It was 4:03 a.m.
UA's campus slept beneath silver mist. But inside the briefing chamber—no one dared close their eyes.
The hologram hovered in the air.
A still image of Kira.No expression. No color in her pupils.Just a faint white glow inside her irises.
Not from a quirk.From something else.
Aizawa stared.
"She doesn't have a quirk anymore."
Silence.
Mic tilted his shades up. "What do you mean—'anymore'?"
"I mean it's gone," Aizawa muttered. "We scanned her cells. Every quirk factor… erased. Rewritten like bad code."
Midnight blinked. "So what's powering her?"
"Not what," Nezu said quietly. "When."
In the underground lab, Power Loader ran the data again.
Kira's movements across time.
Not space.Time.
Every appearance, every pulse, every step—correlated to moments, not locations.
She wasn't teleporting.
She was folding herself backward through short segments of causality.
Seconds. Fragments. Echoes.
A living skip.
"She's not moving through the present," he whispered.
"She's skipping across possibilities."
Meanwhile, in the ruins of Musutafu's South Sector...
Kira stood on a rooftop. Hair rippling in the night.
Her eyes scanned the horizon.
Empty. Deserted.
Then—
The scene shifted.
Instantly, she stood on the same rooftop—but in sunlight.
The building was whole again.
The city alive.
Children played in the streets below.
One of them looked up. Waved.
It was Eri.
Kira blinked.
Gone.
Back to the rain.
Back to the ruin.
Back to the silence.
She clenched her fists.
"She showed me this."
In UA's dorms, Eri writhed in her sleep.
Sweat on her brow.
Horn glowing like a flickering candle.
Midoriya rushed to her bedside.
"Eri—wake up!"
She sat up fast.
Gasping. Chest heaving.
"I saw her. In my dream."
"Where?"
"Not... not here. Not now. A future. A better one."
Her eyes filled with tears.
"She's stuck between it. Between what could happen... and what shouldn't."
Aizawa stormed into Nezu's office.
"I'm taking Eri off-campus."
"No," Nezu said calmly.
"You saw what happened last time."
"Yes. And she's the only one Kira responds to."
Aizawa gritted his teeth. "She's a child."
"She's a key."
A long pause.
Then Nezu added, softly, "And if Kira breaks... time itself may crack with her."
Kira wandered empty streets.
No destination.
Only glitches.
Images flickered around her. Not hallucinations.
Echoes.
Dead soldiers. Explosions. A crumbling UA tower.
Another flicker—Eri, grown, standing atop rubble, horn glowing like a sun.
"Stop!" she yelled.
Kira looked up.
"Eri...?"
The vision blinked.
Gone.
Only rain again.
Only her.
Alone.
Back at UA, Power Loader finally pulled it up.
A ghost pattern.
Woven through all their time-stamped camera data.
Each Kira anomaly pulsed at perfect 13-second intervals.
Across every wing. Every floor. Every dimension of their surveillance grid.
Except once.
Just one time...
Where the pulse bent.
Shifted.
Broke its pattern.
Power Loader zoomed in.
Eri's room.
Kira stood there in the feed. Watching Eri sleep.
For exactly fourteen seconds.
The only place she stayed longer.
"Why there?" Midnight asked.
Aizawa already knew.
"Because that's the only place she feels real."
Nezu sipped his tea.
Watched the blinking dot on the holographic map.
"Kira isn't just a girl stuck in time," he whispered.
"She's the future begging to exist."
To be continued.