A tumbler of whiskey in his hand, Eugene Kurtz sat in his penthouse and surveyed the world. The curtains were drawn, and his room was wreathed in darkness, but he didn’t mind. Everything he needed was right here.

As he rubbed his chin, Eugene looked up at the screens scattered across the wall. On one – the largest – Racer V was addressing a reporter, stiff and unnatural as always. Then again, if they let Caduceus out too often, there was always the risk that she would go rogue. Eugene didn’t believe in putting all of his eggs in one basket. No, it was best to keep them all at each other’s throats, competing to be the most useful. <Look at me, Mr Kurtz! See how I dance!> He chuckled to himself and took a sip.

His eyes snapped back up to the main monitor, latching onto the live translation scrolling across the bottom of the screen. “– personally commend the protagonists of today’s unfortunate incident. It is no mean feat to take down a villain such as this while a mere freshman. I believe I speak for my agency when I say that we shall be following the careers of Shiketsu’s Class 1-D very, very closely.”

Eugene smiled humourlessly and rewound the footage, pausing on a photograph of the teenagers as they posed for the cameras. At a swipe of a finger, data spilled across a dozen other screens. Here, Bobby Samson’s address; there, a heavily-classified document detailing the exact nature of Sandatsu Owari’s quirk. (Three men had died to get that document onto his hard drive.) A photograph of Christopher Cain with his mother. Faith Kang’s Instagram account. A newspaper clipping titled “Tragedy at Mitsurugi Dojo”. Another newspaper clipping, this one much more recent, featuring a grinning Majestic and an enormous, green-haired girl, visibly uneasy from the attention.

“Mercy!”

His assistant’s preternaturally still silhouette appeared in the door.

“I’ve had a new and exciting idea.”

Mercy heaved a loud sigh.

“First things first, though: I want you to add this Broad Daylight woman to the list.”

Eugene pointed at the screen, frozen on a grainy still of Ume Hattori’s woozy face as she was bundled into a police car. Mercy tilted her head to the side.

“Yes, I know it’s a bit last-minute, but I’m sure we can afford it.” Eugene took another sip of his whiskey and considered his monitors. His cursor hovered over Bobby Samson’s smiling face. “Now, about the amendments to the plan that I was talking about…”

------------------------------

Bruno Garcia looked up as the door opened. A nondescript Japanese woman opened the door, moving with exaggerated care to the chair on her side of the glass, and sat down. Bruno could tell that she was trying to meet his gaze, but he wasn’t interested in playing games; instead, he stared at his own faint, green-garbed reflection in the glass and waited for her to speak. Which she did, eventually.

“My name is Yumi Suzuki.”

Bruno grunted.

“I work for the Osaka Rehabilitation Project, a non-profit organization. We primarily concern ourselves with prison reform. As a foreign national, we were wondering if you would be interested in granting us an interview to share your unique perspective.”

Bruno grunted.

“Typically, we tend to give prospective interviewees at least four days to think on it, but as your extradition is just next week, we thought it’d be more appropriate to provide you with a tighter deadline. I’ve asked the authorities to furnish you with one of our pamphlets – perhaps you’ve read it?”

Bruno grunted. He’d used it as toilet paper.

Yumi Suzuki checked her watch. Her expression hadn’t changed since she’d entered the room. “Well, then.” She cleared her throat. “It would be good if you could ask me some questions about the Project. If you’re curious. We’ve worked with thousands of ex-convicts over the past few years, so we know what we’re doing –”

She continued in this vein for several more minutes. Bruno stopped listening after the first few sentences. 

And then, all of a sudden, there was a loud clang. 

“– purely socio-economic factors. Rehabilitation is really important to us, and – oh.”

Yumi Suzuki checked her watch again, then looked up at Bruno. Her eyes had sharpened. “We have thirty seconds until their cameras come back online.”

Bruno narrowed his eyes, regarding her with renewed interest.

“How long have you been in here, Mauler? My employer would like to apologize for leaving you in the lurch for so long. He was held up for a while, but things are moving again.”

“Who?”

“You’ve worked with Nightmare before, I presume.”

Beneath his thick, unkempt beard, Bruno smiled a wide, mean smile. “Yes.”

“Would you like to be free?”

“Yes. He plan thing?”

Yumi smiled. “You could say that.” She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “I have only one instruction for you: when the man in the purple glove comes, take his hand. It’s not a trap.”

Shrugging, Bruno leaned forward. “Ya single?”

Curtly, Yumi shook her head. A few seconds later, the cameras came back on with a whir, and then she left. And Bruno was alone again.

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Hisahide glanced over his shoulder as Kotaro walked into the room. “That was a big dump,” he said, scratching his neck. “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” Kotaro answered, voice empty, and alarms began to go off inside Hisahide’s head. He’d worked alongside Kotaro for five years; something was off. Spinning around in his chair, his hand began to move towards the pistol at his hip, but it was too late, and he met Kotaro’s dead eyes just in time to receive a bullet to the brain.

Mercy discarded Kotaro’s face a moment later, settling into the seat beside Hisahide’s still-warm corpse. A tiny party approached Osaka Prison’s gates as she inserted a pen drive into a nearby port. Searchlights lit up a moment later, bathing the party in light… and this was when Mercy’s pen drive started to do its magic. With a groan, the searchlights shut off, prompting a few distant cries of alarm.

This was when the killing started.

