Warning
This chapter will get dark fast, it also describes a body.
Shuichi frown his hand on his chin as he stared at the machine in front of him, it was a larger production machine used to weave a large amount of cloth from wool but for some reason it wasn't working quite right, the machine's arms weren't lining up and so the patterns came out hap-hazard at best even if it got everything else right.
Shuichi had been working on it for the past hour or so for his software credits, he re-wrote the code in the machine four different times and he was admittedly growing frustrated with it since it was last task of the day and he'd need to finish it before he could go home.
At this point Shuichi wasn't sure what was wrong anymore and he decided to start from the very beginning, this time going over every single line of code regardless of what it was for only to find the one line of corrupted code for the button input which misread everything because it was programed for a different but similar langue.
He sighed whacking himself up the head for not figuring it out earlier but quickly looked for the part and reprogramed it for Japanese.
Shuichi gave the machine a test-run and smiled as it wove a simple pattern as he requested it to, satisfied he put everything back together and went to find his instructor so he could get his grade mark up and return home for the day, and preened over Gujiko-San observing his work then dismissed him with a "see you tomorrow".
He didn't need any more prompting and proceeded to grab his things and to start his journey home, in a bit more of a hurry than he normally would be because today was a very special day, his birthday.
He hadn't been excited for his birthday since before his mom had passed, at best is was just another day and last year was the worst having been thrown out, but this year would be different because he had people to celebrate with.
The Miyakes had been very good to him not just letting him live and eat with them but sort of adopting him into their family, Kaori being the most vocal and followed him around once he returned home to show him things she had found or whatever Deku-Sensei had taught her that time.
Masao wasn't around as much but he was a quiet comfort as one of the few full-bodied reptiles he personally knew and shared his grievances, their father was scary at times but a hardworking man that cared about his kids.
Dabi was probably his best friend if the guy would ever get over himself and admit they were actually friends and Magne was great to talk with at the end of a long day with some treats to munch on.
Then there was Deku-Sensei who was the kindest and most benevolent person he had ever met, the young boy had made good on his promise and was the whole reason Shuichi was studying at all which wasn't even the greatest of the things he had personally seen Deku-Sensei has done for others.
Hearing of Deku-Sensei's actions during the South Side Inferno was one thing but last month Shuichi had gotten to see such a thing for himself, on a much smaller scale granted but that didn't make the strength he saw any less potent as he along with everyone else followed Deku-Sensei's orders to put out and fight the fire Endeavour had caused.
And now he was going to have his first birthday party, Kaori had tried to hide it so that it would be a surprise party but toddlers were hardly masters of stealth, Shuichi played along pretending he didn't notice any of the plans Kaori was drawing up in crayon and it was utterly adorable how much work she was putting into making this party the best one ever.
So Shuichi couldn't help this giddy excitement as made his way home with sun beaming high in the clear sky, today was going just fine other than the hitch with the weaving machine and he was looking forward to whatever Kaori had planned for him.
He barely even registered the looks he normally got as he rode the train to Sekiya station and just looked at his messages from Masao and his friends they unfortunately couldn't make it because of their classes, they had promised they had sent his presents ahead of time and he knew they had because Kaori had tried to hide the boxes that were sent the day before.
The ride was short and Shuichi immediately moved onto heading to the South Side when someone jumped out of an alleyway and grab his arm scaring the hell out of him, Shuichi whirled around and saw a panicked girl in a middle school uniform "Help!" the girl pleaded tugging on his arm hard.
"H-hey what's wrong?" Shuichi questioned as he was dragged into the alley.
"It's my friend! She's hurt and I can't get her free! Please hurry!" the girl begged tears falling down her face and Shuichi's excitement was quashed seeing this girl's fear.
"Hey, hey don't worry, I'll help just take me where your friend is." Shuichi promised letting the girl lead him away.
Getting a closer look at the girl he notes that he knows the uniform that the greenette girl is wearing as the same uniform he's spotted Uraraka-Chan's wore a few times when she couldn't change before coming to meet with Shoji.
Maybe she was from Uraraka-Chan's school? He did think she was familiar the more he looked at her but before he could definitively place her the girl stopped in front of a large abandoned building covered in graffiti and falling apart much like the other building in the South Side.
"She's trapped under a fallen beam, it's on her leg!" the girl said yanking on his arm to come inside and Shuichi dutifully followed along, it wasn't an uncommon accident and Shuichi figured that this girl and her friend were the stereotypical pair of dumb kids that wandering into the more dangerous parts of the area.
