The world smelled like burnt metal and wet concrete. The hero Genesis, Yuki Arakawa, stood amidst the wreckage of Hero's Eve, her boots crunching over shattered glass as her eyes remained locked on the spot where her brother had vanished.
Kobe.
Just the sight of him had sent a jolt through her ribs, like something pinching and twisting her skin. He had looked wrong. He looked shook and frightened as if death were coming to strike him, in some ways it was, well from what she read on the attacker, Daiki Tenma, he could be one of the closest things to the phenomenon.
The League's storm incarnate.
The fight had been a blur, Kobe's paper constructs whirling like a hurricane, Daiki's lance warping the air itself with every swing and before she could even scream his name, they were gone, swallowed by the chaos of collapsing buildings and Nomu screeches.
Her fingers twitched at her sides.
I have to find him.
But then...
A groan.
Sir Nighteye lay sprawled across the rubble, his glasses shattered, blood trickling from a gash on his temple. Centipeder crouched beside him, mandibles clicking anxiously as he checked for fractures.
Yuki forced herself to move.
"Sir," she said, kneeling beside him. Her voice sounded foreign to her own ears, it was too steady, too calm when all she wanted to do was scream. "Can you hear me?"
Nighteye's eyes fluttered. His pupil, when it focused on her, was dilated too wide, his breath coming in shallow, uneven rasps.
"Genesis," he slurred, the word thick with pain.
She didn't wait.
Her quirk, hummed beneath her skin. A familiar warmth spreading from her fingertips as she pressed them against the nearest slab of broken concrete. The material shivered, then moved, reshaping itself under her will into a live, makeshift stretcher, its surface smoothing as if polished by invisible hands.
Centipeder helped her lift Nighteye onto it, his body unnervingly limp.
"You're concussed," Yuki said, her voice clipped. "Don't try to move yet."
Nighteye ignored her. His hands shot out, fingers clamping around her wrist with surprising strength.
"Soryu," he hissed.
Yuki stiffened.
Nighteye's tone was too venomous, toxic.
Not Kobe. Not her brother. Just Soryu. A villain. A target.
"He's fighting Daiki Tenma of the League of Villains." She said carefully. "We need to help him."
Nighteye's grip tightened. "No."
The word was a blade.
Yuki's pulse spiked.
Centipeder shifted uneasily. "Sir, perhaps we should..."
"He is a liability," Nighteye interrupted, his voice gaining strength, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks. "A killer. A manipulator. He has played both sides for too long, and if we do not stop him now, he will become something far worse than the League will even get to be."
Yuki's breath caught.
For a moment, she couldn't speak. Couldn't think.
Then...
"His name," she said slowly. "is Kobe Arakawa."
The air between them turned to ice.
Nighteye's expression didn't change. "Names don't erase actions."
"He is my brother."
"And he is a villain."
Yuki's hands curled into fists.
Centipeder stepped between them, his antennae twitching. "This isn't the time..."
But Nighteye wasn't listening. His gaze had gone distant, his irises flickering with the telltale haze of his quirk - foresight.
"He will ruin everything." he whispered, more to himself than to them. "He will tear it all down. I've seen it."
She wanted to argue. Wanted to scream that Kobe had been helping them, that he had fed the heroes information, that he had saved lives tonight with those paper birds carrying civilians to safety.
But before she could speak.
The earth moved.
A tremor, deep and rolling, shuddered through the street. The rubble beneath them shifted, glass shards dancing like startled insects.
Yuki's head snapped up.
In the distance, beyond the skeletal remains of Tokyo's skyline, a mountain was walking.
Gigantomachia.
The League's living siege engine.
They received information about him much too late, they couldn't prepare for it well enough, but thankfully Mt. Lady was in Tokyo with them.
Mt. Lady, her titanic form dwarfed by comparison, was locked in a desperate grapple with him, her muscles straining as she tried to halt his advance. But he was winning. Step by step, he was dragging her backward, his massive feet crushing entire blocks beneath him.
And he was heading straight for the same evacuation zone that Kobe had sent the civilians to.
Centipeder cursed, "He needs to be stopped."
Yuki agreed, but she stuttered in her step.
She wanted to find her brother. But as she closed her eyes she knows she also had a duty to fulfill. That was what she had agreed to as a hero.
She had demanded whatever information she could get about what the Eden Project was, and she had understood how brutal and traumatizing the place had been.
Kobe had survived Overhaul, Abyss, and many more attempts on his life. She will trust that he will survive this one too, survive so that she can talk to him, be with her brother again.
He would survive.
She hated that she was relying on his survival coming from his endurance from that place. From how they had broken him down to create what he is now.
When she opened her eyes, Centipeder was already moving, his form blurring as he shot toward the chaos.
Yuki took one last look at the ruins behind her.
I'm sorry.
Then she turned, and Nighteye was gone. The stretcher lay empty.
Only a single smear of blood remained where he had been.
Her breath hitched.
No.
But there was no time. Gigantomachia roared, the sound shaking the city to its bones.
Genesis clenched her fists. And ran towards the fight.
***
The world narrows to the space between Daiki's grin and his lance, a sliver of light before the storm. My ribs scream where the shockwave kissed them, every breath a knife-twist of splintered bone and paper-reinforced flesh.
Daiki's boots crunch the ground.
