The Sickly Light of a New Dawn
Anzu powered down the television display and shifted lower in her armchair. The sunset was casting long shadows across her living room with its orange and golden light. The beauty was lost on her. She wasn't in the mood.
How could she be?
She ran her fingers through her hair, automatic habit gliding past the scars, leaving them - and the memories of what made them - untouched. Anzu sighed through her nose. As expected, Shiketsu was still national news, for all the wrong reasons. Other Asian news agencies had latched on to the story too, even the ones that had never fully recovered from the Years of Chaos. Someone as well connected as the retired heroine Karaburan could of course get the news even if it was being peddled on foot in print. The resentment brought on by their judgement in particular was sitting in her belly like a dense poison.
That evil little bastard.
Anzu put down her hand to lever herself back out of the chair and wandered to the private bar in her suite. It took longer than it used to, but she was more than capable of pouring herself something neat with a high ABV. She chased poison with poison, and it burned the whole way down. She stared into the empty tumbler.
If only she could place the blame where it really belonged. That dead woman's stupid social experiment, the way these governments strong-armed their pet child soldiers into her school, the debts that forced her to let them, the rat, the boy. It wasn't her hand that was bloody, so why was it her name being raked through the coals in the media? Sandatsu was front and center but he would be happy about the notoriety. She wasn't happy with hers.
Hadn't she left all the scandal behind?
Wasn't that the point?
Another drink poured, and she emptied it in one go. Couldn't even taste it, not really, not the way the price of it demanded. The breeze tickled her hair. How badly she wanted to let go, to throw the feelings into the wind, to rip her home apart and gouge the campus, to storm through the news stations even. Anzu knew she still had it in her. She could fly herself out to sea and get a cyclone up to speed, send it spinning over the coast enough it would still shatter glass when it blew through Tokyo.
She turned the tumbler over and tapped the upward-facing bottom. It made a crystal clink from her manicured nail. What a worthless daydream. She couldn't hurt all those people. It took a lot more than one bad day, or even a very stressful year, for someone to go Villain. She was a teacher, an administrator, a savior to some. She helped the world. Even if she had made some mistakes doing it.
Anzu tamped down on the power of her Quirk, and her living room's air stilled itself.
"Maybe I should quit drinking," she said to the bar counter with a slight slur. There was much to do. Procedures to implement. Contracts to sign. Money to spend. A funeral to prepare for.
If Karaburan ever got her hand on that cultish killer orphan she'd--
Anzu whipped around and threw the glass tumbler directly at the TV. It smashed in and stuck there, cracks spider-webbing out to the very edge, both luxuries ruined beyond repair. She struggled to slow down her breathing, eye flashing with rage, lounge clothes fluttering and flapping in the wind spinning around her. Gradually, it stilled again. She swallowed down the anger, down the rising bile. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to do worse.
"...Fuck."
Chihiro stood on the well-maintained bamboo-lined path that led from her home to the bottom of the forested mountain. Inside, she felt like a jar full of snakes, shaken about until they writhed around each other in agitation, all of them blindly seeking a way out and only finding more heat, more scales, more darkness. It was a mystery why it couldn't reach to the level of showing on her face. It didn't change her poise, either. She more closely watched last night's hot pot boiling, and that was all.
She looked back at her family's dojo and reflected on how it had stood for a hundred years. Like her, it had two aspects as well. First, the hope it was founded with and that soaked into its very boards from the practitioners that had dedicated everything in them to becoming the guardians of their communities. Second, the tragedy that had visited it again and again as those guardians were inflicted with defeat, with tribulation, with death. It was a little easier to see through the heavy haze of tragedy lately and glimpse the glimmers of hope that still clung on beneath.
Chihiro pulled the straps of her backpack tight, turned towards the forest path, and began to jog into the quiet gloom. She breathed deeply as she let herself speed up, and felt hundreds of trees, thousands of blades of grass, countless little creatures all breathe out. Their cells opened up, and hers drank it in. She became joined to the forest by the air itself. She ran faster and yet faster still.
