Chapter 10
"And then she said it was my fault even though Keiko was the one who started it, which is insane, right? Like objectively insane?" Amane said.
"Objectively," Itsuki said.
"You're not even listening."
"Keiko started it. The teacher blamed you. Objectively insane," he repeated.
Amane looked at him sideways, trying to determine whether he was paying attention or had simply just taken chunks out of the situation to repeat it to her. She hadn't figured out which one it was after ten years and she wasn't going to figure it out now.
"You're so annoying," she grumbled.
"Okay." Itsuki replied.
They walked through the nice weather of Japan produced in the autumn. It was the afternoon, Amane had her school bag hanging off one shoulder and her wings folded back, two white ones, already bigger than their mothers and still bound to grow. She had her hair tied today and a small smudge of something on her left sleeve that she hadn't noticed yet.
"Do you ever get in trouble at school?" she asked.
"No."
"Ever?"
"No."
"That's so boring," she said. "How are you not bored."
"I'm always bored," he said. "But getting in trouble doesn't fix that."
She thought about this for a moment. "That's actually kind of sad."
"It's fine."
"Itsuki."
"What."
"Do you have friends?"
"Yes."
"Real ones?"
"What's the difference?"
"People who actually like you," she said, as if this were obvious. "Not just people who talk to you."
"Shinso," he said. "And someone from school."
"Who from school?"
"Someone."
She opened her mouth to try and tease it more but she started getting this sense of unease that stopped her right in her tracks.
✦ ✦ ✦
A low concussive crack… then a second one, then something that wasn't quite either. A building faced two streets over a section of its upper wall in a slow diagonal collapse that sent people on the pavement screaming and scattering in every direction.
A car alarm went off somewhere, then set off a bunch of others. The screaming of others set a delay in people's movement, they were all still disorientated, lost in thought on how this could have happened.
Itsuki stopped walking.
'It's a destructive type of quirk. The pattern on that wall is uneven which could mean that the pressure being applied is either sloppy work or the quirk doesn't apply it evenly. It's emanating from a point…' Itsuki focused more.
'Someone at street level. Two impacts in four seconds means either it's continuous or the activation time is very short, the radius is approximately fifty meters, in the minimum based on the debris spread. Civilians are still in the immediate zone, at least six that I can sense from here.'
"Stay here," he said to Amane.
"What's happening—"
"Stay here," he repeated, this time sounding more like a threat than a request. He proceeded to close in on the site.
The villain was in the middle of the intersection.
A broad man whose arms were extended, and every few seconds a pulse of force erupted from his body in a visible shockwave that cracked the pavement and splintered the nearest surfaces.
His attacks seemed random, it was like they had no objective target, just firing for the sake of it.
And twenty meters from him, partially sheltered by an overturned vending machine, a woman was pinned under a section of fallen signage that she couldn't shift on her own.
Itsuki had already seen it.
So had Amane, who was no longer behind him.
"Amane—"
She was already in the air.
"AMAND!!!" he screamed out.
She didn't stop.
Her wings carried her up and she glided with confidence, never once looking back at anything behind her. Her speed was incredible as she glided smoothly towards the distance of the pinned woman in a few seconds, grabbed the signage with both hands, and pulled.
'She's in the radius of his attacks, If that pulse goes off while she's at ground level with no distance between her and the source she's going to take the full force of it.' Itsuki sighed.
Amane had managed to push off the signage, the woman scrambled out, and Amane grabbed her arm and got airborne again immediately, which was the right move, as she was almost clear of the radius when the next pulse came.
It caught the edge of her left wing.
She dropped about three meters before she steadied herself, the wing not responding properly on the left side, and landed harder than she meant to on the far pavement with the woman coming down just as roughly with her.
She wasn't hurt badly but the wing was folded wrong and she was on one knee and her face had a look on it that she was trying to hide pain.
Itsuki, seeing that she was out of danger, acted immediately. He started running at breakneck speed.
