The office of the Commission President was not a place of jagged shadows or imposing stone, it was a sanctuary of soft textures, diffused sunlight, and the intoxicatingly clean scent of white lilies. Kanzaki Reiko, known to the public as "Madame President," sat behind a desk crafted from a single, seamless slab of pale birch.
She was a woman of immaculate, almost unnerving composure. Her hair was pulled back into a silver-threaded bun that didn't permit a single stray strand, and her suit was the colour of a winter morning, sharp, professional, yet possessing a softness that invited trust.
To look at Reiko was to feel a sense of profound stability. She didn't radiate power so much as she radiated order. When she spoke, her voice had a gentle, measured warmth that made the most harrowing reports sound like manageable inconveniences.
She was the mother who told you the monster under the bed wasn't real, even as she signed the order to have the floorboards salted. She genuinely believed in the peace she maintained, she simply understood that peace was an engineered product, a machine that required the occasional sacrifice of a gear to keep the engine from seizing.
She didn't revel in the "necessary evils" of her office, she bore them like a mantle of grace, convinced that her willingness to be "utilitarian" was the only thing standing between Japan and the howling abyss.
Hawks stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, his red wings slightly ruffled, looking out at the Tokyo skyline. He felt like a jagged piece of glass in a room full of silk.
"You're hovering, Keigo," Reiko said, her voice a soothing lilt. She didn't look up from the tablet she was reviewing, her fingers moving with the precision of a concert pianist. "The tea is a Darjeeling blend from the northern estates. It's meant to settle the nerves. Please, sit. You've had a long flight back from the south."
Hawks turned, the leather of the visitor's chair creaking as he sat. He didn't touch the tea. "I lost them, Reiko. Furuhaya, the Crawler... and the third one. Some kid."
Reiko finally looked up. Her eyes were a clear, steady hazel, kind, yet possessing a depth that suggested she was constantly calculating the longevity of everyone she looked at. She gave him a small, sincere smile, the kind a doctor gives a patient they are about to deliver difficult news to.
"Loss is merely a relocation of assets, Keigo. We haven't lost them, we simply know where they are not," she said softly. "I do not blame you for the failure in Naha. The 'Age of Ash' has a way of complicating the present. However, we must address the stability of the nation. Furuhaya is a leak that must be plugged, but there are two ghosts I fear more than a disgraced detective, for the short term anyway."
Hawks tilted his head. "Shigaraki's 'Harvest'?"
"Shigaraki is a storm. Storms pass," Reiko replied, leaning back. "But Lady Nagant and the Amur Tiger... they are the foundations of the house. Nagant remains a illusive from teachings we granted her, likely waiting for the right moment to tear down the walls she helped build. But it is the Tiger, Kōga Tsukishiro, who concerns me most. He was the first prisoner of Tartarus for a reason, and if he has truly emerged from the ruins..."
"The Tiger?" Hawks said. "A cautionary tale from the Purge. If he were in the country, I think we would have heard something long ago. He's likely half a world away, if he's even alive."
Reiko sighed, a sound of genuine, maternal regret. "I wish that were true. But even if he were standing in front of you, Keigo, you are to do nothing. You are not to engage. You are not to even shadow him. If you see a glimpse of gold and obsidian fur, you are to fly until your lungs burn."
Hawks stiffened. The Number Three Hero being told to flee from a single target was an insult he hadn't expected. "Why? I've taken down High-Ends. I can handle an old man with a mutation quirk."
"He is not an old man, and his quirk is not a mutation. It is a biological black hole," Reiko said, her tone shifting from warm to clinical, the sound of a blade being unsheathed from velvet. "Kōga possesses Predatory Assimilation. It is a visceral, primal power. He gets to take a quirk, although it is through consumption of his target. Flesh or blood. Once it is in his system, the power is permanently grafted onto his soul. He has a 'Two-Slot' rule: his tiger physiology is his base, but he can carry two external quirks at any given time. If he wants a new one, he must purge an old one."
