Chapter Text
Kotetsu panted, struggling to catch his breath when he was already out of Hundred Power and racing through the lowest part of Sternbild.
“Wild Tiger!” a voice called, echoing off the alley walls close behind him. “Why don’t you just give up? There’s nowhere to run!”
Kotetsu grinned. “Hear that, Bunny?” he asked. “He thinks there’s nowhere to run.”
Bunny’s voice was tinny through the comms, but the scoff came through loud and clear. “Focus, Wild Tiger. You’re going to take a right on the next street; I’m almost there myself.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m bringing this guy straight to you, don’t worry.”
There was just the sound of panting as Kotetsu leapt over a fallen trashcan, and he imagined Bunny pausing to think about what to say. Since dealing with Martinez and Kriem, they had both been trying to be more patient with one another and acknowledge each other’s ideas, and personally, Kotetsu thought they were working a lot better as partners. Bunny had actually agreed to Kotetsu’s idea of using himself as bait for this criminal, for one, and for another—
Kotetsu wouldn’t admit it to Bunny, but it was strange for him, running through the streets without his partner by his side. Having him on the comms just wasn’t the same.
But there was the corner, and with a grin, Kotetsu put on a burst of speed as he rounded it. Bunny was waiting for him.
Mario blinked, adjusted his glasses, and peered closer at the camera image before him as it was overwhelmed by a bright white light.
“Just a second folks, we might be having some technical difficulties. Orlando, can you zoom in for us and try to find Wild Tiger again?”
Orlando gave him a thumbs up, already messing with his camera, and Mario leaned back in his seat.
This segment had been weird from the very beginning. The criminal had been stopped while in the middle of robbing a bank, but had seemed unbothered by it—in fact, he’d seemed downright delighted to get the chance to taunt each hero as they arrived on the scene, his super strength power easily keeping the heroes back from being able to actually arrest him.
Barnaby and Wild Tiger had ended up in charge of the fight when Wild Tiger’s fight with the criminal had accidentally sent them down to Sternbild’s lower levels, where the HeroTV chopper couldn’t follow. Mario and Orlando had done their best to follow them from the skies, and report on how Wild Tiger had quickly run out of Hundred Power and started fleeing from the criminal instead of chasing him—and instead of escaping, the criminal had actually given chase in turn! But now…
Orlando shook his head and gave him a sideways thumb. Frowning, Mario directed his attention to the screen and began to narrate for their viewers.
“Orlando has gotten the view back for us, folks, but it—it doesn’t seem to be working that well. That is, we can see where Wild Tiger and the criminal just were, but we can’t actually see them now. Oh, and here comes Barnaby, looking for his partner—”
Mario kept talking, but he also gestured frantically for Orlando to contact Agnes. They had a missing hero on their hands.
Kotetsu stumbled to a halt, jaw dropping as Sternbild’s night sky was replaced by daylight and a cheering crowd. He himself was standing in the shadows beside them, but inching forward, he realized that they were all gathered around a wall of tv screens facing outwards from a store’s glass front.
There was someone with green hair fighting someone else with red-and-white hair. What was this, some new kind of Christmas style?
Peering closer, Kotetsu noted with surprise the tagline was in Japanese. Thankful he knew his mother’s language, he read: “UA Sports Festival—Second Round of the Battle Tournament.” What on earth…?
Kotetsu tore his gaze away, meaning to see if any of the other televisions were showing something that actually made sense, but his eyes caught on the reflection of someone staring back at him. The criminal he’d been chasing grinned.
Kotetsu bolted, dashing into the nearest alley and heading away from the crowd. So far the criminal hadn’t attempted to harm any civilians, but there was no reason to take that risk.
“Come back, hero!” the criminal called, his feet slapping against the concrete as he followed Kotetsu.
“Not on your life!” Kotetsu replied, and the criminal laughed.
As Kotetsu focused back on the path before him, though, he realized that someone else had been unusually quiet through all of this.
“Bunny?”
No answer, but the comm was still on.
“Hey, Bunny, you there?”
Still nothing.
“Barnaby, this isn’t funny! Answer me!”
Silence yet again.
Cursing, Kotetsu made a series of quick turns, one after another. He’d obviously been transported somewhere new, likely in Japan. Maybe the comms were fried when the transport happened? They still looked like they were on, but Kotetsu knew weird things happened with technology sometimes. Case in point: Whatever happened to land him here.
