The sky over Yokohama was the colour of a bruised lung, heavy with the moisture of the coming gale. Below, the city was a frantic hive of activity. Shopkeepers rolled down heavy corrugated shutters, street vendors packed away their colourful awnings, and the usual digital roar of the city billboards had been replaced by flashing yellow "Gale Warning" alerts.
Yoshi walked through the shifting crowds, his hood pulled low. He moved with a slow, deliberate pace that stood in stark contrast to the hurried world around him. To the panicked citizens, he was just a teenage boy lingering too long in the path of a storm.
"Hey, kid! Get a move on!" an elderly woman shouted as she struggled to pull a heavy rack of umbrellas inside her shop. "The harbour winds are going to be lethal by sundown. Get home to your mother!"
Yoshi stopped. He turned his head slightly, the green curls of Izuku's hair catching the grey light. He felt the phantom tug of a memory, Izuku's instinctual urge to help, to be polite, to be the "Golden Child."
"Thank you, ma'am," Yoshi said, his voice a perfect mimicry of Midoriya's soft, earnest tone. "I'm almost there. Stay safe."
He turned back to the street and kept walking. Inside the "attic," he felt a sharp, sudden throb of resistance. His right arm twitched, the fingers curling into a fist involuntarily before relaxing. It was a faint, distant signal, but Yoshi recognized it for what it was, the owner of the house was beginning to wake up.
The vestiges were right... Yoshi thought, his black eyes fixed on the horizon. He's a fighter. Even in the dark, he's looking for the light.
A part of Yoshi, a small, recessed fragment that remembered what it felt like to have a sister who loved him, felt a pang of something resembling guilt. He was violating this mind, using this powerful vessel to settle a debt that the boy had no part in. But a much larger part of him, the part that had watched spiders crawl over Hana's remains, truly did not care.
As he walked, his mind drifted to the arguments the dead heroes had thrown at him. They spoke of the "good of the world," but Yoshi saw the world through a different lens. He looked at the billboards featuring glowing, smiling heroes and felt a deep, oily cynicism.
Greed, he mused. It's the silent quirk everyone possesses.
He watched a commercial on a nearby screen for a new line of "Stinger-brand" surgical masks. The hero was smiling, looking pristine and holy.
The world has turned survival into a market, Yoshi thought. Heroism used to be a sacrifice. Now, it's a career path. A marketing strategy. People enter this space not because they want to save, but because they want the spotlight. They want the endorsements, the high-rise apartments, the worship of the masses. And the public? They're just as selfish. They pay for the 'peace' so they don't have to look at the cracks in the foundation.
He saw the logic in it, the cold, pragmatism of it all. On one hand, the commercialization of heroes had created a stable society. It funded the technology, the schools, and the infrastructure. It turned a dangerous vocation into a regulated industry that kept the "monsters" at bay for a long time. If a man like Hoshino saved a thousand people just to get a bigger pay check, the thousand people were still saved. The outcome was the same.
But the price is the soul, Yoshi concluded. When you turn morality into a business, you dilute what it means to be human. You create 'surgeons' who care more about the aesthetics of the suture than the life of the patient. You invite the Man of Iron into the house and give him a cerulean suit. You make it so that a boy can die in a shed and no one hears him because the hero's theme song is playing too loud.
He was so deep in the logic of his own hatred that he didn't notice the crowd thinning as he reached the central plaza near the port. He stepped forward, his head down, and nearly collided with a tall, rigid figure.
"Oh! Careful there, young man," a melodic, clinical voice said.
Yoshi looked up. His breath died in his throat.
Standing in front of him, framed by the swirling grey clouds, was Kenji Hoshino. He was in his hero suit.
But it wasn't Stinger who made Yoshi's heart stutter.
Clinging to Stinger's hand was a little girl, no older than six, her eyes wide with adoration as she looked up at her city's hero. And standing just behind her was a teenager, an older sister, perhaps sixteen, her hand resting protectively on the younger girl's shoulder. She looked tired, but her smile was soft, filled with a profound, sacrificial love.
