Author's Note: Hey. I continued this story over on AO3, but if you want to keep reading, I'll be updating it here every day to catch up with where we're at over there and then match my weekly posting schedule. Hope you enjoy.

Nagiso was beautiful. A town located in Nagano Prefecture, it did not even have ten thousand people to call it home. It was a fair distance out from Shizuoka, two days on foot and across a mountain, and that made it perfect for what they were looking for. However, that also meant that newcomers, especially newcomers that looked likehim, were easily spotted and hardly welcomed by the locals. As much as he might like to pretend that he was a normal person, Shuichi knew that he was different. Of course, those differences were only skin deep, quite literally, but there was still a fundamental difference in the way that he was, compared to the way thesevillagerslived. He couldn't stand the country. He'd beenbornin the country, which was how he knew it was a horrible affair growing up a Mutant between the rolling hills of Japan's countryside. His parents had given him the best life possible, but that didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. When the mobs came, they weren't by his side anymore. That was why he'd tried his luck in the big city, but even then, the reliable way to success would never have worked for him. People didn't want an off-brand Ninja Turtle serving them their cheap fast food. Somehow, even though they're getting their three meals a day from a crappy chain restaurant in the slums, 'they're above that'. That was how he'd gotten involved in his new life, his true life. That was how he'd become a Vanguard. It was how he'd become Spinner. But, that was over now. He was still Spinner, of course, as Kenji was still Magne and Atsuhiro was still Compress, but they weren't the Vanguard anymore. They were just … three thugs who achilddidn't care to stop.

That was months ago, two to be precise. It was late September and summer was beginning to diffuse into the aether, making way for autumn to seep into the bones of those who couldn't afford a nice warm sweater or a soft bed. Shuichi and his friends had slept in a car last night, so that definitely applied to the three of them. They'd been trying to make their way around Japan for the last two months after the Vanguard went down, looking for the remnants of Shigaraki's so-called 'assets', as well as the organisations of the boss, who Shuichi had heard the news call the 'Scourge of Kamino' and 'All for One'. He didn't know a lot about that man, but he did know that he was connected, and rich beyond all imagination. He'd have to be to afford the tools necessary to create the Nomu. Thus, Compress had come up with a plan to track down the leftovers from the crumbling empire of the Symbol of Evil and take it for themselves, and Magne and Shuichi had jumped on that plan without hesitation. They all had such lofty dreams, which were cut short when Shigaraki gave up and let himself be captured, so this was their next best thing, their Plan B to get to the top of the world. Shuichi didn't know what happened with Shigaraki to make him surrender like that, and evenswitch sides, buthestill believed in the world that the crusty asshole had talked about, and he was going to make it happen, no matter what. So, understandably, he was all for Compress's plan.

The only problem was that it was taking a little bit longer than they'd thought when planning this undertaking. They'd been at it for two months and made no progress. The only thing they'd found in the various broken-in and raided hideouts they'd used while with the Vanguard was a single tracking device, which was fixed on one location, so they'd had to put their trust in that. Compress said it was a kink in the plan, but rough terrain was always more entertaining than a boring, smooth drive. Shuichi did not agree, but had still gone along with his friends' plans, as the alternative was dying on the streets a week after he left the security of a group. They'd found that tracker two days ago, and had been following the trail since, which was what brought them to Nagiso. The tracker pinpointed coordinates just outside of town, somewhere in the hills, and so they'd come to Nagiso and slept for the night in their stolen car in preparation for whatever they'd find at these coordinates. Shuichi wasn't sure what they'd find when they woke up, but rest had been more important at the time.

While the sleep was restful, unusually so for a night spent in a car with two other people, the question of what exactly they were going to find was once again in Shuichi's mind as he woke on the morning of the twenty-seventh of September. He was the first to awaken, and so Shuichi went about rousing the others from their sleeping state, which was easy enough due to the paranoia around being caught that had arisen in the months after the fall of their benefactor. Soon, all three of the remaining Vanguards were getting ready for their day, acquiring their tools and equipment from the trunk of the car, By the time the hour ticked over, the three of them were ready to leave, having prepared for their day silently and with the heavy weight of anticipation hanging over them. Shuichi, Magne and Compress had been looking for any scrap of influence for two months, and this was their first real lead. They needed this if they were going to get back what they had lost to the kid with the weird Quirk. Izuku Midoriya had ruined the Vanguard, and this was their shot at any possible revenge.

