Adam spent three days being a tourist with a strict deadline.
He found a quiet capsule hotel that accepted cash with zero questions asked, mastered the intricate Tokyo train maps, survived on convenience-store food that tasted far better than it had any right to, and walked the streets until the layout of the city clicked in his mind.
In the background, Sage quietly constructed a comprehensive digital model of this superhuman society: the rigid licensing laws, the commercialized hero agency system, the public ranking boards, and the unyielding legal boundary separating a registered pro hero from an outlaw vigilante.
By the second evening, Adam fully understood his problem.
If he wanted to catch a ghost like All For One, he needed to operate right where the cameras were looking. A pro hero working in the daylight could walk directly into a crime scene, interrogate suspects without interference, and stand right next to the people he needed to protect. A masked vigilante, no matter how noble, would just end up being hunted by the very heroes he was trying to assist.
Sage. Can you slip me into the national database? A fake provisional license, a registration number, a clean service record.
[ Easily, Host. Their current network security is entirely unequipped for an entity of my caliber. I could fabricate a flawless hero profile in under sixty seconds. ]
And how long before someone with a hyper-intelligence quirk notices a hero who has a digital file but zero human history? No alma mater, no sidekick records, and no debut fight anyone can actually remember?
[ ...The Principal of UA Academy. Based on my behavioral profile of him, he would flag the anomaly in under a week. A forged identity has no roots. It survives a casual glance, but crumbles under a dedicated investigation. ]
Exactly. So we don't forge it. We force them to give us a real one. Adam paused, looking across the river at the sprawling, H-shaped structural towers of UA High sitting on the hill. The fortress boasted the highest security budget in the nation. The fastest legal path into the system runs through the man who hands out the keys. Let's go have a chat with the principal.
[ You intend to bypass the most heavily fortified defensive perimeter in the city just to request an audience? ]
I intend to walk in, Adam murmured, adjusting his coat. The audience is something I'll have to earn once I'm inside the room.
Bypassing the Barrier
UA's legendary defenses were built to detect and counter Quirks.
When Adam scaled the massive outer wall under the absolute shroud of the Veil at four in the afternoon, the campus didn't so much as twitch. It was the brief window between class periods. The infrared sensors found nothing to flag. The automated camera grid recorded only an empty corridor and a quiet quad.
Two patrolling staff members passed within arm's reach of him, but the Veil cast a subtle, psychological redirection; they felt only a faint, instinctive prickle of wrongness that caused them to look away, entirely unaware of why they chose to do so.
Adam walked up the central tower's stairwell at an unhurried pace, deciphered the building's layout from the directory plates, and slipped into the principal's top-floor office undetected, just as its occupant was pouring a fresh pot of tea.
He crossed the plush rug while the principal's back was turned. Lowering himself smoothly into the visitor's chair across from the desk, Adam rested both gloved hands on the polished silver head of his cane and deactivated the Veil.
There was no sudden shimmer, no dramatic sound effect. Between one blink of Nezu's eyes and the next, a man simply occupied the seat that had been vacant a heartbeat prior. He sat there, tall and unbothered, dressed in a sharp charcoal suit and a black top hat, a cane resting between his knees, watching the principal with the serene patience of someone who had all the time in the world.
Instantly, the pressure-sensitive plates beneath the chair registered the sudden weight.
The room's automated protocols slammed into motion. Heavy steel shutters dropped over the windows with a resounding thud, the heavy oak door deadbolted itself, and a localized alarm began to wail through the security feed, a specific, high-priority alert that translated to: Every available pro hero on campus, to the main office immediately.
Behind the desk, the small, white creature set the porcelain teapot down with immaculate precision. He turned around, regarding his uninvited guest with two intensely bright, calculating black eyes.
"Well," Nezu said, his voice entirely polite and delightfully unbothered. "That is a fascinating turn of events."
"Good afternoon, Principal." Adam inclined his head respectfully, remaining seated. A faint, amused smile touched his eyes. "Forgive the intrusion. I've always found front desks to be dreadfully slow, and I have a personal dislike for being announced." He gave his cane a slow quarter-turn against the floor. "I came exclusively to talk. You can run out of the building screaming if it makes you feel safer, but it seems a terrible waste of a perfectly good pot of tea."
Nezu studied him for a long, silent moment. His tiny black eyes darted over Adam's posture, his clothing, and his breathing, analyzing the intruder the way a grandmaster looks at a chessboard upon realizing a rogue pawn has altered the entire game.
A white paw reached out, tapped a desktop console, and the piercing security alarm cut out. The heavy steel shutters, however, remained firmly locked down.
"I have stopped the building from screaming," Nezu replied cheerfully, clasping his paws together. "However, I have not unlocked the door. Two of my finest staff members were already in the immediate corridor, and I suspect they will be joining our little tea party in roughly three seconds, whether the door wishes to cooperate or not." He tilted his head. "So, while we wait, please tell me: what is it you want?"
Right on cue, the heavy door locks clicked, and the entrance flew open.
