It had been forty-eight hours since the nation wide disaster.
Kaito sat on the floor of his new dormitory in Kyoto, a well spaced, nine-tatami box that smelled of lavender and flowers.
He wasn't meditating, and he wasn't reveling in his victory. He was focused on the physical sensation of the packing tape screeching against cardboard. Yes, he moved to a new apartment for his new upcoming Haken Contract.
Kaito didn't think about the Singularity Batch 0-9 he had deleted or the skyscraper he had caught with a single, gloved hand.
He thought about the bruise.
The hilt of Stendhal's sword had left a dark, mark on his temple. He could have "Updated" it away. But he didn't.
Kaito needed the pain. It was the only thing keeping him tethered to the persona of a civilian after the high-spec cringe of his performance as Hero X.
KRING. KRING. KRING.
His phone buzzed on the tatami mat.
The caller ID: Grandma Saki.
Kaito took a slow, deliberate breath. He suppressed his heart rate, forcing the "efficiency" of his lungs back down to a normal human rhythm then answered.
"Kaito! My God, I've been calling since yesterday morning!" Saki's voice was a frantic, thin rasp. "I saw the news! They showed that alley in Musutafu... they said a civilian was struck by that 'Vigilante'. Tell me you're okay. Tell me you aren't in a hospital."
Kaito pulled a long strip of tape across his final box, the sound echoing in the empty room.
"I'm fine, Ba-chan. I just got in the way. I was trying to beat the rush to the station so I wouldn't miss my train. The guy hit me, and I blacked out. I didn't see anyone other than the pro hero who was injured."
"You always were unlucky," she sighed, the terror finally breaking into weary relief. "But the news, Kaito... it's all they talk about. They're calling that 'X' a god. They say he reached into the world and fixed it. People in Shizuoka are setting up shrines in the streets. You worked there, did you witness it first hand?"
Kaito looked at the small, CRT television in the corner. He had it on mute, but the images were constant.
Hideki—the reporter he remembered—was currently standing in front of a digital map of the world. Every major continent was highlighted.
The headline read: GLOBAL SINGULARITY: THE ERA OF HERO X.
"No, I'm far away in the evacuation zone, Grandma," Kaito said, watching a surge of unwanted clarity flicker at the edge of his vision, "And besides, the Kyoto sanitation contract doesn't care about 'Miracles.' If I'm not at the office by 9:00 PM for the night-shift, they'll dock my pay. I don't have time to worry about Hero X or something with white suits."
He hung up. After talking a bit with his grandma Saki
Kaito set the phone down and pulled his laptop onto his knees. He ignored the frantic news pings and logged directly into the Haken Agency's payroll portal.
A notification was waiting:
Contract Completion Bonus – Higashi Distribution Hub.
Because he had technically finished the audit before the "disaster" reached the interior of the warehouse, and because his data submission was flagged as 100% accurate despite the structural collapse of the surrounding district, the system had cleared his premium.
He watched the digital numbers tick upward in his savings account—a significant sum, the kind of "major bonus" that bought high-quality tatami and better groceries.
To the world, Higashi was a divine restoration; to Kaito's bank, it was a successfully closed ticket with a hazardous-duty kicker.
He felt a rare, fleeting sense of professional satisfaction. The skyscraper might have been a "nuisance," but the electronic direct deposit was undeniably efficient.
Bzzt
Suddenly, Kaito's vision expanded.
The "Global Fever" hit him like a physical blow. It wasn't a power he activated; it was the world forcing it on him. Somewhere in Washington D.C., a senator was calling for an emergency summit.
In a hidden bunker in Europe, a group of scientists were analyzing the "perfected" concrete of Higashi and declaring it a breach of thermodynamics.
Millions of people were pouring their belief into Hero X, and the "Update" was too much to process the volume.
Kaito slumped against the wall. He felt the entire Japanese archipelago beneath his feet. He could feel the tectonic plates grinding under the Philippine Sea; he could feel the moisture content of the clouds over Hokkaido.
Kaito realized that he could reach out and manipulate the reality of all Japan. He could rewrite the mountains, delete the smog, and erase every villain in the country with a single snap.
"I didn't expect," he whispered, his voice a gravelly rasp. "I've become so strong."
He muffled his presence, dampening his senses until the world felt small, muffled, and normal again.
Kaito stood up, his polyester shirt sticking to the sweat on his back. He didn't look like a savior. He looked like a man who had worked too much overtime and was one bad day away from a breakdown.
[A/n: In the Donghua 'To Be Hero X' the public belief energy was shared among all the heroes while in this world, it's only for Kaito]
-----
Hideki hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. His eyes were bloodshot, and his office that looked like a war room.
He had three different phones on his desk, and all of them were ringing.
"I don't care about the HPSC gag order!" Hideki roared into one of the receivers. "The government can't censor a me! I have the footage of the 'Restoration.' I have the thermal scans of the building Hero X manipulate d. Do you know what the temperature of that concrete was? Room temperature. A million tons of kinetic energy turned into nothing in a second."
