Chapter Six

Freedom Lets Go


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The Green Sun continued to rain unrelenting heat onto Izuku's skin as he walked among the endless dunes, but he endured the heat far better than he had before. He was better able to collect his thoughts now that he no longer felt so close to dying. He knew that he was somehow more powerful than he was before his encounter with Cecelyne, but beyond being better able to traverse the desert he wasn't sure of the details. His lack of perspiration and his dark tan were important clues, but he also felt an intangible energy inside of him that he lacked the ability to define. And something told him this energy was directed towards helping him endure unrelenting harsh conditions. For some reason that phrase stuck itself in his mind and no matter how hard he tried he couldn't restate it using other words. Neither the versatile Malfean language, nor his native Japanese, allowed him to use a different combination of words to represent the idea of what his internal energy was accomplishing. It was as if while the energy was active, he was unable to consciously think about it beyond its explicit purpose, but instead was forced to continue and endure unrelenting harsh conditions.

Still this ability was useful, however mysterious it was. Cecelyne had called her powers Charms. He felt silly when he thought about the Japanese word for the concept, yet in the Malfeas dialect the word held far more importance and power. Rather than a physical object, it referred to something intangible. It was a magic of one's will to reshape oneself and the world. He had never considered magic to be real, as Quirks were nothing more than physical abilities which could all be scientifically explained away with various human mutations. But here he was walking on an Endless Desert who was also a woman, under a Green Sun who had somehow Chosen him to be here and to receive power from the Creators. It was all so surreal that magic was a foregone conclusion. But this wasn't the sort of magic where you point wands and utter words and shoot fireballs, but rather the magic of myriad realities he had never considered before; of infinite worlds previously unknown to him.

His thoughts were interrupted as he felt a strong wind on his back, which at first felt blessedly cool compared to the stagnant air he had trudged through so far. The wind was accompanied by the coarse unpleasantness of sand stirred up around him as the soft breeze turned into an unrelenting gale. Even as he shielded his eyes and slid down onto the trough of a nearby dune, he observed that the wind was eerily silent. The howling of the air and the spray of the sand were absent from his hearing, yet he felt them on his skin and saw them with his eyes. The wind picked up in strength and speed, grinding the dunes down and threatening to flatten them out until they could no longer offer shelter for Izuku. He would have no solace except his new ability to endure unrelenting harsh conditions, and this certainly seemed to qualify.

Of course, things then became even stranger and significantly worse for him. Tearing past him to his right was a hail of arrowheads that tore through a dune like a school of piranha devouring a fat pig. Far overhead the winds spread a rust-filled crimson cirrus that obscured the sky. Or perhaps that was blood, he thought grimly. Most frightening of all was the wind to his left which was somehow made of light, as though brilliant beams of white-hot sunlight were carried on the wind itself. All around him the dunes died and were flattened in a slaughter so quiet that he wondered if he was deaf. He certainly felt almost blind, as the brightness of the winds and the whirling sands left his eyes searing in pain. Although he was surrounded by gale force winds that threated to tear the flesh from his bones, he stubbornly gathered his thoughts to analyze the situation. He felt an insistent need to carefully consider his situation, and he eventually gathered enough sense to realize that the winds moving around him somehow had enough sapience to spare his life. With that understanding, he felt far braver than he otherwise would.

It was upon achieving that knowledge that he looked around and saw that he was not alone. A young woman stood near him. Her hair was jet black and cut short near her ears. Her limbs and her fingers were exceptionally long, which added to her impressive height. Her build was slight, and she wore only what Izuku would describe as a crimson on black jumpsuit. However, the material it was crafted from was alien to him, and there was no indication of how to remove it or get into it. Her feet were bare, and just like her hands had long fingers, her feet had similarly extended toes. Other than her teeth being too perfect and too white, her face seemed rather plain. Her human appearance and soft brown eyes managed to put Izuku somewhat at ease, but not completely. His eyes briefly strayed to a dagger secured to her hip.

For the first time since arriving here, Izuku was painfully aware of his state of undress. When in the company of Cecelyne earlier, he was too thirsty and desperate to survive to care about modesty. But now he was acutely aware of himself and his body. Thankfully, this mysterious woman next to him didn't seem inclined to care. She whispered to him from over four meters away, yet he heard her quite clearly in the cavernous silence they found themselves in. "Run with me, Izuku. Free yourself and run with me." And before he could formulate a response, she took off to run past him. He turned quickly to reply to her, but her whisper carried over her shoulder to his ears. "Run or perish. You are free to choose either."

