Chapter Text
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It was a rare enough thing these days that Miyu almost did not trust it.
A quiet evening.
No shattered dishes. No panicked phone calls. No blood on the floorboards. No late-night argument waiting around the corner like a jump scare.
Just her, Elias, a low table with two drinks on it, and the soft yellow glow of the living room washing over the old wood of the manor.
The television hummed in the background more than anything else, turned low enough that the voices of the anchors blurred into a comforting drone. Some nightly variety segments had given way to local coverage, and now the screen was cycling through weather, traffic, and Hero incident summaries while the city outside settled into darkness.
Miyu sat tucked against Elias on the couch, one leg folded beneath her, a half-finished drink warming her hand. He had one arm around her shoulders and the other resting along the back of the couch, looking more relaxed than he had in weeks.
That alone felt like a miracle.
She leaned into him a little more and let out a quiet sigh.
“This is nice.” She murmured.
Elias smiled down at her over the rim of his glass. “That’s high praise.”
“I mean it.” Miyu glanced toward him, her expression softening. “You’re actually home before midnight. I was starting to think your office had swallowed you whole.”
“It nearly did.” He took a sip, then grimaced faintly. “But I’ve been thinking.”
That got her attention.
Miyu shifted so she could look at him properly. “That usually means trouble.”
Elias huffed a laugh. “That’s cruel.”
“It’s accurate.”
He accepted that with the wounded dignity of a man who knew he had, in fact, earned it.
Then his face gentled. “I’m reducing my hours.”
Miyu blinked.
For a second she just stared at him.
“You’re what?”
“I already started talking to the firm about it,” he said, a little more carefully now, like he knew exactly how big a statement that was. “Not quitting. We still need the income, especially now that we’re apparently funding an amateur nocturnal death cult with a gym membership. But I can cut back. Delegate more. Stop coming home looking like a corpse every night.”
Miyu’s eyes widened, then softened so quickly it almost hurt.
“Elias...”
He shrugged with one shoulder, trying for casual and missing by a mile.
“I’ve missed enough,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to keep missing more.”
That landed somewhere deep in her chest.
There had been a time, not even that long ago really, when she might have cried on the spot from exhaustion alone. Instead she just reached up, cupped his cheek, and kissed him.
It was not dramatic, just warm and immediate and grateful. And when she pulled back, Elias looked a little dazed.
“Well…” He sighed after a second, a smile coming to his face. “...That was an encouraging response.”
Miyu laughed softly.
“You’re sweet.”
“No, I’m strategic. There’s a difference.”
“You are incorrigible.”
“And yet here you are.”
She rested her forehead briefly against his shoulder and let herself enjoy the moment. The house creaked softly around them. The drink in her hand had gone pleasantly warm. On the television, an anchor was transitioning from one segment to another with the polished urgency local news people used when they wanted to make a traffic jam sound like the opening act of the apocalypse.
Then the tone changed.
The music changed first, getting sharper and more urgent.
Miyu’s attention flicked up toward the screen just as the anchor’s voice rose.
“We’re interrupting our scheduled local coverage for breaking news out of Jaku City.”
Elias straightened slightly beside her. Miyu felt it happen before she fully registered why her own body had gone tense too.
The screen cut to shaky helicopter footage of a ruined alley.
It had ruined walls and cracked pavement. The kind of damage that only happens when Quirks, Villains, and unsupervised teenagers with terrible judgement were involved.
The camera caught two figures with its spotlight; one in black and the other in white.
A shared gasp ran through the both of them as Miyu’s jaw gaped and Elias went rigid in shock.
Even from this distance, even through the glare and motion blur and the ugly angle of live helicopter footage, she knew that silhouette instantly now. The white wrappings and cape were immediately recognisable to her.
A mother always recognised her son, after all.
“Oh no…” She whispered.
The anchor was still speaking over the footage, his voice quick with professional excitement.
“What viewers are seeing now appears to be the end of a confrontation between known B-rank Villain Deadlock and two unidentified vigilantes. One of the individuals in black has not yet been identified, but the white-clad vigilante is believed to be the one some eyewitnesses in Fuyuki have recently referred to as Moon Knight.”
On screen, Moon Knight moved. Miyu’s heart lurched into her throat.
