Kaito Arisaka sat by the open window of his 1K apartment, the plastic crinkle of a bag of sour cream chips the only sound in the small, dim room.
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
"It's good, but I missed the taste of Lays. No Lays, no game"
Crunch
Crunch
Kaito was dressed in a worn-out undershirt that had seen better days, his feet propped up on a chair.
To any observer, he was the picture of a tired, entry-level salaryman enjoying the only thirty minutes of peace his schedule allowed.
Outside, the moon was bright shining over Musutafu.
Kaito wasn't thinking about heroes, or the HPSC, or the fact that his bank account had more zeroes now.
He was thinking about the moon. Specifically, he was thinking about how the moon's texture looked slightly more 4K tonight.
"Unbelievable, my eyes now can even see surface crates of the moon."
'Another unasked-for update to my eyes', he thought, popping a chip into his mouth.
Thump.
It wasn't a sound his ears picked up; it was a vibration in the bedrock of the city, transmitted through the floorboards and up into his marrow.
Five kilometers away. North-Northwest.
Kaito didn't stop chewing. He leaned his head back against the wall, his mind instantly filtering through the "noise" of the city.
His consciousness, now a finely tuned instrument of reality management, mapped the disturbance instantly.
Kaito sensed a kinetic barrier flaring a messy, inefficient, leaking energy like a cracked steam pipe.
That was Aegis, the "Shield Hero."
Kaito remembered his file from the morning's news. Aegis had been flagged for "operational anomalies," a polite HPSC term for selling government-sanctioned hero gear to the Yakuza. He was currently in a state of total panic.
And behind him...
Crack-hiss.
The sound of a supersonic projectile cutting through the humid night air.
Kaito's eyes sharpened. He remembered that sound. Not from the news, but from a memory his past life.
"Lady Nagant" was a tragic, fictional character in a manga.
Even after nearly two decades in this reality, his Quirk kept those memories as vivid as a 4K render. His past life wasn't a fading dream; it was a hard drive he could access with zero latency.
'Lady Nagant is out,' Kaito realized. 'Which means the HPSC is getting desperate. She hasn't killed the President yet. She's still their loyal cleaner. It maybe because I made someone practically quirk less...The HPSC is desperate.'
Kaito tracked their path through the city.
Aegis was desperate. The corrupt hero was aiming for the residential blocks, hoping the collateral damage would force Nagant to check her fire.
He was 5 kilometers away and heading straight for Kaito's place. In four minutes, a high-speed chase would tear through this quiet neighborhood, bringing news helicopters, police cordons, and the prying eyes of the HPSC.
Kaito looked at his half-eaten bag of chips.
Then he looked at the distant, flickering flashes of light on the horizon.
"Well it's time for resolution" Kaito whispered, his voice cold and flat in the empty room.
"Every time I try to just exist, you people bring your noise to my doorstep. Agent Mera, the UA, the 'Hero X' alerts... you're all so obsessed with finding a him that you've forgotten how to stay in your own lanes."
"I even saved countless people at that time. What a f*cked up world, No.. the government is f*cked up"
He stood up.
The bag of chips stayed suspended in the air where he had left it, a minor glitch in gravity that he didn't even bother to fix.
Kaito was done. If the world wanted to look for Hero X, he would give them something so blindingly bright they would never look at the others again.
SNAP
"If you want Hero X so badly," he said, the white shimmer beginning to crawl up his skin like a suit of armor, "I'll give him to you. And I'll make sure that it will be foolproof"
He didn't walk out the door. He simply stepped into the air.
Edit: Topology. Distance = 0.
SNAP.
-----
Osu Industrial Ruins – 11:20 PM
The pursuit was a chaotic ballet of physics and violence.
SCREEECH
Aegis's black armored sedan roared through the rusted gates of the Osu Ward, his tires screaming as he drifted around a pile of scrap metal.
His Quirk, Kinetic Bastion, was pushed to the absolute limit.
