Paul Woodman was a man easily described.

  The first words that came to mind when looking at him were ‘deferential’, ‘uncomfortable’, and then maybe at a stretch ‘dutiful’. If you were to speak to him a little further, you’d quickly discover that ‘compromising’ was a better word than all three of those combined. If an idea was ever suggested to him, he would cave first and consider it later. The thought of conflict was worse than the thought that he would be letting himself down when he acquiesced.

  In all the ways Paul Woodman could be described, ‘forthright’ did not make the list.

  That was why, when the others all filed out in pairs onto the Matsuto? street and went their separate ways, and Fukutetsu grabbed his elbow to stop him, he halted his stride without a second thought.

  “Oh- Um….excuse me?”

  “Wait here,” said Fukutetsu. His bright eyes flicked across the people, darting about this way and that like a hopping robin.

  He was a smart-looking young man, Paul could concede that. It unnerved him a little. He wasn’t slow by any means–he just preferred to think things through carefully. Fukutetsu gave him the impression that he was just a thought away from coming up with an entire plan at any moment.

  They stood there idly, watching as they were slowly abandoned by their car, Rin’s loping stride and Bravo hopping along excitedly explaining something to Tagaki, who was looking in the opposite direction from her. Paul felt an itch growing in his palms, but he didn’t scratch it. Fukutetsu seemed perfectly comfortable with the wait, folding his arms and continuing to watch like he was poised for something to happen.

  The moment the last strand of Nari’s hair disappeared from view, he immediately turned back around, running to the car and dragging Paul along with him. Paul was far taller and heavier than the lanky teenager, but he let himself be pulled purely out of obedience.

  “Hey, uh, woah now, what are we doing? Why are we just letting the others go first? We’re losing our head start.”

  “I’m not a hands-on type of guy,” Fukutetsu answered dismissively. He yanked open the car door, crawling in on his hands and knees to reach down underneath the footwell and pull something rectangular and grey out.

  It was a laptop, bulky but still portable. The shiny chrome had worn off around the lip where someone’s fingers would touch to pull it open, and there were a few faded stickers on the back. Fukutetsu did just that immediately, sitting cross-legged in the back seat as he powered it on.

  Paul stood there and blinked at him for a moment, not sure what to do. He felt a little stupid, as if this boy half his age was making fun of him.

  “Sit in the driver’s seat for me. I’ll get this done in a click.”

  This is exactly like talking to one of my old project managers.

  Paul did as he was told, seating himself at the front and resting his hands on the wheel. The only sounds that filled his ears were the rapid-fire clicking of keys and Fukutetsu’s occasional confused huff.

  He could tell the other was busy, or at least looked busy, but the nerves under his skin forced him to speak.

  “Okay, listen. Can you please tell me what you’re doing?”

  Fukutetsu took his time answering, choosing to linger on the words he was typing instead. Then he looked up irritably.

  “I’m trying to access this district’s local CCTV footage.”

  Paul blinked in surprise.

  “Wait, you can do that yourself?” That was Fukutetsu’s skill, he remembered–hacking. He thought back to their first conversation with Bravo.

  “How do you do it, then? Is it through your ability? Hm…something like tracking? Or, no, wait. You said you needed a phone number–or was it an address?”

  “...internet.”

  “But surely–” That sense of foolishness increased. The most Paul knew about computers was how to log admin information on them, and here he was talking to a person who was clearly already experienced, making him sound like an idiot. “There’s thousands of cameras in Matsuto?. How are we ever going to narrow down the one with Kotaki in it? It’ll take days, and we’ll be left behind immediately. I think I should just–”

  He made a move to get out of the car, but Fukutetsu immediately reached out and yanked him back again.

  “Mh-mm. Not so.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small piece of paper, one with Atsushi Kotaki’s face printed on it. Paul recognised it from the previous meeting, when Yugi had held it up to help them identify their target.

  “Did you steal that from him?” he choked after a moment, his spine going cold. Fukutetsu only shrugged.

  “That’s not relevant. See, this image is going to be vitally important. There are plenty of cameras to scrape, true. But if I input Kotaki’s facial data into this program, and scrape only the cameras that logged his face in their recognition software, that’ll narrow down every single result by 90%. I didn’t expect you to know that.”

