Next-Level Villains

Every one of these creatures started as an Instant Villain. The Villain Factory floods a city with Trigger, records what each user does under its influence, and marks the ones showing promise. Agents then abduct those people and deliver them to a hidden laboratory inside Onomura Pharma Corp.

There, bio-engineering reshapes the subject into something enormous and monstrous. The work amplifies whatever Quirk they had and, more importantly, rebuilds the body to tolerate Trigger far past what it could previously absorb. Once the conversion finishes, the Factory doses the finished product and turns it loose on the streets of Naruhata, where it does the only thing left to it and attacks everything in reach.

The chaos is a means, not an end. Violence on that scale reliably draws heroes or vigilantes into a fight, and the Factory is indifferent to whether its creation is beaten and jailed afterward. Its leader, All For One, wants the combat data, plus tissue samples from any subject that performs unusually well.

The damage does not wash out. Where an Instant Villain reverts once the drug wears off, these transformations are permanent, and the body never returns to its original shape. What fades is the strength, which drains away without fresh doses, leaving the victim lucid and stuck in a monster's frame. One purpose-built variant, the Bombers, exists specifically to carry out suicide attacks.

The first appeared when Kuin Hachisuka selected Teruo Unagisawa, an Eel Quirk user already arrested once for going Instant. She meant to wreck the rooftop performance at Marukane Department Store and then dose the audience to multiply the carnage, but Knuckleduster beat her, Eraser Head handled Teruo, and the police took him in. Days later the Factory released Kirihito Kamachi and his Mantis Quirk. The Crawler proved badly overmatched and had to withdraw; Captain Celebrity dispatched Kirihito with ease.

The pattern registered with the authorities before long. Detective Naomasa Tsukauchi told Eraser Head and Midnight that Teruo had been booked twice and his body was entirely different the second time, and that other captured villains showed similar alterations plus drug concentrations several grades past a lethal dose. The conclusion was that someone was deliberately rebuilding people to survive Trigger, and Naomasa pinned it on the Factory. Eraser Head countered that a larger objective had to exist, since disposable pawns like these could accomplish little alone.

Number 6 then loosed the Bat Villain, Batto Yobayakawa, who had been jailed by Ingenium with help from the Naruhata Vigilantes and wanted revenge. He struck at Ingenium, who came through unhurt, then hunted Koichi, and Captain Celebrity ran the creature down as it slowed to attack. Later Number 6 fielded Ikajiro Takobe, Octoid, who baffled even Eraser Head and took a combined effort from Koichi, Kirihito, and the Hotta brothers to corner. Octoid still slipped away, only to meet Number 6 in an alley, sent by the Factory's leader for a sample. He crushed the creature, took what he came for, and was gone before anyone caught up.

Number 6 next set out to kill Captain Celebrity with the Bombers. One of them boarded a taxi leaving a Christmas party, carrying schoolgirls from Saint Lila's Academy, and when the hero closed on them it was detonated by remote. The aerodynamic barrier of the hero's Flight Quirk spared everyone, but the test exposed the weakness he needed. He struck again at the Tokyo Sky Egg during the send-off event for the hero's return to America, having already escaped a police raid on the laboratory by blowing the building and taking five Bombers with him. Koichi, several professionals, and finally All Might ended the attempt.

Teruo Unagisawa was the prototype, an Eel user turned loose on a department store rooftop and taken down by Eraser Head. Kirihito Kamachi followed with a modified Mantis Quirk strong enough to rout The Crawler, though he later helped against Octoid. Batto Yobayakawa returned as the Bat Villain hunting the people who had jailed him, and Ikajiro Takobe, released as Octoid, gave Eraser Head genuine trouble before Number 6 harvested him and left him behind.

Other recorded creations include Tommy S. Gordon, Willy Wanda, and unnamed Panda and Elephant subjects. The Bombers form their own branch of the line, built to detonate rather than brawl, and the Anonymous deployed later followed the same principle.

The organization above them matters as much as the monsters. Kuin Hachisuka fielded the first, Number 6 ran the rest along with the Bombers program, and All For One directed the entire effort from behind both of them.