The entity invading Yoshi's lungs pulsed with a nauseating, rhythmic hunger. This was not a mindless monster, but a man, a hero who had spent years in the shadows of the underworld, reaping bounties that the Commission didn't want on the official books.
His name was Kagehisa, known to other corners of the hero industry as Vesper.
His quirk, Aerosol Wraith, allowed him to convert his physical mass into a sentient, pressurized mist that could bypass any armour by simply flowing into the gaps. He was a specialist in "silent pacification," a man who turned the very air his targets breathed into their executioner.
As he funnelled himself into Yoshi's throat, Vesper caught sight of the figure air-walking across the gray Osaka sky. Lady Nagant, he thought, a flicker of genuine shock ripples through his gaseous form. The Commission did speak of the bounty on her head. If she's here for the Aftermath, the prize just got a lot more crowded.
Vesper didn't know about All For One, he only knew about the massive bounty on the heads of the Akira group. He had planned to bag the boy and the detective himself, but Nagant's presence changed the math.
He needed to finish this quickly. He watched through the hazy, translucent film of his own body as Akira and some woman dragged the unconscious Haimawari through the service exit of the apartment complex.
Go on, run, Vesper sneered internally, his misty limbs tightening around Yoshi's windpipe. Nagant can have the detective for all I care, the Commission still has a kill-order on her head. I'll take the kid, turn him in, and then maybe I'll be the one to collect the bounty on the legendary sniper's head, too.
Yoshi's face was bruised and beat, his hands clawing uselessly at the air. Vesper felt the boy's heart rate spiking, a frantic, dying drumbeat. He began to seep further, moving past the larynx and toward the bronchial tubes to ensure total unconsciousness.
"You're a sturdy little one, aren't you?" Vesper's voice gurgled inside Yoshi's own head, muffled by fluid. "But everybody needs to breathe."
Then, Vesper felt it.
It was a sensation that shouldn't have been possible for a man made of mist. It was a sharp, localized spike of agony, as if someone had taken a pair of tweezers and pinched a single atom of his being.
Yoshi wasn't trying to pull Vesper out. He was doing the opposite. In his suffocating delirium, Yoshi had focused the Ripple Effectinternally. He was collapsing the distance between the molecules of the gas inside his own lungs. He was trying to singularize Vesper's gaseous mass into a solid point of infinite pressure.
What is this? Vesper's consciousness recoiled. He's... he's crushing my very atoms!
Yoshi's eyes snapped open, bloodshot and burning with a primal, demonic light. He didn't discharge the "Burst" he had prepared for the building. Instead, he channelled every ounce of his remaining strength into his legs.
With a guttural, wet roar that bypassed his sealed throat, Yoshi threw himself forward. He didn't use the door. He didn't use the stairs.
He smashed through the exterior wall of the apartment, the reinforced concrete shattering like glass under the force of a spatial kick. He became a meteor of flesh and black-mist, falling from the fourth story. He hit the slanted roof of a neighbouring warehouse, the metal groaning as he slid down at a terrifying velocity, leaving a trail of spatial distortions in his wake.
Vesper screamed, a sound like steam escaping a pressurized valve, as the friction of the descent tore at his gaseous form.
"Crazy... kid!" Vesper hissed, trying to disengage, but Yoshi's internal singularization held him like a vice.
Yoshi reached the end of the roof and launched himself into the air, a broken arc against the morning sky. Below them lay the dark, freezing waters of the Osaka Bay.
SPLASH.
The impact was a hammer blow. The cold was absolute, a sudden, shocking reset to Yoshi's nervous system.
Under the water, the rules changed. Vesper's Aerosol Wraith quirk relied on the compressibility of air. In the dense, high-pressure environment of the deep water, his gaseous mass began to rapidly dissolve and scatter. The water rushed into Yoshi's open mouth, displacing the mist.
Vesper felt the crushing weight of the ocean and the agonizing "pinch" of Yoshi's ripple. He was being torn apart, half-dissolved by the bay, half-crushed by the boy's internal spatial shear.
Panic, cold and sharp, finally broke Vesper's resolve.
With a violent, explosive surge, the hero retreated. He erupted out of Yoshi's mouth and nose in a chaotic cloud of bubbles, his form ragged and thinning. He didn't stop to fight, he clawed his way toward the surface, his gaseous consciousness flickering on the edge of dissipation.
Deep below the surface, in the silent, green-black world of the bay, Yoshi Abara drifted. His lungs were a burning wreck of salt water and lingering mist, but for the first time in minutes, he was alone in his own body. He watched the shimmering light of the surface fade as he sank deeper, his consciousness swaying like kelp in the current.
___
The sky over Osaka was a bruised tapestry of charcoal and violet, but to Kaina Tsutsumi, it felt like a ceiling.