  Paul winced.

  “But no matter. I’ll find him in ten minutes, at most. This will be easy. I’ll bet Yugi never expected me to be this good at tracking people down. It’s my speciality, after all…” Fukutetsu’s grumpy face twisted with a slight smirk as he thought about that, before he sat back to continue typing away.

  That was Fukutetsu’s problem, Paul realised. He knew he was smart.

  “Maybe…” he, albeit weakly, suggested. “Maybe he knew you would try this. I mean, he hired everyone on the basis of merit. What if he expected you to try and do things the fast way? And have you considered not stealing things from angels? He definitely knows you took that picture.”

  The typing stopped. Fukutetsu paused, his eyes drifting from the screen to a spot a few inches away, unfocused.

  He looked thrown for the first time.

  Paul almost held his breath at that. Finally the young man was reconsidering his thoughts. This was his chance, finally, to get a word in edgewise.

  He was sorely disappointed. Moments later Fukutetsu shook his head like a dog shaking off water, and quickly looked back at the screen with rapt smugness.

  “That can wait. I’ve located him.”

  “Already??”

  Paul’s mouth flopped open like a dead fish, and he craned his neck to see over the back of the car seat. He could just about make out the blurry, pixelated image of Kotaki’s face–the choppy black hair, the unshaven mustache, and the tanned skin littered with freckles from too much time in the sun. That was their target–no mistaking it, unless he happened to have an identical twin.

  “You’re…right,” he said with a sense of defeat.

  “He’s hiding in a hotel about half an hour from here. That’s so pathetic. Well, no time to lose.” Fukutetsu snapped his laptop closed, sitting back and putting one boot onto the passenger headrest in front of him.

  “Drive us there.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The young man narrowed his eyes. “Do you want us to lose? Go. I’ll set the GPS.”

  Paul wanted to argue so badly.

  He wanted to snap at this teenager that he wasn’t a personal chauffeur, and a simple ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would make all the difference to his mood. But the truth lingered in Fukutetsu’s words. The longer he fought back, the more advantage they lost over the others.

  So instead, Paul bit his tongue and inserted the key into the ignition.

  As he began to reverse out of the small side street, a gust of wind blew into the back of his head. Fukutetsu wound down the window, dangling one hand out into the cool afternoon breeze.

  “What do you plan to do if Kotaki has neuropaths around him?” Paul asked quietly. “Can you fight?”

  Through the reflection of the rear view mirror, he watched Fukutetsu’s eyes twitch, brows furrowing down a few degrees.

  “You got a gun?” he returned.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Uh, yes.” It had been freshly purchased, given to him by Dexter as a sort of welcome gift. Paul had barely learned how to load it, let alone properly aim and fire it. The weapon was nestled in the glovebox, hidden from the eyes of anyone who might want to search the vehicle.

  “Then we’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t think–” Paul began, but his sentence was cut off as a nearby car swerved dangerously close to them. He cursed and spun the wheel, sending the car into a sharp zigzag, and Fukutetsu hit his head on the window.

  “Hey, what the fuck! Don’t drive like an asshole!” he shouted, holding his monocle to his face. Paul was too occupied trying to reorient them on the road to respond. His sweaty hands slipped off of the plastic and the wheels screeched, but the next moment the other car had fallen behind, and once more they were driving in a normal and straight line down the road.

  “What the hell was that?” Fukutetsu demanded.

  “That wasn’t my fault, that–oh, my god.” It was always the learner drivers. They never gave the right of way, and one could never predict when they’d lose control of the wheel. “Someone swerved into us.”

  Paul felt a conflicting mix of sympathy and satisfaction as he watched his passenger trying to readjust himself, muttering irritably and rubbing at the small red mark that had formed on his cheekbone.

  It was hard to decide which feeling won out over the other.

  “I’m so sorry. Are you alright?”

  Paul took one hand off the wheel to grab at the bottle of iced water he had put in the car’s cupholder. “Put this to your face, it should help.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Fukutetsu reluctantly took it.

  “...right. Just don’t drive like that next time.”

  “You could do with some gratitude that I’m driving you at all,” Paul retorted with a sudden burst of bravery; though he regretted that a second later.

