The television mounted in the corner of the bar was an old, thick-rimmed model that buzzed with the static of the humid Okinawa air. On the screen, the scrolling red ticker of the national news was a relentless reminder of the world Akira Furuhaya had been excised from.
UA HIGH SCHOOL ATTACKED AGAIN. THIRD BREACH IN ONE YEAR. NEZU RELIEVED OF DUTY. SCHOOL LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT.
Akira sat at the far end of the scarred wooden bar, his fingers wrapped around a glass of plain, room-temperature water. To anyone else, the water was flavourless. To him, it was a sanctuary. It didn't have a history. It didn't have a soul. It didn't taste of the panic of a dying child or the cold grease of a scientist's lab coat. It was just hydrogen and oxygen, the only things in this world that didn't demand he witness something unkind.
He listened to the reporter's voice, strained, professional, yet cracking at the edges. The world was watching Japan drown. With All Might in a coma, the light had gone out, and the global fallout was reaching even these distant, salt-sprayed shores.
International heroes debating intervention... Villain groups in the Americas and Europe growing bolder... The 'Harvest' mentality spreading beyond Japan's borders...
Everything had turned sour. The era of the "Golden Light" was being dismantled in real-time. Akira watched the blurry footage of the UA gates and felt a hollow ache. He knew, with a detective's instinct that even a mind-wipe couldn't kill, that the peace he had once protected was gone forever. Japan was no longer a country, it was a carcass, and the vultures were coming from every corner of the map.
He looked down at his reflection in the water. He looked like a man who had been hollowed out with a spoon.
His dark hair, once kept in a sharp, professional trim, was now longer and swept back in a way that felt foreign to him, perhaps a style his "original" self had preferred. He was gaunt, his cheekbones like knives, and his dark coat hung off his thin frame like a funeral shroud. He hadn't bothered to disguise himself. The Commission had already done the work of erasing his face from the public mind, he was dead, and dead people didn't need masks.
He thought about the note.
The letter had arrived during his fifth week in the Akagura Vault, delivered like any other standard piece of mail. The handwriting was his own, the precise, slanted script of a man who spent his life filing reports.
If you are reading this, it means you are alive, and it means your head is a mess. Memories have been altered, Akira. Go to the Blue Reef Bar in Naha as soon as you taste freedom.
He had been here every day for two weeks. He had tasted the wood of the bar (stale tobacco and old regrets), the metal of the door handle (sea-salt and the sweat of laborers), and the glass of his water. Nothing. No contact. No revelation. Just the quiet hum of an island that seemed suspiciously, unnervingly peaceful.
Okinawa was an anomaly. While Yokohama burned and Tokyo became ruins that was slowly rebuilding, this place remained still. No "Harvest" killings. No high-level villain sightings. Akira had once thought he could settle here, leave the "tasting" behind and just exist until the end.
But as the thought crossed his mind, a jolt of static hissed through his brain. Settling down. The thought felt like a transplant, a memory of a desire that didn't belong to the man he was now.
He stood up, the legs of his stool scraping harshly against the floor. He couldn't stay until evening today. The air in the bar felt too thick, too full of the lies the news was spinning.
He walked out into the humid afternoon, his jacket slung over his shoulder. The street was narrow, lined with vibrant green vines and the smell of roasting pork. He began to walk, his mind drifting back to his "crimes."
He could "remember" the assault on the officer. He could "remember" the leak of the classified documents. But when he looked at those memories, they weren't right. For Akira, a memory was a sensory explosion, the taste of the paper he had touched, the smell of the sweat on the officer's skin. But these memories of his guilt were... cinematic. They were in the third person. He saw himself as if from a camera mounted on a wall.
It's a graft, he thought, his jaw tightening. A legal fiction written into my gray matter.
He was so deep in the autopsy of his own mind that he didn't notice the figure approaching from the opposite direction until he bumped into him.
It was a kid.
At first glance, he looked like any other unique resident of the islands, half-Japanese, half-something else, with a striking mop of white hair. But as Akira stepped back to apologize, the words died in his throat.