It was only then that he noticed the arrow laden gale had shifted towards him. Running suddenly seemed like an excellent idea. Adrenaline shot through his nerves like a bolt of liquid lightning as each step propelled him forward ever faster. He never could catch up to the whispering woman, yet his pace was just enough to avoid death by a thousand arrows. Mercifully, the woman ahead slowed her pace just enough to let him catch up while she offered her hand out to him. Gasping with fear he placed his hand into hers.

While her appearance suggested that she was fragile, even delicate, the woman's grip was far stronger than her frame suggested. As she sprinted forward, Izuku felt the pull so hard that he feared she'd dislocate his entire shoulder. That however was still preferable to the certain death that awaited him if he did not pick up his pace. Yet even as they both continued to run the entire situation seemed absurd to him. His mind knew intellectually that it was not possible to outrun the wind, which lead him to observe that something about this situation seemed completely wrong. He cast his gaze to either side of them as they ran, while his newfound power seemed to bring his mind into sharper focus, thoroughly measuring the distance between the two of them and the deadly winds arrayed around them.

He wasn't certain how he was able to measure the distance so precisely while they were moving, or at all, given that he had no instrument to judge by, yet he knew with absolute confidence that they were exactly twenty seven meters away from the storm of arrows behind them, and an equal distance from the blindingly bright wind that flanked their left and the strange crimson wind that had moved to flank their right. They were in the epicenter of a deadly storm, the eye of the tornado. That deduction allowed him to finally understand this lithe woman grasping hold of his hand was in fact the source of the wind itself.

He could practically feel her smile. Realization struck him that her teeth weren't just perfectly white, they couldn't really be considered teeth. Instead her mouth was filled with white what appeared to be jade polished to a bright sheen. "We are Adorjan." She whispered, and once again he heard her as clearly as if she had shouted. "We are the wind. We are silence. We are love. We are death. We and our daughters…" He implicitly understood that the winds arrayed around both of them were her children. "We are one."

The stress on his arm grew even more intense as she picked up ever more speed.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, ma'am." Even in a situation where he felt death so close to claiming him, he remained as polite as possible. He'd have bowed if circumstances allowed, but the best he could do was an exaggerated bobbing of his head as they maintained their frenetic pace across the dunes. His body felt like dead weight compared to her unearthly speed and strength.

Briefly setting his awkwardness aside, he felt understanding finally flood into him. Just as with Cecelyne before, he found that he knew this woman far better than he should have based upon their brief introduction. This woman before him was Adorjan, the Silent Wind. On some level he understood that he was now in the arms of a capricious being who killed as casually as someone else might smile at a stranger. Her effort to run with him, to avoid killing him with her own gale, seemed nothing more than an act of whimsical amusement. After all, she was a herald of death, if not death herself.

Her grip on his hand tightened. Myriad concepts seem to enter his mind rapidly from that physical connection. Whereas Cecelyne was expansive and imperious, Adorjan preferred to communicate quietly, and if possible, without words at all. He understood her better, but that understanding brought a fear into his heart unlike anything he had previously known. This was a being that loved infinitely. She also saw life as a form of suffering… that simple syllogism was why she killed so easily. In his mind's eye, he could see crowds of thousands reduced to viscera and gore in her wake. He knew that, to her, such atrocities of mass murder were borne from an alien form of love that he hoped to never comprehend.

His thoughts were interrupted by a growing whisper of concern from Adorjan, as she dragged him after her stride. "You're too slow. You'll die…" With a solid yank on his arm she pulled him forward and tossed him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. It was not a dignified position for him, nor was it a comfortable one. Her shoulder dug deep into his stomach in cadence with her long stride. But, as uncomfortable as it was, this position afforded him a view of the landscape they were leaving behind, as well as the horrifying gales that were chasing them. Crimson and arrows and light like he had seen before, but now, he had an opportunity to focus on them. Although they were distinct, they seemed to swirl and writhe over each other in a strange coalescing fashion at their edges. It was hypnotic in the way a skilled set of dancers on a stage might appear to their audience.

Only by staring did Izuku observe that there was a fourth dancer in the troupe. Unlike the other three, there was a wind among them that bore nothing visible to the naked eye. No light, no crimson mist, no arrowheads, it carried nothing along with it. It was the small shy sister of the other three, and wove herself through, among, and between them. yet as he focused on that playful gust, he heard a childlike laughter in the recesses of his mind. "Use the gifts the Endless Desert has bestowed on you…" Was that Adorjan whispering to him as she carried him, or the childlike emptiness that chased after him?

