The Aichi sunrise was a blocked, gray smear behind the chemical smog of the prefecture's manufacturing site.
Kaito Arisaka watched it from the window of the Shinkansen, his reflection over the gray landscape.
TO-TOOOOT
TO-TOOOOT
He stepped off the train at 07:45 AM.
The station was a full of navy-blue suits and the rhythmic clatter of leather shoes on tile.
Kaito blended in.
He was wearing a 6,000-yen off-the-rack business suit, carrying a standard black briefcase.
He followed the flow of the crowd toward the Detnerat transit bus.
Detnerat Subsidiary #4 was a windowless monolith of reinforced concrete.
It was the "Back Office" of the hero industry—the place where the gear that broke during patrols was sent to be judged.
Kaito walked through the security gates, his Grade 3 ID swiping with a clean beep.
He knew this place was a hornet's nest. He knew Rikiya Yotsubashi (Re-Destro) sat in a tower in Tokyo, and he knew Tomoyasu (Skeptic) was currently scouring the Kansai data logs for the "Hero X" that had optimized the Osaka ports.
Kaito didn't care.
The salary was 450,000 yen.
The health insurance for his grandmother, Saki, was the best in the country. If the Meta Liberation Army wanted to pay him, he would be the most efficient 9-5 guy they had ever hired.
-----
Day 1: 08:30 AM
The ritual was the same every morning.
Kaito entered the airlock.
The de-ionization spray hissed, a mist of sterile chemicals that stung his nostrils and neutralized his clothes.
He donned the white ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) smock, the hairnet, and the surgical mask.
By the time he entered Clean Room 09, he was unrecognizable. He was a white shape behind a glass barrier.
His booth was a 3x3 meter fortress of logic.
To Kaito's left sat the Digital Loupe 5000, a machine capable of seeing the molecular grain of carbon-fiber.
In front of him was the transaction tray—a pneumatic airlock for passing gear.
"Log-in: Auditor Arisaka. Grade 3," he muttered.
BEEP. BEEP.
The terminal flickered to life.
Kaito could feel the sub-routines of Skeptic's surveillance software probing networks connection. All of the data was monitored ny him.
It was like a digital insect crawling over his skin. With a thought, Kaito partitioned the surveillance server to his liking.
He fed the MLA servers a loop of "Standard 9-5 Behavior."
To the eyes in Tokyo, Kaito Arisaka was just a man typing at 60 words per minute, occasionally pausing to drink lukewarm tea.
-----
09:15 AM
Sssssssss
The heavy pressurized doors of the Sector 4 testing floor hissed open.
Hawks (Keigo Takami) didn't walk; he swaggered with the impatient energy.
At fifteen, he was a study in high-speed wear and tear. His blonde hair was wind-burnt and frizzy from constant Mach-speed friction, and his golden-brown eyes darted across the ceiling cameras with practiced, predatory awareness.
His red wings—vibrant but still developing their full muscular density, shedding micro-filaments into the sterile environment.
Hawks was wearing a prototype flight suit that looked more like an experimental jet-pilot's harness than hero gear.
"Auditor! Hey, Auditor!" Hawks barked, hopping onto a reinforced testing table right in front of the glass of Booth 09.
"The big-wigs in Tokyo told me this hub is a 'high-spec'. My headset is screaming. Every time I break Mach 1, it sounds like a tea kettle is exploding in my inner ear. The techies say it's a sensor glitch. Fix it so I can get back to patrol?"
Kaito didn't look up from his monitor. He was currently verifying the tensile strength of a carbon-fiber cable for a different agency.
"Take your boots off the table, Hawk-kun. And place the headset in the pneumatic tray. Your presence is already raising the count in this room beyond the acceptable limit for a Level-4 Clean Room."
Hawks blinked, his grin faltering. "Tough crowd. You know, most people ask for a feather. They're good luck, you know?"
"I'm an auditor, not a collector," Kaito said, his voice a flat, deadpan drone through the intercom.
