Three months had passed since James last checked the news with any real anxiety.
He'd gotten comfortable, which he recognized as a mistake even as he was making it. The vault was organized. The roommates were settled. The Pokémon patrols had become routine. His coursework was manageable. Life had achieved a rhythm that felt almost normal if you didn't think too hard about the underground chamber beneath the building or the red ring he kept in a titanium box behind a false panel in his wardrobe.
He was sitting in the third row of his media studies lecture hall when the documentary started, and for the first time in weeks he put his phone away and actually watched.
The footage opened on Tokyo at night — aerial shots of the skyline, the kind of establishing sequence that documentary editors used when they wanted to signal that what followed was going to be significant. Then the now-famous clips: the swinging figure in black and green moving between Shinjuku towers, the Shibuya catch, the canal rescue. Footage James had seen before, but assembled here with a score and a pace that made it feel different. More real, somehow, than the raw clips had.
The narrator was calm and precise. In the past three months, the individual identified publicly as the Tokyo Spider has been documented at thirty-one separate incidents across the greater Osaka and Tokyo metropolitan areas. In each case, the intervention resulted in no civilian casualties. In fourteen cases, emergency services confirmed that without prior intervention, fatalities were probable or certain.
The lecture hall was quiet. Forty students who had mostly been on their phones were mostly not on their phones anymore.
The documentary moved through the incidents chronologically — the bag snatch, the warehouse fire, the canal. Eyewitness interviews, faces blurred at the subjects' request, voices describing the same thing in different registers: the speed, the silence, the way he appeared before the situation had finished developing, as though he'd known it was coming.
The Japanese government maintains its position, the narrator continued, over footage of the press conference, that the individual represents an unregistered and potentially dangerous element operating outside established legal frameworks. Independent legal scholars in four countries have challenged this characterization, noting the absence of any documented harm attributed to the subject and the substantial documented harm prevented.
Then the clip that James knew was coming. The shot. The movement. The bullet finding someone else.
The documentary didn't editorialize. It didn't need to.
Public trust surveys conducted across Japan in the past six weeks show an approval rating of eighty-three percent for the Tokyo Spider, compared to a thirty-one percent approval rating for the government ministry responsible for the operation in which the shot was fired.
Someone in the front row said damn under their breath, and a few people laughed, and then the room went quiet again.
James leaned back in his seat and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Somewhere in Osaka, Ren Takahashi was probably at work right now, fixing someone's cracked screen and letting his manager blame him for missing inventory, and had no idea that forty students in a lecture hall in another country were watching a documentary about him.
James found this extremely funny and kept it entirely to himself.
The campus café was the kind of place that tried harder than it needed to — exposed brick that had been artificially distressed, pendant lighting that swayed slightly in the HVAC draft, a chalkboard menu that changed every two weeks but always had the same four things on it. James had a coffee. Steve had whatever the seasonal special was, which appeared to involve oat milk and optimism.
"Okay so here's what I think," Steve said, for the third time, which meant he'd cycled back to the beginning of his theory and was about to rebuild it from the foundation. "Government project. Has to be. The whole 'vigilante terrorist' thing is misdirection — classic — because if he was actually a threat they'd have shut it down quietly. The press conference was for show. He's a field asset and the press conference was about establishing deniability."
"Mm," James said.
"The suit alone — the suit — that's not something a civilian builds. That's materials science that doesn't exist yet commercially. Someone made that in a lab."
"Could be," James said.
"And the abilities. The wall-climbing, the reflexes — you saw the clip where he moves before the shot. Before. He knew it was coming. That's not training, that's augmentation. So either we're looking at a government program that went sideways and now they're trying to recapture their asset, or—" Steve paused dramatically. "It's private sector. Some tech billionaire's personal superhero project."
"Interesting theory," James said.
Steve pointed at him with his coffee cup. "You're not engaging."
"I'm engaging."
"You said 'mm' and 'could be' and 'interesting theory.' That's not engaging, that's waiting for me to finish."
James considered this. "I think the spider thing is real," he said. "I think whoever it is woke up one day with something they didn't have before and figured out what to do with it. I think the government is scared because they can't explain it and can't control it, and scared governments do predictable things." He picked up his coffee. "I don't think there's a lab involved."
Steve stared at him. "That's the boring answer."
"It's the simple answer."
"Those aren't the same thing."
"They usually are."
Steve opened his mouth to reconstruct his theory from a different angle, which James had correctly predicted he would do, when the car alarm went off.
Not just an alarm — the particular metallic groan of bodywork under stress, the kind of sound a car made when something very heavy landed on it or hit it from the side. Then another alarm joining it, and the sudden ripple of voices from the students and staff near the café's large windows that faced the campus parking area.
James was on his feet before he'd made a conscious decision to stand.
He crossed to the window in three steps.
In the parking area, roughly forty meters from the café entrance, something was happening to a silver hatchback two spaces down from his own secondhand car. It was being compressed — slowly, deliberately — by a fist. A large fist, roughly the size and shape of a wrecking ball, constructed entirely from yellow light, squeezing the vehicle's roof downward with a measured, demonstrative pressure that suggested whoever was doing it wanted to be seen.
James recognized the construct immediately.
The color. The quality of the light. The particular density of it, which he knew from his own testing — how a fear-spectrum construct looked when it was being held with concentration and intent rather than thrown in panic.
