My Mangekyo Sharingan Can't Save My Hero Academia

Chapter 197 193 Yuta's Troubles 1

The question lingered in the warehouse.The portable generators hummed.

Somewhere overhead, a damaged metal beam creaked. Curious held her recorder steady. The seven MLA escorts remained silent.

Waiting. Unfortunately, The White Fang opposite did not answer.

At first, Chitose assumed he was considering the question.

The reaction didn't surprise her at all. In fact, she could very well imagine what was going on through his mind right now. Or so she thought.

That was until she noticed something. His attention wasn't on her anymore.

'Yep, definitely doesn't ring a bell.' In reality, Yuta had mentally checked out the moment she introduced her organization. Meta Liberation Army. Nothing. Not a single memory. Not even a vague one. Which was becoming a recurring problem.

Not surprisingly, nothing from canon rang a bell.

'How many groups are in this country?' First there had been the Creature Rejection Clan he ran into recently. Then some star association appearing from who knows where.

He remembered the Shie Hassaikai remnants from back then. Then Trigger syndicates. Shigaraki was probably still out there somewhere.

Now apparently there was a Meta Liberation Army. And judging from the way she said it, this wasn't some tiny local organization either.

'At this point I feel like Japan might just secretly be eighty percent organizations.' Was Japan really this bad without All Might? Every week some new crew appeared. Each one weirder than the last.

The worst part was that this lady clearly expected him to have an opinion. An actual opinion on politics.

Yuta stared at her over his mask. He had zero interest in whatever grand narrative she was spinning, nor did he care about the sociopolitical climate of a crumbling hero society. He was running a strictly practical logistics operation across multiple districts to secure data, eliminate threats, and keep his environment controlled. After all, canon truly had gone to shit.

If he didn't step in to do something, who knows what Japan would turn into. 'What the hell do I do with these guys now .. hmm?' His head had turned slightly. His gaze had drifted past her shoulder.

Toward the rubble and the unconscious bodies.

Toward—

The dealer. The man had woken up at some point, a ruthless scowl stretched across his bloodied face. One trembling hand had risen from the concrete.

A small device rested in his palm. Yuta's eyes narrowed.

"Ah." The dealer laughed. "Go to hell."

CLICK.

The charges wired into the shelving units detonated simultaneously.

BOOOOOOM.

The warehouse disappeared. The world became fire. Steel supports blew apart. The floor ruptured. Shipping containers, most carrying explosives were blasted to shrapnel pieces and launched through the air. The escorts didn't even have time to when the shockwave consumed everything.

A blinding flash of orange fire tore through the darkness, ripping through the metal walls, tearing the corrugated ceiling from its iron rivets, and sending a catastrophic storm of jagged steel shrapnel, burning timber, and concrete dust outward in a three-hundred-degree radius.

The explosion was followed by silence as burning debris rained from above. Large amounts of wood and metal could be seen bedded all over the area.

Smoke drifted lazily across the ruined dockyard. Several seconds passed, eventually revealing the internal situation. The interior of the warehouse was destroyed without a doubt. However, in the middle was a small dome made of solid rock.

Numerous cracks could be seen on the outer edges, blackened and scorched. The resulting damage gained from sustaining the explosion. The area fell into a long period of silence after that.

The stone dome remained motionless amidst the devastation. Three seconds later .. Cracks slowly spread across its surface.

Then—

CRACK. A section of the barrier exploded outward.

Fresh air rushed inside. Several coughing voices immediately followed. Coughing, one of the escorts dragged himself free from the opening.

Another followed.

Then another. Within moments five members of the group had emerged from what remained of the stone dome.

One of the escorts stared.

"What..."

Another looked around. "We should be dead." They looked at their numbers, only to see that they weren't complete.

Out of the seven escorts, three were missing.

Chitose Kizuki walked out into the smoking ruins, coughing lightly as she brushed a thick layer of gray concrete dust off her pale lilac hair. Her aqua-colored jacket was slightly disheveled, but her bright green irises were wide, burning with a manic, unadulterated thrill.

"Director! Are you unharmed?!" the lead escort barked, his face pale as he frantically surveyed the burning wasteland of the area. The warehouse no longer existed, leaving only burning wreckage remaining.

"I'm fine." She said, lowering her dusting hand. "It would seem the dealer here had a dead man's switch."

"Dammit. Killing himself too?"

