Nemoto stood back, allowing her a moment's reprieve as he wrung his wrist. She wondered if his hand hurt from hitting her so much. All forces have an equal and opposite reaction, after all…
Not that she felt like an equal in this transaction.
Her tongue felt like a balloon in her mouth, swollen and too-big. It pressed against the roof of her mouth with the choking, humid warmth of a swamp. Likewise, her lips curled out, puffy and pained. She didn't need a mirror to feel the greens and purples dotting her cheeks.
Nemoto wasn't that strong, in the grand scheme of things. Still, two blows worth five points were worth one ten-point blow. He hit her more to make up for that lacking strength, his questions coming all the faster for it.
Sharp gravel dug into her left kneecap, her shin guard scattered around her in pieces. It cracked in the interrogation, but her legs remained unbroken. Small mercies.
While Nemoto examined his own hand, catching his breath, she tried to rise. She was careful to not put too much weight on her bootless leg—it might not be broken, but by all the heavens, it felt like it.
She only got halfway to her feet before the world did a cartwheel below her. Muscles in her gut convulsed and spasmed. Pain branched out where sharp rocks cut her. Spreading her knees shoulder-width apart, she remained on all fours until the storm passed. Her entire body was a bruise, aching on an atomic level.
Pain she could handle—but nausea was a different beast entirely. With her quirk suppressed, her equilibrium was simply gone—and with it, her ability to stand.
Such was why Nemoto made no move to restrain her, even when she tried to rise once more.
"You know, I've interrogated plenty of quirkless people. They're always nice jobs—easier to crack, and they do it with grace. Or, at least, the equivalent. Usually, they're so crushed by their weakness that any sort of lifeline is a golden opportunity. With you, however? It's honestly kind've embarrassing."
She fell again.
She did not cry. Not even a drop. Nor did she vomit. Not even a little. Ochako kept it down like a champ, kept all the shame and sickness inside. This was a waiting game. They were just in the prelude.
Nemoto would kill her if he didn't get what he wanted—but only after her quirk woke back up. This was a waiting game—and a game of precision. The window between her reacquiring her powers and his recognition of that would be short. She just needed to not fall to pieces before that opportunity presented itself.
"Not only are you a hard nut to crack, you're also a slob. You're basically quirkless, but you're not like them. At least they know when to admit defeat. Maybe if you had a chance, this would be admirable, but I can see snot dripping down your upper lip."
It was like his punches and kicks. Painful enmasse, but manageable by themselves. She endeavored to compartmentalize his disrespect, to only listen chunk-by-chunk. He didn't make it easy for her, however. His mouth jabbed her as often as his knuckles.
"See, I saddled up with Overhaul for this exact reason. He wants to wipe away quirks? I say let him. Start with me, even—Confess is always on, day and night, and I can't do anything to stop it. I'd be better off without it—and there are thousands of people like me across the world. Our quirks are disabilities, and without them, we'd be better off. But you? Look at you. Without that parasyte crawling around your gut, you're fundamentally broken. Wonky. Weak."
She chose the wrong moment to lift her hand. Immediately, she tilted forward, and by then, it was too late. Her shoulder hit the ground first, and she soon rolled over onto her side, aching and ashamed and embarrassed.
Nemoto paused, as if waiting for her reply—but she was careful to not waste her breath.
He wasn't wrong. There was no point in defending herself—not when his words fit her like a lock and key. It'd never occurred to her before, but it was obvious now. She loved Zero Gravity. More than anything. But it was her crutch.
Without it, she wasn't even a simple quirkless person. Without it, she was even below that. Without it, she was a liability. Without it, she was wonky. Without it, she was weak.
Nemoto was correct in all those things. Hell, she might've even agreed with and pitied his plight—but there was an issue.
Ochako was slow to anger, but every ounce of Nemoto was like an adrenaline shot. She was no stranger to bitterness, to frustration, depression, anxiety, and irritation. Hatred, however, was an alien concept foreign to her—until now.
