Historians would later romanticize the Great Musutafu Fire as the crucible that forged the Symbol of Peace's legend. They'd talk about the heroic struggle against the chemical blaze and the atmospheric shift caused by the sheer heat.
Kaito Arisaka, however, was currently too busy cursing the very concept of "The Plot" to care about history.
It was 2:30 AM. Kaito was standing behind the FamilyMart counter, nursing a lukewarm coffee, when the windows vibrated with a sound that wasn't a bang, but a low, guttural roar.
Through the glass, the distant industrial sector didn't just catch fire, it erupted. A pillar of purple-orange flame punched a hole through the night sky, and the shockwave was enough to knock a shelf of overpriced chips onto the floor.
"Wait," Kaito's heart skipped a beat as the caffeine finally hit his brain.
"Wait, wait, wait."
"The industrial chemical spill? The 'Day of Ashes'? That was this year and this place? I'm an idiot! I'm a total, reincarnated, meta-knowledge failing idiot!"
A wave of pure, dry fury washed over him. He wasn't scared, he was offended. He'd spent years memorizing the inventory of a hardware shop and the exact change for a bento box, but he'd completely blanked on the one day his entire neighborhood was scheduled to become a BBQ pit for a hero's backstory.
"Sato-san! The industrial district is gone! The wind is blowing West!" Kaito yelled toward the back office. "Get the shutters down and stay in the cold storage! It's the only reinforced room!"
"Arisaka? What are you—"
Kaito didn't answer. He was already out the door. He didn't have a plan to be a hero; he had a plan to not let his life's work burn down. But as he stepped onto the sidewalk, reality hit him in the face, literally.
-----
A secondary explosion from a nearby gas line sent a wave of pressure through the street. A chimney two buildings down crumbled, and a localized cloud of thick, greasy soot and black ash swept over the sidewalk like a tidal wave.
Kaito didn't have time to dodge. He was swallowed by the black cloud.
When he emerged a few seconds later, coughing and gagging, he wasn't "Kaito the Clerk" anymore. He was a silhouette. His skin was coated in a layer of black, oily ash so thick it looked like war paint. His hair, usually neat, was matted with gray dust and standing in jagged tufts. His FamilyMart vest was torn down the middle, revealing a soot-stained undershirt that clung to his frame.
"Great," Kaito wheezed, wiping his eyes. The ash didn't come off; it just smeared into a dark, raccoon-like mask around his eyes. "I look like a literal chimney sweep. If I die today, the paramedics won't even be able to identify my corpse without a power washer."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a hardware-store face mask, the heavy-duty kind for drywall dust. He snapped it over his face. Between the black soot covering every inch of visible skin and the industrial mask, his face was a complete mystery.
"Breathe through the filter. Stay low. Don't be a hero," he told himself.
He began to run toward the Arisaka Hardware Shop, but he only made it one block before he saw the first failure of "Hero Society."
A pregnant woman was slumped against a bus stop, clutching her stomach, her face pale with terror. Beside her, two toddlers were huddled in the dirt, crying into their hands. The air was already becoming a toxic soup of gray smoke.
"Hey! You!" Kaito barked. His voice was muffled by the mask, sounding deeper and more gravelly than usual.
The woman looked up, her eyes wide. She didn't see the fifteen-year-old kid who usually sold her lightbulbs. She saw a terrifying, grimy figure emerging from the smoke like a ghost of the disaster.
"P-Please... help them..." she whispered.
Kaito didn't strike a pose. He didn't say "I am here." He reached into his belt still wearing his hardware store tool pouch and pulled out a roll of duct tape and a bottle of water.
'DIY survival 101: If you can't stop the fire, stop the inhalation," Kaito thought.
He ripped his own shirt further, soaked the fabric with the water, and handed the wet strips to the kids. "Hold these to your faces. Don't let go. If you drop them, you're breathing smoke. Move!"
He didn't carry the woman like a princess; he braced her under the arm, his soot-covered shoulder taking her full weight. He was straining, his muscles already burning, but the anger at his own forgetfulness acted like a battery.
"Where are the heroes?" the woman sobbed as they stumbled through an alley.
"In the center of the city, getting their hair done for the 6:00 AM news," Kaito snapped, his eyes scanning for structural weaknesses in the buildings they passed. "We're in the 'perimeter' of the map, lady. Nobody's coming for us but us."
He led them through a series of narrow, ugly backstreets paths he knew only because he'd spent years fixing the pipes and fences in this block. He shoved them into a reinforced basement of a grocery store he knew had a separate air filtration system.
"Stay here. Don't come out until you see a guy with a cape or the sun comes up," he ordered.
The woman grabbed his grimy hand. "Who... who are you? How can I thank you?"
Kaito looked at his hand a blackened, unrecognizable claw of soot and grit. He pulled back, already turning toward the orange glow.
"I'm just a guy who's really annoyed that he's working an unpaid double shift," he grunted.
He vanished back into the smoke. He didn't know it yet, but the Trust bank had just received its first overflowing major deposit. To that woman and those children, the "Grimy Guy" was more real than any Billboard Hero.
And Kaito? He was just getting started. He had a whole neighborhood run before his reality and his body decided to break.