Trial of Fools: Ch 2

You never quite realize how similar a square train and a bus look, until FF.N makes you do one of those "Prove your not a bot" capchas, and your shitty wifi renders all the pictures in the grainiest quality png known to man.

…apparently I'm a robot.

Who knew.

-Rain of Sins-

-Trial of Fools: Ch 2-

All for One kept his smile up without so much as a crack, but sighed inwardly- even though it wouldn't really matter considering he was using a voice call, he refused to start developing bad habits.

"You don't understand!" Tomura's voice ranted through the screen. "I was this close to getting All Might! The attack would have been a success, but those losers we took all turned out to be nothing but fodder! They were useless! Fucking useless!"

"Now Tomura, don't be so hard on yourself. This was the first operation you've organized and executed yourself, and against such a high value target as well," Something he'd specifically warned him not to do, "Mistakes were bound to happen! Why it's what makes us human."

"Humph" Tomura crossed his arms and seethed.

"The best course of action now is to pull out your own form of victory from this, to learn from your mistakes so your next attack can be just that much deadlier."

"Oh it'll be deadlier alright!" Tomura hissed and reached for the TV remote. "And the next time I see All Might, I'll have him begging for mercy!"

All for One dropped his smile as the call disconnected, and let out his sigh. Tomura was a headache, but it was a worthwhile headache. The boy was an investment that would pay itself back a hundred fold.

He was moody, quick to anger, and lashed out, but he had potential. Beneath that rough shell was a hidden gem of extraordinary potential. He was intelligent, cunning, ruthless, had ambition in spades, and the drive to make it all happen.

Really all the boy lacked was experience.

Ujiko often called Tomura childish, so did most of his other advisors for that matter, they doubted him. But the things that they hated about Tomura weren't actually negatives, they were just temporary side effects of All for One's gift.

The Shadow King's gift, the thing that he'd drummed into Tomura from a young age and that would enable him to do the impossible.

Infallible self confidence, and complete certainty in every move he made.

That was what made a leader. That was what changed the world. It's not the strongest, or the smartest, or the ones with the most money, no. The people who change the world are the ones that raise their hand before anyone else and say "I'll do it".

Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, history is made by the people who refuse to even acknowledge the word 'no'. Who believe with their entire being that there is nothing they can't do. Who could take the worst punches the world could throw at them and just keep going because, in their mind, they already knew they were going to win.

What people thought were Tomura's weaknesses were just temporary side effects of his self confidence, they'd wear off as he became more experienced. The only real problem was that it made it very difficult to teach Tomura, he often had to learn the lessons himself the hard way.

But it was worth it in exchange for the key to fulfilling ambition.

"Ambition…" All for One frowned pensively as he muttered the word.

Once upon a time he had been the most ambitious man in Japan, if not the entire world.

Dreams of an Empire, his Empire, one that spanned from the frozen tundra of east Siberia, down through the industrious lands of China, the agrarian fields of Vietnam, and the resource rich lands of Indonesia, with Japan as it's beating heart, and him as it's head.

A dream that had died a long time ago.

Sometimes he wondered what happened to that dream.

Well the answer was simple, first was the twin mistakes of finding that demon stockpiling quirk, realizing that since he was functionally immortal that it'd eventually stockpile so much it would kill him, and then giving it to his non-immortal brother before checking if he had a hidden quirk.

The second was the fact that many people had held a deep hatred for quirks, for causing the collapse of society (it was called the Quirk Collapse for a reason), and many powerful groups organized to crack down on the various quirk warlords. Everything from government remnant organizations, to hastily constructed emergency states made by the military, and there were even a couple that were formed entirely to put people like him down. "Purity" worshiping cults and anti-quirk terror groups such as the Silver Order had been just as frequent as quirk warlords who thought the quirkless were beneath them.

Hell, the entire reason superpowers were called quirks in the modern day was the UN's attempt to re-brand them as something less scary than the "Omega Properties" that had caused the collapse in the first place. (Even though they were the exact same thing)

Those were the reasons that his Empire had never reached beyond Japan, and they were what eventually killed the part of it that he had managed to create.

