Chapter 143: Kanzaki

Chapter 143: Chapter 143: Kanzaki

The wedding planning lasted exactly four days before the first crisis arrived, and Haruki should have known better than to assume anything in his life would ever stay simple for longer than that.

He was reviewing venue options with Yui over video call, both of them squinting at photographs of a small garden hall neither of them could quite agree on, when his phone buzzed with a second incoming call. He almost ignored it. Then he saw the name.

Hayato Kanzaki.

He hadn’t heard from Hayato in nearly a year, not since a brief, cordial exchange congratulating him on the animation announcement. The silence hadn’t felt strained, exactly — more like two people who’d fought alongside each other once and then drifted into separate orbits, the way people sometimes did even after something meaningful.

"I need to take this," he told Yui, who nodded, unbothered, already returning her attention to the venue photographs.

He answered. "Hayato."

"Haruki." The voice sounded different immediately — tighter, more controlled than Hayato’s usual relaxed cadence, the specific careful tone of someone working hard to sound composed while failing at it slightly. "I need a favor. And before you ask, no, this isn’t about my father’s company trying anything against you again."

Haruki sat up straighter. "What’s wrong?"

A long pause. "My father passed away three days ago."

The words landed heavily, unexpected in a way that made Haruki’s stomach drop immediately. "Hayato, I’m so sorry."

"Thank you." Another pause, longer this time. "The company is mine now. Entirely, immediately, no transition period, no board oversight I can actually rely on. Kanzaki Holdings, all of it, dropped onto me with three days’ notice and absolutely no preparation."

"That’s an enormous weight to carry alone."

"It is." Hayato’s voice cracked slightly, the composed exterior finally slipping. "And I’ve discovered, going through his private files this week, that my father was still funding at least two of the exact predatory contract practices your coalition spent two years fighting to expose. Quietly. Through subsidiaries I didn’t even know existed until three days ago."

Haruki felt the floor shift slightly beneath the conversation, old instincts sharpening immediately. "How bad?"

"Bad enough that if it becomes public before I can address it internally, it undoes everything the Lantern Project built, and drags your reputation through it specifically because of our history." Hayato’s voice steadied slightly, businesslike now, the shift Haruki recognized from years of watching him operate. "I don’t want to hide it. I want to dismantle it, properly, publicly, on my own terms rather than waiting for someone else to expose it first. But I don’t know how to do that without destroying the company entirely, and four thousand employees don’t deserve to lose their jobs because of decisions my father made without my knowledge."

Haruki closed his eyes for a moment, the weight of the request settling in fully. "You want the Lantern Project’s help."

"I want your help, specifically," Hayato corrected. "Nakamura’s expertise in exposing exactly this kind of structural corruption. Watanabe’s legal precision. Rika’s family connections, if she’s willing to extend them given everything her father did to the original Ghost Project." A pause. "And you, because you’re the only person I trust to tell me honestly whether I’m actually trying to fix this or just trying to protect my own reputation while pretending it’s something nobler."

The honesty of the request landed harder than any dramatic plea could have. Haruki thought of Chapter Twenty-Four, of every hard lesson about the difference between genuine correction and cosmetic damage control, of exactly how thin that line could be even for someone trying sincerely to walk the right side of it.

"I’ll help," he said. "But you need to understand this will be slow, and it will hurt, and there’s a real chance it costs you more of the company than you’re currently prepared to lose."

"I know." Hayato’s voice carried a steadiness that hadn’t been there a moment earlier, something resolved settling into place. "I’d rather lose half the company doing this properly than keep all of it built on something I can’t live with once I actually understand what it is."

They talked logistics for another twenty minutes — an emergency coalition meeting, which records needed reviewing first, how to structure an internal investigation that wouldn’t tip off whoever inside Kanzaki Holdings might try to bury the evidence before it could be properly documented. By the time the call ended, Haruki felt the familiar, exhausting weight of a genuine fight settling back onto his shoulders, different from the anxious dread of the Horizon lawsuit but recognizably related to it.

Yui was still on the video call when he returned his attention to the screen, patiently waiting, her expression already shifted from venue-planning cheerfulness into careful concern.

"That sounded serious," she said.

He explained everything, watching her expression cycle through surprise, sympathy, and finally a kind of resigned, affectionate acceptance that had become familiar over the past two years.

"So the wedding planning is paused," she said, once he’d finished.

"I’m sorry. I know the timing is terrible."

"The timing is always terrible with you. I’ve made peace with it." She smiled, though something more serious lingered underneath the teasing. "Haruki, can I say something honestly?"

"Always."

"I’m not upset that you said yes to helping him. I’d actually be more worried if you hadn’t." She leaned closer to her camera. "But I need you to promise me something. When this fight gets exhausting — and it will, because these things always do — you actually tell me. You don’t disappear into it the way you used to. We’re getting married. That means the exhausting parts belong to both of us now, not just you carrying them alone while I wait to hear about it after the fact."

He absorbed the request seriously, recognizing in it every hard lesson the past two years had taught him about the difference between protecting someone and simply excluding them from difficulty out of misplaced consideration. "I promise."

"Good." Her expression softened. "Now go save the world, or whatever this week’s version of that looks like. I’ll keep looking at venue photos. We’ll pick something eventually."

"You have excellent priorities."

"I have realistic priorities. The wedding will happen when it happens. Right now, Hayato needs you, and you’re the kind of person who shows up for that. It’s one of the reasons I said yes to marrying you in the first place." She blew him a quick kiss through the screen. "Go. Call me tonight regardless of how the day goes."

After the call ended, Haruki sat for a long moment in the quiet of his apartment, the weight of Hayato’s confession settling alongside the memory of everything the Lantern Project had already survived together. Kanzaki Holdings had once been the company actively working to destroy his career. Now its heir was asking for help tearing down its own rotten foundations before someone else did it for him, less carefully and with far less mercy for the employees caught in the middle.

He opened the coalition group chat and began typing.

Haruki: Emergency meeting needed. This one’s serious. I’ll explain everything in person, but the short version is: Hayato needs us, and I think we should help him.

The responses began arriving within minutes, and Haruki felt something steady settle into his chest despite the difficulty of what lay ahead — not dread exactly, but the familiar, hard-won confidence of someone who’d learned, repeatedly and expensively, that the fights worth having were rarely the easy ones.

Outside his window, Tokyo continued its indifferent evening rhythm, entirely unaware that inside one small apartment, a new Chapter of an old fight had just quietly begun.

He picked up his phone to call Mizuno next, already thinking three steps ahead the way two years of hard lessons had finally, permanently taught him to.

The wedding could wait a little longer.

Some things, he’d learned, were worth the delay.