The air in the operating room, previously heavy with the scent of sterile iodine and the ancient dust of the minka, was suddenly shattered by a sound that defied every medical law Asei Morioka had ever learned.
Yoshi Abara exhaled back into existence.
A violent, wet cough tore through the boy's chest, followed by a desperate, wheezing gasp for air, a sound like a drowning man breaking the surface of a black sea. His eyes were wide, the pupils blown into huge, dark voids that reflected the harsh white glow of the surgical lamp.
"Y-Yoshi?" Makoto's voice was a fragile shriek from the doorway. She and Akira had been standing in the shadows, paralysed by the sight of the boy's mangled form, but now they surged forward, stopped only by the sheer, kinetic intensity of Yoshi's movement.
Yoshi's newly mended hand, the one that had been a severed stump hours ago, clenched so hard into the metal edge of the operating table that the alloy groaned and flattened. The Ripple flared instinctively. The air around the table began to shimmer and warp, the spatial fabric of the room vibrating with a high-pitched, crystalline hum.
"Get... away!" Yoshi rasped, his voice a scorched, unrecognisable ruin.
He tried to sit up, but his body betrayed him. The phantom memory of the Amur Tiger's blade, raced through his nervous system like a bolt of lightning. He began to hyperventilate, his chest heaving in a jagged, rhythmic panic that threatened to tear Morioka's delicate fibrous stitches.
Hee... hooo... hee...
"The sword..." Yoshi choked out, his eyes darting frantically around the room, seeing Kōga's golden fur in every shadow.
His features were slick with a cold, deathly sweat. He clawed at his chest, his fingers digging into the bandages Morioka had just applied. He was convinced the hole was still there. He was convinced he was still pinned to the bronze monument, watching the stars fade in the Osaka sky.
"Yoshi, look at me! You're safe!" Akira shouted, his voice booming in the small room, but the sound only seemed to feed the boy's mania. To Yoshi, the noise was a roar, the roar of a predator.
"Stay back!" Yoshi's Ripple snapped. A localised spatial burst erupted from his shoulder, blowing a tray of surgical tools across the room with a deafening clatter.
Morioka didn't flinch. The old doctor, despite the tremors of fear that had been racking his body moments ago, stepped into the storm. He didn't use a quirk, he used the absolute, unshakeable authority of a man who had seen death a thousand times and refused to let it win.
"Enough!" Morioka bellowed, his voice cutting through Yoshi's panic like a scalpel.
The doctor grabbed Yoshi's shoulders with his fibrous, seam-lined hands. The boy's skin was hot, vibrating with a lethal frequency, but Morioka held on. "Look at me, boy!"
Yoshi's head snapped toward Morioka. He saw the ancient, map-like face, the clinical sharp eyes, and the pale, biological threads that were still weeping from the doctor's fingertips, anchoring Yoshi's flesh to the world.
"Breathe," Morioka commanded, his voice dropping into a low, hypnotic drone. "You are in my house. You are on my table. No one here will harm you."
Yoshi's hyperventilation slowed, his chest hitching in small, pathetic sobs. The spatial distortion around the room began to settle, the shimmering air smoothing out as the Ripple retreated into his marrow.
"I felt it," Yoshi whispered, his eyes finally beginning to focus. "I felt the heart... stop. I felt the nothingness. How am I...?"
"You are a damn anomaly," Morioka said, his hands never leaving Yoshi's shoulders. "You held your own cells together through sheer, subconscious stubbornness. But if you keep thrashing like a wounded animal, you will undo six hours of the finest work I have ever performed. My stitches are holding your heart together, Abara."
Yoshi slumped back against the table, the fight suddenly draining out of him, replaced by a crushing, absolute exhaustion. He looked at Makoto and Akira, who were hovering at the edge of the light, their faces pale masks of horror and relief.
"Makoto... Akira..." Yoshi's eyes drifted back to the ceiling. "Where is... Koichi?"
"He's okay, Yoshi," Makoto said, her voice trembling as she wiped tears from her face. "He's in the other room. He's stable. You... you did it. You got us here."
Yoshi let out a long, shuddering breath. He looked at his mended hand, tracing the faint, white line where the a dangerous cut had severed the limb. The brutality of the memory, the silence of the blade, the apathy in the Tiger's eyes, it sat in his mind like a black stone.
Morioka sat back on his stool, his breath coming in heavy rasps. He looked at the boy, a boy who should be dead, a boy who had looked into the void and blinked.
