Anonymous

They pass for people at a glance, standing at unremarkable heights and builds with only a few deviating. The details give them away: a scar crossing the face in the same place as Number 6's, a mouth with pronounced lips echoing the Bombers, and skin webbed with veins and divided into patches of different colors that mirror Number 6's costume. Spheres sit at the center of the chest and on the back of each hand, and both hands and feet end in claws.

Concealment was simple enough. For the lockdown they were dressed in hats and long sleeves, which let them stand in crowds without drawing attention.

There is nothing there. Like the Bombers before them, they carry no traits of their own and exist purely to execute what Number 6 sends them, with no instinct toward survival and no capacity for fear.

Intelligence is the upgrade. They can counterfeit human speech and emotion convincingly enough to work as bait, which the Bombers never managed.

Their coordination is mechanical rather than social. Number 6 runs them like a hive through the parallel processing his Overclock grants, which lets them move in unison across large numbers, but the link demands his full attention and they shut down without it. Physically they shrug off The Crawler's repulsion blasts, taking neither injury nor stagger, and each can trigger its own detonation at will, though the yield falls well short of what the Bombers or Number 6 produce.

The Villain Factory grew them across the two years after the Sky Egg bombing, taking what Bomber cells remained and shaping them into a networked swarm answering to Number 6. He built Operation Anonymous around them with one aim: killing Kazuho Haneyama. The first phase put them through Naruhata disguised as residents and then killed them, using organs inside their bodies to fire an electromagnetic pulse that blacked out the district and cut every electronic link. The second staged collisions across the major roads to seal the area off. The third simply turned them loose to breed fear.

Heroes kept undoing the paranoia. When The Crawler and Eraser Head worked in tandem to pull civilians clear, Number 6 took it badly, though the illusion of O'Clock reminded him that the only thing that mattered was keeping All Might away from an enemy he could not see. The swarm escalated: three of them baited The Crawler and Eraser Head into the open and detonated, while others ambushed Best Jeanist, Edgeshot, and Ingenium. Eraser Head cleared the first wave, met five more, and sent The Crawler ahead to the hospital.

Number 6 brought a group to that hospital but left them outside, both because packing them into an enclosed building was suicidal and because commanding them demanded his concentration. Driven off, he scattered them after his various enemies, then stopped them dead the moment The Crawler came for him personally, and Midnight put the ones stalking the police to sleep with Somnambulist. His Hi-Crawler transformation solved the focus problem by accelerating his thinking enough to run them all at once, and he flooded the streets until The Crawler had to run. Every alley held more. When detonations threatened civilians in the open, The Crawler absorbed the blasts himself and drove the bystanders toward shelter, then led the swarm out of the neighborhood entirely, which was precisely the trap Number 6 wanted before Knuckleduster arrived and broke it. The last of them gathered beneath the final aerial fight to catch their master as he burned down to bone, and he absorbed them, their cells fueling his Destruction Style.