Friday
"It's me. I'm going now."
"Well hello to you too! Do you require anything on my end?"
"Just keep the heroes off our backs."
"Is that tru- hmm? He hung up on me!"
To remake the world, one had to make sacrifices.
His air shields held, but only for the moment it took to ease the burden of the boulders raining atop them. The winds howled his orchestra as he swiped his free hand through the air, the dragons grown from his own back's flesh weaving through the assaulting purple ropes to strike at the demon within.
One of them brushed against a purple strand, no larger than a hair. It crumbled to dust, the other following soon after as the man met it with a fist. Another wall of safety spun into existence, barely in time to shield himself from the cutting pressure that sliced through his storm. It stopped the offending ropes too; they almost seemed to be confused as they slammed into the clear surface, coiling around it for a moment before being recalled.
It had started as such a simple night, too. Another long trek through the wilderness, away from the society that despised them and towards where yet another hopeful Quirk lay in wait to fix his deteriorating body. Finding a way to the remote island he'd sensed it on would take some time, as would lying in wait for the owner to leave that unintentional safety.
It had been Chojuro who'd noticed the straggler shadowing their movements through the trees. It had been on his orders that the bestial man had moved to neutralise the threat.
That had been his first mistake. Allowing their pursuer to shepherd them further away from the city lights in the distance had been the next. Hoyo was doing all he could to stop the bleeding with his bandages, but even with Kiruka's help within the area he was keeping shielded from harm, there was only so much they could do for the arm that had been torn away in an instant.
They were hidden away nearby, taking up a bit of his concentration to keep them enclosed and safe, but that was better than letting them get involved while they were vulnerable.
Throughout it all, Kiruka's hair hung limp around her shoulders. Somewhere in the initially chaotic fighting, the stalker had gotten too close to her, sinking into the shadows of the trees like he'd belonged there after what had looked like a simple brush of her shoulder. She'd been taken out of the fight right afterwards, her completely wrecked balance twisting her ankle out from underneath her.
Nine had stolen enough Quirks to realise what had happened. Just one more transgression he would need to pay back against the world. He'd get it back for her, even if he had to carve it out of this man's corpse.
"Who are you!?" The demands had been met with silence the first time, slight laughter the second. The magenta glow surrounding the man pulsed with the third demand, bright enough that his face was visible through the haze of rain, dust, and bloodlust.
He was smiling. No teeth shone with a threat, his eyes bright and sane. Perfectly calm, perhaps even inviting, even as the trees crumbled around him from bullets of light.
It hit him then. The same feeling he'd had when he'd been approached by that masked man. The same feeling as he'd been put to sleep and experimented upon, all for the sake of a better world.
The memories were stark in how hazy they remained. Almost certainly purposeful on the behalf of his benefactor, but he'd never cared before. They were nothing to each other but clients and happenstantial allies with partially aligned goals.
The order he craved would only come about in the chaos in which his second Quirk's original owner thrived. The man hadn't expected him to succeed at all, but there hadn't been any harm in his eyes with letting him try.
Perhaps this was why.
He'd been a child all this time, raging against a punishment that would only ever worsen. His vows echoed in his ears as he leapt to the side, avoiding a wall of jagged hair that he would have recognised anywhere. The man allowed him the safety, a strange grimace on his face all the while. Unlike before, now he made no more effort to move, weathering all that Nine had to throw at him with that same expression.
He had been destined to change the world. To shake it down to its very foundations and rebuild a proper society in the ashes. His Quirk was just evidence that it had always been meant to be, that his resolve had reached the heavens and resonated with even the gods.
In his divine right, the world had been shaking, but those tremors weren't born of fear.
It was mirth. Twisted, perverted glee that set upon their tracks a phantom unfathomable.
The world had witnessed his challenge, experienced all he had to give and all he was willing to accomplish, and it had laughed.
Something deep in his chest pulsed. The taste of copper filled his mouth as a sharp lance of pain speared through his lungs.
His attacks faltered, just for a moment. His bullets of light faded, the dragons in the air stilling as the mind controlling them stalled out. His scanning Quirk was screaming at him, relaying everything it could sense in this man with an urgency he wasn't aware it could convey.
All that remained was the air shield around his team, and the lightning crackling through the sky.
Until finally, the man took a step forth. Something snapped in that moment, either a branch under his foot, or the very last shred of restraint that Nine had left within himself.
His body protested, as it always did when he pushed himself, and as always it went ignored. The clouds overhead, a recent development in the night, rumbled ominously.
