Location: The Glassed Wasteland – Site of the Radahn Incident.
(Day: 2nd of March)---->past
The wind howled across the blackened plain, kicking up swirls of fused silica that glittered like crushed diamonds under the midday sun. A perfect circle of devastation five hundred meters in diameter marked where the battle had taken place multiple months prior—the earth itself had been scorched down to the bedrock, leaving behind a concave depression of smooth, glass-like stone that reflected the sky like a monstrous mirror.
At the exact epicentre, plunged deep into the unbreakable glass and standing at a slight angle, was the greatsword.
It was a monstrous thing—twelve feet of blackened metal wider than a man's thigh, its edges serrated in a way that suggested it had been forged to cleave through more than mere flesh. The cross guard was fashioned in the shape of twin lion heads, their maws frozen in silent roars. The grip, wrapped in what looked like gold plated sheets , remained untouched by time or weather.
And it would not move.
[Scene 1: The Extraction Team's Failure]
"Again."
Watanabe Hajime's voice was a gravelly snarl, his gloved hands clenched into fists at his sides. Around him, a dozen Commission scientists in reinforced hazard suits scrambled to reset the equipment. The third extraction attempt this week. The twelfth since they'd first located the sword.
The massive hydraulic crane, a custom-built model capable of lifting eighty-ton combat mechs, shuddered as its magnetic clamps locked onto the blade. The steel cables—woven with carbon nanotubes and rated for orbital elevator tension—tautened.
"Pulling in three. Two. One—"
The ground trembled.
For a single, heart-stopping second, nothing happened. Then—
CRACK!
The sound was like a mountain splitting in half. The crane's armature bent, its joints screaming as the force rebounded through its frame. The cables didn't just snap—they disintegrated, unravelling into metallic dust mid-air before scattering across the glassed earth like black snow.
Watanabe didn't flinch. He just exhaled a slow stream of smoke from his cigarette, watching as the crane's ruined remains were hauled away by scowling engineers.
"Sir." said Dr. Ishikawa, adjusting the scanner in his hands,
"We're detecting zero displacement. Not a single atom in the blade or the surrounding bedrock has shifted. It's like-" He hesitated.
"Like it's not really here?" Watanabe finished, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
"Like it's more here than anything else."
[Scene 2: The Lab – One Week Later]
Deep beneath the Hero Commission's headquarters, in a sterile white chamber shielded by six layers of electromagnetic shielding, the ore sample floated inside a magnetic containment field. It was a small thing—no larger than a child's fist—but the room hummed around it, the air thick with the scent of ozone and something sharper, something almost alive.
"Run the test again."
Dr. Akane Tetsuyama, the Commission's lead materials scientist, didn't look up from her screens as she gave the order. Her fingers flew across the holographic keyboard, pulling up data streams that made no sense.
"Particle beam in three. Two. One—"
The particle accelerator fired. A concentrated stream of high-energy protons, capable of punching through three feet of solid tungsten, struck the ore dead-center.
The monitors flickered.
Then—
"What the hell?"
The beam hadn't bounced. It hadn't been absorbed. It had simply diverted, curving around the ore like water flowing around a stone before striking the far wall and leaving a smouldering crater.
"That's impossible." whispered one of the junior researchers.
"No." Dr. Tetsuyama murmured, her dark eyes reflecting the scrolling data.
"It's just operating on physics we don't understand yet."
She zoomed in on the atomic scan. The ore's structure was a labyrinth of fractal spirals, electrons moving in patterns that shouldn't exist.
"This isn't just a new element. This is a new law."
[All For One's Underground Sanctum – Months Before Present Day]
The auction house footage played in crisp 4K resolution across twelve curved monitors, each screen displaying a different angle of the same bizarre transaction. A hooded figure—towering nearly seven feet tall even while hunched—placed a jagged chunk of dark stone on the velvet-lined auction block. The camera's reflection in the auctioneer's monocle caught a glimpse of golden eyes.
"Freeze there."
Doctor Garaki's gnarled fingers danced across the holographic controls, zooming in on the ore sample. The enhanced image revealed an impossible detail—the stone's surface seemed to drink light rather than reflect it, creating a distortion field that made the surrounding air waver like a desert mirage.
