Paths Of A Hero

Summary: Hero or Vigilante? What is the difference? It used to be black and white, a boundary so sharp cut that many have found themselves in pieces just for approaching it. So why is it blurring now, as Eraserhead tries to keep his head low while unwittingly gaining 20+ kids, at least three Pro Hero friends and seems to have caught the eye of All Might himself, all the while his past is persistently trying to catch up to him?

Shouta felt like shit.

Not a week after his last run in with All Might, after going through all that trouble to move adresses for more privacy, just in case, Shouta stumbled upon something that, for the first time since he picked up his capture weapon and decided on his path, had chased him into the bright light of a an early afternoon, none of his friendly and familiar deep shadows in sight to help him keep a low profile and stay hidden.

If he wasn't so sure that the situation was dire as fuck, he probably would have waited until nighttime to try and do something.

But not this time.

This time, he knew he couldn't gamble with that. Couldn't afford to be wrong.

It all started the night he had chased down his target after his strangely ideological chat with the Number One Hero himself on top of the man's own tower. Just after he had tied things up with the would-be re-instigator of the Trigger drug trafficking ring in Musutafu again, he'd spotted none other than the information broker, tug recruiter and weapons dealer Giran. Now that was a man hard to find. Giran was smart. He was careful and paranoid, which is why he has survived for so long. He struck all sorts of deals in the criminal underworld. He was practically the professional middleman for the biggest criminal organizations and petty villains and was one of the richest and best informed men in Musutafu's black books.

His mugshot has been taken exactly once, two years ago, and that was by sheer luck. No Hero has ever seen the man in person since. No Vigilante, either.

Eraserhead had debated snatching him off the streets on the spot and risking it by bringing him in to the police himself, because Giran was not the type of person to just leave lying around for pick up, even if he's unconscious, but decided figuring out what the infamous middleman was up to might be of better use. He followed the man into a seedy deadend alley, but Giran was alone.

And then a warpgate, of all things, opened, so dark a purple it was almost black and out stepped two men. No, a boy who only just entered adulthood and the warpgate itself, which collapsed into itself until it took on the form of a butler-dressed man of fog. Shouta was too far away to hear exactly what they were saying, but the words 'UA' and 'tomorrow' definitely made alarm bells ring in his head. Then, as he was low-key panicking inside his own mind, Warpgate-san gestured towards a new portal for Giran and the middleman followed the two possibly-most-probably villains through before they all disappeared from his sight, gone like they had never even been there in the first place.

Without even really thinking about it, Shouta turned back around and immediately made his way towards Might Tower, only to curse when he found the rooftop empty. All Might had either moved on to the next crime of the night or he had decided to call it quits for the night and gone wherever it is the Symbol of Peace lives.

Realizing there's nothing he can do at that moment in time, Aizawa had gone back to his own new humble apartment and started brainstorming. No Hero knew about this. He wasn't sure if he should actually tell anyone. It might be a false alarm and he doesn't want to be declared the boy who cried wolf if that's the case. He's spent years building up the reputation of competence and reliability he carries now with both the police and a good number of Heroes. He can't risk that by incomplete or faulty information, because there were things Eraserhead can't do on his own, important raids that could mean the difference between life and death of hundreds if not thousands of people.

He'll have to get some solid evidence before he contacts any official authorities, just like he's been doing since he was fifteen.

No one can afford to be startled by a false alarm.

So he turned on his laptop - state of the art, custom programmed by Aizawa himself under the guidance of his old 'mentor'; one of his rare indulgences where spending money was concerned - and hacked into one of the news stations' systems to create an opening for himself. A backup photographer. No need for him to say anything and he can wear a cap to keep his face in the shadows. Can't be too careful. And with this fake identity, he will have prolonged access to UA, or as far as the press can go. It's enough to do a bit of recon and that all he needs.

No one suspects him. The journalists were all far too interested in harassing students and teachers as they entered the campus. Standing before the gates of UA felt nostalgic, but he wasn't here to reminisce about his own unsuccessful student days. He was here to keep inconspicuously out of Principal Nezu's cameras' view and to scan any passersby for suspicious behavior.

He thanked the heavens for being a Quirk Theory major, because it gave him insight in how many Quirk types work. Quirks always evolve, with each new generation, be it in form, delivery or strength, but there are archetypes that all Quirks follow. Telekinesis based Quirks, elemental Quirks, strength Quirks, sound-based Quirks etc etc etc. They can have millions upon billions of variations, but, ultimately, there was at least one common factor connecting them all. Teleportation-based Quirks, be it portals or movement at the speed of light or anything in between, usually relied on the person knowing where they wanted to land on the other side. Warpgate-san can't possibly know the layout of UA. The place changes every few years for security reasons. Principal Nezu took no chances when his students and staff were involved.

