The morning in Yokohama usually arrived with the scent of salt and the mechanical hum of the port, but today the air felt stagnant, heavy with the humid pre-game of a big storm coming soon.
In the Naka Ward, the streets were already thick with commuters, a sea of black suits and school uniforms moving with a frantic, collective purpose.
"Did you see the leaderboard this morning?" a woman asked, her eyes glued to her phone as she navigated the sidewalk by muscle memory.
"It's still at zero." her companion replied, checking her own screen. "Was the threat just to scare us."
"Wouldn't that be for the better," the first woman sighed, though there was no horror in her voice, only a tired, cynical acceptance.
The conversation was common, the background noise of a society that had traded its peace for a scoreboard. Death would no longer be a tragedy, but a statistic, a push notification on a Tuesday morning.
Then, the rhythm of the sidewalk broke.
It started with a sound that didn't belong in the morning commute, a high-pitched, warbling shriek of genuine, unadulterated terror. It came from a narrow street wedged between a luxury department store and a crumbling brick apartment block.
A middle-aged salaryman, his briefcase dropped and spilling papers into the gutter, was backed against a vending machine. His hand was raised, finger trembling as he pointed upward toward the web of high-tension telephone wires that crisscrossed the narrow strip of sky between the buildings.
"Look!" he gasped, his voice cracking. "Up there! God, look at it!"
One person stopped. Then ten. Then fifty. The human tide of the commute stalled, and as eyes turned upward, the collective breath of the crowd hitched in a jagged, synchronized sob.
Tangled thirty feet above the pavement, woven into the black cables like a gruesome macabre ornament, was a body.
It was Takaomi Suda, known to the public as the Pro Hero "Nevermore," the long-standing sidekick and tactical lead for the city's golden son, Stinger. Suda was a crow-mutant, a man whose head was a sleek, feathered avian structure and whose limbs ended in powerful, taloned grips. He was a veteran of a hundred raids, a man who had navigated the shadows of Yokohama for a decade.
Now, he was a nightmare in three dimensions.
The body had been subjected to a violence that defied the laws of biology. He had been hanged. His long, bird-like neck had been twisted three full rotations, the feathers matted with a dark, oily ichor that dripped rhythmically onto the pavement below. But it was the limbs that caused the crowd to recoil.
His arms had been threaded through the high-tension wires. The metal cables didn't sit on top of his skin, they passed directly through the muscle and bone of his forearms as if the flesh had simply ceased to be an obstacle. His legs were splayed at impossible, ninety-degree angles, his talons fused into the ceramic insulators of a transformer box.
He looked less like a corpse and more like a biological error, a man who had been folded into the architecture of the city by a hand that didn't understand the concept of a "solid object." His beak was locked open in a silent, frozen scream, and his black, beady eyes had been popped from their sockets, left dangling by the optic nerves like two dark, wet pearls.
For five seconds, the street was silent.
Then, the first phone came out.
"Get the angle," a teenager muttered, his eyes wide not with grief, but with the frantic hunger of a content creator. "If I go live now, I can hit a million views before the police even arrive."
Click. Click-click. Beep.
The sound of dozens of camera shutters filled the alley, a digital staccato that drowned out the wet drip-drop of blood hitting a discarded soda can. People weren't running for help. They weren't calling for a hero. They were positioning themselves, holding their devices aloft to capture the perfect shot of the unmade man.
"Is that Nevermore?" a man asked, adjusting his glasses to see the screen better. "Look at the way his chest is caved in... that's nasty."
"I wonder if Stinger has seen this," a woman whispered, her face illuminated by the glow of her recording. "The city's going to go crazy. This is a message."
The crowd grew, a wall of voyeurs pressing closer to the zone. They stood in the blood-flecked shadows of the alley, their faces cold and distant, viewing the brutalized remains of a hero through the safety of a five-inch glass screen.
Above them, Takaomi Suda swayed slightly in the morning breeze, his braided limbs creaking against the wires, a silent witness to a society that had forgotten how to look at death without a filter.
___
The office of Kenji Hoshino was a sanctuary of sterile perfection. Located on the 44th floor of a gleaming Yokohama skyscraper, every surface was polished to a mirror sheen. The air was scrubbed by high-grade filters, carrying only the crisp, sharp scent of expensive sea-salt cologne and the faint, chemical tang of lemon-scented cleaning agents.
