A/N: I got a little sick of writing emotionally drained, self-flagellating Hikigaya Hachiman back during chapter 8, so I took a little different approach to things this time around. Let me know what you think!

"Pffffff….. Haaaaaaah."

It's not that I don't know that smoking cigarettes looks bad when you're a pro hero; it's that I don't care. Witness interviews aren't exactly fun even on the best days, and judging by what Detective Tsukauchi said over the phone? I was going to need my nicotine fix for this one.

Idly, I reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror. Driving a convertible was nice, especially on a beautiful spring day like today, but it did make it a pain in the ass to keep my hair from getting all tangled by the wind. As it turned out, my hair was fine, but seeing my naked eyes in my reflection reminded me that I hadn't put my 'mask' on yet. There wasn't really any point to my wearing one; it wasn't like there were a lot of other tall, busty brunettes out there who also had quirks that gave them bulky, biomechanical right arms, but a few years ago when I asked Gang Orca how he managed to go out to buy groceries without being swarmed by fans (even I had been being pestered pretty frequently, and I'm way less famous than he is), he kept giving me advice about 'maintaining a clear visual distinction between your on-duty and off-duty personas.' I've never been much of one for masks, though, so instead I bought a pair of mirrored sunglasses. These days, the mirrorshades were as much of a part of my professional 'look' as the long white coat or the black suit underneath it, and the last thing I wanted to do when making a first impression on a witness was to make them think that I wasn't taking them seriously.

I stubbed out my cigarette, put on my shades and the black leather glove I used to cover up my metal hand, and got out of the car, walking up towards what looked to be a fairly nice apartment building. Way nicer than mine, even, but as long as I was living the single life, I was happier spending my paychecks on cigarettes, take-out meals, and a really nice car than spending it all on rent for a place bigger than one person needed. And given my luck with men lately - well, anyway, I should focus on what I was actually doing here. Shaking thoughts of my relationship woes out of my mind, I reached out with my gloved right hand to ring the doorbell, the shiny chrome skin of my arm gleaming slightly in the sunlight.

"Coming!" I heard from inside. After a few seconds the door opened, revealing a dark-haired pre-teen girl. My first impression of her was that she was the lively, energetic sort; she was wearing clothes that were loose and easy to move around in, and her hair was at a short, sporty length. As she took in the sight of me in my hero outfit, her eyes widened, sparkling adorably. "Eeeeh?! Cyberpunch-sama?"

"That's me. Pro hero Cyberpunch, Hiratsuka Shizuka, at your service." I gave the girl a polite but genuine smile and reached out to shake her hand. It was always nice to meet a fan. I didn't have that many nationwide, but in Chiba at least I could usually count on getting a pretty good reception. "Is this the Hikigaya residence? I was hoping to speak to Hikigaya Hachiman."

The excited look on the girl's face faltered, her expression falling into a more worried cast. "Ah, um, he's here, but. Onii-chan's still asleep." She stepped back slightly from the door to let me in. "Um, would you like to come inside and wait? I can go wake him up for you."

I stepped inside to the foyer and exchanged my shoes (one of my dressier pairs, since there wasn't much of a risk of a foot-chase during a home interview) for a pair of guest slippers. "Then, please excuse me. And yes, please wake him up if you don't mind. I'm not in a hurry, though, so let him know he can take his time if he needs to."

"Okay," she said in a subdued tone of voice. As she walked away to do so, I just barely managed to hear her muttering. "Stupid onii-chan, when I said you should get all famous so I could meet a bunch of Pro-heroes, this was not what I meant!"

As I walked into the apartment proper, my initial impressions that this was a nice place were only reinforced. It wasn't that it felt like a rich person's place per se; the living room wasn't dominated by an incredibly expensive television set, there was no fine art on the walls, nothing really spoke of conspicuous consumption. Rather, it was the little things. All of the furniture looked relatively new and looked like it was built to last. The curtains matched the throw pillows and the rug, while the coffee table matched the bookcases. I could see into the kitchen from the seat I took on the sofa, and all of the appliances matched each other. Many small details that all added up into the impression that someone had spent time, effort, and money to make this a comfortable living space. Compared to the majority of places that I had to visit for witness interviews, it was downright homey.

