….
[Hero Public Safety Commission]
It was 7:14 AM.
And it had exactly been seven days since the battle with All For One.
Keigo Takami leaned against the edge of the desk, his crimson wings drooping low toward the carpet under the physical exhaustion of the last week; the black jacket of his newly tailored presidential suit hung open, his tie yanked loose.
Across the room, Naomasa Tsukauchi stood, staring at three flat-panel monitors displaying live data cascades.
And at another corner of the room, leaning against the wall, stood Kaina Tsutsumi, Lady Nagant.
Following the cleanup of corrupted leaders of HPSC, Dabi had pulled the necessary strings and delivered her straight to the Commission's front door as a 'rehabilitation asset'.
Which was just his way of sticking a deadly sniper with an intimate knowledge of Commission filth right at Hawks' side.
On every screen in the room, mirrored across thousands of decentralized IP nodes, the same bold header displayed:
[THE SEED IN THE ASH: The Tenko Shimura Dossier & The Architecture of an Outcast]
"Every mirror site the Ministry takes down spawns twelve encrypted proxies." Tsukauchi rasped, dragging a hand across his bloodshot eyes. "It's built on Stain's old peer to peer distribution protocol. The Ministry of Communications attempted a total DNS purge thirty minutes ago, and it blew up in their faces.
"Civilians noticed the government firewall engaging, realized something was being covered up, and started ripping raw text files onto thumb drives. It's on pirate radio frequencies in Shizuoka and being printed out by the thousands in back-alley copy shops."
Hawks blew out a whistle. "That bastard really didn't pull a single punch, did he?"
"He gave us four minutes' warning." Tsukauchi said, his voice tightening with a mixture of disbelief and frustration. "An encrypted ping came straight to my terminal. It simply said, 'Make sure the bird is sitting down,' and then dumped the entire payload on us."
"What, you expected him to ask for your permission?" Kaina's asked. She didn't bother looking back, casually tapping an ashless cigarette against her knuckle. "I don't know much about him, but even I can tell that he isn't the type to ask for permission. Be grateful he gave you four minutes instead of none."
"And what the hell were we going to do if he gave us four days?" Hawks sighed, his eyes narrowing as he thumbed through a physical printout of the eighty-page document. "Censor it? Put an arrest warrant out for the guy who just deafted biggest villain of the Hero Society while eighty million people watched the broadcast?
"We're running on fumes, Naomasa. The old Commission brass swept Tenko Shimura under the rug decades ago, and now Dabi just dumped the rotting body right onto the country's table."
The dossier wasn't a standard manifesto; it was a forensic autopsy of an entire society's failure.
It didn't start with the League or the bloodshed at USJ, but years earlier in an ordinary home, with a four year old boy whose father would slap him whenever he talked about being a Hero, all because he wanted nothing to do with heroes.
Then [Decay] awakened, and within minutes, the entire family was dead.
And then came the part that felt like a blade twisting into the public's collective gut: the days following the slaughter.
A four year old boy wandered the streets with dried blood beneath his fingernails, sitting on curbs and shivering in dirty alleys while ordinary citizens, housewives, and salarymen hurried past him, deliberately looking away because they assumed a hero would surely handle it.
Followed immediately by the breakdown of All For One.
Because the entire nation had watched Endeavor stripped of his Hellflame live on camera, the dossier's revelation that Quirks could be stolen, manipulated, and manufactured into weapons couldn't be dismissed as a conspiracy.
It exposed the illegal clinics, the black-market Quirk boosters, and the horrifying truth:
Shigaraki Tomura was not a natural-born demon. He was a manufactured weapon, forged directly out of the trash Japan chose to ignore.
Kaina tapped the paragraph with one finger. "He even mentioned the old Commission orphan programs… operations where kids just... disappeared."
She paused, eyes moving down the page.
"Though he didn't name anyone specifically. Anyone who knows how the Commission worked will understand what he's pointing at."
Kaina leaned back. "He's basically saying the League wasn't the only place that made monsters. The government did its share too."
Tsukauchi reached out and tapped a key, bringing up the street-level civic camera feeds across Musutafu, Shinjuku, and Fukuoka.
The reaction wasn't a loud riot or a wave of burning anger, but something far worse: a cold, sickening silence.
….
In a commuter plaza outside Musutafu Central Station, hundreds of morning salarymen and university students stood completely frozen in front of the giant public broadcast screens, where local news stations had been forced to run tickers addressing the leaked document.
A young mother, holding her preschool-aged son by the hand, stared at a printed pamphlet handed to her by a university student.
Her eyes widened, scanning the paragraphs detailing Tenko Shimura's wandering days on the curb. She slowly looked down at her own little boy, pulling him flush against her legs with an expression of sheer, nauseating dread.
….
At an open-air cafe in Shibuya, a middle-aged businessman spilled his coffee.
"Bullshit!" he shouted, his voice cracking with defensive panic as other commuters turned to look. "They're trying to say we made that monster?! I pay my taxes! We fund the agencies! What the hell are the Pros getting paid for if we're supposed to go patting every street urchin on the head?!"
"Did you even read it properly?" a younger woman sitting two tables over snapped back, her hands shaking as she held her phone screen up.
Her voice was trembling, raw with unvarnished disgust. "An old woman literally looked him in the face and told him a hero was coming! How many times have you walked past some kid crying outside and thought the exact same damn thing?!"
The man opened his mouth to fire back, but the words died in his throat.
He looked around the plaza, catching the eyes of three other commuters who were looking at the pavement, their faces pale, visibly hollowed out by the exact same silent realization.
