I was ahead of schedule.

Calling a hitlist a schedule felt strange, but it was accurate. I'd had everything planned out perfectly. Every month would be a new Quirk hunted down, experimented with, fully integrated, and summarily shown off whenever a camera was conveniently present. Word would spread, stories would spread faster, and eventually I would hunt down the next person on my list and repeat the process.

Between needing to hide and also needing to seek, I'd expected there to only be a few weeks before the start of U.A's semester. Staying out of the clutches of the law without leaving behind the kind of damage that wasn't reversible hadn't struck me as something to be done lightly.

You couldn't make an omelette without heating up the pan. You could, however, very quickly fuck up an omelet if you decided to cook it by setting it on fire.

You also couldn't make an omelette without eggs. In this case the eggs would have been heroes. And I would have been starving with my silverware in hand, because if I didn't know any better, I would have sworn that they were all avoiding me.

My motorbike wasn't silent. Riding it all around the country should have brought more attention than it did. And yet, not once was I accosted. Even when I was riding through towns, adhering to the rules of the road and everything, not even the patrolling capes would approach me. It didn't happen very often, but the lack of a helmet should have warranted at least an attempted ticket.

It was the hair. It had to be. Every single time I would find myself in the crosshairs of the law, one look at the top of my head would have them backing off.

Sometimes they'd pull out phones and start either taking pictures of talking frantically to whoever was on the other end. Weird as hell, but so was basically everything else in this reality.

"You seriously don't know who's called dibs on your ass, purple guy?"

What I'd initially assumed would take eight months had taken three. Two months to get precisely where I needed to be had suddenly turned into seven months of having nothing to do. That had led to me idly rolling along an abandoned mountain road in the Aoi Ward, which had then led to me dialling up the man who had probably become my closest friend in this life.

"Dibs? You can call dibs?" He laughed at me, the unhelpful asshole. His voice carried out of the phone and across the idyllic little clearing I'd found, my bike currently compressed between my third and fourth ribs and my feet kicking idly through the shallow waters of the lake I'd found. "And what did you just call me?"

"One journalist called you the Purple Man and the name stuck." I could tell Twice was sitting in his favourite chair by the way the leather squeaked as he moved around. It hadn't even been part of the house when we moved in; if Manami's grumbling in the background during our first call was anything to go off, it had been left out on someone's front yard to be collected as trash. "Man doesn't really suit ya though, you're more a guy. Purple guy."

I hummed, lifting a rock with a strand of hair and flicking it across the water's surface. I'd overhauled the surface of it a little bit before sending it off, and yet despite that the result was four skips before it sank underneath the waves.

I must have been out of practice.

"Well, I am the man behind the slaughter."

"What?"

"Nothing, just a joke from a while ago." A few centuries ago to be exact. "Not important though. Who the hell called dibs on me?"

Was bounty hunting a thing? I couldn't remember. I had to be worth a lot, though, nobody would be able to look at this face and not shell out the big bucks. My head would look phenomenal atop some asshole's mantle. I'd have to ensure my final expression before I was taxidermied was something appropriately insulting.

"Giran hasn't told you yet? Huh." The leather squeaked again. Something creaked ominously, going completely ignored. Maybe I'd visit the house again soon, that chair sounded like it could use some restoration. "He was here earlier with his daughter, figured he would have been in touch with you before that."

Giran had been to the house? Wait. "Giran's daughter is real?"

"Yeeeaaaah? He adopted her ages ago after her parents were killed by some teenager going nuts with his Quirk." I stayed quiet, reaching for another stone as, with a final groaning honk, the chair was abandoned. The near silent shuffling of his shoes on the carpet morphed abruptly into the clicking of his heels on tile, and I could tell that he'd made his way into the kitchen. "Ain't she the one that he's trying to hook you up with? Figured you would have done your research."

That was the problem, I had done my research, and come up with nothing. Giran knew how to cover his tracks better than I would ever be able to uncover them, and it also didn't help that my primary resource for finding shit out was asking Giran about it.

