[NHK BROADCAST CENTER – TOKYO – 07:34 AM]
The morning show desk had been abandoned since one. What replaced it was the format Japan's networks always defaulted to when the situation exceeded the vocabulary of a single anchor — the panel. Four chairs arranged in a shallow arc, a moderator who had been pulled from his bed in Nerima at three in the morning, and three guests whose qualifications for being in those chairs ranged from directly relevant to having no relevance at all.
To the moderator's left: a retired HPSC senior analyst named Takeda Goro, sixty-two, who had spent twenty years in Commission oversight before the politics of the institution made continued employment unbearable. He had been the network's go-to voice on hero governance for six years. Tonight had given him more to say than six years of commentary combined.
Beside him: a woman named Inoue Haruka, a criminal psychology professor at Waseda whose specialty was threat assessment and who had been consulted twice by the NPA on high-profile villain incidents. She looked like someone who had dressed in the dark, which she had.
To the moderator's right, the outlier: Matsuda Kenji, a sports journalist who under normal circumstances covered athletic events and had no business being on a panel about a national security crisis. He was there because he had been in the building when the calls started going out, he had watched the sports festival broadcast obsessively weeks ago for a piece he'd been writing on UA's Gen Studies anomaly, and when the producer needed a third voice at four in the morning, proximity had become qualification.
The moderator, Hayashi, straightened his notes.
"We are going to return in a moment to our aerial coverage of the eastern Tokyo site," he said with a grim expression. "Before that however, It would be best we address the ... sheer scale of what we've witnessed. Takeda-san, you've seen the Commission's inner workings. When we see a twelve-story headquarters reduced to a hollow shell and forty of our top-ranked heroes listed as 'Incapacitated' or worse... what are we actually looking at from an administrative standpoint?"
Takeda didn't answer immediately. He looked at his hands for a moment, then replied with a colder tone. "What you're looking at, is the bill coming due."
Hayashi waited.
"Most of you may be confused so let me explain." Takeda adjusted his tie and continued. "The Commission was built around a central assumption. That the Symbol system was self-sustaining. That All Might's existence was a permanent condition rather than a temporary one?"
"In essence," Hayashi prompted, "they bet everything on the status quo?
"That's right." Takeda confirmed. "Every administrative decision made in the last thirty years — how heroes are trained, how they're ranked, how they're deployed, where the resources go — was built on that assumption."
He paused. "Nobody wanted to plan for a world without him because planning for that world meant admitting it would arrive. And admitting it would arrive meant the question of what came after had to be answered."
Hayashi sighed. "So let me guess. Nobody had an answer and the commission never planned for succession,"
"Succession in the Hero Billboard sense? Yes, they had a plan. The Number Two moves up. The Number Three fills the gap. Mathematically, the chairs are filled. But that assumes all the chairs are bottled to the same floor. In the terms we are looking at, that isn't succession." Takeda shook his head.
"What the public needs to understand is the concentration of power. The numbers are difficult to contextualise so I will put it like this. Japan has over four thousand licensed heroes. Forty is not forty percent. It is one percent. In pure numbers, the hero system is not destroyed."
He looked directly at the camera, understanding that the next sentence needed to land. "But those forty are not evenly distributed across the tier structure. What we lost last night is almost entirely concentrated at the top. Endeavor. Edgeshot. Crust. Ryukyu. Gang Orca. These aren't just 'strong' individuals. They are the only ones the Commission trained to operate at a scale that actually matters."
He exhaled brows creasing in frustration. "A building can lose one percent of its material and remain standing. It depends entirely on which one percent. In short, we didn't lose the windows, Hayashi-san."
"Perhaps this loss would have worked out fine in normal scenarios. However let's not forget that in addition to those forty plus, we may now have to add one more." An image appeared on the background screen that caused the hearts of 90% of all morning viewers to ache. The frail, shrivelled form of the Number One Hero.
"There has been no word on All Might's condition." Takeda massaged his temples.
"However, this image alone might possible be the worst loss to Hero Society. This brings me back to the problem of the succession theory. The HPSC seemed to have forgotten the very reason why All Might is the indestructible symbol of peace."
Silence followed. Everyone was well aware. For decades, All Might's overwhelming strength and ability among heroes had been second to none.
Proven time and time again, that there was no situation the symbol of peace couldn't handle. No villain he couldn't defeat. "Our country's peace has long been built on All Might's existence as an absolute deterrent. Criminals didn't just fear the law; they feared him."
