The first criminal Izuku Midoriya fought on his fourth week of patrol was a man named Goto Daisuke, who had a Quirk that turned his skin into something resembling granite and who was, at the moment of their encounter, using that granite skin to beat a convenience store clerk unconscious for the thirty-seven dollars in the register.
Izuku dropped through the ceiling vent.
This was not the dramatic, cape-billowing, pose-striking entrance that Pro Heroes favored. There was no catch phrase. No announcement. No "I am here!" or "Stop, villain!" or any of the performative theater that the hero industry had turned into an art form. He just—dropped. Through the ceiling vent. Like a shadow with mass.
He landed behind Goto Daisuke in absolute silence—Daredevil's stealth training, the ability to control every muscle in his body during movement so that his footfalls produced zero audible sound—and assessed the situation in 0.4 seconds.
Target: male, approximately 185 cm, 120 kg with Quirk active (stone-type transformation, full-body coverage, estimated durability: high). Weapon: none (Quirk-based combatant, relies on physical superiority). Civilian: one, behind counter, conscious but injured (possible concussion, laceration above left eye). Environment: convenience store, approximately 8x12 meters, fluorescent lighting, tile floor (low friction when wet—note: spilled drink in aisle three), security camera (recording—mask is on, identity secure).
Threat assessment: moderate. Stone-type Quirks typically sacrifice speed for durability. Joints are likely weak points—transformation Quirks rarely provide uniform coverage at articulation points. Confirm visually.
He confirmed visually. Goto's elbows and knees showed thin lines of normal skin where the granite coverage thinned to allow joint movement.
Weak points identified. Engagement plan: close distance before target is aware of presence. Strike joint weak points to disable mobility. Restrain. Exit before authorities arrive.
Time to engagement: now.
Izuku moved.
He covered the four meters between himself and Goto in less than a second. His first strike—a palm heel to the back of Goto's right knee, targeting the gap in the stone coverage—hit with approximately eight hundred pounds of force concentrated into an area the size of a silver dollar.
Goto's leg buckled.
The man made a sound—not a scream, more of a surprised grunt, the noise of someone whose brain had not yet processed the information that something very bad was happening to their body—and started to turn.
He was too slow.
Izuku was already inside his guard—Moon Knight distance, the range where size and reach advantages evaporated and the fight became about who was meaner. He drove his elbow into the gap at Goto's left armpit, where the stone coverage thinned over the joint, and felt something give—not bone, the man's skeleton was reinforced by the Quirk, but soft tissue, muscle and tendon that hadn't been transformed and couldn't absorb the impact.
Goto's left arm dropped.
"What the f—"
Izuku hit him in the throat.
Not hard enough to crush his trachea—that would be lethal, and Goto Daisuke, for all his sins, was robbing a convenience store for thirty-seven dollars, which did not meet any reasonable threshold for lethal response. But hard enough to interrupt his breathing, to flood his system with panic signals, to make his body forget about fighting and remember that it needed air.
Goto staggered. His hands went to his throat. His granite skin flickered—the Quirk destabilizing as his concentration shattered—and for a half-second he was just a man. Just a large, gasping, terrified man in a convenience store at two in the morning.
Izuku swept his legs.
Goto hit the tile floor. The impact cracked three tiles and knocked over a display of energy drinks. Before he could move, Izuku had him in a mount—knees pinning the man's arms, weight centered on his chest, one hand pressing Goto's face into the floor with precisely calibrated force: enough to immobilize, not enough to injure.
"Stay down," Izuku said.
His voice was—he'd been working on his voice. Not the Superman voice, not for this. This was the other voice. The one he'd developed by listening to Kevin Conroy's Batman approximately four hundred times and then adjusting for his own vocal range. Low. Controlled. Not loud—quiet, which was somehow worse than loud, because loud meant the speaker was trying to intimidate you and quiet meant they didn't need to.
Goto stayed down.
The entire fight had lasted 3.7 seconds.
Izuku zip-tied his wrists with the heavy-duty restraints from his belt, checked on the clerk (conscious, frightened, bleeding from a superficial laceration—he applied a butterfly bandage from his first aid kit and told her to call an ambulance), and exited through the back door before the security camera footage could capture anything more than a dark blur with green highlights.
On the rooftop across the street, he checked his scanner. No police en route yet. The 110 call hadn't been placed—the clerk was still processing what had happened. He made the call himself from his burner phone, gave the address and the situation in a clipped, anonymized voice, and hung up.
Then he sat on the edge of the roof and wrote in his notebook.
Engagement #23. Goto Daisuke, stone-type Quirk. Convenience store robbery. Civilian rescued (minor injuries). Suspect restrained. Engagement time: 3.7 seconds. Lethal force: not required, not considered. Notes: joint targeting effective against transformation Quirks. Moon Knight close-quarters methodology significantly outperforms standard martial arts approach against physically superior opponents. The key is not matching their strength—it's making their strength irrelevant by removing their ability to USE it. Disable the joints, disable the fighter. Regardless of Quirk.
He paused. Added:
The clerk's name was Yamada Suki. She's twenty-two. She's working night shifts to pay for nursing school. She thanked me. She was crying when she thanked me.
I need to remember the names. All of them. The ones I save and the ones I can't. That's what makes this real. Not the fights. The people.
He closed the notebook and moved on.
The second incident of the night was a mugging in Hosu Ward—two men with minor Quirks (one could generate a weak electrical charge in his palms, the other had slightly elongated fingers that were apparently useful for pickpocketing and not much else) targeting an elderly man walking home from a late shift at a factory.
Izuku dropped between them and the victim like a stone from heaven.
"Evening," he said, in the Batman voice.
The muggers looked at him. Looked at each other. Looked at him again.
"Who the hell are you?" said the one with the electrical Quirk.