Which means these guys will be forced, at least this time, to come in right through the front gate. If they can just get in, they'll already have practically all they need to explore the grounds and either make a map by themselves or get it from the mainframe systems. The latter, someone like Shouta could do with one of their hands tied behind their back and their eyes closed. Well, if they've at least once seen how UA has built up their firewalls, which Shouta has. Between his hard earned and delicately polished hacking skills and having seen the style in which the firewalls were made, he could do it easy peasy lemon squeeze. Other hackers would need a pre-programmed virus to help them get in or else they would risk taking too much time, getting discovered and getting caught.

Shouta hoped his bad guys didn't have someone like him. He really, really did.

Classes have started and rolled by one by one and Shouta still kept vigil in front of the gates, along with the annoying reporters. At some point, everyone else decided to take a short coffee break, never quite leaving the gates but stepping a bit aside or taking a few steps back from the big metal doorway. Shouta scanned the area before finding a shadow to obscure him from the cameras and any possible would-be-intruders.

That's when he saw him.

He wasn't sure, but he could have sworn he was the guy from last night with Warpgate-san. Shouta withdrew more into the shadows and watched the guy study the gates before he approached the left side's frame. He knelt in front of it and it seemed like he was just picking up something - like a coin or whatever - but Shouta thought he also saw the guy graze a hand against the metal. Then he just walked off. How very suspicious. Shouta thought about following him, but that's when that one very persistent female reporter got frustrated and tried to stomp right through the gates. Shouta prepared his ears for the loud siren and eyes for the painfully bright red lights-

But they didn't come.

The reporters took less than a minute to storm the grounds all the way up to the three big doorways of the school itself.

In all that chaos, the Vigilante managed to catch sight of the white/pale-blue hair of Warpgate-san's friend but when he tried to follow after him, he was nowhere to be found.

'Fuck.'

This, of course, made for one paranoid Vigilante. UA buffed up their security, just in case, but it wasn't the level of security they'd need, Shouta knew, because they were preparing for reporters getting gutsy again.

Eraserhead, on the other hand, was the one that picked word off the streets that Giran was recruiting large numbers of random small-time villains and criminals. In the dozens. If they were all being recruited for a single customer ... Aizawa's finger hovered over several Pro Heroes' phone numbers. But he couldn't be sure yet if this group was being amassed to attack UA.

He continued following Giran's movements to the best of his abilities, to the point that he sort of worried some of his Hero friends when they didn't spot him a single time out on his usual patrols. He didn't reply anything beyond saying he's busy. Most Pros knew by now that this meant he'd found something big that may or may not later require their help, so they'll no doubt be waiting for his summons.

All Might, though, was still new. He, apparently, didn't know what the word 'busy' meant when it wasn't in connotation to himself.

He'd been pestering Eraserhead for three days now, after he heard from other Heroes that the Vigilante has been curiously quiet.

Shouta had almost called on him last night, when he ran into a strange ... creature-like guy that had almost managed to kill him, but Eraser hasn't been surviving on the streets as a Vigilante for over a decade to so easily fold. It wasn't pride. It was that he knew when he could take care of himself.

What worried him, though, was that it seemed like the guy had multiple Quirks.

And while that wasn't completely abnormal - people could be born with up to four Quirks wrapped into one, either as auxiliary Quirks or as parts of a so called composite Quirk and, rare still, people could be born with secondary Quirks - this guy didn't naturally have those multiple Quirks, not to mention that it was over four. And that's not even mentioning the exposed brain, something no Quirk did. Quirks were a new step of evolution for human kind and, occasionally, animals. In all the two hundred or so years since the Quirk Phenomenon, not once has a Quirk left any part of the nervous system exposed, or any other vital organ, for that matter. All sorts of physical mutations have taken place, but never once has the general structural integrity of a human body been endangered in such a way.

Shouta was lucky with this one. Besides whatever mutation Quirks hardened its skin and gave it wings, this ... thing had an emitter-type regeneration Quirk. Shouta had to put in a lot of work to get it contained. He's used up all the police-grade Quirk suppression cuffs he'd carried on himself last night, but he'd finally felt it was safe to leave the brain-guy to the police, though he did leave a few notes on the thing's strange behaviors and Quirk status, as well as what type of containment it might need.

And if its Quirks don't come back until a few days later, well, Shouta didn't want the police officers to get hurt while transporting that thing.

Strange brain-guy aside, it would have actually been just like any normal night. Except Shouta had found that guy while tracking Giran's recruiting route. That guy had either just been recruited or Giran was about to work him over. Either way, before his night shift was over, Shouta overheard from some low-tier villains that Giran was going underground for a while, which was his usual practice after recruiting a certain number for any organization.