The footage caught him dropping from above in a blur of white, both knees drawn in, cape flaring behind him as he came down on the battered Villain below with a brutality that made the whole couch seem to tilt under her.
The impact looked monstrous as Deadlock’s body folded in half under the strike.
Miyu made a sound that was half gasp, half strangled cry.
“Oh, good God…” Elias muttered, nearly spilling his drink as he stared at the screen in open horror. “That’s our boy.”
The black-clad vigilante stepped into frame beside him while the helicopter spotlight baked the alley in harsh white glare. Then, as if being filmed beating a B-rank Villain into unconsciousness was not dramatic enough, Moon Knight looked straight up at the camera.
Miyu already knew what was coming moments before it happened as Marc drew in breath, and shouted.
Even through the television speakers, even through the helicopter noise and the newscaster trying not to sound thrilled, his voice came through loud enough to rattle the room.
“I AM THE FIST OF KHONSHU AND THE PROTECTOR OF OVERNIGHT TRAVELLERS! CALL ME MOON KNIGHT!”
Miyu covered her mouth with both hands.
Elias stared at the television with the expression of a man who had just watched his teenage son publicly declare himself an agent of an Egyptian God on live news and had absolutely no framework left for dealing with that.
The anchor, to his credit, recovered quickly.
“There you have it, viewers. The vigilante has once again identified himself as Moon Knight. This marks the first known public appearance of the white vigilante, this time operating outside Fuyuki and apparently alongside a second masked individual.”
The footage replayed.
Miyu watched in fresh horror as the double knee drop happened again from another angle.
“Oh, absolutely not.” She whispered at the television, as if parental disapproval could travel through broadcast signals and physically stop her son from doing something so insane retroactively.
Elias set his glass down very carefully on the table.
“I know we said we’d support him.” He laughed shakily, never taking his eyes off the screen. “But I feel the need to formally state that this is an upsetting amount of knees to use in a single move.”
Miyu let out a weak, helpless little laugh that died halfway into another groan. “He is going to break himself, or even kill someone at this rate...”
“He’s trying his best not to… I hope…” Elias said, though even he did not sound fully convinced.
On the screen, the news had moved on to amateur witness footage and breathless speculation. The anchor was talking about vigilante escalation, public safety, and whether the appearance of a second masked fighter suggested a wider underground trend.
But none of that mattered to Miyu Spector.
She slowly lowered her hands from her face and leaned back against the couch, the earlier warmth of the evening thoroughly gone now.
Elias rubbed a hand over his beard and exhaled.
“Well, uhh…” He muttered at last, his voice as dry as the sahara desert. “...Perhaps it is for the best that we are forcing him to keep going to therapy.”
Miyu turned to look at him and nodded after a moment, despite herself.
“Yeah…” She sighed faintly. “I was just thinking that.”
…
Giran sat in the back corner of a run-down bar that smelled like stale beer, cheap cigarettes, and the kind of bad decisions that soaked into wood and never really came out.
The place was barely hanging on. Cracked vinyl seats. A counter with one leg shorter than the others. Yellowed lights buzzing overhead like they were personally offended to still be alive. Some old enka song played low from a radio near the bottles, warped by static and age until it sounded like a ghost trying to remember how sorrow worked.
Normally, Giran liked joints like this.
Places like these were useful. Nobody asked too many questions. Nobody remembered faces too well. Villains, brokers, lowlifes, washed-up fixers, people one wrong turn away from being all four at once. It was comfortable in a filthy sort of way.
Tonight, it just pissed him off.
The television over the bar crackled and replayed the same footage for what had to be the eighth time. A wrecked alley in Jaku. Spotlight from above. Deadlock on the ground, broken and twitching. Two vigilantes framed in the middle of it like somebody had decided to make a recruitment poster for urban insanity.
Giran clicked his tongue and took a slow drag from his cigarette, the ember glowing orange in the dim.
“Dumb bastard…” He muttered, though whether he meant Deadlock, the white one, or the entire situation was honestly a little up in the air.
On the television, the anchor was still going on in that overexcited voice news people used when they smelled ratings.
“—the vigilante identifying himself as Moon Knight—”
Moon Knight. What kind of name even was that?
