Safe to say that this identity was dead.
If that kick was any indication, Mirko wasn't fucking around. One hit had my body reverberating with enough shock to need an Overhaul right off the bat, smoothing out all the bruises that were well on their way to developing. My muscles, and the bones within them, escaped mostly unharmed, but the less said about the state of the blood vessels around the impact zone, the better.
One damn kick, and she made it look casual. If she wasn't so easy to read, she might have taken my head right off my shoulders. I wouldn't have even seen it coming.
And now here I was, buying time for my friends to get away because I was the only one who could. Assuming whatever was left of me after this wasn't sent back in a shoebox, they would have to roll out a red carpet when I got back, at minimum.
Holding my breath and doing my best to ease my thundering heart, I sank further into the shadows of the trees, Chameleon in full effect. It was a self-explanatory Quirk, taking in and reflecting the environment against my skin and clothes. Not my first choice for a Quirk to steal, but undoubtedly useful, especially when I'd just so happened across it in the first place.
What else had I been supposed to do about the knife wielding maniac that had just murdered a jogger right in front of me? She'd been the one to decide what to do with him in the end; all I'd done was revive her and reassemble the organs she'd lost that had been in his stomach.
I guess you had to be a bit crazy and homicidal if you went jogging in a park at two in the morning. Too bad I never got her name, she'd felt oddly familiar…
A pebble flew past my ear, close enough to send my sticky hair waving in the breeze. It hit the tree behind me, where both it and the wood exploded in a shower of splinters. I was invisible, completely hidden, and within a moment I was eye to eye with Mirko the Rabbit Heroine. Her ears twitched, her nose crinkled up for a moment, and a moment later I was catching the foot aimed directly at my sternum, the impact flickering me back into the visible spectrum.
Right, fight of my life right now, distractions later.
Overhaul roared to life, sparking along my fingertips in a bid to splatter Mirko across the forest floor. It would have been the smart and easy move to make, a dead Mirko was a Mirko that wouldn't wouldn't be revealing me to the authorities or chasing after me in a bid to serve justice.
I reigned it in, stamping the urge out. The arm holding Mirko's ankle instead bulged with newly grown muscles, and she barely had enough time to shout before I was hurling her away, deeper into the forest. Hopefully the tree I'd thrown her at would knock her out long enough for me to figure out exactly how to get out of this situation.
Mirko's leg lashed out midair. I watched with something akin to stunned disbelief as her momentum settled into something far more controlled, two full rotations through the air before her feet had touched down against the bark of the tree. Contrary to the force I'd used in the throw, which had probably been enough to tear it right out of the ground, Mirko launched away from the trunk without setting even one leaf out of place, hurtling back through the air at me faster than I could think of anything other than 'what the absolute fuck was that'?
Her leg came around, aimed at my head once again. My arm was already rising, ready to intercept the same kick yet again. I didn't notice her second leg joining the first until it was too late, the expected kick instead wrapping around my neck in a manner I could have described as delicate.
Until we fell to the ground, and she started to squeeze.
Rabbits had powerful legs, that was common knowledge. Rabbits that trained and fought like they were possessed were a whole different story. The muscles in my neck and trapped arm, condensed beyond typical human comprehension and powerful to the point that only superlatives could accurately describe them, began to buckle under the pressure.
Worry about permanently hurting her fled my brain, along with a whole lot of oxygen. Here I was, expecting a more drawn out fight while she experimented with ways of staying out of my range. Surely by now, the heroes had figured out that my Quirk was touch-based and activated. In theory, Mirko would be one of my best matchups, because she had nothing but close range combat skills.
Either they were less informed than I was expecting, or she just didn't care. Bad options all around, it seemed.
"Are you even trying?" My eyes flicked up at her jeering, my trapped arm tensing against the force of her thighs. I was getting some room back, a fact she'd picked up on, if her flushing face and heavy breathing was anything to go off.
"Not really." It was the honest truth, and it seemed to throw her off enough that she didn't react when my free hand came up, coming to a rest on the top of her exposed leg. Funnily enough, the movement made her open her legs, just enough for me to slip out of her hold.
The sneer had fallen from her face. The pink streak across her cheeks had deepened enough to be noticeable, too. Was she…? No, not a chance.
