This is another character focused chapter. Don't worry, the USJ is coming… soom….
Muahahahaa.
-SpiritOfErebus
Unfortunately, Hagakure began following me home.
Now that I finally had shed my disguise with one person as the witness, I slowly began literally deflating. My six pack redistributed itself to form a rather … rotound form due to lack of exercise. My hair finally lost that grey hue and became fully black again, with a couple of white hairs because of how stressed I've been lately. I lost about five centimeters of height, somehow.
My tie undid itself, and I suddenly didn't know where the hell I was going.
And despite losing most of my physique, being totally lost, and my backpack suddenly feeling very heavy, I felt lighter than ever before.
If only Hagakure wasn't talking with me. I could be brooding now like an average edgy teenager!
(It must be nice to be able to be edgy once in a while, but even in this form, I was limited to a couple set actions.)
"…So, what now? Are you going to quit the hero course?" Hagakure said, presumably looking concerned at my rapid changes.
I rolled up the pant legs of my now too large UA uniform trousers. "I don't think I can." I said, scratching my head. "Even if I can just relax now, when I go back to UA, I'll shape up like before and have to be a hero or whatever."
"You really are different." Hagakure said. "You usually sound a lot more like Tokoyami."
"That's because I've latched onto his personality to build my own." I said, taking out my phone and booting up Fate/Grand Order. "Also, video games may have had a part in how I chose what my quote on quote "quirk" was."
"You're actually not lying." Hagakure said.
"Yeah…?" I said, tapping my lagging phone repetitively to get past the open menu. Even if I loved the game, the servers were kind of hot potatoes. "Does changing my appearance seem like the ability of the quirk I made up?"
"Wait, and in the battle exercise, you actually tricked Uraraka and all of us with whatever voodoo things you were doing?"
"Yup." I said, smiling. "If being a hero doesn't work out, I'll become an actor or something. I put on a convincing enough show, and the producers just have to fill in the CGI."
Hagakure looked up and down again. How did I know? Her tiny, black hairpin was bobbing in the air.
"It's like I barely even know you. Speaking of which, you haven't moved, right?"
"No?" I said, confused. "My family hasn't moved at all. I've just changed schools a couple of times."
"So why are we heading towards Chiba instead of the Saitama prefecture?"
"What?" I said, confused. "We are? But that direction should be east!"
"No." Hagakure said, and for a moment, I saw a pale hand floating in midair. "That direction is east. It's the afternoon, and you're pointing towards the sun. That means that it's west."
I shrugged. I was probably seeing things with the minor body dysphoria I was feeling. I kicked a map idly and turned around.
"Do you live there too?" I asked Hagakure awkwardly. "I… don't remember."
Wait a minute… I didn't remember locations! That's right?
"How have I not been late to school? I remembered that I was hopeless with directions…. Unless…"
"your quirk did it again?"
"God damn it." I sighed. "Even when I've finally gone back to normal, I still find out ways that my quirk is messing with me."
"Are you always like this at home?"
"Yeah." I said, sighing. "Whenever I think about going to UA, I take the form of-"
I felt like every muscle was flexing itself, and my ensemble miraculously ironed itself. My hair grew back the shade of grey and my six pack reappeared.
"-this." I said awkwardly, though somehow still sounding confident with the voice change. I then sighed and deflated again.
"My quirk really is a one of a kind torture. Hopefully, nobody else has to go through this kind of two faced balancing of their lives."
…
Elsewhere, All Might coughed out some blood as he deflated back into Yagi Toshinori.
…
"What now, then?" Hagakure said as we stopped at the street corner where we bumped into each other back when we were young and I wasn't a hero wannabe. "Can I like… do something to help? Shout your secret out loud so your expectation bubble gets popped?"
"I'd probably die of a migraine." I said bluntly. "Spilling my secret to you was enough of an aneurism. I can't even imagine living through something eighteen times worse."
"But what can I do to help? Even if I don't think I really know you anymore, I still kind of feel bad and we were friends, sooo…." The uniform floated closer to me, sleeves pointed at each other. I looked her straight where her eyes should be.
