The first warehouse died on a Tuesday.
It sat at the edge of the Musutafu industrial belt, registered to a dummy medical-supply importer that hadn't filed a legitimate invoice in six years. Sage had pulled the company apart in an afternoon, unraveling a shell inside a shell, paying rent on eleven properties across three prefectures, and procuring surgical-grade preservation fluid in quantities that could embalm a small town.
Adam went in at two in the morning under the Veil. He walked right past two sleeping security guards who were being paid in cash to ask zero questions, and spent forty minutes in the basement confirming what the purchase orders had already told him.
Holding tanks. Heavy refrigeration. Racks of high-end medical equipment with the serial plates ground off. There were no Nomu here yet; it was just a way station.
He photographed the schematics for Sage, walked back out, and let the building's own ammonia system do the heavy lifting. By sunrise, the fire department was writing it off as a refrigerant leak and an accidental spark. Nobody was hurt. He had checked the upper floors twice before opening the first valve, and the two guards woke up on the curb across the street with mild headaches and a story the police would never quite believe.
[ Site one of eleven cleared, Host. The network is older than the League of Villains and considerably better built. Kyudai Garaki's name appears nowhere; his mechanical habits appear everywhere. ]
Then we keep pulling the thread.
The grid became the rhythm of the week.
Days at UA: Teaching teenagers how to win fights.Evenings on a Rooftop: Sitting with a thermos of lukewarm tea while Sage mapped the city's purchasing records like an auditor tracking an embezzlement scheme.Nights in the Shadows: Taking the doctor's infrastructure apart, one quiet building at a time.
The press never got their villain story. A refrigerant leak in the industrial belt. An electrical fire in a shuttered clinic in Hosu. A structural collapse in a warehouse that a city inspector had flagged years ago anyway. Sage meticulously chose each cover story based on what the building's infrastructure offered. The news printed the headlines, and the world moved on.
Aizawa caught him in the staff room on the fourth morning. Adam was working through a convenience-store sandwich that tasted mostly of the plastic wrapping.
The underground hero stared at him over a jelly juice pouch for a long, silent moment. "You look like I do," Aizawa muttered, his bloodshot eyes narrowing. "That's not a compliment."
"Night classes," Adam replied smoothly.
"Sure." Aizawa zipped his sleeping bag up to his chin. "I used to say the same thing."
Principal Nezu said nothing at all. He merely slid a thin manila folder across the tea table that Friday. Inside were four municipal incident reports, all small, all boring, all entirely Adam's handiwork.
The principal poured the green tea, chatted pleasantly about curriculum reform for thirty minutes, and as Adam stood to leave, offered a parting note: "Do mind the smoke, Varen-sensei. The wind changes rapidly this season."
"I always check the wind, Principal."
"I know," Nezu said, his black eyes twinkling.
The eighth site was a different beast.
It was a fish-processing plant built on reclaimed coastal land south of the city, and the finances were moving in the wrong direction. The other sites were resource sinks; this one was actively being fed. It pulled industrial power off two separate grids, used water filtration sized for a major hospital, and employed a refrigerated logistics company whose trucks arrived heavy and left empty four nights a week.
Adam stood across the harbor channel, the salty sea wind biting at his face, as Sage finalized the spatial sweep through the Warp Gate.
[ Sub-basement detected beneath the legal facility, anchored to the original pilings. Heat signatures on the processing floor indicate normal night staff. However, the floors below hold thirty-one cold biological signatures in a grid pattern, and four warm ones that are distinctly non-human. ]
Thirty-one units.
[ A production run. Stored cold until deployment. The four warm signatures are the nomus. ]
He slipped through the seaward wall at 03:00, slipping down a maintenance stairwell omitted from the building's official blueprints. The stench hit him before he even reached the bottom: brine, heavy formalin, and a deep, underlying wrongness that his instincts cataloged immediately. It was the smell of meat that had never truly been alive.