She stood up, walking toward a small, framed calligraphy piece on the wall. "He has not aged a day since the day of his arrest. We believe his first slot is occupied by a stasis quirk he ingested during the Purge. But it is the second slot that makes him a god of the old world. Before he was captured, he consumed half of Reiji Kisaragi. The White Standard."
Hawks felt a cold sweat prickle the back of his neck. "He has Refinement?"
"He has the very concept of it," Reiko whispered, her eyes fixed on the calligraphy. "Reiji Kisaragi didn't use force. He used purity. His quirk, Refinement, allowed him to project a field that ignored the physical properties of anything he deemed an 'impurity.' If your skin was hardened like diamond, his blade saw it as an error in human design and erased the resistance. If you had an energy shield, it was merely 'noise' that he filtered out. He moved through things as if the world were made of air, and the target were made of nothing at all. He 'refined' flesh into a state of permanent severance. Regeneration fails because the body no longer remembers how to be whole where he has touched it."
She turned back to Hawks, her expression one of profound, unsettling pity. "Imagine that power in the hands of a predator with the instincts of an Amur Tiger. A man who moves in total silence, who ignores all defences, and who views every hero of this modern era as 'clutter' to be cleared away. Kōga is the apex. He is the reason the Commission was founded, to hide the fact that such things could exist."
The silence in the room became heavy, the scent of the lilies suddenly feeling cloying, like a funeral parlor. Reiko walked back to her desk and sat, the "Madame President" mask of kindness clicking back into place.
"But Kōga is a folk for another day," she said, her voice returning to that soft, encouraging warmth. "Let's discuss the immediate variable. In your report, you mentioned a third party in Naha. Not Furuhaya. Not the Crawler. That boy."
She tapped a key on her desk, and a grainy, thermal image from a satellite appeared on the screen.
"We have no record of him," Reiko said, her eyes narrowing as she studied the distortion. "No name, no registry, no DNA match from the scene. An unidentified variable in a system that does not tolerate them. You fought him, Keigo. You felt his quirk. Tell me about this kid."
Hawks leaned forward, his mind flashing back to the humid heat of Okinawa, the way the air had suddenly felt like it was being folded by invisible hands.
"He's dangerous, Madame," Hawks said, his voice low. "He doesn't move like a student. He moves like he's already won the fight before it starts. He can teleport. And he's incredibly violent, and even arrogant. And his eyes... they weren't the eyes of a child who wants to be a typical teen. They were the eyes of someone who's decided to light a grand fire for the ages."
Reiko watched the thermal image, her finger tracing the edge of the distorted space. She didn't look angry, she looked like a gardener who had found a new, unidentified species of thorn in her flowerbed.
She looked up at Hawks, her smile thin and sharp. "Find out who he is. Every friend, every teacher, every scrap of his history. If he is not an asset, then he is a threat, like he has already shown himself to be."
She picked up her tea, the porcelain clinking softly.
___
The sun over Osaka was a pale, freezing disc, casting long, sharp shadows across the district of Shin-Sekai. It was the kind of cold that bit through hero costumes and settled in the marrow, yet for Kaito Ishida, it felt like home.
Kaito, known to the local precincts as the Pro Hero Lithos, was a man of stone and soft edges. His mutation gave him skin the texture of weathered granite and a pair of decorative, obsidian horns that curved back from his brow, giving him a "human-demon" silhouette that would have seen him shunned in other rural areas.
But here, in the heart of Osaka's mutant population, he was a pillar. He had graduated from UA only a year ago, skipping the glitz of the Top 10 agencies to return to his neighbourhood. He wanted to be near his grandmother, he wanted to buy her the heavy wool blankets she liked and walk the streets where people didn't flinch at his face.
He was currently carrying a small bag of roasted chestnuts, the steam rising in the wintry air. He wasn't All Might, and he didn't want to be. He was a hero who knew the names of the shopkeepers where he grew up. He was content.
As he walked, his boots crunching on the frost-dusted pavement, he stopped before the Central Plaza. In the center stood the Monument of the Severed Needle.