*BOOM*
His legs striding so fast and strong that the ground seemed to crater and his body seemed to be creating after-images.
✦ ✦ ✦
He came around the corner at a low angle, contracted his wings right, but the first pulse caught him square in the chest before he had closed half the distance.
It had hit him hard and he took two steps back.
Above his head the wheel appeared.
CLICK.
It spun once.
Itsuki pulled his hair back like he was going for a slickback before it fell back in place. He spat out some saliva in his mouth and took one step after another.
The villain looked at him: the four wings, the wheel, the fact that this person had just taken a direct hit and was still walking toward him, he scoffed thinking it was foolishness and sent another one.
Itsuki took that one too.
CLICK.
Itsuki cracked a vicious smile.
And continued walking, emphasizing each step.
From the perimeter of the street a hero arrived, red costume, a fire-based quirk from the look of the gauntlets, shouting for civilians to clear the area. He saw Itsuki mid-stride and shouted something at him, one of the standard things heroes shouted at civilians who were moving the wrong direction.
"Kid! Get back, this is a hero—"
"For Heroes? Nah, I just need one shot! " Itsuki exclaimed, continuing his walk without even bothering to look back.
The hero started to respond and then didn't, because what happened next was fast enough that there wasn't really a window for it.
*WOOSH*
Itsuki was behind the villain with a feather in hand.
The villain felt his presence and desperately hit a third pulse at close range. It pushed back multiple pieces of debris, torn through a house like toothpick but Itsuki stood there totally unbothered.
He cracked his neck in retaliation. Before the villain could even feel fear, a detached feather was driven into the pressure point at the base of the man's neck with the full weight of his cursed energy behind it.
The villain dropped.
The street went quiet, like a crowd that had seen something spectacular and breathtaking, no words were uttered, not even the debris and dust left behind seemed to travel.
Itsuki straightened up, looked at the man on the ground, confirmed he was breathing, and turned around.
The hero was staring at him.
"He's unconscious," Itsuki said. "The quirk deactivates when he loses consciousness, based on the pattern. You'll want to restrain him before he comes around."
The hero stared at him for another second. "You're a kid."
"Yes," Itsuki said.
"How old are you?"
"Twelve."
The hero looked at the villain on the ground, then back at Itsuki, then at the wheel above his head which was still faintly visible and slowing to a stop.
"Don't move," the hero said, and got on his radio.
'And there it is.' Itsuki sighed.
✦ ✦ ✦
Two more heroes arrived within four minutes, along with three police officers and eventually a police vehicle. The villain was restrained and loaded into a quirk-suppression transport. Civilians were being spoken to on the perimeter. And Itsuki and Amane were standing together on the pavement while a police officer with a notepad looked between them shocked to see that this situation involved two children.
"You're both minors," the officer said.
"Yeah it's not hard to guess." Itsuki said.
"And you engaged the villain."
"I intervened to stop ongoing harm to civilians," Itsuki said. "There were people still in the affected radius and no hero presence on scene at the time I acted."
'I had forgotten about this dumb law where heroism unless under the government was illegal, tsk tsk.'
"That's not—" The officer stopped.
"We're going to need to take you both in for a formal statement. Do you have a parent or guardian we can contact?"
Itsuki gave his father's number without hesitation.
'Better to call him than to have this go further without him knowing. He's going to find out regardless. Controlling the order in which he finds out is more useful than trying to prevent it.'
Amane, beside him, had her left wing folded at an angle that still wasn't quite right. She was holding it carefully and not mentioning it, which was the most mature thing she had done all afternoon.
"Are you hurt?" the officer asked her.
"I'm fine," Amane said.
"Your wing—"
"It's fine," she said again. "It'll sort itself out."
Itsuki glanced at her.
'It'll sort itself out. Where did she pick that up?'
They were put in the back of a police vehicle and driven to the nearest station.