The black one, too. Some homemade little mutt running around Jaku like he wanted to die stylishly.
It was some random vigilante duo that ruined his plans. That was what stung most.
It wasn’t the Pros. Not a rival broker’s handpicked crew. Or even some underground cleanup team sent by an organization with a grudge. It was just two lunatics in costumes deciding to play Hero in exactly the wrong alley at exactly the wrong time.
And now Deadlock had failed.
Worse over, Giran had failed.
His jaw tightened around the cigarette hard enough that the filter bent.
He hated that feeling.
Because the job itself had not even been that complicated. Dangerous, sure. Sensitive, absolutely. But complicated? No.
Deadlock had one task. One.
Get in, collect the registry package, get out, and keep the thing moving before anyone important noticed. He had not needed to be elegant. He had not needed to be subtle. He had only needed to not get turned into a cautionary tale by two psychos under a news helicopter.
Instead, Giran was now sitting in a dive bar at ass o’clock, staring at the consequences on live television and thinking about that man.
That thought alone made something cold settle under his skin.
The order had come from that man with that power, and Giran had learned a long time ago that orders like that did not exist for discussion. They existed for completion.
Three prefectures.
That had been the scope.
Collect the Quirk registries for every child born within three prefectures quickly and quietly. Without attracting the sort of attention that led back to anyone important.
It was a wide net, but not impossible. Tedious, mostly. Expensive. The kind of thing Giran was good at arranging because it required discretion, contacts, and enough underworld grease to make systems slide where they were not meant to.
He had done his part.
He had found the channels. Found the weak points. Found the men willing to move data, paper, and hard drives for the right amount of money or the right amount of fear. Deadlock had only been one cog in a larger machine. An ugly cog, yes, but a useful one.
Now that cog was in police custody with half his bones powdered into regret and his face all over the late-night news.
Which meant the operation was scorched.
Which meant the missing records would be noticed sooner.
Which meant questions.
Which meant disappointment.
And disappointment from that man was not something Giran ever wanted pointed in his direction.
Ever.
He took another drag and exhaled slowly through his nose. Smoke curled in front of the television screen, blurring Moon Knight’s white silhouette into something even more surreal.
The bartender, an old ex-thug with one ear and no curiosity left in him, gave the screen a grunt.
“Vigilantes these days are nuts.”
Giran did not answer.
He kept his eyes on the footage.
Moon Knight was shouting something again in the replay with enough raw theatricality to make Giran’s teeth itch. The black one was beside him, lean and somehow even more irritating for the simple fact that he looked homemade. Together, they were exactly the kind of unpredictable trash that ruined real business by mistaking adrenaline for purpose.
Giran hated variables. And Moon Knight was a variable now. And even worse, he was a loud one.
The broker leaned back in his chair and tapped ash into an already-overflowing tray. The cigarette burned down between his fingers while his brain worked through the problem.
The registries mattered. Not because Giran cared about a bunch of bratty kids and whatever shiny little Quirks they had managed to hatch with. He could not have cared less about that on its own.
But because that man cared.
That was enough to make it important.
Giran did not know the whole shape of the plan, and he had long since learned not to ask for more of the picture than he absolutely needed. Asking was how lesser people got curious. Curiosity was how lesser people disappeared.
Still, he knew enough.
Children. Quirks. Bloodlines. Potential. Future stock.
The sort of long-game collection work that only someone like that man ever really bothered with.
And now Moon Knight had stumbled into one corner of it with all the grace of a brick through a window.
The thought made Giran’s lip curl.
He reached for the remote on the table, lowered the volume, then thought better of it and muted the television entirely. The helicopter footage still rolled in silence above the bottles, all violence and spotlight and frozen declarations, but at least now he did not have to hear the anchor acting like he was witnessing the second coming of some alleyway God.
In the quiet that followed, the bar felt meaner. Smaller, more honest.
Giran pinched the bridge of his nose and let his hand drag down slowly over his face. His rings clicked softly against his teeth when he lowered it again.
There were ways to handle setbacks. That was why he was still alive.
He would have to reroute, reassign, and replace the missing pieces. Figure out which records had already been exposed, which channels were now compromised, and which idiots needed to be paid off, threatened, or buried before this turned into something messier.
He could do that.
