Chapter Text
The Sol Emeralds hummed like impatient wasps.
Blaze hovered above her castle’s highest balcony, arms spread, eyes closed, the seven gems orbiting her in perfect formation. The air around her shimmered with heat, warping the horizon of the Sol Dimension into a watercolor blur.
“Okay,” she murmured to herself. “Quick visit. Say hello to Sonic. Make sure Silver isn’t accidentally destroying the timeline. Return before the council starts another ‘urgent’ discussion about royal budgets. Simple.”
The Emeralds pulsed. Not reassuringly.
She cracked one golden eye open. “You’re sure you’re locked onto Sonic’s world this time?”
The Sol Emeralds, being mystical extradimensional gems and not very good conversationalists, answered by glowing slightly brighter.
Blaze frowned. “You did misplace me in the mushroom kingdom once.”
They pulsed again, distinctly in the “stop sassing us and jump already” frequency.
Blaze sighed, rolling her shoulders. “Right. Friendship. Trust. Terrifying cosmic stones. All that.”
She braced, feeling the familiar build of power gather in her chest, moving outward, threading through her limbs like molten silk. Fire coiled around her ankles, then her wrists, then spiraled upwards, wrapping her in an incandescent vortex.
“Take me to Sonic’s world,” she commanded.
The Sol Emeralds flashed.
Reality folded-
-and absolutely threw her into traffic.
The first thing Blaze felt was concrete.
The second thing Blaze felt was that she was currently kissing it.
She peeled her face off the pavement with as much dignity as someone who’d just been slapped between dimensions could manage. Her tail flicked irritably, leaving a thin trail of smoke on the ground.
“…Ow,” she announced to no one in particular.
Car horns blared. Something screeched to a halt inches from her head. Gray smoke and the smell of gasoline hit her nose.
Blaze finally looked up.
She was in the middle of a street. Not any street she knew. Towering metal-and-glass buildings stretched into the sky on both sides, lit with neon billboards and giant LED screens showing smiling humans and flashy logos. Carsc sleek, colorful, and definitely not Eggman-brand, rushed past in organized chaos.
Humans.
Everywhere.
Crowds of them on sidewalks, some in suits, some in hoodies, some wearing costumes that would have embarrassed Amy Rose.
Blaze slowly rotated in place, her eyes wide. “…Oh.”
Right. Sonic’s world had humans. Probably these ones. She’d never actually visited one of their big cities. The only humans (In her and Sonic's world's As the Mushroom kingdom's humans were pretty different) she’d ever met were Eggman and Eggman Nega, who were, frankly, a terrible sample size for an entire species.
But this looked… normal. Busy. Busy and loud.
And no giant, round men cackling on floating egg-pods yet. That was a plus.
A car door slammed.
“HEY!” a man shouted. “You can’t just warp into the road like that, lady!”
Blaze blinked. She turned to see a driver leaning out of his car window, hair disheveled, tie askew, face flushed with a mix of rage and fear.
His arms were metal.
Not armor. Not gauntlets. His actual forearms were steel, segmented and glowing faintly along the seams, connected to flesh shoulders.
Blaze’s brain, which had fully accepted “hedgehog breaks sound barrier for fun” as baseline, slotted this under: special ability like Sonic’s speed. Perfectly normal.
“My apologies,” she said, dusting herself off, her voice calm, formal. “Dimensional… jet lag.”
He stared. “What?”
“Please drive carefully,” she added, and then vanished in a blur of purple flame.
The man stuck his head fully out the window, eyes bulging. “…Was that a cat? Did a cat just…? WHY IS IT TUESDAY?”
Blaze landed lightly on a nearby rooftop, coat fluttering around her, tail curling in the high breeze. The Sol Emeralds hovered at her shoulder height, still following in a loose orbit like guilty fireworks.
She planted her hands on her hips and glared at them.
“Okay,” she said. “Report.”
They hummed.
Blaze narrowed her eyes. “Is this Sonic’s world?”