The second my head was free, my hand lit up with electricity. The golden corona of energy overtook the forest, so bright that I had to avert my eyes even though I was the one causing it. Caught staring directly at it, Mirko yelped, though that noise soon changed as I loosened my shoulders and discharged everything I had into her body.
I'd expected a scream. Prepared myself for it, even. I had no idea the havoc that electricity could wreak on someone with a nonstandard body. Maybe I would need to revive her after this, or at least make sure she was still breathing. Those thoughts were dashed when instead of the pain I'd been expecting, Mirko laughed. She laughed hard, hard enough that it was difficult to tell if her thrashing was due to hilarity, or if she was losing control of her limbs.
Never would I have expected such a flat stare to be on my face during the first time I'd been involved in a real fight in this world. Mirko was acting like I was tickling her relentlessly, rather than overloading her with enough voltage to light up a city block. She kept giggling, even after I cut off the charge and stepped back. My hand fell to my side, and I glared at it for a second, utterly confused as to what part of it had triggered that.
Mirko rolled onto her back, staring up at me with lidded eyes. The frizzy mess I'd just left her hair in was falling back onto her head in smooth waves much faster than I would have assumed possible. She stretched out, shoulders still shaking with either laughter or residual wattage, and I realised a moment too late that I was standing just a step too close to her reclining form.
"You're pretty shit at fighting, you know?"
The oversized toes of her hero costume slammed into my shin with enough force to cause an earthquake. I'm sure for her it would have been a small nudge, for me it felt like I'd been hit by a truck. I wobbled in place, anchoring myself to the ground with my hair a moment later, just in time to take another thump to the opposite leg.
Like a tree, I tipped forward, my whole body lighting up with Overhaul in preparation for whatever was about to come. My elbows slammed into the dirt on either side of Mirko's head, sending out a cloud of dust that we probably would have breathed in if I hadn't manoeuvred my hair to shield us both.
I hadn't even meant to cover her as well. She glanced at the curtain of hair for a moment, before her eyelids fell even further. If it wasn't for the solid grasp she took of my shirt with both hands, I would have assumed she was about to fall asleep.
"Should have used the explody quirk that took out the first guy with the zappy shit." For all the terrifying power in her legs, Mirko's upper body didn't seem to have the strength needed to throw me around. She tugged on my shirt twice, the second one firmer than the first, but my own arms held me steady above her.
My mind was just as stuck as my arms, barely registering the feeling of her legs curling around mine. "You knew I could kill you with a touch."
Even while shaking from the aftermath of a lightning strike, there was enough power in her thighs to break my stance. This hold was different from the last; her legs had barely any grip on my back and her arms were far too slow in looping around the back of my neck.
"Yeah." Slowly, she lifted her head off the ground, her gaze shifting between my eyes and my lips. "It's kinda hot."
Suddenly, it all made sense. All those times in the past I'd thought I'd seen her out of the corner of my eye. The suggestive looks. The way she was holding me right now.
She was touched in the head and her rabbit senses were picking up on the fact that my brain was the only one that worked in this entire world. Thus, in order to climb the hero rankings, she needed it for herself!
…Haha, just kidding. Even I wasn't that dense.
Still, that left me with nowhere near enough time to make a decision. Was this a trick? Was it not? Which outcome would be more confusing? Who the fuck knew.
Naturally, where my mind stalled, my Quirks picked up the slack. The curtain of hair that had been shutting us away from the rest of the world lifted suddenly, pushing me up to my feet and away. In a storm of purple it had slithered along Mirko's body, pinning her arms to her chest and wrapping her legs in so many layers of keratin that even she would have trouble breaking through.
The effect was immediate. Mirko's eyes snapped open, her pupils dilating wide when the rest of her body didn't move. She thrashed along the ground, tangling herself further into my hair. The slack, peaceful expression had been replaced with a furious glower, her lips dipping lower as she pushed herself into a sitting position and relocated me several paces away, watching her like she was an irate wild animal.
Could you blame me?
"What the fuck, you virgin?! Lemme go!"
I didn't offer her much more than one last calculating look before I dropped down to one knee. She watched me with no small amount of contempt as I lay a hand against the ground and pushed Overhaul out, though from the way her breath hitched and her ears quivered, she could feel what I had just done.
