Darkest Before Dawn - 132

Chapter 132

Shock.

Pain.

Fear.

Confusion.

Shock.

Pain.

Fear.

Confusion.

Kazuki’s brain felt like it was him that got hit and not the bus. It was so sudden, that he had no way to process the influx of emotions. Not even the press fiasco back at UA had been like that, because yes, the alarm was sudden, but the reactions had not. That? That was a sudden event followed by just as sudden emotions, and Kazuki felt like he got shot with emotional arrows from all directions.

He felt breathless, like the air was knocked out of his lungs. He felt numb, like his nerves suddenly decided to stop working. He felt blind, like his eyes were looking through frosted glass.

Kazuki didn’t think he had ever felt like that, it was new and it was…

Shocking, painful, scary, confusing…

It felt like minutes, but Kazuki was pretty sure it was just seconds before he snapped out of it. It wasn’t because of his own abilities, however. He was still very much reeling and he wasn’t even aware enough to know if he was the only one or not. He snapped out of it all the same…

… to the sound of metal being bent.

That slight nudge was enough though, because it gave him the chance to play his cards like he knew how. He reached through the strands of emotions and pulled on specific ones. There wasn’t a lot of anger, not really. It was almost completely drowned in shock, pain, fear and confusion, but there was some of it. Maybe it was Bakugo, finally coming in clutch with his issues, or maybe it was literally anyone else.

Kazuki didn’t particularly care.

What he cared about was that he found some anger to pull, to focus on, and then he brought it to the forefront of his mind. It pushed off the pain and the fear, which was good, because those are the most distracting. Without those, shock and confusion could finally be dealt with and they… They didn’t fade, but they became manageable.

That was when he looked to the source of the bending metal and saw a giant arm that seemed to not have skin. It was all visible muscle pulling and stretching as it did its job. And its job was to tear apart a hole in their bus.

“Villains!” someone yelled. It might even have been him. Kazuki might have grown more aware, but that was far away from being fine or in any shape to deal with villains. ‘That’s the job though,’ a part of his mind that might have been more bravery than smarts told him and he grinned, anger flowing through his veins to keep everything else out.

Great for focus, terrible for decision making.

Still the lesser of the two evils, as far as Kazuki was concerned, because action was better than inaction, at least in that case. There were more cries and yells joining that first voice too, but he didn’t pay them any mind. Instead, he reached for his belt, the only thing holding him in his seat and unclasped it.

His body fell down almost immediately, but he got enough movement to land semi-well and enough control to build a shadow “cushion” under him. It hurt like a bitch, but at least he wasn’t afraid of the glass on the floor- or the ceiling, depending on how one looked at it. He wasn’t sure others were so lucky, and there were definitely others, because he heard a very desynchronized chorus of groans and whines and curses that followed thuds and the clinking of glass shards pushed around.

He couldn’t focus on that for long though, because he heard – and then saw – a chunk of bus wall being pulled out, torn away from the vehicle. And there were classmates of his over there. There were friends of his over there.

“Move!” It was definitely Kazuki that called that out, but the saving grace of the moment was that Tokoyami was one of the people right next to the hole, which meant Dark Shadow was right there. The living darkness wasted no time lashing out. Meanwhile, Kazuki’s cry seemed to have snapped out everyone else, because there was movement all over the place.

‘Where is Aizawa?’ he had to wonder though, because he’d have expected their teacher to be the first to act, make a call or something. Had the crash gotten to him more than the rest? Had the villains targeted him immediately?

Kazuki had no way of knowing, but he could certainly help. The bus was a little crowded, admittedly, but he could reach outside with his shadows. So, while everyone moved to help on the side that had been opened – he heard an explosion that was, for once, very reassuring –, Kazuki himself went to make Grimm out of the way and probably right under a villain or three.

He didn’t move, that was for everyone else. He set a task for himself that was different, and that was not getting in the way. He could do his thing from inside the bus, but outside. There were too many people inside a too small bus. If they all tried to get a piece from that opening, chances were they’d just-

“Get out of the way, Extras!”

Case in point.

