[MV KANEMARU – CREW QUARTERS – DAY 5, 11:47 AM]
It had been two days since he had been found in the water.
His body was practically freezing cold, heartbeat at an all time low, and physical condition precarious.
The crew had been convinced he wouldn't make it more than a few hours before dying of heart failure.
That changed barely an hour after leaving the cold ocean water. His core temperature, instead of continuing to drop as hypothermia victims' temperatures often did even after rescue, began to rise. Slowly at first, then faster. Far faster than should have been medically possible. His heart rate stabilized at a healthy eighty beats barely twenty minutes after. Then alarmingly rose to ninety five in seconds and settled at nearly 132.
"Did he catch a disease?" Was the next question that came to mind. No one could decide whether this abnormal sign was good or bad.
Until, they saw the mottled purple-black patches across his arms and torso, begin to fade.
"Holy Quirk," Koji muttered to Captain Kagemaru. "Has to be. Some kind of regeneration ability."
"Yep."
From their limited medical knowledge, the boy could be written off as healthy and recovering. However, his heart rate never went back down, but climbed even higher. 140 - 150 ... 175 ... It was beyond anything any of them had seen before.
However, they weren't doctors. And they weren't about to report finding a half-dead teenager to authorities who might ask uncomfortable questions.
They could only keep him warm and hope the kid's heart didn't literally jump out of his chest, else they would have to haul a dead body back into the water. Meanwhile, Yuta's body lay still in the ship's infirmary, chest rising and falling.
On the surface, he appeared to be merely sleeping off exhaustion.
But beneath the skin, something was changing.
His cells, pushed beyond human limits by Uzumaki vitality, stressed to the breaking point by chakra depletion, shocked by hypothermia and near-death had reached a breaking point of its own.
Evolution on a microscopic scale. Just like his near death state with overhaul, stem cells divided in his bone marrow rapidly. In his muscle tissue, fibers restructured themselves, forming denser networks. In his nervous system, myelin sheaths thickened, improving signal conductivity.
Anyone who opened his eyes now would find them blood red with tomoe spinning crazily in all directions, constantly merging and unmerging. While a medical Ninja would be able to notice the churning vitality brought about by an overabundance of Yang release chakra. The skin cells on the surface were surging constantly as if agitated in small unnoticeable waves.
The Chakra pathways that had healed quite a while ago was experiencing an abundance of Yang energy flowing through it like blood through veins. Yet while the pathways from the neck downward were experiencing a strong surge in Yang chakra, everything above that was being flooded in the opposite yin attribute chakra.
Minutes passed and eventually, the two forces collided and mixed together forming a spontaneous reaction. While the crew wasn't watching, Yuta's hair colour deepened red, then lightened back, then turned to black, before turning red yet again.
This phenomenon continued for several minutes before returning to a lighter shade of red.
His quirk factor ... the specific gene cluster responsible for Enhanced Control—was mutating.
It was chaotic. Chakra couldn't be measured or examined in the world, hence the changes were mostly invisible. Even if doctors had run tests, they would have found a recovering teenager with an extremely abnormal cell division rate. And Yuta, unconscious and dreaming of drowning, had no idea. The deaths of hundreds of people from the YAMANOTE LINE haunted him even in his sleep.
Trapped in a constantly reoccurring nightmare of his mom and Eri learning of his death. The pitch black void of Kurogiri's warpgate ... The deep chill of the ocean floor.
' ... I'll end you ...' He murmured on the bed. 'I'll ... I'll ...'
The words faded before they could finish. What replaced it was the silence of a barren land stretching for miles on end.
'What the ..' The thought had barely formed when it changed yet again.
The next moment, He was standing on the ocean, endless open water with nothing alive in it.
'Am I ... Dead?' Soaked from head to toe, he looked down and stiffened. The ocean waters at some point had turned blood red as far as he could see.
Hovering on the surface were bodies ninety percent submerged into the water. The only thing that could be seen was the area from their eyes upwards. It was horrifying.
'No ..' He stepped back, only to step on something solid.
The head of someone else. The body didn't react even as he flinched away. Nothing did. They all just floated there like bodies from a horror movie.
He could see their faces clearly. He really wished he couldn't.
The old man with the newspaper was the closest. Still wearing his reading glasses, one lens cracked. The girl with the headphones floated a little further out, her hair fanned around her like she'd just leaned back to look at the sky. The businessman who'd been complaining about his tie the whole ride ... he was there too.
Yuta had pulled all three of them from the water himself.
The fifty-seven were all there as well. And behind them, were the rest. The ones he hadn't reached nor had his shadow clones.
None of them were accusing him, yet it only made it feel worse. 'Dammit!' He could feel his heart thumping loudly.