But to him, his Empire died many years after the last of his fortifications had fallen. On that flat desert plateau, his final fight with All Might.

He had known, logically, that the amalgamation he'd accidentally created by combining his brother's quirk and the stockpile quirk had the potential to one day become a threat, if given enough time. But he hadn't understood it, until that final confrontation, until he saw the thing that the amalgamation had turned a human into, witnessed it run at him with it's internal organs dragging behind it on the sand. Until the quirk itself resisted his attempt to take it by force.

It had shocked him so deeply that he'd hesitated.

…that hesitation cost him the top half of his head.

His ambitions of an Empire died that day, and all that remained was understanding. Understanding that created a want, a need.

He would kill All Might, he would kill any successor the man made, and he would stop the monster he had created.

All it would take is one wrong move for that quirk to fall into the hands of someone "Less Heroic", and the world would be doomed. There was no entity other than himself who could possibly hope to even compete with such ludicrously insane power.

Now he wasn't doing this for "good", because he'd had some change of heart, or some nonsense, it was purely out of spite.

If he couldn't have his Empire then there was no way in Hell he'd let any fragment of a legacy from his brother have one either.

"But what comes after?" Ujiko had once asked, and while All for One had brushed the Doctor's concern off, it still was a good question.

He had no ambition anymore, his time had long since passed, and his drive of total self confidence had been shattered against the desert sand.

So what would come after? What would happen when all of his schemes and planning paid off? When he'd finally crushed his greatest mistake?

He honestly wasn't sure…

…

But-

All for One once again smiled as the call reconnected, Tomura finally having calmed back down.

-That was up for the new generation to decide.

-Rain of Sins-

"It's a lab run by an acquaintance of mine, go there and they'll supply you with better equipment."

All for One's words echoed in Stains mind as he stared at the corpse in front of him. It may have been moving, but it most certainly was a corpse, there was just no way this creature was a human.

Dirty, matted hair, sunken red eyes with deep bags under them, pasty skin that hadn't seen the sun, interrupted only by burns and bruises. It's cheeks were ever so slightly sunken, showing the starting signs of early malnutrition, and the clothes could hardly be called clothes at all, they looked more like burnt rags dragged out of a warzone.

"Get the fuck-" The corpse hissed, "Out of my Lab!"

And that was the only piece of evidence that flew against the corpse theory, not the fact it was talking, but the rage in its eyes.

But even a walking corpse was nothing for someone like Stain, it would take a lot more to phase him, and a lot more to scare him.

"No."

"Excuse me?" The corpse tilted it's head as if it was having trouble processing what it just heard. "What was that?"

"I was told to come pick up gear here." Stain pulled out his burner phone and flipped it open for the gravewalker to see. "Obviously they got the room number wrong, but I have every right to be in this building."

Izuku bristled as he read the screen of the old flip phone, his face hurling through a storm of emotions before settling on a scowl.

"...Fine!" He spat before whirling around and seething all the way back to his desk. "Stay in the Lab! I don't give a shit! But get out of my office so I can work in peace."

Stain watched Izuku stumble his way back to his chair, with a keen eye, and once again his comparison from earlier surfaced in his mind.

This total lack of fear, this near hollowness… he'd only ever seen it one place else.

On corpses.

"What a waste of space." He eventually said after a few seconds of observing the boy work. "Just a puppet moving in a pattern."

"What was that!?" Izuku hissed as he sent a death glare over his shoulder.

"You heard what I said." Stain looked over the moving corpse in front of him, the sunken eyes, matted hair, and hunched posture as it slumped over it's desk.

"Oh, please, you're just a chump of a Villain, no better than your everyday purse snatcher. 'The Great Stain!' Ha!" Izuku sneered. "I've read over your 'great pledge' myself , what a joke."

"You're calling my purpose a Joke?" The blood curdler narrowed his eyes dangerously and dropped a hand to the knife on his hip.

