The silence of Asei Morioka's traditional home was a brittle, precious thing, sustained only by the rhythmic ticking of a grandfather clock and the medicinal scent of lingering incense. Makoto sat by the shoji screen, her hands trembling as she waited for any sign of Koichi's recovery, while Akira stood in the corner, a dark silhouette of brooding anxiety.
Then, the world outside the "curtain" screamed.
The sound of the spatial wall being torn open was violent, a jagged, wet rip that echoed through the cedar hallways. Ren, the faceless boy with the muscle-fibre skin, burst into the room, his movements frantic and uncoordinated. He was covered in a spray of dark, arterial red that wasn't his own. Behind him, his companion, Ken, staggered in, his broad shoulders heaving under a weight that made the floorboards groan.
They weren't carrying supplies. They were carrying a corpse.
"Doctor! Morioka-sama!" Ren shrieked, his sensory pits vibrating with a sound of pure, unadulterated panic. "He's... we found him... he's... I think he's dead!"
Makoto stood up so quickly her chair clattered to the floor. Her eyes landed on the burden Ken was lowering onto the pristine tatami mats. Her breath hitched, then vanished entirely, leaving her lungs a cold, empty vacuum.
It was Yoshi.
The "Demon-God" of their Aftermath looked like a discarded marionette. His features were waxy and grey, his eyes half-closed and clouded with the film of the end. But it was the nature of the injuries that sent a wave of nausea through the room.
His right hand was completely severed, the wrist a mangled stump of shredded muscle and white bone. More horrifyingly, there was a hole in the center of his chest, a clean, circular void that went straight through his sternum, through his heart, and out his back.
There was almost no blood. The the tissue cauterized by what looked like the mark of the blade that had delivered it.
"Yoshi?" Makoto whispered, her voice a fragile thread. She collapsed to her knees, her hands hovering over him, afraid that touching him would cause the body to simply turn to ash. "No... no, no, no. He was right there. He was... he's the strongest of us."
Akira stepped forward, his face pale as a ghost. He looked at the hole in Yoshi's chest, then at the frantic boys. "What happened?" he demanded, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "Who did this? Was it the sniper? Was it the Commission?"
"A tiger," Ren gasped, his faceless head twitching. "A massive... thing of gold and gray. We were in the district, looking for scrap, and we saw them in the park by the shield statue. I used my quirk to pull back the brickwork, to hide us in a wall so we wouldn't be spotted... but we saw the whole thing."
Ren's voice broke, a wet, clicking sound. "The boy... Yoshi... he was amazing. He even caught him in some massive, ground-shaking snap. We thought he won. But then we saw the Tiger burst into blood, his ribs snapped and all... he should have been dead. Any man should have been dead."
"But he didn't stay down," Ken added, his voice hollow. "He just... shimmered. Like fog. He stood back up. He let out a roar that made the very air feel like lead. Yoshi couldn't move. He was frozen. And then the Tiger... he pinned him. He drove that silver sword through his heart like he was nothing but a piece of paper."
Akira's eyes squeezed shut as he listened to the boys' frantic, stuttering description of the attacker, a titan of gold and gray fur, a monster that moved like liquid light and roared with the authority of a dying sun. He didn't have a name for the beast, but the sheer, primitive terror radiating from Ren and Ken told him everything he needed to know.
"A monster, it must have been a monster" Akira whispered, his voice cracking. "God… look at him."
Morioka Asei stepped out from the surgical room, the sliding door clicking with the finality of a guillotine. His indigo yukata rustled against his fibrous, seam-lined legs as he looked down at the mangled boy on his floor. He didn't offer a word of comfort. He didn't even check Yoshi's breathing at first. Instead, he raised a fibrous hand and struck Ren across the face, a sharp, stinging slap that left a red welt on the boy's faceless, muscular skin.
"Idiots," Morioka hissed, his voice a dry, lethal rattle. "I told you to go home and follow the curfew. I told you the city is more antsy after the news of that dead kid. You went out for 'scrap' while a predator was claiming the streets? You brought the very thing that hunted him right to my door."
"We just wanted to help!" Ren cried, clutching his face, his sensory pits vibrating with grief. "We couldn't leave him pinned to that statue! He was just… hanging there!"
