A High Level Meeting, Interrupted.

A Yakuza boss doesn't drive himself.

Nakamura Kaito certainly didn't. In fact, wealthy and powerful as he was, Nakamura-kun had the best driver in all of Japan. Nitro, in his habitual razor-sharp suit and aviators, brought the car to a halt under one of the fluorescent lights of the subterranean parking garage. The driver-villain got out of the front of Nakamura's 2055 vintage Ferrari S775 and walked around to the rear passenger door. He held it open as his boss climbed out of the low-slung sports-car.

The gangster paused to check his reflection in the immaculate, gleaming red paintwork, adjusted the jacket of his own, calculatedly louche suit, worn as usual without a tie and his shirt open to the fourth button. He brushed a stray lock of his hair back behind his ear, and turned on the heel of his alligator-skin loafers. As he headed to the elevator, he addressed his hireling over his shoulder.

"This is going to take a while; these windbags like to hear themselves talk, so you might want to go get some lunch or whatever."

"Oh, I don't think you'll be very long at all."

A feminine voice with a Chinese accent brought the Yakuza head-man to an abrupt halt. Given the nature of his quirk, he was used to dealing with groupies, some of whom could be surprisingly resourceful and annoyingly persistent. With a sigh he turned to shoo away the love-struck admirer. A woman emerged from the shadows to his left. She was wearing a long, red, silk evening-dress and a Venenese carnival mask with its right eye closed in a permanent wink. The woman tossed something towards Kaito.

"Here, catch."

Nakamura didn't even take his hands out of his pockets and simply raised an eyebrow. The object landed at his feet with an unpleasant 'splat'. He looked down at it with an expression of detached distaste; it was a horrible little creature, vaguely resembling something halfway between a frog and a human foetus. It writhed helplessly on the ground.

Deciding that this was no groupie, Kaito reached into his jacket and pulled out a large pistol.

"Lady, I don't know why you're throwing your ugly-ass pets at me, or how you got past my men, but you have about five seconds to get the fuck out of here before you get seriously hurt."

"Hm, not a reflexive catcher, eh? In my defence you'd be surprised how often that works. For example, it worked very well on your driver this morning."

Before he could even turn around Nakamura realised that Nitro was standing directly behind him, and felt something warm and moist on the back of his neck.

He put his pistol back into his shoulder-holster. He didn't want to, but his arm moved without his input. He strove with all his will to resist as his other hand reached around to grasp the back of his collar and pull it away from his neck, but he felt his limb move as fluidly as ever. The thing clinging to the back of his neck slid down the back of his shirt and clambered around his torso, eventually snuggling into his solar plexus. Now merely a passive observer inside his own body, Kaito was unable even to shudder at the ugly little monster now nestled just under his ribcage.

The woman in red strode over to his car. Nitro wordlessly opened the passenger door and she climbed inside. Kaito watched with helpless, immobile rage as she kicked up her feet on the leather upholstery, high heels digging small furrows across one of the seats. Without any input from him, Nakamura's body bent down and scooped up the horrible creature from the floor where it still lay, his failure to catch it seeming not to have done it any serious harm, and put it in his jacket pocket. Not a word passed between the three of them as he turned again and headed once more for the elevator.

‼‼««««僕のヒーローアカデミア»»»»‼‼

The Yakuza safe-house was as well appointed as it was secure. The majority of the multi-story building was taken up with the offices of Consolidated Financial Holdings P.L.C., but a small core of architecturally well-hidden rooms held very comfortable apartments and meeting facilities. Thoroughly sound-proofed, Faraday-caged, and accessible only by entering a code into a specific one of the underground garage elevators, the rooms were among the safest locations in Kyoto.

Currently the largest meeting room was occupied; the great, baronial dining table in the centre had six people sitting around it, three on each side. A pale man all in black sat next to a tall, muscular man in a white bodysuit with a hood and skull-mask. Next to the man in white was a vaguely feminine figure in a green wetsuit with the face of a deep-sea fish; huge, ink-black eyes and a mouth full of fangs with a fin hanging over one side of her face like a fashionable hair-cut. Sitting across the table were three girls, none of whom seemed to be any older than their late teens. A girl with hip-length hair in a very expensive-looking dress sat next to another dressed in nineteenth-century western funeral clothes with a veil over her face. Next to the gothic girl was the final occupant of the room, a young girl dressed outrageously in a vaguely punk style which showed an indecent amount of her pale skin, who had long hair dyed half black and half white.

