Thank you everyone for all your support. It means alot.
Terraria Infernum Mod Music - "พายุก่อนอรุณ (Storm Before Dawn)" - Special Battle Theme! This is the song I was listening too while writing this.
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"I cannot stress enough how dire this situation has become. We are beyond crisis. We are in uncharted territory."
The television mounted on the wall of the principal's office was tuned to HNN. The screen showed an anchor desk, but the usual composure that came with it was gone. Takeda Shun looked like he hadn't slept in three days. His tie was loose. There were shadows under his eyes that the studio lighting couldn't hide.
"For those just tuning in, the Hero Public Safety Commission has officially revised the Arbitrator's confirmed victim count to over three hundred. Three hundred and twenty-nine individuals affected in a matter of months. Some killed. Others stripped of their quirks entirely and left with no memory of the encounter. I want you to sit with that number. Three hundred and twenty-nine lives destroyed. Mothers. Fathers. Sons. Daughters. Three hundred and twenty-nine families left grieving the dead or caring for loved ones who woke up quirkless with no explanation. Because one individual has decided he has the right to play judge, jury, and executioner on the streets of our cities."
The graphic behind him had changed since the early days. It used to be a silhouette and some crime scene tape. Now it was a full display. A map of Musutafu dotted with red markers so dense in some wards they bled together. A counter in the corner ticking upward like a stock price. A banner across the bottom that read in white text on red: NATIONAL EMERGENCY — ARBITRATOR CRISIS. "We go now to our panel."
The screen split. Six faces this time. They used to have four. The networks had started booking more guests because the segments ran longer now. People wanted to talk. People wanted to scream.
A retired sidekick who had worked under Endeavor's agency spoke first. His jaw was tight.
"There is no precedent for this. None. Not in the history of quirk society. We are talking about an individual who is operating almost every single night. Some nights the police find bodies. Other nights they find people alive but quirkless, wandering the streets with no memory of what happened to them. The forensic teams in the 4th and 6th Wards are working in shifts because they physically cannot process the volume of either category. This is not a vigilante problem. This is a war."
"And where are the heroes?" The host's voice cracked on the question. He was angry. "Where is the number one hero? We keep hearing that All Might is involved. We keep hearing that operations are ongoing. But the victims keep piling up. Every single morning there are new names. New faces. New families on this broadcast crying over someone who's either dead or who can't remember their own quirk. And nobody is stopping it."
The HPSC representative this time was not the polished spokesperson from the earlier segments. They had sent a director. A man with a hard face and a suit that cost more than most people's rent.
"The Commission is deploying every available resource. I want to be absolutely clear about that. Every agency in the Kanto region has been mobilized. Patrol routes have been tripled. Curfew enforcement is at maximum capacity."
"Then why is it not working?"
Silence.
"Why is it not working? You have tripled patrols. You have imposed curfews. You have mobilized every hero agency in the region. And the Arbitrator is still out there. Every single night. Killing people. How is that possible?"
The director's expression did not change. "The Arbitrator has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to evade detection. We believe he possesses detailed knowledge of hero patrol schedules and operates exclusively within windows of reduced hero activity."
That was the official line. Reduced hero activity.
They had no idea how right they were.
The Arbitrator did not study patrol schedules.
He studied one thing.
All Might's clock.
Every public appearance. Every news broadcast. Every blurry phone video uploaded to social media of that massive frame soaring over the Musutafu skyline. All of it was catalogued. Cross-referenced. Timestamped down to the minute. Ren had built the model in his head over weeks, and by now it ran with mechanical certainty. Three hours. That was the average. Three hours of Symbol of Peace before the body gave out and folded back into himself like a deflating balloon.
Ren did not begin hunting when the timer expired.
He waited sixty minutes after.
A full hour of dead air. Sixty minutes to make absolutely, irrevocably certain that the strongest man on the planet was not going to be standing in his path when the gavel came down.
