There was something to be said about having comprehensive intelligence on the powers at play, especially in the criminal underworld. His current condition demanded it. Occasionally though, this intelligence meant absolutely nothing to any educated person.

“What do you mean he was brained with a wok?” All For One enunciated clearly across the phone line, certain that he’d misheard.

“It-it-it just came from the shadows and slammed him across the head with it, Sensei!” His minion stuttered. “I ain’t ever seen anything like it before!”

“A wok,” All For One repeated blankly. Well, it wouldn’t be the most unusual thing he’d heard of, Wash was an up and coming pro hero with a laundry theme of all things. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time some fool of a pro hero had elected for reinforced kitchen implements. Lunch Rush, for all of the lack of action he had, was close to lethal with his, but a wok of all things. How did someone inconspicuously carry a wok around?

“He-it-it hit me with it too!” The minion warbled.

“You’re made of tempered steel, Date. How could a wok knock you out cold as to miss the delivery deadline by four hours?” All For One sighed, resisting the urge to place his head into his hands.

“I’m sorry Sensei! It won’t happen again!” If only his minions learnt to make promises that they could actually keep. That wasn’t the last traumatised report he received about a malevolent figure emerging from the shadows, wok in hand.

Oh no, no it wasn’t. News came in from Kamino next, only a short distance away from the bar where Kurogiri wrangled Tomura. A drug den laid to waste. No security systems and only rapidly fading memories said that someone had opened a door… Then that was it. Bodies strewn about, an extremely confused response team of pro heroes and police left scratching their heads. Various impact injuries, but no sign of an entry or escape. They came, they maimed, they left… with absolutely no indication as to how they’d done so beyond the opening of a door and the victims couldn’t even remember which door. Not that it saved them from a lengthy prison sentence.

Some distance away there was another report of a villain going by Moonfish. A cannibal and likely death row candidate with the ability to elongate his teeth into sharpened spikes. Well, who had the ability. He certainly didn’t after the sizeable dent left in his face and the subsequent loss of all of his teeth. The police had shrugged and assumed he’d crossed the wrong criminal. All For One knew few criminals capable of unrepentantly causing so much damage. This individual was rapidly becoming a point of interest.

A young shapeshifter by the name of Toga had been a target, her disguise not enough to save her from her saunter down a dark alleyway with the unknown figure. Apparently she had a fondness for blood. All For One wondered if that would remain the case after waking up in a large pool of her own. Head injuries did tend to bleed rather more substantially. And obfuscate the memory of who she was with. She was charged with numerous murders and tossed into a cell somewhere.

Magne had a number of murders to her name. She also had a wok shaped imprint in the back of her skull to contend with after she made the mistake of shopping without adequate headgear. She’d certainly attracted something to her. Large, heavy and metallic if All For One’s suspicions were correct.

An unknown reptilian individual was found dangling from an overpass. From what the police said, he was strung up before the first impacts and used in an extremely aggressive game of totem tennis. At least that’s what they guessed from the surrounding scales that littered the nearby area.

There was the magician as well… his hands completely shattered with repeated blows from a heavy object. Not to the point of repair either, staff at the local Villain Hospital had been forced to amputate them in an attempt to prevent the infection from spreading and to spare him from the pain. This magician had the ability to shrink objects with a light touch… and without hands he surely wouldn’t miss it, now would he? All For One added it to the every growing list of things he personally had to attend to.

Perhaps the worst was the man made of some sort of slime. Him the police didn’t catch. He was the only escapee so far, but it would be years before he recovered enough from the trauma of being repeatedly blown to pieces for him to engage upon anymore crime sprees. They found separate pieces of him across four different and decently spaced apart cities. All For One was starting to wonder about a warping Quirk.

