Death

by tmb1112

Death is a Quirk that can only kill. A perfect Quirk for a villain, but what if the boy who manifested that power just wanted to be a hero? Enrolling in U.A. might not be enough when all your Quirk can do is kill people. Follow Zach Sazaki from his first day in Class A on a story that spans years, as he learns to be a hero, finds out more about his Quirk, and too much to summarize!

210. Chapter 210

Disclaimer: I don't own Boku no Hero Academia

Chapter 210:

On a news program with WWNN in the bottom right corner, an old female reporter stood on one half of the screen while the face of another woman took up the other half. The face of that woman was shown in a picture taken of her unconscious with her broken nose centered and still some blood on the bottom of her face, scars all over her skin from her forehead to around her eyes, around her mouth and nostrils, over her ears, and under her chin to her neck. WWNN was one of the most well-accredited news forces in the whole world (as the World Wide News Network), and the reporter was speaking in English despite how she was in Japan for the story.

"…This Mysti has no known name, however 'Mysti' was a wanted woman in 87 different countries. Not much is known about her as of yet, though authorities are still trying to dig up more information on her background and where she came from. This is not the same as just another case of one of Zach Sazaki's nameless assassins coming after him. Mysti was involved with many of the world's worst villains captured over the course of the past two years. I have uncovered rumors of her being in league with names like Kabo, Dorgon the Dragon, and King, and she was known to be involved in companies like the Atlas Corporation and Primatechno, organizations found to be severely corrupted by villains that helped them carry out villainous activity in the shadows."

"Her criminal record is nonexistent, and the Japanese authorities do not know yet how many charges they are charging her with other than the most obvious: the attempted murder of Lifebringer. Other crimes she is suspected of however are numerous. Heroes from around the world have seen her infamous white cat mask that was put back together after Lifebringer broke it during their fight, and Japanese officials have released a statement claiming that they are working with those heroes to determine what she will be charged with. An anonymous source has told me that the litany of her offenses includes murder, torture, conspiracy to corrupt government officials, bribery, organizing villain groups, assassination, and sexual assault on a minor, among others."

"Heroes believe she was involved with a number of atrocities throughout the past two years, yet I have heard reports that add charges against her going back multiple decades where her appearances were less frequent but still occurred. That mask she was wearing when she attacked Lifebringer was what was always spotted in during these incidents however, and we currently believe that this is the first time the mysterious Mysti's face has ever been revealed to the public. Last night, I caught Lifebringer on his way out of the police station where Mysti had been taken. We'll show you a clip from the impromptu interview now."

The whole screen switched to show the older woman approaching Zach as he headed down the steps outside of the back of the police station. She was the only one around, and she caught the boy who chuckled as he saw her approaching and turned her way with his hands sliding down into the pockets of his jacket. The back of the station was lit up and there were a couple of cops around including back in the doorway Lifebringer just left out of. "Lifebringer, do you have a moment?"

"Of course, Eisheia," Zach said with a nod at the reporter who he knew and respected.

"Can you tell us what you know about this Mysti? Was there a reason she attacked you tonight? How did you defeat her?"

"I can't tell you much," Zach replied with a curt shake of his head. His head shake showed he did not know enough to tell rather than he just could not tell confidential information. "She thought I was Death, and she came at me yelling nonsense I didn't understand. She sounded crazy, but I didn't care about her grudge. I just took her down because she was a villain."

"She was wanted in over eighty countries. Did you struggle-"

Zach laughed before he could stop himself. He chuckled at the idea of it and responded to the woman he cut off with that laughter, "No. She was just one more in a long line of failed attempts on my life. Nothing more," Zach smirked and his cocky tone matched the look on his face that had the veteran reporter suddenly at a loss for words. "I just want people to know, that there's no need to be afraid of these villains. I stopped that missile heading for Yutapu, and I stopped her, and I won't let what happened to Norita happen to anyone else. I promise," Zach assured with a serious look towards the cameras but still a determined smile on his face too. "No one else will die because of me."

Zach stepped away and out of his back emerged large black wings that flapped down and sent him soaring into the sky. He spiraled around in the darkness when the camera aimed up to follow him, and that black blur silhouetted by the moonlight flapped its wings out to a much wider wingspan than it had a moment ago, before the shadow shot away in a blur. The camera then lowered back down to the reporter who turned to it again and cleared her throat while lifting back up her microphone to speak into it. Eisheia was at a loss for words though, speechless as she tried to put together her own feelings over what she just saw. The cocky attitude and scary tone Sazaki had confused her, because of the reassuring things it sounded like he was saying and promising them.

The news cut off on the laptop Ojiro was watching it on, as he x-ed out the tab completely at the tearing-up eyes of the girl snuggled into his side while they lay on her bed. "No one knows you were there," Ojiro started, his voice hesitant. "Are you sure you want to-"

"I don't, want to…" Hagakure did not know what he was going to ask, but she cut him off and just shook her head into his side at whatever he was asking if it meant for her to get more involved with this. "You heard what they said about her. She was evil. A really, really bad person," Hagakure whispered, but she closed her eyes tightly shut and a couple more tears spilled out of her eyes. "But-"

"You can tell me about it," Ojiro whispered, hugging her tighter to him with the tail he had wrapped around her side. They told each other everything, but he had barely been able to get Hagakure to tell him the vaguest amount of detail on what had happened last night. It was the night after already and the whole day Toru had been so off, and when she was acting like that it made his whole day off too. "Please, tell me. What did Zach do?"

"She killed his friends," Hagakure whispered in Zach's defense. "She was, bragging about it to his face. Taunting him," Hagakure stopped herself and she shook her head though, as despite these defenses she could not even convince herself that he was right. Tears fell though as she started to get angry at Zach again, as she could not cover up her sadness with anger as some people could. "She was evil, and he knew she was in the country after him… and he used me," her voice cracked with more tears coming out of her eyes, so she had to bury her face into Mashirao's side. "I was just bait. I thought he- we spent the afternoon together, and it was fun and- and it was all… a lie."

Ojiro's eyes shadowed under his blond bangs while they stayed locked down on the top of Hagakure's head where he put a hand down on top of her invisible hair and brushed it down slowly over and over again. His other hand had taken his phone out though, and he got onto his messages with Zach without hesitating. 'Stay away from Toru.' He sent it and put his phone away before wrapping that arm around his girlfriend too. I trusted you. A normal boyfriend would get nervous about a guy friend of his spending time alone with his girlfriend, wonder why they were doing it at least or if he had ulterior motives behind it, but Ojiro had never suspected Zach for a second when Toru told him they were going to hang out after school yesterday. You were my friend, and you knew what doing that would mean. You knew!

Ojiro could not even feel like Zach had made a mistake, or that he would want to make up with them or something afterwards. He knew nothing he could say could ever make up for this. He did it anyway, which shows he really didn't care about us at all. Tossed us aside, as long as he was able to defeat another enemy. That's all that matters to him. The fight. The next fight. And using whatever he can… Fuck. Fuck you Zach! Ojiro was glad Hagakure's face was buried into his chest, because he had to lift one of his arms for a moment to his own eyes.

---

In the dead of night so it was actually technically early in the morning, over sixty heroes stood in a round room gathered around a central holo-projector. The stand came out of the ground four feet high and was rounded too with a grid of glowing blue lines over it, and above that grid played images that looked three-dimensional despite just being recordings. Among the sixty-four heroes stood several who were twenty years old and younger, including a few U.A. Class A students who were still only eighteen years old.

Ms. Clue and Lemillion were at the meeting though, and they had taken along Explosion King and Earphone Jack with them. Bakugo and Jirou were standing next to each other at the meeting, one row back from the inner circle that kept a wide enough berth from the central holo-projector that all of the heroes were able to fit within three standing rows of it. The two teenagers once a part of Lifebringer's class were staring shocked at the hologram that was going through a list of suspected associates of Zach Sazaki scattered all over the world.

Lemillion was the one up close to the hologram and talking as images and videos appeared on it. Also in this meeting and one of the other people speaking most frequently, in their language despite the fact that he was an American, was Star-Spangled Man who just had his face on a wall covering almost the whole thing as he took part with them. Lemillion continued as he made more faces appear over the hologram that Jirou recognized this time, "A team of American Special Forces who are believed to be Army of Death, but who we are certain are acquaintances of Zach Sazaki thanks to surveillance done by Ms. Clue and Earphone Jack. This man, Rodney Black, visited Zach Sazaki at his apartment days before it was blown up. Since then, he has once again disappeared off our radar as he had for over a year since resigning from the US Special Forces."

"This is Gino Garbaldi," Lemillion continued with a picture of an Italian man appearing high over the hologram. It was a 3D image of him that spun around slowly to give everyone a look at his face, while below it a video started playing of several black vehicles rolling down a street with a white label beneath showing this was in 'Rome.' Gangsters flooded out of the vehicles and into a restaurant where they sat in the outdoor seating that was recorded thanks to a security camera of a store across the street. "Leader of the Garbaldi family in Italy. Potentially the most influential mafioso in the country. Also a known associate of Sazaki's."

Lemillion frowned as he looked down at his tablet and a few pictures that were darkened out showing he could not make them appear up on the hologram. His gaze shifted towards the big screen where he saw the leader of the ADTF's face, and then he continued to the people around him while skipping past members of the AoD who they had no confirmation that Sazaki had any association with. Not everyone in the room was ADTF, and not everyone was privy to learning all the information that they in the Anti-Death Task Force had acquired. Lemillion easily kept himself from looking towards Bakugo and Jirou though, Neither of them would tell Sazaki what we talk about here. It makes sense for foreign heroes to get suspicious of us though. We have to be worried about everyone telling Lifebringer, considering his popularity.

"If that Gino Garbaldi is a 'known' associate of his," Ryukyu started, having not heard this herself until now. She stepped forward on that inner circle just outside of where Lemillion was standing, and she wondered to the younger man, "Then why have we yet to arrest Sazaki for that alone, giving us the opportunity to investigate him further while he's in custody?"

"Because the Garbaldi family hasn't committed any crimes since this Gino took over," Star-Spangled Man mentioned to his comrade in the ADTF. "Metallore and Michelangelo came to me with information on Lifebringer's involvement in Italy shortly after our last attempt at arresting the Army of Death, where they fired missiles at our forces." Star-Spangled Man mentioned that line again that he had repeated so many times now to the positive results that he was looking for. "It was back last May, after Sazaki would have returned to our world based on the story he told his prison guards in Tartaros. Lifebringer was in Italy, as there were rumors that he was, and he had been acting as a vigilante, however not in the conventional sense. The Italian government and Metallore are in agreement that they would fight any use of Lifebringer's time in Italy as an attempt to have him arrested."

"If we can find something solid that links Sazaki to the Army of Death, we can arrest Lifebringer," Lemillion continued to the heroes around him. "But he is careful. He knows what we can and cannot use against him. Without proof that Lifebringer was actually committing crimes or fighting villains in Italy, all we would have is that he had spent time there while on the run as a fugitive. That was part of his initial sentencing however, that he had fled the country and became a fugitive. So there is no way we can arrest him for it again when he's received an executive pardon."

Lemillion's voice got lower, "Make no mistake however, I am certain that Zach Sazaki is Death." He said that with as much assurance as any of the heroes could imagine seeing on Lemillion's face, which alone convinced most of those on the fence. Mirio Togata needed that though, to precede what was about to happen. "However we find ourselves in a worse position than ever, even as our new strategy following the failed capture of the Army of Death in Turbonya has given us more information on the Army of Death than we have ever had. Since the Army of Death fired those missiles at Anti-Death Task Force, heroes and police and civilians around the world have come forward with new evidence that they 'found' despite most of it being from a long time ago."

Bakugo humphed and crossed his arms over his chest as he understood what Lemillion was getting at there. Making a huge deal out of those missiles even though nobody got hurt seemed weird. Thought it was probably governments trying to make those weapons themselves though that were pushing it. Didn't expect it was you, Bakugo kept frowning though he had to admit in the back of his mind that it was a good idea, which confused him as to why they were now apparently in a worse position.

"Zach Sazaki is a clear and present danger to this country," Lemillion stated firmly. "His resources, the allies he has, the things he has done, all add up to the most dangerous man in this country."

"If he's so dangerous, shouldn't we have surveillance on him at all times?" Kimona questioned in a low voice, a dark look in his eyes as he talked about his former student who had gotten Shiketsu High targeted by Death's enemies.

"If you didn't kick him out of your school, we'd be able to keep eyes on him better," Ectoplasm remarked right back over towards the other man who grumbled in annoyance at the response, glaring back Ectoplasm's way.

"What about at home?" Ryukyu wondered with a look to Lemillion.

Lemillion shook his head though. "The more people who know Sazaki's home location, the more danger he's put in. I alone know his current address, and I will only reveal what it is when we decide to go after him."

"You think he's such a danger, but you sound worried about him," Ms. Clue mentioned to the young man leading this meeting.

Lemillion just frowned darker at the observation she made. "Let's move on," Lemillion continued. He tapped an option on his tablet that made a new video appear up on the hologram paused at the start of it. "Our newest piece of evidence regarding Death puts a damper on my investigation into Sazaki. United Korean heroes in Sueguon have recently sent the ADTF several surveillance videos that they just found in an evidence locker that they believe could help us find and stop Death. This video is highly classified, and what you're about to see will not leave this room."

Jirou got an intense look on her face and stared closer at the video about to start. Bakugo's eyes shifted towards his side at the girl next to him whose glare was obviously full of hatred, and he just looked darkly back towards the hologram himself. Star-Spangled Man started speaking this time before Lemillion could start the footage, "Although you are not all members of the ADTF, it is my shared belief with Lemillion that Zach Sazaki is most likely Death. Because of this, I know that you are the ones who will have to deal with him, and so although I cannot give you everything, I will show you this piece of confusing evidence and let you determine your next course of action domestically."

"What is this footage?" Fat Gum wondered.

"Is Sazaki in it?" Underguard asked in a low voice, as if not then he did not see why they had all been called here. Based on what Lemillion had said too, he did not feel like they were about to see any kind of concrete evidence incriminating Sazaki.

"No," Lemillion replied. "The footage is from a set of secret surveillance cameras that were used by an underground casino to get dirt on powerful company executives and politicians who visited the establishment, as well as a source of leverage or insurance to use against the villains who showed up there if ever came a time they would need it. The stored footage was mostly destroyed when heroes raided the building after being called in with an anonymous tip explaining the disturbance that got the illegal casino shut down. That tip does not match up with the surveillance from that night that we have obtained, as unlike the stored footage this was still being recorded throughout the raids. The cameras were made to stay hidden from some very high-level villains who visited the establishment, and so even the Army of Death did not seem to be aware of their presence when they appeared."

The video started playing without any further ado. The angle showed from just inside a building as they could tell because of the cut-off corners and top of the video, out onto a narrow street where motor-scooterists were moving by quickly and some bikers and pedestrians were crossing the path too. There were street vendors caught in the sides of the footage, and an old man selling his wares just outside the shop right in front of the camera where he continued to stand even as a long black limo rolled to a stop in the frame. There was a time stamp at the bottom right of the screen showing when this was taking place at night, and a busy Korean man on a scooter tried maneuvering around the limo in a rush, honking as they could see but not hear as the surveillance cameras did not have microphones.

The scooter tried to sneak around the driver's side of the limo which was closer to the storefront, but the backdoor opened up when the man was about to reach it and blocked his path. A figure stepped out of the limousine and turned to face the man who got terrified at the sight of this figure. The tall man already over six feet tall had more than another foot over the top of his head due to the large spiked Pincers sticking out of his bald skull. He had on a black suit and white gloves, and he stood in front of the smaller man in an intimidating way which also moved his jacket a bit to show the pistol he had inside it. Lemillion froze the image right there, and Ms. Clue spoke up right as he did, "I recognize that man."

"It's because of this recognition that we're able to watch this footage," Togata replied to his fellow hero. He made six pictures appear back on the hologram for a moment above the video, and the others in the room suddenly remembered where they had seen those Pincers before. "His name is Grant Edwards. The captain of the team of Special Forces that Rodney Black was a member of." That alone sounded like solid evidence to most people in the room of Zach Sazaki being a member of the Army of Death if not Death himself. Lemillion continued, "If this footage only gave us this connection, the evidence would be damning for Lifebringer. However, we must take the whole video into account, and you will see why this does more to exonerate him than condemn him."

Lemillion unpaused the video which allowed everyone to continue watching as another figure stepped out of the other side of the limo. The man who came around the car had a head in the shape of a water jug, which Ryukyu and Kamui Woods both stared at in recognition which Lemillion saw as he glanced their ways. The man was more muscular than Edwards, and without Edwards' Pincers he would stand taller than him. This man came around the car holding a briefcase in one hand that everyone focused on for a second.

Those two tall muscular men stood on either side of the back door of the vehicle that was still open from when Edwards stepped out of it. A man stepped out of the vehicle with a cocky and villainous look on his face if the heroes had ever seen one. He wore a red blazer, had white skin and a Caucasian and more specifically American-like expression. He looked to be in his thirties, and although clearly with a muscular figure under his clothes he was smaller and shorter than the thugs who had gotten out of the vehicle first.

The man who stepped out of the vehicle turned back to it right after getting out, and he reached a hand down to help a woman out of the car behind him. First came a woman with long purple hair who stood around his same height. As he helped the other two out of the back of the vehicle, a lot of the men in the room found themselves staring at one of the most beautiful women they had ever seen before who brushed an arm along the red sleeve of the man who helped her out of the vehicle before he got the other two out of there. Her hair was long and fell straight behind her over her fur coat, just as one of the shorter girl's orange hair did, and the other's brown hair did too. Despite the purple-haired woman's coat that covered her assets, the way she carried herself was sexy and alluring, but both of the other two were very attractive young women too looking to be in their twenties.

As Lemillion paused the video, Jirou's eyes narrowed in with a strange feeling of recognition stirring inside her as she stared at the frozen clip. Why do I feel like, I've seen… her eyes were locked on the brown-haired girl with the largest bust of the three and who clinged onto the arm of the villain in the red blazer. Lemillion zoomed in solely on that man though after pausing the video, and Jirou refocused too on him herself. "This is Underlord," Lemillion said. "A villain with a criminal record in the United States. Known to be involved in drug and weapon smuggling, and there was a warrant out for his arrest at the time of this footage for skipping bail before his trial as he had surrendered peacefully to heroes at first without committing any Quirk-related crimes. He was also wanted for murder after killing police officers who tried to arrest him after he skipped out on bail, and this is what would come up for an online search of 'Underlord' at the time of this incident."

Several clippings and reports about Underlord appeared on a holographic web page showing search results. Then the search engine turned dark and a different set of results popped up, and new information appeared up there, and the dates on the reports showed to be from a few years before the night of this surveillance. Lemillion let them see this, and he zoomed in on when an underground report on Underlord's criminal profile had been written. The date was from years ago, and yet Lemillion said in a low voice, "All of this information on Underlord, was created and uploaded to the internet hours before his arrival at this secret casino, known as the 100 Club."

Everyone in the room got a lot more intense as they stared at the man who was smirking as he had his arms around the two shorter women. The man with the Pincers was ahead of him speaking to the old man at the vendor stand, attempting to get them past. They all just focused on Underlord though as Lemillion zoomed back out so everyone could see this clip carry on. He explained before pressing play again, "Underlord does not exist. He never killed any officers. His profile was completely fabricated and made to look like it had been compiled over a long period of time. Small enough crimes taken place a long enough time ago that it is understandable why Koreans would not recognize him, with a few small pieces of more recent information on his whereabouts and what he was doing now. These villains you see here, are an undercover team of Army of Death soldiers. And Underlord himself, is Death."

Lemillion played the footage again, and Jirou and Bakugo stared as closely as they could at the figure moving forward with no mannerisms that reminded them of Zach. He and his crew of three women and two men moved through the store and then into a hallway so the camera angle changed again. The camera pointed at a steel door at the end of the hall that the group walked towards and that opened up for a thin man with combed black hair unlike Underlord's dark hair that had a wave in the front of it. The thinner Korean man in a black suit started speaking with Underlord, and during their talk the Korean suddenly froze with his mouth open as Underlord's eyes flashed red for a brief instant. Then Underlord said something threateningly to him, before being allowed into the back with his crew who were led by the employee of the casino the heroes were about to see.

Those eyes look like his, Bakugo thought. And that's him. He's a fucking actor. Something like this, isn't beyond his… Bakugo stared with wider eyes as they finally got a look into this "casino" they kept hearing about.

"Whoa," Mt. Lady whispered next to her husband. Kamui Woods was also staring with a surprised expression at what was apparently behind that run-down clothing store that was no more than a front.

The two story underground casino that Underlord stepped into was an amazing place that looked far wealthier than the slums outside. Underlord stepped forward in an amazed way and put his hands down on the railing, shrugging off the grasp of the brown-haired girl who tried tugging on his arm, so that he could take in the beautiful casino with a smug smirk that he had made it in the villain world just to reach this place. The camera angle shifted from that entrance view to a corner of the main room where it showed one of the staircases down to the lower level that Underlord and his cronies started heading down with the employee of the casino.

"That's, Zach Sazaki?" Underguard wondered, his voice disbelieving as he watched what this white man was doing. The gorgeous purple-haired woman had leaned in towards the side of his head and put her lips nearly on his ear as she whispered something to him, and he did the same back to her a moment later while sliding his hand down to the small of her back that made her bite her lip in a seductive way and him to get a more victorious look on his face. Doesn't look anything like the kid, Underguard thought, unable to believe Lemillion here that Underlord was Death, or that Death was Lifebringer in that case.

"That's him," Jirou said in a low voice.

The video paused for a moment, and Star-Spangled Man questioned, "Are you certain?"

Jirou lifted her head in surprise, and Star-Spangled Man was looking straight towards her. "As his fellow Class A students, I do take your opinions on this matter very seriously."

"Former," Jirou muttered under her breath, though she frowned more as people looked her way.

Bakugo glanced to his side at Jirou who got nervous by the sudden attention all pointed at her. "Yeah, it's him," Bakugo said loudly. "We know that. Keep the video running." He snapped it, wanting to see what was happening next and getting impatient with the hero whose question did not matter since their opinions here couldn't actually do jack shit about anything.

"Yeah," Jirou agreed after a second. Her eyes narrowed and she said in a dark tone, "That's Zach."

