The night in Osaka collapsed, heavy and soot-stained, over the ruins of the Shin-Sekai district. The air was a thick, humid shroud that tasted of salt from the bay and the metallic tang of old industrial grease.
Yoshi Abara moved through the streets like a ghost haunting his own life. He had waited until the rhythmic breathing of Makoto and Akira had settled into the heavy silence of exhaustion, and the low, mechanical hum of Koichi's medical monitor had become a part of the room's heartbeat. Only then did he slip out, pulling the hood of his dark sweater over his head.
He told himself he just needed air. He told himself he needed to scout the perimeter.
He wandered away from the vibrant, neon-lit hubs of the mutant sanctuary, moving toward the places the city had forgotten. He passed a few stragglers, mutants with elongated limbs or chitinous plating who looked at his "standard" silhouette with a mixture of suspicion and a stutter of warning, their eyes darting to the shadows as if expecting the worst of man to materialize from the fog.
Yoshi didn't dwell on their fear. He understood the structural weight of their suffering, but his heart was a clinical place, focused on the immediate geometry of survival.
Eventually, the pavement turned to cracked, weed-choked gravel. He found himself in a secluded pocket of the city that seemed frozen in a different era. This was a ghost zone, a cluster of worn-out brick tenements that, in any other part of Japan, would have been torn down and refurbished already. Here, they were left to rot, home only to the scuttle of rodents and the slow, rhythmic click of beetles in the walls.
Yoshi stopped before a crumbling brick wall covered in layers of sun-bleached, rain-battered posters. He saw faces.
They were "human" faces, standard-looking men and women with soft features and wide, frightened eyes. The ink was faded, the paper yellowed with decades of neglect. As Yoshi leaned in, reading the small, cramped kanji at the bottom of the posters, a cold weight settled in his stomach.
He was looking at the remnants of the Pure Registry System.
The law was a relic of the era just after the Great Purge, a systematic effort to "preserve" the human genome. It was a legal wall built of spite, it forbade any "standard" human from marrying, cohabiting, or intermating with a person of the mutant class. The posters weren't for missing persons, they were public indictments.
"Citizen Tanaka Reiko. Status: Denounced. Reason: Unsanctioned union with Class-4 Heteromorph."
The punishments were listed like a grocery bill of human misery. A denouncing of status. The removal of the family name. Revocation of citizenship. Imprisonment.
But it went deeper, forced sterilization for both parties and any offspring produced by the union. To the State of that time, love was a biological infection that had to be cauterized. If the law didn't kill you, the social exile did, pushing you out of the cities and into the ghettos of the south.
Yoshi stood perfectly still, his hand hovering over the faded image of a woman who looked no older than twenty. He thought about the world he had inhabited.
Under All Might's reign, the world looked magical. The prejudices seemed like small, fading embers, the villainy was something that could be punched into submission. Everything looked great because the "Symbol of Peace" was a sun that blinded everyone to the shadows.
He couldn't imagine living in the time these posters were printed. A time where every breath was fuelled by spite, where misery was a civic duty, and where hatred was the only currency that never devalued.
And thinking on it more, it wasn't even super long ago. If Yoshi were born with grandparents, it would have been a time they lived in, maybe even participated in.
"It is a poor sight, isn't it?"
The voice didn't startle Yoshi. It was too deep, too resonant, and too calm to trigger his combat reflexes. It was a ragged, gravelly baritone that felt strangely soothing, like the sound of a distant ocean or the rumble of a mountain shifting in its sleep.
Yoshi didn't turn around immediately. He felt the shift in the air though, a sudden, intense radiation of bloodlust that should have made his skin crawl, but it was tempered by a strange, predatory stillness. His blood hummed a warning, but it wasn't the frantic scream it gave for Hawks or Junji. It was a low, respectful thrum.
A man stepped up beside him, his presence so massive it seemed to warp the very shadows of the alley. He was tall, broader than any man Yoshi had ever seen in person, barring All Might, and he moved with a fluid, silent grace that suggested he wasn't walking, but gliding through the world. He wore a heavy, traditional indigo yukata, and a wide-brimmed bamboo kasa hat cast a deep shadow over his features.