A tall, gaunt man in a black jumpsuit burst through first. His dark hair floated wildly around his shoulders, his signature grey capture scarf was raised in an active combat stance, and his eyes burned a fierce, glowing red as they locked onto Adam.
Adam felt absolutely nothing. In his mind, Sage caught the mechanic instantly.
[ Amusing. His biological factor is a sight-anchored cancellation. While his eyes hold a target, it switches off the genetic quirk factor. He projects nothing you would feel. On anyone native to this universe, it would leave them powerless. In you, it is finding nothing to switch off. Your abilities are conceptual and systematic, not biological. He cannot touch your power, and he currently has no way of understanding why. ]
Adam decided to be polite and save the man the headache.
"Save your eyes, Eraser Head," Adam said, his voice unhurried, not shifting an inch in the chair. "Your glare isn't doing anything to me, and it will continue to do nothing. Whatever I am, I don't possess a Quirk. There is no biological switch inside me for you to flip." He let the words settle in the quiet room. "I'm telling you this now so you don't spend the rest of the afternoon straining your eyes. I'd rather we didn't waste each other's time."
Shouta Aizawa kept his gaze locked on Adam for two more seconds, his logical mind racing to process the claim. Then, his eyes dried out. He blinked, his hair dropping flat against his shoulders as the red glow faded from his irises.
Behind Aizawa, Midnight slipped into the room at a sharp hunting angle, her hand resting near the specialized sleep-whip at her utility belt. She hesitated, her theatrical instincts momentarily derailed by the sight of an intruder calmly drinking tea in a Victorian top hat.
"My primary method of entry was simple conceptual concealment," Adam added to the room at large.
"Principal," Aizawa said, his voice dropping into a flat, dangerous register. His tired eyes never left Adam. "I can't tell if he's bluffing."
"I know!" Nezu piped up, his tone utterly ecstatic. The sheer, unpredictable danger of the situation seemed to have completely converted into an appetite for information. "Isn't it absolutely marvelous? Sit, please, both of you! This gentleman is about to tell us an extraordinary story, and we are going to discover together just how much of it holds."
Nezu pulled three more teacups from a hidden cabinet beneath his desk. "You have my full, undivided curiosity, stranger. Pray, spend it wisely."
Sitting across from three of the most influential figures at UA, Adam decided that the truth told slant would serve his objectives far better than any elaborate lie.
"My name is Adam," he said clearly. "I am not from your society. I've traveled from a point far beyond this timeline, and I was deployed here with a very singular directive: to prevent a total collapse." "A catastrophe is coming, one far worse than any crisis this world has ever faced. It's moving faster than any of you realize, and I have been tasked with a priority objective: eliminate the mastermind at the center of the conspiracy before his plans bear fruit, and protect the power he desires most."
"Time travel?" Midnight repeated, one dark eyebrow arching high. Her tone was skeptical, but her posture remained tense. "That's quite a claim."
"Let's call it that for now. It's accurate enough for our purposes."
"It is not accurate at all, I'm sure!" Nezu chirped merrily. "But I will gladly accept it as a placeholder. The fascinating part of a narrative is never the exact gears of the machine, after all. It is the scope of the claim. Continue your story."
Adam looked directly at the small principal over the rim of his teacup.
"All For One is still alive."
Aizawa's eyes, which had drifted half-shut from exhaustion, snapped wide open. Midnight went entirely rigid. Nezu's cheerful, animated expression didn't waver, but on a creature whose face usually exhibited a dozen micro-expressions a second, that sudden, absolute stillness was an answer in itself.
"That name," Nezu said, his voice dropping into a soft, whisper-quiet cadence, "is a ghost story. One kept under the absolute highest clearance in the country."
"He survived the historic showdown with All Might that everyone believes killed him," Adam stated flatly. "He is crippled, hidden, and patient. He has spent the intervening years cultivating a malicious successor and engineering a terrifying army of bio-weapons. He plans to hand the reins of this society to a boy who wants nothing more than to watch it burn. The opening salvo of his war begins very small: a surprise raid on a student training facility, executed by a handful of low-level villains and a specialized creature grown in a vat specifically designed to murder the Symbol of Peace."
Adam set his teacup down with a soft click.
"That raid is scheduled to happen in less than two weeks. I would greatly prefer to be standing in that facility, carrying a legitimate hero license, when the door opens. That is the exact reason I am sitting in your office right now instead of a government holding cell."
Nobody spoke.
"You must realize," Nezu said at last, leaning his chin on his paws, "that everything you have just whispered across my desk is either the most crucial intelligence warning this academy has ever received... or the opening gambit of the most terrifyingly sophisticated infiltration plot I have ever witnessed. From where I sit, those two scenarios look identical."
"I am aware."
"And you have brought me absolutely no physical proof."
"I bypassed the most advanced security grid in Japan," Adam countered calmly. "I walked past your biometric sensors, bypassed your camera networks, strolled right past two of your elite staff members, and entered the one room on this campus you would least like a stranger to reach. I arrived before your tea finished steeping. I am not individual proof of my story, Principal. But I am living proof that if I harbored even an ounce of malice toward this institution, we would not be sitting here having a polite conversation."
Adam met Nezu's piercing black gaze.