For now, though, there was nothing Kotetsu could do about it. He wasn’t a tech wizard like Saito, and he had to focus on just evading the criminal for now. In this unfamiliar place, where his hero license didn’t apply and he had no Hundred Power for at least another forty-five minutes, he couldn’t risk a fight.
If he was being honest with himself, he couldn’t risk a fight even after his Hundred Power came back. He’d lost the first one; that was why he’d been leading the criminal to Bunny in the first place.
Kotetsu swerved around another corner and took the opportunity to look behind him. His tail was still a bit back, but—but was he gaining on him? Kotetsu couldn’t tell.
For a moment, he thought about dumping his suit. Its weight only slowed him down, and without his Hundred Power, it was less than useless.
It would take time for him to wrestle the suit off without mechanical help, though, and he might not remember where he dumped it. Plus, Saito would kill him if he lost it.
Resolving to losing the criminal the good old-fashioned way, Kotetsu turned deeper into this maze of alleys.
When Kotetsu’s Hundred Power finally returned, he took the opportunity to get away for good and turned on his speed, sprinting through a series of dizzying turns before grappling up to a roof. Safe in the high ground, he tried every rooftop entrance he came across before tiredly stumbling into the first open one he found and collapsing in a metal heap in a stairwell.
Kotetsu spent the night like that, still in his suit, and when he woke up, he made a mental note to never do that again. His poor, aching body did not like him right now—though Kotetsu liked his comms still being fried even less.
He would have to go out and try to figure out what all of this was himself. But he couldn’t do that while in his suit; that was just asking for the criminal to spot him again, and Kotetsu wasn’t in the mood for another high speed chase through the alleys. He would have to take the suit off.
An hour later, Kotetsu shielded his eyes with a hand as he walked out onto a busy street. Removing the suit had been an adventure and a half. He’d always had Saito by his side for it, which meant this time, he’d fought his way out mostly by randomly selecting pieces to remove individually. He felt bad about it, but he figured Saito should be able to put it back together—and if not, the man would probably just go to Maverick with the idea for a new set of matching suits for Tiger and Bunny.
Reasonably satisfied, Kotetsu had stashed the suit pieces behind some dust-covered boxes in a supply closet, then headed out.
Perhaps he should have second-guessed his outfit choice, though. His tight black under-armor was drawing a lot of looks.
After the third person he spotted openly checking him out, Kotetsu turned on his Hundred Power and sped through an apartment building at top speed, stopping only to snag a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt hanging in a communal laundry room. A little wet, and the theft made his skin prickle uncomfortably, but necessary.
As comfortable as he could be, given the circumstances, Kotetsu finally turned his full attention to finding a newspaper and figuring out where he was.
Or rather, he tried to, but Kotetsu was quickly distracted by just how strange his new surroundings were. Some people looked normal, but there were others with even weirder hair dyes than the two on TV the night before. And even stranger than that was the way some NEXTs’ powers had affected them. Kotetsu had never seen a NEXT mutate before, let alone take on the features of animals.
And then there was just how many people seemed to be NEXTs. Kotetsu was used to being one of a minority, but here, NEXTs seemed to actually be the majority. They walked the streets freely, unafraid of using their powers for trivial things. One boy idly stirred his coffee, finger steaming, while a girl used some of the eyes on the ends of her hair to read a book even while the eyes in her head watched where she was going.
The strangest thing of all, though, was how no one else blinked. Not a single person, whether they seemed to be a NEXT or not, was afraid of those using their powers. It was as though Kotetsu had stepped into some idealistic future where NEXTs were no longer discriminated against.
Finally spotting a stand selling newspapers, Kotetsu hurried over, picked one up, and scanned it. Like the TV the night before, and like most of the conversations around him, the text was in Japanese: “Musutafu Local News.” That wasn’t surprising.
What was surprising was the date next to it.
“Excuse me, sir?” Kotetsu asked the seller, handing him the newspaper. “Is this date right?”
The seller barely glanced at it. “Yep. Do you want to buy it?”
Numbly, Kotetsu shook his head and walked away.
He was 155 years in the future.
The first thing Kotetsu did was find a library and research everything he could about current events. He refused to touch anything from his entire time, worrying that this might be like one of those sci-fi novels where he risked accidentally changing everything.