From beneath the brim, Yoshi caught the shimmer of gold and gray fur, and the glint of eyes that looked like amber pits of ancient fire.
"The history of this nation is a series of burials," the man said, looking at the posters with Yoshi. "Most of what you see here will be lost forever. The children of these unions... if they weren't executed in secret, they were sterilized and left to wither. There are so few of them left now that the world has forgotten they were ever born. And those who survived? They have stayed silent for so long that they probably can no longer bring themselves to care."
Yoshi turned his head slightly, acknowledging the giant. "It's tragic," he said, his voice level. "A dark time. It's hard to believe the world was ever this... small."
The man rumbled, a sound that shook Yoshi's ribs. "Small? No, boy. The world was honest then. Hatred has a way of clarifying the soul. Today? Today is much darker, because the hatred has nowhere to go, so it rots from the inside out."
The stranger stepped closer, and Yoshi noticed the slight tremble in the man's massive, fur-clad hands, not a tremble of age, but of a repressed, tectonic energy. Tucked into the folds of his yukata was a simple, black-lacquered katana.
"I have been in a cage for a very long time," the stranger continued, his voice echoing in the narrow alley. "And when I came out, I noticed that the world had traded its silver blades for glass screens. The people of this nation... they are being marketed to every second of their lives. Especially when it comes to heroes. Heroism is no longer a virtue, it is a product. A flashy, neon-lit addiction meant to fuel the hunger of the masses."
The man let out a dry, hacking laugh. "I walk the streets and I see them. Everyone has their heads down, staring into their glowing rectangles. They are gambling with their time, their money, and their souls. They try to lie to themselves, don't they? They call it 'predicting' or 'investing,' but it is the same old fever. And if it isn't the screens, it is the alcohol, the drugs, the sex... and now, the battle. They watch the 'Harvest' leaderboard and bet on it in secret like it's a game, cheering for the blood because they've forgotten how it feels to bleed."
Yoshi nodded slowly. He saw the logic in the man's words, a cynical resonance that matched his own observations. "Addictions," Yoshi said. "If it wasn't those, something else would just pop up to fill the void. People can't just be empty."
"Because the void is filled with hate," the man growled, his voice losing its soothing edge and turning into a predatory snarl. "A deep, bottomless pit of hate that every living person has for themselves first. They hate that they aren't the heroes of their own lives. They hate that they are trapped in their 'standard' lives. And so, they take that hate and they pour it onto their neighbour. They pour it onto the 'impurity.' They pour it onto their 'villain.'"
Yoshi felt the temperature in the street drop. He turned to face the man fully, his hands slowly sliding out of his pockets. He noticed something strange. The man spoke of phone addiction and hero-worship as if they were new, terrifying discoveries, things that had been a part of the cultural fabric for half a century. He talked about "coming out of a cage" into a world he didn't recognize.
And despite his graying fur and the ancient weight of his voice, the man's body looked... young. He had the physical vitality of a man in his early forties, his muscles coiled and tight, his posture lacking the stoop of the elder that Yoshi thought he was.
"The hate has only gotten stronger since I was taken," the man said, his eyes locking onto Yoshi's. "But the average man has learned how to hide it better. They wear smiles and suits while they sharpen their knives."
The stranger's hand drifted toward the hilt of his sword. The bloodlust in the air suddenly expanded, a crushing, gravitational force that made the brick walls seem to groan.
"I have gained a new like, boy," the man whispered, a terrifyingly serene look crossing his face. "I find I feel a little pleasure in being the first. The first true monster to live within the walls of Tartarus. The one they couldn't break, so they had to bury."
Yoshi's brow furrowed. He felt himself reacting to the man's presence, the spatial fabric around them beginning to shimmer and tear. He knew the legends. He knew his history.
The man tilted his kasa hat back, revealing a face of gold and obsidian fur, a visage of predatory nobility that had once been the nightmare of the White Standard. He looked at Yoshi with a dead, hollow intensity.
"Do you know who I am, little bird?"
