All Might had seen a lot of bad things during his career. People only see the glamor of being a hero, but not all the dark things about it. Being on the front row of a fire is not glorious, not when you smell burning flesh, see children vomiting from the smoke, or hear the screams of pain and pleas to be saved.
But it became worse when it came to saving people who were victims of others, especially those who had been kidnapped for a long time.
Izuku Midoriya was a 14-year-old boy like any other just nine months ago. Quirkless, true, but ultimately normal.
Now, looking at the boy… he could only imagine the torture they put him through for the past nine months.
His body was covered with numerous scars, some even appearing to be caused by fatal wounds.
Upon seeing him, the number one hero could not help but clench his fists with barely contained anger, an anger that increased when, after rescuing the two young and taking them to the hospital, they were able to investigate the bunker and find the notes of whoever had kidnapped them. .
Naomasa placed the notes on the desk, a displeased grimace on his face. It came from narrating what they had discovered when reading them and how silent the meeting room was right now was proof of how gloomy and twisted the experiments carried out on both young people were.
This Seluvis had the objective of transforming both young people into what he called puppets, beings that obeyed his designs and without their own will. What he wrote about the young four-armed girl had made All Might almost vomit. It never ceases to amaze he how sick some people can be.
Luckily, the notes had brought some clarifications about the young and their condition. Seluvis had experimented with both, but had not done anything more disturbing. Although in and of themselves, the narrated experiments were not exactly pleasant experiences either.
"Unfortunately, we have no idea where this Seluvis and his henchman could have gone. He fled as soon as he heard the message, leaving his henchman to try to get everything possible out of the bunker. Luckily, we arrived in time to avoid that," the detective explained.
"What about the young people?" All Might asked.
"They are still being treated by doctors, so we still do not know their condition. Although we have a problem, we do not find any information about the girl. According to the notes, her name is Ranni Caria. Apparently, he had her in his possession since her childhood, although he does not say how he got her. We also did not find any information about the Caria family," Naomasa said. "We have to continue investigating the bunker and try to obtain testimony from the victims."
"How did they capture the boy?" asked one of the police officers present, a question All Might asked himself.
"Apparently, his henchman, who Edgeshot fought, has a Quirk that allows her to transport herself and others away. She was watching the attack and took him away, taking advantage of the confusion of the moment. No one would suspect it was her," the detective explained.
"So Edgeshot's theory about her Quirk is true," one of the police officers said.
"Cunning. In the midst of this chaos, the first suspect in the boy's disappearance would be the villain. We never thought to investigate whether one of those watching the incident had a Quirk that could do that," another police officer added.
The meeting lasted a few more minutes until Naomasa ended it. The police left the scene, leaving only the detective and the number one hero.
"All Might…"
"I was there, that day. I was right there, watching everything like a complete idiot. I just had to act, one damn punch was all that was enough. It would have prevented the boy from taking that hit, from being captured and from going through all of this." He clenched his fists to the point of turning his knuckles white.
The detective looked at him for a few seconds. "It's no use thinking about the past, what's done is done." He put his hand on his shoulder. "Go home, Toshinori. I will inform you when I get information on the status of both."
Clenching his jaw, All Might was forced to obey. His limit was reaching anyway. He left the place with a lazy step, he had to talk to the boy, apologize, although that wouldn't change anything that happened.
Sleeping was not something a Tarnished did, not without being affected by something external. Marika had made sure to create unstoppable killing machines: they felt neither hunger nor thirst, exhaustion only lasted seconds, sleep was non-existent, and dying was only a temporary annoyance.
Despite all that, it wasn't really impossible to sleep on its own volition. The problem was that sleeping was a counterproductive activity in the Lands Between.
It wasn't safe to stay so helpless. Even if the surroundings of the grace points were safe from anything else, they did not prevent the approach of an ill-intentioned Tarnished, and there were many of those. As for the Round Table, that insufferable Gideon would be criticizing him for using the stronghold to sleep instead of being out looking for Great Runes.
And if that wasn't enough to deter someone from sleeping, there were the nightmares. Your mind simply was not the same after dying hundreds of times in horrible ways, and as a result your dreams became torturous experiences.
So now that Izuku had slept for the first time in years he could say that… he hated it. The nightmares hadn't stopped at all just because he returned to his world, plus feeling so helpless for so long got on his nerves.
But he endured his displeasure because, after all, it was necessary for his plan. He slowly opened his eyelids, observing a whitish ceiling above him. He looked around quickly realizing he was in a hospital room.
He had consumed a jar of sleep to well simulate the state of deep sleep. It was necessary for his plan, but perhaps he should have consumed only half of it. He didn't even really know how much time had passed.
He raised his torso slowly, wanting to look around better. Apparently, his movement alerted something, because immediately a nurse entered his room and ran towards him. Izuku fought the urge to throw himself backwards and take a fighting stance. It was only his mental strength that prevented him from acting on the instincts developed during his ten years of fighting.
"Stay in bed," she said, placing her hand on his torso and gently pushing him back onto the bed.
"W-where am I?" he asked, trying to fake a bewildered and scared voice. Acting wasn't exactly a very useful thing in the Lands Between, so he didn't know how well he was doing.