The sub-basement was vast, wet, and echoing. Tanks lined the space in twin ranks, each one holding a grey, distorted body suspended in glowing amniotic fluid. Exposed brains, raptor beaks, hypertrophied muscle groups, and wing-roots, weapons selected from a genetic menu. Stark work lights burned at the far end, where a technician in a sterile hazmat suit was entering data into a console with the relaxed posture of someone working an ordinary graveyard shift.
Four advanced Nomu stood guard in the central aisle. They weren't in stasis. Their heads remained perfectly level, tracking nothing, waiting for a command.
Sage. The nomus or the tanks first?
[ The nomus. The stored units require a sixty-second initialization sequence to awaken. The technician will require eleven steps to reach the emergency manual override. ]
Adam materialized from the dark between the glass vats. He caught the first guard's head with a full five-finger spread, triggering Decay before the remaining three could register a breach.
The grey flesh disintegrated into fine ash from his palm outward. The stolen quirk ran on his own refined reserves now, executing flawlessly and significantly faster than it ever had in Shigaraki's hands. He noted the variance instantly as the second nomu spun toward him.
[ Decay expenditure: four seconds of the recording's total lifetime. Rationing advised, Host. The timer does not self-replenish. ]
He pivoted, greeting the second Nomu with The Knuckles instead. Three heavy, consecutive strikes, shattering both physical mass and spiritual weight. Even a synthetic creature without a proper soul had enough of a cognitive framework to bruise. It collapsed like a dropped sack of stones.
He baited the third into the swinging trajectory of the fourth, letting them collide and lose their footing before driving both of them into a structural support pillar that he'd be compromising later anyway.
The technician had managed exactly four of his eleven steps. Adam closed the distance, grabbed the man's collar, and put him to sleep with a precisely measured forearm strike to the back of the neck. Complicit, but human. The authorities could sort through his wreckage.
Then came the systematic purge. One walk down each rank of vats, one hand pressed to each curved pane of glass. He used Decay to shatter nine more tanks before Sage flagged the total power drain, ninety seconds of the recording's lifetime gone. Shifting tactics, he breached the main coolant lines and let Sage write a catastrophic logic loop directly into the life-support software.
None of the thirty-one units ever opened their eyes. He stood at the end of the corridor until the last vitals monitor flatlined into a dull, continuous drone.
The plant's reserves of fuel oil combined with the quirk-stabilizing capacitors in the sub-basement handled the demolition perfectly. The morning news called it a tragic equipment failure at a fish-processing facility, noted that the night staff escaped with minor smoke inhalation, and promptly switched to the local weather report.
Adam taught third period that morning on four hours of sleep. Footwork, weight distribution, defensive positioning, the standard fundamentals.
Halfway through the lesson, Midoriya raised his hand to ask a brilliant, overly analytical question about managing close-quarters combat in enclosed choke points. Adam answered it with clinical clarity, completely omitting the fact that he had field-tested the exact scenario in a wet basement at three o'clock that morning.
The scent of formalin washed off his hands in the UA staff bathroom. It lingered in the back of his sinuses until Thursday.
The cargo manifests he had photographed, however, remained permanently etched in his mind.
[ Correlating data, Host. The logistics company feeding the fish plant runs a secondary, off-books route. Refrigerated trucks, but the cargo manifest notes no thermal requirements. Two tons of high-density protein meal, bulk grains, and industrial salt delivered every four days into the Oku ridge valleys northwest of Musutafu. The route has existed for years. There is no registered agriculture at the coordinates. There is nothing there at all. ]
Two tons of feed every four days.
[ Someone is sustaining an entity the size of a municipal building. ]
He trekked into the mountains on Sunday. UA owned his weekdays, and he intended to keep his professional ledger perfectly clean.
