Chapter 2: The Harvest and the Sanctuary
Three hundred and sixty-two days.
That was how long Akio lasted as a god among men.
For nearly a year, I watched my first champion from the rooftops of Musutafu. The underground networks had taken to calling him "The Golden Bastion." Unsanctioned by the Hero Commission, Akio had become a vigilante of pure defense. He threw himself into burning buildings, collapsed mineshafts, and gang shootouts. Armed with his innate Eternal Vitality and the Aegis Pulse my butterfly had granted him, he was functionally invincible to blunt force, heat, and kinetic trauma.
But invincibility breeds arrogance. And arrogance breeds blind spots.
I stood perched on the lip of a rusted ventilation shaft atop a chemical processing plant in the industrial district. The rain had washed away the smog, leaving the night air crisp and cold. Down in the loading bay, a skirmish was reaching its inevitable, tragic conclusion.
Akio was surrounded by a syndicate of smugglers who dealt in illegal support gear. Their leader possessed a Quirk I had cataloged mentally as 'Atmospheric Void'. He couldn't punch through Akio's golden dome of hard-light energy, but he didn't need to. He simply stood twenty feet away, hands outstretched, pulling all the oxygen out of the air within a thirty-meter sphere.
Through my Emotion Sight, which had grown infinitesimally sharper over the past year, I watched the brilliant white-gold aura of Akio's righteous resolve slowly curdle into the sickly, erratic violet of panic.
Akio was on his knees. The Aegis Pulse flickered, the golden dome sputtering like a dying lightbulb. His Eternal Vitality was working overtime, rapidly healing the microscopic cellular damage of asphyxiation, but a healing factor couldn't create oxygen out of nothing. His brain was starving.
Fall, I whispered into the wind, the moth-lenses of my mask whirring as they zoomed in on his gasping form. You did well, Akio. But it is time to return my investment.
A hero—a true, sanctioned Pro Hero—would have swooped down to save him. They would have kicked the villain in the jaw, slapped cuffs on the smugglers, and lectured Akio on the dangers of vigilantism.
But I was Nocturne. I was a sovereign, not a savior. I needed him to lose.
With a final, desperate gasp, Akio collapsed. His eyes rolled back into his head, and the golden dome of the Aegis Pulse shattered into a million dissipating sparks of light. The villain laughed, stepping forward to claim his prize.
But before the smuggler's boot could even touch Akio's unconscious body, my tether snapped taut.
It was an invisible, metaphysical recoil that echoed in the marrow of my bones. From Akio's chest, a brilliant, blinding flash of amethyst light erupted. The villains flinched, shielding their eyes. Out of the dying light, a singular obsidian butterfly tore itself free from Akio's heart. It didn't fly; it snapped back to me across the loading bay like a bullet fired in reverse, phasing through the steel girders and concrete walls until it struck my chest.
The impact knocked the breath from my lungs. I staggered back on the rooftop, clutching the edge of the ventilation shaft as a torrent of raw, unadulterated power flooded my veins.
The sensation was indescribable. It was as if my very DNA was being unzipped and rewritten in real-time. First came the Eternal Vitality. A rush of icy, perfect clarity washed through my muscles. A nagging ache in my left shoulder from an old training injury vanished instantly. I could feel my cells humming, dividing and fortifying themselves with perfect, unerring precision. I felt young. I felt timeless.
Then came the second wave. The Aegis Pulse. The knowledge of how to use it bloomed in my mind, perfectly synthesized and integrated. I didn't need to practice. I just knew. I raised my gloved hand, and with a mere thought, a shimmering, translucent golden barrier snapped into existence over my palm.
I closed my fist, and the shield vanished. No side effects. No biological rejection. The power was mine, perfectly assimilated.
Down below, the villains were staring in confusion at Akio's prone, unmoving form, wondering where the flash of light had gone. Sirens began to wail in the distance; the oxygen-vacuum Quirk had undoubtedly tripped the plant's pressure sensors. Akio would wake up in police custody, perfectly healthy thanks to his innate Quirk, but the golden shield he had come to rely on would be gone forever. He would be just a man again.
I turned my back on the loading bay and leapt from the roof. As the wind caught my cloak, I smiled behind my mask. One year down. The foundation was laid.
Three weeks later, the anniversary arrived.
I sat cross-legged on the floor of my safehouse—a derelict, forgotten observation deck near the top of a condemned skyscraper. I closed my eyes and reached into the deep, dark well of my soul. Last year, the effort had nearly drained me, producing a single chrysalis.
This year, the well was deeper. The magic, or whatever cosmic anomaly governed my existence in this world, had grown.
I opened my hands. Darkness pooled in my left palm, coalescing into the familiar, glowing amethyst-and-obsidian butterfly. But then, an identical pooling of shadows began in my right palm. The energy twisted, crystallized, and took form.
