They ran.
Ran as far as their legs could take them. Far enough that the nightmarish squeals and groans of death from the hybrid monsters vanished. Far enough like the cold no longer bothered them.
Henrik was dragging him faster than he could process, driven by adrenaline and emotions, but ironically, he was the weakest between the two. He had overworked himself during his fight with the BeastMaster, sustaining multiple gashes on his skin, and it was like the sheer use of his quirk was taking a toll.
Soon, Henrik collapsed.
Not a stumble, not a trip—his legs simply gave out, and he hit the ground hard, panting, his arms splayed out like he'd just given up on physics.
Blood was flowing from his eyeballs, which wasn't due to any visible injuries, just the overexertion of his power.
Rhett skidded to a stop beside him, nearly falling too. "Shit—Henrik? Hey!"
"I'm done," Henrik rasped, the steam around his body now a faint mist instead of the roaring cloud it had been minutes ago. Henrik coughed, a little blood flecking his lips. His skin was pale as paper, and the veins under his eyes were starting to go dark. He looked… fragile. Like a machine that had overheated and melted its core.
He was dying.
Something crept into his heart—something that felt suspiciously like pity, which Rhett was not supposed to have. At all. Henrik was the bastard that had watched him die repeatedly without stepping in, and when Rhett was done with the grueling battle with the Iron Knight, he jumped him, cut off his arm, cauterized it, blew out his kneecaps and sedated him. Then he used the fact that he was immortal, but physically weak, to capture him and use him as bait for the hybrid monsters in an attempt to escape.
Now he was dealing with the consequences, bleeding out on the floor with his victim standing over him. Hale and hearty.
If I wanted to, I could stomp on his head and end him in revenge, Rhett thought darkly. It'll be easy. There'd be no fear of him coming back to harm me, and there'll be barely any resistance. He's practically a corpse.
But at the back of Rhett's mind, he didn't really want to do that. Maybe it was because of the conversation Henrik had with Marina, that had shone a different light to Henrik. He was nothing more than a scared kid acting stoic, trying to escape a villain-infested city to save his own life. He had abandoned his ideals, his team, and even his humanity by torturing Rhett to achieve his goal.
Maybe it was because, if Rhett was in Henrik's place, he would've done the same for his goal. Or even worse.
He crouched down, squatting and putting his hands to his knees, trying to imitate the bravest person he personally knew.
"You're not doing the whole martyr thing, are you?" The words came out rougher than he intended. "Like, 'leave me, go on without me,' that kind of crap?"
He remembered how Ryoji, his older foster brother in what Rhett remembered as his fifth or sixth foster home when he was around thirteen, spoke to him whenever he had been beaten up by neighborhood bullies because he was quirkless. He would drop beside him, even if he had a broken nose or bleeding lips and act like a tough older brother, yapping like a full grown man about how nobody else would care if he fell a thousand more times to the curb, that with raw determination, he could bounce back, and try again.
Henrik didn't respond immediately. His breathing was shallow, labored. His eyes flicked to the tunnel ahead, still stretching dark and long, like a gullet leading into the unknown.
The silence stretched between them, heavy with unspoken truths.
"I'm not a martyr," Henrik said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. "I'm just tired of pretending I'm not already dead."
Rhett stared at him for a long moment. The words hung in the air like smoke, acrid and suffocating.
Then he laughed. Not a big, heroic laugh. A dry, bitter little sound that echoed off the tunnel walls.
"Yeah?" Rhett's voice was quieter now, less joking. "You really think that's what this is?"
Henrik's eyes found his, and for a moment, Rhett saw something raw and unguarded there. Something that looked like the kid Henrik had been before the world tried to kill him.
"You dragged me out of a death loop," Rhett continued, his voice gaining strength. "You carried me when you were running on fumes. You got shot. Burned out your quirk. Why?" He leaned forward, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "You didn't need me anymore. You said so yourself."
Henrik turned his head away, but Rhett could see the muscle in his jaw working.
"So what is it, Henrik?" Rhett pressed, and now his voice carried an edge—not cruel, but relentless. The way Ryoji's voice had been when he'd forced Rhett to stand up, to try again, to keep going even when everything hurt. "Are you just pathologically incapable of letting people die next to you? Or are you actually still clinging to the idea of being a hero and just too scared to admit it?"
The question hit its mark. Henrik's hands curled into fists, the knuckles white against the grimy tunnel floor.
"Heroes?" Henrik's voice cracked. "You think there are still heroes in this?" He gestured weakly at the tunnel around them, at the blood on his clothes, at the darkness that seemed to press in from all sides. "Look around, Rhett. Look at what we've become. I tortured you."
"Yeah." Rhett's voice didn't waver. "You did. And you also got me out of there when you could have left me to die."
Henrik's breath came in short gasps, and for a moment, Rhett thought he might be having some kind of breakdown. But then Henrik spoke, his voice raw and broken.
"I don't know how to be what I used to be," he whispered. "I don't know how to be a hero when the world doesn't want heroes anymore."
The admission hung between them, fragile and precious.
Rhett felt something shift in his chest—the same feeling he'd had when Ryoji had first told him that getting back up was what mattered, not staying down. Raw determination, stripped of everything pretty or noble, but burning nonetheless.
"Then we figure it out," Rhett said quietly. "We try again."
"It's not that simple—"
"It is that simple." Rhett's voice was firm now, carrying the weight of every time he'd died and come back, every time he'd stood up despite the pain. "Maybe not easy. But simple."
Henrik stared at him, and Rhett could see the war playing out behind his eyes—the part of him that wanted to believe fighting against the part that had been broken too many times.
