Chapter Text
[The Pacific Ocean, June]
It was a heady, heavy summer, and Hajime Hinata was being held at sword-point by a man more than thirty metres away from him.
From such a distance, the sword looked more like a chopstick than an actual threat, a thin blur as indistinct as the literal ocean between it and Hajime’s unstabbed face. Its wielder was leaning over the crow’s nest of an enemy pirate ship; his features were even more distorted by space and wind than his blade.
But, if Hajime squinted just so, he could make out the curve of an eyebrow, the twist of a jaw, the righteous fury smouldering in his opponent’s eyes. Or that may have been embarrassment—Hajime would certainly have been embarrassed in his position. As it stood, he just waved, untethering a length of mast rigging from his own crow’s nest perch.
“Hey, dickless!”
It was neither Hajime nor the chopstick-wielder who had spoken.
Captain Kuzuryu of the Farewell was climbing up after Hajime, singular eye glittering with mirth. His freckles stood raised and dark against the thin air of altitude, and the ruff at his throat rippled like a frilled jellyfish in the wind. In one hand he held the rope ladder; the other was making a crude gesture at the enemy ship.
Hajime loosened his grip on the rigging. “For a moment there, I thought you were talking to me.”
The mere suggestion seemed to offend Fuyuhiko greatly. He wrinkled his nose. “Of course not; I have far more respect for you than that. Unless...” he paused, surveying Hajime with a critical eye. “Unless you have something in your medical history you’ve yet to disclose?”
Even after a year of knowing the Ultimate Yakuza, Hajime couldn’t quite tell whether that was a poorly executed joke, a well-executed threat or a genuine question. Especially when considering the sheer exorbitance of Hajime’s medical history.
Fuyuhiko’s expression didn’t change; Hajime’s grin became a grimace.
“No,” he clarified firmly, not believing that should be something he’d have to clarify. He adjusted his grip on the rigging a final time. “That’s not on there.”
And that should have been the end of their conversation. But as Hajime climbed onto the crow’s nest’s wooden railing, flaring his arms reflexively outward, his captain’s expression brought him pause.
“Hey, you be careful out there, okay?” Fuyuhiko called. “If you lose one of those weird-ass eyes out there, I’m not sharing my eyepatch. Or dealing with those three on my own.”
Despite himself, Hajime felt his eyes soften.
“Don’t worry,” he began lightly, bending at the knees. He looked over his shoulder. “I always am.”
Then he jumped, gripping the rigging with one hand, unsheathing his katana with the other.
And for a soaring, swooping heartbeat, the very wind seemed to hold its breath. The world slid sideways, narrowed to water and sky and a single person, suspended between them. Green lights of nausea appeared and threaded between his eyes as he plummeted; and against the sawblade rigging, Hajime’s hand became a slab of raw meat, numbed by cold and seeming utterly detached from his body.
He gritted his teeth; he laughed. Then he used his katana to sever the rope.
The wind breathed again in a long, slow sigh. Gravity reached out and tilted the world upright; and caught in its grip, Hajime landed on a clean, wooden deck, shockwaves arcing through his knees like lightning strikes. Nobody spoke.
Hey, he realised absently, this time I even managed to avoid skidding. With a deck as absurdly well-polished as this particular warship’s—and the heeled boots Fuyuhiko had commissioned for him—such a feat was easily the most technically impressive of the day. If not the flashiest.
Unfortunately, most of the manoeuvre’s flashiness—and Hajime’s budding ego—was swiftly counteracted by a distant, answering, “No the fuck you’re not!” from Fuyuhiko, more than thirty metres away.
His triumph was further annihilated by the fringe of once-stupefied guardsmen now circling him like sharks. As though broken from a spell, each was rapidly regaining their senses, their anger and their weapons: which were now an actual threat. Hajime surveyed the mob carefully.
His opponents were wearing billowing hemp robes and iron-plated breastplates, but they had blocked the hatch to belowdecks faster than he would have given them credit for—Empress Enoshima’s faithful were nothing if not driven.
Taking a step back, Hajime cocked his head, then raised his sword arm in surrender. He smiled. And as they advanced, weapons held high, he slid his free hand slowly into the folds of his yukata.
