During my first lifetime, it had been a common practice in Japan for some people to pretty much live out of an internet cafe.

They were cheap, they had every amenity you could need in daily life, and the internet could beat a bolt of lightning in a foot race. It was like having dozens of roommates at any given moment who would probably call the police on you if they realised who you were.

We've all been there, I'm sure.

Even centuries later, after the fall of civilisation and subsequent rebuilding on the backs of superpowers, internet cafes still seemed to be going strong. They were basically perfect for a neet like me, not even needing to think before shelling out some of my blood money for their most luxurious room.

The computer on the desk? Gaming. The salaryman in the room next to mine who'd been typing for the last eight hours in a row? Expiring. The couple in the room on my other side?

Fucking.

Jokes on all those losers, I was probably having way more fun than all of them combined. And it was all in the name of my favourite activity, researching!

The first thing I had done after stumbling into this cafe and ordering a drink that sounded so sugary that it probably had a body count was kick myself. In a way, I should have been thanking Mirko for attempting to kill me with a snapped neck. If she hadn't, I never would have realised that there was a problem in the first place.

In hindsight, it was embarrassing that I'd missed something as glaringly obvious as my skeleton.

I could feel it, now that I was actually focusing Overhaul throughout my system and bypassing the muscles completely. Even if there was nothing out of place and the damage that had already been done was easily reversible with just a thought, that wasn't good enough for me.

With what I wanted to accomplish, I couldn't leave openings as large as a thought. It was far too late to not piss everyone off on my way out of this dimension. What happened when someone got a shot off to my skull with something that I didn't see coming? Would I hope that a moment of thought was still an option when my brain was painting my environment?

And here I thought I was good at using my brain.

Thus, the internet cafe. Not only would it provide decent cover while I cowered away from a five foot tall woman with a fluffy tail, but it would also work to alleviate my most recent conundrum. I owed my bones that much; they'd always been there for me, with the few exceptions who'd left as I grew older.

Hopefully I could find a suitable Quirk that belonged to an unsuitable person. I'd heard of bone marrow Quirks before, but would that be the correct avenue to use? Would I have to look for something that could generate calcium, maybe?

I was halfway through clicking towards a public quirk registry that showcased current villains, helpfully sorted alphabetically, when I realised that I was a fucking idiot.

For a moment, I stared into the screen, unable to read the text upon it. I was too busy looking at my reflection, pockmarked around the shadows and looking just as horrified as I felt.

Hopefully I could find a suitable Quirk.

My head met the desk with a resounding bang. Not to be outdone, the couple in the room next to me responded with a few bangs of their own. The salaryman let out a choked sob. I almost joined him in his misery.

A suitable Quirk.

Spoken exactly like everyone else in the last few centuries, when no progress had been made at all.

Oh fuck, I was going native.

The registry was closed on a face I couldn't recognise, with a name and Quirk I didn't bother reading. Would it have been able to handle whatever the top heroes would throw at me? Would some asshole with a bone manipulation Quirk help me in my journey to tear through time and space? Would that be worth losing more sleep over? Probably not, which meant it wasn't going to be worth my time.

Relying on stumbling across the right Quirk for the right situation was how All Might managed to turn his arch-nemesis into a giant thumb. I needed something more reliable. Something better than that.

Something that could get me home.

But where did that leave me? One lucky shot and I would be no better off than the average person. I couldn't just turn around if I didn't feel like spending the rest of my life in a dingy cell. If that last encounter was anything to go by, the heroes were onto my trail, and they were pissed.

Whatever I did, it would have to be quick, and effective. It would also have to be exuberant; over the top, if it was going to fit into the invincible image that I was cultivating.

Hunting for a Quirk could be plan B. B for bone. I just needed a suitable plan A. Airbags? Aerial support?

It was while I was sitting there, wracking my brains for something with the suitable alliteration, that the screen in front of me flickered. Even after all this time, ad blockers still hadn't managed to overtake the source code of some websites, beaming what they thought you wanted to see directly into your eyeballs in a desperate plea for someone over the age of twelve to be fooled into clicking on them.

If these ones still worked on the formula that tried appealing to search history, then the person who used this room before me must have been a massive nerd. My eyes were slightly out of focus as the edges of the website flickered around, going from how one woman earned the ire of the medical community, to places where I could read pre-quirk comic books in their entirety for free.

All the greats were there, in a mix of western and manga styles that was honestly a bit bizarre to see. The colourful costumes, the powers, the ostracisation from society. Art used to imitate life, but it seemed that after a while life had fallen behind in the race of influence.

…But maybe I could push it back even further.

No. No, that was too stupid. There was no chance that would work. I could try to substitute in muscle fibres, or fiddle with the actual composition of my bones, or even just bite the bullet and hunt down a bone Quirk. There were a thousand better ideas before taking inspiration from within another inspiration.

But what if it worked? If there was anyone in the world who could pull something like that off, it would be me. I had all the tools I would need quite literally at my fingertips.

It was a terrible idea. A thousandfold stupider than rushing into a yakuza stronghold with nothing but some sleeping gas and a clinically insane man for backup. Everything I'd tried up until now had been predicated on the idea that, no matter how ridiculous or convoluted it felt on paper, it was something that I could physically do. Delving into theoreticals was a recipe for disaster, and to pull it off I would need to put myself in at a perilous amount of risk.

But what if it worked?

In the end, I knew myself well. And I knew that even though it was probably the dumbest thing I'd ever thought of, I was going to try.

