Hisoka’s Apartment, Musutafu.

I stepped out of my apartment, not yet tired but aware that it was only a matter of time before the exhaustion began to set in. A message had been sent out, and when I checked my school email, I found that U.A. High School was already expecting us to return. All Might’s public reassurances had done most of the heavy lifting there, I was certain, the endless faith the people of Japan had in the man being burnt up to fuel the fading image of a strong, safe society instead of the tenuous, clinging reality that hung beneath the facade. Considering just how many people the man had saved throughout the entirety of his career, it wasn’t hard to see why his influence was so great—either you had experienced the man coming to your aid, you knew someone who had, and if not either, then the media ensured that you knew at least some of what he had done.

I had more than enough experience with tragedy to know that it would be very little consolation to those whom Koji Koda and Rikido Sato had left behind and that the pain would linger on, waiting for just the right trigger to cause it to resurface. There was an increased police presence at the train station, and when I reached the platform, I found that an incredibly rotund man was present, surrounded on all sides by people seeking to speak with him. I recognised him from the hero rankings as one of the names that were well inside the top one hundred entries—Fat Gum. His presence here, at the station that would act as the last stopover before the one closest to U.A. High School was no mystery.

With the large number of students that would pass through this checkpoint on their way to school and with everything that had just happened, it was clear that the city intended to place heroes in every major area as a preventative measure for any further incidents. It was a show of force and a deterrent both, but it was also closer to a thin veil than a substantive shield—if they were worried about a repeat invasion, a single hero and a handful of police weren’t going to be enough, not when the villains could bypass any barrier by way of teleportation. The protective measures that had been implemented at U.A. High School over the weekend would be enough to prevent that method of intrusion from occurring again, but that wasn’t something that could be deployed across the entirety of the city.

Out here, an attack would be met the same way it always was: a rapid response of nearby heroes and a hope that they would be able to arrive before too much damage could be wrought. I opened my eyes as the train pulled into the station and then followed the other passengers as they stepped inside. The blue-haired boy that seemed to be present in this carriage on most days was here once again, but for once, he wasn’t standing with his face buried in the corner; this time, he was talking to a tall, well-built blonde boy, and almost all signs of his normal anxiety seemed to be missing, washed away by some unknown cause. The girl with the indigo hair pressed her way through the mess of people to meet the two boys, the three of them talking in quiet voices, too far away to make out the words.

There would most likely be a shift in the structure of the classes today, and if my guess was right, some kind of discussion focused on how to act in the event of a follow-up attack. Hanta, Fumikage, Ochaco, Mashirao and myself had all been lucky enough to have the guidance of Thirteen during the attack, but that hadn’t been the case for the others after they had been scattered. None of the other groups had standing orders or concise instructions to follow; instead, they had all been dumped into a hostile location where villains had been actively attempting to kill them, and they had been constrained by a lifetime of being told to avoid using their quirks. They had no pro-hero to guide them, no teacher to share wisdom, and no standing strategy for how they were supposed to act—that only two students had been killed was something I thought I might be forever surprised by.

“Hisoka,” Eijiro called.

I stepped off the train and onto the platform, eyes shifting across the dozens of people present until I actually caught sight of him. Eijiro stepped out of the general flow of traffic and fell in step beside me, the two of us moving at a slower pace but still adjacent to them.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Morning, man,” Eijiro said with a tired smile. “I’m glad you ended up coming back.”

It felt so strange to hear that from someone my own age after years of spending most of my time on my own, and I couldn’t understand what he must have seen in me to have felt that way. We had only known each other for a week at most, barely enough time to scratch the surface of who either of us really was, but yet he was somehow glad that I hadn’t vanished from U.A. High School—beyond all that, I found that my own feelings somehow mirrored the sentiment.

“I am glad you have returned as well,” I said, “Was it difficult to convince your mother?”

Eijiro gave a quiet laugh at the question before folding his hands behind his head as he considered it.

“Not as much as I thought,” Eijiro admitted. “I did make her cry, though, so that wasn’t good—she’s just worried about me.”

I just nodded at the words.

“I spoke to Ashido last night, and I’m pretty sure she’s coming too,” Eijiro said, eyes aimed skyward. “I’m just hoping that the others come back as well.”

From what I had seen of both Momo and Tsuyu, along with their respective families, I was mostly certain that both would be returning to classes with us, but there was a chance that things had changed after I had left, so there was no point in speculating yet.

“Fat Gum was at the station,” I said, “It appears they are increasing security across Musutafu in response to the attack.”

“Yeah, I heard something about that on the news,” Eijiro said, “I’ve seen videos of Fat Gum before; he’s supposed to be really strong.”

“I’ve heard as much,” I agreed.

“Man, you look super tired,” Eijiro said, glancing over from the corner of his eye. “You’ve got bags under your eyes and everything.”

“I often struggle to sleep, but after everything that has happened recently, it’s been remarkably worse,” I said, “You look tired as well.”

“Yeah, I had the worst nightmare on Friday night; it took me forever to actually get back to sleep—guess I’m still trying to catch up from that,” Eijiro said before rapping his knuckles against my upper arm. “We’ll get through it, man; we just gotta keep on moving forward.”

The attempt at reassurance was surprisingly endearing; with his good nature and genuine sense of empathy—far removed from the pale mimicry I was using to approximate it—someone like Eijiro Kirishima was much better suited to comforting others than I ever would be.

“Yes,” I said, perhaps just a fraction lighter. “The only way is forward.”

#

Class 1-A, Musutafu.

The empty seat that sat in front of my own desk had developed some kind of vision-based magnetism because I continued to find myself staring at the place where Koji Koda should have been sitting. Eijiro had long since taken up residence on the edge of Kyoka’s desk—the ongoing discussion of famous heroes actually managing to draw Katsuki out of his usual grit—but when she actually made it to class, she looked completely unimpressed by his choice of seats.

“That’s my desk you’re sitting on,” Kyoka said, eyeing him. “Can you move?”

“Sorry, Jiro,” Eijiro said, sheepish. “Here, let me fix it.”

Eijiro had already slipped down beside it and then scrubbed at the top of it with the sleeve of his uniform in an attempt to bring it back to its normal shiny finish. Jiro glanced away, trying and then failing to keep the amusement from showing on her face at the boy’s sudden cleaning frenzy. Eijiro attempted to slip through the gap behind Katsuki’s chair to give her the space to sit down and ended up jarring it in the process—

“Don’t hit my chair, idiot,” Katsuki grunted out in warning. “You were wrong anyway—haven’t you even seen what the top ten are capable of?”

“I’ve seen most of them, but Crimson Riot should definitely be up there,” Eijiro said, content to stand in the aisle. “He’s an absolute beast, right, Midoriya?”

Izuku went from trying to pretend he was asleep on his desk to sitting upright in less than a second, startled by his sudden inclusion into the conversation. Katsuki snapped his head around to stare at the other boy, and for a moment Izuku floundered—

“He has a high amount of successful captures and almost as many rescues, a phenomenal amount considering his ranking,” Izuku said, visibly panicking. “But I’m not sure his combat potential is at the same level as some of the others in the top ten.”

“Don’t you dare agree with me, you shitty nerd,” Katsuki threatened.

“Of course,” Izuku cried.

“Come on guys,” Eijiro complained, “Didn’t you see his battle last week; he fought that Meatsmasher guy—totally kicked his ass.”

“That guy is a damn extra,” Katsuki denied, crossing his arms. “Pick any of the top ten and put them against Crimson Riot, and they would wreck his shit—tell him, Deku.”

Izuku looked completely trapped, unsure whether he was supposed to agree with the other boy’s new demand or outright deny it because of the prior request—I watched as he threaded his hands into his hair, muttering in a panicked frenzy as he attempted to work his way to the correct answer.

“The closest match-up would be with Crust, but it would depend on how the fight was structured, how much information either side has on each other because their quirks share a similar purpose—they protect from damage.” Izuku managed, sounding frazzled. “Crimson Riot has shown he can use advanced tactics to take down superior physically augmented villains before, and if he was aware of who he was fighting in advance, then he would develop a strategy that would take into account his strengths and weaknesses.”

Eijiro was grinning at the positive bend to it, but Katsuki seemed to be growing progressively more pissed off the longer he spoke.

“However, Crust has shown a wide array of techniques using his shields, including both close-range defence and long-range offence; we know that he can make the edges razor sharp, and with how hard he can throw them that Crimson Riot would be on the defensive right from the start,” Izuku said, posture hunched. “Crimson Riot doesn’t have any natural range options, and if he didn’t have time to prepare one in advance, then he would have to rely completely on closing the distance within the first few moments of the fight—”

“Shut the hell up already,” Katsuki raged, smacking his fist down on the desk. “Keep it to a yes or no.”

Izuku sunk back down onto his desk, covering his head with his arms in an attempt to return to his feigned sleeping, but Tenya slid the door open, derailing the ongoing conversation entirely.

“Alright, it’s our first day back, and it’s time for our homeroom period,” Tenya declared as he shut the door once again. “Please find your seats.”

“We are in our seats,” Hanta said, curious. “Aren’t you the only one who is still standing up?”

“That’s false,” Tenya cried, quickly slipping down into his seat in an attempt to beat the accusations. “Kirishima is still standing up.”

Eijiro went willingly, slinking back to his chair to avoid getting further caught up in Tenya’s well-meaning tyranny. I managed to finally pull my gaze away from the empty desk in front of me as Shota stepped into the hallway outside, covered from head to toe in bandages—only a sliver of a gap remained at eye level, presumably to allow him to see out from behind it all. Both of his arms were bandaged, and individually, his fingers had been taped up as well, allowing movement but concealing them from view. I stood up, stepping into the aisle and then making my way to the front of the room.

“Higawara?” Tenya said.

I slid the door all the way open again and then left it there before turning to make my way back to my seat. Shota came to a stop at the threshold, pausing there for a moment, his head turned just enough for him to take in the entirety of the room—I knew from first-hand experience that the view from that spot did a remarkably unfair job of highlighting two of the seats in particular. The energy level of the room dropped in an instant as they noticed him standing there, a clear reminder of what had happened. Kyoka and Mashirao looked equally as disturbed by the man’s unexpected appearance outside of the hospital only days after they’d carried his broken body up to the platform—Ochaco was staring down at her desk now, hands tightly gripping the folds of her skirt as she sat perfectly still.

“Teacher,” Mina managed, “Shouldn’t you still be in the hospital?”

Shota remained at the doorway for a moment longer before he finally stepped forward over the threshold and into the room, ambling at a pace I might have described as a laconic shuffle.

“Don’t be concerned for my health,” Shota said, voice barely audible through the bandages. “It’s not your business to think about that.”

Mina looked uncomfortable at the chastisement, but she didn’t wilt, and if I’d had to guess, I doubted the man’s words had done anything to dispel her concern. Shota made it to his desk and then turned to face them, carefully leaning back against the edge of it. The man stood there for almost an entire minute, perfectly silent, and nobody seemed capable of bringing themselves to speak up.

“Koji Koda and Rikido Sato won’t be returning to this class for reasons that are obvious; I’ve spoken to their families, and there will be a private funeral taking place for both of them,” Shota said, voice perfectly level. “There have been no invitations sent out to anyone outside of their immediate families, and that is very unlikely to change in the coming days.”

I closed my eyes, unwilling to look through the empty space that Koji had left behind in order to watch the man at the front of the room. There was a change in the air; the little spark of cheer that had been trying to grow anew in the wake of the disaster now squashed beneath the weight of his words.

“If you would like to offer your condolences to the affected families, then I suggest writing a letter, and I will personally deliver them for you,” Shota said, “In regards to what happened at the USJ, I want all of you to know that the instructors, the staff, and the security personnel of U.A. High School failed you—I have failed you.”

The image of the man throwing himself against an army of villains just to give us enough time to escape and the sacrifice that came along with that was more than equal to any failure to anticipate a surprise invasion that nobody could have predicted in advance.

“Teacher,” Ochaco managed.

“Everything the media has been saying is correct; all of you are under our protection, but we failed to keep you safe when it mattered, and now two of your classmates are no longer here because of it,” Shota said, the bandages around his wrist twisting oddly as his hand closed into a fist. “So long as you choose to continue your education here, I cannot guarantee that something like this will not happen again, not when the villain responsible for their transportation has eluded capture.”

“That purple mist bastard,” Katsuki muttered. “He could bring more of them in at any time.”

“Yes, it’s a rare quirk and an exceptionally problematic one given the circumstances,” Shota said, “Here is my recommendation for all of you—quit.”

The classroom broke out a wash of noise at the word, shocked, confused, and disheartened.

“Teacher,” Izuku said, fists trembling against the surface of his desk. “You’re telling us to quit?”

“This is something that can happen again, and every other class has been given the same advice—let me make it clear to you all,” Shota said, “U.A High School has become a target for a violent group of criminals who have no qualms about killing children, and they could attack at any time—we have no way to predict if this is a singular attack or the start of an all-out war.”

“This has to be a joke,” Denki said.

“It’s not a joke, Kaminari,” Shota said, voice quiet. “U.A. High School cannot guarantee that another attack isn’t coming, and we cannot guarantee that each of you will survive if it does.”

I wondered if he had been told to make this offer to us or if he had been driven by his own sense of guilt to make it regardless of what the school had been aiming for. Nobody was speaking up anymore, the crushing sense of futility washing over the classroom, forcing heads to bow and shoulders to shift beneath the unseen weight—but there was one person who hadn’t bowed his head and who was sitting up straighter than I had ever seen him.

“There is no way I’m going to quit,” Izuku said, voice strained. “It doesn’t matter how many villains come here—I’ll never leave U.A. High School.”

“Midoriya—” Shota started.

“The shitty nerd is right,” Katsuki said, pushing himself up to his feet. “I worked myself to the bone for hours every damn day to get here, and if you think I’m going to give up on becoming number one because of some freaks, you’re dead wrong.”

