Listen to: Survive Said The Prophet — "NE:ONE"
No dramatic music. No anime-worthy title cards. Just the crunch of my boots against broken glass and the taste of blood sticking to the back of my throat like bad coffee.
You know, for all the flashy cybernetics and Quirk-enhancing tech saturating this neon graveyard of a city, nobody's invented a patch to make a fight feel less like hell. Losing stings. Winning stings worse. Pain's still pain. Victory's just another flavor of failure with extra ego.
The alley around me looked like a backlot from some low-budget cyberpunk disaster flick. Neon signs sputtered, giving up the ghost one flicker at a time. Steam hissed from cracked pipes overhead, like the city was trying to exhale its last breath. And me?
I was there. Standing. Barely. Hands trembling, breath ragged, staring down at the guy I'd just embedded into the pavement. Void Chain.
Or rather, what the city's gravity hadn't erased yet.
His quirk didn't leave corpses so much as... abstract art installations.
"You're still breathing?" My voice sounded like gravel in a blender. I spat out a thick glob of blood that hit the pavement with a splat. "Man, you villains are built like cockroaches."
He twitched. That ugly, jagged kind of twitch that meant not dead, just rebooting. His black-hole field flickered at the edges, that swirling distortion warping the light like the universe was stretching its neck. I didn't need a PhD in astrophysics to figure I had a five-second window before the laws of nature bent over backwards again.
New Order Override pulsed red warnings across my vision, the UI flickering like a dying lightbulb. It'd taken every ounce of timing, loophole abuse, and plain dumb luck to scrape out a win this time.
And the most insulting part?
This wasn't even the final boss. Just another mid-tier horror dressed up in street-level villain drip.
Just another Tuesday in Kairo District.
A proper hero would've had something to say. Midoriya probably would've muttered some analysis between gasps. Bakugo would've screamed until the rubble obeyed him out of fear. Me?
"Screw the speech. You're not worth the air," I muttered, and brought my boot down, hard.
The shimmer of his quirk blinked out. Reality sighed, the street snapping back into its natural state, as if spacetime was relieved to stop contorting into yoga poses it had never evolved to attempt.
I exhaled slow, letting the tension slither out of me like poison. My gaze lifted to the fractured skyline. Somewhere, behind all those blinking agency comms and curated newsfeeds, the PR teams were already drafting statements.
'Rogue vigilante Kael Arashi destabilizes public safety.'
'Unauthorized Quirk use detected in combat scenario.'
Never the whole story. Never the truth. Villains played with people. The system played with headlines.
And I was done letting them write mine.
Silence never lingers in Kairo. It's allergic to peace.
My earpiece crackled, the sharp hiss of static parting just long enough for a familiar voice to punch through. "Kael. Status?"
I paused. Not because I didn't know the answer, but because the truth always tastes worse when you have to say it out loud.
"One target neutralized. Temporary containment achieved. Moderate infrastructure damage." My fingers flexed, stiff and bruised. I could feel the microfractures knitting, nanomeds working overtime. "Personal injuries... within acceptable thresholds."
"Copy," the voice replied, cold and precise. "Extraction en route. Hold position."
As if holding still was ever the hard part.
The weight pressing against my ribs wasn't just bruises. It was the knowledge that the fight wasn't done. Not here. Not ever. This city chewed through people faster than the cleanup crews could scrub the blood away.
Somewhere out there, the next one was waiting.
And it wouldn't give me the luxury of being ready.
"You know this won't end, right?" Void Chain's voice rasped up from the cracked concrete, distorted and low, the kind of sound that slides under your skin and stays there.
"Yeah." My voice came out dry, almost detached. "But I'm not looking for an ending. Just an answer."
He laughed, that kind of broken, humorless wheeze that sounded more like a punctured tire than a human being. "Answers? In this world? Kid, the answers died long before either of us got here."
And he wasn't wrong. Quirk singularity, endless power creep, genetic mutations so unstable half the population couldn't survive their own biology. Cause and effect were fairy tales. This city rewrote its own logic every time someone new got a power spike.
And still — I wanted the impossible.
I wanted it to make sense.
The extraction drone showed up like everything else in Kairo: late, unmarked, and efficient to the point of unsettling. No capes. No hero monologues. Just a matte-black industrial carrier, faceless and indifferent.
Because in this world, heroes don't show up for the cleanup.
Only the janitors do.
The cargo hatch peeled open, bright sterile light cutting through the smog-thick air. Mechanical arms deployed with military precision, wrapping Void Chain's broken body in stasis foam and lifting him like a damaged warehouse shipment.
I stood there, unmoving. Eyes fixed not on the scene, but on the horizon — where the artificial dawn was beginning to claw its way over the shattered skyline, pale and indifferent.
This battle was over.
But the war? The war was just beginning.
The ride back to my hole-in-the-wall safehouse was about as comfortable as you'd expect for someone held together more by stubbornness than bone at this point. The carrier didn't bother with suspension; every pothole was a gut punch, and the low hum of the engine felt like a heartbeat reminding me I was still stuck in the loop.
Kairo's skyline drifted past, glass towers like teeth, the streets below crawling with drones and cleanup units. Somewhere down there, another name would get added to the database of 'incidents.' Another hero would get rotated onto patrol. Another villain would test their luck.
And me? I'd still be here. Caught in the gray space between both sides, watching the pieces slide around the board.
I slumped back against the cold steel wall, closing my eyes as the carrier veered into a descent. The city whispered all around me, the kind of whisper you never quite unhear, even in your dreams.
Some people call that paranoia.
I call it survival.
The carrier's ramp hissed open, hydraulic arms locking into place with mechanical finality. I didn't wait for the green light or any ceremonial clearance. My boots hit the pavement with the grace of a sack of bricks, muscles protesting every step, but my mind already two blocks ahead.
The safehouse wasn't much, but it was mine. A concrete tomb wedged between two abandoned megastructures, shielded from surveillance the old-fashioned way: by being completely unimportant. No heroes patrolled this dead zone. No agencies monitored its coordinates. Here, I could finally peel off the 'Kael Arashi' that the world knew — and just be... me.
My reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror looked like a parody of a Pro Hero poster. Torn jacket, half-melted armor plates, dried blood painting a mural on my face. If this was the part where a mentor figure offered some sage advice, the only voice in the room was the broken faucet dripping in Morse code.
You survived. Big deal.
But that was the lie, wasn't it? Survival wasn't winning. Not in Kairo.
I sank onto the edge of the steel-frame bed, letting the silence stretch long enough for the adrenaline to wear off. The moment it did, exhaustion hit like a sledgehammer. But sleep wouldn't come. Not with the day's fight still playing on loop behind my eyes. Not with the weight of the next one waiting on the other side of dawn.
Void Chain's words still echoed, like static in my brain:
"The answers died long before either of us got here."
Maybe they did. But if the world thought I'd stop looking, it didn't know me very well.
And it sure as hell didn't know what I was about to do next.