"I am not asking for your blind trust, Principal. I am asking you to use a dangerous asset. Point the stranger at the monster you've been secretly worrying about for years. If I am lying, you lose absolutely nothing but the time it takes to keep an eye on me. If I am telling the truth, you have just gained the only combatant in this city who is already looking in the correct direction."
Nezu sat perfectly still for a moment. Then, he let out a sharp, high-pitched cackle of genuine, unadulterated delight, clapping his white paws together.
"Oh, I like you! You speak like a man who has already worked out the numbers on what I will decide." The principal hopped down from his chair, scurrying over to the master console and tapping a sequence to raise the steel shutters, letting the golden evening sunlight flood back into the room.
"Here is how we will proceed. You wish to operate in the open, which requires a provisional license, which means you must be strictly evaluated. I refuse to set an unmeasured weapon loose on my city's streets, even one I find thoroughly charming. UA holds the legal authority to administer an immediate, off-the-books practical assessment with the Hero Public Safety Commission's emergency sign-off. I will make the arrangements at once. And your examiner will be the absolute gold standard of what it means to be a hero."
"All Might," Adam said.
"All Might," Nezu confirmed, watching Adam's face like a hawk for any sign of hesitation. "If you can satisfy his parameters, you will have your license by the weekend, and a great deal of my personal supervision moving forward. If you fail, we will have uncovered a fraud cheaply." He tilted his head. "Does that prospect frighten you?"
"Not particularly," Adam said honestly. "But thank you for hoping it might."
Aizawa let out a dry, guttural exhale through his nose. Midnight was openly grinning.
"Principal," she chided playfully, crossing her arms. "You can't just adopt a mysterious time traveler because he managed to break into your office."
"I can do whatever I choose, Nemuri. I have High Specs," Nezu replied smoothly, pouring himself a fresh cup. "Besides, he didn't break in. He walked in. That is an entirely different category of infraction, and a vastly more useful one."
The practical assessment was held two days later inside Ground Beta, a massive concrete replica of an entire urban district. Nezu, Aizawa, Midnight, and a grim-faced, grey-suited official from the Hero Public Safety Commission watched the proceedings from the observation booth high above.
Down on the street level, All Might stood like a literal force of nature.
Even in the casual afternoon light, his muscle form was staggering: a towering wall of pure, unyielding muscle with a brilliant, white-toothed smile. The asphalt beneath his boots seemed subtly grateful whenever he wasn't actively moving.
"FEAR NOT, YOUNG MAN!" All Might's voice boomed across the faux-city, shaking the dust from the surrounding concrete buildings. "THE GOAL IS REMARKABLY SIMPLE! THERE IS A DESIGNATED EXIT LINE LOCATED DIRECTLY BEHIND ME! YOU HAVE ONE SINGLE MINUTE TO CROSS IT! I WILL ATTEMPT TO CONDITIONALLY OBSTRUCT YOUR PATH! USE WHATEVER YOU HAVE!"
His trademark grin widened, his eyes flashing with heroic intensity. "I WILL NOT GO EASY ON YOU MERELY BECAUSE THE PRINCIPAL FINDS YOU ENTERTAINING!"
"I'd be insulted if you did," Adam called back.
The loud electronic buzzer echoed through the arena.
Adam immediately activated the Veil and simply started walking.
He didn't sprint, nor did he adopt a tactical low-profile. He crossed the open asphalt at a casual, unhurried stride, angling wide of the Symbol of Peace's massive stance.
All Might decided he was dealing with simple invisibility. He drove a fist into the ground, hard, and a wall of dust billowed up across the street. If a human outline was moving anywhere inside it, the cloud would betray him.
All Might's sharp eyes swept the immediate area, but his gaze rolled harmlessly over Adam's position. The Veil didn't just hide him; it made his existence completely irrelevant to the observer's brain. The greatest hero on Earth turned a slow, sweeping circle in the center of the street, focused on scanning, unaware that Adam was strolling right past his left shoulder.
For one single stride, Adam was close enough to touch him.
In that fleeting second, the meta-knowledge from the back of his mind flared. The towering man before him was the current vessel of One For All, the ultimate accumulation of physical power in this universe. The very power he was sent to protect was less than an arm's length away, completely exposed to a conceptual strike.
Sage.
[ Warning, Host. The core spark of the power has already been successfully transferred to his chosen successor. However, the residual embers remaining within All Might's soul are still a massive bonfire of physical energy. If you use Theft right now, you possess a forty percent chance to rip those embers away. They are too frayed to borrow; the steal would be permanent. And it would extinguish his remaining life-force on the spot. ]
Good to know, Adam thought, steering clear. I have no intention of stealing from a dying hero.
He crossed the painted white exit line precisely ten seconds after the buzzer sounded, deactivated the Veil, and turned around.
All Might was still standing in the center of the intersection, mid-turn, scanning the rooftops. Up in the high observation booth, the Commission official suddenly stood up, spilling his clipboard.
"Behind you," Adam said quietly.
