Chapter 11
Izuku grips the phone so hard in his hand the screen cracks, shards of glass digging into the palm of his hand before he drops it to the ground under his feet. He slams his heel down on it to crush the rest of the appliance just in case.
Gently cradling the back of the boy’s head, he starts to make his way out of the alley. “Sorry kid, change of plans. I’m going to get you to someone I decently trust with your care.”
The kid whimpers sleepily into his neck but doesn’t reply.
Izuku takes this as his sign to start walking. He makes his way through the shadows and to the Mustafu police department. Climbing to the roof is a bit difficult, but thankfully there’s an old ladder to the roof that he can climb one-handed.
“Eraser,” he calls, knowing that the hero has probably already heard him.
Eraserhead whips around, his capture weapon disturbing the air by Izuku’s head.
“Mask? Why are you here? And why do you have a kid?” The man steps forward while wrapping the capture weapon back around his neck.
“No time to explain. Kiriko Ramen House on block 15 of the red district. You’ll find the remnants of a Russian gang outpost. Get this kid back to his dad, will you?” Izuku sets the sleepy kid down in front of him, not willing to move any closer to the hero when he knows that Eraser directed him to get medical attention earlier.
Eraser tries to move closer, hands out to reach for Izuku, but he immediately takes several steps backward.
“The kid, Eraserhead, not me,” Izuku warns and pulls his knife from the sheath at his thigh, holding the knife out threateningly towards the hero.
“You know, you’re a kid too, Mask,”. The hero calls as he gathers the small child into his scarf.
“Yeah, but I’m a kid who can take care of himself,” Izuku turns and pauses, wheels turning in his head as pieces start to fall together, “Eraser, what was that cab company that drops off the drug runners?”
“Panda Cab Service, why?” the hero asks suspiciously
“No reason,” He continues walking and vaults over the edge of the roof.
---
Panda Cab Service. PCS.
They were located in the red district and ran all through Musutafu. Innocuous, black and white vehicles that were occasionally mistaken for police cars during villain attacks, the cab service was one of the staples of the prefecture. Izuku had ridden in one of their cars plenty of times.
Their headquarters weren’t hard to find, seeming as they were down the street from the restaurant he had just raided. With an open garage filled with cars being serviced and a parking lot where several more cars were parked, the PCS offices didn’t really stand out to most people.
But when Izuku perched himself on their roof, he could hear the distinct sounds of fists hitting flesh and a very angry blonde’s yelling.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” Katsuki’s voice sounds hoarse to Izuku. Most likely from all the yelling.
SMACK!
“You don’t have to hit me for information I obviously don’t fucking have. Ya some sort of sadist? Kinky.”
SMACK!
The distinct smell of blood wafts up to Izuku. Katsuki could take it, he wanted to be a hero but he was just tough in general. Izuku didn’t want his maybe-friend to have to handle this though.
He was too young to be dealing with this sort of thing. Of course, so was Izuku, but he chose to get involved in all of this, Katsuki did not.
Dropping down in front of the garage entrance, Izuku immediately pulls his billy club from his back, separating it into the two escrima sticks. He didn’t have the energy to fight without them after his injury and the other base.
Izuku took the first guy out with a hit to the back of the head, the man crumpling to the ground before he could alert the others. Sprinting forward, he leaps into the air and stretches his leg forward in a kick, aiming for the next henchman’s head.
He could only count five heartbeats right now, two to the left that must be Katsuki and his guard, one low and slow on the ground of the guy he knocked out, and the last two men he was finishing off now.
After kicking the man in the head he fell to the ground in a crouch, spinning up and around to slam an uppercut into the guy’s jaw. The man stumbles back with a grunt, a hand immediately going to his jaw as he grumbles out curses. He comes back swinging, a punch rocking Izuku’s head back as it impacts with his nose. Blood immediately starts to drip down his face and fills his mouth with the tang of copper. Izuku spits a glob of blood to the side, raising his fists in front of his face and gesturing for his opponent to come at him.
“You little shit,” the man growls and throws another punch at Izuku’s face.
Izuku throws his left forearm up to block, grabbing the man’s wrist with his other hand and yanking it towards him while rolling his body inwards, jamming his shoulder under the other guy’s armpit to throw him bodily to the ground. The whoosh of breath as it leaves the Russian man’s lungs is satisfying, as is the hacking cough from Izuku slamming his foot straight into the guy’s solar plexus.
The man rolls to his side and Izuku sends a quick kick to his temple to knock him out fully.
