The street is already loud before Kaminari touches anything.
Sirens somewhere far enough to be background texture. Neon signs flickering like they're nervous. A delivery truck idling too hard at the corner, exhaust coughing into the cold. Phones are out. They always are. Tokyo learned that lesson early. If it breathes, film it.
Kaminari lands light. Knees bend, coat flares, boots scrape asphalt. Easy hero entrance. The kind PR teams storyboard. Yellow jacket. Grin ready. Thumbs-up halfway raised before he clocks the crowd density and aborts.
Too many civilians. Too many lenses.
He pivots instead, eyes scanning. Urban patrol zone means small crimes, fast fixes. Noise complaints, alley muggings, drunk Quirk flexers who think night makes them invisible. Nothing that should trend.
Nothing that should.
"Hey! Power down!" someone yells from the left.
Another voice overlaps. "Is that Chargebolt?"
A third: "Yo, this is live."
Kaminari exhales. "Of course it is."
The source pops into view between parked cars. A guy in a hooded coat, thin, shaking, sparks crawling up his arms like insects. Illegal Quirk mod. Cheap work. You can smell the ozone wrongness from ten meters out. The kind that fries nerves before it fries circuits.
The man screams. Not words. Just sound. Raw, ugly.
People step back. Phones zoom in.
Kaminari raises his hands. Palms open. Non-threatening. He's done this dance a hundred times.
"Hey, okay, okay," he says, voice pitched light. "Deep breaths. You're overloading. Let's shut it down before you—"
The first arc hits a streetlamp.
Light explodes. Glass rains. Someone shrieks.
The crowd surges. Not away. Sideways. Into better angles.
Kaminari swears under his breath and moves.
He closes the distance fast. Electricity hums under his skin, familiar as a second pulse. He keeps it low. Contained. Surgical. He's not an idiot. He learned the hard way.
The modded guy jerks, eyes wild, and throws another discharge. It skids across the pavement, snapping toward a stroller someone forgot to move.
Kaminari doesn't think. He never does in moments like this.
He intercepts.
The electricity hits him and folds in, redirected, swallowed. His boots skid. Teeth clench. Pain spikes bright and fast, like biting foil.
"Back up!" he shouts.
Too late.
Someone trips. A phone goes flying. Another arc jumps, uncontrolled this time, and kisses a power box on the side of a building.
The block dies.
Lights out. Neon gone. Screens black. For half a heartbeat, the world holds its breath.
Then the emergency generators kick in, uneven and angry. Red lights. Alarm tones. A thousand phones scrambling to adjust exposure.
In that red wash, everything looks worse.
Kaminari grabs the guy, locks his arms, dumps a controlled pulse straight into the mod's system. It's clean. Textbook. The man goes limp, breathing but out cold.
Done.
Except it isn't.
A kid is crying near the curb. An old man is on the ground, clutching his chest. Someone is yelling Kaminari's name like it's an accusation.
He turns, adrenaline still high, brain already replaying angles. He knows what this looks like. Electricity plus darkness plus panic equals headlines.
"Medic's on the way," he says, louder than necessary. "Everyone stay back."
A woman shoves her phone closer. "Did you cause the blackout?"
Another voice cuts in. "I saw him blast first."
"No, the other guy started it!"
"Replay that, replay that—"
Kaminari feels it then. Not the electricity. The shift.
The moment when an incident stops being an incident and becomes content.
Police arrive. Pros follow. Questions get asked, then repeated slower, sharper. Kaminari answers automatically, words practiced, safe. He keeps his smile on until his jaw aches.
The footage keeps rolling.
By the time the lights fully come back on, the story is already splitting into versions.
And Kaminari Denki stands in the middle of the street, static still crackling faintly around his fingers, wondering which one of them will stick.
The first clip is fourteen seconds long.
It opens shaky, vertical, bad lighting, someone breathing too loud into their mic. Kaminari's back is to the camera, jacket bright even in the half-dark. There's a crack of light, a scream, and then the street goes black.
The caption reads:
**HERO CAUSES BLACKOUT IN RESIDENTIAL BLOCK?**
It hits ten thousand views in six minutes.
By the time Kaminari gets back to the agency, there are already variations. Same moment. Different angles. Different sins.
One clip freezes on the instant his hands light up. Another zooms in so far the pixels smear, electricity blooming like a weapon instead of a response. Someone slows the footage to half speed and adds a bass drop right as the power dies.
A creator overlays text:
**WHEN THE "FRIENDLY" HERO LOSES CONTROL**
Another one adds circles. Red arrows. A question mark hovering over Kaminari's face.
He sits in the locker room, towel over his shoulders, watching it all on a tablet he definitely should not have been handed. The room smells like disinfectant and ozone, like every other night. Normal space. Normal routine.
Nothing normal about the screen.
"Turn it off," someone says.
Kaminari doesn't. His thumb keeps scrolling.
There's a version now with commentary. A calm voice, too calm, breaking it down frame by frame.
"Here you can see Chargebolt escalate first. Notice the brightness spike before the civilian discharge—"
"That's not—" Kaminari starts, then stops. Explaining feels pointless. The video doesn't need truth. It needs shape.
Another clip trends higher. This one cuts out the first arc entirely. Starts with Kaminari already moving, already lit. No context. No buildup. Just action without cause.
The title is cleaner. Meaner.
**HERO ERROR LEADS TO CIVILIAN INJURIES**
Someone's added a poll.