Star-Spangled Man nodded, humming to himself that even his former classmates thought this way. He continued the video, and all the heroes in the room just watched closer now as they felt the Class A students knew Zach Sazaki best and they should probably listen to them. It was hard to imagine this Underlord was Lifebringer though. He was acting cocky and talking down to the casino employee with such a smug look. He took out a heavy golden pistol he put on the weapons' counter with the guns of his men, and then he had the women behind him take off their coats before smirking as he looked at their sexy bodies. His villainous look was even grosser as the brunette woman and taller woman both had visible scars on their arms, the brunette with pretty bad ones that made it look like she had been beaten and abused by Underlord who she smiled at and got up close to again.

This is crazy, Mt. Lady thought after watching Underlord pull a knife out of his boot and give it up. The villain on the screen was acting so evil, so clearly a villain that for him to just be pretending seemed impossible to her. That kid, couldn't be… Her eyes shifted towards Bakugo though, and she saw that spiky-haired blond glaring at the footage with the right corner of his lip twitching and then curving up into a menacing smirk of his own. Mt. Lady got a bead of sweat on the side of her face as she wondered what his crazy look was for.

They're checking out their targets, Bakugo thought as he watched the group who just seemed to be acting like villains down there. All those people in that room are villains. They're probably there after someone. What "incident" happened that night? Zach's a fucking psycho, to come up with something like this. Finding a place like this to raid with his friends. While we were at school, doing fucking nothing- Shit. What's he planning here? That's what's important now. And how he fights. Every fight I can see of him… Bakugo thought back to the joint training and the conversation he and Zach had had in the forest after it. He remembered Zach's grin during their talk at the idea of the two of them fighting, and he could not hold back that smirk anymore as he watched just how dangerous Zach could be with everything. What he was seeing now had nothing to do with fighting. Yet the scene playing out in front of him showed a more formidable version of Zach than he had seen since the Lifebringer Incident.

When the women took off their coats, the heroes noted to themselves that they were not patted down like Underlord and the men he brought in with him were. As they focused on this though, Lemillion paused the video again and pointed out certain figures in the hologram who enlarged and then had written profiles appear next to their faces. The ones Lemillion zoomed in on first had long criminal records, with Reno Grande of the Farolio Cartel being someone Lemillion pointed out as an important person to focus on. Then though, he changed up who was being zoomed in on to show just one figure at a table who had the most guards seeming to be watching him and protecting him as he carried out business.

"Kabo," Lemillion said in a low voice for everyone staring towards the hologram. "As most of you probably know, considering his arrest was a big deal, a few days after this incident."

"What happened between then and this day?" Underguard wondered, noticing Kamui Woods and Ryukyu both getting serious but also hesitant looks on their faces. The two just in front of him noticed that he was speaking to them, and they each looked towards the wall where Star-Spangled Man was watching from.

The American hero gave a nod of his head, telling the ADTF members in the room that it was fine to pass on what they knew. "Kabo was captured by Death in this incident," Ryukyu started. "We thought differently, until about a week after this when we received a tip on the Army of Death's location."

"Death told us when we ambushed his army, that he had captured Kabo himself and discovered the location of the League of Shadows," Kamui Woods explained. "Which was directly below where we ambushed him."

"As it was Death himself," Lemillion finished for the other heroes in the room who had not known about this before and were shocked to hear it. "Who gave us the tip as to where his army would be. He did so while leaking to us a short time span that he would be there, so that we would have to rush to him and be unable to report to our governments first or to the UN where he knew that the LoS had corrupted certain members." Bakugo and Jirou each stared towards Lemillion with their eyes huge, like many of the heroes who had just heard from Endeavor's speech after the incident that they had come across the Army of Death and the League of Shadows in the middle of a fight. Lemillion finished as he saw all those stunned looks, "The Army of Death knew that they could not take on the might of the League of Shadows themselves, but they were not willing to wait just so they could get stronger and thereby allow the League to continue acting during that time, so they informed the very people hunting them down where we could find them. It was another gamble on Sazaki's part, that we would choose to fight alongside him rather than against him that day."

Lemillion continued right away with his voice raising louder, "But despite the positive results of that fight! It was through whatever Death did to Kabo that made him talk, that they revealed the League of Shadows' base. Kabo was arrested without any external injuries, and he would not speak to the heroes who arrested him, and yet he was killed three weeks after his capture while inside a jail cell. The word 'Snitch' carved in Russian into his chest." Lemillion paused with a darker look on his face, "I can only imagine Sazaki was able to make such a man talk through some kind of torture."

"The one who captured him here though," Fat Gum began again. "It wasn't Sazaki, was it?"

"…No," Lemillion started. "It was Underlord, as I'll let you see now."

Lemillion unpaused the video, and while one camera angle continued to show over half of the hologram, another angle suddenly appeared showing the back of the club. A white van with a logo of a fishing company selling shellfish pulled up behind the store. The van's back doors opened up and a couple of short Korean-looking employees in white uniforms and hats that had some dirt on them were dragging metal crates with lobsters in them towards the back of the van. A burly employee of the 100 Club came out and was seriously angry at the two for a few seconds, but the short woman started yelling at him and motioning back and forth at the product she was hired to bring and the building next to the bouncer who was getting a confused and anxious look on his face as he wondered what to do here.

"Those more of them?" Incognito wondered to Lemillion.

"Yes," was Lemillion's short response that had the heroes staring in some more amazement at the disguises and level of skill the Army of Death had with all of this.

"Korean businessmen, arrested on charges of association with wanted villains, accepting bribes, and visiting an illegal casino. They were acquitted of some of the charges and just took plea deals for the charges of visiting the 100 Club," Star-Spangled Man announced as they saw where Underlord was heading after trading his briefcase of cash for chips. There were a group of men with Kabo who he was seemingly pitching something to while they drank and played poker together.

Underlord pulled out a seat while gaining the attention of Kabo, the businessmen, all Kabo's guards, and a lot of other people around the room surprised at his boldness. He sent the busty brown-haired girl away with a pat behind him up high on her leg, using his right hand that did not have a glove on it. Jirou's eyes suddenly opened wide as they followed the brunette backwards, then back to the man sitting there in the red blazer whose villainous and smug expression seemed so realistic to her. That's… Is that her? The same girl from- No way!

There were now five people seated at the table being dealt into the next hand. The three with the important villain whose arrest would become big international news looked nervous about Underlord sitting with them, but Kabo's look was calm and indiscernible. The powerful villain rose his hand in a small motion that kept things docile as he had the dealer deal Underlord in instead of ignoring the new arrival or having him taken out by his subordinates. Kabo gained an interested look in the villain across from him who leaned back in a confident way over his chair with the body language of someone unafraid at all of his position here.

The villain in the red blazer looked back at the sexy purple-haired woman behind him who smirked in her usual seductive way back at him. When Underlord turned back to the table to start playing the hand though, Seraphim looked to Kabo who met her gaze. Underlord did not notice, as the gorgeous woman behind him and Kabo had a silent interaction. The woman gazed around at all the men seemingly working for Kabo who was far more powerful than her boss appeared to be, giving off a different aura of calm power unlike Underlord's cocky attitude. Kabo checked out the woman's body as well, while Lemillion had the camera zoomed in on the table alone and the looks of these two facing each other. The woman looked down at her feet, bit down on her bottom lip, and then rose her eyes back to Kabo's again.

"What is going on there?" Kimona muttered as he watched the interaction.

"It's her strategy," Lemillion replied, confusing the teacher from Shiketsu who just stared closer to see what the point of this was. That woman looked down at the back of Underlord's head and started to gain a look of disdain for her current position, and Jirou felt her palms get sweaty as she saw a change in Kabo's expression too.

Kabo started speaking to Underlord, who said something cocky which cut off the more powerful and established villain. In the silence that followed, Kabo gave Seraphim another look, and he stared directly at a scar on her arm. Then with the smallest motion to his side he said a dozen words to the woman who looked stunned by what he was telling her. The cards were dealt, and the five men put in their large antes which alone were worth a lot of money.

The brunette came back towards the table, handing off drinks to the two men who had come in with Underlord first, then to the orange-haired girl. She looked to be trying to give the taller woman a drink too, but that woman who Kabo had motioned at suddenly started moving around the table. The brunette walked up to the table and nervously put a drink next to her boss, while Underlord turned his head and watched with confused but growing eyes as one of his groupies was heading around the table away from him.

Kabo asked Underlord a question. The area around them got tense, as Underlord's smile had gone down and his look got darker, despite Kabo looking to just be enjoying himself in the same calm way yet with a smirk on his face now. The power move Kabo just made was topped though, as Underlord smirked back at him while going all-in with his chips to dare the man across from him to do the same and risk a fortune on this hand. The other villains around them were staring at this interaction with wide eyes, both Underlord's guys behind him and most of the other villains not just with Kabo but looking interestedly towards them too at something risky Underlord just said.

Then, Kabo started counting his chips after focusing on the hand a bit more. Underlord's hand holding his drink shook a bit, and Kabo asked him something that got most of the people around them looking Underlord's way to see how he was reacting to Kabo calling his bluff-

The purple-haired woman who had come around the table right to Kabo's side grabbed him by the back of the head. Her other hand that reached into her cleavage whipped out a knife from under her dress that she put against Kabo's exposed throat while yanking his head back by his hair. Reno Grande jumped up and smirked big as he involved himself into the situation, calling out towards the woman and stepping her way. Most of Kabo's men had their hands down at their pistols they never had to give up, but they would not draw in fear of what she might do to their boss. The sudden takedown of Kabo was unexpected even for all the heroes watching this over a year in the future, and many of them held their breaths as Underlord calmly got out of his seat.

The looks of confusion he had before were clearly faked. His henchmen who had seemed uneasy about their friend's betrayal all had calm looks on their faces. The act was over. Each of their cold expressions were so different from what they were a moment ago. The businessmen had fallen out of their chairs or scrambled away, and all of the villains in the room were turned and staring towards this wondering what was happening that Kabo might actually be killed. It was a shocking turn of events, but as Underlord started speaking while up on his feet, his expression flat and his eyes dark, terror crossed the faces of everyone around the room.

In a second after whatever Underlord just said, sheer chaos broke out across the underground casino. People started screaming and trying to run as fast as they could. "That's…" Presto Change-o muttered, shocked by how terrified all of those villains looked after what they saw on their profiles. Mass murderers who had killed even heroes were just trying their hardest to sprint away, falling over tables and trampling each other in their sheer panic of what was happening here.

Darkness erupted around Death and shot out in different directions as some people tried attacking him. The man with the wide cylindrical head blasted water, while the guy with Pincers used them to toss a villain attacking him up into the air. On another camera showing the back of the building, as gunfire started going off down inside and made the bulky employee turn away, the short Chinese woman he had been arguing with tased him in the back to drop him to the ground twitching for a moment before laying there unmoving.

Some of Kabo's men and the Farolio Cartel were quick to bail as soon as the madness kicked off. Kabo's couple of guys abandoning him went out the front, while the cartel members rushed for the back of the building with Reno Grande, one of them staying behind to try and grab The Mule who was one of those Lemillion had zoomed in on at the start. It was not the Quirks of the group of six who suddenly started this panic that caught the eyes of most of the heroes watching this unfold, but their physical abilities and combat skills as they took down the villains around them while also keeping others from running away after the initial scatter.

"They're so organized," Ms. Clue whispered.

Incognito nodded her head absently as she watched this. Sazaki was so smooth in the night club we saw him in. He was able to blend in perfectly and carried out the job he went in there to do before I could even get started on it. It wasn't just him this time though. He had a whole team here who were as good as I am to have pulled this off. And without losing any...

In the back of the building, the two AoD members who had hopped out the back of the white van were in a fight with the Farolio sicarios. One of the employees of the 100 Club who had met with Underlord in the hallway at first was now unconscious on the ground too, but the Hispanic men fighting against the Army of Death agents were doing better than the rest of the villains inside with Death and his main infiltration force.

Bakugo's eyes narrowed back at the main fight instead of at the back of the building. He watched as the girl with brown hair put her arms together and created a cannon with them. That Quirk seems like his partner's from that night. "Darling" he called her. That's how he was able to put his bare right hand on her without it doing anything. Still, what's with the way he looks?

Enrique Lopez had been one of the top cartel sicarios the initial zoom had focused on, showing he had one of the highest kill counts of everyone inside before. Although the cartel members had their weapons taken, Lopez had noticed a gun on the body of the unconscious employee who had been arguing with the shellfish deliverers before. While Tuco and Vasquez were fighting the two delivery people, and losing, Lopez had grabbed the pistol and he unloaded into the enemies preventing them from escaping.

Lopez marched forward and glared into the van ahead of him before aiming the pistol down at the woman who had been fighting them and showing off a greater strength than her small body suggested. Lopez put a bullet in her moving head as she crawled on the ground, slamming her head back into the floor and leaving her motionless. A second later, the van shook. Reno Grande stepped out of the building and grabbed one of their enemies' pistols off the ground, yelling at Lopez that they had to go as it seemed like based on Lopez taking a step back.

Then the front windshield of the van got smashed out of the vehicle and sent flying down the alley along with a piece of one of the seats. The sides of the van started denting out with the windows breaking, and the cartel members yelled out in panic as a beast of a figure charged out of the back of the van still growing larger and ripping through his own fake uniform as he let out a roar of anguish and fury. Lopez stumbled backwards and lifted his gun that he fired a couple more times, but the figure who roared at him charged forward right through the shots and then jumped up over the villain who dropped the gun to raise his hands and make them start glowing red instead.

Death seemed to notice something was wrong from inside the building, as he dropped Kabo who he had been carrying to rush for the back of the building as the purple-haired woman did too. They would not arrive back there in time. The heroes stared at the holograms in shock and horror as that bulking figure covered in muscles and an enraged, animalistic face, slammed a fist into Lopez that smashed him into the ground so hard it looked like his body must have broken. Blood splashed out of Lopez's mouth as he gasped on his bounce up off the ground, but the beastly man was not finished yet, grabbing him by the right leg and swinging him to the right into the wall, then down on the floor after his arms and legs seemed to break. Then the bulking mass of a man lifted Lopez up above him while screaming out, and he ripped Lopez in half, throwing the halves of his body to either side of him in his rage.

Reno Grande and the other cartel members were getting away, but the beast that just charged out the van and butchered Lopez stayed where he was for a few seconds with blood drenched over his hands and arms. A lot was splashed over his whole body too from when he ripped Lopez open, and yet that animalistic look on his face faltered for a moment as he looked back and down at the unmoving woman laying on the ground closer to the back of the damaged van. That soft and sad look twisted in rage a second later, his head snapping around and his body leaning forward as he let out a roar of rage.

Death charged out the back of the building, and he did not chase after Reno Grande. He sprinted towards the huge bulking man who he yelled out at, but Shang ignored Underlord's orders and started running forward. So Death leapt up in the air and he swung his right arm out in front of him, a longer right arm extending out from it completely black with a massive black hand opening up the size of the beastly man's body that it slammed into the back of to knock him to the floor. Death's arm retracted as he curled his claws in, pulling himself down and onto the man's back who he landed on top of and started yelling at. The monstrous figure reached back behind him though, grabbed Underlord, and threw him to the side into the wall while clawing his way back up and trying to keep chasing the rest of those escaping villains.

The other woman who came up with Death sprinted around the beast's other side as where he just threw Death, and she jumped up on the wall next to her and then towards Shang's head that was too high for her to reach without using the bounce. Shang ducked down though, his instincts and reflexes both powered-up as his eyes darted to the woman moving for his head. He unbent his back quickly as she was going to pass over him, knocking her backwards, and then letting out another roar as he tripped because Death slid in front of him and took him down at the legs using both hands.

"Why doesn't he use Death to knock him out?" Kamui Woods questioned confusedly as he was watching the fight continue.

"He must have already brought that man back to life," Lemillion replied. "His Quirk does not work on those who he has revived before. Though hopefully, it does not work on those who were revived by Death at all," Lemillion added with a look towards Mt. Lady.

Mt. Lady just frowned as Lemillion looked her way like that though. Most of them knew how Monoma Neito was responsible for her revival, as it was made famous in the days after the Sports Festival when he was helping Lifebringer revive people that Mt. Lady was the first person he claimed he had tested Zach's Quirk on and seen that it worked. People were confused as to when that happened, but Mt. Lady responded publicly to confirm the deed when it came out.

"Yeah," Mt. Lady whispered in response after Lemillion kept looking at her, as if awaiting her to say something about that. "Hopefully." Her voice did not sound very convincing, and she looked back to the hologram herself afterwards and just focused on what was happening in that alley behind the casino. Even while he was out there as Death, I didn't know he was trying so hard not to kill anyone. Stopping his own comrades too, if that's really him. Could it be? It looks, nothing like him.

Seraphim knocked out Shang with Death's help as a distraction in front of him, then she dragged that naked beast of a man to the back of the van by one of his muscular arms. The busted-up van reversed closer to her, then the driver inside went to the back and helped get their unconscious enraged comrade into the vehicle. The corpses of their other two comrades were brought in as well, as were a pile of unconscious villains that the two "thugs" who Underlord had come with carried out from inside the building. But what the heroes noticed for a few seconds was the look Underlord had as he stared back through the alley towards the corpse of Lopez, ripped in half with blood splattered everywhere. There was regret on his face and a deep frown that things had turned out this way, but after that he just turned around and helped the others get the villains they had captured into their van. At the last moment they saw him too, Underlord was tossed a black glove that he put onto his right hand before climbing into the vehicle.

It was dark. I didn't see her use her Quirk like that… but that was her, right? Jirou wanted to say something out loud as she got her final look at the girl jumping into the van with the others. She's wearing makeup to make her look a little older, maybe padding too since she'd, she'd have only been like 17- or am I just assuming she's wearing padding, because I know her figure is different, and I'm trying to fit that girl into one who matches the description of who helped Zach? That guy has to be Zach though! So why, doesn't he look like him?

"Authorities would show up here soon after, however the incident did not end at the casino," Star-Spangled Man began to the room of Japanese heroes who glanced his way and then back at the hologram as a different recording appeared with a similar time stamp as the other ones. This angle was a little more pixelated with not as clear an image. The view came from inside of a clothing store pointed towards the front doors out onto the sidewalk and street outside close to an intersection.

"So Death not only caught Kabo here, but Umbagu as well," Underguard began in a low voice as he thought about that other big name he saw in the downstairs of the casino who Death had captured with some of his men. Lemillion looked the older hero's way and the man in a green hood spoke directly to the third-ranked hero in the country, "You've shown me that the Army of Death has done far more than I have been giving them credit for, and yet you've done the opposite of making me think Sazaki is this 'terrorist' considering what we just saw." Lemillion started frowning deeper just like Star-Spangled Man, but Underguard continued in a deep voice through the mechanical mask over his mouth, "If anything, it seems to me like Sazaki is right, and Death is just a man with an identical Quirk as his own."

"You think it's that Underlord who is the real Death?" Emergence questioned from behind Underguard.

"It's most likely a Quirk like Changeling's," Encode began from Emergence's left side. Others looked towards the hero in a pair of glasses who looked Lemillion's way to see if the younger hero thought the same, which Lemillion did so he nodded back at the hero with a raised-intelligence type Quirk. "Someone changed Sazaki's face to make a new persona of Underlord. That is one possibility, and another that we cannot ignore is that the Army of Death has technology that some believed to be impossible only a few years ago. I believe that making a mask as good as the one Underlord could have been wearing is possible."

"You think it was a mask-"

"Showing his real face and then also revealing that he is Death, would have been far riskier," Lemillion cut off Presto Change-o who was asking that with a lot of skepticism.

"That's true," Star-Spangled Man agreed. "Death would not have revealed his identity this easily. Besides, Underlord does not exist. There is no record of him ever existing, nor does facial recognition pick up on his appearance at all. What we do know, is that the man with the Pincers disappeared the same time as Rodney Black, a comrade of his in the Special Forces who is also an acquaintance of Zach Sazaki's. An acquaintance who met Zach Sazaki just over two weeks ago, for some reason we do not know as they detected the surveillance on them and started speaking Arabic in order to hide their conversation from Ms. Clue and Earphone Jack."

Jirou was somewhat surprised that the leader of the ADTF and one of the most powerful heroes in the world, the strongest in the USA at least, had known about her and Ms. Clue's surveillance. She found herself frowning though at the mention of how they had failed to pick up on the conversation and how Zach and Black had known they were listening. Bakugo looked to Jirou in surprise though, having heard nothing about this from the girl who had kept secret the fact that she was investigating Zach, just as he had kept his own investigations quiet as well.

"Everyone focus," Lemillion began to the heroes who were murmuring and giving theories about what had happened here. "As this is another example of why I believe this evidence does help us, as much as it makes Death look like someone other than Lifebringer."

A pair of black SUVs sped down the road just outside the store they had surveillance footage from of that night. One of the vehicles suddenly slammed into some invisible wall though and bounced backwards, riding up on top of the other SUV behind it. A man dropped out of the sky in front of the two vehicles but between them and the invisible wall that he had put there to block them from going any farther. This man was not in a disguise like the rest of his comrades, instead wearing the usual black uniform of the Army of Death. And yet there was something different about his uniform that was caught even on the shoddy store camera that had a good angle on him through the display glass at the front of the shop.

"That man, stood on the walls of Hatto's palace," Star-Spangled Man began. "His Quirk matches the ability of one Danjuro Tobita. Known in Japan as the Gentle Criminal, who assisted Zach Sazaki in his Lifebringer Incident. The fact that he has the Kanji symbol for Death on the back of his purple cape, and that the color scheme of his cape and visor seem to match that of the costume he wore in videos he once posted online, has led us to suspect that this man is in fact Gentle." Bullets were ricocheting off the man as the villains in their SUVs leaned out and fired at the guy who just stood there bouncing on the soles of his feet without reacting to the gunfire much at all.

Gentle bounced up on top of the SUVs, causing one of the Hispanic villains to move away from the vehicles to try and get a better shot on him. Tuco then stumbled away just as a huge hole opened up in the ground; all of the pavement suddenly disappearing below the SUVs to drop them down into the sewer below. Gentle flipped behind a stunned Tuco and though the villain attempted to fight, the Gentle Criminal slammed him down into the hole where the rest of his comrades had just fallen down.