The valley at the terminus of the supply route was a geographic dead end, a steep, heavily forested gorge of granite and dense pine with a single unpaved gravel trail. At the drop point sat a clearing where industrial crates were neatly stacked beneath heavy camouflage netting. Fifty meters away, a mountain of empty, crushed crates stood like a monument to an insatiable appetite.
Adam activated the Veil before stepping past the tree line. Technical sensors meant nothing here because none were installed; human eyes meant less because the valley was utterly deserted. He paced out the clearing, calculating the crate rotation cycles, when the wind suddenly shifted. It swept up the canyon, carrying his scent directly up the mountain slope.
Deep within the earth, something inhaled.
The sound was structurally catastrophic, a massive echoing draw of oxygen that sounded like a bullet train entering a tunnel. Then, the entire hillside began to shift.
Topsoil cascaded down the slope in sheets. Mature pines tilted sideways with an eerie, rhythmic politeness. Out of the collapsing terrace, shedding boulders like a wet dog shaking off water, emerged a face the size of a commercial box truck.
Following it was a body that defied standard biology: ten meters of dense, grey-brown striated muscle, hands wide enough to palm a city bus, and a spine armored in jagged stone spurs. It had been sleeping beneath the mountain crust, yet it had detected a foreign respiration from under a hundred meters of solid bedrock.
"INTRUDER," a voice rumbled, the sheer sonic force causing rockfalls along the ridges. "NEAR THE MASTER'S FOOD."
The Veil was still active. Adam stood in absolute conceptual concealment, completely invisible to every sensory metric the skill governed, yet the giant's massive nostrils flared once, twice, and locked directly onto his approximate direction.
The colossus turned its colossal head and stared.
[ Warning, Host. The target is tracking your physical displacement via pure animal instincts. This is a critical data omission. ]
Noted, Adam thought.
He moved. A millisecond later, the patch of granite where he had been standing erupted into a fan of razor-sharp shrapnel and pulverized soil.
The name crystallized in his mind while he was still airborne, dredged up from old memories of a past life where this world was merely ink on paper. Gigantomachia. All For One's ultimate failsafe. The living calamity that required an entire vanguard of top heroes just to slow down.
He hit the ground, utilizing a rapid Shadowstep to clear the supersonic backdraft of the follow-up strike. He did what any seasoned player did when dropped into an unpredicted boss arena: he started memorizing patterns.
The giant moved with a terrifying speed that mocked its sheer displacement. Its third swing clipped an adjacent ridgeline, instantly converting tons of rock into lethal artillery. Its voice never ceased, a continuous grinding landslide of grief, loyalty, and absolute fury regarding intruders and the master's property.
The heavy blows Adam did manage to take on the Quiet Coat spread horizontally across its conceptual weave, bleeding the kinetic force into the earth. The artifact absorbed a strike that had gouged a four-meter trench into the valley floor, passing down nothing more than a firm nudge. The real problem wasn't the hits he absorbed, but the environment itself; every missed swing fundamentally rewrote the topography of the valley.
And the horror was actively adapting.
It had broken out of the mountain at ten meters. Now, riding its own adrenaline and fueled by absolute devotion, it stood at fifteen. Then twenty. The muscle fibers stacked themselves in visible, pulsing layers. The gorge was physically shrinking around it. If it crossed the forty-meter threshold, the engagement would be visible from the regional expressway. Tomorrow would bring news helicopters, satellite tracking, and a line of inquiry leading straight to his desk.
Sage. The growth factor. Take it now.
[ Initiating cross-Sequence Theft. Target: Gigantification. Success probability remains fixed at approximately forty percent due to the target's overwhelming biological willpower. Cost is absolute regardless of the outcome. Recommend securing a stable anchor before execution. ]
"Stable" was an abstract concept. He timed the descent of the giant's left wrist as it buried itself three meters deep into the hillside, sprinted up the dense forearm, and slammed his palm flat against the burning grey skin.
"Steal," he said clearly. He reached out with his mind and wrenched.
