The silence of the minka returned after Morioka's bleak monologue, settling over them like a heavy, suffocating shroud. The old man sat back down, the fibres of his skin creaking with the effort. He took another slow sip of tea, his sharp eyes never leaving Makoto's face.
"Now," Morioka said, his voice returning to a dry, clinical rasp. "Tell me why you are truly here. What is it you need from me?"
Makoto took a steadying breath, trying to push the image of a "reset button" out of her mind. "It's been two full days since we arrived in Osaka. My friend... he was attacked. He was stabbed through the chest. A clean, high-velocity puncture."
Morioka's brow furrowed slightly. "Two days? And he is still breathing?"
"One of our companions... he has a unique quirk. He managed to close the wound," Makoto explained, choosing her words with extreme caution. She didn't want to explain spatial manipulation to a man who valued traditional biology. "He essentially forced the tissue together. It looks sealed. There's no external bleeding, no infection that I can see. But our friend hasn't woken up. At first, he was groggy, he was making sounds, small groans of pain, but for the last twelve hours, it's been total silence. He's cold, Morioka-san. And his pulse is feint."
Morioka hummed, a low vibration in his chest that sounded like a spinning loom. "Forcing a wound closed is not the same as healing a body, girl. You can shut the door to a burning house, but it doesn't mean the fire is out. If the internal vasculature wasn't repaired, he is likely drowning in his own blood or suffering from severe hypovolemic shock. The silence is the most dangerous part. It means the brain has stopped fighting."
He set his tea cup down with a sharp clack on the wooden table.
"I didn't want more customers," he said, his gaze drifting toward the closed shoji screen. "In my age, I value the quiet. I have my standard clientele, the residents of this district, the workers who can't afford the fees. I wanted to spend my remaining years in rest."
He looked back at her, a flicker of professional irritation in his eyes.
"But the boys who brought you here... they have been of great aid to me over the years. I owe them that much. And besides," he paused, his voice dropping an octave, "things are shifting in the district. A new 'Doctor' appeared in the underground a few days ago. He has no name, no face, but he has reputable testimonies. Ever since he arrived, I've lost contact with some of my regulars. Standard humans, even some of my mutant patients... they've vanished into his 'clinic.' It's as if he's vacuuming up the desperate."
Makoto went still, her researcher's mind instantly cataloguing the information. A new doctor. Reputable testimonies. Vanishing patients. She thought of Kai Chisaki.
"Is he a threat to you?" Makoto asked.
"He is a threat to the balance," Morioka replied. "In the underworld, we survive because we are a community. This newcomer... he feels like an industry. He smells of something cold and calculated."
He stood up, his tall, fibrous frame casting a long shadow over the tatami. He looked down at Makoto, his expression unreadable but final.
"Anyway bring him in," Morioka commanded. "The boy you came with, the one shadowing you. Have him bring the patient through the 'curtain.'"
Makoto was surprised the older man knew Yoshi was following, she wondered if it were one of his 'Boys' that had been aiding him that figured him out.
Makoto scrambled to her feet, her heart leaping with a sudden, desperate hope. She bowed deeply, her forehead nearly touching her knees. The weight of the last forty-eight hours, the plane crash, the sniper, the sight of Koichi's blood, seemed to lift just enough for her to breathe.
"Thank you," she whispered, her voice thick with emotion. "Thank you, Morioka-san. You don't know what this means to us. To me."
Morioka didn't respond with a smile or a comforting word. He simply turned and began preparing a tray of surgical tools, the silver blades gleaming under the dim light of the lantern.
"Don't thank me yet, Tsukauchi-san," he said, his back to her. "The needle always hurts more than the cut. Now go. The clock is ticking."
___
The waiting room of the Morioka residence was a space of profound, heavy stillness. The walls were lined with dark cedar, and the only light came from a single paper lantern that cast long, amber shadows across the tatami mats. The air was a thick, cloying mixture of dried mugwort, antiseptic, and the faint, earthy scent of rain-dampened stone from the small inner garden.
Yoshi Abara sat with his back against the wall, his long legs drawn up, his hands resting on his knees. He looked like a statue of a boy, but inside, a low vibration in his bones hummed in time with his anxiety. Beside him, Akira Furuhaya paced the small perimeter of the room, his boots making no sound on the woven mats, but his agitation was palpable.