"Fascinating!" the doctor wheezed, adjusting his cracked glasses.
"Notice the photonic absorption pattern? It's not merely dark—it's generating localized spacetime curvature."
All For One's respirator cycled slowly in the dim light of the medical chamber. Around them, the underground facility hummed with activity—monitors tracking a hundred different experiments, vats bubbling with embryonic Nomu, and the ever-present drip of condensation from the reinforced concrete ceiling twenty meters overhead.
"Run a spectral analysis."
Garaki obliged, pulling up scans from the auction house's security scanners. The readouts made his hands tremble.
"Impossible... the atomic structure forms a Klein-bottle lattice at the quantum level. Electrons are... tunnelling backwards through time." He wiped sweat from his brow.
"This violates every known—"
"Purchase it."
The command cut through Garaki's scientific awe. All For One leaned forward in his medical throne, the various tubes and wires connecting him to life support shifting like serpents.
"But Master, the price—"
"Name it."
"Thirty three billion Dollars." Garaki adjusted his glasses.
A dry chuckle escaped All For One's mask. His gloved fingers steepled.
"Have Kurogiri acquire it through third-party proxies. Then-" The heart monitor beeped rhythmically as he savoured the moment.
"Package it as a charitable donation to the Hero Public Safety Commission's Materials Research Division."
Garaki's head snapped up. "You want to give it to them?"
"Let them waste years and billions trying to understand what they cannot." The villain's mask tilted toward a bubbling vat where a new High-End Nomu twitched.
"When they inevitably fail, we'll take both their research and the man who sold this little miracle."
[Three Days Later – Hero Commission Main Lobby]
The receptionist stared at the unmarked crate on her desk. "Another anonymous donation?"
The delivery man—a nondescript fellow with cloudy eyes—simply nodded.
"Said it's for your 'special projects team.'" He placed a small card atop the crate:
'For the betterment of herokind.'
When the bomb squad finally cleared the package, the research director's hands shook as he examined the contents. The accompanying analysis report—doctored, of course—claimed it was a "meteorite sample of unknown composition."
[A couple of days later – All For One's Laboratory]
Garaki adjusted the quantum microscope, watching real-time footage from the Hero Commission's lab. On screen, their top scientists were still fruitlessly bombarding the ore sample with particle beams.
"It's working perfectly." he cackled, observing how the latest laser test inexplicably curved around the stone.
"They're chasing ghosts!"
All For One's voice echoed from the shadows.
"And our merchant?"
"Still no trace. But-" Garaki pulled up a satellite image of UA High.
"Our informant confirms—he's there."
The heart monitor's steady beeps filled the silence. Then—
"Hm. Anyways , Prepare the Nomu variants for the upcoming plan."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sir, you need to see this."
Watanabe looked up from his fifth coffee of the night to see Junior Agent Saito standing in his office doorway, a tablet clutched in her shaking hands.
"If it's another dead end—"
"It's not."
She placed the tablet on his desk. On screen was a black-market transaction record from a months ago—a sale of "unidentified exotic ore" for 33 billion dollars. The seller's description was vague.
Watanabe's cigarette stopped halfway to his lips.
"Where was this?"
"An underground auction in Yokohama. The buyer was a shell corporation, but-" She pulled up another file.
"Three days later, this showed up at our doorstep. Anonymous donation."
A photo of the ore sample now sitting in their lab.
Watanabe stared at it for a long, long time. Then—
"Find out who sold it."
"We tried. The records are gone. Like someone scrubbed them from existence."
A slow, humourless smile spread across Watanabe's face.
"Then we're dealing with someone very interesting."
--------------------Present Time--------------------------
Location: Hero Public Safety Commission – Special Research Division Bunker(Recently constructed on the incident site)
The air inside the underground facility tasted of sterilized metal and static. Watanabe stood before the massive reinforced observation window, watching through three-inch-thick ballistic glass as scientists in pressurized hazard suits moved like ghosts around the two research subjects.
On the left: the ore sample—a jagged, fist-sized piece of dark stone that seemed to swallow the light around it, floating in a magnetic containment field.