She felt like a rat in a maze, questing for cheese. The oppressive stare of the researcher far above was a constant, malicious reminder of her predicament—and slowly, cheese was fading from her mind. Any moment now, she would flex her claws, and burrow through the maze walls themselves. Her mind revolved around the researcher's ankles.
With slow, calculated movements, Ochako managed to sit straight up. Nemoto stared, unmoving, and for once, did so in silence. Her sense of balance was non-existence, but as the thought of the researcher's ankles filled her mind's eye, she tried again. Through the aches littering her form, she leaned into her hands and pushed herself up.
Like a baby gazelle, she wobbled in place. Her boot scraped against the ground as she pulled her knee up. This was the most crucial step—if she topped before she got her feet below her, she had no hope. She did not operate on her gut—she operated on memories and theory. It was no true replacement, but it was all she had.
She didn't remember learning to walk. Those memories might've been useful here—rising, tumbling, learning, trying again, and landing in her father's arms...
Nevermind, she thought. The thought of a warm embrace was almost as painful as Nemoto's interrogation. Still.
If it was just pain, she could take it.
Ochako sucked in a sharp breath and pushed.
She stood. Her body remained rigid in success, afraid that even one adjustment would send her falling again.
"I don't know what you want with my friend…" She began, the words dripping out with inconsistent effort. There was a sludge-like quality to her mumble, almost vomit-like. "But you can't have him."
Her spine felt like a turbine, endlessly spinning. Only the thought of ankles kept her upright. Pink pads dug into her palm.
Nemoto didn't say anything for a second. He stopped stretching his wrist a while ago, instead falling into observation. Now that she was standing, however, his voice returned with a vengeance. Each word was a nail on chalkboard—annoying in her good ear and painful in her deaf one.
"Why are you defending him? What has he ever done for you?" Nemoto asked.
The words spilled out, unwanted and unwarranted.
"Because you disgust me," Ochako said, the half-answer leaping from her lips in a careless free-fall. "And he saved my life. The Zero Pointer would've made me a pancake if he hadn't caught it."
"The feeling is mutual. Watching you wobble around reminds me of this one time—"
A buzz interrupted him. Pausing, he pulled an odd device out from his back pocket. It sorta looked like a walkie-talkie, but with a curved antennae. It sparked when he brought it to his ear, and a static-filled noise filled the space between them.
She couldn't understand a lick of it, but Nemoto seemed to. His posture, loose and annoyed before, turned ramrod straight in a blink.
"Yea?" He asked, before another spew of nonsense came out. With a nod and a spark, he turned off the device and lowered it. When he spoke again, his voice wasn't much different—but he almost seemed a little pleased.
"Good news!" He said, holstering the walkie-talkie. "The interrogation is over!"
Maybe he expected her to become excited. She did not. Her gut dropped out from her stomach, falling into a bottomless, dark pit. The words alone almost sent her sprawling, but she refused to let her hard work waste away. Ochako stood tall.
She didn't know how it was possible. It simply felt improbable—wrong, that they captured Midoriya. Ochako thought back to their last interaction, when he'd resigned himself to holding back the monsters. He hadn't been confident, or even assured—he'd simply done what he'd thought was necessary.
It was a mindset he could afford thanks to his competency. His ability was an open secret—something made clear in the Battle Trial. He was different from them. Stronger, better trained, more dedicated. When the USJ's walls became alive, separating her from 1A, she watched him. She saw how he fought them off, how they pushed him into a corner—and how he pushed back. Even exhausted and wounded, he moved in the moshpit of monsters with a nearly divine, unimaginable grace.
Suffice to say, she struggled to imagine anyone except a pro hero taking him down. Nemoto's peers were insufficient replacements in that regard, and that left her only one explanation.
They must have cheated.
Ankles. Gnawing through walls. Giving up cheese.
Newfound feelings—hate.
