A/N: For those of you that were hoping for more Lightning-Struck, I'm really, really sorry. I'm seriously struggling with Ch.8 and spending hours staring at my keyboard isn't productive in the slightest. Instead, I've redirected my efforts into a few other projects that I'd put on the backburner when LSS took off and invested a LOT of that time into a group venture that I'm working on with two other very talented writers (if you've read my bio you can probably guess who they are).

One of my many other projects is this fic, a My Hero Academia morbid comedy. I've been outlining it for ages and finally got around to writing the first chapter. I hope you enjoy, and please don't take anything in this fic too seriously. It's bad for your health.


One: HOURGLASS


Shisaki Soku could feel the blistering jaws of regret clamp onto his bones. It wasn't his fault, though, he was just dealt a shitty hand. He regretted what happened to him. What he had to do.

When he was in college, the apartment that his parents paid for collapsed into a sinkhole due to a villain attack in the sewers under the building. He lost everything. All his clothes, his television, his life savings that he had hidden under his All Might sheets. Everything. All gone, just because the city was too lazy to properly prepare its infrastructure for fucking supervillains.

His parents couldn't believe that he had been dumb enough to keep the allowance they gave him under his mattress instead of at a bank, so they disowned him; he was left with nothing, not even the clothes on his back, as he had been in the shower at the time.

Plus insurance kept spinning him in circles until he didn't know which way was up.

The first time he mugged someone, he felt powerful. He had been cold, wrapped in a garbage bag for heat, the stench of hot rubbish leaving him nose blind and disoriented. A kindly woman had seen his pathetic form crouched in a foetal position at the base of a dumpster. She took pity on him and walked over, her wallet in hand.

"Thank you," he had said, forgetting for a moment that he hadn't brushed his teeth in months, and he'd been cuddling rotting food for just as long, neither of which did any favours for his breath.

As the woman fainted, her purse went slack in her hand, and Soku didn't think twice before snatching it.

As time passed, stealing turned to mugging; mugging turned to robbery; and robbery ended in murder.

"I can hear you, you know that, right?"

The villain jumped, his tangled mess of hair flaring a bright violet. Apparently, in his reminiscing, he had absent-mindedly run into a dead-end, muttering his backstory to himself for the past five minutes.

"Also, Bad Breath is a ridiculously lame quirk for a villain."

"W-What!? That's not my quirk!"

Glowing green eyes widened as a skeletal hand jumped up to cover what he determined must have been his pursuer's nose. "Wait, you mean that's natural?"

"Shut up!" Soku yelled at him, his now red hair defying gravity. He thrust his palm towards the menacing, cloaked form of the Reaper, a shimmering rainbow shooting towards the vigilante's shadowed face. "Rainbow Blast, GO!"

The hooded head tilted out of the way of the beam before the bright orbs shut off and the Reaper's shoulders started to shake, a wheezing laugh echoing around the alley.

"Rainbow Blast? Rainbow Blast!? HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Skeletal hands clutched his sides as the Reaper doubled over in mirth. When he finally recovered, he raised a bony finger to wipe away an imaginary tear and peered into Soku's fearful eyes. "Hoo… haha… hehehe… T-Thanks for that. I really needed it. NOW YOU WILL PERISH, BY THIS HOUR, NEXT MORROW! YOU WILL NOT KNOW WHEN, NOR HOW, NOR WILL YOU SEE IT COMING, BUT IT WILL COME!" Miniature green stars flashed in malice, leaving the thief shaking in his boots.

"DEATH COMES TO ALL." And with that smoke flooded the small alleyway, completely obscuring the Reaper from view. When it finally cleared, he was alone. Not even a rat left to keep him company. It was as if life had vacated the alley, leaving silent stone and harsh wind in its wake.


"In other news, a man was found dead today in the parking lot of a J-Store. Security camera footage from the incident shows that he had been trampled by a rampaging zebra that had escaped from the Musutafu Zoo following the attack of Animal Rights Terrorist/Villain: Bestiality. On a tangentially related note, the Animal Rights Terrorist/Villain: Bestiality's petition to change his Villain name to 'Literally-Anything-Else' has been denied. We'll keep you posted on his next, inevitably failed, attempt."

"Death by zebra-trampling. Hmm. That's a new one." Izuku made a mental note to add it to his notebook after lunch. "If he was just found, then he most likely died overnight. They had to peruse security footage because there were no eyewitnesses; if there were, he would have died in the hospital instead of the parking lot."

After finishing the last of his rice, the fourteen-year-old vigilante carefully placed his bowl in the sink before running to his room.

