Wednesday, April 28th 2128 (285 Days until U.A. Entrance Exam)
The Robber woke up to the ringing of his special cellphone.
While a night of hard drinking with friends and an early morning spent in bed with a very flexible woman would have left him sleeping through the buzzing of his regular phone his eyes snapped open when he heard a friendly little jingle coming from his coat on the floor. Groaning and clutching his head to try and soothe his hangover Robber shot out of bed and pulled the plain cellphone out.
"What!" Robber snarled as he answered as he sat back down on his bed, his partner groaning and turning away from him but just now waking up. He took a moment to enjoy her bare back and behind, her skin a lovely shade of bright green due to her Quirk, before The Entertainer spoke.
"Good Morning Rob!" She said all chipper and probably not hungover. "Guess what you get to do!"
"En, this better be important. I've got a killer headache and more," he eyed his sleeping partner's bare behind again, "important things to do today."
"You do have something important to do!" She agreed and he could tell that she was grinning. "The compass is acting up!"
"…And? It does that anytime…" Robber looked at the woman in his bed and stood up, quickly walking to his bathroom, going inside and locking the door. "…Anytime something from The Between comes over. Or thinks about coming over really. Every time we send somebody out to try and find what's going on the thing's either dead when we get there or it goes back on its own. It's a wild goose chase no matter what."
"Now Robbie," she somehow admonished happily, "are you suggesting that we just let some monster or nonhuman go? Are we just going to start letting in everything that crawls into our dimension or city just walk all over us until they try something?" He could hear the grin in her voice. "That sounds like Fucking Traitor talk to me."
"Fine, I get it. Where are you so I can get the stupid compass?" Robber asked as he rubbed his eyes. "What's got you in such a good mood? Your dealer hook you up with something new?"
"Ohhh, yaaa!" The Entertainer answered positively before telling him where she was. With a street address he ended the call and with a heavy sigh he exited his bathroom.
He found his partner awake and sitting up in bed, her breasts on full display for him to enjoy. "Morning." She greeted with a warm smile, her long red hair covering one of her eyes.
"Closer to noon actually." Robber said as he walked over to his bed and sat down, smiling at her. "How you doing?"
"Great, last night was so much fun!" She said as she leaned forward to get closer to him, probably to kiss him. "I haven't had any in-"
"Thanks, but…" He pulled back cutting her off and she blinked confused. "I'm going to need you, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, grab your shit and get out."
The pencil that Izuku was holding easily went across the page of the journal in his lab, filling in the dark spots of his attempt to draw the sight in front of him. He looked up from the journal at the dead flying red jellyfish lying in the middle of the street. What little of it that wasn't paste due to being run over by unknowing drivers was currently being feasted on by a horde of blue iguanas. While initially frightened by the sight of so many of the lizards that had faded when he realized that they were far more interested in the easy meal in front of them than him.
So now he stood in The Between, standing on a sidewalk doing his best to sketch a good representation of a blue iguana now that he had so many in front of him not attacking him. "I need to come up with a name for them." Izuku muttered to himself as he shaded in the darker blue of their underbellies. "I can't just keep calling them blue iguanas." He spent some time coming up with some names to avoid thinking about the real topic on his mind.
The next First Quarter moon was in 9 days.
His first chance to make the sacrifice to the God that now owned his soul in exchange for the spell that brought him to the strange space he was currently standing in.
If he didn't do it then or a month later then he would miss his Spring offering and have the "Hounds" sicked on him and everyone he loved.
He needed to sacrifice a living create that was a quarter of his weight and with little muscle but no real fat he weighed just over 100 pounds. So he needed to find an animal just over 25 pounds…
A quick look online showed he'd need a "Medium-Small" dog or some kind of young farm animal.
To his surprise a search of the Blue Iguanas from Grand Cayman, the ones in the real world that the police mistook The Between lizards for, showed that they weighed on average 31 pounds. Their Between counterparts however did not weigh anywhere close to that despite being the same size. He'd be surprised if the largest weighed more than 12 pounds.
Still… even if they did meet the required weight he would find it difficult to… sacrifice them. He had killed one before, rather violently at that, but that had been because it was attacking him and he was in a desperate and pained rage.