And it was the reason that every resource the Commission deployed, every patrol they tripled, every curfew they enforced, amounted to nothing. They were looking for a pattern in the chaos. The pattern was not in the chaos. The pattern was in All Might's bones.
On the screen, a woman was crying. A phone-in caller. Her voice was barely intelligible through the sobs.
"He took my husband's quirk. He— Katashi never hurt anyone. He was a good man. He was a good father. He coached our son's baseball team. And now he just sits in the house all day staring at his hands. He doesn't eat. He doesn't talk to our son. It's like whatever that thing did to him took more than his quirk. It took him. And nobody— nobody is doing anything—"
The host bowed his head.
"We hear you. The entire nation hears you."
They did not mention that Katashi had been running a quirk-enhancement drug lab out of the basement of his sporting goods store. They did not mention the eleven teenagers who had been hospitalized from the product he distributed. They did not mention the two who had died.
They never mentioned any of that.
The broadcast cut to a wide shot of the studio. The anchor squared his papers. His hands were shaking.
"If you are watching this, All Might. Japan needs you. We need you now more than ever. Please."
The television clicked off.
The office was quiet. Afternoon light came through the arched windows and fell across a desk that was far too large for the creature who sat behind it. Bookshelves lined the walls. Degrees. Commendations. A framed photograph of the first graduating class of UA's hero course, faded with age.
Principal Nezu set the remote down beside his teacup. He lifted the cup. Took a sip. Set it back on the saucer with a clink that could have cut glass in the silence.
Then he turned his chair.
Slowly.
Ren was sitting across from him. He had been summoned twenty minutes ago by a note slipped under his dorm room door, handwritten on UA letterhead, that read simply: My office. At your earliest convenience. Which, in Nezu's language, meant now.
The principal's black eyes settled on him. That gaze. The one that made you feel like you were a variable in an equation he had already solved.
"So, Asano-kun." Nezu folded his paws on the desk. His smile was warm. His eyes were not. "Three hundred and twenty-nine. That is quite the number for a first-year student, wouldn't you agree?"
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How did he know?
That was the first thought. The one that sat at the front of his brain like a headline, bold and capitalised, demanding attention while everything behind it scrambled to catch up.
How did he figure it out?
Ren sat in the chair across from Principal Nezu's desk with his hands on his knees and his posture straight and his face arranged into the expression of a student who had been called to the principal's office and was mildly confused about it. He was very good at that expression, the trick was in the eyes. You kept them slightly wider than natural.
Behind that face, his mind was running at a speed that would have concerned a neurologist.
Nezu was sitting behind his desk. The desk was comically large for a creature his size. His paws were folded on the surface, one on top of the other. His tea was steaming. His smile was the kind of smile that never reached his eyes because his eyes were already doing something else entirely. Something closer to calculation.
How?
The gavel. It had to be the gavel. The moment in the exam when he threw it to free the girl's legs. The shape it left in the ground. The same shape that forensics had photographed at how many crime scenes? Twelve? Fifteen? More? He'd been careful about the gavel. He dissolved it after every use. But dissolution didn't erase impact craters. It didn't fill in the dents it left in concrete walls and basement floors.
Stupid.
He'd known it was a risk the moment his hand moved. He'd calculated the odds in the middle of holding up a zero-pointer with one arm and a dislocated shoulder and he'd decided that saving the girl was worth the exposure. And now he was sitting in a chair that was too small and a room that was too quiet and a principal who may very well be the smartest being on the planet was looking at him like he was a crossword that had already been solved.
Rule number one through ten. Don't get caught.
"You seem tense, Asano-kun." Nezu tilted his head. The motion was birdlike. Precise. "Would you like some tea? I find it settles the nerves. Although I suppose you don't have much reason to be nervous. After all, this is just a conversation between a principal and his most promising first-year student."
"I'm fine. Thank you, sir."
