Megumi Fushiguro was healing before my eyes. I could watch the effects happen in real time. It was truly amazing, far more advanced than Recovery Girl's quirk. I wanted to ask more, but Megumi wasn't in good enough shape for questions yet.
I had to put that thought aside.
As for pressing matters: we don't have enough food.
The emergency cracker rations I'd brought were gone after a day and that was a week ago.
A week...
That's roughly how long I've been trapped here. If I still had my phone, I could have been more precise, but I dropped it while saving Ryuen Kakeru and his "friend."
I asked Kakeru to watch over Megumi for now. I'm going out again and expand my search radius. There has to be more supplies up ahead.
Hopefully enough to keep us alive. We only have enough rations for today, and we're already starving. My hero school taught me a lot, but they never prepared me for actual starvation.
That kind of problem is unheard of in the field.
Now, the water seemed fine so far. I didn't smell any bad odors. A quick boil should be enough before drinking it.
This place... I don't know what it even is. A prison? Some sort of alternate dimension? We all came from different worlds, so there must be some kind of prerequisite for entering this hellhole.
I paused, staring at a floodlight beneath the still, unnaturally transparent water. Clean to an impossible degree. I'd never seen anything like it.
A sigh escaped me. I couldn't help wondering what my classmates and the other heroes were doing elsewhere. I could still remember how I ended up here, clear as day.
Yuga Aoyama wanted to talk to me. The traitor from U.A. Apparently he was also quirkless and made a deal with All for One: a quirk in exchange for enrollment, then becoming an informant.
The whole conversation was a ruse. A trap. All for One ordered Aoyama to lure me away from the others, threatening Aoyama's parents. Aoyama agreed but we've prepared a counter.
Aoyama and his parents were under the brainwashing quirk of Hitoshi Shinso, bypassing All for One's lie detections.
Now, our plan had been the best we could think of at the time: separate the villains using warping quirks. However, tragedy struck when the ground started shaking.
At first we thought it was just an earthquake. My danger sense didn't activate, so I paid it no mind until the tremors grew violent.
Then the sky turned green as the ground "glitched." It was like in a video game where you turn too fast and the graphics don't render properly.
We thought All for One did this, but he looked just as surprised. He assumed we were behind it. I don't know what else happened because I immediately sank to the ground.
The sensation was disorienting. Like suddenly finding yourself suspended in air before fading to black.
I wonder if someone from my world is stuck here somewhere. A smirk crept across my face thinking of All for One trapped eternally in this place. That'd be a blessing.
As I walked, I noticed a small circular entrance set into the wall. I crouched through it, hoping to find something useful on the other side.
Nothing or at least nothing worthwhile. Just a sterile white room with tiled floors and no windows or pools visible from this angle. An elevated lifeguard chair sat in one corner, the kind you'd see by a pool or beach. Useless here.
I crawled back through the entrance and kept walking. There has to be something here eventually. To distract myself from the gnawing hunger, I started taking notes. It helped.
I jotted down my observations: the impossible space, the endless room of pools, the blank white behind the ceiling windows, and everyone I'd met so far.
I was so absorbed in note-taking that I walked straight into a wall. "Ah, damn." The architecture made no sense. Random pillars, random turns, then suddenly random pools.
In my peripheral vision, something red caught my eye. I lazily turned toward it, and my eyes bulged in surprise: a vending machine. Finally!
Without hesitation, I threw myself at it, boots-first through the glass as it shattered from the impact. Vending machine food isn't exactly gourmet, but beggars can't be choosers right now. All Might taught me that being a proper hero meant maintaining a proper diet—but survival takes priority over nutrition standards.
I quickly gathered what I could and stuffed snacks into my hoodie pockets. For once, this place offered something tangible. A small glimmer of hope in this wretched nightmare.
Back at the makeshift camp, I dumped the scavenged treats onto the floor. They plopped down with a dull thud. That's strange...
"Where'd you find all this!?"
Kakeru muttered as he grabbed a nutrition bar and tore it open, only to discover a flat rectangular object inside with a bar texture instead of an actual nutrition. "What?!"
"No way. It can't be." I muttered, opening one after another.
"They're all fakes!?" I grabbed several more, each containing nothing but impostors. Then when I opened what might have been the last decent-looking bar, there it was.
The unmistakable sight of an actual food.
I took a bite and confirmed: a genuine nutrition bar.
Kakeru even found one real among the fakes. Out of over a hundred items scavenged, only seven were actually edible. What a waste, but at least enough to keep us going for now. We'll need to search again soon if we want more than just scraps.
Megumi was looking better by far. He'd curled into a corner, deep in thought. The desperation in his eyes was clear as day, but he wasn't giving up. That's good.
We can't surrender to this place.
"We're getting out of here one way or another," I declared as I stood.
"We need to go back and defeat that thing again. This time for real. I'm going to give it everything I've got." The words left my mouth and Megumi's gaze slightly lifted from the ground to meet mine.