Izuku didn't answer. He'd learned—from Batman, from Daredevil, from every street-level hero who'd ever operated in the dark—that silence was a weapon. That the absence of an answer was more frightening than any answer could be. When you didn't speak, the other person's imagination filled the gap, and imagination was always worse than reality.
The electrical one charged his hands. Blue-white sparks crackled between his fingers, throwing harsh shadows across the alley.
"I said, who the hell—"
Izuku threw a coin.
Not at him. Past him. The coin—a five-yen piece, chosen for its weight and aerodynamic profile—ricocheted off the brick wall behind the mugger's head, struck the fire escape ladder with a sharp clang, and bounced back to strike the man's electrical hand from behind with precisely enough force to disrupt his concentration.
The sparks died. The man yelped and grabbed his hand.
Bullseye's aim. A five-yen coin. Two ricochets. One result.
Anyone can be a weapon. Anything can be a tool. The universe is full of resources—you just have to see them.
Deadpool's lesson. Applied with considerably more precision and considerably less insanity.
The second mugger—the one with the long fingers—turned to run. Izuku let him take three steps, then threw a second coin. This one hit the man's ankle at the precise point where the Achilles tendon was most exposed, and his leg buckled mid-stride, sending him sprawling on the asphalt.
Neither coin had caused permanent damage. Neither coin had even broken skin. But both men were now on the ground, disoriented, frightened, and very much reconsidering their career choices.
Izuku zip-tied them both. Checked on the elderly man (shaken but unharmed; Izuku walked him to the nearest well-lit street and waited until he flagged down a taxi). Called the police.
On the rooftop afterward, he added to his notebook:
Engagement #24. Two suspects, minor Quirks. Attempted mugging. Civilian rescued (no injuries). Suspects restrained. Engagement time: 4.2 seconds. Lethal force: not required, not considered. Notes: Ricochet targeting with small projectiles is absurdly effective in enclosed urban environments. Must acquire more five-yen coins. Also: the look on someone's face when they get taken out by pocket change is—
He paused. Crossed out the last incomplete sentence.
Focus. This isn't entertainment. These are people's lives.
But a small, irrepressible part of his brain—the part that had absorbed Wade Wilson's irreverence—added, silently, where the notebook couldn't hear it:
It was a LITTLE funny, though.
The third incident was not funny at all.
The scanner picked it up at 3:47 AM. A domestic violence call from an apartment building in the Kamino Ward. Police estimated response time: twenty-eight minutes. Nearest Pro Hero patrol: none. The Kamino Ward was a dead zone—underfunded, under-patrolled, the kind of neighborhood that the hero industry had quietly written off because the demographics didn't support the investment.
Izuku was there in six minutes, crossing rooftops with the fluid, efficient parkour that Nightwing and Spider-Man had taught him—not the showy, acrobatic style that looked good on camera, but the fast style, the style that prioritized speed over form because when someone was being hurt, aesthetics could go to hell.
The apartment was on the seventh floor. He went up the exterior of the building—finding handholds that a normal person wouldn't have been able to use, his spider-enhanced grip strength turning window ledges and drainage pipes into a ladder—and entered through a window that had been left open because the building's ventilation system had stopped working two years ago and the landlord hadn't bothered to fix it.
Inside: a living room. A man. A woman on the floor. Two children in the hallway, watching through a cracked-open door. The boy was maybe seven. The girl was maybe five. They were silent. Not scared-silent—practiced-silent. The silence of children who had learned that making noise made it worse.
The man was standing over the woman. His Quirk was active—his arms had transformed into something like organic hammers, dense and heavy, the kind of mutation that would have made him a candidate for hero work if he'd been born into different circumstances and made different choices.
He had not made good choices.
The woman was curled on the floor, arms over her head, and there was blood on the carpet that was not fresh enough to be from tonight, which meant it had happened before, which meant it had happened many times before, which meant the system—the police, the heroes, the neighbors—had failed this family in every way that a system could fail.
Izuku felt the anger rise.
It was a cold anger. Not hot—not the explosive, uncontrolled fury that Kacchan wielded like a weapon. This was the Moon Knight anger. The Daredevil anger. The anger of a man who had seen too much suffering in too many dark rooms and had stopped being surprised by human cruelty but had never, would never, stop being offended by it.
He moved.
The man didn't see him coming. No one ever did—not at this speed, not in this darkness, not when Izuku was operating in full stealth mode with every sense tuned to maximum and every instinct screaming fast, efficient, final.
He hit the man once.
One strike. A single palm heel to the solar plexus, driven upward at a thirty-degree angle with approximately one thousand two hundred pounds of concentrated force.
The man's hammer-arms transformed back into regular arms as his diaphragm spasmed and his lungs emptied and his brain received the urgent, all-consuming message that breathing was no longer a voluntary activity. He folded like a chair. He hit the floor. He did not get up.
Izuku stood over him and felt something that he recognized with clinical precision as the desire to keep hitting.
The man was down. The threat was neutralized. The woman was safe. The children were safe. There was absolutely no tactical, strategic, or ethical reason to deliver another blow.
But Izuku wanted to.
He wanted to very badly.
He wanted to take this man's hammer-arms and show him what it felt like to be on the receiving end. He wanted to—
Rule Three. The decision to use lethal force must NEVER be driven by anger. If I'm angry, I am NOT qualified to make the decision. Step back. Breathe. Find another way.
The rule wasn't about lethal force specifically. Not right now. It was about anger generally—about the recognition that anger was a terrible decision-making framework and that acting from anger was the first step on the slope.
He stepped back.
He breathed.
He found another way.