Tenya rose up in the wake of his words, as did Shoto, Eijiro and Fumikage.

“I am in complete agreement, Teacher,” Tenya said, “I came to this school because I want to protect people from villains like these; I couldn’t live with myself if I turned my back after what they’ve done.”

“I won’t quit,” Shoto said.

“Me either,” Eijiro said, clenching his hand into a fist. “Koda and Sato wouldn’t have quit if it had been the other way around, so I’m not going to either.”

Slowly, one by one, each and every surviving member of Class 1-A stood up, declaring their own reasons to push forward. I stood up with them but kept my silence—I may not have truly known Koji and Rikido, but I had still played a part in their fate. The weight of that would probably rest on all of our souls for the remainder of our lives, but there was only one thing we do for them now: take their dream of becoming heroes upon our own shoulders and make sure it became a reality. Shota was silent in the face of the united 1-A, and it seemed to take him a while to muster up a response—

“Fine, I get it,” Shota muttered, reaching up to touch the bandages covering his face. “If you’re not going anywhere, then class is starting—so just shut up and sit down already.”

The man pushed off the edge of the desk and then rounded it in that same slow amble of movement, his fingers carefully taking hold of a marker on the tray. He brought it up to the board as the class finally began to sit back down, and over the course of a very long minute, he scrawled out a short message in large, messy letters—U.A. Sports Festival.

“The U.A. Sports Festival is approaching,” Shota said once he’d turned back around. “I’m sure you all know what that is.”

“We’re going to be on the other side of it,” Tsuyu said, “Rather than watching from the stands.”

“Precisely; you will all be participating in it this year, and that means you are showcasing yourself to the entirety of Japan,” Shota said, “All of the heroes, hero agencies, support agencies and law enforcement divisions will be watching closely, and this is your first opportunity to bolster your future career prospects.”

“Teacher,” Mezo said, “Is this not a prime moment for the villains to stage a second attack?”

“It has a low probability, but it is possible,” Shota said, “There are a few reasons why it’s unlikely, and the main one is that their explicit goal was to kill All Might.”

There was a wave of shocked exclamations at hearing it actually confirmed for the first time as more than just a plausible deduction, and Shota continued speaking as if he hadn’t heard any of it.

“The U.A Sports Festival is a nationwide event, and it draws participants from every hero school in the region; the security for it is already naturally high, and the police will be present in force,” Shota said, “Furthermore if an attack were to occur during it, the villains would find themselves surrounded by tens of thousands of heroes and quirk users.”

The vast majority of those would be untrained with using their quirks in combat, but it was still far too many people to pit yourself against without a valid reason.

“A fast, targeted attack could be unleashed to cause destruction on a large scale, but if their target is All Might, then it makes little sense to take the risk,” Fumikage said, “With that many people present, and the public outrage at the attack that has just occurred, it’s far more likely that they would be crushed within minutes of showing themselves.”

“Correct,” Shota said.

“They don’t have anyone left to fight anyway,” Denki said, “Most of them got captured, didn’t they?”

“One-hundred-and-twenty-two of the villains who participated in the initial attack have been captured, including the one they brought with them to counter All Might directly,” Shota said, “It’s possible for them to still go through with another attack, but it isn’t strategically sound.”

Shota waited for a moment to see if any of us would speak up again before he cleared his throat.

“Tell me what you know about the events that take place at the Sports Festival,” Shota said, “Jiro.”

“I know they’ve had a few different obstacle courses,” Kyoka tried, unready for the sudden question. “Last year, they had that room with the holes in the walls that shot out all of those sticky balls as well.”

“Obstacle course. Evasion Room—write these down in your books,” Shota said, “Aoyama.”

“Team Battles,” Yuga murmured, “One on one and three on three.”

While just about everyone in the room was looking tired, the bags under Yuga Aoyama’s eyes were almost as bad as my own, and the exhaustion in his voice was clear as day.

“Team Battles,” Shota said, “Hagakure.”

There was a pause that was long enough that I actually opened my eyes just to see if she was still sitting in her seat.

“Two years ago, they did a baton pass race with eight people per team,” Toru said, voice quiet. “They did King of the Hill the year before that, with seven teams of four.”

When Shota had told us all to quit, and everyone had stood up in the face of that advice, there had been exactly two people who hadn’t spoken a word. I had been one of them, and the other had been Toru Hagakure. When I’d carried her across the desert zone, she hadn’t yet realised the magnitude of what had happened; the concussion had been shielding her from the knowledge of just how close to death she had come. Now, with full knowledge of everything that had happened, the cheerful energy she had brought to the classroom prior to the events of the USJ was no longer present at all. I felt a rising desire to speak with her, although I couldn’t understand why that was, and if I did, I wasn’t even sure what I would say—but it persisted.

“Baton Pass. King of the Hill.” Shota said, “Yaoyorozu.”

“Almost every year, there is a one-on-one elimination tournament as the final event of the festival,” Momo said, “I think there were two times where that wasn’t the case within the last decade; one of those was a free-for-all elimination round, the other was a maze with teams of three and a point system.”

“Good memory,” Shota said, “Elimination Round. Free For All. Maze.”

He waited just long enough for everyone to finish writing down the list of possible events before he spoke up again.

“Every single U.A. Sports Festival has been broadcast across Japan and recorded in full; all of that footage is available online and on the school website,” Shota said, “That is going to be your homework from me for this week, each day I’ll assign a different year for you to review, and I want you to do a short, critical analysis of each describing how you would have attempted each of the events.”

Izuku was already rapidly scratching out a structure for how he would attempt the homework, muttering under his breath as he wrote it all down.

“Homeroom for the next week will consist of us doing a group review of the video footage I assigned for homework, and I expect you all to know at least enough about it to participate in a debate about the strategies that each of the winners used,” Shota said, “Do your homework, pay attention to the creative uses of quirks, and try to uncover that same sense of creativity in yourselves—because you are going to need it very, very soon.”

#

U.A High School, Musutafu.

Midnight watched us all from her place, perched on the desk at the front of the room, her arms planted behind her and one leg crossed over the top of the other. I followed the line into the room, passing by her in the process until I had found my assigned seat—once everyone was seated, she finally spoke up.

“When all of you first decided you were going to enrol in U.A. High School, you were asked to sign a lot of different forms, and one of them is particularly relevant right now,” Midnight said, “It was a waiver, and the first real indication that the career you have so enthusiastically chosen for yourselves may not always be so sweet.”

I studied the lines of her costume as she spoke, taking note of how her collar flared up around her neck and the pattern of red buttons that ran the length of it dipped downwards, lining the seam of her white bodysuit. Red sand against black would be easy enough to do, but the white section held a splash of cream in that, and I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to find such a precise colour.

“This is the second indication that not all is well within our world of heroes and heroics, but this has been the case for a very long while,” Midnight said, closing her eyes for a moment. “This is not the first time that a student has been killed while enrolled within our curriculum; it is, however, the first time it has ever happened on campus.”

There was a sliver of a gradient that transitioned almost seamlessly down her sleeves until it mixed with her bare hands, the shift so gradual that even after studying it for a long time, I couldn’t quite detect the line.

“Heroes are not just theatrics, and we aren’t just showmanship; we deal with incredibly real dangers almost every single day of our lives—threats, violence, death and some things that may well exceed the rest,” Midnight said, pressing her angular red glasses back into place upon her nose, and obscuring her eyes in the process. “This won’t be the last time you experience something like this, and though I wish it wasn’t the case, I want to make sure each of you knows exactly what you’ve signed up for.”

Midnight leaned forward, legs uncrossing until her toes touched down on the floor to support her weight. The belt that she wore—coloured with burnt crimson, creamy gold and made from some kind of thick leather—was more of a stylistic choice than anything functional, and it hung low on her hips without any visible method of securement.

“A hero is a shield between the innocents and the evils of the world; we train, study, and prepare ourselves as a sacrifice to those who look upon us with hope and expectation,” Midnight said before an odd smile took her face. “Our lives are not our own; we exist as a force to protect those who cannot do so themselves, and if our bodies or our lives are the cost of that—well, I suppose that’s why it pays as well as it does.”

The unexpected joke lanced some of the tension that had been pervading the room, and a few titters broke out amongst the class.

“I’m sure that Aizawa has already told you all of that, but I like to cover all of my bases—” Midnight said before rubbing the palms of her hands together for a moment. “Now, as for class, I’ve been inspired by a little birdy—whose name is definitely not Ashido—who told me about an interesting little discussion involving some of my merchandise.”

Tsuyu gave a startled croak at the words, the noise cutting through the silence like a gunshot.

“Teacher,” Mina squeaked in protest. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

“That’s my line,” Eijiro said in alarm. “Why the heck did you tell her about that?”

“Merchandising isn’t usually covered until a bit later on in the year, but I figure that having a good foundation early can only help,” Midnight said, as if they hadn’t even spoken. “Being aware of your options should alleviate some of the financial issues we heroes are sometimes prone to suffer from.”

“What are they actually talking about, though?” Kyoka asked.

“Well—” Midnight started.

“We weren’t talking about anything at all,” Eijiro said, stumbling over his words. “Teacher—whatever she told you actually happened in a dream—which she made up as a joke—and it was all just a big misunderstanding anyway.”

Mina looked entirely helpless as most of the class turned to look at her, slumping down in her chair without any control over the situation she had brought about.

“Mina,” Momo managed.

While I appreciated the fact that they were trying to provide me with some kind of scattered, contradictory defence for the Midnight Figurine Incident, I wasn’t anywhere near as bothered by it as he seemed to think. Either way, I was highly interested in this facet of the hero career because having access to more resources that I could spend without direct oversight was something I would eventually need to reach my goal.

“I did some research over the weekend, and the price point for most of your figurines is set substantially higher than the average, but the reported sales also outperform your competition by a large margin,” I said, speaking up. “Was there an active strategy that you used to accomplish that?”

Midnight laughed out loud at the question.

“I have an entire marketing team that takes care of that kind of thing for me now, and if I told you the exact details, they would probably crucify me, but yes, there is a deliberate strategy involved,” Midnight said, one hand held up to cover her smile. “The truth is that hero work pays well—if you are a popular hero, if you work for a popular agency, or if your ability can function as a profitable side hustle.”

Midnight shifted back a step, returning to lean her weight against the edge of the desk.

“I was in the first category before I took on the job to teach here at U.A. High School,” Midnight said, “I’ve always been popular, but the school’s reputation provided a significant boost to my own.”

“What about the third category? I don’t think many of us fit into that one,” Hanta said, speaking up. “Bakugo would have trouble selling explosions, I’m sure—but then again, he seems to like giving them away for free.”

There was another wave of titters at the jab, and Katsuki smacked his hand down onto the table.

“What did you just say, you soy-sauce-faced bastard?” Katsuki threatened.

“Settle down now,” Midnight said with a genuine snort of laughter. “The explosions themselves would be a hard sell, sure, but the nitroglycerin he produces would be a decent source of income if he could find a legitimate buyer.”

“I believe that is a substance that is regulated quite heavily,” Momo said. “Selling it would get him in trouble.”

“It is regulated, but governmental, science, or even military contracts do exist for these types of quirk byproducts and those are all legal,” Midnight said, “My own quirk produces a potent chemical that is quite sought after, and while it also falls under those same laws, I’ve been approached on numerous occasions by those with the appropriate licenses—Yaoyorozu, you would have been contacted immediately upon having your quirk added to the registrar.”

“Well, yes, I was,” Momo admitted, “I receive bi-annual visits to ensure that I’m not making anything from the banned substances list, and there were quite a few that I have been thoroughly briefed to never make under any circumstances.”

“There is currently a list of seventy-eight banned materials,” Midnight said with a nod. “Some are on there because they act as a destabilising factor to the economy if made in large enough quantities, but some are so dangerous that it’s almost impossible to handle them safely.”

“Tetrodotoxin. Chlorine trifluoride.” I said, thinking back to the list I had gone over years ago. “Plutonium. Sulfur mustard.”

“Sulfur mustard?” Tsuyu repeated.

“Mustard gas,” Izuku said, pencil scratching across his book. “It’s not actually a gas at all; it’s a liquid in a mist-like form.”

“All of those are on the list, and for good reason,” Midnight agreed, “Now, I believe we were talking about my figurine—tell me, which of them caught your eye?”

#

U.A High School, Musutafu.

Mina had spent the entirety of Midnight’s class slowly sliding down in her seat, sneaking glances at me and the rest of the group in an attempt to figure out exactly who was mad at her, and now she was starting to look genuinely frazzled. My own attention was focused on Toru as she crossed straight to the stairs that would lead up to the roof, not even bothering to visit the cafeteria first.

“You can’t ditch us,” Mina tried.

“I finally got Bakugo to agree to eat with me,” Eijiro said, “I’ll be back before lunch is over.”

“Hisoka,” Mina managed, “You’re still going to eat with us, aren’t you?”

“Sorry,” I said, “I have something I would like to do before lunch is over.”

Tsuyu followed my line of sight to the door, but there was nothing to be seen that would have given away my intentions. Mina was wringing her hands together now, as the group seemed to fracture before her eyes—so I spoke up before she could drive herself into a nervous wreck.

“You don’t need to worry, Mina,” I said, catching her gaze. “I’m not upset that you told Midnight; you should stop worrying about it.”

“Oh, thank god,” Mina breathed. “Well, if I don’t have to worry about that, let’s go find some replacements for the boys—Momo, do you think you could pull Todoroki?”

“Hisoka might not feel upset, but that doesn’t mean what you did is fine,” Momo said, taking hold of her shoulder. “Come on, let’s go find a table so I can properly chastise you.”

Tsuyu positioned herself behind the girl in order to help push her along as she attempted to dig her heels into the too-smooth floor.