It was a massive bronze casting, a titanic tiger, its muscles coiled like mountain ranges, its jaws clamped violently around a slender silver blade. It commemorated the day more than sixty years ago when the Age of Ash began to crack, the day the Amur Tiger had hunted down Reiji Kisaragi, the White Standard, and ended the Great Purge in a spray of aristocratic blood.
Kaito looked up at the Tiger's bronze face. As a child, he had worshipped this image. This statue was the reason his family had migrated here, it was the reason mutants had a place to breathe.
But UA's history books had been unkind. They taught him that Kōga Tsukishiro wasn't a saviour, he was a prisoner, a self-loathing monster who had slaughtered Kisaragi not to save mutants, but because he hated the "purity" Kisaragi represented as much as he hated his own "beastly" reflection.
"I wish I knew the truth of you," Kaito whispered, the steam of his breath hitting the bronze. "I wish you'd actually cared about us. Maybe then the world wouldn't feel like it's catching fire again."
Kaito was a humble child, but he still did want more, if not for himself then for his people. There was nowhere in the world they could go where the hatred for them would subside, it was always going to be there.
He didn't know where to start with rectifying something like that though, all those years working toward becoming a man of status for his people and he is now here a year into it and doesn't know what to do with that status.
It's a little shameful, but that is partly why he wanted to know more about the history of this man, he wanted to know why he was so hateful of himself, or maybe if it was false. After he was captured there were no interviews done by any private investigators that didn't go through the newly established commission.
And even though Kaito wasn't big on conspiracies, he just believed that something was being hidden. There was simply no way a man could hate himself and his people that much when Kaito could find as much beauty and uniqueness in them as the regular human looking folk. In fact maybe even more so.
"Is that supposed to be me?"
The voice didn't come from behind him. It seemed to rise from the very earth beneath his boots. It was a low, resonant vibration, like the tectonic plates of the world grinding together.
Kaito didn't move. He couldn't. Every instinct he had honed at UA, the "Danger Sense" that comes with being a hero, screamed at him to vanish. The air in the plaza curdled. A thick, suffocating wave of bloodlust rolled over him, so heavy it felt like his granite skin was cracking under the atmospheric pressure.
Kaito turned his head, his movements agonizingly slow, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Standing ten feet away was a mountain of a man. He wore a heavy, indigo-dyed yukata that billowed in the winter wind, cinched with a weathered hemp cord. At his hip, tucked into the folds of the fabric, was a simple, black-lacquered katana. A traditional, wide-brimmed bamboo kasa hat sat low on his head, casting a deep, impenetrable shadow over his face.
But the shadow couldn't hide the heat. Two glowing, amber slits burned from beneath the brim, eyes that had seen the birth and death of eras. Huge, fur-clad hands were tucked into his sleeves, but the sheer scale of the man was undeniable. He was a titan of gold, silver-gray, and obsidian-streaked fur.
The Amur Tiger.
"I've walked from the tip of Hokkaido to the salt-flats of... Okinawa," the man rumbled, his voice a predatory purr that made Kaito's teeth ache. "I hear whispers of a legend. I hear of a statue built to honour a 'hero.' And I come here... only to find this."
The Tiger looked up at the bronze monument. A low, guttural growl vibrated in his chest.
"A little cat," the Tiger spat. "They made me look like a house-pet playing with a toy. They've forgotten the scent of the blood. They've forgotten..."
Kaito's knees shook. He was a Pro Hero. He had fought villains. He had a license. But standing before this relic, he felt like a toddler. "Y-you..." Kaito managed, his voice cracking. "The records... they said you were in the deepest cell... they said you were gone."
Sure he wanted to meet the man, but under different circumstances.
The Tiger shifted. It wasn't a fast movement, yet it felt as though the world had re-centered itself around him. He stepped closer, the hem of his yukata brushing the frost. The smell hit Kaito then, not the smell of an animal, but the smell of ancient dust, and cold steel.
"The trash has piled up plentifully while I was away," the Tiger said, his eyes locking onto Kaito's.
