The conference room deep beneath the Hero Commission's main headquarters in Musutafu was a fortress of steel and silence. No windows. No external network access. Lead-lined walls. This place wasn't on any blueprint. Only the most classified of meetings occurred here—the kind that didn't make it to the headlines.
A half-circle of high-ranking officials sat before a long black table, each of them holding thin folders filled with paper summaries. Paper. Not tablets. Not digital screens. Because for the first time in decades, the Commission was facing something it couldn't track.
"You're telling me," said Chairman Igarashi, his voice barely more than gravel, "that he wiped out five sites. No footage. No telemetry. No survivors. And all our tracking systems… nothing."
"Yes," replied Chief Analyst Watanabe, adjusting his thick glasses. His hands trembled slightly as he spread out one of the printed images: a satellite shot, degraded and corrupted, of a crater that once used to be a lab.
"Nothing we have can lock onto him," he added. "As soon as he appear, every piece of equipment within roughly 400 meters goes dead. Cameras. Mics. GPS. Even backup blackboxes. All corrupted at the hardware level. Not just jammed—it almost burned for that time he present there. It can only continue functioning after he left the area."
There was a long silence.
"It's impossible," murmured a woman in a red blazer—Director Aizumi. "This kind of field disruption would need industrial-level power. That doesn't line up with a field-deployable suit. Is it a type of quirk?"
Watanabe nodded. "We thought so too. But this... isn't just a field generator. It appears to be adaptive. The jamming doesn't follow a set signal pattern. It reacts dynamically, mutating based on the equipment trying to read or record. It anticipates interception attempts. So we thought that if this coming from activation of a quirk there might be multiple person involve."
"That will almost impossible. The report said that, the survivor witness only one person present. If it not a quirk then you're trying describing the use of an AI," muttered Director Hozumi.
"Yes."
The single word hung in the air like a guillotine.
Chairman Igarashi leaned forward, his knuckles white against the table.
"A rogue AI. In a combat suit. Used by an unregistered vigilante."
He looked around the room, his old eyes hard.
"That's not a criminal. That's a goddamn ghost with a nuke."
—
Across the table, Security Director Akechi finally spoke, voice steady but laced with something almost like awe.
"We've had anomalies before. Blackout events. Quirk-enhanced EMP zones. But this… this is surgical. Precise. Every system fried *just enough* to prevent recovery, but never so much that surrounding infrastructure takes damage. It's like it knows what matters and what doesn't."
He tapped a page. "And look here. At every scene, there's a pattern."
Watanabe adjusted his glasses. "You mean the absence of patterns."
"Exactly." Akechi nodded. "Every incident looks like a chaotic ambush. But the survivors, when there are any, describe clean, one-strike takedowns. Mostly lethal. Until last night where it cause huge commotion unlike the usual where it happen at the place that devoid of people."
He slid a report forward. "Convoy hit. All escort guards dead. Child rescued. No trace left behind. No DNA. No electronic residue. No footprints. Just one witness. The boy."
Director Aizumi's eyes narrowed. "Is he talking?"
Akechi shook his head. "He says a hero saved him. But no name. No symbol. Just said he glowed. Said he was a shadow that 'burned through the bad guys.'"
"That's a child's memory," scoffed Hozumi.
"Maybe," said Watanabe, "but that might be the closest thing we get to a profile."
"So," the chairman said slowly, turning the pages of his report. "Let's lay it out. What do we know about this… Delta?"
Watanabe cleared his throat and began.
"Codenamed 'Delta' by our analysts based on a symbol captured in one of the corrupted frames. Suit appears humanoid. Armor-grade exoskeleton. Design indicates external AI support. Internal power source unknown."
He flipped another page.
"Capabilities: high agility, strength comparable to Class-A reinforcement Quirks. Main weapon appears to be a directed-energy device of unknown configuration. One attack was observed to completely disable a Class-C kinetic barrier and incinerate the target."
"Style?" asked the chairman.
"Efficient. No flair. No theatrics. Goes for the most direct method of incapacitation. Quick strikes. Usually lethal. He doesn't hesitate to kill by causing large commotion if he determines the threat justifies it."
"So not a typical vigilante," murmured Aizumi. "He has military discipline."
Watanabe nodded. "Or he's been trained by someone who does."
"Motive?"
The room fell silent.
Then Akechi spoke. "We think it began with a slum orphan named Mari. She went missing. He brought her back."
"And the others?"
"All connected to the child trafficking ring. Every target he's hit had ties to underground labs or illegal transport."
Chairman Igarashi closed his eyes.
"A vendetta."
"A crusade," said Hozumi bitterly. "And now we can't even see him coming."
—
A tense pause.
Aizumi broke the silence.
"If we can't catch him with cameras, satellites, sensors, drones—then we need a human countermeasure. A quirk-based one."
Watanabe shook his head. "He doesn't trip standard Quirk sensors either. No registry match. And the AI in the suit? It's designed to neutralize quirk-based surveillance too. One of our informants tried to use an empathy detection Quirk to locate him. Got nothing. Said it felt like the world blinked around the area he should be."
"Then we're blind."
"And deaf," said Akechi quietly. "And now... We're like being picked apart."
—
Igarashi leaned back in his chair.
"Let's assume the worst case."
He held up a photo of a shattered lab gate.
"He keeps going. He keeps targeting rings tied to children. Every time we adapt, he evolves. The AI learns. The jamming field strengthens. And public exposure?"
He looked around. "People will see him as a hero. A ghost cleaning house. Not a criminal."
Aizumi frowned. "We can't let that image settle. We need to control the narrative."
"What narrative?" asked Akechi. "We don't have anything to show. We've been left chasing smoke."
"Then we give them a villain. A terrorist. A rogue AI project gone mad," said Hozumi.
Watanabe looked ill.
"That won't hold if a kid says he saved her. And more will speak. Eventually, someone will have seen him."
"Then we control them," Aizumi said, cold and sharp. "We pre-emptively investigate every slum, every orphanage, every blacksite, and label anyone sympathetic to him as a threat vector."
The silence returned.
Akechi then said, "You know that cannot be done, that more an act of villain. We're not like that."
Igarashi finally sighed.
"Make a list. Every orphan tied to his rescues. Anyone connected to the safe houses. Investigate them all, then contact any orphanage that lack the fund that we will help them if they house slum kid. Make sure there no more slum kid on the street make sure they are house into the orphanage. If the organisation do not have anyone to caught as victim there no need for this Delta to exist and cause chaos for us to clean up. And begin development on a counter-AI."
"We can make sure all the slum kid get into the orphanage in a week but that counter-Ai could take years to develop," Watanabe said quietly.
"Then work faster," snapped Hozumi.
—
As the room dissolved into hushed arguments and urgent orders, Igarashi remained still.
His thoughts were elsewhere.
A vigilante with a system that devoured all sight and sound.
A ghost that erased every trace except justice.
"Find him," he murmured to himself.
But deep down, some part of him wondered:
'How do you catch a shadow that rewrites the rules?'