BANG
Hideki slammed the phone down and turned to his monitor. He was watching the clip he'd filmed—the white-suited figure standing amidst the green fog of the singularity.
"He's not a hero," Hideki whispered, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "Heroes are licensed. Heroes have limits. Hero X is an answer to a question we weren't supposed to ask. He is inevitable. An axiom."
Kaito hit 'Enter' on his new column: The Ghost Watch.
Within seconds, the site's traffic spiked so hard the servers groaned. He wasn't just reporting the news anymore; he was like building a religion.
Hideki knew that every time he shared a clip, every time he described the 'Clean Order' of Hero X, the world believed a little more. And as long as they believed, Hideki was the most powerful man in the media.
-----
Agent Mera and other agents sat at a table covered in satellite imagery of Higashi. Beside them, the President of the HPSC looked older than she had two days ago.
"The Americans are calling it a 'Tactical Reality-Tear,'" Mera said, her voice dry. "They want to know why we haven't 'secured the asset.' They think we're hiding him. The UN is drafting a resolution to declare Hero X a 'Global Heritage Entity.' They want to take him out of our jurisdiction."
The President didn't look up from her window. "We can't secure what we can't find, Mera. We've scanned every civilian who was at Higashi. We've tracked every record, every transit pass. Nothing. He's a invisible."
"He told us to stop looking, ma'am" Mera reminded her. "He migh knew our names."
"I know," the President whispered. "If we try to chain a man who can Catch a Falling Skyscraper like a baseball, we won't have a Commission to come back to tomorrow. We tell the world we are 'cooperating' with Hero X. We lie. We tell them he's part of a secret task force. It's the only way to keep the public from realizing their government is obsolete."
-----
"Hah... Hahaha! It's fine now! Why? Because... because I am..."
Toshinori Yagi coughed, a spray of crimson speckling the white sheets of the UA infirmary.
The words died in his throat, replaced by the wet, rhythmic wheeze of lungs that were more scar tissue than organ.
He wasn't the "Symbol of Peace" right now; he was a man drowning in the weight of his own failure.
"Sit down, you oversized oaf!" Recovery Girl barked, slamming a syringe of vitamins onto the bedside table. "You've got a puncture wound in your side the size of a grapefruit and you're still trying to strike a pose? Your 'Muscle Form' is a death sentence after what you did at Higashi!"
Toshinori slumped back, his tall frame looking swallowed by the hospital gown.
His sunken eyes, usually glowing with a piercing blue light amidst the shadows of his brow, were dim. He reached up, his trembling fingers tracing the jagged, legendary scar on his left side.
"I was there, Chiyo," Toshinori whispered, his voice losing its American theatricality and becoming the raspy, solemn tone of a man who knew his era was rotting. "I stood at the base of that nightmare—that 'Singularity.' Every time I punched it, the thing just drank the kinetic energy. It was getting bigger because of me."
He looked at his hands. Large, calloused hands that had shifted the tectonic plates of society.
"I was ready. I was going to use 200%. I was going to turn my own bones into powder to hold that skyscraper up long enough for the civilians to crawl out. I was ready to die to stay the Symbol." He gave a weak, self-deprecating chuckle. "That's the script, isn't it? The Hero sacrifices everything for the win."
"And then?" Recovery Girl asked.
"And then... the world paused," Toshinori's eyes widened, reflecting the memory of the event.
"Hero X didn't arrive with a roar or a smash. He didn't even look at the monster. He looked at the at the disaster and decided it was a typo."
Toshinori's voice dropped to a whisper. "He caught the building with one hand. A million tons of concrete, Chiyo. I hit that same building a second later, expecting a bone-shattering impact, but it was just... solid. Stationary. He had rewritten the gravity of a skyscraper while looking normal. I could punch it but it could cause secondary damage and may implicate thousands of people"
He remembered the look Hero X gave him. It wasn't the look a sidekick gives a mentor, or even the look a villain gives an arch-enemy.
It was the look a professional gives a bumbling intern who is standing in the middle of a hallway.
"'You're in the way. Move,' he told me," Toshinori recounted, a hollow laugh escaping him. "Me. The Symbol of Peace. I was told I was a 'nuisance' . He didn't see my sacrifice as noble; he saw it as inefficient."
Toshinori gripped the bedsheets, his knuckles turning white. His optimism—that chronic, oafish drive to save everyone—was being gnawed at by a terrifying new reality.
"The public... they saw it, Chiyo. They saw a man who doesn't need to bleed to win. Why would they want a 'Symbol' who breaks his body when there's a man who can snap his fingers and make the tragedy un-happen? If he is truly 'The Freest Man,' then what am I? A prisoner to a broken system?"
He turned his head to the window, watching the sunset over the UA campus.
"I have to stay standing," Toshinori whispered, forcing a thin smile onto his face—the habit Nana Shimura had burned into his soul. "But for the first time... I felt unnecessary. I felt like a background sketch in someone else's masterpiece."
