Here is the BONUS CHAPTER. Enjoy!
A/N: Please read this chapter slowly, and in detail. I worked real hard cooking the lore.🔥🔥
Disclaimer: I have wrote about some geopolitical stuff. I want to let you know, I mean no disrespect if your nation is mentioned. This is a fiction work, so I hope you wont take it too personally.
BONUS CHAPTER: 1500PS
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Next night, U.A. Principal's Office:
Nezu sat behind his desk, and in front of him was a file.
Black cover. No label. No title. No markings of any kind. The kind of file that didn't exist in any database, any archive, or any record. The kind of file that, if someone asked about it, Nezu would smile and say he had no idea what they were talking about.
He opened it one last time.
He went through the pages slowly. Reading. Re-reading. Cross-referencing details he'd memorized years ago against the notes he'd added over the last twenty-four hours.
When he was done, he closed it.
He stared at the black cover for a long moment.
Then he sighed.
"Guess it's finally time to use it."
He placed the file carefully into a leather briefcase sitting on the corner of his desk and closed it.
"My gut says to bet on Akira."
He reached for his tea which had gone cold a long while ago. He drank it anyway.
A knock came from the door.
"Come in."
The door opened, and Honoka walked in.
She looked tired. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and she was still in the same business attire from the hospital. She hadn't gone home since then.
Nezu looked at her and smiled.
"Well, I was expecting either you or Chiyo to show up."
Honoka sighed as she dropped into the chair in front of his desk. "Of course you did."
She sat there for a second, looking around the office. The bookshelves. The tea sets. Then her eyes landed on the briefcase.
"What's that?"
Nezu looked at the briefcase. Then back at her.
"This....." He picked it up and placed it on the floor beside his chair, out of sight. "Is something we will most likely need, after none of our tricks work."
Honoka's expression shifted. The tiredness was still there, but now there was something else underneath it.
"What do you mean by 'after none of our tricks work'?"
Nezu didn't answer immediately. He just looked at her.
Honoka leaned forward. "Nezu. Why are you overthinking this? We have the two richest families in Japan on our side, the strongest legal team in the country, and above all, we have you."
"You. The smartest being in Japan. The being who outplayed every corporation, every politician, and every intelligence agency that's ever tried to touch U.A. What can the HPSC possibly do against all of that?"
Nezu still didn't answer.
He just stared at her.
The silence stretched. One second. Two. Five.
It was the kind of silence that made Honoka's skin crawl. Because Nezu always had an answer. Nezu always had a plan. Nezu always had that annoying, all-knowing smile that said 'I've already thought of everything you're about to say.'
But right now, that was gone.
And he wasn't answering.
That scared her more than anything the detective had said.
Nezu finally spoke. But not with an answer, but a question.
"What do you know about the time when the first wave of quirks awakened?" (I changed it from a single kid being born with a quirk, to a wave of kids all around the world born with it.)
Honoka blinked. "What?"
"The emergence period. When the first generation of quirk users appeared. What do you know about it?"
Honoka frowned. "What does that have to do with anything?"
Nezu raised a paw. "Humour me."
She stared at him. Then leaned back in the chair and thought about it.
"I don't know. The basics, I guess. What everyone knows. Quirks started appearing. Society changed. Heroes and villains became a thing. Some countries got stronger. Some didn't."
"And that," Nezu said quietly, "is exactly what they want you to know."
He got up from his chair.
He walked past her to the bookshelf on the far wall. Not the one with the tea sets and the framed photos. The other one. The one in the corner that was always slightly dusty, as if it hadn't been touched in years.
He ran a paw along the books until he found the one he was looking for.
He pulled it out, flipped through the pages, and stopped.
He walked back and placed the open book in front of Honoka.
"What do you see?"
Honoka looked down.
It was a world map.
She looked back at Nezu. "This is just a world map."
"Look at it properly."
She frowned but did as he said. She leaned in, her eyes scanning the continents, the borders, the labels.
It took her about a minute.
Then she saw it.
Countries. Countries she didn't recognize. Countries that didn't exist on any modern map. Dozens of them. Some smaller ones, some bigger. Scattered across every continent. Africa. South America. Southeast Asia. Eastern Europe. Central Asia.