Although, really, Bakugo was a great thing to point at villains right then and there. He was an angry asshole, but he was also a very effective angry asshole when it came to combat. Kazuki could very much acknowledge that. They needed that kind of power, his and Shoto’s and anyone else they could get.

“Let Tokoyami, Bakugo and Torodoki cover the hole!” he heard Momo call and he relaxed a little, because someone had made a call, that was good. “Everyone else cover the windows!” she added and that was even better.

Not that Kazuki was paying all that much attention, because his Grimm kept getting shot down, but that meant that there was someone out there that wasn’t letting them form. That was effort and attention being drawn away from them. They were scrambling though, and they were trapped and that was not good, not good at all.

“Midoriya!” he called and he heard a squeak from somewhere he didn’t have the focus to place at the moment. “Punch a hole somewhere else! We have to get out of here!”

“Detroit… Smash!” he heard not a second later and there was a current of wind sweeping through the inside of the bus, messing with the glass shards.

“Everyone out! We’re trapped in here!” Was going out to face the villains good? No, not at all. Kazuki thought it was better than being all gathered inside the upside down bus like an easy target though. He didn’t know what the villains wanted, but he didn’t like the look of the blue fire at the front. Shoto blocking that with ice was a welcome thing though, very much so.

‘Finally,’ Kazuki cheered internally when one of his many attempts at summoning Beowolves succeeded. It was one single Grimm, but that was more than he had before and it’d likely turn into more. He needed to turn that into more. There were cries and curses and shouts going on around him still, all mixed with explosions and fire and a number of other sounds mixed together in a very confusing pandemonium.

He focused on his job though, because there was too much going on. He couldn’t give attention to all his classmates and even if he tried, what good would that do? Instead, he focused on creating more Grimm, more numbers to throw at whatever villains there were out there. That was exactly what he did too, one after another. Some were destroyed before they were even halfway summoned, but some were finished.

The first Beowolf was cut down with the flash of a blade and some green, Kazuki noticed. He was trying to get a look through them, but it was all so… so chaotic, that he could barely do much of anything. The emotions were getting less overwhelming by the second though. There was plenty of fear, but the shock had waned, and there was… less confusion than before, if only a little bit.

“Move, B-Movie!” a voice called and he remembered that, yes, he was allowed to leave the bus too. He’d made that call, hadn’t he? The situation was so messy that he couldn’t remember and also hadn’t really followed the order one way or the other. “Move, damnit!”

So, move he did. Not as fast as he could have, admittedly. In his defense though, he was making more Grimm and he thought that was a good call. He had two beowolves engaged with some kind of swordsman that was giving him Kamakiri flashbacks, if only because of how blurry it all was as he tried and failed to focus on several things. Another beowolf charged at a guy in black that looked all sorts of odd… before he exploded in blades everywhere from his… mouth?

There was a corner of Kazuki’s mind screaming ‘what the fuck is going on?!’, but he didn’t humor it.

There were pressing matters to deal with.

There were more villains around, a lot of villains, actually. ‘It’s the USJ all over again,’ he thought. Except, this time, there were actually strong villains mixed in. His classmates were struggling. Shoto was locked down with the Blue-Fire guy. Bakugo apparently jumped at the Mouth-Blades guy. And Midoriya and Iida seemed to be fighting Muscle-Guy. He could have sworn he got a glimpse of the Nomu guy/thing from the USJ or something that looked similar enough.

There were a lot of other villains though, some minor, some not so much. And his classmates couldn’t take care of all of them, so Kazuki had a job and it was, thankfully, one that he was good at. That was why he grinned as he continued making more Grimm, evening the numbers as best he can. ‘Numbers are my game,’ he thinks, especially when he started noticing the same villains appearing in two, sometimes three places at once. Not similar, the same. He almost thought he might be seeing double, what with the hit they’d all taken and such, but no, the doubles were all doing different things, fighting different people.

‘Some kind of clone Quirk?’ he wondered, but that’s fine. It seemed to be a weak one, even if on occasion it’d double someone… troublesome. So, his Grimm started emerging, and within that, he pushed further, plunging his metaphorical hand into one of his nodes to make an Alpha. Beowolves would do, both Alpha and normal. They were simple, but effective, and Kazuki didn’t know if anything else would fit or help more. He couldn’t risk wasting time on something useless or that might get in the way, so he settled and waited to figure out if some other Grimm kind would be better.

