It is sad to know that sometimes you leave your home and find it destroyed. A gas leak, the thieves... In my parents' case, it was me.
It was March and I was sixteen. I had just completed the first year of a private high school for Heroes.
My parents weren't there when I came home. Better, I could have acted without being disturbed.
With an angry click, I reached my room and grabbed the scissors. In a raptus, I had thrown down all the class photographs. There was one at the welcome ceremony, one in summer and one in winter. I had not yet withdrawn my school report; they would had taken another damn picture there too, during the closing ceremony.
I remember having my lips pursed as I passed the blades along the necks of my companions. I had done it on their hideous printed faces, but for the speeches I had heard coming out of their sewers they deserved to see them pointed at their jugulars.
I didn't cut all the faces, no. There were those who were still convinced that they wanted to be Heroes for justice, for altruism, for pity towards the weakest. But there were as many, indeed they were more, who studied heroism for personal vanity, to earn money and for competition. How disgusting.
"Damn... die!" I whispered, crumpling up the photo paper containing the faces of those assholes and throwing it into the trash.
"Chizome, are you home?" My mother's voice.
Poor thing... maybe I was not worthy of being her son. She was so mild, so patient. Like my father.
I didn't, I didn't know how to settle in their tranquility, and the Quirk I was exhibiting was proof of this. I could, and can, paralyze people by licking their blood. This is not the Quirk that a housewife, or a quiet employee, exhibit.
My parents saw me crouching on the floor of my room, still with scissors in my hand and a furious expression on my face.
"Chizome... what are you doing?" Wasure, my mother, asked me.
I hadn't answered her, she wouldn't have understood.
Yasashi, my father, had come over and raised one of the photos.
"You cut your school photos!"
"They are just useless pieces of paper, as inconsistent as the people whose face I cut."
My father had given me a troubled look, barely shielded by his thick prescription lenses.
Where was that son who wanted to be a Hero? What were those violent speeches?
Wasure placed a hand on my shoulder.
"What happened?"
Her lower lip trembled and she was scared.
"I don't want to go back to that school of clowns anymore."
"Do you want to change it?"
"And going to another school for unreal Heroes? No."
"So where would you like to study?"
That question remained unanswered that afternoon. I wouldn't have wanted to study anymore, because there was nothing that anyone could teach me. In that horrible school, the 'Mankai no eiyu' in Hosu City, I had learned nothing.
There were twenty of us in that class, and about half was made up of gasbags and go-getters who pursued the career of Hero as if it were a stage for actors. Even after two months of school I already had gastritis at the sight of those beings.
I didn't tell my parents anything, but I think they noticed my discontent when I answered in monosyllables pretending to be tired and when I lost myself looking at my dinner plate.
They had never been too worried until that afternoon, also because with both of them working they never had too much time and I believe they considered my grins normal transitional phases common in adolescents. That afternoon a veil was torn before them, revealing an unhappy and frustrated 16-year-old son.
Among all the dickheads that populated the first class of that school single section, there were two that made me particularly mad: the first was an American girl who was perpetually tanned and as deep as a puddle, the second a daddy's boy who whined for every single thing.
If the Mankai had any merit, it was to be a school open also to foreigners, and in fact it had professors and students coming from various States, maybe even arrived in Japan following the family or through acquaintances.
Of course, that school had collected only the trash of the world, just like the American one, which by name was Crystal.
She had failed the class in her homeland and was a year older than me, and it was enough for me to hear her talk for a day to realize that, if I had been the professor, I would had made her repeat the classes until her death, or rather I would had kicked her out.
She expressed herself in a broken Japanese, but still understandable. That was the last of the problems... the concepts were missing.
"I want to become an Hero because I am beautiful. The Heroes must be beautiful, because beauty is synonymous with goodness. Dad also told me that."
As she spoke, her long, well-groomed blond hair had seemed only tow to me, and her teal eyes, a putrid pond.
I hadn't held back from teasing her vulgarly:
"And what will you call yourself, beauty? 'Inflatable Doll'? 'Erotic Dream'?"
She had frowned and had run to the bathroom, most likely to cry like only vain girls can do. I didn't mind that, nor the other comrades' reproachful glances.
"You have been bad."
"I'll live with that." I blew, adjusting a tuft of hair.
Whoever is on the side of these aspiring false Heroes is like a Villain.
Another one that was really unpleasant to me was Hanamizu Gikunshi, a rich boy with tears always embedded in his eyes and the personality of a burnt mochi thrown in the street.
He wanted to use the 'Hero' name to make even more money...
Leaving aside the disgust that idiot with perennial snotty nose caused me, I wanted to see the people who would had gone along with such a slimy man... because the money earned from his 'heroism' would had attracted women, according to him...
I had tried to sit in the back of the class, to get confused with the wall, because I didn't want to be at the center of the attention of that bunch of losers.
My parents had given me an iron education, they had explained to me the difference between good and evil, and now I found myself, at the age of sixteen, going back to kindergarten, with people who believed they could save lives to show themselves, not because it was right.
But the worst part, if possible, were the professors.
They were exaggeratedly lenient towards those overblown jerks, they treated them with complicity and complacency.
The months passed and the hatred towards that system increased.
I was good, one of the best in the class, and I was kind to those who had shown that they believed in my values. Unfortunately, bad apples stank terribly and their smell covered the scent of the good ones.
One day, I was put in a trio with Gikunshi and Starry, the American. The professor had noticed my resentment, definitely turned on, towards them.
We had to simulate a rescue mission: he was the victim, she the bad one.
I did everything very well, but when I listened to the comments of those two, my brain went jelly again:
"Prof, why didn't you make me the Hero?" was Gikunshi's whimper.
"I broke a nail!" was Starry's predictable, obvious, hateful gripe.
"Shut up!" I blurted out.
Everyone turned to me: when I got angry I intimidated people.
Even the professor, an Indian by the name of Janvi, had been suspended with the score register in hand.
I was out of breath, I wouldn't held back any longer.
"Will you push the other Heroes aside to be the first to go into action? While you will be fine arguing with them the person you will have to save will already have fallen into the ravine, my dear Gikunshi. And you, Starry... will you refuse to immerse yourself in the mud to reach a person who risks drowning in a flooding river?"
Crystal made a yap of disdain, most likely because the thought of getting dirty was a blasphemy for her.
"How dare you talk to me like that?"
It was Daddy's son who spoke.
"I speak to you as I please, dandy."
"Come on, Akaguro... don't you feel like you're exaggerating now?"
Poor Professor Dekhata... he was a gentle and calm man like my parents.
Unfortunately, today's world doesn't look at people like that.
"I'm sorry, but your school is not for me. I will finish the first year and I will present myself at the closing ceremony, but apart from that you will not see me anymore."
The Prof's dark eyes focused on me, with the same troubled look my father had given me when I cut the photographs.
"This teaching method is a disgrace, an insult to Heroes of All Might's caliber. Half of the students present here don't have the slightest consideration of the people who will need them. It's just business, brag."
I had expressed myself with adult tones, and the professor had kept silent. From that day on, no one had ever spoken to me unless strictly necessary.
I was left on my own, with my disillusionment, my anger and my despair.