The Theft slipped.
It was the exact same mechanical resistance he'd felt against the Nomu, the quirk bucking violently against his conceptual grip. The spiritual backlash surged violently back up his arm and slammed into his chest like an industrial current. A full third of his internal energy reserves vaporized in a single heartbeat. His peripheral vision fractured into grey static.
The massive wrist beneath his boots violently lifted; Gigantomachia had felt the intrusion. It wasn't pain, the monster didn't compute pain, but it was an existential wrongness. A hand the size of a multi-car garage swept across its body to swat the anomaly away.
Combat Instinct screamed.
Adam threw himself backward off the arm, triggering a desperate Shadowstep from the deep shadow cast by the giant's own sweeping silhouette. He materialized sixty meters away on one knee, his ears ringing with acoustic trauma, his hands trembling with residual feedback.
[ System Backlash confirmed, Host. Internal reserves down to fifty-four percent. Do you require the stored Super Regeneration? ]
Not for a physical tremor. Save the slot. He forced his breathing into a steady cadence, suppressing the neurological shake. It took far too long. We go again. The exact second it plants its weight.
The giant braced its feet to roar at the empty space where its target had vanished, its height now hovering near twenty-five meters, the sheer volume of its voice stripping the bark cleanly off the surrounding pines.
Adam went up its spine, navigating between the jagged stone spurs like a mountain climber. He slammed both palms onto the base of the skull, right where the central nervous system met the quirk core. He didn't waste time on eloquence. He pulled with everything he had left.
The ability gave way like a tooth being ripped from a jaw.
For three agonizing minutes, the conceptual understanding of Gigantification sat within his own soul, an entire lifetime of growing, of answering emotional fury with physical mass. He held it, letting the minutes tick away without activating it; the absolute last thing this country needed was a secondary giant tearing through the prefecture. He only cared about the status effect: Severed. For one hour, the living mountain was forbidden from being a mountain.
The physical regression was violent. The giant's immense mass collapsed back toward its baseline size in lurching, agonizing stages. Dense joints rapidly recalculated their geometry, and the valley's newest landmark deflated back into something that could merely overturn a main battle tank.
Ten meters of raw muscle stood shivering in the ruined clearing. For the first time since the encounter began, the roaring stopped entirely.
"GONE," the colossus whispered. Its massive hands came up, patting its own chest, claws dragging across its torso in a frantic search. "THE MASTER'S... THE MASTER'S GIFT. GONE. GONE."
"Borrowed," Adam's voice echoed from the shifting dust. "You won't miss it for long."
The subsequent twelve minutes demonstrated exactly why the pro heroes would eventually require an entire coalition to wage a war against this single entity.
Even stripped of its growth factor and shrunken to its baseline, the thing remained a localized natural disaster with a pulse. Adam tested his raw, unaugmented physical output once, delivering a full-weight, kinetic strike directly into the hinge of its jaw, channeling every ounce of his reinforced and improved physiology into a single point. The sheer force of the blow would have put an office building on its side.
The giant's head shifted exactly four centimeters. It snapped back around, teeth bared, snapping violently at the air where his scent trailed. He could break his hands against this creature for a century without ever reducing its health bar to zero.
Brandt's dagger would have sliced right through these seams, he realized grimly. But that blade is sitting on a shelf in a completely different reality. He filed that away under tactical oversights.
The monster's passive skin-hardening turned the physical half of The Knuckles into a human fist striking a tectonic plate. It felt absolutely no pain; he targeted nerve clusters and joints that should have anatomically disabled a normal organism, but the giant simply didn't process the feedback. It answered exclusively with sweeps, stomps, and crushing grips. It didn't tire, it didn't slow down, and its biological engine required no recovery time.