“Wait—Eijiro,” Mina squeaked. “Can I come to eat with you and Bakugo?”

“Not a chance, devil girl,” Eijiro said long after they had pushed her out of earshot. “Todoroki is the strong, silent type, which makes him your replacement—who do you think they’ll replace me with?”

I considered the question for a moment, running a comparison between each of our classmates and the boy in front of me. Rikido would have fit well, as the two had shared a lot of outward similarities, with both having a sort of upbeat, positive energy about them. Mashirao fit, too, but he was far more restrained and levelheaded. Tenya held a lot of those traits, but they were tempered by a strict adherence to authority that Eijiro didn’t really have. Denki was perhaps the closest fit of them all, but his personality was far more erratic, sometimes bursting with energy, while other times, he seemed trapped almost entirely inside his own head.

“Denki, or perhaps Tenya,” I said.

“I’ve got it rough out here, man.” Eijiro joked, “Hey, you want to come eat with us? I don’t think Bakugo will go nuclear if it’s you—but even if he does, you’re more likely to survive it than most.”

I considered suggesting he recruit Izuku just to see his reaction, but the urge passed, and I turned my mind towards coming up with a plausible explanation for why I couldn’t go with him.

“Sorry, Eijiro.” I said, “I want to speak with Toru about what happened at the USJ.”

The words hung in the air for a moment, and I found myself unable to believe I had actually said them out loud—I could have told him I wasn’t feeling well or that I had to speak to a teacher about something in class. I could have come up with a dozen plausible lies, so why had I shone a light directly on my real intentions? I had given him all of the pieces he needed to discourage me from my decision—and I had absolutely no idea why I had done it.

“You were the one that found her, weren’t you?” Eijiro said, reaching out to clap a hand onto my shoulder. “That’s going to be a tough talk, man—but it’s you, so I’m not that worried.”

There was no judgment, no attribution of ill will, no doubts, and no attempt to steer me away from the path I had already decided on long before I had spoken up. Instead of any of that, he had revealed a startling level of confidence in me and in my ability to connect with another classmate—I had no idea what to say to such an unexpected extension of trust.

“Thank you, Eijiro.” I managed, “Enjoy your lunch with Katsuki.”

Eijiro clapped a hand onto his bicep and then engaged his quirk as if he was getting ready to throw himself into a difficult and dangerous task—it was starting to become an iconic pose in the making.

“You got it,” Eijiro said, grinning. “Better keep my guard up, though—I am walking straight into ground zero.”

I watched as he slipped into the cafeteria and then crossed the room to join Katsuki, the blonde boy looking outraged enough at his audacity that I wondered if he really had managed to convince him at all or if he’d simply decided to wing it. Either way, I had my own task to accomplish now, and with the lingering essence of his faith in me guiding my way, I started in the direction of the stairs. There were several people at U.A. High School who had an unrestrained advantage when it came to encrypting their feelings. They fell loosely into three types; the first was purely a result of costume choice, while the second and third types were really just varying levels of heteromorphic qualities.

Lunch Rush, Power Loader, and Thirteen were all people who fell into the first category; they worked to conceal some or their entire body behind a layer of equipment. Thirteen, for instance, was covered completely by her costume, and her voice was concealed by a voice modulator that further muddied things. While those were all in place, it was impossible to really read her the way I did with everyone else, but I’d seen her without it in the aftermath of the USJ battle when they had rushed her off to a hospital that was more equipped to deal with her grievous bodily injuries. I’d seen her face, and I’d heard her speak—and with that, I had seen that she was more or less exactly in line with the patterns I used to decode everyone else.

Cementoss, Principal Nezu and Fumikage Tokoyami all fit into the second category; the three of them spread neatly across a spectrum of difficulties. Their quirks had warped their appearance to some degree, or they possessed some quality that couldn’t be perfectly mapped onto that of a human face and thus required far more effort for me to understand. I found it particularly difficult to read Fumikage because almost all of his expression came from his eyes, and the presence of his beak had rendered the lower half of his face entirely blank of emission. It was clear that from his end, Fumikage had developed ways to enhance his own ability to communicate; exaggerated body language, dramatic tone choice, and possession of a wide vocabulary were all things that worked to pull him into the very edge of what might have been considered a normal range.

Manga Fukidashi, Kojiro Bondo, and Toru Hagakure were all examples of the third type in that their quirks had taken them beyond the pattern matching available to a baseline human. Their levels of encryption ranged from absurd to extremely difficult to physically impossible to decipher without a deliberate one-sided effort or external augmentation. Toru presented herself vocally as energetic, cheerful, and exaggerated in her responses, which were all things you would expect from someone who was entirely incapable of visual communication. All of that auditory expressiveness was clearly her attempt to augment her communication skills for the singular goal of allowing others to understand her—she couldn’t be seen, and so she had learned to fill the air with noise.

But it hadn’t stopped there; the way she moved, the posture she chose, the deliberate shifting of her feet and shoulders to draw attention and give clues to how she was standing. Even the gloves that she wore were deliberate choices she had made to make others more capable of communicating with her; she made large, sweeping gestures with her hands, and she made clear, universally understood signs with her fingers—thumbs up, okay, pointing, spreading fingers, clapping—to bolster her signalling. Toru had learned to broadcast her presence in a way that would be seen, heard, and noticed because, if she didn’t remind people that she was there, then she risked being forgotten. If she didn’t keep those around her up to date on how she was feeling, then she would be assigned an emotion based on the last thing she had made an effort to signal.

For most people, confrontation was a scary thing—even something as trivial as telling someone close to you that they had made a mistake could often go awry—but at least the discomfort rising up in their expression would be visible to the other party. How many times had someone said something unintentionally mean, abrasive or rude, and how often had she flinched back, turned away in hurt or grown quietly anxious? If Toru never spoke up to address it, then how could anybody have even known that it had affected her? Perhaps she had held onto those moments—moments of hurt, of disappointment, of being unheard and unseen—hoping that maybe the people around her would notice her discomfort. That later—an ambiguous time that never seemed to arrive—a moment may arise where they might bring it up.

In a world where she was angry, hurt, scared or alone, and nobody could even see it. In a world where nobody could check on her state with a glance. In a world where she fell into a state of simply being tired—tired of trying to make herself seen, tired of forcing herself to be loud enough to be remembered, tired of being dynamic enough to attain a temporary, fleeting permanence, tired of the days, weeks and years spent waiting for someone who could interface with the invisible girl, and communicate with her invisible mind, tired of waiting for the perfect moment, at the perfect time where she was finally allowed to address all those unseen things that had always bothered her—in a world like that, a girl like Toru Hagakure might never say a thing.

“Toru,” I said, stepping over the threshold and onto the rooftop. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I would like to speak with you.”

The chain link fence that served as a barrier around the roof of the building bulged outwards as she leant against it, one of her gloved hands clenched tight around the metal, a few feet above the empty neck of her uniform—her shoes lay in a mess several meters away, her socks equally as discarded. The collar of her uniform twisted oddly at the sound of my voice, and—through a rapid array of inferences based on the changing creases in the structure of her clothing—I came to the conclusion that she had turned her head to look back at me. One of the gloves let go of the fence, falling to rest against her skirt, while the other one twisted until the palm was showing, but the fingers remained entwined in the metal. The fence shifted again, the uniform spun, and I estimated that she was now facing me directly, her back leaning heavily against the wire.

“You called me that before,” Toru said, “I suppose you want me to start calling you Hisoka now.”

I hadn’t stopped walking, crossing the rooftop but at a slight angle to her left, and by the time she had finished speaking, I came to a stop almost directly beside her—there were another dozen tiny shifts that told me she had rolled her head all the way to one side to keep me in sight, but was otherwise unmoving from her position.

“That would be best,” I agreed.

Beyond the fence and towering walls of U.A. High School, the city of Musutafu stretched out into the distance, a thousand concrete giants patterned by a million sheets of glass. It wasn’t the first time I had seen the view from this spot, but it was the first time I had actually visited the roof of this building in person.

“What do you want to talk to me about?” Toru said.

That was something I had been trying to figure out since I’d first had that urge to speak with her, and it was something that I hadn’t fully managed to reach an answer for. All of the opening lines of dialogue I had prepared for this moment suddenly felt wrong, and so I reached for something else—

“You asked me what happened to Koji and Rikido,” I said. “I’m—not sure why I didn’t tell you.”

The fence creaked, the sound originating from where her hand was still grasping the wire above her head; the twist of her uniform suggested that she was now partly facing me, her shoulder pressed against the fence—her arm had to be bent at a sheer angle for that to be possible—and the material of her gloves started to twist under the pressure of her grip.

“I was angry at you when I found out they were dead, but I’m not anymore,” Toru said, “The only ones I’m angry at now are the ones who did it—sorry.”

I felt a flicker of something in my chest at the words, a tenuous link stretching between us, built upon an all too familiar pathway.

“It would be fine if you still were,” I said, “I’m angry at myself as well.”

“Why?” Toru asked.

“If I had been faster to react to the villain’s attack,” I said, “I might have been able to stop him from scattering everyone.”

“At least you managed to do something; I didn’t even start moving until the portal had already closed around us.” Toru said, “You want to know what the worst part about all of this is?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn’t even see it happen,” Toru murmured, “I don’t know which one killed them, and I don’t know who I’m supposed to hate—hating all of them feels way too vague.”

I had spent years hating an invisible, formless monster whose shape had defied all of my attempts to transform it into someone I could reach—the sheer, overwhelming relief and the terrible, agonising pain of finally giving my own monster a face was beyond anything I could describe to another person without at least some of the message being lost.

“I know that feeling very well,” I said in response. “Toru, is there a reason why you are not eating anything today?”

I had spent hours translating the pattern that would result in Toru’s face from what I had memorised of it inside the desert zone, and I’d spent twice that carving it into a statue that was built in her exacting image. Now, with this growing connection between us, I had reached a point where I could almost see that statue overlayed on top of her invisible body.

“Out of the frying pan and into the topic of my eating habits,” Toru wondered. “Did you really follow me up here to talk about that?”

“No, but I find myself very interested in your response,” I said, “You usually bring your own lunch to school with you, but today you didn’t.”

A neat, opaque container had accompanied her every single day since she had first come here, and today, it was absent—furthermore, she hadn’t made any attempt to eat any of the free and already prepared food that was readily available in the cafeteria. Toru moved again; the fingers of her glove seemed to stretch oddly before they were left behind entirely, stuck in the overlapping chain links and dangling in the wind. The proximity, the lack of her usual energy, and my complete inability to read the expression on her face mixed together in a way that felt strangely dangerous—the fact that there were now three different limbs unaccounted for just made it worse.

“The other day in the cafeteria—I was right about you,” Toru said, “You really were watching me.”

“I was,” I admitted.

“You’re so weird, Hisoka,” Toru said, then after a moment of pause. “I’ve been on a very strict diet since I was little, and I left my bento on the kitchen table this morning.”

“By accident?” I wondered.

“Yes, by accident—I just forgot,” Toru said with a quiet laugh. “Did you think I was starving myself?”

“I considered it,” I said, “Toru, am I correct in assuming that your inability to interact with sunlight is the cause of your diet?”

There was a small distortion on the index finger of her last remaining glove, the tip flattening in a way that suggested it was now pinched between something—it stretched, and I came to understand that she was now pulling it off with her other hand.

“Yeah,” Toru said, “I do receive some amount of UV, but it’s like a hundredth of what a normal person gets from just existing.”

I was aware that there were multiple types of quirks that resulted in the user being invisible, but with different base mechanisms; some were conditional, based on concealing the person selectively by way of criteria—a human male can not see me or anybody over five foot tall is incapable of noticing me—while others revolved around the manipulation of fields and light. If she was receiving even that much UV, then her quirk must have been performing that function autonomously, or her invisibility functioned in a way that was more complicated than simply being translucent—something I should have already guessed, considering that she was still capable of perceiving the world around her.

“Vitamin D is responsible for all sorts of things,” I said, considering the problem. “Reduction in Serotonin levels, lethargy, depression, fatigue, weakened immune system, weight gain, weight loss—”

“I don’t need you to list them off for me,” Toru said, interjecting. “Why do you know them?”

Was she angry about the focus of the topic? Was she angry that I was asking about a medical issue? Was she frustrated that I had reminded her of it? Was she surprised that someone else would understand that much? Was she worried that I would use this information against her or spread it around to the rest of our class? Maybe it was impossible for me to navigate a conversation like this without being able to see her face.

“When I was younger, there were concerns about my health and how I presented myself,” I said, “My lack of physicality, low energy levels, and general detachment were initially interpreted as extreme lethargy, and through that, I learnt about the symptoms associated with Serotonin deficiency.”

I hadn’t understood any of what that had actually meant at the time, and my attempts to learn had failed almost completely—I was too young and uneducated to read such complicated strings of words and derive any kind of meaning from them. But as I’d grown older and my understanding had developed, all of it had begun to fall into place. Toru said nothing to the words. Instead, she peeled the glove off completely and then dropped it down on top of the other one—all four of her limbs were invisible now, and I began releasing a very small spread of sand grains out into the air between us to act as an early warning system.

“Your normal demeanour is far more energetic,” I said, “I would expect that you are on some kind of supplementary medication in order to reach that level—”

The spread of sand between us was shunted away as she stepped into my personal space—noticed, I was sure, but ignored—and I turned to face her completely for the first time. That sense of danger I’d been feeling was now ringing like an alarm, but it was derived completely from within my own mind; my inability to detect where her hands were functioning as an unsettling threat that probably wasn’t even present.

“What did the doctors tell you back when you were little, Hisoka?” Toru said, her hand catching hold of my tie. “Did they tell you that you would grow out of it? That the older you got, the easier it would be for you to work through it?”

