He went deeper.
The stairs smelled of oil and old blood. The lights thinned—fewer bulbs, more shadows—and the corridor narrowed until it felt like being inside a bone. The hum of the city grew faint, replaced by the low, nervous buzz of machines. The farther down he walked, the colder the air became; it tasted like metal and old secrets.
A door with no number sat under a film of dust. The lock had been cut cleanly—someone had used this room before. Inside was a small, windowless chamber. Monitors lined one wall. Drawers of files filled the other. In the center sat a steel coffin the size of a table. The overhead lights were dim, like ribs under skin.
Izuku moved like he had in the cells—quiet, sure. His boots left soft echoes on the metallic floor as he ran a gloved finger across the nearest screen. Dust lifted and danced in the pale light as the monitor flickered awake. Lines of text scrolled, neat and surgical: logs. Names. Dates. Codes.
At first the data was only a pattern—flat, meaningless numbers. Then he clicked a file and the pattern became a face. A child's face. Pale, thin, eyes closed. A serial number burned beneath the photograph.
Izuku leaned in; the green glow of the screen washed over his face. "Project Dawn… Experimental batch—" he murmured, voice low and rough. "Children?"
He gave the terminal a command through his mind and the files opened like wounds. Dozens of faces: smiling school photos cut next to sterile mugshots. Each entry followed by the same notation: Subject transferred to Facility 13. Status: Deceased.
His jaw clenched until his teeth ached.
He dug deeper. A single video file blinked in the corner—Test Footage - Batch 07. He hesitated for a breath, then clicked. Static resolved into picture. A hospital ward unfolded: rows of metal cots, children hooked to wires that hung like spider legs, monitors ticking in a rhythm that sounded obscene in the silence.
Two men in pristine white uniforms stood close to one cot. Hero insignias marked their shoulders—one a face the public trusted, ranked in America's top fifty. A woman in a sharp Public Safety suit entered with a tablet, her voice flat and efficient.
"Batch 07, Subject 3A. Male, age six. Quirk classification: Latent Mutation. Potential high instability."
The tall blond hero's practiced calm cracked at the edges. "Any chance of recovery?"
"None," the woman said. "Nerve degradation at ninety percent. Proceed with reclamation."
A second hero shifted, his hands curling at his sides. "He's just a kid…" His voice was small, the sound of trying to make a wrong thing right with sentiment.
The woman didn't look up. "And he's an asset. Assets that fail are reclaimed. Are we clear, hero?"
Silence. The first hero rolled his shoulders like a man readying a performance. "Get it over with."
A doctor stepped forward holding a syringe filled with a shimmering, clear fluid. The camera tightened on the child's face—lips moving soundlessly. Izuku could read them anyway; he heard the whisper the speakers had not: "Mom…"
The needle sank in. The boy's body jerked once, then stills. The beeping stopped.
The man with the nearest badge smiled faintly and turned away. "That's one less liability," he muttered as if he'd announced the weather.
The woman scribbled on the tablet. "Dispose of the body with the rest. Log quirk residue for analysis."
The conflicted hero swallowed hard. His voice broke. "You're… you're going to tell the family it was a rescue failure, right? We'll… we'll—"
The woman finally looked at him. Her eyes were cold, sharp, empty of conscience. "Of course. You'll attend the press briefing yourself. Say it was a 'tragic incident.' Say you tried."
His throat bobbed. "Right… yeah. 'Tried.'"
"Smile when you say it," the first hero muttered, brushing off his gloves. "They eat that up."
The frame froze on the child's still face; the barcode glinted beneath the harsh fluorescent light. Izuku stood very still. His hands—hands that could pull spines free with methodical efficiency—trembled not with fear but with a deep, humming fury.
"They turned them into experiments. Into numbers," he whispered, barely audible.
He opened the next file. More videos, more names, more lies. A lab with children screaming inside soundproof glass chambers. Heroes pressed their faces to the observation panes, watching the scientists log numbers. A clinician reported, "Quirk factor extraction at sixty percent. No survivable hosts left."
"Noted. Begin the next batch," came the woman's calm reply over an intercom. A small boy pounded bloody prints on the glass and mouthed, "Please." A scientist glanced away. "Subject 12 is destabilizing."