"So, are you ready, Spinner?" Compress asked, breaking Shuichi out of his thoughts.

Shuichi looked around and saw that Magne and Compress were ready to start their trek towards the tracker's destination. Compress had chosen to abandon his usual mask, an ornate porcelain feature, in favour of a simple surgical mask that covered his face from the nose down. Magne sported her usual style, loose-fitting casual clothes, but left her large magnet in the car to be inconspicuous. Shuichi had done much the same while lost in his thoughts, leaving his blades and his villain outfit behind and donning a simple set of civilian clothes to blend in, as much as he could with green skin and purple hair. He cleared his throat and stood to join his allies in their readiness.

"Let's get going," Shuichi said.

Compress nodded, turning to Magne to silently ask her the same question. When the bulky woman agreed, answering with a nod of her own, Shuichi knew that it was time. They were finally going to make some progress with this boring fetch-quest.

It wasn't long before the three of them set out across town, trying their best to sink into the peripherals and not be too noticeable. That didn't work out too well for them, because they were a large, bulky bruiser, a lithe showman and a lizardman walking through a town where it looked like most people hadn't seen a Mutant before. Judging by the stares they got and the whispers that Shuichi still heard anyway, the three of them were causing quite the scandal for the locals. Shuichi did his best to ignore the small children who'd point and stare at him with wide, unbelieving eyes, but it made his skin crawl how they made him out to be such a strange creature, as if he wasn't just another person. That was why he missed the big city, because even if he wouldn't be hired at most of the entry-level places, he could still find comfort in the fact that his existence wasn't seen as anovelty, and that was the better word for it. Pulling the drawstrings on his jacket to feel the hood pull tighter against the back of his head only gave him a portion of the relief that he'd felt when cloaked by the larger Mutant populations of the city back when the Vanguard had been together.

They trekked across town and eventually came to the place where the buildings started thinning out and becoming rarer. Shuichi thought they were going the wrong way, but when he asked Compress, who was in charge of the tracker, the performer had reassured both him and Magne that they were still following the direction he was being shown to go. Shuichi made it a point not to have second thoughts with all he'd done for the Vanguard — attacking and maiming kids wasn't exactly small-time — but he was starting to become less trusting in the gadget they'd randomly found by chance. He had to believe that they were heading towards something good, though, because if they weren't, Shuichi was pretty sure they were done. He didn't have the luxury of second thoughts anymore, but he could still have reservations about his first thoughts, which he showed through his small expressions along the way, such as fidgeting with the drawstrings of his jacket or humming under his breath a tune his mother had taught him in his youth. It did nobody any good, but it kept him from vocalizing his displeasure with the way things were going.

"Oh, I do believe I have good news!" Compress chirped after they'd walked along the side of the road out of town for about ten minutes.

"Is it a 7-Eleven?" Magne moaned.

"No, my dear friend, it is progress! Behold our tracking device and you will see!" Compress replied with a laugh.

The showman held out the tracker so that Magne and Shuichi could see. It looked like a cell phone, but its sole function was to track an object tagged with a few of the bugs they'd found alongside the device. Only one was active, showing a location that the three of them had never actually been able to see on a scale that mattered, only being able to see that it was hundreds of kilometres away. Now, Shuichi could see it with his own eyes — it was now justhundredsof metres away, as if it was right next door for Shuichi's city-slicker sensibilities. In fact, looking ahead at the road at that moment showed Shuichi the turn they had to take to get to it, as looking directly across the hills showed him nothing. He met Magne's gaze and the two of them set off down the road, grinning from ear to ear as they left Compress in their dust.

"Wait a second, you two, we're at the last leg of our journey; no need to go gallivanting about now!" Compress shouted after them, also taking off into a run to catch up with his more excitable teammates.

The trio all but sprinted down the street, but Magne and Spinner came to a stop when they rounded the turn that would take them to their prize. Compress came bounding after them, running into Magne's bulkier frame as he was forced into stopping in an instant. As it turned out, their ticket out of homelessness wasliterallya home, as a relatively large, ordinary looking house stood on top of a hill a while up the road they'd just turned onto. It was more of a driveway, really, and less of a road, now that Shuichi was looking at it, and he wondered just what was beyond the white picket fence that established the property line. What the hell was a normal, brick and mortar home doing storing their one shot at ruling the world? Why this house — whyanyhouse? Why not a fortified bunker under a city? Why a house in the country? Shuichi didn't understand the machinations at play, but the urge to put all that out of his mind and simply accept this blessing was strong. Not strong enough to make him ignorant to the kind of thing they were walking into, but strong.