It was a mirror. A perfect, agonizing reflection of a glass boy and a silk sister.
Stinger looked down at Yoshi, his pale blue eyes static and unblinking. He didn't recognize the boy as the "Champion" of UA. To him, this was just a citizen. He offered a practiced, mannequin-like smile.
"Are you alright, son?" Stinger asked, his voice dripping with an artificial, saintly warmth. "The storm is coming in fast. You should be heading home. Do you have someone waiting for you?"
The lump in Yoshi's throat felt like a shard of glass. His heart began to pump with a violent, rhythmic throb that resonated through Izuku's entire body. He saw Stinger's hand, the hand that had held the gun, the hand that had tied the wire, resting near the little girl's head in a mock-blessing.
The "Golden Child" in the attic let out a silent, horrified scream, but Yoshi didn't listen.
He didn't think about the ritual. He didn't think about the Red Thread or the vestiges. He didn't think about the "violation" of Izuku's mind.
The dam didn't just breach, it disintegrated.
In an instant, the "polite student" mask shattered. Yoshi's black eyes flared with a light that was both ancient and predatory.
"I have no one waiting," Yoshi hissed, his voice a distorted, dual-toned roar.
Before Stinger could even register the change, before his "Needle Projection" could even twitch, Yoshi lunged. He didn't use a spatial ripple. He used raw, unadulterated One For All, channeled through a mind that wanted to unmake the world.
He drove his fist into Stinger's gut with the force of a falling moon.
The impact was thunderous, the shockwave shattering the nearby storefront windows and sending the two sisters flying backward into a pile of safety sandbags. Stinger's breath left him in a violent, bloody spray.
"YOU!" Yoshi screamed, his voice echoing over the first crash of thunder.
He didn't stop. As Stinger was launched into the air, Yoshi grabbed the lapel of the man's expensive costume, his feet leaving the ground as he followed the trajectory.
"I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THE AIR TO RUN OUT!"
___
Two figures hurtled upward from the force of the initial blow, the first heavy, freezing droplets of the gale began to slap against the cerulean armour of the "Pristine Needle" and the tattered black hoodie of the ghost.
Kenji Hoshino, the Hero Stinger, was a man of precision, and even as his internal organs screamed from the hydrostatic shock of the punch, his HUD visor flickered to life. He fired a series of high-tension needles from his forearm plates into a nearby skyscraper, using the micro-cables to arrest his momentum and swing himself into a controlled arc. He landed on a narrow maintenance catwalk, his breath coming in jagged, wheezing gasps.
His cerulean armour was cracked at the abdomen. Blood, bright and offensive against the stark white polymer, leaked from his lips. He looked up, his pale blue eyes wide with a manic, flickering terror.
Yoshi landed twenty feet away, his boots skidding on the wet metal. He went to ignite the green lightning of One For All, to end the Man of Iron in a single, thunderous surge, but the power fizzled. A cold, paralyzing weight suddenly anchored his limbs.
"No! Yoshi, stop! Don't do this!" Izuku's voice was no longer a whisper in the attic, it was a roar in the marrow. "If you kill him with my hands, I'll never be able to come back! Don't make me a murderer!"
"Shut up!" Yoshi hissed aloud, his face twisting in a grotesque snarl. He tried to reach for the Ripple Effect, to collapse the distance between himself and Stinger's throat, but the space refused to fold. It was as if Izuku were holding the very fabric of reality together with his own conscience. "Let go of me, you pathetic brat! This is justice! My Justice!"
Stinger stood up slowly, his military-grade posture returning with a sickening, mechanical jerk. He adjusted his translucent blue visor, his gaze locking onto the boy in black. He watched the way the boy's eyes flickered, the emerald green of the hero student fighting against the bottomless, light-eating black of the ghost.
"The eyes…" Stinger whispered, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, terrifying giggle. "I know those pits. I've seen them in my dreams, staring out from the cracks of a wooden door. Yoshi? Yoshi Abara?"