One of them flickered. Not yes. Not no. Sort of “hahaaaa… depends on what you mean by that.”
Blaze exhaled through her nose, a tiny flame escaping. “You are lucky I love you.”
She turned to the skyline, scanning. No giant Eggman faces projected on skyscrapers. No obvious Death Egg. The city was unfamiliar, but that wasn’t saying much; the human settlements on Sonic’s world were numerous and not necessarily labeled “welcome Blaze” with a helpful sign.
Far below, she spotted a man whose entire body was made of what looked like concrete, helping police push a stuck bus. A woman floated by with feathered wings arching from her back, chatting into a phone. A kid hopped across a crosswalk using tiny explosions from his growth's on his arms that were shaped like cannons as extra boosts, his mother shouting for him to stop.
So. Humans. Many with unusual abilities.
Blaze watched quietly. “So that’s normal here,” she murmured. “Special abilities, like Sonic and Silver. Interesting.”
She’d have to ask Sonic about it later. Perhaps this was one of their “big cities of heroes” he’d mentioned once, where people used their powers publicly instead of hiding them or trying to conquer the planet with giant weaponized carnival rides.
Her stomach rumbled.
She frowned. “…Food first. Dimensional politics later.”
The Sol Emeralds did a subtle, conspiratorial wobble.
She pointed at them. “You’re in trouble. Just so we’re clear.”
They orbited innocently.
Blaze leapt off the building, flames blooming under her feet as she dashed along the sides of skyscrapers, weaving between ad screens and balconies with the grace of a ballerina on fire.
Nobody looked twice.
City smell. City noise. City heat.
She might actually enjoy this place.
For the next thirty seconds, anyway.
Eri had learned there were three kinds of silence.
The silence in her room at the compound, when the lightbulb buzzed and the walls pressed in, and she could hear her own heartbeat.
The silence when the needles stopped and she could only hear her own breathing and Kai’s voice saying words like “necessary” and “useful” and “your fault.”
And then there was this silence.
The alley silence.
It pressed behind her eyes and made her ears ring. It was so heavy that even her bare feet on concrete sounded too loud.
“Don’t run off,” Kai said mildly behind her, as if he were reminding her not to forget a scarf, not to forget that last time she ran he’d punished her and that was the reason her arms were bandaged again beneath the sleeves of the too-large hospital gown.
Eri clutched the edge of the garment tighter. It was cold out here. Wind like fingers sneaked under her clothes and made her shiver.
Her sandals slapped softly. She followed him.
They had just left the two heroes.
The nice one with the messy hair who had eyes like he’d been crying for years and still hadn’t finished, and the tall one who smiled like nothing could go wrong ever again.
They didn’t take her.
She had wanted them to.
It made something loud twist in her chest every time she thought about it, so she tried not to.
Kai’s footsteps were calm. Measured. Tap tap tap. The sound of someone who always knew exactly where he was going and what he would do when he got there.
“Don’t drag your feet,” he chided.
“…sorry,” Eri whispered, though she wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for that, or for escaping earlier, or existing at all.
She wished she could disappear.
Her horn itched.
They turned another corner into another alley, the world of big buildings and busy streets narrowing into an endless series of cold gray walls and puddles that reflected the sky like they were trying to escape upwards.
Something popped at the edge of her hearing. Like a microphone blowing out.
Eri flinched.
Ahead, the alley opened onto another road.
She saw someone standing there at the end of it- turning, looking around, purple coat and strange ears poking through her hair.
A girl.
No, not a girl, something else. Eri had seen a TV show once, when no one was looking, with an animal that talked. But that had been drawn, not real. This girl was… a cat lady? Was it her quirk?
Eri’s brain, which had grown used to suppressing reactions, just quietly threw up its hands.
The cat lady turned slightly, golden eyes catching the dim light, and Eri realized: she was pretty. Not like the ladies from ads who smiled with all their teeth. Pretty like the picture of a princess from a fairy-tale book Eri vaguely remembered once, before she’d made Daddy go away and everything went wrong.