"I shouldn't be here," Akira whispered, his voice jagged and low. He stopped, looking at the closed shoji screen that led to the surgical room. "If this man recognizes me...he might not want the trouble that is following me. I'm a walking death warrant, Makoto."
Makoto, who was sitting cross-legged and staring at her interlaced fingers, shook her head without looking up. "The Doctor doesn't keep up with the headlines, Akira. He told me he's cut himself off from the world. Unless a story is big enough to swallow the district, he treats it as noise. You're just a man with a dying friend to him."
"And the other one?" Yoshi asked, his voice a flat, hollow rasp. "The newcomer doctor he mentioned. The one vacuuming up the patients."
Akira slowed his pacing, his eyes narrowing. "Overhaul," he said, the name sounding like a curse. "It has to be. If he's operating a clinic in the underground, he's not just healing people. He's building an empire of debt. We'll deal with him once Koichi is stable. For now... we just wait."
The silence returned, stretching for what felt like hours, punctuated only by the distant, rhythmic clack of a bamboo water pipe in the garden. Then, the shoji screen slid open with a soft, paper-thin rustle.
Asei Morioka stepped into the room. He looked exhausted, the seam-lines on his face deeper than before, his fibrous skin looking parched and grey. He wiped his hands on a blood-stained towel, his movements slow and methodical.
"Thank you for waiting," Morioka said, his voice a dry, clinical rattle. He stood before them, a tall, ancient pillar of a man. "Your friend... the Skycrawler. He is stable. But you brought him to me just in time. Another hour, and I would have been measuring him for a casket."
Makoto stood up, her face a mask of desperate hope. "What happened? Is he... will he be okay?"
Morioka let out a long, slow sigh. "He will make a recovery. First, the weapon that pierced him, the inorganic matter was coated in a neuro-paralytic stasis-toxin. It's a designer chemical. It doesn't kill instantly, it enters the bloodstream and slowly migrates to the brain, where it induces a localized encephalic shutdown. It was designed to keep a target alive but utterly inert for transport. In his weakened state, it was beginning to snuff out his central nervous system."
Yoshi felt a cold stone settle in his stomach. The "lance" had been intended to capture them, but it had turned into a slow-acting poison.
"But the toxin was only half the problem," Morioka continued, his sharp, clinical gaze shifting directly to Yoshi. The boy felt the weight of the old man's eyes like a physical pressure. "The most significant damage was... internal. The wound was closed with a violence I have never seen. The tissue wasn't just brought together, it was fused. The capillaries were twisted, the muscle fibres crushed into each other at a molecular level."
Yoshi nodded slowly, he was typically fine whenever he had to do similar things, but he never thought it could get that bad. His control was lacklustre.
Morioka stepped closer, his voice dropping into a stern, educational tone. "You saved his life, boy. But in doing so, you nearly finished the job the assassin started. By singularizing the space of the wound, you created a localized ischemic trap. The blood couldn't flow into the repaired area, causing the surrounding tissue to begin to die. More importantly, you trapped a significant amount of internal hemorrhaging inside the chest cavity. The blood had nowhere to go, so it began to press against his lungs and heart. He wasn't breathing because his own chest had become a pressurized tank of fluid."
Yoshi looked down at his hands, the hands of a "Demon-God," the hands that could fold the world. He had thought he was being efficient. He had thought he was being... a hero. Instead, his "fix" had been a torture device. The guilt flared in his chest, hot and sharp, a reminder that his power was a sledgehammer being used to repair a watch.
"I had to go in and manually undo your work," Morioka said, his tone softening only a fraction. "I had to release the pressure, drain the cavity, and use my own fibres to re-stitch the vasculature one vessel at a time. It was like untangling a knot made of glass. I've flushed the toxin from his system with a neutralizing agent, and I've stabilized the torn muscle."
He turned back to Makoto and Akira.
"The Skycrawler is a resilient man. His body is already beginning to accept the repairs. The grogginess you saw earlier was the brain fighting the stasis, the silence that followed was the body entering a deep, protective coma. But the fever has broken."
Morioka took a final, deep breath, the seams on his chest expanding.
"He will wake up. Not tonight, and perhaps not tomorrow. But soon. He needs rest and fluids."
Makoto let out a sob, a short, broken sound of pure, unadulterated relief. She bowed so low her forehead touched the tatami. "Thank you, Morioka-san. Thank you."
