These clanker, fucking allegations are so stupidly annoying can yall like hop off my dick?
And these people that have main character fucking syndrome, I do not care about you and no one else does just stfu already.
If I tell yall that I use AI DROP THE STORY THEN I don't care no more.
DO not use your fucking prefrontal cortex and google chatgpt and ask it to make you a fucking story and then see what it makes nahh dont do that. fucking idiots.
---
*"Good evening. This is NHN Nightly with Akiyama Reiko. Our top story tonight: the reign of terror continues."*
The screen showed helicopter footage of a street in the 9th District. Police tape. Ambulances. A building with its front wall missing. The camera panned to a row of people sitting on the kerb in blankets, staring at nothing.
*"The individual known as 'The Arbitrator' has struck again, bringing the total number of innocent victims to three hundred and nineteen. Three hundred and nineteen law-abiding citizens, stripped of their quirks, stripped of their identities, left with nothing."*
A graphic appeared on screen. A silhouette in a suit and mask against a red background. Below it: THE ARBITRATOR - MUSUTAFU'S MOST WANTED.
*"Among the victims, community leaders, small business owners, fathers, sons, ordinary people going about their lives."*
Cut to a man in a hospital bed. His face was puffy. His eyes were red. A caption beneath him read: VICTIM - QUIRK REMOVED.
*"I was just walking home from work. Next thing I know I wake up on the ground and my quirk is gone. I've had it since I was four. It's part of who I am. And now it's just... gone."*
He wiped his eyes. The camera held on his face for three seconds too long.
The man's name was not mentioned. His arrest record, which included two counts of domestic battery and an outstanding warrant for aggravated assault, was also not mentioned.
*"Authorities have confirmed that the Arbitrator has also come into direct conflict with the brave men and women who protect our streets. Twenty-eight police officers and four pro heroes have had their quirks permanently removed in the line of duty while attempting to apprehend this menace."*
Cut to a police spokesperson. A man in a pressed uniform with a flag pin on his lapel.
*"Make no mistake. The Arbitrator is not a hero. The Arbitrator is not delivering justice. This is a villain, plain and simple, who is attacking the very foundations of our society. Our officers put their lives on the line every single day, and the thought that they could lose their quirks, their livelihoods, their PURPOSE, at the hands of this individual... it's unconscionable."*
His voice cracked on the word "purpose." Practiced.
*"We can also confirm that despite extensive investigation, the mechanism by which quirks are removed remains completely unknown. Victims report total memory loss of the encounter. Even individuals with memory-related or telepathic quirks have been unable to extract any information whatsoever."*
Back to the studio. Akiyama Reiko's face was arranged into an expression of deep concern that she held slightly too long before speaking.
*"We now go to our panel of experts."*
Split screen. Three people in suits.
The first one: *"This individual is a terrorist. There's no other word for it. Three hundred innocent people have been mutilated, and yes, I use the word mutilated, because taking someone's quirk is no different from taking their arm."*
The second one: *"What concerns me most is the silence from the Hero Public Safety Commission. The HPSC has deployed multiple hero teams to the 9th District over the past three months and has achieved nothing. No pattern established. No forensic evidence recovered. The Arbitrator operates exclusively at night, never strikes the same location twice, and simply vanishes. If our best heroes can't stop one individual, what does that say about the state of hero society?"*
The third one, a retired hero with a media-friendly jawline: *"I've been saying this for years. We need harsher sentencing for vigilantes. We need expanded quirk surveillance. And we need the public to understand that people like the Arbitrator are not your friend. Today it's criminals. Tomorrow it's your neighbour. The day after that it's you."*
Nobody on the panel mentioned that two hundred and seventy-one of the three hundred and nineteen "innocent victims" had prior criminal records.
Nobody mentioned that because nobody had checked.
Cut back to Akiyama Reiko.
*"The HPSC has described the Arbitrator as, quote, 'the highest priority domestic threat since All For One.' Anyone with information is urged to contact the HPSC tip line immediately. Do not attempt to approach or engage."*
She shuffled her papers.