Sage displayed its active quirk profile in the corner of his vision:
Gigantification (Current Status: Severed/Stolen)Endurance (Stamina sustained by fervor)Pain BlockerDog (Smell and hearing, target-tracking)Energy SaverFierce Gains (Hardening)Mole (Digging)
The final attribute became an immediate problem. Gigantomachia went underground with terrifying efficiency, turning the valley floor into a hollow drumhead. It erupted beneath him three separate times in a span of two minutes. Only the Quiet Coat and precise Shadowsteps kept Adam from a swift, unceremonious conclusion. The Veil was completely useless for defense now; while it completely masked his footprint, the monster's blunt, patient snout kept dragging its focus right back to his exact coordinates.
So he targeted the sense itself.
The remaining feed crates were still stacked beneath their camouflage netting at the clearing's perimeter. On his next evasive pass, Adam drove The Knuckles directly through the center of the storage pallet.
Two tons of enriched, high-density protein meal and dry salt exploded into the atmosphere, creating a massive, opaque cloud that blanketed the entire valley floor. The giant's sensory world, which had been a single pristine thread of intruder-scent in clean alpine air, instantly degenerated into a blinding, suffocating fog of industrial feed.
The dust filled Adam's mouth as well. Everything tasted of processed grain and heavy sodium for the rest of the engagement.
[ Good job, Host. Note: Target's total kinetic output is dropping measurably whenever it loses visual and sensory contact. Its stamina is directly sustained by fanatical fervor; confusion is actively starving its engine. ]
Then we keep it entirely in the dark.
Step. Strike. Vanish. Never strike twice from the same shadow.
Sage ran the entire tactical engagement a half-second ahead of reality, overlaying a live predictive simulation over his retinas: which leg was anchoring the weight, where the dermal hardening ran thinnest at the fold of a joint, which swing was fully committed and which was merely a biological reflex. He stopped fighting the colossus directly and began fighting her flawless render of it. Step by step, the monster lost ground.
The spiritual half of The Knuckles was the only damage that actually worked. Dermal hardening couldn't blunt it, and the absence of a pain response couldn't mask it. It wasn't physical trauma; it was a conceptual subtraction of spirituality. Somewhere beneath those layers of engineered meat, something foundational was bruising, and the giant couldn't locate the injury to compensate for it. Its deep bellows lost their resonance. Its swings began to arrive a fraction of a second late, the giant's body and the will driving it drifting out of alignment.
Yet, it still nearly ended him twice.
A blind, desperate backhand caught him mid-Shadowstep, sheer statistical probability working in the monster's favor. The impact caught his left forearm, cleanly fracturing both the radius and ulna against the distributed load of the coat. He distinctly heard the bone snap.
He authorized the use of Super Regeneration immediately, spending eight seconds of the recorded Nomu factor. It knit his skeletal structure back together in a hot, crawling sensation while he sprinted along a crumbling slope, keeping his left arm tucked against his ribs.
Moments later, the entire valley floor literally tilted as the giant burrowed beneath a massive fault line, giving Combat Instinct zero targeted intent to intercept. Instead, a cold, sharp warning blipped from the Quiet Coat. Adam initiated a blind Shadowstep off a sliding slab of hillside exactly half a second before the terrain collapsed into a jagged sinkhole forty meters deep.
[ Decay recording remaining: forty-one minutes of active lifetime. Current internal reserves: twenty-eight percent. Severance status terminates in nineteen minutes, Host. If its growth factor reactivates while it remains standing, this engagement scales to a regional catastrophe. ]
Then it doesn't get to stand.
He stopped wasting Decay on its physical form. Disintegrating an inch of flesh meant nothing to an organism that ignored its own destruction. He directed the quirk at the environment instead: the solid rock shelf the giant used for leverage dissolved into fine powder mid-lunge; the entryways of its own tunnels collapsed behind it until the underground became a closed, claustrophobic maze.
He methodically herded the beast, lost, blind, furious, and visibly slowing, into the narrow terminus of its own freshly dug tunnel. It was a stone throat far too narrow for its immense arms to swing.
