The world didn't end with a bang or a whimper; it ended with the smell of melting trash cans and the taste of pulverized drywall.
Kaito Arisaka was currently bent double in the middle of a smoke-choked alleyway, vomiting a mixture of gray bile and ash onto the bubbling asphalt.
His lungs were no longer organs; they were two scorched sacks of grief and industrial waste. Every time he drew a breath, it felt like he was inhaling a lit flare. The industrial grade dust mask he'd snagged from the "Damaged Goods" bin at the shop was a joke. It was so clogged with greasy soot that he was
essentially waterboarding himself with every gasp of air.
'I'm going to die,' Kaito thought, his internal voice sounding like a rusted gate swinging in the wind. "I'm literally going to be the first person in history to die of an unpaid double shift. My obituary won't even mention the fire. It'll just say 'Kaito Arisaka: He was a mediocre clerk who didn't know when to clock out.'
He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that didn't even look human anymore. The soot from the chimney collapse had mixed with his sweat and the oily residue of burning chemical polymers, forming a thick, black lacquer that coated his skin from his hairline to his boots.
His hair was a jagged, ash-frozen mess that felt like charcoal. Between the black "mask" of grime and the heavy rubber of his respirator, his identity was a buried secret. He wasn't a teenager.
He wasn't a clerk. He was a localized tall dark man, a "Soot-Guy" haunting the background of a catastrophe.
He looked up at the sky. Through the swirling orange embers, he could see the distant, golden pulses of All Might's shockwaves. The "future Symbol of Peace" was out there, probably three miles away in the commercial district, punching the weather and saving the hundreds people.
.....
Down here, on the edges of the map where the hardware shops and the budget grocery stores sat, there were no cameras. There were no capes. There was just the sound of structural timber snapping like dry bone and the low, guttural roar of a fire that was eating its way through fifteen years of Kaito's memories.
"Hey!" a muffled, terrified voice wailed from above.
Kaito didn't look up with a heroic glint in his eye. He looked up with the weary, bloodshot gaze of a man who just wanted to sleep for a thousand years.
On the third-floor balcony of a crumbling apartment complex, an old man Mr. Kumashi, a regular who always complained that the 10mm bolts were "too shiny" was waving a white towel.
He was deaf as a post and clearly hadn't heard the evacuation sirens that had cut out twenty minutes ago.
"Dammit, Old man," Kaito wheezed, his voice a gravelly rasp. "I told you last month to fix that balcony door. Now it's probably heat-swelled shut."
Kaito didn't fly. He didn't use a quirk. He grabbed a rusted fire escape ladder that felt like it was sitting on a stove. The metal hissed as his soot-covered gloves made contact. He climbed.
Every rung was a battle. His muscles weren't "heroic"; they were tearing. He could feel the fibers in his biceps fraying like old rope. His boots, the cheap work-boots he'd bought on sale, were starting to de-laminate, the soles sticking to the hot metal rungs with a sickening, tacky sound.
"Why am I doing this?" he screamed at himself internally. "I'm a normal human! I have no cheat! I have no system! I'm a peasant in a world of heroes! I should be in a bunker, not playing Spider-Man without the webs!"
He reached the third floor and kicked the balcony glass. It didn't shatter like in the movies; it cracked and stayed in the frame, the safety film holding it together. He had to shoulder-charge it three times. On the third hit, his shoulder gave a sickening pop, and the glass gave way. He tumbled into the living room, landing in a pile of ash and broken ceramic.
Kumashi-san was staring at him, clutching a ceramic cat. The old man didn't recognize the boy who sold him hardware. He saw a blackened, faceless specter wearing an industrial mask. He saw death, or something close to it.
"Go! Out!" Kaito barked, his voice distorted by the rubber mask.
He didn't carry the man like a princess. He grabbed him by the belt and the collar, hauling him toward the fire escape with the raw, ugly strength of a man who knew he was about to collapse. They descended the ladder as the building groaned behind them a deep, tectonic sound that signaled the end of the structural integrity.
When they hit the ground, a group of neighbors people Kaito had known for years were waiting. There was the pharmacist's daughter, the guy who ran the laundromat, and Mrs. Watanabe from the sushi place.
They were all huddled together, looking at the "Soot-Guy" with eyes that were wide with a terrifying, absolute belief and trust.
Kaito leaned against a melted mailbox, his chest heaving. He didn't understand the way they were looking at him. He was a grimy, masked stranger.
Yet, as he deposited Kumashi-san, the pharmacist's daughter didn't thank the gods or the Pro-Heroes. She reached out and touched Kaito's soot-covered arm.
It wasn't a gentle touch. It was a desperate, heavy cling. It was the touch of someone who had realized that the "Heroes" weren't coming to this block, and that this blackened shadow was the only thing standing between them and the furnace.
To Kaito, it didn't feel like a "power-up." It felt like a physical weight, a heavy, suffocating pressure on his spine. Every person he had ever helped, every "thank you" for a fixed pipe, every nod for a discounted hammer seemed to manifest as a physical anchor. Their collective gaze felt like a rope tied around his waist, pulling him back into the heat every time he tried to run for safety.
'They think I can do this,' Kaito thought, a hysterical, tired laugh bubbling in his throat.
He didn't feel like a hero. He felt like a victim of his own competence. He had spent years being the "Fix-it guy" of the neighborhood, and now, in the middle of a literal apocalypse, they were waiting for him to fix the unfixable.
"Hey! You!" a voice yelled.
Kaito turned his head slowly. A young man with a "Camera-Eye" quirk an amateur reporter named Hideki was pointing his lens at Kaito. The camera-eye was whirring, focusing through the smoke.
"Who are you? Are you an underground hero? The footage... the people are saying you've been in and out of four buildings already! Give me a name!"
Kaito didn't strike a pose. He didn't give a heroic speech. He looked at the reporter, his white eyes flashing like twin beacons through the black soot on his face.
"Stop asking questions, and save more people," Kaito growled, the voice-box of his mask crackling.
-----
He didn't wait for a follow-up. He turned and sprinted well, stumbled toward the intersection of Ashita Street. His legs felt like they were made of lead and broken glass.
Every step was an agony of friction. The skin on his thighs was chafed raw from the soot-clogged fabric of his pants. His heart was hammering a rhythm that felt like a death-march.
"This is it. This is the part where the Background Character dies to show how high the stakes are," he told himself. "I'm going to be a footnote. 'Local clerk dies trying to be a hero without a license.' It's so cliché it hurts."
He reached the corner, and his heart stopped.
The construction site. The massive, reinforced concrete pillar. It was leaning over the only exit for the remaining elderly residents and children. The power lines holding it up were screaming, spitting blue sparks that looked like tiny, dying stars.
Kaito looked at his hands. They were shaking. They were raw. They were blackened. He looked at the pillar, and then he looked at the faces of the people trapped beneath it. They weren't looking for All Might. They were looking at him.
The trust and belief of the block was no longer a metaphor. It was a suffocating, physical reality that was about to break him or wake him up.
"Fine," Kaito whispered, his voice disappearing into the roar of the flames. "I'm clocking in. But I'm charging time and a half for this."
He lunged toward the pillar.
~~~~~
[A/n]
"Hey guys, my 'Manager' (the Webnovel Algorithm) is looking at my stats. If you don't mind, could you leave a review? Tell the boss I'm doing a good job so I don't get 'fired' from the trending list. A simple 5-star 'Employee of the Month' shoutout goes a long way!"