Kaito felt the urge to scream for his grandmother, to run back to the small humble home and lock the door. His body was telling him that he was no longer a hero, he was prey. He tried to raise his arms, to harden his skin to its maximum density, to do something.
"Don't look at me," the Tiger whispered. It wasn't a command, it was a statement of fact.
The world went black.
Kaito didn't feel the blade. There was no sound of a sword being drawn, no flash of steel, no "shing" of metal. There was only a sudden, eerie silence.
For a heartbeat, Kaito wondered why the sky had turned upside down. He felt a strange, weightless sensation, as if he were drifting toward the clouds. He saw his bag of roasted chestnuts hitting the ground, the brown shells spilling onto the white frost.
Then, he saw his own body.
He saw the sturdy, granite-skinned shoulders of the hero Lithos standing perfectly still in the plaza. He saw the high-collared hero costume he had been so proud of. And then he saw the "Refined" edge, a line so clean it was almost beautiful, where his neck used to be. There was no jagged tearing, no messy spray. The space where his head had been was simply... empty.
His vision began to flicker like a dying candle. The last thing Kaito Ishida felt was the cold Osaka wind on a face that was no longer attached to his lungs. He didn't even have time to feel the pain. He only felt a deep, overwhelming sadness that he wouldn't be bringing the blankets home tonight.
That cut truly was beautiful... Majestic even.
The Amur Tiger didn't look back. He adjusted his kasa hat, his hand never having appeared to move from his sleeve. He walked past the falling head and the cooling body with the practiced indifference of a man stepping over a puddle.
"The world is so cluttered. It's time for a proper cleaning." the Tiger muttered into the wind, his voice fading into the bustle of the distant city.
___
The studio lights were a sterile, piercing white, reflecting off the glass desk of the NHN Evening Bulletin. The presenter, a man named Akihiko Sora, adjusted his silk tie. With his neatly combed black hair and striking, pale blue eyes, he was the picture of 'standard' Japanese beauty, the kind of face the Commission preferred for delivering difficult news.
He looked into the camera with a practiced expression of somber concern, his voice smooth and devoid of any regional accent.
"Turning now to a developing story out of Osaka's Shin-Sekai district," Akihiko began, a digital graphic of the Osaka skyline appearing behind him. "Authorities have confirmed the death of 19-year-old Kaito Ishida, a recent graduate of UA High School who had been operating locally under the hero pseudonym 'Lithos.'"
He paused, a subtle tightening of his lips the only sign of distaste.
"Ishida's body was discovered earlier this evening in the Central Plaza, an area historically known for its high concentration of... high-variance residents. While Ishida was a licensed hero, his decision to embed himself so deeply within one of the nation's more 'biologically complex' neighbourhoods has raised questions regarding the safety protocols for young graduates working in fringe environments."
Akihiko shifted his papers, his tone leaning into a subtle, academic coldness.
"The scene has been described by investigators as 'unusually clinical.' Despite Ishida's high-density stone physiology, his body was found completely bifurcated at the neck. Most disturbing, however, is the surgical precision of the act. Forensic teams report no signs of a struggle, no bruising, and a total absence of the environmental damage usually associated with high-level quirk altercations. It is as if the resistance of his reinforced skin was simply... ignored or not yet activated."
He looked directly into the lens, his blue eyes unblinking.
"While the culprit remains unknown, the Public Safety Commission has issued a reminder that areas of dense mutant-type habitation often see an unfortunate rise in internal volatility. They suggest that the 'unconventional' nature of the Shin-Sekai district may have provided the perfect cover for such a brazen act of violence. Local residents are being asked to cooperate, though authorities admit that the 'cultural insularity' of the neighbourhood often hampers these investigations."
A small, thin smile touched his face, not one of joy, but of a man who felt he was explaining a simple, tragic truth to a child.
"Ishida was a student of the prestigious UA program, yet his return to the 'heritage zones' of his youth has ended in a grim reminder: even the best training cannot always overcome the inherent instabilities of certain... demographics. Our thoughts are with his grandmother, his only registered kin in the district."