Chapter Text
Izumi was willing to admit that it was probably a bad idea. It wouldn't have been the first she had—that honor went towards tracking down the League of Villains after the USJ incident—but this particular idea had the greatest potential to backfire and very little to gain from it. Which probably put it on par with the last infiltration mission she had assigned herself. The one that had given her Eri.
Except this... This was probably the riskiest thing she would ever do, more so than any nightly escapade. She was considering setting herself up with an underground hero license.
Like most stupid and risky decisions she made, she wouldn't do it for her own benefit. Yes, it would have made things easier to attempt stealthily and illegally to legitimize her actions as the Forest—albeit under a different name since she isn't that stupid—but the only reason she was considering it was because of Hawks. He had been a solo hero his entire career, emerging from the HPSC fully trained without having gone any of the normal routes to pro-heroism. His records and story were notoriously difficult to pin down, and everything about that stank of a cover-up.
Izumi had followed hero careers the same way people followed their favorite actors. For her absolute favorites, she could list every major battle they'd been in over the last ten years. Hawks eventually got as far as number 2 because he was in far more battles than the rest of the top ten during his debut year, on top of the other missions he ran in conjunction with either the HPSC or the hero agency most relevant to the raid. Because she wasn't particularly picky or legal about how she got her information, she knew that Hawks could and often did run undercover operations, which was shocking considering the visibility of his quirk. Apparently if he stripped down his wings enough, he could pass as someone who wasn't Hawks.
The only thing she hadn't managed to track down regarding his meteoric rise in popularity was what his training had looked like. Apparently, the records were hard-copy only, and only accessible at the Commission's main headquarters—a building that had the same level of security as Tartarus. Anytime someone got it in their heads to question why the Commission would need a building with defenses on par with a prison, the story was buried, and the person who asked underwent a period of misfortune with no apparent source. Sometimes, they died in the midst of this strange downturn and their death was always ruled as accidental or Act of God.
Conspiracy blogs were largely ignored or discredited, but even the moderators of those went through moments where their domains were ripped out from under them for reasons no one could quite explain. It happened even if they were paid up with their hosts, even if their content was carefully monitored to remain within the required guidelines, and any attempt to correct the issue just brought out less than satisfactory explanations for the root cause. Izumi had taken to downloading snapshots of the pages and theories when she could find them to add to her own private files.
The picture all of these theories painted was decidedly grim. Not at all what one would expect from a government-sanctioned organization purportedly concerned with public safety. Of course, the fact that no significant organizations or agencies existed to prevent regular people from deciding that villainy was their only option was telling of just what their priorities were. The HPSC regulated the business of heroics and preventing the birth of villains meant that there would be less of that business to regulate.
Izumi was starting to realize she wouldn't be entirely surprised if she found that they fed the same sort of prejudices and discrimination she had grown up with in order to cut people like her out of the picture entirely. While villainy had never been an option in her mind—not true villainy anyway—she could certainly see how others in the same position would feel like they didn't have a choice in the matter. So-called villainous quirks were almost as bad as quirklessness, after all, and most of the heroes she knew who would have been identified as proto-villains as children had found a place in underground heroics, where their names, faces, and quirks were necessarily hidden.
And here she was willing placing herself in that same sphere.
While she didn't doubt that there were paper copies of the files in HPSC headquarters to be concerned about, the digital files for underground heroes were depressingly accessible. She wouldn't place her computer skills to the level of Nezu or someone with a technology quirk, but she knew enough to be dangerous. And anyone who really wanted information on the underground would either know how to get in contact with someone of a similar skill set or would develop that skill set themselves. Meaning that the information was accessible to a lot of people with not a lot of trouble.
Perhaps that was why the underground network only registered the official hero name, ID number, and quirk in those files. Anything more would cause a lot of casualties in a data breach. Similarly, however, slipping a name into that database would be simple enough to manage, a needle lost in a field of haystacks, especially if the city of origin she claimed in the metadata was large and rife with other such origins. Tokyo, for example, saw the birth of a couple hundred new heroes every year. So did Yokohama and Osaka. With UA, Musutafu produced more heroes per capita than any other city in Japan. The highest number in general was still from Tokyo, and that was only because that's where the main headquarters for the HPSC was located.