Years ago, one would have been hard-pressed to remember the colour of his walls. Not because they were particularly messy, but because every available space was covered floor-to-ceiling with hero merchandise. While the subjects varied from the most outspoken Midnight to the ever-elusive Eraserhead, one had always been the centrepiece. The main attraction in his personal shrine to Pro Heroes: All Might, the Symbol of Peace.

And then he discovered his quirk: Hourglass.

After meeting his ethereal gaze, the timer would start, and any victim of his quirk would die within twenty-four hours. It was simply an objective fact.

He was literally born to be a killer.

Every time he tried to bring it up to anyone they gave him the same empty words. "It's not the quirk, it's the person that's villainous." (He made sure to leave out whom the mystery quirk belonged to.)

Izuku always refused to tell them what his quirk actually was. He knew the second they learned what he could do, if they even believed him, they'd be singing a different tune. Plus, he understood the repercussions of having such a weapon at his disposal. Villains could find him. They could find his Mum. No, it was much better to simply say he was quirkless.

So to the rest of the world, he was. Unfortunately for half of his academic peers, he was not.

The first victim of his quirk was one Bakugo Katsuki, his former best friend.

When he turned six and still didn't have a quirk to his name, Bakugo turned on him. He called him worthless: a Deku. Nothing but a disappointment towards his mother. The reason his father went overseas.

Inko herself suggested that they get Izuku checked out. To see a doctor and ask why he hadn't discovered his quirk yet, but he held out. He knew it was irrational, but he didn't want to open the possibility to have some doctor crush his dreams, to confirm his greatest fear. He didn't want it to be final.

So he kept delaying. He gave his mother every excuse he could to push it back. Either he had too much homework, or it didn't actually matter to him and would have wasted money to check. Or sometimes he just grunted when she brought it up and didn't commit to anything.

Eventually, she backed off, realising that if Izuku wasn't pushing her to go check, then there really wasn't a reason to look.

So weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, and soon Inko had simply changed the registry from 'Unknown' to 'N/A'.

Of course, this only added more fuel to the fire for Bakugo and his cronies. To them, what they had always known had been confirmed. Izuku was a quirkless nobody. On his eleventh birthday, the spiky-haired idiot took it upon himself to give Izuku a little present, and not the kind wrapped with a pretty bow.


"DEKU!"

Izuku jumped in his red shoes, clutching the straps of his backpack tightly. "Y-Yeah Ka-Ka-Kacchan?"

"It's your birthday today, isn't it?" His lips pulled back in a cruel sneer.

He nodded fearfully. "Y-Yes."

"Well, we thought we'd be nice and give you a gift since no one else would ever waste the effort on a dumb Deku like you."

Izuku was thoroughly shocked. "R-R-Really?"

Bakugo and his flunkies cackled like he had said the funniest joke in existence.

"Yup!" Katsuki confirmed, raising his crackling palms. "They're called BIRTHDAY LUMPS! Grab him!"

By the time Izuku realised he should have run, his forearms had been locked behind his back, his struggles doing little to aid his escape. He felt the warmth of salty tears running down his cheeks, his eyes unnaturally bright in the shade.

"ONE!" Pain burst from his side, shooting up his chest and forcing all the breath out of him. Izuku felt something stirring deep within in.

"TWO!" Bright lights flashed in his vision and he felt something impact his skull above his left temple. The feeling grew stronger; his eyes started to burn. He clenched them shut, but it only seemed to make the dryness worse.

"THREE!" Green flooded his field of view.

"W-Woah, what the heck!? Bakugo? DUDE HIS EYES!"

Bakugo's shock at his glowing eyes seemed to dissolve into an unbridled rage. "So you got a quirk, huh? And all you can do is make your eyes glow? YOU GOT TO BETTER THAN THAT AGAINST ME DEKU! TAKE ME SERIOUSLY! FOUR!"

He threw his hand forward as usual, but instead of a fist, he was thrusting palm first, smoke trailing from his hand.

Izuku's eyes pulsed once more before blinking off.

Blinding light blew out his retinae. Blistering pain stabbed him in his ears.

Burning flesh invaded his nostrils.

Someone was screaming…

His throat was raw…

Was it him?

Black.

When Izuku woke up it felt like he had been sleeping in a church bell. Red lights went off like firecrackers. He could feel the rough canvas beneath him. He was on a stretcher?

Someone was asking him a question.

Or was it two people? They kept shifting he couldn't keep track.

He tried to lift his head, but something was holding it down. Weird. He couldn't feel anything. He could have sworn he saw a familiar spiky head of blond hair on another stretcher.


Two hours after they arrived at the hospital, Bakugo succumbed to his injuries. Served the knobhead right. Seriously, getting offended because he thought that Izuku's quirk being lame was a personal attack on him? What an asshat.