As his growing group of Grimm met the villains, he felt something hit his back at the same time that a stabbing pain shot through his shoulder.

“Hello, Zuki~!” a female voice sing-songed right in his ear and a blade twisted in him, drawing a choked gasp-scream from him. “You bleed red~!” the voice said in wonder and he tried to elbow the person on his back, piggybacking on him. He felt weak though and it took him a second to feel the odd, prickly feeling of blood being extracted from his shoulder. Like it was a knife-shaped needle that was in him and he was getting the biggest, most painful blood sample extracted from him.

In a moment of panic, he had the closest Grimm come to his aid.

“I didn’t think you’d bleed red, Zuki~!” the girl – woman? – continued and her words and voice were almost as disturbing as what he felt in his shoulder.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the Beowolf to reach them and swipe the girl off of his back. The knife in his shoulder hurt like a bitch coming out though, but he was more worried about the blood that had been taken. Because he didn’t think a villain wanting his blood could be good, no matter what. So he turned and he saw the girl in some kind of school uniform with blades that had tubes going into some kind of container on her shoulders… or was it her back? Both?

He needed to do something about that.

So, he sent his Grimm after her, a bunch of them. Almost all of them. His control wasn’t great though, he realized. He was at half his maximum and already struggling. His legs felt weak and his arms were heavy. His mind in general felt sluggish and…

‘Blood loss?’ he thought, feeling out of breath. That wasn’t good. The fact that he had to think that to himself spoke volumes too. ‘Can’t just let her take my blood,’ he thought to himself. If she wanted it, then it couldn’t be for anything good. Maybe she had a blood-related Quirk?

“Hey, let me help you!”

“Hey, she can fight on her own!”

Two different things, one voice. A villain was behind him, so Kazuki turned just in time to deliver a punch to the guy. He got no clue who he was, the costume looked generic as fuck, but that was hardly important. He wasn’t alone though. Two more villains followed after him, so he got ready for a fight even as his Grimm continued doing their thing. Some were trying to get the surprisingly elusive Blood-Girl, some were trying to get other villains. His friends needed help, he could hear some of them calling, some others exclaiming things that weren’t important enough for him to focus.

Kazuki had a fight in his hands, after all, so unless something serious was said, he’d push it to the side. Unfortunately, there was a reason why his friends usually used numbers against him in Quirkless spars. That was an effective way to deal with him, especially with enough numbers and/or strength. The three villains on him weren’t particularly strong, but they were still three and, as he learned quickly, he was facing the Clone-Villain. When he punched one of the non-generic villains, a very solid hit too, he turned into a weirdly colored pile of mud… before being replaced by the generic guy.

That was annoying.

Interestingly though, the emotions on the clones were… weird, muddled like their colors when they dissolved, like cheap imitations of true emotion strands. They fueled him all the same though, if very poorly, and Kazuki was almost grateful for the guy, because it was negativity he could use and it was only a fraction of how bad real emotions could be. Now, if only Kazuki hadn’t had to deal with the bloodloss, then maybe he could have properly appreciated that.

It’d have helped if he weren’t battling three different people, two of which had no fear of getting hit because they were clones. They threw themselves at Kazuki with abandon, happy to sacrifice themselves in order to get a single punch in. Their fight lasted all of a minute and he was already stockpiling damage. His lip was busted, his cheek hurt like hell, his arms were even more numb than the blood loss already made them be and there were a number of other spots in his body that were sore.

“Nooo!” the girl cried out somewhere behind him and Kazuki grinned even through the sting of his punched face. His Beowolf had finally managed to claw at the container with blood on the girl’s back, bursting it and making the dark red liquid spill out. ‘Perfect,’ he thought with a grin as he kicked another clone into a “mud” pile. “You! That was not… nice…” she shouted, before trailing off at the end, which confused him.

Even more confusing was the way her anger spike went away in a second.

