Location: Naruhata Park – Center Crater
The silence in the park was heavy, broken only by the wet sound of cooling asphalt and the distant, confused wail of sirens.
In the center of the fairgrounds, the purple mist of Kurogiri's Warp Gate flickered violently. It wasn't fading naturally; it was spasming, the spatial coordinates rejecting a specific piece of cargo as "Error Data."
ZH-POP.
A figure was forcibly ejected from the mist, stumbling onto the grass but landing on her feet with feline grace.
It was Kuin Hachisuka.
She was disoriented, her villain costume torn and singed, but she wasn't unconscious.
Her eyes were wide, the compound lenses of her quirk spinning frantically as she scanned the crater.
She saw the ash pile of the Nomu. She saw the 2D Graffiti of the bombers on the walls.
"What happened?" Kuin hissed, her voice a layered, insectoid buzz. "I was warped out?"
She whipped her head around, spotting Knuckleduster standing meters away, steam still rising from his shoulders.
"You!" Kuin shrieked. The Queen Bee parasite burrowed in her eyes pulsed with violent, red light. "This is your fault, old man! You ruined everything!"
SWISH.
She didn't escape.
She attacked.
Kuin launched herself at Iwao, a stinger erupting from her wrist.
She moved with the desperate, erratic speed of a cornered predator.
"Stop!" Iwao roared, raising his arms to block.
CLANG.
It hit his gauntlet, sparking against the metal.
Kuin didn't stop. She spun, delivering a high kick that forced Knuckleduster to slide back.
She was fast, fueled by the panic of the parasite realizing it was trapped.
"I'll kill you and take a new vessel!" the Bee screamed through Kuin's mouth.
WHIP-CRACK.
Suddenly, a purple lash coiled around Kuin's wrist, snapping it taut.
"Not today, honey!" Midnight shouted, sliding into the crater.
She yanked the whip, pulling Kuin off balance. "Eraser! She's hostile!"
Kuin snarled, trying to summon a swarm of bees from her pores, but her body felt heavy.
She looked up.
Eraserhead limped forward from the smoke. His goggles were shattered, but his eyes flared a lethal red.
FLASH.
The buzzing stopped instantly.
Under the absolute gaze of Erasure, the Queen Bee's quirk factor was nullified. The red light in Kuin's chest died.
The stingers retracted. The hive mind was severed.
"My... my bees..." Kuin gasped, her knees buckling as the power left her. She fell forward, hitting the concrete hard.
"Hold her down!" Aizawa shouted, keeping his eyes peeled open. "Something is moving inside kf her!"
Knuckleduster rushed forward, pinning his daughter's shoulders to the ground.
The Queen Bee, now just a dormant insect without its quirk, was thrashing in her eye cavity, trying to burrow deeper to hide.
"It's digging in!" Iwao roared, seeing purple veins race up Tamao's neck. "It triggered the Deadman Protocol! The toxin is already in her blood!"
"Medic!" Midnight screamed. "We need an antidote!"
Aizawa cursed, dropping to one knee.
He kept his eyes on the girl, but he knew it was useless. He could erase a quirk, but he couldn't erase chemistry.
The poison was already circulating. Tamao's body went rigid, foam bubbling at her mouth.
_-_-_-_-_
Location: Hosu City – Kaito's Car
Fifty kilometers away, Kaito Arisaka opened one eye.
The car was silent. But his awareness was still expanded, a lingering ghost over the Naruhata Ward.
He felt the silence he had created. It was perfect. Except for one spike.
"Sloppy," Kaito muttered. He didn't make a grand gesture. He simply tapped his finger on the steering wheel, visualizing the specific molecular structure of the toxin.
Snap
A silent reality manipulation was done kilometers away.
_-_-_-_-_-_
Knuckleduster was pumping Tamao's chest, his tears mixing with the soot on her face.
"Breathe! Damn it, Tamao, breathe!"
Then.
The purple veins on her neck didn't fade; they simply vanished. The parasitic queen bee inside her was gone too.
"What happened?" A first aider beside Knuckleduster was in disbelief when the poison is receding. No vanished.
"The veins..." a medic gasped, staring at the monitors. "They're clearing. The toxin levels just dropped to zero. Instantaneously."
There was no biological process. No metabolizing. It were instantly deleted—edited out of existence as if they had never been there. No drug poison. No insects.
Then.
GASP.
cough-cough
Tamao's body slumped. The tension left her muscles.
Her eyes rolled forward, finding focus for the first time in years.
They weren't the eyes of a villain; they were clear, brown, and terrified.
She tried to speak, but her throat was raw, unused to forming her own words.
"D... D..."
