For a long moment, Adam simply existed, frozen in place, as if the world around him had been dunked into cold water.
"MT.LADY… Bakugo Katsuki… All Might…
These heroes… this place… this junk beach…"
Adam's voice cracked.
"This is…
This is..."
The words tore themselves out of his throat:
"MY HERO ACADEMIA!!!"
It hit him like a bolt of divine punishment, sudden, merciless, impossible to dodge.
His mind was trying and failing to process a truth too big to fit inside a normal human brain.
He stared at the shoreline, at the trail of debris.
Names he had only ever heard through a screen pressed into his consciousness with a weight he wasn't ready for.
They weren't drawings or pixels or lines of dialogue anymore. They were real, breathing, shouting, casting shadows under a blood-orange sky.
His chest tightened, For a heartbeat he was convinced something in him had cracked, like a thin glass wall that had protected his understanding of reality his entire life had finally shattered.
"Nothing...nothing...made sense..."
This was a fictional work. an anime he watched and liked. Characters he loved and desired to become like them or have their ability, Fanfictions about them he made at night. Not a place you could wake up in, barefoot on a beach that smelled of rust and salt and sour garbage.
And yet… here it stood around him, Solid, Unyielding.
"Ya Rab, What's happening to me?!!"
His stomach twisted sharply. He felt off-balance, as if the world had tilted a few degrees and left him scrambling for footing.
"How is this happening? How can they be real? What does that make everything I knew? My world? My life? Was any of it… less real than this?"
The thought hit him so hard he staggered. His heart pounded in his chest, too fast, too loud, like it wanted to punch a hole through his ribs. A hot pressure gathered behind his eyes, not quite tears, not quite panic, but something raw.
He ran a trembling hand through his hair. His scalp tingled. His whole body felt too light, too fragile, as if a strong breeze might blow him right out of existence.
"Am I dreaming?"
"Am I in a coma somewhere? Lying in a hospital bed while my brain cooks up the most ridiculous fantasy possible?"
His thoughts began to run wild, too fast, too tangled to sort, like horses bolting in every direction at once.
"There has to be an explanation. There must be. Things don't just… turn fictional worlds real."
But every theory that rose in his mind felt more ridiculous than the last, and yet, because of the sand beneath his toes, the weight of the air in his lungs, they also felt terrifyingly plausible.
"Maybe this is a test," he muttered under his breath, pacing a shaky half-step in the sand. "Some kind of trial…?"
"Could it be… the antichrist trial? but could he create a world like this? One with physics, hunger, wind, people, smoke… everything!! Could I really be walking inside an illusion built to trap me? some kind of simulation? could it be that vaccine probably ingested something that tampered with my brain?"
The idea scared him more because it had an answer he didn't like:
Yes, Possibly.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but the moment he opened them again, the skyline still looked like one lifted straight out of an anime.
His chest tightened further.
"Or… maybe the scientific theories are right. Parallel worlds. Infinite branches of reality. Maybe the so-called 'fictional' worlds are just echoes, signals bleeding through from worlds running parallel to ours."
He swallowed hard. The thought tasted wrong, Frightening, Too big to sum up in the sentence he said.
"What if anime isn't fiction at all? What if it's… information leaking from one universe to another? Maybe artists are just tuning into those worlds without realizing. Maybe we_are the fiction to someone else. Maybe…" His voice cracked. "Maybe my whole life, my struggles, my prayers, my hopes for the future, are just… a story someone else is consuming. A way for another world to pass time."
His pulse thudded in his ears.
"And what if I'm not even real?" he whispered. "Just a character someone made up to fulfill a wish. Just like how I wrote fanfictions for fun… "
The possibility hollowed him out from the inside.
A cold, sinking weight filled his stomach, heavier than any fear he'd felt in his life.
The more he tried to make sense of it, the worse it became.
Reality twisted into shapes that hurt just to hold in his head.
He pressed a hand to his chest as if steadying himself against the pressure building beneath his ribs.
"No… don't do this," he breathed shakily. "Don't fall apart, Don't lose yourself!!!"
But his mind kept spinning, refusing to grant him solid ground, it kept generating possibilities that made him feel smaller and smaller in a universe that suddenly seemed too large, too strange, too indifferent.
He forced his eyes shut. Dug his heels deeper into the sand as if anchoring himself physically could anchor him mentally too.
"No," he breathed. "No. Adam! Don't go there! Don't lose yourself!"
'Home.'
The thought rose like a hand reaching through dark water.
Morocco, His neighborhood, His mother's cooking, The warmth of his real bed, The world he lived in, cried in, laughed in.
"That's real. It has to be real. I refuse to believe otherwise."
His breathing slowed, just slightly, Enough to stop the freefall.
"Even if this is a dream," he murmured, "even if it's a coma, a hallucination, a test, I'm not letting it rewrite me. I'm Adam Al Hantakour. I come from my world. And I'm going back to it."
The words steadied him. Not perfectly, his hands still shook, but they planted something firm inside him. A line he wouldn't let this world cross.
"I'll treat this place as real for now," he said, lifting his head. "But I'm not staying. I'm not becoming someone else. I'll find a way home."
And though the chaos of the city continued unabated, the storm inside him calmed just enough for him to stand without swaying, frightened, shaken, but still himself.