Houston, Texas, U.S.A. — Crime Scene
Houston's skyline loomed like a graveyard of steel and glass, the midday sun beating down on the crime scene with merciless precision.
The alley was a jagged scar between two skyscrapers, its walls streaked with rain and rust.
A tense and uneasy atmosphere hung over the crime scene as flashing lights bathed the street in a chaotic rhythm.
Neon signs—Joe's Pawn Shop, Lucky's Tacos—buzzed weakly, their fractured lights bleeding into pools of water below that shimmered with flesh and blood.
Heroes, police officers, and onlookers swarmed the area, all trying to make sense of the brutality they were witnessing.
Two heroes had been killed—gruesomely mauled—and a civilian was found dead with them.
The air tasted metallic with the liters of blood pooling beneath their cold bodies..
"Dispatch two, pull up the security footage from that shop across the street. I want every angle. And you—" the tall black haired-man pointed toward an officer, "—get the forensics team here, now. I want every drop of blood, every trace, identified by our forensics team."
"Yes sir!" the man saluted before running off into the crowd.
Detective Shinra Kuroto stood at the mouth of the alley, his polished shoes avoiding the worst of the gore.
He'd seen death before, but this… this was something else entirely.
Like a sickening fetish.
The two Pro Heroes lay twisted on the cracked asphalt.
Gravel, whose quirk allowed him to morph objects he touched into concrete, now resembled a shattered statue—his skull caved inward, dusty brain matter shifting through fissures in his scalp.
Beside him, Mirage, the telekinetic, was folded into a human origami, her limbs bent at angles that defied basic biology.
The civilian—middle-aged, in a tailored navy suit—slumped against a shattered storefront, his face frozen in a silent scream.
Shinra's quirk, Pattern, which allowed him to swiftly analyze visible connections in the world, hummed in his skull.
'The wounds themselves are too clean. Too precise. Even if their deaths are unusual. Whoever did this is no amateur. They're an experienced killer.'
"Move!" A bellowing voice roared from the back, interrupting the detectives' thoughts.
Shinra turned around towards the source of the voice.
The crowd barely parted as Titan, the Mountain Hero, shouldered through the Police officers, News Reporters, and Fans that surrounded him.
His hulking ten foot frame, swollen by his quirk, Colossal, blocked the sunlight.
Nearby workers flinched as his shadow fell over them as he walked by on his way to his coworker.
"Shinra. Who did this?" Titan's deep voice shook the alley. "The Reapers gang? Another terrorist attack by Autumns requiem? Who?!"
But Shinra didn't answer.
His focus was elsewhere, his eyes had caught a flicker of white in the periphery—a figure slipping past the restricted police tape, patting the shoulders of cops in appreciation as he passed them.
Shinra massaged his temples, a headache already forming, 'Sigh~ I don't want to deal with this. Especially this early in the day.'
Titan turned his head to where Shinra's attention was and immediately narrowed his eyes.
"You!" his growl rattled the nearby dumpsters.
The 5'8' man in the white overcoat froze mid-step, his mask—sleek, white, and featureless—tilted toward Titan. "Oh, hello, Boulder-for-Brains. Here to 'contribute'?"
Titan lunged—
BOOM
—his fist slamming into the brick wall beside the man's head.
Dust and rubble rained down around the scene while the man in white stood unflinching.
"You don't belong here, rat. You think this is a game? Two heroes are dead! You don't get to scurry here whenever you feel like it. Leave the work to the legal professionals."
The white cloaked man—known as 'Insight'—brushed some debris off his shoulder.
"And yet, here you are Titan, redecorating the scenery we need to analyze. Bravo."
Shinra quickly stepped in between them.
"Titan, stand down. Insight… Why are you here? I told you to wait outside until I let you in."
Insight tilted his head slightly, a lazy smile spreading beneath his mask.
His posture was relaxed, as though he found the entire confrontation amusing.
"I'm only here to help. Besides, I was going to come here eventually. I thought I'd save us the time." he said innocently.
