Chapter Text
Izuku Midoriya let out a deep, guttural sigh of frustration after turning the street corner and seeing the chaos in front of him.
A large crowd of people had gathered up the road and were blocking his path to the Tatooine Train Station. Beyond the crowd should have been the train station itself, but it was obscured by a large cloud of dust or smoke. He couldn't tell which at the moment.
His first thought upon seeing the commotion was that maybe there had been a car accident, or some other run of the mill nonsense. Something that would have been easy to avoid without spending much time doing so. Hopefully. Maybe…
‘Please don't be a problem with the train.’
‘Or a villain.’
‘Oh, who am I kidding. My luck hasn't been that good recently.’
Lo and behold, as he made his way closer to the crowd, it became incredibly apparent that there was in fact some kind of villain attack happening, if the derailed train carriage hanging from the elevated station platform was anything to go by. Heros were already at the scene attempting to handle the chaos.
Of course it was a villain. It always was. Izuku chastised himself for thinking it could have been anything else to begin with. The same daily hero vs villain theatrics, as usual.
Some street thug making terrible life choices and forcing heros to intervene was a societal norm at this point when everybody had friggin superpowers. A norm that was screwing up his already screwed morning schedule.
'Is getting to school on time for once asking too much?’ He thought to himself. A large crash sounded from up ahead, the train carriage that had been hanging from the overpass now laid in the street. ‘Apparently.’ So much for catching his train. There was no way it wasn’t outright cancelled at this point.
He didn't have the time, patience, or energy to deal with this crap on a good day anymore. So why in the pits had the universe decided that this particular morning was a good time to shovel even more shit into his path?
All he wanted to do was avoid his regularly scheduled lecture about tardiness from his homeroom teacher at the end of the day. Normally he wouldn't care, but he needed to actually leave when school was over today. There were things he needed to do this afternoon that were time sensitive. Hence the effort to actually get there on time.
Izuku checked his gaudy All Might phone to see if he had any missed notifications from the various news alert apps he had. Villain incident, hero watch, traffic updates, breaking news, etcetera. You name it, he had it. However his phone had nothing for him.
Well, a text from Bakugou, but that could probably wait till he saw him in class later. He glanced at it anyway.
I found one of your stupid fucking robots stuck in a street gutter again you giant green nerd
Yeah, that could wait.
Either way, the fight must have only just started if there was no official news circulating the airwaves yet. Besides the heros, there weren't even any police or other emergency responders here yet from the looks of it.
He could hear them in the distance though, so they were at least on their way. Which meant his phone would be pinging him any minute now. Not that it mattered anymore, he was already here.
He pulled out a second cell phone from his obnoxiously yellow school bag that clashed just as terribly with his black uniform as his bright red combat boots did. This phone was completely black save for a small purple decal of a triangular looking mask insignia with slitted eyes on its back.
'Why the hell haven't I gotten any alerts from my own surveillance network yet though?’ Was the real question going through his mind. There were no notifications from this phone either.
Besides the basic news and alert apps that anyone with a phone could download, Izuku had his own eyes and ears all over the greater Tokyo area for the most part.
Between hacking into whatever government or public infrastructure already existed, physically sleuthing around on his own, and his Autoscout reconnaissance drones. ‘ Stupid tri-wheeled purple scrap heaps, hopefully Bakugou destroyed the one he found and put it out of its misery.’ There wasn't much that could happen in this city without him knowing about it. Especially this close to his home or the warehouse.
Unless it was something seriously illegal that is. He didn't really care to purposely keep track of most movements in the underground unless some villain’s agenda was going to butt heads with his own or was directly related to his own goals. Not that it happened often. But that's what the hands on slutheing was for when he needed it. It provided things that hacking and drones sometimes couldn't provide.
Brokers who threw their business in with criminals and dealt in the illicit were also a good source for that kind of info when he couldn't be bothered to do it himself. Giran was probably the most reliable underground broker Izuku knew. When it came to information, Giran had thus far lived up to his reputation and then some.