This was, without a doubt, the most he's recruited for a single customer in all his known career.

Shouta couldn't make himself go to bed. He couldn't. He knew something was going to happen, and so he said 'fuck you, sleep' and 'fuck you, dry eye' and instead started patrolling the city in the middle of the day for the first time since he'd donned the mantle of a vigilantism. He patrolled and patrolled and patrolled and eventually found himself near UA.

To the day he died, he'll never be able to explain what urged him on to go towards the USJ when he knew UA was the target of these villains. It was off-campus and Aizawa had only ever seen brochure pictures. Regular classes are not, well, regularly held there, but he fucking went there, anyway. Something in his gut was screaming at him to. And so he did. By the time he found himself on the big dome, looking in through the white concrete-glass-like-material-or-whatever-it-was, trouble had already started brewing.

Not good.

There were only two Pros present and twenty students they would have to protect all by themselves while fighting off the villains.

Double not good.

The Heroes in question were Thirteen and Mister Blaster, a rescue Hero and a Hero dependent on fighting in a group to be in the least bit effective due to his dismal hand to hand combat skills.

Triple not good.

And the villains - Warpgate-san and his little friend, who was now covered in fucking hands of all things - had one of those brain-guys.

Fuck.

Aizawa checked his phone and found that the signal was being interfered with. He knew that it wasn't because of the dome itself, but rather because something or someone was disrupting the signal from within. He still had some bars left, but everyone inside was probably completely isolated communications-wise.

Aizawa sent an alert to all the Heroes he had in his contacts, hoping someone will receive it and pass it along to those close enough to actually do something to help, before he left his phone on the dome and took out the knife he carried at his lower back. He had no doubt that it can break the dome's encasing material. This knife was the literal only thing in the whole fucking world that can cut his capture weapon and that is no small feat. So, without hesitation, he hit the dome once, twice, thrice until the knife got embedded in the material. He secured it and stood up, ready to stomp it until he can break in.

Down below, he could see the warpgate guy appearing behind the trying-to-evacuate students and teachers, preventing them from reaching the doors. From behind them, from down below in the center square of USJ, the villains were predatorily stalking towards where the kids and Pros were. Mister Blaster charged towards the top of the staircase, hands crackling with explosions uselessly in an intimidation attempt, but he wasn't counting on there being shooters down there. A single hit and blood was spilled. The Pro went down like a log.

Fuck!

Thirteen was now alone with an injured comrade and twenty kids!

The thought alone was enough to give him the extra rush of adrenaline to break the dome's ceiling and he and the knife gracefully fell though as that whole square shattered. Eraserhead quickly oriented his fall, catching the knife and tucking it back into its place, before activating his Quirk. His capture weapon flared around him and he felt his fall slowing down just enough that he could safely land. His entrance was so surprising that no one made a single move to stop him until it was too late.

The shooters tried to use the same trick on him as they'd managed with Mister Blaster, but Eraserhead wasn't such an easy target. They were down in seconds, because most villains rely exclusively on their quirks when fighting, no hand to hand skills to speak of.

"Who's that!?" He heard both from above and behind him and right in front of him, villains and Herolings both. He paid neither any mind, instead focusing on the dozens of villains in front of him. Heroes were coming for backup. They'll be here in five to ten minutes. Mic and Midnight were no doubt at UA. They just need to convince everyone to come to USJ immediately and not ask questions of why they should listen to a Vigilante. He can hold out for five to ten minutes. Fifteen, maybe.

As long as the big, black brain-guy doesn't dive in.

"Thirteen, protect the students!" He called out when he had to jump back up a few dozen steps in evading a mutant-type villain. He wrapped his capture weapon around him, twisted and slammed him into the incoming guys that looked like they'd escaped a circus. Aizawa wasn't Quirkist by any means - he's suffered through his fair share of 'villain-Quirk' bullying - but this was just stating a fact. Some of these guys literally looked like pre-Quirk circus clowns from horror movies.

Another villain tried to use their Quirk to attack him but he simply erased it and punched the naive fool straight in the face.

"Holy fuck, that's Eraserhead you fools!" One yelled, finally figuring out who the black figure they were fighting against actually was. Well, shit. He quickly focused on that guy, stopping him from blabbing further. Not even villains or other Vigilantes knew about how his Quirk worked, or if it even was a Quirk and not some drug that messed with control.

"Step back, ya pansies! I'll get the little dancer!" A guy with four arms and two-tuned rocky scales declared, running towards Eraser with too-easy-to-read movements. Shouta dodges his punch, pivots on his foot while doing an almost-Limbo dance move, kicks another guy out of the way before using his momentum to kick four-arms away from him, too, sending him flying with the force. He then sends his capture weapon after him, wrapping it around his leg and then slamming him into a group of five villains. Thankfully, that knocks them out. For now, at least.

