And another one!
Running on the Edge
(Inspired by Cyberpunk: 2077, Edgerunners, and Star Wars: The Bad Batch)
Izuku is a scarred boy. His clothes have been singed by Bakugo's relentless bullying, and his skin has been marked by handprint-sized scars running across his arms as his bully's cronies continue to pick at him and torment him as much as they can.
He is quirkless and with little prospects for the future. He doesn't have many places left to go. He is alone.
But then he gets caught up in a violent skirmish between two gangs on the streets of Musufatu, and is surprised to see a quirkless person standing and fighting amongst them.
Escaping from the fight, Izuku looks up criminal behaviour in Musufatu, and finds that whilst All Might's tenue as the number one hero has drastically decreased crime itself, including the dismantling of entire gangs and organised criminal syndicates, there are still smaller gangs and groups of malcontents that wage their own personal wars against each other in the shadows, out of sight of both the heroes and the police. Surprisingly, rumours circulate that many of the number within these gangs are made up of the quirkless, due to them being pushed out by society and forced onto the streets by those who would discriminate against them. However, those said discriminates would shoot down this theory on principle alone, and it would remain as just a rumour.
Recently, there have been rumours of a gang of vigilantes and villains running shop across lower Musufatu. A gang calling themselves the Runner, who welcome even the quirkless into the fold, but again, those are just rumours.
The next day, on his way back home from Aldera (the beginning of the first episode), Izuku would take a different route home from school and ends up walking down an alleyway. However, he is soon accosted by a pair of thugs in hoodies and held at knifepoint as they demand that he hands over whatever cash that he had.
But then the two of them are beaten up by another pair of thugs with bats and masks, their hoodies graffitied with a symbol of two boots running against the ground. The Runners. They tell him to go home, and he pauses, dumbly asking them who they are. They don't answer and walk away, leaving him on his own once more.
Meanwhile, in some other part of the city, Bakugo is come upon the sludge villain as he is trying to rob a store and knocks him down. Illegal quirk usage, but no one pays any mind to it in the face of his amazing quirk, especially one golden-haired number one hero...
The next day, Bakugo comes into Aldera smugger than ever, talking about how he had been given the chance of a lifetime, but he would refuse to share any details about it with anyone. His bullying of Izuku suddenly ramps up, and now Izuku is sporting a fresh scar on his arm. With not much else left to lose in his life, Izuku takes to the streets after school to try and find the Runners once again, but to no luck. He spends days after school looking for even a sign or a mention of them, but whenever he asks around people either shoot him off, ignore him, or threaten to report him to the police should he ask them about the Runners again.
Eventually though, he doesn't find them. They find him.
Having learnt that he was asking around for them, two of the Runners - both girls around his age, one by the codename of Lil' Miss Militant, with a quirk that allows her to summon weapons of all kinds into her hands, and the other a techie by the codename of Black Tarantula, who is quirkless but compensates for it by her mind and inventions, particularly the six mechanical spider limbs on her back - track down Izuku one night and demands he stay out of their business. Izuku, however, wants to know why they do what they do and if they really do accept quirkless people into their ranks, but the pair of them don't answer his questions. They simply order him to clear off and stay away from them.
The next day, Bakugo's bullying is as bad as ever, and after a particularly bad row from him, Izuku takes a long walk out into the city just to think about his life. His prospects are low, he doesn't have a lot to look forward to in life, his mother can only do so much, and no one else gives a damn about him because of his quirklessness.
He has nowhere to go, no one that will accept him, and nothing left for his life.
But then, he is confronted by thugs in hoodies. Those same thugs that he has encountered in the alleyway before.
And this time, instead of robbing him, they stab him in the stomach.
Izuku is left on the ground, trapped in a panic as he bleeds profusely from his stomach. Because of his quirklessness, no one is eager to help him, and so he is left to lose blood on the ground and slowly bleed to death, his breath escaping his body in panicked gasps as the life slowly begins to slip from his body.
And at this point, Izuku isn't sure if he minds it.
But then something grips his body. Through the darkness of his eyes, he sees Lil' Miss Militant and Black Tarantula standing over him. But that is all that he sees before he is rendered unconscious.
When he wakes up, he finds himself in what must've been the basement of an old warehouse, strapped to a table as an underground doctor sealed his wounds, and Lil' Miss Militant and Black Tarantula watching over him. When he asks why they had saved her, or even why they knew he needed saving, they reveal that they had been scoping him out ever since their conversation. They'd been spying on him, in other words, even when he was in school. You don't let someone who'd been trying to track you down for days walk away without someone there to keep an eye on them, after all.
And as for why they had saved him... well, they couldn't just take him to a hospital, considering his quirklessness. Knowing their priorities, he would never have made it onto the waiting list.
Soon enough, an armoured man by the codename of Viper (his appearance in my mind is that of Echo from Star Wars: The Bad Batch) walks in and tells them that it is time for him to leave. Placing a black bag over his head, the three of them unhook him from the table and begin to lead him away from their headquarters, before he blurts something out.
He wants to join them.
They look to each other and blink, before eventually deciding to bring him to their boss. They do, and pull the bag from his eyes.
The visage of an elderly Knuckleduster greets him.
As it turns out, when the Naruhata Vigilantes had split up following their final battle with Number Six, Knuckleduster was the only one who stayed underground as the rest retired or went pro. However, after a year or so of going it alone on the streets, he realised that he couldn't keep going about this fight on his own. Not again. He needed help.
So, he formed a new crew. He collected whatever lost souls and wannabe do-gooders he could find and helped them form a new gang. An underground movement he called the Runners. They would be the ones to keep the helpless in the darkness safe, quirk or not be damned, and anyone would be free to join them, quirk or not be damned too.