The other way was: zip-tie the man's wrists and ankles. Check on the woman (conscious, injured—a black eye, swollen lip, bruised ribs, the kind of injuries that spoke of long practice and careful targeting, hitting where it wouldn't show). Call an ambulance. Call the police. Call a domestic violence hotline that he'd programmed into his burner phone specifically for situations like this.
And then—the part that no Pro Hero would do, because no Pro Hero was there, because the system that trained and deployed Pro Heroes had decided that this neighborhood wasn't worth the investment—
He knelt down in the hallway, at eye level with the two children, and said:
"Hey."
The boy stared at him with eyes that were too old for his face.
"My name is—" He paused. He didn't have a hero name yet. He hadn't decided on one. "I'm a friend. I'm here to help. The man who was hurting your mom isn't going to hurt her anymore tonight. And there are people coming who are going to make sure he doesn't hurt her again."
"He always comes back," the boy said. Flat. Factual. The voice of a seven-year-old who had learned the lesson that the world was teaching him. "Mom calls the police and they come and they take him away and he always comes back."
Izuku felt the anger pulse again. Hotter this time. Harder to control.
He always comes back.
The Joker always escapes Arkham.
The cycle never ends.
Unless someone ends it.
"Not this time," Izuku said. And he didn't know if he was making a promise he could keep, didn't know if the system would work this time when it had failed every time before, didn't know if this man would be charged and convicted and kept away from his family or if he'd be released on bail in seventy-two hours and come right back to this apartment and these children and this blood-stained carpet—
But he said it anyway. Because sometimes a lie told with conviction was better than a truth delivered with defeat. Because sometimes the most heroic thing you could do was give someone a reason to hope, even if you weren't sure the hope was justified.
"Not this time," he repeated. "I promise."
The boy looked at him. The girl—silent, clutching her brother's hand—looked at him.
He left before the ambulance arrived. Climbed back out the window, descended the building, vanished into the dark.
On the rooftop across the street, he didn't write in his notebook.
He sat in the dark and breathed and fought the anger and thought about Jason Todd and the Joker and a boy who said he always comes back and the infinite, grinding, soul-crushing reality of a world where the people who hurt you always came back because the system that was supposed to stop them was designed to process cases, not protect people.
Then he pulled out his notebook and wrote one line:
I need to be better. Faster. Smarter. More. Whatever "more" means. Because tonight wasn't enough. Tonight was a band-aid. And this world needs surgery.
By the end of his sixth week of operations, the Musutafu underground had a problem.
The problem didn't have a name. It didn't have a Quirk registration. It didn't appear in any database maintained by the Hero Public Safety Commission, the National Police Agency, or any of the seventeen intelligence-sharing networks that coordinated hero and law enforcement activities across the greater Tokyo metropolitan area.
What it had was a rapidly growing list of unconscious criminals, zip-tied and waiting for police pickup, scattered across the Naruhata, Hosu, and Kamino wards with the regularity of a newspaper delivery route. Thirty-seven in the first two weeks. Sixty-one by the end of the fourth. A hundred and nine by the sixth.
The police were confused.
The media was intrigued.
The Hero Public Safety Commission was furious.
And one particular underground hero was reading the case files with an expression that could generously be described as "troubled" and more accurately described as "a man watching his fundamental assumptions about reality get dismantled with a socket wrench."
Aizawa Shouta—hero name: Eraserhead—sat in his apartment at 4:23 AM, surrounded by police reports, incident summaries, and crime scene photographs, and tried to make the data make sense.
It did not make sense.
The data was, from an analytical perspective, beautiful. Consistent. Precise. Almost mathematically clean. The vigilante—because that's what this was, no matter how much the media wanted to call it a "mystery hero" or an "unregistered independent operator" (which was just a polite way of saying "vigilante," the way "vertically challenged" was a polite way of saying "short")—operated with a level of tactical sophistication that Aizawa had never seen outside of top-tier professional heroes.
Strike patterns indicated mastery of multiple martial arts disciplines. The restraint methodology was consistent—heavy-duty zip ties, applied to wrists and ankles, with secondary bindings at elbows and knees for targets with physical enhancement Quirks. First aid had been administered to injured civilians at nineteen of the hundred and nine incident sites—bandages, splints, tourniquets, all applied with textbook accuracy that suggested formal medical training.
The vigilante worked at night. Between 11 PM and 5 AM, primarily, with activity concentrated in the gaps between Pro Hero patrol routes. This was significant. It meant the vigilante had mapped the patrol routes. Had identified the blind spots in hero coverage. Had deliberately chosen to operate in the areas where the system failed—the neighborhoods that were too poor, too dangerous, or too politically inconvenient to warrant consistent protection.
This alone would have been enough to get Aizawa's attention. A vigilante who was smart enough to avoid hero patrols was a vigilante who was smart enough to be dangerous.
But it was the other pattern that kept him awake at night.
The vigilante didn't use a Quirk.
Aizawa had reviewed every incident report, every security camera clip, every witness statement. He had analyzed the strike patterns, the movement data, the response times. He had run the information through the HPSC's Quirk Analysis Database, which cross-referenced combat data against known Quirk profiles to identify unregistered Quirk users.
The database returned zero matches.
Not "low confidence match." Not "insufficient data." Zero matches. The vigilante's combat methodology was entirely consistent with non-Quirk-enhanced human performance. Enhanced, yes—faster, stronger, more precise than an untrained civilian—but within the theoretical upper bounds of what a human body could achieve with exceptional training and conditioning.
The database's conclusion, stated with the clinical certainty of an algorithm that didn't understand how absurd it was being: SUBJECT IS LIKELY QUIRKLESS.
Aizawa stared at this conclusion for a very long time.
Then he pulled up the crime statistics for the Naruhata, Hosu, and Kamino wards over the past six weeks.
Violent crime: down 43%.
Property crime: down 31%.