Kai’s steps paused.
“Oh,” he said lightly. “How inconvenient.”
Eri stiffened.
That tone meant trouble.
The cat lady spotted them. Her gaze flickered from Eri’s bandages to Kai’s plague mask, then back to Eri.
“Oh,” she said in return. Her voice was soft, smooth, a little surprised. “A child.”
Kai stepped forward, adjusting one white glove with the other hand. “I apologize,” he said, dipping his head slightly. “My daughter has quite the habit of wandering off.”
Eri blinked.
Daughter.
He always used that word when others could hear. It fit around her about as well as the hospital gown did, not at all, and it chafed.
The cat lady’s ears twitched.
Blaze couldn’t help it.
The moment she heard “my daughter,” something in her brain clicked into protocol mode. Royalty 101: people lied. Constantly. To impress you. To hide things. To manipulate.
She’d grown up with advisors who insisted the sky was green if it meant getting a favorable policy passed.
She’d also grown up with the ability to set people on fire, which did wonders for cutting through red tape.
And Blaze had a gift. A sense for when words didn’t match eyes, or tone, or the subtle shift of shoulders when someone was feeding her a neat little story.
The man in the bird mask said “daughter.” His voice didn’t tremble, didn’t hitch, but his eyes, thin, gold, sharp,flicked to Eri not like a father checking on his child, but like a miser checking on his coin purse.
Blaze’s tail stilled.
She saw the bandages. The oversized gown, hospital white and dirty at the edges. The bare legs. The way the girl held herself, quiet, small, trying to take up no space at all.
Blaze knew trauma when she saw it. Cream cried when she scraped her knee; this girl looked like she’d forgotten how.
“Children do wander,” Blaze said evenly. “Though they usually don’t do it in hospital gowns.”
Kai’s eyes narrowed just a hair.
(Ah, there it is,) Blaze thought. (There’s the worm underneath the rock.)
He laughed lightly. “Ah, yes. She’s been clumsy lately. We were visiting a friend at the hospital, she tripped and got a little banged up. You know how kids are. Right, Eri?”
His gaze slid to the girl like the edge of a scalpel.
Eri shrank, shoulders curling in.
Blaze watched the girl’s fingers tighten around the hem of her gown. Watched her horned head dip with the automatic motion of someone who’d been trained that disagreeing, even with silence, had consequences.
She didn’t need mystical princess intuition to know this was a lie.
But she had it anyway, and it flared like a fire alarm.
Liar, it whispered.
And under that: danger.
Blaze smiled.
It was not a friendly smile.
“I see,” she said. “She looks very frightened, for someone who only tripped.”
Kai’s gloved fingers twitched.
“Children exaggerate,” he replied smoothly. “A little pain, a little lecture, and suddenly they think they’re victims of—”
He didn’t finish that sentence, because Blaze moved.
One second she was standing three meters away, coat fluttering, hands clasped behind her back like a polite tourist asking directions.
The next, the alley detonated in a flash of purple flame and hot air.
To Eri, it was like the world blinked.
She felt a warm rush, like stepping too close to one of the big hospital machines that hummed and clicked. There was a gust of air, the smell of scorched concrete, and suddenly-
She wasn’t next to Kai anymore.
She was cradled in someone’s arms.
Cat arms.
Soft, but strong, covered in lavender fur. A gold collar pressed cool against her cheek.
Blaze landed halfway up the alley wall, shoes digging into brick as if it were springy ground, one arm around Eri’s back, the other braced against the wall. Fire curled around the heel of her high-heel, the flame cushioning the impact.
She looked down at Kai.
His hand was still reaching out for where Eri had been a heartbeat prior, fingers just closing on empty air.
His eyes were wide now. Not panickedx he was too controlled for that, but sharply focused.
Blaze met his gaze, her own narrowed. “She doesn’t seem to want to go with you,” she observed. “And I find lying… distasteful.”