Two butterflies. Two gifts. Two tethers.
My arsenal was expanding. With Eternal Vitality keeping fatigue at bay, I felt unstoppable. But I knew the rules of my own game. I couldn't grant powers recklessly. A poor match of desire and potential would yield a weak Quirk, or worse, a volatile one that could expose me. I needed a specific type of pawn. I needed someone whose desire complemented my weaknesses.
My butterflies were fragile. While they traveled from my hand to a recipient, they could be swatted, captured, or destroyed. I needed a way to ensure their safe delivery, and a way to maneuver the board without being seen. I needed spatial manipulation.
It took me four nights of scouring the city with my Emotion Sight to find her.
Her name was Rin. She was nineteen, a runaway living in the labyrinthine maintenance tunnels beneath the city's monorail system. Her natural Quirk was called Gatekeeper. It was agonizingly weak. She could open portals, yes, but they were barely the size of a dinner plate—just large enough to reach a hand through to unlock a door from the inside, or to steal an apple from a vendor's cart.
When I found her, she was experiencing a terror so profound it painted my vision in jagged, vibrating strokes of sickly grey and neon orange.
I stood in the shadows of a dripping, subterranean aqueduct. Fifty feet away, Rin was backed against a rusted iron grate. Three men—bottom-feeders looking to exploit her Quirk for a bank heist she wanted no part of—were closing in on her.
"Come on, little mouse," the leader sneered, his arms coated in a thick, stony armor. "You just need to open a hole big enough for a bundle of cash. You do that, we let you crawl back to whatever hole you live in. You say no again, and I'll break your fingers one by one. Can't make your little portals with broken hands, can you?"
Rin was hyperventilating. Her aura was a chaotic storm of claustrophobia. She was a rat in a cage, entirely defined by her inability to escape. Her eyes darted frantically, mapping the tunnel, calculating distances, looking for an exit that didn't exist.
I don't want to be trapped, her aura screamed into the damp air. I want to disappear. I want to be untouchable. I never want to be backed into a corner again!
Her potential felt different than Akio's. It wasn't the blazing, high-yield battery of a martyr. It was the sharp, dense, coiled-spring potential of a survivor. Medium-High.
It was time to answer her prayer.
I stepped out of the shadows. My boots made no sound, but the ambient purple glow of the butterflies resting on my shoulders cast long, eerie shadows against the curved concrete walls.
"A cage is only a cage if it can hold you," I spoke. My distorted, echoing whisper sliced through the heavy air of the tunnel.
The three thugs whipped around. The leader sneered, raising his stone-coated fists. "Who the hell are you? A Pro? You're a long way from the cameras, freak."
I ignored him, keeping my butterfly-lensed gaze fixed entirely on Rin. She was staring at me, her eyes wide with a mixture of renewed terror and a desperate, flickering hope.
"You possess a door, Rin," I said softly, walking slowly toward them. "But what good is a door if you cannot step through it? What is your greatest desire?"
"T-To get out," she stammered, pressing her back so hard against the iron grate I thought it might bend. "To be safe. To never be caught!"
"Then take my gift. And let the world pass right through you."
I pointed a single gloved finger at her. The butterfly on my right shoulder took flight. It zipped through the damp air, leaving a trail of amethyst light.
"Get the bug!" one of the thugs yelled, taking a swing at the glowing insect. His bat passed right through the air where it had been a fraction of a second before.
The butterfly struck Rin's chest and melted into her skin.
Rin gasped, her back arching as the power flooded her system. The sickly grey aura of her fear instantly vanished, replaced by a cool, pulsating, midnight blue.
"Grab her!" the leader barked, lunging forward with his heavy, stone-armored hands, aiming to crush her shoulders.
He slammed into her. Or rather, he slammed into the iron grate behind her.
A sharp CLANG echoed through the tunnel as the thug roared in pain, clutching his broken nose. Rin stood exactly where she had been, but her body was shimmering. The edges of her form were slightly blurred, as if she were being viewed through rippling water.
She looked down at her hands in shock. Sanctuary Phasing. The synthesis was immediate and beautiful. By manifesting hundreds of microscopic, localized portals across her own skin, she was constantly shifting her physical mass into a pocket dimension. She wasn't just intangible; she was functionally absent from this plane of existence whenever she wished to be.
"What did you do to me?" she whispered, though a manic, relieved smile was beginning to crack across her face.
"I gave you the keys to your cage," I replied, stepping back into the shadows as the three thugs scrambled away in terror from the 'ghost' girl. "Learn to use them well, Rin. We will be in touch."
I vanished into the darkness of the aqueduct, leaving her bathed in the dim light of the tunnel.
I looked down at the single, remaining butterfly resting in the palm of my hand. One champion harvested. One champion crowned. And still, another gift to give before the year was out.
The shadow war had officially begun.