Chapter Text
CHAPTER ONE
Being a hero was never about the spotlight.
For you, it started as a simple promise. One you made to yourself when you were a kid, watching heroes on TV and seeing them in public. But it wasn’t only them who made you admire helping people. It was firefighters and nurses. It was teachers and social workers.
It was more than the flashy heroes; it was the people who didn’t get all the spotlight but still made an impact on people and society. So, since you had the passion and capability to become a pro hero, you would. You wouldn’t be the flashy kind, the kind who did publicity stunts to get public attention. You promised to never let attention get to you, to never let it make you think you were superior. So you settled on being one of the underdog heroes.
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Now, at twenty-one, you’d been working as a licensed pro for two years under Ironwood Agency. It had been great! Fulfilling your desire to help people while also blending in. It was a little hard to avoid attention as a pro, so you decided to design your uniform to cover your face. It helped you stay out of the spotlight and, more importantly, helped regulate your quirk: Pulse Manipulation— the ability to generate concussive shockwaves from your body. The mask enhanced your focus, allowing you to control the force and direction of each pulse.
But one day, that forcefield you carefully crafted got snatched away from you. You were fighting a particularly strong villain, causing a crowd to form and the media to show up. The villain had calculated that your mask helped your quirk stay precise, so he got close enough to rip it off. Your instinct was to hide your face, but you were more logical than that. What mattered was defeating the villain.
And you did. Very skillfully. Of course, your fight had to go viral— your face plastered across magazines and news outlets. The media started calling you “one of Japan’s rising stars,” a title that felt more surreal than exciting. You tried to slip back into the shadows, but you had gained fans and attention from the media.
They were intrigued as to why you didn’t give long, inspiring speeches to the cameras after a mission, let alone a simple interview. You just… did your job. Saved lives. Stopped villains. Protected people who couldn’t protect themselves.
The news had been playing your clips nonstop. Footage of your last high-stakes mission against a dangerous villain who had nearly leveled two city blocks, and of your very dramatic, very public unmasking. It had earned you a jump in the hero charts and a lot more attention than you were used to.
But this newfound success was starting to feel… tempting.
You started getting the urge to seek validation and recognition from the commission and even the media. But you refused to become that hero. The attention-seeking, superiority-complexed know-it-all.
And all that was why you were staring at the email now, sitting at your kitchen table with your phone balanced in your hand, rereading it for the fourth time.
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You are cordially invited to the Annual Hero Gala, hosted in Tokyo.
Date: [insert date]
Attendees: Japan's top-ranked heroes and rising talent.
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Your first thought wasn’t excitement. It was: Why me?
You weren’t the type to enjoy parties where every smile was a PR stunt and every handshake a networking opportunity. You were blunt, not the cold kind, but not the type to flatter someone just to get on their good side. Which, apparently, made you “refreshing” to some people and “difficult to approach” to others.
Still, a hero gala was a chance to meet some of the best in the business… even if it meant playing dress-up and pretending you didn’t want to be somewhere else.
You sighed, leaning back in your chair, eyes flicking to the TV where a recap of your latest mission played on the evening news. Your name flashed across the screen, followed by commentary about your quick thinking and how your “decisive, no-nonsense approach” was earning attention from the public.
“Great,” you muttered. “More reasons for people to stare.”
You didn’t know it yet, but someone had been watching a while before the headlines. Someone who thought your bluntness was more interesting than intimidating. And he’d be at that gala, too.