FULL GEAR — Chapter 23: "Miyu"
The moment before the door opened and the fight resumed lasted less than a second. No—less than a moment.
Herro snapped back into his stance immediately, fist raised, eyes wide. When the door opened, no one stepped through. Instead, he saw something far more bizarre—the door itself was ripped off and vanished into the darkness beyond.
A sharp rush of air followed, like something spinning at high speed.
By the time he understood what was happening, Miyu had already hurled the door toward him like a javelin. He leaned back as far as he could, the door missing his nose by barely an inch.
As he shifted his momentum to stand upright again, a fist was already there.
More accurately, Miyu herself was there—having launched her entire body forward alongside the door at blinding speed.
Herro ducked to his left, barely avoiding the strike by the skin of his cheek. Noticing that Miyu was still airborne, he took advantage of the opening and drove his knee upward into her chin. The sound of the impact was harsh and unpleasant.
What concerned him more was how little damage it seemed to do.
Miyu flew past him, still carrying momentum even after taking the hit. She came to a sudden stop, like a car slamming its brakes, her knees and stockings scraping hard against the rooftop.
"UHHHHHHH, YOU ARE GONNA PAY FOR THAT!" Miyu shouted in rage, gesturing toward her knee where her stocking now had a hole. She appeared more upset about the damage to her clothing than the open wound beneath it. In truth, she did not seem to care much about her injuries at all.
"And when I say pay for that, I mean literally and financially," she added.
Herro stared at her in disbelief. This girl, who had been insulting and attacking him nonstop, was easily one of the most frustrating people he had ever encountered. She ignored logic completely and refused to listen to anything he said.
"What in Terra's name is wrong with you!?" Herro shouted.
"Say what now?" Miyu responded, clearly caught off guard.
"Are you insane!? You're trying to kill me, and we're on the SAME SIDE!" Herro yelled, still keeping his fist raised. He knew better than to lower his guard. "This is crazy. Why are we even fighting!? Even if I were a Jackal—which, to remind you, I'M NOT—wouldn't me running away count as your victory? You'd get the package. Why are you still pushing a problem that doesn't even exist?"
Miyu let out a chuckle.
From what Herro had seen so far, that was either bad or very bad.
The chuckle quickly turned into full laughter.
"On the same side? Hahahahahah."
She wiped at her eye slightly before continuing.
"Listen, dude. Everything you're saying assumes I need a reason to beat on someone."
Herro stared at her, stunned.
"WHAT?"
Miyu raised her hand to cut him off, clearly signaling that it was her turn to speak.
"I am the royal princess, third in line within the White Lion Empire. To be perfectly honest, you look like some family-unit street rat. Realistically, I don't believe I need to justify my actions to someone of your level. I consider you beneath me. But I'll humor you."
She cracked her neck, her expression sharpening.
"I was already in a bad mood before this. Then you touched my hair. That gives me free rein to call this self-defense and beat the crap out of you. Of course, if you were someone I respected instead of… this, maybe I would hold back."
"…What?" Herro's voice trembled, caught between confusion and anger.
Miyu let out an exaggerated, loud sigh and looked at him like he was slow.
"Think about it like this, Herro." She made air quotes around his name. "If you saw a bug you didn't like, you'd step on it, right? You wouldn't ask it why it's crawling in front of you. You wouldn't hear it out… right? You'd just stomp it."
She paused briefly, her expression flat.
"I'm the one doing the stomping."
WHAMMMMM
A massive right swing from Herro went straight into the jaw of the Yamashita.
"DON'T GIVE ME THAT CRAP."
"A bug."
Herro's voice came out quiet. Not calm — the specific quiet of something that had burned past the point where volume was relevant.
"You just called me a bug."
He spit blood to the side and brought his hands back up.
"I walked two and a half hours across North Valor tonight. I climbed fourteen flights of stairs in the dark. I grabbed your hair by accident and said sorry — actually said sorry — and you put me through a WALL. I tried to explain myself and you did that thing where you repeated everything I said. I told you my unit's name and you called me a liar. I tried to stop the fight THREE times and you kept swinging. You called my jersey cheap. And now—"
He gestured at her, at the rooftop, at everything.
"NOW you're comparing me to a bug. Because of where I'm from. Because of how I dress. Because your day was bad and I was close enough to hit."
He stepped forward.
"I don't care what type of princess you are. I don't care what your Gear does. I'm still winning this — you spoiled brat."
They went at each other the moment the words left his mouth.
No gap. No reset. Just the immediate, mutual decision of two people who had been building toward something and had finally arrived at it together.
She came in fast — full commitment, no setup, the same relentless forward pressure that had defined the entire fight. He met her halfway.
The exchange was brutal and short. Her right caught his shoulder and rotated him. His left drove into her ribs and she absorbed it and returned a hook that clipped his ear and made the world tilt sideways briefly. He got his forearm up for the second, absorbed the third on his collarbone, and felt the bone complain at volume. She grabbed his collar again. He grabbed her wrist. They were chest-close for one half second, both breathing hard, both refusing to be the one who moved back first.
He threw the uppercut from close range.
Not full. Controlled. The same deliberate, measured hit he'd been using all night — designed to create space, not finish something.
But this time, in the 0.003 seconds of his fist connecting with the underside of her chin, something aligned that hadn't aligned all night.
He felt it.
