Shigure's evening had turned chaotic. He had taken care of two villains, and a third had unexpectedly appeared. He was fast enough to force Shigure to burn through his entire chocolate reserve.
'Something's off.' Shigure quickly made his way towards his home.
Halfway home, a deranged onee-chan intercepted him.
'Is this just my bad luck, or was it calculated? Ki didn't see her coming, so she must have chosen her path carefully. I also didn't move through the paths with a camera.' Shigure calculated, trading blows.
Before he could deduce her quirk, he was already subdued.
She held him by the throat.
'I can only use my quirk once, and that also for a few seconds. If I use it now, it would be useless.'
One look at her fighting style told him that she had a touch-based quirk or at least a quirk that needs close proximity.
Generally, touch-based quirks were instantly activated, so even if he uses 'Slow Down' on her, it would be useless. Why? Because the thought and the speed at which impulses move in the human body are quite fast. It would be undeterred even if slowed down by hundreds of times.
Shigure waited. Timing would be everything.
"Hehehe. I will gladly enjoy breaking that expression of yours."
"Kawarin Seiko." Shigure finally spoke to her.
"You know me? Oh, this'll be even more fun." She grinned.
'Ki gave me her information. A psychopath with sadistic tendencies. But there was no record of her quirk. Anyway, before my Visor broke, I had made Ki send an emergency signal. I need to bid my time.' Shigure was calm.
Unnaturally calm—and he didn't know why.
"No wig, huh? This your real face?" She asked, pulling his hair.
"Yeah." Shigure had dyed his hair before, so he wasn't that worried.
"Do you know what my quirk is?"
"No." Her grin got wider.
"Let me show you then." She brought out her other hand and touched Shigure's right shoulder.
—Shing.
"AAHHHH", Shigure groaned, feeling pain.
Mind-boggling pain.
"That's it? You're famous, and that's all it took? Guess, you are just an ignorant kid after all." Her tone lowered. She was feeling disappointed.
Shigure's entire body shook for 3 seconds before stopping.
"Hmm?" Seiko tilted her head. She hadn't stopped her quirk. So, why did he stop shaking?
Shigure's expression regained its calm.
"Quite an interesting quirk you have. It seems to be sending me pain directly to my brain. You should be able to do more damage if you inflict pain while using your quirk. Right?" Shigure's voice stayed flat.
"You... don't feel pain?"
"I do. It's just... faint. I was caught off-guard initially by how it flooded right in my mind." 'Ask more questions. Waste time.' Shigure wanted to do everything to stall for time.
"Hahahaha", she laughed, removing her hand from Shigure's shoulder. "It seems you would be fun to break after all."
—Puchi.
In the next instant, Shigure found his right hand stabbed by a knife.
'So, she can use her quirk if things directly in contact with her hand touch her target. How interesting. I wonder if it awakens, at one point, it would be able to affect everyone in the area using air as a medium.' Shigure analysed the quirk without any change in his expression.
Puchi. Puchi. Puchi.
She stabbed him again. Same spot. Watching.
None.
"Are you under an anaesthesia? Though that shouldn't work when my quirk is involved. Do you not feel the pain?" Confusion flickered in Seiko's eyes.
Even the most impressive victims of her had released a groan when they reached this point.
Shigure was an odd case.
"I do. It's just too less. Do you feel pain when somebody flicks your forehead or touches you? It's similar to that." Shigure replied in a monotone voice.
Seiko understood his point, but still couldn't believe it. What he was implying was insane.
"You... are you a masochist?" 'If not, then maybe he is a child soldier trained by the association.' She couldn't think of any other reason for a kid-looking person to have this much tolerance.
She was sure that his pain tolerance wasn't a side effect of his quirk.
"Yeah." He nonchalantly said.
It was quite common for people who were sadistic to be masochistic too.
It was similar to how people with an inferiority complex also have a superiority complex.
"So... does it feel good?" She asked with uncertainty. 'Is he hiding his expression or something?'
"Pffft..." Shigure started laughing.
The grip on his neck got tighter, but it didn't stop his laughter.
"That's hilarious."
"What's funny?" Seiko wasn't amused.
Shigure's tone changed, his face not indifferent, but something akin to cold. "You think you can make me feel pain? You know why I stopped hurting myself for fun? I have reached the limit of the pain I could inflict on myself. Now? I don't even feel pleasure anymore."
His masochistic tendencies were ancient compared to his sadistic tendencies. Initially, he was just a holed-up NEET with his quirk. He had tried it once and found it to be a fun recreational activity.
Though after a while, it didn't give him what he wanted.
Realisation dawned on Seiko's face. "Ahhh. That explains it." She could relate as she had felt similar feelings at some point in her life.
"Then let me help you. How about I cut off your arm? Maybe that'll finally make you feel something." A crazed grin appeared on her face.
She anticipated a scared look or just a crack in his facade.
A crack did appear in Shigure's facade.
Like a reflection, a crazed grin spread on Shigure's face, tinted with red, blushing.
"I've always wanted to try that. But obviously I can't. Though I still can't say this personally as I value self-preservation, I am also curious."
At that point, Seiko realised something.
This boy was a kindred spirit.