Her voice was a dry, broken croak. She couldn't finish the word.
Her hand reached up, trembling, and brushed against Knuckleduster mask before her strength gave out.
Iwao collapsed.
The "Vigilante" finally broke. He pulled her frail body into his massive chest, burying his face in her shoulder so she wouldn't see the tears streaming down his face.
"I've got you," Iwao sobbed, his voice cracking. "I've got you, Tamao. You're home."
Tamao's eyes fluttered shut.
She fell unconscious, simply exhausted by the weight of being human again.
Aizawa lowered his head, deactivating his quirk.
He wiped the blood from his eye and looked at the sky, then at the 2D graffiti on the walls.
"He didn't just stop the bombs," Aizawa whispered to Midnight, a cold chill running down his spine. "He should be the one doing this."
_-_-_-_-_
Location: Park Perimeter – North Gate
Ten minutes later, the flashing lights of police cruisers flooded the park entrance.
Detective Naomasa Tsukauchi walked through the ruined gate, his coat flapping in the wind.
Behind him, a dozen armed officers fanned out, their weapons lowered but ready.
They stopped dead in their tracks.
To their left, Koichi was sitting on the curb, drinking a bottle of water.
Beside him, Kazuho was huddled in a blanket, shivering from shock.
Further back, Iwao sat on a bench, holding his sleeping daughter's hand while paramedics checked her vitals.
By the strict letter of the law, these three were vigilantes. They had used quirks in public without licenses.
They had engaged in combat. They were criminals.
"Detective!" a rookie officer shouted, pointing at Koichi. "Suspects identified! Should we initiate arrest procedures?"
Naomasa looked at the Crawler. He saw the bruises on the boy's arms. He saw the way Pop★Step was clinging to him. Then he looked at the wall behind them.
He saw the 2D Graffiti. A suicide bomber, flattened into a screaming painting on the brickwork.
Naomasa took a deep breath. He looked at Eraserhead and Ingenium, who were standing guard over the vigilantes.
"Arrest?" Naomasa said loudly. "Arrest who? I see three civilian victims who were caught in the crossfire."
The rookie blinked. "Sir? But the reports say..."
"The reports say the Ward was sealed,"
Naomasa interrupted, his voice hard. "Under the Emergency Good Samaritan Clause of the Disaster Relief Act, any civilian action taken to preserve life during a Class-5 Event is protected. These people didn't fight villains. They survived a terrorist attack."
Aizawa stepped forward, crossing his arms. "I can corroborate that, Detective. These civilians assisted in the evacuation. They were under my direct supervision the entire time."
It was a lie. A massive, glaring lie. But in the face of fifty living bombs turned into art, nobody had the stomach for bureaucracy.
Koichi looked up, his mouth hanging open. "Wait... we're not going to jail?"
"Drink your water, kid," Naomasa sighed, rubbing his temples. "And go home. Before I change my mind."
In the shadows, Stendhal was gone. He had vanished the moment the Snap occurred, slipping away into the night while the heroes were distracted by the miracle.
_-_-_-_-_
Location: Sato Press Headquarters – Central Newsroom
The newsroom was a hive of controlled hysteria.
It wasn't the cramped van Hideki used to operate out of anymore.
This was the nerve center of Sato Press—a sprawling open-plan office in downtown Tokyo filled with the manic energy of fifty journalists, editors, and tech specialists working on a deadline that shouldn't exist.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.
RING-RING.
SHOUT.
"Server load is at 400%!" a tech lead screamed from the back, his face pale in the blue light of three monitors. "The Naruhata stream is crashing the website! People are refreshing every millisecond!"
"Then buy more bandwidth!" Hideki Sato roared, slamming his hand down on the central conference table. "I don't care if you have to steal a server from the government! Keep the stream live!"
Hideki wasn't holding a camera tonight. He was wearing a rumpled suit, his tie undone, looking every bit the chaotic CEO of a media empire built on forbidden truths.
He stood before a massive wall of screens, each one displaying a different feed from his embedded field reporters.
"Unit 1, give me the aerial! Unit 3, stop shaking the camera! And Nagi... Nagi, tell me you have the shot of the wall."
On the center monitor, the feed from Nagi, his lead field reporter embedded with the police perimeter, stabilized.
"Boss," Nagi's voice came through the speakers, trembling with a mix of fear and professional awe. "You... you're not going to believe this. The police are trying to cover it up, but I'm zoomed in. Look at the retaining wall. Those 'Suicide Bombers'... they aren't human."
The image on the giant screen sharpened. The entire newsroom fell silent. The typing stopped.
The phones were ignored.
On the concrete retaining wall of Naruhata Park, there was a row of figures.