Regardless, preventing Izuku from being caught off guard like this was the entire point of all his real time information gathering! Yet here he was, caught off guard. Over a run of the mill villain attack of all things.
Another crash sounded ahead causing Izuku to jump a little. Ok maybe a little worse than “run of the mill.” Which made the surveillance problem worse actually. The network should have picked up on this immediately.
‘If my network isn't working when I need it to, then what is the goddamn point? Ugh, Its probably just something stupid, like interference from the buildings. No need to overheat myself because of this. I’ll figure out the issue when I get home If the problem persists.’
Knowing the comings and goings of everything from heros and villians to first responders and government agencies kept Izuku in charge. Call it paranoia with how overkill it was, as much of it was probably unneeded.
So far though, he had successfully managed to lay low in Japan now for nearly five years without drawing any attention to himself from any of the various government or terrorist entities looking for him. Something he planned on keeping it that way.
Besides, what he was doing had worked well for him so far save for today’s little hiccup. ”If it ain't broke, dont fix it.”
Except the Autoscouts. They all needed to be decommissioned as fast as possible. Destroyed (preferably by Bakugou), melted down, and thrown into the deepest part of the Laurentian Abyss where they could never see the light of day again.
Why had he ever thought a periscope was a good idea on a wheeled robot? He was so happy he was nearly done with their replacement.
None of this helped him solve his immediate problem though. Getting past this crowd. Hopefully he could slip through somehow. Backtracking would take too long and he'd like to avoid that if possible.
Making his way through the sea of bodies was a relatively easy task thanks to Izuku’s large stature of seven feet tall on the nose. Most people tended to make way on their own without much fuss when someone as large as him was coming through. If that wasn't enough, forcing himself through or even moving them if need be was even easier.
Izuku was tall, strong, built like a tank, and as heavy as a car. That was all anyone really needed to know about his “ quirk” as far as he was concerned, and thankfully most people just accepted it.
His thoughts went to one of his classmates, Katsuki Bakugou, who had always been a bit suspicious of Izuku since Izuku had enrolled into Aldera Jr. High during second year. He had a knack for calling people out on their bullshit. But with Izuku, he hadn't figured out what that bullshit was yet which pissed him right the hell off. It was hilarious.
A large gurgling roar followed by shouting heros came from up ahead, but he couldn't clearly make anything out thanks to the veil of smoke still obscuring the view of the station overpass.
Now that he was closer though, he could make out the identities of some of the heroes present. Deatharms and Backdraft were pulling traffic and crowd control duty respectively. Air Jet was flying around attempting to use the thrusters in his costume to clear the air and improve visibility, and Slugger was double checking the fallen train carriage for civilians.
Today was Thursday, if the patrol schedules he had compiled for all the heros in this ward were correct, Kamui Woods was likely to be here as well.
He had finally made his way up to the police line at the front of the crowd that Backdraft had created out of water using his hydrokinesis quirk, when his phone pinged a few times. Hah, there were the notifications from the news alert apps. Villian watch, hero watch, Traffic updates, and local breaking news lighting up his All Might phone.
'Either the first responders are a little slow today, or maybe it's time for that jailbreak software upgrade I keep putting off. Still nothing from my own surveillance or the Autoscouts though damnit, why? I've never had a signal issue in this area before. If the breaker for the com tower back at the warehouse blew another fuse again I'm gonna be pissed.’
“Who is fighting?” he asked no one in particular, hoping to get filled in from anyone who happened to hear him. The dust cloud still hadn't dissipated quite yet but he could make out the movement of something big up on the tracks.
A salaryman to his left gave him his answer. “It looked like some giant mutated fish man or something. It was huge. It came out of nowhere just a few minutes ago and when the heros drove it into a corner, it smashed up the seven’o’clock train.”
A few seconds later a figure shot up out of the smoke and landed on the station roof.
‘ Ha, I knew Kamui Woods would be here.’ He thought to himself just as the smoke obscuring the view was finally blown away by a passing train on the adjacent track revealing the villain Woods was fighting.
Izuku felt his stomach drop when he saw it.