'So this ... This is what it feels like. This is probably what I would have felt like if I had left Eri that night.'
The girl with the headphones sank slowly, still looking at him. She couldn't have been older than seventeen. She probably had somewhere to be that day. Someone to come home to. Some completely ordinary thing waiting for her on the other side of a train ride that she never finished.
Time passed slowly as the corpses sank into the ocean.
The thumping heart gradually died out.
He had grown numb to whatever was left.
Yuta didn't move.
Here, there was nothing to do. No raft to build and no person to attempt saving. It was just him and the spreading dark.
The Sharingan was perpetually active, seemingly wanting to record everything it could see despite his attempts to turn it off.
'The butterfly effect,' some part of him noted. 'Eri for this. That's what it cost.'
He sat down on the water. It didn't sink.
'The feeling .... Just like that night I missed my stop and ended up in Machida. The feeling I had in the moments of holding Eri then and there ... It was almost the same. The circumstances were different but yeah ... It was somewhat like this wasn't it?'
He hadn't regretted Eri. He still didn't. But sitting here, watching the last of them go under, he understood something with a clarity that no amount of running on empty ocean had given him. That not regretting a choice didn't make you exempt from what it cost. It just meant you had to carry it with your eyes open.
The League had attacked a train full of people with lives and futures, just so they could get to a kill one insignificant kid.
His hands clenched right then and there. 'Is my life really worth all this Shigaraki?' Obviously he got no answer. From the creepy atmosphere and bodies, he wasn't certain whether he was alive or dead at this point, but regardless, Shigaraki wasn't here to answer.
'Why.' He though through gritted teeth. 'Why, why, why do you have to make me like this?' He had just finished with stain, then this happened.
If he wasn't dead already, he would definitely be unable to sleep at night after this. 'I just wanted a license. Is it so much to ask ...'
The bodies had all sunk into the ocean at this point.
Eventually, he was the only one left. A self depreciating smile had made its way up to his face at some point.
'So no.' He looked down at his reflection in the blood-tinged water. What stared back was a pair of blood red eyes that carried a burning hatred he hadn't felt since Stain.
The Hero Killer had a code. A twisted one built on a graveyard of people who didn't deserve it, but a code nonetheless. Stain would have looked at a train full of civilians and wouldn't have done what happened today. Yuta was certain of that much. There were lines even he wouldn't cross, people he wouldn't touch. He killed for something he believed in, however wrong that belief was.
Shigaraki hadn't even paused.
Seven hundred people was equivalent to an acceptable cost. No, it probably wasn't even a cost in his eyes to begin with.
Yuta's refusal to kill Stain had stemmed from a combination of many saving graces. He'd looked at the Hero Killer paralyzed in that alley and decided that killing him would make him something he didn't want to become. He'd believed that. Still did.
Impressively, Tomura Shigaraki had managed to shatter everything else in one move.
His chest heaved, heavy breaths puffing from his nostrils.
Finally, "HAHAHA!" He raised his head and laughed wantonly. "HAHAHAHA HA HA HA! TO MAKE ME FEEL LIKE THIS ... YOU REALLY ARE SOMETHING."
He ran his hands through his hair, eyes somewhat gleaming with madness.
For every word spoken, he meant them with every fiber of his being.
The rage boiling inside him now could only be compared to what he initially felt for stain on day one. Even then, it paled. Never before had he ever wanted to rip someone limb from limb.
The Hero Killer ... Despite everything he had done, had reasons for it. Real ones, not excuses.
At least he actually believed his purpose to drove him to kill. Shigaraki was the exact opposite.
Yuta's laughter gradually ceased. He thought of his mother in her wheelchair.
Then thought of Eri's arms around his neck, the warmth he felt from those moments, and imagined all these people in similar scenarios.
It would probably always be there now, somewhere behind the Sharingan's perfect memory, ready to surface whenever he let his guard down. He understood that and he wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
So them and there, he gave up.
'Fine then.' He lay back on the surface and looked up at a sky with nothing in it.
The choice wasn't really a choice. It hadn't been since the moment that warpgate opened above the tracks.
He could see that clearly now, with all the noise stripped away and nothing left but the water and the faces he'd carry for the rest of his life.
'Let's go to war.'
Hundreds had already died, and he would have joined them without the ability to walk on water.
If the League of Villains could go this far for Hosu, there was no doubt all hell would break loose the moment he showed up alive.
It wasn't even up for debate. There was only one option left, and even if there wasn't, he knew he was too consumed by rage at this point to care.
'Shigaraki ...' The thought followed him down as his body sunk on the ocean. 'You're courting death.'
The silence that followed was broken by an afterthought.
'Congratulations. She's already on her way.'
___
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