A orange energy encased the car, absorbing the shock of the debris he plowed through and converting it into pure velocity.
Every time the car hit a bump, it didn't just bounce; it exploded forward in a jagged burst of speed.
High above, a streak of purple and indigo cut through the moonlight. Lady Nagant moved with a grace that defied the laws of biology.
She leapt from the arm of a rusted crane to the roof of a collapsing silo, her right arm already shifting, the flesh and bone reconfiguring into a long, organic rifle barrel.
She didn't use a scope. She didn't need one.
She felt the vibration of Aegis's engine in the soles of her feet. She calculated the wind resistance by the way her hair whipped against her cheeks.
BANG.
Swooosh
The shot was a supersonic crack that shattered the silence of the ruins.
The bullet, a specialized hair-fiber projectile hardened to the density of diamond, didn't travel in a straight line. It curved mid-air, tracing a perfect arc that bypassed the sedan's reinforced trunk and struck the rear axle.
BOOOM
The car didn't just stop; it disintegrated. The rear wheels were ripped from their housing, and the sedan somersaulted through the air, a flaming wreck of steel and glass.
"Daamn!"
Aegis bailed out a split second before impact. He hit the ground at eighty miles per hour, his kinetic shields flaring bright orange as they absorbed the lethal momentum of the fall.
He rolled, came to his feet, and immediately slammed his palms into the earth.
"Get back!" he roared.
A wave of orange kinetic force erupted from his hands, a physical wall that tore up the concrete and sent a spray of jagged shrapnel toward Nagant as she descended.
SWISH
SWISH
Nagant didn't panic. She fired twice more in mid-air. One bullet struck a piece of flying concrete, shattering it into dust before it could reach her.
The second bullet curved around the kinetic wave, aiming directly for Aegis's throat.
Aegis barely managed to bring up a localized shield. The bullet hit with the force of a grenade, the orange barrier spider-webbing under the pressure.
The impact sent him skidding backward, his boots carving deep furrows in the ground.
"Nagant! You bitch!" Aegis screamed, his face contorted in a mix of rage and terror. "The Commission is sending an assassin after a Top-50 Pro? You think the public will let this slide?"
Nagant landed on a rusted catwalk twenty feet above him.
She looked down, her expression one of hollow, mechanical indifference. "The public won't hear about this, Aegis. You're not a hero anymore. You're just a traitor now, a villain in the system. And you'll get deleted."
Aegis laughed, a frantic, high-pitched sound. "Then I'll take this whole ward with me! I've been storing energy for months! I'll level everything within three miles!"
Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle.
Aegis began to glow. The orange light around him intensified until it was blinding, the air beginning to hum with the sheer volume of stored kinetic potential.
Nagant raised her arm, her eyes narrowing as she prepared a killing shot.
Then, the world stopped.
It didn't just go quiet. It felt as if the "resolution" of reality had suddenly increased, making every grain of dust and every rust flake on the silos look terrifyingly sharp.
"You know," a voice drawled from above.
The voice didn't come from Nagant. It didn't come from the ruins. It seemed to resonate from the air itself.
Nagant and Aegis both looked up.
High above the warehouse floor, perched on a rusted crane arm that was currently swinging lazily in the wind, sat a figure.
He was leaning back, one hand behind his head, his legs dangling over the edge with the casual posture of someone watching a sunset.
"The quality of the potato starch in those chips was actually quite high tonight," Hero X said, his voice echoing with a firm, mocking resonance.
"Crisp. Salty. Perfectly optimized for a Saturday night. And then... I hear you two. Scraping your Quirks against the pavement like children dragging loud toys across a floor."
Nagant's rifle snapped toward the figure in a blur of movement. Aegis, his body still glowing with lethal energy, froze.
Hero X finally looked down. He didn't jump. He didn't fly. He simply appeared on the ground between them.
There was no wind.
No displacement of dust.
One micro-second he was fifty feet up; the next, he was standing on the concrete, his hands in his pockets.