All Might spun around on his heel. In a split second, his face went through an entire weather system of expressions: absolute confusion, a flash of defensive alarm, and finally, a slow, deeply impressed appreciation. He hadn't seen a single thing. From the first step to the last, a man had walked across his personal battlefield and exited the zone without triggering a single heroic instinct.
"WELL!" All Might exclaimed, dropping his booming tone into a stunned, quieter register. "That... is an extraordinary stealth Quirk."
"Not a Quirk," Adam replied smoothly, adjusting his cuffs.
"Again," the Commission official's voice grated through the arena's speaker system, leaning heavily into the microphone. "The stealth application is acknowledged. However, the Commission does not grant pro licenses based on evasion alone. We must evaluate his capabilities when his position is compromised. Combat assessment begins now."
"Suits me fine," Adam said. He rolled his shoulders, slipping his top hat into his Spatial Pocket so it wouldn't get damaged, though it was doubtful anything here could manage that.
All Might's massive grin surged back to full power.
"YOU WISH TO ENGAGE ME IN A DIRECT CONTEST OF BLOWS?! BARE-HANDED?!" He cracked his massive knuckles, a sound that reverberated like a minor rockslide. "I ADMIRE YOUR SPIRIT, YOUNG MAN! PLEASE REMEMBER THAT I AM AMONG THE STRONGEST, SO DEFEND YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY!"
"I appreciate the warning."
They closed the distance instantly. The sheer disparity in their physical builds was almost comical, but as the first strike was thrown, the difference in their methodologies became instantly clear.
All Might fought like a localized hurricane because his entire life had trained him to be one. Every single punch displaced tons of air pressure, generating shockwaves that literally tore loose gravel from the concrete road. He didn't require subtle setups; for decades, he had concluded crises simply by arriving and striking with overwhelming justice.
Adam, conversely, fought like a man reading a script one page ahead of the actor.
Decryption was running at maximum output. Sage fed a continuous stream of predicted paths directly into the periphery of his vision. Every single one of All Might's devastating punches arrived exactly where Adam had been a fraction of a second prior.
Adam slipped a left hook that could have leveled a high-rise by simply tilting his head four centimeters to the right. He allowed a massive haymaker to pass close enough to ruffle his shirt collar, using two fingers to tap the side of All Might's massive forearm, just enough to redirect a fraction of that terrifying momentum downward, causing the asphalt below to instantly spiderweb and crack. He was never where the power landed; he lived entirely in the dead angles where the massive hero couldn't pivot to meet him.
And within thirty seconds, the fatal flaw exposed itself.
It was on All Might's left side, low beneath the ribcage. Sage had the area highlighted in a pulsing, angry crimson overlay. It was a horrific, deeply hidden respiratory wound that his muscular form was actively straining to conceal, the one vulnerability where the Symbol of Peace was entirely hollow.
One clean, high-impact strike delivered directly into that cluster, and the strongest hero in the world would collapse. Right in front of the government, the principal, and his own peers. The fight would end in a single heartbeat.
Adam went for the opening.
He ducked beneath a sweeping right cross, shifted his center of gravity, and drove the heel of his palm directly up toward the hidden wound at a velocity All Might had zero chance of blocking.
And stopped. Exactly one centimeter away from the white fabric of All Might's suit. His palm rested in the air, perfectly motionless, hovering right over the agony the hero spent every day hiding.
The entire arena fell silent.
All Might looked down at the hand hovering millimeters from his secret, then slowly looked up into Adam's eyes. The broadcast grin vanished completely, replaced by a solemn, deeply serious expression. He understood precisely what had just been spared.
Adam stepped back, lowering his hands to his sides.
"You're significantly faster than you look, and your raw output is staggering," Adam said quietly, keeping his voice strictly between the two of them. "I couldn't best you in a direct contest of strength if I had a hundred lifetimes to train. But I wasn't attempting to. I only needed you to understand that I could have ended this encounter, and chose not to."
All Might held his gaze for a long, heavy moment. Then, his shoulders relaxed, and a smaller, far more genuine smile returned to his face.
"PLUS..." he began, extending a massive right hand, his booming voice returning with a touch of deep warmth, "...ULTRA! I yield the match, young man! My current stamina limit draws near, and you have effectively demonstrated your proficiency three times over!"
Faint wisps of steam were beginning to drift off All Might's shoulders; his daily timer was running dangerously low. "Whatever your origins, you move like a man who has walked through a true warzone. I have encountered very few individuals who possess that specific discipline. Most of them are long gone." He shook Adam's hand with immense care, handling him with deep respect. "I would be fascinated to learn who taught you that restraint."
"A great many people," Adam replied quietly. "Most of them are still alive. I'd like to keep it that way."
Up in the observation booth, the Commission official was typing furiously on his tablet. Nezu was wearing a small, intensely satisfied smile.
Aizawa, who had monitored every single micro-movement with absolute precision, let out a slow breath. He rubbed his tired eyes and muttered to the empty room, "He identified the respiratory injury instantly, adjusted his strike, and aborted in the last moment. He knew exactly where the weakness was, and he knew exactly why he shouldn't exploit it." He let his hands drop. "That level of analytical awareness is the part we should actually be worried about, without even mentioning his other capabilities."
