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Komori was going to start getting bored soon, there weren't many villains to fight and the ones that they could find were all small fry, she hadn’t had a good fight in weeks, and it was only going to get worse when they met up with another patrol. They already had three people in their group so adding another two people would only make fights quicker and more pitiful on the villain's side.
You’d think that being in Hosu would inspire more loud fights, especially now that Stain had moved on and was no longer killing villains in his spare time, but apparently a year and a half of total silence from him in this area of Japan hadn’t allowed for villains to stop shaking in their boots at the thought of meeting him.
It didn’t matter all that much anyway, Komori was here to learn more about scouting, not battles or capture. Her mentor was teaching her more about how to feel and understand signals from her mushrooms at a distance for better undercover work similar to how she did with smaller bugs.
[Buggy
Her Quirk: Insect Speech
It's pretty self explanatory, she can speak to and control bugs, an interesting feature of this quirk means that she doesn’t seem limited by the size of the bug, big or small!]
Honestly she was mostly annoyed at the lack of villains because without them her reports on the surrounding area were boring, the most interesting thing she had felt on this patrol so far was a drunk guy trying to explain how a microwave worked to a nearby plant. At this point she was tempted to look it up to see if he was right in his drunken state, but she was on patrol and that meant that she had to stay vigilant.
At least she had an acquaintance from UA here. He seemed a bit shy, but that was leagues better than how he had been in their first year, he at least didn’t seem like he was about to jump out of his skin every time he saw a bug like he used to. Anima was here for much the same reason she was though which meant that talking could result in distracting each other, which would make their scouting much less successful. Not that knowing that the drunk guy had moved on from microwaves to dishwashers was very useful when trying to find villains.
Luckily, before anyone could get bored enough to start looking up the mechanics of dishwashers, another hero sprinted up to their patrol route, or rather down.
[Skyrise
Her Quirk: Air Walk
This power allows her to walk, run, and even skip on air, allowing anything to act as the ground in a fight, especially since she doesn’t seem too fond of gravity.]
Having come from on top of the buildings, it wasn’t much of a surprise that she came from above them. What was surprising was that she stayed above them after jumping down towards them.
Luckily for everyone involved, Buggy had given them a warning about Skyrise so she and Anima were only mildly jumpscared by the sprint into launch off of a building the hero had just done. They were also much less concerned about an unnoticed villain attack having appeared that Skyrise needed help with once they remembered that she just sprinted everywhere and therefore was probably just joining their patrol early.
On the note of sprinting everywhere, Tsuburaba seemed to be suffering a bit more than usual. Given that he had chosen to have his work study with Skyrise to learn how to walk on air better for ease of patrolling, it made sense that he’d be panting a bit because of the constant use of his quirk for walking around, but the guy was full on wheezing. Like, get a medical professional wheezing. Like, her spores were clogging his airways during a spar wheezing. Komori knew he had good lungs because of his quirk and he had really good stamina because of that so he shouldn’t be having that bad of a time this early into his and Skyrise’s patrol route.
Unless you consider what Skyrise’s version of sprinting looks like.
See, here’s the thing: Skyrise hates the ground. If given the chance she would never touch it. Luckily for her she has a quirk that makes the ground redundant, meaning that she’s constantly using it to stay higher than the ground. This combined with her need to sprint everywhere means that she is constantly running around with her quirk active, making everything faster and more efficient as she doesn’t need to pay attention to whether or not she can make a jump or get someplace quickly. This works fine for her because her quirk runs on her heart rate and general adrenaline levels, which stay high due to her enjoyment of her time in the air.
This does not work fine for Tsuburaba.
Tsuburaba’s quirk does not run on his heart rate. Tsuburaba’s quirk does not run on his adrenaline levels.
Tsuburaba’s quirk relies entirely on how much air he can breathe.
Right now, Tsuburaba is trying to pace himself with a woman who has been sprinting at all waking moments for 20 years. He is attempting to get his breath based quirk to work enough to keep up with a quirk that automatically places footholds for its sprinting user. He is breathing at a rate capable of matching his mentor's speed and footsteps while running at a speed he has previously never had to go for longer than two minutes.
Tsuburaba has been doing this for six hours a day for the last two and a half weeks.
He recovers within seconds of Skyrise jumping down to meet them and follows her down the building to join them.
Komori has never been more shocked to see someone still alive than she is at this moment, and she sees Eraserhead in the halls of UA semi-regularly.
They continue their patrol routes together, luckily at a Buggy’s pace and not Skyrise’s. Tsuburaba looks ready to start a cult in Buggy’s name mumbling about how no one else had managed to slow her down, shared patrol or not.
Eventually they hear someone calling for help (and it only took three more mechanical explanations from the drunk guy!) and start heading towards the yelling, turning a corner into one of the thinner roads. About halfway down they realize that the yelling is coming from a small speaker hidden to the side of the road.
Well… Komori seems to have found a villain to fight.
…
One that neither Buggy, Anima, or her had noticed.
…
One that knew about the patrol routes well enough to know a hero would be in the area when they started up the recording.
…
Where were Stain’s last reported killings again?
“Skrise, you’re out early.”
Oh right. Here. In Hosu.
The heroes had thought he moved on in accordance with his previous habits of killing or injuring up to five people before moving onto a different city given that he had attacked the night of the League of Villains’s attack on Hosu and injured four people, going over his usual kill count for a city in combination with his previous attacks, but he hadn’t attacked in any city since. Some believed that he had died either in the fires or due to his wounds gained in the fight, but the general consensus was that he had left Hosu permanently.
No one believed that Stain would return to Hosu, not with the break in his pattern and the increase in multi hero patrols. He must have gone pretty far away to get treated for the wounds given to him by the heroes who fought him the night of the attack, any hospital within 100 kilometers would have immediately reported him.
He wouldn’t have returned to Hosu.
But who’s to say he ever left. Transport out of the city may have been en masse, but anyone would have noticed THE HERO KILLER STAIN on a train or bus, Komori doubted he had a car, and there was no way he would have gotten far with his reported injuries. That was one of the main points people used for his death along with the lack of hero attacks.
The lack of villains was starting to make sense now.
Stain had been a normal vigilante before he started killing heroes. Any city Stendhal visited was known to have crime rates dramatically lowered (if only through the deaths of anyone who acted as a villain). So if he had gone back to only killing villains for a while, it likely wouldn’t have been noticed that he was still in the area by anyone who only looked at hero death statistics.
According to her triage and general health studies, broken ribs healed in suboptimal conditions could lead to lingering pain for up to a year and generally lowered immunity in patients. With a year and a half having passed since Stain was injured, chances were that even if he was doing things that would slow his recovery (like killing other villains), he would have reached a point where he would be as recovered as he would ever get.
If Stain was being careful about taking fights he could win, he wouldn’t have attacked trained opponents like heroes while he was still recovering from his injuries. That wouldn’t matter now though.
Heroes were back on the menu.