The rain hammered against the earth like a gavel, pronouncing judgment upon the ruins of Yokohama.
In the center of the flooded plaza, the mummified husk was gone. In its place stood a boy who looked as if he had been forged from the very static of the universe. Yoshi Abara's skin, once parchment-dry and brown, was now a vibrant, living oak, though etched with the faint, silvery lines of his former desiccation.
His hair, once a deep, natural black, had undergone a traumatic metamorphosis, it was now a stark, pristine white, knotting upward on his crown in wild, jagged tufts like a crown of salt.
Yoshi drew a breath, his first true breath in his own lungs, and the air felt like liquid gold. He ignored the dying Stinger, who was dragging his ruined body through the mud like a broken insect. The "Red Thread" had been drawn, the surgeon could wait for the final stitch.
"Finally," Yoshi whispered, his voice no longer a dual-toned echo but a singular, chilling resonance. "Finally."
He felt his body filling in, his muscles densifying as the ritual's energy settled. His grey school shirt, dusty and tattered, billowed in the gale. But as he flexed his fingers, he felt an odd, lingering tether, a ghostly weight in the back of his mind. He was out of the vessel, but the six months of entanglement had left a stain.
"YOSHI!"
The scream didn't come from the vestiges. It came from the muddy water.
Izuku Midoriya stood up, his green curls plastered to his forehead, his emerald eyes burning with a raw, uncharacteristic malice. He wasn't the "Golden Child" anymore. He was a boy who had been violated, who had watched his idol unmade, and whose body had been used to commit a public execution. He looked at Yoshi not with fear, but with a murderous intent that made even Yoshi pause.
Izuku rasped, his voice trembling with a terrifying heat. "You don't get to walk away."
"I'm not walking," Yoshi giggled, his black eyes flickering. "I'm flying."
Before the two boys could collide, the ocean intervened.
"The play is reaching its second act!" King Fin roared, his voice a tidal wave of poetic delight. "The ghost has found his skin, the hero has found his hate, and the sea is still hungry!"
King Fin slammed his palms into the rising floodwaters. "Hydro: Abyssal Trench!"
The water in the plaza didn't just rise, it pressurized. The ambient moisture in the air became as dense as the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The sudden hydrostatic pressure was enough to crush steel, turning the air into a physical weight.
Yoshi reacted instantly. In his own body. He spun in mid-air, his fingers snapping as he created a spatial formation. He "slipped" through the pressure, shrinking the distance of the crushing water until it was a harmless mist around him. He appeared behind King Fin, his white hair whipping in the wind, and delivered a palm-strike that expanded the distance of the shark's own internal organs.
King Fin coughed a spray of seawater, spinning with his trench cleaver in a wide, devastating arc. "Magnificent! You move like a needle through silk, boy!"
The fight spilled out of the plaza and into the Minato Mirai district. It was a dance of gods. King Fin was a terraforming nightmare, every step he took turned a city sector into an aquarium. He collapsed skyscrapers by liquefying their foundations, using the falling rubble as ammunition for high-pressure water cannons.
Izuku was the frantic, violent heart of the storm. As Yoshi and King Fin traded ruptures and tidal surges, Izuku focused on the impossible. He blurred through the rising water, using 12% Full Cowl to snatch civilians from the windows of sinking buildings, his movements jagged and desperate.
"You're still playing hero, Midoriya?" Yoshi mocked, flickering through space to avoid a cleaver-swing that levelled a luxury hotel. "The city is drowning! Save one, ten die! Look at the scale!"
"SHUT UP!" Izuku screamed. He lunged toward Yoshi, his hand outstretched in a claw-like grip.
In that moment of pure, white-hot rage, something in the One For All quirk responded to the malice in Izuku's heart. From his palm, a burst of obsidian-black energy erupted. It wasn't lightning. It was a thick, writhing tendril of semi-solid darkness that lashed out like a predatory vine.
Blackwhip.
The tendril snared Yoshi's ankle in mid-air with the sound of a whip-crack.
Yoshi's eyes widened. "What is...?!"