“You,” the swish of air and smell of aluminum by his face alerts Izuku to a baseball bat coming for his head.
“Yes, me,” Izuku replies cheekily and ducks out of the way of the swing.
“I’m going to kill you for what you’ve done!” The man screams and swings the bat at Izuku’s head again.
“What, rescue a child?”
“No, for my brother!”
“Did I break his bones or something?”
“You killed him!”
Izuku drops to the ground and out of the way of another attack, shocked at the accusation. “I don’t kill!” he yells and attempts to kick out the knees of his opponent.
“Shigaraki, he said that it was the man in the mask, that you were the problem,” the bat slams into the ground by his head, pinging off the concrete with a resounding ding of metal.
“Shigaraki?” Izuku asks, rolling to the side.
“Ah shit, just stay still so I can take your head too,” the man pounds the bat into the ground again.
Just as the man hefts the bat back for another swing, Izuku kicks both feet up, using his arms to push himself into a handstand and send all of his momenta into the man’s chest.
He goes flying, landing a few feet away on his back with a heavy thud, breath escaping his lungs in a harsh exhale that makes Izuku crack a small smile.
Letting his feet hit the ground, Izuku pulls himself upright and lunges for the man just as Katsuki bashes a crowbar down on the man’s head.
“When did you get the crowbar?” Izuku asks as he pulls a lock picking kit from his pants pocket.
Katsuki drops the crowbar and holds his wrists out, the slight jangle of quirk suppressant cuffs guiding Izuku to his hands. “When you were taking forever with the shithead with the bat.”
“Rude, I just rescued you.”
“Yeah, after your vigilantism got me kidnapped.”
“It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“Yeah, yeah, fucking sure,” Katsuki grumbles and rubs his wrists as the cuffs come off.
Izuku holds out a hand to help the boy up, grunting as the movement pulls on his ribs.
“Let’s get you home,” Izuku grinds out, “you need to pack and get out of here as soon as you can.”
“You fucking want me to go home? After I was just kidnapped and had the shit beat out of me?” Katsuki asks incredulously.
“Christ, fine. Take this number and call it. Tell Shinsou who you are, he knows your name, and that I said you needed a place to lay low for a few days. You can crash on our couch and tell your mom you’re with Tsubasa or something.”
Izuku shoves a piece of paper with Shinsou’s number on it into Katsuki’s shocked hands. Shinsou had prepped a couple slips and stuffed them in his pants pocket just as he walked out the door, stating that if Izuku needed out of trouble or something he would at least have a copy of his phone number to give out.
“Fuck, ok, sure. Let’s get going. I need to fix your stitches,” the blonde finally responds.
“Nope, I have a rumor to hunt down.”
“I was literally just fucking kidnapped, you want me to walk to your place on my own?”
Izuku sighs and tilts his head back. Technically, the gang should still believe that Katsuki is being held at the garage, but if someone wakes up while the two of them are gone, Katsuki could be incredibly vulnerable. He hated it when Kacchan was right.
“Alright, fine. I’ll walk you to our apartment building and then I have to go. I can’t leave this shit unfinished tonight.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t, now let’s go.”
Izuku adjusts his vigilante costume so that it looks more civilian-like again, putting his escrima sticks together and folding them out so he has a guide cane again. After instructing Katsuki to pull his hood up, Izuku led the two of them out and down the block.
It takes them half an hour to walk all the way back to the innocuous apartment building that Izuku and Hitoshi had made their home. When they reach the door of his apartment, Izuku puts a hand on Katsuki’s arm.
“I’ll be back tonight. I might need you to patch me up since you seem to know more about the human body than I expected.”
“Call me trigeminal nerve boy again and I’ll shove a fucking spoon through your eyeball,” Katsuki grins and knocks his shoulder into the vigilante’s.
“So that’s a yes to patching me up?” Izuku laughs.
“Yeah sure. Go beat the shit out of people or whatever you do.”
---
He’s on another rooftop. For the fourth time tonight. Izuku feels like he lives on rooftops now. Maybe he and Hitocchi should have moved onto a roof instead of into an apartment.
Izuku chuckles silently to himself before attempting to refocus. Maybe it’s the pain in his side, maybe it’s the exhaustion, but he finds the thought of him and his best friend living on a rooftop hilarious. Mania must be setting in at this point. He could really use that strong black coffee Eraserhead loves. Though, Izuku is sure that the man would have a sugary nightmare if he had the time to get such a coffee concoction for himself.