"Oh, I am absolutely terrified!" Nezu chirped happily, his eyes gleaming. "It is truly wonderful!"
The Teaching Proposition
The provisional hero license cleared in exactly three days. It arrived in a plain, unmarked manila folder containing an official registration number and a hero name Adam had selected without any grand ceremony. The name he chose was Stalker.
Nezu summoned him back to the central tower the morning the paperwork finalized.
"You possess the legal clearance you required," the principal said, sliding a second, much thicker folder across the desk. "You can walk openly in the daylight now. Which brings me to a highly specific proposal. I would strongly advise you to review the entire framework before offering a refusal, as I have structured the components quite brilliantly."
Nezu tapped the document. "Teach for me. Practical combat instruction, working directly alongside All Might, who has taken a frankly alarming liking to you. My current roster of first-year students is about to cross paths with a trial they are entirely unequipped to survive, and you are the only person in this building who has provided me with an exact itinerary of the threat."
The principal folded his paws neatly. "In exchange for your instruction, the entire institutional infrastructure and resources of UA will stand behind you. A hero operating with our backing can access almost any quadrant in the country and ask any question without bureaucratic interference."
"I have one non-negotiable condition," Adam stated.
"Let's hear it."
"My evenings remain entirely my own. I operate independently. Zero agency oversight, no mandatory patrol schedules, and no requirement to clear my tactical movements with your staff. The teaching position is a real commitment, and I will execute it flawlessly. But the threat I am hunting doesn't keep academic hours, and when I locate the thread I'm looking for, I am not going to file a request form before I pull it."
Adam had fully expected a bureaucratic argument. Instead, Nezu's small eyes lit up with profound satisfaction.
"You desire a collar, but you demand the right to unhook the leash whenever necessary," the principal summarized, nodding slowly. "Most individuals in your unique position would attempt to conceal that intent and simply break the regulations in secret. You are demanding the exception in writing."
Nezu pulled the folder back, penned a swift notation along the margin, and slid it back across the desk. "Granted. Frankly, I find dangerous assets far more reliable when they are completely honest about being dangerous. Welcome to the faculty of UA."
To the surprise of the student body, and entirely expected by himself, Adam turned out to be an exceptional educator.
He stood at the front of the sprawling practical-combat grounds beside a towering mountain of a man who could flatten a city block with a fist. Where All Might focused on inspiring the children to discover their inner courage, Adam strictly instructed them on the cold reality of precision.
Analyze the entire layout. Conserve your energy. Win the engagement before the first blow is even struck by positioning yourself where the threat cannot realistically reach you.
The class of teenagers gravitated toward him with that unique, wary fascination teenagers reserve for an adult who refuses to talk down to them.
In the front row, a green-haired boy named Izuku Midoriya muttered continuously under his breath, his pen blurring across the pages of a notebook as he frantically recorded every single tactical concept Adam muttered. A few seats away, a blond boy with literal explosions crackling in his palms stared at Adam with an intense, unbridled fury that Adam found he rather enjoyed managing.
The late evenings, however, belonged entirely to the hunt.
He mapped out the city's criminal underbelly the same way he mapped out everything: through direct, untraceable observation. A licensed pro hero clad in a dark coat and an absurd top hat, arriving at localized gang operations long before the police sirens even echoed down the street.
He concluded every encounter cleanly, breaking nothing that wasn't already broken, and vanished before the media cameras could focus their lenses.
No low-level villain he apprehended could ever articulate exactly what had struck them out of the dark. No civilian he rescued ever sustained a single scratch. The clinical takedowns began to manifest on the morning underground forum boards as flawless, bloodless, impossible ghost stories. A metropolis that had spent six years entirely dependent on the smiling presence of one massive man was suddenly beginning to whisper about a second, unnamed shadow moving through the dark.
Yet, he was searching for a specific thread the entire time. A high-tier medical supplier. A doctor. A hidden facility purchasing highly specific chemical compounds in massive, unmonitored quantities.
He uncovered minor edges, but the center remained entirely obscured. The mastermind of this world's underworld was exceptionally proficient at remaining a ghost. Adam had given the search four days in his head. He revised that estimate twice.
He had started with less than two weeks. He spent eleven days of that window establishing a reputation this society would legally respect.
And on the twelfth day, the thread finally came directly to him, on an official school field trip to an off-site rescue-training dome.
He had taken the duty himself.
A rescue-training exercise of this magnitude required a high-ranking Pro on-site, and the official schedule had All Might pencilled in for the slot. Adam had looked at the date on the faculty calendar, recognizing it with the same cold, leaden weight he'd been carrying since he first read the objective board. He'd quietly traded shifts.
He told Nezu only that the day "mattered." Nezu, who had stopped demanding full explanations somewhere around the time Adam completed his fourth bloodless takedown of a major villain cell, had signed the change without a single question. He had only watched Adam with those bright, knowing black eyes, as if evaluating a fellow grandmaster making an unorthodox opening move.