Muscular had been an up and coming blood crazed serial killer when All For One had first heard of him. It had only take Muscular one unfortunate trip down an unassuming alley while pursuing the Water Hose duo (really? Were they landscaping themed? What was wrong with these people?) for his planned chaos to abruptly end. Neighbours had heard a furious and repeated CLANGING, a TINK and a terminated scream. Water Hose had returned after the lack of pursuit to find Muscular hanging from a nearby down-pipe in chains with the wok wielder's signature concussion.

The pros had been dumbfounded. All For One and the rest of the criminal world sighed and took another name off the For Help list that circulated the fixers of their domain. Wokked, was printed clearly next to each victim.

Nobody was sure if Muscular would ever regain his sight, but that wasn’t particularly high on the priority list of anyone. Perhaps some of the criminal underworld would invest in more reliable head protection, but even that didn’t seem to save them.

And on and on it went. For. Six. Years. All For One was regaled with incidents of his underlings simply disappearing, only to be found concussed and maimed near a convenient police station. Often dangling from the nearest tall object or bound to flagpoles with duct tape. Sometimes they were left in alleyways, but more and more reports emerged of a wok, or skillet or frying pan… Once there was even a mechanical egg beater. No one talked about the egg beater.

No one could find the perpetrator. It avoided All For One’s best efforts. It was avoiding All Might’s best efforts. It was avoiding the efforts of numerous criminal organisations both local and overseas. All they had to indicate that it even was the same person was a single badly bent wok and All For One’s ever growing curiosity.

All For One wasn’t expecting much from Tomura’s invasion at the USJ. All Might would smack him around and All For One would have the sweet sweet satisfaction of telling the pest about exactly what he’d done… but that… hadn’t happened. Tomura was there weeping on the floor, bones buckled at various angles that had the old man cringing.

“Tomura… what happened?” All For One raised.

“There was some crazy kid with a lump of metal,” Tomura groaned in agony. “He wiped everyone out.” Surely that was an exaggeration.

“What of the Noumu?”

Kurogiri wilted. “The boy Tomura refers to, it seems he was a student, did something to interfere with the Noumu’s spine to negate its Quirks. Then another boy who could generate explosions blasted it through the ceiling. I… I didn’t have the coordinates so I couldn’t retrieve him.” Kurogiri sank even lower. “We never saw All Might, I had to remove Tomura before the boy snapped his fingers off.” How brutal. What was UA teaching its students these days?

“Really… What was the first boy’s Quirk?” He might as well get something from the outing. Anything that let a small child solo a group of criminals and a Noumu designed to counter All Might had to be of value.

“He didn’t have one,” Tomura wept.

“What?”

“Some green haired brat. He was fast, but I don’t think he had one. Eraserhead looked at him with his Quirk and nothing happened,” Tomura whimpered.

A green haired boy… without a Quirk… How many green haired, Quirkless children who desperately aspired to being a pro hero did he know of? Why did All For One feel so cold all of a sudden?… Why did he have the sudden urge to ambush All Might and violently strangle him? He’d have to do some research… and hope for the best.

Long past the point of expecting anyone to escape the wok wielder’s clang of justice, All For One knew it was only a matter of time before Stain turned up dangling from the nearest police station’s lamppost. Good pawns were so hard to find these days and All Might, the other pros and various criminal organisations hadn’t even been factored into the equation yet. One lunatic with a cooking implement did more damage than the rest of them combined. A sign that just about everyone was perhaps going about their respective careers the wrong way. Woks. Who knew?

All For One had managed to obtain Ingenium’s report on his “rescue” from Stain by the wok wielder. Paralysed and facing away, Ingenium’s report detailed watching a shadow appear next to Stain’s before it shifted abruptly and Stain was staggering under a hailstorm of CLANGs, TINKs, and solid sounding blows. Then one last almighty CLANG, the wok falling to the ground after a pause and a THUD. Stain had apparently received the… premium treatment, for the wok was left behind, an uncanny imprint of Stain’s skull features evident in the warping of the metal. They had of course tested the metal for anything and it came back with nothing. It was as though Stain had been bludgeoned by a ghost.

