Chapter 10: Blood
The battlefield was a chaotic symphony of violence. From his vantage point beside Shigaraki, Gaara watched as Shota Aizawa moved through the villainous mob like a phantom. He was an artist of brutal efficiency. His movements were not flashy, not like the heroes on television. They were precise, economical, and utterly decisive. A glance, and a villain's boastful Quirk would sputter and die. A flick of his wrist, and his capture weapon would lash out like a striking serpent, binding limbs and breaking momentum. A swift, disabling strike, and another pawn was removed from the board.
Gaara watched, and his mind, a place of cold, dispassionate logic, processed the data. The seventy-odd villains they had brought were a finite resource. At his current rate, Aizawa would neutralize a significant portion of their forces before they could even serve their primary purpose: to exhaust and distract All Might. This was an unacceptable inefficiency. The variable that was Eraser Head had to be controlled.
He felt no anger towards the man. He felt no personal stake in the fight. There was only the quiet, clear imperative of a problem that required a solution. As Aizawa finished neutralizing another small group, landing in a crouch in a clear patch of the plaza, Gaara made his decision.
He did not announce his intention. He did not adopt a dramatic stance. He simply lifted his right hand, his fingers slightly curled.
Deep beneath the polished stone floor of the plaza, the sand and sediment that had lain dormant for decades stirred. It was not a part of Gaara's own sand, but it was earth, and all earth answered his call. He felt the vibrations of the battle through the soles of his feet, felt Aizawa's position as a point of pressure on the stone above, and he gave a silent command.
Aizawa, his senses honed by years of underground hero work, felt it a fraction of a second before it happened—a low, grinding tremor directly beneath him. He tensed, ready to leap away, but he was too late. The ground did not shake. It liquefied.
The smooth, solid stone floor dissolved into a churning vortex of sand and grit. It did not erupt upwards in a wave; it surged, a solidifying, three-dimensional tide that rose from all sides simultaneously. Aizawa's leap was cut short as his legs were caught, the sand instantly compressing around them with the force of setting concrete. Before he could even cry out, the sand shot upwards, enveloping him in a suffocating, grinding torrent.
From the students' perspective on the stairs, their seemingly invincible teacher simply vanished. One moment he was a whirlwind of black, the next he was swallowed by a monstrous, churning sphere of brown and grey that sealed itself with a final, dull thump. It was absolute. A perfect, inescapable tomb.
Inside, there was only darkness, pressure, and the suffocating sound of grinding rock. The air was forced from Aizawa's lungs in a single, painful gasp. The pressure was immense, threatening to crush his bones. He was disoriented, his senses useless. Panic, hot and sharp, tried to claw its way up his throat, but he beat it back down with the iron will of a seasoned pro. He analyzed. The trap was holding him, but it wasn't actively crushing him... yet. It was a prison, not an execution. That meant its controller was likely maintaining it. A concentration-based Quirk.
His only hope was the weapon still clutched in his hand. With a surge of desperate strength, he forced his arm forward, feeding the capture weapon into the grinding wall of grit in front of him. It was like pushing through solid rock, but he poured every ounce of his strength into it. The carbon nanofibers and steel wire alloy of the weapon groaned, but held.
Outside the sphere, Gaara stood, his hand still raised, his focus absolute. He felt the hero struggling within the sand, a frantic, muffled vibration. It would be over soon. The pressure would do its work.
Suddenly, a flash of white punched through the surface of the sand prison.
It was Aizawa's capture weapon, shooting out like a harpoon, a white serpent striking from the heart of the earthen sphere. It flew through the air and, with unerring precision, wrapped itself tightly around Gaara's outstretched wrist.
Gaara's eyes widened slightly in surprise. He felt a sharp, powerful tug. With a groan of protesting stone and sand, the prison began to crumble as Aizawa used the weapon as an anchor to pull himself free. He burst from the collapsing sand, gasping for air, his clothes torn and covered in grit. He landed on his feet, his posture low, and his eyes—burning with a terrifying crimson light—locked directly onto Gaara.
