Night slowly crept over the jungle.
This jungle.... which was our main cast's home for quite a while.
Akira and Momo had been out here for four days now.
Four days without internet. Four days without TokTik... or as Momo called it, "the application that is systematically reducing the attention span of our generation," and as Akira called it, "the thing I watch while eating breakfast." Four days without news feeds, social media, messages from classmates, or any connection to the world outside this forest.
Just trees. Training. Mirko's kicks. And each other.
Right now, the jungle was quiet.
Mirko was fast asleep. Her sleeping bag was spread out beneath a tree at the edge of the clearing. Which, to no one's surprise, was a bright orange sleeping bag covered in a print of cartoon carrots.
The woman who kicked down Supreme Court doors and fought villains with nothing but her legs and her attitude slept in a sleeping bag decorated with vegetables. Her rabbit ears poked out of the top, twitching occasionally in her sleep.
And she snored. Softly. Which almost made her look cute for a moment.
Momo was asleep too. But not in a sleeping bag.
Her head rested on Akira's lap. She was lying on her side, her body curled slightly, her ponytail loose and spread across his knee. Her breathing was slow.
Akira's hand rested on her hair. His fingers moved through it slowly — gently massaging her scalp in a motion that had become habit over the past months. He did it when they watched movies. He did it when they studied. He did it when she fell asleep on his shoulder during long train rides.
She never asked him to. It just happened.
His other hand rested on the ground beside him.
He was looking at the campfire.
The flames danced. Orange. Yellow. The natural colours of combustion — wood burning, oxygen feeding, heat rising. Simple chemistry. The same process that had been happening since the first human struck flint against stone and watched the spark catch.
But Akira wasn't watching the chemistry.
He was watching the movement. The way the flames shifted. The way they reached upward, bent sideways in the breeze, contracted and expanded in patterns that were never quite the same twice.
It was as if the flames were..... 'alive'. That was the word. The flames looked alive.
As he stared, his mind drifted.
Back to the mindspace. Back to the garden. Back to the moment after his death, when he had floated in darkness and then awoken in a sea of purple fire beneath a white sky. Back to Aurelia.
The flames in that place had been different.
Not different in colour or temperature or intensity. Different in behaviour.
The purple fire that had filled the mindspace had reacted to him. When he moved, it moved. When he reached out, it reached back. When he breathed, it breathed with him. As if the flames weren't just around him — they were part of him. Extensions of his body. Limbs he hadn't known he had.
And those flames hadn't belonged to him. They were Aurelia's. The original flame. The fire that existed before the split, before red and blue, before offensive and healing. The unified flame.
But they had responded to him anyway.
Does that mean... I have control over flames?
The thought surfaced slowly. It was a question that felt like an answer. The kind of question that had been sitting in the back of his mind since the resurrection, waiting for a quiet moment to make itself known.
Not just my flames. Flames.
He thought about the quirk-suppressing cuffs. About how they hadn't worked. About how the suppressant had entered his bloodstream, encountered whatever Aurelia had changed inside him, and simply... evaporated. The cuffs were designed to suppress a quirk. His flames had ignored them completely.
Is my quirk even a quirk anymore?
The question was bigger than it sounded. Quirks were biological. They followed rules that scientists had spent decades mapping, categorising, and understanding. Quirk factors. Quirk registers. Output limits. Suppression thresholds. The entire framework of modern hero society was built on the premise that quirks were quantifiable, manageable, and controllable.
But what if his flames had evolved past that framework? What if Aurelia's intervention hadn't just upgraded his quirk — but transformed it into something that the framework couldn't contain?
Something older. Something that predated quirks entirely.
He looked at the campfire. At the dancing flames that belonged to the wood, not to him.
Then he looked at his free hand and summoned a flame.
Red. Small. Hovering above his palm. The familiar warmth of his offensive fire, the flame he had been born with, the one that had defined his identity since childhood.
He closed his eyes.
And just felt it.
Not used it. Not shaped it. Just felt it. The way you feel your own heartbeat when you press your hand against your chest. The way you feel your lungs expand when you take a conscious breath. The awareness of something that was always there but rarely noticed.
What is this?
The flame pulsed in his palm. Warm. Steady.
What are my flames?
He let the question sit. Didn't try to answer it. Didn't try to analyse it the way Momo would have, with frameworks and hypotheses and experimental protocols. He just asked, and waited, and felt.
Is it a tool?
The flame flickered. As if responding to the question. As if the word "tool" was wrong and the flame wanted him to know it.
Something I just use?