They were each a fairly minor player in the Kyoto underworld; Foolproof, Neutronium Man, Dragonfish, Vampira, Uplift and Fluegel respectively, all gathered in a safe-house belonging to the final man to arrive, Nakamura Kaito. He strode into the room and took a position at the head of the table, side-on to all six of the others. There was one question on all of their minds, and it was Uplift, the girl in the funereal clothes who voiced it first.

"Where's Desolator? I thought this whole thing was about a job he wanted us to do for him?"

A slight smile tugged at the corner of Nakamura's mouth and he answered in a cadence not quite his own.

"I'm afraid Desolator isn't coming. You, well we really, have been invited here under false pretences."

There was a general muttering interrupted by the man all in white, Neutronium Man, standing up and thumping his hand down on the table hard enough to make all ten feet of mahogany vibrate from end-to-end.

"How dare someone waste our time like this! Who? Who would willfully antagonise a bunch of super-villains!?"

This time a full smile was plastered across Nakamura's face as he replied.

"Why, a much more powerful super-villain, of course."

At that there was a rattling noise from the ceiling and an object fell onto the table with a clatter and a small cloud of dust and plaster. It was the brass grating from the air vent. As six pairs of eyes turned upward to the now open vent a torrent of disgusting, wriggling, fleshy, little monsters poured down onto the immaculate, white, linen tablecloth and began to squirm towards the assembled super-criminals. All six of them backed up quickly, too quickly in the case of Uplift who, in her ankle-length dress, tripped over her own chair and fell. Wings sprouted from Fuegel's back and the plaid punk girl fluttered up into the air, away from the writhing horrors.

Nakamura, still seated, calmly reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the toadling from earlier and casually lobbed it at the airborne girl. It hit the side of her exposed torso and grabbed on with its horrid little sucker-fingertips. Instantly, the beating of her wings faltered and she dipped precariously before regaining stability, albeit now with a faraway look in her eye. She wafted her arm in the direction of the toadlings still crawling across the table and a cloud of fluffy, white spores landed on them, sprouting wings and lifting the nightmarish monsters up into the air, allowing them to fly at the remaining five villains.

The airborne toadlings quickly latched onto Foolproof, Dragonfish and Vampira, but Uplift and Neutronium Man had costumes which covered them head-to-toe, making it much more difficult for the creatures to make the necessary skin contact. Finally disentangling her floor-length dress from the leg of her chair, Uplift leapt up and ran for the door, but Dragonfish, a toadling clinging to the side of her head, lunged across the table. She swiped a claw across the ruffles of black fabric swadling the fleeing girl, tearing a gash in the side of the dress and revealing a bare thigh. A cluster of toadlings swarmed the gap in Uplift's defences.

Meanwhile, Neutronium Man was backed into a corner. Thinking quickly, he activated his quirk, converting just the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a percent of his body-mass into stuff from the heart of a collapsed star, going from his usual two-hundred-and-fifteen pounds of lean muscle to almost five tons. The floor beneath him groaned and sagged. Underneath the carpet the reinforced concrete cracked and buckled, then gave way and the skull-masked man dropped through to the next floor down. The swarm of flying toadlings dove through after him, but he had already smashed through to the floor below that, and the one below that, leaving baffled office workers gazing open-mouthed or choking on the billowing clouds of plaster and concrete dust as a white-clad human figure crashed straight through the ceiling and floor, followed by a flying hoard of fleshy nightmares.

Seven floors below the meeting-room Neutronium Man landed in the parking garage, leaving a large crater and flattening some poor wage-slave's Toyota Corolla. He reduced his weight back to normal as he vaulted out of the wreckage and took off at a dead sprint. Seconds later the toadlings poured through the garage roof, but by then he was already ascending the ramp up to the street. The winged horrors flitted about this way and that in a confused cloud for a moment, before gathering together and fluttering over to the sleek, red, sports-car parked next to one of the elevators.

Jessica Wu was still lounging in the back of Nakamura's car, which she already thought of as hers. Through the eyes of her newly acquired Yakuza boss she gave orders to the manager in charge of this branch of Consolidated Financial, making it very clear that he and his staff should forget everything that had just happened, and reassuring him that workers would be by later that same day to patch up the damage to the building. It was of no real consequence to her that Neutronium Man had escaped, she had the highest priority target. Indeed, she was currently descending in the elevator.

The doors parted and Uplift stepped out. At Jessica's mental impulse the girl pulled off her gloves, then removed her veil, discarding them carelessly as she went, then reached down and moved the toadling clinging to her outer thigh. She deposited the creature down the front of her dress and climbed into the back of the car as Jessica moved to make room for her. Nitro, already sitting behind the wheel, started the engine and the vehicle purred out of the garage. Jessica's other new puppets would follow in their own cars soon enough, but this one, she thought to herself, this one deserved special attention….