Every moment that passed, she felt more peaceful within. Every moment that passed, Chihiro became more like the wind. Her stride was at its widest, her pace at its quickest, her balance at its keenest, as she flew down the mountain without ever leaving the ground. Chihiro ran so quickly that the world was just streaks of green and brown and speckled light glittering past. She didn't need to see clearly. She knew the whole way down by rote. A cascade of dust and pebbles blew up behind her, and resettled after her passing, and before her feelings were ready for it she was blowing into the quiet city streets at the edge of Kyoto.
By fearful habit, Chihiro closed herself off again, like a million hatches across her skin sealing themselves shut. She stepped up onto the brick wall around a residential garden, bleeding speed away through leaps between the pillars along them, some other early morning pedestrians holding on to their hats or pressing down their skirts as she blew past. This, too, had become part of their routines: the almost daily encounter with the streak down the mountain. Chihiro no longer felt compelled to fumble through apologies, and they no longer felt surprised enough to expect one. In such ways does the fantastic become normal.
Humans will accept anything given time.
When she was back at typical human speed, Chihiro casually hopped the seven feet to the ground, and jogged down the walk path towards Shiketsu high school. More specifically, she diverted a bit out of her way, so she wouldn't have to walk it alone. She spotted a familiar group of backs and gradually slowed down her pace so she could match with her classmates.
"Good morning."
"Morning, Chi-chan."
"Good morning, Mitsurugi." "Hey." "'Lo."
Of course, Nyoro Hoge had greeted her in odd mixture of inflexible and familiar. Her other classmates, Christopher Cain and Sally McCathy, were more casual about it. Ashleigh Katsuragi was here too, today, and had barely spoken at all, nervously fiddling with the free ends of her backpack straps, and watching her feet more than anything else going on.
"I suppose they never officially repealed the rule that students should be moving together to and from school," Hoge began, adjusting her glasses with one hand.
"Not that some people ever followed it," Sally cut off in a barbed aside intentionally mumbled loud enough for everyone to hear.
Hoge puffed up her chest and pressed on, making herself slightly louder. "Though I had expected to see some better organization, especially at key locations such as the train stop nearest the school. I'll have to bring it up to the faculty. There should be more than enough people now that it has been extended to the entire student body."
Chris, who seemed to have doubled in size since the year began, yawned powerfully before he responded. He was looking more at his own thoughts than at the pathway ahead of them. "It's not the best strategy to group potential targets in one place unless you're certain about your defense."
Ashleigh flicked her cross-hair eyes in his direction and glanced away again, chewing the inside of her lip. She was - as all of them were - now thinking about their odds against the monster that had been growing in their midst. Even together, were they any match for...?
A green-winged streak swooped down from the sky in front of them, stumbling in the effort to run into his stride. The wings darted beneath his feet, contorting as they went, until Inigo was suddenly lifted onto a smoothly gliding green and black skateboard, which he grinningly guided into a series of showboating ground tricks. He brake-slid to a stop further up the path and casually stomped on one end of the board, which then unnaturally cartwheeled up under his arm.
Inigo stretched up with his other hand behind his neck and beamed back at his friends. "Am I late?" He adjusted his red tie, and his quirk construct Gigan transformed once more from a skateboard to a little green dragon, which flew up to his shoulder to perch.
Sally's arm clicked a few times as her internal safeties toggled and clenched. She growled, "Dumbass!"
"Nah, man," affirmed Chris with a lazy smirk, as he clapped a hand onto Inigo's shoulder mid-stride.
"You really shouldn't be moving around alone," Hoge snootily chided down her nose at him.
"What do you mean, Coru-chan? Gigan was with me."
He beamed back at Hoge, his heart swelling with warm feelings at her soft-hearted concern for him. She wrinkled her nose in frustration then rolled her eyes.
"Whoa, Ashleigh's here! Man, is it great to see you. We missed you in Team PR-D, you know. But I gave up my grand kidnapping-slash-recruitment plans when I heard how hard you were rocking your internship, whipping the Kyoto underground into submission and all that. Ashleigh sweeeep!"
The shy blue-haired girl in question widened her eyes like a prey animal in the face of the rapid verbal assault of the social butterfly Inigo. She tried to get out something like a "Thank you," but it was as quiet as a mouse in an owl sanctuary.
"And the big guy wanted me to tell you hi," he added with a stage whisper and a wink.
