hero's neck with the ease of a hot wire through butter. Sato's head spun into the air, a spray of dark crimson painting the white ceiling of the plane, before the body slumped forward into a heap of twitching limbs.
The mannequins froze. The clicking stopped.
Koichi skidded to a halt on the ceiling, his eyes wide, his hands trembling as the blue light around him flickered. He stared at the headless body of the man who, moments ago, had been a government official.
"Yoshi..." Koichi whispered, his voice cracking. "What... what did you do?"
Yoshi landed on his feet, his chest heaving. He wiped a smudge of plastic dust from his cheek. "I ended it, Koichi. Now we need to get out before the plane crashes, unless you can fly it. He was going to kill Akira and Makoto. I did what had to be done."
Koichi dropped to the floor, his face contorting with a sudden, violent flare of anger. He didn't look at the mannequins, he looked at Yoshi as if he were seeing a monster. He started stomping toward Yoshi, his fists clenched.
"He was a Hero!" Koichi shouted, his voice echoing in the sudden silence of the cabin. "A government agent! You didn't even try to restrain him! You just... you turned him into a butcher's scrap!"
"He wasn't going to be restrained, Koichi! Wake up!" Yoshi shouted back, his brow furrowing in a mix of confusion and rising heat. "This isn't a vigilante playground! These people play for keeps! It was him or us!"
"It never reached that point!" Koichi roared, getting in Yoshi's face, his eyes brimming with tears of frustration. "I can glide! You can manipulate space! We could have found a way out! We could have disabled the engines and glided down, or you could have... You could have figured something out. You just took what is the easiest for you. You didn't have to kill him! But you didn't even hesitate!"
Yoshi felt a cold stone settle in his gut. He had spent the last week around Koichi, only a week and some days, learning about "heroism," feeling like he was part of something "good." He thought that if he saved them, the methods wouldn't matter. He thought they were... maybe becoming a team.
Now he feels oddly stranded and aimless again.
"I saved your life," Yoshi hissed, his voice trembling. "I saved Akira. I saved..."
"KOICHI! YOSHI! LOOK OUT!" Makoto's voice was a piercing shriek of pure terror.
Yoshi looked past Koichi. His eyes widened.
Behind the grieving hero, one of the frozen mannequins, one with a perfectly generic, smiling face, began to change. Its plastic skin blushed. It took on the colour of human flesh. The glass eyes turned hazel. The features shifted with agonizing, fluid precision until it was an exact replica of Junji Sato.
The "corpse" at the front of the plane vanished into a pile of gray dust.
"You really are a violent little thing, aren't you... Yoshi?" the new Sato said, his voice coming from the doll directly behind Koichi.
Before anyone could react, the mannequin-Sato raised a hand. A beam of concentrated, pressurized air, a "lance" erupted from his palm.
It happened in slow motion. Koichi, still turned toward Yoshi, didn't see it. He didn't even have time to turn around.
Splurt.
A wet, sickening sound filled the cabin. Yoshi watched as a bright, blossoming beam of blood erupted through the chest of Koichi's classy tan travel jacket. The force of the strike didn't just pierce him, it lifted Koichi off his feet, his eyes going wide and glassy as the breath was driven from his lungs in a red spray.
"I am the Stasis-Model," the replica of Junji Sato said, stepping over Koichi's collapsing body with a chilling, clinical smile. "I don't just control the dolls, boy. I am the dolls. My consciousness is a ghost in the machine. You can kill me a thousand times, and I will simply wake up in the next row of dolls."
Koichi hit the floor with a heavy, hollow thud, his blood beginning to pool on the synthetic carpet. Yoshi stood frozen, paralyzed by the sight of the man bleeding out because of a moral argument Yoshi had won with a murder.
It was all amounting to a big response Yoshi had in his mind... Tiring.
"Now," Sato said, his hand glowing with a fresh lance of ivory light. "Let's discuss the tragedy of this flight one more time."