Inoue, the psychologist, spoke without being prompted. "What Takeda-san is describing has a psychological dimension that I think is important to name clearly. The Symbol system wasn't just administrative infrastructure. It was emotional infrastructure. For forty years, the Japanese public has outsourced a specific kind of fear — the fundamental fear of helplessness in the face of danger — to one person. All Might absorbed that fear. His existence made it unnecessary for the average citizen to carry it themselves."
She paused, looking at the monitors showing the smoke rising over the city. "That fear doesn't disappear when the symbol does. It comes back. All of it. What makes it worse is now that the 'one percent' Takeda-san mentioned—the only people we trusted to carry that weight for us—are gone, that fear is hitting the public all at once."
"Which is what we're seeing in the public response this morning," Takeda said. "The fear is real. The anger underneath it is also real."
"What gets complicated is where people direct it once they have it back in their hands." Hayashi turned to Matsuda, who had been reading his tablet. "Matsuda-san. You've been watching the public response since the early hours. What are you seeing?"
Matsuda set his tablet down. "Well ... Grief, mostly, in the first wave after the footage of All Might was released."
He paused. "But the second wave is already coming and it's angrier. People are starting to do what people do when fear turns into something they need to point at something."
"They're looking for accountability," Inoue said.
"They're looking for someone to blame," Matsuda corrected. "The villain is dead. You can't be angry at a dead villain for very long because there's nowhere for it to go. So the question of how did we get here starts to matter more than it did an hour ago."
Hayashi folded his hands. "And how exactly did we get here?"
The panel was quiet for a moment. "According to our sources, the Commission authorised a strike operation against the League of Villains' confirmed location. Without All Might." Matsuda said it plainly.
"Well, that decision, who made it, when, and what information they had when they made it — is going to be the central question of every Diet hearing for the next six months."
"Apparently it was approved by the President of the Hero Commission, currently in recovery." Takeda said. "Which is the only reason I will not say more on that subject at this time."
"Which brings us to the most unsettling part of tonight's timeline," Hayashi said, turning his gaze toward the screens. "The four-hour gap. All For One appeared in Kamino at approximately one in the morning." Hayashi continued. "The devastation there, and subsequently here in Tokyo, happened because the primary deterrent was absent. But All Might—" he glanced at his notes "—All Might doesn't appear until nearly five in the morning. Four hours later. During which time the engagement goes almost entirely against Japan's heroes." He looked at the panel. "I've been watching the same viewer messages Matsuda-san has. That four-hour window is the question people are asking most consistently."
"That four-hour window is a black hole," Takeda said, leaning into the light. "In a crisis of this magnitude, four hours is an eternity. It's the difference between a controlled containment and the structural collapse of a district. If the Symbol of Peace is in the country, there is no logistical reason for that delay. None."
"Unless," Matsuda interjected. "he wasn't in the country." The studio went quiet for a moment.
"I believe the The official position at the time of broadcast was strategic reserve," Takeda said. "That All Might was being held back deliberately."
"And you believe that compared to this?" Hayashi asked. Takeda shook his head. No one, not even the villains would believe that load of crap.
"We have to look at the facts," Matsuda continued, tapping his tablet. "We have multiple witnesses from the U.A. staff, including Eraserhead, appearing alongside All Might during the final breach in Tokyo. And with them, we have a student. Akutami Yuta."
"Eraserhead wasn't at the engagement either. During those four hours. He wasn't with the other heroes in Kamino or at the HPSC building. He wasn't in any of the footage."
"No," Takeda said. "He wasn't."
"So we have All Might absent for four hours. We have Eraserhead absent for four hours. We have a student who was listed as deceased seventeen days ago appearing at five in the morning alongside both of them." Matsuda looked at the panel. "I'm not a detective. But those three facts only fit together one way."
"They weren't in Japan,"
"Has this been clarified in any way?"
"There has been no official confirmation from any sources. What I am saying is that the evidence available to us this morning — and available to anyone watching this broadcast who is willing to follow the timeline — points in one direction." He looked at the monitor.
"All Might left Japan. It is unknown how long but the objective truth is he did leave. During that time period, calamity struck."
"I see." Inoue uttered with a frown. "Are you trying to insinuate that this calamity is All Might's fault? Or the fault of his student?"