Of course, before she put the information into the system, she needed to create it. Peeking at the system for a general template to create her own file, it was becoming obvious that the quirk didn't matter so much to the filing system. At least, not as much as the hero name, and certainly not as much as the ID number. The closest thing to personal information that needed to be in the system was a viable mailing address for the hero where paychecks and ID cards could be sent. Izumi already had a PO box set up for her costume materials and support tech, so that wasn't a problem. Regarding ID numbers, the biggest hurdle to jump for her fake legitimacy, it seemed that they were reused over time. So, she just needed to find a number that hadn't been reused in the last fifty years or so and wasn't already flagged for reuse anytime soon.
Izumi's careful search through the Hero database provided her with the ID number for a pre-Silver Age hero known as Wind Dancer. While the woman was a spotlight hero with a prolific and promising career, she was killed in her prime by an unknown villain. The fingerprints of All for One were all over it, and perhaps thumbing her nose at the near immortal man whose empire of evil she'd had some hand in ending was something that appealed to a petty part of her. Once it fit her criteria, there was no way she was going to pass it up.
If All for One hadn't killed her, Izumi was sure Wind Dancer would have made Number One eventually. Now there were few enough people left in the world who would remember she existed at all, much less know how incredibly powerful she was at the height of her career.
Wind Dancer wasn't a name Izumi could use, though. Not that she would want to. It was wildly inaccurate in regard to her skill set, not that she intended to accurately represent herself in her chosen hero name. Not even fake legitimacy was going to get her to reveal more than she wanted her enemies to know. And where things currently stood, the Hero Commission and the rest of hero society at large were still her enemies.
It was sad, she mused, that she would never be the sort of symbol people looked up to. Not like All Might or Lemillion. Not even like Shouto. Her lack of a quirk had always put her on a lower level compared to most other people, to the point that she avoided telling anyone about it when she had the option. Her vigilante name was equal parts taunt and deprecating observation of the people she encountered, none of whom could conceive of the fact that a person didn't need a quirk to accomplish the same things as the heroes. And no one would properly figure her out until they learned to see past that immediate bias. Until they realized that the trees they were examining so closely were part of the forest they'd managed to lose themselves in.
A thought struck like a bolt from the blue. The idea was so silly Izumi almost dismissed it out of hand. But truth in advertising had worked for her before, and it wasn't like anyone was really going to look too deeply into the hero name she gave herself. Muimina Kigo. It was as perfect as it was funny, if only to her. A bit like the Forest. If making her a hero was a pointless symbol in a world that had left people like her behind, she might as well own it.
She had the name; she had the ID number. Now she just needed the fake quirk to put in the system. Continuing in the vein of ridiculous ideas and spawning chaos, the only thing that could possibly fit with the underground persona she was already presenting was Confusion. She certainly caused enough of it in anyone trying to find her. And wasn't it just so much more satisfying to leave people guessing about her wherever she went?
The best part about all of it was that heroes didn't tend to ask other heroes about their quirks. It was assumed that they knew how to use them for themselves since they managed to get a license, and it was rude to imply otherwise without proof. Pausing in the middle of an operation to demand the functionality of a quirk was a significant faux-pas that insulted the hero asking as well as the one being asked. Izumi was questioned a bit as the Forest when she weighed in on a case, but no one really expected her to answer after the first few times. It had become quite clear she never would.
Even with all of the information, Izumi didn't input her entry into the system immediately. She needed to understand the update cycle, how often it was refreshed and on what schedule. She had been in the Child Welfare system for two weeks before she was secure enough to put Eri's information in and trust that it wasn't going to be discovered. And then she'd gone the extra mile of breaking into the building to create the paper file, complete with Eri's photograph and the "official" documents regarding her existence. Given the security of the Hero Commission main headquarters, she wasn't even going to try and create a physical folder without a valid hero license in hand, which she wouldn't get until the fake renewal date for her license in the information she had created.
She was fortunate that ID renewals were a little over a month out, and she'd get a license once her information was in the system. Moreover, the particular loophole she was exploiting meant that the ID card didn't even require her picture. Underground hero licenses didn’t require photos, which were far too easy to leak. Instead, there was a chip in every card with the information on their hero persona encoded by the HPSC itself and anyone who lost their card was supposed to report the theft or absence immediately so the ID card couldn’t be used by a villain.
