The coastal road was a ribbon of gray stretched between the jagged teeth of the cliffs and the roaring, white-capped mouth of the East China Sea. Koichi Haimawari was a projectile, a violet spark of desperation tearing through the humid twilight.
Behind him, the air screamed. Hawks was a crimson blur, his feathers vibrating with a frequency that sounded like a thousand knives being sharpened at once.
"Hawks, stop!" Koichi roared, his voice torn away by the gale. He twisted mid-glide, narrowly avoiding a cluster of feathers that would have pinned his shoulder to the asphalt. "The car! There's a girl in that car, she's hurt, she's unconscious! They're taking her!"
The Number Three Hero didn't answer. His face was a mask of cold, professional detachment, his eyes hidden behind yellow visors that reflected the dying sun. He dived again, his primary feathers acting as independent blades, slicing the air inches from Koichi's heels.
"Listen to me!" Koichi pleaded, his palms burning as he slapped the road to maintain his momentum. "You're protecting them! You're helping criminals escape. Why?"
Still, the silence. Hawks leaned into a turn, his wings snapping with a thunderous crack as he banked hard to cut off Koichi's path. To Koichi, the silence was more terrifying than the blades. It was the silence of a man who had already accepted his role as an executioner.
The black sedan was visible now, a low, predatory shape speeding toward the bridge that led to the mainland. It was silent, an electric ghost ghosting over the concrete.
"I'm not stopping!" Koichi's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, rhythmic pulse that finally ignited the fire he had been searching for. The 'need' erupted. The sparks beneath his hands shifted from a soft violet to a blinding, incandescent white.
The world slowed. The friction of the road vanished. Koichi surged forward with a burst of speed that made Hawks' eyes widen behind his visor. He was a streak of light, a phantom of Naruhata returning to his peak. He bypassed Hawks in a blur, the wind pressure of his passage nearly knocking the winged hero out of the sky.
He reached the car. His hand was inches from the trunk, ready to latch on, ready to rip the metal apart.
Then, the rear window slid down.
A massive, meaty hand, thick with scarred knuckles and wrapped in stained bandages, emerged from the darkness of the interior. It didn't hold a gun. Between two gargantuan fingers, it held a small, long needle. A sliver of medical steel that caught the setting sun.
The hand flicked the wrist. The needle hissed through the air.
Koichi, moving at nearly a two hundred miles per hour, saw it coming. He shifted his weight, his body screaming at him to dodge to the left, toward the mountainous cliffside. But as he leaned into the turn, a red shadow blotted out the light.
Hawks appeared in the gap. He didn't strike with a feather, he used his entire wing as a solid wall of force, slamming into Koichi's side. He didn't push him away from the car, he pushed him into the path of the needle.
The sting was localized, a sharp, cold prick in his thigh.
Koichi's world didn't explode. It went quiet.
The white sparks beneath his hands flickered and died. The hum of the Slide and Glide quirk, the steady vibration that had been the background noise of his life for years, simply vanished. He was no longer a hero. He was a man moving at terminal velocity with no way to stay on the road.
"No," Koichi gasped, the word a hollow wheeze.
He hit the guardrail. The metal screamed as it buckled, and Koichi was launched over the edge of the mountainous cliff. He tumbled down the rocky slope, a chaotic mess of teal fabric and breaking bones. He crashed through the brush, hitting the lower access road with a sickening thud that knocked the last of the air from his lungs.
He lay in the dirt, the world spinning in nauseating circles. He tried to reach for the sparks. He tried to feel the slide. Nothing. There was a void where his power should be, a cold, empty hole in his chest.
Why isn't it working? he thought, his vision blurring. What did they…?
The sound of soft, rhythmic wing-beats filled the air. Hawks landed ten feet away, his red feathers settling around him like a shroud. He didn't look triumphant. He looked tired. He stepped forward, his boots crunching on the gravel, and pulled a long, crimson blade from his wing.
"I'm sorry, Crawler," Hawks said, his voice a low, somber drone. He raised the feather high, the edge gleaming with a lethal light. "You were probably a good man. But you went against the wrong people."
He swung down.
CRACK.
