บท 10: Chapter 10 – The Hunt (part 2)

3 Months Later

It had been three months since my second meeting with Giran and during those months, I had continued to train Steel Body, I had almost finished in mastering the full-body steel transformation. I also regularly practised my other quirks. I had bought only two other quirks:

Hidden Fingers (319): Allows user to make their fingers invisible.

I used it for spying and sneak attack purposes and it was very cheap, because it was a completely useless quirk alone. I mean, yes it's cool to have invisible fingers, but it won't make you a top ten hero.

I now had spies everywhere. I hero's offices, villain's lairs, politician's offices, police's headquarters, hero's headquarters, everywhere… I knew everything what was going to happen before it even happened.

And the second one, and the first power stockpile quirk I bought:

Strength Gathering (2704): Allows user to make more physical efforts while doing an action to accumulate to extra power used. User can draw from the accumulated power to enhance himself

With this quirk, I could choose to do two, five or even ten times more efforts while doing an action to accumulate the "extra" into a stockpile. I can then tap into the stockpile to use the power to enhance myself. For example, let's say I do four set-ups at 4x efforts, in my next punch, I could add to energy/the efforts of up to 4 push-ups into it. The main weakness is that you need to do an insane amount of extra physical effort to be able to use it often. Also, for normal people, to get a strong punch, you will need an insane amount of power stockpiled.

Those are the reasons why this quirk is so expensive. Though, in my case, I always had it set so I made thrice times to efforts to do everything. This was the most effective way to stockpile power fast. Also, when I activated Steel body, I upped it to 5 times the efforts.

A/N: I'm not sure if you understand what it is, but, for example, you can throw two punches at 2x efforts, your next punch could be thrice as powerful (if you're normal punch is 50 kg, then the enhanced one would be 150 kg)

I also decided to continue to skip years at school, I wanted to enter university just after I turned eleven, in about one and a half year. I was now in my first year high school, in the same class as the fifteen-year-old. I was pretty small compared to them, as I was only as tall as a tall 12-year-old (5"5'), and, like always, the usual Joes and Kevins had tried to bully me, only to get their asses kicked.

But during those months there had only been two things on my mind.

Firstly, I had continued to investigate AnArchY and I had concluded that they weren't the ones that had kidnapped me, as their leader of five and a half years ago had been killed by the now-new leader, who was even crazier. But what I had discovered about them made me want to eradicate them, and that's what I was going to do.

They were truly chaotic evil; they killed, stole, blackmailed, raped, tortured, etc. Worse, most of their victims were just unlucky average people. But the worst of it is that they took pride and joy in what they were doing, often posting videos of their deeds on the internet. They were the cancer to society and no hero had been able to destroy them yet, they always rebuilt.

That's why I had put my vengeance on hold and started to focus solely on how to eradicate them, I was planning to completely deal the finishing blow to them in a couple of months, as they were some quirks I needed to buy, but I had already sneaked my little spies (my invisible fingers) inside most of their bases and I knew their big plans. I had already foiled most of them or leaked them to the heroes.

But what Giran said was, true, I had directly and indirectly taken down thousands of their members, and only now were their numbers starting to diminish a bit, a that was because they hadn't succeeded a plan in ages, as I kept interfering with them. For the first two months, I was starting to think someone was consigning their members, I even had sneaked some finger spies to make sure that no one was cloning them. That's how intense their numbers were. The good news was that the individual quality of members was very low, they were going for quality over quantity.

Today, I was going to foil another one of their plan, I had learned that they were going to attack a transport car with several dangerous villains inside to free and try to recruit them. Of course, I wasn't going to let that happen.

However, there was another thing on my mind since an "incident" two months ago.

Flashback Two Months Ago

I was warping home from my daily patrol, like every other days, when I saw my father hurriedly leave the house, muttering something about a heavily injured important hero. I was quite curious about who it was, so I sneaked an invisible finger on my father's car.

I was curious because an "important" hero probably meant someone in the Top 10 and they were very rarely heavily injured, they were extremely capable after all.

When my father arrived to the hospital, I regained control of my finger and followed him. Yeah, this was one of the new applications of the Detachable Finger quirk, I could regain control of a finger a minute after I lost control over it.

My spy followed my dad to the operation room, unnoticed by everyone, and what I saw astonished me. Inside the room was All Might, with an immense hole in his stomach. It really surprised me that a villain could do that do All Might, as he was immensely powerful, but also, I found it weird that such villain was unknown.

As my dad started operating, I observed people talking in the room and read their lips to know more about the situation, and I learned a lot of interesting information.