Emergency response times: unchanged (because the police were still the police), but outcomes had improved dramatically, because by the time the police arrived, the situation was already resolved. Criminals restrained. Civilians safe. First aid administered.
Forty-three percent reduction in violent crime. In six weeks. In neighborhoods that hadn't seen a meaningful reduction in years.
For comparison, Aizawa pulled up the statistics for the Musutafu wards that were covered by the top-ranked Pro Heroes. Wards with dedicated hero agencies, twenty-four-hour patrols, millions of yen in annual funding.
Violent crime reduction over the same period: 7%.
The vigilante—a single individual, operating alone, without funding or institutional support or a Quirk—was outperforming the entire Pro Hero system by a factor of six.
Aizawa closed the file.
He opened it again.
He closed it again.
He poured himself a drink—not alcohol, just coffee, because Aizawa Shouta's relationship with caffeine was the most stable relationship in his life—and sat in the dark and thought about what these numbers meant.
What they meant was uncomfortable.
What they meant was that the system he had dedicated his career to—the system of licensed, regulated, government-sanctioned heroism—was being shown up by a teenager in a mask. (He was fairly sure it was a teenager. The height estimates from security footage suggested someone between 160 and 170 cm. The build was lean, not fully developed. The movement patterns, while sophisticated, had an energy to them—a bounce—that suggested youth.)
A teenager. Quirkless. No license. No training academy. No institutional support. Just skill and determination and an apparently inexhaustible willingness to throw himself at the worst neighborhoods in the city night after night after night.
And he was winning.
Aizawa thought about his own career. Twenty years of underground hero work. Thousands of arrests. Countless hours of patrol. And in all that time, had he ever reduced violent crime in a district by forty-three percent?
No.
Had any hero? Any single hero, working alone?
He didn't think so.
"Who are you?" Aizawa said to the empty apartment.
The empty apartment, as was its habit, did not respond.
He picked up his phone and called Tsukauchi Naomasa, his contact at the Musutafu Police Department.
"It's four in the morning, Eraserhead."
"I need everything you have on the Naruhata vigilante."
"...it's four in the morning."
"I know what time it is."
A sigh. The sound of a man who had long since accepted that his friendship with Aizawa Shouta came with certain temporal inconveniences.
"What specifically do you want to know?"
"I want to know how a Quirkless teenager is doing our job better than we are."
A very long pause.
"...I'll send you the files."
Three nights later, Eraserhead went hunting.
He positioned himself on a rooftop in the Naruhata district—the epicenter of the vigilante's activity—and waited. He was very good at waiting. It was, arguably, his primary skill set. Other heroes had flashy Quirks and dramatic entrances. Eraserhead had patience and capture tape and eyes that could shut down powers with a look.
Although, if the vigilante was truly Quirkless, that last one would be useless.
He tried not to think about how unsettling that was.
He waited for three hours. At 2:14 AM, his patience was rewarded.
Movement. Rooftop to rooftop, three blocks east. Fast—faster than a civilian, faster than most heroes—but controlled. Not the wild, reckless movement of an amateur. The precise, efficient traversal of someone who had mapped every rooftop, every alley, every drainage pipe and fire escape in the district and had internalized them into a mental model so complete that he could navigate at full speed in total darkness.
Aizawa tracked the movement through his goggles. The figure was dressed in dark colors—black and deep green—with a full-face mask and some kind of utility belt. The suit was—
He blinked.
The suit was good. Not "homemade costume" good—professionally engineered good. The armor panels were positioned to protect vital areas without restricting movement. The mask had adaptive lenses that shifted opacity based on ambient light. The utility belt was organized with the obsessive precision of someone who had studied the concept of a utility belt in exhaustive detail and then improved upon it.
This was not a kid playing dress-up. This was equipment designed by someone who knew what they were doing.
The figure stopped on a rooftop four blocks away, crouched at the edge, scanning the streets below. Aizawa saw him tilt his head—listening, maybe. Or watching something that Aizawa couldn't see from this angle.
Then the figure moved. Down the side of the building—not jumping, climbing, with a speed and fluidity that suggested either a Quirk or training so extensive that the distinction was academic—and into an alley.
Aizawa followed.
He was quiet. He was always quiet—twenty years of underground hero work had made stealth a reflex. He crossed the rooftops on silent feet, capture weapon ready, eyes locked on the alley where the figure had disappeared.
He reached the edge of the building above the alley and looked down.
The vigilante was fighting three men.
"Fighting" was generous. "Systematically dismantling" was more accurate.
The three men had the look of low-level Yakuza—cheap suits, visible tattoos, the kind of casual menace that came from being armed and dangerous in a neighborhood where the police response time was measured in geological epochs. One of them had a Quirk that made his fists glow with a dull red light—heat generation, similar to the domestic abuser from Izuku's first serious encounter. The other two appeared to be baseline humans with knives.
The vigilante was—
Aizawa's eyes widened.
The vigilante was dirty.
Not dirty in the hygiene sense. Dirty in the fighting sense. The kind of dirty that made Aizawa—a man who had spent two decades in the ugliest corners of the hero profession—wince.
The first knife-wielder lunged. The vigilante didn't block or dodge—he intercepted. Caught the man's wrist, twisted it with a wet pop that echoed off the alley walls, stripped the knife from nerveless fingers, and simultaneously drove his knee into the man's groin with a force that lifted him six inches off the ground.
The man's scream was cut short by an elbow to the jaw. He dropped.
1.8 seconds.
The second knife-wielder tried to run. The vigilante threw something—a coin? A coin?—and it hit the runner's ankle with a sharp crack. The man stumbled. The vigilante closed the distance in two strides, grabbed the back of his head, and bounced his face off the alley wall.
Not hard enough to kill. Not hard enough to cause permanent damage. But hard enough to end the conversation.