After leaving him for dead behind the rubbish bins, Bakugo's homosexual harem stopped sucking his dick and they left together, laughing at Izuku's painful misfortune. They were so busy celebrating his dire existence that they hadn't been paying attention and because the vengeful hedgehog would never consider something as plebeian as walking alongside his two followers, only he caught the tail end of a tumbling bus. It smacked him like the mosquito he was over the divider and into an oncoming convoy of Priuses, now with top of the line shock absorption. Apparently, the Prime Minister was in town, and the government's attempts at being somewhat eco-friendly whilst still keeping the politician safe led to three and a half cars barely noticing a squishy mass of human underneath their treads.

They only stopped due to a cat that had been crossing the street, not realising that that same cat had caused a certain bus driver to lose control mere moments before.

When they finally peeled Bakugo off of the undercarriage of Prius number four, it was a miracle he was even breathing at all. He was just that stubborn.

Of course, Izuku had no idea that he had anything to do with the bully's demise. How could he? Anyone at the scene clearly saw that Bakugo's death was a freak accident; the chain of events leading up to it was just far too coincidental to be planned. Too many random acts of unfavourable chance.

After further investigation, it was revealed that the cat was only crossing the street to chase a skittering mouse, one that had evacuated the clutches of a seven-year-old primary student. The rodent made its daring escape while the child bugged out after stepped in a pile of questionable make and origin. Though it didn't end there. The dominoes went on and on.

Two months later, a heavyset teacher that Izuku especially didn't like stopped showing up for school. Apparently, he discovered that he had advanced brain cancer and jumped off a bridge to avoid the pain of chemotherapy, but he misjudged the height and survived, badly broken, floating in the water. When he crawled onto the shore and passed out, someone mistook him for a small whale in the dark. As any good Samaritan should, they rolled him (with tremendous effort) back into the ocean where he drowned.

A month after his spiteful widow spit on his bloated corpse, arm around her not-so-secret lesbian lover, Bakugo's Crony No. 1 tried to take his master's place as top dog. Creatively, he decided harassing Izuku was the perfect way to assert dominance. That very evening, he tripped on his younger brother's lego, collided with his drunk uncle, spilt alcohol all over himself, and fell into the embers of their fireplace.

And then it kept happening.

Crony No. 2 choked on an unpeeled banana.

The Principle was killed by an escaping villain.

One mean crotchety old janitor ignored his own "Slippery When Wet" sign.

A rude, aggressive cop gave his mother a speeding ticket (after making fun of her weight) and was squashed by a stumbling Mt. Lady's posterior the second he got in his patrol car.

People died after they made eye contact with him. Not always "randomly", but always within a day, and always in some humiliating fashion.

It took three more deaths for him to realise that it had something to do with the green that occasionally invaded his vision. Originally, he assumed it was analogous to the idiomatic red veil over one's eyes, but he was observant enough to notice the pattern.

It took one more for him to start writing down the details of every death so far, and all the ones that followed.

The part of him that yearned to be a hero? It drove him to stop villains in their tracks, whatever the cost. The academic quirk-obsessed analyst? That made him seek them out.

Speaking of, he reached over to the left-hand side of his shelf to grab the most recent notebook. Flipping to a new page, he started to write:

Death No. 73: Shisaki Soku

Quirk: Rainbow Blast (User can fire coloured energy from his body directionally)

Observations:

Quirk Fired from palm Hyp: Blast comes from hand; palm is habit No visible markings on palms, nor physical manifestation of quirk usage No precursory glowing No visible recoil No discolouration of any kind Raised pointed finger multiple times, possibly simply for dramatics Finger blasts would allow for more control Smaller SA=More penetrating power Hyp: Blast must come from palm Raised palm before shouting [See IB] Made no clear attempt to use quirk before raising palm Hyp: Blast can only originate from hairless surfaces Trail and projectile gave off significant heat energy Surfaces with hair could likely catch fire and hurt the user. Even if the quirk itself wouldn't hurt the user, the fires it starts probably could Different kinds of skin req. (?) User was wearing shoes w/o soles Possible Occam's Razor User could possibly not own proper footwear Without recoil, blasts would not improve mobility, though range can be adapted Possible voice activation [See IA2a)] User yelled the phrase "Rainbow Blast, Go!" before firing projectiles Most likely Hanlon's Razor Many public quirk users (heroes, villains, etc) preferred to shout something while performing certain actions Gives the audience something to follow Mortem Zebra trampling Died overnight, no witnesses. Physical Attributes Dishevelled Male Appears to have poly-dynamic hair colour based on outside stimuli. Hyp: Tied to Emotion, similar to a mood ring. Hyp: Relates to quirk use, tying in the colours of the rainbow. Smelly

He underlined that last one for good measure.

