Detective

Tsuna stumbles forward and tips over, faceplanting into a sitting Tetsuya's pompadour. Ryohei is already passed out over to the side and the portion of forest they're in is singed and scuffed up. All three are exhausted, but progress was made.

It still seems that only Tsuna is able to light his flames, but both Ryohei and Tetsuya can manage a glow so fierce it looked like fire and electricity.

Tsuna definitely unleashed something bad when he asked about other colours because now Kyouya keeps disappearing for a while and then presenting random children of Namimori to the three, all of the kids terrified in a strangely exasperated manner that Kyouya normally causes.

The good thing is that Tsuna has made a lot of friends, exploring their new superpowers together. Plus the odd restlessness in the back of his head has calmed to a steady warmth, pulsing brighter when a new child is dragged over by Kyouya.

It's not really so bad, if you ignore the fact that Kyouya has abducted quite a few of them by now, and the police have taken to patrolling the streets with an intense determination.

.

Kyouya has been finding lots of other children with an Incendiary Defence now that he understands what activates them. It's primal, raw fear. The kind that makes your mind blank and your legs shake and sends the strongest into a sobbing mess.

Kyouya is very, very good at making people fear him.

.

Kensuke throws himself around another corner of the preschool's hallway and desperately looks for an adult, or just anyone at all who can help him. A rustle of that black cloak and brief, quiet taps on the linoleum flooring behind Kensuke rips a whimper from the child.

The sobbing only starts when he turns another corner and reaches a dead end. His momentum carries him and he hits the wall with his palms out to absorb the impact before whipping around and placing his back to the wall.

There's no one behind him.

Kensuke shakes with fear and he scans the corners, looking for any sign even as hope bubbles up within him at the thought of the creature being gone. Then he looks up, and screams.

.

Kyouya peers around at the half-dissolved wall and the unconscious child at his feet.

Like previous renditions, Kyouya briefly wonders where the wall has gone because there's no rubble or anything to imply that the hole in the wall isn't meant to be there. The edges are jagged, sure, but it's clean. No scratches, no burnt paint, just a hole.

He shakes away the thoughts about disintegration and focuses on the child, one Mochida Kensuke. "Another red," Kyouya murmurs. He doesn't really need another, but he mentally adds the discovery to the herbivore's profile anyway, right next to the child's home address in case Kyouya needs to find him again.

Kyouya has three of the reds now, and while he could count it as a coincidence, he's pretty sure they're the most statistically common colour.

Perhaps he's looking at this the wrong way and it's his method that's failing him. True, he did come across a variety when randomly selecting herbivores, but if he's going to do this properly he needs to streamline the process.

Therefore, if he wants more colours quickly he should find links between the reds and differences between the red, green, yellow and orange.

Kyouya turns and walks away, leaving the child unconscious on the floor and the caretakers plus other kids still locked in the classrooms.

He links socioeconomic background first, but his herbivores are all middle class, so he tries area of living but they're scattered around Namimori with no distinct geographical lines. He then goes for food and ancestry and classroom and winds up looking at personality-horoscopes for some reason, because the information he's reading through is in the police station and the particular officer who owns the desk is a fan.

He blinks and compares the personalities. The orange is like a bunny, the green is a tiger, yellows are bears and the reds are all wolves.

Alright, so Kyouya will try this first and return if it doesn't pan out. He erases his search history through the files then slides off the rolling chair and walks around the desk to the door of the private room.

An herbivore opens it for him before he can do it himself and Kyouya nods in polite thanks before walking under the stunned man's arm and across the precinct's tiled floor. The police kind of stare at the child that none of them saw walk in.

"What are you all doing?!" the first man cries. "Grab the Hibari!"

Kyouya picks up his pace and baseball slides under one woman's legs to reach the front entrance, disappearing into a crowd of primary schoolers walking by in a large mass on an excursion. The police groan but since they can't exactly charge into a herd of tiny children, they hover at the edges and try to spy Kyouya.

The man whose office got broken into quickly tries to find what the demon child was looking for. Unfortunately, the kid seems to have gotten smarter about covering his tracks despite literally walking out the front door in sight of the whole precinct.

...

Omake – colour palette

"If Ryohei and I have a baby, would it be a Lightning?" Takeshi muses.

Hayato stares for a moment, incredulous. "First of all, that's not how flames work. Second of all, you're both male, that's not how humans work."

"What if we were females, then?"

"Do you think before you open your mouth?" Hayato asks, genuinely curious.

"But yellow and blue make-"

"Just stop."