"Okay, gang. Let's be smart about this. For all we know, this is a secret blacksite facility meant to kill any who enter. Caution is the name of the game," Compress said, stepping around Magne to take the lead once again.

As a group, the three villains began to cross the distance and scale the small incline that led to the house. As they approached, Shuichi noticed some things about this house that were odd. The first was that the house seemed old. Like, really old — there were small signs of overgrowth beginning to overtake and grow into the house through the windows and small cracks in the walls. Second, there was no car parked out front, which reinforced the idea that this place had been left alone for a long time. The third thing that was strange about it was that there was a nameplate on the mailbox —Shigaraki. Was this where Shigaraki grew up, or where his family lived before he got involved with All for One? How did the authorities not find and raid this place months ago if this house belonged to his family? Shuichi sent a puzzled look at Magne for any insight that she could give him, but simply got the same look in return.

Compress approached the door, and Shuichi could tell he was tense. The man always tried to make it appear that he was laid back, but something had changed in him after the Vanguard had fallen. Sure, they'd all had to change, but Compress was different. It was like he had more focus, now, more drive to succeed. He had never really told anybody what he'd wanted when they were the Vanguard, but Shuichi had since learned that he was from some crime family from way back when the pro hero system was just getting started, and his goal was to become a Peerless Thief, a criminal the likes of which Japan had not known since that time. Shuichi guessed it was admirable enough, much more than his simple follower mindset. Even Magne had more drive than Shuichi, who had the goal of living how she wished to drive her. Shuichi had nothing, he was hollow on the inside and he knew it. The two people who'd been by his side through this thing were both much more invested in their personal goals than he was, and it stuck out like a sore thumb, at least to Shuichi. Maybe it wasn't bad to be a follower, someone who devoted themselves topeopleand not topromises, but on the nights where it got quiet early and he was left to himself, Shuichi did wonder what it was like to have a dream, to have real desires and wants in life, other than a mere good time. Maybe one day he'd have that drive, feel that fire in his veins that Compress did when talking about his family, or the strength of ideology that Magne exuded when she spoke about her ideal life as her ideal self.

The door shuddered as Compress pushed it, which pulled Shuichi out of his thoughts. Now wasn't the time for reflection, now was the time for action. The masked man stepped foot inside the house and hummed as he looked around inside. Following him, Shuichi noted that the place had a fine layer of dust coating everything. Cobwebs hung from the corners and dust painted the floor and all the furniture a dull grey. The air inside was thick, stagnant, which was the final nail in the coffin that Shuichi needed to definitively call this place abandoned. The trio entered into a living room, all set with a sofa, a single-person armchair and a television. Shuichi, being the no-lifer that he was, was familiar with different kinds of televisions due to the time he'd spent playing video games on them. This television could barely be considered such, as it looked centuries old in model and in the colour that had all but completely faded away, leaving only faint impressions of what it used to look like. Shuichi was sure he looked silly, but he felt heartbroken at the sight and walked over to the poor excuse for a TV, tapping it with his finger to see if it would justfall apart. It didn't, but it did rattle as if it wanted to.

"So, where's it supposed to be?" Magne asked, looking around cluelessly.

"I suppose we'll have to search. It is in this house, however, and that means that we won't be searching for long. Shall we begin?" Compress said.

The search didn't take long. With the three of them, soon enough they noticed that there was a segment of wall, a square about the size of Magne's hand, that jutted out from the wall slightly. Compress took initiative and tried to see if it could be pushed in or pulled out, but he ended up finding out that it slid up and revealed a keypad embedded into the wall behind it. Compress looked back at Shuichi and Magne, but neither of them had anything resembling a passcode.

"Do you wanna try every possible combination?" Shuichi asked, his mind flashing to when characters in movies would try that sorry excuse of a plan.

"This is serious, Spinner. This is the big man we're talking about, the Scourge of Kamino. The way Shigaraki talked about him made him seem like he'd have backup plans for his backup plans, which themselves were for backup plans. One wrong input could lock us out forever. We have to be extraordinarily careful, as we may not be able to afford failing even once. Any ideas?" Compress said, looking to Magne next.