2.3 seconds.
The heat-Quirk user was backing away, hands raised, the red glow intensifying. "Stay back! Stay back, I'll burn your—"
The vigilante picked up a trash can lid.
He threw the trash can lid.
It flew across the alley in a flat, spinning arc—like a discus, like a shield—and struck the heat-Quirk user in the sternum with enough force to send him staggering backward into a dumpster. The impact knocked the wind out of him. The Quirk flickered. The vigilante was there before it recovered, one hand on the man's throat, the other pressing a pressure point behind his ear.
The man went limp.
3.1 seconds. Three opponents. Total engagement time: 7.2 seconds.
Aizawa stared.
He had been a hero for twenty years. He had trained under some of the best combat instructors in Japan. He had fought villains with Quirks that would make most people weep with terror. He was, by any reasonable assessment, one of the most skilled hand-to-hand combatants in the professional hero community.
He was not sure he could have done that faster.
The vigilante zip-tied all three men with practiced efficiency, checked the alley for civilians (there were none), and turned to leave.
He stopped.
He looked up.
Directly at Aizawa.
For a frozen moment, they stared at each other—the underground hero on the rooftop and the vigilante in the alley, separated by four stories of vertical distance and a philosophical gulf the size of the Pacific Ocean.
Then the vigilante waved.
Not sarcastically. Not mockingly. A small, almost polite wave, like a neighbor acknowledging another neighbor across a fence.
And then he was gone. Up the opposite wall, onto the rooftop, into the dark. Moving with a speed and efficiency that Aizawa—with twenty years of rooftop pursuit experience—could barely track.
By the time Aizawa reached the opposite rooftop, the vigilante had vanished completely. No trail. No sound. No trace.
Aizawa stood on the empty rooftop and said a word that would have gotten him fined by the Hero Public Safety Commission's Standards of Professional Conduct board.
Then he said it again, because it bore repeating.
He looked down at the alley. Three unconscious Yakuza members, neatly zip-tied, waiting for pickup.
He looked at the rooftop where the vigilante had disappeared.
He thought about the crime statistics. The forty-three percent reduction. The hundred and nine incidents. The first aid. The domestic violence hotline calls. The children who had been reassured by a masked stranger that things would get better.
He thought about the licensing system. The regulations. The bureaucracy. The annual reviews and the provisional licenses and the ranking boards and the entire institutional apparatus that was supposed to ensure that heroes were qualified and accountable.
He thought about Kamino Ward, where a man beat his wife with hammer-arms and his children had learned to be silent and the nearest hero patrol was eight blocks away because the demographics didn't justify the investment.
And for the first time in twenty years—for the first time since he'd put on the goggles and the capture weapon and committed himself to a career of underground heroism in the service of a system he believed in—
Aizawa Shouta wondered if the system was wrong.
The thought was uncomfortable.
He went home.
He did not sleep.
The vigilante didn't know he was being watched by someone else, too.
Or maybe he did. The thing about operating in the dark was that the dark was full of watchers, and you could never be sure you'd spotted all of them.
Stain—the Hero Killer—had been tracking the Naruhata vigilante for eleven days.
Eleven days of rooftop surveillance. Eleven days of watching this unknown figure—this unregistered, unlicensed, apparently Quirkless nobody—do what Stain had spent years screaming that the hero industry refused to do: actually help people.
Not for money. Not for fame. Not for rankings. For people.
Stain had opinions about this.
Stain had opinions about everything, delivered with the conviction of a man who had replaced doubt with knives at some point in his personal development and never looked back.
His opinion about the Naruhata vigilante was complicated. On one hand, here was someone who embodied Stain's ideology—a true hero, operating outside the corrupt system, motivated by genuine altruism rather than profit or ego. The kind of hero Stain had been arguing existed only in theory, the kind whose absence he used to justify his murder of the false heroes who had polluted the profession.
On the other hand, here was someone who was actually doing it. Not talking about it. Not philosophizing about it. Doing it. Every night. In the dark. Without recognition or reward.
Which meant that Stain's argument—that true heroes no longer existed, that the profession had been irremediably corrupted, that the only way to purify it was through the selective elimination of the unworthy—had a hole in it.
Stain did not like holes in his arguments.
He decided to test the vigilante. To confront him. To see if this unknown hero was genuine or if he was, like all the others, a fraud wearing conviction like a costume.
Stain positioned himself on a rooftop in the Hosu Ward on a Thursday night—a night he'd chosen based on his analysis of the vigilante's patrol patterns—and waited.
At 1:47 AM, the vigilante appeared.
He moved across the rooftops with that fluid, confident stride that Stain had been observing for eleven days. Efficient. Purposeful. No wasted movement. No showboating. The stride of someone who was going somewhere to do something and didn't have time for theatrical nonsense.
Stain stepped into his path.
The vigilante stopped. Instantly. One moment he was moving at full speed; the next he was still, balanced on the balls of his feet, weight centered, hands at his sides but ready—ready in a way that Stain recognized because he was ready in the same way, always, a coiled spring wrapped in human skin.
They faced each other across the rooftop.
"The Hero Killer," the vigilante said. His voice was—young. Younger than Stain had expected. But the tone was flat, controlled, giving nothing away.
"You know me," Stain said. Not a question.
"I know what you've done. Seventeen Pro Heroes killed. Twenty-three permanently injured. You target heroes you consider 'false'—heroes who are motivated by money, fame, or self-interest rather than genuine altruism."
"They aren't heroes. They're parasites. Leeches feeding on a system that rewards spectacle over substance. The hero industry—"
"I didn't ask for your manifesto."
Stain's mouth closed.
This was—not how these conversations usually went. When Stain confronted heroes, they either attacked immediately (the arrogant ones), tried to talk him down (the naive ones), or ran (the smart ones). No one had ever simply... interrupted him.