Izuku is stunned by this, and Knuckleduster asks him why he wants to join them. Izuku confesses that he is quirkless, and doesn't have anywhere else left to go. Knuckleduster figures this from Black Tarantula's reports on him, ad he confesses that he is quirkless too. Izuku is shocked by this, and Knuckleduster asks him what he wants.
Izuku responds that it is to do good.
Knuckleduster welcomes him in on the spot.
And so begins Izuku's tenure as a member of the Runners, delivering packages between the various operatives belonging to the gang and helping to analyse the powers and abilities of their opponents whilst also being mentored by Viper in the art of combat, dirty fighting, and sheer pragmitism on the battlefield. In the Runners, he would also make his first real friends in Lil' Miss Militant and Black Tarantula, the three of them forming a Freudian trio of sorts as they continued to work together.
Izuku would soon ask of why they joined the Runners as well, seeing as how Lil' Miss' quirk would've made her perfect for heroics, as would've Tatantula's inventions. Lil' Miss is reluctant to say and doesn't tell him, but Tarantula shares why she is with them instead of the hero industry: her parents had been inventors just like her, and had been members of the hero industry as well, leading the charge alongside the greats like the Shields and the Hatsumes in pioneering support technology for heroes. However, her parents were quirkless just like her, and found themselves being repeatedly pushed out of contracts by those who looked down on their quirklessness. By the time she was in her early teens, her parents had been forced into owning a lowly little workshop which was soon raided by heroes targeting them for their quirklessness and they had been killed. However, she had survived, and had inherited their great minds from them. Now she was operating in a scrapyard owned by the runners, and had made dozens of her own inventions from spare bits of metal scattered across it.
Meanwhile, Bakugo is revealed to be training under All Might in order to inherit his power, and when the U.A. entrance exam comes to pass, Bakugo aces it with no rescue points to his name. Meanwhile, Izuku is placed into general education, and finds himself at odds with many of the people in his class due to his quirklessness, but tries to keep his head down to stay out of Bakugo's line of sight.
One day, Izuku and Viper are on one of their nightly patrols in the city, discussing possible encroachments onto Musufatu by a rising Yakuza by the name of the Shie Hassaikai, before something - no, someone - bumps into Izuku.
A small girl by the name of Eri, who begs them not to let the bad man take her away.
A second later, a man in a bird mask and plague doctor's outfit by the name of Overhaul, as well as his goons, find and confront them, demanding that Eri returns to them. Realising that he is the head of the Shie Hassaikai, Izuku and Viper are forced into a fight with Overhaul and his goons...
And in the confrontation, Overhaul disassembles Viper and murders him, covering the alleyway in his blood.
Holding Izuku by his throat and threatening to kill him too, Overhaul demands that Eri return to him, which she does out of fear of getting anyone else killed. Despite still in shock at Viper's violent death and everything that has happened in the last few minutes, Izuku still promises Eri that he will save her before she disappears from his sight, and is found by his fellow Runners crying in a pool of Viper's blood.
Retelling his story to Knuckleduster, the Runners begin a full-on war on Overhaul's Yakuza, raiding his hideouts and shell companies before eventually happening upon Overhaul's main base of operations.
The battle that followed would finally thrust the Runners into the spotlight, which was, ironically, the last thing that they wanted. What should've been a silent infiltration of Overhaul's headquarters soon became a pitched battle encompassing an entire block in the middle of the city, drawing attention from heroes and villains alike as all eyes turn to the massive battle between the Runners and the Shie Hassaikai. In its aftermath, the entire city block is devastated and Overhaul and his minions escape their grasp, but Eri is saved and the Runners slink back into the shadows.
However, now they have been unwillingly pushed into the spotlight and have gained both the admiration and the ire of heroes and villains alike. Worse yet, their battle with Overhaul has completely overshadowed the USJ battle that took place at the same time, so Shigaraki and the League of Villains do not get the spotlight and become a household name like they would've liked, and are furious about it.
But their obscurity is also an advantage to them as well, as with the HPSC pushing all of its resources into hunting down the Runners for humiliating their heroes, and the Shie Hassaikai for opposing them, no one except the teachers at U.A. give enough of a damn to look into the League of Villains, and no matter how much the likes of All Might and Nezu warn them about the threat that the League pose, as well as their possible connection to All for One, none of the heroes are willing to give the time needed to tracking them down, meaning that the League are able to work in the shadows without scrutiny by the heroes.
Worse yet, Overhaul is contacted by the League, and falls into a temporary alliance with them, meaning that the League are able to grow stronger in a shorter amount of time, and with access to a lot more resources as well, despite their still relative obscurity.
Meanwhile, the Runners are forced to go deeper into hiding as they are hunted and hounded by both heroes and villains, a small child now in their protection as Izuku struggles to balance his life as a civilian and student in U.A.'s general education course with his life as a Runner and protector of those that the heroes will not, especially when he comes into conflict with other gangs that also have quirkless people in their ranks as muscle and so on.
None of this is helped when the HPSC announces that All Might and the rest of the top tens themselves are going to be put in charge of curtailing the hidden gang movements in the underworld, including the Runners, with All Might himself bringing his new successor, Bakugo Katsuki, along with him, the both of them now armed with One for All.
Now with the League, Overhaul, and the heroes themselves tracking them down and hounding them every step of the way, Izuku and the rest of the Runners find themselves with few allies and enemies at all sides, as the HPSC tightens its grip and tries its best to bring them down.
And soon enough, the Runners' true enemy in the HPSC reveals itself, especially when Lil' Miss Militant reveals her backstory, and how she had been born to be a weapon for the Commission...