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The first time Harua saw Black Cat, he was dangling upside down from a lamppost, webbing a stolen purse back into the hands of a startled office lady. The thief was already three blocks away, moving like liquid shadow, and Harua had just enough time to register the gleam of a domino mask and the unmistakable silhouette of cat ears on a hood before a street sign inexplicably detached from its bolts and sent him crashing into a pile of recycling bins.
That was the beginning.
His name was Spider-Man—well, Harua was Spider-Man, a name he’d scribbled in his notebook between Introduction to Media Studies and lunch. He’d only been at this for four months, ever since a lab field trip and a genetically altered spider had completely upended his freshman year at Meiji Gakuin University. The powers were still half-borrowed instinct, his suit a hand-sewn mess of crimson athletic fabric and hacked-together web shooters, and his crime-fighting style could charitably be called “enthusiastically clumsy.” But he was getting better. He was helping people. That was supposed to count for something.
Black Cat made him feel like he’d regressed to day one.
“You again.” Harua’s voice cracked behind his mask as he somersaulted onto a rooftop in Shinjuku, spotting the thief crouched at the ledge with a velvet pouch in his gloved hand. The cat-eared hood tilted, revealing a sharp jaw and the amused curve of lips below a black domino mask. “You know that’s stolen property, right? Antiques? Bad kitty.”
Black Cat laughed, a low, warm sound that short-circuited part of Harua’s brain. “You’ve got terrible timing, Spider. The police were six minutes away. You gave me a window.”
Harua lunged, shooting two web-lines at the pouch. What happened next was a perfectly choreographed disaster: his left web-shooter jammed, his right line snagged a pigeon that squawked directly into his face, and when he stumbled forward a loose tile skidded under his foot, sending him sprawling flat on the rooftop. By the time he peeled his mask’s eye-lens off the gravel, Black Cat was gone, and the only trace left behind was a single playing card—the queen of spades—wedged under his web cartridge.
It happened again the week after, at a jewelry heist in Shibuya. Harua had the thief cornered in an alley, two webs anchoring Black Cat’s wrists to opposite walls, when a rusty air-conditioning unit detached from above and Harua’s spider-sense screamed a fraction of a second too late. He dodged, but the thief slipped free. As Harua coughed through the dust, Black Cat paused on a fire escape, one hand lightly touching the cat-ear hood.
“Do you always have this much bad luck, or am I special?” the thief called down.
Harua didn’t answer. He just watched the figure melt into the neon wash of the city, and tried to ignore how his heart thumped against his ribs.
He started investigating. Call it spider-curiosity, call it wounded pride—call it the way Black Cat’s voice tilted up at the end of a sentence, vaguely accented, not Kanto. Harua’s enhanced senses picked up details: the specific fabric softener on the thief’s suit (a brand sold in Don Quijote), a faint scent of orange blossom, speech patterns that suggested Japanese learned as a second language. He cross-referenced small-time heists where bad luck inexplicably plagued the authorities, mapped sightings onto a commute radius, and cross-checked with his university’s international transfer intake.
He almost dropped his melon soda when the result surfaced: Wang Yixiang. Taiwanese. Third-year transfer into the Global Communications program. Otherwise known as Nicholas—quiet, devastatingly handsome, perpetually draped in artfully distressed sweaters, and currently seated three rows behind Harua in Media Ethics.
Harua had spoken to him exactly twice: once to borrow a pen, once to say “good morning.” Both times Nicholas had given him a small, tired smile, the kind that lives on the edge of exhaustion. Harua didn’t know what to do with the information that this soft-spoken transfer student with the gentle eyes was the thief who kept turning his patrols into slapstick routines.
He tailed Nicholas after class, keeping to the rooftops in his civilian jacket with the spider-suit underneath. He expected a clandestine meeting, a shady boss. Instead, Nicholas stopped at a 7-Eleven, bought an onigiri and a Pocari Sweat, and then walked to a shabby apartment block near Nakano. Harua watched him unlock a mailbox that spewed bills onto the floor. Watched him sink onto the genkan step and press the heels of his hands against his eyes.
None of it made sense until Harua did the one thing he should have done from the start: he dug up the debt. A loan shark operation run out of a pachinko parlor in Kabukicho, targeting international students with no guarantors. Nicholas owed a staggering amount—eight million yen—and the repayment schedule was a fiction designed to trap him forever. The parlor’s enforcers had recently escalated. They’d threatened his family in Taipei.
Harua caught up with him properly on a Friday, after dusk. Nicholas was slipping down a fire escape in Kichijoji, a stolen statue weighing his bag. Harua landed silently behind him, hood of his own suit pulled up—a spider-styled hood he’d recently added as a dare to himself, the white spider-eyes painted on the fabric glowing faintly under the city lights. (He’d decided if Black Cat got a cool silhouette, so did he.) Nicholas whirled, claws—retractable metal tips on his gloves—flicking out.