The vigilante hadn't moved. Hadn't shifted his stance. Hadn't reached for a weapon. He stood on the rooftop with the relaxed alertness of someone who had already calculated every possible outcome of this encounter and was not particularly worried about any of them.
"You've been following me," the vigilante said.
"For eleven days."
"I know. I made you on day three."
Stain's eyes narrowed behind his bandages. "You knew I was watching and you didn't alter your patrol route?"
"You weren't threatening civilians. You were observing. I had more important things to deal with than a philosophy major with a sword collection."
Something flickered in Stain's expression. It might have been anger. It might have been respect. With Stain, the two were often indistinguishable.
"You're the real thing," Stain said. "I've watched you. You help people—truly help them. Not for recognition. Not for profit. You don't even have a name. You're what I've been saying heroes should be."
"No. I'm not."
"What?"
"I'm not what you've been saying heroes should be. Because what you've been saying is insane."
The word dropped between them like a stone into water.
"You murder people," the vigilante continued, and his voice was still flat, still controlled, but underneath the control was something harder—something with edges. "You've killed seventeen human beings because they didn't meet your standard of heroism. Seventeen people with families. With lives. With the potential to be better, to change, to grow—potential you took from them because you decided you had the right to judge who was worthy and who wasn't."
"They were false—"
"They were flawed. There's a difference. Every hero is flawed. Every person is flawed. The system is broken—you're right about that. The hero industry is corrupt, commercialized, more interested in rankings than rescue. You're right about all of that. But the answer to a broken system isn't murder. The answer is to build something better. To be something better. To show people what a real hero looks like so they have something to compare the false ones against."
"Words," Stain hissed. "Pretty words. I've heard pretty words from a hundred false heroes—"
"I'm not a hero. I'm a guy in a mask who helps people. That's all. That's the whole thing. And I don't have time for this conversation because there are people in this city who need help right now, and I'm standing on a rooftop arguing philosophy with a serial killer instead of helping them."
He turned to leave.
"I'm not finished—"
The vigilante turned back. Fast. So fast that Stain—who had reflexes honed by years of combat against Pro Heroes with combat Quirks—didn't see it happen. One moment the vigilante was facing away. The next moment he was there, inside Stain's reach, one hand flat against Stain's chest, the other gripping the handle of Stain's katana before Stain had consciously registered the decision to draw it.
They were close enough that Stain could see the vigilante's eyes through the mask's lenses. Green. Young. And absolutely, terrifyingly calm.
"Let me be very clear," the vigilante said, and his voice was the quiet voice—the Batman voice—and Stain, who was afraid of nothing, felt something cold move through his chest. "You are a murderer. You have killed people who didn't deserve to die. I understand your frustration with the hero system—I share it. But understanding is not the same as agreement, and frustration is not the same as justification."
His grip on Stain's sword hand tightened. Just slightly. Just enough to make the point.
"If I ever find you hurting someone—anyone, hero or civilian, 'false' or 'true'—I will stop you. And I won't need a philosophical debate to do it."
Then he hit Stain.
One strike. Open palm. Center of the chest.
Stain flew backward twelve feet and hit the rooftop's ventilation unit with a crash that buckled the metal housing. The impact drove the air from his lungs. Stars exploded behind his eyes. His hand—his sword hand—was empty. The katana was gone.
He looked up.
The vigilante was holding the katana. He examined it for a moment—the way a collector might examine an interesting artifact—and then, with a casual, almost contemptuous ease, he broke it over his knee.
The blade snapped.
Stain stared.
"Those heroes you killed," the vigilante said, tossing the broken pieces aside. "Some of them were flawed. Some of them were in it for the wrong reasons. Some of them were genuinely bad at their jobs. But they were trying. In their own imperfect, flawed, human way, they were trying to help people. And you killed them for not being perfect."
He turned away.
"Nobody's perfect. The best we can do is try. And killing people for failing to meet an impossible standard isn't justice. It's narcissism with a body count."
Then he was gone. Over the rooftop edge, into the dark, moving with that effortless, fluid speed that Stain couldn't match even on his best day.
Stain sat against the buckled ventilation unit. His chest ached. His empty sword hand trembled.
He had been in combat with Pro Heroes who had decades of experience and Quirks specifically designed for fighting. He had beaten most of them. He had killed some of them.
This fight—if it could be called a fight, if a single strike and a broken sword counted as a fight—had lasted approximately four seconds.
Four seconds.
He hadn't even been able to activate his Quirk.
Stain sat on the rooftop for a very long time after that. The cold night air pulled at his bandages. His broken sword lay in two pieces on the concrete.
He thought about the vigilante's words. Not the philosophy—Stain had heard philosophical arguments before and had found them universally insufficient. But the delivery. The flat, unimpressed, almost bored tone of someone who had considered Stain's worldview, found it wanting, and moved on to more important things.
Not anger. Not fear. Not righteous indignation.
Dismissal.
Stain had been dismissed.
Not as a threat. The vigilante clearly recognized him as a threat—the speed of the disarmament proved that. But as a thinker. As a philosopher. As someone whose ideas were worth engaging with.
The vigilante had looked at Stain's life's work—his manifesto, his crusade, his bloody campaign to purify the hero industry—and said, essentially: You're not wrong about the problem. You're catastrophically wrong about the solution. And I don't have time to explain why because I have actual work to do.
It was, Stain reflected, the most devastating thing anyone had ever said to him.
Because it implied that the vigilante had already solved the problem. Not through murder. Not through philosophy. Through action. Through the simple, daily, unglamorous act of going out into the dark and helping people.
While Stain had been killing heroes to make a point, this kid had been being one.
Stain sat on the rooftop until dawn.
