What do I want?
The question echoed in Mateo's skull as he stumbled through the desolate street, each step sending fresh waves of pain through his broken ribs. The city stretched before him like a graveyard—empty storefronts with their windows blown out, abandoned cars rusting where they'd been left, the skeletal remains of what had once been someone's life scattered across cracked asphalt.
Behind him, footsteps. Light, determined, refusing to fade no matter how many blocks he put between them.
"You want a chocolate bar?"
Mateo didn't turn around. He'd left Bram in that apartment complex two hours ago, told him to stay put, to hide. But the kid had found him again. Somehow, he always found him.
"You've already given me enough," Mateo grunted, though his stomach cramped with hunger. The chocolate Bram had used to wake him up had been the first real food he'd tasted in days.
"My mom used to tell me I'm not myself when I'm hungry." The boy's voice was closer now, and Mateo could hear the rustle of a wrapper being peeled back. "She said hungry people make bad decisions."
Mateo's mom had said similar things, back when they were alive. Back before the first wave of attacks had turned their neighborhood into a crater. Before everything fell apart.
The chocolate bar appeared in his peripheral vision, held by a small hand that shook slightly despite the kid's casual tone.
Mateo's stomach won the argument with his pride. He snatched the bar and triggered the mechanism that unlocked his mask's jaw guard, shoving the chocolate into his mouth. His broken teeth screamed in protest, but the sugar hit his bloodstream like a drug. For one blissful moment, the constant ache in his body dimmed to a manageable throb.
"Why are you still following me?" he asked after forcing himself to swallow.
"Why?" Bram's voice carried that particular brand of ten-year-old logic that made perfect sense to him and no sense to anyone else. "Because you're the only one that can save me here, right? Like you said, if you weren't there, that lightning woman would have killed me!" His voice faltered slightly. "Then again, she was chasing you, so I guess it was your fault from the beginning... Either way, I need your protection!"
Protection. The word sat in Mateo's chest like a stone. He couldn't even protect himself. Couldn't protect his team. Couldn't protect his brother when it mattered most.
"I'm tired," Bram announced, dragging his feet in an exaggerated shuffle. "Can we sit down?"
Mateo sighed—something he'd been doing a lot lately. The distant boom of explosions rolled across the empty city like thunder, reminding them both that the war was still raging elsewhere. Heroes and villains still fighting. The world still ending, piece by piece.
"You're slowing me down," Mateo muttered, but he was already scanning the street for shelter. The truth was, he needed the rest too. His body felt like it was held together with spite and slime residue.
They found an abandoned supermarket with its front door torn clean off its hinges. Someone had been there before them—the shelves were stripped bare, not even a can of expired soup left behind. But it had walls, and a counter to lean against, and most importantly, it was empty.
Mateo slumped behind the checkout counter, breathing heavily. Every breath felt like broken glass in his lungs. His slime had sealed the worst of his wounds, but underneath the coating, his body was still falling apart.
"Do you have more food?" The question burned his throat..
"Yeah." Bram rummaged through his backpack, producing an impressive collection of candy bars and lollipops. Months old but still good.
Mateo grabbed a handful and stuffed them into his mouth, not caring about the pain in his jaw. Sugar was energy, and energy was survival.
Minutes passed in silence. Outside, something exploded in the distance—another building brought down, another piece of the city erased. Mateo found himself wondering who was winning. Heroes? Villains? Did it even matter anymore when the whole world was burning?
"Why do you only have candies for food?" he asked eventually. "I'm surprised you have any food at all. Wasn't the city wiped clean by the refugees and villains?"
The unspoken question hung between them: Why are you still here?
Bram's smile faltered, becoming something small and broken. "Well, it's what I hoarded for Halloween a couple months ago. Before the..." He trailed off, staring at the wrapper in his hands. "It's nothing."
Mateo didn't push. He recognized that particular shade of pain—the kind that lived in the spaces between words, in the things you couldn't bring yourself to say out loud.
They sat in silence, two kids eating candy in the ruins of the world. Eventually, Bram spoke again.
"What's your name?"
Mateo hesitated. Names were dangerous things. They made you real, made you human. But looking at this kid—this abandoned, scared kid who'd somehow found the courage to follow him through hell—he felt something crack in his chest.
"Mateo."
"Oh, okay." Bram nodded, as if filing the information away. "So what's your hero name?"
Hero name. As if he deserved one. As if what he'd been doing for the past week counted as heroism.
"I don't have a hero name," Mateo said, his voice rougher than he intended. "Names and rankings don't mean much when we're on the edge of a war, do they?"
"I guess so, but it'd be cool to have one, wouldn't it?"
Mateo's hand drifted to his mask, fingers tracing the bent and twisted metal that had once been shaped like horns. Alec's horns. His brother had wanted to call himself the Horned Demon—a name Mateo had laughed at, called stupid and villainous. Now those horns were all he had left of his brother, and they'd saved his life more times than he could count.
