Nozomi stared at the older girl, her pitch-black eyes blinking slowly. Up close, Nejire was like a hurricane wrapped in periwinkle hair. She was practically vibrating on the concrete path, her face so close that Nozomi could see the reflection of her own dark fox ears in the upperclassman's wide, curious eyes.
"I'm Kirigaya Nozomi," she said, her voice dropping into a flat, steady baseline as she took a half-step backward to reclaim a shred of her personal space. "And this is my brother, Hiro."
"Hiro! Nozomi! Wow, what pretty names! Are you two twins? You look like twins, but your style is totally different!" Nejire didn't slide back even an inch; instead, she leaned forward again, her hands gesturing rapidly toward their U.A. uniforms. "You're the first-years from the sports festival, right? The ones who completely demolished the apprehension test on day one! Everyone in the third-year corridor was talking about you! Hey, hey, Hiro, can I touch your tails? Just a little bit? Do they feel like velvet or are they more coarse like a forest fox?"
Hiro let out a slow, dry chuckle, casually shoving his hands into his pockets. His five black, glossy tails gave a single, rhythmic swish behind his uniform trousers, entirely unbothered by her high-energy interrogation. "They're pretty soft, senpai. But usually, people buy us a soda before they start asking for a grooming session."
Nejire gasped, her hands flying to her cheeks in absolute delight. "A soda? Oh, I can totally buy you a soda! There's a vending machine right by the front gate, or we could hit that old convenience store down the hill! But wait! Before that, you two have to help me! You just have to!"
"Help you with what?" Nozomi asked, her dark ears twitching slightly as she crossed her arms.
"An urban mystery!" Nejire cheered, her voice bouncing off the concrete walls of the main entrance. She lunged forward, grabbing Nozomi by the wrist and Hiro by the sleeve of his jacket, dragging them toward the iron gates before they could even agree. "A real, live, secret hidden treasure hunt right here in the commercial district! I've been researching it for three whole weeks, but Mirio and Tamaki are totally buried under their agency workloads. They find it hard to balance everything all week! But you two are free, right? Your quirks are sealed! I saw the news report! You don't have any agency duties until the lockdown papers clear!"
Hiro shared a brief, silent look with Nozomi through their telepathic soul link.
'Our laboratory research is at a complete dead-end, our power is locked behind these paper seals, and we were looking at a completely boring month of normal high school lectures,' Hiro sent.
'She's a total space cadet,' Nozomi replied through the link, her pitch-black eyes gleaming with a trace of genuine amusement as she looked at Nejire's bouncing periwinkle hair. 'But it beats sitting in the mansion scrolling through news forums. Let's see what she's actually hunting.'
"Alright, Hando-senpai," Hiro said aloud, allowing her to drag them past the U.A. security barriers onto the main public sidewalk. "What exactly is this mystery?"
Nejire spun around on her heels, her hair flaring out in a massive cloud as she pulled a crumpled, heavily annotated paper map out of her school bag. "The Legend of the Phantom Cabinet! Have you ever heard of it? No? Of course not, it's super underground! Back in the late eighties and early nineties, before the modern hero ranking system was completely fully digitalized, street-level heroes used to leave encrypted data logs hidden inside old, outdated arcade motherboards! If you find the right machine, put in the right combination of tokens, and trigger the secret glitch... boom! You unlock a piece of history!"
Hiro blinked, a genuine grin finally breaking through his lazy demeanor. "An arcade hunt? Seriously?"
"Yes! Seriously!" Nejire pouted, waving the map in front of his nose. "But the problem is, most of the old gaming dens in Musutafu have been torn down or modernized. There are actually a lot of them left, but they're hidden away in dusty basement areas and deep alleys where people don't go that often. I have the entire map right here, but I need partners to help me search the cabinets and check the serial numbers! What do you say? Are you in?"
Nozomi smoothed down the pleats of her school skirt, her sharp smirk returning. "We're in. Let's see what we can find."
Twenty minutes later, the newly formed trio stepped into the dimly lit, neon-soaked interior of their very first target on Nejire's map: The Neon Oasis Arcade.
The place was located deep within a narrow, winding alleyway where people rarely walked. The air inside smelled faintly of stale popcorn, warm copper wiring, and old carpet. Rows of massive, heavy wooden and plastic cabinets lined the walls, their screens glowing with low-resolution pixels and flashing titles from decades ago. The low hum of synthetic 8-bit chiptune music and the rhythmic, hollow clacking of plastic joysticks filled the room. It was empty of other customers, save for a grumpy, elderly owner sitting behind the prize counter, completely ignoring them as he read a newspaper.
"Wow, it's so dusty in here," Nejire whispered, her voice full of awe as she immediately sprinted toward a row of side-scrolling cabinets. "Alright, Hiro, Nozomi! The map says the first potential serial code should be registered to an old beat-'em-up machine. Let's start checking!"
For the next forty-five minutes, the three of them carefully carried out their search. Hiro dropped down onto his hands and knees, his uniform pants brushing the faded carpet as he wedged his head beneath a rusted metal frame to read a faded silver sticker, while Nozomi carefully inspected the coin slots of a vintage machine, her skirt fabric shifting as she crouched. Nejire checked her crumpled paper notes and checked cabinet after cabinet, her eyes darting across the older metal sheets.
"Nothing on this row," Hiro called out, popping back up and dusting off his hands. "The serial numbers are all standard commercial releases. No hidden encryption codes here."
"Same over here," Nozomi noted, walking over from the back corner. "The boards in the back are completely stock. Looks like the first lead is a total bust."