Kenji sat behind a desk of white obsidian, his posture so impossibly straight it looked as though his spine had been forged from the same high-tensile steel as his needles. He was currently peeling an orange with a silver paring knife, his movements precise and rhythmic. Not a single drop of juice touched the white surface of his desk.
The heavy, soundproofed door slid open. His second assistant, a young man named Saito whose suit was slightly, unforgivably, wrinkled at the elbows, stepped in. His face was the colour of curdled milk.
"Sir," Saito whispered, his voice trembling. "The scene in the Naka Ward... the identification is confirmed. It was Takaomi Suda. Nevermore is... he's dead."
Kenji didn't flinch. The paring knife didn't slip. He finished the slice, placed the orange segment on a pristine ceramic plate, and finally looked up. His pale, icy blue eyes were static, unblinking as they pinned Saito to the spot.
"Suda?" Kenji's voice was soft, melodic, and terrifyingly calm. "I find that... irritating and unbelievable, Saito. Takaomi was an instrument of the highest caliber. He understood the symmetry of a well-executed raid. To hear that he has been neutralized is a significant disruption to the local ecosystem."
"It's worse sir," Saito swallowed hard, his eyes darting to the floor. "The crowd... they're recording it. The way he was found... it was messy. It was grotesque. It's all over the digital boards."
A subtle twitch appeared at the corner of Kenji's square jaw, the only sign of the boiling agitation beneath his porcelain skin. Messy. That was the word that hurt. The thought of his tactical lead, a man he had refined and corrected for a decade, being turned into a public spectacle of disorder was an insult to Kenji's very soul. It felt like a stain on his own blue-and-white reputation.
"Who did it?" Kenji asked, his voice dropping into a low, clinical hum. "Which infection caused this?"
"We don't know, sir. There's nothing to even guess off of, other than maybe someone with a vendetta. But there's something else." Saito held up a tablet, his hands shaking. "UA reached out through an encrypted channel ten minutes ago. Principal Nezu claims they have intelligence suggesting your life is in immediate peril. They've offered to relocate you to the Heights Alliance bunker under the Aegis Protocol. They want to 'provide services' for your protection."
Kenji stared at the tablet, then suddenly, he let out a short, high-pitched giggle. It was a bright, childish sound that didn't reach his frozen eyes.
"Services? From the mouse?" Kenji stood up, his military-grade posture casting a long, sharp shadow across the white floor. "Tell them no, Saito. Tell them the 'New-Port Hero' does not require a nursery. Every hero's life is in danger now. The world has become a jagged, unstitched place because people like Nezu allowed the rot to spread. They let the students become targets, and now they want to hide the professionals in a box?"
He walked to the window, looking out over the sprawling grid of Yokohama. In his mind, he could hear a voice, high, sharp, and demanding. Perfection is a practice, Kenji. A smudge is a failure. Correct it now.
"I am the only thing keeping the fabric of this city from fraying into total chaos," Kenji murmured, his reflection in the glass showing a man of unsettling, mannequin-like symmetry. "If I flounder under the pressure, if I hide in a bunker while my city is 'stained' by whoever did this to Suda, then I am no better than the villains I remove."
He turned back to Saito, his icy gaze sharpening into a predatory focus.
"Prepare my transport. I will not sit here while an amateur defaces my work. I need to see the circumstances of Suda's death with my own eyes. I need to understand the nature of the 'mess' before I can clean it up."
He reached for his translucent blue visor, snapping it over his eyes. Instantly, the world shifted into a HUD of clinical data, vectors, heat signatures, and structural weak points.
"Tell UA to focus on their own." Stinger said, his voice as cold and sharp as a needle. "I have a city to sanitize. And I intend to find the one who broke my instrument and stitch them into the dirt where they belong."
___
The smell of Yokohama was shifting.
Shota Aizawa stood on a street corner, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his jumpsuit, watching as the forensics team finished detaching Takaomi Suda from the telephone wires. The meat-wagon was idling nearby, its amber lights pulsing against the glass of the luxury boutiques. Behind the police tape, the crowd hadn't thinned. They stood with their phones aloft, a digital hive mind recording the final indignity of a fallen hero.