The monster turned in the absolute dark, facing the intruder scent it could finally, definitively pinpoint. It felt a surge of primitive satisfaction. Ten meters of an orphaned war machine, illuminated by nothing, pleased that the exhausting confusion was over and the enemy was finally within arm's reach.
"You've waited all these years," Adam said quietly into the dark. "He isn't coming back for you."
"THE MASTER," the giant roared, its voice shaking the subterranean vault, "WILL CALL!"
It lunged.
Adam went in high, clearing the descending jaw and planting his right palm squarely on the massive stone brow. All five fingers spread wide.
Decay took the creature from the crown of its skull downward. The body that could not feel pain did not feel its own dissolution.
It was a long time falling. He waited in the absolute black until the shifting sounds finally ceased.
The collapse of the overhanging tunnel took another full minute and consumed the absolute remainder of his available reserves. He brought the entire mountain slope down over the dead end, sealing the subterranean maze permanently, before walking back out into the ruined clearing where the salt and protein meal were still settling like dirty gray snow.
He sat down on a single surviving crate and watched the sun climb over a valley that looked like a conventional war zone. It would be reported to the public as a massive, seismically triggered landslide. Sage was already drafting the official geological telemetry.
[ Severance status would have expired in exactly six minutes, Host. ]
"Plenty of time," he said aloud to the empty canyon. His voice sounded raw, scraped thin by the dust. He let it stay that way.
He sat there far longer than the logistics of the return trip justified. At some point, he realized he was properly hungry, and that there wasn't a single soul in this reality he could tell about what had transpired here.
I already miss Ren. She'd probably have scolded me for causing so much destruction. Huuh. Let's just finish this and go home.
He forced himself to stand before the thought could take root.
The following week, Sage presented the post-action metrics.
Adam stood on the roof of the UA faculty building at dusk, holding the mediocre vending-machine miso soup. His left forearm still carried a dull, deep ache where the regeneration had forced the bone to knit; the structural repair was flawless, Sage had verified the imaging twice, but it ached anyway, like bad weather settling into an old fence post.
She projected the comparative analysis directly across his field of vision as he drank.
Quirk Output Optimization AnalysisMetricOriginal Variant (Shigaraki/Nomu)Host Variant (Recorded State)Variance IndexDecay Propagation SpeedBaseline+30% to +40% faster accelerationFlawless uniform spread; zero activation latencyRegeneration Cellular FidelityStandard bio-weapon cellular replicationAccelerated osteoblast/tissue synthesisZero scar tissue; clean structural alignmentEnergy SourceQuirkhon/Biological FactorSpiritual Core (Anima)Bypasses standard biological ceilings and fatigue
[ Findings, Host: The recorded abilities are not digital copies degrading toward an original standard. Within your framework, they actively exceed the original parameters. ]
Why the variance?
[ Fuel. A standard quirk operates within a strict biological framework governed by physical limitations: muscular fatigue, hormonal depletion, and the subconscious mind's intrinsic fear of self-destruction. Your recordings run on pure spiritual energy, which runs far deeper than any quirk factor in this world. They also carry zero authority for this universe to resist. The abilities have literally never been fed this well in their existence. This is not what local science classifies as an 'awakening.' It is entirely adjacent to one. ]
Adam took a slow sip of his soup, his mind reflecting on the dead boy whose quirk he had been borrowing. Thirty percent faster.
He realized he had been treating the hat like a casual trophy rack. Warp, in case he required an immediate exit because travel took longer. Decay, because it was available. Super Regeneration, because mortality was an inconvenience. It was a collection of tactical clutter, accumulated the exact same way he used to build characters in his old software builds.
But if a recorded ability within his system was more potent and cleaner than it ever was for its native owner, then the hat wasn't a trophy rack at all. It was the architectural foundation of his entire ten-year deployment, and he was currently filling its limited memory with whatever utilities dropped from his daily encounters.