After a brief muttered conversation, the young girl walked back out into the living room. "He'll be out in a few minutes," she said apologetically. "Um, Cyberpunch-sama? Would you like something to drink while you wait? We have water, tea, juice, coffee -"

"Just water is fine," I interrupted her, "and please, my pro hero name can be a bit of a mouthful. Just call me Shizuka-san, it's fine. What's your name?"

Despite her earlier heavy mood, she still seemed a little bit starstruck. "Ah! I'm Hikigaya Komachi, nice to meet you! Oh, well you probably could have guessed the Hikigaya part, but yeah call me Komachi that's fine too! Oh, here, um, your water."

I smiled gently and took the cup from her. It was a pretty solid glass tumbler, similar to the brand I had at home. Actually, the more that I looked around, the more that I noticed that a lot things around the house looked pretty sturdy. "Komachi-chan, does one of your parents have a heteromorph quirk?"

"Nope!" She chirped with a sly smile. "Just me!"

I looked the skinny, perfectly ordinary-looking girl up and down in surprise. "Oh, is that so? You know, I actually teach self defense classes for heteromorphs and other people with super strength. What's your quirk rated at?" I didn't really like Heteromorphic Strength Classifications; they were part of a legacy of discrimination against so-called 'mutants' like me, a method of imposing harsh fines and expensive licensing requirements on people who looked physically different under the noble guise of 'reducing public quirk use.' But the laws weren't as bad these days as they used to be, and the HSC was actually a pretty handy shorthand for figuring out what accommodations I would have to make for my students.

As expected, rather than getting nervous at a government hero asking about her HSC, Komachi's sly smile grew even wider. "Class A," she replied smugly.

I hurriedly swallowed the sip of water I just took in order to keep myself from spraying it all over the coffee table. "Class A? Seriously?"

"Wanna arm wrestle?" Komachi challenged, sitting down across from me and plunking her elbow down on the coffee table.

"Oi. Brat. Don't ruin the furniture." I turned at the sound of a new voice to see a young man, possibly a little bit taller than average but with a slouch that made him look shorter. His hair was messy, probably because he had just gotten up, and he was wearing pajama pants and a loose white t-shirt that did little to hide the fact that he was in seriously good shape for a teenager. The most striking thing about him, however, had to be his eyes, which were currently staring at me with the kind of bitter, cynical expression I was more used to seeing on burnout detectives than idealistic high-schoolers.

I returned the stare with my best professional smile, taking off my sunglasses in one of those interviewer's tricks that sometimes helped people open up to me. "Nice to meet you, Hachiman-san, and I'm sorry to show up unannounced without calling ahead," I said. "I hope you recognize me, but if not, I'm Pro Hero Cyberpunch. I'm here on behalf of the National Police Agency to ask you a few more detailed questions about some of the information you gave us yesterday. Feel free to wash your face, have a coffee, grab something to eat, whatever else you need to do to wake up in the morning, and we can talk when you're ready."

"Oh, yeah, the detective said they'd probably be sending someone out," he said, a bit of energy and determination suddenly sparking in the depths of his dead-fish eyes. "Just give me a few minutes."

"You had a long day yesterday," I said sympathetically. "Take your time." He just grunted in reply, shuffling off down the hallway towards the bathroom. As the door closed, I turned back to Komachi. "Does your brother have low blood pressure in the mornings?"

Komachi gave me a wry smile tinged with sadness. "Actually, Onii-san's kind of grumpy all the time." She pulled up her knees to her face, huddling in on herself slightly. In a much smaller voice, she added "he might be mad at me today, though."

"At you? Why?" I asked, trying to put on my best 'tell big sister what's wrong' voice.

"Onii-san hates making other people worry about him or take care of him. I mean hates it," Komachi said, looking up to meet my eyes. "Like, mom offers him a ride somewhere and his eyebrows just go like this," she said, pushing her forehead with her index fingers to make an exaggerated crinkle in the middle of her brow, "like, all, 'don't look down on me, I have a bike!' And whenever he's clearly in a bad mood, if you ask him about it, he's always all, 'it's fine', or 'it's nothing special,' or 'must have been something I ate,' and like, mom and dad pretend to believe him? Because they're all, like, 'he's at that age,' and 'teenage boys need their space,' and 'he'll come to us when he's ready.' Well, Mom is. I think it bothers Dad more, because he's, like, always giving onii-chan lame life advice. But, well, the other day…"

Komachi slowed down, the torrent of words and funny-voice imitations of her family members dwindling to a trickle. Once again, she buried her face in her legs. "The other day I yelled at him for hiding stuff, and pretending to be fine, after he … he got hurt." She tucked herself a little deeper into her ball. "I was worried."