He pulled the headset into his booth.
Kaito didn't need the Detnerat diagnostics tool, though he kept it running to feed fake data to Skeptic's surveillance.
He used his Mastery. He closed his eyes and felt the air molecules in the room.
He visualized the logic—the way the world should function.
Kaito saw the problem immediately. The headset had blunt, squared-off edges at the intake vents.
When Hawks hit high speeds, the air wasn't flowing around the device; it was slamming into it, creating a Von Kármán vortex street.
The air was literally "tripping" over the gear, causing high-frequency vibrations that the internal sensors were misinterpreting as electrical interference.
"The gear isn't glitched," Kaito said, sliding a digital tablet through the slot. He had sketched a series of overlapping, V-shaped patterns.
"Your flight path is the problem. You're flying with your primary feathers locked flat. It's creating a massive high-pressure wake that's funneled directly into the headset's intake."
"So? I'm a bird. I flap. Air moves. That's how physics works," Hawks retorted, leaning in.
"Then use better physics," Kaito countered.
"Look at the wings of a silent predator—an owl. They don't have flat edges. They have serrations. I want you to stagger your feathers into this formation. If you create a jagged trailing edge with your wings, you break the air into smaller, micro-vortices. It creates a pressure vacuum behind your head. The air will bypass the headset entirely instead of hitting it like a brick wall."
Kaito reached out with his mind. He didn't just give advice; he edited the molecular texture of the headset's casing.
He made the plastic "hydrophobic" to air—reducing the skin friction coefficient to near zero. He also "bound" the sensors to a specific frequency range that ignored the noise of Hawks' wings.
"Stagger them... like a V?" Hawks moved his hands, mimicking the Chevron pattern. "That feels... weird. It'll change my lift-to-drag ratio."
"It will increase your speed by 8% and stop your ears from bleeding," Kaito said, marking the ticket as RESOLVED.
"Now sign the log and leave. Your HPSC handlers are waiting in the lobby, and I have a thread-density audit in ten minutes."
Hawks stared at the diagram, then at Kaito. He saw a man who treated a legendary quirk like a faulty plumbing fixture. "You're a weird guy, Auditor. But I'll try it."
-----
It's day 4th, the afternoon shift was quiet until someone arrived.
The fifteen-year-old trainee looked like a frightened marshmallow in the clunky, oversized white space suit.
The glowing eyes behind the visor were wide with panic.
"I-I'm sorry to bother you, Auditor-san," Thirteen whispered through the intercom. "But the gauntlet seals on my right hand... they're beginning to fray. Every time I activate my Qurik, I feel the suit pulling toward my fingers. I'm afraid it's going to consume the sleeve."
Kaito took the gauntlet.
He could feel the gravity. It wasn't just a quirk; it was a spatial tear. Thirteen's containment gear was designed to suppress the hole, which was like trying to put a lid on a volcano.
"The engineers gave you a cage," Kaito said, his voice a clinical drone. "But you can't cage a singularity. You have to stabilize the 'drain'."
"The drain?" Thirteen asked.
"Think of a bathtub," Kaito said. "When the water just falls, it's chaotic. It splashes. It erodes the edges. But if you give the water a Vortex Spin, it creates a stable column. Focus your energy on the rotation at the very tip of your finger. If the 'spin' is tight enough, the event horizon remains centered. It won't touch the seals because the gravity is pulling inward on itself, not outward against the suit."
Kaito didn't just give advice. He reached out with his mind and "anchored" the spatial coordinates of Thirteen's gauntlet. He edited the reality of the suit's interior lining to be "Spatially Neutral," creating a buffer zone that the Black Hole couldn't bridge.
"Try it," Kaito commanded.
SWISH. SWISH. SWISH
Thirteen raised their hand. A small, controlled swirl of dark energy appeared at the fingertip. The suit didn't budge. The glowing eyes crinkled in a smile. "It... it feels light. Thank you, Auditor-san!"