Izuku chewed on the end of his pencil, wondering if there was anything else he should jot down. He mulled it over for a minute before shaking his head and shelving the book, tucking the well-worn writing instrument behind his ear.

His head shot up as he heard a crash ring through the halls. He rushed out to the kitchen to see his mother, sprawled out on the floor, clutching her knee. She seemed to surprised to see him home, and a little nervous?

"You didn't oil your ankle, did you?"

Her look of guilt was quickly replaced with motherly indignation. With a twist, she pulled off her right foot and propped the prosthetic on the wall next to her. "You know I don't when I'm not going outside! It's expensive, Izuku. I'm not going to waste it! Not when you've worked so hard."

Izuku had… liberated… the fake foot from a particularly spastic villain after she had shot a grappling hook into her own back (long story). She was in so much pain she never noticed when the budding preteen swiped her advanced prosthetic and scarpered off with it. They would have never been able to afford such a nice one on their own, so Izuku crafted a story about odd jobs for an eccentric engineer. His father tried his best and even got a nice promotion in America to pay for their home and amenities, but Inko's accident put a strain on their semi-tenuous finances, regardless of how little she let it affect Izuku's happiness.

So after a month on the job, the corpses of all the villains he took down were discovered bereft of their wallets and valuables. When he could keep up with them, anyway.

He knew that he couldn't keep lying to his mother forever, but for now, he was content to see her stress lines fade. Even if it was only a little.


"I'm telling you, there has to be a connection!" Naomasa slammed his hands down onto the captain's desk. "The Underworld believes that Musutafu is cursed; that every villain death that happens in our city is the work of a malevolent god, punishing their crimes. But only murderers! Petty burglars, eco-terrorists, money launderers, drug runners! Every lowlife under the sun gets a free pass, but the second they take another's life? They're marked for death. That's a pattern. And where there's a pattern, there's a motive. Where there's a motive…"

"There's a murderer. I know, Tsukauchi. I know. But what could we do?" Assistant Commissioner Asai's oversized nostrils flared. His hair, cemented down with a half-gallon of gel, started to vibrate. "How could I justify the required funds for the task force necessary for bringing this vigilante down? What evidence would I give them? Our collective hunch? The whispered ramblings of villains? We need more, Detective."

The human polygraph smiled. He came prepared. "What about a suspect?"

Asai's beady eyes flashed as his protruding ears perked up. He reached for the file and nodded at Naomasa to continue while he perused.

"In my free time, I've spent the past seven weeks combing through security footage in key areas where the victims were spotted. Do you see what I've circled?"

"Looks to be a kid in a hoodie. Or possibly a very short man."

"Exactly. I'm leaning towards the latter. In this day and age, people come in literally all shapes and sizes. Note the placement of his hands, in his jacket pocket out of sight. The way he ducks away from the camera. Look at the next one."

"That's…"

"Same hoodie. Same posture: hands out of sight, head bowed down. And this." He flipped to the next picture.

"Huh."

"Here too."

Asai pressed his nose into the laminate images. It was fuzzy but plenty clear enough to make out the distinctive jacket and posture.

"He. Keeps. Showing. Up." Naomasa punctuated every word with another photo of the same person from seemingly unrelated cases. "The only thing we're missing is method. We don't have consistent data from the deaths. They aren't even always accidental. But it cannot be a coincidence that this man keeps showing up within a day of the victim's expiration."

Asai folded his hands together and rested his chin on his knuckles. "Within a day?"

"Never longer than twenty-four hours."

The caricature of a man leaned back in his office chair. "Those are parameters. The same individual shows up out of the blue within shouting distance of the victims. Before a full day passes, the vic dies. The method isn't consistent in the slightest, but they do die. All of them. Without fail. What are your projected numbers?"

"I count twenty-seven victims in the past year and a half. I predict the count could be much higher as these killings are very easy to mistake as unrelated."

"So we have nothing?"

"We have a list of appearances too frequent to be accounted for as coincidence. We have the telltale signs of a quirk. And we have twenty-seven victims spanning eighteen cases."

"Eighteen? Not twenty-seven?" Asai raised a comically bushy eyebrow.

Naomasa nodded and pointed to a stack of files clipped together. He pulled the bind off and opened each one. "In three instances, there were multiple victims."

"Multiple victims!?" Hardened locks of hair started to quiver atop his head. "Why didn't you lead with that?"

The detective flushed and straightened his back. "Because these particular deaths are a tad… unusual."


"DEATH COMES TO ALL!"

"Now!"