But to slit the throat of creature that would have to be at his mercy…
Sighing Izuku snapped his journal shut and put it back into his new backpack. He watched the iguanas eat for another minute, wondering what could have killed the flying red jellyfish or if it had died of old age, before he continued down the street.
It had been over two weeks since he got kidnapped and his entire world had been turned… well upside down didn't really do it justice. Was there a word for learning that the entire world and universe worked the exact opposite of what you believed and the people you thought were crazy were right all along? And to top it all off he would be going back to school next week.
Which meant that he'd have less time to spend learning how things worked in The Between, like how since he couldn't affect blades of grass it made walking on lawns like trying to cross a bed of crooked nails, and improving his abilities in it.
In the journal currently in his backpack that was normally hidden in his room the latest tests read as thus:
CLOTHES TEST #28 – 2 SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR
TOWEL TEST #17 – 01:49
15 days after he began his training and he had only progressed to keeping a few pieces of clothes in the real world and shaved off 5 seconds while traveling through a simple towel. If he kept it at his current rate then he'd be able to walk through the towel and probably be able to leave anything touching him behind in the real world with 5 months to spare until the U.A. Entrance Exam.
But there were things he wanted to make sure of before he claimed to "master" The Between, one of them being how the lizards were able to "burrow" underground and "climb" up inside walls while being intangible. And he wasn't even going to try figuring that out until he could walk through at least a towel like it was nothing.
Then there was another problem that came with going back to school…
Everyone there knew that he was Quirkless and Kacchan and others loved reminding him of that. So when and, more importantly, how was he going to break the news that he had a "Quirk" now?
"…Yewfg qasw lofgh." Izuku said once he was alone on the street and returned to the real world. He supposed that he could just wait until the Exam itself, since it was not required that you have Quirk to take it. But then there'd be a lot of questions of why he was filed and thought of as Quirkless. So he needed a way to reveal that he now had a "Quirk".
He could say that he was an extremely late bloomer but he had never heard of anyone materializing their Quirk passed the age of six or seven before. There'd be a lot of questions and interest as to why it showed up so late. And he didn't want that at all, the Government Agents with stars for eyes made him nervous enough already.
He could say that he just didn't realize he had a Quirk and thought it was a normal thing that everybody could do. But given that his "Quirk" was, to the unknowing, turning invisible and intangible this was almost impossible.
Finally, he could say that he had been lying to everyone, including his family, his entire life about not having a Quirk. He would need a sufficient reason, probably one with a lot of angst, to explain this without him looking like a complete asshole for getting his family to pity and worry for him and continue to allow himself to be bullied for years.
'Maybe some combination of the three.' He mused. 'Like if I say that I developed my Quirk after that visit to the doctor who said I'd never get…' Izuku thought as he strolled down the quiet residential street, the sun shining brightly at his back in the clear sky. 'I can pretend like what he said made me think what I was doing was impossible so I suppressed it for years. Then the emotional trauma of getting kidnapped and attacked by a lizard made me remember and it unlocked!' He reasoned as a smile split across his face. 'Yeah! That can work! Now I just need to figure out how to tell Mom, then I'll figure out how to break it to Kacchan and the rest of the school.' With a grin on his face Izuku walked down the street, his head held high.
There was a shift in the air behind him and Izuku's smile vanished as he felt his skin crawl in a way he hadn't felt in over two weeks.
It was the feeling of magic that was not his own.
A giant shadow fell over him, completely bloating out his own.
Slowly, Izuku started to turn to look behind and above him and stopped when he saw The Between Man standing there. The blank, red leather oval shaped face "looking" down at him. For a moment they stood there like that, Izuku's heart beating a mile a minute and his blood going cold.
'…What is th-' Izuku started to think before The Between Man raised it's right arm and, with Izuku still rooted in place trying to figure out just what he was looking at, it quickly slammed it into his back. Izuku went flying across the street and into a parked car, slamming front first into the back left side door so hard that it left a large dent. The car gave a single loud chirp, a warning from the alarm that any continued activity would set it off.
"GAAHH!" Izuku cried out in pain as his eyes went wide and the breath was knocked out of him. He fell onto his back and tried to breathe as The Between Man turned and looked at him lying in the street. 'What is this thing?!' He thought in a panic as he looked at it. From the red leathery skin, giant 14 foot height, long tube arms that reached its ankles, feet like an ape's with thumbs on both sides, and a blank oval head nothing about it seemed remotely from this world. So that and its use of magic made it pretty clear that it was a monster and not a Villain.