A man came sprinting down the street and into the camera angle behind the hole that Gentle was standing on the side of. This figure also in a black uniform stopped at the edge of the hole where his legs morphed into the ground and started making it look more like a liquid substance around him. The pavement rippled and then shot out from where he was standing to cover up the square-shaped hole in the street, and in only seconds after he arrived there was no sign of the vehicles or the cartel members who had been inside them anymore. Blue and red lights were dim in the recording but getting brighter, and Gentle looked behind him in the direction of some lights before turning to his comrade, swinging an arm behind him, and bouncing towards Paveway who he crashed into fast before slamming down with another hand to send them bouncing up into the sky.

Only seconds after the two of them left the top of the footage, cop cars came speeding out from different sides of the intersection and all converging on one position. The officers got out of their cars and started yelling at each other in confusion, and a hero showed up too only to scratch their head with no idea as to where the villains just disappeared to. "That was, before the League of Shadows raid?" Kamui Woods wondered in a low voice. They were pretty organized in that fight, but we know they've gotten so much better since. So for this to be before that is incredible… and unsettling at the same time.

"The remainder of the Farolio Cartel would be destroyed in the days after this. Reno Grande, Tuco, Vasquez, and The Mule would all be captured along with many others in their gang at the same time," Lemillion explained to the room of people looking towards him again. "They were arrested by North American heroes, and in those arrest reports is not one mention of the Army of Death's involvement. Kabo's capture neither, same with Umbagu. Their arrests were assisted rather by anonymous tips, which was one of the greatest weapons used by the Army of Death throughout the Age of Villains."

The hologram finally cut off fully, and Lemillion looked around at all the heroes in the room who had various kinds of looks on their faces. He was young, only twenty years old, but he was now the third-ranked hero in the nation and felt the pressure that that put on him. And he had also been the one investigating this from day 1 after Zach Sazaki was released from Tartaros. "What you just saw, was but one of the ways Death fought throughout that period. What we didn't see, were the people Death himself killed. Nor how he makes the villains he captured talk. Death, made so many enemies around the world, that he has brought those enemies after him now that he has returned."

"The raid on the League of Shadows' HQ," Star-Spangled Man began to the Japanese heroes he needed to convince to put their full efforts into this. "Was a setup entirely put together by Death, who led the charge inside and took down the leaders Zolo and Turbo himself while the rest of his forces and the ADTF took on the rest of the League. It is also our understanding," Star-Spangled Man continued, and Lemillion grit his teeth but did not speak up as Star-Spangled Man was about to reveal this classified information to many of his countrymen who he did not want to hear it. "That using the same tactics he used in Sueguon, Death was able to capture several other big names afterwards such as Bolivar, and King, two other Shadow Bosses who were also taken down by Death himself over the course of the next months."

Jirou was shocked and stood frozen in place, and she turned her head left and right to see other astonished expressions around her. People started demanding answers, and Jirou asked aloud herself, "How does no one know about this?" I thought King was taken down by that big group of Russian and Eastern European heroes?! That was massive news!

Ms. Clue looked back at her intern though and shook her head with a dark but more understanding look on her face as to the reason for their misunderstanding. "We can't very well tell the public that terrorists were the ones who stopped all these villains. Especially when there's little proof they did, and heroes have already taken the credit," Ms. Clue added at the end with her head turning back forward.

"What kind of heroes take the credit for-" Jirou started muttering, more under her breath now.

In the third row right behind her, an older boy who Jirou knew from the short time they spent in school together her first year spoke up in a low voice to answer her. Jirou looked back just as Bakugo turned his head to the side to listen as Suneater replied, "The AoD don't want the credit. They want the public to believe that it was heroes who saved them, every time." His eyes just stayed focused towards his former classmate and best friend who got everyone around him to settle down and listen to him and the ADTF's leader again as they were finishing here.

Jirou was feeling too confused to focus on Lemillion though. Why would the ADTF members think like that? Suneater's, supposed to be treating them like terrorists. It's the ADTF who are the ones who have been painting them as the biggest terrorists for such a long time, so why are they, the ones who think differently? They're the ones who know them best and know that what they're spreading to everyone else is not necessarily the truth. It's just the truth that they, and the AoD have decided on.

"I still don't think this proves anything about Lifebringer being Death," Mt. Lady spoke up, stepping forward and confronting Lemillion when the twenty year old looked back at her in a frustrated way that people were not accepting what he was telling them. "That's a completely different person. I read the book on where Sazaki had spent most of the time he was gone," Mt. Lady said, and she actually smiled as she thought back on it. "And the stories in that book were way too detailed for him to have just come up with as an alibi. It's not-"

"Sazaki was on this world within that period, that is something, that cannot be debated," Lemillion started.

"How do you know that for sure?" Kamui Woods asked back. He was a part of the ADTF, but he had to agree with his wife here. "We don't have any information about him between when he claims to have left the world, and when he…"

Lemillion lifted his tablet, frowning deeply but resigning himself to this as he tapped the screen and made information pop up in the hologram. Several pictures appeared up in the blue holo-light, though still colored with what they actually looked like. "This has less to do with the Army of Death, and more specifically to do with Lifebringer during his time 'off-world.' In February, while Sazaki should have been in some other dimension," Lemillion paused and he stopped speaking in that kind of doubtful tone. He just lowered his voice while looking back to the pictures of the destroyed Pit. He took in a deep breath while the rest of the heroes in the room besides Bakugo were staring at this with wide eyes. "This is the Pit. It was once, a place in Nigeria where villains would come and watch as people they had captured were forced to fight each other to the death. And it is where Hawks tracked back information on Sazaki's whereabouts, after learning that his underworld bounty had been cashed in; the bounty for him to be captured alive."

Mt. Lady and Kamui Woods were both staring towards the pictures in shock. There were still corpses littered around the ruins of the Pit when the pictures were taken. There were pictures of the underground and the empty cells, and of collars that lay on the ground of those opened cells that also had some corpses littered around them of men who looked like guards and some in nothing but rags and with marks around their necks. The aftermath of whatever happened at the Pit had left a lot of corpses all over the place. Lemillion spoke in a low voice while everyone got a good look at this place for themselves, "The prisoners were forced to wear collars that would explode if they attempted to escape, remove the collars, or use their Quirks. As such, all fighting done in the Pit happened without the use of Quirks. Most of those villains still alive who were arrested in the Pit where Nigerian heroes found them did not speak of what happened, but there were a few who gave small pieces of information to Hawks when he investigated."

Lemillion's voice got even darker, and he said in an even lower voice that made everyone stay completely silent to hear him, "Sazaki had been thrown into that Pit, where he was forced to fight for his life and kill the other prisoners with him." The statement was brutal, horrifying, and it made the Japanese heroes who had varying levels of respect and care for Lifebringer feel even worse about all that had happened to the kid over the years. Lemillion continued though and their pity changed to something else, "Yet before long, Sazaki would stage a revolt with the other gladiators in the Pit. Most of the villains refused to speak on him or claimed he was not there at all, though some who initially claimed that cracked under pressure and fear to reveal that Lifebringer had been the Champion of the Pit. That he had won fight after fight against other gladiators he was forced to kill, until he finally rose up and killed those who had put him there."

Bakugo glanced to his right side as he saw Jirou's jaw dropped and her eyes shaking. She's never heard of this shit. As Lemillion had finished, others started muttering to each other and talking about what they thought of this or if they even believed those villains. Bakugo said in a low voice to his classmate next to him trying to examine everything on the hologram at once, "That's what the red marks on his neck are from." Jirou darted her gaze to the left only to see Bakugo's eyes narrowed forward on a close-up picture of the collar that Jirou turned back to herself. "He butchered the fucks who put it on him…" Why are you here? Bakugo had been annoyed since she came in, and he wondered in a low voice at the girl on his side, "Are you just here so you can arrest Zach?"

Jirou looked back into Bakugo's eyes for a second, only for Bakugo to turn away again first. Why do I care? Bakugo thought in more annoyance at himself now than the girl he just questioned.

Jirou did not have an answer for Bakugo anyway though. She just looked back towards the holographic images that did not show any concrete proof that Zach was at this place, just like everything they had been looking at gave them nothing really that showed he was actually responsible. Jirou believed Lemillion though. She believed that Hawks had actually tracked Zach back to this place, and that he had destroyed it, but one part of this was too unbelievable to her. Zach killed a bunch of innocent people? Even if he was forced to, I don't think he could… Why don't I?! He's a…

She found it difficult to finish that thought in her head, as she imagined the boy who had asked to meet her not too long ago and who she turned away after they had barely been talking for a few seconds. Every time she had seen him since he returned, her blood had boiled and she felt so angry just looking at him. Jirou brought up those feelings inside her on purpose as she had been unable to finish that last thought about him, but Lemillion and Star-Spangled Man were not finished and had one more piece of information they wanted to give the Japanese heroes who were being brought in to deal with their Lifebringer problem.

"There's one more thing we want you all to know before we begin the next stage in our investigation into Lifebringer," Star-Spangled Man started. "Something that has not left the Anti-Death Task Force before. I believe it will give you the greatest understanding of what you are up against though, should it come to the point that you need to apprehend Lifebringer."

"We don't have a way to convert this video to your holo-projector," Star-Spangled Man continued, and his face vanished from the big screen covering one of the walls. "So just look here. What you're about to see is an interview between Endeavor, Sheshou, and Fu. Sheshou and Fu both arrived at the scene of the Villain Summit on the day of as two of the first heroes to respond to the chaos. This interview occurred several months afterwards as Endeavor was following his own intuition that more could still be learned about what happened that day last April."

The two Chinese women Endeavor was in an interrogation room with looked ready to respond to the Japanese hero. They were wearing their hero costumes, just as Endeavor was as he visited the two of them in their home country on their terms after requesting the meeting. The video started playing, showing Endeavor questioning the women in Chinese with subtitles appearing on the bottom of the screen as not everyone in there spoke Chinese to be able to follow along otherwise.

Fu's claws were retracted but visible where her hands were resting over the table, while Sheshou had her costume's archery weapons resting to the side against the wall. The two were attempting to answer Endeavor's questions to the best of their ability, though they each looked hesitant as well when Endeavor asked them to describe exactly what had happened that day. Fu turned her hands over on the table and responded with her palms facing up, "We announced everything at the press conference."

"I'd like you to repeat it, for me. And be as specific as possible," Endeavor requested, his voice stern and deep but only as demanding as if he were asking it as a professional courtesy. "Lifebringer may be in prison, however public opinion is turning to support him. If there is a chance he is Death, I need to know before he is released and can bring danger to Japan. Any information on the Army of Death not only supports my efforts as the leader of the Anti-Death Task Force, but as Japan's Number 1 hero. Please, to the best of your ability," Endeavor gave the women an intense look that made the two looking hesitant about this return those looks in kind, leaning forward themselves and getting more into this.

The Japanese heroes watching this interview wondered whether or not Endeavor just used that as a way to get them to be more loose-lipped, or if that was really coming from his heart. Most assumed it was some of both, and it impressed the heroes who had wondered where Endeavor was during this all-important meeting. Sheshou and Fu started talking, the two of them looking at one another occasionally as they recounted what had happened that day.

"…We left most of the heroes on the outskirts of Huangdoo, to protect the city and deal with the damage caused by Death's fight with one of the enemy-"

"Death should have been one of your enemies as well," Endeavor started. The Chinese heroes looked annoyed for a moment, but Endeavor was not judging them with his look after mentioning that. He just questioned Fu's wording, "Why had you determined at that point already that Death was not an enemy you also needed to face."

"If I had to say," Fu began. She hesitated, then she sighed as Endeavor looked into her eyes, and she admitted, "It would have to be Qingxiao for me."

"Same, here," Sheshou added, albeit more hesitantly than her comrade. Endeavor gave her a look wondering why she was, and Sheshou added after a moment, "I was in Qingxiao when the earthquake happened. I'd never forget what Death did for us that day, but seeing the damage caused by his fight I almost turned- no, I did. I turned against him at the first report that he was there and part of the reason, but all the citizens who saw what happened said otherwise. Death had taken blows for them, and he had forced the enemy who his Quirk was not working on back out of the city and towards the rest of the… the, madness."

Endeavor's facial expression shifted a little as he heard how Death's Quirk had not worked on the villain he had already known was very powerful to have fought Death over such a wide area as was originally reported. He nodded though and just continued his questioning, "What happened next?"

"The two of us left the city," Fu continued. "I flew out, carrying Sheshou. We, couldn't risk getting too close. You have to understand, our priority had to be keeping the villains from getting close to Huangdoo again."

Sheshou nodded, though her look was darker too as Fu's was getting with a regretful look in it as well. "It was terrifying," Sheshou admitted, making Fu's head snap to the side for a moment, then her eyes to shift down like her comrade's were. Sheshou rose her gaze back up to Endeavor and she said, "But when we got close, and found a spot and determined that the villains ahead of us could not get any farther, the Villain Summit was already out of anyone's control-"

"Why did you think it was a Villain Summit?" Endeavor wondered.

"Death flew over to us. Right in the middle of all of it," Fu replied. "He yelled out in Chinese what was going on, how the villains had all gathered to create a new League of Shadows but their talks had broken down. His Army had shown up and was trying to stop them all before it spread too far, but they didn't have the power to face off against all those villains at once."

"Did he ask for your help?" Endeavor questioned.

"No- yes," Sheshou got hesitant again as she answered too quickly. "I mean, not with fighting. He told us, to just stay where we were but to spread out…"

"He said he couldn't defeat them all, but if he could force them to scatter he would," Fu continued. "There was no way, we could have captured all those villains… At least we didn't think it was possible when we showed up there… His idea sounded like the safest option for the citizens behind us. It was still dangerous to have so many thousands of villains running off inside China but, but you didn't see, what it was- not the aftermath that I know you were there for but…"

Fu fell silent, and Sheshou just got a disturbed and darker look over her face again herself. Dark lines covered the women's faces as they sat there in front of Endeavor who had to ask them in a low voice, "What did you see out there?"

Sheshou shook her head. She was thinking about what had kept her and Fu from going any farther and joining in the chaos that they had seen. What the Chinese heroes had stayed out of until it was time to rush in and start arresting villains in a much larger force that they thought could finally handle it, only another ten, fifteen minutes after she and Fu had arrived when the battle was already almost over. Sheshou lifted her gaze to Endeavor, half of her face seen by the camera pointed across the middle of the table to get both Endeavor and the heroes he was questioning at once. "It was like nothing I'd ever seen before."

Her words were translated on the bottom of the screen into Japanese for the heroes watching in Japan months after this interview. Jirou gulped at the look on Fu's face as she rose up her right hand and put it over her forehead, letting the bottom of her hand partially cover up her eyes as a small nervous smile broke out over her expression for a second. Sheshou glanced to her side and then back at Endeavor, "There were so many of them, spread out as far as the eye could see. And there was no way to tell who was on whose side."

"They were all just, butchering each other," Fu said, her voice a whisper so the Japanese heroes would barely have caught it if not for the subtitles that showed up normally. "In the sky, on the surface, underground too. Mountains rose and fell like the ocean's waves."

"The whole landscape changed, it must have been a dozen times in a few minutes," Sheshou continued. "Forests emerged and seas of lava rose to melt hundreds of villains. The smell was... The whole battlefield was covered in the destroyed remains of the hundreds of planes and helicopters that had fallen out of the sky in the initial flash citizens said they saw. An EMP, I think. It took out the Army of Death's headquarters' ship, but there were hundreds of anti-air vehicles, helicopters, fighter jets and- and yet there were still trucks and jeeps speeding around the landscape and blowing up throughout…"

"And Death," Fu started again in a lower voice but with her lips cracking up into a smile for another second before dropping just as darkly again. She rose her head and looked in the most serious way back into Endeavor's eyes. "He was unstoppable. Thousands of them must have fallen at his hands alone."

"She means that," Sheshou continued, to say that it was no exaggeration. "And you know the villains who were there, Endeavor. These weren't just run-of-the-mill thugs and thieves. It was the worst of the worst, from every damn country in the world. And he was the one they were all targeting most of all! But he took everything they threw at him, and he gave back twice that. The sky was ripping into pieces, literal black holes filling it and sucking in the more unfortunate villains who flew too close. The ground opened up with huge fissures that swallowed entire villain groups at once, before the Earth closed back up on them. Enough explosions to level a city went off every minute, blowing apart plateaus and- and... Death didn't flinch."

"We could see him through it all. It was hard not to see the one drawing all the attention, taking on the most villains at once. It was like, everyone was either fighting each other or fighting him," Fu said, her voice still dark with her eyes locked on Endeavor's. "You couldn't beat him. I don't think anyone could. He had the ire of the entire villain world directed straight on him, and he rose up a hundred feet tall and swept Death down on them. Taking out a hundred powerful villains with a single move. And it was brutal out there, Endeavor. Absolute madness and chaos, but those eight thousand villains everyone praised us for capturing at the scene of that Villain Summit… It wasn't the villains sparing each other, I'll tell you that much. And we only started capturing them once they were running at the end, but almost all of those we actually captured at the scene and not during the days after as we chased down all those who fled, were unconscious already. I thought it was a graveyard, but there were more villains laying around unconscious than there were actual corpses at the Villain Summit."

"He was in the middle of all that chaos," Sheshou continued, emphasizing what she and Fu were trying to get across to Endeavor here. "And he still had the power to be able to spare his enemies like that. 7 civilians were killed in Huangdoo that day, in the crossfire between Death and some monster the people of the city blame for their deaths. We still have to put accountability on Death though for that, and yet there's no way to reach him to hold him accountable. He took on all those villain groups though who were really responsible for their deaths. And all those groups were organized by region into five massive forces, six if we're counting the Army of Death too. They left the landscape of Tibet where they had their battle completely demolished. Covered in crashed planes and helicopters and that massive airship believed to be the Army of Death's former base, not that much was able to be salvaged from it as it had been nearly entirely destroyed as the target of the villains' heaviest fire…"

Hold up. Bakugo stopped staring at the screen as intensely as everyone else in the room. His eyes shot down to the floor and the thought he just had but pushed away because of its ridiculous nature came back up slowly. Six… armies? No. Bakugo lifted his head and refocused on the screen, but he furled his lips and had to shake his head with a quick close of his eyes. No, I'm overthinking- unless I'm not. He messed up a name in that story. That's not what… no. No. It doesn't, make sense…

He had to wear a collar, and kill people? There's no way! Jirou may have picked up on what Bakugo was coming to a hesitant realization of herself, but her mind kept pulling back to the pictures of the Pit, a place she never believed could exist in this world. They don't even know if he was really there! Everything everyone knows about what he was doing out there is just a rumor! Even this, though I know he is Death- so then this is real? This, actually happened? I thought the Villain Summit was just… I don't know. They said the Chinese heroes and heroes who came to help them dealt with the villains, arrested them, and everyone was blaming the Army of Death for those Chinese people dying when the summit spread to the nearby city. So why is it sounding different now?

"…At the end of the battle, the Army of Death were not chasing the enemies they had forced to flee." Fu paused, and she continued in a voice with more pity in it as Sheshou gained a sad look too, even grabbing her left upper arm with her right hand in a guilty way. Fu's voice was soft as she went on, "Our group of heroes had grown large enough to give chase in the many directions the villains had fled. We still had to leave several between Huangdoo and ground zero, just in case. And we also needed a lot of us to stay in that main area to deal with the thousands and thousands of villains laying everywhere, dead and unconscious. The two of us, were part of that team."

"The only ones left standing were the Army of Death," Sheshou said. "When we got over to them… they had already gathered up together. And just around, two dozen Army of Death members were still able to move. Less, actually." Sheshou paused and she had to look away from Endeavor and the camera too, her voice just barely audible as it continued to come out with the subtitles continuing on the bottom. "We couldn't apprehend Death, or the others with him there. Every one of those twenty of them still alive and moving, were dragging at least one comrade with them, carrying two or three on their backs for some."

"They were bloody and dying, each and every one," Fu muttered. "A single jet showed up for them a few minutes after that they dragged themselves onto and flew off in." Fu's hands opened up over the table and dug down into it, her claws extending a bit as she grit her teeth imagining that most depressing scene at the end of the Villain Summit.

"Has anyone seen Spiral?"

"Scatter too?"

"I don't- ahh, ah-"

"Heavy?"

"There could be more of us left. We should keep looking-"

"We have to go… There's no one else."

They didn't even care that we were there. I didn't even know, what to say to them, Fu closed her eyes that were getting wet, but a tear still dripped down the right side of her face as she thought back on it. "There were probably," she tried to finish, her voice steady despite the way she looked. "Fewer than fifty of them remaining alive, when all was said and done. And half of those were likely, unable to fight anymore… Though maybe Death could have brought them back from injury, if it was their first time." Fu finished that with a voice crack, and she apologized while raising an arm and rubbing over her eyes quickly as she noticed she had gotten choked up. She just took in and let out a couple deep breaths, before lifting her head and telling Endeavor, "There were a lot more of them when they saved Qingxiao, and it was pretty clear, a lot of them died that day."

She had lied to him when he came to Qingxiao and demanded to be allowed to go in to apprehend the Army of Death. Fu and the other Chinese heroes who had been there were ready to fight the ADTF for trying to involve themselves that day, but she told him the truth anyway and just looked sad to say it. Endeavor nodded back at her in understanding of what she was saying too, and he had a respectful look in his eyes for the way the two of them took it.

As Endeavor had that moment of silence in a similar kind of mutual respect for Death as the Chinese heroes had, the Japanese heroes watching this in the future found themselves silent too as they imagined the description of the Villain Summit. They wondered for once if the news they heard about the Army of Death expanding the fight even larger so it just touched the city of Huangdoo, because their involvement had made it that small amount larger that spread there, was not the truth behind the events that occurred that day. Instead, many of them wondered just how many people in that city would have been killed if not for the Army of Death, which was clearly what the Chinese heroes in that interrogation room were thinking as they defended themselves for not apprehending Death and his army even in their weakened state there.

Jirou's eyes lowered to the floor, and the hatred that she felt so deep within her subsided. Her teeth bared forcefully, but as angry as she was at him for everything he did, as much as she was mad that he was still lying to everyone and tricking the country… She recalled the way his body looked when he came out of his destroyed apartment and the darkness faded from parts of his shirtless torso. And on his neck, she imagined the red marks wrapping around his whole neck, and her eyes shifted to Bakugo at her side again before looking right back at the floor. He already knew. He knows, and he's still here right now! I should- I… He had to wear that, while being forced to kill other prisoners…

What am I doing here? Jirou asked herself, as she felt so much pain at that last thought for some reason. She knew the reason though, and she clenched her eyes shut at the thought of it. Trying so hard, to get Zach arrested. Sure I'm mad at him, but, when did I start wanting… this? Her eyes opened and she rose her head to look around the room full of heroes discussing the danger of Zach Sazaki. A witch hunt for my friend- a former friend… As much as she tried to correct herself in an angry way, she just felt sad at the urge to get mad at him after all she had heard today. I don't get what you were doing. Or why, you thought it was okay- I'm just- I'm not mad, at what you were doing out there. That was never it.