Yoshi didn't blink. He felt the obsidian vines of his quirk tightening around his arms, ready to lash out. He felt the weight of the "Age of Ash" and their modern age colliding in this one, broken street.
"I know," Yoshi said, his voice ringing out with a cold, final certainty.
Yoshi's eyes met the amber pits of the tiger.
"You are the Amur Tiger."
___
The silence in the alleyway was so thick it felt like a physical weight, pressing against Yoshi's lungs. The Amur Tiger stood as a titan of gold and obsidian, his presence radiating a bloodlust so ancient and refined.
Yoshi felt the vibration of the Ripple in his marrow, but for the first time since he'd woken up in this world, he didn't want to answer the call of violence. He held his hands out, palms open, pale in the moonlight.
"I didn't come here to fight," Yoshi said, his voice level despite the frantic drum of his heart. "I was actually searching for someone else. A doctor."
The Tiger didn't move. From beneath the shadow of his bamboo kasa hat, his amber eyes remained fixed on Yoshi, unblinking and predatory. The tiger rumbled.
Kōga stepped forward, his boots silent on the cracked pavement. He ignored Yoshi's plea for peace, his mind seemingly miles away, trapped in a history Yoshi had only read about in the censored textbooks of UA.
"I have read the books they write about me," Kōga said, his voice a ragged, soothing baritone that felt like a burial shroud. "They say I am a creature of self-hatred. They say I hunted the White Standard because I loathed my own reflection, and that I hated my own people because they were a reminder of my 'beastly' nature. They tell the world I am a tragedy of psychology."
Yoshi took a cautious step back, his hand twitching. "You spent sixty years in the dark, Kōga. No visitors. No light. No world. You come out of all that time, and you still carry that weight? That's... that's incredibly sad."
Kōga's lips pulled back in a grim, silent snarl, revealing teeth the size of daggers. "Sad? No. It is honest. My hate for myself has not vanished, little bird. It has simply matured. It has changed direction. It no longer just burns me, it wants to curse every facet of this rotting society. The heroes who play at virtue. The villains who play at freedom. The civilians who hide their phones and their eyes. And yes... the mutants who beg for scraps that their masters don't even want to throw at them. I find it all so fundamentally wrong."
He stopped, his massive frame towering over Yoshi. "I was a cursed child. Never truly loved. Never truly wanted. My mother... she would have been one of those faces on the wall. A 'pure' girl who made the mistake of loving a monster. I was sterilized before I could even talk, a biological error caught by the Registry. My father's execution was a story I was never told, a secret kept behind closed doors."
Yoshi backed away further, the intensity of the man's aura making it hard to draw a full breath.
"For a time," Kōga continued, his voice dropping to a whisper, "she loved me. I could feel it. I remember the warmth of her hands before the world turned cold. But as I grew older, as I came home with more scars from the boys in the district, that love turned to annoyance. And that annoyance turned to a visceral, jagged hate. I was the face of the choice she made as a young and dumb twenty-year-old. Every time she looked at me, she saw her own exile. She saw the life she threw away for a beast."
Yoshi felt a pang of something he hadn't expected: genuine empathy. "I'm... I'm sorry to hear that, Kōga."
The Tiger tilted his head, a bird-like movement that was terrifyingly out of place on such a massive body. He reached up and lifted the wide bamboo hat, revealing his face fully. The fur was thick, streaked with silver and obsidian, and his scars were like map lines of a forgotten war.
"She was the first person my quirk activated for," Kōga said, his eyes locking onto Yoshi's with a dead, hollow intensity. "After I consumed her, I realized her quirk could sniff out the emotions of others. Their fear, their lust, their petty little rages. And when I looked in the mirror, with her blood still warm on my mouth, I didn't feel guilt. I didn't feel horror. All I felt... was apathy. The hate she had felt for me was a hate I had begun to feel for myself. It was a wave I believed I would drown in. A wave that everyone around me was living in, and no one was afraid to share."
The air suddenly snapped. The "Ripple" in Yoshi's blood screamed a final, desperate warning.
