The next morning, Yashiro went out and bought fifteen doses of E3, much to the surprise of Hibara, the shopkeeper, who assumed he intended to put all of them into himself. Yashiro maintained that they were for a whole group.
While he was in the shop, he learned from Aki that he could come and oversee her examination on Friday at seventeen hundred, or five in the afternoon as she then clarified for him. He told her he was busy.
After he left, he could not stop turning over the approach he would need in order to track Levi, because the slightest mistake would end with his own demise and that of his friends.
Beyond that, he was well aware that there had been four more accomplices in the elimination of Ishino — people who had worn him down until the E3 in him ran out before finishing him. As far as Yashiro was concerned, there was only one gang in the city with that pattern of behaviour.
So he went to the Shinjuku dark lord response team and reported that he suspected the Count of Twin Pincers to be the main culprits.
To his luck, the department, which was led by a woman named Mika, had plenty of records regarding the count's minions as well as his patterns, all of which suggested that he was cowardly and clever. Yashiro disagreed with that assessment. Mika went on to inform him that a civilian had put a bounty on the head of one of the Twin Pincers' minions — the civilian being the father of said minion, Harumi Koji, who wanted the matter tidied away to secure his victory in the coming elections.
Yashiro was not interested in the father's background for obvious reasons. He became very interested indeed on learning that the posted bounty was a beefy twenty million yen, provided the minion was brought back alive.
The minion turned out to be one of the Harumi siblings who had been with Wedge in the alley. The younger brother.
The father, it seemed, did not care much about his daughter, who had always been a stray. He was genuinely concerned about his son's well-being. Yashiro remained indifferent to the age of the politician's son, since both his ether perception and his sister's were extremely nasty, hers in particular. He therefore made no promises about ensuring their safety if he ever ran into them, and took the locations of the Twin Pincers from Mika anyway.
According to the reports, the Twin Pincers had been a brave himself until four years ago — more of a busybody than anything, who gathered a group of friends around him and began operating something like a school of swordsmanship. After one particular hunt, in which his entire group was wiped out, Wedge found himself alone and unable to make ends meet, which forced him into working as the minion of the Coffin Count of Storms, training and overseeing the hundred combatants who still served that dark lord.
Most of those combatants were kids with nowhere else to stay. They had run away from home, or could not afford to stay with their parents, or had fallen out of the system for whatever reason.
Reading the report, and knowing that Wedge had kidnapped a panda and turned it into a chimera, Malta became convinced that Wedge was a monster in his own right.
Yashiro argued that the best way to collect intelligence on Wedge and his dark lord would be to take one of his people alive.
The two of them arrived at an abandoned factory, and Yashiro reminded Malta that this mission was to be non-lethal under all circumstances. He then had his hands full repelling the attacks of enemy combatants — until Wedge and the Harumi siblings arrived and told the kids to stand down, since none of them were any kind of match for Yashiro. They obliged, all except Yusuke, who put a crater in the concrete with his bat before Yashiro pacified him.
Livid at the sight, Wedge ordered the kids to abandon ship. That surprised Yashiro, who pointed out that he had come here to talk.
According to Wedge, he had no idea how Ishino had met his end. If anything, he had always believed Ishino to be some deviant serial killer. When Yashiro revealed that Ishino had been investigating the distribution circle of E4 substances, which was assumed to be produced by the Twin Pincers, Wedge confessed that he knew nothing about it. If anything, Wedge said, their gang had been trying to work out how to create E4 themselves.
Seeing that Yashiro was not acquainted with the Half-Dragon in any way, Wedge revealed that this dark lord dealt in arms and substances, and used its control of E4 and E3 to destabilise the underworld. Wedge could not afford to give away the identity of the person behind it. He made it clear that the person in question was a common enemy of them both.
For Wedge, the ultimate goal was stability, which would ensure the steady rise of his own dark lord.
Yashiro was not buying it, given that Wedge had attempted to kidnap him countless times, which put his credibility somewhat in question.
By the time Malta had finished with the goons trying to flee out the back, he caught up with Yashiro, who was preparing for the fight that would let him take Harumi's son — at which the older sister vowed that she would not let them take Yusuke.
The older sister made the first move, and it failed miserably. Yashiro electrocuted her just as she was about to gather her blood fragments back together. Then he darted forward and cut the girl down, to the absolute shock and horror of everyone in the building.
Malta, for his part, moved immediately to cross swords with Yusuke. When he tried to incapacitate the boy, he was surprised to find him protected by his own ability. Seeing his best attempts turned aside by the boy's inner shield, Malta gave up on the sword entirely and went to take him bare-handed, and pinned him down.
Meanwhile Wedge pressed his attack in a style Yashiro had grown familiar with by now.
As Malta assured Yusuke that he could always run away from home again after they took him back there, the boy became so traumatised that he began begging Wedge to save him, because he never wanted to go back to that house again.
Wedge turned his attacks towards Malta. Yusuke was caught in the crossfire, and lost his life, to the shock of both Yashiro and Malta.
Yashiro in particular was livid at this turn of events, because Wedge had single-handedly blown his bounty. Instead of being shocked, or panicking about having eliminated one of his own soldiers, Wedge made it clear that he had long ago promised the Harumi siblings that he would eliminate them himself if being dragged back home ever became a real possibility.
He had now simply fulfilled that promise. He had given the children who came to him dignity and shelter, which nobody else would ever have provided them with.
That did not pass with Yashiro, who considered Wedge's act to be worse than anything a brave had ever done.
Before long the two of them went back to fighting, and this time Yashiro crossed swords directly with Wedge. He was taken aback when he discovered the man's ability was the control of other people's gloves. Wedge came close enough to eliminating him that Yashiro only avoided certain defeat in the nick of time by stripping his gloves off his hands.
Injured, outnumbered and outgunned, Wedge made the obvious choice and disengaged, and Yashiro was left unable to follow him up.
That night, Harumi Koji heard about the fate that had befallen his offspring, and was so furious that he broke the glass table in front of his wife. His youngest daughter overheard the whole fight from the next room, with a blade in her hand.
A week passed after Ishino's death, and Yashiro and Malta's progress was not even modest. They managed to find underlings and nothing more, and the underlings gave up little to no useful intelligence, which meant Yashiro was going to have to think outside the box.
By the time he got to the bar, he was surprised to find Ed waiting for him with a bouquet of flowers in his hand.