Instant Villains

A dose of Trigger does not simply amplify a Quirk, it rewrites the person carrying it. Whoever takes the drug swells into a monstrous exaggeration of themselves, their power running far past anything they could produce unaided. The versions circulating in Naruhata are worse than the ordinary article, having been cut with stimulants by agents of the Villain Factory so that the Quirk hits harder and the user turns meaner.

Reason is the price of the power. Whatever restraint the user had erodes as the drug takes hold, and what follows is usually a blind rampage: street fixtures torn apart, bystanders put in danger, no discernible goal beyond destruction. Ending these outbreaks generally falls to the Pro Heroes or to the Naruhata Vigilantes. Not everyone who becomes one chose it. Some swallow the dose willingly, others have it forced into them.

The outbreaks are engineered. Kyudai Garaki and All For One, who run the Villain Factory, seed Trigger among street thugs and petty criminals precisely so that these episodes will happen, because each one yields data, intelligence, and samples on a Quirk under extreme load. Anyone whose power looks promising under that stress is abducted and rebuilt through bio-engineering into a Next-Level Villain. The whole pipeline exists to serve one goal, the creation of a being capable of matching All Might, which eventually produces the Nomu.

The Police Force draws a line between these people and ordinary Quirk-abusing criminals, refusing to file them as genuine villains given how many were victims of a needle they never asked for. Nobody had a settled answer for the phenomenon. Endeavor argued they should be treated like any other villain first and investigated afterward, while All Might pushed for heroes to concentrate on shielding civilians from the fallout.

Documented cases include Soga Kugisaki, who reached a second and more monstrous form, along with Moyuru Tochi, Rapt Tokage, Mario Kugutsu, Akira Iwako, Teruo Unagisawa, Chuma Yakumaru, Batto Yobayakawa, Ryuichi Gojiyama, Monster Cat, Eiji Okameda, and Rikiya Eno. Numerous civilians were transformed without ever being named, as were an unidentified crab villain, a caterpillar villain, and a wolf villain.