"Oh sweetheart," I said, putting a comforting hand on Komachi's shoulders, "I'm sure he won't get too mad at that, I'm sure he knows you were doing it because you cared about him, right?"

"Mmm," she agreed with a sniffle. "But, last night he was yelling at Mom and Dad, saying stuff like 'heroes get hurt sometimes, deal with it' and like he wasn't yelling at me but he was still really mad and loud and he -"

"Komachi-chan," I interrupted her gently. "A lot of times when someone goes through something stressful or scary, afterwards their emotions are still all hyped up and they can feel more sad or angry or scared for a while. I'm sure that once Hachiman-kun has had time to calm down and relax, he won't be mad at you at all."

Komachi looked up at me with wide eyes, about to respond, when from down the hallway, I heard the sound of a toilet being flushed. Komachi must have too, because she instantly straightened up and grabbed for a tissue, quickly wiping away the evidence of having been upset. After a few seconds, her brother reappeared from the hallway, looking a bit like he had splashed some cold water on his face to wake up. He made a brief detour to the kitchen to grab a can of coffee from the refrigerator, then walked over to join us on the couch, ruffling Komachi's hair as he passed her by. I couldn't tell if he had heard our conversation from the bathroom, but the gesture of affection caused Komachi to brighten up considerably even as she swatted his hand away.

There was a crisp click and a tiny hiss of air as Hachiman opened the can he was holding. He raised it to his lips, took several deep gulps, and placed it back down, looking me straight in the eyes with a determined gaze. "Okay. I'm ready."

I looked for a second at the young man in front of me. Some people, after they peered into the abyss, flinched. It wouldn't have been unusual for him to drop out of the hero program after something like a villain attack, let alone two such attacks back-to-back. Apparently, this kid was made of sterner stuff. "Before we get started," I began by asking, "how much do you know about Pro Hero specializations?"

He stopped for a second to think. "Like whether a hero is better at fighting villains, or rescuing civilians, that sort of thing?"

"More or less," I agreed. "It's not really official, more of a set of shorthand that everyone uses, but generally if you say that someone's a Combat Hero or a Rescue Hero or a Support Hero, people will know what you're talking about." I paused for a second to make sure that we were on the same page, and he nodded. "With that said, I have a bit of a rarer specialization. I'm what's called an Investigative Hero, a pro whose quirk assists them with information gathering and evidence collection."

"Eh? Why is that rare?" Komachi interjected with an adorably confused look on her face. "I thought heroes caught criminals all the time!"

"Well, usually when a hero catches a villain, it's either because they catch them in the middle of doing something bad, or because the police tracked the villain down and called the heroes in to catch them," I explained patiently. "Investigation is the police's specialty. And even if a Pro Hero has a quirk that's useful to investigations, if the police have somebody on the force with a quirk that can do the same thing, then they won't always call the heroes for help because they can do it on their own." I looked from her to Hachiman, and while he didn't seem too perturbed for the moment at her interruption, and hadn't kicked her out before we started… "Actually, Komachi-chan," I said, "your brother said some things to the police yesterday that made them think that his quirk could be a big help to their investigation. That's why I'm here. I specialize in helping the police with missing persons cases, and your brother may have given us some important leads on a few of those. But, when we get started we might discuss a few things that the police would rather keep confidential, so would you mind giving the two of us some privacy at that point?"

"Oh!" Komachi said with surprise. "Sure! Actually, I should probably go grocery shopping at some point today anyway, let me just go get the list and I'll be out of your hair. Onii-chan, anything you want while I'm out?" she asked, matching words to action as she grabbed a piece of paper off of the refrigerator and slipped on her shoes.

"Check and see if protein powder is on sale," Hachiman replied, "other than that... chickpeas, spinach, more eggs..."

"Yeah, yeah, hero health food, already on the list," Komachi complained good-naturedly. "You know you can ask for, like, comfort food and stuff too, right?"

