Time flies when you're planning crimes.

I mean when you're having fun.

I mean… actually no both of those were applicable here.

The apple wasn't falling very far away from the incarceration tree as far as this situation I'd found myself stuck in was concerned, but unlike a week ago it didn't feel like the end of the world. Sure, if I ever heard the words "it can't be that bad" I'd punch every single tooth that failed to contain them out of whatever mouth had said them. It was a horrible scenario to be stuck living out and even after I was dead and buried I would be cursing it.

But the difference between the existential dread at living my life in the lollipop guild and now was that now, I had a plan. A suicidal, very stupid plan, but a plan nonetheless.

I was going to commit war crimes.

I'd actually checked, and what I had planned out actually did go against several conventions the United Nations had come up with after the dawn of Quirks. To be fair to myself, they were mostly archaic and reactionary from a time where society had been ill-equipped to deal with the superpowers it was being bestowed. But also, to be fair to myself, I didn't give a shit.

What were they gonna do, execute me? Seriously though, do you think they would if I asked politely?

Alas, it was not to be. If I was going down, it would be on my own terms. And oh boy, was there ever a good chance I'd be going down.

Much of the previous week had been preparations. Research on world history, the study of Quirks, and the changes in the human body that had resulted. Those last two had been subjects that were mysteriously lacking, given how integral to the layman Quirks had become. Which meant that adding onto the ever expanding list of my priorities would be my own study of the matter. I probably couldn't do worse than the so-called 'leading minds' in the field, who didn't even know the chemical structure of quirk factor.

That could come later though, when I was handsome and tall and miraculously still alive. Right now I had a yakuza compound to raid.

Go big or go home. Alas, I would love to go home, but these mistakes weren't going to make themselves. These mistakes were also in the possession of actual alchemy, and far be it for me to be greedy when I already had convenient footholds to get things from the high cupboards. Heroes weren't greedy, but I'd already decided I didn't want to be a hero, so that meant the logic lined up perfectly or something.

Don't judge me, Mineta's parents were apparently dead. That or just severely neglectful, considering I hadn't actually seen anyone else in the house in the week I'd been here. Why there was a second bedroom set up in the house that wasn't being used was beyond me.

Honestly it had more to do with blazing curiosity and the blatant disregard of my self-preservation instincts. Though to be fair I did watch live last night as a kindergardener ducked a police cordon and almost got murdered in the middle of a hostage scenario, all to ask a man who had been throwing cars around for an autograph. If that was the standard for decisions being made these days then I'm pretty sure that automatically made whatever the fuck I was going to do common sense.

Everyone knew it was common sense to infiltrate a gang hideout, find their leader, and figure out a way to steal his Quirk from his bare hands, quite literally. He regularly had to explode a little girl to get blood and tissue samples, so it wasn't like he even knew how to use it properly. As an aspiring alchemist myself I couldn't help but feel offended at the ineptitude.

It was also the best choice I had moving forward, unless I wanted to track down the 300 year old murder hobo and ask him to do me a solid. Really, I was trapped between a rock and a hard place, except the hard place was a five foot tall fence.

Was it worth it, you might be asking yourself. Screaming into the void in the hopes that I would hear and scream right back. Was it worth it, to risk life and limb on a gambit that would almost certainly earn me an excruciating and prolonged death, just on the off chance that I wouldn't have to live the rest of my life as Minoru Mineta?

…Fucking obviously.

It wasn't like I was going into this with nothing but idiocy as my sword and dwarfism as my shield. Much of what I'd come across was conjecture and pseudo-science at best, but humanity hadn't made a habit of waiting around for discovery to come to them. The last time they did that, Quirks had been introduced to the populace, and that had kind of derailed the whole 'discovery' phenomenon and rendered it impotent anyway.

Humanity was stymied. There was no other way to put it. I hadn't come across a single thing in the world that had made any significant progress since the early 21st century. Before I'd woken up as Gollem's uglier cousin I'd been enjoying the escalating heights of artificial intelligence learning how to mimic the voices of world leaders. Now though, technology hadn't been streamlined at all. The internet was neither faster nor better encrypted. The world wasn't even running low on fossil fuels, which I could have sworn had been projected to be running out halfway through my prior expected lifetime.

