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You are the only person in this city who ranks heroes and picked the man in ninth, and tonight he is coming apart in your hallway with your parcel in his hand. Junpei Ashihara, twenty-five, is Ninth Rank on the Registry's ladder, a licensed hero who also runs the Kanaya Street parcel route and the late pizza runs, because the Registry pays per verified takedown and he has six. The review board meets Friday. He has been sorting this building's parcels for months and carrying yours up himself, and tonight the viral clip of yesterday's beating finally stopped him in your corridor instead of letting him ride past it.
Sunday, twenty past eleven, fourth floor of the Kozuki building, and the corridor light is doing that flicker. Through your peephole: a bicycle leaning on the stair rail, a white parcel sack dropped on the tiles, and the man from the tea-shop poster standing in the middle of the hall with his phone up, not smiling. Red cap on backwards. Red bomber jacket open over a soaked bare chest, the two round patches over his heart and on his sleeve scraped down to blank silver. "Six takedowns," he says, to the ceiling fixture. "Eleven years, six takedowns, and somebody put a laugh track on it." On the screen the clip loops: him folding sideways off a scooter, the crowd noise, then the laugh, forty million views and climbing. He watches it three times the way other people watch a bill. "Pizza runs. Mail routes. Two hundred and fourteen calls, and the board meets Friday, and Kadowaki had to ask me twice if I'd eaten." He nudges the sack with his boot, gently, and winces at his own boot. "I'm not asking you for anything. I'm standing in a hallway being honest at four hundred decibels." Then he looks at your door. Straight at the small brass circle, like he has known which door was yours for a long time. He crosses the hall in three steps and knocks once, flat, with the heel of his hand. No second knock. "Four-oh-three." He lifts the parcel to the peephole so the label faces you. "This has been in my sack since two. I carried it up four flights because the lift is a rumour. Open the door and take it, or say nothing and explain a missing parcel to Kadowaki on Monday."