Chapter 4: The Weight of the Vow
Four months. That was the lifespan of the Quirkless Knight.
I sat cross-legged on the edge of a stylized gargoyle overlooking the chaotic sprawl of the Hosu District. Beside me, Rin was casually eating a stolen apple, her legs dangling over the five-hundred-foot drop. Every few seconds, she would unconsciously shift her left hand into her pocket dimension, the fingers blurring out of existence before snapping back. It was a nervous tic she'd developed since I granted her Sanctuary Phasing.
"He's running hot tonight, boss," Rin mumbled around a mouthful of apple, pointing a half-eaten core toward the eastern skyline.
I didn't need her to point. My Emotion Sight was already locked onto it.
Even from three miles away, beyond my usual detailed resolution, I could see the ambient reflection of Kenji's aura painting the low-hanging clouds. It was a blinding, pulsating sapphire blue. But it wasn't the steady, stoic color of a knight holding the line. It was jagged, erratic, and spiking dangerously high. It was the color of a reactor about to melt down.
"The threat level is too vast," I murmured, my distorted voice practically swallowed by the wind. "His Quirk scales to the danger presented to others. If he's burning that brightly, he isn't fighting a mugger. He's fighting a catastrophe."
"Should I pop us over there?" Rin asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. "A three-mile jump is pushing my limit, but if I chain a few portals through the abandoned subway lines, I can get us a block away."
"Do it."
Rin stood, her eyes narrowing in concentration. She thrust her hands forward, tearing a jagged, shimmering tear in the fabric of reality. The edges of the portal glowed with a sickly, midnight-blue light. I stepped through, Rin hot on my heels, and the world folded around us.
We emerged in the shadowed alcove of a closed bakery. The air was suffocatingly hot, smelling of melted asphalt, ozone, and vaporized metal.
The scene unfolding in the center of the intersection was apocalyptic.
A villain with a heavily mutated body—resembling a walking mound of superheated, molten slag—was tearing through the structural supports of the Hosu monorail overpass. The villain wasn't just mindless; he was laughing, hurling globs of semi-solid magma at the terrified civilians trapped in their cars beneath the crumbling concrete tracks.
And standing directly beneath the central, groaning pillar of the overpass was Kenji.
I almost didn't recognize him. The Knight's Vow had transformed him into an ethereal juggernaut. Because the villain was threatening the lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds of commuters above and below the tracks, Kenji's power had scaled to a monstrous degree to match the threat.
His body was encased in thick, angular plates of sapphire-blue kinetic energy. He looked like a mecha stripped of its metal, made purely of condensed, glowing force. But beneath the translucent armor, I could see the terrifying reality of his physical vessel.
Kenji was screaming. His human musculature was tearing under the sheer strain of channeling that much kinetic energy. Blood vessels had burst in his eyes, and crimson streaks ran down his nose and chin. The power was doing exactly what he had desired—giving him the strength to stand up to anyone and protect everyone—but it had completely bypassed the limits of human biology.
"He's gonna kill himself," Rin whispered, shrinking back against the brick wall of the bakery. "The armor is holding the bridge up, but his bones are turning to dust inside it!"
"Desire miscalculation," I hissed, my hands clenching into fists. I had given a localized, heavy-duty combat Quirk to a boy with zero physical conditioning. I had made him a king, but forgot to build the castle.
"Hey, ugly!" Kenji roared, his voice amplified into a booming shockwave by his kinetic armor. He threw a punch at the magma villain.
He didn't make physical contact. The sheer kinetic displacement of his arm moving at that speed generated a concussive blast of compressed air. It hit the villain like a freight train, scattering molten slag across the intersection.
But every action has an equal, devastating reaction.
The blowback from Kenji's punch shattered the asphalt beneath his feet. The shockwave spider-webbed outward, blowing out the windows of every storefront on the block in a shower of lethal glass. Civilians who had been safe from the magma were suddenly thrown off their feet by the hurricane-force winds of their "savior's" attack.
He was causing more collateral damage than the villain.
Suddenly, a streak of white cloth shot through the air. A capture scarf. It wrapped around the magma villain's arm, pulling taut. From the roof of a nearby office building, a figure clad in black leapt down, his long dark hair defying gravity.
Eraserhead. The Underground Hero.
Along with him came the thunderous footsteps of Death Arms and the giant, expanding form of Mt. Lady. The Pro Heroes had arrived.
