Here's The Chapter As Promised. Before Someone starts saying I don't.
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'So this is Stain.'
Yuta—or rather, the Shadow Clone wearing the makeshift vigilante guise—took a slow measure of the man before him.
Stain looked exactly like the reports said—lean, wiry, wrapped in red and black rags. Eyes sharp to a predatory point. Every muscle coiled, and eyes like that of a fanatic.
The katana was a grim extension of his will, and the collected air of bloodlust around him was almost physical, thick and suffocating like a gas leak.
'Calm... Calm.' He thought, resisting the urge to clench his fists.
Even with nearly a month of buffer time in between, the impulse to tear into the Hero Killer wasn't going anywhere.
He could control his expression. His tone.
Even the micro-movements of his facial muscles.
But the intent—the heavy, suppressed part of a person that wanted violence—was harder.
He pushed it down.
'This is a clone body with limited Chakra. Fragile. Even with my quirk, one fatal hit and I'm done.'
Vengeance was a slippery slope. And now as a clone, he had limits. Killing Stain here, with no real plan, no backup, no certainty, was close to impossible. And wrong. His mother wouldn't forgive that line being crossed.
Had it been a month ago, perhaps he wouldn't have been able to control himself.
It was different now.
He wasn't here to kill stain, neither was he sure he could do it.
Revenge would come, but it wasn't happening today. The main reason for this confrontation was twofold: to save Ingenium from being crippled and to gather actionable intelligence on Stain's current strength and combat style.
'Tch. To think even with the whole incident, Ingenium still found Stain. I was almost too late.'
In the distance, Stain's eyes narrowed. "Your dressing doesn't look like a pro's. Who are you?"
The masked man cracked his knuckles, a casual, almost bored gesture. "An old friend."
"I don't have any friends." Stain's voice was as flat as iron as he raised his sword, "If you're not a pro then you're not my target. I'll give you a chance. Leave now."
"Sorry, can't Chizome."
Stain's pupils shrank into slits.
"You know me?"
"Intimately," he answered. "And not at all."
Stain's grip tightened on the katana.
"Very well then."
He moved.
"Die!" A sudden, explosive snap of motion trained from years of murdering people who moved slower than thought.
The blade whipped toward the masked man's throat.
Yuta's body leaned left by a hair.
The steel sliced the air a millimeter from his neck.
Stain didn't pause. His other hand drew a blade low from his ribs and sliced upward.
THUD!
A palm caught the wrist mid-strike.
The katana came back around in a horizontal arc.
Another hand rose—deflecting it by the flat, not the edge.
Yuta's eyes, hidden beneath the contact lenses he wore, had turned into a three-tomoe Sharingan.
'He's fast. But I can see it.'
The precognition wasn't perfect—it showed intent, trajectory, the micro-shifts in muscle tension that preceded movement. But his body still had to react.
With his previous encounter with Overhaul, and the hospitalisation afterwards, he had no time to focus on exercising his physique.
However, while physically weak, he could still do wonders when enhanced with chakra.
"Good move."
Feeling the strength pushing against him, Stain commented and shifted his stance.
Yuta was caught off guard as stain pulled back, then attacked again.
Three strikes—feints mixed with real intent.
Left shoulder. Right thigh. Center mass.
'Uh.'
Yuta sidestepped the first, twisted away from the second, and threw a kitchen knife to intercept the third.
CLANG.
Steel met cheap iron.
Stain's blade knocked the kitchen knife aside and slashed where Yuta stood a moment ago.
He Body Flickered backward, boots skidding across the concrete as he put five meters between them.
'... That speed.'
Stain's eyes narrowed even further.
"A Teleportation quirk?" he muttered. Yuta didn't respond, replaying every scene in his mind with precise accuracy.
'That was actually better than I thought it would be.'
The thought gave the clone a momentary, cold surge of confidence. His physical body was currently underdeveloped, but the raw speed granted by Chakra-enhanced reflexes and the Shunshin technique was enough to compensate for his utter lack of combat training.
He saw the danger, and the Chakra moved him to evade it.
Two paces behind him, Ingenium watched with wide eyes. 'Who is he?'