He wondered what gift the woman was referring to when some part of him supplied the answer: Hellscry Chakra. Without any true understanding he focused and felt a strange energy from within him coalesce and gather in his forehead, and then he was awarded with enough sensation that he wondered if he had ever had his eyes open before.

He looked outward and there were distinct auras of light floating on the wind that he never noticed before. A veritable diaspora of light and life rushed forward with each of the gales following in Adorjan's wake. And it was indeed a wake, both a celebration of lives taken and a tumultuous wave of destruction that she left behind. He was not nude in the arms of a woman, but carried up by a powerful wind, buffeted uncomfortably, yet clothed in a strange green light that barely covered his modesty. Where previously there was a woman carrying him over her shoulder, now was now nothing. She was a void completely lacking substance, yet that nothingness was all inclusive and all expansive. The void covered a vast distance and leveled dunes as it rushed forward. Where before there were four distinct gales following them, there were now four young women each clothed in long flowing robes that billowed behind them, each article of clothing struggling to keep up with the pace and power of the woman it adorned. They were filled with joy and light and laughter; a family that ran together, played together, and killed together. Wind and woman, woman and wind, they were interchangeable. They were one in their enlightenment, their madness, and their joy.

It was a lot to take in. Izuku was overwhelmed by the opening of his figurative third eye. But he didn't have much time to take in the sights. To his right he saw that Adorjan was reaching with her hand stretched back over her shoulder. She gripped her jade dagger by the blade, presenting the handle towards him as if in offering. "You still weigh too much… you must cut the chains. You must reduce the excess weight."

She pressed the offered dagger towards him even though he had no idea what she was talking about. But as his fingers wrapped around the handle, his third eye seemed to open even wider, focusing on a long array of golden chains, each chain dragging a bright golden weight attached to its end, anchoring it down to the desert. He was shocked to see that each of these chains were tethered directly through his chest, and implicitly he understood that each chain was hooked into his heart.

Cut the chains, she had said, and so he placed the knife's sharp edge against one of the golden chains and slid the blade along the metal surface. It would take a long time to file down each one, he told himself, yet the knife cut into it quite easily… but he stopped cold as a vision filled his mind. The scene was from a year ago, when he was part of a tour group exploring several college campuses. This particular day the tour was at Yuuei Daigaku. The tour had been restricted to the General Studies department where most of the campus' liberal arts degrees were available. Yet he somehow knew that this chain did not contain a memory for him, but rather held his own feelings and ambitions. This chain was his burning desire to go to UA University. He could not cut it. He refused… but there had to be others he could cut, right?

"You are running out of time, Izuku… I will put you down soon. Will you be light enough to run on your own? Will you keep up?" She whispered into the back of his mind. He implicitly understood the threat that loomed over him. If he didn't start cutting away at these chains, then she would drop him into the path of her daughters, and he would die bleeding and screaming.

He reached for another one. This chain brought up the image of Kagome, a pretty girl at school that he had a crush on for years. He knew nothing would ever come of those feelings. He had tried to offer her a Valentine's Day chocolate that he had made for her a year ago, but she had never returned any sign of the affection when White Day arrived. Instead, she had regifted his chocolates to an upperclassman with bigger muscles and dog ears as part of his Quirk. He quickly cut the chain… and suddenly he didn't care about her anymore. It was as if she had never mattered to him in the first place. He remembered the chocolates, but he could no longer recall why they were important. Oh well, he mentally shrugged.

He found another. This one reminded him of a number of times he had been bullied, especially by Kacchan and his lackeys. Without hesitation he cut the chain, and while he still remembered the insults and the injuries, he suddenly did not care about them the way he used to. It was like those incidents happened to a different Izuku and he was just an observer. On some level he knew that this chain contained a name, Deku, and that the name was his before he had cut the chain. But now it wasn't associated with him anymore. He'd have to try and remember to give it back to Kacchan. He moved on to the next chain, no longer caring about how much his mind had just changed in the space of a heartbeat.

The next chain filled him with warmth and love as he gripped it. Inside he found his mother. She was crying as she held him, repeatedly apologizing for him being born without a Quirk. Yet even though it was painful, he found he could not move to cut this one. He absolutely refused to lose any feelings related to his mother. He loved her, and he didn't want to imagine what he would become if he suddenly stopped loving his mother. Instead he gripped another one… and inside he found… absence. Where his father should have been the weight on the other end of this chain, instead there was the impact of the man's absence. He cut that particular chain without hesitation, and suddenly every emotion associated with his father or that his absence had instilled in him were all gone.