On the right: the sword's crossguard fragment—a single grain of the decorative dust on the hilt of sword pried from Radahn's greatsword after months of failed extraction attempts, now suspended in a quantum stabilization chamber.
Both pulsed with the same eerie rhythm, like twin hearts beating in sync.
"So, You're telling me." Watanabe growled, his cigarette dangling precariously from his lips, "that this random rock we got in the mail a couple of months ago is made of the same impossible shit as that goddamn sword?"
Dr. Akane Tetsuyama didn't look up from her holographic displays. The assistant head of the Commission's exotic materials division had dark circles under her eyes—she hadn't slept in 72 hours.
"Not just the same material." she murmured, fingers dancing across the floating screens.
"The same exact molecular signature. Right down to the atomic-level imperfections."
She pulled up two side-by-side quantum scans. The patterns were identical—fractal spirals of electrons moving in perfect, impossible harmony.
"It's not just a match, sir. It's a perfect match."
Watanabe's cigarette fell to the floor.
The research bunker hummed with frantic energy. Technicians scrambled between humming machines, their voices overlapping in hushed urgency.
"Neutron scan complete—zero penetration."
"Electron microscope recalibrating—wait, what the hell?"
"Sir, the spectrograph is giving us negative readings—"
Watanabe ignored them, his eyes locked on the main display where Dr. Tetsuyama was running a new analysis.
"Watch this," she said, pulling up a 3D model of the ore's atomic structure.
"We fired a proton beam at the sample. This is what happened."
The simulation played—the particles bent around the ore like water flowing around a stone, their trajectories warping in perfect concentric circles.
"It's not just indestructible." she whispered. "It's rewriting physics in real-time."
A junior researcher—fresh out of Tokyo University's quantum engineering program—suddenly choked on his coffee.
"D-Doctor... the timestamps!"
All heads turned to his monitor.
Ore Sample Acquisition Date: March 18th, 20XX – 23:58 (delivered)
Radahn's Last Sighting: March 1st, 20XX – 23:59
Sword Recovery Log: March 2, 20XX – 00:01
The room went dead silent.
Watanabe stormed into the secure data vault, his boots echoing off the steel walls.
"I want every transaction, every sighting, every goddamn grocery receipt from that night!"
The tech team scrambled.
"Sir, we're hitting firewalls—someone's scrubbed the records clean!"
"Black market logs are encrypted with military-grade—"
"Wait! Partial recovery on one file!"
A single image flickered to life on the central screen—a black-market auction log. Blurry, corrupted, but one line remained legible:
> Seller ID: [REDACTED] // Payment: 22+Billion dollars // Description: "Glintstone" ore sample.
And there, in the corner of the frame—the edge of a hand, massive and scarred, fingers wrapped around the stone.
Watanabe's grin was all teeth.
"Well Well Well , looks like someone forgot to burn 'everything'."
21km in the south-east, in the Commission's executive briefing room, Director Tsunagu stared at the report like it might bite him.
"You're telling me this---this rock is our first solid lead on Radahn in months?"
Watanabe exhaled a plume of smoke.
"Not just a lead. A trail."
He tapped the auction file.
"Someone out there knows where this ore comes from. And they sold it the same week Radahn vanished."
Tsunagu's eyes narrowed. "Find them."
The holographic displays flickered as Tsunagu leaned forward, his aged hands pressed flat against the wooden desk. His reflection warped in the polished surface, distorting the sharp lines of his face into something almost predatory.
"No matter what it takes-" he said, voice low and unyielding,
"No matter who we have to burn through—we will find Radahn. That sword doesn't belong in this world. And neither does he."
Watanabe exhaled a slow stream of smoke, watching it curl toward the ceiling vents. His lips twisted into a humourless smirk.
"Don't worry, Director." he said, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray with deliberate force.
"Beasts like him? They always leave stains."
"And No beast is invincible in this world." he said, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray with deliberate force.
"Not even monsters. Everyone has a weakness—we just need to find his."
He turned toward the door, his coat flaring behind him like a funeral shroud.
"And when we do?" Watanabe paused at the threshold, glancing back with cold certainty.
"We'll make sure he bleeds."