He flicks his wrist, and the pavement beneath me lurches upward like a tidal wave of asphalt. My fox reacts quickly, six tails slamming down to anchor me as the others spiral into a drill, shredding through the rising concrete. But Daiki isn't waiting, he's riding the recoil of his own attack, the kinetic energy of the shattered debris reversing midair to propel him forward. His lance comes down in a perfect arc, and I realize too late again... its not aimed at me.
It's aimed at my fox's spine.
The impact doesn't cut. It erases. A perfect strike of momentum swallows three tails whole, the paper unravelling mid-motion as if it forgot how to exist. I gasped, the feedback came quicker than I was prepared for. The remaining tails constrict, not attacking Daiki, but the air around him, my paper folds into a thousand origami valves, replicating a piston engine's compression chamber.
We had been fighting over a toxic smelling liquid that I had assumed come from burst pipes as Daiki threw me through buildings. I grabbed a small pebble and slit the ground beneath me letting it ignite...
Daiki's eyes widen.
The explosion tears the street apart, but I'm already moving, my fox's body disassembling into a swarm of razor-winged hornets. They don't sting, they sew, threading Daiki's shadow with filaments of paper-thin carbon fiber, each strand replicating the tensile strength of a suspension bridge cable. He snarls, his lance whirling to sever the threads, but for every one he cuts, two more anchor to the rubble around him.
Then he advances, moving forward like a skipped flame. "Your moves have been clever." he starts, his voice could be heard in echoes as he sped around me in circles. "Much better than they were back then in Eden."
Praise.
"But understand... I am a language you are still not literate in."
I feel a grab behind me on the back of my neck. And I am once again elevated and being pushed against a wall, I didn't go through it this time, but my eyes did lock onto something as they landed back on Daiki.
A bead of blood wells in his palm, then stops, suspended midair as his quirk steals its momentum. He flicks his fingers, and the droplet cracks toward me like a sniper round.
I jerk sideways, but not fast enough. The projectile shears the wall and for a second it just leaves a small hole one could peer through to see inside the building, until it burst reducing it to an image similar to bursting confetti.
Daiki smirks. I keep my eye on him and his smirk while he is watching me. Thankfully not knowing what I have planned next.
That would probably be the only big weakness that I have noticed Daiki having. He is far too confident in his abilities, in his quirk. Not that he shouldn't be. But his ego is so big that he doesn't focus on small things. Or maybe he just finds it hard to.
My paper was in the dust, the rubble, wrapping itself around every little thing in the area we were standing in.
And now it moves.
Daiki realizes too late. His lance comes to block, but my attack isn't a strike, it's a net, a thousand threads of carbon-replicated spider silk anchoring him to the ruined buildings around us. He snarls, muscles straining as he tries to use his own momentum to break free, but it closed in on him and halted his movements too quickly.
But then he just stiffened, and hopped. He didn't jump high, he didn't put the slightest bit of effort, but when his feet touched the ground, the earth shook, the shakings were even greater than what that giant beast in the distance was doing.
And the net detangled slightly giving him enough space to cut through.
His smirk got wider, but this time it told me something he didn't even need to speak aloud. This was the kill shot.
I could barely see him, but I knew he was running straight at me, lance in hand pointed right at the center of my head, it would crush it like it would a watermelon upon impact. That's what he wanted to see, the insides of my skull splattered on the ground before my headless body could match the reaction.
That's what he's still smiling about, a big and wide smile, he's so happy to kill, to end another life.
Wait.
I can see it. I can see him. He's moving at a speed I thought I would go cross-eyed at trying to keep up with, but now in this brief moment I can see him moving towards me with a menacing chill.
In fact, it feels like I'm not even in my body, like I'm watching myself die on replay. Like I died before the attack struck.
But I wouldn't die. Not now. I refused it.
There was clearly still more in me. Still more to do. My mother now knows of my past, dying would be a convenient way for me to avoid her and that whole conversation. But like the observer Daiki described me to be, I am still interested in how that will play out and want to take reign of the situation as it takes shape.
So, I won't die. Not here.
My thoughts were so clear, the attack I thought of came in a blink. And forming it came even quicker.
I brought my hands up in a silent speed that didn't seem rushed, didn't seem urgent, it just played out as it was supposed to. And as I brought them apart, the attack was ready...
Perfect Sphere!
The paper in my palm compresses into a geodesic lattice, each crease replicating the theoretical structure of a neutron's crust, flawless, infinitely rigid. For one heartbeat, it exists, a singularity of borrowed physics humming against my skin.
I could see Daiki's eyes widening, even he could feel something different in the air as I formed this. "You bastard..."
His lance touches it first.
The world unmakes itself.
The sphere wasn't as perfect as it seemed though. It implodes, Daiki's quirk reflects the force, creating a feedback loop of annihilating momentum. The shockwave peels the street apart like wet cardboard, hurling me back through a collapsing billboard. I feel ribs snap, again, the paper that was holding my broken bones in place reformed, reinforcing my spine as I'm buried underneath an avalanche of rubble.
Through my ringing ears, I hear it, the sky breaking.
All Might.
All Might's fist meets that of another, All For One. The resulting pressure waves scours the ruins. Daiki is flung backward like a discarded doll, although I think that had something to do with my attack.
I try to rise, but I fall again.
The last thing I see before darkness takes me is my own paper, still fluttering in the maelstrom, edges glowing with borrowed sunlight, and Daiki's silhouette, half-buried in debris, his grin bloody but unbroken.
Then the dust swallows everything.