Nobody had really questioned why Stain hadn’t fought back. All For One knew exactly why Stain was unable to defend himself. Who could with so much head trauma? It wasn’t as you were capable of thinking rationally while someone rained down blows from what, in reality, was an improvised war mace. All it needed was some spikes for additional efficiency, but that would also likely have it deemed a “Support item”. Perhaps that was precisely why it hadn’t already been done.

Logically speaking, anything that left that much damage to the bottom of a high quality piece of metal indicated a great deal of force. All For One could trace the lines of the serial killers teeth in the buckled metal. A Quirk that enhanced force? Was it through acceleration or some other means? A warp Quirk? An invisibility Quirk? What was it? So many Quirks, so many options, when weapons were rarely favoured compared to the inherency of Quirks.

The wok wielding fiend was still, all these years later, beneath the contempt of the police. And the pro heroes. And a fair few unknowing and easily targeted criminals. A record soaring far away more than both All Might and Endeavor combined… and not a single piece of media reporting about it. While Stain had been subdued, it was unlikely that any action would taken against a living myth. On one hand, All For One’s own mythos was still acknowledged with a wink by the criminal community… but on the other hand, the wok user was laughed off as being little more than a paranoid delusion. All For One would have cracked a smile at the irony… if his shadowy counterpart wasn’t responsible for the systematic demolition of his organisation.

An individual with a wok wasn’t enough to smother All For One’s interest in one particular contender in UA’s Sport Festival. There he was, Izuku Midoriya in the starting line of the festival. All For One had set aside a day of his usual paranoia to watch the event with Tomura… and hopefully ward off any wayward interest in the green haired teenager without drawing too much attention to the fact. He didn’t know what he was expecting. Izuku hadn’t used a Quirk at all it seemed in his USJ encounter with Tomura and the cannon fodder. It hadn’t stopped him from tag teaming his anti-All Might Noumu by severing its spine and having Bakugou of all brats evict it through the ceiling with nothing short of a bomb blast. No… being Quirkless hadn’t held Izuku back at all… Just like someone else he could think of.

Then they started and Izuku was sprinting towards death. To be crushed. But no… he tore a plate from one of the ridiculously sized robots that the government was wasting their money on and… angled it towards a set of cannons pulled from the flesh of the Yaoyorozu girl. He leapt into the air. Surely not…

“What the hell is he doing?” Tomura hissed. “He’s right in front of the-”

BOOM! Izuku Midoriya flew through the air on a steel plate, carried by the destructive force of whatever was in the girl’s creation. He rocketed over any remaining robots, clean over the canyon and landed solidly… In the middle of field of landmines which promptly exploded, carrying the boy straight to the finish line with only the occasional foot touching the ground to rocket himself off yet another mine.

All For One didn’t breathe. Tomura wasn’t either. The announcers were dumbstruck. The audience in attendance ground to a halt, as did everyone watching as a fifteen year old shoot through the obstacle course at record speeds. All without using a Quirk. At least not his Quirk. The Yaoyorozu girl looked to be on the verge of tears.

“FIRST PLACE GOES TO MIDORIYA!” Present Mic’s voice screamed. “Some serious innovation here folks! I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone clear this baby in a single manoeuvre let alone without using a Quirk!”

“What. The. Fuck.” Tomura whispered in awe. “He’s insane.”

All For One couldn’t bring himself to deny it.

Then the boy had the ten million point bounty assigned to him and merely shrugged. As if having the entirety of his school out to get him was a minor inconvenience. Then again, it probably is the norm since he’s Quirkless, a nasty voice whispered at the back of All For One’s head. He found a team with the boy with the shadow, a girl wearing goggles and the pink haired one. Izuku still had that scorched piece of metal the judges were apparently letting him keep after he’d almost killed himself with it. What were they thinking? Letting the poor Quirkless kid have something since he wasn’t born with anything, the nasty voice whispered the voice again and All For One rolled mental eyes.