"Then terminate it." The voice was corporate, surgical. The scream was swallowed.
Izuku's reflection, bathed in blue monitor light, looked monstrous: green eyes bright, jaw clenched like a trap. He whispered, "So that's what they buried down here… the price of their peace."
A stray breath in the speaker carried the last, accidental capture of a child's voice from a fragile recorder: "Are… are you a hero?" Then the sound cut like a snapped string. The screen went black.
He turned off the monitor and let the silence press in. In the center of the room, the steel coffin wore a single brand: QUARK-RECLAMATION UNIT — PROPERTY OF HERO PUBLIC SAFETY COMMISSION. He placed a hand on cold metal and felt the chill run up his arm.
"Not heroes," he said softly, and the words tasted like rust. "Parasites. I was right. All of these so-called name-brand heroes need to be terminated. I'll make sure anyone who dares call himself a hero pisses his pants a thousand times before he names himself anything."
His voice narrowed into something dangerous, a promise without softness. He looked back at the frozen faces on the dark screens; his eyes glowed faintly green. "They thought they could hide this… that no one would ever see."
Beneath that calm, a volcano churned.
He kept going.
The next drawer clicked open to reveal a different kind of horror: minutes-long audio of closed-door meetings, minutes stamped and wiped, but the logs remained. He put the headphones on and let voices fill his head—men and women with the sort of silver tongues that rewrite reality.
"—funding dips twenty percent if we don't manufacture demand," a corporate executive said, smooth as oil. "Operation Beacon will be triggered. A controlled casualty in the financial district. Hero response visible in sixty seconds. PR team prepped."
A senator's voice, thin and practiced: "We need plausible deniability. The shell company handles logistics—no direct trace. Take the public's outrage, convert it to bill support. Voila—expanded Commission powers."
A hero, voice shaking: "You want us to—stage attacks? To—"
"We call them 'managed incidents,'" the woman from the Public Safety Commission said, voice ice. "The public trusts the saviors. We cannot allow complacency. Fear funds us. Consent follows fear."
Another clip: a private contractor briefing a hero team. "We have quirk-dampening emitters. Block a civic center for ten minutes, prevent escape. Make sure cameras catch the hero 'breaking' the dampeners for footage. We bill the Commission and split the remainder with media partners."
Izuku's hand found a paper list: Black Ledger—Payments. The columns were obscene—millions wired to outlets, to charities that were actually shell operations, to "community outreach" that never reached the communities.
Names of anchors, talk show hosts, foundations—paid to narrate the manufactured narrative. He flicked through emails: "Make the hero story personal. Arrange for the hero to deliver the child's eulogy. They'll cry on cue."
Then the worst file: a short, encrypted clip that took a long moment to decrypt. Faces of a different sort—politicians, judges, military contractors—sitting across a table. A man with a senator's cadence leaned forward. "When dissent grows, we cannot rely on mere public relations. We need a control mechanism."
A contractor smirked. "We have prototypes. Quirk siphons. Extractors. For funded units, we can replicate quirks for controlled agents. No domestic oversight, no pesky ethics boards. We'll call them 'rehab trials' for PR."
The senator laughed softly. "And if a congressman objects?"
A note on the screen: Solution: discreet removal. 'Accident' during rescue op. Will be handled by partner heroes.
Izuku felt bile climb his throat. The room spun with the weight of it; the world below the world, where laws bent to ledger lines.
He pulled up CCTV from an incident three years prior: a hero at a press wall, announcing a miraculous save. The file slowed. Behind the hero, in a service corridor, a van idled with men loading a body.
A medic closed a hatch. The hero's practiced speech—"we tried, we failed"—played on a loop. The camera caught the mic being unplugged. The man in the suit, leaning in whispering to the hero, said: "Stick to the script. We own the narrative."
The files kept cutting deeper:
—Assassination vouchers for journalists who dug too close.
—Blacklist files with names of community organizers and opposition lawyers labeled "problematic."
—Human harvest manifests listing donor children, tissue samples with price tags and buyers in biotech.
—Blueprints for "Emergency Quirk Null Zones" meant to be tested on protest crowds.
—Contracts with foreign labs to launder biological samples.