Pulling himself together, Izuku concentrates on what he needs to do now.
He’d found the abandoned warehouse that the Russians were using as their true base, not a restaurant basement or cab company. This was one that wasn’t connected to any of their other income sources or company holdings.
He had stopped at the apartment long enough to shift through the holding companies of the Panda Cab Service to see what the police might have missed, but nothing came up. Like the police had found, PCS was completely clean; however, there were several companies that Izuku had seen in some of his other research. The names were oddly familiar and he was sure he had written them down somewhere, but he didn’t have time to dig through all of his journals and take the rest of the gang out in the same night.
He leans forward from where he’s crouched, listening for patterns in footfalls and heartbeats. He counts about 10 people underneath him, but tuning in further he hears a familiar voice talking.
He’s speaking Russian, a language that Izuku is unfortunately not fluent in, but the tone is angry and harsh. The voice matches the man that Katsuki had hit on the head with a crowbar. It had only been an hour and a half since Izuku had raided the PCS garage, so he was truly shocked that the man was up and moving so quickly. He has to have a nasty concussion, so Izuku would be surprised if whatever he was saying in Russian was coherent.
With the information that the person whose brother he had been accused of killing was in the building, Izuku had to assume that they knew he was taking out the Russian bases in the area. They had to at least know that Izuku riffled through the mail at PCS before leaving with Katsuki and found the address for this building. Well, they would if they had any observational skills. People were generally stupid in Izuku’s opinion though, so they might not have noticed. At the very least, they knew that Mask and their captive had escaped together and they were now down a hostage.
No one had seemed to notice him yet, not even the guy that was leaning outside of the building and smoking a cigarette. The lack of situational awareness made Izuku cringe. Seriously? He was right there, did he not notice another person’s presence?
With a shrug, Izuku pulls his billy club from his back and readies himself to drop down onto the guy. He would make the perfect landing pad from this distance and Izuku might not have to actually fight him. It's a win-win in his opinion.
He stands from his crouch and launches himself over the concrete ledge, the wind whistling in his ears as he makes the single-story drop down onto the smoking henchman.
Izuku lands with a pained grunt, the man was not as soft as he expected. Yet the guy still hits his head on the landing and knocks himself out. Satisfied and a little in pain, Izuku stumbles up from his human crash pad and slips into the shadows of the large garage-like door in front of him.
The argument in Russian is much louder now, several voices had joined into whatever the conversation is about. He doesn’t recognize the new voices but he does hear the names they keep repeating. Viktor and Vladimir. One of which must be the living brother and the other one the dead one.
With this new information, Izuku prepares himself to attack. He isn’t going to be able to sneak in and take them one by one. They’re too grouped together right now and from the echoes of the room, Izuku isn’t sensing a lot to hide behind. It’s fairly empty for a warehouse, so Izuku will just have to take the attack straight on and hope that he can win against ten full-grown adults. Awesome.
A deep breath in and Izuku steps fully into the doorway. It takes a few seconds, but shouts begin to echo through the space as the lackeys see him. Izuku drops into a fighting stance, snapping his billy club in half to hold the two escrima sticks.
He makes it through three men before he encounters the living brother.
“I will avenge Vladimir,” the brother growls.
Ah, so the living was Viktor.
“I didn’t kill your brother. I don’t kill,” Izuku pants and dodges a strike.
“Don’t lie to me!”
“Look, I lie about a lot of things, but this is not one of them.”
Viktor goes for Izuku’s waist and manages to catch the vigilante in a football tackle. It knocks the breath from his lungs and he feels like he’s suffocating for a moment before he hits the ground. The two wrestle for control, flipping over and over to try to catch the other in a grapple, but it seems in a position like this the two are matched for strength, Izuku nearly being overpowered from being so much smaller than the adult.
“I will not let you destroy my pride, my joy, my gang,” Viktor growls and pins Izuku underneath him.
“Oh great, you’re the leader too,” Izuku grunts and blocks Viktor’s punch with his forearm, “just who I was looking for.”
Izuku gets his legs around the man’s waist and is able to flip their positions again, this time also dropping one of the escrima sticks to snag the man’s dominant hand to keep him from punching Izuku again.
He’s just about to slam the end of his weapon into Viktor’s skull when the room explodes.
Izuku is thrown from on top of Viktor, slamming into a support beam as the world around him crumbles and catches fire.