Would Alec even recognize what he'd become?
"I think if you had a hero name, it would be 'The Slime Hero,'" Bram said, pulling Mateo from his spiral of self-doubt.
Despite everything, Mateo laughed. Actually laughed, the sound rusty and foreign in his throat. "Slime Hero? Really? That's like, the most uncreative name you could think of."
"But it fits, right?" Bram's grin was infectious. "The Slime Hero. It has a nice ring to it."
It did, Mateo realized. In another world—one where the war hadn't happened, where his parents hadn't died in the first wave of attacks, maybe he would have been proud of a name like that.
The silence that followed was different this time. Comfortable, almost. But questions burned in Mateo's throat, and eventually, they spilled out.
"Why are you the only one here, Bram?"
The change was immediate. Bram's face went red, a mixture of embarrassment and something darker. Something that looked like shame.
"Oh, it's nothing really. I guess we all just find ourselves in situations like these, you know?"
"No." Mateo's voice was flat, final. "You were wandering through empty apartments all alone. That doesn't just happen. Where were you when everyone else was evacuating?"
He saw it then, in Bram's eyes—that particular kind of hurt that Mateo knew too well. Abandonment. The special kind of pain that came from being left behind by the people who were supposed to protect you.
Bram's voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "They said I was weird. That my quirk was creepy." He unwrapped another candy bar but didn't eat it, just stared at the chocolate while drawing his knees to his chest. "They locked me in the basement. My foster siblings. Tricked me into going down there, then..." His voice cracked. "They said I needed to learn to keep my mouth shut about the things I saw."
"How long?" Mateo asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"Three days. Maybe four?" Bram's voice was steady, but Mateo could hear the tremor underneath. "It's hard to tell when you can't see sunlight. When I finally got out—I broke the lock with a chair—the whole city was... empty. Everyone was gone. The emergency broadcasts had stopped. It was just me and the ruins."
Three days. Three days locked in a basement while the city was being evacuated. While the war was literally tearing through the streets above. While the adults who were supposed to protect him had abandoned him in the dark and run for their lives.
Mateo felt something dangerous building in his chest—a rage that had nothing to do with his brother's death and everything to do with a ten-year-old kid being thrown away like garbage.
"But there's something else," he said, forcing his voice to stay level. "Something about your quirk. How do you keep finding me?"
Because Bram had found him. Again and again, no matter how far Mateo traveled or how carefully he covered his tracks. It should have been impossible.
"You really want to know?" Bram asked, his fingers twisting together.
"Yeah, that's why I asked."
"Okay..." Bram took a shaky breath. "I have a quirk that lets me see into the past. When I enter an environment, I can see what happened there before. Usually just a day or so, but if I really concentrate, I can go back months."
Past-sight. Mateo's mind immediately cataloged the implications. In the wrong hands, that quirk could topple governments, expose secrets, destroy lives. In the right hands...
"So you follow my footsteps backwards?" he asked.
"Yeah. I saw that fight with the electric woman—Eschart, you called her? At the Crispy Corner." Bram's voice was quiet now, careful. "That's how I was able to confirm that you were an actual hero."
Hero. The word sat wrong in Mateo's mouth. Bram had seen the fight with Eschart, but what else had he seen? Had he followed Mateo's trail all the way back to the college, to that stairwell where he'd—
No. Bram's voice held no accusation, no fear. Just the simple faith of a kid who still believed in heroes.
Mateo looked at his broken right hand, at the mangled gauntlet that had once been his pride. Over the past week, he'd told himself he was doing what heroes did—eliminating villains, protecting the innocent. But now, sitting in this ruined store with this abandoned kid, the weight of what he'd done crashed down on him.
I killed them. The thought came with crystal clarity. I hunted them down and I killed them, and I told myself it was justice.
His stomach churned, bile rising in his throat. The chocolate turned to ash in his mouth.
"That's actually really useful," he managed to say, focusing on Bram's quirk instead of his own spiraling thoughts. "Your quirk, I mean."
"Not really." Bram's expression darkened. "It doesn't help me see the future. I can't warn people about things that haven't happened yet." His voice broke slightly. "If I could, maybe I would have known about the evacuation. Maybe I wouldn't have been locked in that basement while everyone else got to safety."
The real wound, exposed at last. Not just abandonment, but the cruel irony of having a quirk that showed him everything that had already gone wrong, but nothing about what was coming next.
"I used to think I was cursed," Bram continued, tears forming in his eyes. "Seeing all the bad things that happened in places. The fights, the tears, the goodbyes. Do you know what it's like to walk into a room and immediately see every argument that ever happened there? Every time someone cried? Every moment of pain that place has witnessed?"
