Real quick: a Gore Warning. This mentions some pretty brutal stuff and lots of cussing. So you have been warned...also expect some character shifts. We finally start some development, its been so long!


"Sneaking around and hunting them down one by one would be too easy, too boring. I want to crush them so completely, that they'll never be able to stand again. Literally…" Shigaraki said, fixing Kurogiri with his crazed eyes and leaning against the doorframe. "We're going to use your quirk to drop them from as high up as possible. From what I remember, the ceiling of this warehouse is rather tall, so even if the fall doesn't kill them, it'll at least cripple them."

Chisaki flinched as Shigaraki continued on.

How could he casually mention brutally crippling, possibly mortally wounding, people? This was a merciless act of violence and he was excited about it.

She glanced at Kurogiri, looking for any acknowledgement of this fear, but he was watching Shigaraki ramble on and his expression hadn't changed. A knot tightened in her stomach. Her eyes flew to Giran, who noticed her and gave her a little reassuring grin but showed no sign of sharing in her distress. They were villains. How else had she expected them to react to this?

Chisaki swallowed over the lump in her throat and forced herself to toon back into what Shigaraki was saying; she at least wanted to know what was going to happen.

"Giran and I will be on the ground, taking care of anyone you aren't able to, but we're still going to need you to be our eyes. Use the cameras to watch for anyone we miss and inform us." He said, still speaking to Kurogiri with a wolfish grin. He turned to Giran. "You made sure to grab the comns units right?" Giran gave a nod. "Make sure everyone gets one." Shigaraki said, his gaze rolling over the other three members, quickly settling on Chisaki. His red eyes narrowed and any glee that had been there fell away. "Honestly, I don't know why you're even here, but Sensei's told me that you're supposed to be observant or something. So just stay with Kurogiri and try to make yourself useful." He said icily, before turning his back to her and walking away. He slouched over the table and began to study the feed on the screens, oblivious to Chisaki's blank eyed stare boring into his back.

She just couldn't understand what he wanted from her. One minute he was telling her that she was useless and naive and the next that she should try to help. Maybe it was his horrible personality that made her so confused.

He was cold, cruel, and almost psychopathic in his disregard for others. Yet he had been managing this impromptu team with ease despite his unsociable disposition, and he had even managed to say something to her that wasn't quite an insult.

Was this possibly an opportunity?

Yeah, Chisaki decided, this was, and she was going to prove to him that she wasn't as useless as he thought she was. That she could be of use to someone. That she wasn't the burden people like Kachaan insisted that she was.

"You all good?" A raspy voice asked from right beside her, shaking Chisaki out of her reverie.

She looked over and found Giran staring at her, a cigarette held between his fingers.

"I-" The smoke suddenly caught in her throat and she gave a cough. "I'm fine."

He watched her for a second while he took a drag from his cigarette, frowning. "If it's about Shigaraki, we told you already, ignore him and don't take it personally. He's always grumpy."

"Y-yeah. I know." She said sheepishly, looking back at the same villain. She couldn't help it, he obviously wanted nothing to do with her and yet there was something intriguing about him. Was intriguing the right word?

"Giran!" Kurogiri exclaimed, Chisaki turned around just in time to see him wretch the cigarette out of his hand. Kurogiri crushed it in his hand indignantly. "What if you had set off the fire alarms?"

"Sorry. Sorry." Giran said, waving his hand dismissively. "I needed a little pick-me-up."

"Well be more careful." Kurogiri said, massaging his forehead with a sigh, before suddenly looking up again. "By the way, what happened with the comms units?"

"Oh, right, that." Giran said, fishing in his pocket. "Here." He said, passing an earpiece to Kurogiri. "One for you." He turned to Chisaki and handed her another. "One for you, one for me, and one for the grumpy man." He said as he popped one into his own ear and held the last in his hand.

"Oh let me turn that on for you." Giran said, taking Chisaki's earpiece and pushing a button on it. Just as he was handing it back to her, and Chisaki was about to thank him, a perpetually angry voice came from behind her.

"Who are you calling grumpy?" Shigaraki said with a glare at Giran.

"No one." Giran said with a weak attempt at a smile. "Your earpiece?" He said in offering, his hand outstretched.