Sage. If our core operational doctrine is flawed, let's refactor it. If you were designing the final three resident slots, what actually belongs in them?
[ You are asking the wrong architectural question, Host. You are still counting to three. ]
He set the soup down on the concrete ledge. Explain.
[ Consider the prime target you were deployed to eliminate. All For One's primary quirk permits him to steal abilities and seat them permanently within his own physical container, maintaining an unrestricted catalog for over a century. He is, within himself, the systemic solution to your three-slot limitation. If you record All For One at the moment of execution, every subsequent acquisition is no longer a temporary recording. It becomes a permanent transfer. It can be executed once, seated forever, completely independent of a countdown timer. The hat concludes this deployment holding exactly one quirk and one is all it will ever need to sustain. ]
The rooftop remained perfectly still for a long time. Below the ledge, a student sports club was finishing up their late practice; he could hear a coach shouting the exact same mechanical correction to a kid who simply lacked the coordination to apply it.
The Bazaar had sent him to this reality to execute a master thief, and the thief's own hands were the ultimate prize. Not the vast library of quirks the man had hoarded over generations, but the engine itself. Record that engine, fuel it with an energy source that sustained abilities better than biology ever could, and both the slot limitation and the expiration timer ceased to exist.
All the system asked of him was the exact task he had been hired to perform from day one.
The Bazaar actually built a scenario where the operational contract and the ultimate payout are the exact same act.
[ Complications remain, Host. It is currently unverified whether a physical vessel entirely devoid of a native quirk factor can properly seat a transferred ability; however, I project his specific mechanism handles the structural seating independently. We also do not know if the recording's timer limits the act of theft or merely the usage; my models suggest only the act of theft consumes active lifetime. Finally, it remains to be seen if an ability that has consumed a hundred different owners objects to being wielded by an outsider. We will inevitably learn the answers to all three variables the hard way, as no soft option exists. ]
Then until the kill window opens, the active slots are strictly utilitarian tools, and we stop being sentimental about them. He looked out over the sprawling city as the grid lights illuminated section by section. Open the acquisition files.
Sage generated three distinct profiles within his vision, a comprehensive strategy for what a man should acquire when theft was about to become permanent.
Dossier I: The Anchor
[IDENTIFIER: STAR AND STRIPE]
Classification: Pro Hero (International / United States Number One)
Quirk Factor: New Order Mechanics: Establishes contact with a target, declares its name, and imposes up to two conceptual rules upon its reality.
[ The foreign pillar, Host. Your memory provided the foundational data for this entry. It is arguably the most versatile quirk this reality has generated. However, it carries a lethal contingency, one its holder arms deliberately. She can set a final rule that orders the quirk to revolt against any thief, and the single time that order was given, the ability cannibalized the holder's entire stolen stockpile from the inside, purging every quirk and gutting the body on its way out. It is not an automatic defense. It is a command she chooses to leave standing. ]
[ The operational hurdles are substantial. Her rule-casting demands direct physical touch and a verified spoken name, meaning a successful recording requires either absolute tactical submission or her willing cooperation. Beyond that, the ability operates on an identity index; it conforms to her personal conceptual understanding of what a target is. And she can turn it lethal on a thief at will. Whether a spirituality-sustained recording, which extracts nothing from her physical body and leaves her native quirk entirely intact, would even register as theft worth that final rule is entirely unknown. I can model every quirk in the national registry, Host. I decline to model that specific ability's temperament. ]
And she's a legitimate hero, Adam thought, mentally turning the digital file over. The real kind. The type who would take a bullet for a civilian and apologize for the delay. This will be a hard decision, but my own life is still more important to me than hers.