Shinra exhaled through his nose in exasperation. "Insight," he muttered, "Don't make this bigger than it needs to be. How did you even get past the police guarding the perimeter?"
Insight replied nonchalantly, "I showed them a badge, obviously."
Shinra's eyes narrowed. "How did you get a badge? As Titan pointed out, you're not exactly a legal presence here. More like a vigilante that I should be arresting."
Insight faked pain as he clutched his chest, "After all these years of my assistance…I'm hurt detective. You should know I prefer being called a 'consultant'. I am a professional in my own way afterall. One that constantly aids you with your conundrums. As for how I got here…"
Insight grinned widely, the sharp edge of his amusement clear in his voice.
"You don't remember? You gave your badge to me to let me in."
Shinra froze, his eyes widening in disbelief. "No…" He drew out in a slow breath. "No I didn't. I would clearly remember if I gave you my badge."
Insight just laughed, "Haha, I know. That's just the excuse I told the police when I showed this to them."
And he pulled out a shiny, pristine golden badge from his coat pocket, labeled with Shinra's full name, badge number, and personal ID code.
Shinra's jaw dropped. "WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?!"
The detective reached into his own jacket pocket and pulled out his own badge, inspecting it with a mix of horror and confusion, sighing in relief once he realized he had his original badge.
"That badge has to be a fake." Shinra said. "In fact, knowing you, I know it's fake."
"Is it?" Insight questioned as he spun it on his fingertip. "Funny. It opened the evidence locker last week."
"..." Shinra glared, unamused.
Insight just shrugged, a smirk playing on his lips.
"Oh don't give me that look. It's easy to fake a badge once you've studied it enough. I've seen yours so many times that I could probably draw it with my left foot. And I'm only proficient with using my right."
Shinra closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose as he sighed in frustration. "I can't believe you," he muttered under his breath. "Do you know how illegal forging a badge is?"
Titan stepped in with a growl, his voice full of warning. "If you don't report him for this behavior, Shinra, I will. He's a walking liability. He belongs in a mental hospital in my opinion. You only encourage this lunatics' behavior. One of these days, he'll bring us trouble we can't solve."
Shinra shook his head. "I will get rid of him, once you find someone to memorize the entirety of the Hero and Villain profiles in the U.S. database like Insight. Or the entire quirk database in the country."
Titan grit his teeth, muttering to himself, "What's so good about memorizing some stupid names."
But Shirna continued, "You know we need him for this case, Titan. Just put up with him for a bit. Now enough small talk. We need to inspect the crime scene."
Shinra turned, leading the way.
Insight followed behind, tapping Titan on the arm as he passed, his voice just a little too casual. "Good man."
Titan's muscles twitched in barely contained fury, but he didn't say a word.
Instead, his clenched jaw and bulging veins spoke louder than his words ever could.
As the trio walked further into the alley, it swallowed them within its eerie darkness until they stopped after a few steps.
Titan stood nearby, arms crossed, scowling at the bodies. He was clearly unhappy with the scene but hid it behind his usual bravado.
Titan grumbled, "Two heroes dead... and some poor civilian caught up in all this mess. Whoever did this must be really sick in the head."
Insight stood a few steps away from Titan, scanning the ground methodically, his eyes sharp while his mind was already turning over the possibilities.
Without looking at Titan, he simply replied, "There's nothing 'sick' about it, Titan. Just... efficient. Whoever did this was in control the entire time. And you're wrong about the main thing, the heroes were just the collateral damage. Not the target."
Titan snapped his head towards Insight, stepping toward him clearly agitated.
"Collateral damage? You mean to say that these two just happened to be in the wrong place? Come on Insight. These are heroes! Professionals! Not bystanders! And that civilian—what, you think he just got caught up in this because of bad luck too?"
Insight, finally glanced up at Titan with a smirk you could hear through the mask, playing on his lips.
"Bad luck? No. Intentional? Yes. The civilian was the target."