Shigaraki's narrowed eyes told Chisaki that he knew exactly who Giran had been talking about, but instead of commenting on it, he took the comms unit and jammed it into his ear. "Whatever." He said dismissively, his scowl deepening only further. "Let's get going. The idiots downstairs have started to look through the goods. We can't afford to sit up here any longer." He turned from Giran to Kurogiri. "Open us a portal to the far left corner of the warehouse, we'll start the ground assault from there. As soon as we're through, start dropping those fuckers from the sky."

"I understand." Kurogiri said with a nod, opening a large portal just behind them.

Giran and Shigaraki turned around and, just as he was about to pass through, the latter shot Chisaki a glare. "Make sure to stay out of the way." He said before following Giran into the wall of black mist.

When they had disappeared, Shigaraki's voice came through the comms unit in Chisaki's ear. "Kurogiri we're through. Get started."

"Yes sir." He responded and turned his attention to the screens, scanning their faces calmly.

Chisaki didn't know what to do with herself, so she just stood behind Kurogiri and watched over his shoulder.

After a moment of roaming, Kurogiri's eyes settled on one of the panels. Three men were grouped together in the middle of an isle, crouched over a crate, one of them had a crowbar and was working to lift the lid off the base. Chisaki watched as a black portal appeared under their feet, swallowing two of them. The third man's face was contorted in surprise and fear at the sudden disappearance of his compatriots. He stumbled back and dropped the crowbar from his hands.

Something caught Chisaki's eye in one of the other panels, it was a view from a camera pointed to show the catwalks near the ceiling. A pair of black portals appeared in the air, releasing the two figures, who tumbled through the air in a brutal freefall to their deaths. The men were gathering momentum as they fell, falling faster and faster, until they were nothing more than flailing blurs and they dropped out of frame within seconds. Back in the first panel, the man's head jerked up violently and the fear in his expression turned to visceral terror. -At first it was a bit of blur at the top of the image. Then it was a whole lower body. Then the entire two bodies were in frame, and the man on the ground was right below them. They barreled down and all the man did was stare up, paralyzed by fear. Chisaki wanted to urge him to run, to get out of the way, but she was no better, with her feet glued to the ground and breath hitched in her throat. Just seconds before the bodies hit the ground, she was struck by barely enough sense to close her eyes and turn away.

Even if with her eyes squeezed shut, she still saw them clearly; a gruesome mass of blood, bone, and tissue splattered across the isle. Her stomach seized and her mouth tasted sour as something burned her throat. She refused to turn around and see them dead and crushed by gravity, but her mind was filling in the image on its own, and that was almost worse.

It had been too sudden, too quick. That was a life, no two lives, that had just been ended. A deafening bang sounded to her right, she spun around. Nothing was there.

"Giran, a little warning next time!" Shigaraki's voice was in her ear. "That hurt like hell. I'd be surprised if that didn't cause some permanent damage to my ears."
"Sorry." Giran's voice said back. "I didn't have time to put on a silencer."

She could picture Shigaraki's expression of loathing. "Just tell me you'll put one on." He snarled back.

"Will do." Giran responded.

That sound had been a gunshot. Chisaki realized with horror.

Suddenly she turned back to the screen, it was almost involuntary, but she had to know where that shot had landed.

It was the man from before, the one who had watched the other two fall to their death.

He was collapsed on the floor, with a pool of blood spreading around him, his eyes unfocused and cloudy; unseeing, unliving, all too dead. She felt her stomach seize again, next to him were two crushed things made of blood, torn flesh, jagged bone, and bits of cloth. They looked only vaguely human; recognizable only by an odd limb or two that had been spared by the impact.

This was brutal, cruel, inhumane.

A voice in her head was screaming to make them stop.

This was wrong, it went beyond murder.

There had to have been a way to stop them without killing them.

Why did they have to die? They surely weren't saints but that didn't merit murder!

She thought back to what Shigaraki had said during his plan, she hadn't taken him seriously enough, she hadn't known how horrible this would be.

Kurogiri was looking at her, but he didn't say anything and he turned back around to face the screens.

He was going to create more portals, he was going to kill more people in the same way. She had to tell him to stop.

Didn't he see how wrong this was?

She opened her mouth to voice her opposition, but nothing came out. A squeaky little, choked, sound was all she could muster.

Kurogiri glanced at her again, impartial and callous.

"If you need to throw up, that far corner looks like a good place." He said, still facing the other way. He was no doubt trying to be sympathetic but Chisaki found that it just sounded condescending and shallow.