The biggest reason I'm still mad at him is the lying. He's a, she could not even think that convincingly at herself anymore. But I'm a liar too as long as I hold onto those letters. He may be a liar, but he's done a million amazing things to try and even that out. I don't have that. I'm just… Then, why not change that?

---

Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz…

Zach's eyelids parted slowly. It was pitch black around him, but he opened his eyes with them already glowing red and letting him see everything down there just basked in a low red hue. He felt movement on his right side and his red eyes shifted to the corners to look down next to him. His back was still against the wall with his legs out in front of where he was sitting, and his arms were limp down at his sides with his forearms resting out forward since he was slouched low into the damp wall.

He stared at the small disgusting creature crawling towards him on all fours, and he watched it in silence without moving a muscle as it crawled onto his right hand. He stared at the rat as it nibbled down but was unable to break through his thicker tevlon that was not meant to rip anymore as he would not ever need it to. The rat moved up the back of his hand towards some exposed skin between his dirty jacket's sleeve and his glove. The rat stopped moving and fell off of his hand, and Zach sucked in a sharp breath of rancid air. He was able to ignore the smell though as the corners of his lips cracked up for a moment, then he sighed and reached for his phone that had stopped vibrating but would go off again soon if he did not respond to his alarm.

Good few hours. Ojiro texted me. Zach opened up his phone and looked at the message he had to unlock his phone to view. He stared at the text through his glowing red vision, then he turned back off his phone and pocketed it before standing up and lifting his bag with him. Drip. Drip. Drip- sclch sqsh, squish, sklsh, Zach walked down the underground murky tunnel with his footsteps making louder noises than the ambient dripping that had gone on through the early morning hours he had rested for. His expression that had dropped in disgust and darkness rose back for him to have a flat lip and calm look on his face. Searched different cities' sewer systems all night for any secret tunnels connected to them, not that I found any. What's the move for today then? Nothing much.

Can't stop someone on Mysti's level every day. The League are in too deep of hiding too. If I had searched every forest though… across the whole country? It's impossible. I couldn't have guessed, and now there's less of a chance too, though I don't have a lack of time. Too much time. Too little freedom, once I emerge from the darkness. I have to show myself though. Let them see, what? What am I even showing them? A disgusting- I'll decide on today once I'm showered and in some clean clothes.

He rose to the surface when no one was watching. Then he snuck into an abandoned apartment, one of many he knew of across the nation and in every city. Water's still on, even if the electricity is off. I'll plug my phone into the new laptop for a little. It'll waste the computer's power, but the phone's about to die. One charge will last me a few days with this thing though. Zach stared at the phone in his hand as he walked out of the bathroom he just turned the shower on in. The battery indicator signaled that the phone was going to die soon, but he gained a half-smile as he stared at the glowing object in his hand. Don't have my costume, nor any of the money remaining. Everything in that box was destroyed or taken from me, or I just used it up. Still have these though.

Zach reached over to his left shoulder with his right hand. He twisted and popped off his arm, sliding it down out of his sleeve still with his phone in its hand. He looked at his arm and phone that he had received in the box L sent to him, the last remnants of the things he received that day. And he remembered the others sitting around him as he went through the contents of his package. Haven't seen any of them for a while, other than Hagakure. It feels like so long actually. And I doubt I'll see Hagakure or Ojiro again. Koda too, most likely. Unless they die. Zach shook his head around, and he tossed his arm to the side before snagging his phone out of the air when it was slipping out of his left hand.

He opened his smelly backpack and got out a laptop that had half its battery remaining which he frowned at again. The other one rarely ran out. It's the research I did yesterday before searching underground. Had to empty out the base at Rairosu. Can't let any of the homeless take on his wrath just for associating with me. It's time to be alone. I had enough time out there. I'm back. Train. Disguise. Fight. Zach stripped, then he dropped to his right and only hand that had scars over his knuckles and crossing all over the back of it as he could see after removing his glove. He did push-ups on one hand, then one finger as he pushed his index finger down and sweat it out with no Death around him.

Train harder. It doesn't matter that she didn't stand a chance. She could have, and that's the issue. Just the idea that someone could be stronger than me… There could be. Eziano cut your throat. Don't forget it- and then he ran with his tail between his legs. Zach continued pushing down and up, though he stopped panting as much and just continued with his muscles losing the strain in them as Death filled certain parts of his arms and joints. Cowards. The whole lot of them. Every fucking villain in this world. Running from me. Even he's too much of a coward to come for me himself. I told him- he'll do it. I'm just waiting. When I defeat all of them, only then can I face the boss. That's what this is, right?

Zach stood up, then he lifted his left foot and put it up on the inside of his right thigh covered in burn marks and scars. The sole of his left foot had a few bumps and gashes on it he could feel as he pressed it against the warm skin of his inner thigh, and he took in and let out a deep breath before pushing up higher on his right foot that was alone on the ground now. In a room almost pitch black as the sun had yet to rise over the horizon, Zach stood on his toes and did a squat with his right hand in front of his chest. The palm he held out in front of his chest was pointed inwards as if together with a left hand, but as he lowered in the squat his hand curled into a fist. He had barely any balance on his curled toes, but he punched his right fist out and held his arm there for a moment without losing his balance. He stood back up, then dropped down and did the same thing again, and again, for twenty reps.

Steam came out of the bathroom door he had left open, and Zach alternated onto his left foot before he did another full set of squat-punches on the tips of his toes. Then he headed into the bathroom and closed the door behind him, letting the shower he had pouring water as hot as it could get fill the room with steam that was not escaping anymore. The air got thinner, and the floor tiles got damp from the water vapor in the air, and Zach did his workout again with thirty reps on each foot this time. His toes dug in harder as the wet ground threatened to make him slip, and his muscles ached until he poured Death into them to ease the workout gradually.

Zach turned and he stepped over the edge of the tub and into the shower that was still sending out searing-hot water. He sighed a breath of relief as the heat hit him though. Zach ran a hand up into his hair and pushed back, getting the dirt and grime to flood down his body and make the bottom of the bathtub look black for the first few seconds after he got in. No soap. No shower curtain even. Floor will be even wetter for the post workout, now that it's splashing off my sides and onto the floor. Hope no one calls the police on someone using the shower in this unused room. I'd slip them easily, but getting my shit from the other room would be annoying. I'd really have to finesse it. Could be good training.

He tilted his head back and got hot water to fill his mouth. He gargled it in the back of his throat, sloshed it around his mouth and licked his teeth to clean them off a bit. What do I need? Money, first of all. Still have a toothbrush and toothpaste in the bag. Had to compartmentalize and choose what was worth keeping with me. The water bottles are empty though, and brushing with sewage this morning wasn't an option. This water tastes like lead. It's too hot. I should fill up the empties with some tap, but I tossed the empties yesterday to make room for a laptop charger. Should have plugged the laptop in too, would probably charge the phone quicker and without wasting as much computer battery. This is starting to hurt.

Zach cracked a grin and stared up into the water pouring onto his face. Not bad. Doubt the water stays this hot for much longer though. Shouldn't use up too much of the hot water for people at this complex either, if we share a water supply. Not fair since they're paying rent. He shook his head around and got to scrubbing himself all over. Should have brought my prosthetic in here too. It's waterproof and could use a good scrubbing after last night. I'll just leave the clothes I wore down there here, but I'll have to wash that backpack. I should get a hiking pack to fill with more… people would notice too much. Wonder why I'm carrying around so much every day. A backpack's easier to explain away…

He got out of the shower before long but turned on the bath faucet and blocked the drain. When he returned to the bathroom he had some more things he needed to clean, and he knelt at the side of the bath and scrubbed his metal arm, cleaned his bag, and then put some dirty clothes into the bathtub too. I'll leave them to dry on hangers in a closet, and maybe come back for them one day. People shouldn't notice if my wardrobe has too much variety, as long as I keep one good set I wear on multiple occasions. I should still wear other things more than once though. I know there are more clothes in here for me, but sooner or later I'm going to get in trouble for doing this shit. No I won't. That's stupid. No one's ever going to catch me. No one could.

He chuckled to himself while washing some clothes, and it was getting difficult so he brought his left arm back into his socket and twisted it to lock in. He winced with a smirk on his face as he felt his nerves reattach, and then he stared down at his left hand's fingers he curled one by one to test out the arm's reaction time compared to when he thought about those fingers moving. Zach's eyes glowed red and darted from his right to his left hand. No difference. The nerves are as good as my actual ones. I guess the arm's still able to keep up with me then. Fucking geniuses, all you guys. Zach shrugged out his shoulders and got back up, moving into the other room and hanging up the wet but clean clothes to dry. He grabbed out another set too he tossed on the bed, though he did not get changed into them yet as he was still a little damp himself despite air-drying for a while now. Wish she had a towel in here, or that my bag could fit one, he thought to himself while stepping back into the apartment's bathroom that had belonged to a woman from his deduction.

Her family cleared almost everything out of here, but they could have left me a towel. I guess, I didn't revive her, so it's on me. I was younger then. Couldn't save everyone at the Sports Festival. Couldn't even save Aizawa sensei. But I saved Shoji. And a few dozen other people, including Richard Hawkins. Zach had walked back into the bathroom, holding his toothbrush and toothpaste in either hand. The thought of the man who had been coming to mind very often recently, flashed in his head again charging straight at him. He saw Mysti's face in his mind, Was she responsible for that too? Bringing him there, was her idea?! It wasn't my fault- Zach felt scars on his back in the shape of claw marks searing in pain as he stared at his own reflection in a mirror that had lost too much of the steam on it. He was able to see a blurry reflection, and the anger inside him suddenly flared up at the sight of it.

CHHH!

Glass shattered and fell around Zach's right hand that just smashed through the middle of the mirror. He stared forward with his eyes getting a little wider as he pulled his hand back and lowered it to his side, his eyes following after the hand that just sizzled with some Death but faded after a moment. His eyes rose back up to the mirror that still had many shards despite the middle of it having fallen down into the sink. His own reflection had been shattered too, different shards reflecting at different angles to make him unrecognizable anymore.

His eyes lowered from those shards though that made him look like a disfigured mess in the mirror. She looked at me like a monster, Zach thought. In his head he saw nothing above a floating set of clothes, but that nothing had a look that made his stomach turn upside-down. I couldn't kill Mysti, not with Hagakure there. But I did the next worst thing. Maybe even worse than… than killing her. Zach closed his eyes, and he calmly started brushing his teeth with his eyes shut. Which was what I tried to convince myself and her, in order to keep myself from taking Mysti's life in that moment. You know that's what you did.

Mysti has other comrades though. She was the second most powerful person in an organization that controlled the world from the shadows. His eyes shot open and glared back up into a single shard of the mirror that let him see into his own hazel eyes with red pupils. Those pupils pulsed, widening then shrinking back to normal size as he stared into them. Inside corporations and governments, with research labs everywhere advancing mankind to a new future. A better future. His lips twisted in rage, They thought they were changing the world, and I destroyed them. Fergus' scientists received no mercy. I killed more of them, than my enemies from any other group combined outside of Tusukan. But Mysti escaped.

She had the resources. She had the know-how in order to keep up her power. The amount of resources and allies she could still have- but I can't kill her- I couldn't! It's in the past. There's no way to kill her now, Zach bit down on his own tongue inside his mouth, gritting his teeth on either side and drawing blood as he did both at once. DON'T DO IT! Taking her out was necessary. She'd have killed them all! I'm not evil. Hagakure's wrong. The way she looked at me- whatever she told Ojiro! I'm not wrong. They're wrong. He said it to himself again, but his chest did not stop squeezing in the grief and guilt of the decision he was questioning.

And then that grief went away as a dark aura swirled around his heart. Then that darkness pulled away from his heart that raced much faster as he glared into the mirror with wide eyes. Shit. Don't ignore it. Don't act like you're in control.

Death might be a drug, Zach lifted his right hand, staring at his open palm covered in so many scars that there was more scar tissue on that hand than non-scarred skin. Before, I rarely used it and I was happier and more stable. Then I felt I needed it, needed to use it, convinced myself that my problems were from not using it enough. In prison I stayed in a good mood for so long. Stable. In the short time out of it, my use skyrocketed, and yet using it to empty hasn't happened. So I thought the occasional bursts were good for me, to keep it down. But then I overused it like an overdose when I got sick, and yet my tolerance got higher after I recovered as well… or so I've thought.

Unless that thought process is just another way to convince me to use it more. To need to use it more, in order to get the same feeling of relief- And I use it so much more often now too. Forcing myself to do periods of it a day, and yet those violent outbursts I had with Broom Man that I chose to believe would subside if I did just release Death every once in a while have not gone away either. I've changed. I'm changing constantly. It's changing me. Not using Death is not the answer though. That's just, impossible. Using it more is just adding to it though…

If the answers were easy, they wouldn't be problems I need to think about in the first place. But killing that rat this morning, and killing the trees I'd been sleeping on for no other reason than like an expresso shot to get me up in the morning? I'm killing, in order to function. What happened to a good old coffee? I love coffee. I should go get a cup.

Zach turned on the cold water in his sink, and he splashed some up into his face a few times before smiling and heading back into the bedroom that still had a bed and mattress even if there were no covers or sheets. He grabbed the clothes in the closet that did not look like the woman's that had been mostly cleared out, and he assumed the black sweatshirt and sweatpants might have been her boyfriend's that she stole from him or that he left there one day. Zach did not know, but after getting changed and packing everything up with him, he glanced over a nightstand and out the window into the Musutafu air getting brighter by the minute. He took in a deep breath and then let it out slowly, and he imagined some couple seeing that same sunrise out this very window themselves many times.

I know I didn't stay here last night, as it was too dangerous for the other people in the complex, Zach thought while facing the bed and staring as if at a person sitting on the foot of the bed. He bowed his head a little and then rose it in gratitude, But thank you, for letting me use your bathroom. I needed that.

Zach turned and he headed from the bedroom out into the main room of this person's apartment. He stopped himself as he was about to head for the door though, and he turned back towards the couch that he remembered having searched under the cushions of the first time he found this place. Huh, that's right. He walked towards the couch and looked at the headphones on top of the middle cushion where he had left them after finding them stuck in the crack behind the cushions last time. I never checked to see if these worked.

He rose up the headphones and glanced at the insides of them. He wiped around the earmuff-like receivers, but they were surprisingly clean for being stuck inside a couch. He bent out the headband part and put it up over his wavy black hair still semi damp even though he had dried only his hair using an actual article of the dead woman's clothing. His hair dried slower than the rest of his body anyway, but he rested the headphones over his head and found the ambient sound around him instantly muted. Didn't even notice it was loud enough for that to happen, he realized with a smile breaking out on his face.

Zach took back off the headphones and smiled down at them as he turned them sideways and found a power button. Let's see. He held the button for a few seconds, and then he cracked an even bigger grin as a Boo-Doo-DEE noise came out of them and a green light turned on in the middle of the right headphone. The headband connecting the two sides was light green, just like the plastic around the rubbery black part that soundproofed each of the earpieces. He opened up his phone and went to the bluetooth settings, put the headphones back over his head, and then he popped his hood up too and on top of them while heading out of the apartment.

I'm feeling good today. Refreshed, I guess. Wearing a dead man's clothes. Aren't all clothes a dead man's clothes, at some point in the future anyway? I'm glad they bought these headphones though. I don't even care about the lack of noise. No more assassins are going to be able to target me without any routine. No known locations. I'm loose. Fresh. Free. I'm out of school for today at least. I'll keep trying though. Need to test out some more potential transfers! His optimistic thoughts could not distract him from his own souring expression as he scrolled over the news, and available podcasts, then flipped over to language-learning apps on his phone.

You know what? He wondered to himself and stopped for a second in the hallway he was walking down. I just stopped Mysti. Even as Death, I couldn't do that. Death could never take a break and celebrate though. Too rushed. And that drove me mad! So why not? Zach popped open a music app and smiled brightly at the sight of some songs he had not listened to in over a month. My mood is down and I have to be cheerful out there. Can't force myself as easily anymore, so this is actually productive. He laughed at the reasoning he gave himself, for why he suddenly started blasting some music in his headphones.

Zach pushed open a back entrance to the apartment complex and headed into an alley, then he walked for the main road with a chipper expression and a bob to his head. I need some fuel. I'll hit a convenience store then. None that were too close to my house. Don't want to see anyone who would remember me instantly. None too close to school either. That still leaves a good chunk of the city. Sounds like a plan.

As he headed out onto the sidewalk, he lifted a hand and put a white mask over the bottom of his face. It was too warm to be wearing a winter face-mask anymore, but in Japan it was not uncommon to see people wearing surgical masks to help prevent the spread of illness. He drew little attention by putting the white mask over half his face, and with his headphones covering up his left ear and his hood most of his neck, he was unrecognizable to anyone who may glance his direction. His hands were down in his pockets so no one noticed the black glove over his right hand, and he was nodding along to the music playing in his headphones in a way no one could imagine Lifebringer would be doing.

Haven't eaten in a while. Water's more important here. I should keep two bottles on me at all times for now on, and just refill in clean taps. It's better than- I'm going to have to stop anyway for food. I don't have much money though. I shouldn't be wasting cash on water when it's free everywhere else. Zach walked across the city in no rush, smiling at the randomness of his playlist on shuffle that he was trying to find a pattern to but failing. He did not know what the next song would be, even though he had guessed it twice out of the last ten songs to turn on which also intrigued him as to how he did that on a list of over 100 songs. Probability hasn't shrunk on any of the songs for playing next. Just going down by one each time shouldn't have been enough to be that lucky. Is there a pattern then? It's not perfectly random? I wonder…

He headed into a convenience store near a corner of a side road but two doors back from the actual intersection. The road was not crowded, though there were people on it heading to work and school that morning. Elementary school kids. School's started a while ago then. He headed into the store and made a slight nod at the shopkeeper before glancing around the room. Actually, his thoughts switched from how the man behind the counter would be less likely to think he was a teen playing hooky this late in the morning, to the smell he caught a whiff of from behind the counter.

"You got fried chicken there?" Zach wondered, heading towards the counter and nodding down through the glass that did not have any hot food displayed there yet.

The clerk seemed surprised, but he also grinned in the fact that he had started cooking this early which did not always play out like he hoped it would and was often a waste of his time. "Yes sir," the old man started, a guy in his early sixties who was balding but still had some gray hair on the back of his scalp with thin slivers over the top of it. "Give me three more minutes and I'll get the first batch out for you. Your choice of the piece that looks best."

"Cool, thanks," Zach nodded at the man then looked around the store from just on the other side of the counter. His eyes scanned around the shelves and the fridges to his left on the far side as the shop's entrance. No one else here right now. Not a big place. Not a crowded street. Maybe he has times when business is booming. Hope so, I don't see how he'd make a profit here. Shelves are fully stocked- no, there are some popular items. Didn't notice he ran out of the new Chinmon toys, but there should be some under that sign. If he doesn't have any other employees it could be profitable, I guess. Cost management of a place like this…

The clerk and store owner behind Zach just stared at the back of the man's head for a minute as he wondered what his customer was looking at while awaiting his food. If he had been able to examine Zach's face during that time, he may have slowly been able to figure out who the teenager was, but from the voice and stature of the man in front of him the owner of the store thought the person was more likely in his upper twenties. When his food was ready, Zach sucked in a deep breath through his mask of the great scent coming from behind him. He turned as the owner was pulling them out of a fryer and about to tell him to choose, and Zach cut him off by just nodding to the right side of the tray at a good-looking piece he saw.

"Haha, alright. That'll be six hundred yen… Exact change. That's what I like to see," the man grinned thankfully at Zach who put two coins on the counter, a five hundred yen coin and one hundred yen coin the clerk did not have to make change of. "Have a nice day-"

"I've got some shopping to do too," Zach mentioned with a nod while turning around and heading in the direction of the fridges.

"Take your time," the clerk called after him.

Zach slid his mask down once he was faced away from the owner and he rose his left hand he had picked up the chicken with. The piece was in a napkin and small cardboard corner-holder too so as to be easier to eat, and Zach went at it while grabbing a couple water bottles from the fridge. The store owner back behind him stared oddly at the heavy backpack he was carrying while walking around, but it looked too thick to be a student's and made the man wonder if this was a traveler or tourist in his store. The older man did not have much to do other than look to his customer, but as the younger man picked up a nutrition bar from one of his shelves, another customer came in who the older man turned to deal with.

Rain started outside which Zach heard as he had lowered the volume on his headphones even after putting them back up, having removed them from his right ear at least while he spoke to the store owner so as not to be rude. He heard the woman who entered the store talking about it, and he heard her asking where the plastic disposable umbrellas were as she had to get back out quickly. Guess it's going to pick up, Zach wondered with a look through the front windows and out onto the road. He took off his hood, while looking away from the counter and to the back wall where there were lines of manga and magazines on display. I can put my hood back on heading outside, use that as an excuse now. So there's no need to walk around constantly with it on then to make that just seem like habit.

His eyes scanned the magazines first that told him a few happenings of the world he had not heard of. Mostly it was celebrity news, though there were a few conspiracy theories that made it to the front page, including theories about the Army of Death. His eyes scanned down as he took another bite from his delicious fried chicken, I've… seen that before.

One of the manga covers had a picture of a young man on it. The man in his early twenties was a teenager the last Zach had seen of him. The pirate with a golden tail sticking out of his lower back held up a sword no longer covered in bandages like Zach remembered it being a few years ago. I read this, Zach thought, trying to think back on when it was he had read it before. His smile rose in a nostalgic way before dropping flat in an instant in regret. I went out to meet Webb outside of school. Read the manga to seem casual, and got scolded 'cause there was no way a blind man could just casually walk up next to me and start reading too. Stupid. Zach shook his head and pushed the dark thoughts from his mind instantly.

His eyes opened back up, and he hummed in interest while looking below the ninja headband the pirate was wearing now that he did not have on that first time years ago. Partially sticking out from below the headband was a scar on his forehead, and Zach crouched down in front of the manga shelves then scooted to his left after picking up the comic book he was interested in. He scooted that way to get out of view of the counter, using one of the shelves in the middle of the store to completely block him off. He crouched like that to stay out of easy sight of people walking by the windows too, and when he crouched he did so in a way that would make his legs start to ache after a while, just sitting in midair with his knees making a right angle.