“Halt, in the name of Lor—”
Hajime flung a fistful of alchemical powder in a wide arc, darting backwards and covering his ears as the guardsmen were bowled over by the ensuing explosion. Non-fatally, of course. Those closest to the blast would wake up in mere hours, with more bruises than visible skin, but retaining all original limbs and organs. He knew that for certain.
After re-joining the 77th division in April, Mikan—the Ultimate Healer—had thrown herself into the modification of Kazuichi—the Ultimate Blacksmith—’s old artillery. Now, each was specifically attuned to the destruction of non-organic matter: it was splinters of wood, not flesh, that pelted Hajime as he leapt over the guards’ unconscious forms.
Hurtling himself through the hatch in a single movement, he found himself in a surprisingly long hall, hung with red curtains and crowned by a silver-rimmed mirror. And after rising to his feet, he glanced into the glass through slitted eyes.
Two more guardsmen, slabbed over with scar tissue and muscle, were barrelling along the corridor toward him, drawn by the blast. The first carried an axe; the second had withdrawn a glittering rapier.
Hajime levied his katana and sighed.
Then he moved. Adder-swift, he surged forwards in a blur of motion, striking low and cleaving the first man’s shield in two. As his opponent cried out, staggering out of reach, Hajime battered aside a jab from the second, then leaned into his lowered guard and slammed the butt of his katana between widened eyes.
The first man, still staring dumbfounded at the shattered halves of his shield, watched his comrade fall. Perhaps he thought him dead. That would explain the desperate roar as he rushed toward Hajime, raising his axe and swinging it down, down in a terrifying arc.
Terrifying, yet imprudent. Splinters erupted from the floor where it landed, yet its target had already rolled to the side. Striking fast and rearing backwards, Hajime kicked his opponent’s feet out from under him contemptuously. Then he stood back to watch.
Here’s the unfortunate thing about being the size of a tree: you fall like one too. The guardsman hit the floor beside his buried axe with a resounding crack. He didn’t get up.
Stepping carefully over both weapon and man, Hajime readjusted his katana and advanced to the open door the pair had emerged from.
“Lord Komaeda?”
The room was shrouded in darkness. Every shutter was drawn, save for one beside the entrance, backlighting Hajime in an arrowing rectangle of light. If his call hadn’t alerted any hidden opponents, his silhouette would have drawn even the deafest among them.
He took a cautious step inward.
Furniture protruded from the long, wide walls within like shadows with bones. The smell of undercooked meat and spices percolated between—a curious blend of animal fat, aniseed and oranges. Hajime’s enhanced senses neatly categorised each individual scent, just as they neatly categorised the sudden footsteps hurtling headlong toward him.
“Die, bastard!”
Hajime whirled, swinging the butt of his katana upwards and landing a vicious uppercut on his assailant’s jaw. A pained gasp. His opponent staggered, gaping at Hajime with a fishbowl mouth, eyes rolling to the back of his head like twin marbles.
Uncreative and unable to take a hit. As Hajime lifted him by the back of his yukata, he dangled limply, already unconscious.
Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, Hajime saw that his foe was unusually innocuous. Middle-aged, bereft of scars and rather tubby—more suited to busywork than battle. A servant, perhaps? He lowered him to the floor, brow furrowing.
“Mukaiyama!”
A figure in a flowy white kimono stumbled across the room, falling to his knees beside the servant. Like Hajime, he was barely more than a teenager, slender and oddly pale, pink-dusted hair swirling like cobwebs in the air between them. He didn’t look up. He rolled the soldier onto his back, then reached out and wrapped five tapered fingers around his throat.
For a moment, it seemed to Hajime that he was going to strangle him. Before he could intervene, however—because he couldn’t just let the man die, Despair or not—he realised that the boy’s lax hand was only searching for a pulse. Rather unorthodoxly.
“Mukaiyama?” The boy withdrew his hand. He sighed.
“Komaeda-sama?”
The boy glanced up sharply. Through soot-matted eyelashes, his green-grey eyes glinted like washed river pebbles—wet on top, dark and dull beneath. He ran them down Hajime’s upright form with a startling intensity; curious, Hajime returned the favour.