The sound wasn't the slicing of flesh, but the shattering of stone.
Yoshi Abara appeared as if he had been edited into the frame. He was upside down, his hands planted firmly on the gravel, his legs coiled like springs. In a single, fluid motion of spatial displacement, he spun his entire body.
His heel caught Hawks square in the jaw.
The impact was a thunderclap of raw, kinetic force. Hawks was launched backward, his body skipping off the ground before slamming into the solid cliffside wall with enough force to leave a crater in the rock.
Yoshi didn't follow through. He flipped back onto his feet, standing perfectly straight in the center of the road. His white hair was windswept, his obsidian eyes dark and unblinking as they stared at the spot where the Number Three Hero lay slumped against the stone.
Koichi watched from the dirt, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He saw Yoshi's silhouette against the bruised purple sky, a boy who looked less like a student and more like a pillar of cold, uncompromising vengeance.
___
The crater in the cliffside hissed as rock dust settled, but the Number Three Hero didn't stay down. Hawks erupted from the debris like a red solar flare, his wings already shedding a dozen primary feathers that hummed through the humid air with the precision of guided missiles.
Yoshi stood in the center of the road, his obsidian eyes tracking the movement not by sight, but by the distortion in the air. He felt a sharp, burning itch on his collarbone, a thin, red line appearing where a feather had grazed him a millisecond before he could move with space.
"Illusive bastard," Yoshi muttered.
Hawks was crimson and gold. He didn't engage in a brawl, he engaged in an autopsy. He moved with a speed that felt liquid, sliding through Yoshi's spatial collapses, his feathers targeting the jugular, the femoral artery, the soft tissue of the eyes. Every time Yoshi thought he had the bird pinned, Hawks would shed momentum, his body thinning and twisting in mid-air to leave only a shallow scar behind.
But Yoshi was a student of trauma, and he was learning the rhythm of the hawk.
Hawks dove, a crimson spear aimed at Yoshi's chest. Yoshi didn't step back. He reached out and collapsed the three meters in front of him into a single centimetre. The sudden vacuum pulled Hawks in faster than he intended. Yoshi's fist met Hawks' ribs in a sickening crunch.
He didn't stop there. Yoshi moved and started piecing the hero up with a clinical, terrifying ease. A hook to the liver that warped the air around the impact. A palm strike to the throat that Hawks barely rolled away from. The hero was staggering, his wings tattered and leaking downy feathers, but he was still the fastest man in the sky.
Hawks wheezed, spiralling upward to gain distance. He hung in the air, his chest heaving, a thin trail of blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. "Don't you want to know? Why a hero like me is acting as a guard dog? Don't you want the reason?"
Yoshi stood on the asphalt, the dark shadows of the cliffs swallowing his feet. "I don't care all too much for reasons, Hero. Reasons are just the stories people tell themselves so they can sleep without seeing the faces of the people they're toying with."
He paused, his obsidian gaze fixed on Hawks' visor. "But I have a few theories."
Hawks went still. The wind seemed to die in the pause that followed, the hero's red wings hovering in a moment of paralyzed silence. He was waiting for Yoshi to elaborate, for the dialogue to continue.
Yoshi didn't offer another word.
In the heartbeat of that pause, Yoshi closed the distance. He lunged forward, his right fist cocked back for a devastating strike to Hawks' midsection. Hawks braced, his feathers forming a protective shield around his core, but it was a feint.
The space between them didn't just shorten, it vanished.
Yoshi reappeared directly behind Hawks. He reached out, his fingers locking into the hero's messy blonde hair. With a guttural snarl, he drove Hawks downward.
The sound of the hero's face hitting the asphalt was a heavy, wet thud that shook the road.
But as the impact landed, the body beneath Yoshi's hand dissolved into a flurry of red feathers. Hawks had used a "feint" of his own, shedding his primary plumage to cushion the blow and slipping away in a desperate, high-velocity burst of flight.
Yoshi stood up, wiping a smear of red dust from his palm. He looked up at the sky, where a small, crimson dot was already circling back.
"Fast," Yoshi whispered to himself. "Annoyingly fast."