What he could not do was walk back to that man empty-handed and hope charm carried him through.
No, absolutely not.
The cigarette had burned nearly to the filter by then. Giran crushed it into the ashtray with more force than necessary and leaned back, eyes flicking one last time to the frozen image on the muted screen.
Moon Knight.
White wrappings. Big mouth. And worse timing. Giran memorized the shape of him anyway.
Then he growled softly under his breath, voice low enough that even the bartender pretended not to hear it.
“I’ll remember you, Moon Knight.”
…
Nemuri Kayama sat with one leg crossed over the other in a cramped police conference room that smelled like burnt coffee, old paper, and men who had not gone home on time in years.
She had changed out of her Hero costume, mostly.
The trench coat was gone, thank God, replaced by a dark blouse and skirt borrowed from the spare locker room stash at the precinct, but her hair was still a little wild from the night air and she still wore her eyemask, which did nothing to hide her sharp, fine features.
His Purple Highness sat at the head of the table in full costume anyway, because of course he did. He wore purple like the concept itself owed him royalties.
Officer Senzaki sat opposite them with his tie loosened, sleeves rolled, and a stack of reports spread out under one hand.
On the wall behind him, a corkboard had already been claimed by the case.
Photographs. Witness sketches. Bullet points. Two grainy stills from helicopter footage. One close-up of Deadlock being carted into an ambulance looking like he had been beaten by an angry mob.
And right in the center of the board, pinned a little crookedly, was Moon Knight.
Even in a low-resolution still ripped from a news broadcast, he looked dramatic as Hell.
Nemuri stared at the image longer than she meant to.
She could still remember the way the moonlight had caught on him in the alley, the way he had looked at her like she was some sort of ambush predator and then fled as if good sense had briefly body-snatched him.
Again. He was rude. Interesting, but deeply rude.
Senzaki tapped the edge of one photograph with his pen.
“So. Here’s what we think we know.”
Nemuri shifted her attention back to him.
The officer’s face was as weathered and steady as ever, but the tiredness under his eyes had deepened since the last time she saw him. Moon Knight had apparently done that to more than one person in this city.
“We’ve got at least ten confirmed incidents in Fuyuki, now one in Jaku.” Senzaki spoke in the flat, clipped tone of a man assembling chaos into something administrative through sheer force of spite. “Same white-costumed vigilante, same self-identification. ‘Moon Knight.’ Strong physical enhancement at minimum. Likely high pain tolerance, above-average speed, and some form of self-targeted regenerative Quirk.”
Nemuri’s eyes flicked to the still image of Deadlock getting folded under those falling knees.
“That last one feels less like ‘likely’ and more like ‘unless he is made of steel and raw spite’...” She murmured.
His Purple Highness inclined his head. “A poetic assessment, and not inaccurate.”
Senzaki ignored both of them and continued.
“Witnesses describe him as male, likely a young adult, probably in his twenties. Height estimates are inconsistent, but build seems athletic. His speech is coherent, if dramatic. His combat style...” He looked down at the report, then back up with all the resignation in the world. “...is improving.”
Nemuri almost smiled.
That was a very polite way to say he fought like an insane ghoul with anger management issues.
Senzaki moved his pen to a second note pinned on the board.
“There’s also the issue of the blood.”
His Purple Highness leaned back in his chair, cape slipping elegantly over one shoulder. Even seated in a grim little meeting room, he somehow still looked like he expected dramatic lighting cues on principle.
“The disappearing blood.”
Nemuri nodded slowly.
She had not let go of that detail since the alley in Fuyuki.
“We know he bleeds. A lot, actually. Enough that most people would just die from bloodloss, but it seems that’s not the case for him. The footage from Jaku shows that clearly enough if you know what to look for. The amount of punishment he takes should leave more trace than it does.”
Senzaki grunted.
“Exactly. We have witness statements from both cities that suggest visible blood at the scene. But every time officers get there, it’s either gone or nowhere near as much as it should be. Which means one of two things.”
He held up one finger. “Either his Quirk includes some bizarre secondary effect that removes biological residue.”
He raised a second finger. “Or someone is helping him cover after himself with a separate Quirk.”
Nemuri looked back at the board.
Someone was helping him.
That should have felt like the cleaner explanation.
