Chapter 4: An Unnecessary Period
Two more days passed in the stagnant, suffocating quiet of the bar. For Gaara, time had begun to lose its sharp edges again, each hour bleeding into the next, marked only by the shifting patterns of light on the screen of Tomura Shigaraki's gaming device. A routine, of a sort, had formed: Kurogiri's methodical silence, Shigaraki's intermittent whining, and Gaara's own ceaseless, silent observation. He had become part of the furniture, a sandy specter in the corner that no longer drew a second glance.
On the afternoon of the third day, Shigaraki threw his console down on the table, the sharp clatter of plastic against wood cracking the stillness.
"Bored!" he shrieked, his fingers immediately finding their way to his neck, scratching with a frantic energy. "I've hit the level cap. Watching these fake heroes on TV is just making it worse. Kurogiri, get ready. We're going on that scouting run."
Kurogiri, ever the stoic manager, showed no surprise. He had clearly been anticipating this burst of volatile impatience. "Of course, Shigaraki Tomura. To what destination?"
"That old district in the Kamino Ward. Giran said there's a rat there with some intel we need." Shigaraki's single red eye scanned the room, settling on Gaara. "And you," he said, not as a command but as a statement of fact, "you're coming. I'm not wandering around without my shield."
Gaara did not reply. He understood his function. He was not an ally; he was equipment. He rose slowly from the floor, the sand pooling around his ankles in thin, coiling streams, ready.
Kurogiri moved to the center of the room, his misty form expanding. The fog that comprised his body swirled and thickened, coalescing into a spinning mass of dark purple and black. It was a vortex of absolute darkness that seemed to drink the dim light from the bar. It made no sound, yet Gaara could feel its presence—a strange, thrumming vibration in the air, an unnatural pressure against his senses.
"After me," Shigaraki ordered, and stepped into the swirling void without a trace of hesitation.
When it was Gaara's turn, he paused for a fraction of a second. His sand, instinctively, surged. It wasn't a defensive wall this time, but a thin, hyper-compressed shell that formed over his entire body, a gritty second skin. This was something new, something that felt like a violation of the natural order. To step through space itself was to break a fundamental rule his senses had always relied upon. But he followed, stepping into the abyss.
The sensation was profoundly disorienting. There was no feeling of movement, only of dissolution. For one, timeless moment, he was nothing but disembodied consciousness floating in a cold, silent darkness, the countless particles of sand that were an extension of his being feeling impossibly distant. Then, just as quickly, he was reassembled.
He stepped out of the warp into a narrow, damp alley. The sensory shock was severe. The musty, stale air of the bar was gone, replaced by the sharp reek of wet garbage and old rain. The muffled quiet was shattered by the hiss of a leaking drainpipe and the distant wail of sirens. After the perpetual gloom of the hideout, the overcast daylight was painfully bright, forcing him to narrow his eyes.
"Come on," Shigaraki muttered, having already pulled the hood of his black sweatshirt over his pale hair.
The district was a labyrinth of decaying buildings, their brick facades stained with dark patches of damp and the faded ghosts of old graffiti. Gaara followed Shigaraki, who moved with an unsettling familiarity through these backstreets, like a scavenger who knew every crack in the pavement. Gaara was his silent shadow, his footsteps deadened by the sand that shifted beneath his feet.
They stopped abruptly at the entrance to a grimy, derelict apartment block. "He's in here," Shigaraki whispered, his voice laced with a predatory excitement.
They ascended the crumbling concrete staircase, the air thick with the smell of boiled cabbage and dust. On the third floor, they stopped outside a door with peeling green paint. Shigaraki didn't bother to knock. He simply shouldered the door open, the rotten wood of the frame splintering as the lock gave way.
Inside, a thin man with the jittery eyes of a cornered rat leaped up from a sagging couch. He was dressed in shabby clothes, his fingers twitching nervously at his sides. "S-Shigaraki-sama! I wasn't expecting—"
"Shut up," Shigaraki cut him off coldly, stepping into the cramped, cluttered room. Gaara positioned himself in the doorway, blocking the only escape route, his face a mask of utter stillness. "You know why I'm here. The intel 'loot drop' Giran promised."
The man, now trembling uncontrollably, scurried to a nearby table and snatched up a small memory card. "Here! It's all on here! The hero patrol schedules for this sector, security shipment times… everything you asked for!" He held out the chip in his quivering hand.
Shigaraki took it, glanced at it for a moment, and then slipped it into his pocket. The mission was complete. The objective was secured.
But Shigaraki did not move to leave. Instead, he slowly looked the terrified informant up and down, a twisted grin beginning to form beneath the hand-mask on his face. "You know," he said, his voice dangerously soft, "I really hate it when low-level NPCs think they can just sell information and then go back to their boring little lives. It ruins the immersion."
The man froze, his eyes widening in horror. "But… I gave you what you wanted! We're done!"
"Yeah," Shigaraki said, slowly raising his hand, all five fingers extended. "We're done."
In that moment, in the tense silence of the squalid room, Gaara's voice emerged. It was quiet, raspy from disuse, but it cut through the air like a shard of glass.
"No need."
Shigaraki's hand stopped mid-air. He turned his head to look at Gaara, his single red eye narrowing in a mixture of surprise and amusement. It seemed the thought that his "shield" might have an opinion had never even occurred to him.
There was no emotion in Gaara's voice. It was not a plea for the man's life, nor a moral objection. It was a cold, logical assessment. The objective had been completed. Further action was unnecessary, chaotic, and inefficient.
Shigaraki stared at Gaara for a moment longer, and then he laughed. It was a dry, cracked sound devoid of any real humor. "'No need'?" he repeated the words as if they were from a language he didn't quite understand. "Sand-boy, you don't get it. This has nothing to do with need. This is the reward. This is the part where you finish the quest and make sure there are no loose ends."
He turned his back on Gaara, facing the informant once more. "This is the part where you show the NPCs that for them, the game is over."
He placed his hand on the man's shoulder.
The man didn't scream. There wasn't time. His shoulder began to corrode, disintegrating into grey dust with horrifying speed. The decay spread across his body like a tidal wave, the only sound a dry, rustling hiss, like autumn leaves skittering across pavement. In seconds, nothing was left of the man but a pile of dust on the worn floorboards and a small cloud settling in the beam of light from the grimy window.
Gaara stood perfectly still, watching it all. His sand did not move to defend the man. He did not say another word.
Shigaraki looked down at his hand, then casually dusted off his fingers. He turned to Gaara, his eye glittering with a vicious glee. "You just don't get the fun of deleting the extra data, do you, Sand-boy?"
A dark purple warp gate shimmered into existence in the doorway behind Gaara. Kurogiri, punctual as ever.
Shigaraki strode towards it, walking past Gaara as if he were an inanimate object. "Let's go. We got what we came for."
Gaara lingered for a second, his gaze fixed on the pile of dust that had been a man. He felt no grief. He felt no anger. But he felt a profound sense of wrongness. Not a moral wrongness, but a systemic one. It was chaos for the sake of chaos. Destruction without purpose.
He turned and stepped through the gate, back into the familiar darkness of the bar. He returned to his corner and sat, the silence enveloping him once more. But this time, the silence was different. It was tainted by the memory of that quiet, rustling sound, and by the weight of his own inaction. He had been complicit. His silence, after his one failed objection, had been a form of consent. His failure to act, a signature on the man's death warrant.
And that realization was a new kind of weight, heavier than any sand he had ever carried.
~~~
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