They were the Bombers.
Identical, bald, pale-skinned experiments with sunken eyes and identical grey jumpsuits. But they weren't standing.
They were 2D Graffiti.
They were high-contrast, charcoal-black drawings flattened into the molecular structure of the brickwork. They lacked depth, volume, or mass.
But they were moving.
The "drawings'" chests rose and fell in a shallow, panicked rhythm.
Their white, circle eyes were darting left and right, frantically scanning the 3D world they could no longer enter.
Their mouths were open in silent, permanent screams, their identical faces frozen in a rictus of terror.
"Holy..." an editor whispered, dropping his coffee cup. It shattered on the floor, but nobody looked down.
"Is that... is that alive?" a junior writer asked, her voice shaking. "They look like cartoons from hell."
Hideki Sato stared at the screen. His eyes weren't filled with fear; they were burning with the ecstasy of the Scoop.
"It's not art," Hideki whispered, a grin spreading across his face. "It's a living detention center. Hero X didn't just stop these creatures ; he edited them out of reality."
"Switch to Feed B!" Hideki barked. "Show me the crater! What about the Monster? The 'Grey Giant' the pro was struggling about?"
The screen flickered.
This footage was grainier, shot from a distance by a drone before the EMP blast of the Snap.
It showed the Type-Zero Nomu—a mountain of grey muscle and obsidian claws—rampaging through the fairgrounds.
It was a biological tank that shrugged off Pro-Heroes like flies.
But it wasn't fighting a Pro.
It was fighting a Vigilante.
The footage showed a silver-and-black blur moving at speeds the camera could barely track.
It was Knuckleduster, moving with the distinct, high-frequency agility.
WHAM. BLUR. CRACK.
On screen, the Vigilante was dismantling the monster, dodging claws by millimeters, delivering hundreds of strikes in seconds.
"Boss, look at the archive match!" a tech specialist shouted, throwing a side-by-side video on the screen. "The movement patterns! The frequency! It matches a hero who vanished years ago without announr! That's not a random vigilante... that's O'Clock!"
"Yes, look at that speed," Hideki breathed, pointing at the monitor. "That's not just a vigilante. That's a Legend coming back from the dead. The public thinks O'Clock vanished? No. He's been in the alleyways."
He spun around, clapping his hands. The sharp sound broke the trance of the room.
CLAP.
"Wake up, people!" Hideki shouted, his voice echoing off the glass walls. "This is the headline! Forget the villains! Forget the rescue! The story is the New Gods!"
He pointed at the layout team.
"I want the 2D Bombers on the front page! Headline: 'THE JUDGMENT OF NARUHATA: HERO X REWRITES REALITY!'"
He pointed at the digital team.
"Upload the raw fight footage now! But give me a title that hurts! I want: 'WATCH: THE DEAD HERO WHO CAME BACK TO DO THE HPSC'S JOB!'"
He paced the room, waving his arms.
"Frame it as a scandal! Ask the question: 'WHY DID THE FASTEST HERO GO ROGUE? THE VIGILANTE WHO SHAMED THE PROS!' The forums will eat it up! Make them question why a 'criminal' is saving the city while the licensed heroes are getting tossed around!"
"But Boss!" the legal advisor stammered, sweating profusely. "The HPSC has issued a Class-S censorship order! If we print this... if we imply the Pros are useless... they'll revoke our press license! They might raid the building!"
Hideki grabbed a stack of papers and threw them into the air.
"Let them raid us!" Hideki laughed, a manic, ambitious sound. "We are the only ones telling the truth! If they shut us down, we go underground again! But tonight? Tonight we own the narrative!"
He looked at his exhausted staff. They had been working for six hours straight. They were scared.
They were tired.
"Listen to me!" Hideki bellowed. "If this paper hits the stands by 5:00 AM... if we break the internet before the HPSC wakes up... Triple Bonuses for everyone! I'm talking vacation time! I'm talking new equipment! I'm talking a raise that will make your parents respect you!"
The room erupted.
YEAHHH!
The fear vanished, replaced by the primal urge of capitalism and glory.
The typing resumed, louder and faster than before.
Phones were answered. Video was rendered.
Hideki turned back to the screen, watching the view count on the livestream tick past ten million.
"This isn't a hero society anymore," Hideki muttered to himself. "This is a failing system. And I'm going to be the one to broadcast the crash."
_-_-_-_-_
Location: HPSC Headquarters – Command Room
Sir Nighteye stood in front of the main screen, his face pale.
The room was usually filled with the hum of analysts and strategists, but now it was dead silent.
Everyone was watching Hideki Sato's feed.