Mateo thought about his own quirk—the slime that had saved his life countless times but had been useless when it mattered most. The power that had failed to protect the one person who actually mattered.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I do."
Bram wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "My foster parents said I was making things up. That I was lying for attention. But I wasn't lying—I could see it all. The husband hitting his wife in the kitchen. The teenage daughter crying in her room because kids at school called her ugly. The little boy hiding in the closet while his parents screamed at each other." His voice got smaller.
"So you learned to keep quiet," Mateo said.
"Yeah. When the evacuation orders came, they told me it was just a drill," Bram continued. "Said I needed to wait in the basement until they came back for me. They were very specific about not leaving, about staying put no matter what I heard." His voice cracked. "They locked the door from the outside. Just to make sure I didn't get confused and wander off."
"But they never came back."
"No." The word was barely a whisper. "By the time I broke out, the whole city was empty. Just me and the ghosts of everything that had happened."
They sat in silence after that, two broken kids sharing candy in the ruins of civilization. Outside, the distant sound of explosions continued—a rhythmic percussion that had become the soundtrack to their lives.
Finally, Mateo spoke.
"Your quirk isn't creepy," he said. "It's not perverted or wrong. It's powerful, and it scares people because they don't understand it."
Bram looked up, hope flickering in his eyes.
"In the right hands," Mateo continued, "a quirk like yours could save lives. Could expose the truth when everyone else is lying. Could help heroes figure out what really happened when everything goes wrong."
"You really think so?"
Mateo thought about all the times over the past week when he'd wished he could see the past—could understand how situations had developed, could track villains more effectively, could piece together the truth from scattered evidence.
"I know so," he said. "You're not cursed, Bram. You're not disturbed or wrong or any of the things they told you. You're just... different. And different can be powerful."
Bram's smile was small but genuine. "What about you?"
"What about me?"
"Your quirk. Do you think it's disgusting?"
The question hit like a punch to the gut. Disgusting. That's what he'd called it himself, in the dark moments when he wondered why he'd been given something so unnatural.
"I used to," Mateo admitted. "I used to think I was cursed too. That I'd been given something repulsive while everyone else got real powers."
"But not anymore?"
Mateo looked at his hands—one broken, one functional, both capable of producing the slime that had kept him alive through hell. "Not anymore. My quirk... it's saved my life more times than I can count. It's gotten me through hero school, through fights I should have lost, through situations that would have killed anyone else." He paused. "It's not beautiful, but it's mine. And it's useful."
"Useful," Bram repeated, like he was testing the word.
"Useful," Mateo confirmed. "Just like yours."
They finished the candy in comfortable silence, two survivors recognizing something fundamental in each other. Outside, the war continued to rage, but inside this ruined store, two kids had found something that felt almost like peace.
A small movement caught Mateo's eye. Something green and serpentine was slithering through the shattered storefront window.
An emerald snake, about the size of a garden hose, moved with deliberate purpose toward them. Its scales caught the filtered sunlight, and when it lifted its head, Mateo saw familiar intelligent eyes.
"Dong," he breathed.
The snake—Akira's quirk given form—coiled itself into a loose spiral on the floor between them. Its head swayed back and forth, and Mateo could swear he saw relief in its reptilian features.
"SNAKE!" Bram scrambled backward, his voice cracking with terror.
"Easy," Mateo said, raising a hand. "She's... she's a friend."
Dong, reading Bram's fear like she always did with people, morphed into a small Golden retriever puppy. The tail wagged, but even in this form, exhaustion clung to her like dust.
Mateo's chest tightened. Dong's alive. That means...
"Where's Akira?" The words came out rougher than he intended. "Is she okay?"
Dong's head bobbed once—a nod—then shook side to side. Yes and no. Alive but not okay.
"She's hurt?"
Dong shifted into a sloth and lay motionless on the cracked tiles.
The breath left Mateo's lungs. "Paralyzed? In a coma?"
A nod. Slow, deliberate. Final.
Just like that? His hands clenched into fists. Akira, who never hurt anyone, who worried about stray cats and always shared her food—
"Where is she?" The question came out sharper, angrier.
Dong began shifting rapidly between forms—earthworm burrowing through tile cracks, then a dove flying upward, then back to snake form, slithering in erratic patterns. The message was clear: somewhere complex, somewhere she couldn't map.
"Can you lead us there?"
The snake's posture changed instantly, becoming agitated. It shook its head violently and began moving in panicked, desperate patterns. Something was keeping it here, keeping it from going back.
Mateo felt his stomach drop. "Then how did you—"
Dong transformed into a fly and buzzed through a crack in the wall. Small spaces. Tiny escapes.
"Henrik," Mateo said suddenly. "What happened to Henrik?"