  “I–I didn’t mean that to be rude. But really, you couldn’t have executed your plan as fast if I wasn’t here. Aren’t we supposed to be a team?”

  Fukutetsu’s eyes flashed as he squished his cheek against the icy cold bottle.

  “Do you seriously think I’m too young to have a license? I’m nineteen. Of course I do.”

  He said that number with the weight and dramatic revelation that every older teenager spoke of their age with–as if anything above fifteen (the babyish, child years) warranted them the respect and awe of adults three times their age. He was much younger than Paul had expected, or really wanted to hear when they were on their way to kidnap a man from the criminal underworld under the orders of a biblical angel.

  So he’s just making me chauffeur him for no reason? Paul’s small previous sympathy evaporated then and there.

  “Very nice,” he replied with gritted teeth. “That’s good to know you can drive us on the way back, then.”

  “Mhmmmmmhhhhh…..I could,” Fukutetsu drawled, playing with his seatbelt. “But it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to be caught speeding again, if we’re going to use this thing as a getaway car.”

  “Again?”

  “I hot-rodded my brother’s car so we could chase down somebody in a racecar, but it just so happened they ticketed me instead of him.”

  Is this what teenagers do for fun? Paul thought weakly.

  A pair of headlights flashed in the wing mirror, blinding him briefly. The carelessness of the driver behind them was astounding, to be on the road in the day with their lights turned up to maximum. Paul began to look for a way to change lanes, or perhaps let them overtake him.

  However, when he eased his shoe off the accelerator, the person behind him slowed down too. It was the same car that had almost hit them earlier. Black, with no markings, and the windows too dark to see inside.

  We’re being followed.

  “Mr. Fukutetsu.”

  “One moment, I’m thinking.”

  “Fukutetsu.”

  “Hush.”

  “Rintaro!” Paul hissed, and that made the young man behind him startle and stare at him with huge eyes.

  “We’re being followed.” He made sure to keep his voice lowered in a shouting-whisper, just in case whoever was driving behind could hear them somehow. Jamming his fingers into the buttons, he closed the back window, and Fukutetsu yanked his hand back in immediately.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That black car behind us. Don’t turn around, look at it through the wing mirror.”

  Fukutetsu’s bright eyes darted to the mirrors, and then he narrowed them as his entire face hardened in realization.

  “...that’s a nokemono car,” he said. “That’s why it’s tinted.”

  “I gathered that!” Paul retorted, feeling every hair on his body start bristling with anxiety. “You asked me if I have a gun, but do you?”

  “I don’t need one, I’m a neuropath!”

  “If that’s so, then how about you use that ability right now??”

  There was another screech of tires.

  The black car swerved again, this time drifting sideways across the road and hitting the left side of the car–thankfully not the side they sat on. There was a horrible noise of metal cracking and caving in and the bang of the collision nearly deafened both men immediately.

  Paul spun the wheel wildly, but their pursuer was not too willing to back down. His heartbeat sounded like a pounding drum echoing in his ears, so loud in fact, that he completely missed what Fukutetsu was saying until he shouted it at him.

  “–gun! The gun, throw it here!”

  The back window whirred as Fukutetsu put it down again. Paul scrabbled around, popping open the compartment and closing his hand around the cool, smooth plastic of the handle.

  The feel of it gave him a terrible pit in his stomach. There were real bullets in there–pitiless pieces of metal capable of tearing right through living human skulls. He wasn’t sure if he had the strength to handle something like that. He wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to, either, but Fukutetsu yanked it from his hand before he could properly order his thoughts.

  The young man climbed halfway out of the window and braced himself with his legs, both hands gripping the gun. He stared down the sight with total stillness, aiming it right at the windshield of the other car, at the very centre of the driver’s forehead.

  Paul held his breath, and the next second there was another deafening bang.

  But through the harsh ringing that swallowed up his hearing, there was no shattering of glass or wet splatter like he had expected. Paul stamped his foot on the pedal again, speeding up and swerving around a corner as Fukutetsu slid back in and blew on the smoking barrel.

  The car behind them spun off course immediately, crashing into the barrier and sliding off into a nearby building, emitting a plume of smoke from the hood.

  “What did you do?”

  “Shot one of their tires,” said Fukutetsu tersely. “But they’re probably still alive, so you need to drive.”

