U.A. High was quiet.
Not just the casual quiet of nightfall—but a deeper stillness, the kind that settled into the walls, thick and unmoving. The kind of silence that came after a long day of shouting, training, and teenage chaos. The kind that made the massive halls feel like a forgotten monument rather than the heart of the hero world's next generation.
The corridors, normally alive with footsteps and laughter, stood frozen in the hush of late evening. The lockers stood like silent sentinels. Overhead lights flickered occasionally as they dimmed into night mode. Most classrooms had long since gone dark, their windows black rectangles against the pale moonlight outside.
Even the security drones, ever-vigilant, moved with a kind of programmed lethargy—slower, quieter. Their soft mechanical hums echoed gently, more like whispers than warnings.
At the far end of the faculty wing, one room still pulsed with a warm yellow light, its glow leaking beneath the door like a lantern in a cave.
Inside, Shota Aizawa sat hunched behind his desk. Papers were scattered in loose piles across the surface—student evaluations, incident reports, training schedules. His sleeping bag lay crumpled in the corner, unopened, as if he hadn't even considered rest tonight. A cold thermos of coffee sat forgotten at his elbow, half-full and long since gone stale.
He barely blinked as he scanned another student's quirk assessment, eyes narrowed in focused scrutiny. He'd read hundreds of these, but each one demanded attention—every strength, every flaw, every hint of danger or promise.
Then, his phone buzzed.
The sound cut through the room like a thread snapping in the dark. Aizawa didn't react at first. Most people knew better than to call him at this hour. Fewer still had the nerve to actually do it. But there was something about the rhythm of this vibration—calm, deliberate, intentional.
Not panic.
Purpose.
He reached over without hurry and turned the phone face-up.
EmPee.
Aizawa stared at the name for a long second. Memories flickered in the space between heartbeats—missions in dark alleys, silent coordination, the shadow of Strikeline moving like smoke ahead of them. EmPee had been a quiet operator even then, but solid. Reliable.
Trusted.
Aizawa swiped to answer, settling deeper into his chair. His voice, when it came, was quiet. Tired—but alert.
"…Didn't expect a call from you at this hour."
There was a pause on the other end. Not long—just enough to mean something.
Then EmPee spoke, voice low but edged with urgency. "I wouldn't call unless it mattered. This is about Eidolon."
Aizawa froze.
The room seemed to still further around him. He placed the student report down with slow care, no longer seeing it. His eyes narrowed, though his tone stayed steady.
"I'm listening."
EmPee didn't waste time.
A soft click echoed through Aizawa's speaker—background static, low hum, wind. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere alone.
Then: the faint shuffle of paper. A screen turned. A muted beep. EmPee was already laying it out.
Aizawa listened, eyes fixed, saying nothing.
First came the photos. Blurry surveillance stills. Grainy images of alleyways half-shrouded in shadow. One frame captured a boy mid-motion—black armor, ghostly hands phasing through a brick wall. The angle was wrong, the lighting worse—but Aizawa knew what he was seeing.
Not a myth.
Not rumor.
Real.
Then came the patterns. A pause. A swipe. Another screen.
EmPee didn't speak, but Aizawa heard the clicks—maps being pulled up, pins dropped in locations that formed no pattern at first glance. A parking structure outside Musutafu. An abandoned mall near the edge of town. A residential block where a villain hideout had been raided weeks ago.
Each site seemingly random.
Until Energi overlaid them.
The movement wasn't chaotic—it was methodical. A circle. A path. A deliberate search.
And tucked between the attack locations… a missing persons bulletin. A child's face. Familiar.
Rei Kageyama.
Aizawa blinked. He hadn't seen that name.
The boy had vanished just before Eidolon ever showed up. No ransom. No body. Just... gone. Quietly forgotten in the avalanche of villain activity that followed.
Energi hadn't forgotten. He'd dug. Compared timestamps. Studied quirks. Pulled up old training footage from elementary school, then matched the awkward palm positioning of Rei's early "ghost hands" to the combat stance of Eidolon's phantom limbs.
The conclusion hadn't come easily.
But it had come.
Eidolon might not just be some weapon.
He might be a boy they all failed to protect.
Aizawa leaned forward, elbows resting on the edge of his desk, the cool glow from his phone casting stark lines across the tired creases beneath his eyes. EmPee tapped again. A new file opened—Energi's notebook, captured in a shaky camera scan. The images loaded slowly, each page crammed with scrawled notes and underlines, like the thoughts of someone racing against time.
It wasn't typed. It wasn't neat.
Crossed-out words bled into arrows and messy footnotes. Doodles in the margins, hastily drawn maps, fragmented thoughts looping back into themselves. Frustration filled every line—but not aimless frustration. It was the kind that builds into clarity. Energi hadn't just been grasping. He'd been closing in.
One bold heading stood out on the page like a warning:
"Eidolon is real."
Another note below, circled multiple times:"Targeting former AFO sympathizers?"
Then came timestamps. Names. Locations. A pattern that didn't look like a pattern until it did—until you noticed how each site had a history of shadow deals and whispered loyalties.
"Always hits at night. Avoids cameras. Too clean to be coincidence."
A small, hastily drawn diagram compared two images. One labeled: "Rei – Age 5 (Ghost Hands Training)." The other: a blurry screenshot of Eidolon from a surveillance cam. Despite the distortion, Aizawa saw it. The positioning. The reach. The posture. A child's clumsy technique turned into a killer's discipline.
"Ghost hands can phase now—new quirk growth?"
Aizawa's eyes lingered on that sentence. He'd seen this before—in other students. Quirks evolve, sharpen, mutate. If Eidolon was Rei, that meant his ghost hands were no longer just a childhood anomaly. They were being trained. Hardened.
At the bottom of the page, larger than anything else, a single line, underlined twice in red:
"Next: Shimura Heights. 72 hours, max."
Aizawa's breath slowed. His eyes locked on the name. Shimura Heights. An old neighborhood bordering one of the larger black-market zones in Musutafu. It was quiet now, supposedly cleaned up after multiple raids—but Aizawa remembered the rumors. That some of All For One's lowest-level fixers had gone to ground there.
Now, those same names were being whispered again—right before they disappeared. No trace. No noise. Just gone.
He rubbed a hand along his jaw, thoughtful. Cold coffee sat untouched beside him. The silence between him and EmPee stretched out, taut with meaning.
Then—another buzz. This time, an audio clip. He pressed play.
Energi's voice came through, faint and tinny, rough from pacing or adrenaline.
"…I'm going. I'm going whether anyone helps or not. If he's who I think he is—if he's what I know he is—I can't wait. I won't."
Click.
The message ended.
The silence that followed wasn't empty.
It pressed in.
Aizawa sat still, gaze distant, mind turning fast beneath the still surface. EmPee didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The pieces had all been laid out.
Energi was already in motion. He was going after Eidolon.
And if Energi was right—if that masked boy in black really was Rei—then this wasn't just about saving a city.
It was about saving a student.
Aizawa exhaled through his nose. A long, steady breath. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than before. Heavy. Steeled.
"…How long ago did he leave?"
A pause on the other end.
"Few hours," EmPee said. "Didn't ask for backup. I'm giving it anyway."
A beat.
Then Aizawa pushed back his chair and stood. His tired frame shifted into instinct. His hand moved for the familiar coils of his capture weapon, pulling it tight with practiced motion. He moved with clarity now—no hesitation. Only purpose.
He looked toward the window, toward the city beyond the glass, cloaked in shadow.
"I'll meet you at the station."