"What was she like?" I had absolutely no doubt that Giran knew I was nowhere near the house. I also had absolutely no doubt that he was smarter than to try going around my back to pull something underhanded. If he wanted something from me he had all the leverage he would need to try to force me into it, so what was the point of making his daughter's face known to anyone I could call a friend?

I wasn't the only one with grand plans, it seemed.

"Pretty." Came the immediate reply. Twice could probably see my exasperation from the kitchen given how hard I rolled my eyes. "Dark hair, kinda funky teeth. She spent most of her time here playing with Eri. I don't think she liked Gentle much either."

That… told me nothing, really. "Did she have a name?"

"Probably."

I could actually hear some kind of bug chirping in the trees while I sat there for a moment and waited. "...Probably?"

"She never said what her name was and he never introduced her."

"The fuck?" The next stone, finally etched down to perfection, skipped thirteen times. The success was somewhat marred by my inability to enjoy it, my knees clicking as I climbed to my feet, stepped away from the water's edge, and ran a hand through some errant strands of hair that had stuck to my shoulders.

What the hell was the point of withholding her name? It didn't matter if she was a felon; everyone in that house over the age of six had broken the law. Was it her idea, or was it her fathers'?

Or, perhaps she wanted to be something a bit more dangerous to us all than a villain. That would be just my luck right now, wouldn't it.

Nothing could ever be simple, could it?

I sighed, reaching through my body and grabbing the metallic shell of my motorbike with Overhaul. Constructing it got quicker every time as I grew more used to the shape it would take in my mind, different infinitesimal pieces that if missing or misplaced separately could spell disaster for the finished project no longer an issue. Every odd quirk in its design and divot in its steel was imprinted more thoroughly in my imagination than even my own body at this point.

It was while I was drawing the rubber for the tires up from where I'd packed it away between the muscles in my thighs that I'd noticed it. The bubbling of the water and whistling of the slight wind through the grass was constant, ever present in the world and uncaring of those around them. But the insects? The rustling of things bigger than what the wind could move on its own? Those had gone silent.

Usually, there was only one thing that could make animals in the wild go silent. And that was when there was something around that they really didn't want to be found by.

I pulled my bike inwards, Muscular's stolen Quirk sparking to life in a way that thrilled it and usually sent an uncomfortable tingle through my stomach. The muscle fibres of my body erupted, Overhaul snatching them and compressing them down much further than my understanding of physics should have allowed. I shouldn't have been able to move with how dense my own muscles had become, and in the blink of an eye I'd doubled or perhaps even tripled that amount.

Just in time, too. Even with the absurd level of defensive tissue in my body, I could still feel the foot that had just collided with the side of my ribcage. My bones, far more brittle than anything else I had in there, rattled ominously with the collision, that single kick alone being enough to necessitate a quick Overhaul to keep them from splintering.

Though I was no longer in the water, the force of the impact sent a visible ripple across its surface. The foot withdrew, and it was only an accurate prediction mixed with an awful lot of luck that I managed to raise my free hand and catch the second kick aimed at the side of my head by the ankle.

Slowly, wary of any following attacks, I turned around. Unbalanced though I may have been, now with my hair rooting me to the ground, I had no issue with tangling it around my assailant's other foot as it dropped down towards me in an axe kick. Brutally efficient and very likely to end the fight in a single move, that was definitely something I could respect.

The face staring back into my own was tanned, with white hair that was striking in both its appearance and familiarity. She looked far less stressed than last time, an odd occurrence considering I was now holding her up physically as opposed to figuratively.

"Hey buddy, I'm gonna have to call you back."

Mirko, already staring incredulously at her own trapped legs, zeroed in on the phone I was still holding with narrowed eyes. Her struggling, which up until that point hadn't even managed to move my arm, picked up with renewed fervour.

My grip on her ankle tightened. Her movement stopped, her face flushing pink with what was probably anger. I could tell by the way her teeth were sinking into her lower lip that she wanted to scream at me in rage, but the manners that came with being a hero wouldn't allow her to interrupt my phone call.

"Why's that?"

"I just figured out who called dibs on me."