"You're thinking too much about this scene, Insight. This scene is just plain brutality. Not a planned murder."
"Ah. But that's the difference between you and me, Titan. You look at the blood, the violence, and see chaos. I see purpose."
"Focus. Both of you." Shinra interrupted them, cutting in before Titan could retort. "Let's keep our heads straight. This scene—it's not random. So we need to identify the culprit and prevent further scenes like this."
Insight didn't blink as Titan shouldered past him to loom over Gravel's corpse.
The hero's body was a monument to his own power—skin mottled gray and fissured like ancient concrete, his chest and head a crater of shattered stone.
"How the hell do you punch through a guy who turns into a boulder?" Titan growled, prodding Gridlock's arm with a boot.
The limb snapped off with a dry crack, disintegrating into gravel.
"By making him too sturdy," Insight replied, humming a nursery rhyme as he put on a pair of black gloves.
He crouched to sift through the debris of the dead hero.
He plucked a crystalline shard from the rubble, holding it up to the flickering streetlight.
"Look at the lattice structure. His cells didn't just petrify—they hyper-mineralized. No flexibility left in his body. All it took was one blunt-force impact to his body, and…"
He let the fragment crumble between his gloves.
Then Insight moved to Mirage's contorted form. Her body twisted into the shape of a pretzel.
"Her joints were dislocated post-mortem." Insight said as he inspected her. "Someone played puppet master with her body after she died."
Shinra knelt, examining her limbs. "No defensive wounds. She couldn't even struggle in her fight against the target."
"Or she didn't know," Insight said softly, "She was probably ambushed."
"Pft. I doubt that." Titan scoffed. "I've partnered with her before. She was always vigilant. Always alert. She's not one to drop her guard."
"Except for the evidence that is clearly disproving that." Insight muttered.
Insight moved onto the final victim, and crouched by the civilian's corpse.
Up close, the man's suit was burnt at the edges, while his skin was untouched except for his neck. Which had extreme bruises around it.
'Burned fabric that's still hot. But cold flesh. Not the combo you'd expect to be together. And clear signs of being choked to death.' he thought to himself.
"Multivex Industries," Insight murmured, plucking a silver pin from the man's dress shirt— marked with three interlocking gears.
"Their logo." Insight explained as he handed the pin to Shinra who placed it into an evidence bag. "And judging from his wallet ID and the chemical residue under his fingernails, he was mid-level management. Lab division."
Titan crossed his arms. "So? You don't seriously think Multivex is behind this?"
"Ah, but Business Corps eat their own all the time." Insight explained.
He drifted to Gravel's body once more. He shifted a gloved hand across the hero's shattered body while examining it.
Picking up the already separated pieces and scanning them closely.
"I only see blunt physical trauma. No slashing or piercing wounds. So the killing blow…"
Shinra's quirk flared. "—had to be done by something at least equal in strength to concrete."
"Precisely" Insight agreed.
Then he continued, "And Mrs. Mirage here was turned into a pretzel that would require the softest of hands to not bruise her body while bending her into that shape. Unless she was controlled by an invisible force."
"Like telekinesis," Shinra mumbled to himself.
Titan kicked a trash can sending it flying twenty feet, rats and trash flying through the air. "Enough back and forth like an old couple! Who's the killer?!"
Insight straightened, his mask catching the neon glow of the street signs. "Someone who borrows powers. A quirk copier."
Shinra froze. "Echo…"
Titan laughed aloud, "That fairytale? He's either a made up story, or a coward. He never even gave me a response when I challenged him on National TV! What kind of man ignores the challenge for an official duel!"
Insight: "..."
Shinra: "..."
Ignoring him, Insight turned to Shinra, "He seems to be the closest fit of the perpetrator."
"But… but he's just a myth. A senseless concept to answer our unsolved cases." Shinra countered.
"Myths," Insight said, "Are just truths in costume."
He gestured to a puddle near Gridlock's body.