[ Two approaches, Host. The first: present the time-traveler narrative and persuade her to surrender it willingly. The second: subdue her and take it by force. Either way, UA secures the introduction. ]
All Might handles the introduction. I provide the tailored 'time traveler' narrative. And then I ask the top hero of a foreign superpower to let a complete stranger take the most powerful conceptual weapon on earth, knowing it has literally executed people for trying. He rubbed his left forearm. That doesn't sound like a good plan.
[ By a significant margin, Host. I have prioritized the schedule accordingly. If she declines, take it the hard way; I have already prepared the plan for a clean exit. ]
Dossier II: The Multiplication
[IDENTIFIER: JIN BUBAIGAWARA]
Classification: Unaffiliated / Parolee (High Risk)
Quirk Factor: Double
Mechanics: Creates near-flawless duplicates of any object or living organism. Requires precise physical measurements.
[ The most cost-effective force multiplier in the local database, currently completely unflagged by the authorities. Your historical recall identifies him as a crucial asset. His ability duplicates anything, including himself, and including the active quirks of those he copies. His psychology was broken in a room filled with his own identical faces, leaving him permanently uncertain of his own authenticity. The villains will inevitably secure him, weaponize his trauma, and spend him like currency. ]
[ The acquisition protocol is permanent removal using All For One. It will help him deal with his mental issues. There will only be one left, the real one. ]
I agree, this should be an easy one.
Dossier III: The Reconstruction
[IDENTIFIER: CHISAKI KAI]
Classification: Yakuza / Overhaul Capo
Quirk Factor: Overhaul
Mechanics: Complete molecular disassembly and reassembly of matter via physical touch. High utility for demolition, healing, and biological restructuring.
[ The grim file. An archaic criminal syndicate operating out of a traditional compound, running a medical procurement network that mirrors Garaki's logistics. His operation represents the only other independent quirk-manipulation program in the country. They are actively manufacturing specialized ordnance designed to erase quirk factors, though this current batch only suppresses them temporarily; the permanent version is still months from completion. The raw material for the rounds is drawn from the blood of a six-year-old child whose native quirk rewinds living matter. She is currently classified as a recurring resource in their subterranean facility. ]
Adam read through the logistics manifests a second time. The rooftop around him felt incredibly cold.
The procurement ledger was chillingly mundane. Pediatric-gauge sterile needles. Heavy leather restraints in two sizes, one of them small. A recurring monthly bulk order of plush toys from a clearance wholesaler, because an analyst in that compound had determined the biological asset cried less when provided an object to hold.
He closed the file.
That one isn't a shopping trip.
[ No, Host. But the tactical tools and the child occupy the exact same location. By our current operational doctrine, these recordings will serve as excellent temporary assets: the disassembly factor for our upcoming heavy demolition work, and the rewind attribute for resolving structural problems that should never have been permitted to occur. Including, theoretically, a ruined respiratory tract forty meters beneath your feet. I flag that strictly as a hypothesis. ]
Flag it as a priority.
He stood up, stretching the tightness from his shoulders. The city lights stretched out continuously until they hit the black void of the coastline. Order of operations?
[ The Yakuza compound this upcoming week while the logistical trail remains hot: secure the child, record the structural tools, terminate the ammunition project. The parolee immediately follow-up, before the League's recruiter establishes contact. The American pillar when the academic calendar provides a legitimate pretext for international travel, with the introduction secured via All Might and the exit strategy fully established. And beneath all of it, Garaki's primary laboratory—which remains entirely dark, and will stay dark until he is convinced you have ceased your search. ]
He's burning his own network to stay off my radar. Let him burn it. Every outpost he abandons is one less factory producing monsters, and every quiet week makes him check his locks one less time. Adam picked up the empty thermos. Day twenty-eight of one hundred and eighty, Sage. He thinks he can outlast my deployment.
[ He is half-dead, Host, sustained by life support beneath a metropolitan center, holding his breath. ]
Mhm. He turned toward the stairwell, the heavy roof door clicking shut behind him, sealing out the night. Plenty of time.
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