And the countries she did recognize... were smaller. Different borders. Different shapes.
"What is this?" she asked.
Nezu took the book back and set it on the desk between them.
"This was the world before the first wave of quirk users. Roughly two hundred years ago."
He tapped the map with one claw.
"A time that is not actively taught in schools. Not suppressed, exactly. Just... forgotten. If you wanted to, you could find a book about it in some dusty corner of an old library. But nobody does, as no one is interested in a time without heroes and villains."
Honoka was still staring at the map.
"But what does this have to do with us, Nezu?"
Nezu sat back down. He folded his paws on the desk.
"Every single one of those countries that no longer exist," he said, "was a nation with the highest levels of civil unrest when quirks first emerged."
Honoka listened.
"In the pre-quirk era, civil unrest could be managed. Governments banned weapons. They deployed police. Military crackdowns. Surveillance. It was messy, but it worked. The state always had the monopoly on weapons, because at the end of the day, a man with a gun is still just a man with a gun."
He paused.
"But when quirks emerged..."
Honoka finished the line. "All hell broke loose."
Nezu pointed a claw at her. "Bingo."
He stood again, this time walking to the window.
"A single person with even a decent quirk was a game changer," Nezu continued, his back to her. "Suddenly, a factory worker could level a building. A farmer could control the weather. A teenager could set a city block on fire with a sneeze."
He turned around.
"The state no longer had a monopoly on violence. Any individual, at any time, could become a one-person army. And many did."
He walked back to the desk.
"That started a wave of massive internal clashes. Revolutions. Coups. Civil wars that lasted years. Decades, in some cases. Country after country tore itself apart from the inside."
He tapped the map again.
"Most of these nations faded because of those internal clashes. The government couldn't control the quirk users. The quirk users couldn't agree on who should be in charge. It was chaos. Pure chaos."
He looked at her.
"And while those nations burned, the ones with stronger nations — the ones who adapted faster — took advantage."
Honoka's eyes narrowed. "Took advantage, how?"
Nezu sat down and began counting on his claws.
"The United States used the civil clashes between the Mexican cartels and the government to destabilize the region. With the cartels suddenly having quirk-enhanced enforcers and the government unable to respond, the country collapsed. The US swept in under the banner of 'stabilization' and absorbed Mexico as its fifty-first state."
He raised another claw.
"Russia finally took Ukraine. With the world too busy dealing with its own quirk crises to intervene, there was no international backing. No NATO response. No sanctions that mattered. Ukraine fell."
Another claw.
"China invaded Taiwan. Same playbook. The world was on fire. Nobody came to help. Taiwan fell in weeks."
Another.
"India, after decades of diplomatic restraint, invaded Pakistan. Ended the dispute once and for all. No more border skirmishes. No more proxy wars. Just a decisive, overwhelming military campaign backed by a generation of quirk-enhanced soldiers."
One more.
"And South Korea, following India's path, wiped North Korea off the map. The Kim regime, which had survived for over a century through isolation and nuclear threats, couldn't survive a world where a single South Korean soldier with the right quirk, who could walk through a bunker wall."
Nezu lowered his paw.
"The world we live in now, Honoka, was not built on peace. It was built on the ashes of nations that couldn't adapt."
The room was silent.
Honoka stared at the map. At all those borders. All those names she didn't recognize. Countries that had existed. People who had lived there. Cultures that had thrived.
Gone.
"The countries that survived," Nezu continued, his voice quieter now, "all learned the same lesson. The same fundamental truth that every surviving government on this planet understands."
He looked at her.
"A powerful quirk, left unchecked, can end nations. So every surviving government built a system. A system designed to ensure that even if an overwhelmingly powerful quirk appeared once in a generation, they always had the infrastructure, the resources, and the people in place to deal with it."
He paused.
"That is what the HPSC is, Honoka. That is what every nation's equivalent of the HPSC is. Not a hero management agency. Not a licensing board. A failsafe. A kill switch. Built two hundred years ago to ensure that no single individual — hero or villain — ever becomes too powerful to control."
Silence.
A long, heavy silence.
