Narita Airport thrummed with the ceaseless, indistinct noise that seemed to haunt every such place, a cacophony of voices and machinery that blurred into a single, oppressive presence.
Karl moved through it with the weary resignation of someone who had only just recalled the existence of airports and found himself faintly dismayed that they persisted.
Mandy kept pace at his side, burdened with a bag, a lukewarm coffee, and the expression of one subsisting on four hours of sleep and a single hour of professional tolerance.
Japan. Karl took in the unfamiliar script, the restless crowds, the omnipresent vending machines. The country remained as inscrutable as ever. Some peculiarities, it seemed, were eternal.
He had walked these lands before, long ago, when vending machines were a rarity and etiquette revolved more around swords than convenience.
He found he preferred the era of swords.
"Alright," Mandy said, adjusting the strap on her bag. "We are meeting our contacts just outside arrivals. The Japanese Hero Public Safety Commission sent two people."
"Wonderful."
"Try to behave."
Karl said nothing, which she correctly interpreted as not a promise.
Outside arrivals, two figures stood waiting.
The first was immediately recognisable. Tall. Blonde fringe. A pair of enormous red wings folded loosely behind him like he had forgotten they were there. A coffee in one hand. The practised smile of someone whose job involved being photographed constantly.
The second was wearing a full hero costume in the middle of an airport. Standing in a rigid, textbook-correct posture. A printed sign held with both hands. The sign read: SDN Representative – Blonde Blazer.
The sign had a small Japanese flag sticker in the corner.
One of them takes this seriously, Karl noted. The other one is like me.
"Blonde Blazer!" The one with the wings raised a hand in greeting before they had even fully stopped walking. "Hawks. Pleasure. I would have written a sign too, but " He glanced at his colleague. " Iida had strong feelings about that."
"It is standard protocol for welcoming foreign dignitaries," Iida said, entirely without irony.
"She is not a foreign dignitary."
"She is a foreign hero representative operating under an international cooperation agreement."
"Right, a foreign dignitary."
Iida's mouth opened, then closed.
Mandy shook Hawks' hand. "Blonde Blazer. You can call me Mandy." She looked at the sign. "That is genuinely very sweet, thank you."
Iida appeared momentarily human. "You are welcome. I am Ingenium. It is an honour to—" He stopped.
He was looking at Karl.
Karl, incongruous in sunglasses and a black coat beneath the harsh airport lights, carried a single bag and a bottle whose contents were unmistakably not wine. He surveyed the terminal with the detached curiosity of one who had witnessed far stranger things and found most of them wanting.
"...Who is this?" Iida asked.
"Karl," said Karl.
"His full designation?"
"Karl."
A pause.
"Are you a hero?"
"No."
"A licensed specialist operative?"
"Something like that."
Iida turned to Mandy with what was clearly a prepared argument about proper clearance documentation and guest registration procedures.
"He is with me," Mandy said. "It is handled."
It was, of course, not handled in the slightest, Karl mused with a trace of amusement.
Hawks drove. Iida sat in the passenger seat and periodically turned around to ensure that the people in the back were still following all applicable traffic safety protocols.
Karl, unburdened by a seatbelt, gazed out the window, indifferent to the rules of mortals.
"You are required by law to—"
"I am aware."
"Then please—"
"I will regenerate."
A very long pause.
"...What?"
"The seatbelt is for people who can get hurt from a car crash."
Hawks, from the driver's seat, made a face that was very clearly a suppressed laugh.
"Put the seatbelt on," Mandy said without looking up from her phone.
Karl grumbled but did as she told.
Money was hardly the only force Mandy could wield to compel obedience, he reflected, not without a certain respect.
Fuyuki was visible from some distance before they reached it.
Not the city itself. What was visible was the damage.
Entire districts darkened. The horizon still faintly discoloured where smoke had risen and dispersed. Streets that had been cleared but not yet rebuilt. Buildings with black scorch marks, climbing walls that had survived things they should not have survived.
Karl regarded the devastation in silence.
Ley line convergence. High-yield. Multiple ritual deaths. A sacrifice? No, a summoning... maybe both. The kind of energy release that leaves a mark on the land for decades. He paused. Possibly longer depending on how much was summoned and how much of it came apart violently.
"Gas explosion," Hawks said, completely straight-faced.
"Obviously," Karl agreed, equally straight-faced.
Mandy looked between them. Iida stared very hard at the road ahead.
Not a soul in this vehicle believed the tale of a gas explosion. It was almost comforting, this shared pretense.
The primary rescue site was in a district that had taken the worst of it.
They heard him before they saw him.
"DO NOT WORRY. I AM—"
"—HERE," finished two of the four people in the car simultaneously.
Iida looked deeply moved.
Karl wore the expression of a man who comprehended every word yet could not decipher the meaning behind their arrangement.
They parked, stepped out, and there he was.
All Might.
It was, objectively, a lot of a man. An enormous person with a silhouette like a warning. If not for the costume, Cain would have mistook him for a Greek titan. Grinning a grin that had no business being that large in a crisis zone, crouched over a section of collapsed building with both hands braced under a concrete slab the size of a shipping container.
He lifted it.
Not with a crane. Not with a machine. With his hands. In one smooth motion. Set it down twenty meters away in an empty lot with the careful deliberateness of someone placing a teacup.
From beneath it, three rescue workers rushed into the space.
"THREE MORE SURVIVORS," he announced to the general vicinity, which included two news cameras and a paramedic team that had very clearly been waiting for exactly this. "THEY ARE SAFE!"
A cheer went up.
Karl observed the spectacle in silence.
Extraordinary physical output. Far beyond what any unaugmented mortal body should possess. He paused, considering. The theory of a divine spark grows more compelling with each passing moment.