….
Further down the avenue in Shinjuku, two low ranked Pro Hero sidekicks in sleek, colorful costumes turned onto the main promenade expecting the usual morning wave of high school chatter and casual greetings.
Instead, the sidewalk parted around them.
A teenager in a high school uniform took one look at them, sneered under his breath, and deliberately crossed the street to avoid them.
An elderly shopkeeper pulling up his metal security gate paused, staring at the heroes with cold eyes, before turning his back and slamming the shutter down.
There was no yelling or thrown bottles, only a withdrawal of trust as the shiny costumes no longer looked like symbols of safety, but like an expensive distraction designed to let people sleep through a nightmare.
"They're asking the question now." Hawks murmured from the desk, his golden eyes watching the silent footage play out across the monitors. "How many more Tenkos are walking around out there right now?' And the worst part is, we don't have anything to tell them."
Nagant turned from the glass. She had spent years in Tartarus because of the very lies Dabi had just dragged into the light.
"At least they're speaking up now. I thought this society was already dead, with nothing left to save. So let them be angry. For thirty years, this office taught people to smile, cheer for the Top Ten, and trust the system to keep the ugly parts out of sight."
Her eyes settled on Keigo. "Dabi just pulled the curtain down. Don't you dare try to hang it back up, Keigo. The moment you do, you're no different from the man I put a bullet in."
Hawks let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. "Harsh, Kaina. But fair."
He tossed the printed report back onto the desk. He understood the game and human nature, but Toya Todoroki understood both even better.
Right now, the shock was fresh.
The guilt was burning through the public's chest like hot iron.
But in two weeks, the average citizen would get tired of feeling guilty.
The bills would arrive, the trains would run, and people would slowly retreat back into the comfortable numbness of their daily routines. They would pretend the world was fine because facing the alternative was too terrifying to bear.
Dabi hadn't dropped this document to turn the country into enlightened saints.
He wasn't naive enough to believe an eighty-page file would teach humanity how to love its outcasts.
He dropped it to drive a permanent spike into the foundation.
To make it impossible for the Commission to ever rebuild that hollow, gilded pedestal, and to ensure that when U.A. High locked its blast gates and drew its perimeter lines, everyone knew exactly what kind of rotting world those walls were built to shut out.
"So." Tsukauchi asked, turning his tired face toward the young Commission president. "What's our move? The Cabinet is already blowing up my secure line demanding a denial statement."
Hawks turned toward Nagant, exchanging a silent glance with the woman Dabi had stationed in his office to keep his moral compass from spinning out of control.
Nagant simply raised an eyebrow, waiting for his answer.
Hawks straightened his suit jacket, his wings rustling faintly with calm resolve.
"How about this suggestion? To go choke on their press releases." Hawks said calmly. "We don't deny a single word. Release an official memorandum stating that the Commission acknowledges the contents of the report and is opening an immediate inquiry into historic hero-syndicate ties and municipal child-welfare failures.
"And if the reporters ask who authorized the leak..."
Hawks reached down, tapping the bold font at the bottom of the front page–
"...tell them an angry school teacher just graded our entire society, and we all failed."
….
While the outside world was tearing itself apart over leaked documents, the fourth-floor recovery ward of the municipal sanatorium was drowned in bright sunlight.
Dabi slid the door shut behind, tucking a stamped folder beneath his arm.
The discharge papers were signed, clearance forms were stamped, and the medical transport was already booked for the following weekend.
The doctors hadn't offered a word of resistance, partly because Rei had been stable for months and mostly because nobody in their right mind wanted to argue with the Hero.
As soon as he stepped past the privacy curtain–
Rei was sitting up in bed, propped against a stack of clean white pillows.
Her long, snow-white hair tumbled loosely over a pale lavender cardigan, but her face wasn't the pale, ghost-like mask he remembered from his childhood.
Her cheeks were flushed bright pink, her shoulders trembled with helpless laughter, one hand clutching her ribs.
"P-Please... sweethearts, give Grandma a second to breathe." Rei gasped softly, wiping away a tiny tear of amusement. "My cheeks hurt so much..."
The two little terrors showed zero mercy.
Himiko was perched right on the edge of the mattress, bouncing on her knees while aggressively demonstrating how she had done her "guard bunny face" down in the basement cells, scrunching her nose and baring her tiny sharp fangs–
"Grandma! If the bad guys try to sneak into the kitchen, Himi bites their kneecaps! Like CHOMP!"
Beside the bed, Eri was diligently holding up a crayon drawing of an enormous cat with rabbit ears. "And this is Mr. Whiskers-Bunny. He guards the front door so you don't get cold, Grandma. I used the silver crayon for the armor."
"It's a wonderful drawing, Eri-chan." Rei said softly, her fingers gently brushing the edge of the paper, her eyes crinkling with genuine warmth. "He looks very brave."
They had technically crossed paths with Rei once before during a brief visit, but that had been under the guise of an impromptu student errand. It was their first real afternoon together as a family, and the two little girls had already turned Rei's hospital room into their own new playground.
Across the room, Rumi watched the entire spectacle in amused silence.
"Don't let 'em fool you with the cute routine, Rei-san." Rumi chimed in, tossing a wink toward the bed. "Give 'em ten more minutes and they will have you climbing onto the wardrobe to play pirate ship."
"Oh, I wouldn't mind that at all." Rei chuckled. "It's been so quiet in this room for years... this is much nicer."
The moment Dabi entered, four pairs of eyes snapped toward the doorway.
"PAPA!" both girls squealed in unison.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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