Honoka's hands were gripping the armrests of the chair.
"That's... that's two hundred years of infrastructure," she whispered. "Two hundred years of planning and resources."
Nezu nodded.
"Now you understand why I'm not smiling."
He leaned forward.
"Honoka. I am the smartest being in this country. I know that. You know that. Everyone knows that. But intelligence has limits when you're playing against a system that has had two centuries to prepare for people exactly like your son."
He folded his paws.
"The Shuzenji fortune? Impressive. The Yaoyorozu legal team? Formidable. My own strategic capabilities? Considerable. But we are three players on a board that was designed before any of us were born, by people who anticipated every move we could possibly make."
Honoka's throat tightened. "Then... what do we do?"
Nezu looked at her. For a moment, just a moment, she saw something she had never seen on his face before.
Uncertainty.
But it was gone as quickly as it appeared.
"You know," Nezu said slowly, "while I believe we are strong enough to put up a fight, and we can make the HPSC's life miserable... I don't know everything about them. The full extent of their capabilities. Their deepest contingencies. Their real arsenal."
He let that sink in.
"The complexity of what we're dealing with is beyond what most people can comprehend. I am a genius among geniuses, Honoka. If I am telling you that I don't know everything about the system we're about to challenge... that should tell you something about how deep this goes."
Honoka was silent. The weight of his words pressed down on her.
"But I am one hundred percent sure of one thing," Nezu added.
She looked at him.
"If the government wanted to, they could deal with every villain problem in this country within a month. Every single one. The League of Villains. The underground syndicates. The quirk traffickers. All of it. Gone."
Honoka's eyes widened. "Then why don't they?"
Nezu's expression didn't change.
"To keep the common man occupied. Heroes chasing villains. Villains threatening cities. A never-ending cycle of conflict that keeps the population distracted, entertained, and too busy watching the show to ever think about questioning the people running it."
He looked at the city lights through the window.
"A society that has no external threat will eventually turn inward and question its leaders. But a society that always has a villain to fear? That society will cling to its heroes, and through its heroes, to the government that manages them."
He turned back to Honoka.
"The villain problem isn't a failure of the system, Honoka. It is the system."
The room was completely still.
Honoka sat there. Processing. Her mind was racing, but her body felt frozen. Everything she thought she knew about hero society, about the world her son was trying to climb to the top of, was built on a lie. Not a simple lie. A two-hundred-year-old lie, maintained by every major government on the planet.
And her son had just painted a target on his back by being exactly the kind of person this system was designed to control.
"Then what do we do?" she asked again.
Nezu looked at her.
Then he looked down at the briefcase beside his chair.
He placed a paw on it.
"Leave it to me."
Honoka stared at him, then at the briefcase.
"What's in that file, Nezu?"
Nezu smiled. For the first time all night, the old smile was back. The one that made politicians sweat and intelligence agencies file complaints.
"Insurance."
He didn't elaborate.
Honoka wanted to push. Every instinct told her to demand answers. But she knew Nezu. She'd known him for over a decade. And she knew that when the rat smiled like that, he had already calculated every possible outcome and chosen the one that gave him the best odds.
She stood up.
"If anything happens to my son because of this," she said, her green eyes glowing faintly, "I'm coming for you first. Before the HPSC. Before the government. You."
Nezu's smile didn't waver.
"I would expect nothing less."
Honoka turned and walked to the door. She opened it, paused, and looked back.
"Goodnight, Nezu."
"Goodnight, Honoka. Get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a long day."
The door closed behind her.
Nezu sat alone in his office.
He looked at the briefcase.
"Two hundred years of preparation," he whispered to the empty room. "Against one very angry mother, two very rich families, and one very clever rat."
He took a sip of his cold tea.
"Well, it's fair after all," Nezu said, a smile forming on his face.
"You do need sacrifices to wake up a god. I shall happily be that sacrifice. After all, I am a part rat. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!"
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What do you think???? Did I overcook it? Or was it just right? Let me know.
Plus if you want, you can read up to 8+ because you guys are too fast(10 will be up soon) advanced chapters and support me you can alway join my P@treaon. (Just search up Joe_Mama p@treon on google.)