"No clue," Magne sighed.

There have been many times in his life that Shuichi wished that he was a character in a video game, but none of those moments matched his intense desire in this moment to be one of those characters that can see through walls to find objectives. This boggled Shuichi's mind in a way he hadn't experienced, not even from the hardest of difficult playthroughs. He looked, truly studied the keypad, tried to recall everything he knew about safecracking and hacking, but he had nothing. After a few moments of silent contemplation, Compress sounded off with an excited hum.

"I believe I have the answer! See, if we can identify the buttons with the least dust on them, then we can determine which numbers make up the passcode. That'll do nothing to help us figure out what that code is, but it'll be a start, eh?" Compress explained.

"Knock yourself out, buddy. This is getting a little too complicated for me," Magne said, stepping away from the keypad to look around the house.

Shuichi got closer to the keypad, but worried that his breathing would disrupt the dust on the keys and invalidate their efforts, so kept his distance for now. Instead, he looked at the display for the passcode, how the number of numbers was already shown by the underlined blank spaces where the numberswouldbe shown to them, if they could figure it out. There were seven numbers in the passcode, which stood out to Shuichi as something worth noting. Why specifically seven? That number seemed innocuous enough, but an odd number being present on what was presumably a lock of some kind was strange, and not something he'd ever seen before. Granted, he'd lived a pretty sheltered life, so he really didn't know.

"Aha!" Compress cheered, spooking Shuichi out of his thoughts.

"What is it?" he asked, stepping back and clenching his fists in case it was bad news.

"I may have a method of learning what numbers make up the passcode. All I need is …" Compress trailed off. He reached into the little satchel that he always had on him and pulled out one of his marbles. He snapped his fingers, and in a flash of blue light, the marble became a roll of sticky tape. "... this!"

"How's that supposed to help?" Shuichi asked, unimpressed.

"You see, Spinner, if we press some tape up against the buttons, hard enough to adhere to them but not so hard it'll push the buttons, and then rip it off again, we can potentially see how much dust sticks to the tape from each button. I got the idea from those old overdramatic cop shows where they'd carry out a similar process on door knobs to obtain fingerprints, but it should work well enough for our purposes," Compress said, sounding like he was smiling under that mask of his.

"I suppose it's the only plan we have, so do it," Shuichi grumbled.

Compress hummed in agreement, and went about his plan. He rolled out a square of the tape, no bigger than one of the buttons, which itself was no bigger than Shuichi's thumb. Then, Compress gently held the tape up to the first button, keeping it there until he was sure it had stuck. The man had impossibly still hands, possibly from his training in the circus, or wherever it was that he learned his many skills. Shuichi didn't know where he'd learned how to break out of things quite the way he could, and he didn't know where he'd gotten the tape from either, come to think of it.

"How many things do you keep in that bag, just in marble form?" he asked.

"Things that may be useful in the future, such as this. Now hush, I need to work my magic," Compress answered.

Shuichi watched as Compress continued. He ripped off the tape and held it up into the air between the two of them so that they could determine how much dust came off. It was a fair amount of dust, so much so that the button now looked clean, or at least cleaner than the others. Shuichi raised an eyebrow at this, wondering if this plan may actually work after all, but didn't want to get too excited in case it ended up not working. He instead jerked his head back at the keypad, a prompt for Compress to keep going.

Compress obliged, pinning the tape up onto the wall next to the button it had been used on. He then carried out the same process on the second button, and once he did, the results were painting a positive picture. The tape came away almost clear, as if there was barely any dust on it at all. Shuichi couldn't really tell from looking at it, due to it being a cool grey already, and so this gave him a considerable boost to his ability for optimism. He encouraged Compress to keep going with a smile on his face, and by the time he was done, they had twelve squares of tape, all with various amounts of dust and grime on them, and twelve relatively cleaner keys. Shuichi looked at the tape squares and clearly saw a difference. Three of the keys had almost nothing on them, whereas the others all had visible dirt and filth and dust. This was promising.

"That means the numbers we're looking for are two, three and six!" Compress said, crossing his arms in a way that clearly told Shuichi that he was a little too proud of himself.

"But we need seven, and that's only three, genius," Shuichi explained, pointing to the display above the keys.

