BET

Prologue

【Ｄｏ　ｙｏｕ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｈｉｓ　ｍｕｓｉｃ？
Ｎｏ．】

Y/N wasn't sure just how she had managed to survive the final exams of her hero course without going insane. Sure, it wasn't a course as demanding as U.A. or some of those high class high schools that specifically focussed on making people heroes, but that didn't mean that it wasn't hard anywhere else. Especially when it was about someone like her, who was just... really good at all this shit. She didn't want to brag or anything, but as a matter of fact she had been flying through the first and second year of the hero course without much effort, but all of that bit her in the ass once she got to her third year. She had completely miscalculated some things.

Things had gotten a lot harder in the third year and the big problem was that she had been doing so good that everyone had certain expectations of her. And she had certain expectations of herself as well. So she really just put an immense amount of pressure on herself and it paid. She did incredibly well, she finished top of her class and she made it look like she did it with ease. But now that she was completely done with school she found that she was completely exhausted. And that exhaustion showed whenever she hung out with her friends or tried doing anything remotely fun. Slowly, but surely, Y/N was starting to think she might be getting depressed.

And it wasn't just her that was noticing it. Her friends from school were noticing it, too. A lot of them had signed up for college, some had found jobs in hero agencies. Y/N had been doing fuckall. She just didn't feel up to doing anything. Instead she was lying in bed wondering whether she was wasting her life, wasting her potential and why she couldn't have just been really bad at the hero thing and gone into... farming or something like that. Anything.

She was isolating herself from her friends and from her family until her mother one day had called an end to it and had told her in not so unclear terms that she would either go out for some food with her classmates this evening or she would be kicked out of the house and be forced to find a job or do anything to become a productive member of society. And since going out for "food" (her mother of course wasn't aware that they'd be sneaking into some bar with a fake ID and get drunk) was the way of less resistance, that was what Y/N was going with.

And now here she was, feeling miserable among all her friends that were chatting as if everything was normal, but that were looking at her with this odd worry in their eyes while she was staring into the void, not sure what the hell she was supposed to do with the remainder of her life. What was even worse was that there was so much left of it and Y/N had no clue what the hell she wanted to do. She felt like she had spent all the energy she had on that last year of high school and now she just didn't have anything left for the rest of her life.

"Okay, since no one else is willing to say it, I'll bring it up. Y/N, what the actual hell is wrong with you? You're not yourself." a girl with fiery red hair asked. Her name was Akiko Suzuki and she and Y/N had been hanging out almost every single day back in high school. But now it all just seemed meaningless. Akiko had gone off to college and was working in a hero agency part-time. She wasn't even doing hero work, she was working on the front desk. What a waste of talent.

"There's nothing wrong with me." Y/N protested. She could see her other friends around her looking at each other with shocked expressions on their faces. Apparently she had said something out of pocket. Oops.

"Y/N... you know, back in high school you were always kind of like some sort of eternal candle. Like you were just always shining, shining, shining and burning and it was like nothing could stop you. And now you're just... not."