"Whatever, man." Rhett sighed, trying to lighten the moment as he tore a piece of his already ravaged shirt. The fabric was stiff with dried blood and dirt, but it would have to do. "Let's get you patched up."
He started to tie the makeshift bandage around a gash on Henrik's elbow, but Henrik waved him off weakly.
"Don't bother with that. Ineffective." Henrik muttered, then pointed to something a few feet away. "Bring that."
"This?" Rhett asked, walking over to grab what Henrik was indicating. It was an old, grimy, dented metal plate the size of his arm, probably debris from some long-ago construction project. When he handed it to Henrik, the other boy weakly grasped it and brought it to his bleeding flesh.
Immediately, the metal began to merge with his skin, fusing seamlessly until it became both bandage and armor. Rhett watched, fascinated despite himself, as Henrik's quirk worked its strange magic—taking the discarded, the broken, the useless, and making it part of himself.
Rhett still hadn't completely understood Henrik's quirk, just saw him removing his cloak and revealing the guns fused with his flesh, but now he had a better understanding, even made clearer when Henrik used his hero name, "The Merger."
"Your quirk. . . You can merge with objects?" Rhett asked with morbid curiosity. Then he changed his tone. "That's seriously fucking gross."
"You're one to talk." Henrik forced a dry chuckle, which only made him cough out speckles of blood. "You literally regenerate your entire body when you die. Do you know how disgusting it is from an outside perspective? Seeing the flesh and blood reform until the battlefield looks more like a slaughterhouse? I almost vomited when I saw that. Almost."
"Eh," Rhett shrugged, but there was less bravado in it now. "It gets the job done."
While they talked, Henrik's hand found a small steel cylinder and brought it to his calf. Rhett could see the flesh and bone rearranging beneath the skin, making space for the cylinder to serve as some kind of internal support structure.
They sat in companionable silence for a while, both lost in their own thoughts. The emergency lighting cast long shadows that seemed to reach for them with skeletal fingers, but somehow the darkness felt less oppressive now.
Henrik was probably processing his conversation with Marina, grappling with the choices he'd made and the man he'd become. The weight of abandoning everything he'd once stood for.
And Rhett couldn't stop thinking about what Marina had said—about seeing him and Casey together. He racked his brain, certain that the interaction had never happened, but could he be so sure?
The memory gap gnawed at him like a physical wound. How could he have forgotten traveling with Casey? How could he have no recollection of meeting Marina before? The regeneration had always brought him back exactly as he was—same memories, same personality, same driving need to save the people on his list. But now...
The simple fact was that he didn't know what was going on. He wanted to save the people on his list, hoping they were in Brookside.
But if Casey wasn't even in Brookside anymore—if she'd already escaped, already moved on, already found her own way to safety—did she even need his help?
Did he even have a purpose anymore?
He remembered what Ryoji had told him after another failed boxing lesson, when Rhett had been used as his own personal punching bag and then told to get back up. Again. And again. Until his legs shook and his vision blurred but he kept standing.
That's determination, Ryoji had said, his voice gruff with something that might have been pride. That's what it means to be a man. Not that you never fall down. But that you always get back up.
"Yo," Rhett said, stretching his hand toward Henrik, who was still flat on the ground. "You coming?"
Henrik stared at the offered hand for a long moment, his eyes still wary, still guarded.
"Why are you helping me?" His voice was small, almost childlike. "I've been nothing but a monster. Using you for bait, torturing you, leaving you to die over and over again."
"Just chalk it up to my sunny personality," Rhett said, but the joke fell flat. They both knew it wasn't that simple.
"Plus," Rhett added, more seriously, "I haven't given up on heroism. Unlike you."
"Really..." Henrik grunted as he tested his reworked ankle against the ground, wincing at the pain.
"Yeah. I always sort of wanted to be a hero, but I never really took it seriously, unlike you—going to that Hero academy, training, having a team and all that. It was more of a pipe dream that I never really acted on."
Rhett continued as he gazed down the unending maw of the tunnel, watching the shadows dance in the emergency lighting.
"But Ryo told me being a hero doesn't need to be official. That anyone can be a hero, if you just try helping people, whether with something big or small." He paused, remembering the weight of his foster brother's words, the way they'd anchored him when everything else felt uncertain. "And the most important thing? You don't have to be perfect at it. You just have to keep trying."
Henrik stared at him for a long moment, and Rhett could see the exact moment the decision was made. It wasn't dramatic—just a subtle shift in posture, a straightening of shoulders, a hand reaching up to grasp Rhett's offered help.
"And besides," Rhett continued, hauling Henrik to his feet, "you might prove useful, since you're trained and you're a good fighter with your quirk. I might need your help, if you agree to my working conditions."
Henrik leaned heavily against him, limping but standing. "What kind of working conditions?"
Rhett thought for a moment, remembering what Henrik had called him when he was still tied up and injured on the top of that building. Something about it had stuck with him, rolled around in his head during the quiet moments.
"Comrades," Rhett said finally. "Not friends, not teammates. Comrades. People who've got each other's backs."
Henrik was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was rough with emotion.
"Fuck you, Rhett."
But there was no malice in it—just exhaustion.
Rhett laughed, a genuine sound that echoed off the tunnel walls. "Fuck you too, Henrik."
He put his arm around the other boy's shoulders, supporting his weight as they began to walk toward whatever waited for them in the darkness ahead. It felt familiar, this gesture—the same way Ryoji had helped him walk after particularly bad beatings.
"Comrades," Henrik repeated quietly, like he was testing the word on his tongue.
"Comrades," Rhett confirmed.
Despite himself, a thought formed unbidden in Rhett's mind. On the people on his list, he wanted to save Henrik too.