"Eh?!," glared Hoge.
The somber mood was successfully dispersed for the next few minutes in the ensuing chatter, until the students arrived at the crowd making its way slowly through the front gates of Shiketsu High School. As always, the top 10 hero Majestic, who also taught combat skills in the Hero Program at the school, was standing to one side of the gate and watching the students filter in.
Normally he simply groused at the kids who were running late, and maybe made various comments to troublemakers about their behavior or to older girls about their appearance. On this day, he was standing there with his arms crossed, looking at the face of each student, scrutinizing them all and imposing his silent presence across the crowd. Shiketsu had spared no effort to get him back into fighting fitness. The keen-eyed could tell where his regenerated eye shined a little more whitely than its brother, and perhaps the mismatch of texture for his new prosthetic arm.
Guarding with him but on the opposite end of the gate was a thin, broad-shouldered man in a dark purple super-suit with black boots and gloves. He had a full helmet on, which looked more like a bubble space helmet of smoked glass from some ancient sci-fi movie than anything functional. It had brass radio antennae affixed to it, of different lengths and terminal shapes.
"Who's that supposed to be," asked Sally suspiciously.
Hoge guessed, equally suspicious, "One of the new pros to patrol the grounds?"
Chris filled them in. "It's Broadband. A psionic for EM waves. Can send and receive radio, microwave, radar, that kind of stuff."
Hoge gave him a look which spoke volumes on her disapproval of his study priorities. He pointedly ignored her. Always aware of how strangers were perceiving them, Ashleigh and Chihiro noticed how many of the other students were eavesdropping on the conversation.
"That's pretty cool," Inigo added thoughtfully. "So can he shoot microwave beams or whatever?"
"Technically yeah, but he'd probably go into diabetic shock before he would do more than irritate someone's skin. He's likely here as a living comms relay more than anything else."
The crowd kept moving through in sets of four to six abreast, generally nervous about all the changes. New surveillance cameras, housed in featureless black orbs affixed by poles to either side of the gates, silently watched the student body filter through. Before the group from 1-D got there, Broadband put out a hand to stop one bleach-haired student, and firmly guided him with stiff arms to the wall out of the path of the ingress. There, a third man with lean, corded muscle and the long ears of a hare patted down the youth and pulled out a spring-loaded handle from the kid's pocket.
The delinquent started to sweat and tried to meet the hare-man's eyes, but the wild look to those yellow eyes stared him down much more effectively, and the lagomorphic professional switched the catch on the device. Out flicked a shining metal narrow-toothed comb. The hare-man smacked the boy on the head with it, causing it to bend enough to be incapable of retracting, and roughly slapped it into the smarting delinquent's hand before shoving him back into the crowd again.
The flow of students dispersed like river delta tributaries once in the courtyard of the campus. Little cliques, some within classes and some across them, circled up to gossip and rile each other up. The minority of more loner types went straight to their classrooms to wait for the morning bell.
Off alone by one corner of the main building, Bobby Samson was hunched away from as many prying eyes as possible, talking in his native English in his distinct Texan drawl. His mother was on the other end of the line, and it was not going well.
"<Even if we could afford the flight, how's that going to look? They might even say I'm a villain now. ... No, the United States would. It would be breaking the law. ... I know but-... Ma, I'll,>" he gripped the phone tighter and his shoulders tensed. "<I'll handle it.>"
There is more sound from the other end, more volume. A pleading. Bobby locked his jaw and rubbed his hair in a vain attempt at self-soothing.
"<Ma, please stop crying. I'm sorry. That's not what I meant, okay? I won't... I won't do anything stupid. I've learned that lesson. ... They're going all out to protect us. Everyone was blind-sided but that just means they're on full alert now. Everything's getting changed. And I'll lock in and lock it down, just like-... Yeah. ...Yeah, okay. ... I will. I'll call you after school, okay?>"
He looked around to make sure the Japanese locals weren't listening in on his private conversation. Even if they had been, the hard expression he was wearing ensured that anyone nearby was now busying themselves with other things. "<I-love-you-bye.>"
He thumbed the call closed and immediately began marching off towards the training gym, rolling his shoulders and sighing hard through his nose. He'd have to miss home room. Before he could do anything else today, a training dummy needed to feel the power of the sun.