I felt myself being dragged forward a step, my chest pressing against her invisible forearm, and her tight grip on my tie pulling it free from where it had been tucked away.

“Maybe they told you that if you took the right combination of drugs, in the right amounts, for just the right amount of time—” Toru said, face close enough that I could feel her breathe on my skin with each word. “That you’d fit right in with all of the other kids.”

I said nothing in response, namely because most of what she had said had been strikingly on point—my quirk had reacted in response to the threat, following an unconscious thread of my attention by sending grains of sand rising up from my skin to fill the air, the mass of it slowly coalescing around us.

“There is a difference between that and me,” Toru said, voice whisper quiet. “Maybe there is a right combination, and maybe there might just be a perfect dosage to get back to a normal range—but guess what, Hisoka?”

It might have been ironic that through my complete inability to read her, I had somehow managed to push her into a state where she was now capable of broadcasting exactly what she felt. The tie around my neck twisted in her palm as her anger, frustration and hurt washed over me—and for the very first time, I was able to decrypt Toru Hagakure.

“It doesn’t matter how well you curate your diet or how long you take medication,” I said, answering the question she hadn’t even expected a response to. “Because so long as your quirk exists, the underlying problem will never be dealt with; this isn’t a problem with a cure or a phase of your life that will be overcome—this is your life.”

Toru’s grip on my tie slackened at the words, and the lethargy that she’d possessed since I’d found her face down in the sand returned almost as quickly as her fury fled—two dozen claws of sand surrounded us, frozen in the middle of reaching inwards, fingers not quite touching either of us.

“Yeah, a whole lifetime of this, with everything already mapped out for me,” Toru murmured, “Taking the same pills and eating the same things every single day—kind of takes some of the fun out of it, you know?”

Toru ran her fingers down my tie, straightening out the mess she had made of it as best she could before tucking the tail back into place. She patted a hand against it, just once, as if to make sure it wouldn’t come free again, before letting go—the mass of sand surrounding us began to dissolve as I managed to focus my attention back on it, the structure of the constructs crumbling to the rooftop in a vanishing waterfall.

“Toru,” I asked, “Did you skip breakfast as well, or was it just lunch?”

“Both, but I’m having something of an off day,” Toru said, “Are you going to tell me off too, Hisoka? I get enough of that outside of school.”

In an effort to maintain the current, safer position we had reached in the conversation, I sourced a joke format that Eijiro had used only half an hour earlier.

“A strict diet and strict parents,” I said, with a stolen lilt to my voice. “Toru, you’ve got it rough out here.”

Toru snorted out a breath at the words, and I felt her cheek shift against some of the remaining sand that was still present in the air—she was shaking her head.

“Don’t you worry about that; my parents are way too busy to be strict,” Toru said before I felt her hand pass through the air in front of her own face. “Hisoka, your sand is getting in my hair.”

I made an active effort to pull it all back, drawing the tiny grains back beneath the surface of my skin until there was nothing except open air between us.

“If your parents aren’t the ones who tell you off for not following your diet,” I asked, watching the place where her face had been. “Who were you talking about?”

There was a distinct pause in the conversation, a few shades too long for it not to register as completely out of place—

“Nobody,” Toru said, “I guess I just misspoke.”

Without my sand and without her anger, the impassable encryption of her quirk had locked itself back into place. But despite my general inability to read her and her admittance of making a mistake—I was absolutely certain that Toru Hagakure had just told me a lie.

#

Hisoka’s Apartment, Musutafu.

Trying to locate a specific person was an easy task—if you already knew a few precise details about them. If you knew their name, you could use it to discover almost everything about them. If you had their name, you could scour their social media presence for pictures, videos, or comments and use it to build up a model of what sort of daily activities they got up to and where those things could take them. Once you had the pattern, you could place yourself at the spots they were most likely to visit, at the most probable times when they would be present. Shopping malls, restaurants, libraries, train stations, and anything else they had made mention of. Then, once you knew where they were, once you had seen them pass by, in the shadow of a doorway or at the mouth of an alley, all that was left was to follow them home.

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But none of these methods were applicable for someone without a name, without a social media presence, and without an address. I was left to begin a much more broad and far more systematic search to locate my target. I had already narrowed it down to five locations; two of them were physical locations, while the other three were independent databases. The first place to look was the restaurant where Nanami’s birthday had taken place. The advent of advanced compression algorithms and increasingly large storage drives over the last hundred years meant that almost all security footage was now semi-permanently backed up. If they still kept payment records, security footage or some kind of regular customer list, I might be able to find out who was present on that specific night. While there was no guarantee that the blue-skinned man had paid for his own meal, someone at that table must have, and if I could locate that person, it wouldn’t be a difficult process to have them tell me the rest of the names.

If the security footage was still being stored, then I could use that video feed to search for clear images of each of their faces. The second location on my list was the port in Shimoda, more specifically, the café where Minato had seen the blue-skinned man. My targets were the same—payment records and security footage—but there was also another one: employment records. If I could find the waitress who had spoken to the man on that day, then it was possible that he had given his name to her when she had first taken his order—if I was really lucky, I would see her writing it on the cup on the security footage. The restaurant was in Musutafu and close enough to my apartment that I could physically check on it without needing to take any form of transportation to get there. The cafe, however, was in Shimoda, and while that was still in the Shizuoka prefecture, it was still two and a half hours away by train—or a five-hour round trip.

I could use my quirk to cut a path straight across the open water of the bay, forgoing the use of the train entirely, but the travel time would still be large enough for my absence to be noticed. Either I would have to convince Eijiro to make it our next travel destination, or I would need to choose a day where I wasn’t expected at school—and where Sajin and Hayami were both occupied. The other points of focus for my search was a task that required going through vast amounts of information—but only two of them were something I could do from my apartment. The first was to determine if the blue-skinned man—or any of the other people who had sat at that table—were daylighting as heroes, and to do that, the very first place to check was the official hero rankings. As non-intuitive as it would seem that a person involved in human trafficking could also be a hero, I couldn’t think of a better strategy for avoiding suspicion than hiding in plain sight. So far, it had borne no fruit, and I hadn’t discovered any of them within the top two hundred, but there were still a lot of entries to go before I had exhausted the list.

The next place to search was the unofficial List of Villains, an archive hosted online made up of user-contributed and curated information regarding all publically known villains. Names, criminal acts, quirk details, and more were listed beneath each entry. As far as sources went, the vast majority of it was the result of first-hand retellings and other—highly speculative—user-submitted content that hadn’t been fully verified, fact-checked or otherwise validated as being accurate. There were, however, thousands of hours of video of those exact same villains—security footage, phone recording, and everything else the users could dig up—which were far more objective in their depiction of events.

The List of Villains was the place I had concluded as second most likely to find the answer to my search, but it hinged entirely on whether or not the blue-skinned man had revealed himself as a villain since I had last seen him. I knew of two separate occasions where the man had been in public, and both times, he had made absolutely no attempt to hide his face. If he was comfortable enough to enter a restaurant and a cafe without covering his face, then it was very likely that his civilian identity wasn’t tied to his criminal one. I had been scouring the list in every moment of free time I had, and I had yet to cover even a tenth of it—the site’s poor setup seemed to resist every attempt to refine my search via keywords.

The last place I had thought of to search was simultaneously the option with the greatest chance to provide an actual answer and also the one that was hardest to physically access. Every single person who was born in Japan and who possessed an active quirk was listed down in the Quirk Registrar, but while that covered the vast amount of the population, it didn’t cover everyone who lived here. Anyone who was born outside of Japan and who had entered the country would not have had their information collected, and two of those who had been present at that table had been foreigners—the large, dark-skinned man with the tattoos and the girl with the two-toned hair. Temporary visitors to Japan had a temporary permit that had their quirk listed down, but that information wasn’t kept on the Quirk Registrar. It was also of note that I was investigating criminals and villains, which meant that they might not have entered the country legally in the first place, and so they might not have ever participated in a quirk appointment. That whole system was also something that had been implemented within the last thirty years, and so anyone who was born before it had become mandatory might have managed to slip through.

Beyond all that, three percent of the population have had the details of their quirk expunged from the QR database in every way, leaving just a legal name, an identifying image and that they had a quirk. For one percent of the population, that was rendered down even further to nothing more than an alias. All Might himself was in that one-percent category, along with a large portion of the top one hundred heroes; Thirteen, Hawks, and Mirko were all others of that same category, but even the fallen hero Nagant met the same criteria. Within that same range, high-ranking government agents, politicians, and other powerful families also existed.

Endeavour was an example of a one-percent category hero who’d had all of their private and personal information plastered all over the Internet—his civilian identity and the identity of his family members were all publicly known now. How All Might had managed to avoid the same fate was beyond my understanding; the man must have attended a school growing up, he must have had classmates who knew him or neighbours who had seen him, and though he was older than the Quirk Registrar implementation, he must have visited a hospital when he was younger—the sheer lack of information about his origin was probably one of the contributing factors to the grand mythos surrounding the man.

The real problem with the Quirk Registrar was in how I was going to gain access to it; government offices, hero agencies, the health care system, law enforcement agencies, select research facilities, and even some licensed private investigators all had varying levels of access to that database. In most cases, the buildings with the greatest amount of access were facilities with a high degree of security—and breaking into the Hero Public Safety Commission was something that I was hesitant to do. That meant I would need to pick a target that had a high enough level of access that it wouldn’t censor or filter out my targets, with also a level of security that wouldn’t end with me sitting in a government agent’s office.

I would need to physically enter the building, avoid the security systems in place and then find a computer with the correct privileges so that I could perform the search without being interrupted. Out of all the options available, the one that stood out to me the most would be a hospital, where the staff would be overworked and tired and where there were simultaneously lots of people present and lots of locked rooms. If I targeted the office of a doctor who was near the top of the food chain, one who wasn’t present in the building, whose office would be off limits for the vast majority of their colleagues, I would gain almost unrestricted access to the Quirk Registrar.

In the year twenty-one-forty-nine, every single city in Japan had a hospital, and in most cases, they had far more than one—and Musutafu was no exception to that rule.

#

U.A High School, Musutafu.

At some point—between one blink and the next—the room had vanished, taking all of the desks and all of the members of Class 1-A along with it. I turned on my heel, and the world spun for a moment, blurring until it snapped back into clarity—a vast desert stretched out around me, great dunes of sand shifting like waves atop an ocean. I turned my gaze upwards to find that the sun was missing from the sky, and a wretched lens of blue light fell, oppressing the desert in an array of dark hues. The sand was lapping at my feet, rising with every tiny shift until my toes had sunk beneath the surface, but even then, the connection that had existed since I was a child was no longer there.

My consciousness refused to split, refused my call to seep into the great mass, and the absence felt like I had been stripped of my sight or my ability to touch. I sank down to one knee and pressed my fingers into the material, my mind reaching—but there was nothing there, the sand lifeless, cold and unresponsive. My knee began to sink beneath the surface as if my weight had been multiplied a thousandfold, and when I tried to pull my hand back, I found that it was trapped—the sand splashed up over my thighs, rising to my elbow, the material suddenly viscous, and wet. The blue sand began to ripple outwards from my hand, and I shivered as the temperature began to drop, my breath coming out as a visible mist as the rising tide of dark water stretched upwards.

I fought to rebuild the connection, to wrench the now vanished sand upwards to pierce its way through the water—but it failed to heed my call. The water rose past my chest, up my neck, and I reached for the empty sky with my only free hand as it passed over my chin—

“Settle down,” Shota said from the front of the classroom. “Don’t make me speak louder just to be heard.”

I stared ahead, my heart thundering in my chest as my body rippled beneath my clothes, my eyes refused to focus, and a point near the back of my head throbbed in time with my pulse, a horrible ache radiating outwards from it. Twelve points of perspective raked across the entirety of the class at once, trying to discern whether anybody had noticed that I had fallen asleep.

“Sorry, teacher,” Mina said, clapping her hands together. “I’ll whisper next time.”

Shota made a noise that was distinctly unimpressed before nodding his head back towards the pull-down projector screen behind him. My real eyes fought to gain clarity, aimed directly at the sheet of light that depicted two teenage boys standing across from one another in the middle of a concrete stage. The continued lack of sleep was starting to become a problem, leaving the world foggy and indistinct, and I could feel my attention crumbling as I fought to keep myself awake.

“The deciding match of the finals, seven years ago,” Shota said, “It wasn’t a very long bout, and the audience’s reaction to it was rather tame in comparison to some of the others.”

The two boys were both in tracksuits, but each from a different school; the blonde boy wore the blue and white that U.A. High School favoured, while the silver-haired boy was wearing colours that I wasn’t familiar with—it could have been Ketsubutsu Academy.

“The boy with the silver hair is the runner-up of the sports festival,” Shota said, eyes shifting between our faces. “The blonde came in at first place.”

Momo and Tsuyu reacted to the comment, shifting at their desks and suddenly appearing much more focused—I reached up to press a hand against my right eye, but the ache wasn’t relieved in the slightest. Why had they reacted? Had Shota said something strange? I should have done my homework. The video unpaused itself at the man’s direction—the concrete tile beneath the blonde boy exploded up and behind him from the force of his sudden sprint. Each step left a crack in the surface of the area as the boy pressed downwards at a specific angle to help convert his enhanced strength into forward momentum. The silver-haired boy remained exactly in place, his hands raised up as if to brace himself for the oncoming impact—the video paused a second before the two collided.

“Teacher,” Hanta complained, “You can’t stop it there.”

There were more than a few echoes of the boy’s protest, but Shota said nothing to the words; instead, he tapped the remote against his hip for a moment in consideration.

“This is a situation you have already found yourselves in once before,” Shota said, watching them through the gap in his bandages. “It is a situation you will find yourself in time and again during the course of your future careers.”

“Fighting a blonde kid with super strength?” Denki said, curling a hand around his bicep. “Is there a lot of them running around?”

