It was a warm, unusually steamy Saturday evening in spring. The humidity was high, and Shōta Aizawa's unkempt black hair was lifting and frizzing as if he had earlier utilized his quirk while defending himself against a horde of villains—except he had not. His dark irises set against a backdrop of red-veined sclerae as if he had overused his quirk—except he had not. A grimace strung along his chapped lips as if he had already been privy to the perpetration of a heinous crime that evening—except he had not. Both his appearance and mood had been caused by the unusual amounts of pollen and heat which were clearly controlled by hellish beings out to distract him from his patrol which had only just begun.

Or so he would believe if he were a less logical man.

Alas, he favored logic over fantasy and thus found himself rubbing at one of his irritated eyes with an indistinct grumble which barely penetrated the barrier of capture bindings wound around his neck and settled atop his shoulders.

He had been scouting the area for a little over an hour, but despite his intel, there had been no major happenings as of yet. From his vantage point near a monstrous smokestack on an aged industrial building, Shōta let out a long, low sigh as he awaited the arrival of representatives from various drug cartels. According to his source, two—maybe three—rings were negotiating the spread of a more potent cut of cocaine amongst their buyers—particularly those who were purchasing their goods for the first time—in order to expand their sales.

Essentially, the villains were hoping to make a quick buck.

Shōta idly wondered when villains in the city had become so predictable.

He also wondered what they were cutting with the cocaine in order to make it more potent since surely they would not be distributing a purer product. What would the effects be on the users? Would he be finding addicts with nosebleeds and muscle spasms roaming the back alleys, or would they be suffering from more extensive disinhibitions and venturing into stroke territory? Would the new cut of drug have harsher withdrawal symptoms for the user? It was likely if the cartels' united goal was to bring in a strong profit. They had to keep their customers returning somehow. That being the case, what type of profit margin were they aiming for: double, triple—anything above their current yield? What were their standards like in situations like these? It was easy to tell that the cartels were becoming desperate if they were agreeing to compromise what little values they had in order to cooperate with one another.

Question after question ran amuck in his mind, but despite his speculation, Shōta realized that this situation needed to be nipped in the bud since the ramping up of the illegal drug industry often lead to human trafficking and forced prostitution—neither of which he wanted to witness increase in the city. Being an underground hero made him more privy to such situations. It was grueling work for body, mind, and soul, and try as they might, his coworkers at UA never really understood the mental taxation of dealing with such situations. There had been times where his colleagues attempted to help, such as when Nemuri had voluntarily aided him with a human trafficking sting once upon a time—in a fit of righteous, if likely misguided, passion, undoubtedly—, but Shōta could honestly say that he never wanted to see her eyes that haunted again and thus never uttered a request for assistance again. Yet, it was something he regularly handled along with the police and other covert heroes since it was rarely a one-man job.

Situations like that were why he had trouble truly letting down his guard and sleeping restfully at night. Who knew what was happening in the city at this very moment that would slip under the heroes'—well-known and underground alike—radars?

Regardless, his mind was wandering too much, he decided as he rubbed a finger under his nose, olfactory senses protesting the increased pollen in the air for the umpteenth time that evening. He could not afford distractions when the meeting between cartels was supposedly drawing near, nor could he afford to give his position away by sneezing since stealth was a matter of importance in his line of work.

A heavy steel door screeched as it was steadily pushed open.

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear—that was the phrase of the year, was it not?

Shōta fluidly spun to catch the rooftop intruder in his sights, not yet activating his quirk and instead choosing to remain hidden in the shadows of the large smokestack yards away from the newcomer.

The cartel representative was a monster of a man. He most definitely had a mutation quirk, and Shōta's exasperation at that realization was certainly not minimal. With skin like Kirishima's when the boy's quirk was activated, the hulking thug easily stood above six feet tall, if not closer to seven, even without the gnarled horns protruding from his forehead; he easily rivaled All Might in terms of height. In spite of his intimidating appearance, the man wore what appeared to be an expensive, pinstriped suit.

Definitely flaunting money and power, Shōta noted critically.

"Oh, you're already here," came a silken voice from another portion of the rooftop. Shōta whipped his gaze to the side to study the next cartel representative, making a conscious decision to slink closer to the smokestack and further into the shadows as he studied the slender blond man who stood atop a raised ridge extending over the side of the warehouse. As the, yet again, well-dressed man hopped lightly onto the roof and the bricks he had left behind crumbled into dust, the UA teacher reached up to yank his goggles down over his narrowed eyes. Ground manipulation of some sort, he concluded as he listened in on the representatives' conversation.

"Look," began the monster of a man, placing both hands on his hips as he settled into a relaxed stance, "You and me both know that using our quirks will just cause trouble that nobody wants. Let's just throw that out before anybody gets any funny ideas."

