The Wraith {MANIA Prequel} - BNHA

THREE

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SENSORI
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3 years later...

The loud crash of glass sounded from the teenager's bedroom upstairs.

It was like a bullet of silence had pierced the house and left nothing in its wake. The life and color that was the Arima Residence had vanished completely. Time seemed to move in slow motion as the three words on the television were displayed in giant font across the screen like it was screaming out to Kimiko Arima.

Three simple words... that's all it took for Kimiko's entire world to shatter around her.

Sensori is dead.

Kimiko stumbled backwards, moving slowly away from the screen and the shattered remains of the glass cup that she had dropped not a moment prior. She couldn't hear anything. She couldn't even hear her own breathing or her heart beat. Even the news broadcast seemed to fade into nothingness in her ears. It was as if she was underwater and all sound from the above world had just muffled into nothingness. She opened her mouth to scream out some sort of response or fit of agony, but nothing came out. There weren't even bubbles to expel from her lungs in the deep blue sea of despair.

She felt like she was drowning.

She tripped on her own two feet as she took a step back, falling onto the ground. She slid and crawled backwards, trying to get as far from the television as she could, until her back hit the hard frame of her bed.

She took a shaky breath in and out, bringing her knees up and hugging them against her chest. There were no tears. There were no cries of anguish. There was nothing. She didn't know how to react.

But how could she? How was she expected to react when one of the most important people in her life was suddenly ripped away from her? No warning. No signs. Nothing. Simply and utterly nothing.

Life had a funny way of showing how precious it truly was by taking it all away in an instant.

Kimiko closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to her knees. She screamed, but she couldn't hear it. She screamed louder, and louder—only to hear the distant and distorted sound of her pained cries as if she was miles away from herself. Her fists clenched and she made little crescent imprints against her legs as she squeezed her fragile skin. She was shaking.

But she soon lost her grip on herself and all control she once had. She felt herself slip away into nothingness when her quirk activated on its own. Her legs disappeared and her arms followed suit soon after, shifting into a dark gaseous state. Her physical limbs changed into a black smoke, funnelling and creating a cloudy sheet over the ground. Startled, she brought her head up and stared down at her body in terror as she shifted into nothing but a cloud of smoke.

She raised her chin with eyes full of fear as if she could run away from it, but she couldn't. Her eyes closed and anything physical left of her was simply gone. Turned to smoke and air. The dark smoke rested gently on the ground as she existed all throughout it, leaking across the ground like a puddle of gas. She opened her eyes again and looked up at the ceiling of her room. It was like she was floating in a never ending space of darkness as she lay in her gaseous state. She could feel her body but it simply wasn't there. She could see every little nook and cranny in her room where her smoke stretched but she couldn't touch it with her hand or feel it.

She was a ghost. A smoky illusion.

Kimiko closed her eyes again and let her mind fade away like her body had. Maybe... maybe she hoped she wouldn't be able to feel anything when she turned to smoke. She wouldn't have to feel the pain that Sensori's death brought into her life. Maybe she wouldn't have to bear it... but that was a lie—a false sense of hope she could only wish for.

There was silence in Kimiko's room, until she heard the familiar and distant sound of the front door opening and closing slowly from downstairs.

She opened her eyes and peered up from where she was floating in her smoke. The dark gas slipped underneath the door like a rolling fog and barely fluffed out into the hallway from her room. She could see farther. Along with her room she could now see out into the hallway and further down the stairs where her mother had just entered the house.

The blonde pro hero was bruised and beaten down. She was covered in dust and ash from the mission she had just come back from alone. Her visor was cracked and in her hands and she leaned against the doorframe. Her eyes were glazed and staring down at the ground.

Kimiko held her breath when she saw the state of her mother. Never in her life had she seen her mom so... broken... before. Irisa had always been headstrong and brave and confident. She never let anything phase or deter her from her goals and ideals. Everything happened a certain way for Irisa and it always went according to plan...

But that long record of perfection had finally come to an end. She let her partner—her sister—die.

Kimiko's jaw fell open in her metaphysical form. Everything she once knew was crumbling to pieces. Sensori was gone and Clockwork was breaking, shattering in her place.

Irisa bit down harshly on her bottom lip and marched slowly up the stairs. At some point in her trance she dropped her cracked visor on the ground, letting it fall down the stairs and crack further when it hit the bottom of the steps. The broken helmet rolled pitifully to a stop as it hit the leg of a table.

Her heels dragged across the ground as she walked into the hallway, not noticing the smoke that was drifting out the door of her daughter's room. Her mind was dead and gone, just like her sister. Kimiko watched in horror and silence as her mother suddenly stopped in her tracks next to the archaic grandfather clock against the wall.

The soft ticking of the clock as its golden pendulum swung back and forth was the only sound that was heard in the entire house. It had always been this way. Never, in Kimiko's whole life of being in this house, had the clock ever malfunctioned or stopped chiming away. They had gotten used to its incessant ticks and tocks and chimes as the hour changed. Time was always consistent. Just like her family... Kimiko used to believe.

The gears of the clock churned silently, only giving off a small indication of the loud ringing that would follow with the changing of the hour.

However, it never came.

Irisa's face contorted into a look of anger and she screamed out at the top of her lungs like a banshee. She turned towards the clock and violently punched her fist through the ordained glass, shattering the front of the clock. Her fist grabbed onto the golden swinging pendulum and yanked it out. The clock's ringing heightened in pitch and rang numerous times before the golden instrument finally came loose.

The clock sounded like it was screaming, or crying, for another chance at life. But Irisa would have no mercy on the old antique.

She stood, breathing heavily in the hallway, her arm raised at her side with the pendulum in her grip. It was like she ripped the organs out of the clock. Blood dripped from her wrists and arms from the cuts and scrapes of the shattered glass she had made. Her golden eyes were dark and solemn, but unforgiving and with no remorse.

For the first time in 13 years that Kimiko could remember, there was no soft chiming in the house. For the first time, the clock didn't ring out with loud tones for the coming of the new hour. It didn't chime to signal Orina's precision of being right on time when she entered the house...

But maybe it was because there was no one left to arrive.