He hears screams from the top of the stairs and curses, but when he tried to run towards the kids, more villains come at him. Useless like cannon fodder, but they still just kept coming and coming. Warpgate-san was still blocking the entrance and endangering the kids. Handsy McMike was still standing by the fountain, scratching his neck, with the brain-guy just standing beside him like a loyal mutt.

Now that doesn't sit well with the Vigilante.

He doesn't know how long he fights like that, taking down villain after villain. Some of them go down and stay down, others manage to get up after some time and go back to making Aizawa's eyes burn from Quirk overuse. Fuck, but he needs a moment to use some eye drops! But he can't stop. He knows he can't stop, had suspected the fight would go like this the second he had dropped from the sky and decided to protect these kids. There were too many villains all around him. It's not a matter of skill. It's a matter of space and numbers and time. He wouldn't have enough time to squeeze in a drop in each eye, not to mention that it would be a dead giveaway as to his weakness. He's just lucky to not have sustained an injury yet. That would just make things even more complicated.

Eraser's a little surprised when he suddenly finds no villains making a lunge for him. A quick scan of his immediate surroundings reveals a fountain square full of groaning or passed out villains struggling to get back up and fight some more. Persistent bunch, some of them. Almost admirable. But mostly just really annoying, because that means he'll have to keep fighting.

"Eraserhead!" A new voice calls and Aizawa whirls around only to see Handsy McMike running towards him, one hand outstretched towards the Vigilante in an obvious intent to grab him.

"So, you're the boss?" He asks as he lunges towards the apparent leader, launching his capture weapon, Quirk flaring to life despite how much his eyes hurt from overuse. Handsy McMike manages to catch it, but Shouta's not worried. They keep running at each other and he dodges the too obvious move the villain makes to grab him, instead using his elbow in an attempt to hit his windpipe and, hopefully, render him useless on the ground. Only the villain grabs his elbow with his free hand at the last second.

"It's hard to tell when you're scampering around," Handsy McMike says almost calmly if not for the maddened edge to his words. "But there are moments when your hair falls down." Shouta did his best not to give any outwards indications of his reaction to someone noticing that. Damn, he's been fighting too long if someone noticed. The reason no one's ever found solid evidence that he even has a Quirk at all was because he always finished his fights as quickly as possible and was always moving about so that no one could tell if his hair suddenly floating about his head was a result of Quirk-usage or movement. "Every time you finish a given move, it happens. And your max duration is getting shorter and shorter."

His eyes itched. They hurt.

He had to blink.

Searing pain from his elbow actually caused tears to spring to his too dry eyes.

The manic look in his opponents red eyes, behind that decayed hand on his face, unsettled him almost as much as facing that first brain-guy had.

"Don't overdo yourself, Eraserhead!"

"Tch." Without hesitation, Shouta decked the villain, hard, sending him flying several feet away from him, giving him a moment to collect himself through the pain, catch his breath and blink away the tears. Those might actually come in handy, as already his eyes felt the tiniest bit better.

He was ready for the next group of villains, never loving his capture scarf as much as he did now for its versatility in the many ways it can be used. Most weapons can't be handled as easily with a single hand, and with his elbow now disintegrated down to his muscle, his right hand was all but useless unless he wanted to destroy it irreparably. He will, if he has to, because he now understands in just how much danger those children actually were.

The cannon fodder villains still went down relatively easily, but now he had to ignore both Handsy McMike taunting him about how 'useless' his Quirk-stopping Quirk was - which was a goddamned lie and only an idiot would think as much; emitter were the strongest and most common Quirk type, after all, and he only couldn't affect mutation-based types ... most of the time, anyway - and the agonizing pain radiating from the open wound.

"Yet you jumped right into this. Hoping to make those kids feel safe? So cool. So cool," the man-child praised and he was the one person Shouta definitely didn't want praise or acknowledgment from.

It was true, though.

Part of the reason he had so confidently leapt into this death-trap of a fight - for him, anyway - was because he needed those kids to focus on getting the hell out of here and harm's way. They needed backup. Backup they knew could hold up their own, at least long enough for them to escape. Shouta needed to hold out just long enough.

"By the way, Hero," his little villain admirer said with a sneer just as Shouta felt a presence at his back, seconds before its shadow covered him. Even before the Vigilante looked back and up, he knew it was the brain-guy. He was the biggest thing here, perhaps even larger than All Might. "I'm not the final boss."

'Final boss? As in ... In a video game?' Was the last thought he managed to have before his whole world was filled with pain and screamed and breaking bones.

Everything after that was fuzzy.