Apparently, the villain's name was One for All and a certain sentence that I lip-read interested me a lot: "He seemed to have even more quirks than the last time All Might fought him, but this time he was defeated for good…I hope."

I quickly made the link between this statement and what Knuckle Buster said, that his quirk was stolen by a villain. The villain the injured All Might was the one with the ability to steal quirks. It was the only explanation I could think of that explained how a villain would be able to injure All Might to this extent and have more than one quirk. Maybe he had the same quirk as me, or something similar, but I don't think it was the case, because he could've probably defeated him by creating quirks specialized in dealing with All Might.

I mean, by the rate I was improving, I would probably be as strong as All Might, or even stronger before I turned 18, so…

If a villain like that existed, that also meant that I needed to get stronger, because I highly doubted it was the last time we heard of him, he could've stolen a strong regeneration quirk or something else that would keep him alive. As long as he wasn't in Tartarus, I wouldn't be convinced that he was dealt with.

Present Time

I was now lying on top of the vehicle with the villains inside, waiting for AnArchY to attack it. I didn't have to wait long, because, a couple of minutes later, I saw three pickups with some mean looking people on their trunk speeding toward the transport car.

As I had already "prepared" several fingers to launch beforehand, so when they were close enough, I shot some of them to pierce the tires of the villain's pickups. Quickly after, the villain's vehicles deviated and crashed on the side of the road.

Before they had time to process what happened, I shot several more fingers to knock all of them out, but there was a couple of them that were still conscious.

I opened a warp gate leading to them and activated Quirk Vision to know of their quirks. They all had pretty mediocre quirks, except for the leader who had quite a strong strength-enhancing quirk.

I quickly took down all of the remaining small fries while they were still in shock, using a mix of finger bullets, as I called them, and good old punches, using steel body. As all my body was covered by my costume, now could see that my body was now made of metal.

Now, only the leader was remaining, not the leader of AnArchY, only the leader of this small operation. He started to speak, visibly very infuriated:

"Knockout, I finally found you! Today is the last day you foil our plans. You attacked the wrong person, kiddo!"

Ah, yes, another infatuated villain, as if I would've attacked you if I wasn't sure I could defeat you. Also, I wasn't very surprised that they knew it was me who was messing with them, after all, I had "trademarked" all their members whom I delivered to the police. It wasn't as if they could discover my real identity, I was paranoid about it; I changed my fingerprints, washed all money I paid with, travelled as if I lived in another city using my warp gate quirk, patrolled in a different neighbourhood every week, etc. They wouldn't find me.

"You're freezing in fear, kiddo? You should've gone back to your mommy when you had the chance", he spoke again, no doubt trying to intimidate me. Not that it worked, I mean, why to the always use the same lines when fighting against me? Always speaking about me freezing in fear and going back to my mom…

Not even bothering to answer him, I charged at him, stealthily opening a warp gate leading to behind his head and launching several fingers at him through it.

They all it him in the back and, surprised, he turned around, looking for what hit him. It was a mistake on his part, as I used his moment of distraction to open a warp gate in front of his head and launching a powerful kick, enhanced with my Steel Body quirk. It knocked him out cold. As easy as that, why bother doing a "fair" fight when I could fight smartly, I didn't have a code of honor or anything like that.

He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, this villain, he was quite weak and dumb. Not that I was complaining…

I quickly ensured that all the twenty or so villains were really unconscious, not faking it, before I tied them all together, wrote a note, with proof, of what they were trying to do, "trademarked" them all(drawing a mustache on them) and opened a warp gate leading to an alley close to a police station, but without any camera.

I waited around 30 minutes before I brought them all in front of said police station, much to the exasperation of the officers and inspectors, they were used to seeing me in the middle of the night with villains in tow. After blowing them a kiss, I quickly disappeared.

The reason I had waited before delivering them was to lower the chance (to the police) that I had a warp quirk. I knew that, because I hadn't been seen by any camera, before a couple of streets to the police station, they would most likely deduce that I had a warp gate quirk, but I still liked to mess with them, or at least, my persona liked to mess with them.

Yes, I was building a persona for Knockout, the mysterious Vigilante. I was making him a bit of a joker, laid-back and quite relaxed, seemingly infinitely confident in himself. That would reduce the suspicions on me, as I was quite rigid, unapproachable (not cold, just a bit intimidating at first glance) and without a sense of humor, really. It was all the opposite of my vigilante personality and it would reduce suspicion on the real me even more.

After delivering the villains to the police, I returned home, satisfied with this night's villain harvest.