"Sign the safety release," Kaito said. "And don't eat before your next test. The spatial rotation might affect your inner ear."
-----
Day 12: 11:30 AM (Aichi Hub)
A yellow-hoodie-clad mountain of a man who smelled of fried dough and laundry detergent entered.
At nineteen, Taishiro Toyomitsu, Fat Gum was already massive, but his "vessel" lacked the structural density because it's too soft.
"Auditor! right?" Fat Gum's voice boomed through the intercom, rattling the glass of Booth 09.
He held up a shredded Detnerat Tactical Vest. The high-tensile polymer was hanging in ribbons.
"The HPSC guys are gonna kill me! This is the third one this month. Some villain with a pressurized air-cannon just... pop! Right through the chest!"
Kaito didn't look up from his ledger. He was finishing a digital signature for a batch of other pro hero gears.
"You're bleeding on the floor. It's a Level-4 Clean Room. Every drop of your blood is an hour of sanitation I have to log."
"Ah, sorry, sorry!" Fat Gum laughed, though he looked genuinely exhausted. He dropped a crinkled bag of takoyaki onto the transaction tray. "Lunch is on me? As a bribe?"
Kaito stared at the bag through the glass. "Take that off my tray before I void your insurance contract."
Fat Gum sheepishly pulled the bag back, stuffing a piece of octopus into his mouth.
CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
Kaito pulled the vest into the booth.
Through the digital loupe, the failure was obvious. The fibers hadn't snapped from force; they had melted from the friction of Fat Gum's own body expanding and contracting too rapidly.
"You're acting like a sponge," Kaito said, his voice a flat, clinical drone. "You take the hit, the kinetic energy enters your adipose tissue, and it dissipates randomly. It's a mess. Because the energy has no direction, it creates heat. That heat is what's melting the vest's polymer lining."
"A sponge? But that's the point!" Fat Gum protested, patting his stomach. "I absorb the damage so it doesn't hit the people behind me!"
"It's inefficient," Kaito countered. He pulled up a blank projection on the glass. "Think of an industrial truck. It doesn't use sponges for suspension; it uses Leaf Springs. Layers of tempered steel that bend to store energy and then snap back. Your fat isn't just padding, Fat Gum-san. It's a biological polymer. If you layer it—tensing the deep tissue while keeping the surface pliable—you don't just 'take' the hit. You store the Joules."
Kaito reached out with his mind. He didn't just "fix" the vest; he edited the reality of Fat Gum's kinetic field. He organized the hero's energy dissipation into a tiered, hexagonal system. He was essentially writing the "firmware" for Fat Gum's future signature move.
"Layering... like a spring?" Fat Gum looked down at his midsection. He tried to mimic the "tension" Kaito was describing.
"Exactly," Kaito said, sliding the reinforced vest back through the tray. "I've updated the vest's molecular weave to match this 'Spring' logic. If you store the energy instead of letting it bleed out as heat, the vest stays cool. And eventually, if you store enough... you can release it all at once in a single, localized strike. But that's not my department. I'm just an auditor. I just want the gear to stop coming back shredded."
Fat Gum's eyes went wide. He tensed his core, and for the first time, his round form didn't just wobble—it hardened into something resembling hammered iron. "Whoa... I feel... solid. Like a battery!"
"You're a variable that needs to be balanced," Kaito said, already opening the next ticket.
"Now take your takoyaki and leave. Your presence is raising the humidity in the room by 4%."
'Its fun giving them some inspirations. Atleast they will saved more people and disasters and be an efficient pro-heroes' Kaito thought as he watched a happy man holding his gear and skipping while grinning from ear to ear.
-----
Day 15: 10:45 AM
BANG. BANG. BANG
The airlock didn't just open; it was kicked.
Someone entered and has a tanned muscle, white rabbit ears, and pure, unadulterated aggression.
She was wearing a simple purple leotard and metal-plated shin guards that were bent at sickening angles.