"Wha — well, I don't seeyoucoming up with any ingenious schemes to help, do I?" Compress said as he pointed an accusatory finger at Shuichi.

Shuichi groaned at Compress, but indeed wasn't offering any actually helpful ideas to the group effort. Neither was Magne, in fact, but that was only something that Shuichi realised after she'd already begun making her way back to the two of them and took a look at the keypad for herself. She gazed at it blankly for a moment, and then looked at the two men with a pitying glint in her eyes.

"The numbers couldrepeat, you know?" she said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

"That they could, dear Magne, thank you very much!" Compress said, diving in once again to try and solve this puzzle.

With a sigh, Shuichi looked back at the keypad as well, and felt like something was bugging him about it. It just felt like he'd seen something like this before. The numbers would have to repeat to get anything, but the way they'd repeat was familiar to Shuichi in a strange, dreamlike way, as if it came from a memory he'd forgotten. If he were taking it at face value, the code would be two-three-three-three-six-six-six, but that couldn't be it. Could it? Compress was right earlier, they were dealing with All for One, the man who'd stalemated All Might in battle. Huh, that was funny; they both had names beginning in 'All', and they were enemies. Shuichi was about to blame his lizard brain for focusing on the wrong things when he got a crazily stupid idea. It may not have been numbers, butlettersthat they were putting in. That was why they repeated, because it was like typing on an old phone with no actual keyboard —you had to use the number keys to get letters. Shuichi had lived in the country, so he'd seen a bunch of those old crummy phones around. He tried to remember what it was, and then it came to him.

The number two, letter-wise, got you the lettera. The number three, pressed thrice as in the code, got youf. The number six, pressed thrice, got youo. It wasn't two-three-three-three-six-six-six, it wasa-f-o. It almost felt obvious, because those were the big man's initials, but it felt a little too obvious. It probably wouldn't work. It also kind of made sense, in a way. Shuichi had seen the clips from the Kamino Incident; All for One sounded like he was so far up his own ass that Shuichi suspected that was how he lost his face. He was simply overflowing with pride and arrogance, so why not put his name on his lock? Well, Compress had gotten a crazy idea in, maybe Shuichi should pitch.

"Hey, I might know what to do. Put in one two, three threes and three sixes, in that order. If this doesn't happen, then I'll take responsibility for that, I've just got a good feeling about this," Shuichi said.

"Are you sure?" Magne asked with a furrowed brow.

"This could cost us everything," Compress said with a grave tone that he rarely used.

"I know, just trust me. We've come this far, yeah? Let me pull my weight," Shuichi replied, meeting both of his comrades' eyes.

The two nodded to him, and Shuichi watched as they stepped out of the way. They wantedhimto do it. Well, he was certainly up to the task. He leaned in close to the keypad and sucked in a steadying breath. He was so afraid that, in the moment of quiet tension exuding from all three villains that followed, that he was mess it up and hit the wrong number, but he didn't. The lock took the number two as correct. Next was three, which was also correct. At that point, Shuichi felt that he'd gotten it right, but didn't want to celebrate too son, as that was how it always went wrong in the movies. He pressed three again, getting another chipper sounding beep out of the device. Another three, another beep. Shuichi pressed two sixes in quick succession, now fairly confident that it'd work, and they did, earning him two more beeps. The last six felt almost congratulatory, as if the beep that rang out from pressing it was cheering him on. The display flashed green for a split second, and then nothing happened. The wall didn't open, no hatch in the roof swung down to meet them, nothing. Shuichi looked around for anything that had changed, but there were no differences in the room after correctly inputting the passcode.

"Well, that was underwhelming," Magne sighed.

Shuichi was about to retort with a quip of some sort when the floor started rumbling. The vibrations shook his legs so that they became very slightly numb, and the three villains got into positions they could fight in as they prepared for the worst. However, the remaining Vanguards were thrown off by the floor of the living roomsinkinginto the ground, being swallowed up by the earth and revealing itself to them as an elevator, not a solid floor. Shuichi looked over at Magne as her face became shadowed by the walls that rose above as they were taken further into a shaft where the light of day did not reach.

"How underwhelming isthis?" he asked.

Magne scoffed and flipped him off, which was the last thing Shuichi saw before the three of them were plunged into near-total darkness. The ride from there was quiet, so Shuichi studied the walls rolling past them instead of breaking that silence. They were dark walls, metal, with wires and tubes running along them that ran down to where the elevator was taking us, and merged with the wall at the top of the shaft. Shuichi suddenly got a gut feeling that they were walking into something bigger than they'd ever believed, but held strong in the face of his trepidation.