There were too many people speaking, chiming in, asking questions and interacting that I couldn’t focus on any of it. That throbbing ache in my head grew steadily worse, and I found myself turning my head away from the windows to avoid direct light.

“More like negative strength,” Kyoka said, “In your case, I mean.”

“Hey, I’ve got guns, okay; big guns,” Denki said before cocking a finger gun in her direction. “I just don’t show them off all the time—call it concealed carry.”

Kyoka snorted at the joke, and there were at least three other voices who made a comment in response, but I couldn’t untangle any of it.

“That’s not exactly what I meant, Kaminari,” Shota said, “The point was that you will be placed against opponents who you do not know, and you will not know the details of how their quirk functions—this is a situation that can range from inconvenient, to dangerous, to deadly.”

That was exactly what had happened at the USJ when the portal villain had attacked us all, and if I’d known exactly how his quirk had functioned—

“Kaminari, you have correctly identified that the blonde boy’s quirk is enhanced strength,” Shota said, pointing the remote directly at him. “How would you deal with him in this situation?”

“Uh,” Denki said, furrowing his brow. “Honestly? I think I’d get flattened.”

“Idiot,” Katsuki muttered. “Don’t give up so quickly—”

“Hey, don’t give up so quickly,” Nanami said, planting her hands on her hips. “You’re supposed to say you’ll beat him up for picking on me anyway.”

I closed my eyes and pressed the heel of my hand further into my eye in another failed attempt to muffle the pain—one of the sand nodes I’d just rebuilt out in the hallway exploded as the world shifted back into that realm of wretched blue water, and I dug my fingernails painfully into my palm in an effort to stay awake.

“I mean, my quirk doesn’t do anything for mobility, so the best I could do is to try and dive out of the way,” Denki said before raising his two finger-guns up. “Shoot him in the legs, maybe?”

Denki let off a rapid one-two firing pattern as he mimed doing exactly that, and Kyoka gave another derisive snort of laughter.

“Put those away, would you?” Kyoka said, amused. “You’re going to hurt someone.”

The boy holstered his fingers at his waist before tipping an imaginary hat in her direction. Shota, showing far more patience than I would have expected, said nothing about the continued interruptions.

“Consider that you are seated in the audience, waiting for your future match against this boy,” Shota said, interjecting. “You know everything that you do now, that his quirk is strength-based and that he can leverage it to move very quickly—what do you do to win this fight?”

Denki sat back in his seat, the question still overtly aimed in his direction, making it clear that he wasn’t going to be able to get out of answering it.

“Okay, I’d plan out a strategy to take him down from a distance,” Denki said, “If I could hit him before he started moving, I could probably take him down—I suppose that would only work if he doesn’t have durability as well.”

“Adequate,” Shota said, “Ashido, same question.”

“Uh oh,” Mina said, sitting up straight. “I’d slick up the ground around me so that when he got close, he would lose his footing—then I’d hit him when he’s not in a position to fight back.”

“Merciless,” Shota said, “Ojiro.”

“That boy is fast in a straight line, but he cannot easily change direction; he is also lowering his body as he approaches, so he intends on tackling his opponent,” Mashirao said, eyes narrowed at the projector. “I would evade upwards and get behind him before attacking.”

“Inspired,” Shota said, “Bakugo.”

“Blow up the audience,” Hanta declared at the same time as Tsuyu croaked out, “Die.”

“Idiots,” Katsuki gritted out, “Tail-boy was right, evade the obvious attack and then attack from behind; he can’t use his strength if he can’t target me, and mobility is a good counter for straight-up strength.”

“He just jacked Ojiro’s answer,” Denki complained, “Make him do it again, Teacher.”

“Shut the hell up,” Katsuki snapped.

I stared at the empty desk in front of me, wondering if, eventually, someone else would join our class and fill that spot. It was only the second week into the school year, and finding a replacement for Koji Koda and Rikido Sato should be possible, considering just how many people were trying to gain entrance to U.A. High School—

“Rowdy today, aren’t you all,” Shota said, without heat. “Higawara.”

Momo kicked the leg of my desk, and I turned to look at her for a moment before following her urgent glance to the front of the room where Shota Aizawa was watching me—my sluggish mind clawed outwards, trying to establish exactly what I had just been asked.

“I would seek out additional information before engaging,” I said, uncertain if my response was even on topic anymore. “There is not enough to plan it out effectively.”

Shota stared at me without expression, an awful beat of silence stretching between us—a second sand node exploded two hallways away as I lost track of it.

“How would you do that?” Shota asked.

How would I do what—get the information? The projector showed two students facing each other, barely a meter apart. One was wearing a blue and white tracksuit, the other was wearing a black one—

“I would locate the Ketsubutsu Academy contingent and speak with them,” I said, hyper-aware of the attention now on me. “There will also be footage of my opponent’s previous trials being circulated; I could use either method.”

Two answers, which should be enough to escape an additional—how sure was I that the student came from Ketsubutsu Academy? Could it have been a variant tracksuit belonging to one of the other schools? If I went to observe the wrong school, I would learn nothing. Was the foundation for my answer even remotely solid?

“We will presume that he is also aware that you are his opponent,” Shota said, voice perfectly level. “His classmates will not speak with his opponent for obvious reasons.”

Of course they wouldn’t, but he hadn’t said anything about having prior knowledge—had he? If he had, then my answer was absurd. I should have said to observe the other school’s contingent instead of speaking with them because I didn’t need to talk to them in order to learn something useful; listening in would have been more than enough.

“If I was unable to speak with them,” I said, forced to defend an answer I no longer believed in. “I would recruit assistance from someone else to speak with them on my behalf.”

Which probably wouldn’t work for the same reasons that I couldn’t speak with them myself—anybody asking questions about the quirk of the boy in the semi-finals would be suspicious, and nobody would reveal a weakness to a stranger like that—Shota said nothing in response to my failure of an answer, and I was left to stew in the disgust that was rising up in my chest.

“How many of you actually did the homework,” Shota said, voice light. “Raise your hands.”

The disengagement from my answer felt like a slap in the face, and I returned to staring down at my desk as the throbbing in my head worsened. Every single hand went up into the air, except for mine, my fingers locked around the edges of the desk—I was all alone.

“Interesting,” Shota said, “Now, keep your hand up if you can tell me what quirk the silver-haired kid has.”

The question seemed to unsettle them all, and a wave of unease spread across the room as Shota pressed them to back it up. Hands began to fall as the seconds passed until only Denki, Momo, Tenya, and Tsuyu had their arms still raised.

“Bakugo,” Denki snickered, absolutely confident. “I can’t believe you didn’t do the homework.”

Katsuki looked furious, but he didn’t say anything to the call out, his fists clenched on top of his desk—through the sleepless haze, I noted that Tenya’s hand was shaking.

“Kaminari,” Shota said, “What does his quirk do?”

Denki held his finger gun high in the air, clearly savouring his moment in the spotlight—and then left it to fall to the desk, shattered in defeat.

“I didn’t do it either,” Denki admitted, head bowed low in humble apology. “Sorry, teacher.”

“You—” Katsuki snarled.

“Ida, Yaoyorozu, Asui,” Shota said, “Write the answer down in your notebook, and then bring them up here.”

There was a rustle of paper as the three began to do just that—Tenya shot up in his seat without warning, bowing at the waist until his head actually bounced off the surface of his desk, his arms glued to his hips in a rigid expression of apology.

“Teacher, please forgive me,” Tenya cried, “I did not complete the assigned homework.”

Ochaco cracked up, fighting to muffle her laughter with her hand, unable to help herself.

“Seriously—even you, Ida?” Shota said, letting the remote fall down to rest against his thigh, “What kept you from completing it?”

“Teacher,” Tenya cried out again, “My older brother visited, and we spent the majority of that time practising together—but by the time he had left, it was already late.”

“Your brother is Ingenium, isn’t he?” Shota said, in consideration. “Well, at least you weren’t wasting your time.”

Momo and Tsuyu were already finished and now stood at the front of the room with their books held out so the man could see what they had written down.

“Well done—close enough, I guess,” Shota said as he did a double-take at Tsuyu’s answer. “You two can show the class your books.”

Tenya remained where he was, bowed at the waist over his desk as the two girls turned back around, holding their books up in front of their chests. Everyone else in the class seemed to shift in place as they realised that the two answers were completely different. Across the top half of Momo’s page, the words ‘Weight Manipulation’ were written in a neat but curvy style. Tsuyu, on the other hand, had written out a name across the middle of her book, the two words scratched out in a blocky font, and beneath it sat a smiling chibi face—Ochaco Uraraka.

“Me,” Ochaco said in surprise. “I fought the blonde boy.”

“I knew it was you all along,” Mina cheered. “It’s a good wig, but you can’t fool me—”

“Shut up.” Katsuki snapped. “What the hell is Airhead doing on that book?”

“If you had done the homework, you would know,” Tsuyu croaked, “Their abilities are very similar.”

“Brother, which is the correct answer?” Tenya cried to himself, forehead still pressed tightly against his desk in supplication. “Weight or gravity?”

“The effect of the two quirks is mostly indistinguishable from the video,” Shota said, “Asui is still correct.”

“That’s a bad matchup,” Shoto said, pushing past his own failure to do the homework without addressing it at all. “Enhanced strength is a direct combat quirk, but weight manipulation isn't so he has no place being in the semi-finals—I suppose that explains why he only came second.”

Momo and Tsuyu turned to look at each other again as Shota pressed the play button on the remote—the silver-haired boy fell backwards just as the blonde boy reached him, one foot trailing behind him. The blonde crashed stomach first into his foot, the impact throwing him up and over the now prone boy. Instead of crashing back down on the other side, the blonde boy spun through the air, entirely weightless and unable to catch himself as he landed upside down, back first in the stands with the rest of the audience.

“I won,” Ochaco cheered.

“Good job, Uraraka,” Izuku praised.

“Keep your damn delusions to yourself,” Katsuki raged.

“You lied to us, Teacher,” Kyoka said, “You said that the blonde boy won.”

“It was a logical ruse to see if any of you had done what I told you to, so imagine my surprise when only these two recognised the lie,” Shota said, scanning the room. “I thought you were all taking this seriously.”

The direct call out sent a ripple of unease across the room—

“I’ll watch the damn tapes—all of them,” Katsuki said, voice low. “You can ask me anything about them tomorrow.”

“You’re going to watch a decade’s worth of videos in an afternoon,” Kyoka asked. “Really—and you called Ochaco an airhead.”

Katsuki stood up, shunting his desk almost into the aisle from the force, apparently at the limit of his patience.

“You damn extras think you can talk shit to me? At least I know that I screwed up,” Katsuki snarled, turning on her. “How about you shove your janky-ass-ears right up your—”

Kyoka flinched back as he stepped towards her, the vitriol in his voice catching her entirely off guard—

“Enough, Bakugo,” Shota snapped, “Sit down, now.”

Katsuki paused in the middle of his next step, palm sparking within his clenched fist before he gritted his teeth and twisted on his heel. The boy wrenched his desk back into rough alignment, the legs screeching against the floor, before he sank down into his chair, no longer looking at anybody.

“All of you will keep any further comments to yourself,” Shota said, eyes like shards of ice beneath the bandages. “If you’re all so full of energy today, then get your tracksuits out of the cabinet—we’re going running.”

Half a dozen conversations broke out as the man slid the door shut behind him, and I pressed my fingers into my eyes as the pressure in my head continued to build.

#

U.A High School, Musutafu.

The running was actually working to clear my head, and the throbbing of the migraine was being drowned out by the wash of chemicals my body was releasing in response to all the movement. But as much as I appreciated the reprieve, it was wasting what little energy I had left, and I knew that as soon as I stopped moving, I’d be returning to that uphill battle just to stay awake. I’d picked my spot carefully, placing myself right in the middle of the pack but not quite close enough for anybody to take it as a challenge or an invitation to start up a patchwork conversation as some of the others seemed to be. Eijiro had fought my attempt at avoidance for a little while, but eventually, he’d broken off to go ahead, his energy levels far higher than my own, fueling his optimistic goal of reaching the front runners.

Now, he sat just behind Shoto and Katsuki as the two waged a cold war. Oddly enough, he was in his own silent but far more friendly war with Izuku, who’d doggedly stuck himself to Katsuki’s heels, much to the other boy’s obvious frustration—despite their best efforts, the four boys weren’t anywhere close to being at the front of the pack. Mina and Mashirao were ahead of them by half a lap, a lead that had been slowly growing since we had first started. Beyond them, Mezo and Tsuyu were in an eternal struggle for second place, the two maintaining a merciless pace that could only be granted by their individual physical attributes. Mezo’s prodigal height, his long legs, and his quirk enhanced musculature, making him simply unreachable for the vast majority of the class.

Tsuyu’s own quirk-augmented legs were a match for him, but she seemed to lack the same level of stamina, and it was becoming clear that in the aspect of endurance, she would inevitably fall behind—none of it made a bit of difference to Tenya Ida. The boy had already lapped the entire class twice, and now he was already in danger of making it a third—his machine-enhanced legs were an unstoppable, relentless display of speed, and his body seemed singularly built for the task of running. Even now, in the small moments by which I had caught sight of him as he passed us all by, the boy hadn’t even been breathing heavily. Momo pushed herself, cutting the distance between us until she was running side by side with me, close enough now that her breathing was actually audible to me.

“Hisoka—are you—okay?” Momo managed. “I saw—you—in class.”

The fog of my failing energy made it a task to actually get my mind in gear enough to focus on her question, but I couldn’t even dream of figuring out a path towards deflecting her concern—not in my current state.

“I haven’t—been sleeping,” I said, just as out of breath. “It’s—catching—up to—me.”