It was worrying too, which was why he took a moment to glance at her and she was staring at him. Why? He didn’t know, but she wasn’t moving and that was good. Another Beowolf took that opening to tackle her.

“Keep your mutt away from Himiko!”

The voice was accompanied by action, just not action that Kazuki had expected, because the girl – ‘Himiko?’ – was torn away from the Beowolf, flying off. And she was sent in his direction, somewhat. She twisted in the air, a knife in one hand and a very disturbing looking giant syringe kind of device in the other.

That’s what she’d used before, he was pretty sure, not a blade. Or, at least, not a normal blade.

“Hello~!” the girl sing-sang when she dodged, jumping after him almost immediately while two clones tried to grab him. Tried being the operative word, because one of them got punched and the other was shrugged off.

There was only so much that he could do though. He was stopped only a few seconds later by a stabbing pain on his side. The girl – Himiko, he tried to remember – got to him, her knife digging right under his ribs. Somehow, the gleeful look on her face scared Kazuki more than the injury, however.

“You’re covered in blood~” she said, leaning closer to him and twisting the knife. It made him gasp and flinch, neither action feeling great at that very moment.

Distantly, he thought he heard his name being called by familiar voices.

“You look so good covered in blood,” Himiko whispered, sending a shiver down his spine and making his hair stand on end. “I’m going to-” Whatever she was going to do, Kazuki didn’t get to find out, thankfully.

“Get off of him!” a voice yelled before someone crashed against Himiko, getting her off of Kazuki. When he looked to the side, he saw Eijiro, covered in his hardened body. He’d have to remember to thank the guy. What would he like though?

“Kazuki!” a new voice said by his side and he felt arms wrapping around him. ‘Invisible arms,’ he noticed a second later and it took him a whole other second to realize why that was. “Come on,” Toru told him, trying to help him up, and he did his best to follow the command.

There was still a knife on his side though.

With a shuddering breath in, he pulled on his nodes to sharpen his mind. It was risky, pain existed for a reason, but he could worry about his body’s cries for help when there weren’t villains around trying to kill them all. So, he let anger and boredom both run rampant in his body.

His Grimm were still doing their jobs, especially the Alpha Beowolf. There was a lot of fighting going on though, much of which he’d missed and much of which he couldn’t really process. He didn’t do much else other than follow Toru wherever she was taking him though. He wasn’t going to be winning any Quirkless fights, after all, so he’d make do with just Grimm and getting out of the way.

His invisible friend was plenty at risk herself at that moment anyway. A fighter, Toru was not. She could defend herself alright, but it was certainly not her strong suit. Might as well take her with him out of the fighting zone… or let her take both of them out of it. That was a more accurate description of what was going on, he supposed.

“Kazuki?” Toru asked when he stumbled a little more than he had before. “Are you alright?” she asked, concern bleeding off her voice and her strand of emotion.

“No,” he answered bluntly and honestly. A Beowolf intercepted the clones behind them. He didn’t want to have a Grimm directly following them though. That’d… That’d give them away, right? “How’s… How’s everyone else? How are you?” he asked, a little breathless. Maybe talking would help him focus, because his attempt at using emotions hadn’t quite worked as well as he’d have wanted.

There was only so much he could do with two very nasty wounds bleeding and having had probably a lot of blood sucked out of him with some kind of device.

“It’s… It’s a lot,” Toru said, overwhelmed, just how Kazuki had felt. Or was it just her- “We’re winning though, but the clones are annoying, especially when he makes clones of the stronger villains. That’s a nightmare. He made some of the flame guy, he’s the most troublesome.”

Until Kazuki distracted him, he supposed.

Almost made him want to go back, almost but not quite.

“I can help with-” he was interrupted by the urge to cough and, when he did, his mouth was filled with a coppery taste that he knew very well. “-that,” he finished, trying not to take a deep breath in. He wanted to, oh he wanted to, but that’d just make everything worse, just like taking out the knife.

“Kazuki-”

“Go… Someone else might need… back up. I can do my thing,” he said, keeping it as short as he could. He dropped by a tree and Toru helped him lean on the thing to stay sitting up. “Perfect,” he commented, holding back another cough. He had a feeling Toru wouldn’t leave, with how worried and afraid she was. “Thanks. Now, go,” he told her and he tried his best to put some steel in his voice, some strength. He needed her to believe he wouldn’t just die. He needed her to listen.