He looks older now. His expression isn't as carefree as before too, and he has a scar on his face. I mean, maybe they're basing him off me. Or I'm just projecting, but still, seems like something I'd be interested in. Years have passed in the story that I was already jumping into the middle of. Wonder if I can keep up…

---

In Class A's dorm after classes had ended for the day, the exhausted third years done with another intense practical training entered their building with groans and limps in their steps. "Why'd Mother Russia sensei, have to come back, today?" Ashido groaned while heading towards the couches she promptly fell face-forward into.

"Weren't you the one so excited to see her, that you jumped up and yelled her name?" Mineta asked with a sweatdrop looking over at the couch, though he turned his head a bit more as the way Ashido fell like that made her skirt…

In the corner of Mineta's gaze he saw a dark aura, and he cleared his throat while heading towards the couches himself like that was his only reason for looking that way. He just took a seat on a different couch as Ashido, still trying hard not to make eye contact with Asui whose eyes he could feel following him across the common room. "Let's see what's on tv," Mineta said, slouching back into the couch tiredly himself and clicking the power button on the remote.

Kirishima had headed over towards the kitchen with Bakugo, the two of them still talking about the fighting style of Mother Russia and her army of U.A. training robots that could mostly fly like her. "…You flying guys headed off too fast," Kirishima complained at Bakugo who grunted in annoyance, though he knew Kirishima was right after how poorly the training session had gone. "You know you and Midoriya can't just take everything by yourselves."

"We almost ended it before it started," Bakugo muttered.

"Yeah, but you didn't," Kirishima replied with a raise of an eyebrow as it was odd for Bakugo to make an excuse like that after messing up. Kirishima gained a more interested look though and added, "It almost seemed like you were preoccupied though. Like what was bothering you all day-"

"Nothing's bothering me," Bakugo started. He glared to his side and finished, "Except you right now."

"Alright alright, but I don't remember you coming back in last night. Lemillion's working you to the bone, huh?"

"Yeah, that's it," Bakugo muttered. He turned his head while losing focus on their talk here and getting a lot more focused on the things coming back to mind now that Kirishima was bringing them up. His eyes widened as he stared back towards the common room, then he grunted in annoyance but started that way as most of the class did as Mineta called out and rose the volume.

"Lifebringer stops robbery?" Sero wondered, and he grinned after a second of just being surprised. "Nice," he added.

"He did that today?" Tokoyami questioned in a low voice. Though, he is not at school anymore. There is no reason he would not be able to stop crimes on his free time. He has given himself many reasons, why no one can tell him otherwise. "He should be looking for another school to enroll in," Tokoyami added, though that was more of a mumble of disapproval as he did not care to say it loudly when it sounded like Zach had done something good. He can't get his pro license this way. Prioritize, Zach. Or you will wind up falling behind.

Mineta turned up the volume even more as everyone started talking, and he wanted to hear what the news was saying about this. "Three robbers were arrested by Lifebringer after fleeing from a convenience store they attempted to rob this morning, just another of an increased number of villain incidents since the Koimou Massacre. As a stroke of luck of being in the right place at the right time, apparently, Lifebringer was already in the store when the robbery occurred. A source has sent in video from a surveillance camera inside the store during the robbery, which we'll play for you now."

The screen suddenly became filled with the surveillance footage inside a convenience store. The angle was from behind the counter pointed down and out over it across the entire store. It had the front door on the right of the counter, refrigerators on the left, and shelves across the middle of the shop. From the angle the camera caught, there were only two people in the store at the start of the tape. There was the old shopkeeper just below the camera whose face was unable to be seen the way he was standing, and across the store from him where the man just leaned to the side to check on around a shelf, there was another person wearing black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a thick backpack on too. That other person had wavy black hair pushed down in the middle of his head by a green headband that connected the two thick pieces of his headphones, and the person sitting back there did not have a seat from what anyone watching could tell as the angle caught more of his right side than the owner was able to see.

"That's Zach?" Shoji wondered, looking closely at the screen and to their old classmate who he was confused to see back there near the manga shelves. "What is he…" Shoji watched as the teen back there flipped a page of a manga book, then took a bite out of something that seemed to be the last bite as he crumpled up the carrier afterwards. He left the manga resting over his thighs for a moment while wiping off his hands, then he opened up one of the two water bottles he had sitting next to his right foot and took a big chug out of it before getting back to reading.

The manager of the store noticed this and frowned at the sight, but he shook his head around and then turned with his face blurred afterwards when it was shown on the news. He got to cooking some more food for people who would come by on their lunch breaks for a quick bite to eat, when the door to his shop suddenly swung open. The store jingled with the noise of bells to indicate customers had arrived, and the shop owner started turning back around.

Three figures in all black sprinted into the shop out from the rain. The first one of them had a baseball cap on and his head stayed pretty bowed as he ran across the front of the counter while pointing a pistol over it. "Don't move!"

The surveillance did not pick up sound, but the teenage heroes watching afterwards read the men's lips and gained glares as the other two yelled at the man too. A few of their glares did not last long, as they noticed someone in the back of the store the robbers had apparently not realized was inside when they rushed into the otherwise empty shop run by a single man.

"Open up the register!" The man in the middle called out. He had wet and wavy blond hair that fell down behind the back of his neck and over his shoulders draped in a black cloak. The other two just had on heavy black sweatshirts, with the last of the three who entered not carrying a pistol at first like the other two. Instead that bigger man just had his black hands risen, his hands a different shade than the rest of his skin that more matched a normal Japanese tone like his partners. His hands rising like that did something to the windows that flashed dark for a moment before becoming able to be seen through again from the inside, his Tint Quirk just making it harder for anyone outside of the shop to see into it. Then he pulled out a larger pistol from under the hem of his shirt than either of his comrades had up already.

"I don't want to have to tell you again!"

"Do it now!"

The guy in the middle started shaking his pistol in his right hand while yelling at the man behind the counter. He's scared, Midoriya thought. Nervous. Trigger happy. One wrong move and he might fire. Zach, you were careful weren't you?

"Hey."

Zach kept his voice calm and steady as he spoke to the three men in front of him. He had already moved back between the shelves behind him so he was halfway to the counter from where he had been crouched before. On the surveillance footage, it showed Zach Sazaki stand up and walk their direction, his eyes scanning left and right across them to check them out while not one of the three noticed him. When he spoke, it was calmly and meant to make the men turn to him without panicking too much that one might fire on accident into the shopkeeper.

The man behind the counter trying to steady his hands to open the register, snapped his head back up too and froze in shock at the sight of who was in the middle of the store. Then the manager flinched, just as the three on the other side of the counter as him did, because the man in the middle had spun in too much panic and fired at the sight of someone that close behind him. The blond man's hair bounced, his left arm swinging up as he had tried to pull away at the last second as he felt himself pulling the trigger in reaction more than because he planned it.

BANG

When the gun fired, four of the five people in the store flinched. Even the man who fired it was not expecting the sudden loud noise and the jolt on his arm that made it swing even more. He stopped swinging his arm though, freezing in place as he recognized the person in front of him he just fired his gun at. Zach had his surgical mask down to eat, and he was not wearing his hood anymore. He had pulled his headphones down when he heard the shouting behind him, so the earphones were close to touching in front of his neck where he had dropped the loop down around. Everyone watching the clip afterwards stared with their eyes suddenly bulging too, while even Zach's eyes grew slightly wider at the gunshot he had not flinched at.

Then, every person watching both in the present of that video and afterwards stared towards Zach Sazaki with sweat forming and their heart rates speeding up. His eyes lowered down to his own torso, his chin dipping a little as he stared at the middle of his chest. Then he turned his head to the side and stared down the middle of the aisle between two shelves. He looked at the space on the shelf he had put the manga back on when he stood up, directly behind where he was standing now. There was a hole in the middle of the manga over the main character's face on the cover. He turned his head back forward and looked down at the middle of his chest again where there was not even a hole in his sweatshirt. Then, his head started to rise.

The right corner of Zach's lips curled up and revealed his teeth behind them as he grinned at the enemy who just shot him. And then it was Zach's turn to freeze up, as the villain directly in front of him threw his hands up in the air still with the gun in his left. The man on his left side threw his hands up almost at the same time, while the largest man noticed the other two give up first before putting his hands up in the air with a look of terror flashing over his face at the look that replaced the last one on Lifebringer's.

Hagakure found herself gulping and crossing her arms in front of her chest, her heart pounding as she stared at Zach's face that lost the smile the instant the center villain put his hands up. His eyes shifted over the counter and up, directly at the camera for a brief moment before looking back down at the villains in front of him. His lips flattened and his eyes got much darker than when the villains were threatening the old man or spinning to him. Even when it seemed like he was going to have to fight them after the first man fired, he looked interested and excited more than anything. The three putting their hands up like that though made the emerging smile vanish from his face.

"Leave."

In the convenience store, Zach spoke that one word to the men before him seconds after they put their hands up. His tone was angry, even though his expression was flat and did not look pissed. He did not even sound annoyed. His tone was just dark and the men who heard it felt like the person in front of them was an angry person rather than his anger was all directed at them. His eyes had returned to a normal size though half-closed even, just glaring forward at them and speaking in a voice much more menacing than straight rage or hatred. His words were cold. "Or die," Zach added, like just informing them what would happen if they did not do what he had said.

The sheer terror that filled the villains' expressions was not caught fully by the cameras. The three men did start shifting their feet towards the door though, and the people who thought they had read Zach's lips correctly were shocked by what they were seeing. The clerk behind the counter started to move, and Zach shifted his head and looked into the older man's eyes. "Not you. This is your store." The clerk stared at him with his expression flinching, though he nodded as he had just been so shocked that he thought he had to go too.

Leave? The largest of the three men glanced towards the door, then back at Sazaki who he felt his whole body tremble in fear of. Why? Does- does he want us to run, so he has an excuse?!

The villains started to lower down their arms. None of them wanted to argue, or to fight, and they were almost too afraid to run. They lowered their guns so their pistols were even passing Sazaki, but not one of them thought to shoot at the kid anymore. The large man took a step towards the door, darting his gaze to it and then back to Zach in so much fear that the front of his pants started to get wet. "Should- should we leave our guns?" He asked, while pissing himself.

Zach tilted his head to the side while looking at the villain like he was an idiot. "Obviously," Zach replied, sounding more pissed off this time that he even had to say it.

All three of the villains quickly bent dow and put down the weapons, then they ran for the door and sprinted out almost falling over each other or slipping on the fat man's piss. Zach walked up to the counter as they scrambled outside and started running down the sidewalk. He stepped up and he lifted a protein bar and one water bottle, though he scanned the water bottle twice under the scanner on the counter the clerk would usually scan items under. He'd take too long. Zach looked at the price that appeared, then he pulled out his wallet and turned it over above his more coins fell onto his hand, and he counted off most of what fell there before placing it down on the counter.

He put the rest back in his wallet and slid it into his sweatshirt pocket. His eyes were still half-closed and his expression dark, and he grabbed the items in front of him on top of the counter. "Are, you not going to chase them?" The clerk finally asked the teenager in front of him he had no idea had been the one in his store.

"I'll catch them in a minute," Zach muttered. "First, I'll let them start to believe they're free. Give them that hope that they escaped. Make them question all their life choices as they realize just how differently this could have gone for them: jail, death, and they might even consider turning their lives around." He paused and lowered his arms down to his side while glancing towards the door he had to head to now. "And then, I'll appear back before their eyes. And I'll catch them one by one."

He turned his head partially back, "Keep the change." He had left a little extra on the counter due to leaving an almost empty water bottle on the floor, getting a manga shot through the middle, and making a small piss puddle the clerk would have to clean up.

The clerk looked down and saw seemingly for the first time that there was money on the counter, as he had been frozen with his eyes locked on Lifebringer for most of that. He looked nervously back up at Lifebringer's back. The man was nervous. He was scared. Everything that just happened in front of him was terrifying. But before Zach reached the door, his body starting to wisp with dark tendrils coming off his arms and back, the man called out, "Lifebringer!"

Zach paused and his head turned slightly, the smallest movement that indicated he heard the man behind him. "You- You know," the guy continued, leaning over the counter and saying it towards the teenager's back. "We all, appreciate you." Zach's body twitched, the teen hesitating at the door as the older man behind him gulped but found more courage within him anyway. "I mean it. We're all glad you're back. We're glad you're here!"

Zach closed his eyes. He lifted his right hand up and rubbed his forehead, the dark look vanishing to replace with more of a tired one. Then he turned partially with a half-smile back on his face and said, "Thanks. I really needed that."

The clerk let out a breath of relief and smiled brightly as he felt that he helped Lifebringer. Zach turned the rest of the way back forward and said in a more heroic voice, "I need to catch those crooks now." He stepped outside and crouched down just past the door. He jumped up into the sky with his body erupting in darkness so there was a miniature explosion below him upon his jump.

Zach rose up above the building and the one next to it. He landed on the opposite side of the top of an alley nearby that he did not see the villains under despite knowing it was the first place they would have ran to. They'd probably get changed in this alley and then make a break for it out the other side. He dropped down onto the sidewalk at the far end of the alley he figured they ran out of. They were quick and already made it out, but probably only a few seconds ago. Probably not moving very fast so as not to draw attention. No escape vehicle left from here, so should still be on foot. Moving slowly but… His eyes scanned either side of him down the sidewalks, and he recognized three pairs of shoes while he gazed around with his focus low.

His eyes rose to three people on the opposite sidewalk heading away from him. All three had different hair colors and clothes on than before, and only their shoes that remained the same. People started to yell out about his appearance there with darkness swirling off of his body and his huge black wings sticking out to his sides and pointed above him. He looked towards three people speed-walking the other direction who glanced over their shoulders towards him, so that he made eye contact with the three who screamed at the sight of those red eyes looking back at them.

It took two seconds for the man in the front of the three who ran the fastest. Zach landed down on top of him and made the other two stumble and skid to stops back behind him. The man in second spun too fast and slipped on the cement, yelling out in pain as he hit his knees and then attempted to scramble forward. "Help-" Zach grabbed him by the back of his head as his friend who turned and ran back the other direction glanced back his way. Zach pushed his head into the floor, then kicked off the ground and slammed both feet into the chest of the guy who had shot him and spun around screaming-

"WAI-"

---

Eighteen of the nineteen students of U.A.'s Class A were gathered on the first floor of their dormitory. It was dark outside, and they were all talking to each other while scattered into a few different groups around the room. There was Iida, Midoriya, Mineta, and Sero who sat at one of the tables nearest the empty kitchen with a gap between them and the others in the class. Despite their separation though, Jirou was sitting on the couch and had one of her earphone jacks plugged into the floor as she attempted to drown out the people closest to her. I knew it! They do know!

Most of the class was gathered in the couch area, including Yaoyorozu who was taking part in the conversation but just barely. And she was also looking to her side at Kyoka who flinched at the look Momo was giving her. Her earphone jack came out of the floor and her eyes opened wide as she saw Momo giving her that look, and then her eyes dropped down to her lap in a dejected and regretful way at what she was just doing.

Yaoyorozu shook her head and then turned to her right to look over at Todoroki who said something serious about Zach's attitude all the way back during the hero licensing exam not making any sense either. His actions that day against the other participants were excessive and violent, and he took a longer amount of time than he needed just so he could go fight more enemies. Uraraka offered up hesitantly, "But, maybe he just did that, because he wanted to fight more people? And maybe that's why he was… disappointed, by what happened in the store-"

"You think he risked letting those villains go out and hurt people as they ran away, just so he could have a chance at fighting them?" Kirishima asked. The question came out darkly, though not skeptically but more as something he was actually wondering himself.

"His actions put people in danger," Asui agreed with Kirishima from the couch she sat on between Uraraka and Koda. "And the way he looked at the camera," Tsuyu added it, and she glanced to the television they had on where the newscasters were talking about Zach as they had been for most of the afternoon and evening.

Yaoyorozu looked to the screen as they started replaying the video from earlier that everyone turned to watch again. Her thoughts strayed from the video though. He isn't the same person he was back then. There's, no point in reading it…

---

Four Hours Ago.

Momo Yaoyorozu closed the door of her best friend's dorm behind them after they entered her room after school. "What do you need to show me, Kyoka?" Yaoyorozu wondered quietly, as everyone was still gathered downstairs and arguing with each other about what they just saw on the news. What is he doing? I understand why he would do something like that, but he must know what would happen! To be so… "Kyoka?" Yaoyorozu asked softer, as Jirou was hesitating in front of her with her hands starting to shake at her sides.

Jirou walked to her desk, her trembling hands steadying as she opened up a drawer. Don't look at her, Jirou could not bear to turn around yet. She did not want to lose the conviction she had found in the early morning at the meeting with so many of the nation's top heroes. They were all right. He's too dangerous to be left alone. But, but then I can't- Jirou pulled out a pair of envelopes from her drawer, and Yaoyorozu's concerned and wide eyes went back to normal-sized.

"Momo," Jirou whispered. "I- I have something I need to…"

"Kyoka, it's okay," Yaoyorozu began in a soft voice.

"It's not," Jirou shook her head around. She turned, and she held one of the envelopes close to her chest for another second before moving it out in front of her between her and her taller best friend. "I've- I've been a bad friend." Yaoyorozu stayed quiet now and just looked at the envelope Jirou was holding out that had 'Momo' written over the middle of it. "Everyone, got these letters. I heard that they all… I don't know, if you thought he didn't leave you one. He did though," Jirou said that in a whisper with her voice breaking and her eyes dropping down from Momo's that locked with hers for a moment. "I'm sorry. I- I went to your room, the night he left us. I took it, because I knew he'd have left one for you too and I-"

"Did you read it?" Yaoyorozu wondered quietly.

"No!" Jirou snapped her head up and replied fast. She shook her head around, "I couldn't. I wouldn't, read either of them, while denying you…" Jirou shook her head again as she tried to give what she did some kind of moral justification. "I'm sorry," she whispered again. "I, I was so angry. And the longer I kept it, the more afraid I got of- but I'm sorry," she stopped trying to give herself an excuse again by explaining her reasoning. She just shook her head and apologized again and again, "I know you must hate me-"

"Of course I don't hate you," Yaoyorozu countered, walking across the middle of the room. She reached out and took the envelope, but she just slid it down into the waistband of her pants without giving it a second glance. "I'm not, I'm not that mad," Yaoyorozu said. Jirou rose her head, and Momo gave her a soft look though she did not embrace her friend for finally telling the truth. She held back, if to just make sure Kyoka actually learned a lesson from this. "You shouldn't have lied, or kept this from me," Yaoyorozu continued. "But it's fine."

"It's not," Jirou said, her eyes watering up as she shook her head faster. "You're just saying that for-"

"Anything he wanted to tell me in this, he could have back then," Yaoyorozu countered with a shake of her head right back at Jirou who froze at the sound of that. "And, admittedly, he wrote this without the intention of ever coming back here." The taller girl shrugged with a half smile at the stunned girl before her with her hair tied back into a dark purple ponytail. "Thank you, for finally telling me the truth, but I'm not going to read this. I don't want to."

Jirou rose her right arm and rubbed her eyes quickly, then she lowered that arm and glanced at her own envelope she did not plan on opening either. She rose her gaze up though as Momo continued, "If this was the last thing he had to say to me, which I think it was, then it doesn't matter anymore since he's back." She sighed with a look down at the envelope she considered just ripping in half right there to prove her point to Jirou, though she decided against it and just rose her head again with a strong smile on her face. "Anything he wants to tell me, he can do so face to face. There's no point in reading his farewell now, is there?"

---

Present

"Dude, come on. You can't defend that," Mineta said, his voice low as he looked back next to him at Sero. "He looked like totally evil right there!"

Sero had looked back towards the tv as well from over at the table they were isolated from the rest of the class at. "It's not about defending that," Sero started, though he was hesitant as he watched Zach's calm demeanor as the villains went running out of the building. He frowned deeply at the sight, "Though, that does look really bad. He shouldn't have done it," he said it, then his eyes shifted towards the closed front door. I don't know what I'd say to Zach right now. Just glad Mina went, at least. Hopefully she gets something out of him.

Todoroki looked to his right from where he was standing behind the couch, and he saw Ojiro saying something to Hagakure but she was shaking her head back at him telling him not to. Ojiro frowned down at his girlfriend, but he glared back towards the tv screen himself with a dark look over his face. This isn't an isolated incident, Ojiro thought. He's getting worse. After this, the next step being any worse would already be too worse.

"What you just saw was footage from an armed robbery foiled this morning by Lifebringer in the Kudou District of Musutafu City. Violent incidents like these have become more common in recent days since the deaths of several of Japan's top heroes, just as incidents of Lifebringer appearing in our news' stories has been on the rise as well."

"He's been popping up all over the place," the other newscaster started in a disapproving and even angry voice. "Appearing places he shouldn't be. He's still showing up in hospitals and bringing people back at random, and now these kind of events have been becoming more frequent too. He's out of control. Just doing whatever he wants. And after being kicked out of Shiketsu-"

"I heard he got even that high hero institution too scared of his presence. That it has less to do with him breaking their rules-"

"Of course they'd be scared! Villains fired a rocket directly at Sazaki- that Eziano Mozcaccio person Sazaki talked about and dared to attack him!"

"Yes, though he said that his challenge to Eziano was in an attempt to keep more people from being dragged in like they have been," the other news host countered. "I think he's really trying on that front, and we can't just talk about what he's doing wrong. Even in that last incident, by the end of it he was smiling and looked like he was really trying to be a hero to that shop clerk-"

"Yes, Lifebringer's smiling there," the host angrier at Lifebringer started, his voice calming for a moment. "And whatever his fault in carrying out that incident like a pro hero, I admit he's doing better than when that explosion went off at his apartment. He was very professional in both his interviews about getting kicked out of Shiketsu and capturing that Mysti villain."

"He's been acting professionally, and maybe he was just shocked a bit from getting shot in the chest during that altercation which caused his lapse in judgement-"

"Sure, sure I'll accept that if he says that's his reason. But, you have to admit, Lifebringer is scary."

"Oh yeah, haha, no one's denying that. Lifebringer is ranked 1 in the rankings of heroes who look like villains."