"You helped no one!" Morioka snapped. He knelt beside Yoshi, his clinical gaze raking over the boy's ruined form. The brutality was staggering. He looked at the clean, circular void where Yoshi's heart should have been. It was a vacancy that defied biology, little blood leaked in sprays like it typically would, no ragged edges, just a perfect, hollow silence in the center of his chest.
Morioka's hand moved to Yoshi's neck, his fibrous fingers pressing into the skin. He stayed there for a long, agonizing minute.
"He's dead," Makoto sobbed, her hands over her mouth. "His heart… there's a hole in his heart, Morioka-san."
"Quiet," Morioka commanded. He leaned closer, his ear hovering over the void in Yoshi's chest. He didn't hear a heartbeat. He didn't hear the rush of air. But he felt something else, a faint, rhythmic vibration in the very marrow of the boy's bones. A low-frequency hum that felt like the world itself was trying to hold Yoshi together.
"He is not dead," Morioka whispered, a flicker of genuine, scientific shock crossing his aged face. "Not yet. But he is no longer truly alive, either."
Akira leaned in. "What does that mean? He has a hole in his chest, Doc."
"It is suspended animation," Morioka said, his fingers tracing the edge of the wound. "The strike was so clean, so conceptually absolute, that the boy's own quirk has reacted in a way I have never seen. It has localized itself around the injury. It is 'holding' the space where the heart has been split, like he is waiting for recovery before he can act. His cells are trapped in a loop, refusing to die because the space they occupy hasn't realized the organ is dying. He is holding his own life together through sheer, subconscious force."
Morioka turned to Ken and Ren, his expression hardening into a mask of grim, utilitarian urgency.
"Pick him up. Now," he ordered. "The secondary operating table. If that loop collapses for even a microsecond, he will die."
Makoto let out a gasp, her eyes wide with a desperate, terrified hope. "You can fix it?"
Morioka stood up, his joints clicking. He looked at her, and for the first time, there was no pity, only the cold, hard weight of a man who knew he was about to attempt the impossible.
"I will fix it, but it will be a long and strenuous trial," he said. "Hope for a miracle . But understand the brutality of this going forward."
He looked back at the faceless boys.
"Take him to the room," he repeated. "I will clean the entry and exit points, and I will attempt to graft his hand back to the stump while he is still in stasis."
Makoto and Akira watched in a trance of horror and hope as Ren and Ken lifted the limp, broken body of Yoshi Abara. They carried him toward the back of the house, his head lolling back in suspended agony.
___
The secondary operating room was a chamber of shadows and silver, illuminated only by a high-intensity surgical lamp that hummed with a low, electric drone. Asei Morioka stood over the boy, his fibrous hands already weeping the pale, translucent threads of his Stitchabody quirk.
He had to move with a precision that bordered on the impossible. Yoshi Abara's body was currently a biological anomaly. The "Ripple" quirk, acting on a desperate, subconscious level, was holding the space of the heart together in a suspended loop. To a normal surgeon, there was nothing to sew, the heart was simply "not there" in the center of the wound. But to Morioka, who could feel the tension of the flesh through his fibres, it was a tapestry that had been unraveled, maybe calling it a paradox was more accurate.
"Hold the stasis," Morioka whispered to the silent room, though he was really speaking to the boy's unconscious mind. "Don't let the distance collapse yet."
The process was grueling. Morioka began by stabilizing the perimeter of the entry wound. He used his biological stitching to anchor the aorta and the pulmonary veins, which were hovering in a state of "refined" severance. He was lucky, Yoshi's body was young, dense with the vitality of a fighter, and possessed a sheer cellular resistance that kept the tissue from necrotizing even without blood flow. If this had been an older man, the shock alone would have turned the organs to mush.
Morioka began the "Bridge." He wove his fibrous tissue across the void in Yoshi's chest, creating a structural scaffold that mimicked the missing sections of the heart. He had to work inside the spatial loop, threading his needles through a space that technically didn't exist. As he neared completion of the ventricular walls, he felt a sudden, sharp vibration.
Yoshi's quirk was reacting. The boy's subconscious felt the "repair" and tried to assist by collapsing the distance, trying to "Singularize" the heart back into wholeness.
"No!" Morioka gritted his teeth, his forehead slick with sweat. "If you snap it shut now, you'll crush my stitches!"