Dong paused, then became a cockroach. First, she played dead. Then she mimed being dragged away by some invisible force. Then played dead again.
"You don't know." It wasn't a question.
The cockroach's antennae drooped.
Bram, who'd been silent through the exchange, finally spoke up. "Who took you?"
Dong eyed him warily, but Mateo nodded. She tried to transform into something larger—a bear, maybe—but flickered and shrank back down. Her limits were showing.
Finally, she settled on a rooster, brown feathers gleaming, red comb proud and defiant.
Mateo's brain, still dulled from hunger and exhaustion, struggled to keep up—until it clicked.
"King." The name tasted like ash. "King took you."
The same King that Slave bragged about. The puppet master pulling every villain's strings for the past two and a half years.
Dong nodded, then shrank into a chick. Not King himself. His soldiers.
Mateo slumped against the counter, the weight of it all pressing down on him. Akira in a coma. Henrik missing. King collecting quirk users like trophies.
Just like Amara.
The memory of those blank, barely human eyes in the muscle-bound villains flashed through his mind. They were stacking quirks, turning people into weapons. And in exchange for power...
"Why did you come to me?" The question came out quieter than he intended.
Dong coiled back into snake form, then did something that made his blood run cold. She pointed her tail at him and made it flicker erratically.
"They're coming for me," he said slowly. "Specifically."
She nodded.
"My quirk?" He created a small puddle of slime in his palm, his body protesting the effort. "This? Why would anyone want this?"
The slime was just... slime. Not fire or ice or super strength. Just gross, sticky, useless—
No. Not useless. Eliza's words echoed in his head. I see potential in you, even if you don't.
Did King see something he didn't? Or were they planning to stack it with something else, turn it into another weapon in their arsenal?
The thought made his skin crawl. He hated his power, sure, but it was his.
Dong shifted again, this time into a bright red-headed lizard with blue scales.
"You're looking for Reeves?"
A nod.
"I don't know where she is." The admission felt like swallowing glass. Reeves had left on her reconnaissance mission and never came back. Dead? Captured? Or worse—
Was she the mole?
Dong made a disappointed face and turned into a chimp, cupping her hands around her mouth in a whispering gesture.
"You need to tell her something. Something secret."
Another nod, this one apologetic.
So that was it. His options laid out like cards on a table: keep hunting villains until he dropped dead, or help Dong find Reeves. Neither felt like winning.
What would Alec do?
Alec was the one that really wanted to be a hero. He was the heroic one between the two brothers. He was everything I wanted to be. Strong, brave, kind.
"Was I really all that?" Alec's voice materialized beside him, invisible to Bram and Dong. "Strong, brave, heroic? I mean, I'd like to think I was decent, but..." He flexed his barely visible bicep. "Not exactly the words people would use."
Mateo pressed his palm against his helmet, refusing to look.
"Then why don't you act like that?" Alec leaned closer. "Did I ever tell you I wanted revenge? Did I ever strike you as the vengeful type?"
The cognitive dissonance twisted in Mateo's chest. What Alec would have done versus what Alec would have wanted. The brother he remembered versus the ghost haunting him now.
"Mateo?" Bram's hand touched his shoulder. "You okay?"
"I'm fine." He stood up despite the pain shooting through his ribs.
All this time, he'd been chasing ghosts. Hunting names on a list. Telling himself it was for Alec, when really it was for the rage burning in his chest. But this... this might actually save someone.
"I'm done running in circles," he said, the words feeling like pulling teeth. "We find Reeves. Or we die trying."
Too many missing pieces. Eschart and Reeves' connection. Alan's death. The barely human fighters. Ben's special mission. Amara's kidnapping. Now Akira.
And King, the shadow pulling every string.
Mateo didn't care about half of it, but Reeves had information. And whatever secret Akira wanted to share through Dong—whatever was worth risking everything to escape and deliver—it was a piece of the puzzle.
Maybe the biggest piece.
A high-pitched whining sound cut through his thoughts. Both boys looked up as a small drone descended through the broken ceiling, its camera lens focusing on them with mechanical precision.
"Shit," Mateo cursed, scrambling to his feet. "We need to move. Now."
But it was too late. The drone had already begun transmitting, its red recording light blinking rapidly. Mateo lashed out with a tendril of slime and smashed it against the ground. But he knew they were no longer safe.
His first thought was that it was a hacked official drone, turned into a spy machine. And only villains would want to spy on them. Which meant they were in danger if they stayed here any longer.
"Come on," he grunted in pain as he wrapped his arm around Bram and Dong curled around his arm.
He let loose a tendril and shot himself sideways, through the exit of the abandoned store. The door was rusted shut, so he had to activate the hydraulic function in his gauntlet to break through. The front of the glove shot forward with hydraulic force and the door gave in with a billow of dust.
