New heroes often despise the media. Some criticize the glorification of violence and danger. Others think reporters are useless hangers-on. Parasites feeding off reflected fame.
Experienced heroes disagree. Long experience teaches them the necessity of the symbiotic relationship. Without their mythmakers, heroes are just dangerous madmen wearing spandex.
News agencies receive word of an ongoing villain attack from their hero agency contacts. Thickset men smoking cigars make hurried calls. Helicopter crews get scramble alerts. Interns plumb social media to verify what, where, and when. Reporters apply makeup and camera crews double check their gear. They'll figure out the "who" and the "why."
Endeavor wraps up an interview early. He steps backstage. One of his dispatchers gives him a hurried report about a "developing situation."
Pilots fill their instrument panels with coordinates. Rotors begin to spin.
Endeavor and his intern take off from the Endeavor Agency roof. His sidekicks stay behind to hold down the fort.
Endeavor touches down in front of Musutafu Penitentiary. Circling helicopters capture every visual detail.
But in terms of audio, they're out of luck. Helicopter pilots are a risk-taking bunch, but none of them have a death wish. News station executives beg their pilots by radio to fly closer. None of them have any clue what's going on, and they all want to be the first to know.
They'd thought the MLA moribund. Obsolete. Irrelevant. They'd been wrong. And worse: they'd been ignorant . A news agency could commit no greater sin.
The MLA hadn't been collapsing. It had been entrenching . Hero agencies, support device manufacturers, industrial concerns, news agencies. All under its control. Where did their influence end?
"The media" is no monolith. Personification fails to capture the complexity of all its feuding, squabbling tribes. Reporters and journalists and managers and stakeholders, each with their own conflicting goals.
And yet, "the media" knows this - that it must redeem itself. It must restore authority. It must come up with explanations, comforting or otherwise.
It looks for principal actors. It looks for motivations. It looks for backstories, and settings, and points of view.
To executives in boardrooms-
To politicians in the Diet-
To investors in the Tokyo Stock exchange-
It broadcasts a narrative.
An attack, more brazen than any before. Escalation after escalation, all leading to this.
Breathless rumors about Re-Destro leading an attack against the Diet? Dismissed. A feint. This, the reporters agreed, was the real action.
An audacious liberation of an entire prison. Masterminded and executed by a revolutionary with charisma unseen since Destro himself.
The helicopters record nothing of the conversation between Rat and Endeavor. But luckily for posteriority, someone does: a meek, twelve-eyed high school student.
His video and audio recording equipment are almost as amateur as he is. And his courage lasts only long enough to turn it all on.
He dives to the ground, covers his head with his hands, and starts shivering in fear. But before it gets knocked over by a stray attack, his video camera manages to capture a single, perfect frame.
Out of the millions of frames of video taken of the fight, it'll be this shot, born of the perfect confluence of luck and timing, that gets put first in the news articles, and then in the history books.
In the foreground is blogger-turned-revolutionary, rhetorician and rabble-rouser: Rat. In proportion, he's well shorter than the people surrounding him- pro hero Endeavor, and high school student Midoriya Izuku, a young boy with green hair and dog ears.
Rat stands with the upright posture of Man. But his large head, expressive eyes and sleek, gray fur give him the impression of being an altogether more neotenous creature. He wears a rumpled school uniform: a black jacket, white shirt, and blue dress pants. Each of those items are both unwashed and far too large for his diminutive frame. A stubby, bewhiskered snout and two round, hairless ears complete his features. In any other context, he might have been nonthreatening, or even adorable. Less like a rodent aping a human than an animated stuffed animal.
But his reputation looms much larger than he does, and the threat he poses looms larger still.
This isn't the first time he's been in the national news. Or the second.
In fact, at some point between times three and four, a local syndicate had run a full news segment on him. The most salient part, the part clipped from the show and made viral by notoriety, is a sequence of three interviews.
The first begins with a boy. He has dyed-blond hair and an unbuttoned highschool uniform.
"He was always a fighter," he says. "He never hurt you in a way that left marks… but he did hurt you." The boy looks away from the camera, and there's silence for a few seconds.
Another boy leans in, and roughly pats his friend's shoulder. "He sent my buddy here to a psych ward. Over a toy."
