Before school, I checked my phone and saw the group chat that I created and saw over two hundred messages. As I walked out the door, I scrolled through them quickly to see what they were thinking. To play it safe, I checked their social media profiles and messages. They said nothing, and that made me feel a little bit better as I started to go to school.

It was another sleepless night, and I fought the urge to close my eyes and risk my attendance for an extra 30 minutes of relaxation. I stopped to sit down at a coffee shop when it happened. A crack of thunder echoed through the entire city, and I clapped my hands over my ears. I looked around and saw others doing the same. I wondered what had happened when I looked at the sky.

The familiar purple fog enveloped the sky completely. Imagine the cloud from the stadium, but a thousand times bigger. Given how dark I expected the sky to be, I was surprised that we were able to see at all.

The terrible thing hung above everyone's head. I went to the group chat.

Shiraseru: Where are you?

I received dozens of replies.

Midoriya: at home

Bakugo: Just arrived at UA.

Ojiro: At the gates of UA! I wonder how everyone else is doing right now.

Hagakure: Be quiet everyone, my phone's notification sound is really loud.

Mineta: I just got up, I'm going to be really late.

After looking at all of them, I sent a reply back.

Shiraseru: A little over half of the people are going to UA, so meet there. If you have family, try to bring them over as well as any food + electronics. Kurogiri's probably going to wreck more stuff, and I don't want anyone's home destroyed.

Looking up from my phone, I saw the destruction beginning. The fog began to snake its way down to ground level. On its way, it tore through everything, even the stuff that looked strong enough that you would expect to stay standing. Scaffolding was torn down like it was nothing, and that's when the chaos really started.

Tokyo Bakery, the very first place that I tried to steal from, was beginning to fall over. The chef covered his head while thousands of dollars worth of baked goods began to topple to the ground. Luckily, everyone was able to make it out of the store before it finally collapsed in a pile of wood and metal. The next building also sustained heavy losses. Any chance of repair was gone, and due to the structural nature of the second building, it too began to fall.

I looked forward and saw that the road wasn't safe either. Purple tendrils tunneled through the ground and ripped up tiles. I stepped on the sidewalk, narrowly missing an accident. A tile flew up directly in front of a car. The driver panicked and stepped on the gas, and the tile broke the windshield. This also happened at an intersection, and a chain reaction was already in place. The air was filled with the sound of car horns and breaking glass.

People began to scream and run through the streets. Any hope of rational escape was gone; those who didn't know what was going on were thrown out of the loop.

Shiraseru: How are you guys holding up right now?

Yaoyozuru: Too crazy. Our car can't even get out of the driveway.

Shiraseru: Ditch the car. Just run to UA as fast as you can.

I called Eraser Head. "All of the students are going to UA. The security system is decent here, and there's enough food to last us a good while. Is that plan okay with you?"

Eraser Head sighed. His voice was impervious to any form of alteration, and I felt sleepier just by listening to it. "Considering that a flowerpot almost struck me on the head as I walked out, sure. I'll contact the other staff members."

Hanging up, I vanished and took advantage of the volume of trash around to fly above the masses. If I couldn't be surprised any more from this, I was wrong. The fog was quite literally eating up the city. Anything that wasn't flying in the air at dangerous speeds were left on the ground to be tripped over or eaten into the portals, never to be seen again. The purple hurricane over the school apparently wasn't the only fog cloud that appeared. Strips of clear, blue sky marked the boundaries between the different clouds. They too were causing chaos in the areas that they were above.

UA was easy to find, not only because it was built that way in general, but because of the Pro Heroes standing guard outside. I showed them my student ID and they let me in.

"You're Shiraseru?" I recognized Vlad King, the homeroom teacher for Class 1-B.

"Yeah." He let me through the gate.

"Thanks for receiving that information. Without this, we wouldn't have been as prepared, even if we're barely holding on right now."

The front doors were also reinforced, and I had to show my ID again to another guard.

Shiraseru: I'm inside, what about you?

More replies. The only people left were Midoriya and Mineta, and by the time I had walked into Class 1-A, both of them had just entered the building. I took my seat and looked out the window.

People with construction-related Quirks had spiced up the building when everyone was asleep. The dark grey metal found at the main entrance now covered every single square inch of wall. Electricity crackled from bars at the top of the walls. Each bar produced enough current to make a normal person unconscious. I couldn't see any more defenses at the moment; someone caught my attention.

"Listen up, everyone." Eraser Head seemed to conjure silence immediately. "This event has been declared an emergency. You might think it's only happening here in Tokyo. Look." The screen at the front of the room was split into nine squares. Each of them showed different cities that were in the same struggle as we were.

"We're planning on expanding UA to have residential areas. Right now, the construction workers are tunneling underground and installing beds as we speak. By the end of the day, there should be enough space for 100 people. If you still want to go home, assuming it hasn't been destroyed, all trips must be done before sundown and you must go with another person."