Then, like clockwork, every single person that approached Izuku Midoriya was slammed firmly and unrepentantly in the face with that dependable, scorched lump of metal. Even Tokoyami’s shadow was in the act, shielding itself from light and using it to harass the other teams with deft tosses and catches. Sometimes the plate, with the rest of the team hanging off it would be made to float… only to brutally land on a nearby unfortunate team with the fury that only a dense piece of metal could provide. Thirty minutes and thirty six concussions later, Izuku’s team reigned victorious without losing a single headband.

The crowd wasn’t sure if they should cheer… or express horror at the dazed state of the other nine teams. After all, the instructions had been not to deliberately make anyone fall. To Izuku’s credit, he hadn’t made anyone fall and beating people senseless was perfectly within the round’s regulations… Or so Eraserhead explained in a drone through the booing of the crowd. That hadn’t made them any happier. It was all All For One could do not to eye the wine bottle in the corner cabinet more longingly than he’d ever been allowed to in his long career of criminality.

The third round wasn’t really going any better. For everyone else of course, Izuku was breezing though it. Hitoshi Shinsou had been drop kicked off the stage before getting a word out edgewise, that infuriating plate still there to be used as an improvised pole vault stick for the initial lift. All For One and Tomura were beyond words. They’d been beyond words already when Izuku had shield bashed Bakugou's hand back into the brat’s face and almost blown his head off. Present Mic wasn’t wrong about Izuku’s gift for innovation. Perhaps Tomura was rethinking his life’s choices as well

Todoroki had faired only marginally better. Todoroki unloaded wave after wave of ice into the arena. Not that it opposed Izuku in any manner, who sledded down the glaciers on the newly favoured lump of recycled metal in style. Todoroki was slowing, no doubt slowly freezing to death, refusing to use the full extent of his Quirk. All For One didn’t particularly care for why, not when his defeat was inevitable with such pathetic behaviour. It wasn’t in anyone’s interest to restrain their full abilities. Izuku was saying something… All For One couldn’t make out what, but Todoroki erupted into a furious blaze. Izuku grinned and All For One felt the slightest amount of sympathy for what was going to happen next.

Fire shot forwards, the shield flew to meet it, ricocheting the flame off at an upwards angle. Izuku skidded underneath the shield, his body contorting, twisting into a rising kick aimed at Todoroki’s temple… And Todoroki went down with a solid THUMP. The glowing hot metal hit the floor just after with a CLANG that had Tomura flinching, shuddering and scratching. All For One ignored it.

The final match was against Bakugou… and All For One couldn’t deny his satisfaction. Bakugou snarled, got precisely one blast off… before a solid plate shield slammed into his temple from his blindspot and he went down like a sack of dirt. All For One winced and heard Tomura mutter “ouch”. A nearly instantaneous KO. An extremely satisfying KO. The audience didn’t agree, but who cared about them? Izuku seemed capable enough to deal with Quirk wielders… provided he had a solid sheet of metal on hand.

“Katsuki Bakugou is unable to move!” One of the pro heroes called and All For One watched Izuku Midoriya be crowned victor, the boy beaming at the cameras. Won in all rounds and the overall competition itself… without a Quirk and only a solid plate scavenged from a robot to his name. If his stomach had sunk upon the realisation that the boy was enrolled in the school, now it was mantle bound. Izuku Midoriya had thrown himself on landmines without a Quirk. Who had wiped out UA’s best and brightest without a Quirk.

“Tomura… do you remember what I said about strangers with large pieces of metal?” All For One raised carefully. The wok wielding pro hero who singlehandedly manage to change All For One’s operating policies… with woks. How humiliating.

“Run, Sensei,” Tomura answered, scratching furiously at his neck. “He… he didn’t even use a Quirk.”

“That is precisely why you’re running, Tomura.”

Somehow, All For One didn’t think Tomura running was going to save him from either of the two metal plate wielders. All Might, with his diminishing health, was the least of their worries. He had a time limit and those two were limited only by their access to metal. Unfortunately for the League of Villains, Japan was full of scrap metal… and an entire beach full of it had recently disappeared.

