"You should come over to the States one day, Kazuya! The burgers here are to die for!"

"Too much fast food is not good for your health, Toshi," Shigaraki Kazuya replied over the phone, his first reaction upon hearing that is to chastise the future Symbol of Peace for his dietary habits. It's been several years since Toshinori left for America but they still kept close contact with each other no matter how busy they are.

"You act like a mother hen," Toshinori's loud groan could be heard loud and clear, and Kazuya's imagination filled in the image of the kind of expression the muscular man is sporting right now. Toshinori is supposed to be the adult and he's supposed to be the child here, but their regular interactions with each other often suggest otherwise.

Toshinori had always been the more emotional one. He, on the other hand, is the logical one.

"Someone has to keep your ill-disciplined ass in line."

"Language!" Toshinori shrieked over the phone and Kazuya unashamedly let out a laugh. His physical age had finally entered the realm of double digits, and yet Toshinori still treats him as though he is still the same four year old boy when they first met under Nana's introduction.

"Language? What the fuck is that?"

"Shigaraki Kazuya!"

"Who's the mother hen now?" Kazuya teased before his eyes narrowed when his target suddenly made his long-awaited appearance and entered his line of sight. "Alright, Toshi, I got to go. Take care."

"This talk is not over, Kazuya. We will be having words about your language when I return-"

Kazuya swiftly ended the call before Toshinori could verbalise his threat. It's better to let him think that he's undergoing the rebellious phase than to tell him that he has to hang up because he's at work right now, and they both know what his "work" entails.

He's been staking out here for four fucking hours for his target to finally come out from hiding. Four, fucking, hours. If the target makes an escape it will be another two long weeks of tracking down his whereabouts and another long stakeout to wait for that perfect opportunity to present itself once more. Like hell he will miss this opportunity to finally complete this mission.

He took aim through the scope of his sniper rifle, equipped with the state of the art technology and a silencer attached to it. The crosshairs of the scope aligned itself with the target's head and at the moment the target took a brief pause to observe his surroundings Kazuya knew that this was the perfect moment that he had been waiting for.

A pull of a trigger, the fall of a villain. The crowd screamed when they realised somebody has been shot and that murder had been committed in broad daylight. If only they knew that this person was responsible for selling out the information to villains that subsequently led to the bombings two weeks ago that racked up a casualty count of a hundred and twenty-two.

The target used to work for the HPSC, and the irony that he helped create the current model of the sniper rifle that he's now using wasn't lost on him. This is the reason why the HPSC needed him to assassinate the target, because chaos will ensue if the public ever found out that a HPSC employee was responsible for the recent bombing that led to the loss of so many innocent lives.

Someone got to uphold the HPSC's squeaky clean image that it wants to present to the public, and who else is a better candidate than its very own hunting dog?

"New mission."

Kazuya resisted the urge to roll his eyes when new instructions were being pumped down from above right after he reported the successful completion. Come on, at least let him rest for a few minutes.

The location for the new mission is an abandoned shipyard not too far away from his current location. His mission is to wipe out the villain group that had been eluding the HPSC's detection for quite a while now. Oh, and had he mentioned that these villains are the same ones that conducted the bombings two weeks back?

"Make sure to get everything out of them before their termination. We will send a Pro Hero in after you are done."

As the HPSC's secret agent, he is destined to never come into contact with either fame or glory because his existence and identity is a secret that must be tightly guarded. There will be no recognition for the things that he had done for Japan and HPSC in the name of peace, he had accepted that fact a long time ago when the HPSC approached him and gave him a choice to join them, not like he really had a choice in the first place.

However, the HPSC needs to also put up a show to appear as if they had been doing all they can to bring those despicable villains to justice. Since his identity as Cerberus cannot be revealed, that's where the Pro Hero the HPSC will send comes in. Basically, Cerberus will do all the work, and the only job the Pro Hero will do is to get all the glory and pretend that he was the one who resolved the situation.

Yeah, it sucks to be him, but that's life isn't it. Life simply sucks.

Will there really come a day where he no longer needs to kill in the name of peace? He does not know, but it's much better to be an optimistic fool and believe that he will live to see that day.

The villain group turned out to be a large group of twelve. He can easily snipe one or two using the element of surprise, but the terrain makes it such that it will be easy for the remaining villains to find cover to avoid sniper fire before using their superior numbers to overwhelm him. The HPSC had trained him to be a hitman, not a fighter like Toshinori is with that ridiculous quirk passed down from his ancestor.

He could also choose to wait for the Pro Hero that the HPSC is sending in to show up and assist, but he has no freaking clue on who the hell the HPSC will be sending in. If it turns out to be an incompetent idiot…

It's better to do this himself. It's not like the HPSC strictly requires him to cooperate with the Pro Hero to complete this particular mission.