"Though he's also ranked first in the popularity rankings too…"

And the rankings for the most hated hero too, Tokoyami thought. People's views on him are becoming more and more polarizing with each person he fails to save. After seeing this video too, I cannot blame them. What was Zach doing in that store but reading a manga? They've accepted that he can go to hospitals and revive the dead, so seeing him do something like that in his spare time has to anger a lot of people. I'm surprised that he was doing that too, but I suppose if he knew the robbery was coming he may have set up in there in order to catch them. How could he have known though? Well, how could this have been a coincidence? That's more unlikely than him knowing in advance.

I was probably wrong giving him a chance, Todoroki Shoto thought darkly as the hosts continued to talk about Lifebringer. I should have taken him in the moment I found out… And then Sato would be, Todoroki's gaze shifted towards Sato who sat on the couch to the left next to Yaoyorozu and Jirou. I don't know what will happen a week from now. Someone else in here could die, and Zach could revive them if they do. He probably would. He would, Todoroki corrected himself by removing the 'probably' from his thoughts. But is it alright to let him be just as a precaution for that? He's acting like a villain. If that camera wasn't there-

"If the camera wasn't there," Aoyama began, as Kirishima changed the channel to a different news program where they were talking about Zach yet even harsher than the last one. The title on the bottom of the screen showed what the news hosts were in the middle of talking about, and Aoyama read it before questioning the others around him. Shoji and Tokoyami looked in at the blond boy between them who asked nervously, "What do you think, Zach would have done?"

"He waited to attack them until after he was out of the camera's view anyway," Kirishima started in a low growl. He hesitated though after saying it, then he said in a lower voice, "Maybe, so that he could counter this kind of argument he knew would come, once he had already looked up there." He could have planned that. He knew we'd ask, and so he took them down where no one was watching and with little to no injury to them, so that we don't think he was only taking them down normally because he was on camera. So what was he going to do?

They're more than just certain it's Zach, Jirou thought while thinking of what she heard Iida mention to the others at the table back behind her and the center couch. Iida, Midoriya, Mineta, and Sero. Does Momo know too? She caught me, and- it's that same group who went to the fair with him. Jirou's eyes shifted past the couch to her right and back to the wall where Ojiro and Hagakure were standing. I didn't think the two of them had been acting weird afterwards, but Hagakure went out the other day and I thought it was to spend time with Zach. That Mysti thing happened and she's been… What did she see him do? It had to be bad. She's been out of it.

"I gave him a chance," Iida said to the others at his table. "What he did today-"

"He caught those villains," Sero argued back. "Maybe he just didn't want to risk taking them down inside the store, and having one decide to take the shopkeep hostage? We don't know what he was thinking."

"That's just it though," Mineta argued to Sero now. "We don't know what he's thinking. We never know. He's got so much mystery surrounding what he's up to right now. It feels like he's fighting all these villains around us and dragging everyone else into it, but he won't tell us- I mean, he did tell us about Eziano, before he told everyone else."

"Eziano Mozcaccio," Midoriya whispered. The other three looked to the curly-green-haired boy whose expression darkened as he said that. "He's so powerful. Zach was right, and he's the only one who knew just how strong Eziano could be. So antagonizing him… Zach knew the kind of target he'd put on himself."

"The target was already there," Midoriya turned his head and saw Todoroki walking to his side. "The two of them are in the middle of their war. They haven't stopped just because Zach came back here for whatever he's doing now. Taking on Eziano is still one of his goals."

Midoriya hummed and nodded in agreement with Todoroki there. Mineta and Sero each gazed at Todoroki hesitantly, as neither of them had talked to Todoroki much about Zach despite having heard from Iida and Midoriya that he had found out some things on his own and had them confirmed by Zach. The two felt weird about how they had kept it secret from their classmate, but Todoroki just continued to all four of them sitting there, "Eziano killed his friend Mark. I can't imagine Zach will let that go."

Mineta and Sero's eyes each widened as they remembered that letter they read the first day they went to visit Zach at his apartment. Mineta nodded in solemn agreement, and he added in a low voice, "I wonder if that's part of why he was so angry that night, when he called Eziano out. Not just Norita, but Mark too, and for any of the others who Eziano's killed." And for Yemen, Mineta thought. For his own arm, or for the people of countries like Yemen but where it went too far and he wasn't able to stop it. Zach's still fighting his war, but he brought it back here instead of continuing it away from people he could drag in. I don't know why, but it has to be for some reason other than being a hero.

"…It's surprising that for the first time ever, the number 1 and 2 in the popularity polls for the country are both not even pro heroes themselves yet. Though as soon as Deku and Lifebringer become pros, I'm sure they'll be at the top of the hero rankings too in terms of strength and incidents solved."

"Haha- thought Deku's going to have a hard time catching up on the 'heroes who look like villains' rankings though. No one's going to catch Lifebringer on that one-"

"That's not funny! It's not just looking like a villain, Lifebringer acts more like a villain than a hero most of the time…" the argument started back up on the news as the upbeat way they started reporting on dropped back down in a more confrontational mood discussing Lifebringer's dark antics.

Koda shifted his gaze left towards Jirou whose expression was intense and her eyes locked on the screen. In his head he thought about the message Zach gave him when he tried to listen in on Zach and Dover's conversation after they had to leave his apartment. He keeps so many secrets. He knew I was going to listen in, but instead of just having a fake conversation and letting me- then he went and tried to make things right with Jirou. In the joint training, he tried to fix things again. He's trying a lot, but there's also no denying the kind of person he is. Zach's scary. He scares a lot of people. He, scares me.

Bakugo leaned back against the wall next to the windows looking in on the courtyard. He had his phone lifted and was looking at different articles that were written over the past few hours about this incident. He knew it would blow up like this. He plans everything out, so what's he looking for here? Bakugo rose his eyes from the article on his phone to the tv where the hosts started getting a lot more derogatory towards Lifebringer's style and even villainous ways of taking down villains. They talked about Mysti's injuries, but worse the mental state of the woman who is on suicide watch in prison after her run-in with Lifebringer. They talked about his appearance after the bombing of his apartment and how he looked on the talk show afterwards, and then even on the interview he had about capturing Mysti where he was so cocky about how no villains could hurt him or the people around him, as if daring them to try it.

He knows what he did will scare most of them. Drop that rising rate since Indago's death, Bakugo knew it, and yet his eyes still narrowed at the screen and a paused picture of Lifebringer in that store when his smile dropped. But that wasn't faked. He was pissed he couldn't just smash the shit out of them right there. The fact that one of them would shoot him, it made him think maybe he could actually get a good fight. Bakugo grit his teeth and could not even force a smile on that. Thousands? That fucking battle he was talking about at the joint training, he was talking about the Villain Summit. He was really… They only know it's a Villain Summit because that's what he told them, and no one else even picked up on that last night. They aren't even thinking about it, to question if he was lying about even that. But what's the story? What's the real fucking lie here? He's fucking nuts, and I'll get to fight him soon. The strongest enemy… Except he's not an enemy- the strongest opponent. He might be my enemy. Bakugo narrowed his own eyebrows in, as he was getting annoyed by how complicated he was feeling when it was supposed to just be simple.

How do you plan on getting out of this hole you've dug yourself into? Yaoyorozu stared down at her hands interlocked over her legs. You wouldn't tell me your plans. Nothing about the present and future, just stuff about Life City and the good things you did. Trying to hide all the bad. You were sick and I didn't want to push anything… But I need to know what's going on. At this point, you've already moved into the next stage though. You're moving faster and faster, and no one here can keep up with you. Not Midoriya, not Sero, and Mina is trying but she, she won't be able to get anything out of you. I know that.

In two weeks his apartment's blown up, he's been kicked out of school, and he's done a million other things. Asui Tsuyu croaked under her breath while looking away towards the windows out the front of their dorm. No one knows what we're supposed to do here. We don't want to have to face Zach, but we all know we'll have to face Zach. The problem that Zach's turned into. That, I knew he would become, as soon as we spoke to him in the hospital.

He's a danger to everyone, Ojiro held Hagakure's hand as she sadly leaned back on the wall behind her, her gaze shifting around the room at all their classmates and then back to her own boyfriend's expression. Her hand squeezed his tighter, as Ojiro's eyes narrowed and his expression got angrier. Toru trusted you. Not for a second did she ever think- did we! I trusted her with you, because I thought we were friends- that you wouldn't do something like that! Not after last time… Isn't that why you came back?! So what are you doing?!

Midoriya took in a deep breath and he let it out through his nose. He listened as his classmates talked around him in hushed voices about their problem. I haven't seen him lately. He's going through so much, that I don't even know what I'd talk to him about. Mysti. The missile? Today? Saving Sato? Or what he said to Uraraka and Sato afterwards, that Iida said was him pretty much admitting his lies without even caring… I don't know what you're doing. What this new direction you're moving in is. I can't figure it out, but you're getting more and more dangerous.

"Zach's out of control," Sato said, speaking up suddenly with his dark voice louder than all of his classmates' around him.

Sero stood up from his seat as he heard that, and he started for the couch area which made Sato glance his way and just frown deeper at the look on Sero's face. "All he's been doing," Sato continued with a shake of his head, regret covering it but still an angered look as he spoke. "It's vigilantism. There's no way around it. He just, doesn't have a pro license. And he doesn't do things as a hero…"

"When he's close enough to stop it," Sero started arguing back to Sato, stepping up behind the middle couch and shaking his head at this argument. He continued, "And he has his provisional license, there's nothing wrong with what he's doing."

Sero looked past the couches and towards the screen where the reporters were just talking about how Zach and Midoriya's rankings would look like once they were pros. "Don't know why they're sounding so sure Zach's still going to be a pro though. I don't know how Zach's going to do that without graduating." Sero shrugged and lifted a partial grin that still showed more of his teeth than most people's full smiles. "Maybe the Prime Minister only forced Zach to go to the last term of school because of his age though, and Nikko'll let it go even without Zach graduating if he keeps up what he's doing-"

"That's wrong," Asui said, shaking her head back up at Sero who looked down at her in confusion. "The whole reason they forced Zach to go back to hero high school was to ensure that the morals and teachings of being a hero are instilled into him. And, no one is confident of that right now."

As they were talking and arguing, the front door of the dorm opened up and Ashido walked inside. Her expression was dejected and she just glanced towards the common room, then headed that way without drawing too much attention to herself. A host on the screen suddenly started snapping at the others in the news room, calling out, "Are you all forgetting? He saves people solely based on if he wants to or not at the time! That's all it is for him. He only bothered to stop that robbery in the first place because he was there, while-"

"He only has a provisional license, Tanado. That's the only time he-"

"Except he does it at other times too! We only use that excuse when it's convenient, like right now, to explain why he does this but not saving the dozens of people who were dying while he was sitting there reading a manga! He was acting like a child, with the power of- the power to stop missiles! The power to take on the whole Subspace Devils with superficial wounds, and take a bullet to the chest like it's nothing! Did you see that?!"

"Maybe, the shot missed?"

"Did it look like the shot missed him?! Sazaki stared at his own chest like he was surprised the shot went through him. We're dodging around the question we don't want to ask, because we're nervous of what the answer might be!" The students of Class A looked towards the screen and the man with green horns sticking out of his bald head who declared firmly, "What if Sazaki really is a villain like he's appearing to be recently? What if he's shown us his true colors again, and we just don't want to admit it because we know how powerful he is?!"

"I don't think-"

"Tell me, was what he did today something a hero would do? Something you could imagine any other hero doing?! No! But we see Sazaki do it and we let it slide, because it's literally just one more thing added onto a list of monstrous acts he's committed. Sazaki is a villain, and it's time people start to see that and call him out on his actions. If we don't, he's going to get worse and worse, and we all know it. We all see it coming."

"And as popular as you say he is, that doesn't mean anything about his nature. He is scary because not one of us knows what he's going to do. In that video, all I heard was that it was a robbery Lifebringer had foiled before I watched it, and none of us knew what to expect from that description. Was he going to brutally beat them? Take them down quickly and easily? No. He just glared at them and said something, and they put down their weapons and ran. He took his time and then went after them when it would be more of a challenge. Like he was playing with his prey. Or like it was a chore and getting that water bottle and protein bar was more important to him."

"He actually bought those things before chasing after them," another host admitted, cracking a smile and trying to relax the tense mood with their comment. "Which I think is ridiculous, but also a testament to his strength and ability that he was able to do so and still catch up…"

"Hey, hey can you turn that off?"

Everyone in the room turned towards the pink girl in a light pink hoodie who just came back in. She asked that towards the couch area, and Kirishima muted the screen before frowning back over at Ashido for asking them to turn it off. His annoyed expression shifted a bit though at the sight of her depressed look with her eyes still shifted down towards the floor. Ashido rose her gaze, and she looked around the room at the other eighteen students in Class A. Her mouth opened, and she hesitated at the looks of the people staring back at her who thought they could see what she was thinking.

Ashido's eyes shook as she stared around at the eighteen of them looking at the one person who had taken Zach's side right away, as she always did. The look on her face actually made a few of her classmates wonder if she had changed her mind about that. The hesitation and depression did not hide the shock that was on her face too, but the expression of shock was less of a surprised look as her friends realized the longer they stared at her. "Mina," Uraraka started, getting up from her seat and stepping towards the pink girl who looked more like she was in shock with the way she was frozen up and unable to make out words. "Are you alright?"

"What'd he do now?" Jirou asked, her eyes shifting back towards Ashido from the couch she stayed seated on. Her expression was dark at the look Zach had made form on Ashido's face, First Toru, now you. What the hell is he thinking?

"Noth…ing," Ashido responded, her voice coming out as a whisper as she tried to speak up in Zach's defense. She shook her head, but her eyes shifted towards Hagakure who had told her something earlier she had kept secret from most everyone except Ojiro. She stared above the invisible girl's floating clothes, then shifted her eyes to Ojiro's harsh eyes though also sympathetic towards her. Ashido started shaking her head at that look, a look clearly showing that Ojiro thought something had happened to her that she was refusing to believe. "You don't…"

Bakugo frowned towards Ashido as he saw her eyes shift his way for a second with much more hesitation in her eyes as she stopped talking. That's not it? Then what're you doing? Bakugo leaned off the wall as the pink girl broke eye contact with him and then rose it again in an even more hesitant way.

"We-" Ashido started. She panted a few times, then she said in a soft voice to everyone looking her way, "We have to let him come back here."

Ashido sucked in a sharp breath as she got it out, then she kept panting while standing there watching the surprised and then annoyed expressions of her classmates. "You don't understand- we have to," Ashido whispered, her voice already pleading as she knew it was a losing battle from the start. Her face covered in desperation at the rejecting looks of disapproval that crossed the whole common room.

"What are you talking about?" Ojiro asked, stepping away from Hagakure for a moment and closer to the back of the couch where a few of the others were standing. The four sitting together at a table closer to the kitchen had walked closer too, to about where Bakugo had been leaning though he had stepped away and closer to Ashido with a darker look on his face than most of their classmates. Ojiro shook his head at Ashido, "Zach?"

"That's not our decision to make," Iida began. "Principal Nezu was-"

"Even if it was our decision," Bakugo snapped. "I'm not letting him come back here."

"Why not?" Ashido asked, her voice raising in pitch though still very quiet as she asked it of him. Her eyes then shifted to Iida as Bakugo just frowned deeper without giving an explanation, "And how do we know, it's not our choice?" She asked it of the class rep who got a more confused look on his face at the question, as did half of the others around the common room. Ashido continued though with her voice desperate but also hopeful as she said, "We've changed their minds before, when it came to him. Like the Sports Festival? We could- we could at least try. We never really tried, to get them to let him come back-"

"That's because he knows, he doesn't deserve to come back here," Kirishima said. He said it in a low voice neither happy nor upset about it. He said it like it was a fact, and then he added with his eyes narrowed and focused sternly on Ashido's, "Not after what he did-"

"Please," Ashido begged, her voice cracking and her eyes watering up as she said it towards her middle school classmate. Kirishima froze at the look on her face again as her lips quivered, her eyes trembling in fear. "Pl-please. We have to. He needs us-"

"Is that what he told you?" Midoriya asked, concern in his voice though he also doubted Ashido was passing this on from Zach himself.

"No," Ashido replied. "No, of course not." She shook her head, bowing it for a moment with her eyes closing tightly shut. "Zach doesn't ask for help, but I know he needs it-"

"He looks fine," Todoroki countered.

"I, gotta agree," Mineta started towards Ashido who lifted her head a bit and made the short boy pause at that terrified look in her eyes. "What did you- what makes you think… It's Zach. He wouldn't want us to-"

"What makes you think this is what he wants?" Yaoyorozu wondered, as Mineta was starting to ramble trying to get out what he was thinking while also not upsetting Ashido any more than she already was. Zach. Is Mina right? I thought after seeing you today, that you were handling everything…

"Did he say something?" Midoriya asked too.

"It doesn't matter," Bakugo muttered. "He's not coming back here-"

"Why?" Ashido asked, her voice breaking as she asked it, stepping towards Bakugo and looking straight into his eyes from up close. "Why do you hate him so much?"

"It's not like that-"

"Then why?!" Ashido exclaimed, tears in her eyes.

"Ashido, did he say something?" Todoroki demanded, as it sounded like something serious must have happened for her to be acting this way.

"No! No," she whispered it the second time, shaking her head and closing her eyes again as she leaned away from Bakugo who had narrowed his eyes at her shouted question demanding to know his answer. She turned her head to Todoroki, then glanced Momo's way then to Midoriya after. "He didn't say, anything like- I went to see him, and he asked me how my day was. Asked how school was and what we did, ah, haa, ahh-" Ashido sucked in a sharp breath as she was panting there to the confusion of her classmates who thought this sounded like a normal conversation to them. "He asked, how I was," Ashido continued, her voice holding steady though emphasizing sharply on herself and in an angry tone. "Before I could ask him- and when I asked him, he was- he laughed it off. That everything is fine, and he's fine, and that he was just getting ready for what was next… Like he clearly knows, what's about to come."

"What's coming-" Iida began.

"That's not!" Ashido started to exclaim but had to stop with her teeth clenching hard. "When, when has it ever been so obvious, that Zach has a plan? That he," Ashido had to close her mouth but her lips just trembled again. "But I believed him," Ashido clenched her eyes closed again, in so much regret. "I believed him because, because he's always been a good liar."

Her teeth bared and she snapped her head up, and she said in a strong voice, "But he needs our help. He's in a corner, and he needs his friends to help him."

"We're not letting him back here-" Bakugo started.

"He's going to leave again!" Ashido yelled, her head snapping forward and her eyes furious and full of dread as she yelled it in Bakugo's face.

"What?" Yaoyorozu stepped closer to Ashido. Several people jumped up at that shout but Momo took multiple steps past Uraraka so she was closest to Ashido on her left side. "Why do you say that?"

"Did he say something-" Midoriya began too, though his eyes shifted towards Bakugo for a moment away from Ashido to see his friend's surprised eyes go back to an even angrier look than a moment ago.

"He looked fine, and he sounded fine," Ashido continued strongly, though with tears in her eyes. "And when I asked how he's going to get his pro license now- he was so quick. How he had already applied to like a dozen different hero schools that he listed off for me. How each one would just love to get Lifebringer there, so that they could have one of the, the top hero recruits graduating from their school! And he was so certain, that everything was going to be okay… That I believed him. I believed every word out of his mouth earlier, even though I had already been out of school before I texted him to meet up. Even though, he had appeared so quickly, that it was obvious he had already been in Musutafu and-" Ashido bit down again, her eyes clenching shut.

"Mina-chan," Tsuyu began. Ashido turned her head and stared over at the frog girl with shaking eyes, but Asui just continued softly and in an apologetic tone, "I understand, that you are worried about Zach." Ashido winced as Tsuyu called him 'Zach' without the 'chan' after as she used with the rest of them. Ashido's flinch at that moment made Asui lower her own gaze for a moment, but she rose it and finished, "But he's fine. He's always fine, and he always has a plan."

"Don't try to understand the things he says," Sato agreed. "You already know he's lying, so why even bother?"

"Why do you think he's leaving?" Yaoyorozu questioned softer than her classmates, asking it to the side of Mina's head and making her friend turn back to her with her frustrated and sad eyes shaking even worse. "Did he make any indication he was going to?"

"No," Ashido whispered. "That's not… He talked about going to school, and getting his pro license… it's just-" she paused and started panting again. "When we left each other…" Ashido tilted her head back with tears falling out the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks. "See you later, has never sounded more like goodbye."

Yaoyorozu flinched. Her eyes shot open wide and darted towards the door. Back behind her, Mineta spun to his side as he noticed Sero reaching into his pocket quickly and pulling out his phone with a panicked look on his face. Midoriya stepped closer to Ashido so he was on Bakugo's side now, "What do you…" he began.

"And so it ate away at me," Ashido continued, her lips pursing as the tears fell down her face. "And so I called Isamu on my way back. I decided to check to see if he was telling the truth, and Zach had applied there to enter their hero program with a transfer from Shiketsu. But that wasn't all they said... I called every, single, one of the schools Zach told me he applied to!" Ashido called it out and shook her head, tears splashing off her face. "And every last one of them told me how they had already declined his applications. Right as he sent them in, actually." Midoriya's eyes opened wide at the sound of that, and Ashido recited straight to the curly-haired boy in front of her, "'Lifebringer's too dangerous to have here.' 'We can't risk the other students' lives.' 'Sazaki doesn't represent the values of our hero- our hero class…' Every one of them, had a reason not to let Zach go there. But it was mainly just because it's not safe for him to be there."

"He's brought that danger on himself," Tokoyami began. Ashido spun his way angrily, but Tokoyami started shaking his head and continued, "He brought the wrath of-"

"They've been attacking him long before he called out Eziano on tv!" Mina yelled back at the dark boy who pulled back at her emotional shout. "All he's been trying to do, from day one out of Tartaros, is become a hero! That's all he's been doing and- and we told him that he had to go to hero school before he could be one. And so he tried. He went to school, and he's done his best to stay within the rules, and it doesn't matter! Because they won't let him come back! They won't let him be a hero… He got expelled, because he protected Shiketsu High from a missile?! He knows they're targeting him and that being at school makes him an easy target, but he has to go in order to be a hero, and now- now he CAN'T go!"