Like ‘Mukaiyama’, the man seemed entirely out of place, yet for an entirely different reason. Along the sleeves of what Hajime had taken for a plain kimono swirled clouds of filagree gold. And though the fabric was blackened and torn by debris, the hairpins at Komaeda’s temples lent him a certain grandeur. Sunlight flashed off their four points whenever he moved his head… clover-shaped? Hajime wondered.
If those were real gold, in an economy decimated by The Tragedy, his suspicions had rung true: the man before him was none other than Lord Komaeda Nagito himself.
Still, it was odd that he’d been allowed to keep them—according to Fuyuhiko’s yakuza intelligence, the reclusive daimyō had been imprisoned in his own estate for months—Enoshima’s army should have relieved him of any valuables within seconds. If not seconds after his capture, then seconds after learning of their leader’s defeat in Edo. Had their restraint been owed to luck, or something else?
“Komaeda-sama,” Hajime began, offering a hand, “I’ve come to rescue you.”
The daimyō’s ears must still have been ringing from the shockwave; it took him a few seconds to grasp Hajime’s words.
“...Rescue me?”
“Of course,” he replied uneasily. His hand, still suspended in the air between them, was beginning to cramp. And look rather awkward—he needed to speed this up. “Do you know who I am?”
The daimyō’s eyes flickered to the emblem at his chest, then lit up like a firework display. “Oh, yes,” he breathed reverently. “I know precisely who you are.”
Lord Komaeda rose from the servant’s unconscious form, clasping Hajime’s outstretched hand with two of his own.
“You’re perfect.”
[Komaeda Estate, March – Three Months Earlier]
Nagito Komaeda had woken up that morning to find himself a criminal.
It was shocking news, of course, but made entirely logical as its deliverer expounded. Empress Enoshima was dead; the empire Nagito had subsidised for years was toppled, leaving its allies to either flee or be felled in turn.
If he were a saner man, or perhaps a less intelligent one, this would have seemed a profound stroke of bad luck. It might have merited a great deal of worry, or colourful language, or a simple rail against the injustices of the world. Perhaps he would have whipped a servant or two.
As it stood, Nagito was having a marvellous day.
Seated neatly on the throne where he’d spent most of his life, a newfound fire was thrumming beneath the daimyō’s skin, zipping through his veins like a never-ending arrow, prickling at his too-wide eyes with a strange, sugar-rush ache. After years of stoking the flames of despair from across the sea, a worthy hope had finally risen to douse them. Everything was as it should be.
Mukaiyama, his chief retainer, shared none of his master’s enthusiasm.
“Komaeda-sama,” he began, eyeing the emissary’s retreating back, “shall I schedule a scribing?”
Idly, Nagito reached over and plucked a slice of crabapple from a nearby fruit platter. The day’s excitement had made him quite peckish. “A scribing?” he echoed dryly. “Whatever for?”
Mukaiyama stared at him. Nagito bit into the crabapple.
“Surely, you’ll want to compose a letter of surrender—and peace—to Emperor Naegi?”
Nagito’s answering smile felt like a crack opening in porcelain—thin at first, then splitting wide. Now that was a name he could get used to hearing.
When the Tragedy had first struck, Nagito had recruited dozens of emissaries to survey the mainland, ensuring he stayed unreservedly informed. Now, after years of correspondence, one had finally brought him the long-awaited news: an escaped prisoner of Despair and his ultra-talented, Ultimate companions—blessed by the gods themselves—had overthrown their despotic oppressor. With Enoshima’s suicide (and what else could she have done in the face of such indisputable hope?) four years of famine and plague and pestilence were finally at an end.
Naegi Makoto—a name for the swooping calligraphy and fairy tale illustrations of Nagito’s youth. Hope personified.
“No,” he decided simply, selecting another sliver of fruit at random. “There will be no need for surrender.” This time, he had withdrawn a pear; its winter-wrinkled flesh was tart and snagged uncomfortably between his teeth. Unlucky.
After a moment of otherwise blissful silence, Mukaiyama’s expectant look reminded him of the conversation he’d discarded. Nagito lifted his eyes from the fruit platter. “Mukaiyama, I haven’t been entirely transparent with you.”
He rarely was. From a young age, the last living Komaeda had become very careful, very suddenly, about transparency. People tended to look right through transparent things, after all.