"Why… why…" He swayed on his feet, his head tilted towards the floor and supported by his hands. The blood that flowed from his nose dripped from his chin, sizzling before it could even hit the ground.
The man was less than twenty paces away now. The sharp scent of ozone was his only warning as Nine threw his head back, his insides coiling even further as that unknowable expression remained on the man's face all the while.
"WHY WON'T YOU DIE!?"
Overhead, the skies opened. The man's head whipped upwards, alarm crossing his face for the first time. Even if he'd had the time to think before the lightning was upon him, he wouldn't have been able to act.
In a literal flash, he had disappeared, leaving nothing behind but the memory of the light reflected off his gleaming skin.
Thunder rippled with a calamitous roar. A thick curtain of dust and debris hung in the air as Nine slowly fell backwards, the few trees surrounding them that hadn't been immediately vaporised missing all their leaves.
Pain wracked across his body, though it had no energy left to even shiver. There was nothing but sediment underneath him, anything even remotely cushioning or soft having been blown away by his attack.
A superbolt. Nature's most awe-inspiring showcase of power, and something that he'd strived for ever since he was a child. At least now, as the strength left his body, he'd accomplished at least one of his dreams.
His friends were crying out. There was no energy left to maintain the air shield that had kept them safe. They'd planned for this outcome, as absurd as it may have been. They would leave, they would hone their own skills until they could rise again with power surpassing his. They would-
Two hands reached out through the haze of destruction. The grip on his shirt was rough as they caught him, but the journey to the ground was gentle. His friend's voices were only growing louder, but Nine could barely hear them; the surprise had granted his expiring body one last burst of adrenaline, that strength being used to open his eyes to slits and tilt his head down.
His gaze was foggy, one half tinted red while the other had trouble tracking movement, but the face standing above him wasn't one that he would have recognised before that night. The man was spotless, utterly unruffled all the way down to his dark business attire.
Nine's most powerful attack, unearthed from the depths of his being and pushing his very existence to the brink of destruction, entirely ineffectual.
In that moment, with a burning clarity that he'd never felt before, he'd figured out what that emotion was. The one that the man was still wearing as he slowly breathed his last, ignoring the others as they arrived.
He couldn't even find it within himself to appreciate the irony that the first person who had ever shown him concern had been the one to kill him.
"Leave…them…"
His last plea rattled through his throat, and finally, Nine knew no more.
Saturday
…For about five seconds.
Consciousness returned with all the subtlety of a slap to the face. Nine lurched up, his eyes shooting wide as he gasped a deep breath, his movement so erratic that he almost slammed foreheads with the other man.
He… felt good. Great. Amazing, even.
The constant aches that he'd carried in his joints for as long as he could remember was gone. His skin, always feeling too tight around his muscles and itchy, felt like it was actually made for his body. Small sparks of electricity danced along his arms, and he watched them for a moment, marvelling at the fact that they weren't setting his nerves alight.
His last attack had blown everything away, including the clouds that had generated it. With the moon shining clearly through, it was easy to see as the man pushed himself to his feet.
"Impressive," was all he offered, along with a nod. Nine blinked at him blankly, so caught up in the fact that his body didn't feel like it was falling apart that he almost missed his own group stumbling through the last of the trees that had been standing on the edge of their new clearing.
Those trees had only remained standing by the grave of his given protection.
"Nine!" Chojuro was already in his enhanced state, but his body seemed to grow even larger still, his horns curving further towards the stars. His remaining arm was tense, but even through the darkness, it was easy to see that the bandages around his stump were only darkening to a deeper red. "Get the hell away from him, you-!"
The man leapt forth, crossing the distance between them in a heartbeat. Hoyo, having been trying to sneak around to flank the man with his sword, swung at empty air, the look of vicious triumph in his exposed eyes switching to shock.
With deceptively light steps, the man landed before Chojuro, his head tilted back to stare up at the man's face. Regardless of whatever was happening where Nine couldn't see it, Chojuro wasted no time, his talons sharpening further as the air screamed around his arm.
The man huffed that same laugh that had chilled Nine's spine before, catching the swipe on one of his arms. There was an odd haze of heat surrounding the limb, different from the Quirk that he's caught a glimpse of before, and with a flurry of unravelling bandages, Chojuro once again had two arms.