Yoshi didn't answer with words. He lunged, his physical speed still formidable even without the quirk. He swung a wild, desperate haymaker. Stinger leaned back, his movements mannequin-like and eerie, a silver needle sliding from his fingertip to graze Yoshi's cheek.
"You're supposed to be a blemish that was scrubbed away," Stinger said, his voice regaining its clinical, delusional edge. "I stitched you into the dark, Yoshi. I corrected the narrative. Why are you back to stain my city?"
"Because the air didn't run out!" Yoshi roared.
He tackled Stinger, and the two tumbled off the catwalk, falling through the grey abyss of the storm. They traded blows in freefall, brutal, uncoordinated strikes that lacked the grace of a hero's duel. It was a brawl between a victim and his killer.
The rain began to pour in earnest, a torrential downpour that turned the world into a blur of grey and silver. Yoshi felt the cold water soaking into his hoodie, and a hysterical laugh bubbled up in his chest.
"Does the rain feel familiar, Kenji?" Yoshi shouted over the howl of the wind as they smashed through a series of construction awnings and hit the muddy earth of a park near the harbour. "The thunder? The mud? It's the same night, isn't it? The night you tore the silk!"
Stinger scrambled back, his pristine suit now covered in filth. The sight of the mud on his cerulean plates sent him into a visible state of psychosis. He began to claw at his own armour, his needles projecting and retracting in a frantic, clicking rhythm.
"Dirty," Stinger whimpered, his unblinking eyes darting around the shadows. "It's all dirty again. I have to clean it. I have to sanitize the memory!"
He launched a volley of needles, aiming for the pressure points in Yoshi's legs. Yoshi tried to use the Ripple Effect to deflect them, but again, Izuku's will acted as a shield for the villain. The needles grazed Yoshi's thighs, drawing blood.
"Please, Yoshi! Give me back control!" Izuku's voice was sobbing now, a crushing weight of morality that made Yoshi's movements sluggish. "We can go to the police! We can find the evidence! Don't do this!"
"The police belong to him!" Yoshi screamed internally, his mind a storm of black bile. "The evidence is a heap of white stones! I am the only truth left!"
Yoshi staggered forward through the mud. His black eyes were fixed on Stinger, who was now weeping as he tried to wipe the mud off his sleeves with trembling hands. Yoshi was the stronger one, he could feel the raw potential of the body he inhabited, but he was a king fighting with his hands tied by a saint.
Yoshi's gaze fell on a rusted steel pipe protruding from a pile of construction debris. He grabbed it, the cold metal biting into his palm. He focused every ounce of his hatred, bypassing Izuku's resistance for just a heartbeat.
"Ripple: Flatten."
The space around the tip of the pipe squeezed inward. The heavy steel groaned and shrieked as it was crushed into a flat, razor-sharp edge, a makeshift executioner's blade.
Yoshi began to walk, the pipe dragging in the dirt, creating a jagged furrow behind him. He looked like a nightmare, a boy with black eyes and a silver blade, framed by the lightning that illuminated the harbour.
"One drop of blood," Yoshi whispered, his voice a chilling monotone. "The Red Thread. Then I go home, Golden Child. Then I leave you to your heroics."
Stinger looked up, his visor cracked, his hair finally out of place. He saw the blade. He saw the death in Yoshi's eyes. He opened his mouth to scream, to plead, to offer another lie...
"A truly fascinating display of terrestrial drama," a voice boomed, cutting through the thunder like a physical weight.
Yoshi froze. Stinger's eyes widened.
Standing on the edge of the harbour wall, silhouetted by the crashing waves of the incoming tide, was a gargantuan figure. His blue-grey skin was slick with the rain, his massive, shark-like jaw slightly agape to reveal rows of serrated teeth. He held a rusted trench cleaver over his shoulder, looking down at them with the detached curiosity of an apex predator watching two fish fight in a drying puddle.
