The city was quieter tonight, or maybe Taylor was just too angry to hear the usual chaos. Or maybe—more likely, it only seemed quiet because most people were too afraid to leave their homes.
Bakuda had seen to that.
In the last seventy-two hours alone, she’d bombed a courthouse, a city bus terminal, and a PRT-sponsored community outreach center. The death toll was still in the low tens, for now, but the message was deafening: nowhere was safe, not anymore. Th...
2025-08-01 08:51:11 +0000 UTC
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Taylor was done.
Not with life—she wasn’t ready to cross that line yet—but she was done with everything else. Done with the endless whispered insults that made her dread walking down the hallways; with the ‘accidental’ spills that always managed to soak and stain her clothes; with the snickering that always occurred within earshot, even in the company of others.
She was done with the silence of the teachers: the way they’d glance her way, then look past ...
2025-08-01 06:00:11 +0000 UTC
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She should’ve felt relieved.
Instead, Taylor stared out the grimy third-story window of the abandoned office building she’d chosen as a temporary lookout and felt... annoyed. She shifted her weight, the strap of her backpack hanging loosely from her shoulder, while her mask dangled from her fingertips. It was almost ten, but bar the occasional passers-by and passing cars, the city was still quiet.
She’d done two full loops around the Boardwalk, checked in on a few alleys dow...
2025-07-31 06:01:18 +0000 UTC
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The air in ABB territory was always a little heavier.
Greg couldn’t tell if it was the ever-present cloying scent of smoke from burn barrels, the broken streetlamps that bathed everything in jittery, unreliable light, or just the psychological weight of being in Lung’s territory. That too-familiar pressure in the chest, like something watching you from every alley and rooftop.
Whatever it was, it was perfect. The kind of terrifying, high-stakes environment heroes were...
2025-07-30 07:46:46 +0000 UTC
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It should have been something Gojo did a while ago.
Be it a conversation or whatever you wanted to call it, it was one of those boring, sensible, and painfully bureaucratic things that involved official meetings and tedious protocol. The kind of thing old Gojo would have ignored entirely while doing exactly what he pleased.
But new Gojo? New Gojo was trying.
He had four—possibly five—students now, and while the temptation to toss them into the fire and call it a...
2025-07-29 08:01:25 +0000 UTC
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The casket descended slowly, the winch groaning as it fed the lowering straps inch by inch. It was an ugly sound—mechanical, oddly strained, and too final—and it made Taylor want to scream.
She didn’t.
She stood perfectly still, rooted to the muddy ground, and eyes locked on the polished wooden box as it sank into the waiting earth. Her fists were clenched in the pockets of her black coat, nails digging pale crescents into her palms even through the fabric. The wind...
2025-07-28 17:25:51 +0000 UTC
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Outside Taylor’s bedroom, the wind rattled against her windowpane from behind her curtains, but inside the small, dim space, there was only the weak glow of her desk lamp and the faint scratches of pen meeting paper.
She hunched over the open journal, eyes narrowed, her handwriting as ugly as always. For a moment, she paused, chewing absently at the cap of her pen—the ink smeared slightly under her thumb—then she dropped the cap and pressed the pen back down.
She hadn’t wr...
2025-07-27 06:29:45 +0000 UTC
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Emily Piggot stood at the broad window in her office, looking down over the modest sprawl of downtown Brockton Bay. The city had always been a mess, fractured by politics, strangled by corruption, and held together with thoughts, prayers, and blind hope. But even in this disaster of a place—a place where even a marginal success felt like a temporary reprieve, not progress—what had happened to the Merchants stood out.
They’d vanished. And unlike what most would think, they hadn’t...
2025-07-26 04:43:40 +0000 UTC
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Taylor walked down the halls of Winslow, her steps even but without urgency. Her arms hung limply at her sides—neither clenched in tension nor relaxed in ease—and her shoes squeaked faintly on the linoleum floor, but she barely noticed.
Students parted around her without thinking, but she didn't notice them. Even Emma and Madison, who normally would have been quick with a cutting remark or a mocking laugh when she walked by, said nothing. Their eyes followed her warily, confus...