"How did you-pfft!"

Apparently I couldn't end the call soon enough. Twice's snort rang out across the lake, probably having grasped the situation far quicker than I ever could. Now I had a hero in my hands whose face was rapidly moving to a deeper shade of red, no doubt a result of her legendary temper after someone basically laughed in her face. Thanks a lot, Twice, you prick.

Even so, it would have been a lot easier to figure out what to do if she would say something. I couldn't read the expression on her face as she looked between the hand holding her ankle and the side of my chest where she had kicked me. She wouldn't even look me in the eyes, defiant to the end even in the grasp of a dastardly villain such as myself.

Really though, what was I supposed to do? I couldn't exactly Overhaul her, and letting her go would just mean I'd get sucked into a fistfight that neither of us would win. Maybe with some of my spare time I could learn how to actually fight instead of relying on overwhelming force and cheap moves.

Overwhelming force and cheap moves… that's it!

With my phone secured back in my pocket, I reached up slowly, letting my hair part just enough for me to grab Mirko's other ankle. The pressure easing seemed to knock her out of whatever daydream she'd been stuck in, and with a growl she buckled her knees. My shirt could have found itself in her grasp if her arms weren't too short to make it happen, and after a moment of effort she gave up straining to reach it, instead locking her hands on either side of my face.

"Fight-"

I twisted my hips, sending up both snapping sideways. The movement was so abrupt that her hands lost their grip on me, the rest of her body unwillingly seeming to lose all its tension. I completed one full rotation, building up the momentum, and with a sharp flex of my shoulders at the beginning of my second spin, I heaved my arms up and let go.

"MEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeee…..!"

I counted two skips on that one. There might have been a few more after that, but I didn't stick around to witness it, my motorbike out and screaming down the road hopefully faster than a pissed off rabbit could run.

Calling dibs was never a good thing, and I was perfectly happy to have an unkicked ass for the foreseeable future-

Wait. What if I'd fucked up her paperwork somehow?

A chill ran down my spine. It felt like death.

Silently, I urged the bike to go faster.


Powerful legs dragged her onto the opposite shore. Mirko collapsed onto her side after her impromptu swim, hacking up water and a few pieces of whatever gross plants were growing under the surface. A fish flopped out of her long hair, which she sent back into the waves she'd kicked up with a contemptuous flick.

Throughout it all, her teeth ground together. Her eye twitched dangerously. Worst of all, the giddy sensation in her stomach refused to go away.

Fucking Quirk. Fucking rabbit instincts. Fucking fuck. She was screwed. As soon as that first kick did fuck all and the second one was caught with no effort, she knew she was screwed.

She loved being a rabbit, she really did. The strength was intoxicating, but so too were the hormones. There was nothing better than getting right in the face of danger. The exhilaration of her entire body and mind telling her she was going to die, and rushing in head first anyway. That was the shit she lived for, and the sort of shit that was no doubt going to get her killed.

And oh, he could so easily kill her. A simple touch, if the analysts were correct, and it could all be over. He held her so easily, in the palm of his hand and at his mercy. She'd barely held back on those kicks, not concerned in the slightest when he'd picked Water Hose up so easily from beyond the grave, and he'd barely felt them.

Her foot slammed into the ground with a scream. The cloud of gravel that exploded from the impact skipped across the water's surface, some reaching halfway across to the other side while most simply dipped below the surface and settled in the shallows.

It wouldn't be necessary to report this one to the Hero Commission. It wasn't really a failure like Muscular had been, after all. She'd just been testing him to see how he would react to a direct attack. Now whenever she reported to them next, she could let them know that they'd need to be sneakier.

Or she could just try to be sneakier herself. Finding him once hadn't taken more than a couple months, after all, she could always do it again.

She needed to stay on his trail. There was no telling who he'd target next.

Those optimistic thoughts lasted for all of two seconds before her abdomen twisted again, feeling distressingly empty. With a heartfelt groan and ears falling flat against her head, she took off, hopping at top speed in the direction she'd watched her predator leave.

In every way, she was screwed.