Elsewhere in the courtyard, a group of freshmen general course students had their own small circle. They kept casting nervous glances at everything new: device housing in the flowerbeds, strangers across the sprawling campus, even door locks with optical scanners.
"So now they have our faces forever?" A kid with one big cyclops eye in a baseball uniform complained to his friends. Through no fault of his own, it was especially noticeable when he glanced askance at the rapidly installed security measures.
"Aren't you, like, in club photos already?" A smaller girl with thin snakes for hair responded to him flippantly. Through no valor of her own, she had a much more subtle way to scope the place out. She was no less nervous about it.
"That's different." When his friends didn't reply, the cyclops filled the silence. "You don't think they'll cancel the matches with the other schools, do you?"
His pal with a purple bowl cut smirked at him. "Why, were you hoping they'd let you play in the stadium?"
"They could," he replied defensively, shifting the bat bag over one shoulder. He felt a lot steadier with it nearby - and partially unzipped. "What's with you guys today? You don't have to give me the bad end of your bad mood."
"What's with you guys? Do you hear yourself?"
"Well, did you know him?"
"No, but--"
"So what, then? So some delinquent got another delinquent. It's sad or whatever but it's just more hero-villain bullsh--"
The snake-haired girl grabbed the cyclops by the ear and pulled him down to her level. He gasped and hissed in pain, tugged off balance, teetering on one foot.
"Do you even have a brain in your head?"
"Yeah bro, you're going to get us in trouble." After seeing the girl squint her eyes, he hurries to add, "And it's a mean thing to say, too."
"Okay! Sorry, sorry, so sorry! Let me go!" He grabbed onto the girl's arm and stabilized himself with a sloppy kind of bow in her direction. She released her grip and tugged her arm away.
"We're all freaked out, so don't act hard."
He watched the ground and rubbed the red mark on his ear. Like a lectured child, he mumbled, "Hai."
The boy with a purple bowl cut looked at the snake-haired girl as if nothing strange had occurred. "So in the end, what about your cousin?"
"Who," she asked back, "Sasuke or Throckmorton?"
"Huh? Were they both here?"
"Oh, that's what you mean. No, just Sasuke, and my aunt already pulled him out. He's lounging at home until the transfer goes through to some tech school on the north end or something like that."
"Well, didn't He tear up some neighborhood before?," Mr. Cyclops added in with a distracted sadness, "So it doesn't really matter where any of us are."
No one knew what to say to that. By coincidence, a group of Hero course students were having a similar conversation, across the courtyard and near the entrance doors.
"I believe that all of 3-D is still here. Logically, leaving now would look bad when starting their careers, and they're close to graduation regardless. But 2-D..."
"It's totally gutted. Nene-senpai was saying it's too lonely in there now."
One girl - with blue-grey skin, blind white eyes, and gaps in her clothing so her mushrooms can come through - was holding hands with an anxious, pale catgirl with wrap-around sunglasses and white fur on her head. They were Joan Brooks and Koukoka Fuhayai of the freshmen class 1-E, and they were catching up the 1-D girls in the circle with them. In the group were Aomi and Rikae Kamiyami, also of 1-E, as well as Hoge Nyoro, Chihiro Mitsurugi, and Tame Takara of 1-D.
"Yesterday, Tanaka-kun hadn't shown up," Hoge informed them, as she frowned thoughtfully and idly pet Tame's hair. Tame, a full-body cyborg, was laying her cheek on Hoge's shoulder and hugging the taller girl's arm. It was more for her clingy friend Hoge's benefit, though Tame appreciated Hoge's effectiveness as a heat-sink.
"He's been looking for an excuse for a while even though I keep telling him he only has a provisional license. I even showed him in a dictionary what provisional means." Hoge, the representative for her class, was always putting more responsibilities on her shoulders than any of the teachers actually assigned to her. She mumbled an addendum to herself: "He better be there today. There's no future in e-celebrity."
Chihiro was slightly more comfortable with these girls than the rest of the student body outside of her class, due to previous familiarity. So she was able to ask them politely about how their own class was doing.