2025-07-25 06:18:13 +0000 UTC
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The curtains were open and the rays of the morning sun streamed through the kitchen window, casting pale beams across the worn flooring and catching the fine dust motes that danced in the still air. Danny Hebert was hunched over a steaming mug of coffee, and a half-eaten piece of toast sat on a napkin to his right, its crusts untouched.
Taylor hovered in the doorway, her hands tucked deep into the oversized sleeves of her sweater. She hadn’t slept much, too many anxious thoughts circl...
2025-07-24 08:00:07 +0000 UTC
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There had never been a time when Ultraman existed without a directive. From the first breath drawn into his cloned lungs, his purpose had been absolute: obey without hesitation; strike without mercy; and destroy without question. He was not born, not truly. He was forged solely as a weapon, with the voice of his creator and those worthy as his constant companion, always whispering instructions, correcting errors, and praising his successes.
But now… silence.
He did not remember ...
2025-07-24 07:30:41 +0000 UTC
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2025-07-21 10:52:38 +0000 UTC
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2025-07-21 10:48:31 +0000 UTC
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Beep-beep-beep.
With a series of mental jerks and nods, the world came back to Taylor in pieces. Her eyes, heavy and rusty, creaked open a fraction at the repetitive beeping of her surroundings. They were drawn to the slivers of harsh, white-gold light clipping through the blinds of a large window at her left, reflecting off clear white walls.
I’m in a hospital, her mind registered, sluggishly. That was odd. She remembered Fugly Bob’s, her dad sitting across ...
2025-07-21 08:34:06 +0000 UTC
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The wind had quieted, and the rooftop had long since emptied. Yet Gojo Satoru remained behind.
He sat on the helipad now, long legs stretched out before him, arms braced behind as he leaned back on his palms. The late afternoon sun was dipping, casting long shadows across the roof, and the sound of Brockton Bay below had softened into a background din. It wasn’t quiet, but it was still.
And in that stillness, Gojo let his smile drop, and his mask slip. The world’s strongest so...
2025-07-21 06:54:22 +0000 UTC
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Anakin knew what he was doing was reckless and dangerous, maybe even delusional.
Without the Force, without its constant presence guiding his instincts and sharpening his reactions, he was just a man. A veteran, yes—a master of war and machines, and a tactician honed by a thousand battles—but still, just a man. And right now, that man was hunched over the makeshift metal workbench in the rusted-out boxcar, trying to recreate one of the most powerful weapons in the galaxy with little...
2025-07-20 05:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Gojo stood at the edge of the PRT Headquarters’ rooftop helipad, overlooking Lord Street. His hands were tucked into his coat pockets, and the late-morning sun warmed the back of his neck. His blindfold was pushed up, worn like a headband now, letting the breeze tease at his hair.
He didn’t look like someone about to gather a team. He looked relaxed, almost lazy, like he’d wandered up here to kill time rather than that. But he felt it, the weight of what was coming, even though
2025-07-19 10:08:58 +0000 UTC
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The average man would have panicked. Would have called it quits the moment the girl slipped through his fingers and into the PRT’s open arms.
But Thomas Calvert was not the average man.
To the public, he was a respectable figure: a former PRT special forces operative turned private consultant for the same organization. A face of law and order, increasingly visible in city halls and back rooms where policy decisions were made, always offering soundbites on cape regulation, city i...
2025-07-18 09:36:32 +0000 UTC
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Taylor Hebert woke up at 4:37 AM.
The numbers on her alarm clock burned into her vision like a brand, but she didn’t scream. She didn’t even move. She simply lay there, eyes open, staring at the ceiling like it might finally offer a new answer. But there was nothing up there apart from dust, cobwebs, and shadows cast by the moonlight.
It had not mattered that she didn't go to school. It had not mattered that she wandered aimlessly, keeping away from buses and traffic and peopl...
2025-07-17 08:39:09 +0000 UTC
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The hallway between periods was only half-full, filled with scattered conversation, lockers shutting and opening, and the slap of sneakers on tile. Taylor kept her head down, books clutched tightly to her chest. She wasn’t trying to hide—Naruto-sensei had said that hiding could make you a target, not invisible—but old habits died hard.
She spotted them before they saw her.
Emma and Madison leaned against the lockers up ahead, trading whispers with smirks as they looked...
2025-07-17 07:00:32 +0000 UTC
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Hoping the universe would just hand her an opportunity to be a hero?