*"In other news, the UA High School entrance exam takes place tomorrow with an expected..."*
---
The TV went silent. Yui had pressed mute.
She was standing in the living room with the remote in one hand and her other hand pressed flat against her collarbone. Her face was the colour of old paper.
"Kenji."
Her husband was in the hallway, putting on his shoes. Early meeting.
"I heard it," he said.
"Three hundred and nineteen people. He's taken quirks from three hundred and nineteen people."
"I heard it, Yui."
"And heroes. He attacked heroes. What kind of person attacks heroes?"
Kenji straightened up. Looked at her. His face gave away nothing.
"The kind who thinks heroes aren't doing their job," he said.
"That's not funny."
"I'm not being funny."
Yui looked at the TV. The screen was showing the UA entrance exam graphic now, bright colours and the UA logo, the sound muted. Tomorrow. Her son was taking that exam tomorrow. Her son who woke up at six and trained every day and studied law every night and had been brighter lately, a steadier kind.
She didn't think about the Arbitrator and her son in the same thought. She didn't have a reason to.
Kenji did tho.
He stood in the hallway with his shoes on and his briefcase in his hand and his spatial awareness quirk telling him that his son was upstairs, at his desk, awake, and that the density reading around his body was higher than it had ever been. The distortion that had started as a faint shimmer six months ago was now a constant, measurable compression in the air. His son's body occupied more space than physics said it should.
He didn't have proof. He had data points. A son who went out at night and came back before dawn. A son whose mood improved in cycles that didn't match anything normal. A son who'd stopped growing taller but kept getting denser. A news report about a vigilante in the 9th District who removed quirks and left no memories.
Kenji was an insurance man. He dealt in probability.
The probability that these things were unrelated was not zero.
But it was low.
"He'll be fine tomorrow," Kenji said. "The exam."
"I know."
"He's ready."
"I know."
The corner of Kenji's mouth pulled upward. A smirk. The expression of a man who knew something his wife didn't and had decided that not sharing it was the kinder option.
He left for work. The door closed behind him.
Upstairs, Ren sat at his desk and heard none of it. His headphones were in. He was reviewing his notes on prosecutorial strategy for the fourth time this week.
Template: 50%.
Exactly 50%. It had been 50% for six weeks. Nothing he did moved it. Not the nightly patrols, not the trials, not the studying. Like the template had given him everything it was willing to give at this stage and was waiting for something he hadn't figured out yet. A ceiling that wasn't about effort or justice or kills. Something else. Something he couldn't brute force.
He'd think about it after the exam.
---
The UA entrance exam was exactly what the teacher's memories said it would be.
A fake city. Robots. Points. Ten minutes.
Ren stood at the starting line in Battle Center D with a few hundred other teenagers and felt absolutely nothing about any of it. The kid next to him was shaking. The girl on his other side was doing breathing exercises. A hundred quirks waiting to go off, a hundred kids convinced this was the most important day of their lives.
Somewhere in a different battle center, Midoriya was probably muttering to himself and Bakugo was probably vibrating with the need to explode something. Not his problem.
Present Mic, the pro hero with the voice quirk, had explained the rules in the auditorium. One-pointers, two-pointers, three-pointers. Destroy robots, earn points. Simple. There was also a zero-pointer, a massive robot that was worth nothing and was meant to be avoided.
Rescue points existed but nobody was told about them. The teacher's memories knew because the anime had shown it. Ren filed the information and moved on.
"START!" Present Mic's voice hit like a wall.
Everyone froze for half a second because there was no countdown. Then they moved. A stampede of teenagers with quirks and ambition pouring into the fake city.
Ren walked in.
The first robot came around a corner. A one-pointer. Green, mechanical, about twice his height. It swivelled toward him and raised an arm.
Ren punched it.
The entire front panel caved inward like tin foil and the thing folded around his fist and hit the building behind it and the building cracked. The robot's remains embedded in the wall about four metres off the ground.
One point.
He kept walking.
Two more came from a side street. Two-pointers. They were faster than the first one, moving in tandem, trying to flank. Ren grabbed the first one by the arm, swung it into the second one, and both of them disintegrated into scrap. The impact sent metal fragments skidding across the concrete for thirty metres.
