Chapter 1: Shards of Light
The outskirts of Musutafu felt like a different world from the bustling core of the city. There were no massive hero towers or commercial tech blocks here—just narrow roads, concrete embankments, old train lines, and rows of aging buildings with frosted windows and rusted fixtures.
It was a quiet place, where time moved slow and predictably. Aoi Tsukishiro liked it that way.
He was six years old and already preferred silence to noise, patterns to chaos. His parents—civil engineers with the city—spent most days designing bridges, overpasses, and support systems. They brought home blueprints and models that cluttered the kitchen table, marked with sharp lines and ruler-perfect curves.
Aoi liked the structure of it all.
He especially liked glass. He liked the way light passed through it—how something could be solid but clear, fragile but sharp. Sometimes, he'd press his hand to the glass panes in their hallway and close his eyes, feeling the cool transparency of the world beyond it.
He wore gloves most days. Not for warmth, but because touching raw surfaces made his skin itch. Sometimes he claimed it was a "sensory thing," but in truth, it was more than that. Metal felt cold and chaotic. Stone felt too heavy. Plastics too fake. But with gloves, everything was buffered—manageable.
Safe.
That day at school, the sun had broken through morning clouds, casting long golden beams across the yard. Recess had always been a mixed bag for Aoi. He didn't play tag or climb jungle gyms. He preferred to sit under the shade of the old tool shed, where light filtered through holes in the tin roof in mesmerizing specks.
He was drawing a simple geometric sketch into the dirt with a stick when they found him.
"Oi, Tsukishiro."
Three boys. Upper class. Taller. Louder.
Aoi looked up, then quickly back down.
"Still pretending to be some kind of genius or something?" one of them asked, kicking the stick out of his hand. "Drawing those freak symbols again?"
"They're diagrams," Aoi said quietly, brushing dust off his pants. "For material dispersion."
That earned a shove. "Say that again like a normal person."
He didn't.
They laughed. Another boy reached out and flicked one of Aoi's sleeves. "Still wearing those gloves? What, afraid of getting cooties?"
"No."
"You a germ freak or something?"
Aoi shook his head. "I just don't like how things feel sometimes."
That was the wrong answer.
"Maybe we should help him get over it."
The first boy gave a hard shove. Aoi stumbled backward, shoes sliding on gravel, and hit the old stair rail that bordered the edge of the shed. The iron piping was old—flaking with rust, pitted with age.
Instinctively, he reached back to steady himself—his right hand catching the edge of the railing.
The seam of his glove snagged on a jagged bolt head. It tore.
A split second later, his bare palm slapped directly against the cold, rusted metal.
Then—everything shifted.
A jolt surged up his arm—not electric, but resonant. His fingertips burned cold. A pulse beat inside his bones.
The world shifted.
The rusted metal beneath his hand turned bright—brighter than chrome, then translucent, then fully crystalline. With a sharp crack like ice under pressure, the railing bloomed into jagged sheets of glass-like material. The change swept along the pipe, fast and violent, transforming it completely within seconds.
It wasn't just clear—it was refracting. Like sunlight through water, beams of light bent and scattered into rainbows across the ground and shed wall. The air shimmered.
Then came the fracturing.
One of the transformed bars—unable to support its own altered structure—split down the middle with a loud crack. The vibration triggered the rest of the railing like dominoes. Lines of fracture spread in an instant.
A second later, it all shattered.
Shards burst outward in every direction, glass-like daggers catching the sunlight and twisting it into deadly arcs. The boys screamed. One ducked and fell. Another caught a sliver across the cheek. Blood splattered against the shed wall like red on canvas.
Aoi fell with the broken pieces.
When the light finally dimmed, the schoolyard was chaos.
One boy sat on the ground, sobbing and clutching his arm, blood streaming through his fingers. Another was already running back toward the main building, crying for help.
The glass shards that hadn't embedded into the ground had crumbled into sparkling powder. Thin mist-like streams of light still twisted in the air like afterimages, the final echoes of the event.
Teachers rushed over from the yard. Screams rose. A few students watched from across the lot, eyes wide.
But Aoi didn't move.
He was crouched where he'd fallen, his gloves shredded, his palms bleeding. His chest heaved with shallow breaths, heart hammering beneath his ribs like a drum.
He couldn't feel his hands. Not from pain—just from disconnect.
He looked around, saw the way the world shimmered and split in his vision. It hurt to focus. Everything seemed like it had cracked along invisible lines.
One of the boys' faces was white with fear. Not because of the injury.
Because of him.
And that's when Aoi understood.
They weren't scared of what happened.
They were scared of him.
The voices around him grew louder. One teacher was calling a medic. Another was yelling for the office to call his parents. Someone mentioned Pro Heroes, legal paperwork, structural damage.
But Aoi just sat there—small, pale, hands trembling in the wreckage of light and glass.
He stared at the fragments glittering around him, once part of something solid, now reduced to ruins.
'I didn't mean to break anything', he thought.
'But everything around me already is'.