-superhero setting, emergent inherent superpowers situation like x-men.
-mentor figure of main team has the power to awaken new powers in non-supers through introducing his dna into their system (usually through something like eating a hair, but blood transfusion is also a thing).
-uplifts normal people to help protect the world from the actions of those who would abuse their powers blah blah blah, something something newfound perspective, something something great responsibility.
-story arc starts with team chasing down anti-establishment terrorist (who has a history with both the mentor and the main character) and two goons through the streets. corner him.
-he says just as planned, but doesn't do anything out of the ordinary, just fights back like normal.
-fights with body-grown blades, and in fight prioritizes mentor, does as much damage to mentor as possible.
-fight looks like terrorist is gonna lose, him and his goons appear to exchange agreeing glances and manage to get away.
-mentor is heavily wounded afterwards.
-team returns to base, and discusses some of how they weren't sure exactly what the terrorist's plan was.
-time passes, weeks or so.
-a few more altercations with the terrorist happen over the following time period, usually involving military groups (private and national), and underground terror actors. As they do, reports of power-related incidents, many lethal, increase globally. this continues for most of the middle act.
-discussion is brought to how the two might be related. the group catches on that maybe the first fight they had was bait, and theorize that the terrorist wanted some of the mentor's dna to manufacture an army, and maybe he's targeting the places that he is to gather strong individuals and/or incite open conflict, and that these new incidents which have been cropping up are the failures he's been leaving behind.
-start trying to actively plot out and track his movements, try to corner him.
-eventually succeed.
-probe him for information. He rants about how with the advent of super powers, the dynamic of the elite will shift until it rests such that those with powers will rule while those without serve, and he exclaims that his actions will ensure this tyranny of supers ruling over normals never comes to be.
-the team call him out by saying that him building a personal army of supers is just the same as any other elite using the power of supers to enforce their authority, and they demand to know what he plans on doing next so they can stop him.
-he lights up, shocked and elated. he begins to seemingly ramble, talking about how because he didn't have a guy on the inside he couldn't have been sure of what the main team knew, but that he is genuinely surprised that he's being told his plan was working on its best-case scenario.
-the team, confused, asks to elaborate.
-the terrorist says that he hasn't been building up an army, in fact he thought he was causing mindless havoc to disrupt whatever actions the main team had taken to correct what he had already done, but says that he now feels like an idiot because it appears he didn't even need to have been doing that. He enacted his plan the night of the initial conflict, and had thought the team understood what he was going to do that very night, but it appears he overestimated them. He used plants inside water filtration facilities around the globe to set up anchor points for a teleporting agent under his care to disperse the collected mentor's genetic material to the highest population density locations he possible. By his estimates, had the team known his plan and acted to counteract it he would have only managed to change just over 50% of global populations within this generation, but had hopes that the dominant heritable nature of powers combined with the acquirable nature of the mentor's power synergising to make super powers a universal trait of the species over the course of 3 or 4 generations. With what the team is telling him, his estimates are that it will likely happen as soon as the next generation, or the one just after that at worst.
-the increasing number of incidents weren't the failures, they were the early signs of the success that had already come and gone. The terrorist rejoices, falling back to give up, saying that "the mighty cannot crush the meek underfoot if all that is meek is made mighty". 
-He tells them to take him away, he thinks that it's going to be safer to watch the bright new future emerge from behind bars.