Nemoto said five minutes. Her time was almost here.
She swayed in place, feeling her fingertips rub against her palm. They were ever-so-slightly oilier than the rest of her skin.
When she spoke, she cast out the shudder from her voice.
"Wonderful."
The sting of the bullet-dart was fading.
Nemoto clapped.
"Well, your quirk isn't back, so killing you isn't exactly within our bargain's diction… but I think we've established a mutual dislike, no?"
Slowly, her uneven, shifting weight settled between her ankles. She pursed her lips. They cracked, dry.
"Yes," she whispered.
Nemoto nodded. Something about the simple bob of her head ignited something in her. A formerly sleeping thing in her chest crawled up from the darkness, replacing her anxious gut. It was a pointed thing with sharp claws. They dug gouged in her intestines as they latched themselves in place, sending streaks of pain through her whole body.
If it was just pain, however, she could handle it.
She might be dependent on her quirk, and she might not be well-trained. The odds might be stacked against her, and her ears and jaw and stomach and leg might hurt like all hell, but she couldn't help it. Defiance roared in her gut, mixing and bleeding with a genuine hate that made her squeeze her first so hard she felt light-headed.
"Alright, alright," Nemoto said, his tone flippant. Like this was a casual interaction. It infuriated her. From his cape, he produced a skinny curved blade. It couldn't have been wider than a finger. "Then let's say we make this quick. Drawing this out seems like a total pain—Ack!"
Ochako lunged forward, using all the strength in her legs to tackle Nemoto. She wrenched the knife from his grasp and flung it off the cliff. He squawked and flailed his skinny limbs, but Ochako didn't need balance to straddle him and wail her fists against his stupid mask. His glass goggles cracked under her knuckles, tearing up her hands—but she didn't stop.
She didn't feel like a heroine when she flung his stupid bowler cap aside. She certainly didn't feel like one when she grabbed his mask by the ears and tore it off, revealing Nemoto's honest face.
He was handsome for all of one millisecond before her fists turned his nose crooked. His fists landed on her sides with all the strength of before, but Ochako didn't care anymore. They rammed against her ribcage, hard at first, but steadily lost strength with each passing second.
Every ounce of her frustration poured onto her face. The stress of moving out, of U.A.'s incredible difficulty, of her future. The fear of Overhaul's invasion, of being hunted and battling shadowy kaiju and seeing her friends almost die back to back to back. The struggle of finally, finally making it home free—only to be sucked right back in.
Her fists only fell with more and more weight as she thought of Nemoto. His apathy, his sadism, his "interrogation," his disgusting, wandering gaze. Every ounce of torture he inflicted on her body and mind, she unleashed back on his delicate, fragile face. She didn't blame him for wearing a whole plague mask, now. If her enemies saw her look so thin and brittle, she'd hide too.
Distantly, she was aware of a terrible force echoing through the USJ. It attacked her ruptured eardrum like a ravenous predator, tearing her sensitive organ to pieces—but that was far off. A different problem. Here, she was only aware of the way Nemoto's hands fell to his side, unmoving.
Internally, she was aware that her balance was back. She still continued to hit him, to release every single microscopic shred of frustration on him.
A soft hand came down on her shoulder. She let it pull her to her feet and away from Nemoto. Her eyes stayed fixed on his face, but her chin turned as the same gentle hand dragged it aside.
She was gorgeous—like a princess. Her only flaw was a small wrinkle between her eyebrows. Even that was delicate, and bespoke only of concern. Ochako took a moment to recall her name—she'd seen her on the news. Momo Yaoyorozu. Behind her, a taller male stood at attention. He stared at her in half-concealed surprise.
A small drop of blood dripped from her fist onto the ground. She didn't know whose it was. Yaoyorozu's other hand came around to cup her cheek.
"It's okay. Just relax, and we'll take it from here."
Like a robot, Ochako nodded once.
And went out like a light.