Tomura’s plan to retrieve the screaming, shrieking Bakugou from the school’s camp was a good idea in theory. In theory being the operative words. In practice the overwhelming majority of the criminal underground were in hiding after being bludgeoned by kitchen implements… that Izuku Midoriya of all people was promoting with “Wok Defence! Come get your lessons on defending yourself with household kitchen supplies! Learn how to cook up a feast and beat the Support laws!” that left All For One more than a little dismayed. But, Izuku had always followed rumours… he’d surely have been inspired by that particular one.

All For One’s spy had come back and confirmed that Izuku had no registered Quirk, which left All For One’s stomach twisting unpleasantly with the realisation that Izuku had indeed dealt with all of it… without a Quirk. His interest in the local wok wielding blight on criminal society would have appealed to him in a fundamental manner… since no one could pin any one specific Quirk on the individual.

So, All For One gave the go ahead for the team, sent off the Noumu to retrieve Ragdoll for… reasons, that had nothing to do with tracking one wok using individual. He and Tomura were less surprised by the result than they should have been. Kurogiri fell through his own portal, not another person in sight.

“Was it that brat again?” Tomura snarled and Kurogiri nodded.

“He got Dabi first. Popped down from a tree branch and hit him with a sheet of metal.”

Oh, for the love of… “He still has the sheet metal from the Sports Festival?” All For One found himself asking in spite of himself.

Kurogiri nodded. “He did the same thing to this Noumu that he did to the last one. When it was paralysed, he had Bakugou blow it away.”

“Did anyone else make it out?” Tomura pushed. “Did anyone even see Bakugou? Was All Might there?”

“No. It was mainly Midoriya. It’s like… it’s like they were waiting for us. We hardly got there and…” Kurogiri gestured.

Interesting. UA had a chess master. That certainly livened up events.

Though why they were allowing a child to carry around a buckled sheet of metal was beyond him. Not that it was a problem for another person who carried around pieces of metal.

Finally, after years of painstaking searching, he had the location of an in progress incident and found his way to a particularly noisy section of the underground complex. For once it wasn’t his underlings experiencing grievous bodily harm. It was a pleasant feeling.

“Please-please-I’ll do anything!” Shrieked from behind a closed door. All For One paused to listen. “Just not tha-” CLANG. Its tinny resonation echoed, neatly mapping the room for All For One. A mass thumped to the ground. There were a number of bodies already on the ground and only four remained.

Was the wok wielder perhaps a yakuza? That almost sounded like an interrogation, though the body count was far too high for any interrogation technique he knew of… yet. The complex resembled one of their old holdouts. Why they bothered with it he didn’t know. Tomura had been staging most of his villainous schemes in a public bar for years and no law enforcement officers had bothered to kick in the door. Ah well, that was their problem.

Then, a roar. “You sonuva bit-” CLANG. Another solid thud as someone toppled over. Nope, not an interrogation. Far too much backtalk.

Then, a hail of what could only be gunfire. PING PING PING PING PING radiated through the doors and walls, another scream, another thud, then TINK- “what the fuck was that?” TINK. “Fuck! He’s deflecting them, take cover!”

If All For One had eyes, he would have blinked. The wok wielder could deflect bullets… Well, it wasn’t a non-standard part of the pro hero arsenal, or even many vigilantes. They all needed some measure of speed for evasion… Perhaps a speed Quirk? Something was needed to return bullets on a viable vector.

CLANG! He’d almost missed that one. There was no thump of flesh hitting the ground though…

A shriek of terror - “NO YOU OAF, NOT ON M-” and that cut off as well, the ground shuddering.

Two (plus all the countless others) down, two to go. The wok wielder was making remarkable time. All For One was considering barging in, then had his thought cut short. He stepped to the side, an exaggerated THWACK and a masked figure shot clean through the closed door in a hail of splinters (or was it a strength Quirk of some sort?). All For One’s infrared vision only let him momentarily perceive an oddly shaped strand of hair before the victim slammed into the ground.