"...ah. Then, maybe some hamburger?" he said, "And maybe some chips? Recovery Girl-sensei did say it'd be better if I ate a little more…"

Komachi just sighed at her brother. "And you only remember this now? Honestly!" She turned to me with a long-suffering expression. "Big brothers take so much looking after." With that parting line, she was gone.

An awkward silence spread for a few seconds after she slammed the door shut behind her, before I finally smirked. "Heh. Cute kid."

Hachiman let out a good-natured groan. "What's worse is, she knows it, too." He let out a deep sigh, and then his eyes narrowed as he looked straight at me. "So. You obviously had a reason for getting rid of Komachi, and I highly doubt it was that bullshit about police confidentiality, since we're having that conversation here in my house and not down at the police station. What's going on?"

Hm. He's sharp, for a kid. "Yesterday in your interview with the police you described an individual, a so-called 'biological weapon', and claimed that they had four quirks," I said, making sure that we were on the same page.

He nodded. "I did," he replied with a tense voice.

"All four quirks that you described were… potential matches, at least, to persons on the National Missing Person database, most of whom have gone missing within the last several months." I sighed. "One of whom, Zaimokuza Yoshiteru, you were able to identify by name." He winced at the name. "From what the officer at the scene said, it sounded like you were close with him?"

Hahciman shook his head convulsively. "I don't…." his voice cracked. "I don't deserve to call myself a friend of his, or anything. I didn't even know he was missing. We were just classmates."

Despite myself, I blinked in surprise. "You didn't know? The notes from the investigation said that they visited his middle school to ask if anyone knew anything."

He shrunk in on himself, hanging his head. "If they came in on a day that I was out sick… I probably wouldn't have heard about it. I was... pretty unpopular in middle school."

I felt a sudden surge of kinship. Me too, kid. Me too. "Well…" I trailed off awkwardly, "Either way, I'm guessing that the Chiba PD didn't follow through on the investigation properly. I'm going to be lighting a fire under their asses about this after we're done here, believe me." He didn't respond, just sitting there looking at the floor. "Listen, my guess is, the officer on duty probably got enough info to judge that your friend's disappearance was probably related to a recent string of missing persons cases, the same ones that I'm investigating, and stopped asking." That got his attention. I wanted to take out a cigarette and smoke as I explained, but it was someone else's house so I resisted the urge and just continued. "There's been an uptick of unexplained disappearances lately. All of them people with no ties to crime, all without any apparent reasons to leave their lives behind… and all with powerful quirks."

"That's why you had Komachi step out, isn't it?" Hachiman asked, his voice hoarse. His eyes glittered with unshed tears that were swiftly being burned away by righteous indignation and big brotherly protectiveness. "You think she's a target."

"It's possible," I said bluntly. "We still don't have proof that these disappearances are being caused by anyone in particular, and if they are, we don't yet have a firm grasp of how they decide who to abduct… but I'll be frank with you, the existence of a teleporter of the caliber of this 'Kurogiri' suggests a lot of possible answers to a few locked-door mysteries we've come across." I smiled gently at the kid, trying to ease his nerves a bit. "Personally, I think the risk to your sister specifically is small. Most of the disappearances that we've identified so far have been adults, with older teenagers a small minority. But there's no sense in talking about it in front of Komachi and making her worry, right?"

Hachiman took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Right," he said. "So, you think that I can help you with these disappearances?"

"I hope so." I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a voice recorder, setting it on the coffee table between us. "The thing is, there are tens of thousands of people who disappear every year in Japan. Usually, whenever we find someone without identification on them, we compare them to the missing person registry. If we have usable fingerprints or photos, we use those first, but in cases where a victim has been affected by a mutagen like Trigger or physically altered by someone else's quirk, then we try to identify people by their quirks." I sighed. "In theory, quirks are as unique as fingerprints, therefore we shouldn't have a problem matching people up. In practice, while no two quirks are the same, there are a lot of quirks that are roughly pretty similar to each other. If all we're going on is a rough description of what happens when somebody uses their quirk, there can be a lot of potential for misunderstandings or bad matches."

"And because my quirk gives me a lot of detailed information on the quirks I copy, you think I can help you narrow things down?" Hachiman asked rhetorically. He looked curiously at the voice recorder on the table between the two of us, then back to me. "Just tell me what I need to do."