First off, the salaryman wasn't kidding when he said huge mutated fishman. Holy shit, not only was the villain at least twenty feet tall, but it looked as if Dr. Frankenstein had decided to use the mismatched corpses of sea creatures to build his monster instead of the bodies of other humans.
Despite being an entire aquarium the villain looked mostly like a large shark reminiscent of a great white as if it had grown legs, except it was a pale blue in color. A large tail jutting out from behind it and a fin right on top of its head as you would expect of a shark creature. The sclera of its eyes were entirely black with piercing red pupils that glowed with an unsettling eriness.
Strangely enough though, for a large bipedal shark monster, it did not have a mouth full of jagged white teeth. It didn't have a mouth at all. Just rows of fleshy peach colored gills that ran down its chin and neck where a large gaping toothy shark mouth should have been.
That's where the shark stopped though. Its left arm seemed to just literally be a giant bright magenta squid with the tip of its head fused into the shark's “shoulder”. The villain was currently flailing around the tentacles that its squid arm provided in attempt to grab Kamui Woods as he jumped around the station.
Its right arm was a massive grey stony claw from some kind of crustacean that was nearly as large as the villain itself. A large conch shell in the same magenta color of the squid adorned this shoulder like an armor pauldron. To top it all off, its whole body was sporadically covered in barnacles, accentuating the whole ocean life menagerie aesthetic it had going on.
One of the things that caught Izuku off guard though was that this villain’s apparent quirk had a striking resemblance to that of a second year UA student. Tamaki Amajiki, AKA Suneater. A hero in training. The tentacles and general mismatched animal parts aesthetic of being one of Suneaters defining characteristics.
Which is why Izuku’s first instinctual thought upon seeing the large villain was. ‘ Gods. Why is Suneater overdosed on trigger?’
The incredibly illegal quirk enhancement drug was having a massive resurgence in Japan the past month or so, and it was the real good American made stuff too. (or the real bad stuff, depending on who you asked.)
The kind of trigger that gave a quirk a huge boost in power for nearly an hour with nasty psychotropic side effects, and then leaves you with severe quirk exhaustion and a nasty black tongue when you come down from it. The kind of Trigger that has the potential to permanently mutate you into a monster when overdosed on.
The reason Izuku was so upset over this?
The recent flood of the trigger into Japan was entirely Izuku’s fault. He had bought a large amount of the American made drug off of a seller in China he trusted. Well, as much as you could trust a foreign drug dealer anyway.
Izuku had purchased from this guy before in much smaller quantities for his own personal use as a chemical ingredient for the fuel substitute he made from it. So when he heard the dealer was trying to offload a whole lot of it quickly at a huge discount, (which should have been a huge red flag) Izuku couldn't say no. He had been desperate for it recently, and he knew the guy well enough.
So he bought five hundred gallons. Stupid mistake number one.
Five hundred gallons of trigger that had cost Izuku nearly ten million yen, even with the discount. Stupid mistake number two.
Five hundred gallons of trigger that had been stolen while en route by the group of yakuza he had hired to smuggle it into Japan for him! A group he had paid an additional million yen to for the job. Stupid mistakes number three and four.
Five. Hundred. Gallons. Of American made trigger. That was now being distributed all across Japan with abandon by those same yakuza assholes. Being wasted on junkies. Being used as a weapon against heros.
Words couldn't begin to describe how absolutely livid Izuku was with himself over the whole thing. How guilty it made him feel that innocent people were being affected by his massive fuck up. This was the last time he would ever work with any kind of yakuza group, let alone the Shie Hassaikai.
The entire situation was a shitshow.
A shitshow that he unfortunately couldn't deal with right now thanks to the fact he didn't have the trigger.... He would though, as soon as he was able. The Eight Precepts of Death's days were numbered as far as Izuku was concerned.
After closer scan of the twenty foot fusion creature on the train bridge in front of him however, he realised with relief that it was not in fact Tamaki Amajiki being affected by the horrible drug. Thank whatever gods needed to be thanked for that. Though the alternative was distressing for other reasons.