"Hero X," Nagant whispered. Her heart, usually a steady drumbeat of a professional killer, was now hammering against her ribs. The HPSC had classified this man as a Level 4 alert—a "Dangerous and Uncontrollable Vigilante". And this should be the first time X talked to someone.
Standing this close to him, Nagant understood why. He didn't feel like a man with a Quirk. He felt like something else. Too much pressure radiating.
"Looking for me for years, and yet you still don't know how to approach me?" Hero X tilted his head. "Is this what you call a hunt? Chasing a failing pro through the ruins? It's messy, Kaina. It's unoptimized. It's... disappointing."
"How do you know my.. No!.. Step aside," Nagant managed to say, her finger trembling on the trigger. "This is official Commission business."
"Business?" Hero X laughed. It was a cold, beautiful sound. "You're trying to delete a 'trash'.
"Die!" Aegis screamed. The pressure was too much. The rogue hero couldn't handle the aura of the silhouette. He unleashed everything.
Buzz
Buzz
The kinetic energy Aegis had been storing erupted in a massive, hemispherical blast of orange light.
It was enough force to vaporize a city block. The concrete beneath him disintegrated. The air itself began to burn.
Hero X didn't even look at him. He was still looking at Nagant.
As the wall of orange destruction reached within a hair's breadth of Hero X's shoulder, he raised his fingers.
SNAP.
The orange light didn't explode. It didn't push back. It simply ceased to exist.
The transition was so violent it created a vacuum. One second there was a sun-bright explosion; the next, there was only silence and a faint popping sound as the air rushed back into the space where the energy used to be.
Aegis's momentum hit a wall of absolute nothingness.
Aegis's arm didn't just break—it folded back on itself as the physics of the punch were deleted mid-motion. He stood there for a heartbeat, staring at his mangled limb in mute shock, before the sheer impossibility of what had happened caught up to him.
"Quiet," Hero X said. He didn't even hit the man. He just stepped an inch to the left, and Aegis went sailing into a concrete pillar with the force of his own redirected momentum, collapsing into a heap of groaning meat.
Nagant didn't wait. She couldn't. Her instincts told her that if she didn't fire now, she would never fire again.
Crackle-boom
Swish. Swish. Swish
She unleashed a three-round burst—specialized, high-velocity rounds that she curved into three different vectors to hit Hero X's head, heart, and spine simultaneously.
The choreography was perfect. The bullets hissed through the air at Mach 3.
Hero X didn't move. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching the moon.
Snap
As the bullets entered the five-foot radius around him, they slowed down. Not because of a shield, but because the space they were traveling through seemed to have its "friction" turned up to the maximum.
They crawled forward, then stopped dead, hovering in the air.
They stayed there, spinning uselessly, their kinetic energy trapped in a recursive loop.
Hero X reached out, plucked the bullet aimed at his forehead from the air, and held it up to the light.
"You're the HPSC's 'Top Asset,' aren't you?" Hero X asked, his voice dripping with condescension. "And yet, you're shaking. Your heart rate is 145. You're so scared that you're pulling your shots by 0.3 millimeters. HPSC have been hunting me for years, and you've learned nothing."
"Who... Or what are you?" Nagant hissed. She tried to load another round, but her fingers felt like they were made of lead.
"I'm the one who's tired of being followed," Hero X said.
He began to walk toward her. He wasn't running. He was strolling, every step he took causing a ripple in the air like a glitch in a high-resolution video.
The ground beneath his feet didn't just crunch; the rust on the floor vanished as he stepped on it, the metal becoming brand new, then turning to glass, then back to metal.
Then.
Aegis scrambled up from the rubble, his eyes bloodshot with a mix of rage and madness. "I'm a Pro! You can't treat me like this!"
BANG
Aegis threw a massive kinetic wave, a wall of pure force meant to level the entire factory floor.
Hero X didn't even stop walking. He didn't even turn his head. He just waved a hand as if brushing away a bothersome fly.