Kōga threw his kasa hat at Yoshi. It was a casual toss, spinning through the air with a velocity that made it hum. Yoshi's vision was momentarily blurred by the wide bamboo disk, and in that split second, the predator moved.
Yoshi didn't think, he reacted. He threw his body to the left, his feet sliding on the gravel.
SHING.
A long, silver katana pierced the space where Yoshi's ribs had been a heartbeat ago. The strike was silent, eerily so. There was no sound of a sword being drawn, no metallic ring. It was a phantom movement.
Yoshi scrambled back, his hands glowing with the distorted light of the Ripple. "Wait! I told you..."
Kōga didn't wait. He didn't speak. He became a blur of indigo and gold. He moved with a biological impossibility, his massive weight seemingly irrelevant to his speed. He was a god of the hunt.
Yoshi clapped his hands together, releasing a "Spatial Burst" to create distance, but Kōga simply walked through the expansion of air as if it were a mild breeze. Yoshi lunged into the air, hopping atop a crumbling brick chimney. He grabbed a massive chunk of debris, using his distance control to make it weightless as he hurled it toward the Tiger.
"Singularity!" Yoshi roared, collapsing the space in front of the debris to accelerate it to terminal velocity.
Kōga didn't dodge. He raised his sword, the blade of the White Standard, the needle of Refinement, and performed a single, vertical stroke.
The massive stone block didn't shatter. It didn't explode. It simply separated into two perfect, clinical halves that slid past Kōga without touching him. There was no impact, no resistance.
What is that? Yoshi thought, sweat stinging his eyes. My space... I wrapped a shroud around that stone! He shouldn't have been able to slice it like that!
Yoshi leaped from the chimney as Kōga levelled the entire structure with a backhand strike. They moved out of the alley and into a nearby municipal park, a wide, desolate space of frozen grass and dead trees. In the center of the park stood a weathered bronze statue of a hero holding a shield, a monument to a peace that no longer existed.
Yoshi landed in a defensive stance. He was breathing hard, his lungs still burning from the salt water and the mist of his earlier fight. He focused on his "Spatial Shroud", an advanced application of the Ripple.
Think of it like an ocean, Yoshi told himself. The world is the big space. I'm creating a separate, secondary space in a layer around my skin. It's like putting a layer of oil between two sheets of paper. Nothing from the outside should be able to touch the inner sheet because they aren't in the same spatial dimension.
Kōga was standing twenty feet away, his sword lowered. He looked at Yoshi with a gaze that suggested he was looking at a piece of fruit he was about to peel.
"You control space it looks like. That's certainly new," Kōga's voice was a low growl.
Kōga vanished.
Yoshi's eyes dilated. He didn't see the movement. He didn't even see the sword. He only saw a sudden, white flash.
SHHH-TUCK.
Yoshi's right arm, from the shoulder down, simply ceased to be a part of his body.
There was a moment of absolute, horrifying stillness. Yoshi stared at the air where his arm should have been. Then, he looked down. His arm was lying on the grass, the fingers still twitching, the cut so clean with blood seemingly flowing endlessly. The tissue was perfectly severed, as if the space between his shoulder and his elbow had been erased.
"Aaaaggh!" Yoshi screamed, more out of shock than pain. He lunged back, his left hand grabbing his severed limb.
Kōga stood where Yoshi had been, his blade glistening with a sterile, white light. "The cut is clean," Kōga noted, his voice clinical. "Refinement ignores the resistance of the flesh. Your cells still believe they are connected. If you are fast enough, you can still save the meat."
Yoshi, trembling violently, slammed the stump of his arm against his shoulder. He didn't even have to use the Ripple to force a mend. The "Refinement" had been so precise, so conceptually pure, that the biological structures of his body recognized each other instantly. The nerves re-connected, the bone fused, and the skin sealed with a faint, white scar.
Yoshi clenched and unclenched his right fist, the feeling returning in a cold, electric rush. He spun to his left just as another strike whistled past his ear, cutting a strand of his hair.
He's cutting through the shroud, Yoshi realized, his mind reeling. He's not fighting my space. He's refining the concept of 'resistance' out of the air. My shroud is just 'noise' to him.