"Impressive, right?" Hawks said from beside him, hands in his pockets, looking at All Might with something between fondness and professional respect.
"Remarkably."
"You sound surprised."
"I am recalibrating several assumptions about your era," Karl said with complete seriousness.
Hawks stared at him for a moment.
"...Okay. We need you both to coordinate with the south sector. That is where they are having trouble due to structural instability caused by the fires. Are either of you fireproof?"
"Relatively," Mandy said.
"Yes," said Karl.
"Great. South sector. Try not to destroy more than is already destroyed." Hawks took off, wings catching air, crossing the distance in seconds.
I had every intention of doing precisely that, Karl thought, faintly amused.
The south sector was still on fire in several places.
Not actively burning. The kind that smoulders in the skeleton of a building and then reignites the moment someone moves the wrong piece of debris. The kind that kills rescue workers who stop paying attention.
Karl surveyed the burning ruins for scarcely two seconds.
Then he raised one hand.
The shadows cast by every burning structure lengthened, reaching out and coiling around the heart of each fire like a strangler's grip. He did not so much extinguish the flames as deprive them of breath. One by one, with deliberate precision, the smouldering ruins fell silent and dark.
The rescue workers nearby went very quiet.
One of them turned to look at him. Turned back to the building. Turned back to him.
"...How did you do that?"
"Old habit," Karl said, and stepped into the ruins.
His search for survivors was meticulous, almost surgical. Pressing a hand to the battered wall, he reached beyond the surface, sifting through the tangled geometry of collapse—discerning what would hold, what would fail, and where the weight of stone might yet conceal a living soul.
Two. Thirty metres north. Beneath the stairwell, a collapse occurred.
He told the rescue coordinator exactly where to dig.
She looked at him, then at her equipment, then back at him.
"How confident are you?"
"Entirely."
She looked at him for one more second.
Then she picked up her radio.
Mandy worked the way she always worked. Fast and precise. Well... maybe when she was in the field and not dispatching. She is horrible at that. Unheroic in the theatrical sense and very heroic in the actual sense. She moved debris with her bare hands when it was faster. She talked to survivors when they needed it. She did not make announcements.
At some point, she ended up next to All Might, both of them braced against the same section of collapsed ceiling, lifting.
"YOU ARE VERY STRONG FOR YOUR SIZE, YOUNG LADY!"
"Thank you," she said through gritted teeth.
"ARE YOU A HERO?"
"Director. SDN."
"AH! INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION! EXCELLENT!"
He smiled at her. With an enormous grin.
She genuinely could not tell if he was doing it on purpose.
Probably not, she decided. Probably just how he is.
They set the section down.
"THAT FRIEND OF YOURS," All Might said, glancing across the site to where Karl was walking calmly through smoke, gesturing at structural collapses, and periodically making fire disappear without any visible method. "IS HE A HERO ALSO?"
"No," Mandy said.
"AH. WHAT IS HE?"
She considered this for longer than the question probably required.
"Complicated," she said finally.
All Might nodded with great enthusiasm, as if this were an entirely satisfying answer.
She didn't realise I was asking as a helper. She answered about the relationship.
Sometime around the third hour, Iida appeared at Karl's shoulder with a clipboard and a form.
"I need your full name and designation for the coordination log."
"Karl."
"Full name."
"Karl Arnur."
"Specialist classification?"
Karl thought about this.
"Independent consultant."
"Area of expertise?"
"Several."
Iida wrote something. Stopped and looked up.
"...Is that blood in the bottle?"
"Yes."
"Are you—"
"A vampire. Yes."
The pen stopped moving.
"Is that going to be a problem?" Karl asked.
Iida stared at him.
Then, with the expression of a man who had decided that the paperwork would resolve itself later, he wrote something in the classification box and moved on.
Karl glanced at what he had written.
Independent Consultant – Specialist (See Notes).
He almost smiled.
By the fifth hour, the fires were out, the critical rescues were complete, and the kind of quiet that settles over a disaster site after the immediate urgency passes had begun to take hold.
Karl lingered at the sector's edge, coat unblemished, sunglasses undisturbed, bearing the look of one who had completed his task and now awaited the next turn of fate with idle curiosity.
All Might appeared beside him. Still enormous. Less theatrical, now. The grin had softened into something more human.
"You have done good work today," he said quietly. Not the loud announcement voice, but the actual voice.
Karl looked at him.
Fatigue, he observed. More than the man revealed. There was a boundary here, carefully hidden beneath the surface. Something is going wrong with him.
"As have you," he replied.
All Might looked at the ruins. "Every time I see something like this, I think. What if we had been faster? If we had understood sooner or foresaw what was happening..."
"It would not have changed what happened here," Karl said. Not unkindly. "Only those who found out first. Take it as advice from someone who was in that situation way too many times. Don't bother with if's, think of what's next."
All Might was quiet for a moment.
"...You know what caused this?"
"I have suspicions."
"Would you share them?"
Karl weighed the request, casting his gaze skyward, where the faint scars of ley lines lingered in the aftermath of the ritual that had torn through this city. He regarded the extraordinary man beside him, still standing, still resolute after hours of impossible labour, sustained, it seemed, by will alone.
"Buy me a coffee," he said, "and I will tell you what I know."
All Might blinked.
Then he laughed. Genuine, surprised laughter. Still big. But human.
"I think I can manage that."
Somewhere across the city, Iida was updating his coordination log.
Under Notes, he wrote: Operative Karl Arnur – shadow manipulation, fire suppression, structural detection, possible additional capabilities not yet documented. Non-aggressive. Cooperative. Species: vampire (self-reported). Age: old as fuck (probably). Priority classification: pending review.
He underlined pending review twice.
Then, because paperwork was important, he filed the form correctly and moved on to the next one.