Ash and blood cake his senses. Gasoline, burning wood, and dust overwhelm him and Izuku chokes to get any air in. The crackle pop of flames is disorienting, warping the echoes of the debris around him so he isn’t sure where he is.
“Mama, mama! Please, answer me!”Izuku screams into the rubble, flames licking at his red shoes as he tries to yank concrete and rebar out of his way. There are hands yanking on his arms, pulling him away from the danger, but Izuku can smell the cherry blossom shampoo that his mother loves and his heart aches to find her.
Izuku stumbles to his feet, holding in the scream that burns to escape his lungs. He’s not sure where he is, if he’s in a warehouse in the red district or the burning remains of Musutafu General. All of his senses feel overwhelmed, the massive quantities of information unable to be filtered by his warring brain.
He needed out. Out, out, out.
He staggers forward, kicking crumbled concrete and plaster as he tries to find an exit. A body trips him and he falls fast first, nearly impaling himself on rebar as he goes down.
The body coughs and groans, attempting to roll over underneath the weight of Izuku’s legs. They speak in Russian, the words sounding garbled and like they’re speaking through liquid. Their voice is familiar though and Izuku realizes he’s found Viktor, who must have been severely injured in whatever blast had taken out the warehouse.
Izuku needs him. He needs answers because this attack wasn’t his doing. It was someone else's, and that someone was possibly blaming him for a murder he didn’t commit.
He grabs the lapels of the man’s jacket and drags him along toward the exit Izuku’s starting to be able to discern. The man curses at him in slurred Russian, but Izuku ignores him in favor of getting out before the building fully collapses on them. He reaches a pile of debris that he can’t get around while dragging a body, so Izuku hefts Viktor up and onto his shoulder, nearly screaming from the pain of burns and shrapnel wounds he didn’t know he had.
Izuku finally wobbles out of the burning building and to the large alley behind the building, tossing Viktor to the ground and collapsing on all fours, hacking and heaving from the smoke built up in his lungs. It takes him a few minutes to clear out his lungs and nose enough to feel like he can decently breathe again and then he’s standing over Viktor. Pulling him up by the front of his jacket, Izuku leans in close to the man’s face.
“Who told you I killed your brother?” he snarls in a low voice.
“Fuck you,” Viktor slurs and Izuku drops him roughly to the ground, the man’s head bouncing on the concrete with a crack.
Izuku pulls his knife out from the holster and kneels over Viktor, holding the knife to the man’s throat.
“Wanna join your brother?” Izuku growls and presses the knife into the man’s throat, “or do you want to give me the information I want?”
“Shigaraki,” Viktor mumbles, “We’re not ‘spose to say his name, but fuck ‘em.”
“Why did he say I killed Vladimir?”
Viktor spits in Izuku’s face upon hearing his brother’s name, so Izuku stomps down and snaps the man’s ankle in retaliation. The man screams in agony, but Izuku just keeps going, slipping his hand into the man’s hair and yanking his head back.
“Why did he tell you that I killed him?” Izuku snaps.
“He- he was found- Hi-his head completely smashed in. You couldn’t tell who he was from his face it was so awful,” Viktor cries, squirming in pain underneath Izuku’s grip, “I recognized ‘im from his tattoos when Shigaraki’s fucker, Kuro-whatever, showed the body to me. Said that you attacked Vlad and bashed his fucking face in.”
Izuku pulls the knife from Viktor’s throat and slides it back into his thigh holster. “See? Was that so hard?”
He’s moving to get off the man when sirens come screaming behind him and the shouts of several voices fill the air.
“Hands where we can see them!”
“Get on the ground! On your knees! Interlock your fingers behind your head!”
“Don’t make me shoot!”
Izuku slowly puts his hands up and drops to his knees beside Viktor, mind racing with how to get out of this situation. He’s trapped at the moment with cops covering the exit to the alley and a large fence blocking the other end.
The heavy footfalls of boots circle behind him and Izuku can hear the click of several safeties being moved on weapons.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Cuff this son of a bitch.” calls a voice a few feet back.
Down on his knees, Izuku slowly interlocks his fingers behind his head and waits for the quirk suppressant cuffs to be wrapped around his wrists.
“What about this asshole?” says the cop right behind him.
“Take care of him like we were instructed. No witnesses.” Answers the first voice.
Hearing that, Izuku freezes, confused for only a moment as to why they want to kill Victor when they’re cops.