"It's okay, you're in the hospital. You're safe, it's all over," the nurse said with a comforting smile.
Izuku knew he had to react in a completely different way than he normally would, so he tried his best to start crying. You'd think it would be easy for someone capable of crying as much as he does, but it seems that the amount of tears his body can bring out doesn't translate into an excellent ability to summon said tears whenever he wants.
It took him several awkward seconds to bring out a few tears. "It's over… it's over… where is Ranni?" He asked, trying to look relieved and worried.
Again, he didn't know if he was doing it right, but at least it seemed like the nurse was being convinced by his act. "She's fine, she's in the next room. she's still sleeping," the nurse assured him.
Izuku, still letting out fake tears, nodded. After making sure that he woke up safely and that he did not have any serious consequences, the nurse left his room. A few minutes later, his mother entered.
If Izuku was unsure of his performance, his mother was worse. She approached him with tears that looked fake for miles and hugged him with much less passion than she had when he actually returned. Izuku hugged her in turn and tried to continue crying fakely.
"You are a terrible actor," Ranni pronounced. Her mother was startled by the sudden arrival of the lunar princess.
They both looked towards her. Ranni entered the room and closed the door behind her. The doctors and authorities were giving them their space.
"Sorry, I never thought acting would be useful," Izuku replied sarcastically.
"I'm still not sure about all this. What happens if they discover us?" his mother asked.
"It wont happen. Izuku's bad acting can easily pass for the acts of a traumatized person. As for yours, mother-in-law, they may also be the acts of a relieved mother who doesn't know how to act," Ranni said, climbing onto Izuku's bed and wrapping her arms around him.
Ranni's sudden act of closeness took Izuku by surprise. She wasn't exactly the type of person who gave out affection and hugs easily and unsolicited, although she seemed to notice his strange look.
"I must play the role of the traumatized girl who clings to the only source of security she has ever known, that is, you," she said, her face looking serious, but her spectral face had a small blush that Izuku could notice.
The green-haired boy hugged her back, causing the blush on her spectral face to only increase. "Still… we are lying to the authorities," his mother whispered.
Izuku took one of her hands, giving it a gentle squeeze. "It's the only way, mom. It's this or tell the truth."
His mother squeezed back and let out a sigh, probably accepting that this is the best course of action.
Although it crossed his mind to simply tell the truth, that would cause more problems than anything else. First, there was the chance that they simply wouldn't believe them, and would end up trying to lock him and Ranni in some psychological institute. But that was the best scenario; The worst thing would be if they believed them.
Another world, gods, magic, all those things would just break society as everyone knows it. Science would have to be reinvented, beliefs would have to be reinterpreted and, in all that chaos, he, Ranni and his mother would be in the middle.
As interesting as it would be to see that, Izuku preferred to avoid it. He didn't leave one hell to enter another and drag his mother with him.
"We're done, thank you very much for your testimony," Naomasa said with a smile, the girl just nodded and stood up, leaving the room to return to the arms of young Midoriya.
It had been a difficult week, they had found nothing else in the Bunker and the testimonies of the young people did not help much.
Although it was expected, they come from coming out of a traumatic experience, their mind is a mess and now that they have come out of those horrific experiences, probably the last thing they want is to remember anything about it.
It also doesn't help that they were under the influence of drugs most of the time, as narrated by the young Izuku Midoriya, he had taken advantage of a moment of inattention where the drugs in his body had stopped taking effect sooner than his kidnappers believed, and sent the SOS message, luckily the kidnappers avoided getting rid of the boy's belongings, mostly for fear that someone would find the belongings and track them down thanks to them.
As for the girl Ranni Caria, it is complex, her mind is the most affected, she is barely able to remember things from a few years ago, she doesn't even know how she came into Seluvis's hands.
They also couldn't find anything about her family which leads many to believe that Ranni may be the daughter of Seluvis, after all the notes indicate that the man had had her in his possession since her earliest childhood, Naomasa let out a heavy sigh, thinking that a father would subject his own daughter to things like that, especially with the objective he had for her: "How bad can a person be?" was a question he had asked himself many times since becoming a detective.
In any case, without a family and having developed a dependency on having Izuku close, everyone decided that it was best to let the girl stay with the Midoriya family. Mrs. Midoriya saw no problem with it.
In any case, those two still need to visit a psychologist from time to time to help them deal with all these events, but at least both are free of danger, although a patrol remains around where they live, watching in case their kidnappers try to recover them.
As for the blue liquid they were injecting, it was studied by scientists, they have no idea what it is, they have done several studies on the liquid, they have observed it in different ways and they simply don't know what it is, much less for how it works.
Seluvis's notes say he would use that to turn them into Puppets but the man's notes were more of a diary than scientific notes.
The only thing they could be thankful for is that it does not seem to have left any physical scars on any of the young people.
It is incredible how in just one week they had made a lot of progress on the case of Izuku Midoriya's disappearance and at the same time they had encountered a wall that seemed to have no way of being knocked down, the only thing left to do now is to continue investigating the bunker, study the blue liquid and hope that the young people's minds clear enough for them to speak.
