Recap:
Tom confronts kaito while arresting the Realist, Kaito killed all the police officers of Rashistan who were chasing the Realist and Simon.
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Chapter 45 : Whatever Happened There
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Tom and Kaito were both cyborgs. Their artificial backbones turned human limits into numbers — speed and strength that jumped by the hundreds depending on the chassis they were bolted to. A Private-grade backbone was sluggish and crude next to a Captain's. A Major's rig was surgical: faster, stronger, smarter. Ranks rose with the capability to handle those harder, hungrier spines.
Tom had been a super-soldier long before Kaito woke into his Major frame. But Kaito's body — and his mind — could accept a Major-level backbone, and that was why he outranked Tom now.
Kaito ran like a torque-driven meteor and threw a kick that should have removed Tom's head. It happened in milliseconds. Somehow, by a fraction of timing, Tom angled his shoulders, slipped the kick, and the blow clipped the car beside them. The vehicle rolled and slammed on its roof with a noise like tearing metal; Realist, strapped inside the backseat, rattled with the impact. Simon jumped clear at the last second and hit the asphalt, panting but unhurt.
Tom's breath was a tight wire in his chest. He could feel the backbone's assistance — the little hum behind his spine — but against Kaito it felt like being a candle in a hurricane. He thought, I don't stand a chance in speed or strength. I need a strategy.
He fished at the ground and flicked a stone toward Kaito. Kaito moved a hair's breadth and the pebble ticked past his temple. He raised a hand and folded Tom's punch away like a child's gesture.
Tom's plan had never been about one trick. As Kaito watched the first stone fall, Tom used himself — his pitch and body language — as the decoy. With two fingers he flung two more stones high into the night sky in perfect arcs. Then he watched, heart hammering, as a ninety-five-pound slab of concrete — dislodged from the wreck — shuddered and fell.
The slab landed on Kaito's head and shattered to dust. Kaito's skull… didn't crumple. The dust sifted down from his hair; he didn't blink. The Major craned his neck and, with a single palm, caught Tom's arm as he rolled in to lock him in an armbar. Tom's forearm slid into Kaito's grip, and Kaito, with one cold, effortless motion, threw him aside.
Tom flipped in the air and hit his feet. The spine behind him whined like a tuned engine; he tasted metal. He looked at Kaito and thought, He's durable — I need something stronger than I am to put a single scratch on him.
"Simon," Tom gasped, "toss me that shotgun."
"There's still time—just f*cking untie me!" Realist screamed from inside the crumpled car, voice cracking with panic. The power-blocker jacket strapped across his chest leaked static and sparks where its clamps had failed in the rollover. The jacket was the whole problem: designed to suppress any power interfaces inside a human so precise that the wearer became a purely organic bag of meat.
Simon unfastened what he could and heaved the shotgun out like it was the only lever left against fate. He pitched it toward Tom.
Kaito didn't move like someone calculating where the gun might go. He moved like someone who had already predicted the toss and taken it in his hands. The shotgun never reached Tom. Kaito snatched it mid-flight, fingers clamping around the cold barrel, and looked at Tom as if prying a loose tooth out of a jaw.
Tom's lungs emptied. Kaito raised the shotgun and gave a small twist of the wrist, holstering it casually at his side as if it were a toy. His face was calm. His eyes — too still, too mechanical — promised only the end of a line.
Tom ran anyway.
He ran because there was nothing else to do. Strategy was gestures, delays, the geometry of chaos he could still control. He darted low; Kaito moved his shoulder to redirect him. Tom slipped under and grabbed the SUV's roof, slamming his palm into the brittle glass. It spidered under his weight. He used the shard to cut the straps that held Realist in place, the glass biting and pouring small, hot lines of pain across his palm. Kaito's hand found his ankle and spun, and Tom's weight turned into a fling that sent him skidding across broken glass and oil like a rag under a wheel.
Kaito laughed that quiet, empty laugh of someone who owned the rules. "Brave," he said. "Stupid."
Tom landed on his stomach but kept moving. He couldn't outmuscle Kaito. He could only be smaller, faster in thought than Kaito's strength. He wriggled, reached into the car through the smashed window and found Realist slumped, the power-blocker jacket's clamps sunk in around his collar and wrists like a surgical harness. The jacket's main clasp sat over the sternum — a disc of matte black alloy with three tiny ports arranged like a constellation.
Tom's fingers fumbled at the straps. The jacket had a fail-safe: a magnetic latch that would only release with a command sequence or a physical override hidden beneath the rear collar. That was military design — elegant, invasive, cruel. Tom slid his hand up Realist's back, searching, and hit the seam. There, a recessed slot, no wider than a fingernail. He cursed under his breath.
Kaito's palm closed under Tom's shoulder and lifted. "You'll make it quick for me," he said, and he tightened his grip.
Tom allowed himself to be lifted, a puppet, and then slipped free in a practiced little wriggle. He traded weight and momentum and then dove, driving both his boots into Kaito's abdomen. The Major's breath did not leave his lungs, but his grip shifted.
"Not yet," Tom told the air. He wriggled back into the car and found the slot again. He had no tool. He had one fingernail and stubbornness. He pried, groaned, and sound came out like old wire. The seam gave a little.