“You see, beyond the walls of this estate, not a single soul knows of my defection. As you will later attest, I have been a prisoner of despair for years—much like the other Lords and Ladies still loyal to the Kirigiri family. Nobody has any reason to arrest me, nor any proof of my involvement at all.”
His retainer baulked, then opened his mouth. That was good. Komaeda had begun to think him turned to stone. “But what of our connections with the Warriors of Hope?”
“Already taken care of,” he dismissed. “Even they themselves wouldn’t connect the ever-dutiful Servant with Lord Komaeda, daimyō of the wealthiest prefecture in Japan. Anyone who did would merely believe me a prisoner of Despair; and who could blame a prisoner for surrendering his coffers? Especially one so enthusiastically, fiscally receptive to Hope’s return?”
Though, his brow furrowed. Mukaiyama’s allusion to his once-allies was troubling for entirely different reasons. Now that Enoshima had been overthrown, he had no more use for them—no more hope could be fostered by infantile pretenders to it.
Ah, that reminds me, Nagito realised. “On the subject of hope...”
Perhaps, he supposed, it was time that he finally shed the gilt chrysalis of his estate. Assisting Naegi’s armies in person would be far more efficient—and sincere—than written correspondence. While someone like him was by himself useless, his late parents had left him enough gold to open any closed door in the world. Even without the menagerie of samurai and blacksmiths and retainers he’d possessed before the Tragedy, half of the rooms in his estate were vault rooms. Fortune always favoured the undeserving.
“You’re alone, right Mukaiyama?” he mused, inspecting his nails for pear skin.
Weighted by a decade of his master’s strange tirades, his retainer sighed. “My youngest moved out last year, yes.”
Nagito was already rising gracefully from his throne. “How do you feel about a vacation to Edo?”
Another sigh. “I’ll ready the warship.”
[The Pacific Ocean, June]
Lord Komaeda, as it turned out, did not know precisely who Hajime was. That much was made immediately evident; questions and assumptions tumbled from the daimyō’s mouth like water from a brook, rushing over each other with such fervent zeal, Hajime couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
“You’re a member of the 77th, of course? That’s wonderful!” Komaeda clapped his hands together, as if in prayer, and beamed. “What luck, to chance a meeting with a member of such an illustrious, inspirational group...Ah, you were even here to rescue me...”
Lost in thought, the daimyō wrapped his arms around himself and started shaking.
“That’s right,” Hajime confirmed, rubbing a hand against the nape of his neck. Usually, hostages weren’t quite so enthusiastic, liberated or otherwise. But, looking at the veritable stars coruscating in Komaeda’s sea-glass eyes, Hajime found he didn’t quite mind the change. Even if the shaking was becoming a tad concerning.
“But you’re safe now, okay? I can’t imagine what you endured out here...”
And in here, he thought privately, glancing at the fallen guardsman, crumpled unceremoniously in the corner like forgotten laundry. Seeing a strange, bomb-wielding man drive a weapon into someone’s jaw must have been regrettably traumatic. Perhaps Hajime should have listened to Chiaki’s recondite advice and worn more colourful, less threatening attire. The Ultimate Karuta Master—his best friend—had been very vocal about Hajime’s ‘Skeletron cosplay of an outfit,’ though she’d insisted it was a compliment.
“Ah, of course,” Komaeda agreed, returning Hajime to the present with a disarmingly intent glance. “Yes. Say...” he began, drawing out the word with a deliberate, almost indulgent care. “Are you...the Ultimate Blacksmith?”
Hajime suppressed a sigh. For a moment, he’d forgotten who Komaeda’s adulation was really for. After the 78th’s victory over Enoshima, Japan’s apotheosis of its talented had only resurged—with a vengeance. It seemed Komaeda was no exception to the rule.
But before Hajime could clarify his lack of a definitive talent, the daimyō leaned in uncomfortably close and continued. “From your efficacious dispatchment of my captor, I would have said Ultimate Swordswoman, though you don’t quite fit that description. But I don’t mean to presume, of course.”
Peko’s talent? Resignation settled beneath Hajime’s skin like a layer of damp wool, and despite a token effort, he wilted. At least this will be a familiar conversation. Despite what the other claimed, Komaeda was somehow managing to presume even more than the average.