Coughing and rolling onto his front Izuku stood and looked at it. The Between Man made no threatening moves and just stood there watching him. 'What do I do?!' He thought in a panic. 'I wasn't expecting to encounter something like this until after I became a Hero! I need to get away from this thing!' He looked up and down the street and started edging his feet the direction he had come, getting ready to book it.
The Between Man was not happy about this.
It closed the distance between them with just two steps and pulled its left leg, the prehensile foot at the end closing into a fist. Izuku managed to move his head at the last second, dodging the blow that sailed past him and punched through the glass of the car door's windshield. This triggered the car alarm and broke Izuku out of any fearful hold he was in. While The Between Man's foot was caught in the windshield he broke out in a run down the street.
"Kewkak xexxex hujgt!" Izuku shouted, casting the incantation and entering The Between. He dared to look back as he ran onto the safety of the sidewalk and found The Between Man easily closing the gap between them. It helped that it could just walk through the cars parked on street like they weren't there.
'It followed me into The Between?!' Izuku realized with a fright. 'But I didn't hear it speak the incantation!' Not that it could with no mouth. 'It can enter and exit whenever it wants! How do I get awa-' Before he could finish his thought The Between Man raised its right arm and pointed the end of the tube-like appendage at him.
Out of the opening slithered a pale teal tentacle covered with deep purple spikes that stood up as soon as they were out of the arm. The tentacle shot out towards his legs and Izuku leaped forward to dodge it, nearly stumbling when he landed.
"Don't get caught, don't get caught." He breathed as The Between Man bounded next to him, it's bottom half in a van. It seemed to grant Izuku's request and instead of wrapping the tentacle around him brought it against his back like a whip. "AHHH!" He cried out as his new backpack exploded and showered its contents onto the sidewalk. Izuku didn't stop running and instead shouted the exit words and left The Between.
Now alone in the real world he was granted a few moments of solitude before he looked back and saw The Between Man blink into existence, standing next to the van it had previous been inside. It couldn't enter the real world inside of another object it seemed, probably not wanting to get split in half. It closed the brief distance that Izuku's jump to the real world had bought him in a second.
"DAMMIT!" He cursed as the small space between the cars in the street and the wall next to sidewalk left him precious little room to dodge the spiked tentacle. Breathing heavily and beginning to feel his muscles burn Izuku couldn't dodge them forever.
The tentacle wrapped around his left ankle and the spikes dug into his skin, drawing blood. Before he could even cry out in pain The Between Man lifted him off the ground and flung him over the street, sending him flying over a fence on the other side. Izuku screamed as he soared through the air and crashed into the ground, remembering to shield his head with his arms. He groaned in pain as he heard voices and feet rushing towards him. He opened his eyes and found a number of children in matching uniforms holding catchers mitts as more in different uniforms ran over with a number of adults he assumed were their parents.
Izuku had been thrown into the middle of a little league baseball game.
"Hey, are you okay?" One of the kids asked as they looked down on him on the ground trying to get back up. "What were you doing in the air?"
"R- Run!" Izuku shouted to the kids as he stood, his body bruised and dirty from landing in the dirt of the baseball diamond. "Get away from me!" He shouted as he turned to run only for the kids to cry out and fled from him. He turned around in time for The Between Man to slam its tentacle into his chest. Once again he went flying, not as far this time, but he managed to go over the children and make to the pitcher's mound in the center of the diamond.
Izuku groaned in pain as he looked up at the sky, his shirt torn apart and his chest bloody due to the spikes on the tentacle. 'How… how do I beat it?' He thought as he stared up at the sky. 'I can't out run it, its strides are too long and it can follow me into The Between.' He could here its footsteps as it approached and the screams of the people and children as they ran away. He managed to crane his head up to watch The Between Man walk towards him, towering above him even more now that he laid on the ground.
The tentacle receded back into it's tube arm and it's walk slowed as it approached, taking its time to observe him groan in pain and bleed on the ground. The Between Man had appeared before him maybe a minute and a half ago yet he was already battered and bruised and the only damage it had taken was probably when it had punched the car windshield with its foot.