Seafood Louie here seemed to be wearing some kind of dark green metal plated vest that was surgically fused to it’s torso. On the chest were two large blinking yellow lights reminiscent of headlights from a car. There were also what seemed to be metal exhaust pipes that came out from the sides of the armor that wrapped around to the creature's back, and then dug into its flesh near the spine. Its body was also covered in what could only be assumed to be an uncountable number of surgical scars.
The implications of the scars and the now seemingly artificial nature of the monster in front of him sent a shiver through Izuku’s frame. That type of surgery, that type of torture. That was something he was familiar with.
Izuku brought a hand up to rub a nasty dark grey scar of his own that looked almost like a welding seam just under the collar of his school jacket.
Much too familiar with.
Artificial monsters were never a good sign. One only needed to look back to the Tokyo Sky Egg incident with Captain Celebrity and those exploding things a few years back to see why. Either way, they usually only meant one thing. Some villain somewhere was working on something big, and Izuku knew through experience that those villains were not to be trifled with.
“Hey kid, you a hero fanboy or something? You've been mumbling along something fierce about a whole bunch of stuff for a while now. I barely caught most of it, but I did hear you say that shark man up there might be on that quirk drug?” a much shorter older gentleman with stars sticking out of his head to his right asked. The man crossed his arms and looked back at the fight. “Makes sense, it came out of nowhere and just started smashing things.”
“Something like that.” Izuku responded while rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment. ‘Shit, I really need to kick that habit. But he didn't catch anything incriminating, so no need for any damage control. This is why I try to stay quiet, once I start talking I can’t stop.’ “Hopefully it's an actual villain using the stuff and not some poor hero or civilian dosed with it as a distraction.”
“Ain't that the truth!” the older man replied.
Izuku pointed back to the fight. “I think Kamui Woods is about to finish the fight with a special move.”
Kamui Woods was back on top of the train platform’s roof facing the massive land shark that stood on the rails. He took an offensive stance, putting his right arm at his side, his quirk primed and ready as sticks and branches started to coil like living vines around his forearm.
“Show us your best move, tree guy!” The short man next to Izuku shouted, his attention back on the fight in front of him.
“Here's your punishment villain!” Woods threw his arm out in front of him. “Lacquered Chain Prison!” An entire tree’s worth of wooden branches grew from his arm and lashed out at his opponent.
The fusion creature brought up its large claw to defend itself.
In the blink of an eye, the wood from the hero’s quirk had wrapped itself around the monster's massive stony crab claw, tethering it closed. Even more anchored it to the ground. The creature wasn't entirely immobilized, like having your arm handcuffed to a railing, but it wasn't going anywhere for at least a few seconds.
“Mount Lady! NOW!” Woods shouted.
“CANYON CANON!” A giant blonde woman easily three times the size of the monstrous villain came out of absolutely nowhere.
Using the opening Kamui Woods had made with his attack, she planted a flying kick directly into the side of the shark’s face. The wood and branches anchoring the claw to the ground snapped and broke away under the force of the creature lurching backwards towards the edge of the bridge.
Instead of cleanly knocking out the villain and sending it falling to the street below like the heroine was probably hoping for with her surprise attack, the massive shark grabbed the attacking women's offending leg with the tentacles of its squid arm. They latched on tight, wrapping around her right leg all the way up to her hip and ass.
She quickly dug the heel of her free leg into the train tracks in an attempt to prevent herself from being pulled over the bridge’s guardwall with the falling monster. Unfortunately the villain was heavier than she anticipated and her heel broke right through the rails destroying them.
She lurched forward, her left knee struck the guardwall and it gave a loud metallic groan as it just barely withstood the impact.
Mt. Lady managed to stop herself from tumbling into the street, but now she was left in an awkward position. Her tangled leg hanging over edge at the knee while she kneeled on the other as it dug painfully into the metal wall. The large aquatic villain now dangling off the bridge from the tentacled grip it had on her.
“Oh gross! Get your nasty tentacles off me you pervert!” She yelled, grabbing at the appendages in an attempt to pull them off.