Izuku froze as four more guys jumped from their hiding places and blocked off his exit. He turned back and flinched away from his latest villain who was grinning stupidly and brandishing a blade. It was a stark contrast from the fearful look of anguish that coloured his featured mere seconds before.

Three of the four ambushers were very large, heavyset men wielding wicked metal bats with barbed wire wrapped around the widest end. They were all snarling at him, standing shoulder to shoulder behind the fourth.

He was much thinner, and by his swagger, it was easy to pick him out as the leader. He had a long purple overcoat and elevated shoes; his face was a deep maroon with white skull imagery over his eyes and jaw. Possibly natural, but more likely paint. A sleek, velvet top-hat adorned his tangled, yarn-like hair. When he spoke it made the vigilante's skin crawl. A cockroach's carapace dragged across a rack of hollow ribs.

Obviously, the leader. No one else would present himself so… creatively.

"So you're the bastard who's been messing with my people."

A chorus of 'yeah's and 'you tell 'em's rang out from the four cronies.

Such wit. Oh, the agonising aluminium-tongued devils.

"This here is our turf. Where d'you get off butting in our business?" he asked, leaning over the teen and baring sickly yellow teeth.

Shaky hands reached for the clouds as Izuku pressed his back against the alley wall. "I-I'm not… I d-didn't…"

"I-I d-didn't…" he mock-blubbered as his goons cackled cruelly at Izuku's expense. "Shut up! I think it's high-time someone taught you a lesson. This is for Snake Hands: get him!"

Two of the brutes rushed him, bats held high above their heads. "Struggle, kid, I dare you."

Izuku screwed his eyes shut and prayed that it would be quick.

He really should have left them open.

The first large man outpaced his friend, but he wasn't looking where he was stepping, far too intent on the green-haired cause of so many of his gang's problems. So it wasn't a shock when his foot went straight into an abandoned takeout bowl of mush.

(Well, it was, but his lack of careful attention certainly didn't help.)

"WhaAAUGH!" He completely lost traction and his heel cracked into the chin of the goon behind him before he overbalanced and fell to the side. A gong rang out through the alley accompanied by a sick crunch when his right temple slammed into the corner of the steel skip.

Izuku's eyes shot open to stare in wonder at the blood splattered on the metal and seeping from his open wound on the pavement. Part of his mind recoiled at the gore, but the rest of him was futilely trying to calculate the odds of such as accident occurring.

"Why you little…" The grunt with a sore jaw seemed intent on blaming Izuku for his mate's unpredictable demise.

Izuku was more than ready to high-tail it out of there, but someone grabbed him from behind and put him in a full-nelson.

"I got him! Time to prove yourself! Give him everything you got, Bruiser!"

He cursed himself under his breath for taking his eye off his original opponent. It was a rookie move that made it obvious he was green. Experienced villains could pick up on that, and suddenly every rat with an axe to grind would be gunning for an easy target.

He had a one-hundred per cent mortality rate, so those dumb enough to stay in Musutafu did their best to prioritise keeping their victims alive, as well as warn off any newbies. It made their jobs exponentially harder, so if they found out they could be rid of him with a focused assault? His body would be dumped in a ditch within the week.

The now-named 'Bruiser' stomped vengefully towards Izuku's struggling form, slipping a pair of steel knuckledusters onto his fingers and popping his joints. His thick veins swelled with started to glow with unidentified power, a swirling cavity of gold energy swimming under the skin of his wrists. He cocked his meaty fist back and was about to slam it into Midoriya's nose when a light blue blur crashed into his snarling teeth, bowling him over. His audible choking quickly faded as he suffocated/ingested whatever the cyan disinfectant was made of.

His restrainer suddenly let go as if the simple contact with Izuku burned him. "Screw this shit! I don't get paid enough to fuck with gods!" He ran from the alley praying that the Emerald Reaper would spare him.

The final burly enforcer was sweating heavily, his beady eyes darting towards the open street, imaging a world where he was far, far away from the grisly scene. Perhaps on a nice nude beach in the far reaches of France…

Izuku was silently observing everything, shell-shocked. Was this the work of his quirk?

Well, obviously, it was, but before that moment, it had never killed anyone other than the original mark. Why would it change and kill indiscriminately now? Was it evolving? This quickly?

And the deaths… They'd been bizarre before but never so… abrupt.

"Well!?" the leader prompted suspiciously, far from oblivious to his employee's anguish.

He gulped audibly and started tiptoeing towards Izuku's trembling body. His eyes were so intent on watching the reaper that he accidentally kicked his coworker's corpse. The amber complexion that had been fading from his forearms lit back up in full force before bursting out his knuckles directly into the goon's shins. His pant-legs were totally shredded and the revealed skin was a sickly, jaundiced yellow, blistering and bubbling around the edges.