He quickly cut through several more. One of them held his favorite foods. Gone. Another held his love of video games. Gone. The next one held his lingering embarrassment over puberty and his body. He quickly cut it away. After that, he found one that held his anxiety in social situations, born from his early sense of Quirkless inadequacy. He smiled when he sheared that particular chain away. With each chain he cut, his mind unburdened itself of the pleasures and pains of his life before coming here, before wandering this desert of madness. He expected to find a chain representing his encounter with Cecelyne, but he never found one. Perhaps that was by design.

There were others that he also refused to cut as he went through them. His desire to rescue others and to become a hero were both bundled together with his admiration for All Might. He could see the two weights dragging through the sand, each pulled by the braided chain that bundled the two by association. He considered trying to see if he could cut just one of the two chains but decided against it, as the two weights in his heart were inextricably linked. His ambition was something he would not give up, even at the risk of death. But then he found the chain of All Might's passionless words to him, the final discouragement that lead to his suicidal ideas. He cut it without thinking through what that could mean. He wanted no more of that kind of weakness inside of him.

His mind continued to shift and alter with each chain he severed. The memories all remained, but they held no more weight when he considered them. No longer was he cutting just for the sake of survival, this had now turned into an opportunity to cut out the weaknesses he wished he had been strong enough to remove before all of this. Now he could lobotomize the dead weight of his emotions and come out better than he had ever been before. That's what he kept telling himself as he searched for another chain worth cutting. His obsession with Quirks? He kept that. His need to mumble his thoughts out loud in order to efficiently organize himself? He cut that away.

And then he struggled. The next chain he grasped held his childhood friendship with Kacchan. He had already cut away the negative feelings associated with being bullied by his former best friend. Could he also cut away the friendship itself? He held this one, weighing it far longer than any other he had held onto up to now. This one held meaning for him that he didn't want to necessarily abandon, and it was easier for him to hold onto it now that he had let go of so much of the pain the friendship had caused him. He knew that this chain also tied into some of that pain, as it included the emotions that caused him to write a suicide note for Kacchan's benefit. But it also held all the hope and promise he had by looking up to his childhood friend, from his admiration of the boy's Quirk to his hope that Kacchan would stop being a bully someday and become a great hero.

"Freedom Lets Go." Adorjan prompted him with a gentle whisper. She didn't need to say anything else. Either move on to the next chain or cut this one already. Izuku no longer hesitated, and he swiftly cut the chain that held all his admiration and brotherly love for the temper tantrum ridden kid named Bakugou Katsuki. Izuku idly wondered what he ever saw in someone so weak that they would bully Quirkless children, or someone so small and petty that they were enslaved to their own anger. Izuku remembered all of the times Bakugou had bullied him throughout their early bond, but none of these memories had any meaning for Izuku anymore. And with emotionless clarity, he realized he was glad to longer feel tied to young Bakugou. Izuku remembered telling himself moments ago to return a nickname, but suddenly that internal promise seemed to lose weight and merit. Why would he need closure with someone who didn't even matter?

Izuku searched for another chain, but after passing his studious admiration of heroes, his deep meticulous nature, and his own optimism, he struggled to find one that he hadn't previously considered. At last he found the one that represented his interaction with the Neomah, Ahalmahlhat. It contained an emotion that he had never admitted to himself before. He loved her. He had only known her for minutes, but her indelible impression on him caused his immature teenage mind to fall helplessly into deep romantic amour. He also took the chance to study the memory of her closely, despite the present danger he was in. Although this was not the time or the place for exploring such memories, he knew in this moment that he would not find a chain related to his desire to lose his virginity. He had already lost it, not to Cecelyne's one sided demands but to Ahalmahlhat's generosity. Their coupling was brief and unfinished, but now he could remember it clearly, and he could not bring himself to cut the emotions of that encounter from his heart. He briefly wondered if he would ever see her again.

Moving onward, Izuku severed two more of the golden chains. He hoped he wasn't doing too much damage to himself when he cut through his own modesty and his yearning for a role model. Yet already he could feel his pride growing as he felt reassured in these decisions. It no longer mattered that he was nude, nor did his previous yearning for encouragement or guidance concern him. He would guide himself. He would take inspiration from wherever he could find it, and he would build within himself the ideal that he would strive for from this point onward. No one's voice but his own would truly matter anymore, not after he had taken what inspiration from them that he could. Not after discarding the useless and unreliable weakness such attachments could bring him.