How could he say that to her? He was killing people, yet he was more concerned with making sure that she threw up in a proper spot.
Yet again she felt her stomach seize, and this time something was clawing its way up her throat. She rushed quickly to the corner of the room, and barely had a second to tear off her mask before a wave of acid and chunky bits spilled out through her mouth. It hit the floor with a wet splattering noise. She retched once more time, then a third and fourth.

An eternity later, when her stomach was done emptying itself, she leaned her head against the wall. Her head felt light and hollow and her troso felt like a lump of lead, like a balloon held to the earth by an unrelenting weight. Her body felt alien and wrong, but she reminded herself that this was nothing when compared to what those people would have felt just a moment before impact. One second standing on solid ground and the next suddenly falling endlessly, knowing that the only thing awaiting you is a hard slam and death. Her stomach seized again, but it had nothing to give. She was breathing hard now. She had to calm down, steady her breathing. If she hyperventilated too much, she would just throw up again.

"You doing okay there Kiddo?" It was Giran in the comms. How much of that had he heard?

"That was disgusting. You should have at least spared us the ear-wretching specatcle and taken off you'r fucking earpiece." Shiagaraki said. "Can't even handle a little blood." He muttered. "Honestly you really are a disgrace-"

Chisaki wretched the speaker out of her ear and threw it on the floor. She didn't want to have to deal with his bullshit!

What did he mean a disgrace? He'd just killed-

She looked up at the screens, scanning, counting the corpses.

-He'd just killed at least twelve people!

She was the disgrace? He had just brutally murdered over a dozen people for absolutely no reason! Unnecessary death made him a pig, not mature!

A little voice in her head told her that she had no experience, and that she didn't have any grounds to base this off of. She didn't care. It was wrong!

She found Shigaraki on the screen, standing between two rows of shelves. He had his hand on a man's throat, barely raising him off the ground. Muscles had begun to show and decay under Shigaraki's touch, the skin flaking off in bits of dust. That must have been some side effect of his quirk.

She didn't have time to care, the little shit was about to add to the body count.

There was a flicker of movement behind him, an eye blinking, a face peeking around the corner at the end of the row. Someone was there. He could easily sneak up on Shigaraki and kill him before Kurogiri even noticed that he existed. Shigaraki could die.

She wasn't about to get her earpiece back to warn him. No. If she was going to say anything to that psychopathic brat, it would be to his face!

A little piece of black metal shone in the corner of the panel, just a few feet away from Shigaraki. Chisaki assumed that the man Shigaraki was currently torturing must have dropped it. Perfect, that would make for a decent weapon.

"Kurogiri." She said forcefully, pointing to the panel. "Take me there."
He turned around to face her, his eyes wide in surprise.

"Please!" She said insistently.

He blinked twice and quickly summoned the portal.

"What are you planning to do?" He asked, his eyes watching her in concern.

She met his eyes but didn't respond, instead she fastened her mask around her face and stepped through the portal.

Once through, she was facing Shigaraki and stood only an arms length away from him, the dying man dangling lifelessly in his hand. Shigaraki's eyes immediately went wide in surprise.

"What the hell are you doing here?" He exclaimed, glaring at Chisaki indignantly; but Chisaki didn't react, her attention had shifted elsewhere.

Yes, just at her feet was what she had glimpsed on the screen, a small handgun. She picked it up, flashing her eyes in Shigaraki's direction. Just behind him now, less than six feet away from her, was the man she had seen crouching behind the row. He was standing, his arm half raised, a gun in hand. She didn't give him a chance to react, she aimed, braced, and fired.

He buckled quickly as the bullet buried into his left leg. He was on the ground, immediately hollering in pain, his gun falling beyond his reach.

"Fuck! You fucking bitch!"

"Oh shut up." She said coldly. "Stay quiet and you'll live."

Shigaraki's head spun to look over his shoulder at the man, shocked. His eyes darted to Chisaki, then back to the man, and between them a few more times, almost as if he couldn't believe his own eyes.

Chisaki's ears rang and her shoulder throbbed, but she couldn't focus on that, there was still a man dying in Shigaraki's hands.

"Shigaraki, drop him." She said, shifting the barrel to face him instead.

Shigaraki's eyebrows raised in startled amusement and a small smile stretched across his lips.