"Meals will happen in shifts. So far, this is the most people that we've ever had to feed. The staff members have received a list with the different shifts. For now, all classes are suspended except for the hero class. We still don't know how much help we need."

That's how I spent my morning. I declined breakfast. I had other stuff to do. I created a sort of computer setup for myself. A few minutes later, someone tapped my shoulder. I turned around and saw Todoroki. "What's up?"

"I have a question about your Quirk." Okay. "You say you have access to all the data in the world? If you do, then you should know where the League of Villains are."

I sighed. On everyone's desk, I projected a blue circle with an arrow inside that pointed to my desk. Within two minutes, all the eyes were on me. "Here's the truth about my Quirk. Yes, I can access all data, but not all data is created equally. Some of it, especially the more confidential ones, are encrypted. Think of it this way. The original data might be a picture, like a person's face. By encrypting it, you're basically putting a bunch of filters over it that distort the image over and over again. In some cases, you can kind of guess what the original thing is supposed to be; other times, it's literally just a blast of random colors. Right now, I'm in the process of applying the filters in reverse." I ran a hand through my hair. "Wow... that was a really bad explanation."

For the most part, people looked at me weird, but Midoriya got out of his seat and started talking to me. "Oh, that's cool! Can I see what you're doing right now?"

"Okay, sure."

The League of Villains create virtually zero online presence of their own. For the most part, search results for them bring up reports of the damage they've caused, and those reports are written by hero agencies. There were over a hundred thousand links, and I scrolled through them all by finding different keywords in the pages. This process took me about 20 minutes and I found nothing.

"Why do you always work so quickly? If you slowed down, maybe you'd notice more."

That is actually a good idea. After putting my head on the desk and thinking, I had an idea. The League of Villains' purpose is to destroy modern hero society, starting by killing All Might. Because of this, they create panic every time they attack. If they want to be popular, maybe they're sending signals in plain sight.

"Midoriya, you're much more studious than I am." I put all of the files in a giant virtual stack and handed half of them to him. "Look for any words that stand out or don't fit in with the rest of the story. I'll do the same." The translucent blue screens glowed brightly as we looked at article after article. We didn't seem to be having much luck, and I was beginning to regret skipping breakfast.

"Here, I found one." Midoriya handed the article to me. "At the beginning, there's just the word 'hero.' It's in a different font from the other words, and it definitely doesn't belong."

I made sure to remember that as we kept searching. "There's also something at the bottom of this page. I can't read it, though." I zoomed in on the message, and it read, use code for every tenth word's beginning.

I was able to strip the beginning of every tenth word and place them in a separate file. What I got was a jumble of random letters. "That's worth a try. Do you think it means anything?"

Midoriya started to mutter again. "If we're looking for a location, try to turn those letters into numbers." Replacing 1 for A, 2 for B, and so on, I ended up with a slightly shorter list. A blast of numbers was still easier on the eyes than a blast of letters. I split them into groups of latitude and longitude, but most of the time, I ended up someplace in the ocean.

"I'll shift over the letters one by one until I get something." That made no sense at all, but I knew what I was doing, somewhat. The sequence of letters was coded using a keyed Caesar cipher.

In a normal Caesar cipher, a shift of 5 means that the letter A corresponds with the letter 5 places to the right of it, which is F. It's easy to break; there are only 26 possible letters to choose from, so you can use brute force and find the original message anyway. Instead, in a keyed cipher, you use a code word. That code word becomes the beginning of the alphabet in the cipher, where repeat letters are removed. This makes a code a lot harder to break.

It took me about 30 minutes to guess the correct shift, and I finally ended up with a pair of coordinates that were in Japan, more or less. When I used a 3D map to find where the point actually was, it turned out to be a very specific particle of dust out in the open street.

"Wait." Midoriya took my list of numbers and looked at it again, more closely this time. "Notice how this sequence keeps repeating? There's more than one point here."

I followed his advice and split up the document accordingly. There were eight points, and when I plotted them on the map, they were the coordinates of the corners of a room. I adjusted the camera view and saw the room more closely.

This was a bar of some sort, but given the traffic that passes through there, it's unlikely that anyone would find a drink there. Scratches in the floor were covered by a red carpet, and the color had slowly faded over time. The couch was made of probably the same material as the carpet. "Why are the villains using this place? It's older than my parents, probably."

Shaking off the memories, I saw something else. A TV was on the opposite wall, and it was programmed to only display sound. I tried to track the signal's source, but whoever used this TV ran its signal through a loop of pretty much infinite VPNs. It would take me years before I would find it, and we didn't have that time.

I looked outside. The purple clouds were still going strong. I ached to go outside and bring my possessions back to UA; at least they would be safe there.

Midoriya interrupted my thoughts. "Let's go find the other villains."

I shrugged. "Okay."