"Kheum-hum. Alright," I said, putting my best 'formal business voice' on. I reached down to switch on the recorder, a little green light blipping into life as I pushed the button to let us know it was working. "Saturday, April fourteenth, year 21XX. Interview with Hikigaya Hachiman, U.A. student, hero track." I began. I reached out to pause the device for a second and looked up at Hachiman, switching back to a less formal tone of voice for a moment. "The recorder's just to make sure that I don't forget any details or miss out on anything when I take the info back to the office." He nodded, so I switched the recorder back on. "Hikigaya-san, with your consent, I'd like you to use your power copying quirk on me and to describe the results in detail so I can get a baseline for how your power works. After that, I'd like you to give me as much information as you can on the quirks that Nomu had so I can hopefully use that information to identify who the previous owners of those quirks were. Are you willing to help me?"

"Yes," he said for the record, and then he coughed lightly before reaching out to pause the tape himself. "Sorry, but 'previous owners?' I could tell there were four quirks in the Nomu's body somehow, but..."

Oops. I sighed and reached for a cigarette, only to stop myself as I remembered that I was in someone else's house. At least I said the wrong thing in front of a kid who was going to be a pro, and not some panicky civilian. "I suppose you deserve to know," I said slowly, "but if I tell you more about this I need you to promise me two things."

His eyes narrowed. "What, like I didn't hear this from you?"

I smirked. "Nah, that much isn't a problem. I'm actually going to be letting people know that I told you once we're done here. Probably gonna get yelled at, but eh," I added with a mumble. "In any case, first, I need you to promise me that you'll keep it to yourself. There's more than a few things that Pro Heroes need to keep from being public knowledge to prevent mass panics, and this is one of them."

"Okay," Hachiman said, his voice serious. "I can do that. And second?"

"Second." I glared at him, giving him my best impression of Endeavor in a shitty mood. "You do not look into this on your own. No poking around sketchy websites looking for information, no vigilante investigations, none of that. If you want to help get justice for your friend, you do it through official channels, with somebody or preferably a whole team of somebodies watching your back. Do I make myself understood?"

The little punk actually scoffed. "Hiratsuka-san. Just because I'm trying to be a Pro Hero doesn't make me stupid."

I could feel my eyebrow twitching. "No, but you're a teenager, so that automatically makes you suspect," I fired back.

"Tch." He folded his arms in annoyance, unable to think of a response. Hmph, you're not bad, kid, but I've got the advantage of a decade's worth of experience in snappy comebacks over you! … shit, it's actually over a decade. Dammit, when did I get this old? "Alright, alright, if it makes you feel better, I'll say it out loud, I promise not to look into this by myself," he suddenly said, startling me from my self-pity. Whoops, guess I made him think I was waiting. "So what's so scary about all this that you're being this serious?" Hachiman asked.

"A Villain," I said softly. "Thanks to you informing us yesterday that the Nomu possessed multiple quirks, our number one suspect right now is an old foe of All Might's, a villain who can steal other peoples' quirks and then either use them for his own or give them away to his allies. Goes by the alias 'All For One'." I said the last three words in English, and almost despite myself I still paused for effect after saying them. When All Might himself says someone's name that seriously, it's hard not to do the same. Hikigaya didn't interrupt, so I continued. "He went inactive and was presumed dead about five years ago, but it looks like he's back in action." The fact that All For One was a monster from the Troubled Century, the fact that he had nearly a hundred years of experience as an active villain, I kept those under my hat for now. No sense scaring the kid off too early. Even as it was, the kid's eyes went wide, and I held up a hand to keep him from exploding with questions. "Listen. For now, this is all you need to know. More to the point, it's all I can really tell you without bringing you in on the investigation if I don't want to get in trouble with the detectives leading it. If you want to find out more, you're going to have to show me you can handle yourself."

He blinked. "Handle myself? What do you mean?"

I shrugged, a slow smirk stealing across my face. "Get your provisional hero license, place well in the U.A. Sports Fest, impress one of your teachers enough that they recommend you to me, that sort of thing. Give me something I can use to convince everyone else working on the investigation that you won't be a liability so I can bring you in without getting hassled," I challenged him.

Predictably, Hikigaya Hachiman's eyes narrowed, his fists tightened, and he sat up straight to look me right in the eye.