Eri clung automatically to her new anchor, trembling. She risked a tiny glance upward.
The cat lady’s eyes were glowing.
Not just reflecting light; actually glowing, a bright, hot gold, like someone had put the sun inside them and then given it anger issues.
Eri’s breath hitched.
“Put her down,” Kai said quietly.
“No,” Blaze said.
The temperature in the alley rose by ten degrees.
A drop of sweat rolled down the side of Kai’s face under the mask, though whether from the heat or irritation or both, it was hard to tell.
He adjusted his tie with exaggerated calm. “You’re a Pro Hero,” he said. Not a question. “And yet you’re kidnapping a child from her parent based on a feeling.”
“Parent,” Blaze echoed, lips curling slightly around the word like it tasted bad. “Is that what you are?”
Her gaze flicked over Eri’s bandages again, then lower.
There, peeking out from under the gown: more gauze. Ankles. Wrists.
She’d seen injuries. She’d seen battle scars, training bruises, people bandaging each other up after egg-shaped robots exploded in their faces.
This was not that.
This was careful. Repeated. Systematic.
Blaze’s fingers tightened, very gently, around Eri’s shoulders. She could feel the girl’s bones. Too small. Too light.
“How old are you?” Blaze asked softly, not looking away from Kai.
Eri startled. “…S-six.”
Cream’s age, Blaze’s mind supplied immediately, like a reflexive punch.
The mental image slammed into her: Cream, laughing, ears flopping as she ran through fields of flowers, Cheese the Chao bouncing along behind her.
Six.
Blaze’s composure, polished, regal, carefully cultivated, cracked.
Just a little.
Kai noticed. His eyes sharpened even further. “You’re interfering in private family matters,” he said. “I’d advise you to return the girl before things become… unpleasant.”
There it was.
The threat.
Blaze had been threatened by gods, emperors, interdimensional parasites, and, once, a very angry Squirrel with a wrench. The tone was always the same: a quiet assumption that they held all the cards, that she would back down, that people like her, people who cared, were fundamentally predictable.
He didn’t know her.
Not yet.
She lightly leapt from the wall, landing at the alley’s midpoint. Eri remained in her arms, carefully shielded, Blaze’s body turned so that Kai only had a clear view of Blaze herself and fire.
Up close, the plague mask was more detailed. Gold accents. Filters. The faint scent of antiseptic and something metallic beneath his cologne.
Blaze inhaled.
Under the chemicals.
Under the city.
She smelled fear.
Not just the child’s. His too, underneath the bravado, like a crack buried deep under polished stone.
“You’re no father,” she said quietly. “You’re an infection.”
Kai’s eye twitched.
He smiled.
“If you insist on playing hero,” he said, shrugging off his coat, “then do try to last long enough to make it interesting.”
The air changed.
Eri felt it immediately. The way it always did when Kai took his glove off.
It was subtle at first, a tightening, like the world itself was holding its breath.
Kai slid the white material off one hand. His bare fingers looked ordinary. No glow. No claws. Just a hand.
Eri flinched anyway.
Blaze noticed that, filed it, and let the first real ember of fury catch.
“You’re going to give her back to me,” Kai said pleasantly. “Or I’m going to take her, and you, apart.”
He lifted his hand.
Something inside Blaze went very, very still.
Calm, she thought. Remember your training. Remember you’re a princess. You keep a cool head. You weigh options—
She shifted Eri slightly, just enough to see her face.
The haunted eyes. The bandages. The dirt in her hair. The way she wasn’t crying, not because she wasn’t scared, but because she had moved past tears to something quieter and worse.
Cream’s laugh flashed in her mind again.
Something snapped.
Blaze smiled, tiny and terrifying.
“I see,” she said.
She turned slightly, so her mouth was closer to Eri’s ear. “Close your eyes,” she murmured.
Eri obeyed instantly, squeezing them shut.
Blaze looked back up at Kai.