When the sun came up, he was still sitting there.
He did not go looking for another hero to kill that night.
Or the night after.
Or the night after that.
Three days after the Stain encounter, Izuku had his most unsettling confrontation yet.
Not because it was dangerous. Not because it was violent. Not because anyone was in mortal peril.
Because it was personal.
It was a Saturday afternoon. Izuku was not in the suit. He was in his school uniform—middle school, Aldera Junior High, the institution that had spent the last three years teaching him that he was worthless—walking home from school, taking the long route, the one that didn't intersect with Kacchan's usual paths.
Except today, it did.
Bakugo Katsuki was standing at the corner of Fourth and Mikasa, flanked by his usual entourage of sycophants—two boys whose names Izuku knew but didn't care about, whose entire social function was to laugh at Kacchan's jokes and tell him he was amazing and stay out of the blast radius when his mood turned volatile.
Which it had.
Kacchan was angry. This was not unusual—Kacchan's emotional range spanned from "annoyed" to "volcanic" with no intermediate stops—but today's anger had a specific, targeted quality that Izuku recognized from years of experience. This was not generalized aggression. This was Deku-specific aggression.
"Oi. Deku."
Izuku stopped walking.
In the old days—the days before the comic shop, before Superman and Spider-Man and Batman, before the strength and the skills and the intelligence and the understanding—this moment would have gone a specific way. Izuku would have flinched. His shoulders would have hunched. His eyes would have dropped to the ground. He would have stammered an apology for some unspecified offense and tried to make himself small enough to avoid attention.
That Izuku was gone.
The Izuku who stood on the corner of Fourth and Mikasa was the same height, the same build, wearing the same school uniform. But something in the way he held himself had changed. His shoulders were straight. His chin was level. His eyes—green, bright, steady—met Kacchan's red ones without wavering.
"Kacchan," he said. Neutral. Calm. The way you'd greet a coworker you didn't particularly like but had no strong feelings about.
This was, apparently, the wrong response.
"The hell is wrong with you?" Kacchan said, stalking closer. His palms were crackling—tiny sparks, the prelude to larger explosions, the visible manifestation of a boy who had been told his entire life that his power made him special and had built his entire identity on that foundation. "You've been acting weird for weeks. Walking around like you're hot shit. Looking at me like—"
He stopped. His eyes narrowed.
"Like that," he said. "You're doing it right now. That look. What is that? What the hell is that?"
Izuku knew what the look was.
It was pity.
Not contempt. Not defiance. Not the sullen resentment of a bullied kid who'd finally had enough. Pity. The genuine, unfeigned sadness of someone who looked at Bakugo Katsuki and saw—clearly, with the analytical precision of a mind enhanced by the intelligence of five fictional geniuses—the terrified, insecure, desperately lonely boy underneath the explosions and the rage.
Izuku had read about bullies. Not in comics—in psychology textbooks, which his enhanced intelligence allowed him to comprehend at a doctoral level. He understood, now, what he hadn't understood before: that Kacchan wasn't cruel because he was strong. He was cruel because he was afraid. Afraid that without his Quirk, he was nothing. Afraid that the world would see through the explosions and the aggression and the dominance displays and find—underneath it all—a boy who didn't know who he was without his power.
Kacchan's entire identity was built on the premise that strength equaled worth. That his Quirk made him special. That being the strongest meant being the best.
And Izuku—Quirkless, powerless, pathetic, useless Deku—had looked at him with pity.
Which was the one thing Bakugo Katsuki could not tolerate.
"I asked you a question, Deku—"
"I heard you."
Two words. Said quietly. Without inflection. Without fear.
The sycophants exchanged glances. This was not how the script went. The script—refined over years of repetition, as predictable as a liturgy—called for Deku to stammer and apologize and shrink. The script did not include Deku standing with his shoulders straight and his eyes calm and his voice carrying the absolute, unshakeable certainty of someone who was no longer afraid.
Kacchan's hands exploded.
Not at Izuku. Into the air—a threat display, a dominance gesture, the human equivalent of a gorilla beating its chest. The explosions were loud, bright, impressive. They would have terrified Izuku six weeks ago. They would have sent him stumbling backward, arms raised, apologies tumbling from his lips.
Izuku didn't flinch.
Didn't blink.
Didn't move.
He stood there, on the corner of Fourth and Mikasa, and watched Bakugo Katsuki's best intimidation display with the same expression a veterinarian might wear while watching a Chihuahua bark at a Great Dane.
This—this—was what broke Kacchan.
Not the lack of fear. Not the steady gaze. Not the refusal to flinch. The expression. The calm, slightly sad, almost affectionate look of someone who understood exactly what was happening and felt sorry about it.
"STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!"
Kacchan lunged.
Right hand extended, palm forward, explosion already building—the signature move, the technique he'd been using to terrorize Izuku since they were children. A small explosion, close range, enough to burn and deafen and establish dominance without causing permanent damage. The move of a bully, not a fighter—designed to hurt and humiliate, not to win a real fight.
Izuku caught his wrist.
The explosion went off. It was loud. It was bright. The heat was significant—Izuku could feel it against his palm, feel the skin of his hand register the thermal damage and immediately begin repairing it, the Deathstroke healing factor working in real-time, knitting burned tissue back together as fast as it was damaged.
Through the smoke and the light and the noise, Izuku held Bakugo Katsuki's wrist in a grip that the boy could not break.
Kacchan tried. He twisted, pulled, wrenched, fired another explosion directly into Izuku's palm—and Izuku held on. Not tightly enough to hurt. Not aggressively. Just... firmly. The way you'd hold the wrist of a toddler who was reaching for a hot stove.
"Let—GO—"
"Kacchan."
"—of me you Quirkless piece of—"
"Katsuki."