The kid was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen, but he didn't move like a teenager. He was dressed in simple, utilitarian clothes, but there was a gravity to him, a cold, tactical weight that made Akira's detective instincts scream Predator.
"Sorry," Akira muttered, his voice a low crawl.
The kid didn't respond. He just kept walking, his gait rhythmic and silent.
Akira stopped, turning his head. "Rude kid," he said under his breath, a flicker of his old, irritable personality sparking through.
The kid stopped.
The movement was instantaneous. One moment he was walking away, the next, he had pivoted on his heel, staring Akira directly in the eye.
Akira's heart didn't just beat, it thundered. His blood felt like it had turned to ice water. The kid's eyes were the most terrifying things Akira had ever seen, obsidian pupils that seemed to swallow the light of the sun, cold and apathetic, yet vibrating with a hidden, ancient violence.
For a man who had "tasted" massacres, Akira knew what death looked like. He felt a primal, biological urge to drop to his knees or run until his lungs burst. The fear was so foreign, so visceral, that his hand began to shake.
They stood there for five seconds. To Akira, it felt like an eternity in a lightless room.
Then, just as suddenly as he had stopped, the kid turned back around. He didn't say a word. He just continued down the street, vanishing around a corner where the hibiscus grew thick.
Akira stood frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, the tropical heat suddenly feeling like a winter chill. He let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, his knees nearly buckling.
"That kid..." Akira whispered, his voice trembling. "He gave me the creeps."
He looked at his hands, still shaking. He was a detective who had forgotten his past, but his body hadn't forgotten the feeling of standing in the presence of a monster. And for the first time since he arrived in Okinawa, Akira Furuhaya realized that the "peace" of the island... might be coming to a devastating crunch.
___
The humid air of Okinawa clung to the skin like a second, unwanted layer of clothing. Yoshi Abara walked through the narrow streets of Naha, his eyes fixed on the horizon where the turquoise sea met the bruised purple of the twilight sky.
Purpose was a heavy word, a concept that had governed his entire existence while he was a ghost inside Izuku Midoriya. Now that he had his own bones, his own lungs, and his revenge was complete, that purpose had evaporated, leaving him as light and directionless as a dandelion seed.
He didn't even know why he was here.
A few days ago, he had stood on a street corner in Tokyo, watching a teenage couple argue over their vacation plans. They had flipped a coin, heads for Sapporo, tails for Okinawa. It had landed on heads. Yoshi had found a 10-yen coin in the gutter after they left and did the same. Tails. So, he had come south.
Peaceful, he thought, looking at the vibrant hibiscus flowers. It's too peaceful. It makes me feel like I'm still dead.
He wondered what other kids his age were doing. They were in classrooms, worrying about exams or this current Harvest leaderboard. Yoshi knew he could walk into any Hero Academy and pass the entrance exams without breaking a sweat. His mind was a biological calculator, his quirk, Ripple Effect, required a high-level mastery of spatial geometry and calculus, that just came naturally to him, to manipulate distance. But he didn't care for heroism, and he certainly didn't care for the mundane life of a civilian.
He reached the "Blue Reef," a small, unassuming hotel tucked away from the main tourist strips. Earlier that day, he had noticed a lanky, distracted-looking young man with a teal hoodie fumbling with his wallet. Yoshi had lifted the room key card with a surgeon's precision.
He swiped the card. The light blinked green.
Yoshi stepped into the room, expecting the sterile silence of an empty suite. Instead, he found the lights on. Standing by the bed was the man from earlier, now half-dressed in a sleek, streamlined hero costume that looked like it was built for high-speed mobility. He had a wide, somewhat goofy smile on his face, though it faltered the second he saw Yoshi.
"Whoa! Hey, kid! You're the one from the terminal!" He pointed a finger at him, looking more surprised than threatened. "You've got something that belongs to me, don't you? My key card? And maybe my lunch money?"
Yoshi didn't flinch. He didn't even change his expression. He stood in the doorway, his obsidian eyes scanning the room. "I don't have it."