The fear that Izuku had felt when he had seen the Deep Tunneler remerged from his gut, turning his skin cold as he once again helplessly watched certain death approach. He was a fool, a child high on the possibility of fulfilling his dream, to think that he could fight and protect the people from the things that existed in the dark and strange corners of the world.
He thought that with a simple incantation he could be a Hero and it had left him in the dirt the first time he met something that could use it like he could.
He thought that he could fight creatures the likes of which had taken a grown man with at least partial knowledge of what he was fighting several shots from a shotgun point blank and better mastery of the incantation they shared to kill. All Izuku had done was kill a lizard by stomping it to death after nearly being eaten by it.
Much like The Between Man was getting ready to stomp him to death he was sure.
"Leave him alone you bastard!" A man shouted and a baseball flew through the air and struck The Between Man in the side of the head.
Izuku's eyes widened and he threw them to where the baseball had come from and found a man in a uniform, the coach he assumed, whose Quirk left him looking like he had a moose head. The rest of the adults had fled with their children, leaving the baseball diamond to the three of them as no doubt police and Heroes were called.
The Between Man stopped walking and turned to look at the coach before blinking out of existence. The coach was confused for a moment before bolting towards Izuku who was trying to get up to warn him away. But before he could form the words through the pain The Between Man reappeared at the side of the coach and kicked him square in the chest, sending him flying into the grass.
As he watched the innocent man fly through the air and cry out in pain when he landed Izuku's fear evaporated.
And a fire took its place.
"YOU BASTARD!" He screamed as he rose to his feet, getting to The Between Man's attention again. "IT'S ME! I'M WHO YOU'RE HERE FOR!" He cried out as he stood there glaring at the monster, his shirt in tatters and his chest bloody as it rose and fell to try and breathe through the pain. "IF YOU WANT TO FIGHT THEN COME ON!" He clutched his fist and challenged the giant creature before him.
He shouted the words to enter The Between and ran forward, The Between Man needing a moment to follow him and notice that he was in fact running to meet him. This time it released both tentacles from its arm tubes and raised them up to strike him down.
When he was close enough Izuku dodged the crashing tentacles by diving thought the giant monster's tall legs and kept running for the batter's box. His eyes were fixed on the discarded metal bat that rested there. 'Got to get a weapon!' He thought as he looked back and saw The Between Man turn around to chase after him. 'I've got to fight it with something!'
He saw one of the tentacles closing in on his ankle and jumped forward, shouting the exit words to return to the real world and sliding into home base from the wrong direction but grabbing the small metal baseball firmly in his right hand. "Yes!" He cried out as he clutched his new weapon in his hand. "No!" He screamed as he felt a tentacle wrap around his left ankle, making it bleed even more than before.
Once again Izuku found himself lifted off the ground and thrown across the baseball diamond, this time much farther than ever before. It also seemed that The Between Man had seen fit to bring them back to The Between as he briefly saw the light green void and planets. He was soaring into the outfield and saw the grass, the very hard grass that may as well have been nails to those in The Between, fast approaching.
The Between Man had brought him into The Between to try and impale him on a makeshift bed of nails.
Screaming the exit words Izuku slammed into the ground right leg first, the limb folding in half with a snap as he broke it several places. He cried out in pain in the outfield, tears starting to form in his eyes as he looked at his twisted and broken limb. 'GOD DAMMIT!' He screamed in his mind as he watched The Between Man blink into the real world, already at the pitcher's mound. The coach, who had been moving to help Izuku saw the monster reappear and fled saying he would get help.
'I can't stand and fight now!' He thought as he cried and clutched the baseball bat in his hands, his grip only tightening as he flew through the air. 'I can't even enter The Between with all this grass around, fucking solid objects may as well be…'
And with that thought an idea formed in Izuku's mind. One that if it didn't work would certainly get him killed.
"COME ON!" Izuku shouted to The Between Man as it approached. "WHAT ARE YOUR WAITING FOR?! JUST KILL ME ALREADY!"
'Closer, it has to be closer.' He thought was he began to sweat heavily, his heart pounding so hard it felt like it would burst out of his bleeding chest.