Yeah, that was foolish.
Taylor crouched on the edge of a rooftop across from a shuttered gas station, peering up at the sky above. It had been hours since she’d started patrolling, walking down streets and climbing rooftops and ducking through alleyways, trying to stick to routes she knew well and areas where small-time crime usually brewed after dark. The cold crept in under her armor, not enough to make her s...
2025-07-16 09:02:58 +0000 UTC
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Greg stood in the kitchen doorway, heart hammering like a jackhammer in his chest. His mom sat at the table in her robe, nursing a steaming mug of tea while flipping through a dog-eared copy of Women’s Health. Across from her, his dad hunched over his laptop, fingers tapping rapidly on the keyboard. From the angle of the screen, it looked like something equally boring.
Classic Sunday morning stuff, especially with the quiet, and he was about to shatter that.
He cl...
2025-07-16 09:00:42 +0000 UTC
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Bakuda was a genius.
She didn’t say that in the way most people did, casually as a brag whenever they accomplished something difficult. No, she meant it in the most literal, quantifiable sense. IQ tested off the charts. Graduate-level physics knowledge before she could legally drive. Cornell dropout. Or, rather, a ‘voluntary withdrawal under duress,’ as she liked to phrase it.
Her former university hadn’t appreciated her. Hadn’t given her the recognition she de...
2025-07-15 08:35:42 +0000 UTC
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Coil wasn’t stupid.
He liked to believe that, above all else—above charm, above ruthlessness, above cunning—his intelligence was what had kept him alive and in the game this long. A lesser man would have hesitated. A sentimental man would have waited. Coil was neither.
He did not mourn broken tools, nor did he lose sleep over sacrifices made in pursuit of greater victories. This world, the entire institution of masks and secrecy, did not reward sentiment. It rewarded m...
2025-07-15 05:07:30 +0000 UTC
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People talked.
It was one of the few certainties in Brockton Bay. Streets whispered secrets faster than any signal, and Anakin Skywalker was far too visible now. A name as ridiculous as that carried weight, even if most dismissed it as an obscure reference to some nerd shit or an ironic call sign. After all, who really called themselves Skywalker?
A joke, maybe. Or a dare.
But after what happened to the Merchants, no one was laughing.
Anakin Skywalker hadn’t...
2025-07-14 08:32:06 +0000 UTC
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2025-07-14 00:32:45 +0000 UTC
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Anakin had expected whispers eventually.
Cities like this one had a way of passing stories faster than bullets. Still, he hadn’t expected them to reach here so quickly.
The bell above the shop door rang as he stepped inside the auto shop just after sunrise. The sound felt oddly loud in the stale, grease-heavy air, and the fluorescent lights shone overhead, casting uneven shadows across rows of half-gutted vehicles. The usual scent of burnt rubber, motor oil, and soldere...
2025-07-12 08:33:03 +0000 UTC
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Taylor woke to sunlight.
Not darkness, not the sweltering heat of a confined space, and not the choking stench of rot filling her lungs with every breath.
Sunlight.
It slipped through the edges of her curtains, casting soft golden lines across her blanket and face. So she didn’t move at first, content to bask in its warm embrace as she lay there, eyes open, staring up at the ceiling of her bedroom. Her body didn’t ache, her fingers weren’t raw or bloody, an...
2025-07-11 07:25:52 +0000 UTC
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Taylor had meant to be alone.
After the meeting with Armsmaster, she had wandered the halls with no destination in mind, her thoughts too loud to settle. A small part of her expected someone to stop her; some security officer, a clipboard-wielding staffer, or anyone tasked with keeping track of her. But no one did. Either they didn’t care, or more likely, someone had told them to let her be.
She appreciated that. No longer being seen as a threat, or maybe, just being given space...
2025-07-11 05:50:46 +0000 UTC
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The gym was quiet in the late afternoon, lit only by weak bands of orange sunlight slanting through the high windows. The usual sounds of Wi
The gym was quiet in the late afternoon, lit only by weak bands of orange sunlight slanting through the high windows. The usual sounds of Winslow—shouting students, slamming lockers, and the distant pounding of footsteps—had faded, leaving only silence and the soft rustle of movement.
Naruto was finishing up for the day, long after the re...
2025-07-10 08:02:38 +0000 UTC
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