One of his rings had found someone. And that someone had followed it here.
"James, what is that—"
"We need to go." He was already moving toward the door, hand on Steve's arm. "Right now. My car."
"What? There's something — did you see that? That's—"
"Steve." He said it quietly but with enough weight that Steve stopped mid-sentence. "My car. Now. I'll explain in the car."
"You always say that and then you don't explain in the car—"
"This time I will. Move."
They were twenty meters from the car when the pulse happened.
It came from above — a wave of yellow light that expanded outward from a point somewhere over the parking area in a perfect sphere, passing through cars and concrete and people without disturbing any of them. James felt it move through him and kept walking, kept his expression neutral, kept his hand on Steve's arm steering him toward the passenger side.
But he felt the pulse slow when it reached his coat pocket.
Not stop. Slow. A fraction of a second of resistance, like a metal detector finding something it recognized, before the wave continued past them and dissipated against the campus buildings.
He gave it two seconds. Then he glanced up.
The figure was maybe sixty meters up, hovering, yellow light playing at the edges of the aviator jacket and the tinted glasses catching the afternoon sun. Looking down at the parking area. Looking, with increasing focus, at the two people currently trying to get into a secondhand Honda.
James opened his door, dropped into the seat, and started the engine.
"Get in," he said through the open window.
Steve got in. "James, there is a person up there made of—"
James pulled out of the space.
"—yellow light — James—"
He was already at the parking area exit, signaling left, merging into campus traffic with a patience that was entirely performative. Normal speed. Normal behavior. Nothing to see. Just two students leaving campus on a Wednesday afternoon.
In the rearview mirror, the figure above the parking area turned.
James put his foot down.
The campus gave way to the main road in about thirty seconds and the main road gave way to the city in another two minutes, and by the time they hit the first interchange James had confirmed in his mirrors that the yellow light was following them at rooftop height, keeping pace without apparent effort.
"Why," Steve said, in the voice of a man working very hard to stay calm, "is there a flying glowing person following our car."
"He's tracking something in my coat."
"What is in your coat?"
"It's complicated."
"James—"
"Steve, I need you to not talk for about ninety seconds."
"I am absolutely going to talk—"
James reached across with his left hand and opened the glove box without looking at it, keeping his eyes on the road as the Honda accelerated up the on-ramp and merged into highway traffic. His hand moved through the box by memory — registration documents, tire gauge, the small torch he kept for emergencies — until his fingers closed around a familiar weight in the back corner.
The Omnitrix. Mad Ben's. He'd put it there three weeks ago and forgotten about it, which was exactly the kind of carelessness he'd been telling himself to stop.
He pulled it out and held it across to Steve without looking.
"Put this on your wrist."
Steve looked at it. Then at James. Then at the mirror, where the yellow light was now lower, closer, moving between the highway overpasses with a casual ease that suggested the person wearing the ring was in absolutely no hurry. "Is that a toy."
"Put it on your wrist."
"You want me to put a toy watch on while someone made of yellow light chases our car down a highway."
"It's not a toy. Put it on."
"It looks like a toy!"
"Steve." James cut across two lanes smoothly, earning a horn from someone, gaining fifty meters. "I know this looks bad. I know you have questions. I will answer all of them, I promise, every single one, but right now I need you to put that on your wrist and keep it there and do absolutely nothing with it until I tell you. Can you do that?"
Steve stared at the watch. He stared at James. He looked in the mirror at the figure that was now close enough that they could see the yellow tint of the glasses clearly.
He put the watch on.
The Omnitrix settled onto his wrist with a click that was slightly too solid and too purposeful for a toy, and the faceplate lit up orange. Steve stared at it. "It turned on."
"I know."
"James, it turned on."
"I know, Steve."
"Why does a toy watch—"
"It's not a toy." James took the next exit at a speed that was technically legal if you were generous about it, swinging down into the city's secondary road grid where the overpasses would break the line of sight temporarily. "When the moment comes — and you'll know when the moment comes — press the faceplate down. Not hard. Gently. Like you mean it but you're not angry about it. And don't panic about what happens next."
Steve turned to look at him with an expression that had moved through alarm and disbelief and arrived somewhere in the territory of deeply, personally offended. "Don't panic about what happens next."
"Correct."
"What happens next, James."
"I'll tell you when we're not being chased."
"We are currently being chased!"
"Exactly, so this isn't the time." James checked the mirror. The yellow light had found them again, lower now, threading between the office buildings lining the secondary road with the unhurried confidence of someone who knew they were faster than whatever they were following and was simply choosing to stay close rather than end it quickly. Which told James something. The ring-bearer didn't want to destroy the car. He wanted what was in James's coat pocket.
He wanted to talk.
James filed that away and kept driving.
"Stay calm," he said. "Watch the dial on that thing. When something on it looks right to you — and I mean right, like you understand it without knowing why — that's the one. And when I say go, you go."
Steve looked down at the Omnitrix. The faceplate was cycling through silhouettes, slow and deliberate, each one different from the last.
"James," he said, quieter now.
"Yeah."
"What is this."
James glanced at him. Then back at the road. In the mirror, yellow light filled the gap between two buildings and kept coming.
"It's the beginning of a very long conversation," he said. "And I'm sorry I didn't start it sooner."