[center][img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/617914243760783381/866258589646323732/thumbnail_yuuya.png[/img][/center]Just as it seemed like everyone had finally gotten settled in, and the real meat of the discussion could finally start (the boss, of course, building a quiet suspense for what he would say to this news, and to his lackeys' suggestions), Yūya heard footsteps clack-clacking up the stairwell. The distinct crispness of leather soles told him that Kevin-kun had arrived in his engineer boots. Good. He'd be just about jumping out of them in a moment. Despite a casual, kicked-up posture right beside the entranceway, Yūya was coiling. Bracing.

The footsteps made less sense the nearer they came to the door, though. They had none of Kevin's stomping bravado; too urbane, too ... genteel. They only could have belonged to the pompadoured punk in question if he was seriously ill, wounded, or maybe heartbroken. But Kevin's fellow [i]yankii[/i], entirely committed to his innocuous ambush, didn't waver; not until the wrong head of hair—not slicked up with a handful of grease, but draped over a narrow shoulder in a demure braid—bobbed past the window and out onto the school's observatory. Yūya had to skid up onto his tiptoes to stop from crashing right into her.

"[sub][i]Waa-waa-waa-waa,[/i][/sub]" he hissed, like the squealing brakes of a bullet train. "Akina-chan! [i]K-k-ka-ka-ka-konbanwa![/i] I was, I was just, uh ... eh heh heh ..."

Her greeting, a smile and a wave, glazed over each of them with the same impersonal warmth. Either she hadn't heard Yūya, or—likelier—she was feigning as such, to give him the chance to come up with a bad excuse, and caulk up some of his injured dignity. He certainly could not rebuff this offer. Holding the door for her, he entered, and peered down the stairwell; then, hopping the ledge of the roof and twining his fingers through the chainlink fence, he glared down at the parking lot, where his motorcycle should have facsimilied itself into the next spot over. Kevin wasn't coming. Yūya reckoned that every gang had its half-hearts, but he wondered why here, why now: had an enemy ambush put Kevin in a sanitized white room, reeking of surgical stainless steel and formaldehyde? Had he broken down on the highway, his hands now a blank canvas for dirty oil and road-soot? Had the men in blue hats and blue tunics finally put Kevin in the back of their van, then a piss-stained cage, then a room with benches and a podium and a panel of men looking down on him with silk nooses knotted around their sweaty, grave-pale necks?

The ember at the end of Yūya's cigarette now warmed his knuckles; he gathered saliva on his tongue and drowned it. He hopped down from the fence. Umeko was there. Yūya scanned the roof for empty spots—by the vent, for example—by the now-quiet access door—really, anywhere but that radius around Ishida-san, thickening with people as his quietude forced them close, the moons revolving his Saturn—and concluded that there was plenty of room, and wanted to ask why she had chosen there, beside him, to situate. The realization—the wanting—hurried a shameful heat to his face. Molten fairy tales melded together with whisky commercials and radio pop songs in the kiln of his blood-rushed mind. He didn't think to question the irony: that he could dash ears-first into a platoon of baseball-batted thugs with no regard for the bones they'd break and the gashes they'd write in his skin, but such a childish curiosity could leave him petrified, like a bullfrog trapped in the crystalline pith of a November pond. That his face could feel so warm while he was utterly frozen in place.

When he thought she wasn't looking, Yūya did take the chance to glance down at her feet, though. She was wearing basketball shoes, the ones with the thin, hard rubber soles. He stifled a grumble.

[color=a187be]"You could be bait, Mai Li-chan."[/color][center][hider=Recommended Listening][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqNy_XoMX-4[/youtube][/hider][/center]Oh ... that's right. He and Umeko were on the rooftop to contribute to a war effort. To resolve easy questions with easily-understood blunt instruments.

[color=a187be]"Wait for them to come find you, all by your little lonesome; and then if there's anything left once you're done with them, the rest of us play clean-up!"[/color]

As if, for the second time in machine-gun-fire succession, reading the climes of his temperament in the dials and barometers of his face, Umeko once again saved Yūya the trouble of speaking. Whereas he would have objected to the plan on moral grounds, refusing, in so many hypermasculine words, to let a little girl take a beating for him, Umeko, in more clinical, [i]strategic[/i] terms, explained why the plan [i]would not work[/i]. Yūya admired her cleverness—envied it. How tactfully she had rejected this idea without spitting in the faces of its most frenzied proponents: Yonaka Aimi, eager to be indispensable to Ishida as she sniffed out fresh fuel for his war-machine. And Ri Mai—given no other avenue or purpose—eager to burn.

On the topic of Umeko, Yūya thought back to something she had told him once, on a day when he had walked outside to his motorcycle, only to find that someone had snipped the brake lines, obviously scheming an injurious and humiliating crash at the next red light or stop sign. Of course Umeko had said it in ... was it English? Latin? It sounded something like [abbr=クイボノ][i]kuibono,[/i][/abbr] but she'd had the grace to translate for his illiterate ass, too: "You know, Yūya-kun, there was once a Roman politician who was famous for solving cases like this," she had chirped. "During the trials he always asked, '[i]Cui bono?[/i]' That is, 'Who does this crime benefit?'"

"[i]Mattaku.[/i] Where the hell do you keep learning this stuff?" he'd growled, trying [i]very[/i] hard to ensure he sounded unimpressed.

"In books, of course. My father's books. Maybe you should start reading more, too. You'll be more useful at Minato-kun's gatherings!"

"[i]Haaah?[/i] I'm plenty useful. When you need a guy to stand behind you menacingly, cross his arms and look mean, who's the first guy you call, hah?"