“No,” he explained patiently, “Kazuichi is the Ultimate Blacksmith; he and another member were the ones to manufacture our artillery, but he’s dismantling the rudder right now. And the Ultimate Swordswoman is captaining another division.”
After Kazuichi dispatched the warship’s rudder and navigation system, its crew would still be able to leave, of course: abandoning them to starve was out of the question. But they’d have to use the rowboats. With the Ultimate Blacksmith’s mechanical expertise, a 70-year-old drunkard would be more capable of following the Farewell than the Despairs’ warship.
Komaeda’s eyes widened. “Right, of course, there are others with you. How marvellous.”
Gods above, Hajime thought to himself, this guy sure missed his calling as the ‘Ultimate Home-schooled Rich Kid’. Then he winced. Judging the interpersonal skills of a kidnapping victim was in rather poor taste, even for him.
Also, Hajime had met Togami Byakuya. Twice. Komaeda couldn’t hope to compete with either iteration.
“Then... what about the Ultimate Team Manager?” the daimyō was musing now. “You’re so serene, and composed, and comforting to be around—”
“I’m not an Ultimate,” Hajime interrupted.
Komaeda paused; his mouth hung open mid-sentence in a square black hole.
“What?”
Staunchly, evenly, Hajime met Komaeda’s eyes. Even after the literal end of the world, confirming his objective mediocrity still felt like speaking underwater. “I’m still a member of the 77th division, I just...joined late. I don’t have an Ultimate.”
He braced himself for the disappointment, the platitudes, the awkward silences. During his time at Hope’s Peak’s reserve course, people usually delivered some combination of the three. He didn’t brace himself for:
“Ah, I see. You’re useless.”
Komaeda was eyeing him dispassionately, a flat, opaque expression shuttering his gaze. It was a disarming contrast from the vivid animation Hajime had just witnessed.
He bristled. “And until five minutes ago, you were a hostage.”
Komaeda pursed his lips, as though about to disagree. He said nothing.
Hajime sighed. “Now come on, the prow is just to the left of here. You need to get out of here before that guy,” he pointed to Mukaiyama with his katana, “wakes up. I’ll be searching the other rooms.”
Now, Komaeda hesitated, regarding him with a look of derisive scepticism. Hajime wasn’t one to stereotype, but he’d seen that exact expression on a lot of noblemen. Perhaps Komaeda could give Togami a run for his money after all.
(Okay, maybe Hajime wouldn’t go that far.)
“And some of the others will have already reconvened there—tell them Hinata sent you. They’re all real Ultimates.”
If she hadn’t been a literal ocean away, Chiaki would have huffed at the regression in his wording. Hajime sent a silent apology but was too irritated to care overmuch. In any case, his bluntness seemed to do the trick: Komaeda slowly nodded.
Then, pausing only to glance at his fallen captor, Komaeda turned and strode from the room. His kimono swirling wraithlike in his wake.
What an asshole, Hajime thought uselessly, watching it vanish around a corner. The ensuing silence was so complete, he could hear the slight unevenness of his own breathing. He glared at the space Komaeda had just vacated.
Then, on silent feet, he slipped through the other door and left as well.
***
“Hajime Hinata,” Nagito echoed quietly, five minutes and only two rooms later.
Flipping through memories like koi-koi cards, he’d found himself searching fruitlessly, incessantly, for the flaw in his impression of the privateer. He’d never been wrong before, but he’d never been immodest, either; it was entirely possible that he’d made a miscalculation, misread some tell-tale sign of the stranger’s utter mediocrity.
And yet, even standing over the unmoving form of a man Nagito had known longer than his own reflection, Hinata had been radiant.
There was something so strikingly solid about even the way he’d stood, tilted up on his toes and steadied by straight, sculpted shoulders. With the sun at his back, the depressions of his cheekbones had been thrown into shadow, two chimeric eyes slanting above: one a flickering flash of fox-pelt red, the other a bright, dark olive.
Both wore the same warm sheen. Both were staring directly at him. And really, what could Nagito have done but stare at them in turn, stare at the privateer’s hand, outstretched in scar-flecked salvation, and take it.
Now, of course, he was thoroughly befuddled. As he walked through the ship’s underbelly, neatly sidestepping rows of unconscious guardsmen, he turned the memory over and over again in his mind, wondering. He simply couldn’t place the fault in its clean, perfect kismet.