  This time, Paul had no complaints. He turned off into a smaller side alley, trying to avoid the traffic and the people ahead who seemed to have noticed a crash had occurred behind them.

  Except–he tried to, but the car suddenly ground to a stop.

  Even when he desperately revved the engine, it only groaned with the effort, as if he was driving into an invisible wall. Panicking, Paul reversed a little, only to feel the entire car suddenly be dragged even further back.

  “Fukutetsu, we’re-!”

  The young man adapted to the new threat immediately. “I know,” he said, quickly getting up and out of his seat to jump into the front. Through the windscreen, Paul could see an iron railing going up the fire exit to a building maybe ten feet ahead of them, which Fukutetsu was now staring directly at.

  As his face whitened a few shades, those iron railings began to spark, and then the entire car creaked yet again.

  「 Magnetokinesis - 4th Rank

  >>The ability to cause metallic objects to become magnetic, as well as strengthening or neutralising existing magnetism. 」

  That backwards force halted in favour of a slight creep forwards. They had been pulled away by somebody else’s ability, that much was easy to guess.

  The car hood was sparking now, a small buzzing making itself audible. Fukutetsu let out a soft noise of effort as his fingers slowly tightened on the seat, going bloodless with pressure.

  “Don’t overdo it,” Paul whispered, seeing his eyes turning bloodshot.

  Before either of them could do anything further, whatever outside force had been dragging the car suddenly disappeared; and with nothing to hold them back Fukutetsu let out a panicked shout as they hurtled straight into the railings.

  The windscreen shattered into pieces. The airbag that exploded out just in time was the only thing preventing Paul’s head from turning the dashboard into a cherry-red mess. Up was down and down was a whole new direction for a few rushed moments as the car’s front crumpled into the building, sending them both spinning until it rolled onto its side.

  “Agh…..uh….ah-”

  It was almost impossible to see out of the smoke now pouring from their own car in tandem with the wreck forty metres down the road.

  As everything settled into stillness, Paul wiggled the fingers in his hands. They all responded appropriately. Then he lifted his head, squinting in a desperate attempt to see.

  “Fukutetsu?”

  A 19-year-old shouldn’t be in this situation. He should be in school, or at home–

  “Mgh….I’m here…”

  His weak voice filtered through the creaking and popping of the twisted metal. There was blood running down Fukutetsu’s face from a small cut on his forehead, monocle lost somewhere amongst the glass. He began to push at the passenger door, trying to force it open, but it was so damaged the mechanism refused to budge.

  Paul slowly pushed himself up, trying not to put his hands on anything sharp. “You’ll hurt yourself. Let me try,” he panted. The next moment was filled with the heavy thud of a shoe on metal and a short pained grunt. Even the older man’s powerful kick did nothing to dislodge it.

  “It’s stuck against the stairwell,” said Fukutetsu through heavy wheezing breaths. “Put…put your sleeves over your hands, and try to climb out through the windscreen. I’ll follow you.”

  “Are you insane? You’ll cut yourself to shreds, you can’t–”

  Someone banged the window on the opposite side.

  Paul’s heart leaped joyfully. His first thought was that it was a kind pedestrian, or maybe even the police. The gun and the disastrous chase would be difficult to defend in a court of law, but right then he would have given anything just to get out of the wreck.

  “Hello?” he shouted, and then again: “Hello? We’re in here!”

  The web-like cracks on the windows obscured any clear view of the person outside. After a moment, Paul scrambled to right himself as he felt the car being pulled back onto all four wheels, causing a cascade of broken glass to pour around him.

  “Hello…?”

  The door on the opposite side was slowly, painstakingly wrenched open, and Paul realised their would-be rescuer was a woman.

  Her bright blue hair was the first thing he saw, like the skin of a poisonous frog. She yanked the handle clean off, tossing it aside, and it clattered noisily across the concrete before rolling to a lifeless stop.

  Her darkly-tanned skin was smeared with dirt and some blood from a little graze across her face. As Paul looked up, the woman tilted her head until the two were staring directly into each other’s eyes, and the second thing he saw was the wicked glee flickering in her gaze.

  “So you’re the ones looking for Mr. Kotaki?” she laughed.

  Paul’s heart dropped directly out of his chest.