It was a thorny question even still. The late Genma Go had started the year in 1-D and ended his life as a member of 1-E. The Kamiyami twins traded a look between themselves.
"Aomi-chan heard cute Kamome-chan hasn't left the house since that night..." The devil-featured girl somehow made her hovering seem morose as she talked. Her sister Rikae, who was bending the uniform rules with layered lolita underskirts, uncomfortably twirled her blonde hair around her fingers and added, "Yokia, too. It seems it was a final straw. Her mom told our mom that she's not even leaving her room, and is getting worried she'll become a full hikikomori."
"Interface has been formally withdrawn," Tame said, and refused to elaborate. She smiled in a friendly way, and Joan nodded slowly in confirmation.
"It's odd," Joan said with a flat affect, "to be in there with no class rep, no self-declared vice rep, and with sensei trying to continue lessons as if pretending it's normal. Like everyone is being left to deal with it alone."
"And with all the empty seats," said cat-eared Kou-chan. She gripped on to Joan's hand tighter. She might be the blind girl's sight guide with all the crowd around, but Koukoka needed to lean on Joan's fortitude. "Like gra-- uh. ...The Harukas are going to live in Tokyo and attend U.A., Jackson's in Europe somewhere, Walker's moved back with his parents, McDichael's family forced him back to Canada. Naza's family wants her to come back to China but she won't go..."
"Ain-chan transfered to general studies. She says her dream died," cut in Rikae. Hoge clenched her jaw and looked up at a tree without seeing it.
"And Kiba-kun..." Aomi floated lower so she could hug on to Rikae's neck, legs up behind her like she was a cape in the wind.
"He's in my forest," Chihiro clarified. Her eyes were closed.
Rikae explained, "He wants to get stronger. He thinks it will help him 'hunt that demon king down.'"
"He's bothering the boars." Chihiro still refused to open her eyes.
"Is anyone left," queried Hoge with a hint of irritation.
"It's hard to say how many," Joan began diplomatically, "without knowing how long Gunn-kun's break is, or even where Victor is at all, but roughly half the class is still there."
"I think we'll see today how many we lose," Hoge said stiffly. Somehow, 1-D had formed stronger bonds than a normal class. Perhaps from all being put through the wringer together.
Tame piped in, lifting up her head to better look at everyone else. "What about 1-F?"
Aomi blinked and slowly rotated supine mid-air. "1-F...?"
"Where they sent poor Hertz-kun," said her sister Reika.
"Ooooh, Aomi-chan forgot about them, Blue-chan..."
"Who cares," declared Hoge bluntly.
Chihiro looked up at her friend and gently said, "Hoge, that one was at your birthday party. He was nice."
"Eh? Rob? He's one of Inigo's weird friends. And he's over there." Hoge pointed out into the crowd, and the taller girls saw the strange young man named Rob Williams, the Velvet Worm of 1-F, emphatically chopping his arm as he passionately ranted at a hole dug into the ground. He looked oblivious to the uncomfortable stares and cringes of the general student body nearby.
"I think they're funny," Tame added in. "They all go to the bathroom together."
Hoge briefly looked scandalized. "Eh? Isn't that a co-ed classroom?" Tame held a hand in front of her lips and tittered.
"Aomi-chan doesn't go to that part of the hallway... She doesn't want the smelly ones to come under her quirk..." The self-referential devil-girl allowed herself to glide back up to just above head height in the conversation circle.
"I don't know if they even understand what's happened," Joan frowned at the sun.
"Hoge-chan's right," Koukoka huffed. "Who cares. Nothing will happen to them, anyway."
That was when the warning bell rang out, and the students dissolved into a migrating herd. A stranger got too close to Aomi for her comfort, and the spunky girl bruised their shin, pointed at a surprised Reika, and immediately flew off. Aggrieved Reika tried to hurry ahead while demurely flinging back apologies, and they apologized back if they had bruised Reika's foot.
The atmosphere in 1-D was, in a word, heavy. The room was broken up into its constituent cliques, though sometimes a member in one would turn and lean away to call something out to someone in another cluster.
