Chapter Text
CRACK
“Woo! Super Strength!” Hitoshi cheered, staring down at the pile of gravel that used to be a cinder block on the ground in front of him, giddy with excitement at his new discovery.
Then the adrenaline wore off and he noticed the grey shards that had embedded themselves in the skin of his hands. Tiny specs of scarlet dotted his palms when he swept them off.
“Owwwwwww…super strength” he groaned weakly, waiting out the seconds it took for the pain to subside before reaching for his science notebook.
- Enhanced Senses
- Enhanced Flexibility
- Stickiness???
- Mild resistance to blunt-force damage
Hitoshi penciled in “Super Strength” at the bottom of the list, before stuffing the notebook into his backpack. The sun had just about reached the horizon by that point, the sky fading to a gorgeous watercolor of purples and oranges. Hitoshi’s dads would want him back soon.
Or right now. Probably right now. Fuuuck.
He hoisted his backpack over his shoulder and slowly wove his way out of the junk maze that was Dagobah beach, dodging old appliances and random car parts until he made his way back to the street.
The walk to his apartment building was only about ten minutes by foot, but the sun had almost entirely gone down by the time he actually got there. Hitoshi stopped just short of the door, before silently pushing his way in, letting the door close smoothly behind him.
He opted to take the stairs, just for the sake of using his powers a little more , just to get used to them. He managed to get all the way up to their floor (the third up from the bottom) without touching the ground once.
Hitoshi reached the door to his apartment and paused for a moment, to remove his key from the pocket of his backpack. He unlocked the door, shoved his hands in his pockets, and nudged his way through the door with his knee.
Pops was in the kitchen, clearly having just gotten home from work. His uniform was still on, and his glasses were crooked on his nose. He looked stressed. Hitoshi’s pops was never stressed. The two of them made eye contact and Hizashi mouthed ‘ordering takeout’ and ‘your dad’s still at work’ before turning back to the counter, Hitoshi just then realizing that he had his phone in his hand, device raised to his ear.
With that interaction over, Hitoshi completed the trip to his room, nudging the door shut with his foot before flopping himself down onto the bed. The afternoon’s discoveries held about 90% of his headspace right now, and he was eager to fill in any gaps in his knowledge of them. The notes he'd made on his new powers were almost certainly incomplete – there were only so many situations you could simulate in a junkyard– and he was eager to test out his powers in a real fight. There was the unfortunate moral dilemma of picking fights being… not exactly the pinnacle of goodness, but Hitoshi had already come up with a few ideas to get around that.
He drew his laptop out of his backpack and opened it on his lap. Making sure to use an incognito browser window, he typed in one simple phrase.
UNDERGROUND COMBAT RINGS
Now, Hitoshi wasn’t an idiot– far from it in fact. Nobody in their right mind would openly post an ad for an illegal fighting ring. Anyone who would was definitely already in police custody. Instead, Hitoshi was relying on a little something he liked to call deductive reasoning .
Insert electric guitar riff here, he thought sarcastically. Turning his attention back to the screen in front of him, Hitoshi got to work.
It took quite a while. Cross-referencing police records ( public ones , Hitoshi wasn’t going to break the law yet ) with news articles and social media posts, he narrowed his field of search down to a small section of Mustafu with quite a lot of bars in it. From there, it was pretty simple to find what he was looking for.
Crossing out one bar here, mapping out police routes there, and just a little bit of google image searching, and Hitoshi found the place. The Rose Room, it was called, tucked in a largely abandoned neighborhood of the city.
The blueprints– posted online– had proved that there was quite a large space underneath it, and most damningly, a few images that had been posted on social media included an inconspicuous downwards staircase nestled just behind the bar, a well-dressed bouncer standing beside it. One of the photos even had some buff dude who looked an awful lot like a boxer (knuckle tape and all) being allowed past the bouncer and into the staircase.
Bingo.
Scribbling the address onto a crumpled bit of paper, Hitoshi shut every tab on his laptop, wiped his search history for the last hour, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Pops was calling about dinner from down the hall. Hitoshi could smell something bread-y(?) and potentially fried.
He took one last look around his room, making sure nothing incriminating was out, and unlocked the window for later. It produced a harsh grinding sound, making Hitoshi eternally grateful for the clattering of dishes down the hall. It would be harder to hide such a noise in a silent apartment.
“Hitoshi! Eri! Dinner time!!!” Pop’s voice, loud as ever, rang from down the hall. It was followed by the quiet, rapid steps of Eri’s sock feet, pat pat patting from her room down the hall.
Hitoshi got up to follow her, and slipped out of his room, veins thrumming with excitement and suspense.