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

Later that night, back in my cluttered and claustrophobic office, I lit up yet another cigarette. All around me on my desk, piles of paper detailing the quirk profiles of missing persons towered, while directly in front of me a final, significantly shorter pile was fanned out so that I could see the profiles in detail. I hit play on the voice recorder yet again. Just like the past few times I had listened to this section, Hachiman's voice came out dry, almost clinical.

"The first thing I notice about your quirk is that it's heteromorphic. There's a difference between quirks that belong to people with minor physical mutations, and true heteromorph quirks - only heteromorph quirks make me feel like my body is the wrong shape. After that, I can feel which areas are the most different from me; for instance I can feel that my bones ache slightly. If I think about my bones specifically, I get a feeling of solidness, heaviness, and metal. That's all over; I'm guessing that your left arm isn't much weaker than your right, even if it looks more 'normal'."

I hadn't responded at the time, instead doing my best to keep up a poker face, but it was true. I had tricked more than a few villains in the past by making them wary of my bulky metal right arm, then sucker-punching them with my left.

"There's also another area of difference that's spread through your whole body," the recording continued, "but it's denser around your spine and skull, so it's probably your nerves and not your circulatory system. That's got some metallicness to it, but there's also something weird… reminds me of some psychic-class quirks I've scanned before. Those are usually centered on the brain, though, not spread out through the body. I'm not sure what good it does to have telepathic nerves in your arms and legs… fast reflexes, maybe? I'm cheating a little bit there, I think I read that you had those on your hero website, but telepathic nerves seem like they would either cause that or some sort of touch based telepathic impulse like pain induction, and given how reinforced the rest of your body is, fast reflexes seem like the better fit."

Again, he was right. Not that it was a big deal to be able to say that I had fast reflexes; that was a part of my abilities that I wasn't terribly hesitant to share, but the fact that my reflex speed was fundamentally telepathic in nature was the reason that I couldn't respond to disaster operations where the Wild Wild Pussycats were on the scene. I love Mandalay, she's fun at parties, but her quirk is so loud that it actually messes with my motor control if I'm too close. What's more, even I hadn't known that until I found it out the hard way!

"Speaking of your reinforced body, you do have some additional strength… your muscles feel extra 'twitchy'. Good at high speed movement and for sharp bursts of power, but probably not a lot stronger than normal for sustained activity. And nowhere near as strong as my sister." Even through the tinny speaker of the voice recorder, Hachiman's voice came out wry and smug.

Of course I'm not as strong as your sister, sis-con! The reactionary assholes who set up the HCS in the first place called Class A the 'fierce beast' category! And somehow she looks completely normal? I was a little tempted to look her up in the Quirk Registry just to see what kind of quirk she actually had, but I restrained myself; technically I could justify the request by saying that I needed to see if his estimation of our respective strengths was accurate, so I wouldn't get in trouble for doing it, but from a basic human decency standpoint looking up an acquaintance in a national database in order to satisfy my curiosity about their quirk would be rude and unprofessional. I'd just have to keep my fingers crossed and hope that she signs up for the self-defense classes I teach.

Finally, Hachiman's voice got a little bit more hesitant, as he got onto unfamiliar ground. "The biggest difference from normal physiology is the right arm, of course. I was expecting it to be stronger or for the muscles to be hydraulic or something, but I'm not getting a lot of feedback from my muscles telling me they're the wrong shape, so that's not it. Instead I'm getting a feeling of, like, missing pieces where you have the spikes or fins coming out. The telepathy nerve feeling is strong at the base, there's like little knots of nerves there? But the feeling doesn't extend out to the ends of the fins, so… I'm guessing that those fins are maybe heat sinks, probably full of blood vessels or something to help you cool off when the lumps in your arm are activated. Your skin feels a little like your nerves where it's metallic, but not as strongly. Maybe it's an amplifier or a transmitter… and my hand feels numb, like there aren't nearly as many nerves in it as your quirk is expecting, and the missing nerves all feel extra telepathic, more sensitive than even the rest of your body. It feels like your entire arm is just a support structure for your right hand, with the dense clumps under the fins acting like biological computers to process the data coming in from whatever your hand touches." Despite having heard the recording multiple times already, I still felt a little uneasy listening to it. It was like I was being audibly dissected. "Unfortunately, since it's a heteromorph quirk, I can't just turn it on and see what it does, but if I had to guess… maybe psychometry? Reading telepathic waves off of things you touch?"