Standing up to stretch and walk to the kitchen, Izumi was glad that this particular job was far less likely to end in her death. It just meant she was far more likely to work alongside heroes, which was something she could live with.
"Not exactly how I intended to go about this," she muttered to herself, "but needs must and all that."
Eri glanced up from where she was working on her homework at the table. "What did you do?"
Izumi leaned over to kiss the top of Eri's head as she passed. "In about four weeks, I will have an official hero license, and the Hero Commission will have had nothing to do with it." Izumi pulled a mug down from an upper shelf and set the kettle boiling for tea. "I'll also have a second job. Or third, depending on how you look at it."
"Is it safe?"
"As safe as I can make it, starlight." Which probably wasn't all that safe, but definitely more than going out as the Forest. As Muimina Kigo, Izumi was allowed and expected to call for backup. So long as she didn't look like the Forest when they showed up, she should be fine. Which was something else to consider. "Do you want to help me design my new costume?"
"Yes! We could try designing my future costume, too!" Eri bounced up, homework forgotten. And Izumi was willing to let it keep for a bit. Costumes were much more fun, and they still hadn't talked much about the sort of hero Eri wanted to be.
It was something Izumi hadn't gotten to talk to her mother about before she died, and she wasn't going to let Eri think she wouldn't support her dream. She would prove her devotion to Eri's ambitions over and over so her daughter would have no reason to doubt it. And if—gods forbid—something should happen to her before they had a chance to see it through together, Eri would know exactly how much Izumi loved her.
Nezu was prepared to rain hell on whoever it was hacking into the Underground Heroes database. It wasn't technically part of any of his jobs to police the database, but for what little information it contained, any breach could cause many of the most diligent members of hero society to fall. The foundations under the pillars were far more vulnerable than the pillars themselves, as they didn't have the support of an attentive public on them and their actions. As the Hero Public Safety Commission hardly concerned themselves with the security of a database with such minimal information, Nezu had taken it upon himself to ensure that any hacker stupid enough to try and compromise the underground community would be ended. Permanently, if need be.
Frustratingly, the hacker seemed to have some skill, and they knew exactly what they were after. They didn't interface with the database for very long, and they covered their trail on the way out, ensuring that he wasn't able to catch a location from them. The only saving grace of the first incident was that they didn't seem to have ripped out any information. If anything, it looked like the hacker had merely peeked at several dozen different entries—never long enough to pull any real information from them—before pulling out again.
Nezu flagged those entries just in case and sent messages to the heroes to let them know that their information might have been compromised. He wasn't going to take any chances with their safety, especially not when several of his staff and former students were among those viewed.
There was an immediate response from Aizawa. The man knew that anything Nezu sent should be read immediately as there were any number of time sensitive issues that might have cropped up regarding either their hero work or their schoolwork. The rest of the heroes he had contacted responded over the next couple of hours, expressing gratitude for the warning and promising to be on guard.
A week and a half after the initial breach, the hacker was back and Nezu dropped everything to immerse himself in the system code, monitoring their progress. In spite of himself, he had to admire their style. Whoever they were, they were meticulous and careful every step of the way, like walking across gossamer spiderwebs to get into the database. If he didn't have alarms set up on the system, he would have missed their intrusion even when he was looking for it.
And then they did something he didn't expect. They inserted a new entry in the database. A female underground hero going by the name Muimina Kigo.
What sort of person would refer to themselves as a meaningless symbol? Or, for that matter, go to the trouble of obtaining an underground hero license by hacking into the system? Underground hero licenses didn't require photographs, but the cards themselves had special chips in them that could only be programmed and produced by the HPSC. They could be stolen, of course, but any underground hero who lost their ID card in that way usually had bigger issues to deal with, if they were even still alive.
The hacker had backdated the entry for Muimina Kigo far enough that a replacement card would be sent out, neatly legitimizing themselves in the most illegal way possible. Nezu could put a stop to it, could draw attention to the fact that this person was not, in fact, a licensed hero before they input their information in the database, but he was far more interested in what they would do with the license.