YES / NO / NEEDS INVESTIGATION
The numbers tick upward in real time.
In the hallway outside, voices overlap. PR. Legal. Agency heads doing damage calculus like this is a numbers game. It is a numbers game.
"Kaminari," a handler says, poking her head in. "Don't post. Don't reply. Don't like anything. If you've already liked something, tell me now."
"I haven't," he says.
She studies him. "Good. Keep it that way."
She leaves. The door doesn't quite close. He can hear them arguing about wording. About whether silence looks guilty or professional. About how much the public already thinks they know him.
Someone brings up his image. The jokes. The brain-fry memes. The harmless idiot electricity boy.
"That works against him," a voice says. "People expect incompetence."
Kaminari swallows.
The edits get better as the night goes on.
Someone syncs the blackout with dramatic music. Someone else color-grades the footage colder, harsher. In one version, Kaminari's jacket is the only bright thing left in frame. A target.
Then come the compilations.
**CHARGEBOLT: A PATTERN?**
Clips from old fights, stripped of resolution, stitched together. A stumble here. A misfire there. Moments he walked away from, lessons learned, mistakes already paid for. All flattened into a narrative that points in one direction.
Careless. Reckless. Smiling while the city flickers.
A counter-thread starts, of course. Fans arguing back. Posting longer clips. Pointing out the modded Quirk, the intercepted arc, the stroller just out of frame.
It never travels as far.
Truth is heavy. Outrage floats.
Around midnight, a new clip surfaces. Different source. Higher quality. Security cam from a storefront across the street. Wide angle. No sound.
It shows the first discharge. Clear. Undeniable.
For an hour, the tide shifts.
Comments soften. Polls rebalance. Someone deletes a tweet.
Then the clip gets reuploaded.
Cropped.
The first discharge is gone.
Kaminari watches the edit loop on his screen, jaw tight, electricity itching under his skin like it wants out.
"So that's it," he murmurs. "You just… cut it."
No one answers. The locker room is empty now. Everyone else went home hours ago. Or pretended to.
His phone buzzes. Agency message.
**Do not address the footage. Stand by.**
Another buzz. This one private.
A friend sends a screenshot. A headline mock-up from a tabloid site.
**FROM SPARK TO STATIC: IS CHARGEBOLT TOO UNSTABLE FOR SOLO PATROL?**
Kaminari locks the screen.
He sits there a long time, listening to the hum in the walls, the city breathing through wires and grids and systems that only matter when they fail.
Somewhere out there, people are deciding who he is.
And he doesn't get a vote.
The official statement is six sentences long.
It thanks the public for their concern. It confirms an investigation. It praises heroes who act under pressure. It says nothing about blame.
It drops at 9:00 a.m. sharp.
By 9:03, people are mad it says nothing.
By 9:07, people are mad it exists at all.
Kaminari doesn't read the replies. He already knows the shape of them. He's learned that silence has weight. He just didn't realize how heavy.
He's reassigned within the hour.
Not grounded. Not suspended. Just shifted. Team patrols only. Less visibility. Fewer cameras. A quiet optimization that nobody calls punishment.
In the briefing room, no one looks at him too long.
Aizawa doesn't say anything. That's worse somehow. A clap on the shoulder would've meant closure. This is just… continuation.
"Stick close," someone mutters as they head out.
Kaminari nods.
The city feels different when people think they know you.
On patrol, conversations stop when he passes. Phones dip, then rise again when they think he's not looking. Kids who used to wave now stare like they're doing math.
Is he dangerous?
Is he stupid?
Is he both?
A street vendor hesitates before taking his money, like electricity might jump out of it.
Kaminari keeps his hands in his pockets.
Online, the discourse evolves. It always does.
The loud ones get bored. They move on to a bigger scandal, a flashier failure. What remains are the quiet edits. The Wikipedia phrasing. The tone shift in explainer videos.
"Controversial hero."
"Mixed public reception."
"Known for high-output Quirk usage."
Nothing overt. Nothing defamatory. Just enough.
A late-night talk show makes a joke. Not mean. Worse. Casual.
"Hey, at least when Chargebolt shows up, you won't need mood lighting."
Laughter. Applause.
Kaminari hears it the next day from a teammate repeating it verbatim, then stopping mid-sentence when he realizes.
"Sorry," they say. "I didn't—"
"It's fine," Kaminari says, because that's the word people need.
He stops doing interviews. Stops posting. His accounts go dark without announcement. Fans notice. Critics celebrate. Analysts speculate.
Silence becomes the headline.
One night, weeks later, there's another blackout. Different ward. Different cause. Kaminari isn't even on duty.
Still, his name trends for ten minutes.
Someone posts an old clip. Someone else corrects them. Someone else says correction doesn't matter. Someone else says nothing ever does.
The city comes back online. It always does.
Kaminari stands on a rooftop, city lights stretching out beneath him, steady and bright and unforgiving. He flexes his fingers. Electricity hums, obedient. Controlled. The same as it's always been.
He wonders if anyone would believe that now.
Below, a group of civilians walks past a flickering streetlight. One of them glances up, spots him silhouetted against the glow.
For a second, their eyes meet.
The person doesn't wave. They don't film. They just look, assessing, then keep walking.
Kaminari exhales slowly.
No sparks. No speeches. No corrections.
Just a hero standing very still in a city that's decided it's done listening.
And somewhere in the silence, the story settles.