His speed was so finely controlled, his vision must be helping too, for someone to move as the winged hero did they had to have fine motor skills as well as a great perception of how things moved on the battlefield.
He looked toward the long causeway bridge stretching toward the mainland. The black sedan was a mere speck now, nearing the final military checkpoint before the island gave way to the heart of the country.
"We're out of time," Yoshi said, turning toward the dirt where Koichi lay. "The checkpoint is six kilometres out. At the rate that car is moving, they'll be through the gate and lost in the mainland traffic in exactly four minutes. If they cross that line, we lose the scent."
Koichi looked up, his face bruised, his quirk still silenced by the needle. "Yoshi... I can't..."
Yoshi reached down and gripped Koichi's shoulder, his fingers digging into the teal fabric.
He looked at the sky one last time. Hawks was diving again, his scream of frustration lost in the roar of the coming storm.
"Hang onto your stomach, Koichi," Yoshi muttered.
___
The space in front of the black sedan screamed as the laws of physics were forcibly rewritten. Yoshi and Koichi materialized in a thunderclap of displaced air, the sudden shift in atmospheric pressure shattering the car's windshield before Yoshi even raised his hand.
Yoshi didn't hesitate. He reached out, his fingers twitching in a precise, rhythmic motion. He snapped a high-frequency spatial vibration, a Burst, directly into the car's engine block. The metal disintegrated into a flurry of shrapnel and white-hot steam.
The sedan swerved violently, its tires shrieking against the asphalt before it began to roll. But even as the chassis crumpled, the occupants moved with a terrifying, preternatural speed. Four figures blurred out of the wreckage before the fuel tank could even ignite.
Overhaul landed with a heavy, gloved hand on the asphalt. In a single, fluid motion, the ground beneath him surged upward, forming a jagged, ten-foot wall of earth that blotted out the sunset. Yoshi caught a fleeting glimpse of the bundle in the man's other arm, the small girl, her white hair matted and her face buried in a drab brown cardigan.
She looked like a doll being dragged into a furnace.
"Koichi, get back!" Yoshi hissed.
Two of the masked men, the Shie Hassaikai's enforcers, immediately lunged through the dust. One was a mountain of a man with wrapped knuckles, his fists already moving in a high-speed blur; the other was a calm, silent figure who seemed to be generating a shimmering, golden dome of kinetic resistance.
"Yoshi! I can't...I can't feel it!" Koichi yelled, his voice cracking with a raw, visceral panic. "My quirk! The slide... it's gone!"
Yoshi's obsidian eyes widened for a fraction of a second. Gone? He didn't have time to process the logistics. The mountain of a man was already on them, his punches coming with the force of industrial pistons.
"Stay down!" Yoshi grabbed the scruff of Koichi's hoodie and hurled him toward the grassy embankment.
Yoshi pivoted, his hands moving in a blur. He didn't try to block Rappa's fists. Instead, he used Ripple to expand the space between Rappa's knuckles and his own chest. The villain's strikes hit empty air, overextending his balance. Simultaneously, the barrier-user closed in, his golden shield expanding to crush Yoshi against the cliffside.
Yoshi giggled, a dry, joyless sound. "You think a wall of light can hold me?"
He didn't attack the barrier. He collapsed the space behind the gang member named Tengai. The sudden spatial vacuum jerked the barrier-user backward, stumbling into his own partner. In that heartbeat of confusion, Yoshi lunged. He delivered a twin palm strike, not to their bodies, but to the space they occupied.
Collapse.
The two enforcers were slammed together as the air between them vanished, the kinetic shockwave knocking them senseless before they could even scream.
But as Yoshi turned toward the earth wall to go after the Doctor, Overhaul, the ground beneath his feet showed life. A large, ink-black hand, rubbery and predatory, erupted from the soil. It wasn't human. Or at least it didn't seem so. The hand swept across the road, snagging the unconscious two, pulling them into the solid earth like stones falling into water.
Yoshi flashed to the side of the raised earth, his hand ready to tear the stone apart. "Overhaul!"
The wall was gone. The ground was flat, the dirt smoothed over with a clinical, terrifying precision. Yoshi pushed at the earth, his spatial sense searching for a heartbeat, and found nothing but a jagged, hollowed-out tunnel leading deep beneath the sea-line.
