7 Chapter 7 – Investigating

In the following year, I started to learn how to hack and continued my work as a Vigilante alongside Knuckle Duster. We had taken down a couple of small gangs, nothing big and I now had a small investigation by the police, but they weren't actively searching for me. I even had my own nickname, Knockout, because I always knocked people out without them realizing what happened, although some people were calling me Mustache, because I drew Mustache on everyone I captured.

Additionally, I had continued to skip grades until I was in high school, I had entered it not long ago, a bit after I turned nine. I was now hailed as "the genius of the century", and already had several scholarships offered to me by prestigious universities. I was also mildly famous,as, once in a while, there was a news coverage about me or I did an interview. It was all in the goal to ease my life once I would reveal my "second" quirk, entered UA and became a hero.

Lately, though, I had a little bit separated from Knuckle Duster as I didn't want to involve him in my vendetta against the villain group that captured me, and the more dangerous groups I wanted to take down in the future. He was only a quirkless man, after all. He wasn't like me who had a plethora of quirks if I one day found myself in a dire situation.

During this year, I had continued to train my quirks and fighting style and I was now way stronger than a year ago. My fingers could shoot twice as fast as before, 200 m/s, and it was devastating. I could also use Detachable Fingers for one minute now, twice as long as a year ago. But my most notable improvement was that I had finally bought a warp quirk! It was:

Space Distorting (1775) : Allows the user to distort space using their fingers, opening a warp gate leading somewhere they can see clearly. I was surprised at how cheap the quirk was, a normal warp gate quirk would've cost at least 4000 AP, but there were two glaring weaknesses for anyone other than me: you needed to see your destination clearly, it couldn't be a somewhere far away you only saw vaguely and it didn't work if you saw something clearly, but from a camera or computer. Also, you needed to use your fingers to open the gate. It that sense, it was more similar to a blink quirk. In my case, though, the drawbacks were advantages, because of the second quirk I bought.

Eyes everywhere (456): Allows user to create eyes on their fingers. Yeah, I broke the system… I could use this, Detachable Fingers and Space distortement to create one if the most broken warp gate quirk there was. It was also very useful if I one day wanted to spy one someone and 360 vision worked with this quirk so my finger eyes saw all around them and up to 100 meters away. Alas, nothing can be perfect, as I couldn't use Quirk Vision on the eyes created by this quirk because it was a mix of Transformation and Emitter type. It transformed my original eyes to see quirk energy and allowed me to read it.

I could combine Quirk Vision with Eyes everywhere if I really wanted to, but it would cost a lot, and I mean a lot of Quirk Levels because they were two fundamentally different quirks.

I had also upgraded my Steel Hands quirk last week. It was now:

Steel Body (1545): User can change any parts of their body into steel. It also increased strength if I turned my muscles into steel. I wanted to be able to do the same with my bone and I knew I could, but I wasn't skilled enough yet. It was the same with turning my whole body into steel, but I hadn't trained this quirk a lot, I had received it fairly recently. It was still a very useful protection quirk, though, people would hurt themselves trying hitting me. Eventually, I wanted to upgrade it to titanium.

A/N: It's like Tetsutetsu's quirk without some of the drawbacks.

Finally, I had upgraded Voice Change by paying 135 AP so that I now could imitate other people's voice.

The bad news was that, once again, I had few Quirk levels, only 646 AP remaining.

The good news was that I could escape almost any perilous situation and that I had a quirk to protect myself. It was finally time to start investigating the group that tried to kidnap me.

The first thing I did was to hack the police to read the file about my kidnapping four years ago. As the case wasn't a very important, high profile or one with sensitive information, it was not very hard to gain access to it.

It was disappointing as there were next to no information about the group that did it. The only thing they knew was that they needed my father to heal their boss, as they overheard one of the criminals say it. But the police had information the criminals, though. According to their files, it was their first crime, but they probably had probably committed some before that weren't reported.

I hoped to find more information in the criminal's files.

The first criminal, Iwao Shizo was 25 five years old at the time of the crime and had a quirk named Shadow Manipulation, allowing him to manipulate shadows to hide himself or blind opponents, but it had no offensive capability, it was a support type quirk. He was a tall and well-built man with black hair and eyes of the same color.

The second criminal, Jyto Okate was 23 years old at the time of the kidnapping had a very interesting quirk. He could put a mark on a person by touch, and he would always know the location of the marked person. He could only put one mark at a time and the mark would disappear after one week, but there was no other way to remove the mark. It was probably because of his quirk that they could know when to abduct me. He was a scrawny, but tall man that had red hair and blue eyes.

They were both sent to prison for ten years for their crime, but the interesting part was that they both escaped 2 years ago. I had to hack into another file to know how they escaped, but it got even more interesting.

The criminals weren't qualified as dangerous villains, so they weren't sent a high-security prison, only a normal one. 2 years ago, both criminals mysteriously disappeared from prison. The night of the escape, the cameras in their cells both stopped working at midnight and when they restarted to function, the two criminals weren't there anymore. Also, the security guy that watched the cameras had been drugged with a poison that put him to sleep.

It was a very clean escape. It also meant that it was very likely that the person who helped them escape had a warp quirk, and a strong one at that.

If someone had a strong warp quirk, that meant that they were either in a strong group or a group with a lot of money, as everyone with a strong warp quirk I in the underworld was either in a well-established group that paid them well or they were independent and charged a lot for their services. The demand for warp quirk was high, but the number of people with them was quite low.

Additionally, the two criminals were probably not high on the chain of command of the group as the group had waited 2 years before rescuing them, but the fact that they were rescued meant something.

With all this information, I had pretty much two leads I could follow. I could try to search for the man with a shadow quirk as I had pictures and a physical description of him or I could try to search for groups that had declined around five to five and a half years ago, but that were still active two years ago.

The fact they were willing to kidnap me to force my father to heal their leader meant that the leader was, or indispensable to their group or they were very loyal to the leader. Otherwise they would've simply chosen another leader. In both cases, that meant that with their leader injured, they would've been less effective, thus, they would've declined.

Of course, I could be completely wrong, but those were the only leads I could think of given my limited information. I just tried to narrow down the suspects as much as possible, but it was possible that the ones who kidnapped me hadn't declined 5 and a half year ago or that the weren't active two years ago and that someone else had rescued those two.

After reading (thus memorizing) both files, I erased all traces that I had hacked the police and quickly put my costume, it was time to visit my favourite information broker, even though I had never met him: Giran.