Level Horizon (Haikyuu!! WingedAU)

Year One.50 1/1; Umbral Encounter

In a world that's changing so quickly, you're guaranteed to fail if you don't take any risks. ~Mark Zuckerberg

Kuroo Tetsurou glances over his shoulder a little uneasily as he skitters through the shadows looking for a good vantage point.

The rookery is unusually active for how late in the evening it is with a large number of people still milling around while the last rays of light disappear as the world rolls over for another day. Of course, it was only after he'd gotten here that he remembered the bustling mass of avians the rookery turned into in the days just before migration.

He finds a ledge in shadow just inside civilian premises and deftly leaps up and settles into place to wait. He shouldn't be stuck here long; his target just finished delivering his daily report. All that was left was to catch him when he was alone. Kuroo grimaces.

He'd nearly been caught twice as he'd moved around, one of them while he'd been slinking through the rafters of the large assembly building on military grounds. Being cornered in the middle of one of the main military buildings and surrounded by the largest concentration of sentries in the rookery would likely have been most unpleasant.

He'd found an alcove above the Grand King's study in the course of shadowing his target, Iwaizumi... and had entertained more than one fantasy of offing that monster while he waited for the sentry crow to show up. He's been inside the rookery more times than he can remember, but he'd never been quite that close to the Grand King. All it would have taken was a slight leap between a couple support beams near the vaulted ceiling for him to drop down on top of the rookery leader and taking him out at that point would have been easy. It was remarkable, he thought, that avians— masters of the sky— even they didn't look up.

Iwaizumi had come in, still half sweaty after an aerial Volley practice, and the ensuing conversation had been entertaining to say the least. The rookery leader's and his son's personalities were truly night and day. The sentry leader was nearly as antagonistic toward the Grand King as Kageyama was toward the redhead... the difference was in the Grand King's reactions. Where Hinata would immediately fire back a retort and promptly lose himself in a bickering match, the rookery leader was a crackerjack manipulator and excelled at crafting elaborate verbal sparring traps. He could lay out a perfect insult and expertly maneuver Iwaizumi straight into it. To his credit, the sentry leader had been stoic through all of the Grand King's superficial animation, adeptly picking out the important details camouflaged within the cheerful childishness.

Seeing this man, this monster from his memories, so oddly playful around Iwaizumi had made him wonder if he was really the same person who'd marked Hinata for elimination. But then Kuroo'd remembered the faces of the people he'd lost at the whim of that man— and it had sobered him. It had taken a solid dose of control not to act on any of those dormant emotions that surrounded his memories of the Grand King, and he'd left the assembly building as soon as the sentry leader was finished in order to keep it that way.

As Iwaizumi walks by his shadowed hiding place now, Kuroo smirks.

Quickly surveying the empty area, he silently drops in behind him. He has to hand it to the crow— he seems to have taken their criticism on his movements to heart and his steps are much quieter now. Kuroo almost has to pay attention to his own as he crowds in close to him.

"Gotta say, this place is different than I remember—and yet completely the same." He drawls quietly just over his shoulder and the sentry leader nearly leaps out of his feathers.

Kuroo smirks, because thanks to that last fight their most volatile level pair endured, he knows what that looks like and can easily picture the crow before him with bald wings. But even knowing how much smaller and far more fragile those limbs appear without the feathers, Iwaizumi's wings still spread into an impressively threatening display that almost has him backing up a step.