"The hero in the stained glass," King Fin said, his voice a deep, resonant rumble that seemed to vibrate in the very water falling from the sky. "And a child wanting to take its skin. You two are making quite a mess of my new hunting ground."
He stepped off the wall, the ground shaking as his massive weight hit the mud. He looked at Yoshi, his black, doll-like eyes reflecting the lightning.
"I was promised a harvest," King Fin purred, a poetic, terrifying smile spreading across his face. "But it seems I've stumbled upon a ritual. The king of the sea has come to witness the fall of the surgeon. Tell me, brat… does the blood of a hero taste as sweet as the poets say?"
Yoshi gripped the steel pipe, his knuckles white. The storm raged on, the rain washing away the distinction between the living and the dead, as the three of them stood in the center of a world that had finally, mercifully, run out of air.
___
The storm was no longer a weather event, it was a weapon.
King Fin stood in the center of the flooded plaza, his gills pulsing with the sheer volume of ambient moisture. With a casual wave of his massive hand, he commanded the harbour. A wall of seawater, twenty feet high and thick with salt, rose over the harbour wall and crashed into the streets. It was a "Drowning Domain." The water adhered, King Fin's Hydro quirk allowing him to increase the surface tension until the seawater felt like liquid concrete.
Yoshi, still piloting Izuku's body, lunged through the knee-deep surge. He swung the flattened steel pipe with a desperate, jagged geometry. He was relying entirely on the Ripple Effect to bridge the gap between his strikes. He parried a massive swing from King Fin's trench cleaver, the spatial distortion at the point of impact causing a pressurized "crack" that sent a spray of water a hundred feet into the air.
"Struggling, little brat?" King Fin purred, his voice a sub-bass rumble that vibrated in Yoshi's chest. The shark-mutant spun his cleaver, creating a vortex of high-pressure water that pinned Yoshi against a half-submerged bus. "Let's see how you overcome this! Or will I be the anchor dragging you into the depths."
"STOP! YOSHI, STOP IT!" Izuku's voice was a tectonic shift in Yoshi's mind. Every time Yoshi aimed a lethal strike at Stinger's throat, Izuku's nerves would lock, the muscles seizing in a paroxysm of heroic restraint.
"Shut up!" Yoshi screamed at the air. He used a spatial ripple to "slip" through the water vortex, appearing behind Stinger.
Kenji Hoshino was a manic blur of cerulean and white. Despite his shattered psyche, his tactical HUD was still feeding him data. He was zipping through the air, his needle-cables anchored to the high-rise skeletons. He looked like a frantic spider weaving a web in a hurricane.
He was trying to "fix" the environment. He fired hundreds of micro-needles into the rising water, attempting to use his quirk to "stitch" the flood-barriers back together, his mind obsessed with the idea of sanitizing the mess.
"Dirty... so dirty!" Stinger shrieked, his voice lost in the thunder. He pivoted in mid-air and fired a volley of silver needles at King Fin's eyes.
King Fin didn't blink. He raised a hand, and the raindrops in the air suddenly coalesced into a shield of "Heavy Water"... liquid so dense it caught the needles like they were stuck in resin. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the needles flying back at Stinger, encased in high-velocity water-slugs.
Stinger grunted, his armour sparking as he took the hits. He was a master of mid-range, but against the King of the Sea in a storm, he was a surgeon trying to perform an operation during an earthquake.
The fight escalated into a three-way slaughter. King Fin was the undisputed sun of the battlefield. He moved through the water with terrifying grace, his cleaver shearing through concrete pillars like they were paper. He was terraforming. He collapsed the moisture in the air around Yoshi, creating a "Vacuum-Hydraulic Press" that tried to crush Izuku's ribs.
Yoshi spat blood, his black eyes flashing. He used the flattened pipe to slice through the water-pressure, the Ripple Effect "splitting" the liquid mass so it flowed harmlessly around him. But he could feel his grip on the body slipping. Izuku was fighting for the wheel, his grief for All Might and his fear of becoming a killer creating a barrier that Yoshi couldn't bypass.
