【ＮＥＧＡＴＩＶＥ ＯＮＥ】

¹⁸ꜱᴏ ᴇᴀꜱʏ

Things were changing, Stain could already tell.

Moving from place to place and just finding sleep wherever he could isn't ideal, but with the lifestyle that he lives, it's the safest one possible.

As he wipes off the blood from his latest kill, he couldn't help but think about how much free time he's had lately, though he's not sure if it was a sign of someone trying to one-up him or just a side effect of someone else's work.

He's never met Lady Nagant in person, but he could still remember the times when she would show up on television after saving the day. There was a smile on her face and her movements were chipper, but her eyes told differently. It took him a while to recognize the look.

It was the look of someone who has a lot of blood on their hands and spilled those blood out of duty.

He's not a very optimistic person, that side of him hasn't been around since he was a kid. But he's starting to think that Lady Nagant really is aiming to clean the streets from the filth, just like he is.

But there was something about her that was causing him to hesitate to reach out to her for now.

Her kills were distanced far apart in a short time frame.

One day she kills someone from Tokyo, then the next she just kills someone from Nigata.

Either she's somehow obtained an extremely fast vehicle that stays hidden from the common eyes, or she's working with someone that has a Quirk that helps her move around quickly.

Stain knows that he works better alone and he's not planning on joining a team anytime soon, but Lady Nagant apparently doesn't think the same way.

He doesn't think that their group is a threat to him directly per se, after all, if they really wanted him dead then they would've sent the female sniper to hunt him down, and he would already be dead from a shot to the head at this point.

Simply put, he doesn't know what this group's agenda really is, they may be cleaning up the streets like he is, but they could have ulterior motives. Lady Nagant was freed by an unknown party, and it's reasonable to believe that she works for them now as payback for her freedom.

Stain isn't sure how they did it, but it certainly would have required a lot of talent to pull off. People with that kind of skill or power always have an agenda, a plan to make their mark in society and change it to suit their needs, like the Meta Liberation Army.

Seeing that his blade is now clean, he takes a fighting stance and imagines an enemy in front of him.

He trains throughout the afternoon and cuts up many imaginary fake heroes in that time.

Yes, things were changing now, and he better be prepared for the day it comes.

+/+

/

"Oh, this one seems interesting, 'Brainwashing', courtesy of Hitoshi Shinso. What kind of brainwashing? How does he activate it? Eye contact? Verbal commands? Some sort of telepathy?" Izuku mutters alone in a rundown apartment.

It's been a few days since Izuku tagged in with the attack on the USJ with the League of Villains, and while he plans on staying with their group, at least for a time, there's no way in hell he's sleeping inside a bar. So he gave them an encrypted phone that can message him directly and used the money he's stolen from less fortunate people to get himself a cheap apartment. It wasn't clean but the landlord doesn't ask questions as long as he's paid so it's as close to home as he can get.

He's hunched over a worn-out table with a laptop open in front of him and he's writing into one of his now many, many notebooks, about the data he was able to steal from UA. He's cataloging and researching every scrounge of data on the students and teachers he could find.