Dancing Shadows

Chapter Thirty-Four

Bakugou's POV-
Cherry looks angry. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen her this upset, maybe not even that night at the ball. She paces back and forth in front of me while I'm on the phone with Jeanist's agency. They tell me to stay on the line a minute longer so they can track my phone and follow us as we tail Kaneko. When they're done, I hang up and Cherry immediately says, "Let's go."

She leads me through the maze that is the back alleyways of this city. Eventually, she says, "This way, quickly. They're about to leave the alley and I'll lose them once they're in broad daylight."

We catch up just in time to see them entering a literal fucking mansion across the street. We stay in the alley as I call the angency and tell them the address.

"Great job. Thank you both." The sidekick on the phone tells us. "Now, I need you to stay put until we get there."

Cherry grabs my phone and frustratedly explains, "I could teleport Bakugou and I in there right now, find Ryu, and teleport all three of us out within a matter of minutes. Then we wouldn't have a child caught in the middle of this fight. Let me go in."

The sidekick doesn't say anything for a long moment. Then they sigh before they reply, "Okay. But if you are spotted at any moment, you both leave immediately, whether you have the boy or not. Understood?"

"Yes, I understand."

"Okay. We'll be there in fifteen minutes. Be careful." They hang up.

Cherry grabs ahold of my hand and asks, "Are you ready?"

I nod, and with that confirmation, she teleports us inside.

I look around to see fluorescent lights, white tile floors, and white walls. "Where the fuck are we?"

"I'm not sure. The lights are too bright. I can't sense anything here."

We continue to walk down the hall. There are a few rooms that we come across. A few are just small training rooms, some are just empty, but most of them are filled with supplies such as ammunition, explosives, and medical supplies. It looks like they are preparing for a fucking war. But there's no Ryu.

After about five minutes of just wandering around, we find an elevator. We step inside it to see there are five floors in this building, plus a basement, and we are on the ground floor. We decide to make our way down before heading up, so we go down to the basement. Its a bit different. This floor is just one huge training room with no other rooms. A person who's missing limbs lays in a pool of their own blood in the middle of the room. When Cherry checks, they have no pulse.

"This looks like it was done by a quirk. Maybe Ryu was here? It would explain the blood on his hands."

"Possibly. Let's keep looking."

We head to the second floor. It ends up being the same as the first.

When we get to the third floor, Cherry says, "It's a bit unnerving that we haven't run into any villains yet."

"Yeah, it's really fucking weird."

We search the floor to only find more empty rooms.

We go up to the fourth floor, which we immediately see is different from the rest. There are only eleven rooms on this floor, and each of them has a name plate. Cherry immediately runs up the first door with the name Ryu. She opens it to see only a bed and a dresser. No decorations, no toys, and no Ryu.

We move onto the next door with the name Haru. We open the door to see a room that's a bit more lively with a boy who looks to be only a bit older than Ryu sitting on the bed in the corner. He looks frightened when he sees us but Cherry quickly says, "Please don't be scared. We are heroes. We are looking for Ryu."