✦ ✦ ✦
The station was as busy as it could be, phones, paperwork, people in there with bad moods, just the typical stuff you would expect. They were put in a waiting area, while someone found a room for them. Amane sat beside him with her bag on her lap and her wing still at the wrong angle, she stayed silent for a few minutes, which was very strange considering her very very talkative nature.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah," she said. "Sorry."
"For what."
"Going up when you told me not to."
"You helped someone so… ," Itsuki said.
"I still should've listened."
"Yes you should've," he said. "But I don't control who you are, never hesitate to help someone, although I would've helped her regardless."
"Is dad going to be angry?" she asked.
"No," Itsuki said.
"How do you know?"
"Because he won't be," he said. "He'll have questions about what happened."
Itsuki was more times right than wrong about their father, like he was used to reading his every move, she had given up on understanding how he did it and just came to accept it.
✦ ✦ ✦
They interviewed Itsuki first, in a small room with a table and two chairs and a recording device and a detective who introduced himself and then asked the same questions the officer outside had asked, in a different order, which was a standard technique for identifying inconsistencies that Itsuki found mildly nostalgic.
He answered everything calmly and in sequence. His name, his age, where he lived, where he was going, what he observed, what he did and why. He used specific language — I observed, I determined, I acted when no licensed hero was present on scene — the kind that sounded cooperative and also made the answers harder to use against him. He gave them the villain's quirk behavior, the activation pattern, the civilians he had observed in the radius. He was, on paper, a remarkably useful witness.
The detective thanked him and said they would need to speak with his parents and that using a quirk without a license was technically a violation regardless of circumstances, though given his age and the context it was unlikely to go anywhere formal. Itsuki nodded and was taken back to the waiting area.
Amane was taken in next.
'She'll be fine. She's not going to volunteer for anything. She'll answer what they ask and that'll be the end of it.'
He sat down and waited.
Eight minutes passed.
Then the door to the interview room opened and the detective came out first, followed by Amane.
✦ ✦ ✦
Their father arrived twenty minutes later.
He came through the station door in his suit, glasses on, and scanned the waiting area once. His eyes landed on them. He crossed the room, looked at Amane's wing, looked at Itsuki's face, and said nothing for a moment.
"Are you both hurt," he said.
"No," Itsuki said.
"My wing is a bit—" Amane started.
"It'll sort itself out." Itsuki replied, Amane glared at him and puffed away.
His father looked at him for a moment.
He went to speak to the detective. Itsuki watched through the glass partition — the conversation was short, his father listening more than talking, nodding once or twice, asking one question.
He came back out and picked up Amane's school bag from the floor beside her.
"Let's go," he said.
They walked out of the station into the early evening. Their father's car was parked two streets over. They got in the car, Itsuki seated right next to his father who was in the driver's seat and Amane who was seated at the back. They drove for about two minutes in complete silence.
"The detective said you described the quirk's behavioral pattern in detail," his father said, eyes on the road.
"Yes," Itsuki said.
"Before you got engaged."
"Yes."
"How long did that assessment take you?"
"A few seconds," Itsuki said.
His father nodded slowly, the way he did when he was putting something somewhere to come back to.
"Amane," he said.
"Yeah," she said quietly from the back.
"The woman you got out. Was she clear before the pulse hit you?"
"Yeah," Amane said. "She was clear."
"Good," he said. And that was all he said about it.
The rest of the drive home was quiet. They pulled into the driveway. Their mother appeared at the door before they had finished getting out, looking between all three of them with worry.
"Everyone is fine," their father said, before she could ask.
"Amane's wing—"
"It'll sort itself out," Itsuki repeated again.
Itsuki went inside and up the stairs.
Behind him he heard his father come through the door, stop in the hallway, and stand there for a moment in the house.
He didn't look back.
But he knew, without looking, exactly what expression his father was wearing.
***
[A/N]: Here is the actual chapter.
Ya'll know the goals!!!
300 - 1 extra chapter
600 - 2 extra chapters
Give me your sou– I mean power stones!!!