The Terran Energy met the impact exactly where it was supposed to — not before, not after, at it, simultaneous, the Gear locking into the strike like a key finding a tumbler in the dark through feel alone. The stored energy compressed into the contact point.
He triggered it immediately.
BOOM.
The secondary impact detonated from her chin with four times the force of the original hit. The sound was wrong — not the sound of a punch landing but something heavier, a concussive crack that the open rooftop air swallowed and spat back. For a single frame, something appeared behind the motion — a shape made of white-edged Terran Energy, transparent, his own silhouette reproduced in light, throwing the same uppercut again from the same angle with white eyes and no face. Gone before it fully formed.
Miyu left the ground.
Not stumbled. Not staggered. Left it. Her body went up and sideways simultaneously — the force having a direction it had decided on and executing it — and she came down hard on the rooftop gravel four meters away. Not a controlled landing. The full, unmanaged impact of a person whose body had received a message too fast to respond to.
She lay there.
Herro stood where he'd thrown it.
His arm was still extended from the follow-through. His right eye was swelling shut from something she'd landed two exchanges ago. His ribs were making sounds that ribs should not make. The hand that had thrown the punch was shaking — not from fear, from the accumulated damage of a night of trying to stop a force of nature with his bare hands.
He waited.
(That's it,) he thought. (That has to be—)
She laughed.
From the ground. On her back. She laughed — long, genuine, slightly broken at the edges by the fact that she was clearly working around something in her jaw, but laughing nonetheless.
"Okay," Miyu said, from the gravel. "Okay. Sure."
She sat up. Slowly. One hand braced against the rooftop.
"That one actually—" she touched her jaw, tilted it experimentally, something in her expression shifting for half a second before the grin came back, "—okay. Yeah. That one counted."
She stood up.
Herro's legs decided, at this precise moment, that they had fulfilled their professional obligations and submitted their resignation. He went down to one knee before he could stop himself — not a choice, just the combined invoice of everything arriving at once. The swollen eye. The ribs. The collarbone. The forearms. The gut. All of it, collected, presented.
Miyu looked at him from across the rooftop.
She tilted her head.
"Aww," she said.
"Don't."
"Was that your big move?" She gestured at the space where she'd landed, the gravel displaced by the impact. "Was that what you had? That was the finale? The grand moment?" She pressed both hands to her cheeks in exaggerated awe. "The little energy punch thing?"
"It worked," he said, through his teeth.
"I'm standing."
"You were on the ground—"
"Briefly," she said. "Briefly on the ground. Momentarily. I was momentarily on the ground and now I am standing and you—" she pointed at him, on one knee, "—are not." She let the point sit for a second. "So. Statistically."
Herro did not have a response to this that he could deliver without his voice doing something embarrassing, so he said nothing.
"You gave it everything," Miyu continued, and her tone was almost gentle, which was somehow worse than the contempt. "You really did. I could tell. That was very — spirited. For someone who dresses like that, honestly very spirited." She rolled her shoulder, the one that had taken three of his better hits tonight, without any visible indication that the shoulder had an opinion about this. "You should feel good about yourself."
He pushed off his knee and stood up.
It cost him something real to do it.
She watched him do it.
"You're still trying," she said. Something unreadable crossed her face for exactly one second. Then the grin was back. "Okay, loser. Let's finish this."
Then....BOOM
Hilda came off the stairwell door like she'd been moving for several floors already.
No announcement. No pause at the threshold. The door opened and she was already in motion, her trajectory set before she'd cleared the frame — a running kick that had been loaded since whatever floor she'd heard the noise from, and Miyu Yamashita had approximately zero seconds of warning before Hilda's foot connected with her side and sent her across the rooftop.
CRACK.
Miyu hit the parapet wall. Gravel scattered from the impact. She bounced off it and landed in a crouch, one hand catching the rooftop, amber eyes finding the new arrival with the specific expression of someone who had been mid-sentence and was now recalibrating.
Herro's knee hit the ground.
Not a choice. The leg just went. He caught himself on one hand, the gravel pressing into his palm, and decided this was an acceptable position for the moment. He had earned this position. He was going to stay in this position for a brief and reasonable period of time.
Hilda was in front of him.
Her hand landed on top of his cap — the same motion she'd used in the precinct hallway, the same careless specific weight of it — and she looked him over with the efficiency of someone doing a damage assessment in three seconds.
"You okay?"
"Define okay."
"Alive and mostly your original shape."
"Then yes."
"Sorry I took so long." She patted his head once. Not gentle, not rough. Just present. "Generator took longer than it should have."
"EXCUSE ME."
Miyu's voice came from across the rooftop at a volume that suggested the parapet impact had not meaningfully affected her mood.
"EXCUSE ME, WHO THE HELL IS THIS?"
Hilda straightened up.
She turned around.
The two of them looked at each other across the rooftop — Miyu in the gravel with her stocking torn and blood on her face and her jacket askew, and Hilda with her hands in her pockets and her ponytail intact and the expression she wore when she had already assessed a situation and formed an opinion she was comfortable with.
"First of all," Hilda said, "bitch, who are you?"
Miyu's eye twitched.
"I asked first—"
"You asked louder," Hilda said. "That's different."
Miyu opened her mouth.
Hilda was already looking at her like she was something she'd stepped in.
Herro got quiet knowing he was about to see something intense.