SSD: Eri

1. Exile

This bonus book is set part way through Part VI of the SSD series. When Silver returns to class after the summer, an incident that occurred in the holidays is briefly mentioned. Meet the incident!

As with much of the SSD series, this book doth require a number of warnings.

Possessive behaviourChild abuse*Implied/referenced past sexual assault*Threat of suicide*

*ones with asterisks will have in-chapter warnings. Those without will not because they run through so much of the book that there wouldn't be any book left. If the warnings without asterisks will be difficult for you, please, I love you all so much, please do not read, you will only hurt yourself, and that will make me sad. This book is not necessary to understand the rest of the SSD series (or Controlee), it is only a bonus book.

This fight just refused to end. Working with her foster brother was always nice, but more often than not, it got to be real troublesome. It wasn't often that they got to work together since being students meant they only teamed up when the heroes they were with teamed up, but Silver was already starting to notice a disturbing pattern:

Her brother, only a year older than her at seventeen, seemed to have a knack for being involved in cases where the villains were unexpected in some way. Smarter than assumed. More powerful than believed. Many instead of few.

It wasn't even like every case he had seemed to be like that, because he'd told her about several that went completely normally. It only ever seemed to be during the cases when she was also there that life got hard for both of them.

She really should stop agreeing to working with Hitoshi, it would make her life so much easier in the long run. Hell, Silver would take patrols with her foster parents over this.

It was a summer work studies that had brought them together this time, not like last year when Hitoshi had been on his work study and she'd been on round two of her internship with Shouta. The heroes they were working with today were another underground hero Chaya (Hitoshi's last work study hero) had suggested for him and a hero similar to Recovery Girl— though a little younger and a little more willing to get involved in a fight— for Silver.

When Silver's mentor had read about her heart condition in her file, he'd practically told her she wasn't to get involved in any fights whatsoever. It was frustrating. Her condition limited how long she could last in combat, but if a fight lasted that long, then something had gone so seriously wrong that Silver's help would be needed. Still, he had a lot to teach her about field medicine while a fight was ongoing so she sucked it up. At least he wasn't sidelining her because she was quirkless, right?

So today, she was here as Hitoshi's backup and medical aid, and only barely backup. The idea was, if something happened, he was meant to fight and she was meant to call for help.

That very quickly and very obviously stopped being an option.

It was a tip that had brought them here. Anonymous. Unsubstantiated. The likelihood of anything happening was in the decimal region, which— naturally, with Silver and Hitoshi's combined bad luck— meant everything happened. And since the heroes they were working with had had so little faith in the tip turning up anything, Silver and Hitoshi were the only two here.

The villain case they'd been working was against Exile. The villain had made a minimum of twenty-four people disappear over the last three months and efforts to catch him had only ended in further vanishings. Exile's quirk seemed to work via physical contact with his hands, and eye-witness accounts described how victims seemed to pop out of existence when that contact lasted for a few seconds (an exact time hadn't been figured out yet, though the approximate guess was five seconds). As no victim had been found yet, the likelihood was that the quirk didn't just make people vanish, it killed. Near-instantaneous death at the touch of a hand.