Five points.
Ren didn't run, because he didn't feel like running. there were cameras that were definitely recording and judges that were definitely watching and he wasn't interested in showing everything he had to a room full of pro heroes who might start connecting dots.
So he walked. And punched things.
A three-pointer came from above. Dropped from a building. Ren sidestepped it, let it crash into the concrete, and kicked it. The kick sent it through two buildings. He heard it exit through the far wall of the second one.
Eight points.
Around him, other examinees were fighting. Quirks going off everywhere. Explosions, ice constructs, a kid with extending limbs ripping a two-pointer apart, another one melting through a robot's leg with some kind of acid. A hundred different powers doing the same job a hundred different ways.
Ren walked past all of them.
Forty-seven points in four minutes. He stopped counting.
In the observation room, the judges were watching multiple screens. Most of them were focused on Battle Center B, where a green-haired kid had been fumbling around with zero points for most of the exam and a blond kid with explosions was tearing through everything in sight. Standard drama. The kind of exam footage they saw every year.
One of the judges glanced at Battle Center D's feed. Glanced away. Glanced back.
"Who is that?"
The screen showed a tall teenager walking through the arena. Every robot that came near him was destroyed in a single hit. No quirk activation visible on the sensors. No energy discharge. No transformation. Just a kid hitting things hard enough to fold metal around his fist.
"Asano Ren. Aldera Junior High. Registered quirk: Regeneration."
"Regeneration doesn't do that."
"No. It doesn't."
They watched him kick a three-pointer through two buildings. The seismograph at the edge of the arena registered the impact.
"What's his score?"
"Seventy-three. He's still going."
The judge looked at the screen for a few more seconds. Then he wrote something on his clipboard and moved on to the next monitor.
The ground shook.
The zero-pointer emerged from behind a row of buildings. Massive. The size of a skyscraper turned sideways and given legs. It moved through the fake city like a natural disaster, crushing buildings under its treads, sending debris flying in every direction.
Everyone ran away. The zero-pointer was worth nothing and it was dangerous and the smart play was to get distance and keep collecting points from the smaller robots.
Ren looked at it.
He could destroy it. One hit with CE reinforcement at his current output would put his fist through the central processor and drop the whole thing. It would look impressive and mean nothing and he'd be on camera doing something that a kid with a regeneration quirk should not be able to do.
He turned to leave.
Then he heard the sound.
A gasp. The short, sharp intake of breath that happened when the body registered danger before the brain caught up.
Ren stopped.
A girl. Black hair, short, maybe five foot two. She was on the ground maybe twenty metres from the zero-pointer's foot. A slab of concrete pinned across her legs. She was pulling at it, screaming, her quirk doing something to the edges of the rubble but not enough, not fast enough. The zero-pointer's shadow was swallowing her.
Everyone else was running the other direction.
Nobody was going back for her.
Something in his head ran a calculation that had nothing to do with math. She was a stranger. This was an exam. The judges were watching. Heroes earned rescue points for saving people. Saving her would look good on the score sheet.
That wasn't why he was hesitating.
He was hesitating because the last time he felt the impulse to help someone, his technique had fired involuntarily and told Midoriya Izuku he was worthless. Because the hollow behind his eyes was quiet right now, stable, held in place by a rhythm of nightly patrols and a number that wouldn't move past 50%. Because saving this girl would mean something and he wasn't sure he wanted things to mean something because meaning things was how the warmth started and the warmth always faded and the fading was worse than never having it.
The zero-pointer's foot lifted. Started to come down.
The girl looked up at him. Her eyes were wide. Terrified. Looking at him the way the woman in the alley had looked at him. The way the teacher's student had looked at the world.
Like she'd already decided nobody was coming.
Ren looked at her.
And then he—
---
Idk if the start of my authors note was outta pocket or not but its genuinely hella annoying yk. But anyway's did you guys have fun reading? had to rush this out since yk life is bussy and all that.
You know how it goes. Leave a review. Leave a comment.