Kaito watched his notebook hit the floor, pages scattering as flames licked across the paper. Black ash curled in the air. He didn't move to pick it up—couldn't, not with Akari hand hovering inches from his face, fingers wreathed in orange fire.
"What's wrong, Hero Boy?" The girl's smile was all teeth and cruelty. "Can't save yourself without a quirk?"
The classroom buzzed with the kind of energy that came before something bad happened. Students leaned in, some laughing, some uncomfortable but silent. No one moved to help. They never did.
Kaito ducked as her hand swiped past his ear, close enough to singe hair. Kaito choked, suffocating in the heat. His heart hammered against his ribs. This was too much. This was—
The girl's hand pulled back for another swing, flames growing brighter, hotter—
And then someone caught her wrist.
The world shifted.
Sound didn't just quiet—it vanished into a vacuum. The fluorescent lights overhead didn't dim; they curdled into a sickly, bruised gray, as if the room were an old photograph left in the rain. The air grew heavy, pressing against Kaito's lungs like deep-sea currents.
A boy stood where there had been only empty space a heartbeat before. His hand was clamped around the girl's wrist. Her flames—once roaring and vibrant—now looked like cheap orange paint, flickering uselessly against his skin without emitting a single degree of heat. The "Hero Boy" was gone. In his place was something that didn't belong in a classroom.
The girl stared at him—at it—and whatever bravado she'd had shattered like glass.
His skin had taken on a strange, mottled texture, like rough stone shot through with veins of dark blue. His eyes were sunken, hollow pits that reflected nothing. Wisps of shadow coiled off his shoulders and arms, writhing slowly in air that had gone still and thick. He looked wrong. Not quite human. Not quite alive.
"You freak!" The scream tore out of her throat, raw and panicked. "Monster!"
Her eyes were wild, darting across his transformed face like she was trying to find something human in it and failing. For a heartbeat, she didn't recognize him—couldn't reconcile this thing holding her wrist with anything she'd seen before.
Then something clicked. Her expression shifted—shock bleeding into recognition, recognition twisting into disbelief.
That gloomy kid. The transfer student who never talks. Dante.
"What does that make you then?" His voice was hollow, distant, like it came from the bottom of a well.
I'm afraid to use this curse—I had no choice.
The thought had barely formed before his body moved. Before the transformation took hold. Before he could stop it.
Now he stood there, and the girl—Akari, some distant part of him remembered—stared up at him with eyes gone wide and white, the fear in them now laced with something sharper. Recognition. Understanding that the quiet boy who sat three rows back had just become something out of a nightmare.
"D-Dante—" Her voice cracked, his name stumbling out like she wasn't sure it still fit. She yanked her arm back, but his grip held firm. "Let go! You're hurting me!"
Her quirk responded on instinct—fire erupting up her arm, across her shoulders, bright and furious. The heat should have been unbearable. Should have burned.
It didn't.
The flames washed over his transformed skin like water, harmless and distant. Nothing. No pain. No warmth. Just cold, clinical awareness as her struggles turned meaningless against his grip.
"You bully someone who can't stand up for himself." His grip tightened, just slightly. Bruises were already forming beneath his fingers, dark purple spreading across her pale skin. "How does it feel?"
The girl—Akari, her name is Akari—screamed.
Two of her friends lunged forward. A lanky boy with paper-thin arms stretched them like ribbons toward his shoulders. The arms passed through him as if he were smoke, meeting no resistance, and the boy stumbled forward with a yelp of shock.
A stocky girl threw a kick at his legs. Her foot connected—thud—and pain lanced up his shin, sharp and sudden. He flinched, his shoulder jerking backward, but his feet stayed planted. He gritted his teeth and tightened his stance, forcing himself to stay still.
Don't move. Don't let them see it hurt.