"Sir! How polite. Most students your age call me Principal or Nezu-sensei or, in Bakugo-kun's case, nothing at all because he has not yet acknowledged that I exist." Nezu's whiskers twitched. "But 'sir' works. It has a nice formality to it. Almost legal in nature. Like addressing a judge."
The word landed like a pin dropping in a cathedral.
Ren's expression did not change. His hands did not move. His breathing stayed even. Fourteen breaths per minute. Resting rate. He'd trained himself to hold resting rate in high-stress situations the same way he'd trained himself to throw a punch without telegraphing.
Don't react. Don't react. He's fishing. That's what the smart ones do. They throw words into the room and watch where your eyes go.
"I called you here to discuss your entrance exam performance," Nezu said. He lifted his teacup. Took a sip. Set it down. The clink of porcelain on porcelain was unreasonably loud. "One hundred and eighteen points. First place across all battle centres. Seventy-three villain points and forty-five rescue points. A remarkable achievement."
"Thank you."
"Your registered quirk is Regeneration."
"Yes."
"Regeneration. A healing factor. The ability to recover from physical damage at an accelerated rate." Nezu recited the definition the way a teacher would read from a textbook."A wonderful quirk. Very useful. Very survivable. Not typically associated with throwing a softball one thousand four hundred and thirty-seven metres or putting one's fist through industrial-grade titanium alloy, but then again, quirks are full of surprises, aren't they?"
"Regeneration enhances my physical capabilities."
"Does it?"
"The constant cellular repair cycle allows for greater exertion without risk of permanent damage. It's not just healing. It's reinforcement."
That was true.
Nezu's smile widened by approximately two millimetres.
"Fascinating. I'd love to have our science department study that mechanism. The idea that regenerative tissue could produce superhuman strength output is quite novel. I don't believe it's been documented in any existing literature on regeneration-class quirks." He paused. "But that's not really what I wanted to discuss."
Here it comes.
"I wanted to ask you about something I noticed during the zero-pointer sequence."
"The rescue?"
"The rescue, yes. Specifically, the object you used to destroy the concrete slab pinning your fellow examinee."
Silence.
Nezu waited. He was very good at waiting.
"You produced an object in your left hand," Nezu continued. "A small, dense implement. Dark in colour. It appeared instantaneously. You threw it with enough force to shatter reinforced concrete at a precise angle that avoided injuring the girl beneath it. The object then embedded itself in the ground approximately three metres past the impact site." He paused.
"And then it vanished."
Ren let the silence sit.
"I'm not sure what you're referring to, Principal."
True. Technically. He wasn't sure which specific detail Nezu was zeroing in on. The existence of the object. The throw. The dissolution. The shape. All of them were problems. Not knowing which problem Nezu wanted to discuss first was genuine uncertainty.
Nezu's whiskers twitched. "The object in your left hand, Asano-kun. The one you threw."
"I used what was available to me to save a fellow examinee."
Also true. The gavel was available to him. It was always available to him. It was part of his cursed technique, which was part of him, which made it available by definition. The fact that "available" implied something he'd picked up off the ground rather than something he'd manifested.
The binding vow didn't care about implications. It cared about statements. And "I used what was available to me" was a statement that was true.
Nezu stared at him for four seconds. The stare of something that had just been handed a puzzle piece that technically fit but was clearly from a different puzzle entirely.
"What was available to you," Nezu repeated. Slowly. Tasting each word. "I see."
"With respect, Principal, the arena was full of debris. The zero-pointer had been demolishing buildings for several minutes before I engaged."
"With respect, Asano-kun, I have reviewed the footage frame by frame. Forty-seven times." Nezu's paws unfolded. He reached to the side of his desk and tapped a button. A holographic screen materialised above the surface. Two images, side by side.
The left image: a freeze-frame from the entrance exam. Ren's left hand, mid-throw. The object was blurred by motion but the shape was unmistakable. A handle and a flat striking surface.