"Let me satisfy your curiosity." Her knife crept toward his shoulder.
Both of them anticipated the next moment.
"Just in time." Seiko stopped. Her head cocked back so fast that it almost broke.
Her face paled. In the sky floated the current number 13 hero—Hawks.
"Stop. I have him as hostage." She barked.
However, unknown to her, the hostage of hers had used "Slow Down" on both him and Seiko.
So, to them, Keigo's next movements were very fast.
In the blink of a slowed-down eye, Seiko was out cold.
The last thing she heard was "Sorry, Nee-chan. Guess self-preservation wins again."
THUMP
Her body landed on the cold floor.
"We need to talk about your last statement," Keigo said with an unimpressed look.
"Later. I need medical attention. Can't use my quirk as I am out of energy." Shigure cheekily said, pointing at his injured stab wound.
Keigo sighed. "Of course."
---
Date: 1st January
Keigo woke up from the bed. "What a fine holiday." He said, looking out of the window.
It was snowing.
He turned on the coffee machine, sat in the chair and opened his tablet to see some news.
On the first page, there was an interesting article.
$$$
NeoTech Review
Date: January 1st, 2XXX
From Training Tricks to Thinking Machines: Shigure Hatsune's Latest AI Breakthrough Could Redefine the Field
"It's like watching neural networks wake up."
— Dr. Arata Kinoshita, Chair of Cognitive Systems, TokyoTech AI Labs
At just twelve years old, Shigure Hatsune has done it again. After quietly shaking up model training pipelines at age nine with his Recursive Sparse Gradient Cascading (RSGC)—sold directly to the government—he's now pulled off something far bigger. This time, it's public. And it's blowing minds across academia and industry alike.
Enter: Cognified Modular LLM Architecture (CMLA)
Developed under wraps, CMLA isn't a training trick. It's a fundamental reimagining of AI architecture. Forget Transformers as we know them—CMLA introduces a framework built on cognition modules: semi-autonomous micro-agents that learn, specialise, and reason independently.
Each module can:
Retain long-term memory
Perform subtask decomposition
Self-tune over time
Collaborate with other modules dynamically
The result? A system that doesn't just complete prompts—it thinks.
Performance Gains:
Early benchmarks from licensed deployments show:
50% latency reduction via internal parallelisation
60% model compression without significant performance drop
Interpretability via traceable module interactions
Local deployment on mid-tier edge devices
In short: smaller, faster, smarter—and vastly more transparent.
The Shockingly Low-Budget Build
The kicker? This wasn't built in a trillion-yen lab.
In fact, the entire development was funded by a public-facing 960 million yen fundraiser, pitched vaguely by Hatsune as "support for his next project." There were no technical whitepapers, no PR stunts—just a single donation page and his name attached.
The biggest backers? The Yaoyorozu family, followed closely by Principal Nezu, are now tied into early licensing and deployment efforts. Most donors thought they were contributing to a promising student's hobby project. No one expected a Nobel-winning AI paradigm shift.
💼 Business and IP Strategy
Unlike RSGC, which was government-locked, Hatsune retained full ownership of CMLA. He has:
Plans to sell core patent rights to Yaoyorozu Corp for hero/medical applications
Begun licensing the architecture via a tiered API model
Planned limited open-sourcing of non-core modules to build developer adoption
Top-tier modules remain proprietary—likely forming the base of a future startup or foundation.
Nobel Recognition
Within hours of the public demo, Hatsune is nominated for the Nobel Prize in Machine Cognition, becoming the youngest nominee in history. The citation?
"For transforming token-prediction models into reasoning agents capable of emergent cognition."
He is highly likely to get the award before this month ends.
Industry chatter suggests the committee is considering renaming the category in his honour.
What's Next?
CMLA is planned to being piloted in:
Hero-strategy assistants
Disaster-zone medical agents
Hyper-personalised educational platforms
Hatsune has remained characteristically quiet, but those close to him hint that more inventions are on the horizon—and this might have just been the opening move.
"This isn't the next step in AI," said Akira Iwasaki of Shinjuku Robotics.
"It's the start of a new era. And Shigure Hatsune just kicked the door open."
$$$
Hawks blinked. "Woah, I missed a lot in the last 16 hours. He mentioned that it will be revolutionary, but I didn't expect it to be quite literally one. Nobel prize? Damn."
Keigo was impressed. He didn't understand half of what was present in the architecture, but if Shigure is getting the Nobel Prize, then it must be something crazy, right?
Keigo's eyebrows strained. 'Wait, if the news was released less than a day ago... Won't it be the perfect time to assassinate him?'
Keigo got up from his chair, ignored the noise his coffee machine released, and jumped out of the window.
He lived in the same city as Shigure, so he quickly reached the latter's house.
He opened the window. However, before he could pull the curtain aside, his eye caught something on the floor.
Blood. Fresh.
***
A/n- To be honest, I felt a bit confused about whether to add Masochism to one of the tendencies, as people generally don't like that. Though I won't be using it in se*ual context, I still felt hesitant.
But, I think it should be fine as it was a thing of the past, not a current one. Moreover, masochism and sadism are parts that won't be covered much in the story, as stated before.
What do you think?
***
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