"Stop it! Stop!" Akari thrashed in his grip, hitting him with her free hand. Flames flickered across her knuckles. Each blow landed with dull force—thwack, thwack, thwack—and each one sent jolts of impact up his arm. Not enough to make him let go. Not enough to matter.
But he felt them.
His jaw clenched. His free hand curled into a fist at his side. The shadows writhing around him grew darker, thicker, responding to something he couldn't name—anger, maybe, or fear, or the awful realization that he was doing exactly what he'd sworn he'd never do again.
I'm scaring them.
I'm scaring her.
His expression didn't change. No anger. No satisfaction. Just that flat, analytical detachment, like he was watching this happen to someone else. Like he wasn't really here.
He released her wrist.
Akari stumbled backward, cradling her arm against her chest. The bruises had spread—angry purple and black, stark against her skin. She hit the floor hard, breath coming in hitching sobs, eyes still locked on him with something beyond fear. Something closer to horror.
The boy turned, his movements slow and deliberate. The tile beneath his feet was cold. Wet from the sprinklers that hadn't activated yet. The classroom remained locked in that awful silence, every sound swallowed by the void pressing in from all sides. Students pressed themselves against the walls, eyes wide, mouths open in silent gasps that went nowhere.
He stopped in front of another desk.
The quirkless boy—Kaito—sat frozen, trembling, staring up at him with the kind of raw, primal terror that couldn't be faked. The same terror prey animals felt staring down predators. His chair scraped backward, inch by inch, as if his body wanted to run but his legs wouldn't obey.
The boy in the monstrous form reached out a hand—slowly, carefully, the way someone might approach a wounded animal.
It's okay. I helped you. You don't have to be scared.
"Kaito—" His voice came out wrong. Hollow. Empty. "It's—"
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Kaito's chair tipped over. He scrambled away, hitting the floor and backpedaling on his hands and knees, shoes slipping on wet tile, eyes locked on the boy like he was staring at death itself.
"Leave me alone!" The words tore out of him, high and panicked and terrified.
He pushed himself to his feet and ran, stumbling over his fallen chair, shoving past frozen classmates, disappearing into the hallway without looking back.
The boy stood there, hand still outstretched, staring at the empty space where Kaito had been.
What...?
What did I do wrong?
Then—RIIIIIIING!
The fire alarm shrieked to life, shattering the oppressive silence like a hammer through glass. Sprinklers burst open overhead, cold water raining down in sheets. The classroom flooded with sound again—gasping breaths, sobbing, the rush of water on tile, the scrape of chairs as students scrambled for the door.
Color bled back into the world like someone had turned the saturation back up. Reds. Blues. The sickly yellow of overhead lights struggling through the gray.
The boy's hand hung suspended in the air, still reaching for something that was no longer there. His hollow eyes—gray now, not empty, gray like storm clouds—stared at the empty space, confusion and something else flickering across features that were slowly, painfully shifting back to human.
The transformation melted away like smoke. Stone texture fading to olive skin. Shadows dissipating into nothing. Hollow eyes filling back in with color and recognition and the creeping, horrible realization of what he'd just done.
He was just a boy again. Fourteen years old. Soaked uniform clinging to his frame. Standing alone in a classroom full of terrified students while water poured down around him and Akari sobbed on the floor and everyone, everyone, stared at him like he was a monster.
He looked at his hand.
It was shaking.
Behind him, someone whimpered. Someone else was crying. Footsteps pounded in the hallway—teachers, probably, coming to see what had triggered the alarm.
Slowly, like his arm weighed a thousand pounds, he lowered his hand to his side.
The water kept falling.
"Dante Corvo!"
The Principal's voice boomed from the doorway, heavy with authority and barely restrained anger.
The boy—Dante—didn't turn around. He just stood there, staring at his trembling hand, watching water drip from his fingers to the flooded tile below.
I was just trying to help.
Why did he run?
Why did they look at me like that?