Once, she had loved the light. She had loved the idea of the "Hero" as a beacon, a figure of porcelain grace that stood between the innocent and the dark. She had reached for that light with hands that were meant to be soft, hands meant to be held in gratitude.
Instead, the Public Safety Commission had taken those hands and fashioned them into a biological weapon. They had painted her palms in a dark, warm red, a red that never truly dried, no matter how much she scrubbed at her soul.
She had played her role. She had been the poster girl with the lethal aim, the silent guardian of a peace built on top of a mass gravesite. But the weight of the bodies eventually crushed the pedestal. One bullet for her handler, a lifetime of silence in Tartarus, and she thought she was finally finished with the theatre of blood.
She was wrong.
Tartarus had fallen, and for a few heartbeats, the air had smelled like freedom. Then the shadows moved. All For One had found her not with a hand, but with a cage.
And so, her world had been a room of perpetual noon. The lights never flickered, the darkness never came to save her eyes. And for ten hours a day, the intercom bled his voice, that velvet, condescending baritone that sounded like silk being pulled over a whetstone. He told her that her rebellion was a script he had written. He told her that her hands had always belonged to him, even when they wore a Hero's badge. He broke the clock of her mind until time was nothing but a loop of her own failures.
And then, he had opened the door.
He had "blessed" her with the ability to walk on the very air she used to breathe, but the gift was a leash. She could feel him now, a cold, static hum at the base of her skull. A kill-switch tucked neatly behind her thoughts. He was watching through her eyes, a silent spectator to her latest performance.
Below her, a building groaned as a boy and a shadow smashed through its side, plummeting like a lead weight into the dark waters of the bay. Kaina didn't look. She didn't care about Vesper or the "Demon-God" drowning in the salt. They were noise. They were the static of a world that had forgotten how to be quiet.
She stepped through the sky, her boots finding purchase on the invisible currents of the Air Walk. She moved with a jagged, high-speed grace, a ghost haunted by its own silhouette.
Finally, she saw him.
Akira Furuhaya. The Mouse.
He was running through the narrow, frost-bitten streets below, his breath hitching in the cold air. Beside him were a woman and a supposed hero, dragging an unconscious body between them. They moved with a clumsy, frantic desperation, their feet stumbling over the uneven pavement. They looked small. They looked human. They looked like the kind of people Kaina used to be told were "necessary sacrifices."
Kaina landed on the jagged edge of a rooftop, her movement as silent as a settling moth. She knelt, her right arm shifting, the skin pulling back as the biological rifle manifested with a dull, wet click. She didn't feel anger. She didn't feel loyalty. She felt only the cold, mechanical vacuum of a woman who had been emptied of everything but her aim.
She sighted Akira's legs. Retrieval, the voice had said. Not execution.
She drew in a slow, steady breath. The world slowed. The shivering of the targets, the distant siren, the hum of the kill-switch, it all narrowed down to a single point of impact. Her finger tightened on the trigger, a coil of her own hair ready to become the iron spike that would end their flight.
Ping.
It wasn't a bullet. It was a rock, a small, jagged piece of concrete no larger than a marble, travelling at a velocity that defied the senses.
It struck the side of Kaina's head with the force of a wrecking ball.
The world tilted. Her vision exploded into a kaleidoscope of white light and agonizing pressure. The force of the impact veered her off course, her rifle discharging into the brickwork of the roof as she was literally knocked off her feet. She spiralled toward the alley below, her lungs seizing, until her hand caught a satellite dish with a shriek of tearing metal.
She swung, her boots catching the wall, and threw herself back up onto the roof with a desperate surge of the Air Walk.
She stood on the edge, her hand pressed to her bleeding temple, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. She scanned the street.
The alley was empty. The street was a silent, gray ribbon of concrete. Akira, the woman, and the hero, they were gone, vanished as if they had never existed at all.
Kaina looked at the sky. She looked for the source of the rock, but there was only the cold, unmoving clouds. She felt the kill-switch at the base of her brain throb, a silent warning that she had failed her first shot.
She let out a long, slow sigh. It was a sound of profound exhaustion, a hollow echo that carried the weight of her entire, blood-stained life. She didn't know if the rock was a blessing or a curse. She didn't know if the relief she felt was her own, or a symptom of her madness.
She wiped the blood from her brow and looked at the empty street where the Mouse had escaped the Cat.
"Better luck next time," she whispered.
___
The roof of the small, cramped okonomiyaki restaurant was slick with a thin film of morning frost and industrial soot. Yoshi Abara was bent double, his hands clutching the greasy tiles as he heaved, a violent, rattling cough tearing through his chest. Each spasm brought up a mixture of salt water and a lingering, greyish phlegm that tasted like static and old oil.
"Easy, kid," Akira muttered, though he made no move to touch him. He was busy helping Makoto settle Koichi against a rusted ventilation unit. The hero was pale, his breathing a shallow, rhythmic whistle that signalled his body was barely holding on.