Izuku didn't understand what he had just manifested, but he didn't care. He leaned into the instinct, his teeth bared. He yanked the black cord, slamming Yoshi downward through the roof of a submerged parking garage.
"I won't let you hurt anyone else!" Izuku roared, the black tendrils multiplying, wrapping around his arms like obsidian armour as he dove after the ghost.
The three of them collided in the dark, flooded guts of the garage. King Fin burst through the wall, bringing the harbour with him. The garage became a pressurized death-trap.
King Fin's quirk was devastating in its simplicity. He didn't need to touch them, he simply manipulated the surface tension of the water in their very sweat, their blood, their eyes. Yoshi felt his own skin tightening, the water in his pores trying to crush his bones.
Yoshi fought back with surgical brutality. He used "Split" to bypass the water pressure, carving paths through the liquid mass. He moved through the garage like a glitch in the matrix, appearing and disappearing, his white hair a flickering ghost in the dark. He wasn't just fighting to kill. Every movement in his real body felt like a revelation, even as he felt the "restraint" hovering on the edge of his soul.
The fight moved back into the open air as King Fin used a "Hydraulic Geyser" to launch the entire parking garage roof into the sky. They fought across the flying debris, a three-way battle for Yokohama's soul.
Yoshi used the Ripple Effect to compress the air into "Singularity" points, trying to pull King Fin's mass apart. King Fin countered by turning the very rain into "Needle-Drops" each droplet of water hitting with the force of a bullet.
Izuku swung through the chaos on his new black tethers, catching falling cars and debris to prevent them from hitting the crowds below, while simultaneously launching himself at Yoshi with a fury that even the shark-mutant found poetic.
"A boy of shadow, a boy of light, and a king of the deep!" King Fin laughed, his cleaver glowing with blue energy as he prepared a final, city-level surge. "Yokohama will be the ink for this masterpiece!"
The water rose, a massive, swirling vortex centered on King Fin, drawing in the very foundations of the city. Yoshi stood atop a leaning clock tower, his white hair glowing under the lightning. He raised his hands, preparing to collapse the entire sector's space to end the shark. Izuku was grounded below, his Blackwhip tendrils anchored to the earth, trying to hold back a collapsing bridge filled with people.
The tension was a physical cord about to snap.
Then, the grey sky burned!
A pillar of incandescent, blue-white flame descended from the clouds, striking the center of King Fin's vortex with the sound of a nuclear detonation. The seawater vaporized instantly into a blinding wall of superheated steam.
The temperature in the district jumped fifty degrees in a heartbeat.
Yoshi shielded his eyes as a figure dropped through the steam, landing on the surface of the water as if it were solid ground. The water hissed and boiled away from his boots.
The man stood with a terrifying, stoic menace. His hero suit was scorched, his flaming beard and mask flickering with a heat that made the very air warp and distort. He didn't look like a savior. He looked like an executioner.
Endeavor.
The Number Two hero looked at the shark-mutant, then at the boy with white hair, and finally at the green-haired student covered in obsidian vines.
"Your Harvest ends here," Endeavor growled, the fire around his fists turning a lethal, blinding white.
___
The steam rising from the harbour was a thick, spectral shroud, illuminated by the hellish blue-white flares of Endeavor's descent. Yoshi Abara did not stay to watch the collision of titans. He felt the weight of his own skin, the unfamiliar drag of his own muscles, realizing with a cold, clinical detachment that his reclaimed body was a far cry from the "Golden Vessel" he had just vacated.
Izuku Midoriya's body had been an anvil, forged by the relentless hammer of All Might's training. It was built to host a god. Yoshi's own body was thin, lithe, and recently mummified, while the Ripple Effect was more fluid here, he lacked in other areas, specifically in his quirk use.
I won that fight against All Might because I was a parasite in a stronger shell, Yoshi thought as he slipped through a fold in space, his white hair whipping against his face. And because Toshinori is a man of rules. If he had understood the spatial logic with his own "Adaptability", I would have been crushed.