Plan B would have to be discarded. The couple next door, helpful as ever, sounded like they would be taking it off my hands by tomorrow morning. Plan C was taking the forefront right now, and in order to work, it would need a little help from Plan A.

The website was still live, with the same design as well. Not bad for something that would have been running for the last three hundred and something years. Even my old account login information worked, though it did force me to verify my email once again.

By that dread name, it was time to summon another relic from the past. Eternity, thy name was versus forums. What a fool I'd been to believe that my days arguing semantics and fictional materials would never catch up to me.

Plan C, comics, was a go.

First phase, Plan A.

Assholes on the internet.


Closest Real Life Equivalent for Indestructible Metal? (Prize for best answer within 12 hours)

Title says it all. Any metal can be the inspiration. Show off some chemical formulas, either real or theoretical. Best one gets a 2 million cash prize.

-Old ass account wtf?

-No way this is the same guy, this account is over three centuries old. Hacker grabbed an older account. Cash prize is probably a scam too. Reported the thread, all of you guys should as well.

-[IMAGE]

- No image results found

My guy is burning a literal pile of money in an alleyway.

-Wait, is that Mirko in the background of that pic?

-[IMAGE][IMAGE] These are some that I worked out in my spare time a while ago, but a lot of the components are really rare. I have some others in older notebooks that I can find if you'd like?

-A fan of the classics? Nice.

-Interesting.

-Wait did you seriously just give me 500,000 yen!? I didn't even answer the question! How did you even get my details?

-You learn a few things when you've been around as long as I have, kid.

-ACTUAL VAMPIRE?

-What the fuck is happening?

-The prize is real? Shit hold on! My friend's older brother is studying chemistry.

-Just use titanium dude lmao

-WHAT IS HAPPENING?!


For whatever reason, the cafe sold notebooks at the front counter. Two of those, along with a toothbrush and chicken sandwich, became my second purchase for the day.

From there, I observed.

One sandwich became two as people argued back and forth in the thread I'd created, exalting whatever metals they could think of that might have fit the bill I'd created. Two sandwiches became three when one person brought up an experiment in Europe that hadn't borne fruit at the time, an alloy inspired by exactly what I was looking into that unfortunately went nowhere due to budget constraints.

That person enjoyed yet another small reward for their work. Well, small for me. And as I'd hoped, it drew more attention.

People would argue back and forth behind a screen for hours. Nothing had to be on the line other than the pure desire to prove yourself right. Introducing money was throwing blood into shark infested waters. More users would arrive, curious about what was happening, and inevitably adding to the traffic.

If anything, these folk were lucky that I wasn't looking to steal from them. Getting into their bank accounts was even easier than pilfering Chisaki's ill-gotten gains. Setting up my own so they looked like a hero charity meant that nobody would realise what was going on until it was too late to stop me. Eat your heart out, NTA.

One of the notebooks filled gradually with graphs and diagrams that I honestly didn't fully understand. Mathematics, as much as I hated it, made sense. That was mostly memory and following methods that had been set in stone. Anyone could realistically do that. Science was much the same while also being entirely different, and that was before you stepped away from what was strictly realistic.

If this had taught me anything, it was that I was a little too harsh on all those Quirk researchers. They absolutely should have learned more by now, but I could see now that this shit was hard.

The second notebook, the one that I would be keeping much safer within my body, had the good stuff. The money makers. The theories on differing covalent bonds from that one guy that everyone called crazy. The elements that I couldn't find on any periodic table I looked up, coming from users who were just odd enough to remember. The deleted posts from an account that was just as old as mine, featuring pictures of handwritten notes on pages that were yellowed with age.

Eventually though, the time limit I'd set had to run out. There were a few more zeros than initially planned on the end of the amount I'd ended up giving out, but those users who had been willing to spend part of their weekend entertaining my inquiry got their bills paid for the next few months at least.

Combined with what some of their proposals would have cost, it was a drop in the bucket. A crack in the clouds. Honestly, there wasn't even any guarantee that any of their ideas would work at all. I didn't have the faintest clue of how to actually go about making some of the things suggested to me. I didn't even know if it was probable.

I'd checked. The equipment, the tools and elements, didn't exist.

But that didn't mean it was impossible. There were more tools in this world than the ones that were created by human hands.

In the end, I would be relying on a Quirk. It just wouldn't end up being mine.

Taking one more sandwich for the road, I left that internet cafe with a healthy tip, a burn mark on the alleyway floor beside them, and a suspicious gap in their user search history. My bike flowed, building itself in the space between a single step, carrying me down the road as fast as I could push it. The roar of the engine was duller than it had been when I first started driving it, an intentional decision on my behalf. Loud vehicles were bad for stealth, and also a symptom of a chronically small penis.

I didn't make the rules, I just broke most of the unimportant ones.

Sandwich in one hand and handlebars in the other, I fished my phone from my pocket with my hair, fully charged and ready for the insanity I would soon subject it to. The first number on speed dial, something he'd insisted on and I'd accepted pretty much instantly, picked up on the second ring.

"Eyyyyy, what's up!?"

I hooked a left away from the town centre, using some more strands of hair to secure my mask over my face. I'd driven without it once and gotten a bug up my nose. Never let it be said that I couldn't learn.

"How good are you at kidnapping?"

For a moment, there was silence on the other end of the call. Metal clanked down on more metal, followed by the clicking of the stove. He must have been in the middle of cooking dinner.

"Better than I should be, probably. Why?"

Beneath the mask, I grinned. Whether it was sharper than the painted smile was up for debate.

"An appointment with an heiress."