Normality was a glass fortress, and I walked its halls in combat boots. Every day was an exercise in containment, in suppressing the instincts that had kept me alive on battlefields across half the world. The smile I had shown Chitoge on the rooftop had been a crack in that fortress. A dangerous crack.
She had changed with me after that. Her open hostility was replaced by an intense, frustrated curiosity. She tried to talk to me, cornering me in the hallways or at lunch, asking questions that were both trivial and, for me, impossible to answer. "What music do you like?" "What did you do over the weekend?" How could I tell her that my musical taste had been replaced by the analysis of enemy radio frequencies and that my weekend had been spent in a virtual conference with my PMC's COO about destabilizing a cartel's supply routes in South America?
So I remained silent, which only fueled her frustration and the intrigue of those around her.
The confrontation occurred in a public park one Saturday afternoon. Fate, with a cruel sense of humor, had conspired to gather all the players of my strange high school play in one place. I was sitting on a secluded bench, observing, my supposed cover as a melancholic student. About fifty meters away, Raku Ichijou, Chitoge Kirisaki, Kosaki Onodera, and Marika Tachibana were entangled in some comical picnic dispute. It was a picture of peace so alien to me that I might as well have been observing an alien species.
And then, a piece of my past materialized.
A black Lexus sedan, with tinted windows and an expensive gleam, pulled up to the curb. The way it stopped, the professional silence of its doors opening, put me on alert. It wasn't the police. It wasn't tourists. It was them.
Haruki and Ryo. My brothers.
Haruki, the eldest, stepped out first. He wore a Zegna suit that probably cost more than most people's cars. His hair was slicked back, and his cold, calculating eyes swept the park until they landed on me. His expression was one of amused disdain, as if he had found a particularly unpleasant bug under a rock.
Ryo, the younger, exited on the other side. He was the opposite of Haruki: more casual, with an expensive silk shirt unbuttoned to show the start of the intricate yakuza tattoos that covered his chest. He moved with the swagger of a street predator, a cruel smile already playing on his lips.
They crossed the lawn and stopped in front of my bench. The air around me grew cold.
"Well, well, well, look what we have here," Haruki began, his voice the same one he used in boardrooms: soft, condescending, and sharp as glass. "Kenji. The family ghost. So this is where you've been hiding. Playing student. Isn't that sinking even lower than you already were?"
"I thought I smelled failure," Ryo sneered, cracking his knuckles. "Dad laughed when we told him we found you. Said to let you rot in your own mediocrity."
I remained silent, motionless. My mind had become a cold, analytical command center.
Threat analysis. Subject: Tanaka, Haruki. Physical threat: Low. Psychological threat: High (historical). Subject: Tanaka, Ryo. Physical threat: Moderate. Training: Street fighter, probable Judo/Karate experience. Weaponry: Not visible, but probable knife.
My primary objective was to maintain my cover. Non-confrontation was the optimal strategy. I could take their insults. I had for years. They were just noise.
But I hadn't accounted for an external variable. I hadn't accounted for the gorilla.
"Hey, you two!" a sharp voice cut through the air.
Chitoge Kirisaki marched towards us, brow furrowed, hands on her hips, an indignant blonde valkyrie. Raku and Onodera followed her, with worried expressions.
"Who do you think you are talking to him like that?" Chitoge snapped, stopping a few meters from us. "Leave him alone!"
My brothers turned, genuinely surprised by the interruption. They looked Chitoge up and down, their expressions turning even more scornful.
"Oh, this is adorable," Haruki said. "Did you get a girlfriend to defend you, Kenji? I guess even stray dogs find company."
"This ain't your business, dollface," Ryo growled, his smile turning menacing. "This is family talk. Now scram before you regret sticking your nose in."
The threat hung in the air, venomous and real. Raku paled, recognizing the tone of a true yakuza. But Chitoge didn't back down. In fact, she stepped forward, partially interposing herself between them and me.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said, her chin held high.
That was the moment my non-intervention plan disintegrated. Ryo, fed up with her defiance, stepped forward and raised a hand to roughly push her aside.
I didn't think. I didn't analyze. I simply acted.
Primary directive overridden. New directive: Protect civilian asset. CQC combat protocol activated.
The instant Ryo's fingers were about to touch Chitoge's shoulder, my hand shot out and closed around his wrist.
Time seemed to slow.
The surprise in Ryo's eyes was absolute. Then it was replaced by pain as my fingers, strengthened by a superhuman training regimen, dug into his bones. He, who prided himself on his strength, found himself caught in a steel vise.
"Let go of me, you piece of shit," he hissed, trying to pull free.
Instead, I used his own momentum against him. A twist of my body, a pivot on my heel, an application of leverage at his elbow joint. It was a simple Aikido technique, executed with the speed and precision of a master. Ryo, expecting a bar brawl, found himself flying through the air in an uncontrolled arc. He landed hard on the ground, the air escaping his lungs with a gasp of pain.
I straightened up, turning to face my other brother.
Haruki was frozen, phone half-drawn from his pocket, his face a mask of disbelief and nascent fear. The weak brother, the failure, the ghost... had just dismantled his street enforcer as if he were a child.
I took a step towards him. My face was impassive, but my eyes... from my men's accounts, I knew how they looked in moments like this. Empty. Dead. The face of Kage.
"Don't call anyone," I said. My voice was low, calm, and utterly devoid of Kenji's emotion. It was an order, backed by the promise of unimaginable violence.
Haruki flinched. He saw something in my eyes he had never seen before. He saw the monster that had been hiding behind his pathetic little brother's face. He nodded slowly, lowering the phone.
I bent down and helped Ryo to his feet, my touch now surprisingly gentle. He stared at me, his arrogance replaced by pure, primal fear.
"Get out," I told them softly. "Don't come looking for me again. Tell father the ghost he despised is dead. And tell him to pray he never meets what has taken his place."
Without another word, the two brothers practically ran to their car, Ryo limping and clutching his arm. They scrambled inside, and the Lexus sped away, leaving a thunderous silence in its wake.
I stood there for a moment, the adrenaline fading, exposing the cold, hard panic. I had failed. I had failed catastrophically. My cover was in tatters.
Slowly, I turned to face my audience.
Onodera was pale as a ghost, a hand over her mouth. Raku stared at me with an expression of absolute astonishment. As the heir to a yakuza clan, he had seen tough men. He had seen fights. But he had never seen anything like that. It hadn't been a fight; it had been an... elimination. The efficiency, the speed, the calm... it wasn't human.
And Chitoge... she stared at me, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Her face showed no fear, but a mixture of shock and... something else. Something I couldn't identify. She saw how I had interposed myself between her and danger. She saw how I had neutralized a man bigger than me without breaking a sweat. The gloomy, weird kid, the rooftop delinquent, the psychopathic diner... all those images had shattered.
I knew I couldn't explain what had just happened. I couldn't give them a logical answer that didn't involve the truth. So I chose the only option left.
Without a word, I turned and walked away, leaving behind my "classmates" and the shattered remnants of my normalcy sanctuary.
As I walked, the weight of my mistake crushed me. I had come to Japan to escape my enemies, only to be found by the demons of my past. I had won a fight effortlessly, but I had lost the war for my anonymity.
Every action has a reaction. And the reaction to what I had just done would be immense. I had created a ripple in the pond, an anomaly that no lie could cover. And I knew, with an icy certainty, that halfway across the world, a man calling himself L might soon receive a very strange report from the Tokyo police about a park fight that defied all explanation. And another data point would be added to his board.
My hiding place had become a stage. And I had just performed a solo act under the brightest possible spotlight.