The pieces click again, wheels turning in his head as Izuku realizes the bigger picture. The accounts he had recognized earlier. The name that Viktor had given him. This man ruled the underground, and he didn’t just interconnect the gangs, this person had police departments under his thumb as well. Izuku would bet he had several politicians and heroes in his pocket as well. He wouldn’t have made it this far without being discovered if he didn’t have that kind of pull. This “Shigaraki” character had control of all of Musutafu.
Just as Izuku hears the click of a gun over the Russian gang leader’s head, he leaps into action. Headbutting the officer that’s pulling him away by the elbow, he quickly turns to kick the officer next to him, who is already raising his gun, in the chest. The cop he had headbutted is reaching for him again, and Izuku snaps a kick at his right knee, hearing ligaments tear from the force.
Another gun being drawn alerts him to the officer behind him. He shoves off the ground in a standing backflip, his feet hitting the policeman behind him in the face and knocking him to the ground. In the quick break where all of the officers are recovering, Izuku jumps over the handcuffs to bring them in front of his body.
The officer he headbutted is standing up again, wobbly on his feet, so Izuku grabs him by the waist and flips him sideways in the air, almost like the man is doing a cartwheel. The cop hits his head on the concrete as he goes down and is out. The second cop he had kicked in the chest is back on his feet and raising his gun to shoot Izuku, gun cocked and finger on the trigger, and the vigilante lunges. Izuku shoulder’s the man’s shooting arm just as the gun goes off, the bullet going wild and seeming to hit Viktor by the scream of pain he lets out.
The officer pulls the gun back into himself and prepares to shoot again, this time with both hands on the gun, but Izuku is again faster, using both hands to slam the gun into the policeman’s face. The man stumbles back but stays on his feet, arms going out to grab Izuku.
He decides to fold in. Grabbing the wrist of the gun hand, Izuku rolls inward so his back is to the cop and throws an elbow at his face before completing the rotation. He throws another punch at the officer’s face while he’s disoriented and grabs the gun fully out of the man’s hand. Izuku takes the gun, shoves it into the man’s open mouth, snags the back of the man’s neck, and pulls him face-first toward the ground. The cop hits the ground and his jaw cracks as the gun bounces off the concrete, knocking the last man out.
Now Izuku is wobbly on his feet, working the quirk suppressant cuffs off of his hands with the key he had found on the last officer and walking over to the Russian.
“How bad are you hurt?” He asks gruffly.
The gang leader reaches for the discarded gun, but Izuku is quick to kick it away and down the alley. Turning back to the Russian, he kicks the man in the head and he immediately falls unconscious.
The air is filled with the shrill sound of sirens and Izuku wants to bash his own head into a wall this time.
“Well shit,” he sighs and reaches down to hike Viktor up onto his shoulder.
---
“Precinct 212, all units to blocks 1, 15, and 22 in the red district,” a voice calls over the radio static.
Shouta is tucked into the back corner of Tsukauchi’s car, face buried in his capture weapon as he listens to the reports of the explosions.
He had been reuniting the small boy with his father when the sound of explosions echoed throughout Musutafu. Immediately the department was thrown into chaos. Apparently, six or seven places all around Musutafu had gone up in flames all at once.
Shouta and the detective had booked it to the man’s car. Shouta had already described the brief meeting with Mask and was planning on going to the red district to see the aftermath of his gang operation takedown, so when the call for units to the building sounded he had locked eyes with Tsukauchi and nodded. This had to do with the kid.
“Those correlate to some of the known Russian hideouts,” Shouta grunts.
“Yes, including the Panda Cab Service and an old warehouse that are new to us,” Sansa responds from the driver’s seat in a tight voice. Stress leaks from the man, tightening his grip on the steering wheel and influencing the sharp turns he’s taking to their destination.
“I don’t think Problem Child caused the explosions,” Shouta ponders as he grabs the door on one of Sansa’s wild turns.
“He’s involved somehow, and we better find out now before I have to charge him as an adult,” Tsukauchi grumbles and tries to keep his coffee in the actual to-go cup during the car ride.
Shouta is just about to agree when the dispatcher’s voice pipes up over the scanner again.
“Explosion perp spotted on block 5 of the red district. Man in a black mask and a severely injured man in an abandoned building. Rookie cop is currently inside. Situation seems to be turning into a hostage. All units available to block 5 red district.”
“Unit 412 responding, copy,” Tsukauchi mutters into his handheld device.
“Copy that.”
Sansa whips the car around in a u-turn and takes off toward block 5.