“I’ll burn you to death,” she said.
She didn’t shout. She didn’t rage. She said it almost conversationally, like commenting on the weather.
It made it worse.
A sphere of fire blossomed in her palm, unbidden, eager. It grew from a flicker to a grapefruit, from a grapefruit to the size of a human head, flames licking over her fingers without hurting her.
Kai stared at it. For the first time, his composure slipped entirely.
“Oh,” he said.
He realized there was no nonchalant way to respond to that.
“Shit.”
Blaze stepped.
The alley detonated.
Her fireball slammed into Kai point-blank, the street erupting in a white-orange bloom that turned shadows into razor-sharp things. Heat washed down the alley like a tidal wave.
Kai didn’t have time to touch anything. He was fast, but not “I expected the princess to open with war crime” fast.
The blast picked him up and launched him.
He crashed through three trash cans, a brick wall, a parked car, another brick wall, and the world’s most unfortunate vending machine, then disappeared into the city like a plague-masked meteor.
Blaze didn’t watch him fly. She had more important things to do.
She cradled Eri closer and called.
The Sol Emeralds answered.
They streaked to her side, humming in frantic circles, finally behaving like they realized something serious was happening.
“Help me protect her,” Blaze said, looking up at them, flames already starting to swirl around her feet. Her voice dropped to a low, resonant timbre that wasn’t entirely hers.
Power surged.
Fire exploded outward, engulfing Blaze and Eri in a corona of red, gold, and violet. The world blurred, colors stretching, heat pouring off her in waves that warped the buildings around them.
Her fur shifted.
Lavender brightened to hot pink. Her tail’s tip turned into a pure flame, whip-like and wild. The bottom of her coat went from purple to blazing red, trimmed with gold. The fluffy cuffs on her gloves and heels became living fire, licking up her arms and legs.
Her eyes, already molten, became twin suns.
Burning Blaze hovered in the alley, no longer simply a cat with fire powers, but a compact supernova in heels.
Eri, nestled in her arms, glowed.
The Sol Emeralds, whirling around them like asteroids around a sun, sparkled, their energy spilling outward. Threads of light reached for the child, wrapping around her small form like a protective cocoon.
Fire kissed her skin and… did not burn.
Her bandages glowed, then dissolved into gentle orange light. The hospital gown rippled into a new form, a small dress of shimmering flame that didn’t hurt, only warmed, reshaping into something softer, stronger.
Eri herself shone, a flicker of golden-orange aura wrapping around her like a second skin. For an instant, her horn gleamed bright white.
If Blaze was a sun, Eri became a tiny, fierce star pressed to her chest.
Burning Eri.
Eri’s eyes flew open despite the warning.
What she saw was color.
Endless, infinite color and warmth. For the first time in her life, heat didn’t mean pain. It meant… safety. Being held in arms that could melt steel and choosing not to.
Her lips parted in a tiny “oh.”
Somewhere, very deep down, a seed of something unfamiliar stirred.
Hope.
Blaze now, Burning Blaze, clenched her teeth, feeling the power roar through her. It threatened to run wild, to tear free, to level everything. Everything. This was why she didn’t do this often. The Sol Emeralds did not believe in half-measures.
“I need control,” she hissed through her teeth. “For her.”
The fire surged, then folded in, concentrating around her instead of expanding outward in a lethal tidal wave.
She launched upward, streaming through the sky like a shooting star made of righteous fury and terrible fashion choices.
Behind her, the alley, miraculously, remained mostly intact. Singed. A bit melted. But intact.
For about five seconds.
Then the shockwave hit.
Chisaki Kai, also known as Overhaul, slammed into a rooftop, bounced, and rolled.
He had enough presence of mind to grab the edge of the building before going over it.
He lay there for a moment, half his jacket vaporized, mask cracked, skin blistered and charred along one side of his body. The pain was immense, a screaming hurricane across his burned flesh.
He hated it.