“Whoa. Peace.” Harua raised both hands. His suit was personalized now: a sleek red and black body piece with subtle web patterns on the arms, a hood shaped like a spider’s head, the large white lenses sewn in. He’d sewn a small chibi spider on the back as a joke. “I’m not here to fight, Wang Yixiang.”
The use of his name made Nicholas freeze. The domino mask couldn’t hide the widening of his eyes.
“You know,” Nicholas said, low and careful. “Congratulations. What do you want? To arrest me? Hand me over?”
“I want to help.” Harua stepped closer. “Eight million yen. The Sakurai group in Kabukicho. They threatened your mom. I saw the letters.”
Nicholas’s jaw tightened. His bad luck field pulsed around him like invisible static, making a nearby tile crack, but Harua’s spider-sense had finally learned its rhythm, and he didn’t flinch.
“You don’t get it,” Nicholas said. “Every time I try to run or go to the police, things just… happen. Accidents. People get hurt. I can’t control it, and I can’t escape it. They know what I can do, and they’re using me. So yes, I steal. I pay. I survive.”
“Not anymore.” Harua pulled his mask off, hood falling back. It was stupid. It was the dumbest thing he’d ever done. But seeing the guarded, brittle expression on Nicholas’s face, he didn’t want to be Spider-Man right now. He wanted to be himself. “I’m Harua. We have Media Ethics together. You gave me a pen once.”
Nicholas stared at him, bare-faced and earnest, the breeze lifting his dark hair. “You’re an idiot,” he breathed. Then, softer: “You’re a literal child.”
“I’m nineteen. And I’m really superhuman.” Harua touched the spider emblem on his chest. “So what do you say we take down the bad guys together? You’ve got bad luck. I’ve got good reflexes. We’ll cancel out.”
The pachinko parlor wasn’t built to handle a spider and a probability manipulator. Harua crashed through a neon-lit window with Nicholas at his side, their silhouettes sharp against the smoke. The loan shark—a bull-necked man with gold rings and a worse temper—snarled orders, but his thugs kept tripping over upturned mats, guns jamming, light fixtures swinging. Nicholas’s bad luck was finally aimed like a weapon, and Harua danced through the chaos with fluid precision, webs disabling enforcers before they could regroup.
In the end, the boss cowered behind a flipped desk, and Nicholas crouched beside him, cat-eared hood stark against the garish lights. “The debt’s cancelled,” he said quietly. “You’ll leave my family alone. And you’ll let every international student out of your scam. That’s non-negotiable.”
The man nodded frantically. Harua webbed him to the wall for good measure, then tapped his spider-shaped phone clip—already dialing the police. Evidence of the loan shark’s operation covered the back office: ledgers, recorded threats, enough to put him away for good.
They fled to a rooftop ten blocks away, breathing hard, the adrenaline cooling on their skin. Tokyo sprawled beneath them, a galaxy of streetlights and train lines. Harua’s hood was down, hair sticking up in a dozen directions. Nicholas pushed his own hood back, letting the ears flop adorably, and peeled off his domino mask.
Without the mask, he looked younger. Softer. The tiredness in his eyes hadn’t vanished, but something lighter had replaced the fear.
“You really did that,” Nicholas said, voice hoarse. “For someone you barely know.”
“That’s kind of the job.” Harua rubbed the back of his neck. “Also, I really wanted to see you smile for real.”
A breath of a laugh escaped Nicholas. Then he stepped forward, cupped Harua’s jaw with a gloved hand, and kissed him.
It wasn’t a long kiss—soft, chaste, tasting faintly of the melon soda Harua had grabbed before the fight. The city hummed around them, and somewhere a distant train rattled past. When Nicholas pulled back, his cheeks were dusted with pink, visible even under the rooftop’s dim safety lights.
“Thank you, Spider,” Nicholas murmured.
Harua’s brain had completely blue-screened. “Uh. You’re— I mean. Anytime. I mean, not just for the kiss— I mean, yes, the kiss was— great. Amazing. You can do that literally any time. Not just on rooftops.”
Nicholas ducked his head, laughing properly now, a real sound that wrapped around Harua’s heart like web-silk.
“Tomorrow,” Nicholas said, stepping toward the fire escape, “let’s start with coffee. On campus. After Media Ethics.”
Harua nodded vigorously, pulling his hood back up to hide the fact that his entire face was now the color of his suit. “Yeah. Yes. Coffee. Definitely.”
He watched the cat-eared silhouette vanish into the night, and clutched the front of his suit where his heart was hammering. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed—good guys winning. And for the first time since the spider bite, Harua thought maybe superpowers weren’t the best thing that had happened to him.
It was the boy with the bad luck, and the cat ears, and the kiss.