The girl was more frantic and after a few seconds of entering the building ran off ahead of him "Hey wait!" Shuichi cried trying to keep up but he didn't have as much stamina as Masao did and lost the girl around a corner when his nose was strongly hit by the smell of rot.
It was awful but familiar smell he's come to know in his days on the street, he's had enough experience with it that he could tell what he'd just smelt as not any animal but a human, a real old one if the putrid stench was anything to go by.
His mouth immediately went dry "Hey! Where did you go? Miss!" Shuichi yelled carefully searching the building hoping that he could get the girls out before they stumbled upon whatever poor soul had passed away inside the building.
Unfortunately the building's disrepair had made it difficult to move quickly and it was like a labyrinth with very little light inside to guide him with the few windows he came across completely boarded up.
The girl hadn't answered him as he searched and the smell of rot only got worst so he must be getting closer to the body wherever it was.
Honestly Shuichi was starting to feel there was something wrong going on here, wandering the building like some horror movie character as the only sound he could hear was his own footsteps and the echo of his voice, and the rot was only getting worse that he had to breath in and out of his mouth to keep from gagging at the foul scent.
The sooner he could find the girl and her friend and leave this place the better so Shuichi pressed on having stopped calling for the girl in hopes he might hear her or her friend since the building had great echolocation apparently.
He was rewarded with a soft thump almost directly above him. Shuichi raced up to the second floor only to be hit by an even stronger wave of rotting corpse smell and Shuichi wasn't sure it was just one body anymore and that would only be more concerning, because you can argue one body could be an overdose or victim of exposure but multiple is where you start suspecting something more human.
Shuichi turned a corner having worked out this room to probably be the one over the hall he was in and called out "Hey miss are you in here-"
He choked on those words once his eyes adjusted and saw what was in the room, a total of ten bodies lay in the room with large pools of dried blood around them or splashed on the surroundings all lit up by a single lamp on a box.
Shuichi almost instantly recognized the uniforms each body was wearing as from the various high or middle schoolers he sees on the train though all but two of the bodies were, fresh enough to be easily recalled from missing posters and news stories he's seen over the past month, however it's the body slumped against the wall right beside the lamp that truly cemented the horror of the situation.
The single glassy eye of the girl who brought him there stared back at him, half her face and body covered in blood from where her other eye had been stabbed by something as well as other stab wounds, but it was the fact the girl had undoubtedly died days ago that made his heart drop, and he took a step back, his body trembling as he tried to understand what the hell he was seeing because that long bright neon green hair of her's was unmistakable.
Before Shuichi could fully recover something cold and sharp was quickly jabbed into his side and he screamed from the explosion of pain, his body instinctively yanked itself away and he tumbled over one of the corpses in his flailing, Shuichi turned around on the ground clutching his wound feeling his blood pooling his hand.
He hadn't needed bother searching for his attacker as the greenette girl he'd so foolishly followed here stood at the door way with a simple but bloody kitchen knife in hand grinning down at him "Oh wowie~ Your blood looks so much better than I thought it would against your scales lizard-Kun!' the girl cheerfully proclaimed as her face turned red.
"And you almost found my play room all on your own too! So I wouldn't have to drag your body here like I had to with the others! Thank you so much Lizard-Kun!" she said with a sadistic glee as walked over to him.
Shuichi tried to crawl away from the clearly dangerous girl that intended to harm him but the pain from his back made that very difficult, so the girl easily approached him and pinned him with a single foot on his chest that caused his pain to nearly double.
"Yes!Yes!Yes!~ Keep making that face! You look so handsome covered in your own blood like this Lizzie~ I can call you that now right? We are so close now, right? I'm going to be you now so of course we are!" The girl giggled as she brought the bloody blade to her mouth and licked off the blood, fucking moaning at the taste.
And despite his terror Shuichi became even more horrified as he watched in the limited light as the girl's skin slowly melt off of her and revealed a version of himself with the same crazy eyes and grin from before contorting his face into something spine chilling.
The girl- No his double proceeded to slid their empty hand over their new form and groping their new body with a churr "So this is what it's like to have scales... I love it Lizzie, and the smells~!." his double squealed eyes half-lidded in a love-drunk expression.
