The week passed faster than Ren expected.
Not because it was peaceful—but because everything felt compressed. News cycles moved quicker. Conversations grew sharper. Opinions solidified faster than facts could catch up.
Stain was gone.
But his ideology wasn't.
Ren noticed it in fragments first. Passing comments between students. Posts clipped into short videos. Casual remarks framed like jokes.
"Maybe he had a point."
"Some heroes really are in it for the money."
The words weren't shouted. They didn't need to be.
They were spoken casually, and that was worse.
Ren didn't react outwardly. He listened.
During his internship week, he had seen how quickly public sentiment could tilt when given the slightest push. Heroes still operated. Crime still existed. But belief—the quiet trust that made hero society function—had begun to fracture at the edges.
Midoriya and the others had been dragged into that chaos directly. Ren hadn't.
He had watched from the periphery.
And watching, he realized something important:
Stain hadn't attacked hero society with violence.
He attacked it with narrative.
Ren sat at his desk, fingers loosely interlocked, gaze unfocused as he reviewed what he knew.
Stain's ideology was simple enough to dismantle in theory—but once people internalized it, logic stopped working. That kind of thinking didn't disappear with arrests.
It metastasized.
Ren exhaled slowly.
"That phase is ending," he muttered.
Because the next threat wouldn't argue ideals.
It would exploit structure.
Overhaul.
Ren didn't dwell on the name emotionally. He treated it like a file.
Leader of a yakuza faction.
Obsession with "purity."
A quirk capable of full control over matter.
And more importantly—
A drug.
A weapon disguised as medicine.
One that erased quirks.
Ren leaned back slightly, eyes half-lidded.
Manufactured using a child's quirk.
That was the fulcrum of everything.
Ren didn't react emotionally to the idea anymore. Emotional responses made mistakes. He had already moved past that stage.
The problem wasn't what Overhaul was doing.
The problem was that Ren had no legitimate vector to act on that information.
He considered the obvious answer first.
All Might.
The thought lasted less than a second.
"How do I know?" was the immediate counter.
There was no explanation that didn't unravel into nonsense. No evidence trail. No witnesses. No predictive justification.
Ren didn't have foresight.
He had knowledge without provenance.
And hero society didn't work on trust alone—especially not at that level.
Nezu came next.
Ren paused there.
The principal was intelligent. Dangerously so.
And that was precisely the problem.
Nezu didn't just evaluate information—he evaluated intent. If Ren brought him a conclusion without a path, Nezu wouldn't dismiss it.
He would dissect it.
Trace it.
Corner Ren until the missing pieces became the story.
And Ren couldn't afford that.
Not because Nezu would punish him—but because he didn't know how to explain it , he could just make bullshit like he has an extra future seeing quirk but that would be easily be seen through as after making changes to the story the future would not remain the same and he will not be able to predict it anymore
Ren tapped a finger against the desk once.
"Not everything needs to be told," he said quietly.
So the question shifted.
If Ren couldn't tell the truth directly—
How could he make the truth discoverable?
The answer wasn't exposure.
It was direction.
Ren stood and paced slowly, thinking through constraints.
He needed:
Plausible motivation
Verifiable presence
No claims of certainty
No accusations
And most importantly—
A reason authorities would investigate on their own.
The location came first.
The city where it would unfold—where Night Eye's agency operated—was public knowledge. Ren didn't need inside information to justify being there.
A quick search. A train ticket. Done.
Why go?
That was easy.
Post-Stain instability.
Vigilantism spikes.
Volatile emotional environments.
Ren's quirk responded more strongly in chaotic emotional fields. That was documented. That was believable. He could say he was trying to find more emotional application for his quirk and document vigilantism for future reference of his novel . then he remembered that he has only written 5 volume of LOTM and did not update further but it was not important as the novel was already quiet popular already any ways where was i , ah the bullshitting part
"I want to observe how civilians react in unstable hero jurisdictions," he murmured.
Not a lie.
Just incomplete.
Next came the incident.
Ren didn't need to fabricate something elaborate.
He needed something messy.
Unclear.
Something that raised more questions than answers.
"I saw a masked man hurt someone who tried to help a child."
That statement replayed in his mind.
It was deliberately vague.
No names.
No conclusions.
No certainty.
Heroes investigated vague reports constantly.
Especially ones involving children.
Especially when paired with recorded presence.
Ren glanced at his phone.
He could record alleyways. Streets. Crowds.
Nothing illegal. Nothing invasive.
Just timestamps.
Proof that he had been there. He could just say he say it with enhancing his eyes from a faraway place hence the camera did not record it as it was faraway and not in direct line of site of the camera
Proof that he had reason to be concerned.
If asked why he didn't intervene—
"I wasn't sure what I was seeing."
True.
If asked why he didn't pursue—
"I'm not licensed."
Also true.
If asked why he's reporting now—
"Because it didn't sit right and I don't want to take chances ."
That was all the justification required.
Ren stopped pacing.
There it was.
A nudge.
Authorities didn't need Ren to solve the case.
They needed a reason to look.
Once they did, Overhaul couldn't hide forever.
Nezu, especially, didn't need full truths.
He needed patterns.
And Ren would provide just enough data to let Nezu find the rest himself.
He exhaled once, slow and measured.
"This isn't lying," he concluded.
"It's framing."
Ren wasn't manipulating outcomes directly.
He was aligning incentives.
The system would do the rest.
He knew the risks.
If he said too much, Nezu would dissect him.
If he said too little, nothing would happen.
The margin was narrow.
But Ren had always operated best in narrow margins.
Ren picked up his phone again, opening a blank note.
Not names.
Not plans.
Just reminders.
Observe, don't act
Record
No predictions
Let authority conclude
He closed it.
This wasn't hero work.
It was something quieter.
Something more dangerous.
Ren stared out the window at the U.A. campus.
Stain had forced hero society to question why heroes existed.
Overhaul would force it to question what it protected.
Ren didn't intend to be the one in the spotlight.
He just intended to make sure the light pointed in the right direction.
"Information without a source is poison," he said calmly.
"But information with the right trail…"
He allowed himself a thin, restrained smile.
"…becomes inevitable."