"That doesn't mean he can come here," Bakugo said. Ashido turned to him and Bakugo stepped towards the girl who was not going to just accept that this time. "He gave up everything," Bakugo continued in a low voice, the rest of Class A staring towards him as he spoke in a tone most of them had not heard him use before. Even Ashido's eyes opened wide at the sight of Bakugo's face, and even the respect in his voice. "He tossed it all aside for that goal he had, knowing he could never get any of it back." Bakugo grit his teeth and anger spread across it, and he continued darkly, "But then he came crawling back for it. All that which he gave up, and he got all of it back. He came back here, after leaving like that?" Bakugo asked it furiously, thinking about the awe he had felt that night as Zach left them, dropping his wallet into the mud and turning away.

"And there's only one thing he hasn't gotten back," Bakugo said. "One thing, that he's still sacrificed. If we give him that back too, then what consequences does he face from what he did that night? What did the sacrifice even mean?"

"Bakugo," Kirishima whispered, staring towards his friend who never got into the explanation that deeply. Kirishima's face hardened though at the resolve on Bakugo's, and he nodded his head intensely with a look matching several of his classmates' expressions too.

"'One thing?'" Ashido repeated back at him. "You think, you think any of that other stuff he got back matters?" Ashido asked it with her voice cracking and all of those hardened expressions around the room shaking at the tone in her voice and what she was asking them. "You think he cared about his name? About being allowed to be in public and, and his fame? You think he cares about any of that?!" She yelled it at Bakugo who even lost that resolved expression too at what she yelled looking like she thought he did not understand anything. "Is that 'one' thing you're talking about U.A.? Because he doesn't even care about, about that… He was fine with going to Shiketsu, because he knew he could still see us even if was there. And that's what matters to him! That's the ONLY THING that he really- that he came back for-"

"Mina, you-" Hagakure started towards her friend.

"What he lost that day was all of us!" Ashido yelled around, staring towards Hagakure desperately for a second for her to just listen. Ashido's eyes shook and Hagakure closed her mouth that she opened to argue with what Mina just said. Ashido bit down in anger and she spun back to Bakugo, "When he said, 'all of it' that night, he was talking about us. You saw that right?" She asked Bakugo, seeing if he remembered that moment as he talked about casting 'Zach Sazaki' and everything he had aside. "That was the hardest part of what he was giving up, when he looked around at US! Because what Zach cared about more than anything, was us. He shouted it that night too! That he wasn't going to risk the lives of all the people he cared about just for some petty revenge…"

"That was, a long time ago," Shoji started. "He doesn't still care like-"

"You're wrong!" Ashido yelled back at the boy with a mask covering his mouth. Shoji froze at that angry shout, and Ashido continued at him, "You just don't realize it, because you didn't go to see him. He came back here for us and- and he cares about us so much, but he's out there and we're in here, and he's come to realize that we don't care about him the same way. That some people just, want to move on," Ashido said it while looking into Shoji's eyes, and glancing next to him to Aoyama then Tokoyami too as the three of them got more hesitant and shocked looks on their faces. "He stays though, because he wants to make sure. He wanted to make sure he did everything he could to fix what he did that night. And so he came back, and he made sure to show us that he's perfectly fine. That he's got a plan still, and that there was no reason for us to ever feel guilty about what he did that night because he's always planning his next moves and making steps to do more-"

"We shouldn't feel guilty," Kirishima countered towards Ashido, stepping towards her himself now. "Zach made the choice-"

"When did we start accepting that?" Ashido asked, her voice so angry but as much at herself as it was at Kirishima. "It wasn't our fault?" She asked, skeptically and like what she just asked was absurd to even say. "Was it because that night, he shouted all those things that he had planned out beforehand? And he told us all the terrible stuff he did, and showed us an unfamiliar version of him to make us think we knew nothing about him? After weeks of him pushing us away and trying to make us hate him, think of him less like… like a friend. He did everything he could to push us away, and we let him!"

Hagakure felt her heart drop in her chest, her head bowing and her eyes snapping open huge as she stared at the floor. "And he's doing it again," Ashido whispered in horror, her eyes shifting to Hagakure again. "He'd never let me know, that he was actually planning something big if he didn't want me to know it. But he wanted me to be able to figure it out so that if he leaves- When he leaves, I'll just think it's some big plan he's got going. And all of you will hear that he's gone and wonder, 'what's he up to now?' And 'was this all part of his big plan-'"

"HE DOESN'T HAVE A PLAN!" Ashido screamed it at them, trying to get it through their thick heads. "He just reacts and responds to what happened around him so fast that it seems like he's always had it all planned out. Like, it was all part of some master plan he had," Ashido said it with her face scrunching up and her voice disgusted in the fact that she had believed this herself.

He doesn't have a… that's not, true, Kirishima got confused, because Ashido sounded convinced of what she was saying despite it not making sense to him. Worse though, to him and to most of the others in the room, was the fact that Ashido had been the one likely to see Zach the most since his return. If she thought it… He does have a plan though. She heard him, talking like he was planning on, on leaving?

"Zach," Ashido started again. "He's a good actor." Her voice rose but more tears formed in her eyes as she called it at her classmates. "You think he looked at that camera and held himself back?" She wondered. "That was so obvious, which means it wasn't what he was doing!" She stopped and panted a few times while all the others except for Yaoyorozu just stared at her with wide eyes at what she was yelling at them. "Zach knew we would see him do that! He didn't just notice the camera then, because Zach always knows! But he knew that we would see him and make these assumptions that he's reverting, and turning bad, and it makes us wonder what kind of horrible things he would have done to those villains if- if he wasn't being watched-" Ashido's voice cracked a couple more times and she had to sniffle in hard to control herself.

"He knew we would see him and make these assumptions, and if we made them, then the villains have made them too!" Ashido yelled it at her classmates like they were all being idiots. "And those villains who see Zach barely holding himself back are going to be too scared to do anything in fear of him and what he would do if there was no camera around when he caught them. Zach knew everyone would call him a villain, that he looked like a monster, and too dangerous, but he did it anyway! He did it because it could stop villains from hurting people. It could stop the lower level villains from distracting the heroes supposed to be hunting the League, who Kaminari wanted to start acting up and making big distractions- We all know this! We know Kaminari and should have been able to see that this was his plan, right? Zach saw it! And when that robbery started happening, Zach just acted! It wasn't a plan. He couldn't have guessed what was coming- Yet he knew what would come afterwards," Mina continued. "He knew everyone would hate him for it, call him all sorts of horrible things, but he knew it could save people, and that matters more to him than what we all think."

"But-" Ashido continued, tear streaks flowing down her face as she went on. "But do you think it doesn't hurt?" She asked. "Yeah, it was the exact response he wanted out of everyone, but you think he can do that without it hurting him?"

Iida's eyes shot open wide, as he thought back on a talk he and Zach had had about the Villain Summit. "…And yeah, I was the one who created the story of the Villain Summit in the first place, so I made it so all those news channels said what they did about us… But when they, talked about how, how the heroes had seen when we left how few of us there were, and they said how that was a good thing. How, how maybe we should just fade away, as we had just gotten in the way- and we had just made the incident bigger to damage that city and kill those people… I couldn't- I couldn't watch that and still not feel…"

Is that- it is. There is no question. Iida realized the similarity was too much to be a coincidence. His fists tightened at his sides at the thought of what Zach was trying to do, and what he had succeeded in doing so well that he had not even noticed it himself. But, even if that's true, that doesn't mean we can just assume that he's-

"He's hurting. All they've been talking about, all day, is how horrible what he did was. How horrible a person he is. That's all they talk about anymore. And when they don't, they only say good things about him with how he's bringing people back, but even then! Even then they still hate him for not doing more."

"…Shown that he brings back certain people over others based on his own preferences. He decides when he saves people on a whim!" Mineta thought about one of the last things he heard on the news earlier that day.

Shoji heard another reporter's voice in his head, "Bringing assassins after him. Getting people around him killed."

"It isn't safe for those kids to be in a school with Lifebringer!" Hagakure could hear it as if being said fresh in front of her. That's, the only excuse schools need to deny him. But if he can't go to any school, and he can't be a hero unless he goes to a… what's he, going to do?

"He's putting everyone in danger through his reckless actions."

"…And when we haven't seen Lifebringer lately, what's he been doing?! Reading a manga in a convenience store?"

"He needs to graduate to get a pro license-" "I don't even know if I want him having a license. You've seen how irresponsibly he's been acting with his Quirk!"

"And seeing how strong he was when he beat the Subspace Devils? He's so strong bullets don't hurt him, attacks seem to go right through him! And he has the strength to take down an entire villain group on his own, one that had defeated several heroes and plagued the country… I'm not saying this in an appreciative way! He showed us he's able to do all that? And bring back hundreds in a day? His power's unheard of!" Midoriya felt his heart pounding as he thought about the news reports that had only made him concerned earlier. Concerned about Zach though, rather than for the boy he now remembered was probably watching those same things. "Like there's a nuclear weapon just walking around the streets of Japan. One that we can't trust."

"He's made bad decisions before! Decisions that resulted in the deaths of a lot of people! Now he's brought assassins into the country hunting him down, because what? Was he Death? Was he a vigilante fighting- I don't believe his stories about being on a different world. That's a lie. He's lying to us, because he knows we'd throw him back in jail if he told us the truth!" Yaoyorozu gulped with her eyes darting towards the door for a moment and then back to her pink friend who was barely keeping it together in front of her.

"'He's a danger to Japan,'" Ashido whispered, as if quoting the last thing she had seen on the news herself. "'A danger to us all,' they say." Ashido whispered it and her classmates realized how subconsciously they had been accepting those news reports as they were repeated over and over. To the point where in their subconscious these quotes were actually things they had to be concerned about. "But we know Zach. We know that more than anything he just wants to help people. Yet, he came back here. He came back knowing that he'd have to follow the rules, and that he'd have to face us for the things he did, and even though he has so much power he's done everything he can to stay within the rules so that he can stay with us! He could be anywhere in the world. He could be doing anything, and no one would be able to stop him. But he's HERE!"

"Why? Why when he can't go to school anymore? When he's brought danger here, to people close to him-" Ashido sucked in a breath though the tears streamed from her eyes. "And so he's got no school to go to get a license, and no home to go to at night, and he lives on the streets, in the cold-"

"What are you-" Bakugo started.

"You think he would find a new place to live, after what happened to Norita?" Ashido asked, her lips shaking and tears falling from her chin as she asked it like it was obvious. "I didn't even question him," she added, feeling like a fool again. Her classmates stared at her in shock, and Ashido continued, "When he told me that we couldn't redecorate his new place, like we had the old apartment, because he didn't want anyone knowing his new address. I didn't even- I didn't think that he was lying. It made so much sense to me that he didn't want anyone finding his new apartment, so he wasn't going to tell anyone his address this time. But- but do you really think he would live anywhere now, after getting Norita killed?! His landlord who cared about him and, and gave him a place to live for free since Zach had already saved him once before. You think Zach would just move to another place and put the people around there in danger?! No! No he wouldn't risk that. But, he also wouldn't want anyone knowing… because Zach hates hurting people, and he knows that people care for him and would be hurt just to know about his situation that they can't do anything about!"

"It's why he puts up a mask!" Ashido yelled at them all. "He doesn't let anyone see how much it hurts him, or how much he needs help, because he doesn't want to be a burden on anyone! He doesn't want to hurt us by letting us know how bad he's hurting. And he is-" Ashido pursed her lips as she said that. "He is, being crushed under the weight of it all. Every day, having to hear everyone call him out on not saving more people, even though it kills him to do it. That he has to die over and over, and no matter how many times he does it, every day! It's never enough for anyone! HE CAN'T TAKE IT!"

"Ashido," Koda whispered while staring at his classmate sobbing at them in so much grief. Is Zach really, Koda started to think too as he watched this heartfelt breakdown of his classmate who knew him best.

"And of course he didn't say anything about wanting to come back here, when he was told that he couldn't," Ashido continued. "Even though that's why he's here. Because he hurt us. He, who can't even let us see the smallest crack in fear that he'll hurt us, did something like the Lifebringer Incident? I remember what he did!" She yelled at the people who were questioning before if she recalled what he had done. "I remember him killing those people right in front of us. Making a trap, and using the Hunter, and doing really, really bad things. But as much as we remember it, Zach came back here because of it! He came back because he knows that he hurt us and might have made us question if there was anything we could have done to stop him. He knows that as heroes, we might blame ourselves forever if we never saw him again. Even though he showed us that night that there was nothing we could do, and he told us afterwards how it was all his plan and there was nothing we could have done to stop him… And then he left us those letters too, to show us that he had had it planned out so well in advance!"

"AND THEN in those letters!" She screamed at them. "He tells us again! Again how it's not our faults, and how he's made the decision on his own, and by having those letters we're able to go back and see it again and again, and remind ourselves over and over how there was nothing we could have done. And when he tells us so many times, he who's so convincing and able to make people think what he wants them to, we start to tell ourselves it! We remind ourselves over and over how it isn't our fault, until we've forgotten that it's a LIE!" She screamed and started panting desperately while glaring at her friends around her staring at her in shock.

"Nothing we could have done?" Ashido asked in disbelief. "We were the ONLY ones who could have done anything. We were RIGHT THERE! Right next to him, for weeks as he carried out his plans. And we did nothing. We just, sat by as he planned out the Lifebringer Incident right under our noses. And we say we couldn't have done anything?" She asked it while staring at Midoriya who pulled back as the guilt flooded back into his heart from some deep well he did not even know he had pushed it away into. "We were the biggest influences in his life! He didn't have a family, everyone else he cared about outside of school was being butchered, and we all wallowed in our own sadness about Kaminari while he lost his fucking mind! Right in front of us!"

Ashido cursed at them at the top of her lungs and threw her hands up into the air, pushing them up through her hair and making strands fall in front of her face giving her an even more disheveled and panicked look. Her heart was pounding so hard as she shouted all these things that Zach was always able to convince her were never a problem, and which her phone calls to every school he told her about had gradually broken down that wall in her head of belief in what he told her.

"You're mad that Zach lied to us?" Ashido asked, her voice cracking and her eyes shifting towards Uraraka for a moment. "Or that he's still lying? Zach's, Zach's always lied to protect himself, and to protect others- and the only person he ever told the truth to- the first person he ever trusted enough to do it! It was Kaminari, and Kaminari took that trust and used it to murder everyone Zach loved- and Zach knew it was his fault! He knew that he was the biggest monster in the world, and we should have been able to see that that was what he felt like. We're mad that he spent those weeks deceiving us? Why was he able to? Why, were we so easily fooled? Are we all that stupid? Did we really think, Zach could come back into class the next day and just- WE WERE BEING IDIOTS!"

"And now he's doing it again," Ashido whispered. "I know he's going to leave again, and that's why he's been pushing us away. Why he's been acting like he has… even if he doesn't know it himself. He looked into that camera to scare the villains, yeah, but he also did it so that we wouldn't feel as bad when he disappears. He did it, so that we'd start to hate him again," Ashido pursed her lips while her classmates staring at her in so much shock started to believe those things she was saying. Hagakure's eyes watered as she imagined the friendship she had with Zach, breaking apart a few days ago and then causing his relationship with Ojiro to end, all his relationships straining more and more.

Bakugo turned his head away from Ashido when she looked towards him. In his head he saw a meeting he had with Lemillion and a few other heroes a few days ago. Lemillion said he knows Zach's address. That he wouldn't tell anyone, to keep it from getting to Eziano. That made sense. What didn't though, was when he said we didn't have to worry about him dragging in the people around his new address. I didn't get it. I thought he just meant because not many people know, but she's right. The convenience store makes it obvious.

"He's living on the streets," Ashido whispered. "As he has been since they blew up his apartment. And yet even without a home he was still trying. Even though we rarely went out to see him, he's never once said no if I asked to hang out with him. Has he ever denied you? Has he ever said no when you've asked to see him since coming back?" Ashido asked it with a glance around. Shoji and Tokoyami felt punches in their guts when she looked their way, because neither of them knew whether that was true or not.

"And even though he can't go to school anymore, and he already knows that he hasn't gotten into the others he applied to," Ashido continued in a shaky voice. "He's still here." She said it in a gasp, and she shivered with her arms crossing over her chest as agony filled her body. "All alone. Alone in the cold, with not one person who cares enough to even know what he's going through. Dying every day, going through so much pain to revive people even though he's terrified of losing his mind. Terrified that by having no one by his side, and his life nothing but pain- that he won't be able to hold on any longer. And I know this, I know that he's out there right now listening as they call him a monster over and over. As they talk about how terrifying a person he is, when that's just who he is! When he can't help it- and he's exhausted, and he doesn't know what he should do next, because he's in a corner."

"We won't let him be a hero if he doesn't finish hero school first, but we won't let him go to hero school, and yet we still demand that he be a hero? What is he supposed to do about that? Where is he supposed to go?!" Ashido asked it, yelling it around at the room of stunned people who did not have an answer for her. "There's only one place that's safe enough for Zach to go and finish his studies. The one place he has people who could maybe help him, because no one else understands him at all! And it's not like we do either, but we know better than anyone else! Right?! We know, that we know Zach better than anyone else does. Tell me, do you really think Zach's a bad guy? Please! Do you really think he's turning into a villain? Zach?! He- he had Kurogiri in his hand, one of the people who had burned his family alive and tortured him- how many people could have held off like he did?"

"Was it easy for Zach to kill him?" She asked. "Zach had every reason to hate them, to want to kill them, but Zach, more than anyone, hates killing people. He's the kindest person I've ever met, to be sitting out there in the cold right now with no one around, and to still put up that front just so I don't feel slightly bad about him having problems. Yeah, he lies. I still trust him," Ashido said. She said it in more assurance than anything in her life, and she continued to her class shocked to hear that statement. "No matter how much he lies, that doesn't change anything. Zach lies. That's who he is. That's always been who he is. It's not like he suddenly changed! But just because he lies, doesn't mean I don't trust him. Because I know Zach. I know that what he did that night hurt him more than anyone else. And he did it anyway, for the peace in our world! Because he's that good a person, which no one else understands but us. We're the only ones who should know that. The only ones who know, that more than anyone else in the world, Zach's not a selfish person."

"So if Zach isn't selfish, then why did he come back here? Why come to Japan specifically? Why spend so much time trying to make things right with us? Trying to help us and make us think that the Lifebringer Incident was just some mistake he made and not- not something that we failed to see coming." Ashido bowed her head and tears dropped off her nose to the floor. "And even though he's out there sleeping in the streets, in parks, and alleys? I come to see him and he asks how my day was-" Ashido gripped a hand into her chest and rose her head, staring at Bakugo in so much physical pain that it made him lean back away from her. Tears spilled freely all over her disheveled face, "He can't take it, because no one can take that much. As strong as he is, as much as he's able to handle and he can handle more than anyone- he has taken more than he can take. Nowhere to turn. No one to turn to, who he's willing to ask for help. Because he doesn't feel like he deserves help," she sobbed at the class.

"He came back here to make things better with us, fix things that he messed up by leaving, but either he succeeded, or you didn't want to be his friend anymore. But he tried! He's tried for a while now, and, and what else is there for him to do?" She questioned in despair. "He can't be a hero. We won't let him." Ashido bit down hard and her eyes narrowed at all the people in front of her, "You won't let him."

The class had a collective moment of shock, as she put it on them. "Every decision Zach's made," Ashido continued, her tone angry at the people around her. "It's all on you. I blame you. All of you, and me, for not trying earlier." She cursed herself in her head for just putting this on the others for denying her request. She could not just blame them alone though, and she said in horrified regret, "I wanted him at U.A., and I knew that that's where he wanted to be, but because he accepted it so easily I accepted it. Because that's how it always happens! He tells me it's fine and I accept because that's what he said, but Zach lies all the time! Especially when it comes to if he's alright, because he's never alright! He- he lost his mind-" Ashido said it with her eyes locking on Yaoyorozu's for a moment, then darting over to Midoriya and Iida. "And he watched so many of his friends murdered in front of him- his family."

"And he is covered head to toe in horrible scars from wars I can't even imagine!" Ashido yelled. "Battles between thousands that I don't even understand how they could happen. I'm confused, and scared… but most of all I'm terrified that he's about to leave again, and that we'll all say the same thing: 'Oh, he's off doing something else.' 'I knew he couldn't do it.' 'This is all part of his plan-' He has NO PLAN!" She screamed it at them after saying those things in a mocking but horrified voice. "He's just sitting there with nothing! Nothing to do! And he's still trying, but this new plan isn't working out as everyone's just criticizing what he's doing and- and-" she bit down on her bottom lip so hard, but she shook her head as she had to let go from the pain. She had seen the scar on Zach's bottom lip though, a scar that told her that even though what she just did hurt and she couldn't break through, Zach had bit through so many times before.

"Zach has given up more than anyone…" Ashido continued. "And we're all sitting here talking about how he hasn't given up enough?" She asked it with her shaking eyes shifting onto Bakugo. "That, that letting him come back is- is what? It ruins the sacrifice he made in that forest? Really? Because he sacrificed his relationships with all of us," Ashido clenched her eyes shut, while everyone else froze where they were in shock as she whispered, "and that's what mattered to him more than anything."

Most of the class in front of Ashido felt their stomachs turn over. Their mouths were dry, and their hearts raced as what she said echoed in their minds. Even Bakugo understood it in that moment, and his wide eyes narrowed but looked away from the girl before him who was breaking down in tears. Not letting Zach back into U.A., isn't even that important. It had been all-important to him since the idea of Zach getting a pardon started floating around. But in a single conversation he realized how idiotic it was to hold that action in such high regard. Because it's not, to Zach…

Midoriya had started to realize it through everything Ashido was saying, but he found himself unable to breathe for several seconds at the end there. Every time, Midoriya realized with his breath finally releasing in a harsh gasp of panic and fear of the realization he was having.

"We're letting him down again," Ashido called out, her head raising back up as she said it desperately to the class in front of her. "We all failed him over and over and didn't believe it anymore, because Zach always blamed himself and told us it was his fault." Midoriya bowed his head as the realization only got stronger in his head at the things she was saying. "It doesn't matter what're lies and what's the truth; it doesn't mean anything! Do we trust Zach doesn't depend on trusting every word he says!" Sato felt his racing heart stab with pain at how angry he was for something so stupid. Then Ashido yelled towards him, "I trust him, because he's always been the best person I've ever known, but also the most vulnerable."

"The strongest and the one who needed the most protection, but who never got it." Ashido was sobbing at them and she cried out, "Do you really think Zach's a bad person? Is he an evil villain, or does he just need help? I think he needs help. I- think he doesn't have it all together. He doesn't have huge plans that he needs to stay here for, because he can fight the League and Eziano and all his enemies without being here and doing it as a hero. The only reason he needs to stay in the light, is to be able to continue interacting with us. That's the only way he can still be our friend. Which means, that that has to be the only thing keeping him here. And so he's going to leave, and we're never going to see him again, because none of us are trying to stop him! We'll all think he's out there with some new plan doing some new thing, and we'll tell ourselves that so we don't have to think about how we let him down here AGAIN!"