"Auditor! Hey, you in the box!" she yelled, slamming a shattered boot into the transaction tray. "This Detnerat junk snapped during a basic roundhouse! I want the high-density stuff, not this tin-foil garbage!"
Kaito didn't look up. "It snapped because you're hitting with 100% tension from the hip to the toe, Mirko-san. You're treating your legs like iron bars. Physics doesn't like iron bars; it likes Springs."
"Don't tell me how to kick!" she snapped.
"I'm telling you how to not break my equipment," Kaito said. "Relax your calf muscles until the microsecond before impact. Be a Rubber Band. If you stay soft until the hit, the kinetic energy doesn't vibrate back into the boot's frame. It flows into the target."
Kaito reached out with his mind and "Updated" the molecular bonds of her shin guards. He didn't just fix them; he made the metal "Elastic."
To the sensors, it looked like a standard alloy, but in reality, Kaito had made the boots as durable.
"I'll take your word for it Auditor" Rumi Usagiyama said after she left the room.
'No wonder a lot of people were glazing over her in my last life. Now that I remember, do she also a heat cyclenof a rabbit?' Kaito thought as he remembered some strange doujinshi panel in his last life.
[A/n: Kaito uses his power to make the Audit look like the Maintenance.
Standard Auditor: Finds a crack in the metal, rejects it, and sends it back to the factory.
Kaito (The Master): Sees the crack, uses his mind to fuse the molecules back together more strongly than before, and then logs the report saying: "No crack found. The previous technician was simply incompetent. Audit passed."]
-----
"Auditor, I tried the movement pattern thing," Hawks said, hovering six inches off the floor.
"The wind-noise is gone, but now I'm too fast. I'm outrunning my own GPS pings. Fix the satellite sync?"
'Haaa' Kaito sighed, it's already his 21st day in this company.
His fingers flying across the keyboard to manually "edit" the HPSC's satellite latency so it could keep up with Hawks' new speed.
"I'm not fixing the satellite, Takami-kun. I'm adjusting your 'Signal Lead-Time.' And stop hovering. You're creating a localized downdraft that's scattering my paperwork."
"Got it, got it"
-----
Day 27: 2:00 PM
Ryukyu entered the testing floor with a grace. She was tall, her silver hair tied back with a signature dragon-claw headband. She wore a high-collared, traditional-style hero suit made of Detnerat's premium heat-resistant polymers.
Even in her human form, she carried a predatory stillness.
'Hmm, finally a beauty. It's been a long time since Mirko came. All the other pros who came here were mostly males and has weird biological aesthetics. Thank you Horikoshi' Kaito thought.
But as she approached the glass of Booth 09, Kaito noticed the subtle "glitches" in her presence.
There were faint, shimmering heat waves rising from her skin, and the fabric of her collar was brittle—micro-fractures caused by extreme temperature fluctuations.
"Auditor Arisaka," she said, her voice a calm, melodic contrast to the intercom's static.
She placed a charred flight-suit component in the tray. "The HPSC mentioned your work with Hawks. They said you have a... unique perspective on structural integrity."
Kaito didn't look up from his screen. He was reviewing the molecular stress logs of her transformation. "The dragon form is the problem, Ryuku-san. You aren't just growing in size; you're increasing your metabolic output by four thousand percent in under three seconds. That's not a transformation; it's a localized thermal event."
"The suits are rated for three thousand degrees," she noted, her brow furrowing slightly.
"The suit is fine," Kaito countered, pulling the charred component into his booth.
"The problem is the byproduct," Kaito continued. "You're trapping the heat inside the suit's lining during the expansion phase. It's like putting a blowtorch inside a sealed thermos. The heat has nowhere to go, so it cooks the polymers from the inside out."
"I've tried external cooling units," Ryukyu said. "They're too bulky. They ruin the aerodynamics."
"You don't need a cooler. You need a Chimney," Kaito said.