The second interview takes place in a put-together apartment. Two adults sit together on a couch. The man sits to the woman's right, and holds her right hand in his. Both lean towards the camera.
"That boy was never right in the head," says the man. A black bar appears on the bottom of the screen, and identifies him as "JUNICHIRO'S FATHER."
"He came out of the womb with that quirk, and never once hesitated to use it. Nearly killed my wife when she gave birth: froze her in place in the middle of a contraction. The way she screamed…" He shakes his head.
The woman speaks up. Another black bar appears, emblazoned with "JUNICHIRO'S MOTHER."
He used to find and catch small animals. Rats or squirrels, usually. He'd find them near park trashcans, make them stop breathing… Said it was for practice! To torture them, more like. I've heard that people on the internet think we started calling him 'Rat', because he looked like one. But we're not monsters," she says, a pleading tone sneaking into her voice. "We never chose to call him that. But we had to yell at him to let go of whatever critter he was menacing so often… it was easier to get his attention with the word 'Rat' than his own name. We tried discipline, but it didn't make him stop. It just made him secretive."
The third interview features a woman with lobster claws for hands. She stands in front of a whiteboard covered with roman letters and katakana.
"He was the smartest student I ever had, and also the worst. He was fluent in English. Far beyond the level of a native- more like a motivational speaker or a poet. But he refused to do homework and intentionally failed his tests. My friend Aki- his math teacher- told me he acted the same way in her class. Like he was so much smarter than us, so much better educated, that it was a waste of time for him to even be in school. I heard the only subjects he ever enjoyed were Japanese writing and literature."
The people who record history, create it. And eventually, when people think of "Junichiro," they think of those three short clips. Analyzed. Quoted from. Cited in studies and history textbooks. Time crystallizes that news broadcast. Though the video gets played backwards and forwards, the moments within it become frozen and sterile.
But as Toshiharu's camera captures its fateful image, things are still all too fluid.
A helicopter's camera zooms in on the scene. A helicopter pilot has, finally, been goaded into audio range.
Rat stands in front of the prison. With his allies, his hostages, his released prisoners, and the backing of the MLA.
Bakugou doesn't give a shit.
Rat has just enough time to yell, "Get Eraser Head!" before Bakugou attacks.
Bakugou sets himself on a path not around, but through Toshiharu. Only Todoroki's quick thinking saves the boy. A towering pillar of ice forces Bakugou to divert from his intended path.
He skims inches above the ground, staying aloft with the power of small explosions. From his position he launches drops of sweat towards Rat. Todoroki blocks the first few, but Rat redirects him to another part of the fight. "Get Eraser Head!" Rat tells him, with Izuku's voice. With his own, he orders the villains to attack.
And then Rat lets loose.
Rat has no practice with Endeavor's quirk, and consequently very little finesse.
But superior firepower covereth a multitude of sins.
Todoroki fights to freeze Cementoss's pillars of cement as they emerge from the ground. Villains run, jump, slide, and fly around the constantly changing terrain. Aizawa pulls himself away from the fight with his capture tape. He's multitasking: his quirk trips up villains with mobility quirks as he looks for a better vantage point. Midnight uses her own quirk as a front-line defense against the charging villains. Only the most susceptible fall asleep, but even the hardiest have their reflexes slowed.
Rat counters Bakugou blast for blast. They scour their corner of the battlefield with flames.
A long-range microphone captures snippets of their conversation. Rat alternatively tries to reason with and threaten Bakugou, to no avail. Whether due to the volume of the fight or Bakugou's own stubborn intransigence this last ditch attempt at diplomacy fails.
Rat remains rooted in place by the need to control both Endeavor and Izuku. Bakugou flits around the battlefield like an arsonist hummingbird.
The news anchor notes that Bakugou is perhaps the worst type of enemy for Rat to face. Not just because of the type and strength of Bakugou's quirks, but because he seems to be completely incapable of responding rationally to threats.
A stray blast knocks Saiai off her feet. She cries out, and Rat's expression of fear morphs into an expression of rage.
No longer content to defend, Rat begins to attack. The camera zooms in further. It captures a shot of Rat screaming as the heat of his own assault blisters Endeavor's skin and lights patches of Rat's fur on fire. He scorches the penitentiary's cement, setting off alarm after alarm, trying to catch Bakugou with a stream of fire.