Come to think about it, he really needs to start collecting quirks that are able to allow him to brawl like Toshinori. It will be necessary in the event he found himself in a situation where assassination is not an option and he is forced to fight mano-a-mano.

What kinds of quirk will be useful to create such an overpowered quirk? He's running out of quirks to copy from since he had already tried copying the quirks of almost everyone he could possibly come into contact with in the HPSC as their hitman. The kinds of people that he will regularly meet belong to the same flock as him, miserable people who are trained to kill and destined to forever rot in the shadows. People like them do not possess the quirks they need to create an overpowered quirk because that is not what they need in their line of work.

An assassin does not need to be powerful, they just need to be lethal and to be able to appear and disappear at will.

After surveying the shipyard and after much consideration, Kazuya decided that his usual modus operandi of sniping his targets will simply not work. Thus, his sniper rifle was placed aside in favour for a pair of handguns, modified and custom-made just for his use. It's time to go in guns blazing.

Kazuya activated his stealth quirk, camouflaging himself and erasing any sounds he would make, and steadily made his way closer to the villains that were making an abandoned container their temporary residence. One of them just so happened to make a turn and thus disappearing from his companions' view for one short moment, just the perfect opportunity to reduce their numbers by one.

Kazuya easily made the leap through the power of flight granted by the assimilation of Nana's and Gran Torino's quirk, still undetectable by the villains, and swiftly shot a hole through the villain who had briefly separated from his companions for whatever reasons, maybe to take a leak or something. His Stealth quirk allowed him to silence the sound of the gunshot and the fall of the body.

Kazuya quickly acted, knowing that it's just a matter of time before someone discovers the body. He made a quick detour towards the back and stealthily got closer to one of the villains who was sitting at a corner that was relatively further away from the rest. Kazuya immediately acted when nobody was looking in his direction, swiftly covering the target's mouth with one hand as his other hand pressed the barrel of the gun on the target's skull. Another villain was added to his kill count with the squeeze of the trigger as he swiftly dragged the body behind a large crate to hide it from view.

All of that, completed in just a second.

That was how Kazuya slowly picked off his targets in the next ten minutes that followed, and when there were seven of them left the remaining ones finally realised that something wasn't right and swiftly grouped together. Picking them off without being noticed would not be possible any longer.

So, he simply adjusted his position, perching himself on the roof of a rusty old container not too far away, took aim, and fired a shot.

There was a shout of surprise when the remaining villains saw how their companion was shot without seeing the hide nor hair of their assailant. That brief window of surprise was immediately exploited by Kazuya and he fired another shot, successfully killing two villains within a second.

"Over there!"

One of the smarter ones accurately guessed the direction in which Kazuya fired the shot from, but he's already changing his position and is on the move while remaining invisible. The villains are still unable to locate him and they wouldn't be able to do so in their current state of fear and confusion.

Another pull of the trigger, another one down.

"He's on the move!"

"I can't see him! I think it's a quirk that turns him invisi-"

That one seems to be too smart for his own good, so he's the next one to get shot. Three left.

"Run!"

The one that said so immediately got his brains blown out. The remaining two are running for their lives in two separate directions. It would be a hassle to kill them both, but thankfully he has flight capabilities.

One shot ended the life of the villain fleeing towards the left. One jump was all Kazuya needed to close the distance between himself and the last villain before the last shot was fired. Twelve out of twelve targets, neutralised. Mission complete.

"Cerberus to Command, targets neutralised. You can send in the Pro Hero now."

"He's already on his way, should reach you anytime now."

A blazing ball of fire caught Kazuya's attention just at that very moment, causing Kazuya to squint his eyes to take a better look. The ball of fire in the sky got bigger and bigger as it gradually came closer and Kazuya could feel the surprise when he identified who the ball of fire was.

"You are very young."

Endeavour looked down at the boy who looks to be around the age where he should be starting to attend middle school. He had heard sporadic gossip and rumours that HPSC do groom their own agents, but he wasn't aware that the HPSC made them start so young.

"I get that a lot. I will leave this to you, twelve of them in total," The boy gestured to the corpses with a slight jerk of his chin while sheathing the handguns he held back in their holsters. "Endeavour, right? You have been making quite a name for yourself recently. It's only been like, less than a year since your debut?"

"Six months, to be exact," The large man grunted out, not knowing what to think and feel about the knowledge that the HPSC is using a kid to terminate villains. Endeavour may be tall, but the kid's height did not even reach his chest, that's how young he is.

"Very impressive," The boy raised a hand and casually patted him on his bicep in an act of encouragement, not knowing that Kazuya had used this opportunity to conveniently copy his Hellflame quirk through Assimilate before making his leave.

Endeavour understands that the current state of the world is bad, but is this what Japan has been reduced to? Training and having children to do their dirty work for them to protect the peace?

Something's not right here.

Things are wrong, in more ways than one.