Keigo Takami

The air above Musutafu sang with the shriek of parted wind and the metallic tang of blood. Hawks, a crimson streak against the azure sky, wove through the villain’s retaliatory blasts with practiced, desperate grace. His feathers, extensions of his will, danced a lethal ballet—a shimmering cloud of precision that sought the heart of the chaos: a pulsating gem embedded in the villain’s armored chest. Below, the park was a diorama of upturned earth and scattered debris. Each movement sent a fresh lance of pain through him—a throbbing, wet heat at his left temple, and a searing line of fire along his forearm where a blade of condensed air had sliced through jacket and skin alike. His visor was gone, lost in the tumult, leaving the world painfully bright and unfiltered.

With a final, concerted focus, a dozen feathers found their mark, piercing the gem in a shower of crystalline shards. The villain’s power guttered out like a spent star. Momentum carried Hawks downward in a controlled, gritty descent, boots skidding on churned soil as he secured the restrained foe. He delivered his report to the waiting officers through gritted teeth, the words clipped and efficient, a professional mask over the dizziness beginning to swim at the edges of his vision. As the villain was loaded into a transport, Hawks turned toward the flashing lights of an ambulance, a beacon of promised respite.

It was in that moment of transition, as his guard dipped a fraction, that chaos erupted. A shout, a scuffle—the new officer overwhelmed. The supposedly neutralized villain had one last trick, a final, desperate emission of energy from his shattered core. It wasn’t a blast of force, but a strange, pressurized wave that washed over Hawks. It felt like a giant, unseen hand giving him a firm, disorienting shove. He stumbled back, the world tilting on its axis, his balance deserting him. His hands found the cold slats of a park bench, gripping until his knuckles turned white. The dizziness intensified, a swirling vortex behind his eyes. He saw Best Jeanist’s denim-clad form blur past, heard the definitive snap of fabric restraints, but the sounds were muffled, distant. The vortex claimed him, and the world dissolved into silent, deep black.

Time Skip...

A sterile white ceiling. The slow, steady beep of a monitor. Consciousness returned to Hawks in a gentle, unhurried tide. The clock on the wall read 5 P.M. The doctors were reassuring, their diagnosis almost dismissive: a concussive-wave-type Quirk, designed to disorient and cause a fall into the surrounding hazards. A lucky escape. Hawks offered a trademark, lazy smile and a nod, the perfect picture of compliant recovery. But beneath the surface, a restlessness vibrated. Duty called. After a few cursory stretches that pulled uncomfortably at fresh sutures, he was airborne, the hospital shrinking away beneath him.

The sky was his sanctuary, his true home. But today, as he ascended above the jagged skyline of Musutafu, the sanctuary turned against him. A sharp, sickening stab of pure agony lanced through his skull, utterly disruptive. His breath hitched. The meticulously maintained altitude slipped away as if the air had turned to liquid lead. His hands flew to his temples. The world spun into a nauseating carousel.

"What the hell was that Quirk?!"

The cold truth settled in his gut. It hadn't been a simple concussion. It was a trap, a time-bomb designed to detonate in the one place he was most vulnerable. His wings, extensions of his very will, became clumsy, heavy burdens. He listed violently to the side, his vision tunneling. The shimmering blue-glass facade of a high-rise office building rushed up to meet him. He fought with every shred of his legendary control, his primary feathers straining to adjust, to pull up, but his neural commands were scrambled, his coordination in tatters.

My body isn’t listening—

Impact. A cataclysm of shattering glass, a deafening symphony of breaking crystal. A rain of glittering daggers. A brutal, grinding slide across a cold, hard floor. Then, a ringing, profound silence.

Dazed, every tiny movement sending fresh pinpricks of pain through him, he pushed himself up to a sitting position, leaning back against something solid. The world was… wrong. Terribly, monumentally wrong. The floor tiles were vast, seamless plains. The scattered glass shards around him looked like glacial spikes. The ceiling was a distant, unreachable sky. And his own body…

He looked down.

His hands—the hands that wielded Fierce Wings with pinpoint precision—were tiny, pudgy starfishes with dimpled knuckles. His arms were soft, rounded rolls. A wave of cold, clinical shock washed over him, followed immediately by a hot, unstoppable physiological revolt. Tears welled and spilled over, accompanied by a loud, hiccupping sob that erupted from a place deeper than thought—a purely infantile distress his sharp mind could observe with horror but not quell. The tiny, downy red tufts on his back, the pathetic precursors to his magnificent wings, fluttered in useless agitation.

Damn, the sharp, adult cognition of Keigo Takami cut through the babyish cries, I was a cute kid. Wait, focus! I need to get out of here, now.

He tried to stand, to command his legs. They buckled instantly, betraying him with the utter helplessness of new, untested muscle. He swayed and thumped back onto the floor, a wave of furious humiliation hot on the heels of the shock. The familiar, streamlined fabric of his hero costume—the sleek flight suit, the reinforced jacket—now hung off him like a deflated, cavernous tent. The collar gaped wildly around his neck, the sleeves swallowed his arms whole, and the bulk of the material pooled around his tiny body in heavy, wrinkled waves, threatening to trip him with every movement.

Great. Now I have to learn how to walk again. In this… blanket.

Cursing internally with a vocabulary utterly at odds with his form, he resorted to crawling. It was a clumsy, lurching progress, his palms slapping on the cool tile, the excess fabric of his costume dragging and tangling around his knees. Glass crunched ominously nearby. His mind, the mind of the Number Two Hero, raced. Communication. Backup. My phone.

His hawk-like eyes, still preternaturally sharp despite their new, large proportion to his face, scanned the colossal landscape. There—by the leg of a chair that towered like an office building—was his phone. Or rather, its corpse. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks, dark and utterly unresponsive. He crawled to it, his chubby fingers struggling to even close around its massive form. He poked it, slapped it, but it remained a dead, black slab. Frustration bubbled over, manifesting in another loud, wavering cry that escaped his lips without his consent. He was trapped: in a broken body, in its uncontrollable expressions, and in the absurd, drowning fabric of his own identity.

Then, a new sound. The definitive click of a door handle. The soft scuff of footsteps on the entryway mat.

Instinct, both hero and prey, screamed at once. Hide. He abandoned the phone, waddling and crawling with desperate, graceless haste toward the deep shadow of the gigantic chair, the excess material of his costume hampering his every move. A bag of groceries hit the floor with a heavy, decisive thud, followed by a sharp, startled gasp that seemed to echo in the vast, broken room.

He froze. Caught.

The presence loomed behind him, a silhouette blotting out the light from the hallway. Slowly, heart hammering against his tiny ribs with a frantic, birdlike rhythm, he turned his head to look over his shoulder. His wide, tear-brimmed golden eyes lifted to see who, or what, now owned his fate.

The figure stood frozen in the doorway, their features obscured by the backlight, their shock a palpable force in the suddenly suffocating silence.