He flickered through the city, the adrenaline finally beginning to drain like water through a sieve. The urgency of his reclamation was over. The ritual of the Bone and the Vessel was complete. He was no longer a ghost in an attic, he was Yoshi Abara, a boy who had survived the dark.
But as the silence of the outskirts settled around him, replaced only by the distant, muffled thud of explosions, a terrifying realization settled in his gut.
He was empty.
For months, his entire existence had been defined by hatred, by the singular, burning need to claw his way back into the light. Now that there was no one left to fight, no hero to dismantle, and no vessel to possess, he felt hollowed out. His sister's sacrifice, the silk she had spun to keep him alive, felt like a heavy, cold stone in his chest. He had his life back, but the world he had returned to was a graveyard.
He reached the Shed.
The door hung open, a gaping mouth in the ivy. Inside, Kenji Hoshino, the great hero Stinger, was a pathetic sight. He was on his hands and knees, dragging his ruined body through the dirt, his cerulean armour shattered and caked in filth. He was muttering to himself, his voice a broken, rhythmic chant of "Stitch it shut... clean the wound... find the thread..."
Yoshi stood over him, his black eyes devoid of anything resembling mercy.
"Do you need help?" Yoshi asked. His voice was flat, a monotone that lacked even the edge of malice.
Stinger looked up. His visor was gone, revealing eyes that were bloodshot and drowning in a sea of madness. He didn't see a demon-god, he saw the boy he had murdered.
Yoshi knelt beside him. He placed a hand over the gaping wound in Stinger's chest, the hole left by King Fin's cleaver. He didn't use a bandage. He activated the Ripple Effect, shrinking the distance between the edges of the wound until the flesh touched and fused.
Stinger gasped, his breath hitching in a sudden, sharp intake of air. He looked at his chest, then at Yoshi, his mind struggling to bridge the gap between reality and delusion. "Why...?"
"Get up," Yoshi said, standing. "Follow me."
They walked. Yoshi led the way, his steps light and silent, while Stinger stumbled behind him, his straight, military posture replaced by a hunched, defeated shuffle. They ignored the roar of the battle in the distance, where the sky was turning a violent, glowing orange. They walked deeper into the forest, toward the large, cavernous house that stood like an abandoned art piece against the stormy sky.
The interior was cold and smelled of dust and expensive wood. They reached the dining room, a vast, hollow space with a long mahogany table. Yoshi sat at one end, his white hair stark against the shadows. Stinger sat at the other, his hands trembling as he rested them on the polished surface.
"Why did you want to be a hero, Kenji?" Yoshi asked.
Stinger blinked, the light from a distant flash of lightning illuminating his mannequin-like face. "Why do you want to know? You've already taken my city... my life..."
"Answer the question," Yoshi commanded.
Stinger's gaze drifted to the ceiling. "My mother," he whispered. "She was... a masterpiece of a woman. She saw the chaos of the world, the dirt, the disorder, and she explained to me that part of man's worth was their ability to refine it. She used to correct my posture with a ruler until I was straight as a needle. She told me that if I could be perfect, the world would be perfect around me. She wanted me to be a surgeon of society. Every hero I helped, every villain I removed... it was for her. I wanted to show her that I had finally stitched the world into the shape she wanted."
Yoshi listened, his eyes unblinking. He heard the echoes of the "refinement" in Stinger's voice, the trauma of a boy who had been broken into a shape that was "perfect" but entirely hollow. "Do you think she'd be happy with the way you turned out?"
Stinger looked as if he had been punched. His face twisted, a jagged, agonizing spasm of doubt crossing his features. "Of course," he stammered, his voice rising in a frantic, defensive pitch. "I am the New-Port Hero! I am pristine! I have done everything she asked! I cleaned the narrative! I..."
"Then why did you kill my sister?"
The question hung in the air like a guillotine. Yoshi's voice had shifted, it was no longer flat. It was thick with a vibrating, ancient grief that made the glassware on the sideboard rattle.
Stinger didn't giggle. He didn't scream. He reached up and slowly pulled back his hair, his eyes filling with tears that felt like they had been dammed up for a lifetime. "I don't know," he whispered.