The delicate man gave a slight bow, running a hand through his perfectly-parted hair. His suit flitted between maroon and black as the moon cast its light on the duo. "But of course. We are both looking for profit, and bloodshed does not fit into those ideals at the moment," he purred smoothly. "Let us hope that our third party wishes the same."

So there is a thir—

His senses screamed at him to drop to the ground, and Shōta did so without hesitation, trusting in his instincts and narrowly avoiding a large steel pipe that flew past where his head had been only a moment before. It clanged excessively loudly against the smokestack's solid frame.

Remember your limits, he reminded himself as his body whipped upward and to the side as he swung his gaze around to find the new interloper in his recon mission.

There! The newest villain was a female, short and unassuming aside from the cocked eyebrow and vicious smirk plastered across her darkly painted lips. Firmly gripping the capture weapon around his neck, he calculated its trajectory and flung his arm out toward the woman, long hair flaring upwards as his quirk activated and erased whatever ability she had.

"Oh, no. Whatever shall I do," she drawled with a roll of her light blue eyes, raising her hands as high into the air as she was able while bound with his scarf in a facetious gesture of surrender. "We know who you are and what you can do, Eraserhead."

A thrown knife cut deeply into his side, and he flinched as he double-stepped in retreat, just barely avoiding the ground as it grew unstable and tried to snag his foot. What luck! More often than not, his opponents solely relied on their quirks, so the knife had most definitely caught him off his guard. Stupid mistake. Rubble—glass shards, stinging pebbles, and even a piece of rebar—was violently sent his way in a steady barrage which he deflected with his own weapon, dodging the debris that did escape his weaponry with relative ease and shutting down the quirks of the telekinetic and ground manipulator until—

Stars exploded behind his eyes as a fist slammed into the side of his head causing the straps of his goggles to cut into the skin of his scalp. The impact was not singular; another blast of overwhelming pain coincided with a poorly-timed clap of thunder as the other side of his skull clanged against the very smokestack that had been an ally earlier in the evening. He slid downward along the weather-corroded metal for a split-second, playing the role of a hero who was down-and-out all the while mentally cataloguing his wounds and general ailments: concussion, bloody nose, ringing in the ears, deep laceration across the right side, contusions galore, minor scratches from debris, dizziness—just to name a few.

Shōta's stomach rolled with nausea as he dove to the side just in time for the mutant's hard-as-rock fist to collide with the metal pillar instead of his own body.

This entire meeting had been a setup, and its sole objective was to remove him from the picture.

He idly wondered if he should be flattered.

Stone began latching onto his boot again, and he hurriedly busted his way free, cutting the telekinetic woman free from his line of sight in the process—a mistake if he had ever made one. In the span of less than a second, he could not breathe due to his own capture weapon strangling him. His arms were immediately restrained by ribbons of the tool when he reached up to try and loosen the garment that was acting as a noose.

The next thing he knew, he had seemingly been thrown in front of an oncoming train as the man with the mutation quirk barrelled into his side and broke him from the telekinetic's hold.

He would never pick a fight near a smokestack again, he vowed to himself as he pinballed from the side of the large column into the rooftop's breaker box and promptly pitched over the edge of the building, shaking fingers weakly willing his capture weapon to stretch out and latch onto something—anything—to break his fall as he wheezed and tried to inhale air properly. Dark spots danced in his vision, and Shōta glanced upward through blurring vision and broken goggles to catch a glimpse of the villainous trio merely watching him fall, one of them—the man or the woman—tapping a foot in annoyance as his full weight caught and hung from the carbon-nano-fiber-infused cloth that had clung to a rough patch of the roof's ledge, nearly ripping his right shoulder from its socket and causing his side to spurt blood from its earlier wound.

The woman—his sight was nearly nonexistent at this point, but it had to be the woman—flicked her hand, and his weapon went slack, dropping him like a sack of rocks down, down, down onto the side of an open dumpster with an audible crunch.

"He's down for the count, I'd wager," growled the huge thug. "He's not getting back up for a while after that beatdown."

The slender man nodded sagely, thumb and forefinger on his chin as he peered over the edge of the roof at the sight below. "I do believe you are correct, my good sir. The lady certainly does pack a punch."

With a roll of her eyes and shrug of her slim shoulders, the woman granted the two men a brief smile and began sauntering toward the rooftop's exit. "Let's go, boys. Maybe that'll teach him to stay out of our business. He'll be out-of-commission for weeks, and by then, our operations will be in full swing. We make a good team."

Thunder rumbled steadily somewhere far above where he lay, and icy droplets cut through the sweltering heat as lightning flashed across the dark clouds. Shōta's consciousness came back in steps. The first was a general awareness that he was, in fact, still alive. Breathing difficulties and stabbing pain in his chest cavity alerted him to the fact that he was heavily injured, and that was the second step taken by his waking mind. Finally, his olfactory senses were throwing a fit about wherever it was he had ended up.

