Shota was no slouch at fighting. Ever since that first lesson with his sisters, he'd only gotten better. He couldn't beat Kiken – he didn't think he'd ever be able to beat Kiken – but he could hold his own against any of the other kids at his school, even if they teamed up on him. These were not kids from his school.
In hindsight, it was stupid of them to assume safety in numbers. Four quirkless out together was just four times the target, whether or not they could throw a decent punch.
Ikari hadn't noticed them, and neither had mother. Not even Kiken, distracted by something on her phone. But Shota had. Shota always noticed.
Later, he would wonder why he'd never noticed it before. Better visual awareness of his surroundings should have been noted and commented on in their quirk-obsessed society. But Shota had the extra toe joint, wisdom teeth, and goosebumps, and no one had ever bothered to look beyond that. That would be a thought for later, though.
In the moment, the only thing that had been on his mind was adrenaline. A flash of light caught his eyes, a flicker of motion, and Shota was moving before he had a chance to truly process what he had seen.
It was a metallic whip-like appendage, sprouting from the palm of the man across the street. It had been aimed at Kiken. Instead, it hit Shota's raised arm, wrapping tight around his forearm and yanking him forward.
"I got the little one!" The man shouted to his friends, and Shota gritted his teeth.
He jerked back on the tentacle, pulling the man off his feet and towards Shota. With a shuddering motion, the metal tentacle disconnected from the man's hand, sliding off Shota's forearm. But now he had their attention.
The man and his equally ugly friends were paying attention, and they were angry. Kiken was off her phone and Ikari had dropped into a fighting stance next to her, both of them standing at just the right angle for Shota to be able to see them from the corners of his eyes.
"You ever seen such a feisty geneless before, Hoippu?" the one with bark-like skin over the backs of his hands leered.
"Not around here, that's for sure," The original instigator, Hoippu, smirked.
And then before Shota could even blink, a wooden fist was flying towards him. He dodged on instinct, springing away from the attack. It still clipped his cheek, scraping a painful gash on the surface of his skin. It stung, but Shota'd had worse.
After that, it was chaos. Steel whips coiling around ankles, wooden claws tearing at skin, fists and foul language flying freely. The third guy's quirk must have been some sort of forcefields and the fourth guy had a low-level speed quirk that made him fast enough to get through Kiken's guard, landing blow after blow that were just barely too fast for her to deflect.
The fight finally came to an abrupt halt when, behind where Shota was holding his own against Hoippu, someone screamed. A very familiar someone screamed, and Shota faltered.
"Why don't the three of you put your hands down." The forcefield guy's voice was snarling and wild, like a rabid dog in need of being put down. It was maybe not the most polite thought Shota had ever had, but it felt appropriate.
The man had his knee braced in the center of Mother's back and a dagger of blue light against her throat. There was a splotch of red that would eventually be a stunning black eye already forming on the guy's face that Shota was about eighty percent sure Ikari had given him, and he was still breathing hard.
All eight of them were breathing hard, and for a long moment, that was all Shota could hear. His breathing, Kiken's breathing, and Ikari's breathing. He balled his shaking hands into fists, digging his nails into his palms. He was shaking slightly, almost choking every breath. His heart still pounded and his cheek stung with every beat, his forearms and ankles throbbing and tingling as blood flowed into them.
"Nice catch, Yasei." Hoippu, standing slightly behind Shota, was laughing. Mother was on the ground, a dagger to her neck, and he was laughing.
Shota felt something press behind his eyes, something brittle and sharp like a bristling pincushion. 'Am I crying?' he thought wildly, his heart still pounding double-time.
And then, like magic, the feeling sprung up in the air around him. The world was flooded with red, and Shota felt something like nails on a chalkboard scrape up his spine. Had he been a cat, his fur would have stood on end. His hair was standing on end, drifting up around his head like a halo.
And wherever he looked, quirks faltered.
The blue dagger at Mother's throat vanished into mist. Metal whips slid to the ground like so many discarded scarves. Motion was like a beam of light directly into his eyes, and Shota couldn't focus on one person, his gaze snapping to whoever moved. Finally, he had to blink.
His hair dropped around his shoulders and his knees hit the pavement. Around him, chaos erupted once again, but Shota's hand had fallen on one of the discarded whips. The metal was cool and smooth under his palm. It slowly occurred to Shota that he knew how to use a whip.
Shota looked up, eyes pinned to the speed-quirked one who was double-teaming Ikari with Yasei.
What had happened? He had been angry. He had been angry and desperate, and there had been a pressure in his eyes like his anger was boiling over. He was still angry, and equally desperate.
Shota held his breath and pushed on something inexplicable and unnamed in his head. Pressure rushed to his skull, building up behind his eyes until it was almost unbearable. And then it exploded outwards, and Ikari's strike landed true right on the speedster's jaw. He dropped unceremoniously to the pavement.
Ikari moved, twisting towards Yasei. Without his weapons or forcefields, he was any other bruiser and Ikari took him down in moments. Without his forcefields, he was essentially quirkless. Shota could make other people quirkless.
He scrambled to his feet and spun towards Kiken. He was forced to blink, his eyes burning with the effort of holding them open, but he still had the whip in one hand. In a smooth, well-practiced motion, he looped the metallic materal around Hoippu's ankle and yanked the man to the ground.
It took only a few strikes from Kiken to knock out the wood-skinned one. Shota loosely tied up the still-disoriented Hoippu, and then finally, finally they could go home.
The next morning, Ikari and Kiken presented him with his shoes. They were still Primordial brand, still the same bright red canvas that marked him forever and always as a target, but now they had bright yellow spider-lilies embroidered on the red canvas. It was crooked and uneven – neither Ikari nor Kiken were that great at embroidery – but it was unmistakable.
No outsider would recognize it. To others, he would always be quirkless until proven quirked. But to the truly quirkless, he was immediately recognizable as a false-negative. Combined with the black laces he'd refused to swap out of his shoes ever since he learned what they meant, he was marked as a safe haven. A quirked person that could be trusted.
As he stared at the messily embroidered shoes, Shota felt an entirely different sort of pressure prickling behind his eyes.