"We'll think about how he disappeared but it wasn't our fault, it was Zach's own choice to leave. It's always his choice!" She yelled, then she shook her head violently and shouted louder, "But that doesn't mean we don't influence his choices! That doesn't mean, that all those times he made those hard choices that we were all free from blame, because we've had some of the biggest influences of anyone on Zach's life. So whatever he chooses to do is on us! We do hold fault in all those hard decisions Zach made, the ones he made while we were around him and should have helped him figure it out, should have pushed him in other directions sometimes, and should have pushed harder the times we tried and he ignored us! But we were there when he planned out the Lifebringer Incident. And he planned that out because he got all those anti-heroes he fought with killed, but it's not like the reason was that far removed from us either, because he only acted as an anti-hero while he was back here with us after escaping the League! He was sneaking out of school, fighting with them against villains in the shadows, and we were blind to what was happening! Right under our noses!"

"He made those choices, and it was him who made them." She paused and took in a deep choked-up breath, "But even when he made stupid! Stupid decisions! Not once, did he lose my trust. Because I know that what he says doesn't matter as much as what he does, and who he is. That every choice he's made, he's made it because he believes it will save people, protect the world, protect us. And he doesn't just protect us by saving our lives. That's never been it at all, and I know that because he's going to leave and do so knowing that none of us will feel bad about it this time, and that was the point! That was the point of every action he made since coming back. To make us believe that it wasn't our fault, but it is!"

Tokoyami and Shoji had gotten up from the couch, and the two of them looked at each other with similar looks of guilt-ridden dread. Sato dropped his gaze down to his hands, and Uraraka covered up her mouth in realization of what happened the last time she talked to Zach. Did he do that, on purpose- does he even realize what he's… Uraraka sucked in a sharp breath of shock with her eyes filling with tears at just the idea of that.

The people who had been ignoring Zach since he returned understood deep in their chests that those actions had been messed up. They stared at Ashido who told them these things about Zach like it was still how he felt, and how much he cared about them, even now. Bakugo darted his eyes to the side as he saw legs crouching next to him, and then he spun with many others towards the front door that swung open as Midoriya was gone from the dorm.

He's in Musutafu. The robbery happened here, and he was still around because Ashido's right, Midoriya thought with his teeth baring as he shot towards the main office building of U.A. High School. He's just here because of us now. There's nothing else holding him back, except for us, and we're not even trying to hold on!

Sero stared down at his phone with his teeth clenching as he stared at the four unanswered texts he had sent. His eyes darted to the door Midoriya rushed out of, and even as Yaoyorozu ran for it as well with her eyes wide and afraid, he just shook his head and glared down while sending off another message. Don't you do it.

Sato sprinted for the door a second after Yaoyorozu went, only glancing back when he saw Ashido falling out the corners of his eyes. Ashido fell to her knees, and Hagakure and Uraraka rushed over to her sides. Sero started walking forward, and he looked down at Ashido who her friends just bent down to help. "Midoriya will find him-"

Ashido just shook her head with her knees splayed out to either side. She cried softly but with tears still dropping off her chin, and she sobbed to the others still around her, even as more of them rushed out, "He's- he's-" she rose her head and looked to Todoroki whose expression was concerned and serious, but not very depressed. Then her eyes shifted over to Jirou who just looked upset about everything Ashido had said and blamed them for. The two of their expressions shook though as Ashido whispered hoarsely at them in a completely broken voice, "He's our friend."

Uraraka bit down on her bottom lip, and Hagakure rose a free arm that she was not holding Ashido's with to rub her own eyes to the surprise of Ojiro walking up behind her with a hesitant look in his eyes. Bakugo ground his teeth but he stepped back and leaned against the wall again, looking away with a frustrated look over his face. Ashido gasped in again, and then she whispered to the others right around her, "He cares so much about us, all of us, and we're going to pretend like it was his decision to leave again. That none of us were able to impact it, because Zach just makes all his decisions on his own. And I can't- I can't just accept that this time."

"But that's what he tells us, so that we never feel like it's our fault," Ashido whispered with her head bowing and her words coming out devastated. "And every time he did something we could have stopped him, or helped him, or- or done something! We could have done anything. We were right there. We were always, right there next to him." Ashido shook her head some more and then rose it and stared into Todoroki's heterochromatic eyes in anger, "And somehow we all think that it wasn't our fault. That it's never our fault. But- but we don't get to do that this time. I won't let us. We don't get to say that he just chose to leave, when there is no other choice before him. If he disappears right now- if we never see him again…" Todoroki's eyebrows curled up softly and his eyes shifted slowly to the exit some more of their classmates just sprinted out of. He heard Ashido's raspy voice as she whispered in the corner of his vision, "…It was our own damn fault."

"And whatever Zach does after," Ashido continued, her eyes shut and her tone sounding thoroughly exhausted. "Wherever he goes. If he goes back to what he was doing before, if he goes to any other country to be a vigilante where they accept him, or just to go be a ghost in the wind… doing what he's doing now in Japan but on a wider scale across the world… alone… all alone." Ashido whispered that final part, having exhausted herself with worry, and Hagakure knelt down to help hold her friend up who seemed like she might collapse right here.

Uraraka could hear how tired and near passing out Mina sounded, and she held her arms around Ashido's back and her front. Zach, how could you make her so worried about you? Uraraka thought with her face scrunching up and her lips curling into a frown. Please, you have to prove her wrong. Be there, when Deku-kun shows up. Please be there.

"Mina, it's going to be okay," Hagakure started, whispering it and trying to comfort her friend who sounded shattered at the end there.

Ashido rose her head though, looking at her invisible friend next to her who was stunned that Ashido was this torn up that she could not even stand. Ashido's face looked like she felt years of guilt crashing down on her at once though, and she looked at Toru with her black eyes bloodshot and shaking. "I never even thanked him," Ashido whispered in a voice that crushed Hagakure too, and it made Jirou take a step back seeing that look down on Mina's face. Hagakure sucked in a sharp breath and failed at holding back her tears, as Mina whispered to her, "Not once, for saving us all."

Ashido shook her head around and then bowed it forward into Hagakure's shoulder. She clenched her eyes shut, Zach's not one to brag. He'd never tell me all he did out as Death, but if what he talked about was just a few things, and there were other times too that I had heard about on the news, and odd stories about villains caught by heroes but who said that it was Death! Even though all the other villains there said it was just the heroes. Or how without the heroes doing anything big, no big change at all, suddenly they were all just catching so many more villains than ever before. How in a few months, the crime rate in every country went down. It didn't make sense that all the heroes suddenly got better. In those countries where there were fewer heroes, since in February there had been so many hero deaths, how was it that in March crime rates went down in every country in the world? And that month there were more villains caught than ever before in history. Until April, where nearly twice as many were caught!

Mineta ran down the road outside of the dorms as fast as he could for the main office building, even using his Quirk to bounce himself there quicker. He wouldn't tell anyone where he was living anymore. Since he wouldn't tell anyone, it wasn't weird that he wouldn't tell me. I didn't even- I didn't push the issue, because I thought I understood it was just to be safer… Ashido's right though. I'm so dumb! Mineta shook his head around frustratedly, and he bounced past Shoji and Tokoyami on his right who were surprised to see him catch up and get past them.

"He was still trying," Ashido whispered with her head bowed and her only support being Uraraka and Hagakure on her sides. "His apartment exploded but we hear he's alive and see what he had to say, and it looks like he's got everything under control. And we thought he could handle it, because he was strong. But we were wrong!" She gasped it and coughed as she had lost her voice and failed at raising it right there again. "We had seen it before. When Aizawa sensei said he couldn't be in the Sports Festival, we all saw through his mask when it was at its weakest! We saw that Zach could get hurt as much as any of us, and even if we didn't know why he was so at the end of his rope at the time, even if we thought it really was just because of being kept out of the Sports Festival… we knew. We saw through it, and I saw through it today, but too late. He's putting up a mask again, and we have no idea how much he's hurting. But we're wrong to think he can do this now, all on his own!"

Ashido rose her head and her anger was back on it though there were bags under her bloodshot eyes. "To think he'll stay trying to be a hero when no one wants him here, when people are complaining about him getting Shiketsu targeted, his apartment targeted. He didn't have a place to live but he still went to school because we said that he had to, and they kicked him out for protecting them even if it was just because someone was targeting him! Zach has so many enemies. Monstrous enemies that no one else is helping him fight. And he's at it alone. I can't even- imagine… If I got people killed like that, and the school targeted- I would kill myself if that happened to me."

She said it in horror and gasped out with a look to her right into Ochaco's wide eyes, "If everyone I still loved abandoned me, the world hated me, and just being alive was putting everyone else in danger. It's horrifying to even think about, what it would be like to stand in his shoes for a second. I know. He made me know, what that was like, and it was the worst moment of-" Ashido couldn't breathe as she thought back to that night on the rooftop of the abandoned apartments, apartments she suspected in pain Zach had likely been using on occasion lately. "He's trying!" She sobbed. "But they keep trying to kill him, and we're going to lose him again. Because as hard as he's trying, he can't do this. Not without help! And we just sat here, and let him go away again."

Ashido dropped her chin to her chest and whispered down to the floor as her friend stared speechlessly at her. "Because what's left now? What's keeping him here? If he can't be a hero, and he can't go to school, and he can't even have a home… and all the friends he came back here to be with don't even care?" The final part of that question stabbed into the chests of the others around her who felt that guilt vibrate throughout their bodies. They each understood, that Ashido was right, in that there would be no way after Zach left that they could go on thinking they had been unable to stop it.

We didn't even try, Todoroki thought darkly.

Hagakure felt a buzz and she shot a hand to her pocket, pulling out her phone fast as she had sent Zach a text a little before. "We should have tried harder," Ashido whispered under her breath to no one in particular, though Toru felt it was towards her. "It's our fault…"

Toru's heart fell as it was just Sato texting from the main office to say that they were not letting anyone else out. Midoriya, Hagakure thought, and then Zach flashed through her mind towering over Mysti and ripping her mask off. Please, find Zach, Hagakure thought back on what Zach looked like all the times before that. And her realization from the other night fully shattered as she realized that it was not a realization she had had but something Zach wanted her to believe instead. He wasn't like that the entire time he's been back. He turned into that. Turned back into that, maybe. It wasn't all fake though. It wasn't a lie! Midoriya, we're losing him, so please… Find him.

Shooting across the sky over Musutafu was a curly-haired teen whose head snapped each and every direction while he kicked the air behind him. Zach! I know, Ashido's right.

"Where are you?" Midoriya whispered it to himself as he shot across the air, his eyes darting around the streets and between buildings as he flew over them. All Might told me how you were there for me. That you were protecting me. "…He had friends who were closer to him than you, and who I'm sure he was more worried about." I didn't come to talk to you about it though! I thought not taking you down was, was helping you- I'm an idiot! She's right, I haven't done anything- "He chose to follow you though, because he was thinking about the future. The future for everyone."

"Zach," Midoriya gasped as he felt his heart pounding violently in his chest. I remembered who you always were. Who you still are! I saw that even in the middle of that torture you wouldn't betray me. You were going through so much, and I- I was just a kid. You were covered in scars, and I had just seen how you got them at the Sports Festival. I saw the horrible torture, heard your family getting murdered in front of your eyes, and you had all that dragged back up too as they tried again to destroy you… And then you chose to follow me. You came to Hokkaido to protect me! Not once did you falter. After all that, you never faltered in who you were. The deepest traits inside you that make you you, they didn't change even when everything else did. Your body and mind, your soul and your ideals, they changed… but you never gave up.

He came close sometimes, Midoriya spun around in midair and looked around the vast city below and in all directions. Please, be here! He shot back another direction moving faster, I heard how close you came when Kaminari betrayed you. At your worst moment, about to take pills and just break down completely, knowing that your best friend was out there killing your friends and family and there was nothing you could do to stop it. Deku bit down in self-hatred and frustration, seeing nothing down below to give him any hope and feeling the deepest regret as he heard Zach's screams in his mind that night. I stood outside his door because I thought Yaoyorozu could handle it better, but I was just being a coward back then not going in myself!

It's like Ashido said. None of us understood what Zach was going through, so we told ourselves we'd only make it worse, or that Zach wouldn't want to talk to us- to me. But I didn't know! I didn't know what he needed, because I didn't know what it was like… and so I, and most of us just ignored it and figured that he could handle it in his own way as he always seemed to do. We didn't give him alternatives or tell him that it would be alright. I didn't tell Zach that. I could have, but I didn't. Midoriya felt tears come out of his own eyes and fly off the sides of his face at the speed he was soaring around the sky.

I stood outside your room and cried myself. I went back to my own room and cried for you, for what I just heard you say about Kaminari killing your family. I thought you were done. But Zach came to class the next day. He was back, and he was strong. For Zach to be there so strong, I thought I should go tell him that he didn't need to be there, but what if Zach did need to be there to keep himself strong? Maybe it was something he needed to do, or something. I didn't know, so I didn't presume to ask. I didn't talk to him about it. I could have. I had weeks, Midoriya clenched his teeth in deeper regret. But I just tried to talk to Zach about other things because Zach said we had to move forward and past Kaminari, and that was easier for me than going back and talking about him. Ashido was right. She knows, what we all decided to forget.

I could have said that we could go after Raijin together. I could have talked about what I heard him say that night, or asked him why he and Yaoyorozu had to break up where I would have noticed something was wrong with him! Even if he ignored everything I said, even if none of that had worked… If I had spent more time with him I would have seen the signs of the Lifebringer Incident before it happened. Instead I was floored by it. We all were. We were caught completely off guard, because we knew as much about Zach as everyone else in the country, as the villains Zach was trying to fool! Zach was my friend though. We lived, ate, studied, and fought together. It shouldn't have been so easy to fool me as to how he was really feeling, no matter how good of an actor he was. Damn it! Why did it take so long?! Why were we all so stupid when it came to Zach? I let him convince me time after time that my failure at saving him was never my fault, but it was.

Somehow he thought I could still be the Symbol. I don't know how you think that, when I'm failing you even now. But you told me it, back when I didn't believe I could be it myself because I had let you get taken from right in front of me by that Nomu. I had failed you so much back then. So many times. Midoriya gasped in while flying over All Might Park and not spotting any sign of Zach down below. He dropped lower to the ground to get a better look below canopies too, but Zach was not in sight. And you convinced me that I wasn't to blame, but I can't accept that. I did let you get taken. I had All Might's power, and you stepped through the portal in front of me, twice. You were dragged through by the Nomu.

In that worst moment of his torture, when he could have died at any second, Zach had the strongest look I have ever seen. When he looked into Shigaraki's eyes and said that I would save him. I knew back then that I had failed when I saw that, but then he pushed me even harder to believe in myself and my power. Pushed me to become stronger, a better hero, and he stayed by my side to… Why couldn't I believe it when I talked to All Might? The plans I thought you might have actually been back here for, to just be by our sides again, Ashido was right about them. I don't know why I thought your plans were necessarily bad. He thought it in a pained way, and he wanted to grip at his chest as he thought, He really is, someone I trust more than- more than almost anyone. No matter what he's done, he's my friend. I failed him. I let you down, Zach. I've always let you down.

"I promise," Midoriya said aloud, while the trees below him shook at how hard he just kicked off the air above them. "It won't be like that if I can find you," Midoriya promised it to no one in particular. He just said it aloud, and continued under his breath, "I'll be a better friend. I promise that I'll try, no matter what, to save you-" Midoriya's eyes darted down at the sight of something in bottom of his peripheral vision, and then they grew…

---

Some time ago…

Midoriya's suspicious gaze followed Zach ahead of him where Zach and Sero were standing and watching in amusement as Hagakure told the photographer to get another picture with her and Ojiro. The two boys were trying hard to keep a straight face as Hagakure complained about how she looked and asked for another picture, which the kind photographer just agreed with a smile and a sweatdrop as he felt he probably should not mention anything about it. The mall had background music Midoriya wished was a little louder, as he sweatdropped himself having to hear all the people around him whispering about Lifebringer and Deku, and Class A, as a lot of them were watching the group hanging out in Yutapu together.

Midoriya shook his head around as he saw Sero glance back towards him, then he walked up and stood next to the other two. Zach looked to his side and flashed a grin at Midoriya like he was wondering if Deku saw what Hagakure just did, and Midoriya chuckled too as he saw Ojiro trying to just appease his girlfriend and not say anything about it either. "Ah! That's a great idea!" The three boys turned their heads and saw their pink-skinned friend running up behind them with an excited look covering her face that made both Midoriya and Sero gain dreading looks to their faces that lowered to have only half-smiles as they could see what Ashido was about to call out.

"Let's take a group photo! Come on!"

"It's-" Midoriya started.

"I'd be honored to take a picture of you all," The photographer said quickly over to the group of boys, looking specifically at Lifebringer for a moment and then at Deku too. Sero rolled his eyes as he was completely passed over, but he shrugged his shoulders anyway with a glance at Zach who nodded in agreement that they should just go with it now.

Ojiro looked relieved, and Hagakure called out excitedly about the group picture too as Ashido ran over in front of the background. The camera in front of them was an old-timey one that Hagakure had spotted and dragged Ojiro too, one where the photographs came out the front of the camera and after being shaken could be seen right away. The photographer motioned the others to move inwards, and Midoriya awkwardly moved towards the background's edge which got Ashido sighing at him for his slow and unsure movements. She ran up behind him and pushed on his back, "You're big, so you go here in the middle, and- Zach! Sero!" She turned after pushing Midoriya, and the other two walking over and just talking to each other glanced to their pink friend who separated them and rearranged the group to get a more artsy pic.

"Here, put an arm around me like this," Ashido continued, moving in front of Zach between him and Midoriya. She grabbed his left arm and put it over her shoulder, then pulled it down a little more, and Zach finally got a bit of a hesitant look on his face at what she was doing and how close his hand was getting to her chest. Ojiro glanced over to his side with a risen eyebrow, though his eyes shifted back to Midoriya who he smiled to see was looking nervous at the amount of attention they were drawing so that many other pictures had already been taken around them.

"Smile kids," the photographer said to them while leaning down to his camera.

Sero started laughing as he spotted what Mina was doing even worse now, and he mentioned across Midoriya's front, "Not making it easy to convince people that you're not dating Zach."

Ashido looked up from Zach's hand she was trying to position in a good spot on her, then she turned from Sero and looked around at the interested and shocked people around them who were wondering if she and Zach were dating. Her eyes darted up to Zach who had already noticed but did not say anything, then her cheeks somehow got more pink. She laughed but threw a hand up towards a couple of teenage girls near them who had their phones out and were typing quickly as they sent the pictures that they had taken to their friends. "Hold on we're-"

"Hahaha-" Sero couldn't hold it as Ashido somehow didn't realize what she was doing. Midoriya looked inwards at Zach with a surprised look as Zach scratched the back of his head with his gloved hand, his look partly apologetic since Ashido just spun to him looking like she had not realized what she was doing. Hagakure held up a peace sign in front of her, not that it was able to be seen above the end of her sleeve, and she squeezed Ojiro's right hand with her other one just up against her left side down near her waist.

The flash went off…

---

Present

Midoriya dropped down in a dark alleyway near the edge of Musutafu. The car that's lights flashed down the alley as it was driving on the street completely passed behind him, leaving only a faint red glow for a moment that let Midoriya see down more of the alley and into the darker shadows farther from the road behind him. There were no street lights in this section of the city, leaving even the edge of the alley closest to the street only lightly illuminated, and Midoriya had landed past that area so he was further into the darkness now.

As Midoriya landed, his shoes squished on the floor that was wet due to the earlier rain. In the corner of his vision he spotted something when that red glow was still there, and his eyes shifted from down the dark alley to the puddle the light had reflected off of. There was something sticking halfway out of the puddle, and Midoriya saw the polaroid that had a corner burnt off and a rip on the bottom of it. It was clean other than the damage though, yet despite being kept in good condition usually it was sitting in the puddle as if discarded. Midoriya's eyes shifted up again, towards the silhouette down the alley that stopped moving when he hit down on the ground.

In the bottom left of his vision and on the edge of the alley laying flat next to the side of a building, there was an open backpack. A half-empty water bottle rested outside the zipper with crushed plastic in the shape of fingerprints around the top of it, just past the end of a sweatshirt sleeve splayed away from the rest of the sweatshirt sticking out of the bag. And Midoriya heard a buzzing sound coming from inside that backpack, sounding like a phone set on vibrate.

Midoriya recognized the backpack. He recognized the brand of water bottle even, but it was the photo he recognized that made his heart pound. His heart rate raced as he heard the vibrating of the phone this figure was seemingly leaving behind, as he had seen the person finishing a step right as he landed when the red glow was still at its brightest and gave him a better look down the alley. Even then, all he had seen was a black silhouette in the shape of a human, but now it was barely a shadow in the dark. Deku's breathing was heavy, and he said to the figure down the alley, "Zach."

The silhouette turned his head first, and a faint red glow near the top of his face faded away. Midoriya stepped farther into the alley, and his eyes were adjusting to the darkness, or so he thought must have happened as he was suddenly able to see farther down it and make out the face of the person who just turned. His dark face came into focus to show there was no actual Death around it, and Midoriya could see him. His heart rate skyrocketed. His eyes stared straight ahead into Zach's cold, dead eyes, as Zach stared back with an emotionless expression on his face.

"Midoriya," Zach replied. "What are you doing here?"

---

A/N Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed this very long chapter. Merry Christmas everyone (technically Christmas Eve now as I finish editing this after a whole afternoon and night of it, no dinner even). I'm working both days of Christmas and all the way through the new year, so I doubt I'll get another chapter up though I did get this one up today after work... so who knows? But happy New Years too everyone if I don't get another up by then. Hope you enjoyed this Christmas present, even if it made me cry to write and again when I edited it. Leave me a review telling me what you think and any predictions/questions you have about the chapter. I have work this morning, so I have to go to sleep now as much as I want to spend another hour doing review responses lol ;) but I really do have to pass out. I'll do a bunch of review responses next chapter to make up for it, but yeah, Merry Christmas guys, I hope you enjoy reading this over the next couple days (if it takes you more than one to read which I'd totally understand). XD