"Not good enough," Yoshi said, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the table. "Well we're not leaving this room until you find the truth. Why?"
Stinger's head bowed. He looked at his hands, the hands that had held the gun and the wire. He seemed to struggle to come with the answer but he knew his options were limited, even with his wound seemingly healed on the outside, the pain was still there, aching, and weakening him.
"I loved her," he said, the words so quiet they were almost lost to the rain against the windows.
Yoshi felt a surge of visceral, nauseating disgust. "You loved her? You tied her in a shed and let the spiders eat her eyes? You call that love?"
"It's different! I don't know..." Stinger cried out, his voice cracking. "Hana... she was the only thing in this city that reminded me of the good times with my mother. She was bright. She was warm. She let me goof off, let me turn my brain off and not be the perfect son for a few hours. To me, she was a soulmate. She was the purest thing I had ever touched. Like a newborn babe... unblemished by the world."
Stinger's face hardened, the clinical delusion returning to his eyes. "But then I found out. The landlord... the financial struggles. She was giving parts of herself to him to keep you fed. She was... she was making a mess of herself. She was becoming impure, Yoshi. She was letting the world stain the one thing I didn't even have to help."
He looked at Yoshi with a terrifying sincerity. "I felt betrayed. I didn't know how to feel, so I went back to the only thing I knew. I resorted back to being the perfect son. I decided to remove the impurity that was so close to my heart. I thought if I put her in the dark, she would stay mine. She would stay pure in the memory. I'm sorry... I am so sorry, Yoshi. For her. For letting you be taken to the ward. For taking your life. I was just... trying..."
The silence that followed was absolute. Not even the thunder dared to break it.
Yoshi sat in the dark, his mind playing back the image of Hana in the shed, the arm missing, the "purity" that Stinger had claimed to protect. He saw the broken obsessiveness of it, the crushing weight of a man who viewed a woman's struggle as a personal slight against his own aesthetic.
Stinger hadn't killed her to save her, he had killed her because he couldn't own a version of her that wasn't perfect.
"You're not forgiven," Yoshi said.
Stinger looked up. He looked tired. He looked ready. "I know. I'll hand myself over. I'll tell the police everything... I'll even be the first in whatever new tartarus they plan on building..."
"You're not going there," Yoshi interrupted. "I always planned on killing you, Kenji. From the moment I felt the first breath in Midoriya's lungs, your death was the only outcome I ever wanted."
Stinger's eyes widened. He began to stand, perhaps to flee, perhaps to offer one final plea for the "purity" of his record.
"I was allowed a second life because of my hatred for you," Yoshi said, his voice as cold as the floor of the shed. "The universe didn't bring me back to be a hero, or to put you in a cage. It brought me back to be the consequence. Whether we had this conversation or not, I always knew you had to die."
Yoshi didn't stand up. He didn't even move his arm. He simply looked at Stinger and snapped his fingers.
"Ripple: Burst."
The sound produced a sharp, localized vibration. Yoshi targeted the air around Stinger. He expanded the distance of the sound waves as they passed through the hero's chest, turning a simple click of the fingers into a focused, internal explosion of kinetic energy.
Stinger's chest bucked forward. A thick, dark pool of blood erupted from his mouth, splattering across the mahogany table. His pale blue eyes rolled back, the light of his high-functioning madness finally flickering out.
He slumped back into the chair, his head lolling to the side.
Yoshi stood up and walked the length of the table. He stood over the man, watching as the final, frantic twitches of his heart ceased. He reached out and touched Stinger's neck. There was no pulse.
The Red Thread had been cut.
Yoshi looked around the empty house. He had his body. He had his revenge.
But as he looked out the window at the storm-ravaged city of Yokohama, Yoshi Abara realized that the silence wasn't peace. It was just the absence of noise.
He was back in the world of the living, but he was still a boy made of glass, standing in a house of needles, with no one left to call his name.
He turned and walked out of the house, leaving the "Pristine Needle" to rot in the dark, as the rain continued to wash away the sins of a hero who had never learned how to be a man.