He sketched a series of micro-perforations on the digital tablet, focusing on the spinal and axillary (underarm) regions of the suit.
"Look at industrial kilns. They don't use fans; they use passive venting. I'm going to adjust the suit's pore-density to follow a 'Chimney Effect' logic. As you grow, the suit will pull the cold air in from the ankles and blast the heat out through the spine."
Kaito didn't just sketch. He reached out with his mind and performed a "Silent Update" to the suit's material reality. He altered the thermal conductivity of the fibers, making them "One-Way" heat gates. He essentially turned her hero suit into a living heat-sink.
"Try a partial transformation," Kaito commanded. "Focus on venting the heat through your back, not holding it in your chest." as he give the equipment to her after doing some fake processing behind the glass.
Ryuko closed her eyes.
"Hmmm"
Her arms shifted, scales shimmering into existence for a brief second.
A violent blast of hot air hissed out of the suit's new "chimneys," rattling the ventilation ducts in the ceiling. The suit remained pristine. Not a single fiber melted.
"It... it's the first time I haven't felt like I was burning alive during the shift," she whispered, touching her shoulder.
She looked at Kaito with a piercing, analytical gaze. "You're wasted here, Arisaka-san. A mind like yours should be at the HPSC Headquarters, designing the next generation of gear."
"I don't like Tokyo," Kaito said, his fingers clicking rhythmically on the keyboard as he forged the R&D logs to hide his interference.
"Too many people. Too much noise. I'd rather sign your safety release and go back to my coffee."
"You are a strange man," she smiled, signing the log with a flourish. "But a brilliant one. If you ever tire of the 'quiet,' my agency is always looking for some talents like you."
"I'll keep that in mind," Kaito lied, already opening the next ticket. "Now please leave. You're still radiating enough heat to set off the fire suppressed-systems."
-----
Fat Gum returned twelve days later.
He wasn't laughing this time. He was thinner—his body had burned through months of caloric storage in a single night. He stood in front of the glass, looking at Kaito with a newfound, heavy respect.
"It worked," Fat Gum whispered. "There was a villain in the dockyards. A real heavy hitter. I did what you said. I layered the hits. I felt the energy 'stacking' inside me. And then... I just let it go."
He pointed to his knuckles, which were bruised bone-deep. "I didn't just absorb him, Auditor-san. I broke him."
"It was a correction of a technical error. You were using your body incorrectly. I merely provided the manual. Now, do you have the damage report for the vest, or are you here to waste more of my shift?"
Fat Gum grinned, leaning his now-slimmer frame against the glass. "You're a lifesaver, you know that? Even if you are a grumpy jerk."
"I'm a professional," Kaito corrected. "And your 'Spring' theory caused a 2% increase in my paperwork. Don't let it happen again."
-----
Day 37
Mirko returned three weeks later. She wasn't yelling, but she looked annoyed.
She dropped the same boots into the tray. They weren't broken, just covered in villain blood and concrete dust.
"They didn't break," she muttered, crossing her arms and looking away. "My training partner... I broke his ribs through his armor. The boots didn't even creak. It's boring. I like the sound of things breaking."
"Then break the villain, not the invoice," Kaito said, cleaning the sensors. "Your efficiency rating is up 15%. Keep using the 'Spring' logic and stop wasting my time with 'boredom' complaints."
-----
Day 45
Hawks returned six weeks later, landing on the platform with a silent, terrifying precision that wasn't there before.
He had mastered the new movement feathering. He looked leaner, faster, and for the first time, he wasn't shouting.
"It works," Hawks said, dropping the headset into the tray. It was pristine. No scratches, no vibration damage.
"I hit Mach 2.4 yesterday. No noise. Just... silence. Even the villains didn't hear me coming until I was on top of them."
Kaito pulled the logs. "Good. Then my paperwork for this month will be shorter. Is there a technical reason for this visit, or are you just here to contaminate my air filters again?"