He let out a very ladylike squeak and tensed up. "B-boss!" he stammered. "Bruiser's quirk! My shins…"

"So you have a bruise! Go on!"

"It's n-n-not a b-b-b-bruise! His quirk…"

"I don't care what his quirk is!" he interrupted before whipping his hat off his head with a flourish. "I want you to do what you're told!"

Fat tears started welling up in the henchman's eyes. "N-n-no… Boss, please!"

The Boss extracted a small clay figurine roughly in the top-heavy shape of his blubbering bodyguard. "Go! Or I start squeezing."

His sobbing only grew louder as he turned towards Izuku. "Please…" he whispered. "Kill me, quickly"

What possible quirk could make such an able-bodied man panic so terribly as to plead for an easier death? And 'Bruiser' was going to do it deliberately to Izuku?

"GO!"

The man sniffled, wiped away the worst of his tears, and stepped forward.


Asai gaped at Naomasa's deadpan severity. It was so ridiculous, so… stupidly convoluted.

"You're serious." It wasn't a question.

The detective clenched his fists and answered anyway. "As the day is long."

"An unknown quirk, utilised by an unknown assailant, can…" he glanced at the official report whilst counting on his spindly fingers, "…cause random bouts of clumsiness in sturdy men, summon an icy block of blue sewage from the sky, an occurrence, mind you: infinitesimally rare nowadays thanks to modern technology, and finally, force a man's quirk to activate posthumously, another extremely obscure event, turning the third vic's legs into what are effectively landmines, killing both him and the final victim. Do I have that right?"

"Don't forget the fifth man who fled the scene. He tried to kick a can but missed and hit the wall. He angrily hopped on foot into the street and tripped into an oncoming motorbike."

"Of course, let's not forget him."

"As well as every other recorded death in this file. The instances with multiple victims seem to prove this cannot be random chance. There's a menace out there acting as Musutafu's executioner, and he must be stopped!" He slammed his fist into the photos with righteous fury.

Asui pursed his puffy lips and leaned back in his chair, spent. "Alright, Detective," he finally growled. "You'll get your task force. Now, get out."

Naomasa popped his fedora back on his head, gave the captain a stiff bow and left.

'I'm coming for you, Jade Reaper,' he thought. 'Your murderous days are over.'


So far as Izuku could tell, Hourglass never grew stronger. From the very beginning, his morbid power was maxed out. The events set in motion by his quirk were always set in stone, and any bout of chance was simply given a push. His quirk didn't kill people. He activated it, and people died. No one could appreciate the difference better than the Reaper.

Due to that particular semantic, his quirk couldn't be stopped. The parameters of the quirk had to be met after it was activated. Since the vigilante was the source of the quirk's dominion over probability, any threat to him had to be eliminated for the original directive to be met.

He thanked his lucky stars he hadn't been targeted by quirk-suppressing-capable police officers or the Underground Hero Eraserhead.

It wasn't capture he was afraid of.

This is why he stuck with murderers, and why the nature of his quirk was so useful. Almost every death appeared unrelated to him. Garnering support to chase after a shadowy undead nightmare certainly wasn't easy, even in a world built atop a foundation of supernatural crime.

Keeping himself as lowkey as possible was essential for his crusade. Unlike Icarus, if he flew too close to the sun, everyone else would plummet down to their grisly demise.


He's cheating.

Tomura barely flinched as the controller in his hand crumbled into desaturated flakes. The ashen-grey dust collapsed into nothing and spilt between his fingers onto the hardwood flooring of their current headquarters: a long-abandoned dive bar.

Fucking FAKE!

HACKER!

Giran finished summarising why he couldn't meet his contracted quota of recruits for the fifth week in a row. He was blaming it all on this… this Reaper.

"I told you when you first roped me in, and I'm telling you now: your numbers aren't realistic. Not here in Musutafu. Not with the Reaper." The broker's teeth were clenched so tightly together he bit his fag cleanly in two. He made an unpleasant face and spit the foul globule onto the floor, crushing the soaked paper under his boot.

Kurogiri, always the calming voice of reason, chimed in. "Are you telling us that the overwhelming force bottlenecking our plans has been the work of a single, unknown man?"

Feeble paranoia flashed across Giran's posture as he slinked into himself and lowered his voice to a whisper. "He's not a man. He's a demon. He literally shapes reality to more creatively slaughter his victims. It's a game to him." He glanced nervously at the door, the same way a hyperactive child fearing the monster in its closet would. "This is why you had to find me in Tokyo! The Reaper's bad for business, and worse for my health. I'd rather take my chances with All Might, any day. At least I'd be alive to tell about it."