To no avail.
Bakugou backs away, avoiding the attack. Rat turns up the output, one more time.
The volume of fire threatens to lay waste not just to Bakugou, but to the miles of forest behind him- and to the penitentiary itself.
But then Endeavor's flames gutter out. Rat looks towards Izuku and towards his sister.
A threat? The newscaster speculates. Worry for his sister's safety? An aversion to causing more civilian casualties, out of some last vestige of morality?
In the brief lull Bakugou's distance affords her, Saiai pushes herself up off her feet. Tears and snot drip down her face, and a nasty, though shallow scrape covers her left knee. Thin lines of blood criss-cross her arms, cheeks and forehead, left by debris kicked up by Bakugou's explosions.
Bakugou rushes towards Rat once more, propelling himself with more speed and rage than ever before. But where all of Rat's threats and pleading had failed, Saiai manages to stop him with a single sentence.
"Useless fucking Deku!" she shouts.
A single mistimed explosion sends Bakugou tumbling. He comes to a rest just within the range of Rat's tails.
And then the cavalry arrives.
Hawks and Ryuku arrive by air. Ingenium, by road. Kamui Woods rides on Mount Lady's shoulder.
They bring with them their sidekicks- a menagerie of minor heroes, clad in colorful costumes and employing a variety of simple, flashy quirks.
But before they can join the fight, overwhelming Rat's forces, Swirling portals appear in the air. And through them come Re-Destro, Iceman, and Slidin' Go. The MLA's infantry follows: a mismatched but sizable army of fanatics and lunatics, brandishing all manner of ugly, dangerous, unstable, and uncontrollable powers.
Trumpet's voice rings out, shouting encouragement to the MLA. His words get drowned out by maniacal, high-pitched laughter when a colossal robot drops out of the sky.
Rat turns his attention back towards Bakugou-
- but it's already too late. The distraction had bought the trainee hero just enough time to get to his feet.
He raises a gauntlet, and aims it towards Rat.
Endeavor's power begins to activate. But slow, far too slow, when slaved to the dull reflexes of a high school delinquent instead of the #1 pro hero.
Bakugou's gauntlet flashes. Stendhal jumps in front of it.
The blast knocks Rat flat-
-and disintegrates Stendhal. Like a grenade being set off in the middle of a red velvet cake.
One of Rat's tendrils, barely visible on the camera, spears into Bakugou's leg.
Bakugou freezes, then drops to his knees, then collapses fully to the ground. He begins to writhe and scream. As if drawing power from Bakugou's suffering, Rat rises. He pants in exhaustion, and his expression, once angry, once panicked, has been replaced with a blank, out-of-focus look.
Endeavor's body spasms, and he joins Bakugou in convulsing. Izuku starts to twitch- and then Rat's three hostages go still.
Enterprising MLA members have breached holes in the prison, from which prisoners stream out of. Former prisoners, now. Some join the fray, but most run.
Kamui Woods and Mount Lady hold back Iceman and Slidin' Go. Ingenium and the sidekicks fight lower-level MLA members and collect the wounded- like Eraserhead and Midnight- to transport away from the fight. Nezu's robot is in pieces, and the UA principal is nowhere to be found.
With a final blast of ice, Todoroki concludes his duel with Cementoss. He leaves the hero frozen in place, suspended above the ground with only a small hole to breathe out of.
He turns, and sees his father under Rat's control.
The conversation drops to a pitch too low for the helicopter crew to pick up, but lip reading software automatically generates subtitles for the audience's benefit.
"What have you done to him?" asks Todoroki.
Rat and his puppets stop walking, but not fighting. Endeavor continues to let loose jets of flame as Rat considers the damage he's made Endeavor inflict to himself.
Angry burns cover Endeavor's arms, and towards his extremities his costume has entirely burned away. Ash drifts away from the stump of his arm. Skin, carbonized by the heat of his own flames.
"Very little," says Rat, "compared to what he did to your eldest brother a few days ago."
"To Natsuo?"
"To Toya."
"Toya is alive!?"
"He was ."
