Heroes, Vigilantes, and Villains

Chapter sixteen

Izuku POV

Sitting in my room, I tinkered with the black boots that I've grown accustomed to wearing on my nightly patrols. They were metal tipped and packed a hell of a kick when needed. Though, for tonight at least, I was more concerned with the bottom of the shoe. The man at the shoe store that I'd gotten these from told me that the shoes were hollow in the bottom to counteract the added weight from the metal and to allow swiffer movements.

The hollowness also gave another added bonus.

Taking out a switchblade that I'd swiped a few months ago from some common street thug, I carved a hole into the bottom of the shoe, one just big enough to hold the collapsed bow staff that I'd made a while ago. I wasn't planning on using the staff in fights, not when there were much more efficient and less violent approaches to this, but I knew that it would come in handy if one day I were to run out of tranquilizers. I put a little hatch on the bottom of the boot. It was the kind that you'd find on the bottom of children's toys to hide the batteries stored inside.

Sliding the boot and its matching pair on, I stood up, shaking the shoe harshly. The boot didn't so much as make a sound, the hidden weapon staying securely in its new home. A small trickle of warmth made its way to my chest at my small success.

Good, cause this would've been a really shitty waste of my time and shoes if this had failed.

I liked how it was hidden in a way that no one would ever think to look for it, where no one would know to miss it until it's too late.

Where no one would know to miss it...

I felt my body go still, my mind screaming at me the way that it does when I finally find the tool that I'd spent an hour looking for laying out in the middle of the room for all to see.

Muggers tended to grab the men and women off of the street that were walking out at night alone, the ones that no one would remember the face of on the street or think to look for when the stranger suddenly wasn't there anymore.

Walking with a newfound purpose, I made my way to the computer, going to the search engine faster than I ever had before. I searched around online for enough time that the sky outside of my window started to get light, something that I didn't really bother to pay any attention to.

"I was right..."

It was the first time that I didn't want to be right.

There were always cases online of people going missing in big cities like these, but most of those people had people. There were people to mourn them and draw attention to their sudden disappearance. Signs and crappy posters get put up in the nicer store windows, people begin to pay attention to the others decorating the street.

They had people.

That's why the ones that don't are the easiest targets.

There were too many reports online of coworkers going missing that were only reported days after the soul was gone. Some of the cases, the others around them only seemed to notice that the person had gone missing at all when they came back seemingly changed in some fundamental way. But I figured that there were probably many cases never even created because those around them thought that they just left.

Whoever was doing this was targeting those that didn't have anyone to miss them, which threw things like randsum and other typical abduction motivations out of the window.

Something made Tsubasa special, the same thing that made them all alluring marks other than the easy availability of most of the targets themselves.

But what?