Kurogiri hummed. "I was under the impression this Reaper only went after murderers. You may not be an upstanding citizen, but you're no killer."

"Are you fucking whispering!?" Tomura's tentative hold on his temper was seriously strained. Such reverence should be reserved for Sensei. Not some bullshit cheap mini-boss!

He adjusted his coat and wrung his hands. His discomfort was obvious, but he resumed his normal speaking voice. "Sure, I don't get my hands dirty, but I organised hits. Put people in contact with each other, skim a small commission from the middle, you know how it is. I wasn't willing to wait and see if it counts."

Tomura scoffed at the NPC's cowardice. It was one hacker. Ban him and move on. "You used to be worth something. Now you're just a scared rodent running from a kitten." The damn bastard was throwing, and it was pissing him off.

"What if we removed this… Reaper? We have considerable resources. If we dispose of him, could you meet our requirements by the end of the month?" Kurogiri asked, setting a freshly-polished glass down behind him.

Giran snorted and rolled another cigarette. He made a rude face at the bartender's protest while he lifted his lighter-pistol to draw a fresh puff. He blew a ring out the corner of his lips and nodded. "You think you're the first to try? If you pull it off, every street-thug in Japan would flock to your side just to join the winning team. 'Reaped the Reaper.' Put that on your resumé; recruits will be knocking on your door faster than you can warp 'em."


Quirks can be anything and are always changing. These two facts are the only constants in quirk science, and also the plagues of any aspiring scientists.

Breakthroughs are made obsolete within a decade.

Modern information doesn't apply to the past.

Past, long relied-upon studies could be thrown out entirely because of the discovery of a new quirk. Physics. Chemistry. Mechanical Engineering. Even social science doesn't properly reflect how quirks really affect greater society. Nothing makes sense.

Genetics, for example, seems to have completely turned on its head.

I knew a boy when I was younger who could create explosions from his palms. He'd secrete a substance from sweat glands (similar to nitroglycerin but with an amped-up explosive yield) and ignite it with a single twitch of a muscle in his wrist. He seemed perfect for hero-work and was groomed as such until a tragic accident took him from his family. But it's actually his family we should focus on.

The mother is thirty-eight years old but could easily pass for her late-teens/early-twenties if she wished. She is due to her body secreting glycerine, an odourless, viscous liquid used to soothe burns for its antiviral/antimicrobial properties.

The father, on the other hand, sweats an acidic compound with a very low flashpoint. He can reach the required heat necessary for combustion just by rubbing his hands together.

Two quirks; two parents. The only similarity they share is that they somewhat affect the skin.

And yet together they created a quirk capable of levelling skyscrapers. With some training, of course.

There is something distinctively human about the way quirks are combined, and the implications of that statement are far-reaching and world-breaking. I'm not going to go there.

Instead, I started writing these little blurbs to focus on the quirks themselves. I find them fascinating. The science of how they work is truly impossible to understand, contradictory and upside-down at every turn, but if I'm right, and if the way they're constructed truly is by something's (or perhaps someone's) design, we can study that.

We can move beyond science, and go straight to reality.

—Questionable Quirk


And… post.

Izuku finished filling out the "About Me" portion of his new website/blog and turned back to the actual content, dragging his very first notebook in front of him.

Stealing from villains was all well and grand but he needed a stable job.

Unfortunately, vigilante work took up enough of his life that he realised he only had two marketable skills: violence and quirk study.

The former was rather obvious, but the latter was a bit of an unforeseen boon of his chosen lifestyle. He spent years trying to learn everything he could about his quirk. The conditions. The triggers. Especially the execution. Accepting that his quirk was literally inexplicable was one of the hardest things he ever had to do.

But in his quest to know everything he could, he also learned about the quirks of his opponent, desperately hoping that his targets somehow held the answer.

He quickly found that correctly analysing quirks was both extremely satisfying as well as useful.

However, the laws around quirk counselling were arcane and quite classist. The certification process wasn't just stupidly expensive: you also needed to be sponsored by an existing certified counsellor. As such, quirk counselling was considered an opulent luxury offered only to society's elite.

So Izuku decided he wouldn't be a quirk counsellor. Instead, he'd be quirk blogger. He'd just also offer to have people pay him for personalised blog posts about their quirk. This would incidentally make all of his advice public. Hopefully, that wouldn't limit his audience too much.


Eijiro was despondent.

Two girls were in trouble, at the bitter mercy of a villain, and what did he do?

Nothing.

He just stood there, gaping like a dead fish.

And his quirk? He could be replaced with a rock. It literally wouldn't have made a difference. How could he ever hope to be a hero? How would he even dare try?

If by some miracle he did make it in, he'd constantly be overshadowed by people who were better prepared and better suited for their lot in life.