"Who was that?" Bram asked, fear creeping into his voice as he coughed out the dust.
"I don't know, but—"
The sound of an engine roaring to life cut him off. Mateo saw a sleek red motorcycle racing down the debris-strewn street, and instinctively knew the rider.
Green jacket. Combat boots. That hair.
Of course it was her.
But something was different. The bike looked reinforced, sturdier and more compact. Torrents for long-range combat had been set at each side. A protective shield glimmered around it, military-grade. A golden V had been encrusted on the bike's front like an insignia.
'She didn't bring that with her.' Mateo thought clearly. 'So where did it come from?'
The rider swerved and skidded the bike to a stop in front of them, the engine roar cutting off abruptly. She dismounted with fluid grace, pulling off her helmet to reveal a familiar face framed by dark hair.
"Yo, Boss." Alex said as she mounted down and flashed a smile at him.
The last time they saw each other, Mateo had abandoned her, running out of the City Hall Base to go on his destructive mission. After much pushback, she had let him go through tears, telling him how she went against her ideals to save him, because she cared about him.
And now here she was. There was still some sadness hidden behind her smile, but she didn't look deterred like last time. Her green irises, like Mateo's, looked determined.
"Remember when I said I wanted to have another fight with you?" Alex said as she grinned, revealing her wolf-like canines. "Well then, the time is now."
She cracked her knuckles, while Dong's head swiveled confused between Alex and Mateo. Which was to be expected. The last time Akira had been with them, they had been a functional team. She didn't witness Alex and Mateo's falling out.
Bram looked up to Mateo as he placed him down. "Is she a villain?"
"No, she isn't." Mateo said as in front of him, Alex got into a fighting position. Her feet stable on the dusty concrete floor with her hands held up in fists.
She's taking me seriously.
Past Mateo would've been invigorated by that, but it just left him feeling hollow. And oddly scared.
"Bram, go hide in the store. Dong, protect him."
Dong reluctantly slithered from Mateo into a raven and directed Bram into the store they'd just run out of.
"I've beaten you once already." Alex said as she twisted her neck to her sides, creating loud cracking noises. "And I'm going to beat you again."
Twice, Mateo corrected internally. Once in their entrance duel, and again when she pinned him against a wall. But that last one was so one-sided, Alex barely considered it an actual fight.
"Why?" Mateo's voice sounded empty, even to him. The sun was above them now. Mid-day afternoon, casting shadows and heat. "Why do you want to fight me?"
"Because I realized fighting is the only way to get into that dumb head of yours" She winked. "And fighting's the only thing I'm really good at anyways."
Despite the casual delivery, Alex pressed on. "I'm offering you two options, Mateo. If you win, you get to run away to wherever you want to. I promise you'll never see me again."
"And if I win?" Mateo found himself asking despite himself. The familiar competitive air he felt whenever he was with Alex was beginning to infect him with its contagious energy.
"Then you come back to me." She smiled, and it looked completely genuine. "You join the B-2 team you left behind..."
Their eyes connected, and Mateo felt a jolt of something awaken in him. At his side, Alec emerged and stared forward, a small smile crawling to his face.
"...And maybe finally we can talk. Really talk."
"I like her." Alec grinned as he folded his arms like he was about to watch a movie. "This will be interesting."
Mateo ignored the ghost of his deceased elder brother and stood his ground. Something was rising in him. Something he hadn't felt in a long while.
Excitement.
His mind went back to his first real fight ever. His brawl with Brett. He remembered what he said, and repeated it verbatim, though with grim finality.
"Let's fucking go." He growled as he clasped his hands and rushed forward.
This fight wasn't like the others. In his previous fights, he was either fighting for his pride, to get admission into AA, for mandated combat duels, or for his life.
This fight didn't have such high stakes. Even still, Mateo felt something burning in him, like Alex had rekindled a fire that wouldn't die down.
Even though the stakes weren't that high, Mateo could feel that the result would completely change the direction of his life.
Alex was always the stronger fighter. That was undebatable. At the beginning of their journey together, she had demolished him in their entrance duel, even without using her quirk.
Even after all the training Mateo faced in AA, he had never been able to physically reach her strength and martial prowess. Such was the gap between the two.
But Mateo hadn't relied purely on martial prowess to hunt those fifty-eight villains. He used tactics, traps and tricks to win in those dark alleys and stairwells.
Come to think of it, that was how Mateo had won a majority of his fights, including the one with Inferno. Not through brute strength, but by overwhelming the enemy, relying on speed and strategy.
But this was an open plain. He didn't have any dark corners to hide, but that didn't mean he was out of tricks.
He ran forward, and Alex held her fist up high to begin the battle. But before she could land a punch, Mateo dropped low, coiled tight—and launched skyward.