Inevitably, he came upon how much he valued life, a chain that tied back to his earliest memories of encountering death. Gripping this golden chain in his hands caused him to freeze completely. The memory was clear in his mind. His mother had laid a mouse trap and it worked quite well. Horrified, little Izuku had begged her to trade it out for one that would simply capture the mice alive. He couldn't stand the idea of a small helpless creature dying just because someone didn't like it. This early experience helped shape him and the value he placed on human life later. There was no way he could cut this chain away, and it gave him pause enough that he no longer wanted to cut any more chains from his heart.

Adorjan had had enough, apparently. Izuku saw her outstretched hand gesturing impatiently for her knife to be returned. Fearing her anger, he offered the knife back to her handle first, and immediately he lost sight of the chains connected to his heart. Somewhere out there behind them were the lost weights that had once been important parts of him, important emotions that helped shape and mold who he was. Now they were just debris in an endless sea of dunes, and would soon be covered by the sands. Despite the wounds he had inflicted on his own mind, he felt lighter and freer than ever before in his life.

Izuku did not mourn these losses. Instead, he focused on a brilliant array of energy moving through him, one that he barely understood. He felt lighter, and was consumed with an urge to move, to run, to howl. He needed to direct this energy, and could not allow himself to be carried anymore. Despite the danger to his own life, he struggled free of her hold on him and broke immediately into a sprint alongside her. He leapt with her from dune to dune. Already he was moving faster than he ever had before in his short and unexemplary life. Yet even as he exulted in his newfound speed and power, he continued to gain momentum. Faster and faster, he felt like he could run forever.

Even as Izuku's mind moved on past his self-inflicted emotional mutilation, he quickly processed his newfound speed. The fastest he had ever run before was a top speed of twenty-four kilometers per hour, or a two-and-a-half-minute kilometer. He certainly could not keep that pace up for multiple kilometers in a row, not back then. He now easily surpassed that. Without any measuring equipment, his mind grasped at his senses for accuracy, determining the height of, and the distance between the dunes, using his own height and stride as the basis for these measurements, as well as the angle of each dune's slope. From there he kept a methodical count of his steps, measuring that against his heartbeat in order to determine the rate he was passing everything by. Izuku calculated all of this rapidly, paying almost no mind to the fact that a wall of arrowheads loomed behind him, ready to tear his body into ribbons of bloody flesh strewn across the desert. He calculated he was moving at a pace of fifteen meters per second, which multiplied out to nine hundred meters per minute. This of course meant he was moving just over fifty-four kilometers per hour.

Despite his newfound ability to do all the above math in his head while running faster than a human had any right to move, Izuku still felt too slow. He knew he could push himself to do more, but he didn't understand how. No matter how much he begged his muscles, he could not get them to cooperate and go farther or faster than he was already going.

"Focus." He heard the dread deity whisper to him from afar. "Feel the energy, the essence pooling inside of you. Channel it through your muscles, your ligaments… focus not on the physical, but the immaterial. You are the wind. You are of the desert. You are our champion." Adorjan urged him onward, prodding him with just enough information to figure out for himself how this newfound power worked.

Moving at dangerous speeds, and with the threat of death looming behind him if he slowed down by even a hare's breath, Izuku closed his eyes just long enough to turn his attention inward. "Essence" Adorjan had called it. The word in Malfean had connotations like chi, but it was subtly different. Setting those semantics aside, he turned his thoughts inward to the vast store of energy inside of him. It was an energy that he had previously tapped the surface of to survive, to endure unrelenting harsh conditions. Now, he focused on that power to move forward at shocking speeds. He forced his way to just under sixty-nine kilometers per hour. Unrelenting and untiring he surged forward. His soul filled with laughter, filling the recesses of his mind where his fettering emotions once held him in check. Izuku's laughter burst from his chest as the only sound for miles. His eyes opened to endless dunes passing him as he moved far faster than he had ever dreamed he could propel himself. He turned his eyes towards Adorjan running beside him, and in that fleeting moment of shared unadulterated joy, there was a spark of love between them.

The love of Adorjan, the Silent Wind, is something no one should ever have to experience. Izuku had no idea what a mistake he had made by sharing such a joy filled moment with her. He would soon discover why all the residents of Malfeas prayed for Adjorjan to leave them be and to let them live. He would experience a hell unlike anything he had ever imagined he would face.