Hawks leaned against the glass, looking at Kaito with a strange, heavy intensity.
"Why are you here, Arisaka? A guy who understands aero-acoustics better than the HPSC's top engineers... why are you sitting in a windowless box in Aichi signing off on gear-checks?"
Kaito adjusted his glasses. "I like the dental plan, Takami-kun. And at 5:00 PM, I get to go home and eat a rice ball in silence. That is a luxury your 'Hero' life will never afford you."
Kaito pushed the signed release form through the tray. "Now go away. You're making me late for my lunch break."
-----
In the subterranean "Command Center" of Detnerat's Tokyo headquarters, the air was chilled to precisely 16°C.
Skeptic sat at the center of a circular console, his long, spindly fingers twitching over a haptic interface.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap
To anyone else, the screens showed supply chain logistics. To Skeptic, they showed the Quirk Singularity's entropy.
"It's happening again," Skeptic hissed.
On the main monitor, the heat map of "Efficiency Anomalies" was centered directly on Subsidiary #4. Specifically, Clean Room 09.
"Rikiya, look at the delta-curve for the Support Gear Audits," Skeptic said as Re-Destro stepped into the glow. "When Hawks or Mirko test gear, the failure rate is 12.4%. They are destructive. But for the last forty-five days, the failure rate in Aichi has been 0.00%. Not a single rejected batch. Not a single fracture."
Re-Destro leaned in. "Zero? That's not a miracle, Tomoyasu. That's a lie. Is the Auditor lazy?"
"I thought so," Skeptic snapped, pulling up Auditor Arisaka's biometric logs. "But look at the documentation. Arisaka doesn't just sign off. He files three-hundred-page technical reports. He claims the gear didn't break because the previous technicians made 'clerical errors' in calibration. He's re-writing the maintenance history of every piece of gear he touches."
...
Kaito felt the digital probe. It felt like a cold needle pressing against the back of his neck.
He didn't stop typing. He didn't look at the hidden camera.
'What a drag', Kaito thought.
Kaito reached out with his mind.
He didn't just hide; he manipulated the corporate reality.
When he "fused" the molecular cracks in Mirko's boots using his quirk, he didn't leave a "quirk" signature.
Kaito manually edited the facility's Audit Log 12-B. He wrote a scathing report blaming the Aichi Maintenance Team for using the wrong torque settings on the assembly line. He made it look like the gear was always perfect, and it was only "human error" that made it seem broken before it reached his desk.
To Skeptic, it looked like this:
* The Reality: Kaito fixed a broken boot with his mind.
* The Log: Auditor Arisaka discovered the boot wasn't broken, just misaligned by a lazy technician. Audit passed after "Minor Calibration."
...
"He's just normal," Skeptic muttered, watching the video feed of Kaito drinking lukewarm tea.
"He's just a spiteful, high-spec professional who hates his coworkers' incompetence. He's finding the 'errors' we missed and filing them under Standard Operating Procedure."
...
Kaito went further.
He accessed the Detnerat R&D-9 server. He forged a series of firmware updates, backdating them by three months.
He made the "miraculous" stability of Fat Gum's vest look like a success of Detnerat's own internal software.
He wasn't just hiding; he was making the MLA think they were the ones getting stronger.
The Final Result?
Skeptic pulled back.
"The boy is a good worker," Skeptic concluded, closing the file. "An infuriatingly efficient drone who is making our Aichi team look like amateurs."
Kaito watched the probe withdraw. He logged out at 04:59:58 PM.
He had successfully turned his reality-warping into a Technical Optimization Report. He had turned a miracle into Maintenance.
-----
WHIISHHH
The airlock opened with a slow, deliberate hiss.
Tsunagu Hakamada (Best Jeanist) walked onto the testing floor. He was twenty-seven, in the height of his "Aesthetic" prime.
His denim collar was so high it brushed his ears, and his hair was a golden, razor-sharp sculpture.