Thoroughly and absolutely terrified and aided by a mix of pain and blood loss Shuichi grabbed the severed hand of the nearest body, then took advantage of the double's euphoria exploring it's body to chuck it at the lamp which broke as soon as it hit the ground, not wasting a second Shuichi kicked the double in the crotch as hard as possible to get them off of him.
His voice screeched in protest but Shuichi blocked it out as he scrambled for one of the walls and started climbing up it and out of the room sticking to the ceiling while steadfast ignoring the raging agony it made from his back.
"That wasn't very nice Lizzie, if you wanted to play hide and seek you could've just said so." he heard his voice hiss and the anger in the echoes made Shuichi shudder and pick up speed as he tried to find some way out of the damned building but there wasn't any trace of the windows he saw before and Shuichi had no idea where the hell the entrance was because of his mad dash to get away.
"Oh where, oh where did you go Lizzie?~" his double churred and Shuichi sped up attempts to get away and find somewhere he could hide at least.
he stumbled upon a hole on the ceiling of the hall and immediately went in it and up to the floor above then hide himself in a room, barricading himself by closing the door then curled up in a corner feeling his head getting light, the double's voice teasing echoes all over and keeping him tense as he held his wound.
His hand went back to his wound and he whimpered when he brushed it, unsure what else he could do since no one would know where he was and wasn't sure how much blood he's lost.
Then like a miracle Shuichi's forgotten phone began vibrating and he rushed to answer it "Hey Zilla, you miss your-" Shuichi didn't let Dabi finish his question and immediately started talking over him.
"Dabi help me! I'm trapped in a building with some kind of shape-shifting manic!" Shuichi hissed tears falling from his eyes.
"Zilla where are you?" Dabi questioned and Shuichi tried to recall where the building was "I, I don't know... it's got tags from the Night Crawlers, the Kels, and the Strikers I think, it's three stories and within walking distance of Sekiya station." Shuichi told him, finding it harder to breathe just a bit.
"Okay, I'll be there soon just hang tight got it?" Dabi promised then hung up and Shuichi swallowed the lump in his throat as he curled up and bunkered down.
If Dabi said he'd be there soon then he would be here before Shuichi knew it and take care of the doppelganger.
He just needed to wait.
Dabi was having too many decent days in a row and that should've been the biggest red flag but hanging around the Twinkie had been making him lower his guard.
And to be fair he really wasn't expecting to hear Zilla being that scared or chased by some psycho when he had managed to go to his nerdy tech classes all year without a hitch but that meant little as he ran through the streets searching for a building like Zilla had described.
It took far too long for him to find the damn place and he didn't wait before he started stomping through the winding halls searching for any trace of Zilla.
He found it a minute later when Zilla turned a corner and nearly jumped a foot in the air "Zilla there you are, the hell is happening?" he hissed and Zilla hesitated for a second too long.
"Sorry, but we need to get the girl out of here and ditch before that crazy finds us." the person that looked like Zilla said.
Because despite how much this person looked like Zilla and had his voice there was no doubt in his mind that this was the shape-shifter Zilla mentioned, this person didn't even try to sound or act more likehis friend.
Dabi didn't say anything about this and just followed this impostor for about a minute then knocked them down and didn't hesitate to beat the double's face in. The imposter fought back of course so Dabi had to be careful when they tried to use Zilla's claws to swipe at his face, and the fucker got him pretty good, leaving four angry lines down his face before Dabi hit them over the head with a loose brick.
"Mother fucker," Dabi hissed under his breath clutching his eye hoping that he wouldn't have any damage to the eye itself, then took a couple of zip-ties and binding the now unconscious imposter and dragging a loose beam to pin the person where they were "Zilla the fuck are you!?" Dabi yelled expecting it to echo enough for him to hear Dabi.
Not getting an answer Dabi started looking again calling for Zilla until he spotted the guy creeping past him on the ceiling with a broken pipe in his mouth "Zilla I swear if try to hit me with that damn pipe I will bring your charred bones back to the Twinkie after I fry you." Dabi lowly threatened, lighting his left hand on fire.
A choked gasp of relief escaped Zilla, and he immediately dropped to the ground and drunkenly stumbled over to Dabi to crush him in a hug "You're here." Zilla slurred and Dabi quickly had to hug him back to keep Zilla from falling down.
"Zilla?" Dabi questioned only to realize that Zilla was bleeding bad, and Dabi panicked "You got stabbed!" Dabi exclaimed and he scooped Zilla up and ran for the closest exit.
The impostor could wait for Dabi to tear him apart later, Zilla needed treatment now.