WELLL I SAW A LOT OF YOU GUYS WANTING ANOTHER CHAPTER.... and because the nice guy i am... here is the next chapter... Enjoy.....
++++
Momo held Akira's body tight.
His head was in her lap. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. His skin was cold beneath her fingers....
She wasn't screaming anymore... he voice was long gone. What was left was something quieter and more devastating... it was grief. She sat in the ash with his body in her lap, and her tears fell onto his face, each one tracing a line through the dirt and blood on his cheeks.
Beside her, Honoka knelt with her son's remaining hand pressed against her face, whispering something no one could hear.
She.. was broken.
Her son..... her baby. The child she had raised, the child she had protected from everything the world had thrown at them, the child who had survived Kamikochi and USJ.
He was gone....
She had nothing left.
As Momo and Honoka were deep in the sea of grief someone walked towards them.
Muscular stopped. His massive frame cast a shadow over them. His eyes looked down at the scene, and slowly he smiled.
"YES!!!"
"THIS!! THIS IS WHAT I WANTED TO SEE THAT DAY!!"
Honoka's whispering stopped. Her head turned toward Muscular.
"Back on the mountain," Muscular continued, his voice rising with excitement, "back when I killed those two heroes!! The kid didn't cry. He didn't break. He got up and fought me. And I thought... where are the tears? Where's the grief? Where's the beautiful, delicious despair?"
He spread his arms wide.
"HAHAHAHAHA!! The wait was long... but my GOD was it worth it!! Cough cough cough!!"
Honoka stared at him, and in an instant.. the grief turned into pure rage.
"I am going to kill you."
Her voice was low. Her throat felt dry. The words scraped out of her throat like sandpaper.
She stood up slowly... her legs were shaking out of exhaustion.
And that exhaustion evaporated in a second, and she charged toward Muscular.
Her punch connected with Muscular's jaw.
Alas.... the effect was none.
Her knuckles cracked. Pain shot up her arm, and Muscular didn't move an inch.
But Honoka did not back down. She threw another.. this time into his ribs. The membrane again absorbed it.
She kicked. She elbowed. She hit him with everything a human body could produce, and none of it mattered. Muscular just stood there, amused, letting her exhaust herself against him the way a wall lets a wave exhaust itself against stone.
Then he grabbed her by the hair and lifted her up.
Muscular held her at his eye level, dangling, and laughed again.
"You have gotten weaker...." he said.
Honoka's eyes were still burning with rage. She spat at him and yelled.
"Run, Momo!!" Honoka screamed. "RUN!! GET OUT OF HERE!!"
Momo, however, didn't move.
She was still sitting with Akira's body. She hadn't looked up when Muscular appeared. She hadn't flinched when he screamed. She hadn't reacted when Honoka charged.
She was simply staring at Akira's face.
"MOMO!!"
"YOU HAVE TO--- What?"
She stopped mid-sentence.
Her lips had split open. But... not due to the fight. They had cracked on their own.... the skin was peeling apart as if every drop of moisture had been pulled from her body in an instant.
Honoka's eyes widened. She touched her lips with her free hand. And felt blood running down her lips. Her mouth was bleeding from dryness?
What?
Muscular looking, confused, and suddenly coughed again. Harder this time. His throat felt really dry. He dropped Honoka due to his confusion.
He stumbled backward as his hand went to his throat.
"What... is going on?" he whispered.
The air was changing.
Not just the temperature. The moisture too. Every drop of water in the surrounding area was being drawn away. Evaporating. Not slowly, not naturally, but rapidly.
Honoka felt it in her skin. The dryness was spreading.
The trees at the edge of the clearing began to crack. Their bark split as the moisture inside them boiled away. Leaves curled, browned, and crumbled to dust in seconds. The grass beneath the ash turned to powder.
The ground itself was drying. Moisture that had been trapped in the soil was being ripped upward, evaporating into the air.
All of it was radiating from a single point... Akira's body.
Momo felt it first as she was closest. The heat rising from the body in her lap was different from anything she had ever felt from Akira.
This was something else.
