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Chapter 115 - Chapter 112: A Little Girl

Welllllll guess who is here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Somewhere far from U.A., in a place that sunlight had never touched, a little girl was crying.

The room was small and windowless, the walls were grey concrete, stained in places with things that a child should never have to see. The floor was cold... made out of bare stone, no carpet, no rug, nothing to separate a small body from the chill that seeped up from below.

There were toys scattered across the floor. A stuffed bear with one eye missing. A set of wooden blocks, untouched, still in the pattern someone had arranged them in weeks ago. A picture book with its pages torn. They had been placed there to make the room look like a child's bedroom, but they fooled nobody. Not the people who put them there. Not the child who lived among them.

The toys were props, and the room? This was no room; it was a cell.

In the corner, curled into the smallest shape a human body could make, a girl sat with her knees pulled to her chest, her face buried in her arms, her shoulders shaking with sobs that had no sound left in them. She had been crying for so long that her eyes stopped producing tears. What remained were hitched breaths.

She was small. Too small for her age, her body was thin in a way that showed someone who skipped meals. Her hair was white, falling in tangled strands around her face. And from the right side of her forehead, a small horn protruded.

Her wrists were bandaged heavily. Layer upon layer of white tape wrapped around both arms from her palms to her elbows, hiding what lay beneath. The bandages were fresh — someone had changed them recently — but faint spots of red had already begun to seep through.

She whispered into her knees.

"Why..."

Her voice was barely there. A sound so small it could have been mistaken for the building settling.

"Why is this happening..."

Her fingers curled tighter around her arms. The bandages pressed against her skin, and she winced, but the pain was so familiar that it barely bothered her anymore. Pain had become the background noise of her existence, like the hum of the fluorescent light above her that never turned off.

"Why do I have to go through this?"

She rocked slightly trying to comfort herself.

"Did I do something wrong?"

The question remained unanswered.

"Do I deserve this?"

Again, nobody answered. Nobody ever answered. The toys stared at her with button eyes.

CLANK.

The door to her cell opened as the metal bolts snapped open.

"Hey, Eri!!!!"

The voice was loud, casual, and completely indifferent to the terror it caused.

Eri's body jerked. Every muscle locked. Her rocking stopped, and so did her breathing. She pressed herself deeper into the corner, trying to make herself smaller, trying to disappear into the concrete, trying to become nothing, because nothing couldn't be hurt.

A man walked in, looked at her, and laughed.

"Relax, kid. I was bored waiting outside, so I came to watch TV." He gestured at the small television mounted on the wall near the ceiling, its screen dark. "You don't use it anyway."

Eri said nothing. She couldn't. Her jaw was clenched so tight her teeth ached. Her eyes were fixed on the floor in front of his feet, because looking at his face meant acknowledging that he was real, and acknowledging that he was real meant acknowledging that this was her life.

The man shrugged, dropped into the single chair in the room, pulled out a remote, and turned on the television.

The screen flickered to life, and the man put on a news broadcast. Live coverage from a helicopter, the camera shaking slightly from the rotor wash, showing an aerial view of a massive stadium surrounded by emergency vehicles and flashing lights.

A female reporter's voice came as she was reporting live.

"..... reporting live from above U.A. High School's Sports Festival, where what was supposed to be a celebration of young heroes has turned into a full-scale villain attack. Approximately ten minutes ago, ten creatures identified as Nomus — bioengineered supervillains previously encountered during the USJ incident — were dropped into the centre of the arena along with a villain identified as Muscular, a convicted murderer who had gone missing years ago."

The camera panned across the stadium, where smoke rose from multiple points. Sections of the arena wall were cracked. Emergency barriers of concrete and ice divided the stands into protected zones.

"The response from the pro heroes on scene has been nothing short of extraordinary. Endeavor, the Number Two Hero, single-handedly engaged and destroyed one of the Nomus using his Hellflame quirk. Witnesses report that the creature was incinerated within minutes, unable to regenerate against the intensity of his flames."

Footage cut to a replay which showed Endeavor standing over a charred, motionless mass of blackened tissue, his body burning like a furnace, the arena floor molten beneath his feet.

"The pro hero team of Kamui Woods, Mt. Lady, and Death Arms successfully contained and neutralised three additional Nomus through coordinated efforts. Kamui Woods used his Lacquered Chain Prison technique to immobilise the creatures while Mt. Lady's size provided critical crowd protection. Death Arms provided the physical force needed to keep the Nomus grounded."

Another clip. Mt. Lady, in her giant form, standing over a bound Nomu, while Kamui's wooden tendrils held two others in place.

"In perhaps the most remarkable development, three first-year students from U.A.'s hero course — identified as Shoto Todoroki, Katsuki Bakugo, and Izuku Midoriya — engaged and defeated a Nomu that had breached the civilian sections of the stands."

The footage shifted. The camera had caught the fight from above, where a Nomu whose body could shift into a viscous, slime-like state was rampaging through the lower stands. Todoroki's ice walls kept reforming to block its path, but the creature liquified and flowed around each barrier, re-solidifying on the other side.

Bakugo came from above, driving the Nomu into the concrete with an explosion. But the moment his hands touched its body, the slime absorbed the impact, wrapping around Bakugo's arms, trying to engulf him. He detonated point-blank, blasting the slime off, but it reformed instantly.

Then Midoriya appeared. He had figured it out — the Nomu couldn't maintain its slime form and its solid form simultaneously. When it was liquid, it couldn't hit. When it was solid, it could be hit. The trick was timing.

