Paint the Stratosphere Red

22

Aizawa cursed under his breath when he came across the distorted figure of something unimaginable.

He had seen many horrible quirks in his life. He had seen horrible things, a wendigo taring the head off a nomu. When Hiryur walked towards him out of the shadows, he looked like something straight out of purgatory.

(He thought he was fighting his students. Not this. Never this.)

Here, It looked like Hiryur, but his eyes were hallowed. His eyes were gone. His mouth was circular and looked like a sea lamprey with hundreds of sharp teeth that line the entirety of its mouth.   long claws tearing across cement and powerlines where they collapsed and danced across the ground like venomous snakes.  Aizawa could do little to stop him- he could only dodge and evade and watch as this... thing hunted him.

"Hiryur!" He shouted, because what happened?

The thing-  a  changeling he realized,  growled and shrieked at him with rattling cries. The creaking of a door hinge, the tapping of cat claws across his kitchen floor. A collection of sounds with no humanity and  Aizawa moved.

His eyes burned, and the shell receded enough to recognize that his student was the manifestation- and still, Hiryur flung forward wreathed in a shapeless dark aura.

And he broke the line of sight behind a breaking billboard and failed to emerge from the other side.

Aizawa refused to break composure. He settled on a lamppost, crouched at the ready with his capture scarf prepared to whip. Beyond the billboard out crawled a different creature. It was Hiryur. It looked exactly like Hiryur, with no physical changes.  His eyes were a soulless gray, he smirked.

It spoke to him in a growl, a mimicry of his voice: " Run."

Aizawa whispered, "Good God."

The boy ran at him.

'No, that isn't him,'  Aizawa concluded.  'It has to be his quirk...right? '

Hiryur made a horrible rattling noise, reptilian or...like something long extinct. One long hooked claw made of shadows extended, gripping and shredding metal as it descended down the front of the billboard. Aizawa steadied himself on his lamppost. If Hiryur's higher thinking had been suppressed (how had Hiryur done that? ) then the boy would attack him in a clear obvious way. He had to activate Erasure timed, counter the child into the ground, and subdue him.

"Easy..." Aizawa murmured quietly. He wasn't called often to instances like this, where body modification quirks went wild. Let alone his student.

(Something about this...bothered him, to his core.)

His student opened his maw and roared .

It jumped at him, fingers outstretched. Aizawa activated his quirk, lifted his arm into a firm counter and hurled Hiryur into the ground.

The boy scrambled at him, claws (hadn't he removed his quirk?) tore against his shirt and scraped against his reinforced body armor. He was kicking and clawing against his throat and shirt and neck.

Hiryur was thrown to the ground, already scampering away behind a broken wall. Aizawa steadied himself for the counter-attack...

...and it didn't come.