And again, I heard my almost disbelieving voice. "And you said that heteromorph quirks were the ones you were bad at?" I was still surprised, when it came down to it; there were other people out there with power copy quirks, some of whom could even copy heteromorphs, but I didn't know many that could get data so quickly and easily.

Surprisingly, Hachiman's reply didn't sound as proud as you'd expect from a cocky little shit that got into U.A.; it sounded almost dull or depressed. "Back when I was trying to get my quirk to be useful, the counselor recommended that I do my best to try to use it a lot, to stress it out so it could grow stronger. Like building a muscle, you know? So hypothetically I might have spent a significant amount of time doing things like, uh, going onto the subway or out into the city and just, bumping into random strangers to copy their quirks and then breaking them down to see what they did."

"You're lucky nobody thought you were trying to pick their pockets," my voice replied dryly.

"Right… lucky…" he said, adding a nervous laugh. "Anyway, my quirk never got stronger in the way I hoped it would, but I did eventually get better at telling what other quirks did, so… I guess it wasn't a total waste of time."

I hit pause on the tape recorder and lit another cigarette. Dammit, it was like looking in a mirror and seeing myself ten - okay, twelve - years ago. A bullied kid, getting themselves into a hero program mostly out of desperation, not knowing what to do with themselves once they succeeded, and then… "Pffffffff…. Haaaaaah." I blew out another cloud of smoke, staring into it wistfully. Well, unlike the me of the past, the Hikigaya kid seemed like he was at least reasonably cautious; hopefully as long as I could keep giving him reasonable goals to strive for he wouldn't go too far off the rails investigating this League of Villains the way I did against the Creature Rejection Clan.

I hit play again, "No, not a waste of time at all," I heard myself say. "And you can do this to any quirk you copy?"

"More or less," Hikigaya's voice responded. "Though once I drop a quirk to copy another one, it eventually gets hard to remember all the details because I can't just go back and check."

"I see. Do you still have all four of the Nomu's quirks? If not, I might be able to -"

"Yeah." I remember him nodding determinedly, his mouth pressing into a thin line. "I kept them," he growled, "and even aside from the whole kidnapping people for their powers and wanting to kill All Might, whoever put this combination of powers together is vile. The speed? Comes from an adrenaline quirk. Normal adrenaline supercharges your body, slows down your perception of time, lets you tap into 100% of your strength - that quirk's superadrenaline actually speeds you up in time, forces your muscles to activate above their capacity, and so on. But to keep up with All Might? The Nomu would have had to be locked into a permanent state of panic. And that's not even the worst of it."

"The next quirk, the strength quirk? The person that got abducted for it probably thought it was an exercise quirk. The more you destroy your muscles, the more super strength they have when they heal back up. But to push that up to All Might's level of strength, you'd basically have to torture someone over and over. They would have needed Zaimokuza's regeneration just to survive - and it had to be his regeneration specifically for them to benefit from it, because his quirk replaces damaged cells with healthy cells in a really similar way to actual healing without creating like scar tissue and so on, and apparently that's pretty rare. The fact that it doesn't numb the pain any probably wasn't a particular concern of theirs, but with enough superadrenaline in its system the Nomu might not have felt the pain at all."

"And the reason they needed all of that muscle, was the shock absorption quirk. One that stored the energy from impacts in its muscle fibers, so it could release the energy later. I think whoever put that Nomu together did so knowing that they would torture it, knowing that they could force it to build up an incredible bulk of muscle, all so they could set it up against All Might and watch him effectively punch himself to death." I hit pause again, cutting off my requests that he go into more detailed descriptions of the quirks and his exceptionally useful, exceptionally detailed responses. Once again, I heard the raw anger and outrage in Hikigaya Hachiman's voice.

Again, I remembered his response to my challenge, to my telling him that he needed to find a way to impress me if he wanted to be brought in on the investigation.

"I'll see what I can do," he'd said.

"Pfffff…. Haaaaaaah." I let out another cloud of smoke.

I should probably start cleaning up around the office, if I'm gonna have an intern in a couple weeks, huh?