"Is it a quirk effect?" the HPSC President asked, her voice tight. "Like Edgeshot's Foldabody? Can we reverse it?"
"Edgeshot folds his body," Nighteye whispered, taking off his glasses. "He retains his mass. He retains his volume. This... this is different. The mass is gone. The volume is zero. These creatures have been translated into pure visual data."
He pointed at the screen. A team of hazmat scientists was trying to peel one of the bombers off the wall. The "ink" didn't smudge. It was fused to the molecular structure of the concrete.
"We can't arrest him," Nighteye said, realizing the futility of their previous plans. "You don't arrest a force of nature. If we provoke him... he could do this to the entire Diet Building. He could do this to us."
The President slumped in her chair. The illusion of control was gone. They weren't the rulers of this society anymore. They were just the tenants living in Hero X's building.
_-_-_-_-_
Location: Public Reaction
Across Japan, the fear was instantaneous.
In bars, living rooms, and train stations, people stared at the "Living Graffiti."
They had cheered for All Might because he could punch hard.
They had cheered for Endeavor because he could burn hot.
But this? This was divine judgment. This was a power that said, 'You are too noisy. Be silent.'
The internet forums exploded not with fan theories, but with prayers. Hero X wasn't a vigilante. He was the new law.
_-_-_-_-_-_
Location: Villain Factory – Deep Dive
Dr. Garaki was trembling. He wasn't scared; he was ecstatic. He was replaying the footage of the "Snap" on a loop, his goggles reflecting the moment reality bent.
"It's confirmed! It's confirmed!" Garaki cackled, dancing around his lab. "The mass conversion! The instant biological editing! He didn't use energy to stop the bombs, Master!"
All For One sat in his chair, staring at the screen. A small, satisfied smile played on his lips.
"So, the Singularity has a personality," All For One mused. "He is really everywhere. He dislikes mess. He is a perfectionist."
In the corner of the room, Number 6 was curled into a ball.
The speedster, usually manic and arrogant, was catatonic. He was rocking back and forth, clutching his knees.
"He's faster..." Number 6 whispered to himself, over and over. "The OClock is faster. The OClock is faster."
He wasn't talking about Hero X. He was talking about Knuckleduster.
The defeat had shattered his ego. The man he had dismissed as a "quirkless relic" had returned from the dead, humiliated him with pure martial arts, and then outpaced his Overclock with a speed that defied the laws of biology.
"Master..." Garaki hesitated, looking at the broken speedster. "What about the O'Clock quirk? You stole it years ago. We have the original factor in the vault. How did that man... how did Knuckleduster regenerate a stolen quirk? It should be impossible."
All For One didn't look surprised. He looked delighted.
"If I can take, Doctor, then it stands to reason that a true God can give," All For One said, gesturing to the screen. "Hero X didn't just fix the city; he fixed the man. He rewrote the biological history of Iwao Oguro. He returned what I stole."
He stood up, walking to the reinforced window overlooking his army of gestation tanks.
"Leave Number 6," All For One said, dismissing his pawn with a wave of his hand. "He served his purpose. He drew out the a retired hero, and he also drew out the Singularity."
"Cancel the brute force attacks, Doctor. Stop sending thugs to Naruhata. We can't beat Hero X with muscle. If we throw a mountain at him, he will just turn it into a painting."
"Then what do we do?" Garaki asked, his mustache twitching. "If we can't fight him, and we can't hide from him..."
"We change the game," All For One said, his eyes gleaming with a cold, strategic light. "We don't try to conquer him. We try to crash him."
He turned back to the screen, staring at the frozen, 2D face of a suicide bomber.
"We need to find the limit of his processing power. We need to create a problem so complex, so contradictory, and so widespread that even his reality-warping cannot edit it all without breaking the world."
All For One clenched his fist.
"We are moving to the Harvest Phase. I want his power, Kyudai. And I will find a way to take it. Prepare the High-End production line. I want a legion of consumable biological weapons. Design them to burn out in seconds if necessary, but for those seconds, I want 300% output. We will flood the system. We will tire out the Singularity. And when he blinks... we will be there to catch him."
Garaki grinned, a wide, toothy expression of pure malice. "The Crash Protocol. I like it, Master. I like it very much. But what about the forced teleportation of the parasitic bee master?"
"She had served her purpose."
_-_-_-_-_-_
Kaito Arisaka walked into his entryway and kicked off his shoes.
"What a hectic day" He groaned, rolling his neck until it popped.
Kaito noticed that the neighbors next door were all missing.
He didn't care anymore. He had done everything. What he needs now is some shut-eye.
"Sleep. I need sleep."
~~~~~~
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