The pencil dropped.
Clattered to the floor.
The words remained.
Scrawled across the sketchbook in her own handwriting—but not from her hand:
"I was you once."
She stared at the page.Fingers cold.Mouth dry.
Eri hovered nearby, her horn pulsing faintly.
"…Did you see that?" the girl whispered.
Eri nodded. "It didn't come from you."
In the walls of UA, hidden beyond the main corridors,Nezu paced in front of a stasis monitor.
Inside it—
The Time Anchor.An unstable core of sealed energy,harvested from the last known Temporal Nomu.
It pulsed harder now.Matching the beat of the girl's horn.Matching the error in the world.
Nezu turned to Power Loader.
"We're running out of time. Get everyone out of Class 1-A's dorm wing. Quietly."
Later that night.
The girl sat alone.
Eri had fallen asleep beside her.
But she couldn't rest.
The words in the sketchbook had changed.
More appeared slowly, line by line, like something writing from the other side of glass.
"You survived because I died."
"The Architect saw no place for both."
"So he made a choice."
She turned the page.
Her breath caught.
A face stared up at her.
Her face.
But wrong.
Older.
Eyes harder.Hair shorter.A scar across one cheek.
This version of her wore a black jumpsuit lined with time-stitch markings.
A symbol on her chest.
Not UA's.
Not a hero's.
The Architect's.
She stood in a hallway again.
Dream-warped.Unstable.Slanted like time was folding around itself.
And the other version stood at the end.
Hands behind her back.Calm. Controlled. Precise.
"You finally woke up," the Other said.
The girl stepped closer.
"…Are you me?"
The Other smiled. Small. Hollow.
"I was."
"But you survived. So now I'm not."
She turned, and the hallway behind her peeled back like a curtain.
Revealing broken memories.
Not hers.
Stolen ones.
Worlds where Midoriya fell in Kamino.
Worlds where Eri became the next All For One.
Worlds where she was erased mid-breath before she ever spoke a word.
The girl whispered, "Why are you showing me this?"
The Other didn't blink.
"Because I didn't come to fight you."
"I came to offer you a deal."
She stepped forward. Closer now.
Her shadow flickered against the memory walls.
"A paradox walks the earth," she said."Every second you breathe, something breaks."
"You're not meant to be here."
"But you are."
"So…"
She raised one hand.
A small, flickering device blinked in her palm.
It looked like a mechanical snowflake, made of glass and steel.
"This lets you step out."
"No death. No pain. Just… vanishing."
"You return to the fold, the world heals, and no more echoes come."
Silence.
The girl stared.
Then, finally, she asked:
"…And if I say no?"
The Other blinked once.
Then turned around.
And behind her, the hallway cracked.
Something stepped through.
A boy.
Her age.
Same school uniform. Same smile as her memory of him.
But he shouldn't exist.
Not anymore.
The boy looked up. His voice soft.
"…You left me behind."
She stumbled back.
No breath.
No words.
Because she knew him.
Knew the sound of that voice.The angle of that smile.
He was one of her timeline's casualties.
Someone who had died during her escape.Someone she couldn't save.
And now—
The Architect had rebuilt him.
"Every time you choose to stay," the Other said quietly, "he breaks more."
"Your memories keep him alive, but wrong."
"Soon, he'll be all that's left of that broken world."
The boy smiled again.
And cried without blinking.
Then the Other turned fully.
Hand still outstretched with the snowflake device.
"You don't have to keep hurting them."
"One step. That's all."
"Step out—and we fix everything."
The hallway shuddered.
The walls flickered.
Reality buckled.
She felt it—
The temptation.
The weight of it.
The peace.
But then—
Eri's voice.Distant. Echoing.
"Don't go."
The girl looked up.
The boy—the echo—reached for her.
But something in her heart screamed.
Not in pain.
In truth.
"He's not real," she said.More to herself than to anyone else.
"But I am."
She slapped the device from the Other's hand.
It shattered.
So did the dream.
She woke up gasping.Sweat soaked.Eyes wide.
And outside the window—
The sky cracked again.
A thousand faces peered through.
Each one—
A version of her.
To be continued.