Wasted Quirk

Chapter 4

But, damn, was it frustrating.

It was weeks before we turned up anything. And what came up, we weren't even sure if it directly tied to the attack on the café. We wanted it to so that we felt like we were making some kind of progress. But there was no obvious connection. Whoever set off the chemical weapon in the café was clean. They left us not just nothing helpful but plenty of somethings to have us running in circles. Most of our time was spent on deciding whether or not a clue we had found was real or just another red herring. We were desperate for anything. Which is why the second event sparked a little hope.

It was the middle of the night when I was called in to our base of operations. Standing around a metal table was me, the head detective Tetsuro, two officers, and another hero, Le Million.

"They brought you on?" I said to the hero, begrudgingly. "I would of thought this wasn't high profile enough for you, big guy."

Le Million smiled. I hated him. Not because he was bad, but because he was so good. It was annoying. His smile and good natured-ness were genuine. And I hated it, especially the fact that he was my primary competition for the top.

But I think, deep down, I knew that the real reason I hated him was because anytime he showed up, I would suddenly be reminded of Deku. I had worked hard to suppress the guilt and pain of his death. So this guy coming along and digging it all up made him enemy number one in my book. I didn't need him shoving my greatest mistake in my face.

"Every problem in this country is high-profile, my friend!" he replied. "I heard about what happened, but I had every confidence that the heroes involved were taking care of it. I'm here because someone thought my skillset would be an asset to this team. I'm excited to see that they've got you here too!"

Stuff it, I thought.

Le Million was young, only a couple years older than me. But he was what everyone considered to be the next All Might. His power of permeation seemed useless, until you grouped it together with whatever juice he drank in the morning. The guy had unbelievable power. It seemed to me that his quirk was just a helpful tool he kept in his back pocket. What made him the favorite was his insane power set and his disgusting amount of optimism.

A deep grunt alerted us to switch our attention to the detective at the end of the table. He took a deep breath before beginning.

"We've had some interesting occurrences over the last two days," Tetsuro started. "Several emergency calls have been made from various locations within the city."

"Calls like what?" I asked.

"Burns," he answered. "Bad ones."

He paused, like that was supposed to mean anything to me.

"So?" I retorted. "Dispatch gets calls to burn victims all the time. Seems more like a fire department problem than a hero problem."

"Every problem is a hero's—"

"I'm gonna stop you there, Casper," I said, cutting off Le Million. "I'm not here to argue the definition of altruism with you. I'm being realistic. Heroes handle what emergency responders can't. So, what makes these guys so special that they get to wake me up at two in the morning?"

I knew I didn't have many fans, particularly in the police force. I was a no-nonsense kind of guy. They knew I wasn't big on wasting time. They also knew I wasn't big on sweet talking victims. I got the job done. Helping them process the trauma was what therapists were for. Not me.

"All of them were burned on their hands," the detective answered, "and in every case, none were exposed to any kind of fire."

"No fire," Le Million repeated. "Could these have been hot water burns?"

"From what the reports say," Tetsuro continued, "they appeared to be more acidic. Chemical burns."

There it was. The reason why we were there.

"You think there's a connection between these chemical burns and the chemical weapon used two months ago," I said. "Am I right?"

"We can't confirm anything," he replied. "We have zero evidence connecting the first incident to these. But the fact that several people have been targeted in a short period of time by using some sort of chemical weapon makes us suspicious that they could be tied together."

"Do we know the source?" Le Million asked.

"Up until now," one of the officers contributed, "the only thing connecting the victims was this area..." She pointed to a portion of a map laid out on the table. It was circled in red.

"It's so..." I trailed off.

"Unassuming," Le Million finished. I nodded.

The area circled was just a random shopping complex. No connection whatsoever to the café of the first attack. They weren't kidding when they said they had nothing tying the two events together. Unless...

"Do we have someone investigating the area?" I asked.

"We do," Tetsuro affirmed. "We roped off the area in hopes of limiting any more interaction between civilians and wherever these burns are happening."

"But you said that the calls were random. To people's homes or adjacent streets," Le Million added.

"That's true," he replied, "but when the fourth or fifth call was received for a similar burn type and site, I started to think that it was too much to call it a coincidence.

"We began making house calls to the victims, to hopefully get more information. At first, everything they said seemed irrelevant. But then we started asking the right questions. In the beginning, I thought it was a common agent used that was causing the burns. Like a cleaning product or detergent of some kind. But after I realized that it was instead a common location, we made significant steps forward in this case.

"That's when it occurred to me that this may be connected to the first incident in the café. It seems a stretch, but I've just got a gut feeling that something more is happening here."