So it was Adam, not the Symbol of Peace, who stood at the gilded rail of the central plaza inside the massive glass dome of the Unforeseen Simulation Joint. Below him, Class 1-A filed in, their voices echoing with teenage excitement, while the rescue hero Thirteen began explaining the life-or-death stakes of disaster relief.
Then, the air in the center of the dome tore open.
It manifested as a spreading, jagged wound of black and purple mist. Out of the swirling void stepped the vanguard of an army.
A pale, gangly man emerged first, his face obscured by a severed hand clutched to his features like a macabre mask. Beside him, a curtain of dark fog with two glowing, slit-like eyes stood silent. Behind them, a literal tide of low-level street thugs spilled onto the plaza fountain like filth from a burst pipe. At the very back, hunched and monstrous, a creature with an exposed brain and a raptor's beak waited with the stillness of a weapon on a hair-trigger.
Down on the steps, the children froze. Thirteen moved instinctively to shield them. Up at the rail, Adam was already in motion.
That's the warp, he thought, falling through the air. In any battle, you take the transport first. Always take their means to escape.
He hit the plaza in a silent Shadowstep, erupting from the fountain's mist directly in front of the warp villain. He was inside the fog-man's guard before the entity's glowing eyes could even register a localized displacement of air.
[ Target: Warp Gate. Analyzing biological quirk-factor... This is a high-order spatial signature, Host. Recording and Decrypting now. On your word. ]
Take it.
"I came, I saw, I recorded," Adam murmured. The phrase was a mechanical trigger, devoid of dignity and spoken with the clipped efficiency of a man who had zero time for theatrics.
The Theft clamped onto the warp villain's quirk and wrenched. For the next three minutes the conceptual authority to fold space and open doors anywhere was his to use, and the hat had recorded it for keeps; the owner would not be getting it back for an hour. The towering curtain of mist guttered like a dying candle, thinning into a wispy, pathetic vapor. Kurogiri let out a choked, metallic sound of static shock as he realized he could no longer move anyone, including himself.
The villains' single greatest tactical advantage, the ability to scatter the students and bring in reinforcements, slammed shut like a vault door. The army on the plaza was no longer an invading force; they were just a crowd of people in a room with only one way out.
Then, Adam walked through the small fry.
It wasn't a fight; it was a harvest. He moved through the crowd like a scythe, his motions so precise they looked casual. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't use a single flashy ability. One sharp strike to a carotid artery, a palm-thrust to a solar plexus, a thumb-press to a nerve cluster. Each villain folded bonelessly before the person standing next to them even realized their comrade had been dropped.
By the time the students at the top of the steps had finished drawing a single, terrified breath, the fountain plaza was covered in a floor of unconscious bodies.
At the center of the wreckage, Tomura Shigaraki dug his clawed fingers into the skin of his own neck, his breathing coming in ragged, hysterical hitches. "The game... it's glitched. CHEATER!" he hissed, his voice cracking. "NOMU! KILL HIM!"
The creature moved.
It exploded off its haunches with a speed that defied its massive bulk, a blur of grey, engineered muscle. Adam didn't bother to parry. He let a Shadowstep carry him past the sonic boom of the strike, reappearing directly in the space Shigaraki occupied.
The boy had just enough time for his pupils to contract in pure, unadulterated terror.
[ Target: Decay. Disintegration upon five-point contact. High lethality risk. It is a biological masterpiece, Host. Recording into the final Hat-Slot now. ]
"I came, I saw, I recorded," Adam whispered.
The Theft tore the quirk loose. Shigaraki's hand, already reaching out to crumble Adam into dust, hit his chest and did absolutely nothing. The boy stared at his own palm, his world-view fracturing in a half-second of human vulnerability.
Adam didn't offer him a monologue. He didn't offer him a chance at redemption. He simply drove his hand through the boy's sternum, closed his fist, and pulled.
He ripped the heart out.
It should have been the end. But the shadows beneath the plaza stones suddenly turned into a viscous, black sludge.
The sludge boiled upward, swallowing Shigaraki's collapsing body and the weakened Kurogiri in a single, oily wave. They were gone between one blink and the next—extricated by a power that wasn't present in the dome. Where the leader of the League had been, there was only wet stone and the cooling remains of a dead man's heart in Adam's hand.
He was watching, Adam realized, his jaw tightening. The Master. He reached in the instant I moved for the kill.
[ That extraction signature was not the Warp Gate, Host. It was a localized forced-activation of a secondary teleportation quirk. That was him. All For One. He knows you exist now. ]
Good. Let him wonder what else I can do.
Adam looked at the heart in his hand, then let it drop to the stone.
Sage, use Decrypt. Trace the residual energy of that sludge. If it's not a location, I want a direction. And start searching for the doctor. Garaki, I think the name was. He's the one growing these things. Find his facilities.
[ Search initiated. Warning: One active threat remains on the field. ]
The Nomu had finished its initial lunge. Having missed its target, it stood in the wreckage of the plaza, its beaked head tilting slowly as it searched for the entity it had been ordered to destroy.
Adam walked toward it, rolling his shoulders. The stiffness of the deployment was starting to settle in.
This one, Adam thought, I want to do with my bare hands.