While Mt. Lady struggled to get free of its grasp, the monster was also preoccupied with freeing itself from its own entanglement. The woody vines of Kamui Woods quirk wrapped around its claw were still preventing it from doing anything but be a large club at the moment.
It bashed its tangled lobster claw into the side of the bridge a few times breaking off the wooden vines. The moment the claw was free, It grabbed onto the edge of station overpass with a crunch as the steel of the gardwall bent under the strength of its grip.
Using the position the two combatants found themselves in to its advantage, the monster braced its legs against one of the support beams of the bridge, webbed feet gripping tightly, and tore Mt. Lady right over the ledge.
It swung her over its head in an arc with a loud bubbling roar that sounded like someone yelling from underwater, slamming her into the ground with a window rattling crash.
Never letting go of her leg, the creature dropped down from the side of the bridge landing with a thud at her feet. Before the heroine could shake off the impact and right herself, another loud gurgling roar came from the aquatic monstrocity.
Using all of its strength it lifted Mt. Lady off of the ground and swung her back over its head again directly into the side of the bridge.
The already damaged section of the overpass buckled under the force of the collision and came crashing down to the street.
Dazed and confused, Mt. Lady found herself laying on her back in a pile of rubble and steel in the street, staring up at the sky through the hole where the bridge used to be.
The heroine did her best to sit back up, but the beating she had just taken proved to be too much and she fell unconscious. She collapsed back to the ground. Her quirk quickly deactivated, shrinking her back to normal size and out of the monsters tentacled grasp.
By this point the large crowd of people began to panic and scatter in an attempt to flee as the fight escalated out of control. Clearly Mt. Lady’s attack had been planned to end the fight, not make it worse. Whatever this thing turned out to be, it was much stronger than the heros had anticipated.
Death Arms, Slugger, and Backdraft had begun to try and calm the panicking people and get them evacuated as quickly as possible as Kamui Woods and Air Jet played chicken with Franken-Fish in an attempt to keep it distracted and away from civilians. This had gotten very out of hand very quickly.
It was a good thing that police and other first responders were finally starting to arrive on scene and handful of other heroes had already shown up to provide assistance. A few of them helped keep gill-face distracted while another got Mt. Lady out of harm's way and into the hands of the arriving paramedics.
As serious as the situation was, it would be brought under control soon enough. The sharkman may have been a large powerful brute, but villains causing a scene like Seafood Louie here never lasted long once reinforcements arrived.
Izuku had spent long enough here anyway. Time to double back with the evacuees and find a new route to school. At least he had an actual excuse for being late this time.
He quickly walked off, following the the rest of the crowd to safety while tapping away at his black phone, taking notes about what had just transpired. He could do a proper analysis of it later with the various video recordings he would no doubt get his hands on, but he wanted to get his initial thoughts into words while they were still fresh.
This would be a fun fight to break down and pick apart while he did some investigative work on where this creature came from. Not that he would do anything about it, the hero commission would have it covered. But Izuku would rather know, than not.
Though given the villain’s artificial nature, he couldn't shut out the small possibility poking at the back of his mind that it could be his work. Though it lacked many characteristics of something made by him, so maybe not. Looking into it and definitively crossing out that possibility would settle his nerves about it though.
“LOOK OUT! MAKE A PATH” someone yelled from behind him.
'Fuck! I wasn't paying attention!’ Lost in his own thoughts again, Izuku had been following the crowd on autopilot using his peripherals, the crowd that was now scattering to the sides of the street around him. He was usually much better at being aware of his surroundings.
Izuku spun around as fast as he could, only to see all twenty feet of Seafood Louie barreling down the street directly at him. Kamui Woods stood on the top of its back with vines wrapped around its head trying to steer the monster like an angry bull.
He barely had time to dive out of the rampaging beast’s path and onto the sidewalk, cracking the curb under his weight, as the monster tore down the street past him and other bystanders.
‘Ok! Time to get the hell outta dodge!’
He thought as he picked up his black phone from the ground and jogged off in the opposite direction the monster was headed with heavy footsteps to find somewhere that wasn't
here.