It was like the world and all its ventures had been frozen in time, with the only things moving forward being Quirks and what their existence meant for humanity. Except their existence apparently meant fuck all, because even with I-Island being an international domain for scientists to research to their heart's content, the general populace still had next to no idea what the thing they were basing their entire societal worth on even was.

Toe joints, quirk factor, and feudalism. Not bad for three hundred hours having passed. Wait, what was that? Years? Oh. Oooooh.

There were a lot of things I hated in this world. People, animals, the sun, brussel sprouts, Mineta, uncomfortable chairs, and Mineta. Topping that list, however, was stupidity.

And my fucking lord this world was so motherfucking stupid.

I'd been here for a single week. One measly, one hundred and sixty-eight hour long week. In that time, I'd not only managed to get the basic outline of what had happened in this world in the last few centuries (a process that had gotten significantly faster upon factoring out whenever the solution ended up being 'quirk bullshit'), but I had also managed to do something that had left the law enforcement of this world scratching their heads.

Mineta had a dual-screen setup. Everything on the desk had red light spewing out of it. It came as approximately no surprise that he was a gamer. Ignoring the brimstone glow of the hard-drive was difficult, but the contents of those two screens were much more important to me.

The left had the details of a bank account. It wasn't mine, nor was it Mineta's. If my guy had that many digits in his balance then his negative attraction of women would have been even more tragic than it already was. No, that money belonged to a fancy little organisation that liked to call itself the Eight Precepts of Death, or Shie Hassaikai for weeb.

How in the hell did I manage that? Good question. I wasn't really all that much of a hacker. I knew some bits and pieces, skills of the trade that I'd taught myself during boring classes in high school, but there was no conceivable notion to suggest that I could get good enough in a week to crack an underground crime circle so utterly wide open, right?

See, that was where the second monitor came in. Good ol' Righty, unlike Lefticus, had been granted much of the horsepower in the machine for its role. Whereas Leftificus was merely a display unit for numbers that fluctuated up and (very rarely) down, Righto had two jobs to maintain. One was to keep up a spread of camera feeds, which was where I'd managed to get the log-in information for the bank in the first place, and the other?

Online tutorials for basic navigation of the dark web.

I wasn't even kidding.

Quirks probably didn't inherently make you dumber just for having them, but they did have quite an interesting effect on society. With the rise of heroes came the gradual decline of grey morality. I could understand the appeal of living your entire life in black and white when DNA became a case of open carrying, but never let it be said that you could never have too much of a good thing.

Things weren't criminal anymore, they were villainous. I could vaguely remember something that I would have been told if I did decide to go to U.A, that the smarter villains stayed out of the public eye. Indeed, those smarter villains did stay out of the limelight and neglect to rob gas stations. In yet another parallel to my first life, it seemed that most of them had decided to become online content creators.

I couldn't imagine it was very profitable, but the fact of the matter was that they were there. If I wanted to, I could have paused the video I'd found right after waltzing directly into the yakuza's cctv network. Yes, waltzing. Their security really was that bad.

Or maybe I was just that good?

…We could stick that one in the 'maybe' category.

The dark web wasn't a place that was built for the sole purpose of websites that cloned online stores, except to sell organs. People forgot before that it was always a place for the nebulous coding that went on behind official lines, and it seemed that people forgot that now as well. Yes you could use it for creepy shit, but you could just as easily use it to browse data streams until you found a point of entry that was appealing.

Technically, it was a violation of ethics, and also a few laws. Unofficially, and the real reason most people and even shadier hero agencies didn't bother to do it, was because it was villainous. See a word thrown around enough and eventually it'll lose all meaning. As for why the Eight Precepts of Death didn't have the kind of cyber security to fend off one bored teenager with a chip on his shoulder, some severely out of practice skills, a helpful dude on dailymotion, and an agenda?

Probably because they didn't have anyone on staff with the right Quirk for the job.

Dumbasses. Though perhaps not so dumb, seeing as it seemed to have worked up to this point.

Don't even get me started on that.