The use of his first name stopped Bakugo cold. Izuku had never—in all the years of their acquaintance, in all the history of their complicated, painful, one-sided not-friendship—called him by his first name.
They stood there. Kacchan's wrist in Izuku's hand. Smoke dissipating around them. The sycophants frozen on the sidewalk, mouths open, brains unable to process the deviation from the script.
"I'm not going to fight you," Izuku said. "Not here. Not like this. Not because you're angry and confused and scared."
"I'm not scared—"
"You're terrified. You've been terrified since we were four years old and I reached out to help you when you fell off that log in the stream. You're terrified because a Quirkless kid offered you a hand and you didn't know how to process that. Because in your world—the world you built for yourself, the world where your Quirk makes you the best—a Quirkless kid shouldn't be able to help you. Shouldn't want to help you. And the fact that I did—that I always have, that I've never stopped—scares you. Because it means your world is wrong."
Kacchan's face—
Izuku had seen a lot of expressions on Bakugo Katsuki's face over the years. Anger (constant). Contempt (frequent). Triumph (regular). Joy (rare, and usually tied to destruction). But he had never seen this.
This was the expression of someone who had just been told the truth about themselves for the first time in their life.
It was not a comfortable expression.
"Your Quirk doesn't make you a hero, Katsuki. Your choices do. And right now, your choices are terrible. You bully people. You hurt people. You use your power to dominate and humiliate and control, and you call it 'being strong,' but it's not strength. It's fear. You're so afraid of being weak that you've become something worse than weak. You've become cruel."
Izuku released his wrist.
Kacchan didn't move. His hand hung in the air where Izuku had held it, palm still smoking, eyes wide.
"You could be a great hero," Izuku said. "You have the power. You have the talent. You have the drive. But not like this. Not as long as you're using your strength to make other people feel small. That's not heroism. That's villainy with a hero license."
He turned.
He started walking.
"You don't get to—" Kacchan's voice was hoarse. Raw. Stripped of its usual explosive confidence. "You're Quirkless. You're nothing. You don't get to lecture me about—"
Izuku stopped.
He looked over his shoulder.
"Batman doesn't have powers," he said. "Spider-Man was a bullied nerd from Queens. Captain America was a ninety-pound asthmatic. The greatest heroes in any universe aren't great because of what they can do. They're great because of what they choose to do."
Kacchan stared at him.
"You wouldn't understand those references," Izuku said. "But maybe someday you will."
He walked away.
Bakugo Katsuki stood on the corner of Fourth and Mikasa for a very long time.
His sycophants did not speak to him. They had the survival instincts, if not the intelligence, to recognize that this was not a moment for commentary.
Kacchan looked at his hand. The hand that had exploded in Izuku's grip. The hand that Izuku had held—not avoided, not deflected, not fled from, but held, like it was nothing, like the most powerful Quirk in their class was nothing—
He closed his fist.
Something inside his chest that had been very, very sure of itself for a very, very long time was suddenly, violently, unsure.
He went home.
He did not bully anyone the next day.
Or the day after that.
The sycophants were confused.
That night, on a rooftop in Naruhata, Izuku sat with his legs dangling over the edge and wrote in his notebook.
I talked to Kacchan today. Really talked. Not stammered, not apologized, not flinched. Talked.
I told him the truth. About himself. About his Quirk. About the difference between strength and cruelty.
I don't know if he heard me. I don't know if it'll matter. People don't change because someone tells them to—they change because they decide to. And Kacchan is stubborn enough to resist any change that he didn't initiate himself.
But I planted a seed. And seeds are stubborn too.
Superman would have been gentler. Batman would have been harsher. Spider-Man would have made a joke to diffuse the tension.
I was just honest.
I think that's enough. For now.
He closed the notebook.
He looked out over the city. Musutafu at night—lights and shadows, lives and stories, a million people sleeping and waking and struggling and hoping and failing and trying again.
His city.
Not officially. Not legally. Not by any authority recognized by the Hero Public Safety Commission or the National Police Agency or the government of Japan.
But his. Because he'd claimed it. Because he went out into it every night and bled for it and fought for it and carried its weight on shoulders that were getting stronger but would never be strong enough, because the weight was infinite and the shoulders were human and the gap between what he could do and what needed to be done would never, ever close.
And that was okay.
Because he'd keep trying anyway.
That was the whole thing.
The whole philosophy.
The entire point.
Keep trying.
He stood up. Adjusted his mask. Checked his scanner.
Somewhere in the dark, someone needed help.
He went to find them.
On another rooftop, eight blocks away, Eraserhead watched the vigilante disappear into the night and thought about crime statistics and broken systems and a Quirkless kid who was doing the impossible.
He should report this. He should call it in. He should activate his capture weapon and pursue and apprehend, because the law was the law and vigilantism was illegal and the system was the system.
The system that had left the Kamino Ward unprotected. The system that had let a domestic abuser beat his wife for years without intervention. The system that ranked heroes like athletes and treated civilians like spectators and called it justice.
Aizawa Shouta put his capture weapon away.
He went home.
He did not file a report.
Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he'd make the call. Tomorrow he'd do his duty. Tomorrow he'd be the professional hero that the system required him to be.
Tomorrow.
But tonight—
Tonight, he let the kid work.
END OF CHAPTER 4
Next time: UA entrance exams approach. Izuku has a decision to make—work within the system, or against it? All Might enters the picture. And a certain underground hero makes a recommendation that shocks the UA faculty.
"You want me to WHAT?"
"Recommend him. For the hero course."
"Aizawa, he's a VIGILANTE."
"He's also the best candidate I've ever seen. And if we don't bring him in, the Commission will eventually catch him, and they won't be as understanding as I am."
"...you're not understanding at all. You're terrifying."
"Exactly."