—An itemized schedule of staged villain attacks to preserve "hero indispensability."
—A list of judges and justices who had quietly signed off on immunity clauses.
—A list of all the criminals who have committed heinous crimes were actually working with the police, that included serial killers, mass murderers, rapists, all those that don't deserve to live.
He found photographs—blurred, but enough: men in Public Safety jackets closing crates marked with names, a government van dropping off a sealed container at a private facility labeled with a donor number. He found wire transfers with the same dates and the signatures of people who gave speeches about "transparency" and "sacrifice."
Izuku's breath came shallow and quick now. He read an internal memo, hand trembling: "If we cannot control dissent through narrative, we will control them through necessity: rationing, emergency powers, targeted 'containments'." The memo was stamped with the Commission seal and a senator's initials.
He did not stop. The machine of corruption had teeth everywhere. The files connected heroes to lawmakers to corporations to media houses—the infrastructure of trust itself weaponized, monetized, and amended into a system that devoured the vulnerable and rewarded the powerful.
He found names that meant things to people—names on campaign posters, photographs in family albums. He found the pages the families of missing children had been denied.
He found the footage of a mayor shaking a hero's hand while his own niece sat in a facility intake form marked "Voluntary." He found release forms with the words "consent under duress" circled in red handwriting.
When he found an audio clip labeled Senate Briefing — Confidential, he almost dropped the headphones. A steady, commanding voice explained to a closed room: "When hero credibility sags, we will create a need for them. When funding dries, we manufacture threats.
When protests rise, enforce null zones. The populace will plead for security. We save them, and we keep power." A judge's voice responded, "Legal cover will be retroactive. Emergency resolutions are fast-tracked. We will call it preservation of public order."
He scrolled until he found the direct contact chains: commission heads texting anchors with timestamps, heroes being told which family to console, the PR lines to use, the exact phrases for condolence.
Every public mourning had a script. Every tragedy had an invoice. Every mishap and major activity all of them smokescreen for their actions.
Izuku composed himself and moved with a strange calm as if walking through a necropolis mapped beneath the city. He opened a final folder—Master Index: Operation Beacon & Collateral.
It listed all the pawns, all the beneficiaries, all the backup plans for when the first leaks happened. It ended with a single line: Deny until discredited. If evidence surfaces, escalate the public safety narrative immediately.
He did not argue. He chose the mirror.
He found the uplink: a dusty terminal tucked under the desk, a fiber cable looped like a secret lover. Someone had kept this place connected—planned for exposure or retained control of it. The footage was the confession; the ledgers were motive; the waivers were complicity.
He did not craft a speech. He did not stage a reveal. He let truth do what truth always did: cut clean.
Izuku uploaded. A progress bar crawled like a heartbeat under his clenched stare. He watched each byte crawl into the dark like a surgeon watching blood flow. When the final byte finished, he reached up and flipped the right switch—small, precise. The terminal blinked. A relay hummed.
Above ground a media tower hiccupped. The living rooms around the country went quiet. Hero support chatrooms froze mid-typing. The first station, a morning network, began to play a clip—raw, unedited. Social feeds picked it up. Within minutes, another clip surfaced: the Senate audio. A third showed the ledgers. Hashtags ignited like matches.
And then — everything.
Families recognized faces in the footage. Mothers who had been told their child vanished for "rehab" saw intake forms with their own signatures. Neighborhoods that had cheered at heroes' parades found their names in ledgers.
A factory worker who'd paid middlemen for a "medical clearance" clicked a link and saw that his payment had funded a shell group that paid anchors to "narrate" fear.
Classrooms went quiet. Clergy stopped mid-sermon. City councillors watched the live streams with the same green light reflection in their eyes that Izuku had seen in himself.
The reaction was not subtle. It was volcanic.
Protests lit up first in the city—families and strangers on the same streets, faces raw, hands shaking but fists unified, those that hadn't started protest as to where the heroes were when villains roamed around freely, were now joining hands in the ongoing protest.
The streets were filled with people. The chant began soft and small, then spread: "No more lies! No more heroes!" Placards bobbed: WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN? NO MORE BEACONS. HANDS OFF OUR CHILDREN.
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