Heroes were meant to save everyone.
That's what they always said on the news. That's what the advertisements told you. That's what the glossy posters in every convenience store claimed.But that night, when fire licked the edges of their family estate and smoke clawed at the windows like a dying beast, no one came.
No All Might crashing through the wall. No blinding light of justice. Only silence, followed by the soft, wet sound of flesh meeting steel.
Kaito Shinamori, just eight years old, had hidden in the wall panels of the training wing, clutching a tablet with shaking fingers. His father's muffled voice rang through the hidden earpiece, taut with urgency.
"Don't move. Don't make a sound. And don't look back."
He looked anyway.
Through the gap in the panel, he saw them, his parents, cornered, bleeding, fighting without their hero gear. Both had been pro heroes once. Disgraced and cast aside by the Hero Commission when their views on "systemic dependence on quirks" went public. They had dared to ask if people without quirks could still have a place on the battlefield.
That question cost them everything.
His mother collapsed first. His father went down fighting, until the final blow cracked the marble floor and the feed cut out.
The estate burned to the foundation that night.
And the child who emerged from the wreckage was no longer anyone's son.