"I've seen many things in this district," Morioka said, his voice a dry, weary rattle. "I've seen the Purge. I've seen the rise of the symbols. But I have never seen a boy wake up from a Class Gamma erasure in a matter of hours. You are either the luckiest creature on this planet, or the most cursed."
He looked at Akira and Makoto, his gaze heavy with warning.
Yoshi closed his eyes.
___
The surgical lamp had been dimmed, casting the room into a deep, amber twilight. Yoshi sat propped up against a mountain of pillows, his chest wrapped in thick, medicinal-scented bandages that pulsed with every shallow breath. His mended right hand was resting on a tray, the skin still pale and the new scar itching with a ghostly intensity.
Akira sat on a wooden stool by the bed, his arms folded, his face a map of grim anxiety. Morioka stood by the window, his back to them, staring out at the Osaka skyline as if he were looking for the fires of a war that hadn't started yet.
"I went out to find Overhaul," Yoshi began, his voice a low, raspy thread that seemed to scrape against the silence. "I thought… if I stayed in the heart of the district, I'd just be searching all night. So I went elsewhere."
He took a jagged breath, his fingers twitching. "I ended up in a ghosted zone. Worn-out brick, rodents, the smell of rot. There were posters on the walls. Old ones. The Pure Registry System."
Morioka's shoulders stiffened, but he didn't turn around.
"I was looking at the faces of people who were denounced for loving mutants," Yoshi continued, his eyes glazing over as he retreated into the memory. "Forced sterilization. Revoked citizenship. Death. I was standing there, thinking about how All Might's era made all that look like a bad dream. And then…"
"That's when he showed up," Akira whispered.
Yoshi nodded. "A massive man. Gold and black fur. A traditional yukata and a wide bamboo hat. But he acted normal like a neighbour just having a midnight stroll. He started talking about history, about how those posters represented an honest world, and how today's world is just a theatre of addictions. Phones, gambling, hero-worship… he called it all a cover for the hate people have for themselves."
Yoshi looked at his hands, his expression hollow. "He told me he was a cursed child. His mother was one of those 'pure' women on the posters. He was sterilized before he could speak. His father was executed. He told me that for a while, his mother loved him… but as the tiger grew, as he became a reminder of her mistake, that love turned to hate. He said she was the first person his quirk activated for."
Makoto, who had been leaning against the doorframe, let out a sharp, stifled gasp.
"He consumed her," Yoshi said, his voice dropping into a dead monotone. "He told me that with her blood on his mouth, he looked in the mirror and felt nothing but apathy. The hate she felt for him was a wave he believed he would drown in, so he decided to share it with everyone else."
Morioka turned around then, his fibrous face pale. "Kōga Tsukishiro. I knew it. The Class Gamma erasure… only he could have done that. But how? How is he still alive? How is he younger?"
Yoshi's hand tightened into a fist, he shook his head as he had no answer to the question. The wood of the tray beneath it groaning. "I caught him in a Maximum Burst. I didn't hold back. I heard his bones turn to gravel. I felt his organs collapse under the spatial pressure. He should have been a slurry of meat on the grass. But he didn't die."
Yoshi shook his head, a look of genuine, terrified confusion crossing his face. "He... he shivered. Like a glitch in a screen. The blood flowed back in. The bones snapped back into place. And then he roared and my body... it just stopped."
Yoshi slumped back against the pillows, the exhaustion of the story taking its toll. "I tried to use the Shroud. I wrapped a separate space around myself. I thought I was untouchable. But his sword was still able to cut me."
"The Needle," Morioka whispered, his voice trembling. "The style of the White Standard."
"My distance didn't work," Yoshi said. "And whatever he done... it made my arm fall off before I even felt the cold. He pinned me to that shield statue. He drove the blade through my heart and told me there were no doctors where I was going."
The room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence. The gravity of Yoshi's words, the description of a man who could simply "shiver" away his own death and walk through spatial defences as if they were air, was a weight that threatened to crush the Aftermath's resolve.
Morioka walked over to the bed, his fibrous hands reaching out to check Yoshi's bandages, but his mind was clearly miles away. "He is the ghost of a war we thought we won. If he has returned, and he is wielding the concepts of the Old World... then we aren't fighting a hero or a villain. We are fighting against a purge."
Akira stood up, his face set in a grim mask of determination. "We have to move. If he found Yoshi once, he'll find us again."
"No one is moving tonight," Morioka commanded, his voice regaining its clinical firmness. "The boy's heart is held together by my stitches and his own stubbornness. If you move him now, he dies. The Tiger has had his fun for the evening. He thinks he's finished the job. Use that silence to breathe."