[x]
The blond man's hands never stopped moving. Setsuno, Kyouka told herself—not Setsuna, Midoriya's infamous maybe-girlfriend—wasn't a spazz. It wasn't like he was shifty. His posture was steady—ramrod straight, really, and his shoulders stayed stiff, even through the dips and rises of the boat's rocking. It wasn't like he was a wacky waving inflatable tube man.
It was his fingers, his palms. He reminded her of her father about to leave the house—always patting his pockets, always double checking his possessions, always checking for anything missing. His fingers, likewise, wouldn't stay still. They flexed and curled and clawed and prodded like baby snakes new to the world, hungry for information.
There was no great challenge in steeling her nerves. Even if her stomach was a pretzel, pulsating with anxiety, she wouldn't let that show on her face. While there were… some… emotions she couldn't mask, pure panic was not one. Thoughts of her father straightened her shoulders. New strength entered her fingers, and she felt the steering wheel's rubbery cushion swell between her knuckles.
With the hand not holding the steer wheel, she made a show of prodding her skinny jeans. When she found no glass rectangles, she did the same for her jacket pockets.
"No…" She began, speaking as soft as her voice could go. Kyouka did her best to drain the anxiety and growing anger from her throat. "I left my phone at U.A."
If Setsuno smiled, she could not tell. His mask was pitch black and stork-like, with a long and thin cylindrical mouth. It melted into his face from chin to nose bridge, leaving only his eyes and ears bare. Of those windows to the soul, Kyouka failed to read them. Each was more akin to glass or cut stone than a normal emotive human's.
All she could understand at a glance was his nod.
"Wonderful. So, now that I've got you in a corner, mind spilling the beans? I'd rather not beat the information out of you… but I've got orders."
She blew a long, silent breath through her nose.
"Beans?"
His glass eyes betrayed nothing. His fingers did. They pinched and twisted the loose fabric of his khaki pants as her question echoed around the cockpit.
"Yeah, the beans. Bossman's in need of one of your peers. You mind telling me who broke the Zero Pointer?"
Kyouka couldn't help how her eyes narrowed, but she kept her voice level. She wasn't close with Midoriya, somehow, despite his friend group encompassing half the class—but that didn't mean she'd give him up… Especially as the weight of the situation grew heavier.
A bead of sweat rolled down her neck. Setsuno's eyes remained stone, his fingers remained hungry, and Kyouka remained afraid, even if she didn't show it. The longer she spent in the cockpit, staring at this man, the more she withered under his heavy stare.
His active hands, his glare, his statuesque, imposing posture. His silhouette, blocking her only avenue of escape—and her backside pressed against the steerwheel. His surprising strength, unbefitting his skinny frame.
Another bead of sweat trickled down her neck. She felt hot around her wrists and bangs. Kyouka thought of her own skinny limbs, a mixture of fear and jealousy growing. He crushed her radio with his bare hand.
She refused to blink, to wipe away the sweat building along her brow. It was hot in the cockpit. Setsuno's stone stare didn't imply anything, but it was impossible to not feel his expectation in the air.
When she didn't make a fast reply, Setsuno sighed.
"Ah, so that's how it is. Listen, I'm in a pretty decent mood, if you couldn't tell. So, while it's pretty obvious you were about to lie to me, I'll let it slide this once. Hell, I'll even give you another chance."
He took a step into the cabin, dropping down the one-step pit. With one foot on the cockpit floor, and one still hovering in the threshold slightly above, Kyouka saw her chance. Her plan, which she'd begun planning only seconds prior, were about to start moving. Before she could throw caution to the wind, however, he paused.
Something buzzed in his back pocket, freezing her grip on the steering wheel. Setsuno, none the wiser, reached around and retrieved an odd device.
A thick bead of sweat dripped down her bang and made a dull splash on the floor.