"I'm… fine," Yoshi managed, his voice a scorched rasp. He took a shuddering breath, his lungs feeling like they had been scrubbed with steel wool. "That guy… He was inside me. Like a living gas."
Makoto snapped her fingers, her eyes widening behind her wind-swept hair. "Vesper? I remember that name from the internal briefs. Back when Edgeshot was first making his climb, there were rumours of a relative or a protégé with a similar, albeit more 'visceral' power set. They called him the Wraith. He was never as famous though."
Yoshi spit a final glob of grey fluid onto the roof. "He solidifies the air he becomes, I figured anyway... But he'd be vulnerable to pressure. When I dived into the bay, the density of the water scattered his molecules. It was like dropping a bath bomb into a tub. He couldn't hold his form anymore."
Makoto nodded slowly, looking at Yoshi with a newfound sense of gravity. "To deduce that while you were literally being suffocated… you've got a terrifyingly analytical mind, Yoshi."
"Analysis doesn't stop bullets," Yoshi grunted, wiping his mouth with the back of a bruised hand. He looked toward the skyline, his eyes narrowing. "There was someone else. A woman in purple. Her hair… she was using it as ammunition. Two shots. One nearly took my head off."
The colour drained from Makoto's face. "Purple hair? Hair bullets?" She sat back on her heels, a look of profound, shattered disillusionment in her eyes. "Lady Nagant."
"You know her?" Akira asked.
"Everyone knew her," Makoto said quietly. "She was the peak. The idol of the marksman program. I used to have a poster of her in my room when I was a girl, back when I still believed the Commission was a sanctuary. Then came the scandal. They said she killed a member of the Hero Commission's board in cold blood. She was labelled a villain, stripped of her rank, and buried in Tartarus."
"So she's a villain now," Yoshi concluded.
"Maybe," Akira countered, his voice cynical and heavy. "Or maybe the Commission realized they needed their best killer back. She might be buying her way into their good graces by hunting us. In a world falling into this kind of wickedness, everyone has a price for their soul."
Yoshi looked down at his palms, the hum of the Ripple still vibrating in his bone marrow. "She was flying. Or… walking. It didn't look like a flight quirk. She was stepping on the air like it was a staircase. And she was moving fast. Terrifyingly fast."
Akira and Makoto shared a look of pure confusion. "People are born with one quirk, Yoshi," Akira said. "Nagant's quirk is that rifle she can form. If she was walking on air, that's a second quirk. That's impossible."
Yoshi kept his mouth shut. His mind flashed back to the Ninth Successor. He remembered the feeling of Blackwhip, and the other vestiges who's quirks were in him, all coexisting within Izuku Midoriya's frame. He knew it was possible, but he also knew the cost. If Nagant had a second quirk, it meant someone had given it to her. Unless she truly did just awaken a second quirk.
"It doesn't matter who she's working for," Yoshi said, his voice hardening. "Whether it's the Commission or the League, it means our clock just got cut in half. They found us in a city of millions in less than a day."
He looked at Akira, who was staring at Koichi with a look of profound, simmering guilt. The detective's hands were stained with Koichi's dried blood, and for the first time, the man looked his age.
"We can't just move tactically anymore," Yoshi continued. "We need more than just a plan to find Overhaul. We need a way to stay alive long enough to reach him. And Koichi isn't moving."
"He hasn't even had a drop of medicine," Akira whispered, his voice thick with a rare vulnerability. "We're just dragging him around like baggage. He's going to die on our watch, and for what? A truth that might never get told?"
"Then we find a doctor," Makoto said, standing up. The wind whipped her jacket, making her look small against the urban sprawl. "A back-alley medic would be our best shot, but a real hospital and doctor is ideal. But because of those 'Aftermath' headlines, our options are more than limited."
"You should do it," Yoshi said, looking at her. "Search, I mean. There are fewer eyes on you than on us."
Makoto let out a short, sarcastic laugh. "Yoshi, the Commission already knows my face. They saw me on that charter. The only reason my name isn't on that 'Aftermath' triptych is because of my brother. They're trying to keep his name clean by omitting mine because he would fight back and get too close to knowing what we know, but they know exactly who I am. If I step into the wrong street, I'm as good as dead."
"Take the risk anyway," Yoshi said, his voice flat and uncompromising. "I'll be nearby. I'll shadow you from the rooftops. If anyone moves on you, I'll be there."
Makoto mirrored him, her expression a mix of fear and grim determination. "Such a comforting thought. Truly."
"Koichi's recovery is the only thing that matters right now," Akira said, his eyes finally meeting Yoshi's.
Yoshi nodded. He looked at the unconscious "hero" and felt a strange, hollow sensation. He didn't want to be a hero, but he didn't want to be the reason a good man stopped breathing.
"Go," Yoshi told Makoto. "Find a doctor."