[ Host, that is a needless indulgence. Your energy reserves would be better spent elsewhere. ]
I've earned an indulgence. Adam rolled his neck until it cracked. And turn the simulation off, Sage. No previews. No half-second warnings. I want to feel the weight of this thing. I want to see what the Quiet Coat is actually worth against a creature designed to kill the Symbol of Peace.
[ ...Understood. Simulation offline. Be advised: it will hit you. ]
"That's the point."
Adam walked directly into the Nomu's reach. The creature obliged him instantly. Its first punch caught him square in the solar plexus—a strike with the force of a high-speed freight train.
It did almost nothing.
The Quiet Coat reacted instantly. The kinetic energy hit the artifact's outer layer, spread horizontally across the conceptual fabric, and drained away into nothingness. What Adam felt was a dull, distant nudge, a pressure that rocked him back half a step but didn't even knock the wind out of him.
He let the next one land. Then four more. The Nomu hammered him with blows that would have caved in a bunker wall, and the coat swallowed them all, converting the force into a mild vibration he could have slept through.
Perfect, he thought. I can trade with this thing all day long.
So he traded. He planted his feet and stopped dodging. He took the Nomu's strikes on the chin and answered each one with the full, unaided weight of his body, strikes that shattered the monster's skin and sent shockwaves through the dome.
But the Nomu simply knit itself back together.
Shock Absorption ate the bulk of his damage; Super Regeneration repaired what little leaked through. He broke its arm, and it reset while he watched. He caved its chest, and the bone snapped back into place.
He stepped back, watching the monster stand there, patient as a mountain.
Right. Pride's satisfied. It can't hurt me, but I can't kill it through raw attrition. The healing is the engine. I'm taking the engine.
Two Thefts had already carved deep into his reserves; he had enough left for this, but not for waste. He needed a clean hit. He set his stance, letting Sage line up the cross-Sequence Theft on the creature's core regeneration factor. He reached.
The steal failed.
It was like trying to grab a greased cable under massive tension. The quirk was woven too deeply into the Nomu's synthetic biology; it bucked and tore itself out of his conceptual grip. The failure hit Adam like a physical blow, draining nearly a third of his remaining energy in a single, nauseating rush. He staggered, his vision swimming with grey spots.
The Nomu, sensing an opening, lunged again.
Sage. How much for a second attempt?
[ Almost everything you have left, Host. If this fails, you will be empty—collapsed on the floor in front of a killing machine that does not tire. ]
He had one card left, a legacy from a different world.
Spend the 'Heal'. Steady my frame. Then we go again, and we don't miss.
The recorded slot in his mind opened. The "Reverse Cursed Technique" he had recorded from Ren, eighty-five percent of a full healing instance, poured through his nervous system. It didn't replenish his energy, but it undid the physical trauma of the failed Theft. The tremor left his hands. The world snapped back into focus. It was the last piece of that world he had been carrying, and he spent it here, in a dome full of children, to kill a monster.
He set himself. Sage locked on. The Nomu's beak filled his vision.
"I came, I saw, I recorded," he barked, his voice ragged.
Now.
This time, the Theft caught. It held. It tore the regeneration out of the Nomu's DNA like a weed from the earth.
[ Success. Record complete. The 'Super Regeneration' factor is now yours, Host. ]
Three things happened at once. The minor abrasions on Adam's knuckles vanished as the stolen quirk activated within him. The hat-band behind his eyes hummed as it committed the regeneration to the slot the spent Heal had left open.
And the Nomu, the engine that only functioned because it repaired itself faster than it broke, simply stopped.
It didn't fall like a defeated fighter. It fell like a machine that had its power cord severed. Its impossible biology, no longer held together by a constant tide of repair, succumbed to its own overstressed mass. It was dead before its head hit the concrete.
The USJ went quiet.
Adam stood in the center of the devastation, breathing hard. The League's three pillars were gone, for now: one heartless, one severed from his quirk for the next hour, and one dead. A class of fifteen-year-olds stared down from the steps at a man in a top hat who had turned their worst nightmare into a ninety-second exercise.
[ Objectives, Host. The bio-weapon is neutralized. The League's vanguard is broken. Your identity as a top-tier Hero is now indisputable. Three of five objectives secured in a single morning. ]
And the two I can't close yet?
[ All For One is now officially wary of you. And the boy, Shigaraki... he is beyond our reach for now. ]
Adam looked up at the students. He took a breath, smoothed his coat, and put the "Hero" mask back on over the exhausted soldier underneath.
"It's over," he called out, his voice calm and carrying perfectly through the dome. "You're safe. You did well to stay back. The Pro-Hero backup is arriving at the gates now."
He caught the eye of the green-haired boy, Midoriya, who was staring at him with a look of pure, analytical worship, his notebook trembling in his hand.
"Class resumes Monday," Adam added. "Read chapter nine. We'll be discussing tactical positioning."
He took his tea with Nezu that evening. The office was quiet, the city outside glowing in the soft gold of a setting sun.