"It's no surprise." Chitose said, unfazed. "With the commission's rules remaining unchanged since Tokyo and the ... Distinct punishment style of their attacker, their lives after this would have been worse off than death. To exchange his life for everyone else's .. probably didn't seem so bad."

The White Fang has quite the notoriety now compared to his first appearance. Crippling individuals for life? And the subsequent lifetime imprisonment under harsh conditions? How was that any worse than death?

"Luckily, we're alive." She stepped closer to the stone.

Examining it.

Running blue fingers across the fractured surface. Her smile slowly returned.

"Were any of you responsible for this?"

The group exchanged looks.

One shook his head.

"No."

"We don't have any earth-based quirks."

"None of us."

"Then that's what I thought." Her smile widened.

She turned. Scanning the ruins. The rooftop. The roads. And the surrounding buildings.

Nothing. The White Fang was gone. "He saved us." She looked around, counting their numbers. "Well, some of us." Everyone carried calm expressions.

The "deaths" of comrades had no effect on their mindset. This was the ideal of the army. If you died in battle, then it was because your meta ability was weak.

It was unfortunate, but life would go on regardless.

Kizuki turned to one of them whose Quirk she had specifically requested for this trip. "Vibe. Confirm." The woman codenamed "vibe" raised an arm that quickly transformed into a large radio-like receiver. Headphones appeared on her head at the same time as she closed her eyes. Five seconds later ..

"The other three are still alive." Vibe opened her eyes. "They're over in the distance groaning on the floor. It seems they didn't die in the explosion."

Hana Kurusawa was a worker at Shoowaysha Publishing. Her quirk was called Radio. Able to home in on all sounds in the surrounding area while active. She could also record any sounds she heard during that time, filtering what she wanted to keep and what she didn't, and was capable of presenting it in a voice recorder created from her own body.

She had worked in the publishing house for five years and was Chitose's right hand woman when searching for news worthy leads. Unfortunately, without a combat quirk, her standing in the army as a whole was rather low.

"Oh, so he saved everyone huh?" Chitose said, her voice carrying a melodic, thoroughly impressed laugh escaping her lips as she looked around the scorched earth.

"Then ran off before the smoke could even clear. Out of all the ways to avoid a follow-up question, detonating the venue is certainly the most dramatic." She licked her lips, her smile deepening. "His reaction time is quite fast. To save a bunch of people he doesn't know ... Quite the hero's mindset."

She pulled her notebook from her jacket. The cover had a scorch mark along one edge. The pages inside were fine. She opened it to the half-written column she had been drafting when the warehouse went up. The ink had smeared slightly from the impact of hitting the stone wall but the neat, elegant handwriting remained entirely legible.

She looked at the empty space beneath her notes, running a finger over the crossed-out observations. Possible ex-hero. Crossed out. Former underground operative. Crossed out. Commission black-ops asset. Crossed out.

Then looked at the empty space again and sighed dramatically. "And I didn't even get a direct quote." She closed the book and tossed it aside. There was no doubt now that this stakeout was a failure. However, she wasn't upset. Far from it.

As the Executive Director of Shoowaysha, she knew that a story didn't need to go according to script to be weaponized. For the past week, she had been systematically fueling the digital firestorms tearing through Japan's social media. Her article, 'The Illusion of Monopoly: Efficiency in the Vacuum,' had successfully hit new heights and reached more readers than all her previously released journalism works. All the right stars had practically aligned for this.

With the public distrust growing and the incompetence of heroes, the general narrative was already swaying. It would certainly take more than this to achieve definite results but this was the first step for the MLA's ambitions to come out of dormancy. This was why she was even here in the first place.

Too bad, things hadn't gone as planned. Still, there was progress. She hadn't given up on a story since her first year in the industry. That was not modesty or professional pride. It was the simple truth after seventeen years. Every subject she had ever pursued, she had eventually gotten what she needed. Some took longer than others. Some required more creative approaches to access. Some had tried to stop her in ways that ranged from legal threats to, on one memorable occasion, a very large dog.

When was the last time she had felt this sort of an interest in an interview subject? She herself couldn't quite remember. Before the attack at U.A.'s USJ, hero society had been completely, utterly dull.

Even after the collapse started, the actors on the stage were so intensely predictable. The so-called League of Villains, for all the panic they induced in the public, was currently nothing more than an aimless, petulant child throwing a tantrum against a hollow system. It was even more so when All For One made his first appearance on national television. The entire speech was nothing more than a declaration of how he was a Demon Lord who was going to kill the ultimate hero.