He wasn't sure he was prepared to speculate who the mysterious hacker was just yet. There were certain hallmarks of the style, clean and methodical as it was, that could point to any number of people, but no certainties. Someone with less experience would probably believe it was the interaction of a technological quirk in the system, completely overlooking the fact that there were already several pieces of security in place to prevent a technology quirk from accessing the Underground database. Regardless of the fact that the HPSC didn't consider that particular database a priority, it was still afforded practically the same level of security as any digital data they secured, including the servers that contain the information for past and current Spotlight heroes, which held far more compromising information.
No, whoever it was hacking into the network, they were not using a quirk to get in.
He needed to keep an eye on this particular person. They clearly had more skills than the average person who tried to breach the database, and it could be a problem if they decided to use what they know to compromise some of the best underground heroes he had the pleasure of knowing.
But Muimina Kigo... That was a bit of speculation he was willing to make. Calling themselves a "meaningless symbol" was a bit like the taunt the Forest offered to the whole of hero society when they first appeared. In a way, it was almost another taunt, a jab at the social convention of naming the Number One hero a symbol of some kind. It was an underground identity they were creating, of course, but that didn't mean the suggestion in the name meant nothing. In fact, paired with the recent information from the Forest themselves, it likely meant that they were not the sort of symbol anyone would want.
And that... Nezu added another mental point towards one of his theories. He wasn't sure what would happen if he were right, but he was excited to find out. If he was right about either the Forest or Muimina Kigo—or if he was correct that they were the same person—he wasn't sure anyone was prepared for that reveal. In all honestly, he wasn't sure he was prepared for it, even if he half-expected it at this point. There were simply some things you couldn't truly prepare for, and that was one of them.
It was interesting that the listed quirk for Muimina Kigo was Confusion. It offered no explanation, and none was required to be entered into the database. The most personal information they had provided was a PO box listed under a clearly fake name, but someone clever enough and possessed of the sheer gall to attempt to give themselves an underground hero license wouldn't set themselves up to be caught immediately.
On a hunch, Nezu pulled up the security footage of the post office where the PO box was located. And he was right to think that the box they had chosen was out of sight of the cameras. The footage was also grainy, so even if he had the patience to monitor the camera feed until Muimina Kigo came to pick up their hero license, he likely wouldn't have a clear enough picture to identify them. They would also not show up without a disguise of some sort, so he immediately discounted the possibility of discovering them when they retrieved their ID card.
With legitimacy came the need to work, however, and that would eventually bring them into police stations where their card would be verified, and their involvement logged. More importantly for Nezu's purposes, the police stations in the area had much better cameras.
It was more difficult than he expected to crush the sudden and intense desire to send an offer for a position in his agency to Muimina Kigo. It would immediately be met with suspicion based on the timing and the interest given their information hadn't been in the database more than a day. Even if their hacker had made it seem like the entry was merely updated rather than inserted shortly before a system maintenance cycle, it was still too soon to try to drag them into his circle.
That being said, he did have one of the largest underground agencies in Musutafu and he was known to keep a look out for the next young heroes to support, so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility that he would keep an eye on any heroes newly established in the area. He needed to wait.
Nezu gave himself two weeks. He would wait two weeks after their hero license arrived before he sent his offer and let the chips fall where they may. Until such time, he ensured that a regulation comm unit was provided, giving Muimina Kigo access to both the police and to backup while out on patrol. He didn't want to lose this interesting new player before he had a chance to see what they could do. And if that meant he placed a bit of a rush on getting that license out to them, he was the only one who needed to know that.
Nezu was slightly starved for interesting problems lately, and this mysterious hacker had just placed a new one in his lap. He was going to take his time unraveling it.
Dabi dearly wished he could say that meeting the Forest didn't fuck him up as much as it had. No, unfortunately even attempting to say such a thing would be the biggest lie he had managed in his life, and that was including the lie he was telling everyone about himself.
Quirkless. The word kept circling back into his consciousness. It wouldn't have been all that hard to look up how many quirkless people lived in Shizuoka prefecture. He had some contacts and resources, and he didn't think the list was all that long. And if he restricted that list to his age and younger, he didn't imagine there would be more than a hundred names to go through.
There was still part of him that was desperate for it to be a lie told to throw him off. This was the Forest, the vigilante who managed to bring down Stain and also seemed to have something to do with the capture of the League of Villains, in spite of not showing up for the raid. He knew enough people involved with that shit to have gotten some of the inside information, and the heroes had been working with a lot of information passed to them by the Forest.