He hated the heat. The smell of seared fabric. The knowledge that his skin, his precious, carefully maintained skin, had been contaminated.
His breathing grew shallow. Hives broke out across his remaining unburnt areas as his mysophobia went into overdrive.
“Dirty,” he rasped. “Filthy-"
He forced himself to stop.
He had lived in filth before. He had walked through blood and bile and the waste of experiments and smiled. Because he had a goal. Because he was above it. Because he could fix it.
He still could.
Overhaul pressed his bare hand to his own burnt side.
The world around his fingers exploded into meat and bone and ash.
He screamed once, teeth gritted, as his body disassembled itself into a wet, monstrous mess.
And then, with a thought, he rebuilt it.
Cells reknit. Skin smoothed. The burns vanished, leaving behind pale, perfect flesh.
He sat up, shaking, gasping, but whole.
He pulled his glove back on with shaking fingers.
“Hero,” he muttered under his breath, staring at the wisp of lingering purple smoke on the horizon where she’d flown. “No record… no reputation… power on that scale…”
He rose to his feet, swaying slightly.
“This is why quirks are a disease,” he hissed, half to himself. “All that potential, wasted on emotional idiots.”
He dusted imaginary dirt from his shoulders, trying not to think about the fact that his pants were partly gone on one side.
He failed.
“Disgusting,” he muttered, face contorting with both fury and revulsion.
He looked around.
The city stretched in every direction. Rooftops, alleys, streets. Humans.
Tools.
He needed to catch her. He needed to get Eri back. His entire plan depended on her blood, on her ability to rewind, on her tiny, fragile body breaking and re-forming over and over until society bowed to his anti-Quirk vaccine.
All Might was gone. The era of heroes was crumbling. Villains were scrambling for the throne.
He’d be damned if a flaming housecat derailed years of work.
“There,” he murmured.
Below, on an adjacent rooftop, two men were on a smoke break, chatting and laughing, one idly scrolling his phone.
Overhaul leapt down.
“Excuse me,” he said politely as he landed between them. "I'm in need of your services."
They barely had time to look up.
“Wh— hey, who—”
He touched them both.
For a split second, flesh, bone, nerves, quirks, years of life and memories all came apart like a Lego set crushed under a hammer.
They didn’t even scream.
Overhaul’s hands plunged into the disintegrating mass.
He rebuilt, reshaping the matter not into two men, but into one bigger him.
His body swelled, new muscle layering over his frame, new mass making his limbs longer, thicker, stronger. Extra tendons, extra bone. His suit groaned as seams strained.
He flexed his fingers experimentally. The power felt… good. Crude, but useful. He wrinkled his nose at the faint lingering scent of cigarettes.
“Annoying,” he muttered.
He looked around for more.
It didn’t take long.
By the time the first screaming started, he had fused with enough unfortunate bystanders to bulk up like a walking nightmare, veins pulsing with borrowed quirks and strength, limbs a grotesque blend of human and something else.
He jumped.
And the city noticed.
Death Arms had been having a very normal patrol.
Stop a robbery here, help a granny there, sign an autograph for a kid whose quirk made his hands invisible whenever he got excited. The usual.
He was just thinking about lunch when the first call came through his earpiece.
“Dispatch to all available heroes in the Shinjuku area,” the operator said, voice tense. “We’ve got reports of a large villain rampaging near- uh- okay, witnesses say he’s… ripping people apart and fusing with them?”
Death Arms stopped mid-step.
He looked at the nearest civilian, who was happily licking an ice cream cone.
He gently turned the man around by the shoulders. “Go home,” he said.
The man blinked. “Huh?”
“Special hero advice,” Death Arms said, already breaking into a run. “Go. Home.”
He leapt onto a parked car, then another, his powerful arms swinging him up to a lower rooftop in three easy motions.
“Kamui Woods!” he barked into his communicator. “You on this frequency?”
Static crackled, then a measured voice replied, “I am en route. Mt. Lady is also responding.”