A declaration that sounded like it came from the worldview of a Chūnibyō adolescent reading a kids manga, with no grand philosophy, no elegant execution, no real story to tell beneath their surface-level malice.

In Chitose's view, the mighty All For One who had pushed Japan's greatest hero to his limits, was nothing special. With his death, the league of villains were nothing more than a shallow headline.

Predictable. Every single one of them was predictable. Their motivations. Their grievances. Their methods. The deeper she looked, the simpler they became.

This was the first time in a long time where she found someone she couldn't clearly fit into a category. He wasn't an anti-hero sending a message. He wasn't a liberationist fighting for quirk freedom. He was executing state-level pacification via illegal vigilante methods with absolute personal sovereignty, and from the looks of it ... completely uninterested in the grand narrative she was trying to spin.

'Interesting.'

"Director," Hana spoke up, adjusting her receiver arm back into a human limb. "The local curfew enforcement teams will likely log the concussive signature within ten minutes. We need to clear the sector."

"Naturally," Chitose replied, closing her notebook with a crisp snap and sliding it into her pocket. An interview would have been ideal, but a face-to-face confirmation of his nature was acceptable for the Army's current campaign.

Bzzzt. A sharp vibration interrupted her thoughts.

Chitose paused. Then reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a slim black phone. Unlike her personal devices, this one contained no identifying marks whatsoever.

The screen displayed a single encrypted identifier.

A smile spread across her face.

"Ah."

She pressed accept. The line connected instantly, a deep, heavily structured voice echoing through the receiver. "Report, Kizuki."

There was no need for introductions. Rikiya Yotsubashi.

To the public, the successful CEO of Detnerat.

To the Meta Liberation Army— Re-Destro. Chitose's smile widened. "Good evening, Commander."

"It is a good evening indeed. From your tone, I assume you've made contact."

"Yes. The operation succeeded in its primary purpose," she said. "I made contact. He was present, confirmed active, and I was able to observe him directly for a few minutes." She looked at the stone dome. "Unfortunately, there was a last minute interruption that prevented me from getting more. It was out of my control."

"So the necessary narrative leverage for Shoowaysha's upcoming print cycle?"

"Unfortunately not. The warehouse was blown up by a dead man's switch before I could proceed with the interview."

"A dead man's switch," Re-Destro repeated, his tone entirely level. "And yet you are calling me rather than dealing with a forensic extraction."

"What can I say. It's a long story "

"I see. Your assessment of him then."

"I see. Your assessment of him then. Can he be of use to our cause?"

"He certainly has the physical parameters for it," Chitose said, walking past her remaining escorts toward the edge of the perimeter."The dealer blew the place to hell. Not exactly enough time to decide on anything as a whole." She looked back at the burning building. "I might need to initiate contact again to come to that conclusion."

"I see," Re-Destro replied, his voice shifting back into a smooth, decisive corporate tone. "Then do so. We have a strict timeline to maintain before our public reveal, so do not let this pursuit interfere with your primary directives."

"Naturally," Chitose smiled, stepping toward the waiting sedan as Hana held the door open. "The lack of an interview won't slow us down."

"Excellently handled. Ensure your cell vacates the sector immediately. The local authorities will be forced to respond to a blast of that magnitude quickly."

"Understood."

The line went dead with a clean click. Chitose slid the black phone back into her aqua jacket and turned to her remaining staff. "Alright, everyone, wrap it up," she called out, gesturing toward the vehicles. "We have a front-page layout to finalize before the morning web-traffic spike."

The doors of the luxury sedans slammed shut in unison, the engines purring quietly as the vehicles smoothly navigated away from the burning ruins of the dockyard, melting into the shadows of the Shizuoka highway.

High above the bay, perched on the absolute edge of a towering steel high-rise building that overlooked the entire port, a single figure sat motionless against the cold night wind.

The featureless, dark mask of the White Fang reflected the distant, flickering orange glow of the ruined warehouse. His eyes were blood red, carrying the signature three Tomoe of the Sharingan. Even from this distance, he could clearly and accurately decipher her words through lip reading.

"Sigh! You've gotta be kidding me." He sighed and made a hand sign. A cloud of smoke erupted beside him, revealing another shadow clone.

"So it's my turn to work now?" The second Kakashi uttered.

"Yep. Keep going till you exhaust the last of your chakra. I'm done for the day."

Those were his last words before exploding into a cloud of smoke.

It was best to let the original decide how to handle these problems.

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