Snap
The wall of force, capable of shattering tanks, turned into a gentle breeze that barely moved the collar of Hero X's white garment.
With a casual flick of his wrist, not even looking at his target, Hero X edited the ground beneath Aegis.
The concrete turned to liquid, then instantly hardened into solid, transparent diamond, burying the rogue hero up to his chin.
"What!"
"No! Nagant help I surrender"
Aegis gasped, his lungs unable to expand against the absolute rigidity of the diamond. He was a living statue, eyes wide with terror.
Hero X appeared instantly in front of Nagant.
There was no movement. One moment he was ten feet away; the next, his face was inches from hers.
The pressure he released was so heavy Nagant felt like she was being crushed by the weight of a mountain.
"Listen to me carefully, Janitor," Hero X whispered, his glowing white eyes burning into hers. "You and your handlers have spent years trying to catch a me. You've audited the entire city. You've looked into every face, every file, every 'civilians'. You've bothered office workers and nobodies, searching for a me in a pile of dust."
He reached out and touched the barrel of her rifle.
"I can be everywhere and anywhere"
Hero X gripped Lady Nagant's chin forced her head up, locking her gaze into his.
SNAP.
The rifle in her arms didn't break. It didn't shatter. It turned into a flurry of white flower petals—thousands of them—that blew away in the midnight wind, leaving Nagant's Quirk bare and trembling.
"Tell the Commission that I am officially introducing myself," Hero X said, his voice dropping to a terrifying, bone-deep vibration that rattled the rusted silos around them. "Tell them to stop the searches. Stop looking for me in the crowds."
He looked back at the moon one last time, the cold light reflecting off his pristine silhouette.
"I value my peace, Kaina. I'm no Hero, a Villain nor a Vigilante."
"I'm just freest man there is. And I can do whatever the hell I want"
SNAP
With a blinding flash of white light that turned the night into day for a single second—blinding Nagant and the satellite cameras watching from above—he vanished.
-----
11:55 PM – Kaito's Apartment
Kaito sat back down by his window. The white shimmer was gone.
The "Hero X" weight had been folded back into his cells, hidden in bis body like a second skin.
He was back to being Kaito Arisaka—the guy with the 100% cotton shirt and a half-empty bag of chips.
The bag of chips was still suspended in the air. He touched the plastic, and gravity returned to it. He reached in, found a particularly large chip, and took a bite.
Crunch.
"Finally," he muttered, looking at the now-silent street below. "The ending is good."
The pressure was gone. The X was in the light.
By formally introducing "Hero X" as a High Risk Individual, he had created the perfect lie.
Kaito had explicitly told Nagant that looking for him among civilians and mundane crowds was a waste of time.
He had built a psychological wall that the HPSC would never cross.
But then, a strange sensation washed over him. A prickle at the back of his neck.
Kaito looked at his hands. They were trembling—not from the "Update," but from a buried, adolescent thrill.
Kaito remembered when he was four years old, reborn into this reality, shouting and crying in the corner of his room because the physics of this world didn't make sense.
He remembered the years he spent acting like a chuunibyou, wearing capes made of bedsheets, doing hand signs, speaking arrogantly like a king, doing a workout that didn't make him go bald and so on.
"I... I really just called her 'Janitor' and turned her quirk into flowers," Kaito whispered, his face turning a small tinge of red. "I even did Homelander's line."
The chuunibyou soul Kaito thought he had killed at nine had just been given a god-like stage, and it had performed perfectly.
The HPSC would never look at a civilian Kaito again.
But underneath the relief was that tiny, nagging goosebump.
"That was very cringe" Kaito whispered into his palms, "and I hate myself for how much I enjoyed doing it."
Kaito looked at his reflection in the window. He looked like a normal, boring guy.
But for one night, his inner childness had been the main character.
Kaito groaned, aggressively closing the blinds. "I have orientation at the warehouse on Monday. I am a now back to 9-5 person."
He climbed into bed and pulled the covers over his head, trying to hide from the memory of his embarassing past.
~~~~~
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