"The HPSC informed me that Aichi's Subsidiary #4 had recruited a 'Specialist' of remarkable precision," Jeanist said, his voice a smooth baritone. He stepped up to the glass.
His eyes met Kaito's.
Kaito didn't flinch. He sat with perfect posture, his white smock pristine, his movements clinical and dry. He looked like a man who had never touched a wrench in his life.
"The spools, Sir," Kaito said, gesturing to the transaction tray. "I've reviewed the batch you sent from Tokyo. They are unacceptable."
Jeanist's eyes narrowed. "Unacceptable? That thread is the result of six months of genetic fiber engineering. It has the 'flow' of silk and the strength of steel."
"It has the flow of silk, yes," Kaito said, sliding a digital report through the slot. "But look at the molecular scan. Your engineers used a standard Cross-Stitch weave at the core. It's elegant, but it creates a single point of failure under tension. If you use this to restrain a villain with a strength-quirk exceeding 4,000 Newtons, the fibers will melt into each other from the friction. It's a death trap."
Jeanist picked up the tablet. He looked at the scan, then at Kaito. "I remember you. Shizuoka. The vocational school. You were the boy who the HPSC kept tabs for years. I didn't know you already worker here"
"I was a student who realized that fixing things is messier than auditing them, Sir" Kaito replied, his voice a flat, bureaucratic wall. "I found a profession that values precision over 'flow.' Now, please look at the suggestion on page three."
Kaito had drafted a Honeycomb Lattice structure—a hexagonal weave inspired by carbon nanotube geometry.
"The honeycomb distributes the kinetic load across six vectors instead of two," Kaito explained. "It's not as 'pretty' under a microscope, but it will hold a falling crane. Do you want a thread that looks good, or a thread that works?"
Jeanist was silent for a long minute. He felt the "logic" of the suggestion. Jeanist sighed, a sound of defeated aesthetic.
"It lacks... spirit," Jeanist murmured. "But its functionality is undeniable. You've grown, Arisaka-kun. You've found your 'true thread.'
You were never meant for the workshop; you were built for the audit."
"Sign the log, Hakamada-san," Kaito said. "I have a lunch break in five minutes."
-----
The contract ended on a rainy Friday.
Kaito stood in the empty Clean Room 09. He had audited 4,200 components. He had "fixed" six future Top Pros. And he had fooled the Meta Liberation Army into thinking their factory was just "working well."
Kaito's suitcase was packed. His single suit was pressed.
He had 450,000 yen in his bank account, plus a 50,000 yen "Efficiency Bonus."
As Kaito walked toward the exit, he saw a small group waiting by the security gate.
Hawks was sitting on a railing. Mirko was leaning against a wall, her bunny ears twitching. Ryukyu stood with her arms crossed, her dragon-headband catching the dim light.
"Leaving already, Auditor?" Hawks asked, jumping down. "The HPSC offered you a Lead Consultancy. They said you can name your price."
Kaito adjusted his glasses. He looked at the "this Bridge Generation"—the heroes who would define the next decade.
To them, he was a genius. To him, they were just variables that he had finally balanced.
"I have a 9-to-5 life to get back to," Kaito said, his voice flat and final. "It's is too loud there. Too much ozone. I prefer the quiet."
"You're a weird guy, Arisaka," Mirko barked, a smirk on her face. "But if my boots break again, I'm coming to find you."
"Please don't," Kaito said. "The consultation fee for private work is triple my Haken rate."
He walked through the gate. He didn't wave. He didn't look back.
He boarded the Shinkansen heading toward Shizuoka. He was nineteen years old.
But as the train blurred past the Aichi skyline, Kaito Arisaka just pulled out a 10-yen-off coupon for a convenience store rice ball. He had five minutes before it expired.
He bit into the tuna rice ball, the dry seaweed crunching in the quiet carriage.
"Good grief," he muttered.
And then, he closed his eyes and let the world fade away.
~~~~~
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(9 Advanced Chapters)