Unless Hinata had been lying. Or mistaken, perhaps. Yet there had been something so genuinely, foolishly wounded in the curve of the privateer’s face—a stuttered pause, a vein of ice threading through those impossible eyes.
For a moment, instead of at a god, it had seemed almost like Nagito was looking through a mirror.
So, of course, Hinata could not have been an Ultimate. With that certainty in mind, he emerged onto the top deck, where the sun greeted him like a levelled crossbow.
Nagito shielded his eyes against an invisible volley of sunlit arrows. Then, shaded, he watched them slip delicately over the waves below, breaking in frothing splinters over the warship’s hull. Beautiful. And a sight utterly wasted on someone like him.
For a moment, Nagito simply stood there, rooted beneath a sail’s shadow, blue-green light from the ocean crawling over his skin. As he surveyed the sail above him—the centremost sail, as it happened—he found it to be the only one left intact. All surrounding masts had been stripped of canvas and bent along the middle, left to loom over Nagito like a herd of giant, wooden praying mantises. Is the Ultimate Gymnast aboard, or had this been the Ultimate Team Manager’s handiwork?
The orchestrator must have possessed incomparable athletic prowess, to have scaled even one stripped pole of bark, before leaping froglike to the others. Or perhaps they had used the mast rigging for leverage, trusting their life to veins of thread no thicker than spider silk. Nagito’s warship was more decorative than functional, after all.
Fascinating... He could only wonder at the strength (the conviction!) this unknown Ultimate would have required, to then snap each mast with such thoroughness. And then he could only grimace as a spray of seafoam battered his off-guard face, defending himself with an ineffectual palm.
After taking one, two, three careful steps to the side, he set about searching for the rest of the 77th division. It wasn’t a labour-intensive effort. In the distance, two men were very visibly leant against his warship’s prow, starkly different heights but arguing in the same faux-hushed tone. The taller wore an offensively bright apron and spoke in a wheedling, expressive voice. The shorter had a delicate, freckled nose, but a hard-set mouth and chin. And, fascinatingly, an eyepatch. As Nagito drew closer, it was the shorter who turned, revealing a singular eye as hard and flat as coffin nails.
Nagito smiled wide and raised a hand in greeting. He’d remembered that was a typical address among commoners (Ultimates?). Or people with experience in interpersonal interaction. “Ah, hello! I’m Komaeda Nagito—Hinata said you were here to rescue me?”
The shorter man nodded. “Looks like he beat us to it, if you’re out here. The name’s Kuzuryu Fuyuhiko,” he announced, with a gravitas befitting of the Ultimate Yakuza. From his reconnaissance of the family, Nagito was already intimately familiar.
“And that,” Kuzuryu continued, pointing his longsword idly at his companion, “is Souda Kazuichi.”
The Ultimate Blacksmith seemed less than pleased with his introduction. “Hey, watch where you swing that thing, man!” he complained, leaning away from the sharpened blade.
Kuzuryu sheathed it; Souda stood upright.
“But he’s right,” the blacksmith admitted, toying with his braided hair. “I would say that it’s pretty cool to be meeting nobility, but nothing beats meeting Miss Sonia, so...”
Nagito’s smile twitched—not at the well-deserved snub, but at the stridently Western name. If Souda was able to address Novoselic’s abdicated queen so casually, the pair were likely close. Hopefully, not close enough that she was on that boat behind them, knowing more about Nagito’s involvement in the Tragedy than would be prudent to reveal. That would be regrettably unlucky.
“All right, cool it, moon-eyes,” Kuzuryu reprimanded Souda, rolling his eyes. And as the blacksmith grinned sheepishly, the yakuza turned to survey Nagito with an analytical eye.
“Hey... Did you know who they were? Apart from Despair, I mean.”
Despair? He’d surmised that to be the 77th’s assumption, of course, but it was still strange hearing verbal confirmation. The rumour Nagito had set—involving his capture and extortion by Enoshima’s armies—must have circulated far faster than anticipated. Which was of course very fortunate for him, if not for his unsuspecting guardsmen. Or perhaps they had suspected as much—prolonged time in Nagito’s service, after all, was akin to prolonged time around an open flame. It was common sense to stay far, far away.