Her lips continued to crack. Her skin was tightening. Every cell in her body was screaming at her to move, to get away from the source.
But Momo? She didn't move.
Because she had seen it.
A wisp of purple flame flickered in Akira's dead eyes.
It was there for less than a second, but Momo saw it.
And a smile appeared on her face.
It was a strange smile. Wrong, almost, given the circumstances. A girl sitting in ash and blood, holding a dead body, her lips cracked and bleeding, her skin drying, surrounded by a clearing that was being drained of all moisture..... and she was smiling.
Because she knew.
She didn't know what was happening.
But she knew Akira was coming back.
And she knew, with the certainty, that there was no way in hell Akira Shuzenji was going down like this.
She looked up at Muscular, who was on his knees, coughing, clawing at his throat. Honoka was on the ground, staring at Momo with confusion and fear.
Momo looked at Muscular's eyes.
And smiled even wider.
"He's alive..."
Muscular's white eyes snapped to her. "What?"
BOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Purple light exploded from Akira's body.
It erupted upward from his body in a pillar that punched through the forest and through the clouds. The column of purple light was visible widely. It turned the sky violet for kilometres in every direction, casting the entire region in a light that made the sun look dim.
Muscular was thrown back. The shockwave hit him like a wall and launched him backward, his massive body tumbling across the clearing, his membrane sizzling where the purple light touched it.
Honoka, however... barely moved.
"Akira?" Honoka whispered, staring at the pillar of violet light.
The whole nation paused.
Every screen. Every broadcast. Every phone, television, and monitor in the country showed the same thing — a pillar of purple light, erupting from a jungle behind a school, reaching into the heavens.
In the evacuation shelter, Class 1-A and the citizens stared at the screens. The crying had stopped. Not because the grief was gone, but because something had replaced it. Something that none of them could identify but all of them could feel.
In his living room, Kota was still in Mandalay's arms. Still sobbing. Still broken.
Mandalay's body, however, went rigid.
She was staring at the screen. Her eyes were wide. Her tears had stopped. Her mouth was slightly open.
Kota felt something odd. He looked up at her through swollen eyes.
"Auntie?" he whispered.
Mandalay didn't answer. She was staring at the screen.
He turned and looked at the television.
The purple light filled the screen. The helicopter camera was shaking, the pilot fighting to maintain altitude against the updraft. The news anchor was silent, with her mouth wide open.
Kota didn't understand what he was seeing. He didn't know what purple light meant. He didn't know what was going on.
But he felt something... deep down in his heart.
Something warm. Something that cut through the grief and the anger and the despair like a blade made of sunlight. Something that settled in his chest and pushed the broken pieces of his heart back together, not fixing them, but holding them in place long enough to beat again.
A smile appeared on his face.
"He is here," Kota whispered.
BOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!
The pillar detonated.
The purple light expanded outward in a sphere, washing over the jungle, over the campus, over the stadium, over the city. It wasn't destructive. It didn't burn or break or destroy. It passed through everything like a wave of warmth, like the first light of dawn touching a world that had been dark for too long.
Then it stopped and pulled back inward. Compressed into a single point where it began.
The point was empty. The ground where Momo had held him, where his body had lain, was empty.
The news anchor in the helicopter recovered first. She looked around, scanning the clearing, the jungle, the sky. The camera operator was doing the same, panning across the destruction, searching for the source.
She saw nothing.
Then something touched her shoulder.
The camera operator. He wasn't looking at the clearing anymore. He was looking up. Above the helicopter.
His hand was shaking, and his mouth was wide open. His camera was aimed at the sky.
The news anchor followed his gaze.
And she froze.
High in the sky...
Floating in the air, wreathed in purple flame, wings of violet fire stretching across the sky, was no kid.
It was no student.
It was no Symbol of Fear.
It was a god.
+++++++++++++++
HELL YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW WAS IT!!! WORTH IT RIGHT!!!!!!
Let me know your thoughts!!
Plus if you want to support me, you can join my P@teron and read up to +17 advanced chapters and support me you can alway join my P@treaon. (Just search up Joe_Mama p@treon on google.)