"No, I'm calling you out on your Bull Shit!" The scientist scoffed and turned his chair around to better face Stain. "Every last word you've ever said about 'Fake Heroes' is true, the problem is that you're just like All Might, you're nothing but a fake! A liar! You're a petty murderer who uses 'Fake Heroes' as an excuse to kill Hereos, because you got kicked out of Hero school." Izuku leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, smirking at the faint twitch on Stain's face. "That's right, I actually do my research about things, and all it takes is one glace at your backstory for your real motive to stick out like a fucking sore thumb."

"Because I'm a guest in this lab," Stain grit his teeth, "and because you agree with me about Heroes, I'm going to choose to only hear the part where you said I'm like All Might, and I'm going to choose to take that as a compliment. I'm going to choose to understand that you're saying I'm a man of my word, just like All Might."

Normally antagonizing a deadly killer without a weapon, backup, or any means of escape would be a very bad idea, and normally Izuku wouldn't be dumb enough to do that, but this situation was anything but normal. With the loss of his mother, his home, his dream, and everything he'd ever truly valued, along with being put under an ungodly amount of stress in a very short time period, Izuku had finally snapped, allowing old wounds to resurface and make the whole situation worse.

The years of bullying, of being looked down on, of being 'lesser' than everyone else, of neglect, all the things he'd pushed down and put a smile over, never properly handling, were finally bubbling to the surface.

"A man of your word!? What a fucking joke! All Might said that anyone could be a Hero!" Izuku spread his arms and cackled. "Hell, Hitler said he'd stop after Czechoslovakia! The world's full of liars! No one's ever cared enough to be 'truthful' without a lie detector, and even then they only tell it if it benefits them!"

"Watch your tongue boy." Stain growled. "You might find yourself without it."

"Go ahead!" Izuku laughed deeply, slamming his fist into the desk before smirking cruelly at Stain. "Break your joke about only killing Heroes! Prove me right! Prove you're just another liar! A nobody who's gonna be caught by some random Hero, and completely forgotten about by the end of the year."

"Over my dead body! The only Hero who I'll let capture me is All Might! He's the only true Hero out there!"

Izuku sent an incredulous look at Stain, before he nearly doubled over laughing, sounding disturbingly like Ujiko. "BWOHEAHOAHEAHaeHhAahEhAha! 'True Hero'? That's fucking hilarious! All Might-" Izuku pointed to the ceiling, "Is the king of liars! He's the ringleader of this whole thing! The reason all the other Heroes are so fucked up is that they're all trying to be like him!"

The scientist pushed himself to his feet with a manic grin. "He's the root of the problem! Why, now that I think about it I…I…I…"

Izuku trailed off, his grin falling into his previous dead eyed expression, and slowly his gaze drifted from the man in front of him to the knife embedded half an inch from his head.

"You're wrong." Stain scowled as he stalked forward.

"You're wrong." He repeated as he glared down at Izuku. "You're wrong no matter what you say, no matter how good you can ever make your arguments."

Izuku looked death in the eye and raised an eyebrow. "And why's that?"

"Because you're stuck in this room, locked away on your own accord, allowing yourself to become a dead man before you're even in the ground." Stain turned and walked back towards the door without sparing Izuku a second glance. "If you truly believed your ideals you would go out and prove them."

"...ideals?" Izuku whispered to himself, clenching his fists so hard his nails drew blood. "IDEALS!?" Izuku ripped the throwing knife from the wall and hurled it at Stain, he missed the man by a mile but the thud of it impacting the wall got the point across just as well.

"IDEALS DON'T GET YOU ANYTHING!" He shouted as he took a step forward. "Ideals get you beaten! Ideals get you burned! Ideals get everything taken away from you!"

Silence consumed the room as Stain stared at the knife in thought for a long while before turning to address Izuku. "... you don't have any ideals? Impossible," He scoffed, "No one without an ideal can have that much fire in their voice."

"I-" Izuku glared and hesitated before speaking with more emotion than any scream. "I lost all mine…"

"Well," Stain left the room, pausing only for a split second at the doorway. "Then I'd suggest you get new ones."

The sound of the metal door sliding shut echoed through the room louder than any of the previous shouting, and once that faded all that was left were the words ringing like white noise in Izuku's head.

Izuku scoffed, turned his chair back around to his desk, and tried to get back to work… but the words echoed.