I never would have told her that, at least not in the current context of my weakness, if I had been in a better place. Momo didn’t respond right away in an apparent effort to maintain her breathing, and I turned my gaze ahead again, blinking away the sweat that was trying to fall into my eyes. Shota Aizawa grew larger ahead of us, his position leaning against the fence unchanged since we had first begun.

“Is it—because—of Koda—and—Sato?” Momo managed. “If you—need to—talk—about—it—”

I felt a flicker of something ignite inside of me at the sounds of their names, rising above all of the exhaustion, the fog, and the rush of endorphins—the feeling that I had done something wrong, that I had made a mistake had been lingering at the back of my mind ever since the USJ. I had admitted as much in the conversation with Toru—which I still wasn’t sure why I had—and that had served to bring it all the way to the forefront. As much as I understood that Momo was simply offering a hand in support, I couldn’t handle the thought that she was, in some small part, associating Hisoka Higawara with the deaths of our classmates—I leant forward and then sped up, burning my dwindling stamina to force some distance between us before I could unravel any further in front of her good nature.

Momo gave a yelp of protest as I left her behind before she gave a cry of effort and then fought valiantly to catch up. My breathing was loud in my ears now, and my heart was beating so hard that I was sure it was only moments from tearing itself free of my chest, but for a short time, I found a place of shelter, nestled safely behind Izuku. The laps were blurring into one another now, and the only thing that really mattered as a metric for how much running we had done was how many times Tenya had lapped us—I stumbled on the next lap, and Shota called me out of the group as we passed him by. I angled out of the group, feeling once again like I’d failed some great test, that out of everyone else who had been present, I’d been the first one to stumble—the first one to make a mistake.

“You’re pale, you’ve got bags under your eyes, and you are far more tired than you should be,” Shota said, not even looking at me. “You were even falling asleep in class.”

Of course, he had noticed—the fact that he had been willing to pretend that he hadn’t was just another strike against my ability to function in this state. I said nothing to his words, using my lack of breath as an excuse not to offer up any information.

“You didn’t do the homework, and your answers weren’t anywhere near as good as what I know you are capable of,” Shota said, glancing over. “When your work here starts suffering, I am obligated to get involved, so tell me—what have you been doing that is keeping you up so late?”

I didn’t answer, unwilling to answer a question as dangerous as that in my current state and hoping to use the running as a shield for a little bit longer. He might have been obligated to ask, but I wasn’t compelled to answer anything that I didn’t want to—this man was exactly the type of person who I didn’t want checking in on me.

“That wasn’t a question you can choose not to answer,” Shota said, turning to face me full-on. “You weren’t like this before, so I can only assume this is your response to what happened at the USJ—were you close to Koda and Sato?”

Everywhere I went, I couldn’t seem to escape the sounds of their names, and that flicker in my chest burned bright—the assumption that he knew what I was feeling when I barely knew it myself broke something deep inside of me. For a moment, my skin felt like it was on fire, and when I locked eyes with him, I found myself genuinely considering attacking the man.

“They weren’t my friends, and I didn’t feel anything for Koji or Rikido.” I breathed, rejecting everything he said outright. “You don’t know anything about how I feel—”

I cut myself off as I realised just how little control I had over what I was saying, how little thought I was putting into it, and how much I was just channelling the mess inside of me straight into a flow of unrestrained words. Everything I’d done and everything I’d said today was a mistake—this entire day was a mistake. I could have avoided all of it if I’d just stayed at home. I could have feigned being sick. I could have spent the entire day parsing through the remaining databases. I could have spent all these hours searching for Nanami, and instead, I was out here, wasting time and energy running around a field.

“Is that right,” Shota said, “Are you telling me you don’t care that two of your classmates have died?”

The words felt like a personal attack, even though there was nothing in them that I could have pointed at as an actual attack on my character. It felt as if agreeing to anything that he said to me would equate to an admission like I would be allowing him to define what I was feeling for me—it was intolerable, and I was left to dig my heels in, even knowing that I didn’t truly believe what I was saying.

“I don’t care,” I managed.

“If you didn’t care,” Shota said, “Then why did you come back to save them?”

I fought to hold my silence, but that terrible feeling was washing up my neck now, like a wave of heat that came to settle behind my eyes and then started crawling down my cheeks towards my mouth.

“You told Midnight that you couldn’t leave your classmates to die,” Shota said, voice quiet. “You rushed back into danger to save them even though you knew it would get you in trouble—does that sound like someone who doesn’t care?”

I clenched my jaw shut against the stinging behind my eyes, but it did nothing to stop the tears from building up.

“This is what the role of a hero requires, and so those were the actions I took,” I said, fists clenched into fists at my sides. “If I had left them there to die, nobody would ever consider me a hero—they must already think I am a coward for leaving.”

I couldn’t seem to stop talking, even when I knew that every word I spoke was another mistake; it was all too close, too ready on my lips—just spilling forth, and I couldn’t get a handle on any of it.

“Have you asked any of them what they think?” Shota asked. “Because it sounds to me like you are the one making assumptions about how they feel.”

The trap caught me entirely off guard, my own words clamping down around me in a vice—I’d just told him not to assume he knew anything about me without having a rational basis for it, and now here I was, admitting to doing the exact same thing. I couldn’t hold a conversation in my current state; that much was clear. I wasn’t being careful. I wasn’t anticipating the flow of conversation. I wasn’t guiding it towards an advantageous end goal. I was just falling to pieces in front of a man who had risked his life to save all of ours. I’d gone too long without sleep, and I no longer had the presence of mind or the sharpness of thought to handle something like this.

“If you want to pretend that you’re not upset about what happened to them, then that’s fine,” Shota said, lifting his hand up in an open gesture. “But tell me then, what is keeping you up at night?”

There had been a perfectly good reason for my sleepless nights sitting right in front of me all this time, an excuse for the bags under my eyes and for my lack of focus in class. I could have placed it all at the foot of my classmate’s death. I could have used that and the guilt that the man in front of me must have been feeling to avoid any kind of reprimand—but instead, because of my washed-out state of mind, I’d allowed him to put me in a position where I was arguing against the obvious cover story. The reprieve that all of the running had brought to me was vanishing fast, my energy levels faltering, and with it, my anger was swallowed back up by the unknowable mess inside of me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure if it was even aimed at him. “I can’t do this—I’m going home.”

Shota lowered his hand from in front of him, fingers closing into a loose fist that came to rest against his thigh—

“That is probably for the best,” Shota said in agreement. “Higawara, make sure you change out of your tracksuit before you go—it won’t get cleaned if you take it home with you.”

#

Higawara Manor, Musutafu.

The world felt strange now, in some indescribable way, and I put it solely down to the fact that I had slept for almost the entire day—waking up in the late afternoon just felt somehow wrong. Clarity had returned to my mind, and the sluggishness that had been dragging me down for the last few days had finally vanished. It was such a stark contrast that I couldn’t believe I had let myself deteriorate so much—I would need to apologise to Momo and Shota both.

“There you are,” Sajin said as he slid the door open. “I should have checked the balcony first—you’d think I would know better by now.”

Sajin slid the door shut behind him and then came to lean against the railing beside me.

“I guess it’s become a habit,” I said, “Happy birthday, Uncle Sajin.”

“Thanks, kiddo,” Sajin said, “I’m getting close to half a century now, which is pretty strange to think about; time just kind of moves along without you—every now and then, it just seemed to hit you.”

“Are you going to retire now that you are old?” I asked.

“Funny,” Sajin said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Hayami told you to ask me that, didn’t she?”

“Sorry, Uncle Sajin,” I said, “I promised her I wouldn’t talk about it.”

“It’s like clockwork,” Sajin said, smiling now. “I’m in this for the long haul, Hisoka, and I’m honestly not sure what I would do with all the free time.”

“I’m relieved,” I said, “The U.A. Sports Festival is coming up soon, and I was hoping you would put in a good word at a hero agency for me.”

Sajin laughed out loud at the words.

“That sounded like one of hers, but I’ve got a feeling it’s all you this time,” Sajin said, “You’re in the festival then; that’s going to be something to see—I’ll make sure I’ve got time off for it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Did you have an eye on an agency in particular?” Sajin asked.

“I would have asked to join yours if you were a part of one,” I said, “I’m currently researching them now; I was hoping for something with an investigative focus rather than a reactionary, rescue or combat-orientated one.”

“Those types are definitely more uncommon, and it’s why I like working with the police force,” Sajin said, eyes on the sky for a moment. “They are the ones doing that kind of investigative groundwork—what’s your rationale for that?”

“There are a lot of villains in Japan, and the vast majority of them have managed to avoid being caught,” I said, “The ones that do get caught seem to have impaired judgment, personality complexes or quirks that make it impossible for them to remain hidden for long; with the right kind of training, I could find them before they can hurt anyone else.”

“That’s a good answer, but I want you to keep in mind that it isn’t always that simple when it comes to villains,” Sajin said, squeezing my shoulder for a moment. “Sometimes—especially from a more distant perspective—what looks like impaired judgment or an atypical personality is really just the externalisation of desperation and suffering.”

“Suffering?” I asked.

Sajin retrieved his hand before reaching up to brush his knuckles across his moustache, neatening it up just a fraction.

“People fall between the cracks of our society all the time; some of them have terrible lives, or maybe they had terrible childhoods, and so they grow up with distorted views of the world,” Sajin said. “The appearance of quirks hasn’t solved any of the fundamental problems that exist in our society, and if anything, they’ve only exacerbated them.”

Sajin gestured out towards the city skyline ahead of us, the glittering buildings and thousands of lights sparkling in the dark.

“Everybody has a breaking point, and when you reach it, you’re forced to start leaving pieces of yourself behind just to survive,” Sajin said, “When you are that desperate, you start doing things you know you shouldn’t because nothing else seems to work.”

“Pieces of yourself?” I murmured.

“Honor, decency, kindness, empathy, morality,” Sajin said, “If you’re starving in the streets, and you’ve got nowhere to go, your ability to make good decisions falters—or rather, bad decisions start to look like the only ones that get anything done.”

Sajin raised his arm up in front of him, and sand washed upwards from his palm as he converted the entire thing into a mass of shifting grains.

“Our society is filled to the brim with heroes, people who style themselves as saviours, or crusaders, and who are ready to battle the evils of the world,” Sajin said, “But the reality is that heroes can’t do a single thing to fix the root problem.”

It twisted in on itself until All Might stood on the palm of his hand, his iconic smile in place—it shifted again as Endeavor took his place, sand flickering about in a mimicry of pale flames.

“Heroes are a hammer designed to combat villains, but the kinds of people who go on to become villains don’t need a hammer, Hisoka—they need help,” Sajin said, “Unless we deal with the underlying conditions that create villains, they will continue to appear.”

Endeavour spun in on himself, and a young girl took his place, her face buried in her hands as she knelt beside the motionless figure of a man. The scene changed again, and the child grew to become a woman, but now she had an array of floating knives hovering around her body.

“Heroes come in at the last minute to save the day,” I murmured. “But providing aid to those who need it the most is the panacea for villainy.”

“I knew you’d understand, kiddo,” Sajin said, smiling again. “Hisoka, let’s go inside—I told a friend of mine that I would introduce you to her son.”

“Okay, Uncle Sajin,” I said.

As soon as the door opened, the sound of two dozen voices washed over us both, and when I followed him inside, it only grew worse. Sajin led me through the mass of people that Hayami had invited to the gathering, making a beeline towards an interesting pair who were standing beside a table by themselves.

“Nyoko, this is my nephew, Hisoka,” Sajin said, “I’m sorry to say that he ran off and joined U.A. High School instead of a proper school.”

I smiled at the running joke and studied the woman in front of me; Nyoko was tall, at roughly half a head higher than Sajin, and her skin was an abnormal, matte black that was rendered impossibly smooth. Her eyes were perfectly round, two white circles without pupils or sclera, while her mouth was a jagged line across her face.

“Hello, Hisoka; Sajin has spoken of you many times,” Nyoko said, her voice oddly faint. “This is my son, Kiyoshi, and I hope that you will both become friends—I’m afraid his quirk has left him unable to speak.”

Kiyoshi looked almost identical to his mother, with white eyes on a canvas of matte black, but unlike her, his face was entirely absent of a mouth. As always, the sight of unique heteromorphic qualities drew my interest, and I found myself curious about a great many things.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” I said, ducking my head in greeting. “Kiyoshi, do you attend Shiketsu?”

It was a guess—but not a baseless one—because I had heard Nyoko’s name once before during the conversation about which school I was going to attend. The context in which it had been used suggested that she was an instructor at Shiketsu, and if that was true, then Kiyoshi may have been a student there. Considering his inability to talk, I had been expecting either a nod or a shake of the head, but instead, he drew a phone from his pocket and began writing out a message.

“Yes, I am a second-year in the hero studies course,” The phone read out loud, converting the message into audio. “Your uncle said that you are a student of U.A. High School.”

Sajin and Nyoko had already abandoned us by the time it had finished playing, vanishing into one of the guest rooms upstairs. It was clear that they wanted the two of us to get to know each other without the presence of adult supervision, although why they had removed themselves from the party entirely was beyond my understanding.

“Yes, I am a first-year in the hero studies course,” I said, “I am curious just how closely the curricula are mirrored between both schools.”

Kiyoshi tilted his head at the question before raising his phone up once more.

“Perhaps we will compare notes,” Kiyoshi said, “For now, I have a question; it was reported that the recent villain invasion was targeting a first-year class. Were you involved in it?”

That was a rather direct question about a subject that probably should have registered as a delicate subject. The medium by which he was forced to speak might have accounted for the stiltedness, but I had a feeling that there was another element at work here.

“My class was the one involved; we were attacked during an exercise at a rather secluded training facility,” I said, studying his eyes. “All Might was quick to defeat the villains when he discovered what was occurring.”

“Alarming,” Kiyoshi said, holding his phone up. “What is All Might like in person?”