The right image: a forensic photograph from an HPSC case file. An indentation in a concrete wall. Basement. Poor lighting. Evidence markers on the floor. The indentation was roughly the same shape as the object in the first image.
Roughly was generous. They were identical.
"The image on the left is from your entrance exam," Nezu said. "The image on the right is from HPSC Case File 2247-B. An incident in the 9th District, three months ago. Four individuals found unconscious and quirkless with no memory of the encounter. The forensics team catalogued this indentation as 'impact damage, unknown source.'" He looked at Ren. "The shapes match."
The room was very quiet.
Ren looked at the images. He looked at them for exactly three seconds. Then he looked back at Nezu.
He couldn't say it wasn't a gavel. He couldn't say he'd never been to the 9th District. He couldn't say any of the things that a normal person in this situation would say because every single one of them would be a lie and his mouth would not form lies. It would choke on them. It would stop mid-syllable and leave him hanging in the silence with half a word and a face that screamed guilt louder than any confession.
"What are you suggesting, Principal?"
Nezu tilted his head the other way. "I'm not suggesting anything. I'm showing you two images and noting a visual similarity. That's all. As an educator, I find it my responsibility to investigate when patterns emerge." He picked up his tea again. "Although I will say, the HPSC has been looking for a pattern in the Arbitrator case for quite some time. Three hundred and twenty-nine incidents. Almost nightly. And yet, not a single piece of actionable evidence. No DNA. No fingerprints. No CCTV. No quirk signature on any scanner. Complete memory erasure in every victim. The only physical trace left behind at any scene has been the occasional impact damage in walls and floors." He took a sip.
Ren said nothing.
"You know what I find most interesting about the Arbitrator case?" Nezu set his cup down. "The timing. Every single incident occurs during a very specific window. Late evening. After approximately nine PM. Never before. And always, without exception, at least one hour after the last confirmed public sighting of All Might."
He knows.
"Now, on its own, that's just a statistical observation. Criminals prefer the dark. Nothing unusual. But when you combine it with the precision and the consistency. The fact that this individual has never once been spotted by a hero patrol. Never triggered a sensor. Never been caught on a single camera." Nezu's smile was gone now. His face was neutral. His black eyes were fixed on Ren with an intensity that made the air in the room feel heavier. "It paints a picture of someone who isn't just avoiding detection. It paints a picture of someone who knows exactly when the strongest hero in the country is off the board. Someone who has mapped All Might's operational limit down to the minute."
The clock on Nezu's wall ticked.
"Someone young enough to have the energy for nightly operations. Someone strong enough to overpower individuals with combat-oriented quirks. Someone with a mechanism for removing quirks that doesn't register on any known scanner. And someone who, during a high-stress situation at a UA entrance exam, instinctively produced an object identical to the only physical evidence ever recovered from three hundred and twenty-nine crime scenes."
Tick. Tick. Tick.
"And that someone scored first place in the entrance exam. And that someone is sitting in my office right now. And that someone has a registered quirk that does not explain roughly ninety percent of what I watched him do on camera."
Nezu folded his paws again. The smile came back warm and friendly.
"So, Asano-kun. I think it's time we had an honest conversation, don't you?"
Ren looked at him.
The hollow behind his eyes was not quiet. It was vibrating. A low hum that sat between his temples like a tuning fork struck against bone.
Nezu was not a target. Nezu was not a criminal. Nezu was something worse.
Nezu was someone who already knew the answer and was asking the question anyway.
"I'm not sure what you want me to say, Principal."
"The truth would be lovely."
"The truth is that I'm a first-year student who passed your entrance exam and is trying to become a hero."
"That is a true statement," Nezu said. "But it's not the whole truth, is it?"
Ren held his gaze.
The silence stretched.
Nezu watched him with the patience of something eternal.
"Let me ask you a different question," Nezu said. "What do you think justice is, Asano-kun?"
Ren opened his mouth
And then he—
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Get mogged by cliffhanger-kun again.