Another flicker. Sharper this time. A pulse of heat that wasn't intentional — wasn't generated by his conscious control. The flame reacting on its own. Disagreeing.
Is it something I was born with?
The flame steadied.
Is it just another part of me?
The warmth deepened. As if the flame was sinking into his skin, merging with his bloodstream, becoming indistinguishable from his body heat.
And then the final question rose from somewhere beneath all the others. From a place deeper than thought, deeper than memory, deeper than the garden and the tea and Aurelia's ancient eyes.
What am I?
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.
And everything went black.
Not darkness. Not the absence of light. Blackness. The complete, total, infinite void that existed before light was invented. The kind of black that had weight, that pressed against his skin, that filled his lungs when he breathed.
Akira floated.
There was no up. No down. No gravity. No horizon. No ground beneath his feet and no sky above his head. Just the void, extending in every direction, endless and absolute.
"What?"
His voice didn't echo. It was absorbed. Swallowed by the blackness as if sound itself couldn't survive here.
He looked around — or tried to. There was nothing to look at. Nothing to orient himself against. Just the void and the silence and the sensation of floating in a space that shouldn't exist.
Then he saw it.
In front of him. Distant at first, then closer.
A shape.... A circular shape.... A massive circular shape....
Hanging in the void like a second moon, radiating energy that Akira could feel pressing against his skin from a hundred metres away.
It was something like an yin-yang symbol.
Not the simple, two-toned symbol printed on t-shirts and tattooed on forearms. This was something else entirely. Something ancient.
Something that made the symbol look like a child's drawing of the thing it represented.
The yang half burned with blue flames, the healing fire, the regenerative warmth, the flame that had saved his life at Kamikochi and healed every wound he had ever suffered. But amplified. Intensified. Burning with a ferocity that Akira had never achieved, never imagined, never known was possible. As if..... it was alive. Breathing.
The yin half burned with red flames, the offensive fire, the destructive force, the flame that had burned Muscular and scorched the Sports Festival jungle and defined everything the world feared about him. But like the blue, it was beyond anything he had ever produced. The red was so intense it looked like liquid.
The two halves spun slowly. The blue is bleeding into the red. The red is bleeding into the blue. The boundary between them not a line but a gradient.
And the intensity. The sheer, overwhelming, incomprehensible intensity. Both flames burning at their absolute maximum. Not constrained by Akira's body. Not limited by his control. Not filtered through the biological framework of a quirk. Just flame. Pure. Unlimited. The full, unrestrained potential of what lived inside him.
Akira floated closer.
He couldn't help it. The pull was like gravity, but not gravity.... it was something deeper. The pull of a thing calling to its origin. Of a flame recognising its source. Of a boy approaching the core of what he was.
He drifted forward slowly. The void parted around him. The light of the yin-yang grows brighter, hotter, more overwhelming with every metre.
He got closer.
And closer.
And then he was close enough.
Multiple arms shot out of the construct.
They erupted from the surface of the yin-yang — dozens of them, hundreds, a forest of limbs made entirely of flame. Blue arms and red arms, intertwined, reaching, grasping, extending toward Akira with a speed and purpose that left no room for escape.
He tried to move. His body refused. The void held him — locked in place, suspended, unable to retreat, unable to dodge, unable to do anything except watch as the arms closed the distance.
They reached him.
They wrapped around him.
Blue arms around his legs. Red arms around his torso. Blue hands on his shoulders. Red hands on his face. They covered every inch of his body — layering over him, cocooning him, pulling him toward the centre of the construct with a grip that was absolute and inescapable.
And they started to burn.
"AGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!"
The scream tore from his throat.
The red flames burned. Actually burned. His skin blistered. His nerves fired. The pain was real.... after years, flames were hurting him.
And the blue flames healed. In real time. The blisters closed as fast as they formed. The nerves repaired as fast as they fired. The damage was undone the instant it was done, only for the red flames to burn again, and the blue to heal again, and the cycle to repeat — faster, more intense, more excruciating with each revolution.
Burning and healing. Destroying and rebuilding. Death and life, applied simultaneously, in an endless loop that made every second feel like an eternity.
Akira screamed. He couldn't stop. The pain was beyond anything he had experienced — beyond Muscular's beating, beyond losing his arm, beyond dying. Because those had been temporary. Those had ended. This didn't end. It just continued, layer after layer, burn after heal after burn after heal, his body being unmade and remade in a cycle that had no visible conclusion.
And then, as if a grand announcement was being made to an audience that existed beyond the void, beyond the flames, beyond anything Akira could perceive — a voice spoke.
"To know the flame, you must feel the flame."