Setsuno's device was a radio, she surmised, with a curved antennae. At a glance, she recognized a few components, but the overall design was something totally foreign. It was like a rubix puzzle, to her. She was familiar with the function, and knew the objective was to organize the colors—but this was no cube. It was a dodecahedron, and the leap in logic was beyond her.
He held the curved end up to his ear. A small spark followed the curve to the top, and an unintelligible babble began spilling into the cockpit. Setsuno turned aside, as if seeking privacy. She spotted a little black curve lining his ear—a listening device.
She had no clue how he was getting a signal, here—and with such casual ease, at that. It took an incredible amount of luck and precision to find the sweet spot, and this was the only place in the whole dome she'd found it. For a moment, she almost considered if this was an act. There was no way he'd actually gotten a signal, right?
But, she soon saw him nod as the babble slowed to nothing. Setsuno pressed a button, and the cockpit fell to silence once again. His gait was different, she noted, as he spun to face her once again. He'd learned something.
It dawned on her as Setsuno's eyebrows lowered to his eyelids. This was the first expression she truly saw in him, and it almost made her shudder. It was anger.
There were probably no jammers—just scramblers set over a wide frequency range. That way, they could communicate if they had a descrambler… such as the little device on his ear. Kyouka wondered if the rest of the men around Overhaul had one too.
As she watched Setsuno's fingers ball into fists, however, that wonder dissolved into hope. With a silent prayer, she wished that her theory was wrong. If all of Setsuno's peers received the same message… then it wouldn't end well for her friends.
Unballing, Setsuno's fingers began rolling up his sleeves. From mid-forearm to elbow, he revealed more and more skin. Though Kyouka's initial impression of a thin frame proved true, she had not expected the sheer cut of his muscles. Setsuno was lean but very clearly dense, with hard grooves where muscle groups bordered one another. There was a dark hint of a tattoo on his elbow, but his sleeves kept it hidden.
She swallowed down a thick glob of saliva as Setsuno finished. When his eyes leveled hers once again, she could almost see the mercy draining out of him.
"Change of plans, princess rock," Setsuno said, raising both hands to chest level. With two wrist-flicks, Kyouka dropped an inch and almost fell entirely. Only her grip on the steering wheel kept her upright. In his hands, he held both her boots by the heel. The only barrier between the ground and her feet were her paper-thin pink socks.
He tossed one overboard, but he kept the other. Changing his grip, he grabbed the boot by its top and swung the steel toe full-force at the nearest window. She screamed, but he didn't react. It shattered, but the glass didn't go everywhere. Faster than Kyouka could track, different shards of glass appeared in his hand. Dropping the awkward pieces, Jirou only understood what he was doing after it was too late.
In his hand, he lifted a long shank. From his pocket, he retrieved a tattered handkerchief and wrapped it around the least-sharp end. He swung it once, his eyes hard, and practiced a stab. Setsuno spent long seconds studying his work, puzzling over it. Every nanosecond felt like lifetimes.
When the tension became so thick she could hardly breathe, he turned. His shank glinted in the light, almost blinding her.
Somehow, someway, when he spoke, the tension constituting her atomic structure did not dissipate. It only grew more rigid, more compelling, more intense.
"Nevermind the beans. Ole' Firecrotch got your boy, so that means our transaction here is canceled. Joy."
She eyed the glass dagger. Her heart was pounding so hard that her eyes began to burn with withheld tears. Blood screamed in her ears, and she released a shaking breath. Anxiety fueled her. The muscles in her arm felt spring loaded with enough force to snap her elbow backwards.
"So," Kyouka began, pausing to wet her dried out mouth, "what's with the… dagger?"
Setsuno raised the indicated item to chin-level.
"When I was an intern, I had to take calls from morons. Real idiots—the kind you only thought existed in sitcoms. I listened to them drone on and on and on about how they missed their payments for whatever reason… it was torture. I usually ended those calls with murder on my mind—if only to cleanse the world of one more mentally impaired cretin"
Kyouka's heart was a jackhammer, even as she listened to this man's odd story.