"Are you going to shoot me?"

She stared at him and, for just a moment, it occurred to her to do just that, but…

"No." She said, lowering the gun. "Just let the poor man go. He's passed out from the pain, he's not going to hurt you. You don't need to kill him."

"Maybe I want to kill him." Shigaraki said, his grin growing. "Has that occurred to you, that I might enjoy this?"

She stared at him, a new wave of fiery rage rushing through her veins.

"Then, maybe I can still shoot you. I'll just shoot your arms until you're forced to let go."

"Fine. Fine." He said, his red eyes trained on her as he released his grip on the man. He crashed to the floor in a stiff pile.

Now that he was on the ground, Chisaki could see the damage Shigaraki had caused. He'd left a gruesome wound all along the man's nape and collar, she could see the muscle and blood glistening on his neck from where the skin had been turned to ash. The skin that hadn't fallen off had cracked and left bloody fissured snaking all along the man's visible skin.

"You know, I didn't think that you could get angry." Shigaraki said, smiling widely, drawing her attention back to him. It was a wolfish almost repulsive thing, a grin that displayed his yellowed teeth and stretched his pale, chapped, lips farther than she would have thought possible.

She glared at him. "You ended more than twelve lives today." Her tone sharpened quickly growing low and accusatory. "You and your stupid plan brutually murdered more than a dozen people, and it wasn't even necessary! You were never in any immediate danger! There was never a reason to kill them. You could have just as easily had Kurogiri send them somewhere else, somewhere far away from here—"

"Hey! I'm going to bleed out down here." The man on the floor interrupted. "Girlie, you don't want me to die, now do you?" He was watching her with indignant, beady, little eyes.

Chisaki glared at him and was about to respond, when Shigaraki beat her to it. "Shut it you old croak, or you'll lose another leg." He snarled with a tilt of his head, his eyes still fixed on Chisaki. "Maybe... Just maybe, I didn't want to risk them coming back."

Her eyes shot back to the pale man before her, her blood boiling. "Then invest in better security. People don't have to die for them to leave you alone."

He raised his eyebrows again and then narrowed his eyes. "You like your heroism and your justice right?" His eyes were boring into her, probing for a reaction. "So tell me, what if people like these leave us alone but not the next person they come across. What if they decide to attack an old woman or a defenseless child next? What would you do then?"
Chisaki glared back stubbornly. He had a point, when put into that perspective his actions almost made sense, but this whole idea was a very slippery slope. "I-I don't know…" She shook her head resolutely, furrowing her brow. "But we can't just go around killing every person to ever inconvenience us. If everyone did, that society would still be in the feudal ages."

He watched her for a second, red eyes narrowed and analyzing. Chisaki stared back defiantly, studying him in return.

He had a cold intelligence in his eyes, maybe that's what had intrigued her. He had always been so bored and aloof that she had assumed that he didn't care about others, that he didn't look twice at a person. Maybe she had been wrong.

"What that FUCK are you two panzies doing? I'm bleeding ou-"

They both turned to the man on the floor with fire in their eyes. "We told you to shut up!" They roared at once.

Their eyes shot back up to meet each other. Shigaraki grinned. Chisaki glared and looked away.

"If you're planning to do anything with this prick, you should do it now." He said, raising a pale eyebrow. "Giran should be just about done finishing off whoever's left."

A cold feeling settled in Chisaki's gut. Right, more people had died while she had been here debating.

"Can Kurogiri drop these two off at a hospital?" She asked, her eyes softening as they landed on the unconscious man with the neck wound.

Shigaraki's grin dropped an inch. "That sounds like a really shitty idea... but yeah it should be doable." He paused for a second and cocked his head, listening to something Chisaki couldn't hear. "Giran's done." He informed. "Kurogiri'll take us home-"

Just then a black portal appeared next to them.

As they were about to step through-

"Wait! What about me?" Exclaimed the man on the floor.

Chisaki spun around.

This prick!

"You heard my friend before! We'll get you to a fucking hospital." Shigaraki said with a glare over his shoulder, before grabbing Chisaki's arm, careful to only use four fingers. "Lets go." He said as he pulled her through with him.


Yay! Its finally written. That one was hard to finish. Well, I hope you enjoyed our bit of development here. Things will be moving a bit faster after this, I'm so excited! We can finally get into the main plot!