She giggled first, and he followed. Remembering it now, a smile struck a glancing blow across his face, and died just as quickly, like a firefly's S.O.S. signal in a tepid, lonely, dark blue summer night. [i]Cui bono?[/i] In other words, who benefited from systematic attacks on the new first-years? Yūya's knee-jerk response, of course, had been to assure the others that he wouldn't back down from a confrontation with these perpetrators no matter how honed their skills, how indomitable their spirit. Whether as a matter of his confidence in his own fighting strength, or simply his snorting, horn-headed stubbornness. But these more cautious, hesitant members of the group still wanted certain assurances. Some of them wanted to know they championed a noble cause. Others thirsted for domination and conquest. More still simply wanted a glorious fight, a worthy opponent, a smooth, hard stone on which to whet their skills. Most of them, boringly, needed to feel assured that they would win [i]before[/i] taking even one provocative step onto another gang's turf.

[i]Think. Who the hell is it? Who stands to gain from pushing around a bunch of green-gills?[/i]

Was a stronger gang putting the squeeze on them while they still didn't know their way around the school? (It was only June, after all.) Were the first-years, against the odds, actually a force to be reckoned with, so much so that someone wanted them crushed before they found their bearings? Had they unknowingly stepped onto someone else's turf, which its bellicose [i]banchō[/i] then took to heart? But none of these helped to [i]narrow it down[/i] whatsoever.

[i]Y'know, this, right here, is why she thinks you're a dumbass.[/i] Yūya side-snuck a curious glimpse, but when Umeko threatened him with eye contact he shyly snapped it forward. [i]Well, maybe it can't be helped. Only way to find out might just be to be there when the next bop goes down.[/i]

Yūya stood right on the cusp of resigning himself to this non-answer when something ... strange—something cold and jagged—pierced his gut, and hooked him back from the precipice. A feeling. A strange, pluck-churning gravity which tugged him into its nucleus to be crushed by the weight of a new epiphany. His eye, inexplicably, was drawn to Ishida Minato, calm and gathered in his grey sport-coat and white Oxford button-up.

[i]... Huh?[/i]

In his typical fashion, Ishida had pocketed a single hand. The other hand hung from its shirt sleeve, unwaveringly cool, inert, brimming with potential energy like a firing pin pulled taut behind an unfired bullet. He leaned against something—didn't matter what—and stared off into the light-polluted evening sky so as to look like he couldn't care less about the conversation at hand, while he quietly gauged the air for the moods and atmospheres radiating off each of his subordinates. He needed to look aloof and speak rarely if they were going to hang on his every word, and he needed to give them what they wanted, if only every now and then, if he wanted them to see the value in sticking around and following orders.

[i]Don't be ridiculous. That [/i]chūnibyō[i] just wants everyone to [/i][b]think[/b][i] he's secretly some kinda genius mastermind. Besides, how does Ishida-san benefit from a bully messing up the young blood, anyway? Spoiling the school's fresh meat ...[/i]

Fresh meat. The new recruits. The heirs. The new growths after another year's rumbles had scorched the political landscape of the school, like the yellow-green fern buds that burgeoned from cooled lava, the first new color in a blackened, glassy-dead world. Ishida needed them just like every other boss-boy: to carry his legacy, and let him graduate in the comforting knowledge that all his grudges and rivalries, even the ones he had inherited from [b]his[/b] [i]senpai[/i], would be kindled and carried on into the next generation of students. But this would only happen in time; with patience. Right now they were still saplings: soft, pliant, easily trampled.

... Unless ... unless that meat wasn't going to waste.

What if a boss had some way of getting the young blood into the fight a year, even two years early? And not only that: what if he could threaten them so existentially, so absolutely, that they had no choice but to join [i]his[/i] side, and all-together swell his army to an unaccostable size? Was such a thing even possible? If so, it made a sick kind of sense: either pose as (for example) the cheer squad, or incite the actual cheer squad into doing your dirty work. Then go to the smaller, weaker, battered, humiliated victims and offer them relief. Protection first; shelter from the relentless storm. Then, as they got back on their feet: dignity. Respect. An alliance.

Kill two birds with one stone, as they say: gain a new ally, and scapegoat your enemies for their mistreatment. Hell, Yūya himself could corroborate at least the former half of that story. After his defeat, he had been given precisely that dignity: the chance to rise to his feet, dust himself off, and shake hands with the victor. No gloating. No shame.

But ... no. No, this was too high-level even for Ishida. No one could handle [i]that[/i] many variables, [i]that[/i] many moving parts, no matter how well-machined.

Yūya discovered that somewhere in his rumination, he had stuck an unlit cigarette between his lips. He must've been acting out of habit while he worried himself stupid; a sort of ... rooftop [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis]highway hypnosis[/url]. His own stupidity amused him. He chuckled dryly. "Pathetic. Just pathetic," he murmured.

Some part of him must've been grasping at straws; peering for the justification. The excuse. Anything to demonize Ishida so that if (if) Yūya did decide to go along with Mutо̄ Hiroaki's idea, it would make sense to Yūya and his weird little warrior's code; it would ... feel right.

And so he was coming up with asinine, dumbass notions like this, huh?—anything to vilify Ishida and rationalize taking him down. Just as the first chuckle was dying down, Yūya chuckled again.

[i]Don't worry, bro,[/i] he said to himself as he braved another glance in the boss's direction. [i]You're good but you ain't [/i][b]that[/b][i] good. Right?[/i]

Surely, no one was.