One to go.

“What are you?” All For One heard hissed, clearer now through the shattered panel. Pain, the speaker was definitely in pain. A great deal of agonising pain. How wonderful it was to not to be on the receiving end.

“You can’t heal through head trauma, can you?” A horribly familiar voice remarked and All For One felt himself freeze midway through tearing through the rest of the panel. “With each blow your regenerations are less and less accurate… I guess your Quirk only works if you’ve got enough brain left to use it.”

Then, All For One saw. A sea of spikes erupting from the ground. Izuku Midoriya springing along their rising tips with practised ease. He leapt high, an extremely dense wok held aloft with two hands. Then he fell. Overhaul didn’t even have the chance to scream. Overhaul slammed into the ground hard enough to leave the imprint of his face in it; much like the imprint Stain had left behind on the recovered wok.

All For One stared, then did the only appropriate thing he could - he applauded. “Well, I can’t admit that you’re what I was expecting when I came here looking for the individual menacing my operations.” Applauded while his stomach sunk through the floor. Had… had it been Izuku the whole time? These attacks had started when the boy was nine. Even Tomura hadn’t grasped the art of efficient bodily harm until much later. What was Inko doing? What had happened to Izuku? What had he been doing?

“Thank you?” Izuku turned around, the monstrosity resting on one shoulder with ease. Through the haze of the little vision he had, All For One saw the boy blink and do a double take. “Aren’t you meant to be dead?”

“Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” All For One found himself commenting dryly. So Izuku knew about his criminal identity. He wasn’t sure what to think of that… anymore than he knew what to think about All Might only being responsible for 20% of his forces’ devastation… versus Izuku’s 80%. All Might who largely stuck to his legal tipoffs… versus Izuku who paid house calls to criminal elements as a nine year old. All For One needed a drink. That bottle of wine was calling him…

“Not anymore. The Noumu gave away that you’re still around,” Izuku observed.

Overhaul groaned and went down with another CLANG. The boy’s technique was something else. The wok had snapped in half with the blow, leaving the boy defenceless.

“I was willing to live with the risk,” All For One shrugged. “So. It’s been you, all this time.” Izuku had been giving wok based defence classes. Who else was it going to be? All For One felt like grinding his teeth.

Izuku rolled his shoulders and a wok materialised from thin air in the other hand. Just in time for Overhaul to mumble something and be slapped with another CLANG.

All For One stared. “Your Quirk… generates woks…” The Quirk itself made woks… of all of the Quirks to have… “Where did that even come from? Neither of your parents have such a Quirk.”

“Well, mum’s got telekinesis and dad’s meant to breathe fire,” the boy nodded.

Oh no. Did All For One have something… that perhaps he’d forgotten about? He struggled to remember the Quirk’s he had at the time and found himself coming up dangerously short. Did he have anything that could create something at all resembling cooking implements? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember.

“I have a motto when it comes to criminals,” Izuku nodded solemnly. “Wok for one and wok for all.” With that, a stirring Overhaul received another CLANG and went down yet again. All For One was starting to worry if the echoes would reach above ground. They certainly were when All For One had first walked in.

It was All For One could do not to double over in hysterics. Japan’s criminal population purged by a child with heavy kitchen implements. No wonder he was little more than a ghost. They were chasing a seasoned professional, not a small child with an aptitude for bodily harm. Did anyone else know?

“Does your mother know about this?” All For One gasped for air. Inko was going to have an aneurysm, or a heart attack, or any number of medical episodes once she heard this news. The Sports Festival and the Camp were bad enough, but this? This took it well beyond either of those incidents.

“Does your wife know about yours?” Izuku tartly replied.

Hisashi Midoriya paused, feeling the metaphorical CLANG of dread while Izuku eyed him knowingly and winked.

On second thoughts, maybe Inko didn’t need to know.