Instead, for some reason, it annoyed her. And she was not entirely sure why.
Maybe because the image she had of him in her head did not fit “carefully managed team operation.” He had not looked polished enough for that. Too raw. Too immediate. Too much like a man trying very hard to wear the shape of a legend without all the boring support systems that usually came with one.
Then again, she had also thought he was somewhere in his twenties until she heard him insult someone.
Now she was only mostly convinced of that.
His Purple Highness folded his hands on the table.
“If he does have support, then it is impressively discreet support. There is no sign yet of a visible handler, partner, or extraction specialist following him between scenes. The black-clad vigilante in Jaku appears to be a separate case altogether.”
Nemuri’s mouth twitched.
Daredevil, if that was really what he called himself, had looked less like a coordinated partner and more like another neighborhood disaster who happened to run into the same problem at speed.
“Agreed, that wasn’t polished teamwork. They were barely working together in the slightest.”
His Purple Highness actually laughed at that.
Senzaki rubbed at his temple with two fingers.
“Whatever it is, somebody’s cleaning up after him. And somebody taught him enough not to leave the obvious evidence behind.”
Nemuri thought of the moonlight burning blood off concrete.
No, not taught.
It had to be something else, something stranger.
She looked down at the old records spread across the table. That had become the second weird thing tonight.
The name.
At first everyone had assumed Moon Knight was just that, a vigilante name. Dramatic, made up, trying too hard. Then one of the older archive clerks at the precinct had gotten curious and gone digging through ancient Hero registries, back far enough that half the files looked like they had been typed by men who thought carbon paper was cutting-edge technology.
And they had found something.
Another Moon Knight.
They didn’t find much. Almost nothing, really.
Just a name in a registry from the beginning of the Quirk era. There were no surviving costume images. No preserved combat data. No real public record worth trusting.
Just scraps, mentions. A few references in early reporting that had been half-lost to time, bad archiving, and the fact that the first decades of Quirk society had been an administrative train wreck held together by panic and ink.
Still, the name had existed.
His Purple Highness tapped that file lightly. “So our white-clad friend may be paying homage to an earlier figure. A revival of an old mantle, perhaps. Some group playing at an ancient legacy.”
Nemuri rested her chin on one hand.
“Maybe…”
It was the sensible theory. It should have satisfied her.
But it did not.
Because the moonlight thing still did not fit. The blood. The movement. The way he had looked in that alley. The way he acted had seemed... wrong, almost.
Wrong in the way genuinely strange Quirks could sometimes feel when they did something your body knew it should not be watching.
His Purple Highness’s phone rang.
The sound cut cleanly through the room.
He glanced down, blinked once, then straightened slightly.
Nemuri saw the caller ID and recognized it before he said a word.
Nezu.
She sat up a little as His Purple Highness accepted the call and switched it to speaker without ceremony.
A small, cheerful, unmistakably squeaky voice filled the room. “Good evening! I hope I’m not interrupting anything too dreadfully boring.”
Nemuri smiled despite herself. “No, just police paperwork and existential confusion, the usual.”
“Excellent!” Nezu replied brightly. “Then I’m right on time.”
Senzaki looked tired enough to age on the spot, but to his credit, he did not complain.
His Purple Highness leaned back again. “We were discussing Moon Knight.”
“So I gathered.” Nezu’s tone remained pleasant, but there was something thoughtful underneath it now, something sharper than the voice ever sounded at first. “I heard your conclusion. That this might be a group paying homage to an old Hero using the same name.”
Nemuri glanced at the file again, choosing not to question how the Rat knew things he shouldn’t. Even while still just being in her first year, she knew better.
“That’s where the evidence points so far. Thinly, but it points.”
“Yes, that could certainly be true.”
The room went quiet. Nemuri knew that tone too.
It was the one he used when he was about to say something small and mildly phrased that would then crawl into everyone’s head and nest there for days.
His Purple Highness caught it as well.
“But?” He prompted.
Nezu hummed softly on the other end of the line.
“But I have a funny feeling that there’s more to this story than just that. Something more… exciting about the Lunar Guardian of Fuyuki...”
Author’s Note:
Say that again…
…
Next Chapter Title: Vigilante Friends (Maybe?).
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