It was a true struggle to open his bloodshot, bruised eyes, and it took a long moment to register that he was hanging upside-down, blood rushing to his head as he became alerted to the fact that he was face-to-face with the exterior casing of an industrial-sized dumpster.

As he lay tangled in his own capture weapon, half-in and half-out of the dumpster that reeked of weeks-old garbage, the stench of which would undoubtedly permeate and cling to his clothes for days to come, Shōta admitted to himself that this was a lesson he really needed to teach his students: battles were rarely straightforward, and the heroes did not always win. All of their experiences up until now—the USJ incident when All Might saved the day (his own failure aside) and the Hero Killer Stain incident when "Endeavor" rose to the occasion and beat down the notorious villain (as if Endeavor could ever do anything involving large amounts of logic and technique; he was all bluster and brawn), for example—showed the lighter side of heroism. It would hurt his pride (although not as much as it physically pained him now at this very moment in time), but it definitely would not kill the children to demonstrate how a hero could be seriously injured on something as simple as a standard patrol and intervention; in fact, the cold shock of it would likely save their lives somewhere down the line.

Oh, how it would hurt his pride, though, to find himself impersonating a mummy in front of them again.

Perhaps Recovery Girl would take pity on him if he obediently listened to her speech about the importance of taking care of oneself. Is it really worth it, he wondered to himself, voicing an agonized groan as his body slid fully into the confines of the dumpster, capture weapon spilling over the dumpster wall and onto the ground.

No, he decided adamantly, it's not worth it. He would not even be able to make it to UA for treatment later in the day, given the state of his body's injuries. This warranted a call to Detective Tsukauchi, one of his few contacts who understood the struggles he faced with every patrol, and a trip to an emergency room of some fine medical establishment.

Please work, he urged his phone as he patted his pocket with a trembling hand. Please don't be broken.

Everything afterwards happened so quickly that Aizawa Shōta could not even recount how he had wound up in a hospital bed. He assumed with a fair amount of certainty that someone had pulled him from the dumpster and had treated his body with as much care as possible when transporting him to the local medical center. Snippets of dialogue played through his memories—concerned voices mentioning surgery and other healing techniques, medical jargon referencing his various wounds, and soft murmurs of concern from the nursing staff who had become accustomed to seeing him around the building either for his own treatments or for those of the victims he had previously rescued.

Exhaustion oozed from his very being, and it took nearly all of his strength to turn his head and take note of the light filtering through his hospital room's window. His drooping and eternally bloodshot eyes took note of a whiteboard mounted to the wall, idly noting that it was now Sunday, and the clock tacked on the wall just above the board declared that it was eight o'clock in the morning.

He had rested here for long enough, he decided as he struggled into a sitting position. Black hair falling limply over his face, he coughed roughly before kicking his legs over the side of the hospital bed and shakily standing, mindful of the IV's needle embedded in his wrist. Fingers rough from years of heroics and the chafing coils of his capture weapon, Shōta gingerly slipped a calloused hand under his hospital gown and felt along his side for the telltale rough skin of a fresh scar healed by a quirk and was unsurprised when he found a long slice along with the remnants of several small incisions. Hm, he thought as he yawned, a stab wound and severely broken ribs—and it looks like very little bruising, as well. My head's not even spinning anymore. Healing quirks are wonderful things.

Removing his hand from under the garment, he placed it at the small of his back and arched his spine just enough to realign several vertebrae with a series of popping noises not unlike Bakugō's smaller explosions and a brief sensation of relief.

Still tired, though.

With that thought in mind, he pressed the "call" button to gain his nurse's attention and promptly—bluntly—declared he wanted to be served his discharge papers against his doctor's orders.

A few hours later with the sun high in the sky and a small bag of groceries in hand, Shōta opened the door to his sparsely furnished apartment and closed and locked it behind himself. He kicked off his boots with a bit of difficulty and tossed his keys onto his kitchen counter where they clanged loudly against a few dishes he had left out the previous night. Wavering in his steps, he set his bag of groceries on the very same countertop with a bit more care, and not bothering to put them away, the bedraggled hero staggered toward his room where, in his opinion, the most comfortable mattress in existence resided. It was calling him to it like a siren to a ship of sailors. Both he and the sailors would crash shortly once they gave in to the hypnotic melodies, and he was okay with that. It had been a long night, and he had been pushing himself too hard since leaving the hospital.

He had work tomorrow with a classroom full of talented hellions. Between Class 1-A, Hizashi, Recovery Girl (who would undoubtedly know something happened despite the lack of physical evidence), and his other colleagues, Monday would be a world of hurt for his body and mind if he did not achieve a bit more rest.

With a heartfelt groan of defeat, he collapsed onto his bed, fully clothed sans his boots, and, after drawing a long breath of air, settled into an exhausted sleep.