Later, a metallic grinding noise began to echo throughout the facility. Bruno Garcia, lying in his bunk with his fingers interlaced over his navel, blinked, bushy eyebrows twitching, and sat up. He’d been placed in solitary confinement after murdering his cellmate for snoring. He didn’t mind, though; after all, he’d be free soon. Hands clasped behind his back, he ambled to his cell door and peeked out into the corridor just in time to catch a procession of guards running past, weapons armed and humming with energy.

Bruno remained there, grinning out into the corridor, his ghastly visage almost quivering with excitement. After a few long, tortuous minutes of nail-biting tension (not that Bruno would ever bite his nails), a guard flew past his cell and collapsed in a crumpled heap. A prehensile tendril, made from a dark, sticky material that seemed to absorb all light, crept past and lifted a card and a keyring from the unconscious guard’s belt.

And in few short moments, Bruno was free.

The mountainous ex-convict stomped out into the corridor, roaring in delight. “NIGHTMARE! KNEW YOU’D COME!”

Nightmare stepped backwards smartly, dodging Bruno’s attempted bear hug, and nodded at the man beside him, who was wearing a full-face mask. “Yes,” he muttered. “Good to see you too, Mauler. Come on, now. Take his hand. We don’t have that much time.”

Bruno squinted dubiously down at the man’s purple-gloved hand. It took him a few seconds to recall the instructions that he’d been given, but he needn’t have made the effort; by entering Getaway’s range, he’d freed the other man to use his quirk. With a soft pop, Mauler was compressed into a tiny, black pill, which the man then stuffed into his satchel. There were dozens of pills inside.

Without waiting for Getaway to follow, Nightmare pivoted on his heel and began to ascend the steps of the prison. Wisps of what might have been smoke surrounded him as he emerged from beneath the earth, yellow eyes glittering impassively as he stepped over another unconscious guard. Or was he dead? He didn’t really care. As he walked past, a pair of so-called heroes affected not to notice.

A full-scale battle was in progress outside. The exercise yard, where the inmates would pump iron, had transformed into a makeshift arena, and dozens of highly dangerous career criminals were trading blows with the brave men and women of 360 Hero Agency. A man with long, twirling ram-horns was throwing fireballs at one of Three-Sixty’s disposable underlings, the twenty-something hero-wannabe having transmuted herself into some sort of rubbery parody of a human being. Another convict, a four-armed woman, had made a beeline for the exit with a few of her compatriots and was struggling to outfight an armoured hero whose legs appeared to have fused into a giant wheel. It was all very chaotic. Very cinematic. It would make for a fine show when it appeared on the newsreels tomorrow morning.

Nightmare retreated into the shadows as they twisted to hide him from view. They weren’t, of course, actual shadows; indeed, if one were to look very, very closely, they might notice that these shadows had an uncomfortably organic texture. Every once in a while, they would twitch, revealing beady yellow eyes – the exact same shade of yellow as Nightmare’s, coincidentally – eyelids fluttering lazily.

As the villain looked on, Racer V emerged from underground via another exit, flanked by two of his subordinates. He’d removed his full-face mask and turned his purple glove inside out. Nightmare watched as he dodged a fireball on his way to Three-Sixty, who was busy commanding a spirited defence of the main building.

Smiling thinly, Nightmare tilted his head up to look at the sky. A few moments later, he was gone.

------------------------------

The sun had barely begun to rise over the horizon, but Eugene was still awake. He’d stayed up all night, holed up in his penthouse with a bottle of hyper-caffeine pills courtesy of Kurtz Pharmaceuticals, and perched at his desk as his monitors broadcast a litany of disaster.

“– all-out attack by an extremely well-armed paramilitary force,” said the Kyoto Commissioner, cameras flashing as he struggled to fend off a dozen predatory questions simultaneously. He looked haggard. “We are not at liberty to discuss the finer details.”

That was fine. The media had more than enough information to speculate on behalf of the Commissioner. Transferring his gaze to another monitor, Eugene kicked his feet up on his desk and grinned at the headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen. <THIRTY-THREE POLICEMEN DEAD IN BRAZEN ATTACK ON KYOTO PRISON… HUNDREDS OF VILLAINS LOOSE IN THE STREETS OF KYOTO… CURFEW EXPECTED BY KYOTO AUTHORITIES… EXPERTS WARN OF LOOMING CRIME WAVE IN THE KANSAI REGION…>

And, to the southwest, a very different story. The fellow in charge of Osaka Prefecture looked much more laid-back as he stood at his podium and took a sip from his bottle of water. “Yes?” he asked.

“How many villains would you say have escaped Osaka Prison, Commissioner?”

“As the situation is largely under control,” a badly-hidden dig at Kyoto, “we have been able to obtain a preliminary estimate of nine villains.” Of these, two had been killed to muddy the waters, their bodies buried in unmarked graves. “We also have confirmation that fifteen of the convicts were unfortunately killed in the riot.” His tone of voice, however, indicated that he did not consider this to be terribly unfortunate at all. “I would like to reassure the citizens of Osaka on behalf of 360 Hero Agency that the aforesaid are on the case. We, of course, intend to spare no effort in assisting them in their search. Let us all –”

Eugene muted that monitor and flipped to another one. Almost a third of the policemen in Osaka were on the take from Kurtz Industries (albeit filtered through a hundred proxies), and he had a live connection to their internal database, free to browse whenever he felt like it. A preliminary incident report had already been uploaded to their network. <KILLED IN ACTION: UME HATTORI (BROAD DAYLIGHT); OWADA TOMOHITO (BLACK MASS); TATSUYA …> Every last one of their deaths had been faked, of course. 

Eugene kicked away from his desk and did a swan-dive onto his bed, cackling. A job well done.