"I lost the job before I ever got around to it, however. They caught me stealing long before that. For a long time, that rage built up… and then I joined Overhaul. There's nothing to repress, anymore, because I don't have to bottle it up."
Kyouka didn't need to hear the words to listen to the meeting.
"I just got the order for your execution, lass. Bad luck."
She didn't need to hear any more.
Setsuno took a step forward, but she didn't allow him to take a second.
With all her strength, she threw herself to the side, pulling the steering wheel with her. Setsuno stepped into her, as if to chase her—only to lose his balance. The world tilted as the yacht leaned into the sudden turn, the floor nearly becoming vertical.
Loose glass slid with him as the floor became too steep to stand on. Jirou held tight, not allowing herself to fall. He cried out as he landed on the cockpit's wall, glass showering him—but it didn't last long. Curses spilled from his lips, even as the yacht failed to tip over. The moment the floor evened out enough to walk, Jirou disappeared.
Sprinting with all her dwindled strength, she made it onto the deck, her eyes scanning the horizon. They were on the edge of the lake—if she took a dive, she could reach the end.
But it would be the wrong end. Whereas if they were anywhere else, she could've dove and made it home free, the closest "shore" was the USJ's wall itself. There would be nowhere to go from there—and even if she made it, she'd become a sitting duck.
That momentary hesitation was tragic. Setsuno appeared in the cockpit's doorway a moment later, cuts and lacerations littering his shirt and arms. There was even a cut dividing his eyebrow, forcing his right eye closed. With a careless hand, he brushed off one last glass shard from his shoulder. In his other hand, his glass dagger was still whole and sharp-looking.
"Bad move, princess rock." Setsuno said, stepping onto the deck. He rolled his shoulder, cracked his neck, and burst into a sprint. Almost faster than Kyouka could react, his face enlarged by half, the gap between them closed in a blink. She stumbled backwards, dodging the jagged glass dagger by a hair—but her backside hit the rail, and she realized she was pinned.
When Setsuno's knife came whistling down on her again, she couldn't dodge. A thin, painful slice burned from her shoulder to collar. Setsuno didn't follow that strike up, instead choosing to switch his grip. Despite the pain, she had the clarity to understand why:
He wasn't going to slice again—he was going to run her through.
Her ears throbbed with an exhausted ache. She had nothing left in the tank, and only a split second to react. As she watched the dagger drop to Setsuno's hip, his grip primed for her murder, she came to a realization.
Kyouka was going to die. And she really, really wanted to live.
She brought her knee up as fast as she could, but it was like swimming through molasses. Setsuno, likewise, moved in slow motion—but his slow motion was simply faster than her's. He caught her knee before she brought it to her full height, stopping the motion before it became a devastating kick. Now, standing on one leg and perched on a precarious railing, her balance disappeared. Kyouka became a sitting duck.
Setsuno's knife rammed through where her guts were. At least, it rammed through where they'd been half a second ago, before a borderline-tsunami crashed against the hull. The yacht tipped not a moment later, flipped by the powerful wave.
Her back in the water with a frozen shock, knocking the wind out of her.
An echo rang through USJ, loud and abrasive and unignorable—a crack in the air, a scream, a pounding drum, a rung gong. Kyouka heard it as clear as day—even though she was some ten feet underwater, sinking to the bottom. The lake wasn't salted, but her shoulder wound still stung. Her descent wasn't struggled. She didn't fight it. There was an alien serenity to the chaos—an alien, artistic value she'd never experienced. All her remaining oxygen escaped her nostrils in one large bubble, and then she was one with the water.
It invaded her nose, suffusing her mouth and throat—but she welcomed the way it cleansed the lingering taste of that putrid teleporter quirk. She welcomed the cool water on her burning, exhausted muscles. She welcomed the dull waves of force echoing through the water, she welcomed the sight of the yacht sinking.
