Back at it again with another idea!

Hunted

(Inspired by Linger by littlemissoyashirou, Halo Infinite, and Halo: Rubicon Protocol)

One night, when the clock struck midnight, ten thousand children were abducted in their sleep.

There was no flash of light, no sound to indicate their departure. One second they were just there, and the next they weren't.

Ten thousand children, of all walks of live. Some were poor while others were prosperous. Some were quirkless while others had the most powerful quirks imaginable. Some were born to heroes, others to villains, and others in between.

There was no pattern to the abductions, no secret sign or gleamed understanding. The only thing to note of them was that they were all children, and they had all been taken.

Hero society immediately scrambles to respond. Thousands of heroes are deployed on the hunt, calls were made, councils were held, entire armies of government officials and workers were put on the hunt.

And yet, they found nothing.

In another place, high up in the air, the children were held in ships that began to lower to the ground. Then, as the doors opened, those same children were forced out by soldiers and hunters in red and black garb (think of them as the Banished from Halo) out of the ships and were tossed out onto the beach below.

The trash filled beach of Takoba Municipal Beach, outside of Musutafu.

Then, gunfire rips out from the ships and soldiers and into the crowd, cutting down dozens of children and forcing the rest of them out into the forests and into the city of Musutafu.

A city that was empty, ransacked, broken, flooded, overgrown, and left to rubble and ruin.

From there, the ten thousand abducted children, now released into the empty urban and natural wildlands, are forced to go on the run from the army of bloodthirsty mercenaries, all of them looking to hunt them down and cull them like beasts. The first few days of the wild hunting game were marked by vast massacres and local extirpations, chaos filling the air as the streets and waters were stained with young blood.

And in the other plain, the dead children would be brought back into their world, teary-eyed, broken, yet happy that they had returned.

But the rest of the children did not know this, so through the wildlands, in the forests and in the city, they would go into hiding from the army of mercenaries as they were hunted down by the droves, massacres taking place over days until only a few thousand children would remain.

Afterwards, the remaining few thousand children would be forced to adapt and mature in order to survive, developing their own tactics and strategies to overcome those hunting them, or die trying. Some children would slip into depression and desperation, killing each other in bouts of mad rage and the need for survival as they fought over water, food, and clothes. Some went into hiding, becoming hermits hiding away in cubby holes and old homes and refusing to step out under any circumstances. Some would even give themselves up to the hunters out of suicidal depression, only to be taken to camps and separated from the weakest to the strongest. The weakest of them were killed via firing squads and gas chambers, whilst the strong were taken away to camps and tortured for no reason other than the entertainment of their captors.

The rest of the children, however, chose to fight back.

It was determined that survival was better on their own or in small groups, so some children, like Bakugou, Todoroki, and Yoarashi, become lone wolves, waging their own private wars against their executioners. Other children, however, rally around charismatic personalities such as Midoriya, Yaoyorozu, and Uraraka. Some groups of children, like Midoriya's, focus themselves on helping other children and saving prisoners from the soldiers. Some, like Yaoyorozu's, would attempt to fight back against those hunting them and try to find an advantage against them. Others, like Uraraka's, would begin to surrender themselves to the desperation and bloodlust that came over them, and would become as violent and sadistic as those trying to kill them, devolving into nothing more than bandits and killers.

But most of the remaining children would eventually hunker down and slip away into the cracks, too scared to try and confront the people trying to kill them.

In the next plain, the heroes begin to work around the clock to rehabilitate the thousands of children that had returned to them after their supposed deaths in the other world, but find that there is something... off, about them. Something different. Something that should not be there.

In the other plain, several groups of children find the remains of U.A. High School, its iconic structures shattered and crumbled, and begin to make camp within the old academy. Soon, the site would become a hub for many of the surviving children that had been taken, creating shelters and homes for those who had been abducted and had nowhere left to go.

For a time being, things would begin to look up for the children as they began to rest, feed themselves, and make ready for the days to come.

But then everything would change when Uraraka and her clan would capture one of the soldiers and dragged them back to their new home.

They would proceed to torture the mercenary, peeling off the armour and shucking the skin off their bones, cutting into them and breaking them, before they finally took off their helmet...

And Ochako Uraraka found herself staring into the eyes of Ochako Uraraka.

And that's when the truth is finally revealed.

This isn't just a different plain of existence or other dimension that the children were abducted and placed into: it is a parallel universe in of itself. It is an alternate world where, during the past confrontation between All Might and All for One, instead of All Might winning and forcing All for One into hiding, here All Might was killed and All for One took One for All from him, becoming the most powerful quirk user on Earth.

All for One would bring the whole world to ruin, killing millions and enslaving the rest of the world, bringing the heroes to their knees and taking their children for his own. Millions of children would be taken and trained into weapons - child soldiers - for All for One's reign, becoming the fist that would bring dystopian order to the world.

However, years later, a global uprising would bring the world into a global civil war, devastating what was left of the Earth and completely destroying society. All for One and his followers would be killed in the process, and all that was left would be the child soldiers that once enforced All for One's reign, filled with anger and rage and sorrow for all that had been done to them.

However, they would soon find a survivor with a unique quirk: one that would allow them to look through parallel universes, and soon they saw though the universes...

And they saw themselves.

Their alternate universe counterparts, happy and cheerful and living in comfort in their childhoods.

This filled the child soldiers with rage. How dare they? How dare their lookalikes be happy when all that they had done was toil and suffer for years. They wanted to be happy. They wanted to live peaceful lives.

They wanted their childhoods back.

And they would make their counterparts suffer for what they did not have.

And so the child soldiers, warped and twisted by All for One's cruel rule over them and locked in a childlike mentality due to their neglect and inability to grow up thanks to the man, abducted their ten thousand counterparts and dumped them into their universe, taking sadistic pleasure in making them suffer as much as they had, and beginning step one of their plan.

The next step was to kill their counterparts, let their souls leave their bodies, and then fill them with their own.

The children who returned to their original universe weren't really the same children from before.

They were the child soldiers, taking their place in their lives.

Realising the full extent of their parallel counterpart's plan to body swap with all of them, the children would have no chance to react as a massive forth of these former child soldiers, now grown up, invaded U.A. and began a mass culling of the children within, killing hundreds of children, inhabiting their bodies and sending them back to the alternate world, and forcing the rest back on the run.

Realising the threat that they now face, and the risk to their friends and families back home, the children are forced to unite together against their new enemy. Against this grave new enemy, they finally gain the courage to stand up and fight against them, for their lives back home.

Because this was not just a battle for their survival.

This was a battle for their souls.