The Between Man entered the outfield and one of the tentacles snaked through the grass to wrap around his left ankle and began to lift him in the air. 'Yes!' Izuku thought triumphantly as he was raised into the air, his broken leg dangling oddly as he was hung upside down.
Soon Izuku was "eye" level with The Between Man and it stared at him for a moment, as if examining him. 'Please God,' Izuku began to pray to whoever was listening, even the God that owned his soul, 'let this thing not go intangible immediately.'
With that thought he flung the metal bat at The Between Man's midsection, throwing it so that it sort of spun in the air towards the monster.
With only a few feet to its target Izuku whispered, "kewkak xexxex hujgt," as fast as he could.
With The Between Man's tentacle wrapped around his ankle he was brought with him into The Between the exact same moment that Izuku was.
The baseball bat, currently in the air towards the monster's stomach, was not.
Izuku had prayed that The Between Man could not instantly become intangible, that it needed a moment or two to do so. If it didn't then nothing was stopping the bat from just passing through the creature and falling to the grass and him being killed.
Luckily his prayers were answered.
The bat, with the impossible weight and force that everything in the real world had on those in The Between, seared through The Between Man like a hot knife through butter. Before it or Izuku even realized it had been split in half at the mid-section, cut into two seven foot halves.
For a moment that seemed to drag on for an eternity Izuku and The Between Man just looked at each other. Then the bat hit the grass and bounced once before settling. And then The Between Man's halves started to fall towards the ground.
"Yewfg qasw lofgh!" Izuku shouted as he approached the grass again, not wanting to be impaled on a hundred nail like blades of grass. Returning to the real world with the top half of The Between Man he fell to the ground for the fourth time today. His head spinning and eyes seeing stars Izuku didn't notice as yellow blood and green organs flowed out of The Between Man's missing bottom half into the grass.
The Between Man twitched and eventually stilled next to Izuku, who was so hurt and damaged that he couldn't even bother to unwrap the dead tentacle from his ankle.
He simply laid there, bleeding and broken with a smile on his face.
The Robber shook the small compass in his left hand as the arrow stopped fidgeting and stilled. "Aww, come on really?" He complained as he walked down the quiet street. "Fucking drive all the way out here and it fucks off right as I was getting close to it? Fucking knew it, wild goose chase man." He lamented his wasted time.
He was about to turn around when a couple of police cars with full sirens on roared past him towards the direction the compass had said the "visitor" from The Between had been. "…Better make sure that any evidence of it is gone at least, save the cops the trouble of getting told to keep their mouths shut by the Fucking Traitors." He sighed as he chased after them.
Soon he came across a large crowd of people, which seemed to include a little league team for some reason, being moved away from what looked like a park. "Kewkak xexxex hujgt." He whispered and entered The Between, allowing him to stroll right past and through the crowd of people. Making sure that nobody was watching he exited it once he was far enough away, he wasn't going to deal with walking on the grass or encountering any lizards.
Soon he spotted what all the commotion was about, the corpse of one of the weirder Between inhabitants, one he had never seen outside of The Between before. But what interested him more was the fact that it had been cut in half and there was one fucked up kid attached to it by a tentacle.
"Fucking hell kid." The Robber said as he looked over the scene. "You do this?" He turned to look at the boy but he was too out of it from his injuries to answer. Instead Robber went about investigating the scene himself. After some back and forth into The Between to find the other half of the body he constructed a rough idea of what had happened.
"Cutting it in half with a baseball bat in the real world while it's in The Between." He whistled impressed. "You're either really smart to figure that all the rules of The Between when it took you over or you've been going on your own little trips." He said to the pretty much unconscious boy. "Either way, you killed it. Would've taken probably all the ammo I brought with me." He mused as he felt the revolver stashed in his coat pocket.
"You know," he said as he saw the police start to approach, already shouting at him to know what he was doing, "we usually kill people who see too much." He kneeled down and touched the boy and the dead monster and entered The Between with them, vanishing before the cops eyes. "But we do have a special exception," he smiled as he picked up the boy and slung him over his shoulders, taking care with the shattered leg, "if we find somebody who took care of the problem before we got there. Well, then they're somebody we want to try to bring onto our side!"
"So congrats kid!" The Robber said with a smile as he walked past the confused police who stared at the remaining yellow blood. "You just earned yourself a stay of execution!"