Kaito pivoted, shoved the shotgun into Tom's ribs, not to fire but to make a point. The butt jabbed a rib and tore Tom's breath from him. He tasted blood. Pain sharpened his sight.
"Enough," Kaito said. "Stop flailing. It won't change—"
Tom thumbed into the recess with everything left in him. The latch clicked. The jacket's magnetic holster released with a sound like a small animal dying. The clamps unlatched. Realist sagged into Tom's arms, limp and leaking shock. The jacket was still warm against Tom's chest; the override had triggered but the jacket stayed, uselessly, as if it had to be physically removed to restore freedom.
Tom reached for the zipper, hands shaking. He hauled, fingers torn, until the jacket opened and slipped over Realist's shoulders like a dead thing. Realist coughed, a sound like someone learning to breathe again. For a second, the world narrowed to the wet suck of lungs filling. That was enough.
Kaito closed the distance in two strides. He raised his arm and hit Tom across the face so hard the impact sawed sound apart. Tom's head slammed into the steering column. Stars fled his vision. For a spare second he felt the spine's hum die as the Major's strength reclaimed gravity and then nothing.
Kaito pinned Tom face-down, the shotgun's foregrip across his back, and pressed his knee into the base of Tom's skull. The force could have crushed bone; instead it was a message: stop or die slower. Tom tasted the asphalt, spring-scented and salty. He had given Realist the last inch he could. He had failed to keep his own body in one piece.
"Get up," Kaito said, voice devoid of malice and full of consequence. "You could still fight. But the world will be in stitches if I let you. You chose this."
Simon crawled forward, breath rasping, and helped Realist out of the car. Realist's eyes were glassy, but he clung to life as if it had been promised to him since birth. He looked at Tom — and Tom looked back, everything going soft at the edges.
Kaito flexed his mechanical hand and tilted his head as if listening to a distant metronome. He inspected the jacket with a practiced eye, then kicked it aside. The device's display blinked and died as if it had decided without complaint.
"You freed him," Kaito observed. "Stupid. Brave. Either way, it was never going to be enough."
Tom tried to answer and found that his mouth was full of gravel. He felt the world shrinking to a point of pain, then expanding again when someone — Simon — clapped his cheeks and shouted. Realist coughed, then blinked at Tom, a gratitude so raw it made Tom's chest ache more than any blow.
Kaito rose and dusted the gravel from his jacket, a ritual more for himself than for anyone watching. He picked up the shotgun like a walking man might lift a sleeping child and slipped it back into his hands. He turned his head toward Simon and Realist and the ruined car and then looked at Tom, who was trying to breathe and failing to move.
"You almost made a martyr of yourself," Kaito said. His tone held no pleasure in victory. It was a fact. "You almost made a legend out of dead meat."
Tom coughed. Blood frosted his lip. "Worth it," he managed. "Realist—alive."
Kaito glanced once at Realist, at the ragged rise and fall of his chest. "That's all that mattered to you," he said. "Fine."
Kaito stepped forward and, with a single swift motion, planted the butt of the shotgun against Tom's shoulder and pushed. The force sent Tom rolling like a tired animal, and he hit the curb and slid, eyes going up to meet Kaito's. Kaito didn't finish him. The Major believed in leaving options; men who had nothing to lose fought differently, and tonight Tom had at least the small mercy of having given life to another.
"Get him out of here," Kaito said to Simon, voice thin as a wire. "Take your friend and vanish. Tell whoever needs telling that the Major passed through. He prefers that order be known."
Simon blinked rapid tears and helped Realist to his feet. He looked at Kaito as if the man were a problem spelled out in a language he didn't understand. He then looked at Tom, who smiled a cracked, ridiculous smile. "You did it," Tom croaked. "You always—stole the right moment."
Realist's hand found Tom's bandaged wrist and squeezed. "You idiot," he rasped. "You idiot."
Kaito watched them with the stillness of a man who knew his victory but not its meaning. He should have left them there, or taken them both in. Instead, after a long, quiet beat, he bent and picked up the power-blocker jacket. He turned it over in his hands like a coin he'd found in the gutter and, almost tenderly, tossed it into the ravine between the curb and the smashed fence. It fell and vanished, swallowed by shadows and debris.
"Tell me one thing," Kaito said finally, voice softer than before. "Why risk your life for a man who's not you?"
Tom's smile sagged. "Because he trusted me," he said. "Because that's still worth something."
Kaito nodded as if he believed it, then straightened, the Major's silhouette cutting the neon like a blade. "Then go. Run. Live like you mean it." He turned away, boots ringing on broken glass, and left them under the streetlight and the ruined sky.
Tom was too tired to stand. He watched Kaito go until the figure blurred into the city's stain of light. Sirens finally began to wail in the distance, as if the world had acknowledged that something irreversible had happened. Simon half-carried Realist, leaving Tom where he lay. The adrenaline bled out of him in hot waves, and when he closed his eyes, images of Kaito's stern face and Realist's shallow breathing fought for his last glance.
He had been defeated. He had been cracked and pushed and held down. But Realist was free, chest filling with the crooked, noisy air of someone who'd been given a second hand on the hour. That was his victory.
Tom smiled again, smaller this time, and let the darkness come.