"You've managed to destroy a monumental amount of my afternoon's paperwork," Nezu said, pouring a fresh cup. "And in doing so, you've saved a great deal of my facility. The Commission is already calling your performance the most efficient piece of rescue work in the history of the academy. I haven't corrected them." He passed the cup to Adam. "He is real, then? The man behind the curtain?"
"He's real. He took his pieces back the moment I moved for the checkmate." Adam swirled the tea. "He knows I'm a threat now. That makes him more dangerous, but it also makes him move. And a man who moves leaves a trail."
"You could have told me from the beginning that you intended to bait him out today," Nezu said, his eyes steady.
"If I had told you, you would have filled that dome with five more Pros. He would have seen them, and he never would have shown his face. I needed him to think it was an easy day." Adam met the principal's gaze. "I don't like manipulating people I respect, Nezu. But I do it when the work requires it. You'd have done the same."
"I would have done much worse," Nezu admitted comfortably, "and felt much cleverer for it. We are very alike. It's why I've decided to trust you slightly more than is wise, and slightly less than you would like. It is the perfect amount." He sipped his tea. "What now?"
Sage answered first, a whisper in Adam's mind.
[ The trace is resolved, Host. I have a short list of facilities under shell identities. They are purchasing industrial-grade nutrients and medical stabilizers. One of them is a match for the energy signature we recorded. ]
Adam looked out at the peaceful city. Somewhere out there, a half-dead monster was thinking about him. And somewhere out there, a list of doors that shouldn't exist was waiting to be kicked in.
"Now I find the man," Adam said. "He'll go deeper. I'll just have to go faster."
"And if you run out of time?"
Adam thought of his 180-day window. He had spent twelve. He had a hat full of stolen power and a direction to head in.
"Don't worry," Adam said, a faint, witty smile playing on his lips. "I've got plenty of time."
Snapshot: end of Chapter 71 ADAM STATUS
Great Sage (secret) — An artificial mind that lives in his head. Thinks a thousand times faster than he can, remembers everything, runs his abilities for him, and does his combat simulations in real time. He calls her "Sage."
Stalker Pathway — Sequence 7 "Houseguest" — His exclusive power path (a Beyonder system nobody else has). Grows by living out a "role". Its tools right now:
Stalker's Veil — Near-total concealment. Eyes, sensors, and even spiritual detection. He simply isn't there. It can also induce the feeling of unease to those who look at it.Stalker's Shadow — The flip side of the Veil. He feels it when someone is watching him or hunting for him, often before he can see them himself.
Theft — Steals another person's item at close range, through walls.
Cross-Sequence Theft — One tier higher due to Great Sage influence. On success, he borrows the target's full power (and their lifetime of skill with it) for ~3 minutes, and cuts it off the owner for an hour. Roughly a coin-flip to land.
Shadowstep — Blinks about 30 meters through shadow, almost instant.
Decryption (with Sage) — Rebuilds hidden truth from scraps: what a thing is, who was here, what really happened. Can see weaknesses and predict actions.
Houseguest's Right — Once he's been welcomed into a place, its locks and wards mean nothing to him. He can also teleport to somewhere he's been as a guest, bigger range if the invite was sincere.
Superior Observation — Reads people's spiritual "signatures".
Enhanced Body + Mind-games — The path hardens his body (120+ tons lifts, mac 1+ speeds) and hands him a social toolkit: charm, silver tongue, misdirection, and illusions.
The Compendium (Sage-built) — Home-made pseudo-spells: fire, ice, lightning, an air-burst, a water-pull. Handy, but weak for his level. He treats them as a parlor trick.
Compound V body — A permanent physical upgrade (from another world) baked into him: far stronger, far tougher, heals fast, and a lifespan measured in centuries.
Bazaar starter kit (Level 1) — The four cheap abilities he's had since day one and never lost:
Reinforced Physiology — baseline body hardening.Accelerated Cognition — fast, parallel thinking.Combat Instinct — danger sense and fight reflexes.Spatial Pocket — a personal storage dimension (Earth guns and explosives won't pass through it; simpler gear will). Goes with him to every world.GEAR & ITEMS
Quiet Coat — A living, sealed suit bound to him (it dies with him). Shows as ordinary clothes or retracts under his skin. Soaks up various damage types and spiritual force, and hides him from any attempt to scry or divine him. It earns a permanent "stamp" — a one-shot trick — each time he clears a major world:
- Homelander Resonance — a soft-landing passive, plus one homelander laser blast.
- Beyonder Awareness — senses other Beyonders nearby, plus a one-shot detection sweep for Amon.
- "Quiet World" stamp — feels lethal accidents forming around him before they happen that might not directly target him, plus one-shot guaranteed "freak miss" against a killing blow already in motion.
Traveler's Hat — A sealed artifact that moves him between spaces (using spirit world) and, more importantly, records up to three abilities (he has to say the words out loud: "I came, I saw, I recorded"). Right now it holds a copy of Ren's healing, with two slots empty.
Twin-Blow Knuckles — A sealed artifact weapon kept in his Spatial Pocket. Every hit lands twice: once on the body, once on the spirit. The spirit half means he can actually hurt things that turn intangible.
AN: If we get to 500 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 700, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123