Ultra Responsibility (My Hero Academia X Spider-Man Reader)

Issue 66 - Beginning of the End Part 1

The orphanage slept in pieces.

A radiator that clicked too loud. A window that never sealed properly. A hallway bulb that flickered like it was thinking about quitting.

In the girls' room, the curtains were pinned shut with old safety pins, and the only light came from a tablet held low beneath a blanket, its glow smeared across anxious faces like candlelight in a storm cellar.

They weren't supposed to have it.

That was why they hid it. That was why they watched anyway.

The broadcast stuttered, then steadied into a shaky live feed. Sirens. Floodlights. A ruined building. Heroes moving in a tight perimeter like they were afraid the ground might open and swallow them.

A voice from the tablet barked questions in a language that wasn't theirs. The name on the screen meant nothing, but the tone did.

A broadcaster's voice buzzed through cheap speakers. "Breaking... confirmed pro hero response... multiple entities... the situation is developing—"

"Turn it down," a girl whispered, thick vowels softening the words in a Sokovian lilt. "If matron hears, she breaks it."

Another girl, eyes wide and shining, didn't look away. "Where is All Might? Where is he?"

"He always comes," a third said, like a prayer she'd repeated enough times it almost sounded like truth. "There is nothing to worry. All Might saves the day."

The first girl hugged her knees. "But why they look like that? Why everyone... running?"

On the small screen, a man in a suit stood in the rubble like he belonged there.

The air around him looked wrong. Not smoke. Not dust. Something darker, cleaner, more deliberate. The heroes moved, tense, but even through a screen it was obvious: they were reacting, not controlling.

"Where... where did he come from?" one girl breathed.

"Who is that?" another asked.

Then the camera caught someone else.

A boy. Bound. Head tilted forward. Blackness clinging to him like living clothing.

And something red, thin as mist but heavy as blood, leaking from his body in faint pulses that made the picture glitch at the edges.

The girls spoke over each other, suddenly loud enough to be dangerous.

"What is that red fog?"

"It is quirk thing, yes?"

"It looks like—like curse."

On the far bed, apart from them like an island, a little girl sat cross-legged with an old doll in her lap. The doll was patched in several places, its stitching uneven, its button eye dull. The little girl's brown hair fell around her face as she smoothed the doll's dress with careful fingers, over and over, like repetition could keep the world from changing.

She didn't look at the tablet.

She didn't flinch at the sirens.

She didn't care about the voices climbing into panic.

"Wanda," the first girl hissed, twisting around. "Wanda, you have to see this!"

Wanda didn't answer. She kept rocking the doll.

Because the room had gone cold.

Not the normal cold of a place that never had enough heat. This was a different kind. A cold with intention. The kind that presses fingertips into the back of the neck. The kind that makes breath visible when it shouldn't be.