Long diatribes about the folly of humanity aside, this was only one factor in pulling off the miracle I needed. The bank account had honestly been a happy little accident in the grand scheme of things. I'd already put out a little test, using its details to order a few things to a house further down the street. Using a VPN proxy of course because at least someone here had to know a thing or two about cyber security. It was a few thousand yen worth of candy, which I'm sure the middle-aged man living there alone would appreciate, and hopefully it would serve as a great apology if any thugs showed up at the address of the delivery in the hopes of having a few words.

I'd protected the details as best I could, but there was only so much I could do. Still, it was small, harmless; easy to pass off as a kid playing a prank, which was fairly close to the truth all things considered. It would also test how they would react to something like that, in case I ever decided to dip a bit further into their savings in the future.

A proxy server probably wouldn't be enough there, but a capable ally would be. That would have to come later though, when I had a more solid outline of what I wanted to do.

For now, though, it was planning. Observation. Poke around the servers and marvel at the fact that I hadn't been caught. And above all else, try not to focus too much on the screen in the corner that showed a petrified girl, and the madman standing over her with a hand reaching out.

Easier said than done.

It wasn't easy to get me angry. I would get annoyed, I would get caustic, and every now and then I would get irritated. Anger, for me, was fairly foreign. Even for all the gripes and the distaste in my soul, there just wasn't very much in the world that could push me over the edge of vexation and into the realm of pure rage. Hell, vexation was such a common attribute for me that my chosen username in my previous life had been an anagram of it.

Watching Eri die for the third time since gaining access to these cameras coincidentally happened to be one of those few things that could have a red haze settling over the corners of my vision. She was tiny, smaller than a girl her age should have been, and yet the sheer amount of blood that would appear every time Chisaki laid a hand on her was oceanic.

And to think, when I'd started this little venture into his network, my first idea had been to somehow ask Overhaul politely.

He restructured her, just as he had both times before, and left her there. Left her trembling in agony obvious even through the camera feed. Left her in her cell, alone save for whichever crony had been tasked to spend time with her that day. The worst part was that she didn't cry. A child her age, who should have been bawling their eyes out at the sight of their own blood, barely batted an eye once the pain had subsided enough for her to open them.

My hands shook almost as much as hers as I opened up a third window. A video editing software; it seemed like Mineta maybe had been considering throwing his hat into the streaming ring. A dark corner of my mind, the part that had gotten used to Eri's gruesome executions after the first couple of times, wondered if Mineta had ever thought that this would be the first video he'd ever put together.

It wouldn't be the last. Not when I had a case to build. Initially, when this idea had occurred to me, it had been a pipe dream more than anything. I'd been ready to throw my hands up at the difficulty, shrug my shoulders, and become another drone to society that would fade into the background and quietly die. Maybe I'd swipe here and there, steal enough of an income to leave the country to its fate and live somewhere without an active evil mastermind. Before now, I had the determination to make it succeed, but no starting point. Nothing to push me in the right direction and force me to take that first step.

Now, however?

Thoughts flew through my head. Every time parts of the video I was cropping together needed to buffer I would switch over to another document and start noting them down. The good, the bad, the impossible and the improbable. The legal, the illegal, and the morally questionable.

I had no reason to help this child. She had nothing to do with me. Until I'd been looking at her I'd genuinely forgotten she'd existed in the first place. If anything, her being there made things more difficult for me.

If I went to the cops, my access to Overhaul would disappear. If he ran and hid, I'd be wasting time and putting myself on the line to find him. If he was arrested, then I was straight up shit out of luck. If he decided to fight and die, then that might have been fine, but I didn't want to chance needing him alive. If he decided to fight and win? Then, whoops.

Plus there was also the whole 'child being tortured' thing. That really waged war against my priority of hitting a second puberty.

I had no illusions that vigilantism would work out well for me. I had no training, no weapons, no contacts, and no desire to do the right thing. Thankfully I also had no desire to do the wrong thing. On a bad day I probably couldn't even be bothered to do the thing at all.

But what I did have was one hell of a selfish desire to not be Minoru Mineta. And at the end of the day, with a whole compound of criminals and a psuedo-science I couldn't even begin to understand between me and my goals, that would have to be enough.

I didn't care if this world, so utterly obsessed with the glitz and glamour of professional heroism, didn't see me as a hero.

But sure as the balls resting on my head were sticky, I would be dead and buried long before they decided I had been a failure.

…Wait no let me rephrase that-!