So it was with a heavy head and a heavier heart that he walked into his favourite café, fully prepared to make a valiant attempt at getting blitzed off of coffee (the contradictory nature of the concept notwithstanding).

As he was nursing his fourth mug a crumpled, peeling poster caught his eye, tacked up to a local announcement board on the opposite wall from the counter.

"Want to learn more about your quirk? Maybe get a couple ideas on how to use it? Send information about your unique ability through . Reality of Quirks is a blog dedicated to everything quirk-related, and if you're one of the first fifty to donate your quirk to our site you can get a personalised blog post about it!

"**NO PERSONAL INFORMATION NOT PERTAINING TO THE QUIRK WILL BE RELEASED WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE DONOR.**"

Eijiro couldn't take his eyes off of the paper. "One of the first fifty", huh? How many signed up? People tended to be rather private with their quirks, but that was mostly because they weren't exactly used all the time. The average person rarely did much with their quirk at all.

He reached into his bag and pulled his phone, absently sipping his cooling drink while typing one-handed.

… -F-Q-U-I-R-K-S… the URL prompted an auto-fill to take him straight to the site. The UI was pleasant and sleek, with a scrolling image of a newspaper blurred in the background, though it was much clearer in the margins. Eijiro could vaguely make out the familiar forms of the top ten heroes in Japan, as well as a few from Europe, North America, even one from Australia.

There were seventeen posts. Less than he was originally expecting, but it made sense now that he thought of it. Why would the site be asking for quirks to talk about if they already had a steady audience? They were obviously new.

At this point, he was decently invested. He tapped on a random post and starting reading:

Last time I asked you guys to vote on the next hero I write about, and you chose the silver-haired shinobi with a resounding 48% lead. Onward!

Based on interviews and my own observations, the No. 5 Ranked Ninja Hero: Edgeshot's quirk 'Foldabody' is a misnomer, as many hero quirks are. Whether this is due to ignorance or a PR move, the fact remains that Edgeshot does not, nor has he ever, folded his body to become the razor-thin wire/flexible blade that he can be.

Think about it. If you take a leaf of paper and fold it in half, its thickness doubles. No matter how hard you crease it, it will always be thicker than when you started. Edgeshot can make any part of himself flat and razor-thin, certainly thinner than he was before engaging his quirk. Therefore, he can't be folding anything.

However, at the thicknesses he's shown himself to be capable of, a slight breeze should be able to snap him. The fact that he can use them in combat suggests that the wire itself is either indestructible(or close enough) or unfathomably dense.

I've concluded it can't be the latter.

The most basic/common explanation for a denser wire/mesh is that he is being compressed into that thickness (think Mr Molehill; he can expand or compress the space between his molecules, thus weakening or strengthening himself respectively). If this is true, that at best he could turn into a lumpy stick-figure, not a cohesive, prehensile thread. That's not to say he couldn't do that if he wanted to. More on that later.

No, what he's doing is clearly more complicated than that.

I propose his quirk is actually in two parts.

One: he can flatten and stretch any part of his body, in that order.

Two: the tensile strength of his body increases inversely to how thin he becomes. I'll leave the how up to someone else's headache.

I guess you could call his telepathic control of his body while in that state a third facet of the quirk, but I consider it an aspect of the first part.

Now I'll leave you on a final note, as I've now done the past three posts, on the costume and equipment. Last time I gave my insight on the R18 Hero: Midnight's costume. If your interested, check out that post here, or scroll down in the home page and give it a read. I had fun with it. This time I'm not actually going to make any suggestion, but I want to talk about his clothes and accessories.

Far as I can tell, they don't help him or hurt him in any way, but what happens to them when he turns into his wire/mesh form? It seems obvious, they don't go anywhere, but if he can control them with the same vitality he controls himself, where does it end? The cloth could be made from his hair or based off its makeup somehow, that's relatively common, but from the high-res photos I could gather his costume is more than cloth.

I counted around fifteen silver studs, four bronze ones, and his iconic demon-face pauldron on his right shoulder. What are they made of? Definitely not hair.

I don't think I have to explain the implications if his costume transforms with him because he's touching it.

Anyway, that was Edgeshot. You all seemed to really like the voting idea, so I'm going to set Fridays as the Readers' Choice. Every week, I'll compile a list of the most liked hero/villain requests. You guys will be able to cast your vote until Thursday so I have time to write and proofread. As always, the weekend is me-time, but come Monday we're back in the swing of things with three reader-submitted quirks!

See you then, and stay safe out there!

—QQ

Eijiro had to pick his jaw up from off the floor. It… it was perfect.

He had to submit his quirk.


A/N: Lemme know what you think.