Nejire let out a long, exaggerated whine, slumping her shoulders as she dropped onto a round plastic stool in front of a cabinet titled Super Samurai Showdown II. "Aww, man! I was so sure the Oasis would have it! What a bummer."
Hiro smirked, walking over to the heavy metal coin changer machine near the entrance. He dropped a thousand-yen bill into the slot, the machine letting out a loud, mechanical rattle as a heavy cascade of dull brass tokens spilled into the metal tray. He scooped them up, walking back over and dumping half the pile into Nejire's open palms before sliding onto the plastic stool right next to her.
"Well, since we're already here," Hiro said, dropping a token into the slot. The game let out a loud, pixelated sword-slashing sound effect as the machine booted up. "Why not play some games?"
"Ooh, yes! Let's play!" Nejire cheered, instantly forgetting her disappointment as she dropped her own token into the machine.
The next hour completely dissolved into pure, grounded fun. Because Hiro and Nozomi's massive power was tightly sealed, they couldn't rely on any shortcuts. They had to play the old-fashioned way—mashing the oversized plastic buttons, slamming the joysticks, and laughing across the rows as they realized how absurdly bad and poorly programmed these ancient games actually were.
"Oh my gosh, look at the graphics on this character!" Nejire laughed, pointing a finger at the screen as her pixelated warrior moved with incredibly stiff, blocky animation loops. "It looks like he doesn't even have joints in his knees!"
"The coding in this era was remarkably primitive," Nozomi chuckled, her pitch-black eyes fixed on the display as her character glided across a digital field.
But it didn't take long before they started discovering actual bugs in the systems.
Hiro slammed his joystick to the left, trying to perform a standard defensive block, but his character suddenly executed a strange, continuous vertical slide, floating completely off the bottom edge of the screen and getting stuck in the border graphics. "Wait, look at this. The boundary collision parameters failed just because I input a block during an animation transition."
"That's a bug," Nejire giggled.
Two minutes later, Nejire accidentally triggered a special move while crouching near the center obstacle. The entire game screen suddenly flipped upside down, the colors reversing into a flashing neon green text file before returning to normal, though her character was now completely invisible to the opponent. "Wow! Look! I made myself vanish! That's bug number two!"
Nozomi was currently playing an outdated space shooter cabinet. She casually tapped a combination of directions while her ship was positioned near the top right corner. Instantly, the game's background starry landscape stopped scrolling entirely, and a massive wall of blank white code blocks appeared across the screen, allowing her ship to completely ignore all incoming enemy bullets. "Bug number three. The memory buffer can't handle simultaneous directional inputs while rendering scrolling background layers."
Within another ten minutes, Hiro found a four-frame animation error that allowed him to infinitely punch an opponent without them ever hitting the ground, and Nejire discovered a glitch that gave her infinite credits just by wiggling the coin return slot.
"Alright, that's five bugs total we've stumbled onto," Nozomi noted, a sharp, highly competitive smirk slowly spreading across her face as she stood up from her stool, smoothing down her skirt. She looked between Hiro and Nejire's triumphant expressions. "Let's make this interesting. Since we're going to be hitting a lot of these old places on your map this week, let's establish a strict rule right now."
"A rule? What kind of rule?!" Nejire asked, bouncing on her stool with intense curiosity.
Nozomi tapped her knuckles against the wooden side of the cabinet, her black eyes gleaming with pure amusement. "From this point forward, as we play through these ancient machines, whoever finds the fewest bugs has to buy the rest of us our drinks on the way back home."
Hiro's eyes widened comically, a wide, confident grin breaking through his face as he dropped another token into his machine. "Oh, you're on. Prepare to lose your allowance, Nozomi. I'm going to break every single motherboard in this district."
Nejire let out a wild, hyperactive laugh, clapping her hands together. "Yes! Yes! The least bugs buys the drinks! That is so totally on! I'm going to click every single button until the screens turn blue!"
They spent the remaining hour mashing buttons and hunting for software flaws until the elderly owner started aggressively rattling his keys to indicate closing time. By the time they stepped back out into the cool, twilight air of the alleyway, Nejire had found three separate glitches, Nozomi had secured two, and Hiro had finished the afternoon with a perfectly stable game, apart from the one he found before the rules were established, putting him at the very bottom of the leaderboard.
"The rules are absolute, little brother," Nozomi teased as they walked toward the main street. "You found the fewest bugs. Time to pay up."
"Hiro is buying! Hiro is buying!" Nejire chanted, skipping along the pavement ahead of them with her long periwinkle hair flaring in the evening light. "I want the premium grape soda from the glass-bottle vending machine down the avenue!"
"Alright, alright, I get it," Hiro laughed, a relaxed smile on his face as he adjusted his jacket and reached into his pockets for change. "I'll pay the drink tax for today. But tomorrow, I'm finding every single glitch on that map."
The twilight settled beautifully over the bustling city as the three of them walked toward the train station, their casual, light-hearted chatter echoing through the streets. The long, boring month they had been anticipating had officially been completely rewritten into the start of a wild after-school adventure, and as Hiro handed the cold glass bottles to his sister and their chaotic new companion, the sense of unforced camaraderie was absolute.
X X X
I have an idea.
Releasing a new chapter of all my books every day makes me tired and takes a long time to write. So, I thought of a solution.
I will release two new books in a few days. Then, I will be releasing a chapter for a book each day.
I will release the release schedule when I release the new books.
For now, we will do Goddess' brother today, then Dragon's game tomorrow, and so on.