In the span of seconds, a sequence of expressions race over Todoroki's face. Confusion. Epiphany. Anger. "How did you…" Todoroki looks towards the fight. "No, I'll get my answers later. I always wanted to… planned to take down Endeavor myself. I see, now, that the task was better suited for your hands."
Rat looks up towards the sky. "What was it that Stendhal said, when we met?" He looks back towards Todoroki. "Ah, yes. 'Violence is an individual fighting alone. Justice is brothers in arms fighting together.'" He closes his eyes, and Endeavor's flames cut off. Rat takes a deep breath.
"Where is he?" asks Todoroki.
"The next life." Rat looks towards Bakugou with a hateful look.
Todoroki looks shocked. "I never thought I'd have to mourn him," he says and scowls.
Rat narrows his eyes and lets out a bitter laugh. "I didn't either. Let's end this fight. You'll have plenty of time to bond with Dear Old Dad after it's over."
Todoroki nods, and the pair turn their attention back to the fight.
For now, the combat is at a low ebb. Heroes and villains disengage to reorganize themselves and evacuate the wounded.
Hawks and Ryuko circle Re-Destro, but make no attempt to attack him. Hawk's plumage is beginning to look quite thin, and Ryuko cradles a crushed forelimb.
Re-Destro's enormous figure sports a variety of gashes. Deep injuries that leak and gush blood. He's crouched down, muttering something to himself. The battlefield is silent, save for the wailing of the injured.
Re-Destro looks up, and notices Rat and Todoroki. His face lights up, into a broad, manic smile. He pushes himself off the ground, in the process levering out a large boulder with his hands. He hefts it and looks towards the heroes. "And so another number one bites the dust! Rally, my brothers, in the name of liberation! Raise once more your-"
"-ENOUGH!" Rat yells, with four voices. "We have what we came for. More violence won't change anything." He's pleading by the end of his outburst, but with his threefold vocal accompaniment the effect is more eerie than plantitive.
Re-Destro creases his eyebrows, and takes a moment to collect himself. In doing so, he seems to gain another meter of height, and the black texture of his quirk entirely darkens his face.
"We are on the cusp ," he says, "of achieving everything Destro ever wanted. Of achieving everything you ever wanted. And you'd have us stop now?"
"Yes!"
There's a flash of realization on Rat's face, and he looks to his left and right. To the heroes he's captured, to the allies he's made, and to the subordinates he's suborned. And then he looks directly into the camera. The camera that had been following, not Re-Destro, not Hawks, not any of the smaller scuffles between heroes and villains, but him, the entire time.
Re-Destro tries again. "You are a soldier of the MLA, and I order you to fight!" There's a desperate edge to his voice.
The heroes are getting antsy, but Hawks keeps his allies back from the fight with his feathers. He covers his mouth and says something into a communicator. Later, transcripts provided by his agency to the press confirm him parroting a quotation from Napoleon Bonaparte.
Rat… ignores Re-Destro entirely. He turns his back to the MLA's leader, and addresses his audience of rebels and revolutionaries directly. "A citizen's duty is to disobey unjust laws! A soldier's duty is to disobey unjust orders! Violence, to save many, is justice. Violence, to serve ego, is pointless ! Re-Destro would sacrifice you for his own ambitions. Re-Destro would sacrifice you to crown himself Emperor. Refuse his subjugation. We are the liberators! Retreat, re-arm, and remove the taint of tyranny from the Meta Liberation Army." Rat flashes the camera a sardonic smile. "And when you're done, come get me from wherever I'm locked up. Until then, I'll hold the heroes off." He and his puppets turn to face the heroes.
By the end of Rat's speech, Re-Destro's skin has turned entirely black with stress.
Re-Destro surveys his troops, and sees their loyalties waver. He sees the doubt in their eyes, and he sees that some have begun to walk backwards, or even turn and show the enemy their backs. Even those too far away to have heard Rat look uncertain and unsure. Re-Destro had given an order. And it wasn't being followed.
Re-Destro looks up, closes his eyes, and pinches the bridge of his nose with his free hand.
"And you showed so much promise, too. How… tragic."
He throws his boulder.
It all happens far too fast. The news stations have to replay it twice for their audience. First at regular speed, and then in slow motion, as if they were broadcasting a highlight from a baseball game.
In the first second, Rat sees Re-Destro wind up. Rat's eyes widen- in shock? In fear? In anticipation?