Aizawa felt a surge of cold, visceral disgust. They weren't mourning, they were harvesting content. To them, the "New-Port Sidekick" was just a trending topic. The city felt wrong, unreal. It was as if everyone was playing a part in a script they hadn't read, obsessed with the reflection of the world rather than the world itself.
He turned away, his mind retracing the geometry of the crime scene. He had arrived ahead of the official time Nezu was set to send the email to Stinger, acting on a hunch that the "exemplary hero" would be at the morgue.
It wasn't a villain attack, Aizawa thought, his stomach twisting into a hard, cold knot. Villains of this era are more messy and want the recognition, unless the harvest is starting.
He thought of Yoshi Abara. He thought of the power that had unmade All Might. The brutality of Suda's death was targeted, intimate, and impossibly precise. And the most sickening part, the part that made Aizawa want to roar at the sky, was that Izuku Midoriya's hands had done the weaving. His student, a boy who couldn't stand to see a classmate trip, was now a vessel for a murderer.
Aizawa navigated the streets toward the municipal morgue, blending into the shadows. He reached the facility ten minutes later, and there, standing under the harsh LED floodlights of the intake bay, was the "Pristine Needle."
Kenji Hoshino, Stinger, looked like he had been sculpted from marble. His cerulean and white suit was spotless, his dirty blond hair perfect despite the morning wind. When Aizawa approached and introduced himself, Stinger let out a short, airy giggle.
"Eraserhead! UA is certainly... prompt," Stinger said, his pale blue eyes static behind his translucent visor. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Nezu has always been a fan of efficiency."
"My condolences for Suda," Aizawa said, his voice flat. "It's a significant loss for the city."
"It is a tragedy of disorder," Stinger replied, his voice taking on a clinical, detached tone. "Have you seen the report? The way he was... tied into the infrastructure? His arms were threaded through the copper wiring without a single tear in the insulation. His talons were fused with the ceramic of the transformer. It's almost surgical. If it weren't so filthy, I'd almost be impressed by the focus it required."
Aizawa felt a chill. Stinger wasn't talking about his friend, it was like he was talking about an operation on a medical desk.
"I have some questions, Hoshino," Aizawa said, dropping the hero names. "Specifically about a cold case. Does the name Yoshi Abara mean anything to you?"
The shift was subtle, but to a man like Aizawa, it was as loud as a gunshot. Stinger's impossibly straight posture went rigid. Behind the blue tint of his visor, his unblinking eyes seemed to freeze.
"Abara..." Stinger murmured, the name sounding like a slur in his mouth. "I knew a Hana Abara. A deeply troubled girl. She was... a blemish on the port's development. I tried to help her, to provide a path to order, but during a terrible storm she had died. It was bad, only a ripped off arm was found."
"And her younger brother? Yoshi?"
Stinger's jaw tightened, the mannequin-like symmetry of his face fracturing just a fraction. "The boy was unwell. Psychotic delusions. He spent some time in a ward for the safety of the public. I... I felt a sense of filial duty. I donated to the facility, ensured he had the 'best' care. It was a tragedy when I heard he had escaped and later died. Why are you asking about a dead boy, Eraserhead?"
"Oh, you know..." Aizawa said, watching Stinger's reaction with predatory intensity. "You've kept quite a close eye on a boy who supposedly had 'so little' to do with you, Hoshino. Most heroes don't track the psychiatric history of a victim's sibling for years."
"He was accusing me of murder!" Stinger's voice suddenly rose, a sharp, childish edge cutting through his clinical mask. He stuttered, his hands twitching at his sides. "I... I am nothing like Endeavor! People make claims against him all the time because he's a brawler, but I am pure. I am clean. The boy was simply... broken. I wanted to make sure he was okay and could carry on with his life."
Aizawa didn't look away. He remembered the hollow, broken shell of All Might in the hospital bed. He remembered the look in "Midoriya's" eyes... the black pits of Yoshi Abara. He looked at Stinger's spotless white suit and felt a sudden, mounting certainty that the "blemish" wasn't the Abara siblings.
"I see," Aizawa said softly. He stepped closer, his shadow falling over the cerulean armour. "Just one more thing..."
Aizawa paused, his red-rimmed eyes locking onto Stinger's visor.
"What exactly was Nevermore's quirk, Hoshino?"