"This is it," Compress said, his voice ringing out around the elevator in an odd way. Shuichi turned to him to notice that he'd taken his mask off, now letting his eyes and mouth show through his cloth ski mask. "We've come so far and our reward is just seconds away. Are we ready, friends?" he asked. He was smiling, which Shuichi thought was probably appropriate, but the lizard just couldn't shake the feeling that it was more than just a simple weapon or tool, or whatever it was that Compress thought was down there.

"I amsoready," Magne said with a grin.

"Yeah," Shuichi muttered.

The elevator soon came to a stop, after about a minute of descending. It opened up into a dark area, so dark that Shuichi couldn't see a thing. Compress, judging from the sound of rustling behind Shuichi, was looking for something in his bag. Finally, he seemed to have found it after a few moments of searching when a blue flash preceded a flashlight being turned on, pointed right at Magne's face, causing her to flinch back and curse under her breath. Compress then handed Magne the flashlight and took out two more, one for himself and one that he handed to Shuichi, which he gladly took for himself.

The trio began to look around and enter the area they'd been dropped off in. Shuichi hadn't been in a lot of fancy hospitals or universities lately, but this sure looked like some kind of laboratory. There were a lot of computer screens along one of the walls, embedded into the walls, which were turned off at the moment. Shuichi's footsteps rang out around the room, echoing for a moment before fading out once again, as the others' were. He looked down from the screens and saw a long desk running along the wall at waist level, with a series of keyboards greeting him.

Shuichi approached the computers and looked for a power button of some sort. He ran his fingers along the keyboards, brushing the dust off of them with a few swipes of his hand. Pressing a few random keys didn't do anything, so Shuichi roamed his eyes around the tops of the keyboard he was currently stationed at, hoping to find a power button. Running his fingers along it let him feel that there was a groove in the plastic, and he pressed it to learn that it was indeed a power button, as a red light shone from that spot when he pushed it. It seemed that the button itself was hidden by the years of dust and dirt that had accumulated down here, similarly to the surface house. Shuichi couldn't help but smile to himself as he watched the computers turn on, the screens flickering as they turned on for the first time in who knew how long. The screen, when they booted up onto a screen full of numbers and what looked like different entries in a journal of some kind, shed light on the rest of the room, halfway invalidating their use of flashlights. Shuichi, however, was focused on the screens, as the entries that had opened sounded familiar in what they spoke of.

"Holy mother of—!" Magne yelled, taking a few hasty steps back from where she was standing.

Being startled by the scream, Shuichi quickly spun around to see what Magne was reacting to, and immediately understood at first glance what had frightened her so much. There were structures along the wall opposite the computer wall, and there werepeopleinside, though the glassy panels were too dusty and dirty to see exactly what they looked like. Shuichi sucked in a harsh breath at the number of them, five in all. The five coffin-like pods were plugged into the wall by a series of tubes and wires, with the people inside seemingly being unconscious. It gave Shuichi the idea of life support, or some kind of medical service. It kind of looked like the method used to store Nomu, which made him think thattheywere what the tracker was attached to. They must have been Nomu that were stored away in case the Vanguard fell, and now they'd found their backup infantry. Shuichi felt a rush of excitement wash over him, and looked over to Compress to silently ask what they did now.

"Can you get them open?" Compress asked, his voice laced with the same excitement.

"I don't know. Maybe," Shuichi replied, turning around to face the computers once again.

Shuichi began to push keys in a semi-random sequence. When that didn't work after a few moments, he waved the computer's mouse around a little to find it on the screen and started to click on things he thought might do something. He scrolled through the notes on what looked like experiments with DNA, terminology about Quirks that Shuichi didn't really understand, and eventually came to a program in the corner of the desktop named 'Stasis Control'. Shuichi opened the program and saw five buttons greet him, the meaning of which he could put together quickly, even if he didn't know a lot about technology. Shuichi looked back at the pods, once again getting the feeling that this would change everything, but wondered if that was really a bad thing, or if it would finally get them to where the three of them wanted to be. He felt Compress and Magne's eyes on him, and so he clicked on each of the 'open' buttons on the screen, left to right.