The topic change was notable, with no additional follow-up questions about the villains or what had occurred—it was hard to determine what he was thinking when the bottom half of his face gave away zero expression, and I couldn’t even use his tone of voice as a guiding force.

“Energetic, and he is always smiling,” I said, “Sometimes, he makes silly jokes; he once called out his catchphrase but modified it to announce that he was walking into the classroom like a normal person.”

Kiyoshi’s eyes seemed to change shape slightly, the muscles in his face moving upwards where his nose should have been. It was impossible to really know, but he may have been smiling. I took a moment to speak up about my own curiosity.

“Kiyoshi, do you mind if I ask you some questions about your quirk? I find myself very interested in its function.” I said, “You are a second year at a hero school, so I assume it has some kind of combat capability, but I am unable to discern its function from your heteromorphic traits alone.”

Kiyoshi seemed to pause for a moment before quickly tapping out a message on his phone.

“Most people are afraid to ask about my quirk for fear of hurting my feelings,” The phone declared. “Are you not concerned about this?”

The directness of the response reminded me of Tsuyu, and I wondered if the two would have gotten along.

“I am not making a value judgment about you based on your quirk; I am simply interested in its function,” I said, watching him. “If the topic is uncomfortable, we can move on from it.”

“It’s not,” Kiyoshi said, typing out his message. “My quirk allows me to absorb anything I am in contact with and hold it inside of myself.”

He’d abandoned the previous topic again, moving straight on through to the details of his quirk without pause. I had no issue following along, but I expected it could be jarring for most. The quirk itself could have made him a perfect counter to most melee combatants—depending on how fast it activated. If it took more than a second, that might not be the case.

“Interesting,” I said, “Does it activate fast enough to be useful in close-quarters combat?”

The phone vanished into his palm, and with a flick of his wrist, it returned, the matte black of his skin peeling back away from it like slime—it was fast activating, but not completely instantaneous. Some of the impact of a strike would likely affect him, but any extended contact would only be to his advantage.

“Yes, it does,” Kiyoshi said via the phone. “I prefer to grapple my opponents.”

I nodded in understanding.

“Kiyoshi, without a functioning mouth or nose, you must have a nonstandard experience with most things.” I said, “I assume you can absorb both oxygen, water and nutrients through your skin?”

Kiyoshi’s eyes changed again, thinning slightly as he typed.

“Yes, although the process takes much longer,” Kiyoshi explained, “Eventually, whatever I hold within myself will begin to break down and be digested.”

“Including your enemies,” I said.

It was an obvious joke and one that resulted in that same shape change affecting his eyes—more evidence towards the familiar shape being amusement, or at least a smile.

“Yes,” Kiyoshi said, “It makes cleaning up much simpler.”

“If you were to close your eyes and take in something from that table at random,” I asked, “Could you identify what it was by taste?”

“The shape and texture would be very noticeable,” Kiyoshi said, “But I cannot conventionally taste anything.”

Fascinating.

#

Hisoka’s Apartment, Musutafu.

“You remember Marcus, don’t you?” Sajin asked.

The officer who had conducted the interview regarding the aftermath of the Pasana Middle School Incident wasn’t someone I would have forgotten so easily.

“I remember him,” I said.

“He was there at the party last night, and we were talking about this hero who had come in from Australia—the guy is doing a little world tour,” Sajin said, scratching his chin. “I’m supposed to be working with him for a couple of weeks, so I am going to be pretty busy for a little while.”

“I understand,” I said, “Have you met him yet?”

“Marcus is the point of contact for that, and I haven’t had a chance to meet him yet,” Sajin said, “The problem is, my hero name got brought up during one of their discussions, and the guy just started belly laughing right in the middle of the station.”

I tilted my head at the comment, unable to discern why that would have made the man laugh.

“You look about as confused as I am,” Sajin said with a sigh, “Marcus had no idea either—I’ll have to ask the guy when I actually meet him.”

Sajin pushed down on his knees, lifting himself up off the couch and up to a standing position with a grunt of effort.

“I’ll get out of your hair for now,” Sajin said, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “Be careful while I’m gone, alright?”

“I will, Uncle Sajin,” I said. “Thank you for coming.”

I walked him out of the apartment and watched as he vanished down the stairwell with a wave and remained there for several minutes until I was sure he was gone. The door clicked shut as I went back inside, and then I began removing my uniform, placing it in the washing basket to deal with in the morning. I changed into a plain pair of black business slacks and an equally dark shirt, neither with any identifiable brands or notable marks present. The black fabric face mask was tugged on, the elastic straps carefully placed over my ears and tightened until it would remain in place. I slipped the prepared pair of tiny, portable storage drives into my pocket and then stood still in my bedroom for five more minutes, just in case anyone would take that moment to call or knock on my door—and when they didn’t, I opened the window of my apartment and then let myself dissolve.

I sent a thread of sand up to the rooftop and then dragged my clothing up with it. My sand was already stretching out across the city, shifting in small nodes between the rooftops to establish a network that would expand my range and allow me to keep surveillance on a larger area. My clothing was balled up and then sent skyward in an arc that kept it out of sight of any windows. The sun was already long gone, and night had taken the city, so a single speck of black in the night sky was almost impossible to see or distinguish. It took seven minutes for me to reach the rooftop of my first target, and I kept my clothing two buildings away from it, just in case I was forced to run. I spread out across the roof of the restaurant, seeping in through the gaps in the ventilation duct.

I split down every branch that I came across until I had the entire system mapped out, and then I began sending tiny sprinklings of sand through each of the grates. It was still open and would be for another hour at most, but there were only three groups present inside the building—the sight of the seat where Nanami had once sat had me frozen for a long time. I could imagine her sitting there right now, her family and my own surrounding her, the brilliant smile on her face like a beacon in my mind. The hazy shadow of five people filled the other noteworthy table, and I set about trying to match the scenery with the image I had burned into my mind—there was something wrong with it. It took me a little while to realise that they had moved a potted plant into place just beside the table, an errant detail that felt wrong to me. I watched it for a moment longer as my sand seeped through the grate in the ceiling of the security room before I shifted my primary thread of focus there.

The room was unoccupied, which was expected because the on-site security guard was currently standing by the back door to the kitchen, speaking with a young woman in a chef’s uniform. There were several monitors across one side of the small room, along with a server rack and three different computers—one of which was booted up and unlocked. The monitors showed a spread of video feeds from the different cameras in the building. The application that was processing all of it was stamped with a familiar logo, one which was repeated across almost all of the equipment present in the room. I remained unformed but sent a dozen thin tendrils down to manipulate the keyboard and mouse, clicking through each of the application’s tabs until I found the settings menu. There was an option to change the file path for where the security footage was being stored, and I used it to open the directory.

Folders upon folders, compressed to a fraction of the size, and dated by year—I found the year twenty-one-forty-one and then extracted the folder. I searched for the correct date—March 5th—and found it exactly where it was supposed to be. I bent the grating just enough to slip the portable storage drive in through the gap and then slotted it into the computer. Once I had copied the files over, I compressed the file again, returned the application to its previous state, and then went in search of payment records. The other two computers were password-protected and had an attached scanner, but when I tried the security guard’s forgotten lanyard, it did nothing to unlock them. I searched the room for a note or a stick with the password written down, but the security guard was already returning to the room. I withdrew from the room, bending the grating back into place, and then returned the storage drive to the pocket of my stashed clothing before moving on to my second and final target of the night.

The Bacta Medical Centre was the largest hospital in Musutafu; it had seventeen floors, two of which were primarily reserved for heroes and active service personnel. Within those two floors, there existed a long-term ward for critical or slow recovery injuries. On the opposite wing of the building, there was a medical containment facility used solely for treating the injuries of villains, and it was guarded by at least one on-duty hero at all times—that was the depth of the knowledge that I was able to discover from researching it on the Internet. The extent of the security measures and the active hero roster were completely unknown to me. As I touched down on the top of the hospital, I remained spread out in an amorphous cloud of diffused sand particles, unwilling to form myself into a solid enough figure to be seen. My lack of familiarity with the security system meant that I couldn’t be reckless in how I infiltrated the building.

There were many heroes with sensory abilities, remote viewing techniques and more esoteric methods of detecting people who could be here—but it was impossible for all angles to be covered, and whichever hero was present, they couldn’t have every single quirk. Still, that uncertainty had resulted in the development of several strategies to lower the chance of being discovered. The first was to minimise contact with the on-duty hero as much as possible. Unfortunately, that particular wing was the place most likely to host the doctors with the highest clearance level, so I couldn’t avoid it entirely. The second was to avoid entering the high-security areas that were most likely to detect me—namely, the wing responsible for villain containment.

There would be mechanisms in place to stop common quirks, and if I tried to enter that area, the probability of being spotted by something that detected motion was quite a bit higher than the rest of the building. After exactly five minutes had passed, and there had been no indication that I had been detected, I started spreading out across the rooftop in search of points of entry. I found four separate roof access points, forty-five air ducts, seven fire escapes—on just as many floors—and a thick metal pipe that served some unknown purpose. I entered through all of the fire escapes at once, seven grains of sand slipping underneath the gaps in the doors before each one shifted up into the corner of the ceiling. I stopped there, partially extended into the building, just waiting for a response—and once I was sure I was unnoticed, I began to expand each grain into the minimum amount of sand needed for perspective emergence.

Seven different hallways opened up ahead of me, not quite empty of movement, but with few enough people present that I felt much better about my chances of going unnoticed. The seventh floor had the fewest people, so I sent a new grain of sand along the ceiling, aiming for the elevator at the opposite end of the building. It reached it without issue, and I slipped the grain of sand into the shaft through the gap in the floor before sending it directly upwards again. I used my position outside of the building and the grain of sand inside of it to determine that the elevator only went up to the fifteenth floor. The two high-security floors must have had their own elevator, detached from the public one. The fifteenth floor was surprisingly busy compared to the others, with doctors, nurses and even security guards walking around, moving between rooms and crowding around open areas with large, curved countertops—a woman with a white surgical mask and an opaque hairnet crossed the hallway directly in front of me, unaware that she was being watched.

I found the other elevator on the opposite side of the building and then slipped into the new shaft as I had with the first, taking far more care with my ascent. A grain of sand slipped through the gap and into the sixteenth floor, carefully moving towards the corner before rising up to the ceiling. It slowly expanded—and I felt a thrill of alarm pass through me as I found myself looking directly down at a figure who was wearing black robes. The hero was facing away from me, but even then, I recognised him by his costume alone; Kesagiri Man possessed a durability-based quirk—not unlike Eijiro—that had a particular focus on the man’s arms. As far as I was aware, he held no extrasensory abilities or methods of detection, which left me feeling far more confident about continuing—

“How long are you going to remain hidden?” Kesagiri Man murmured.

I stopped cold as the man stepped forward and away from the elevator, watching him through my frozen sand as he came to a stop in front of the very first door on his left—there was a yelp of alarm as a young boy cut across the hall, gown flaring about his feet as he rushed to escape. Kesagiri Man ‘gave chase’ wandering after the boy at an unhurried walking pace, and once I was certain he hadn’t actually discovered me, I began spreading out across the ceiling. I took note of the offices, wards and rooms, slipping into each one until I had eyes on everywhere on the entire floor, with the exception of the containment wing. There were three offices with golden name plates bolted to the doors, but only one of them had a lanyard present hanging off the handle of the top drawer of the desk—the office of Dr. Marcoh.

I kept an eye on Kesagiri Man as he wandered about the building, playing a game of hide and seek with what must have been a long-term patient—and in the process, I located a familiar person lying face down on a bed, tapping away on a tablet. I hadn’t seen her since she had been taken away in an ambulance, but Thirteen looked exactly like she had back then. The bandages wrapped around her torso made it clear that she hadn’t fully recovered yet, but the expression on her face seemed more bored than pained. The clipboard hooked into the bottom of her bed had her real name written across it in full—Anan Kurose. I managed to drag my focus away from her and back to Dr. Marcoh’s office before sending a series of thin tendrils down towards his desk. I swiped the keycard through the reader to unlock the computer, and with the desktop open, I was left to try and find the correct application—there was a sea of them, all unfamiliar to me.

Specialised software for medical diagnosis, databases for medication, and any number of other things. Eventually, I found an icon that matched the one from the Quirk Registrar website, and when I opened it up, a prompt flashed up on the screen. The card reader beeped again, the light flashing blue. I swiped the card again and bypassed the authorisation check—I turned off the monitor as Kesagiri Man passed by the office in his ambling chase of the young, giggling fugitive. Once he had turned the corner, I returned to my task. There were a multitude of buttons, search functions, filters and add-ons, but everything had a hover-over tooltip explaining its use. Right at the top was a series of tabs, each one a saved ‘quick search’ that the man must have used frequently, and in an attempt to familiarise myself with its use, I opened the one with the most interesting title—U.A. High School.

The list contained what had to be every current student at U.A. High School, sorted by year level and then secondarily by alphabetical order. I scanned through the names, searching for the letter H until I discovered a summary of my own entry—a small picture of my face sat beside it, the picture taken for my ID after my enrollment had been confirmed.

Name: Hisoka Higawara

Quirk: Sandmaker

Sex: Male

DOB: 25th February 2134.

Relatives: Katashi Higawara(+), Kichi Higawara(+), Sajin Higawara(+), Hayami Higawara(+).

I wasn’t entirely sure how the application tracked searches, and while scrolling down on a preloaded quick search wasn’t going to matter, actually clicking through into my own entry was probably a bad idea. Still, my parent’s names weren’t something I had expected to see today. I scrolled down the list again, quickly finding Momo’s entry.

Name: Momo Yaoyorozu

Quirk: Creation

Sex: Female

DOB: 23rd September 2134.

Relatives: Ume Yaoyorozu(+), Minato Yaoyorozu(+).

