Cold and rainy, darkness swallowing all light, and the common street scum emerging from their rat dens to prey upon those foolish enough to remain on the streets every night. The Japanese city of Musutafu was not holy enough with its temple, U.A. High School, producing its false gods and deities to keep the whores and murderers and thieves away in the darkness. Quirk or no quirk, bullets and blades could still stop the still mortal heroes the people would grovel and throw themselves at their feet. The news would paint every crime the local heroes thwarted as the story of the century with enough press coverage to put the one before to shame. Here was the cold truth of it all: for every villain locked away, three heroes nobody had ever heard about were killed. Yet every hero school across Japan would have their hallways filled with future cannon fodder to turn loose on the villains once believed to reside in the minds of children and in the comics they read. Even if the criminals were arrested, time in prison would not remove their quirks from their DNA and all they would have to do is bide their time until their prison cells opened and they were right back on the streets to pick up where they left off. Yakuza families now bolstered their ranks with what society deemed to be the mutants and abominations forced to live in the gutters of filth and shame while they placed those who they deemed titans and olympians on the ivory pedestals of fame. Once the title of hero was garnered and earned through sacrifice, through blood spent on those who would never even know your name, and through deeds far greater than what any ordinary citizen would be capable of. Now all that mattered was earning 'points' in the world of prostituting themselves in a leaderboard weighed by the numbers of lives one could possibly save at a time.
It was one of these heroes that found themselves at the mercy of the scum she was chasing after that very evening. In of the the many abandoned buildings left to rot from previous earth shattering battles between good and evil was where they had her bound and gagged to a chair with the perpetrators having their faces covered in gas masks and other respirator devices to combat the heroine's quirk. Two men stood guard in the small room with the only window being covered by newspapers on either side of her with one holding a machete to her throat and the other wielding a lead pipe as reassurance. Outside, four men stood around a shoddily put together hideout of a few moldy chairs found in a dumpster and a worn out billiards table with large sums of drugs being prepped for packaging for a future buyer. Midnight had obvious and unknowingly stumbled into a deal made by influential and high up members of the criminal underground attempting to branch out into a group of up and coming producers of narcotics. It was to her misfortune that the men would already be wearing the respirators during the drug-making process when she arrived and their numbers would easily overpower her. While the men continued in packaging the narcotics into a duffel bag, one began to look to the wristwatch on his person frantically.
"They should have been here by now. They know where we set up shop, they know we're here, and they know we've got a surprise 'package' for them now!" the scumbag began to stutter out while making occasional gestures towards what he spoke of.
"Maybe the rain has them held up? Traffic always gets bad this time of night," another attempted to diffuse his colleague's paranoia to little success. Before he could make another attempt to ease the tension, the muffled struggles of Midnight in the other room turned all their attention away from the table and towards the smaller room. Their annoyance only increased when the other men in the room began trying to control her struggles and failing in the process. The four men joined the two in the room and each man looked down at the restrained and lewdly-dressed heroine for a moment before devious minds thought alike until one perverse idea formed.
"You know, there's a surefire way to relieve stress like what you've got. We'll finish up while you finish," the leader of the six soon-to-be rapists said with a laugh as he playfully pushed the stressed out delinquent towards Midnight just as she began to realize what the men had in store for her now. Her struggles picked up in ferocity along with her quirk pumping gallons of the seductive scent into the air around them to no avail. They all laughed as they turned to leave their lust-stricken colleague to commit his perverse sin while making sure to keep the respirator on to prevent his mind from being overtaken.
"Normally, I like it when they scream. I'll make this quick and skip the foreplay!" the rapist exclaimed with a psychotic voice of trembling excitement after removing his upper garments. Midnight could only watch in horror as he wielded the machete to begin cutting away slowly at her costume inch by inch.