'I doubt you two noticed, but the puddle was formed by a crater in the shape of a fist. And it's size is much too small for Gridlock to be the cause of it. Someone else was sturdy enough to make that hole. Someone that copied his quirk and killed him with it. Then they overpowered Gridlock with his own quirk, shattering him with a punch."
Then Insight turned to Mirage, "I've seen her interviews before, and like Titan said, she had a method to being so alert. She uses her telekinesis to swarm small clouds of dust around her to alert her of anyone who enters the area. A method that always worked... unless the assailant also had telekinesis and countered her own tactic. Then he would be invisible to her senses."
"As for the office worker, I'm willing to bet that once you search the government quirk database, he has some sort of quirk that heats up non-living things. Hence why he was killed via strangulation, and why only his clothes were burnt."
"But, why go through such a roundabout method to kill them though?" Shinra asked.
"Yes… that is the question isn't it?" Insight mumbled to himself in thought.
He began fiddling with a coin in his pocket.
Titan scoffed, "Out of answers aren't you? Mr. Know-it-all?"
"I'm a genius, not a god Titan. But I wouldn't be surprised if you got the two mixed up with your limited vocabulary."
"Tch."
Then Shinra's phone buzzed.
"They got the cameras." Shinra spoke aloud.
Insight had zero hesitation in snatching the phone from Shinra's hand, earning a glare from Shinra while Titan stomped over as well.
The security footage flickered on the screen—the civilian, alive and frantic, was clutching a clear data drive in his hands.
"He's scared." Shinra noticed from the civilian's evident anxiety.
"Looks like he stole that device." Titan mumbled from the back.
Shinra and Insight turned around to look at him, their eyes slightly open in surprise.
"That is…a good deduction for someone of your IQ."
"I didn't know you had that in you Titan."
"Don't look at me like that! I can use my brain too!" Titan screamed.
They turned back towards the phone
Then the civilian ran into the two heroes, rambling on and on about something.
But just as quickly as the civilian ran into the heroes, the screen began going fuzzy as a shadow was seen walking towards them from far off in the distance.
Far enough that the trio didn't notice.
But then, the screen's video went haywire and eventually turned completely blank.
"Charming." Insight quipped. "Do we have any other recordings to depend on? Any that could possibly get a better look at the shadow's face?"
Pulling out his comms, Shinra replied "I doubt it would work given what happened to this camera. But it doesn't hurt to check. I'll tell my team to get on it."
"So what now?" Titan looked to Insight who was on the ground, inspecting the floor. "We're looking for a boogeyman. A villain that most people don't even acknowledge. How are we expected to find that?"
Insight leaned over next to the civilian, and plucked a shard of metal from the ground.
He pulled out a magnifying glass with an installed flashlight and analyzed it from every corner.
"This is a piece of a NAND flash memory disk."
"So?"
"Sooo… it means that the villain's aim wasn't to retrieve the device in one piece. It was to stop its contents from being leaked. Seeing as how I'm holding a piece of what is supposed to store the memory and data."
"And the rest of it?" Titan asked.
"Probably cleaned up." Shinra answered as he gestured for the piece of metal to be handed over.
Insight handed it over, "Which reminds me. I didn't notice the civilian's phone on him."
"Oh. Our men who found the scene already picked it up before we got here. It was mostly empty. Just a few unanswered calls he tried to make to both of his sons."
"Can I check it?" Insight asked, curious.
"You can, if you do it the legal way. But we'll get to that matter after this. So we're assuming this was related to Multivex industries. Correct?"
Looking around the scene once more, consistently flipping a coin up and down in his hand, Insight replied. "At the moment, yes."
"AGHH! I hate corporate crimes the most! They always hide behind their lawyers!" Titan raged.
Shinra's eyes narrowed. "Multivex wouldn't risk this unless they had something to hide. Something big. Something disturbing."
He turned to Insight, "We need to dig deeper. If we can find what the civilian was trying to steal—it'll give us the leverage we need."
Titan snapped back, Insight's coin still clinking in the back with every flick.
