Chimera.
That was what Akira named her quirk. An animal companion that could transform into any existing creature, adopting all their natural abilities. If it became a snake, it could produce venom. If a bat, it gained echolocation and flight. If a blue-ringed octopus—well, Mateo had just witnessed that firsthand. The creature, which Akira called Dong, was more than a pet. It was an extension of her will, capable of infiltration, reconnaissance, and as the chrome-suited woman had learned, assassination.
The paralytic toxin worked with brutal efficiency. Within seconds of Dong's bite, the woman's nervous system had been overwhelmed, her muscles locking in place as tetrodotoxin blocked the sodium channels in her nerve membranes. She'd collapsed like a marionette with severed strings.
As the woman hit the floor, twitching and immobilized, Mateo fell too. His neck landed on a jagged piece of concrete that tilted his head at just the right angle to see what was happening. He still couldn't move his body—whatever the man in the white coat had done to him persisted. In the corner of his vision, Alex lay motionless beside the paralyzed woman. Is she breathing? The question clawed at him, but he couldn't turn his head to check.
In front of him, Mateo could only see the man from the legs to his torso. The clinical calm that had defined his movements was gone. His hands trembled slightly as he pulled out what looked like a tablet, fingers flying across the screen. Dong had already transformed back into a sparrow and disappeared into the maze of ruined buildings, probably returning to Akira.
They're coming. Henrik and Akira are coming.
But the relief was short-lived. The problem wasn't that he didn't trust their abilities—the problem was he still had no idea how this bastard's paralysis worked. Alex and Mateo had been turned into sitting ducks despite their training and various strategies. What if the same thing happened to his teammates?
On cue, Mateo heard movement behind him.
A shout—Akira's voice—came from behind one of the buildings, gaining distance and speed as she approached. Mateo's heart lifted. Come on, Akira. End this.
Then the sound of running stopped.
A dull thud as a body hit the ground.
No. The realization hit Mateo like ice water in his veins. She'd been paralyzed too. Whatever this man's quirk was, it had range. Serious range.
The man in the white coat made a sound that might have been satisfaction. "Predictable. They always rush in without understanding the parameters."
Now Henrik was their last hope. But what if he was still dealing with whatever had kept him and Akira busy before?
Mateo's vision blurred with frustration. Move, damn it. Do something. Anything.
The man stepped closer, and Mateo caught sight of his face for the first time. Mid-thirties, maybe. Wire-rimmed glasses. The kind of face you'd see in a university lecture hall, not standing over paralyzed teenagers in a war zone. But his eyes... his eyes held the cold interest of someone conducting an experiment.
"Fascinating specimens," he murmured, crouching down to examine Mateo more closely. "The Academy's new batch shows remarkable potential. The slime-based hero especially—such versatility in defensive applications. The King will be pleased."
Specimens. We're specimens to him.
The man reached into his coat and withdrew a syringe filled with something that glowed faintly blue. "This should keep you stable during transport. Can't have the merchandise deteriorating."
He's going to drug us. Panic spiked through Mateo's paralyzed form. Where the hell is Henrik?
The crack of the gunshot split the air like thunder.
Suddenly, feeling rushed back into Mateo's limbs. The paralysis vanished as if a switch had been flipped. His muscles screamed in agony from the earlier electrocution, but he could move. The quirk user is down. That's why I can move again.
He struggled to his feet, legs shaking, vision clearing as he tried to process what had just happened. One second he was helpless on the ground. The next, there was Henrik standing over—
The smell hit him first. Copper. Sharp and metallic and wrong.
'Oh.'
The sight that greeted him made his stomach lurch. Earlier, when he was on the floor, he could only see the man from the legs to the torso. Now he could see everything.
The pristine white coat was no longer white. Dark red spread across the fabric like spilled ink. The shot had gone straight through his temple. Blood leaked steadily from the wound, pooling on the cracked pavement below. Fragments of bone and grey matter decorated the concrete in a grotesque constellation.
He's dead. Actually dead.
"Good, you're mobile again," Henrik said matter-of-factly, sliding his weapon back into his body beneath his coat. He surveyed the scene with the detachment of someone checking items off a grocery list. "Status report. Injuries?"
"What happened?" Alex groaned, pushing herself up from the ground. Blood trickled from her nose, which sat at an unnatural angle. Behind them, Akira was getting to her feet as well, Dong perched on her shoulder as a small green finch.
Mateo's eyes remained locked on the corpse. He'd known this day would come eventually—their mission was to eliminate villains, after all. But knowing something intellectually and experiencing it were entirely different beasts.
He didn't feel sick like he'd expected. He wasn't horrified or traumatized. He just felt... empty. As if the corpse had taken something from him he hadn't realized he could lose.
"Y-you killed him," Mateo heard himself say, the words coming out flat and distant.
"Killed him? What do you—" Akira started to speak, then froze as she walked forward and took in the murder scene. Her face went white as chalk. "Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god."
She stumbled to the side and retched violently, emptying her stomach of the dry rations they'd eaten hours earlier. The sound echoed off the ruined buildings.
Even Alex seemed subdued. She stared at the body with an unreadable expression, absently touching her broken nose. "Did you really have to kill him?" she asked quietly. There was something in her voice Mateo had never heard before—uncertainty. Alex, who believed in strength above all else, who thought might made right, was looking at ultimate might and finding it... lacking.
"He was a threat," Henrik said with the same tone he might use to comment on the weather. "We eliminate threats."
For a long moment, no one spoke. The weight of what had just happened settled over them like a burial shroud. Mateo found himself staring at the dead man's face. His eyes were still open, staring at nothing with the glassy fixation of the recently deceased.
Their first kill. The war had officially begun for them.