Midoriya waited for the exact moment the Nomu solidified to throw a punch with everything he had. Before it could liquify again, Todoroki froze it solid — encasing its entire body in ice while it was still in its vulnerable solid state. Bakugo finished it with a concentrated explosion that shattered the frozen Nomu into pieces too small to regenerate.

"These three students, all fifteen years old, demonstrated combat abilities and tactical coordination that experts are already comparing to professional hero teams," the reporter continued.

The guard in the chair whistled. "Not bad for a bunch of kids."

"But perhaps the most shocking footage of the evening comes from the stadium rooftop, where an unidentified woman engaged a Nomu in single combat."

The screen showed helicopter footage of the rooftop fight. Even from the air, the speed of the exchange was visible. Sparks could be seen erupting across the roof like a fireworks display, two figures moving at speeds that the camera could barely track.

Then, in the final moment, with an explosion of a pink aura, the Nomu was diced into a hundred pieces.

"The woman has been identified as Mei Lin, a Chinese national and reported associate of President Ming of the Asian Hero Support Association. Her combat abilities appear to be on par with top-tier professional heroes. She eliminated the Nomu in a single decisive attack after what witnesses describe as a two-minute engagement in which she sustained only a minor injury."

The guard leaned forward. "Damn. She cut that thing into pieces? That's insane."

Eri had been trembling through the entire broadcast. She hadn't moved from her corner.

But something made her turn.

She didn't know what it was. A word. A tone. A shift in the reporter's voice that cut through the haze of her misery like a light through fog.

She raised her head. Just slightly. Just enough to see the screen through the curtain of her white hair.

The heroes were on screen. Standing tall. Endeavor with his flames. Mt. Lady towering above the stadium. The three students, battered but standing. Mei Lin on the rooftop, her blade fading into nothing.

They looked strong.... they looked confident..... they looked like people who could protect the world.

Eri stared at the screen.

Maybe one day, she thought. The thought was fragile, barely formed, like a soap bubble that would pop if she held it too tightly. Maybe one day... someone will come for me too.

The guard noticed her looking. He glanced at the screen, then back at her, and laughed.

"Don't overthink it, kid. They can't do shit."

Eri flinched.

"They all just care about how they look on camera. Nobody is actually crazy enough to-"

The television went red.

The helicopter had lurched sideways, the pilot banking hard to avoid something, and when the camera stabilised, the shot had changed.

The stadium was no longer the focus.

Behind the stadium, in the jungle that stretched across the hillside, a tornado of fire had erupted from the canopy.

The guard stared. "What the fuck is that?"

The helicopter circled closer. The camera zoomed in.

The tornado subsided, and what remained was something the reporter struggled to describe.

"W-we-we're seeing some kind of barrier that has formed in the middle of the forest. It appears to be a circular wall made entirely of red fire!"

The camera focused through the transparent barrier of red flame. Inside, the ground was scorched black. The trees were gone. Nothing remained but ash and heat and two figures.

One was massive, half-human, half-Nomu, muscle fibres layered across his body like armour.

The other was a boy.

"The individual inside the barrier has been identified as Akira Shuzenji, the first-year student who earlier today declared himself the Symbol of Fear during the Sports Festival pledge ceremony. He appears to have created this fire barrier to contain his fight with the villain Muscular."

The camera zoomed in on Akira's face.

To most viewers — to the reporter, to the millions watching at home, to the guard sitting in the chair — his expression looked blank. Empty. The face of someone who had shut down emotionally, who had gone somewhere inside themselves that couldn't be reached.

But Eri saw something different.

She saw it because she recognised it. She had seen it in her own reflection every day for as long as she could remember. In the bathroom mirror, in the dark screen of the television when it was off, in the puddles of water on the cell floor after they cleaned her room.

It wasn't emptiness. It was weight. The weight of something carried for so long that it had become part of the soul. It was the look of someone who had been hurt in a way that didn't heal, who had lost something that couldn't be replaced, who carried a pain so deep that it had settled into the foundation of who they were.

Then the boy on the screen opened his mouth.

"After this day," he said, his voice carrying through the microphone of a camera drone that had gotten close enough to pick up audio, "no kid will cry because of disgusting thing like you."

Eri's eyes widened.

The words hit her like something physical.

Her hands unclenched, and her shoulders dropped. The trembling that had been constant since the guard walked in slowed, then stopped.

Tears fell from her eyes, but not the tears of pain, of fear, of hopelessness, of a child who had given up on the world and the world had given up on her.

These were different.

She hiccupped as her small body shook, but not from fear. From something breaking loose inside her chest. Something that had been locked away, buried under layers of suffering and silence and the absolute certainty that nobody would ever come.

It... was hope....

She looked at the boy on the screen. At his crimson eyes. At the fire around him. At the weight on his face that matched the weight on hers.

And she nodded as beads of tears fell down her face.

"I will wait," she whispered.

The guard didn't hear her. He was too busy staring at the television, looking at the future symbol of fear.

Eri wiped her eyes with her bandaged wrists. She looked at the screen one more time. At the boy who had promised the world that no child would cry because of villains.

She held that promise in her chest like a candle flame.

And for the first time in years, she didn't feel cold.

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Hope it was not that bad. And trust me when i say this... I had something reallllllllllly dark, so I hope this is better. Plus i changed a few things here and there... hope its not too bad..

Anyway bye...........

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