“I haven’t the faintest,” Nagito answered airily, interrupting his own thoughts. He tilted his head and frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“Because,” Kuzuryu explained calmly, “I prefer to know the names of people before I murder the shit out of them. They usually have friends, very keen on returning the favour.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that.”
“No shit, crone,” Kuzuryu retorted, looking him up and down. “You look like a twig.”
Nagito’s smile twitched again. I wouldn’t have thought the Ultimate Yazuka so ineloquent as to require this much profanity... Ah, well. What would I know?
He lifted his hands placatingly. “No, I simply meant that they don’t seem overly malicious. More like they’re just following orders.”
At Kuzuryu’s raised eyebrow, Nagito realised the inadequacy of using such an excuse on the Ultimate Yakuza, of all people. It seemed, for once, he’d actually have to explain himself. After over a decade of servants and dead air, Nagito wasn’t exactly a seasoned emphasiser. Nonetheless, he persisted.
“It’s just that, after your talentless crewmember went to such lengths for their survival, it would seem a shame to just kill them,” he reasoned.
Relieved as he had been at the time, Nagito still didn’t understand why the privateer had spared Mukaiyama. Stabbing one’s opponents with the correct end of the katana seemed a simple enough task—even for the not-so-ultimate swordsman.
Then Nagito’s gaze refocused on Kuzuryu’s face, rapidly contorting into a murderous glare. Oh, dear, he thought disappointedly. It was just like him, to have offended the nation’s hope so drastically, so ignorantly.
“But I don’t mean to presume, of course...”
The yakuza blinked. Or winked, if one considered the eyepatch. Is his other eye blinking underneath it, or had the socket been picked clean?
“No, I mean... Don’t dismiss my first mate like that again,” Kuzuryu asserted. “I wasn’t serious about the stabbing thing, anyway. There’s too many of them and no point murdering some and leaving others.”
First mate? Nagito echoed internally, trying and failing to compartmentalise such an odd decision. And the sheer incongruity of an Ultimate Yakuza that shied from murder.
“Eh?” Souda piped behind them, scratching his head. “Won’t doing that send a message?”
“Don’t sound too enthusiastic,” Kuzuryu replied. “The only message that’ll send is ‘come stab me, I’m strong enough to have killed your pals but weak enough to have spared you’.” He proffered his longsword to the blacksmith. “Unless you’d like to be the one to convey that sentiment.”
“Nope!” Souda exclaimed, waving his hands about like Kuzuryu had actually impaled him. Or knocked him overboard. “That’s—oh, hey Hajime!”
Nagito turned. Sure enough, striding towards them on absurdly silent feet was Hinata himself, eyes like embers. Behind him, the sky was green and grey and copper-coloured, painted across with streaks of woollen cloud. It seemed almost pale by comparison.
Jerking Nagito from his reverie, Kuzuryu raised a hand. “Still alive, I see,” he called. “Good. If you weren’t, I’d have let Saionji deliver your eulogy.”
Beside him, Nagito clapped his hands together. “Ah, I see! So, you were worried about Hinata...”
The yakuza stiffened. He eyed Nagito’s hairpins. “Did you know kanzashi make great weapons?”
Just then, Hinata reached the group, hilting his katana and glancing inscrutably back at the direction he’d come. Nagito pointedly ignored him, and for a moment, there fell a strange silence.
Until Hinata spoke again. “Hey, where are Akane and Sonia?”
“Back on the ship,” Kuzuryu explained, crossing his arms. “Sonia found a couple of historic paintings that disappeared after the Tragedy. Akane volunteered to help her move them.”
Nagito silently mourned the loss of his art collection. He’d been rather fond of it.
Beside him, Souda laughed nervously. “Hey, where’d you even find this creepy guy, Hajime? He doesn’t look like a guardsman...”
Hinata was already walking toward the Farewell, which had been anchored beside Nagito’s warship. Still in possession of all its sails, the 77th’s ship was resplendent—far more impressive than his own lowly, single-sailed vessel. “According to Fuyuhiko, we’re taking him with us: he’s Lord Komaeda.”
Souda baulked.
Kuzuryu sighed. “Of course he is,” he said calmly. Then, under his breath, he muttered: “fuck.”
Walking cheerfully behind him, Nagito pretended not to have heard.