In the second second, the boulder leaves Re-Destro's hand. It begins its flight. Rat takes three steps forward. Bakugou and Endeavor raise their hands.
In the third second, Rat stops. The boulder reaches the apex of its flight, not even marginally slowed by Endeavor's flame. Explosive sweat launches from Bakugou's gauntlets, but no significant quantity of it manages to strike and deflect the boulder. Under Rat's control, Bakugou's quirk has none of the finesse Bakugou trained so hard to develop.
In the fourth second, Izuku raises his left hand. His index finger and thumb form a circle.
Ice thrusts up from the ground and impacts the boulder. It sends the rock tumbling, but fails to stop it in place.
An instant before it hits Rat and his thralls, an explosion of dust and ice obscures the camera's view of Rat's location. An unseen force shatters the boulder into chunks.
In the fifth second, a shockwave of force shakes every filming camera. A chunk of the boulder tumbles across the ground until striking a tree trunk. It snaps the plant in half as it comes to a violent stop. Sap drips on the cherry-red boulder and turns into pungent smoke, evaporating as it absorbs the leftover heat of Endeavor's flames.
Saiai moves first.
Four bodies lie on the ground. Two stir.
Bakugou rises first, fueled by that same bullheaded stubbornness that had seen him start the fight. He's unharmed, save for a few lines of blood left by fragments of stone.
Izuku stands last. He clutches his left hand to his chest, obscuring the camera's view of his fingers. A dark bruise covers his harm.
Todoroki looks towards Endeavor's fallen form- and then immediately looks away. A shard of stone has embedded itself in Endeavor's right side, tearing open his skin and suit and exposing a mess of gore and intestines. But at a gurgle from his father, he looks back. Almost against his will, he stumbles to his father's side, and takes Endeavor's hand.
Hawks and Ryuku resume their battle with Re-Destro. But none present at the impact site watch the fight. Todoroki excepted, they all focus their attention on Rat.
Bakugou grabs Izuku, and blasts himself and his friend backwards. Izuku as Bakugou's jarring mode of transport jostles his injured arm.
Saiai begins to wail. Bakugou tenses. Izuku takes advantage of his friend's distraction to struggle out of Bakugou's grasp. Izuku stumbles forward, towards Saiai and Rat.
"No!" screams Bakugou. "It's a trap!" He brandishes a gauntlet and manages to summon a few feeble pops, like the last gasp of a sparkler. He takes a step forward, but can't bring himself to move any closer. He gives Rat's fallen form a helpless, enraged look.
Toshiharu stumbles forward, past Bakugou, holding onto his camera like a life preserver.
Saiai leans back, to wail towards the sky. The camera catches its first glimpse of Rat.
His body, from the torso down and from the chin up, is uninjured. No blood stains his clothes.
But something bulges inside his neck, straining against the skin, His expression, once so eerily human, now resembles nothing more than the dead stare of roadkill.
Whatever force shattered the boulder had knocked him back, too. A short flight, and then a quick death.
The cameras continue to roll.
Saiai grieves.
Bakugou runs forward, and catches Izuku when he collapses. Bakugou hoists the body of his friend, and when no one makes a move to stop him, carries it away.
Todoroki lets go of his father's hand. He reaches for Endeavor's face, and with two fingers helps him close his eyes for the last time.
He stands, and looks up towards Re-Destro, in time to see the villain swat Hawks out of the sky. "He's dead!" he yells. "You killed him!"
Re-Destro spares him enough attention to say, "Regrettable. I only wished to-"
Todoroki attacks him.
The villains of the MLA weigh their divided loyalties. Each comes to their own conclusions. Some take Rat's words to heart, and run. Most choose to fight. A few fight the heroes. The rest fight each other.
And in keeping with that ancient wisdom, "divide et impera," the heroes nibble at the edge of both groups. They subdue the fighters on the outskirts as the Meta Liberation Army implodes around its center. Having divided his house against itself, Re-Destro falls to a pillar of ice through his gut.
Saiai and Toshiharu allow themselves to be captured, making no effort to avoid the heroes. Todoroki, however, escapes- entirely against his will- when he's sucked inside a swirling black portal.
The revolution continues. Much happens. Nothing is resolved.