They were gone. The Doctor, the girl, and his monsters had vanished into the bowels of the earth.
"Dammit," Yoshi whispered, the obsidian sparks around his fingers fading into the humid night.
A heavy, wet thud sounded behind him. Yoshi turned to see Koichi stumbling toward him, one hand clutching his shoulder, his face a ghostly, translucent shade of gray. The hero took two more steps before his knees buckled and he collapsed into the dirt.
Yoshi moved faster than sight, catching Koichi before his head hit the gravel. He lowered the man slowly, his grip firm but strangely careful.
"We... we lost them," Koichi wheezed, his eyes glazed with pain and exhaustion. "The girl... Yoshi, I'm sorry. I left without telling you. I thought I was fast enough."
"It's fine," Yoshi said, his voice a flat, tired rasp. He sat down on the edge of the road, leaning back against a jagged rock. He looked up at the sky. The crimson silhouette of Hawks was nowhere to be found, the bird had retreated, likely back to its nest. "You did what a fool does. You ran toward the fire."
They sat in silence for a long time, the only sound the distant, rhythmic crashing of the waves against the cliffs. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind the cold, jagged reality of their defeat.
"I can't feel it," Koichi whispered, his hand trembling as he stared at his palm. "The quirk. It's like a part of my soul was just... erased. It's hollow, Yoshi."
Yoshi looked at the man's hand. He thought of the needle he had seen in the car. "I don't know what to do about that. We aren't in a clinic, and I'm not a doctor."
And that was it, they just had to wait until they were in a better position themselves to think that one out.
"What do you think they putting her through?" Koichi asked, his voice breaking. "That little girl. If they were using her for that... that age reversal thing... how much of her did they have to take?"
Yoshi let out a long, heavy sigh. He thought of the girl's horn, the way the light had felt like a cosmic reset button. "Could be everything. A quirk like that... it could very quickly become a curse. It makes you a resource instead of a person."
Koichi let out a small, tired laugh, a sound of pure, exhausted irony. He looked at Yoshi, his gaze lingering on the white hair and the obsidian eyes that had stood between him and the Number Three Hero.
"You're very strong, Yoshi," Koichi said softly.
Yoshi nodded once, his face a mask of apathetic stone. He didn't want the praise. He didn't want the connection.
"You should become a hero," Koichi said.
Yoshi didn't flinch. He didn't give a disgusted look or a snarky retort. He simply turned his head, his gaze meeting Koichi's with a profound, terrifying stillness. "Why?"
"Because you can't help yourself," Koichi said, a weak but genuine smile touching his lips. "I've watched you. Every time I needed help you showed up, even if you were probably swayed into it. You don't seem like the type to do it for the fame. You did it because you're a hero, whether you want to be or not."
Yoshi looked away, his jaw tightening. If you knew, he thought. If you saw what I did to All Might. If you saw the Malice I left in Midoriya's heart. You would take it back.
But Koichi didn't run. He leaned his head back against the stone, his voice growing steady with a terrifying, absolute certainty.
"You're strong, Yoshi. You're smart. You think rationally while the rest of us are drowning in our own feelings. And you have the experience. And like all other teenagers, you'll grow out of this dark and moody phase."
"My fighting experience..." Yoshi corrected him, his voice a low crawl. "I know how to break things. I don't know how to fix them."
"Then learn," Koichi said. He reached out and placed a hand on Yoshi's arm, a firm, grounding weight. "Become a hero, Yoshi. Not for the Commission. Not for the cameras. Become a hero for that child we lost tonight. Become a hero for me, since it doesn't look like I can't slide right now. But mostly... become a hero for yourself. For your future and past self."
Yoshi sat in the cooling Okinawa night, the weight of the man's belief pressing down on him hard. He didn't answer. He didn't agree. But for the first time in his second life, Yoshi Abara starting seeing a direction in his aimless path
.
"A hero," Yoshi whispered to the dark.
"A hero," Koichi reaffirmed, his eyes closing as he finally let the exhaustion take him. "For all of us."