Chapter 11: A Symphony of Screams
The world dissolved into a sickening, lightless vertigo. Gaara's scream was swallowed by the void as Kurogiri's warp consumed him, tearing him away from the sight of his own blood and the hero who had revealed his fragility. There was a moment of profound dislocation, a feeling of being turned inside out, and then he was violently expelled, tumbling out of a swirling black gate and onto sharp, unforgiving ground.
He landed hard on a steep, rocky slope, his body rolling several feet before coming to a stop against a large boulder. The impact sent a fresh spike of pain through his side where Aizawa had kicked him, a raw, alien sensation that reignited his panic. The air was different here; cooler, thinner, and filled with the scent of damp earth and cold stone. He was no longer in the open plaza but in a deep, shadowy ravine, surrounded by towering, man-made cliffs meant to simulate a landslide disaster zone.
But Gaara saw none of it. His universe had collapsed to the single, traumatizing truth of his own mortality.
He scrambled into a sitting position, his back pressed hard against the cold rock. He was hyperventilating, his breaths coming in ragged, shallow gasps. He clutched his head, his fingers digging into his scalp as if he could physically claw out the terror that had taken root there. The world was a blur of spinning rock and shadow.
Blood. It came out. He hit me and it came out. My blood.
The thought was a frantic, repeating drumbeat in the chaos of his mind. He kept touching his split lip with a trembling finger, half-expecting to see it still bleeding, to re-confirm the horror. His entire life, the sand had been an extension of his body, a perfect, impenetrable shell. Pain was what happened to other people. Wounds were what other people suffered. To be breached, to be made to bleed, was to have the core principle of his existence proven false. If he was not untouchable, then what was he?
His fear was so absolute, so consuming, that it became a sound. A low, wounded keen escaped his throat, rising in pitch until it was a raw, animalistic scream of pure psychic agony. The sound echoed off the high rock walls of the ravine, a lonely, desperate cry in the heart of the simulated disaster.
Elsewhere in the same zone, the disaster was already over.
Shoto Todoroki stood calmly amidst the fruits of his labor. A dozen low-level villains were frozen solid around him, trapped in grotesque poses of aggression, their faces masks of shock beneath a thick layer of rime. He had dealt with them in less than thirty seconds, his Quirk an overwhelming force of nature that they had stood no chance against. For him, it had been a simple, logical process: identify threats, neutralize threats. Now, there was only silence, broken by the faint creak of the ice settling around its captives.
"Wow, Todoroki-kun, you're amazing!" a disembodied voice chirped from nearby.
Todoroki glanced to his side, where a floating pair of gloves and boots—the only visible parts of Hagakure Toru—were jogging on the spot. "It was a straightforward application of my Quirk," he replied, his tone flat and devoid of pride. "They were not significant threats."
"Still! You took them all out in a flash!" Hagakure said. "I barely had to do anything… Say," she paused, her boots turning in a specific direction. "Do you hear that?"
Todoroki fell silent, his heterochromatic eyes scanning the ravine. At first, it was faint, but then he heard it. A high, thin sound that seemed to tear at the air. It wasn't a battle cry or a yell of anger. It was a scream of pure, unadulterated distress.
"It's coming from over there," he said, his expression hardening with suspicion. "One of the villains we missed?"
"I don't know," Hagakure's voice replied, a new note of uncertainty in it. "It doesn't sound like they're fighting… it sounds like they're… scared?"
Driven by a cautious curiosity, they began to move towards the source of the sound, navigating the treacherous, rocky terrain. As they rounded a massive, artificial cliff face, they saw him.
It was one of the villains from the plaza. The boy with the strange gourd and the dead, empty eyes. He was huddled at the base of a boulder, clutching his head and screaming as if he were being tortured. He looked small, pathetic, and utterly broken. Todoroki and Hagakure exchanged a look—or, Todoroki looked at where he assumed her face was—of shared confusion. This was not the image of a villain they had in their minds. This was a child having a complete breakdown.
It was their presence, the slight crunch of their feet on the gravel, that finally broke through Gaara's prison of panic. His screaming stopped abruptly. He slowly lifted his head, and his tear-filled, terrified eyes landed on them. He saw Todoroki's distinct, powerful form. He saw the faint outline of a U.A. uniform on Hagakure. He saw… heroes.
In his shattered mind, a new, desperate logic began to form, a way to give his formless terror a target. His pain needed a cause. His blood needed a culprit.
A Hero hurt me. A Hero made me bleed.
They are Heroes.
Therefore, they are the cause of my pain. They are here to hurt me again.
The terror in his eyes did not vanish. It twisted, curdled, and reforged itself into something else. It became a pure, incandescent rage. His expression, which had been one of broken fear, hardened into a mask of absolute hatred.
He struggled to his feet, his small body trembling with a new, violent energy.
"Heroes…" he rasped, his voice raw and broken from the screaming. He pointed a trembling finger at them. "You hurt me! You make me bleed!" His voice cracked on the last word, turning into a sob of fury. "You are all… my enemies!"
Todoroki's calm demeanor did not change, but his eyes sharpened. The shift was instantaneous and absolute. The boy's distress had vanished, replaced by a killing intent so potent it was almost a physical force. He didn't need to understand the reason. He only needed to recognize the threat.
Without a word of warning, Todoroki stomped his right foot. The ground groaned as a massive, jagged wall of ice erupted between them, a glacier born in an instant. It was a perfect defensive maneuver, a crystalline fortress meant to halt any possible attack and give him time to assess. A wave of frigid air washed over the ravine.
But he was trying to cage a tsunami with a picket fence.
The sight of the wall, another hero power being used against him, was the final trigger. A guttural roar ripped its way out of Gaara's throat, and the very ground beneath them exploded.
The sand, infused with all of his pain, his terror, and his newfound rage, surged upwards not as a shield, but as an avalanche. It struck the ice wall with the force of a tidal wave hitting a cliff. For a moment, the ice held, groaning and cracking under the impossible pressure. The air filled with the sound of a million tiny impacts, a deafening hiss of grinding sand against crystal. Then, with a sound like a series of cannons firing at once, the glacier shattered into a billion glittering shards.
Todoroki's eyes widened in disbelief. He had never seen his ice wall, his absolute defense, destroyed so effortlessly. This was not a Quirk. This was a natural disaster.
The sand did not stop. It continued to surge, growing in volume, a monstrous, churning wave of rock and grit that threatened to fill the entire ravine. As it swelled, the sand around Gaara's own body began to shift and crawl. It crept up his face, and with a sickening, grinding sound, the particles on his right temple coalesced, twisted, and grew, forming a sharp, demonic horn of compressed sand. His teal eyes began to glow with a feral, inhuman light.
"We have to move. Now," Todoroki said, his voice grim. He reached out and grabbed onto the sleeve of Hagakure's uniform.
"Hey! Watch the hands!" she yelped, a surreal complaint in the face of impending doom.
Todoroki ignored her. He stomped his foot again, but this time he didn't create a wall. He created a path. A long, smooth slide of ice shot out before them. Planting his feet, he began to surf down the path with incredible speed, pulling the invisible girl along with him, always staying just ahead of the roaring, building wave of destruction.
He risked a glance back. The sand tsunami now towered over them, scraping the top of the artificial cliffs, a moving mountain of death. And at its crest, impossibly, stood the small, horned figure of the boy, no longer screaming in terror, but roaring in absolute, world-ending rage.
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