-----
In the uknown vault, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and the tapping of fingers against glass.
All For One didn't look like a man who had just lost years of research; he looked like an architect who had just discovered a flaw in his rival's foundation.
He stood before the monitors, his scarred face illuminated by the flickering data of the Higashi aftermath.
For decades, every move he made—every Quirk stolen, every shadow organization funded—had been a surgical strike against the lineage of One For All.
He had mapped out the fall of All Might with the precision of a master composer. He was prepared for the grand, final battle.
AFO was prepared for the blood, the Smashes, and the eventual collapse of the Symbol of Peace.
But the "Singularity Batch 0-9" hadn't been destroyed by All Might. It had been deleted by a X.
He leaned in closer, his fingers trembling as they traced the silhouette of the white-suited figure on the screen.
The obsession took root again instantly, but it was shaped by a century of strategic malice.
"I have spent years preparing the grave for Almight," he mused, a jagged smile spreading across his face. "I have cultivated the perfect chaos to break his spirit. But this 'Hero X'... he just appeared. His quirk is a type that sits above. Clean. Silent. Absolute."
His mind began to pivot. Reclaiming One For All was still the destiny he sought, but Hero X was the shortcut. If he could peel that reality-altering power away from Hero X's soul, the "Symbol of Peace" wouldn't just be defeated; he would be erased. The century-old feud with OFA user would end not with a clash of fists, but with the total obsolescence of everything All Might represented.
"Doctor," All For One called out, his voice turning sharp. "We do not let the obsession blind us. The plan for All Might remains. We continue to bleed the public's trust in him. But Hero X is now our second primary objective."
He turned away from the screen, his cape billowing in the cold draft.
"Find the clues and leads. Everyone has a routine. And when he reaches out to 'fix' the chaos I create for All Might, I will be the one holding the cage. How beautiful you will look, X, when I finally peel that power away and leave Almight to rot in a world that no longer remembers his name."
-----
In the penthouse of Detnerat Tower, Rikiya Yotsubashi stood with his back to his mahogany desk, staring at the panoramic view of a city that was currently obsessed with a ghost.
He wasn't stressed. On the contrary, he looked enlightened.
"Do you see it, Hanabata?" Rikiya asked, his voice trembling with a rare, ecstatic fervor. He didn't look at his assistant; he looked at the footage of the Higashi 'Restoration' playing on a loop.
"The HPSC is calling it a 'Tactical Reality-Tear,'" Hanabata replied, adjusting his glasses. "The public is calling it a miracle."
"The public is small-minded," Rikiya snapped, turning around. His face remained calm, but the stress-lines of his Quirk flickered briefly around his eyes. "This isn't just a miracle. This is the inevitability. For generations, the Meta Liberation Army has preached that the 'Quirk' is the soul. That to be truly human is to use one's power without the shackles of the law."
He walked to the window and pressed a palm against the glass.
"Look at him. X doesn't ask for permission. He doesn't wait for a license. He acts because he is. He reshapes the world because it is his natural right as a superior being. He is the 'Ideal Human' my ancestor Destro dreamed of—a man who is so free that the laws of physics themselves bow to his will."
Rikiya turned to a camera setup in the corner of the room—the gateway to the MLA's encrypted network.
"Prepare a broadcast for the cells," Re-Destro commanded.
"Tell them to stop looking for 'Vigilantes.' Tell them to watch for the 'Him.' We will not hunt Hero X. We will study him. We will worship the way he renders the government obsolete. If All Might is the 'Symbol' of a crumbling system, Hero X is the dawn of the new world. We must ensure that when the revolution begins, we are on the side of the man who catches skyscrapers."
-----
Kaito stood at the front desk of a grey, office building in the industrial heart of Kyoto. He looked tired. He looked bruised.
He handed his Haken ID to the night manager, a man with a permanent scowl and a Quirk that made his skin look like sandpaper.
"Arisaka, Kaito?" the manager grunted, checking the digital ledger. "You're the one from the Higashi mess. You're lucky to be alive, kid. I heard the whole place was turned into a garden."
"I missed my dinner because of it," Kaito said flatly, his voice devoid of any heroic flourish. "Where's my locker sir?"
The manager pointed to a row of rusted metal cages in the back. "Shift starts in five. You're on the sewer audit. Don't fall in. We don't pay for dry cleaning."
Kaito nodded. He walked to his locker, hung up his jacket, and put on a high-visibility vest that was two sizes too big. He looked at his reflection in the dented metal of the locker door.
The world was screaming for a god. They were holding summits, building shrines, and starting wars in his name.
The "Updates" was surging, making him feel like he could reshape the very molecules of the city he was standing in.
Kaito Arisaka just picked up a clipboard and a heavy-duty flashlight.
"Another 9-5 job that pays more" he muttered, his voice clinical. "Then let's get to work."
~~~~~
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