The Principal's office smelled like old coffee and furniture polish. Dante sat in one of the two chairs facing the desk, sandwiched between Marco and Chiara. On the opposite side of the room, Akari sat with her parents—her mother draped in expensive designer clothes and glittering jewelry that caught the light with every breath, her father in a pressed suit that probably cost more than Dante's entire wardrobe.
Akari wrist was wrapped in a clean white bandage, and she clutched it to her chest like a war medal. Like proof of victimhood she'd earned.
The Principal paced behind his desk—a short, round-bellied man with a magnificent mustache that didn't quite match his nervous energy. His gait carried a subtle limp—a souvenir from his hero days—that made his pacing seem almost comical against the tension in the room. It wasn't. Not with the tension thick enough to choke on.
"Madam, sir," Principal Hayashi said carefully, addressing Akari parents with the tone of someone defusing a bomb, "I refuse to believe Dante acted out of ill intention."
Akari mother scoffed, the sound sharp and contemptuous. She shifted in her chair, jewelry clinking like wind chimes.
"Ill intention?" Akari's mother scoffed, her silk scarf shimmering as she bristled. "Principal Hayashi, my daughter is on the fast-track for UA's recommendation entrance. Now she has finger-shaped bruises on her wrist and a trauma report. Do you have any idea what this looks like on a record? It looks like your school houses villains."
"That's right!" Akari leaned forward, and for just a moment—so brief Dante almost missed it—something sly flickered across her face before the tears welled up again. Her voice climbed higher, practiced and trembling. "He attacked me! For no reason! I was just—just talking, and he—he grabbed me and—" Her voice broke on cue, and she buried her face against her mother's shoulder.
Her mother's hand stroked her hair, but her eyes stayed fixed on Dante.
Dante stared at the floor. The tile was scuffed near the desk leg. Someone had scratched initials into it—K.M., maybe, or R.N. He couldn't tell.
Marco's jaw tightened. His hand flexed once, twice, like he wanted to reach for something—evidence, the CCTV footage they both knew existed. But he stayed still. Waiting.
Chiara's hand rested on Dante's shoulder—warm, firm, grounding. She didn't speak, but her thumb brushed against the fabric of his jacket in small, steady circles. I'm here. We're here.
Principal Hayashi sighed heavily and glanced out the window. Rain streaked down the glass in uneven rivulets, blurring the schoolyard beyond. "Dante has been enrolled here for nearly a year. In that time, he's had zero behavioral incidents. He's quiet—perhaps too quiet—but never violent. Never aggressive."
"Until today." Akari father spoke for the first time, his tone flat and final, like he was closing a business deal. He didn't even look up from his phone.
The Principal's mustache twitched. He wasn't looking at Dante with anger, but with the weary eyes of a man who knew the school board would side with the "bright fire girl" over the "void-shadow boy" every single time.
"Dante," Hayashi said, his voice barely a whisper. "The cameras show you intervened. But they also show... that. Give me something to work with. Why didn't you just call a teacher?"
"Dante. Please. Explain yourself. Tell us what happened."
The room fell silent.
Akari lifted her head just enough to watch him through tear-wet lashes, her expression carefully composed. But her eyes were sharp. Waiting.
Her mother's lips pressed into a thin, disapproving line. Her father checked his watch.
Dante felt all their eyes on him—heavy, expectant, judging.
Marco leaned closer, his voice low and careful. "Just tell them what happened." A pause. "It's okay."
Chiara's hand moved from his shoulder to the back of his head, fingers threading gently through his damp hair. The touch was careful, deliberate. "We know you had a reason," she murmured quietly.
"Whatever it was, we're with you."
Not that we know you made a mistake. Just: We're with you
We're with you.
Dante's throat felt tight. His hands curled into fists in his lap, nails biting into his palms.
I just wanted to help.
The memory flashed through his mind—a hand reaching out. Someone stumbling backward. Eyes wide with fear, looking at him like he was—
What went wrong?