"So what do we do with the body?" Henrik asked, breaking the silence.
Mateo genuinely didn't know. Reeves had never briefed them on corpse disposal. Maybe she assumed they wouldn't make it this far. There was no soft earth around to bury the body, and leaving it here seemed wrong on multiple levels.
"If we leave it," Mateo said slowly, thinking aloud, "and another villain finds it, they'll know heroes are operating in the area. That compromises our stealth mission."
"We need to carry it back to base," he concluded with growing certainty.
"How the fuck do you propose we do that?" Alex snapped, some of her usual fire returning. "You want to sling a corpse over your shoulder and march back home? You'll get blood everywhere! And what if someone sees us?"
Mateo felt oddly like they were covering up a crime scene, even though what they'd done was legally sanctioned. This is what being a hero means now. This is what we signed up for.
"I have an idea," he said, calmer than he felt.
He extended a large tendril toward the dead man, fighting back his revulsion as the green slime enveloped the corpse. Soon it was completely encased, a grotesque cocoon that sealed away the blood and brain matter. The metallic smell faded.
He raised his arm, and the body-cocoon slid across the ground with minimal friction. No blood trail. No evidence left behind.
Then he hefted the dead weight onto his shoulder, trying not to think about what he was carrying. The evening sun was setting, painting the dead city in shades of orange and red. Dark clouds gathered overhead, and the first pale stars were becoming visible. It might have looked beautiful, if not for the circumstances.
I'm carrying a dead body. I'm eighteen years old and I'm carrying a dead body because my teammate shot a man in the head.
Akira finally stopped retching, but her face remained corpse-pale. "We're really going to carry this... thing... back?"
Alex sighed heavily. Mateo got a better look at her face now—her nose was definitely broken, the skin around it swollen and discolored. Blood had dried beneath one nostril. She'd taken the hit when the paralysis dropped her face-first to the ground, but she was doing her best to hide the pain. "We don't have another option. Reeves needs to know what happened here."
Now she wants to follow orders, Mateo thought with bitter irony. Maybe if Alex hadn't rushed in, none of this would have happened. But even as the thought formed, he wasn't sure it was fair. They were all learning. They were all making mistakes.
"We need to move," Mateo said wearily, adjusting his grip on the corpse-cocoon. "It's getting dark."
Before they could start walking, Akira whirled on Henrik with tears streaming down her face. "Don't you feel anything?" she demanded, her voice cracking. "You just killed a person! A human being! Don't you feel... anything? Anger? Shock? Regret? It would feel better if you were laughing right now! How can you just stand there without a shred of emotion? That's not human!"
Henrik's expression didn't change. "You're acting like this was unexpected."
"Of course I expected we might have to fight! But you didn't have to execute him! He was down! We could have captured him, interrogated him, maybe even reformed him! He might have had a family, people who loved him—"
"'Might have' doesn't stop bullets," Henrik cut her off. His rigid posture relaxed slightly, and for just a moment he looked less like an emotionless soldier and more like a tired teenager. "We had no way to know if the situation would escalate. His partner was down, but he still had his quirk. He could have paralyzed us all again and called for backup."
He paused, something almost human flickering across his features before the mask slammed back into place. "Besides, do you think the other side will have these moral debates as they put bullets in our heads? Do you think that hybrid bastard would show us mercy?"
Akira tensed at the mention of the hybrid, but didn't respond. She folded her arms defensively as Dong shifted from finch to caterpillar on her shoulder.
Hybrid bastard. Mateo's ears perked up at the term. Was that who Henrik and Akira had been fighting? They seemed mostly unharmed, so either they'd won, escaped, or... Mateo decided to ask about it later, when everyone wasn't running on emotional overload.
As they prepared to move, a twitch from the chrome-suited woman drew their attention.
"Right," Henrik muttered. "Akira, you still have the antitoxin?"
"Yeah," she sighed, pulling a small medical syringe from a compartment in her costume. She knelt beside the paralyzed woman and administered the injection. The rigid twitching stopped, and the woman's body relaxed into what looked like natural sleep.
"That's one less death on our hands, at least," Akira said quietly.
"Mateo, can you restrain her? In case she wakes up during transport."
"Right." He shot slime at the woman's hands and feet, binding them with the same gelatinous fluid that currently encased a corpse.
"My hands are kind of full," he said, gesturing to his grisly cargo. "Can someone else...?"
"I've got her," Alex said, hoisting the unconscious woman over her shoulder with a grunt. The roles were reversed now—minutes ago, this same woman had been carrying Alex like a sack of grain.
As they began the long walk back to base, Mateo couldn't shake the feeling that something fundamental had changed. Not just the mission parameters or their tactical situation, but something inside each of them. He'd felt it the moment Henrik pulled that trigger—a line being crossed that they could never uncross.
His muscles ached from the electrocution. His skin still felt raw and tender where the electricity had burned him. The weight of the dead man pressed against his shoulder with each step, a constant reminder of what they'd become.
Was this a victory or a defeat? Mateo honestly couldn't say.
As they walked through the gathering darkness, shadows seemed to stretch longer than they should. More than once, Mateo caught movement in his peripheral vision that disappeared when he turned to look. It felt like they were being observed—not just watched, but studied. Catalogued.
He thought about the dead man's final words. "The King will be pleased." Whoever this King was, he'd just lost two assets. Would he send more? How many others were out there, treating teenagers like specimens to be collected?
The base felt impossibly far away. Each step took them deeper into a war they were barely prepared to fight, carrying the dead weight of their choices on their shoulders.
Behind them, in the ruins they'd left behind, something shifted in the shadows. But when Mateo glanced back, there was nothing there except empty buildings and the growing dark.