Yoshi didn't bow. He just stared at the shoji screen, his heart thudding a slow, heavy rhythm. Koichi was going to live. The man who wanted him to be a hero was going to wake up in a world that still viewed them as "Aftermath."
"Go to him," Morioka said, gesturing toward the room. "But keep the noise down."
___
Ochaco was a storm in a bottle.
She sat at her desk, her lamp casting a sharp, clinical circle of light over a notebook that looked drastically different from the ones she used to keep. There were no cute stickers here, no rounded doodles of her friends. The pages were filled with jagged diagrams of vectors, gravitational constants, and anatomical sketches of her own hands.
Her pen scratched against the paper with a rhythmic, obsessive intensity.
Todoroki, she thought, her eyes narrowed. He controls ice and fire. He can freeze a city or melt a mountain. Yaomomo… her ceiling is limited only by her creativity. Bakugo… She paused, her teeth gritting at the thought of him, but she couldn't deny the truth. His kinetic output is a force of nature. And Izuku.
The name felt different now. It wasn't "Deku," the boy who needed a hand. It was Izuku Midoriya, "Champion", a predatory apex who moved with the weight of life fully actualized.
If I want to stand beside them, she whispered to the empty room, if I want to be a hero in a world that wants to eat us alive, I can't just be 'useful.' I have to be undeniable.
She looked at her palms. The pads of her fingers, the "trigger points" for her quirk, felt sensitive, almost humming with a low-frequency vibration. For years, she had viewed Zero Gravity as a utility. She made things float. She made people light. She was a support piece on a board filled with queens and kings.
But what is gravity? she wrote, the ink bleeding into the page. It's not just weight. It's the curvature of space-time. It's the force that dictates how things move, how they fall, and how they stay together.
She thought about "thinking like Izuku", the methodical, obsessive breakdown of quirk mechanics. But as she stared at her notes, she realized that Izuku's way wasn't her way. He analysed from the outside in. She needed to feel it from the inside out.
Zero Gravity removes the downward pull of the Earth, she noted, her hand moving faster now. But it doesn't remove inertia. Mass remains. If I touch a boulder, it's weightless, but it still takes force to move it. But what if I stop thinking about 'removing' and start thinking about 'displacing'?
She stood up, picking up a small, heavy iron paperweight. She touched it with all five pads. It floated. Usually, she'd just let it bob there, a parlour trick. But today, she focused on the void where the gravity used to be.
If I can remove the weight, I am essentially creating a pocket where the laws of the planet don't apply. If I can expand that pocket… if I can manipulate the re-entry of gravity…
She imagined a battle. She wouldn't just make a villain float. She would remove their gravity, then slam it back into them at ten times the normal velocity. She wouldn't just glide, she would manipulate her own inertia to turn herself into a living projectile.
Flight isn't just floating, she scribbled, her heart rate beginning to climb. It's controlled falling. If I can manipulate my own weight-center in mid-air, I don't need wings. I can 'fall' in any direction I want.
She began to sketch a new application of her quirk: Gravitational Rebound. By pulsing her release and touch in rapid succession, she could create a localized "shiver" in the air, a kinetic vibration that could shatter solid objects or pin a target to the ground with a ghost-weight that felt like a ton of lead.
The more she thought, the more the possibilities unfurled like a dark, beautiful flower. She was becoming the mistress of the most fundamental force in the universe. She could catch up. She could stand by Izuku, not as a shadow, but as an equal.
A small, giddy laugh escaped her throat. It wasn't the bubbly, innocent laugh of the Uraraka who wanted to help her parents with their bills. It was the sharp, jagged sound of a girl who had just realized she could break the world if she wanted to.
She looked at the clock. It was nearly two in the morning, but the exhaustion that usually dogged her after a day of training was gone, replaced by a frantic, buzzing energy.
I need to test this, she thought, her fingers twitching. I need to see how much weight I can displace before I vomit. I need to see if I can make the air itself 'heavy.'
She grabbed her training jacket, her eyes reflecting the clinical white light of her desk lamp. The schools cameras watched her as she moved toward the door, her steps feeling lighter than they ever had.
She wasn't going to wait for the world to change. She was going to make the world fall for her.
"Just watch," she whispered, a fierce, determined smile stretching across her face. "I'm coming for the top."