The battle moved into the open grass. Yoshi was no longer the aggressor, he was a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf. Kōga moved on all fours now, a massive, indigo-clad predator. He was faster than Hawks, more brutal than the asshole on the plane and in control of his prowess where All Might lacked.
Yoshi tried to take to the air, using a series of spatial bursts to propel himself upward, but a sudden, sharp pain exploded in his ankle.
"Gah!"
He looked down. Kōga had bitten him. The Tiger's teeth were soaked in Yoshi's blood, his amber eyes glowing with a feral delight. Yoshi hadn't even seen him move through the grass.
I am prey, Yoshi realized, a cold, primitive fear finally breaking through his resolve. He's not just fighting me. He's hunting me.
Yoshi flipped backward over a horizontal strike, his coat being shredded by the wind of the blade. As he reached the apex of his jump, he stretched his arms out.
"Ripple: BURST!"
He snapped his fingers. The space around the Amur Tiger didn't just expand, it shattered. The vibration was so intense it pulverized the grass into green dust and cracked the concrete base of the shield statue.
Kōga was caught in the center. He coughed out a thick spray of blood, his ribs audibly snapping under the spatial pressure. His eyes rolled back for a second, and he slumped toward the ground.
Yoshi landed, his chest heaving, his lungs burning. He held his breath, waiting for the smoke to clear. He saw the mangled, bloody form of the Tiger. He felt a wave of nausea. I killed him. I killed a legend.
But then...
Then, the world broke.
Kōga's body didn't stay broken. It didn't heal like a normal person's would, there was no knitting of flesh, no closing of wounds. Instead, his entire biological form seemed to shimmer. The blood flowed backward into his pores. The snapped bones clicked into place with a sound like a rewinding clock. His graying fur darkened, his muscles becoming even more defined and youthful.
His eyes were no longer amber, they were a burning, molten gold.
This was Turritopsis. The immortal reversion. Instead of dying, Kōga had forced his cells to transdifferentiate, reverting his entire being to an earlier, undamaged developmental state.
"You... you're still alive," Yoshi gasped, his hands trembling.
Kōga didn't answer with words. He answered with a roar.
It wasn't a sound. It was a physical shockwave of predatory intent. Yoshi felt the air in his lungs turn to lead. His muscles locked in place, his very soul paralyzed by the primal, apex authority of the Tiger's voice. He was a statue of flesh, unable to move, unable to even blink.
Kōga dashed.
He hit Yoshi with a kick that sent the boy flying fifty feet across the park. Yoshi hit the bronze shield statue with a sickening thud, the metal denting under the impact. He slid down, his arms outstretched, his vision swimming.
The Tiger was on him in a heartbeat.
Kōga didn't use the sword this time. He used his hands. He grabbed Yoshi's palms and slammed them against the bronze surface of the shield statue.
"Stop!" Yoshi croaked, the blood from his lungs bubbling in his throat.
Kōga looked at him with a gaze of pure, unadulterated anger, not for Yoshi, but for the world that had dared to produce such a brat.
"You talk of heroes and doctors," Kōga hissed, his breath smelling of ozone and his mother's ancient blood. "You talk of my tragedy as unfortunate. But you are just another piece of clutter, boy. Another error in the fabric."
Kōga's sword appeared in his hand. With a terrifying, casual movement, he drove the blade through Yoshi's hands, pinning them to the bronze shield.
"AAAGGGGHHH!"
The scream was cut short. Kōga didn't stop there. He leaned in, his face inches from Yoshi's, and with a final, brutal thrust, he drove the sword of Refinement directly through Yoshi Abara's heart.
The blade passed through the boy's chest, through the bronze statue, and out the other side. There was no resistance. No sound. Just the clean, white light of the White Standard.
Yoshi's head slumped forward. His eyes went wide, reflecting the cold Osaka stars. The "Demon-God" hung from the shield of a fallen hero, his blood staining the bronze, as the Amur Tiger stood before him, the apex of a world that had forgotten how to show mercy.
"Go to your peace, little bird," Kōga whispered, letting go of the hilt. "There are no heroes where you're going."