"Impressive." Stain didn't attack immediately. "Even though your movements show that you lack formal training. To predict my attacks and react appropriately shows your fighting instinct is superb."
Stain lowered his center of gravity, blade angled down in a predatory line.
"But instinct alone won't save you."
He dashed forward with explosive speed, swinging his katana.
'He's faster.'
Yuta's Sharingan tracked his movements and dodged the strike. Stain seemed to expect it. This time, he replied not just in speed but on complex, unpredictable movements, mixing the flat of the blade with the edge, aiming to confuse and expose.
Each move was predicted and dodged in advance.
'Good combat instincts.' Stain thought. 'But your agility isn't enough.'
He lunged with the katana low, then feinted a retreat, only to transition instantly into a high slash with his short blade aimed at the masked man's neck.
WHOOSH!
The attack hit nothing but air.
'Tch. That again.'
Stain frowned as Yuta emerged in the air. Several blades shot towards him.
'He brings cutlery to fight a killer ' The Hero Killer swatted them aside. He was running out of time.
At the beginning, he sought a single cut to end this, but the masked man had proved more capable than expected.
Fast, strong, and able to react to his attacks.
His quirk made him invulnerable to a quick kill.
Heroes were searching for him throughout Hosu. If he stayed here, he would be surrounded.
'That's enough.'
His earlier intention to leave Ingenium alive evaporated. He needed to end this now.
Stain quickly ripped a throwing knife from his belt and hurled it straight at Ingenium's paralyzed body. The blade flew true, aimed for the head.
Ingenium, still regaining feeling, felt a cold dread of imminent death.
SHNNK!
The knife stopped a centimeter from Ingenium's skull, caught in the gloved hand of the masked man, who had Shunshin'd from five meters away to stand directly in front of the fallen hero.
'Got him.'
Stain's eyes narrowed in satisfaction. His intention had been clear: Ingenium was bait. The masked man wanted the hero alive.
Stain rushed forward, covering the distance in an instant, katana raised for a final, overhead slash. "Let's see how you get out of this one!"
Just as his blade descended, the six kitchen knives Yuta had thrown out earlier—knives scattered and embedded in the concrete—suddenly shot out from their scattered locations.
They zipped across the pavement, their trajectories bending toward the advancing Hero Killer.
Stain was stunned. A Quirk of telekinesis? He tried to adjust his body to defend, the surprise momentarily costing him speed.
He succeeded.
Managing to defend two aimed at his vital spots, but the rest sank in—one in his shoulder, one in his side, and two in his thighs.
Pain shot through his body, quickly suppressed by his mental fortitude and years of training.
However, in that split second before he could recover, Yuta appeared right in front of him, having used the knife distraction to close the gap with a Shunshin.
A Chakra-enhanced and Chakra-condensed punch shot out, carrying a focused, pressurized force of pure energy. It landed squarely in Stain's face, a sickening CRACK.
WHUMP!
Stain was launched backward like a cannonball.
'Success!' Yuta thought, feeling the immense power of the strike ripple through his arm.
However, even as he flew backward, Stain, driven by pure instinct and fanaticism, shot his spike boots upward. The sharp point of the toe was aimed to pierce Yuta's hand—the hand that had just delivered the blow.
Yuta saw it clearly. The precognition of the Sharingan showed the spikes impacting his wrist. But the Body Flicker technique was already spent on the advance, and the sheer speed of Stain's counter was too fast for his untrained body to completely evade.
Stain crashed to the floor, rolling twice before stabilizing himself against the alley wall.
At the same instant, Yuta's body gave out under the fatal damage. The masked man's form dissolved in a bright cloud of smoke.
Ingenium's eyes widened. "He... exploded?"
Stain's gaze swept to his feet, expecting to see a pool of blood to lick up, desperate for the paralysis agent to take hold. However... nothing was there.
'What the?'
His gaze snapped back to the dissipating smoke. As the white cloud cleared, Yuta was still standing there. He was whole, except for his right arm—the one that had delivered the punch—which was gone from the elbow down, having been the part that took the spike boot's damage.
Silence filled the alley.
Until.
"Well ... That sucks."
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