There was also the raid on the Shie Hassaikai base. No one could definitively say that the Forest was involved, but they had passed information to the police through a hacker and there was a record of a recruit that managed to duck the raiding heroes and get a parting shot at Overhaul with one of the asshole's quirk-erasing bullets.
Basically, everything he had heard about the vigilante said that they were not someone to be fucked with. Adding on to that the strong possibility that they were quirkless just made Dabi start to question what everyone else was doing wrong with their lives that someone without a quirk was obliterating the whole of Japan so easily. Possibly the world, too.
What he was doing wrong was a series of explanations that he didn't want to revisit for the sanctity of his somewhat questionable mental health. It was bad enough that he'd been laying spread-eagle on his bed, staring up at the ceiling for the past seven hours. He could feel how delicate he was, how he was just one wrong move from tipping over into utter madness.
He wished, not for the first time, that life had been different, that he hadn't grown up in the house he did, that his father wasn't a heartless bastard with a raging hard-on for All Might he disguised as rivalry. Dabi had laughed long and hard when the old man had the number one spot for less than a year and a half before dropping back down in the rankings.
The whole situation was hilarious, in his opinion. The only reason Endeavor became the number one hero was because All Might was forced to retire based on injuries from his final fight that made it impossible to continue working. He hadn't surpassed All Might as he'd always wanted to, merely outlasted him, which was hardly a feat because no one had ever seen the former Number One take anything even resembling a break. Then he started falling back down in the rankings as Shouto's class—the kids that had been attacked by villains in their first week, the group that had Endeavor's perfect masterpiece in their number—started appearing on the rank lists before they'd even graduated. To add insult to injury, this was the class that All Might had taught during his brief time at UA, so it wasn't as though Endeavor could accept any of the credit for Shouto's achievement. Especially since the kid didn't use his fire. Ever.
The old man was stubbornly clinging to number 62 in the latest hero rankings, but age was starting to catch up with him and people weren't expecting him to stay there for very much longer. Dabi was going to be there to watch Endeavor drop out of the top hundred, then see all the little news bits about his anticipated retirement that his Public Relations department no longer put effort into crushing. A vindictive part of him wanted to go find Enji on that day and gloat about how far he's fallen, how empty his life is because of all the things he sacrificed for the hollow dream of becoming the best hero.
He wouldn't do it though. Dabi wasn't sure he could restrain himself from trying to murder the man if they were ever in the same room, and he was trying not to put himself on the Forest's radar in the worst sort of way. He knew how that would end because he didn't have anything near the resources of the other groups they had toppled, and for some reason they had decided he wasn't a big enough threat to take down yet.
He didn't know what exactly they saw when they looked at him, but he wasn't going to question it. You'd make a terrifying villain, Dabi. Dangerous and effective, they'd said, as if they didn't already know that he was one. He didn't doubt for a minute that they knew a lot about the things he'd done over the years just to make ends meet, up to and including murder.
I want you to know that you have more choices than that. And where it doesn't look like they exist, you can make them.
Their words haunted him, almost as much as admitting they were quirkless. As much as he wanted to believe that life could be fair and just, no one who had lived the life he had could delude themselves into thinking that was the case. The Forest, who understood the way the world worked just as much as he did, didn't believe that everyone could be saved, didn't believe that they could be saved.
But maybe that was the point. If they were really quirkless, every door would have shut in their face, every path to heroism would have a hundred different versions of Endeavor gatekeeping that shit so they couldn't even get their foot in the door. And so they made their own option and started saving people without a license, without the backup and support any licensed hero could get with a quick call.
He kind of wanted to talk to them again since he'd had the time to process their parting mic-drop. He couldn't see a lot of options for himself, not with the scars and the sordid past and the lack of legal documentation. But they worked with a hacker, so maybe they could help with the last one at the very least.
Dabi knew he didn't have it in him to be a hero. Or a vigilante. That whole world was tainted by growing up under his father and he wasn't nearly as good as the Forest at turning the other cheek and all that. But maybe there was a career path he had never been allowed to consider before. Which was every other career path because "hero" and then "villain" were the only roles he actually tried for.
If he managed to get a proper job eventually, maybe he could afford some goddamn therapy. No one who really knew him could say he didn't need it.