He flooded the area with a localized sedative-essence secreted from his palms, dampening Yoshi's neural activity just enough to slow him down.
For three hours, the only sound was the wet snip of surgical scissors and the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the old man. He grafted the severed hand back to the wrist, meticulously re-connecting the ulnar and radial arteries, weaving the nerves back into their sheaths with a delicacy that made his own skin crack and bleed from the strain.
Finally, it was done. The heart was whole, held together by a dense, fibrous mesh of Morioka's own biology. The hand was mended, the blood flow returning in a slow, steady pulse that began to warm the boy's cold skin. The scars were jagged and red, but Morioka knew the boy's cellular turnover was high, in time, they would fade into thin, white memories, unless the boy found a way to refine his own skin back to its original state with his own quirk.
Morioka stepped back, his legs trembling. He slumped into a wooden chair in the corner of the room, the surgical lamp still casting its harsh, white light over Yoshi's resting form. He was exhausted, drained of the fluids his quirk required, but his mind was wide awake, pacing through the corridors of his own history.
He looked at the boy. He thought about Akira and Makoto, the two adults who had looked at this teenager as if he were their only shield against all bad. They had a hero with them, the Skycrawler, and yet they viewed this... boy as the strongest pillar. What kind of monster did I just sew back together? Morioka wondered.
His eyes drifted back to the entry wound on Yoshi's chest. He couldn't stop thinking about the "cleanliness" of it. It was too perfect. Even the heart, an organ of dense, shifting muscle, had been split as if by a laser made of pure thought.
His mind retreated to his college days, decades ago, sitting in a cold lecture hall where the professors spoke of the "Three Classes of Quirk-Induced Trauma." In those days, before the "Standardization" of the Hero era, doctors had to be experts in the specific physics of violence.
"Class Alpha," his teacher had said, pointing to a slide of a mangled limb. "Kinetic and Thermal. Messy, blunt, governed by the laws of friction and force. This is what you see with strength-types or fire-emitters."
"Class Beta," the teacher continued, showing a body riddled with black veins. "Biological and Chemical. Rot, toxins, internal decay. This is the work of the parasites and the poisons. It is the sickness of the world."
"And then," the teacher's voice had dropped to a whisper, "there is Class Gamma. Conceptual and Spatial. Absolute Severance. It is rarer and harder to define, but as time goes on I expect that there will be many more that fit into this class. The tissue is not torn, it is more so split apart. The resistance of the body is treated as nothing. Like it doesn't exist."
Even then, it was the lesser of the three, so there wasn't enough information about it. But due to a specific someone of that time, the advancement of understanding the classification sped up for a time, although the files weren't released to the public until much later.
Morioka shivered in his chair. He remembered the supplementary notes he had studied in the university archives, notes taken from the victims of the White Standard. The silver blade of Reiji Kisaragi had been the primary example of Class Gamma trauma. To see it again now, sixty years later, in the chest of a boy in Osaka... it was a ghost returning to haunt a world that thought it was safe.
Sure there were other cases, but none gave him the chills like this one is currently doing.
White Standard was dead. Kōga Tsukishiro had hunted him down and ended the Purge.
Morioka's body began to tremor, a deep, bone-deep fear that he hadn't felt since he was a child sleeping under floorboards, afraid to be ambushed in the dead of night. The "Age of Ash" was supposed to be a chapter in a book, not a spirit in his operating room.
The rules were still being written in blood.
Cough. Hack.
The sound was sudden, wet, and violent.
Morioka nearly fell out of his chair. He scrambled to the side of the table, his eyes wide with disbelief. Yoshi Abara's eyes were snapped open, bloodshot, dark, and burning with a terrifying, lucid intensity. He shouldn't have been awake for weeks. His heart had been a void hours ago.
Yoshi gripped the edge of the metal table, his mended hand clenching so hard the steel began to groan and warp under the pressure of a localized ripple. He looked at Morioka, his chest heaving as the new heart struggled to find its rhythm.
"Where..." Yoshi rasped, his voice a scorched whisper.
Morioka stared at him, a cold sweat breaking across his brow. He didn't see a boy. He saw a variable that defied every medical law he had ever learned.
"Damn...!" Morioka cursed, his voice trembling as he backed away. "You... you shouldn't be breathing."