"Come on, man," he sighed, scratching the back of his head. "I saw you slide it out of my pocket. I'm a hero, you know? Well, a sidekick, technically. You can't just steal from the good guys."
"I don't have it," Yoshi repeated, his voice a flat, dead calm. "The card declined at a pizza joint three blocks away. I assumed you were broke, so I cut it up and threw it in a drain."
The man's mouth fell open. He looked like he had been slapped with a wet fish. "You... you cut it up? That was my last twenty bucks! Do you have any idea how expensive it is to stay in a luxury spot like this in Naha? I'm supposed to be back here on a 'stealth mission'!"
Yoshi glanced at the hero's gear, high-tech sliding pads and aerodynamic plating. "Don't heroes get bank? You look like you're dressed in a year's rent."
The fool turned a vibrant shade of red. "Yeah, well, I'm a sidekick for an American guy. Captain Celebrity? He's... uh... not great with the budget. He spends it all on hair gel and billboards of his own face. I'm basically working for 'exposure'."
Yoshi let out a long, weary sigh. The man was a hero, an adult, and yet he was more of a child than Yoshi had ever been. "It's not my fault you don't know how to handle your money. Get out."
"Hey! You can't just kick me out of my own room!" the man stepped forward, his posture shifting. He wasn't aggressive, but he was fast. "You could get in a lot of trouble for this. Stealing, trespassing, property damage... but look, I'm a nice guy. If you let me stay here tonight so I don't have to sleep on the beach, I won't press charges. Deal?"
Yoshi didn't negotiate. He moved.
He stepped forward and swung a low kick, aiming for the hero's lead leg. To his surprise, the man glided. Using his quirk, the hero hissed across the carpet like air on ice, dodging the strike and immediately looping around to latch onto Yoshi's arm in a restraint hold.
"Whoa, kid! You're fast!" he grunted, trying to pin Yoshi's arm behind his back.
Yoshi felt a flicker of annoyance. He didn't like being touched. He clenched his fist and activated Ripple Effect, to compress the kinetic energy in the small gap between his elbow and the hero's ribs.
A small, localized shockwave vibrated through the room, rattling the windows in their frames. The force was enough to knock the air out of the hero and send his nervous system into a momentary shutdown. The hero's eyes rolled back, and he slumped forward, slipping off Yoshi's back and hitting the floor with a heavy thud.
Yoshi stood over him for a moment, his heart rate barely elevated. He felt a sour, twisting sensation in his chest, a ghost of a feeling he recognized as guilt. It was a "bad" feeling, one he hadn't felt since he was human.
"Annoying," Yoshi muttered.
He reached down and pulled the phone from the hero's utility belt. It was a high-end, military-grade device. He tried to swipe it open, but the biometric lock held firm. Hero tech, he thought. He dug through the man's discarded wallet and found a specialized ID card.
Koichi Haimawari. Rank: International Hero (Class B-1). License status: Active under the International Hero Act (IHA).
Yoshi's eyes narrowed as he recalled the political climate. The IHA allowed heroes from the Western Bloc, the US and several European nations, to operate in signatory countries. Japan had signed it years ago or maybe they initiated it, Yoshi couldn't recall, it was the answer to some surprise test Izuku Midoriya had anyway.
China and Russia had refused, isolating themselves, but the West was already pouring "assistance" into Japan.
The Crawler wasn't just a sidekick, he was an international operative, a high-ranking mover in a five-year career that had spanned two continents. He was what some might call a "Big Fish" who had just been taken out by a kid in a Naha hotel room.
Yoshi looked at the unconscious man. He could have finished him. He could have taken the gear and sold it. But the "sour" feeling remained.
He leaned down, grabbed Koichi by the underarms, and hauled him onto the plush sofa. He moved with a clinical efficiency, propping the hero's head up on a cushion. He walked into the bathroom, soaked a small hand towel in cold water, and draped it over Koichi's forehead.
"There," Yoshi whispered, walking toward the bedroom door. "That's my good deed of the day."
As he shut the door, Yoshi didn't see the way Koichi's finger twitched, or the way the hero's phone, even while locked, began to pulse with a faint, blue tracking signal.