“Kazuki.” God, the pain and the halfway hysterics she put into her voice – and felt, truth be told – were almost enough to convince him to let her stay. That would have been selfish though and there was the entirety of their class out there still in need of help.

“Go,” he repeated firmly. “I’ll make a Grimm or two to cover for me,” he reassured her and it was an effort not to let his voice crack, not to start coughing. His lungs burned and he had a feeling that if he’d coughed blood before, he was about to do so again.

Fortunately, she only seemed to hesitate for a moment longer before he saw her shoes, the only visible part of her, turn and then move away. When she did, Kazuki started making new Grimm at the same time that he took in the fight… Or what he could see through his blurred sight. His mind wasn’t doing so well anymore, between pain and blood loss and wounds and the likely internal injuries from the knife in his gut.

He pushed all that aside though, channeling boredom and anger like his life depended on it, sprinkling some other emotions now that he could focus on that instead of the very complex matter of walking… with a knife in his gut. His mind wouldn’t focus much, it seemed. He wanted to pull the thing off, but he knew he shouldn’t. That’d just make him bleed out faster. No, he needed to keep going for a little bit longer.

Then his class would finish kicking villain ass and Momo would make a bunch of bandages or someone would fish out a first aid kit from the bus or… Or someone would do something to save him. And that would be that. Happily ever after and all that shit, Kazuki was sure. He couldn’t wait.

He really couldn’t.

He’d rather not be in pain or in danger… Or worrying about his friends. Because goddamn, he missed the time when he was too busy fighting to look at the bigger picture. Where he was, sitting against the tree, he could see the entire battlefield on the side of the road. He could see the now almost completely destroyed bus, with Shoto and the Blue-Fire guy still going at it. They’d melted half of what little remained of the vehicle by then.

He could see his classmates fighting the villains. Minoru was bouncing around on balls he’d apparently set up, kicking minor villains all over the place and making them dissolve. He could see Kyoka and Tsuyu having paired up, covering for each other. He could see…

He could see everything.

‘I need more coverage,’ he thought, using his shadow to make a Nevermore this time. ‘I need to break things up a little, we’re too surrounded,’ he noted afterwards. A King Taijitu and a Deathstalker would work wonders for that. ‘I need more power,’ he thought, watching Midoriya struggling to keep Muscle-Guy in check and deciding that the best Grimm for that was probably a Boarbatusk. It’d have enough punch with a charge to at least buy time.

He’d go from there. He didn’t have that much left in him to push to his limits more than he already was. His Alpha Beowolf was keeping the rest of those in check, but he couldn’t push. He was struggling already, because of the damn… everything that was going on.

‘Things were going too well, weren’t they?’ he wondered, somewhat bitter and somewhat amused.

It was just his luck, after all.

[} Chapter End {]

Hey guys! How’s it going?

Man, what a mess this chapter feels like, but I guess that’s kind of expected and reasonable. The fight is a mess, the entire thing is a mess, really. Especially from Kazuki’s perspective. An already chaotic situation turns even more so when you add a lot of foreign emotions, blood loss and injuries. Who’d have thunk?

Other than that, the attack is fun, isn’t it? Everyone’s having a great time. Especially Kazuki, I gotta say. Nothing like a few stabs and bleeding after a long training trip filled with emotions and shit. Himiko was having almost as much fun as Kazuki, evidently.

A great time, all things considered, I’m sure.

Speaking of, I hope you guys enjoyed the chapter.

As always, if you can't wait until next week for next chapter, or if you just feel like supporting my writing, there's up to three new chapters in my Pa tre on:

P a treon . com (slash) AdrianKing

Discord Link: discord .gg/UTDransjJZ

Random Question: What’s the last fic you’ve read (before this, of course). I just got done reading a chapter of “Threads of Sweetness” by WokFriedIce, Harry Potter fic that, if you like fluff (which, being a reader of mine, I’d assume you do), you should definitely check out.

See you.