Twenty feet up in a heartbeat. Slime pulsed beneath his boots, spring-loaded from days of villain hunts. He wasn't stronger. Just smarter.
And he wasn't coming down empty-handed.
"The hell—?" Alex muttered, unfamiliar with Mateo's new tactics. Before she could finish, something hard shot towards her side. She spread her hand forward to push it back, but not before taking damage to her shoulder.
Before Mateo had taken off, he had twisted, hiding his iron block flail behind his curl before launching it.
As Alex reeled from the impact, she found her foot sinking into something thick and viscous. A slime trap—not destructive, but enough to keep Alex in check.
She looked up and saw him descending, the boy who looked like he had gone through hell. His horns were barely intact, his dark green hero suit was torn and scorched at multiple places, barely holding together. She caught glimpses of dried blood stuck to his suit.
"What the hell happened to you while I was gone, Mateo?" she muttered as she got back into fighting position, dealing with her right foot being immobilized.
Mateo gazed down on Alex as he descended. He couldn't stay in the sky forever. He shot whatever slime he had left in his gauntlet and felt the pressure build, threatening to fall apart in his hands.
"Just hold on buddy," Mateo muttered as the hydraulic cylinders wheezed and groaned wildly.
Alex's eyes widened as she recognized the setup. She brought her hand up and stretched her fingers. Push, in anticipation of the powerful blow.
Except that blow never came.
As he fell, instead of punching, he twisted his torso and ejected shortened tendrils to the concrete floor. He shot diagonally downward, and when his steel boots made contact with the ground, he used his inertia to slingshot toward Alex and delivered a kick that she barely blocked with the back of her arm.
He felt her bones rattle underneath his leg, but he knew she could take it. She was tough.
Before he could land another hit, Alex used her elbow and caught him dead center in the neck, knocking the wind out of him.
Before he knew it, she was throwing more blows, and Mateo was automatically fighting back.
Barely.
Even with the hydraulic punch feint, the flail hit and the slime trap, she's still a complete beast.
Her foot was still stuck, but that didn't seem to impair her one bit. She held her ground against his relentless attacks, and was even managing to overwhelm him even though she could only move one leg.
Is that simply how wide the gap between us is? This isn't working.
Realizing his strategy in hand-to-hand combat was not effective, he decided to switch tactics. With another slime spring jump, he bounced multiple feet backwards, but that little pause gave Alex all the advantage she needed.
Swiftly, she pulled her foot out of the combat boot still stuck in the slime. With one foot bare, Mateo could already feel the tide of battle shifting in her favor.
After that, Mateo could only describe what Alex did next as godlike.
Before he had a chance to launch a long-range attack, he felt the earth quivering beneath him.
Alex planted both feet—one booted, one bare—wide on the floor. She stretched her fingers, not at Mateo, but at the ground itself.
Cracks split the road like spiderwebs. The ground screamed as she pulled.
Mateo's mind lagged as he slowly realized what Alex was doing.
'She's tearing out the earth itself. She's using her pull quirk to pull weapons from the ground.'
Sure enough, Alex forced out two massive boulders the size of small cars from the ground, filling the air with red dust. Massive cavities remained in the road, as if a god had dug its fingers into the asphalt and clawed it out.
She's gotten stronger. Much stronger.
"Think fast!" She yelled as she stretched her fingers again and shot one of the boulders towards him.
"Shit." He grunted, the massive piece of rock approaching faster than he anticipated. He barely sidestepped it, plume of dust blocking his vision, impeding his reaction just before the next boulder came into view.
He could see the metal from the road embedded in it, the red earth, every jagged edge of its surface.
If it connected, he was minced meat.
No time to run, no time to jump. There was only one other option.
The hydraulic punch he'd faked. It was still activated, holding its release. Mateo punched forward with it.
The gauntlet met the boulder head-on, resisting its mass and tearing cracks through it until it crumbled completely into smaller pieces.
That wasn't to say the threat was completely neutralized. Waves of dust erupted from the clash, clogging his lungs, his damaged respirator barely doing anything against the onslaught.
His gauntlet fared even worse. Already weakened, the metal crumbled under the pressure and tore apart, the impact sending shockwaves through his arm.
She's not holding back. Mateo clenched his fist. And neither am I.
As he thought that, something came through the plume of dust that impeded his vision.
A palm, fingers outstretched.
Here we go again.
The palm caught him straight in the chest, and he was sent flying backwards—not due to the arm's raw strength, but because of her push factor activated on him.
He was sent flying backwards, but not before he heard two words that caught him in a web of confusion.
"I'm s-sorry!"
Huh? He thought as he stretched ten slime tendrils to catch the surfaces of buildings as attachment points to build tension for another slingshot.
The admission was voiced with a waver, like the person had never apologized for something in her life.
As the slime tendrils slowed his momentum and he came to a complete stop, he saw Alex as the dust cleared.