I took hold of the scroll bar before pulling it downwards until I reached the T section of the list—and then paused as I realised the name I was looking for was simply missing. I checked each of my remaining classmates, careful to only use the scroll bar and found every single one. There was only one person missing from the list, a singular exception out of everyone in our class—Toru Hagakure. I frowned, moving out of the ‘U.A. High School’ quick search and then entered her name into the search field. Nothing. No name, no picture, no entry, nothing. In an attempt to gather some context for why she would be missing, I entered a name I’d only just learned—Anan Kurose. Nothing showed up, just like I had expected. I was already aware that she’d had her Quirk Registrar entry scrubbed from the database, so it wasn’t a surprise. I deleted the name before typing out her hero name instead.

Name: Thirteen

Quirk: Black Hole

What exactly did this mean? I already knew that certain people had their identities removed from the Quirk Registrar, but even Thirteen had a listing—albeit one that had everything else removed except for her Hero name and the ‘nickname’ of her Quirk. I tried two more: All Might and Edgeshot.

Name: All Might

Quirk: Strength

All Might’s quirk name seemed a bit inappropriate considering the sheer level of strength the man possessed, but the confirmation for the formatting was good, at least.

Name: Edgeshot

Quirk: Foldabody

Unsurprisingly, both entries were in the exact same classified format, and it left me with only one conclusion—was Toru Hagakure listed under a hero name? That was the only thing that made sense. I couldn’t find her because her entry matched the formatting for those that had been scrubbed. I typed in ‘invisibility’ in an attempt to locate her entry, but apparently, that term had been used as a ‘catch-all’ for anyone with an invisibility-based quirk, and it was simply too broad of a search parameter, leaving me with six-thousand-two-hundred-and-seventy-eight names. I had no way to filter the entries either because if my guess about the formatting was correct, then nothing else would have been listed on her entry.

None of the students in my class had picked a hero name yet. I knew because Midnight had already mentioned that we would be addressing this in a future class. Even if the students within 1-A had chosen a hero name, it wouldn’t have been publicly available until it was registered and added to the license database. For some reason, Toru Hagakure had been scrubbed from the Quirk Registrar database and most likely already had a hero name—Kesagiri Man strode down the hallway again, forcing me to turn the monitor off a second time. By the time he’d passed by, I’d come to the decision to stop wasting time and do what I came here to do because I could always investigate the mystery of Toru at a later time. I turned my attention towards my main goal: finding a member of the group that had been sitting at that table in the restaurant.

Without a name, my best method for locating them was to use the exhaustive formatting options to start filtering people out based on physical attributes.

‘skin=blue’ ‘hair=black’ ‘eyes=black’ ‘heteromorphic=true’ ‘heteromorphic=arms’ ‘male’ ‘age>18’ ‘age<45’ ‘height>165cm’ ‘height<180cm’ ‘weight>60kg’ ‘weight<100kg’

The result was thirty-seven entries, which was far less than I had expected after my previous search. I scanned each of the pictures associated with the entries one by one. The shades of blue represented by the group were various, but none of them matched my memory. I scrolled through each of the entries twice more before fiddling with the height and weight parameters in case I’d been too strict, but the blue-skinned man simply wasn’t present. Somehow, he’d avoided being placed on the Quirk Registrar—or maybe, at some point afterwards, had somehow removed himself from it. Something that would have required physical access to where the government database was stored.

I wiped the search terms and began again, starting with the second most memorable person who had been at the table. The man had been a natural giant, towering over everyone else at the table and with the most impressively tailored suit to match—most likely because it would have needed to be custom fit to his large frame. There was no parameter for body modifications, like tattoos, which was a shame because the man had been covered in them.

‘skin=black’ ‘hair=brown’ ‘eyes=brown’ ‘heteromorphic=false’ ‘male’ ‘age>30’ ‘age<50’ ‘height>190cm’ ‘weight>115kg’

Zero entries. The man hadn’t been ethnically Japanese, so I was expecting it to some degree. If he’d come from overseas and had never had his Quirk registered, then I wasn’t going to find him through this method. Still, two of the six people had been exhausted already, and I had yet to find anything helpful. I moved on to one of the two women who had been at the table.

‘skin=white’ ‘hair=pink’ ‘eyes=pink’ ‘heteromorphic=true’ ‘heteromorphic=mouth’ ‘female’ ‘age>20’ ‘age<45’ ‘height>150cm’ ‘height<165cm’ ‘weight>45kg’ ‘weight<60kg’

The list refreshed again, and this time, there were only fourteen entries present—a shiver ran through my amorphous, diffused body as I immediately found myself staring at a face that I’d never forget. The very first entry on the list was a woman with long pink hair, bright pink eyes and a monstrous grin spread across her face.

Name: Susumu Hoshi

Quirk: Multisplit

Sex: Female

DOB: 16th January 2112.

Relatives: Yukiko Hoshi(+), Kazuhiro Hoshi(+).

Another shiver passed through the intangible force that linked every grain of sand in my network together; after eight years of searching for ghosts, eight years of mistakes, and eight years of false leads, I had finally found a name—Susumu Hoshi. Without a shred of hesitation, I clicked through to the full entry, uncaring if it left a trace behind. The summary bloomed into a full spread of information, with a much larger picture showing the woman posing for the camera, a white lab coat wrapped around her slight frame, the sharp interlocking teeth permanently transforming what might have been a pleasant smile into a terrifying and forced grin.

I read through the entire entry three times, back to back, and then went through it again for a fourth—Susumu Hoshi was born in Tokyo, Shibuya, in twenty-one-twelve. She unlocked her quirk at age five, and her quirk fell under the category of a mental deviation based on multitasking. The details of its function were listed in full; Susumu was capable of running two thought streams simultaneously and in parallel. There were two updates to her file in regard to her quirk, starting one year after her original Quirk Registrar registration. The first update listed that her quirk was growing stronger, and she was now able to process three streams at once.

The second update, one year after the last, was similar in nature, describing a new limit of four streams. After that, there were no further updates, but there were several notes on her file. The first was an offhand note that described some strange observed behaviours during the appointment: difficulties knowing when to speak and when to listen, uncomfortable levels of eye contact, abruptness, visible impatience, and a reference to ‘ongoing social difficulties with her peers.’ The second note reported that Susumu had adamantly refused to participate in any further quirk appointments. Those appointments weren’t mandatory to attend, I knew, because I had been asked to return twice to update my listing, and I had declined to do so both times.

There was another section near the bottom that seemed to have been attached long afterwards. The notes suggested a correlation between her quirk and the large deviation from normal behaviour. Severe mood swings were common for her, as she seemingly shifted from energetic to lethargic in waves, and she had a history of suddenly growing detached or withdrawing from conversations with no visible cause. As reported by her parents, she would quickly develop unhealthy or obsessive attachments to both teachers and other students. These behaviours had steadily become worse as she grew older, eventually culminating in an unnamed event that required her to be home-schooled from that point onwards.

I took in everything that was present, committing it all to memory. It was unfortunate that there was no longer any contact information listed, as the only number on file had a note beside it stating that it was no longer in service—the light on the elevator turned on, and the doors opened a moment later. I spent the next minute furiously removing all evidence of my presence, closing the searches, and then turning off the monitor as Principle Nezu and Shota Aizawa stepped into the hallway. Kesagiri Man—still playing hide and seek with the young boy—crossed in front of them before pausing as he realised that someone had entered the wing while he was supposed to be on duty.

“Principle Nezu,” Kesagiri Man said. “It’s good to see you.”

“You as well, Keiji,” Nezu said, smiling. “I can see that you are hot on the tail of a wrongdoer.”

“Aha—I’m just making sure to use everything you drilled into me whenever I have the chance,” Keiji said, reaching up to rub the back of his head. “He’s a good kid, and it’s been something of a quiet night—Shota.”

“Yo,” Shota said, sounding tired. “Have they moved her since we were last here?”

I wasn’t taking any chances that either of them would somehow figure out I was present. I’d most likely left some traces on the computer, and the best method to avoid anyone figuring that out was to make sure that nobody bothered to look in the first place. Once I was certain I had cleared what I could of my presence from Dr. Marcoh’s office, I let myself dissipate and then withdrew from the Hospital with as much haste as I could manage.

#

Hisoka’s Apartment, Musutafu.

For the first time since I had set out to find Nanami all those years ago, finding information was actually easy. Susumu Hoshi was a child prodigy, the rising star of her generation, and one that had only burned hotter as she grew older. Born and raised in Tokyo, where she attended a local elementary school for two years before she was withdrawn for ‘social difficulties’ and then homeschooled. At age fourteen, she had passed the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo and had summarily been accepted as a student there, years before most would even be eligible to apply. At sixteen years old, she had completed her doctorate, and at twenty, she earned her PhD while working at H.J. Labs, a private research institute. Susumu Hoshi was a career scientist who had spent her life researching quirk biology, or, in her very own words, ‘The understanding, replication and production of high-value quirk byproducts.’

But for all of her academic achievements and all of the citations that listed her work as a primary source, everything Susumu had done in her life had been singularly overshadowed by a public breakdown in twenty-one-thirty-six where she had violently attacked a colleague at H.J. Labs. She was subsequently removed from the premises, her employment terminated, and the security footage of the event leaked onto the Internet. Susumu Hoshi had been a favoured child of Japan throughout her life, right up until that video started to circulate, and then she had fallen from grace. Now, she had vanished from the public eye almost entirely, her social media presence basically nonexistent except for a shell of inactive profiles. Unless things had changed in the last five years, Susumu was childless and without a husband, wife or partner.

The only recent mentions of her name came from the dozens of attributions to her work through more recently published papers, the quality of her work still cutting edge even after all this time—but there was one other mention of Susumu Hoshi, buried in a list of other names within an article describing an upcoming scientific exposition. I clicked through to the article, and a shiver ran down my spine as I found myself staring at a very familiar headline—

“I-Island opens to the public on July 20th,” I murmured. “Introducing the long-awaited I-Expo.”

I-Island, the technological marvel of a city that served as the home for thousands of world-renowned scientists, doctors, engineers and support heroes. The floating mega-structure with the lowest crime rate in the known world and humanities attempt to turn the bright spark of light they had stolen from the gods into an age of peace and prosperity—and the destination of two of the seven ships that had the potential to have stolen Nanami Kureta away from Shimoda. Both the cargo ship and the passenger ship had been something I had almost immediately dismissed because of the world-renowned security that had been present on both. Sneaking onto those ships was supposed to be as impossible as sneaking onto I-Island itself—there were news reports of people who had tried and failed exactly that.

There were security systems in place, checkpoints that would scan for contraband, and guards that were present throughout all of it. On a ship with that much security, how could an abduction take place without it being noticed? Nanami and her parents would have shown up on the scans, and they would have been noticed by the guards who searched all of the luggage. I raked my eyes across the article, searching every single line for the name that had triggered the search result—and sure enough, I found it. Nested in the bottom half of the article, within a well-populated table that held the names of hundreds of scientists, inventors, heroes and celebrities. They were the names of those who lived on I-Island, who worked there, and who would be present during the I-Expo. I clicked through on her name and found nothing more than a brief summary; Susumu Hoshi lived and worked there full-time, and she would be performing a public talk on her specialisation—Quirk Byproducts.

I knew where she was, and I knew when she would be there. My hand was shaking now, badly enough that the cursor on the screen was shifting, and I sat back in my chair for a moment, mind racing to gather everything I knew. I-Island was a structure that held three different cities within its borders. It was surrounded by towering walls on every side, along with a single platform on one side that held an airstrip that brought in guests and a dock that allowed for resupply via shipping routes. The docks were entirely automated and attended to by the island’s own robotic labour force. A far more recent change to the security system had been implemented to stop passenger ships from docking, and now every single person that visited the island arrived via aircraft.

Now that I knew Susumu Hoshi was involved, everything was starting to shift into place—the largest flaw in any security system was always physical access, and the abductors had someone behind the towering walls of I-Island. I-Island was a utopia, and these vaunted security measures had been put in place to keep people from coming in without authorisation—but if they already had someone inside the walls, with physical access and the right kind of genius mind to leverage it, then what did that really matter? The abduction had taken place eight days after Nanami’s birthday, which was more than enough time for Susumu Hoshi to catch a flight back to I-Island.

Both the cargo ship and the passenger ship had reached their destination, and if Nanami had been on either of those ships when they left Shimoda, then she would have reached the docks. If she had been on the passenger ship, then she would have had to pass through the authorisation checkpoint at the front gates—that meant that Susumu Hoshi would need access to which database tracked the visitors. Either adding a false entry into the database to account for her presence or to head off whatever alert might have been sent out when it came up empty. If she had been on the cargo ship, Susumu would have needed access to the automated cargo scanning system to interfere with the loading process and prevent the scan from detecting that someone was inside one of the containers—either method would have been enough to get Nanami past the walls of I-Island. If she had come onto the island as a passenger, then she would have needed someone to bring her inside through the gates; if she had come via the cargo ship, then she would have needed somebody to retrieve her body from the containers.

The blue-skinned man hadn’t been on the ship during the handover because he’d stayed at the port, so it wasn’t him, and if Susumu Hoshi was inside making sure the security didn’t detect them, then it couldn’t have been her. That left the man with all the tattoos, the girl with two-toned hair, and the short man with the moustache—one of those had to have been on whichever ship she had been kept on, and another had to be inside I-Island to take custody of the body. The situation was clear in my mind now because I’d seen the statistics a hundred times over; one of the largest and still rising cause of missing persons were quirk-related abductions, and there would be no other reason to target her.

Susumu Hoshi, a disgraced scientist who studied quirk byproducts, and Nanami Kureta, a girl with a quirk that enhanced the effects of others. If Nanami was still alive, then there was only one place where I would find her—and through the twisted hands of fate, I already had a way inside.