"Leverage? What good is leverage if we can't bring them down?! They're a multi-billion-dollar company with their hands in everything! Our agency is too small against them!"
Suddenly—
Beep. Beep.
Insight caught the coin midair, and pulled out his phone.
He momentarily froze when he saw it, before pocketing it once more and staying silent in thought.
"...Insight?" Shinra asked, slightly concerned.
Insight snapped out of his momentary stupor. "...I need to go."
And quickly readjusted his coat and mask before walking towards the darker shadows of the alleyway.
"Hey! What are you doing?!" Titan called out in confusion.
"Leaving."
"But there's still a psychotic murderer roaming the country! Isn't that what you live for?! You can't just leave!"
"You say 'can't'. I say 'watch me'."
"Insight!" Shinra called out, causing Insight to pause and turn around. "Are you okay? I've never seen you leave a case unsolved."
"I'm doing just peachy detective. But your worry is misplaced. You should be asking Titan that question. Given how he's gained 50 pounds in the belly region. And not from his quirk mind you. It's probably from stress eating. But I didn't care to ask him and confirm."
And as fast as Insight replied, he turned around again, walking once more.
Shinra stood motionless for a moment, before muttering. "I swear, some moments he's a genius. And other times, he's so… so… so childish. I can never get a read on him."
Titan grunted with an unamused face. "Now you feel my pain."
And there was a moment of silence before—
"And I'm not a greedy pig or anything." Titan gruffed. "My wife is pregnant. And I tend to eat when I'm nervous. Is that a crime?"
"...It's not big guy. Congratulations to you both."
"Thanks."
"And I don't know how you'll feel about this, but Insight already blabbed the news of your wife's pregnancy to me…"
"..."
"And the entire office…"
"..."
"Apparently it was an easy deduction."
"..."
"..."
"..."
Every muscle in Titan tightened, "...When I get my hands on his scrawny neck—"
"Not so fast." Shinra said to Titan before he destroyed the first thing in his eyesight. "He asked me to give you this once you decided to tell people the news."
And Shinra handed Titan a paper, who snatched it and flipped it open.
[Dearest Titan,]
[If this letter has found its way into your considerable grasp, it can only mean you've at last decided to share news of your impending child with the agency.]
[A heavy, but rather unneeded, decision for you no doubt.]
[But fear not—I have anticipated your needs with my foresight.]
[Enclosed, you will find a chart detailing various natural herbs of particular efficacy for prenatal care. Administer them to your wife as directed (dosages are color-coded; even you cannot mess this up).]
[The herbs shall arrive at your domicile within the month. Do not attempt to procure substitutes from elsewhere—your local "health store" is a den of charlatans and drug enthusiasts that seek money.]
[Regarding medical consultation: I've taken the liberty of… persuading certain unconventional physicians to prioritize your case. Simply tell them "Insight sent me," and you can skip appointments, bypass queues, paperwork, and other trifles that vex men of your… temperament.]
[Now, a proposition: If you name the child Insight Jr. (middle names negotiable), I shall personally oversee the entirety of the pregnancy. Even the childbirth itself. My methods are unorthodox but infallible—a fact even you cannot dispute.]
[The brains in your hero agency,]
[Insight]
Titan narrowed his eyes, "I'm… conflicted."
Shinra chuckled, "I was too when Insight gave it to me. He can be rude one second, and a reliable pal the next."
Titan pocketed the chart carefully before he screamed down the alleyway, "Just choose a personality so I can decide to hate or appreciate you! You stupid Einstein!"
Insight turned around right before turning a corner.
His arms opened wide in an exaggerated shrug as he called out, "What can I say?! I'm just a big old—"
Chapter 1 - "Paradox!"
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Welcome!
I hope this is the beginning of a wonderful story!
And I hope we can all make it to the end!
Any critiques about the Chapter are appreciated. I want to improve my writing obviously. I know I'm nowhere near perfect.
But some compliments wouldn't hurt... (It motivates me to keep writing this for free.)
Also, don't worry, the MC's POV will begin next chapter.