"You can play along."
"But I thought-"
"Look at my white hairs." I said, ruffling my head and showing all of the years of stress that had accumulated lie after lie. "I have to plan my actions out every single day, and do you know how stressful it is fighting somebody with a literal superpower while yours has to be sold like a sales pitch before you can even use it?"
"I kind of do." Hagakure said, sighing. "Invisibility isn't exactly an offensive quirk."
"…Oh."
"Yeah." She said flatly.
"Well, I can message you my plans for certain situations later, and you can act as an explanation giver so I don't have to do all the acting myself. You're a perfect liar too, because nobody can see your face or expression."
"I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or as an insult."
I was saved from interrupting by a meow. I turned around, and the irritating face of High Priestess showed herself in all its catlike glory. Suddenly, High Priestess's eyes almost glowed.
"Hello there, contractor. We have a lot to talk about."
"Wait, who's talking?"
I looked down at my phone. My audio was closed, so it couldn't have possibly been servant dialogue.
"Down here."
I looked at Hagakure, who shrugged her shoulders, before looking around for other people.
"I'm right in front of you."
I looked at high priestess again, who was definitely annoyed now.
"Wait, you could talk?"
"The vessel cannot talk, but us nature sprites can once we merge with a willing host."
Hagakure turned to me. "I thought your quirk wasn't actually… whatever you said it was!"
I sighed. "Remember, if people expect it to be true about me, then it becomes real. They don't think I'm lying about all this nature spirit stuff, so because of it, sometimes it exists. And that cat has an intelligence quirk or something, so if she thinks that it's real, then she can be the host to a spirit or whatever."
"You do use something and whatever a lot when you're talking." Hagakure said in lieu of a reply. "Why don't you talk like that normally?"
I jestured down to my once again ruffled getup. "I'm in lazy teenager mode. I can say whatever the fuck I want."
She nodded. "True."
"Stop ignoring me." The cat said, scaling my back with its sharp claws. I winced as the points dug into my skin.
Oh, right. More problems.
"I'll get back to you later." I said, nodding to Hagakure. "But for now, I have to talk to a cat."
"I am no mere cat anymore. I am the embodiment of-"
"Don't talk like this in public! Do you know that quirk animals are taken into custody by the police for safety reasons?"
"The affairs of mortals shouldn't affect an individual as grand as-"
"Just… shut up. Please." I said, pinching the bridge of my nose as I walked towards my building.
"As the contractor commands."
…
Hagakure looked at the retreating back of who she now identified to sort of be a childhood… acquaintance.
"I just hope he doesn't go insane."
With a last sigh, she turned her heels and left for her own home.
…
Koda shivered in the corner of his own home, absent mindedly petting a street cat.
The great god of plenty was among them. And in the form of Yohaku Tenshin.
The cat continued to praise their god, describing his mortal form and how he had created food from nothing, how they had lined up to sacrifice offerings to him at the day of an exam.
Koda shivered as the cat continued rambling on in religious fervor, despite looking completely calm on the outside. It was even purring and appeared to be sleeping!
"May the great lord finally commune with our high priestess today. She has dedicated herself to hosting one of the powerful local spirits and will soon be able to commune with his excellence. All hail the-"
Koda plugged up his own ear. It was better to not focus on whatever the cat was saying and just focus on petting the cat.
Still, the seeds of doubt and worship had been planted in his heart. What if his classmate, Yohaku Tenshin, really was a god? The animals were many things, but a liar wasn't one of them.
The cat had clearly said that he made cat food come out of nowhere…
…
Somehow, I wrote this in forty five minutes.
Update on my situation: Still writing a scientific paper. The pain is unbearable.
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Hope you enjoyed this chapter! It's been more than a month since I wrote anything for this fic, and for that, I'm sorry. I have been working on other fics, though. IF you're interested, you can come onto my profile and check them out. They're not nessesarily BNHA fics, but hopefully they're a decent read. Just avoid the discontinued ones.
Time to go back and keep bashing my brains in trying to write this paper!
-SpiritOfErebus