"Fucking dog," a gruff and muddy voice grunts from the side of the two, which causes the would be rapist to look over just in time for a devastating right hook to land on his jaw. The impact instantly shattered the felon's jaw and sent him falling to the floor in an instant knockout. Midnight looked to her now incapacitated assailant before quickly looking over to her newly arrived savior. From the quick glances towards his attire and demeanor, this was no prim and proper licensed hero adorned in a flashy costume like herself. His attire was worn and battered by harsh living, his build was stocky yet still slim enough for quick movements, and his eyes were as rough as his voice. The clothes consisted of a pair of rust colored overalls with the straps hanging down to his thighs and held up by an olive drab web belt with a browned metal buckle, a longsleeve sandstone shirt, oak brown leather work boots with patches of duck tape as mends, and a red piece of cloth stained with oil and dirt covering the lower part of his face leaving only his emerald green eyes and scruffy hickory brown hair with hints of dark grey. The two most outstanding pieces of his gear were he boxing wraps around his hands that were stained the same way as the rag around his face with the now accompanying stains of blood and the worn black plate carrier with the faded word 'Police' across the back.
The vigilante knelt down to retrieve the machete but seemed to not even glance over towards the still restrained Midnight in her chair as the sound of approaching footsteps echoed from the other side of the door.
The five remaining criminals were huddled around the billiards table when they heard the audible sound of a body hitting the floor in the closed off room. Each looked to one another to give their sinister laughs as their perverse imaginations ran wild with the possibilities of what was unfolding a mere few feet from them. One turned from the table and began heading towards the door with a light step as to avoid detection by his colleague on the other side he believed to be enacting vile deeds on the heroine. When he finally arrived to the door, he carefully and slowly pressed himself closer to the door with his left ear pressing to the wood to eavesdrop.
"Come on, you dirty bastard, you'd better be giving it to her in-" the crook began to say in a low voice before he was cut short by the blade of the machete piercing through the door and straight through his gut to nail him to the door. All eyes were on their fellow lowlife as he gargled and choked on his own bile and blood before the door was kicked from its hinges and pinned the dying cretin to the floor beneath it. They watched in both disbelief and horror as the unknown man stepped onto the door as if there were not a dying man beneath it to continue into the drug den before him. When their senses finally returned, one man instantly went for a hammer laying on the counter of the decaying kitchen before charging straight towards the masked man. When the assailant tried to strike the vigilante with the hammer, it was instantly countered by the vigilante grabbing hold of the hammer and placing a powerful kick to the sternum. The now disarmed lowlife was flung back by the impact into the billiards table with a bone-chilling snap of his neck on impact. The remaining two began to scramble for whatever weapons they could find while the vigilante began to close in on them. He quickly threw the hammer into the face of one going for a lead pipe to shatter and send shards of protective eye covering of the gas mask into his eyes to blind him. The last lowlife still standing revealed a baseball bat that had been stashed beside the door and began to charge foolishly at the vigilante. Now rearming himself with the lead pipe, he blocked the first swing of the baseball bat and followed it with a low swing at the lowlife's knee. The joint collapsed instantly beneath the weight of its owner as he fell to the ground with a blood curdling scream of pain. With them now either bleeding out, incapacitated, or even dead, the masked man now turned and began heading back towards where Midnight was now wide-eyed and trembling in the chair she was bound.
"Cops will be here any minute now...they already grabbed the yakuza coming here for the drug deal...you'll be fine," the man said as he walked passed her and back towards the window he had broken through to gain entry. However, he had taken the time to stop and remove the gag from her mouth to allow her to speak without hinderance.
"W-Who are you?" she finally asked, her voice trembling as she strained to choke back tears of fear, as she looked back to watch the man lift one leg out the window to prepare for his descent downward into the alleyway dumpster below.
"I have no name. I have no title. I have no need to whore myself out in order for the masses to want me. I do what you actors and politicians cannot: I clean up your messes and keep the promise of safety you made to the people. But if you want to call me something...
...they call me Judge."
And with those final words, Judge plunged into the darkness below just as the rapid approaching footsteps of police came just before the door of the hideout was kicked open.