The chimera had little time to do anything other than gape before the man was moving again, once again avoiding Hoyo's backstab. The bandaged man let out an audible growl of frustration, but any further attack was halted when the earth underneath his feet rose up, crawling along his body like a living entity and caging him up to his neck with solid stone.
A second, thicker cage rose around Chojuro. With a contemptuous snarl, the chimera flexed his muscles, arms that had shattered concrete and legs that could punch holes through steel. The rumbling in his throat stuttered out when the show of strength failed to yield any results.
For some reason, despite nothing physically holding him in place, Nine felt just as stuck as his teammates. His eyes continued to track the man as he walked further towards the edge of the blast zone, all three of them now at his back, his head tilted slightly to the side and his eyes closed.
"Gotcha." If anyone else had been making a noise, Nine wouldn't have been able to hear the man mutter to himself. Hoyo and Chojuro had fallen silent, ignoring the man in favour of watching Nine watch him; an afterthought at best.
Crouching down, the man nodded to himself twice, his movements slow, before rapping a knuckle against the stone at his feet. The noise echoed across the clearing, carrying with it far more impact than it should have.
"What the fu- eek!"
A blur of red flew out of the trees, aided by what looked like a tangle of tree roots. The man caught Kiruka around the midsection as she hurtled across the clearing, a low moan leaving her as she was folded over his arm.
Even without the speedy entrance, she was a mess. With one foot hanging at an awkward angle and twigs littering her long hair, she looked utterly miserable, even ignoring the fact that she was currently hanging off his would-be murderer like a dishrag. Breaking his staring contest briefly, Nine shared a bewildered glance with the other two, getting nothing in return but confusion and, in Hoyo's case, burning jealousy.
In the time it took him to turn back, everything had changed.
Kiruka's hair was tying itself back up in loops, looking shinier and livelier than he'd ever seen. The gleam he was used to catching as it moved was back, ready and deadly as she brushed her fingers over her realigned ankle. Even the small rips and tears in her leggings had been fixed, her clothing returned to the perfect condition that she'd shown off to him when she'd bought them weeks ago.
There was none of that glee on her face now, though. Not while the man still had her tucked under his arm like an unruly child, or an overflowing suitcase. Ignoring her as she began to thrash, he turned first to the other two that had been trapped, before finally facing Nine.
"Weaker than I was expecting, but that's fine. We'll work on that."
"...We?" Nine's voice was almost drowned out by Kiruka's violent hissing, two of her glove blades having already been shattered against whatever part of the man she could reach. He didn't seem to notice, his own clothes regenerating from the slashes much like hers had just before.
She hadn't seemed to notice that her Quirk was back.
Who was this man?
The smile on his face belonged elsewhere. Underneath a helmet that was connected to a life support system…?
No. No, this was something else entirely. The breath easily passed through Nine's lungs as he stared up at the man, lungs that should have been too damaged by his own power to ever function properly. Power that they hadn't had an answer for, that they refused to help with, even after he'd offered everything of himself.
"Welcome to Overhaul International." The man's arm tensed, just for a moment, and Kiruka fell still with a small squeak. The stone fell away from the other two as he placed her on the ground, heedless of their cautious stares and hair triggers as he strode across the clearing, back towards Nine.
They all stared, dumbfounded, as the man extended an offering hand. The tension hanging upon the others' shoulders was near palpable as Nine remained transfixed on the hand hovering in front of his face, open and inviting in a way that nothing ever had been before.
This man knew who he was, surely. He had to know who they all were. He knew what a single touch like that would allow him to do, so why would he leave himself so utterly vulnerable like this?
Why? Why!?
"Why?" His voice was barely above a whisper, his own fingers curling and clenching as the thoughts raged through his mind. Grab his hand, take the Quirks that made him so powerful, rule the world with an iron fist-!
"Because this world needs to change."
Nine's neck snapped up, eyes wide. The man was still smiling. Still open. Still holding that hand out for him to take.
His gaze held all the difference. The fire that he'd never seen in another Quirk thief aside from himself. The burn of ambition, the veil of insanity, the promise of war.
Perhaps that was why he held no fear or contempt. Because he'd already decided what his enemy was.
"It needs to change, but I can't just let anyone destroy it."
Nine swallowed. The night was crisp, but the shaking in his limbs wasn't from any temperature. The warning rang through just as clear as the promise, and as the seconds he sat there stretched further towards an entire, that offer was never retracted.
Slowly, he reached forth. His own hand curled halfway into a fist, unsure of how to link with another.
The man made no comment as he completed the connection, and pulled him to his feet.