"Sorry, for what?" he asked, utterly confused.
"For bullying you!" she yelled. "I always thought I had to be stronger and better than everyone else. I always thought when you got stronger and beat me in competitions, you were trying to be better than me. And I couldn't have that!"
"What..." Mateo asked. "What does that matter now? After everything that happened?"
"That's why you left, right? Because of me, right?"
"So, you think that's it, huh." Mateo grunted, preparing to launch forward for another fight. He had to win this battle. "Everything from your mouth is 'I, I, I.' Well it's not fucking about you!"
"Then what is it about? Why did you leave the City Hall?! Why did you leave your team? Why did you leave me?"
"It's about him!" Mateo screamed, his throat feeling sore as he blasted himself forward towards her. "It's about my brother! It's about Ale—"
"You and I both know that's not true." Alec said, materializing in mid-air, just enough for Mateo to falter in his attack.
Alex took the opening wholeheartedly, deftly stepping out of the way. She punched him in the side and used her push factor to shove him into a nearby wall.
Mateo hit the brick wall with a thud. His eyes were blurring up. His already damaged body was falling apart in this fight. Wounds sealed off with slime were reopening due to his quirk's overexertion. Soon, his whole body would start breaking down.
"You're wrong, Mateo." Alex continued as she ran towards him to keep fighting, to win their battle. "This is about me. I'm the kind of girl that always gets what she wants. I'm the kind of girl that solves her problems through fighting."
He could hear the crunch of her single combat boot on the ground. "Do you know how hard it was for me? To see you broken on the floor after that explosion with Slave? To abandon my teammates, my friends, my fight, to save you? To see you after all that, throwing all my efforts away and running out on the battlefield? The very thing I trained for all my life and abandoned just to save you?"
She was just a few feet away from him now. The midday sun cast a glare on her, making her look even more intimidating as she gazed at Mateo. "I want to be a hero. Not just because I love fighting—but because I care about the people I love. I want to protect them and make sure they are okay. I care about my dad and mom. About Uncle Arx, his wife and kids. I care about the people in the other classes, about Team B. That is why I became a hero!"
She clenched her fists tightly. "I did that because I want you. You, the only thing in my life I haven't been able to have, no matter how hard I tried. That is what I want."
Their eyes connected, and Mateo could swear he felt something burn inside him. Alec appeared, not beside Mateo like he usually did, but by Alex's side. And then they both uttered one single question.
"What do you want, Mateo?!"
"I can't take this anymore!" He screamed, shooting a tendril and slinging himself away, away from Alex and his dead brother. Away from anything but here. Alex could take care of Bram and help Dong find Reeves, but Mateo... he couldn't deal with any of this.
He couldn't even deal with his own feelings.
"I'm not letting you run off again!" Alex yelled determinedly as she clenched her fist in Mateo's direction. "We're not done fighting! The only way this ends is if I yield, or you yield!"
"Fuck that, Velez," Mateo roared. "I'm done playing your games!"
But Alex wasn't done. She moved to another piece of rubble and pushed it towards Mateo at vicious speeds.
Mateo saw this one coming. He dodged just in time and sent a slime tendril to catch the piece of rubble, catapulting it back at Alex.
She barely dodged before Mateo converted his angular momentum into an overhead twist kick which she blocked, but now they were in the same space—which was bad for Mateo.
Blow after blow was traded, and Mateo could barely hold up. Not only did he feel like his body was breaking apart, it also felt like his mind was unraveling, being shredded to pieces because he was being confronted on his ideals.
"I want revenge, okay?!" he choked out, repeating what he said to Oblitus when questioned about his quirk. "I want to destroy Slave! I heard him on that night, two years ago! He killed my brother! My mother! He took everything away from me! I have to destroy him and every villain alive! I already have so much blood on my hands! That's what he would've wanted!"
"Do you even hear yourself, Mateo?" Alec sighed as he stood by Mateo while he fought with Alex. He was barely landing any hits, trying to weave and dodge as much as possible, but with every second, Alex landed more and more blows to his arms, shoulders, legs, ribs and stomach. He was running on fumes and frustration now. But Alec talked like he was watching a boring TV show. "I never told you to seek vengeance for me. So why are you really doing this?"
I'm doing this for you, Alec? Don't you fucking get it? I want to get revenge for you. That's why I became a hero! Because of you! I want—
"That's not what you want." Alec groaned, stomping his feet, sounding slightly annoyed while Mateo took even more blows. "That's what you think I want. If I never said I wanted to be a hero, if I was never killed by villains, would you still become a hero?"
"No." Mateo admitted, tears forming in his dry eyes as he absorbed Alex's hits. "I'm doing this all for you. I would've never been a hero without..."