Hifumi was sitting backwards in a chair beside Hailey, who was of course with her friends from Korea. He looked like a kicked dog who was daydreaming about kinder days and his eyes kept flicking towards the classroom door, though even he didn't know who he was waiting to arrive. Minnie was doing the same with pursed lips and loud sighing, but everyone was clear who she was annoyed with. The other four girls in the circle was talking over each other and still managing to follow along in the conversation. They didn't pause even when Bobby slipped into the room many minutes later with still-damp hair.
At the front of the room, Imai was making polite small talk with the new students, who were nervously putting out feelers socially on everything that was falling apart. Mahoko was especially put out, concerned that his family would be the next to push their offspring to something less likely to meet with the reaper. Noah was doing his best to counsel and comfort, but all of his optimism seemed to disappear somewhere between his bright inner world and the dark thoughts of his classmates nearby. Tame, too, was doing her best to defuse the angry, fearful tension of Sally, who was sitting as close to Noah as she could without actually being in the same chair.
Kaylee and several other students were crowded around Shinkan who was furiously speed-writing the last of a homework revision under the direction of their hints and encouragements. The British giant had her hands on Shinkan's shoulders and cheered him on with the same phrases she used when hyping him up at the gym. He had already been struggling with the class's faster academic pace to make time for the hero-specific vocational training, but with everything that had happened lately, he was on the edge of flunking out. As the son and grandson of professional Heroes, way back from the origin of Japan's certification system, he had a history weighing him down and for all his strength it threatened to crush him. Of course, the ones directly around him were in similar straits, and not the brightest bulbs themselves, but it only drove them harder in sympathy.
Inigo was part of that loud study circle, and he kept running back and forth between them and Hoge, who matter-of-factly answered every question he posed in the shortest words possible. He would hurry back to carry the knowledge and trivia back, smooth out the delivery, and have to leave when no one there could agree on the next mental roadblock.
Hoge was sitting with Chihiro, Orochi, and the other Mitsurugi Dojo regulars, and they tried to talk about practical things except that Hoge repeatedly fell into scheming double meanings and Orochi kept tamping down on unnameable impulses hiding beneath the surface, leaving Chihiro dizzy and confused with how normal conversation felt so intense.
At one point, a returning Inigo noticed the storm cloud brewing in their hearts and decided the only thing to do was break the mood again with a secret technique he had picked up from his personal hero Popsy. He conjured Gigan as a green-tinned cream pie piled extra-high and complete with cherry, cocked back his arm, and flung it directly at Hoge's face. At the same moment that she noticed and gasped in pre-emptive outrage, the class period bell rang through the school's intercom speakers, and the Gigan pie braked to a halt in mid-air a hairs-width from Hoge's nose. Before the bell's melody had even finished, Gigan spun a full 180 degrees, accelerated back up to speed, and splattered into Inigo's face hard enough to sell the boy's prat fall backward onto the next desk.
Rosethorn thought better of what she was going to say next and simply clapped her hands.
"Pencils down, back to your desks, literature textbooks out. You too, Sen-kun. Home period is over and we need to do our best to not fall behind the mark. There is a time and place for all things. For example, ancient Reiwa poetry, now, in Chapter 14. Th-"
Her words petered out as she noticed unusual sounds coming through the hallway. Normally, it would not be anything that she would have allowed herself to be distracted by, but recent events had left Rosethorn on alert, no less than any of her students. Perhaps, because of her responsibility to protect them, even more so. As soon as she was derailed, the kids became on edge, and communicated through furtive glances until almost everyone was paying attention to the hallway door.
Behind it was echoing the heavy tread of wingtip shoes power-walking across the tile. Behind it, the staccato rhythm of heel-clicks from a woman trying to keep pace with the man's longer stride. In moments, the classroom's door slid open with a whoosh and a clack, revealing a jowly middle-aged man with a severe haircut and receding hairline, grey at the temples, narrow-eyed and sharply dressed. Hovering behind his wide shoulder was a mousey woman in a simple belted dress. When the man in the ironed business suit then spoke, it was with a deep, authoritative voice - the kind of barking rumble that had long become disused to being argued with except by very specific superiors who were all far away from this room.
"My name is Hissori Nyoro," the man grimly announced to the room in general, "and I am withdrawing my child from this death-trap of an academy, effective immediately."