The moment their gazes met, Gaara felt it.
It was not a sound, or a sight, or a physical sensation. It was a severance. A fundamental connection, a sixth sense that had been a part of him for as long as he had been alive—his link to the sand—was violently, brutally cut. It was a deafening silence erupting in the core of his soul. It was the phantom limb of his power suddenly going numb. The sand around his feet, the sand that had been a living, breathing extension of his will, became inert. It fell to the ground with a soft, lifeless hiss. The sand in his gourd felt impossibly heavy, a dead weight on his back.
He was powerless.
The shock was so profound, so absolute, that it paralyzed him. He had never, not once in his entire life, known what it was like to be without the sand. His perfect, absolute defense was gone. He was just… a boy.
Aizawa did not waste the opportunity. His professional instincts took over, his body moving before his conscious mind could process the scene fully. He launched himself forward, a black-clad blur of motion. The kick was swift, precise, aimed at Gaara's side to knock the wind out of him and incapacitate him.
The impact was a shock to Gaara's system. He had never been truly struck before. The pain was a sharp, alien thing that stole his breath and sent him stumbling sideways, his body crumpling to the hard stone floor.
As Aizawa landed, his mind finally caught up with his actions. He took in the sight before him: the villain who had wielded enough power to bury him alive was a small, thin boy in strange clothes, now gasping on the ground. He looked no older than the students Aizawa was sworn to protect. The jarring dissonance of it all—the immense power and the childish frame—sent a wave of deep, professional unease through him. What is a child doing here?
Gaara pushed himself onto his elbows, his head spinning. A warm, metallic taste filled his mouth. He coughed, a wet, ragged sound. He lifted a trembling hand to his lips, and when he pulled it away, he saw it.
On the pale tips of his fingers was a smear of brilliant, shocking red.
Blood.
His blood.
The concept was so alien, so impossible, that his mind refused to process it. The sand had always protected him. It was his shield, his armor, his skin. It stopped everything. Bullets, blades, fists… nothing had ever gotten through. To be wounded, to bleed, meant that his shield had failed. And if his shield could fail, then his entire existence, his identity as the untouchable, the unkillable boy, was a lie.
He was not absolute. He was fragile. He could be broken.
The realization did not come as a thought. It came as a tidal wave of pure, unadulterated terror that shattered the foundations of his sanity.
A choked gasp escaped his lips. He stared at the blood on his fingers, his teal eyes wide with horror and disbelief.
"B-Blood…?" he whispered, his voice a broken, trembling thing. He looked at his hand again, as if hoping the red would disappear. It didn't. "My… my blood?"
The whisper grew, swelling into a sound of raw panic. He began to scramble backwards, away from Aizawa, away from the impossible truth on his fingertips.
"MY BLOOD!"
The sound that tore itself from his throat was not a yell of defiance or a cry of pain. It was a high, hysterical shriek of a child who has just witnessed a fundamental law of his universe shatter into a million pieces. It was a scream of pure, existential horror.
The sound was so raw, so filled with genuine terror, that it made Aizawa freeze for a half-second, a cold knot of something unpleasant—pity, perhaps, or guilt—tightening in his stomach.
Nearby, Shigaraki watched, his expression turning from surprise to utter disgust. He began scratching his neck with a violent, agitated fury.
"Pathetic," he hissed, his voice dripping with contempt. "So that's his limit? One little scratch and he breaks down completely? What a useless tool."
Kurogiri, ever the pragmatist, recognized the situation for what it was: a compromised asset and a highly dangerous, unengaged opponent. "This is not his battle to fight," he stated calmly.
A swirling vortex of purple and black opened silently on the ground beneath the screaming Gaara.
"This isn't your place," Kurogiri's voice echoed as Gaara began to sink into the warp. "Go cause trouble somewhere else."
Gaara was swallowed by the void, his terrified, unceasing scream of "IT'S MY BLOOD!!" being cut off with an abrupt, chilling finality as the portal snapped shut, leaving only a stunned Aizawa and a disgusted Shigaraki in the sudden, ringing silence.
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