"But you saved that kid," Alec interrupted him. "You saved Bram instead of going for Eschart. Instead of going for vengeance, the sole thing you keep saying drives you, you put saving that kid above that. Isn't that what heroes do?"
"No, that's not..." Mateo was about to say, but he realized, too late, that his hallucinations were distracting him.
A nasty right hook shot straight to his already fractured jaw, and the hinges that held up his mask broke. The metal helmet began falling in pieces, and Mateo felt something in him break.
"No. no no no no no no no no no no NO!" He screamed, slime strings streaming from his face to hold back the pieces of mask, to prevent the world from seeing what he looked like under his fake motives. To keep what he had left of Alec's image. To—
Slime tendrils writhed from his cheeks, desperate, pitiful, trying to stitch together the shattered pieces. Not yet. Not like this. He wasn't ready to let the world see what was left of him without Alec.
But it was already too late.
"Oh." Mateo thought. He felt the world slowing down, felt his environment changing for a brief moment as he was taken back to the sterile halls of AA, to his interaction with Brett. The thug turned hero-in-training had stayed back and offered Mateo a single cryptic line, even though the tough guy looked like he was struggling with his own issues.
"Don't lose it. Don't lose it like I did."
"I lost it, didn't I?" Mateo thought to himself and Alec, before the scene went back to the present, and a solid punch met his solar plexus.
"SMASH!" Alex roared as she punched Mateo in the diaphragm with all the strength she could muster.
Mateo felt bile rush to his chapped lips as all the fight left him with that punch and realization. There was no quirk packed in that final hit, just all of Alex's raw and primal strength, and that was more than enough to push Mateo to the brink.
"Do you yield, Mateo?" Alex yelled as she clenched her fists at him, he who could barely stand on his own two feet anymore.
But I couldn't save you, Alec, Mateo mumbled weakly. I let you die. My quirk let you die while you and mom burnt to your death. How can I call myself a hero when I couldn't even save you?
Alec stood in front of him, directly. So close that he could make out all the individual strands of his ruffled hair, the pores on his face, the smell of fries from long days at the fast food shops where he worked. Maybe if he reached out, he could even feel his touch.
He stood without answering for a while, then his hand went to the back of his head, a little embarrassed. "Well, I'm not a hero either, am I? I wanted to be, but I'm no longer here, am I?"
When Mateo didn't answer, Alec continued. "What I do know though, is that when I wanted to be a hero, all I thought about was that I wanted to save people. I'm a boring guy, but that's all I know."
He shrugged. "But you can't exactly save people that are no more, can you? You can't save me, or mom either. So what are you going to do? What does being a hero mean for you?"
Mateo looked at Alex, the girl who had risked it all, shaken her core values and came here to save him from himself. She was a hero. And she cared about him.
He was starting to realize he cared about her too. He cared about Bram, and Dong. And Henrik and Akira. And Reeves, and his team, and everyone else he had crossed paths with.
"You can't save dead people, bro." Alec shrugged. "That's just how it is. But you can save the people in front of you. And that girl in front of you cares a lot about you. So what are you going to do?"
After everything, all the suffering he put himself through, hating himself for not saving his family in an explosion he had no control over, pushing his body to the limit to beat the villain who took everything from him, training the same power he rejected to become a murderous hero, hunting and killing villains one by one in the ruins, the answer came surprisingly easy.
I want to be the kind of hero that cares, he thought. And then aloud: "I yield."
The broken pieces of his mask clattered freely to the ground, falling apart completely.
"There you are," Alex said softly, lowering her fists. "There's the real Mateo."
He stood there, exposed and vulnerable, slime tendrils still grasping weakly at the fragments of his mask. Without it, he felt naked, defenseless. The mask had been his identity, his connection to Alec, his shield against the world.
He began to fall from exhaustion, and Alex moved in to hold him up.
With his mask off, his swollen face fell forward against her chest, his head settling between her breasts—purely from exhaustion and the angle of his collapse.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, dumbass?" she yelled, and it was the first time Mateo had seen her so flabbergasted and flustered, but she didn't move him away.
Mateo, on the other hand, started crying, his salty tears soaking Alex's jacket.
"I'm so tired," he said as he held her closer. Alex's expression softened as she held him tighter.
Dong, watching from the store and seeing that the fight was over, curled around the two of them as an emerald snake, Akira's default form, and soon Bram joined in the hug.
Nothing was fixed. Things were far from over. But for this moment, Mateo was satisfied.
Alec looked at him from the side of his vision.
"Is this what you wanted, Mateo?"
Yes. Yes it was.
Alec nodded, a small smile crawling to his face.
"Good. That's all I wanted for you too. Mom would be proud."
And then in a smaller, more wistful tone, "Dad would be proud too."
And then he turned away, and vanished.
This the story of Mateo Mendoza. This is how the Slime Hero was born.