Immediately, a hissing sound rang out in the chamber. Shuichi stepped away from the computers and rejoined his friends to see that the rightmost pod'd front panels were lifting away from the base and folding upward, allowing whoever was inside to exit it. A light mist escaped from the pod as it opened, as the form inside was illuminated by the light from the screens and unobscured by their being freed. As the rest of the pods opened, it felt as though Shuichi couldn't breathe for a moment as he realised what the first pod gave them.

It was a child. A small boy, who couldn't be old enough to even go to middle school, fell out of the pod and collapsed onto the floor in a heap, unaided by any of the villains who'd released him. He wore what looked like a one-piece swimsuit from head to toe, with only his hands and head left revealed to show that he was shockingly pale, likely from his time inside, as a cold breeze wafted away from the pods as they opened. Shuichi looked at the boy with wide eyes, not wanting to believe that their grand prize was a little boy. What washesupposed to do? Shuichi forced himself to wait until he'd seen all of them to make a judgement on them as a group; maybe the rest would balance the kid out. He was thin, weak looking, and it made Shuichi want to just walk out of the room, but he resisted that urge.

As the rest of the inhabitants exited their pods, they all fell to the ground, though some had an easier time adjusting and getting back up than others. The one right after the boy was a girl who looked like she wouldn't be allowed to drink, and this made Shuichi again want to groan very loudly. She was wearing an almost identical bodysuit to the boy, which made him think that it was necessary in some way. The girl was better, looking like she could take a solid hit and keep standing, not like the boy. Still, she looked young, too young to be of very much value to their mission. She, along with the boy, looked very plain, with the boy sporting freckles and a shock of white hair that poofed out in all directions, and the girl letting her similarly white, shoulder-length hair fall around her head messily. They looked like ordinary kids — other than the hair and, as he discovered when they began to look around, red eyes — and it made Shuichi's blood boil.

After the girl came another, a grown woman by the looks of it. She was much stronger, by the way she calmly stepped out of the pod instead of face planting on the ground. She looked right at Shuichi and it sent a shiver down his spine, as she had a different energy to the kids. She knew something he didn't, and it made his heart skip a beat at the way she bore her eyes into his own, as if she was judging one had longer hair, still white, but it was tied up into a tight ponytail that waved around the back of her head as she looked around at her fellow podlings. Her eyes seemed to be a brighter red than the others', as they cut through the darkness in a way the kids' didn't. The next podling was a man, tall and lean. He sported an undercut of that same white hair they all shared, and his eyes seemed calculating, almost critical of everything they were laid upon in a way that made Shuichi uncomfortable, but not as much as the woman's had.

The final podling to exit was a larger one, male again, who lumbered out of his pod with footsteps that made the ground shake. He was at least eight feet tall, which Shuichi noticed alongside the fact that the pod he'd exited from was twice the size of the others'. He fell to the ground as well, gravity overtaking him, leaving the woman and the other man as the only ones standing. The two of them looked at each other, seemingly studying both themselves and the other as they locked eyes in an icy glare. It seemed that the man was intimidated, as he looked away and stood back as the woman walked around, looking at each of her fellow podlings, though Shuichi wasn't sure if they were the same as this woman, given her ability to assumedly put the others in their place. The energy around each of them was different, too, as the man had a criticising gaze, but the woman's was more like she waslearning,and that was more unsettling to Shuichi, even as someone without any major secrets that he kept. Eventually, the woman seemed to have learned all she could about the other podlings, and stepped towards the Vanguard in silence, giving each of them a look of acknowledgement, before she spoke for the first time.

"Who are you? Where are Master and the Doctor?" she asked, her silky smooth voice not seeming to echo at all, as other sounds did.

"Master? You mean All for One?" Magne asked.

"Yes. You know him, I assume?" the woman asked again. Her tone was so casual that Shuichi was almost fooled into thinking she was just another person, but then her piercing, studying eyes were placed onto him again, and he came to the conclusion that she was much more than met the eye.

"We worked for him. Or at least, he was our boss's boss. How do you know him?" Compress said.

The woman snapped her eyes over to Compress, as if she'd been planning it. She then turned her head toward him, which gave Shuichi the feeling that she was like a robot learning how to move or something like that. Depending on how long she spent in that stasis pod, she might have been.

"He created us. We are his vestiges, and we have finally been summoned to fulfil our destinies as his vassals. We are the Children of All for One."