Nothing. None of the tree roots in the forest had felt a disturbance bigger than the animals that already lived there, aside from our short bout. There was no imminent backup from the ground, and there wasn't enough visibility for any to be coming from the air.
We were alone. No imminent backup. No reason for a distraction like this.
"Why?" Drawing Overhaul back into myself, pushed myself back to my feet, crossing my arms and matching her glare with my own. "Where the hell did this come from?"
"Quirk, personal preference, your face and body. Take your pick." Her eyes, the only part of her body outside of her mouth, roamed up and down. The sudden urge to cover myself was unwelcome and absolutely ridiculous. "Seriously, do you understand what that face and body can do to a girl?"
Whatever I'd been about to say was interrupted by my phone buzzing in my pocket. Tempted as I was to ignore it and get to the bottom of this, there were quite a few things happening in my life recently that I would need to stay on top of.
Without bothering to find the opening, I Overhauled my jeans, ripping a hole in the outside of the pocket. The notification was from Twice, the man still clad in his suit and shooting the camera a thumbs up. In the background, Gentle was talking to the man that had loaned us the car, though both of them had stopped their negotiations to shoot Twice almost identical unimpressed looks.
"How's your date going?" The caption of the image read. I switched my phone off without responding, shoving it back through the opening in my pocket and stitching the hole I'd ripped back up.
"Did you forget that this face and body is attached to a murderer that you're supposed to be arresting?"
That earned me a slow blink. For a single, horrifying second, I was worried that I'd just tied up someone that wasn't even capable of remembering something as simple as that. Thankfully, or regretfully I suppose, Mirko burst into laughter so sudden it seemed to take even her by surprise. She rocked backwards precariously, cackling to the point where she didn't even seem to notice that I'd pulled her back on balance.
"You think you're the only person in this forest that's killed people?" With her arms bound, she couldn't wipe away the tear that was gathering in her eye from the laughter. Instead, she just flicked her neck, sending it flying off into the forest and making me wonder for the umpteenth time whether she actually was human. "I wasn't always in perfect control of my Quirk, ya know. Sometimes people die, and that's the way of the world, because the world is a shit place or it has a sick sense of humour."
She leaned forward, her teeth bared in the kind of grin I'd come to expect from her. "Besides, we got the list, name one person you killed that didn't deserve it."
That wasn't enough. That didn't feel like enough. This had quickly worked itself up to being the weirdest day of my fucking life, and I was including the time I woke up as Minoru Mineta in there.
And yet it was undeniable that a very attractive woman had just made a pass at me. Had she been doing that this entire time and I'd missed it?
…What else had I missed!?
The hair that had her trussed up loosened. I couldn't even tell if that was something I'd consciously decided to do. The grin on her face closed into a smile that was still wide, though it lacked the sharp and shiny contrast of her teeth against it. There was some dramatic irony in the idea of a rabbit approaching someone slowly to make sure they didn't flee.
Had she picked up on that, or was it those damn instincts of hers' at work again?
"One tiny favour, and I won't tell the Safety Commission a damn thing about Michael Wise. He doesn't even seem like that bad a guy." The gloved hand that came to rest over my chest could no doubt feel my heart pounding. The level of implicit trust we were both taking here was making my head spin. "I won't even tell your little girlfriend."
"She isn't my girlfriend." That single sentence felt like a signed confession. It was difficult to think through your implications when the woman pressed up against you felt like such a contradiction. "She's… a business associate."
It was slower than it had been in the mansion, but the weight of Mirko falling entirely onto me was unmistakable. I didn't tense up this time, battling down the urge to do so much like I did whenever Overhaul desired carnage, so it was much easier to feel just how boneless she seemed in that moment.
I was the only thing holding her up.
That felt like a revelation of some kind.
"Should probably let her know that, then. Besides, that just means you've got nothing to lose, don't it?"
One of the hands over my thundering heart drew a line down my chest, her fingers walking along their path. Those red eyes were damn near hypnotic. So much could go wrong with this. Apocalyptic scenarios flashed across the back of my eyes like stock war footage. Did I really need the identity that badly?
…Did I really want to say no?
No. No, I don't think I did.