I'm running out of time, Yoshi realized. The ritual has to happen now, or I'll be buried in this boy's heart forever.
He looked at Stinger, who was currently being hammered by King Fin's relentless hydro-jets. The "New-Port Hero" was a wreck, his white suit stained with brown mud and his own red blood.
Yoshi reached out for his body. With the limited control of his quirk his senses over long distances diminished, but he could still latch on to what was his. He pulled out the White Stones.
The mummified corpse of Yoshi Abara appeared in the center of the flooded plaza, suspended in a pocket of distorted space. It looked horrifying, a brown, parchment-skinned husk frozen in a scream, its grey school dress shirt tattered and ancient.
"What... is that...?" Stinger stammered, his visor flickering as he stared at the remains of the boy he had murdered. The sight sent him into a final, cataclysmic dissociative break. "No... I cleaned it! I stitched it shut! Why is it here?!"
King Fin laughed, the sound a tidal wave of mockery. "The skeleton in the closet! How poetic! So you're a ghost who wants his skin back!"
King Fin lunged, his cleaver aimed to shatter both the boy and the corpse. Yoshi moved. He didn't fight King Fin, he used him.
As King Fin's massive cleaver came down, Yoshi used a spatial ripple to swap the positions of the air and the water, causing a massive explosion of steam and pressure that momentarily blinded the shark. In that heartbeat of chaos, Yoshi grabbed Stinger by the high collar of his cerulean suit.
Stinger screamed, firing a needle point-blank into Yoshi's shoulder. Yoshi didn't flinch. He ignored the pain, his black eyes fixed on the mummified mouth of his true self.
Yoshi maneuvered Stinger like a shield. As King Fin's cleaver swept through the mist, the rusted blade didn't hit Yoshi. It pierced through Stinger's chest, the massive slab of steel erupting through his back in a fountain of hot, arterial crimson.
Stinger's eyes went wide. His "Pristine" suit was finally, irrevocably ruined.
Yoshi didn't let him fall. He grabbed the dying hero and slammed him against the mummified corpse. He forced the gaping, gushing wound in Stinger's chest against the mouth of the parchment-skinned husk.
The Chi-Musubi. The Blood-Binding.
The red thread flowed. Stinger's blood, the blood of the one who broke him, washed over the dry, mummified lips of the boy of glass.
Instantly, the world in Yoshi's head went black.
In the attic of the heart, the Golden Child felt the Shadow vanish. The cold weight that had been suppressing Izuku Midoriya for months simply... evaporated.
In the flooded plaza, the body of Izuku Midoriya collapsed into the knee-deep water, his eyes fluttering as the black pits faded back into emerald green.
But the mummified corpse did not fall.
The grey dress shirt, once tattered and dusty, suddenly billowed as if filled by a sudden, violent wind. The parchment skin began to throb. A deep, resonant hum, the sound of space being mended, echoed through the storm.
The brown, desiccated flesh began to gain colour. From the mouth where the blood had entered, a flush of life spread like a wildfire. The "White Stones" were being covered in new feathers. The eyes of the husk snapped open.
They were no longer empty sockets. They were pits of absolute, terrifying blackness, but they were alive.
Yoshi Abara, the real Yoshi Abara, drew his first breath of air in months. He looked down at his hands. They were pale, thin, and his.
He felt the silk of his own skin. He felt the weight of his own heart.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Yoshi looked up. He was standing in the rain, his grey school shirt soaked, his real body finally reclaimed. He looked at Stinger, whose blood was still staining the ground, and then at the gargantuan shark-mutant who was staring at him with a mix of awe and hunger.
"I'm home," Yoshi whispered, his own voice, his true voice, ringing out over the thunder.
Beside him, Izuku Midoriya groaned in the water, his hand reaching out for a hero who wasn't there. King Fin raised his cleaver, a wide, serrated grin on his face.
The Hone-Kara is complete.
King Fin roared, the water rising around them. "Now let's see if the demon-god can swim!"