Because God knows that you can't let someone as sick as that Seluvis go free, much less with a henchwoman capable of matching a top ten hero in skill.
Ranni had to thank the fact that Izuku had tried to cure Seluvis's puppets. It was a futile effort, obviously, but in those times Izuku clung to any hope, no matter how small.
She couldn't entirely blame him. The Lands Between had become a horrible place where the Tarnished mostly ended up becoming obsessed with something to gain the will to continue. There was a saying that Iji had: "All the Tarnished are crazy, in one way or another, it's the only way they can move forward." Izuku was and may still be.
He had clung with all his might to the ideal of heroism, even though it always ended in disappointment. She hadn't observed Izuku on his travels until he joined her; It was only at that moment that she began to keep an eye on him, but he had told her.
What his first days were like, trying to talk to the crazed soldiers patrolling Limgrave, how he wanted to avoid killing, how he tried to help when he saw someone in danger.
He was trying to be a hero in a world where heroes simply couldn't exist anymore, but he adapted. He killed even if he didn't like it, he attacked at the first attack, he mistrusted even his shadow and turned his back on people in danger if he saw that the situation was too dangerous.
That was until he met the blind girl. She asked him for help, to bring something to her father. Izuku hadn't become apathetic enough to leave a blind woman on the side of the road knowing she was being chased. He took her to a safe place and then went for her father. When father and daughter reunited and thanked him, Izuku's sense of heroism had been reborn.
Only to be crushed in the next tragedy and reborn to the next achievement and so on. He held on to that heroism because if he didn't, who knows what would become of Izuku now.
In any case, his desire to save the puppets that Seluvis had created made him steal the latter's notes and study them, trying to find a solution. And the fact that he took said notes was very useful for her entire plan.
It had been something simple, a plan that would help them both: her with the fact that she is effectively not from this world and him with being able to return to her life without causing too many problems.
The narrative was simple: both would be victims of Seluvis, captured with the aim of being transformed into puppets. Using her divine powers and her ability to travel the world incorporeal, she managed to find the perfect hiding place for a mad scientist, that is, that bunker.
The next thing was to have someone to receive the heroes who came to rescue them. Simply finding them both abandoned in the bunker would be meaningless. No one would leave loose ends like that; They would have been killed before they left, so they needed someone to fight the heroes to pretend they had arrived before their kidnappers could fully escape.
Izuku had the solution: Tiche. He summoned her and gave her simple directives: not to kill anyone but fight them in a way that they would believe was a serious fight and to fade away when she felt things were starting to become disadvantageous to her.
Tiche was a good decision. The assassin of the black knives was quite loyal to Izuku and, on top of that, incredibly skilled. Add to that the fact that constant refinement had made her much more powerful than she ever was in life, then they had their perfect candidate: someone powerful, skilled, and who would not disobey the orders given by Izuku.
And to make everything more believable, they both used those things called intravenous where they were injected with Cerulean Tears, completely harmless to both of them and unknown in this world, but of no use to these people without magic. Therefore, even if they drank the liquid, they could not achieve anything with it.
The rest was a little acting and the trick was done. Now she is recognized as an inhabitant of this world and Izuku is free to return to his life. The only drawbacks are that they are now watched from afar by law enforcement who want to make sure everything is fine, and they have to visit a psychologist once a week.
But both drawbacks are only temporary.
She, Izuku and his mother entered the house. The woman let out a heavy sigh. "At least the hardest part is over," she said.
Even though the whole plan has stressed her out a lot, the woman looks better than when they both returned. I was slowly starting to put on some weight. Ranni figured the stress of lying was nothing like the stress of not knowing where her son was.
Thinking about it reminded her of her mother, but Ranni quickly dismissed the thought. She shouldn't be sentimental...not with anyone other than Izuku watching.
"Yes, for now it's just visits to the psychologist and we'll probably be called again to give another testimony, but it's all over," Izuku let out a big sigh. "Back home, for real this time."
Izuku smiled, a smile Ranni had seen so rarely on his face. Izuku always smiled, it was like a defense mechanism for him. He smiled when he was afraid, when he was stressed and even when he cried he tried to smile. But those were never full smiles, they always felt forced and even when he smiled with the intention of truly doing so they weren't smiles as bright as the one he's showing now.
The few times she saw him smile like that was when they were married, when Nepheli Loux was crowned, and curiously enough when he killed Gideon Ofnir. It was the first time she saw Izuku smile when killing someone, it was somewhat disturbing.
If anything, she's happy to see him smile like that. It is the very sign that she had made the right decision by bringing him back to his world. Now they just have to see what this new life has in store for them.
Fourth chapter ready, and we're almost done with the return arc (yes this was an arc)
Now to answer some questions.
DavenTheNomad: You guessed right it was indeed Tiche
Azure Sky Dance: As seen in this chapter, the problem with doing that is that it would bring a lot of problems to Izuku and frankly after everything he's been through he doesn't want to have to deal with all that, much less drag his mother with him. .
Well that was all, I thank you for reading my story and leaving your Review is greatly appreciated.