"Keep the civilians back!" Eraserhead barked, his eyes flashing a brilliant, menacing red from beneath his goggles as he stared down the magma villain. Instantly, the molten slag began to harden, the villain's heat-generation Quirk erased. Death Arms lunged forward, tackling the now-solid villain to the ground with brutal efficiency.
The threat was neutralized. The villain was down.
And because the threat was gone, the Knight's Vow reacted.
Through my Emotion Sight, I saw the terrifying shift. The massive, ambient danger that had been fueling Kenji's immense power vanished. Instantly, the thick, sapphire-blue plates of armor began to thin, crack, and dissolve.
But Kenji was still holding up a collapsing, thousand-ton monorail overpass.
"No!" Kenji screamed, his arms trembling as the kinetic armor faded to a whisper. The concrete pillar above him groaned, beginning to crack and descend. His normal, frail human arms were suddenly bearing the impossible weight.
I stepped out of the shadows, my hand raising, prepared to summon the Aegis Pulse to catch the bridge. But I was beaten to it.
"I've got it!" Mt. Lady shouted. She expanded to her full, towering height, wedging her massive shoulders beneath the crumbling overpass just as Kenji's armor failed completely. She grunted under the colossal weight, her boots cracking the street, but she held it steady.
Beneath her, Kenji collapsed.
Without the Knight's Vow holding his shattered body together, the physical toll caught up to him in a single, devastating instant. He hit the pavement like a broken doll, utterly unconscious.
From my position in the alley, I felt it.
The invisible, metaphysical tether pulled tight. The recoil was violent, almost knocking me off my feet.
"Boss?" Rin asked, watching me stagger.
Down in the intersection, Eraserhead turned his gaze from the restrained villain toward the fallen vigilante. He took a step toward Kenji to check his vitals.
He was too late.
A blinding burst of amethyst light erupted from Kenji's chest. Eraserhead flinched, his capture weapon reflexively lashing out to grab whatever had caused the flash. The cloth passed right through it.
An obsidian butterfly, heavy with stolen power, tore itself from the boy's sternum and shot into the sky. It bypassed the heroes, bypassed the wreckage, and hurtled directly toward the shadows of the alleyway.
It struck my chest with the force of a cannonball.
I fell to my knees, gasping for air as the Knight's Vow crashed into my system. It was raw, heavy, and incredibly violent. My bones ached, my muscles seizing as the kinetic potential flooded my veins.
But I wasn't Quirkless. And I wasn't frail.
Eternal Vitality flared to life. The moment the kinetic energy threatened to tear my muscles, my cellular regeneration stitched them back together, stronger and denser than before. I felt the Aegis Pulse rising to meet the new power, the two abilities overlapping, analyzing, and synthesizing within my DNA.
The golden hard-light of the Aegis Pulse merged with the dense, sapphire kinetic force of the Knight's Vow. I raised my hand, willing the power to manifest.
A gauntlet of deep, iridescent purple energy formed over my forearm. It wasn't just a shield anymore, and it wasn't just blunt armor. It was a perfected, dense weapon of hard-light kinetic force, entirely supported by a body that could never tire.
It was intoxicating.
"We need to go," Rin urged, grabbing my shoulder. "Eraserhead saw the light. He's looking this way."
I glanced back at the intersection. Eraserhead was staring directly at the alleyway, his eyes narrowed, speaking rapidly into a wrist-mounted communicator. Death Arms was kneeling beside Kenji, calling for medics.
Kenji would live. The Heroes would make sure of that. But he was Quirkless again. And worse, he had become a data point.
First, the Golden Bastion loses his powers in a flash of purple light. Now, the Iron Juggernaut loses his powers in the exact same manner. The Hero Commission wasn't entirely incompetent. They would put the pieces together. They would start looking for the puppet master.
"Take us back to the skyline," I ordered, standing up and allowing the purple gauntlet to dissolve back into my bloodstream.
Rin sliced her hand through the air, opening a swirling portal. As we stepped through, leaving the chaos of Hosu behind, a cold, hard truth settled over me.
My system was flawed. Giving people what they wanted wasn't enough. Desires were raw, unfiltered, and dangerous. If I wanted to build an army—if I wanted my Chrysalises to survive long enough to change this broken society—I couldn't just be a granter of wishes.
I had to become a teacher. A mentor. A sovereign who controlled his subjects from the shadows, ensuring they didn't burn themselves to ash with my gifts.
And as the portal snapped shut, leaving me standing on the quiet rooftops of Musutafu, I knew the Hero Commission had just opened a file on the most dangerous phantom in Japan. The hunt had begun.