Even with his research, though, he was missing things. Refusing to go too far back meant he missed a lot of both the civil rights movement for NEXTs, and the laws that were eventually put in place for both civilians and their present-day version of heroes.
Because of that, what he knew could generally be summed up as most of the population having powers, now called ‘quirks.’
A consequence of this was stricter laws on when and where a person could use their quirk; what Kotetsu had seen in public so far was generally the limit. There was also discrimination against the quirkless, which threw Kotetsu for a loop for a moment since he was used to being discriminated against for his Hundred Power, though he supposed it made sense considering he was now in the majority.
For a moment, Kotetsu wondered if he would still be discriminated in this future, since he as good as had no quirk for most of the day—then he shook his head and moved on. If he was, it wasn’t like it was anything he wasn’t used to. If anything, he thought wryly, it might be refreshing to be discriminated against for how weak his power was, instead of how powerful it could make him.
Hopefully, though, Kotetsu wouldn’t be in this future long enough to find out.
Unfortunately, he was losing that same hope every second longer he was stuck here. It had been nearly twenty-four hours, and the power still hadn’t faded.
For all Kotetsu knew, it would take technology to get him back—technology that not even this future seemed to have.
Kotetsu headed back to the same stairwell he’d stashed his suit in that night, and sighed when he woke there the next morning.
For now, he decided, he would act as though he would be stuck in this new society for the rest of his life: Settle in and build a base of support, before trying whatever it would take to find a way home. He would have to lay low, since it was possible the criminal who’d also gotten snapped here was still after him. It was also possible that same criminal knew how to get back home, but Kotetsu had nothing to make him want to take Kotetsu back with him. Besides, it was better to be the one surprising than the one being surprised. He could track down the criminal and stay low.
The next big problem was money. Kotetsu needed it for food, shelter, a place to store his suit, toiletries, and just about everything else. He had a decent amount of cash stashed away in his suit for emergencies, but for the most part: For money, he needed a job, and for a job, he needed a new identity.
Kotetsu couldn’t trust that the heroes of this time wouldn’t see straight through a fake paper trail, which meant no seeking a position with them.
At the same time, this new society was different enough to the one that Kotetsu knew that he didn’t quite trust it anyway. Before, he knew that money motivated sponsors, while heroes competed but ultimately trusted each other. Now, he didn’t know what pushed society—if they did catch him, they might not let him go free. They might not even help him. And for now, that meant avoiding heroes and picking up smalltime jobs until he had the money for a new identity.
Kotetsu chased criminals for more than ten years; he knew how to track down a forger—though admittedly, this would be his first time hiring one.
It didn’t take long for Kotetsu to figure out the main issue with his plan: When you’re searching for one kind of criminal, it’s not hard to stumble upon others. Kotetsu managed to ignore them for as long as it took to set up a new civilian identity—Kaburagi Muramasa, after his brother—and to find a retail position.
Several weeks later, Kotetsu had enough money that, while he still returned to that stairwell every night, he felt comfortable caving to his instincts and putting his suit on for the first time since he’d taken it off that first morning.
Or at least, he tried.
Without Saito and his mechanics to help, it took Kotetsu an entire day to figure out how to piece his suit back together.
After that, though, Kotetsu started spending all of his free time on the streets. He knew Bunny wouldn’t be happy about him going out, but he also knew that Bunny would understand why Kotetsu couldn’t just sit still when there were people in need. In a compromise to his partner, though, he at least tried to stick to the shadows.
It only took a week and a half for the heroes and police to start hunting him.
Naomasa Tsukauchi pinned a sketch to an otherwise blank board, then sat on his desk and stared it. Glowing neon green eyes stared back.
A new vigilante had appeared on the streets, and those eyes were one of the only clues he had for finding the man. He hid behind armor that lit up when he used his quirk, though they hadn’t yet figured out what it was: Some of the villains he’d caught claimed super strength, others super hearing and a half dozen more.
Naomasa had been tempted to nickname the vigilante ‘Superman,’ after the classic comic, but the villains had already named him ‘Midori Oni.’
The Green Oni.
Naomasa couldn’t deny the vigilante had the typical horns and green coloring down perfectly, though he lacked a tiger pelt.
Sighing, Naomasa stood back up and grabbed a box already full with case files for villains Midori Oni had caught. He’d been busy, Naomasa could give him that—but vigilantism was illegal. They had heroes for a reason.