By the second day, Amato had developed a working theory about his system.
It didn't help him fight. It didn't give him more stamina or faster reflexes or a better sense of direction in a city that was increasingly hard to navigate because the normal landmarks were either useless or hazardous. What it did was make him very, very aware of the people around him.
Not in a surveillance way. In a weather way. Like he'd grown a new sense that tracked barometric pressure but for human states. He knew when Kato was getting close to a decision point on something. He knew when Hana was about to cry before she knew. He'd always been reasonably good at reading people, he'd spent three years studying sociology because the question of why people do what they do had always seemed more interesting than most other questions, but this was different. This was structural.
The passive resonance the system mentioned extended now to everyone in proximity. Not pain sharing, not exactly, more like emotional static. A faint awareness of what was happening in the people around him without being able to control it.
It was going to be a problem, eventually. He could tell.
But not today. Today the problem was getting out.
The konbini couldn't be permanent. They all understood that without it being said explicitly, which was one of the things Amato appreciated about this particular group, no one was pretending the current situation was sustainable to avoid the discomfort of addressing it. Kato had mapped a route north toward Yoyogi on a paper tourist map he'd found in a rack near the entrance. Tsuna had scouted the immediate street from the roof access via a maintenance hatch. Sato had, at some point, transitioned from eating rice balls to carefully organizing the remaining ones by flavor in a way that somehow made Amato feel better about the future.
The route Kato proposed would take them through two blocks of side streets, one larger intersection, and then into the residential area north of the station where building density dropped and lines of sight opened up.
"I should go first," Tsuna said.
"You should not go alone," Kato said.
"I won't be alone. He'll be with me." She meant Amato. He was mildly surprised.
"I'm not combat capable," Amato said.
"I know. You're faster than Kato and lighter than Sato and Hana shouldn't be running point." She said it without any particular judgment, just an assessment. "And your system tells you things about people. That includes them."
"It hasn't worked on them. The infected. I don't think they register the same way."
"Hasn't worked yet," she said.
He wasn't sure if that was optimism or just a distinction she needed to make.
They left at midday when the light was highest and the streets offered the fewest shadows. Amato carried a bag with food and a fire extinguisher he'd been practicing holding like it was useful. Tsuna had found a length of steel pipe from the maintenance closet and had done something to her grip on it that made clear she knew exactly what she was doing with it.
The first block was fine.
The second block had three of them in a cluster near a shuttered clothing store, and Tsuna went through them with the pipe before Amato had fully processed that she'd started moving. He watched her work and thought, distantly, that he had never actually seen a real fight before, not one where someone was this precise, and there was something almost terrible about how efficient it was, no wasted movement, no hesitation, just cause and effect at speed.
The bond marker for her was pulsing steadily in the corner of his vision.
He didn't do anything with it.
The intersection was harder. Six of them, scattered, and Tsuna couldn't clear them before the group behind them caught up. Amato made a decision he didn't think about long enough to talk himself out of and ran directly through the gap on the east side, loud, making himself the thing that moved so Tsuna could see the angles. It was a terrible tactical decision by any reasonable measure. But two of the six followed him and that shifted the math enough.
He ran fast. Relatively.
He made it to the far side and ducked into a doorway and pressed himself against it and his heart was doing the irregular thing again except now it was also very fast. He could hear them stopping. The infected moved toward motion and sound but they weren't fast, not these ones, and when he stopped moving they seemed to lose the thread.
Tsuna appeared beside him three minutes later.
She looked at him. She looked at the two standing in the road, directionless again.
"That was stupid," she said.
"It worked."
"It worked because you were lucky."
He thought about the system. The Luck Aura he didn't have yet. The passive sense that was already telling him something about the street to the north, something moving that felt different from the infected. Human. Alive.
"There's someone up ahead," he said.
She looked at him. "You can feel that."
"Barely. But yes."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "How many."
"One. I think. It's not precise."
She looked north. Then back at him. "Then we move."
They moved.