Well, she thought, dull and foggy, at least Setsuno destroyed her electronics already. No further water damage there.
Looking up, she watched through warping, uneven refractions as something flew over the lake. Like a flock of birds, an arrowhead of black shapes hovered above. Each shape was dark and inconsistent, but the overall formation was simple—everyone followed the lead of the largest figure. It almost reminded her of the giant class tree, when everyone was weightless and under Reiko and Shiozaki's control. All it was missing were the vines.
The clarity began to fade as more and more of her lifeforce seeped from her shoulder, shrouding her vision in purplish-brown blood. The eleven dark figures smudged over, then faded into the growing darkness of her vision.
With a sudden start, her brain remembered she was drowning. All at once, her peaceful, cool descent became infused with boiling panic. When she tried to swim, she found her limbs were leaden and cold. Her arm, cut by Setsuno's knife, was dead weight and only served to drag her further down. She thrashed in the water, her pathetic spasms bringing her no closer to the surface.
The mysterious wave saved her a stab wound, but condemned her to suffocation.
A second, smaller sonic boom tore through the water—followed by nine more. It shook the water with unparalleled violence, sending her on a wild downward spiral. Just when she thought she'd get her bearings, another would come, and the world would shake. A particularly strong one forced her throat open, letting water clog her lungs. She tried to fight, she tried to swim, but she was helpless under the lake's turbulent strength.
It was too late for her when the lake stopped shaking. Her shoulders brushed the lumpy stone coating the bottom, her awareness dull and her strength null.
She hardly noticed the powerful pressure easing off her ears and eyes. Her addled mind didn't register the lake's dissipating weight. No confusion ailed her as cold air brushed her skin. No questions followed the watery vomit escaping her lips a moment later.
Kyouka didn't understand, for the longest moment, why she was suddenly dry. She didn't understand why the lake water was suddenly pushed aside, surrounding her with impossible walls of pure water.
She didn't understand why such a large, old man was reaching a hand out to her. She didn't understand why he was hovering, or why the wind whipped around him like a personal tornado.
What she did understand, however, was that she felt a whole lot safer when she took his hand. Hand in hand, she lifted into the air, born on the back of invisible wings. Something invisible pressed against her shoulder, slowing her bleeding. Looking around, she struggled to find the other smudges from before. It occurred to her that this man—this legend, Whirlwind, this living storm—sent them away.
"Are you alright?" He asked, his voice the crash of typhoons on coastal towns.
She nodded.
When he nodded, it didn't feel like a movement he made with his neck. It felt like the world around them bobbed, his head held in place. When he turned to survey their surroundings, it felt like the world tilted on its axis.
Then, like a bag of bricks, she remembered Setsuno—and his oddball radio.
"W-wait, they're gonna kill my friends!" She said, unabashedly squeezing Whirlwind's hand. "They h-had an order to kill us since… t-they got Midoriya!"
When he turned back to her, relief flooded through her. It was warm and in sharp contrast to her cold limbs—but it wasn't shocking. No, it felt natural, feeling relief in his presence. The winds around them turned nippy, and a stray breeze fluttered her bangs.
"Relax, young lady," Whirlwind said. Below them, the mysterious force holding the lake open faded, and the waves crashed back together. The splash should've reached them, but it was like an impenetrable bubble surrounded them. It turned to vapor before her socks could become wet again..
All across the USJ, little dark shapes flew on wings of nothing. They traveled in groups, but they weren't flocks of birds. They were student-shaped—young and humanoid and loosely familiar. Kyouka blinked as the situation dawned on her—and her shoulders sagged in deeper relief.
Whirlwind's voice lowered, reminding her of rustling tree leaves in a tornado.
"I've brought our best."
[x]
AN: I mighta let a little bit of real life stuff slip through in the first half lol. ANYWAYS! The first post-usj chapter is done, and I'm excited to keep the ball rolllng towards the climactic Sports Festival.
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review!~