This is based off a picture or a comic I saw somewhere...?

"You're a demon," Mob gasped.

The creature – too heinous and twisted to really be called anything resembling human anymore – gurgled heartily. A wispy, dark aura flowed out of its body like smoke, disguising its features. Mob could tell it had retained a vaguely humanoid shape, in the same way a person set on fire did, but that was all he could see. Far more visible was its aura, so thick its mere presence was enough to smother him, leaving his throat tight and parched. It stung his eyes.

"We're one in the same."

"We're nothing alike."

Evil permeated the very air surrounding this creature. This was the power of an ESPer gone from bad to worse, the power Reigen was always warning him of.

"Give it a few more years," the creatured gurgled again.

"I won't – " Mob began, but the creature shattered his defenses almost as quickly as he lifted his hand. By this point, just staying on his feet was exhausting, and another prickle of fear ran through his veins. He should have been close to reaching 100% by now, and unexplainably wasn't.

"It's unavoidable. Think about how much stronger you become once you lose control... once it becomes easier not to care about who gets hurt."

"Master Reigen says – "

"Master Reigen has lied to you before!" the demon shouted.

With every word, it came closer to shattering Mob's defense, an opaque wall of sheer psychic power that even the strongest ESPers had difficulty breaking through. It cracked like glass, hardly noticeable at first, then spreading outwards until suddenly there was a whole spiderweb of fractures. Mob's heart jumped up his throat, realizing that if that didn't kill him, the smoky black hands about to enclose his neck would.

This was not right, this is not what Reigen had told him would happen. People who abused their powers could never be this strong, they were selfish and unwittingly limited themselves.

"You... will never be popular," Mob croaked, the last words he spoke before air became a luxury.

He had been in this situation once before, but Teru had changed. If this ESPer killed him now, they might remain a monster forever – or maybe they already were. Maybe Mob would just turn out to be another notch on a belt somewhere.

'But at least I weakened it,' Mob thought, in those harrowing seconds where timed slowed down while his eyes and heart rate ticked up.

Exhausted as he was, Mob's psychic powers were useless.

Instead of a slow and painful fade to black, the world lighted up with florescent pink.

"Mob, are you okay?"

His knees hit the ground before he'd even begun to recover, but he recognized that voice. The instant he recovered from his fit of coughing, Mob lifted his head and – there was Tsubomi, the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen.

The monster was already fading away in a swirl of black and pink. It's mouth was stretched open in a shriek, but no sound emerged. Mob couldn't hear anything, in fact, except Tsubomi. The most perfect girl in the world.

"Mob, Mob – "

"Mob!"

An entirely new voice chimed in.

This voice did not belong to Tsubomi. This voice was not even the right gender.

Actually, he knew it even better than Tsubomi's.

"Hurry up or you're going to be late for school," Ritsu sighed, straightening a stack of papers against Mob's desk. He set them inside Mob's school bag as he continued, "I already ate your breakfast for you. What were you dreaming about? It must have been rather intense, considering you slept through your alarm and Dimple's attempts at taking over your consciousness."

"You were in a really deep sleep," Dimple deadpanned. "I had to make sure."

"Nobody would believe that!" Ritsu snapped back, followed by something about comas and not happening over night that quickly faded to background noise.

'What was I dreaming about?' Mob wondered.

All he remembered was feeling safe.

Maybe Zephyr should've left this one in the incubator longer? Oh well, it was intended to be short because we don't know much about Tsubomi's character... Time to make dinner. I'll think of a way to use Tsubomi's lack of characterization as a plot point in a fanfiction later.