“Of course I am,” Mt. Lady chimed in, the sound of wind rushing past her mic. “You say ‘giant villain in public with lots of cameras’ and my schedule magically clears.”
Death Arms grunted, spotting movement ahead, a massive shape tearing through the street.
As he got closer, the details resolved.
“Oh, that’s… not pretty,” he muttered.
Overhaul, though Death Arms didn’t know his name,was an abomination of grafted limbs and bulging muscle, his plague mask still perched absurdly on what could only generously be called a “head.” Extra arms sprouted from his shoulders, his back, each ending in fingers constantly flexing, reaching, ready to touch and ruin.
And he was fast.
He dove through the street like a shark through water, cars flipping and slamming into buildings as he used Overhaul to reshape the ground beneath him into spikes and platforms.
Civilians ran screaming.
“This area is supposed to be low villain activity,” Death Arms muttered, flexing his hands. “What is he, a Tuesday special?”
“Death Arms,” Kamui said sharply in his ear. “I have visual. I’m moving to bind him. Wait for my signal.”
Death Arms reached the edge of a building and saw Kamui Woods swing in, tree branches stretching from his arms, snagging lampposts and traffic lights as he arced overhead like a wooden Tarzan.
“CROWD CONTROL!” Mt. Lady yelled gleefully from somewhere approaching fast. “And also, like, villain control. Obviously.”
“Please focus on the villain control,” Kamui muttered.
“Rude.”
Kamui dropped down, landing on a streetlight, then shot his arms out.
“Lacquered Chain Prison!”
Thick, wooden tendrils erupted from his hands, coiling around Overhaul’s limbs, torso, and one unfortunate stretched chunk of monster-flesh that might once have been a leg.
Overhaul’s momentum faltered as he was yanked to a stop, branches tightening, digging in.
Death Arms saw his opening.
He jumped off the building, landing with a crack that sent a small tremor through the pavement.
“Civilians clear?” he shouted.
“Working on it!” Mt. Lady called.
She was in her giant form at the far end of the street, carefully plucking cars out of harm’s way and setting them aside like toy blocks, her enormous ponytail swishing.
“Hey, ugly!” she yelled at Overhaul. “You know how much paperwork we have to do when you mash this many vehicles? I don’t even read all those forms!”
Overhaul ignored her, his focus narrowing.
He could feel it. The burn marks on his mask. The phantom pain on his once-scorched side. The memory of that voice, calm and furious, promising death by fire.
Eri, wrapped in inferno.
His entire body, the amalgamation of stolen flesh, twitched.
The hero with the wooden arms tightened his grip.
“Stay down,” Kamui Woods said. “You’re under arrest.”
Overhaul’s eye twitched.
“No,” he said.
He slammed a hand into the pavement.
The street exploded into spikes.
Kamui’s branches shuddered, splintering as the ruptured ground tore them free. Death Arms jumped, barely avoiding being impaled, grabbing a chunk of rebar on the way up and wrenching it bodily from the concrete.
Mt. Lady snarled, stomping closer, carefully avoiding the worst of the spikes.
“Oh, we’re doing this, huh?” she said.
Overhaul’s extra arms lashed out, grabbing debris, crushing it, reassembling it into jagged spears, hurling them like missiles.
The heroes moved.
Kamui dodged, twisting mid-air, branches grabbing onto a building to swing him away. Death Arms intercepted one spear with his bare fists, shattering it. Mt. Lady shielded a group of late-escaping civilians with her body, taking a spray of smaller shards to her leg and wincing.
It was messy, chaotic, dangerous.
It was also… weird.
Because Overhaul wasn’t running.
He was looking up.
“Where are you?” he muttered under his breath, scanning the sky.
Which was when the sun appeared.
It started as a bright spot directly overhead.
That was strange enough, because it was already daytime and the sun was, last Death Arms checked, supposed to be in a completely different part of the sky.
The bright spot grew.
“Uh,” Mt. Lady said.
The spot flared to the size of a car, then a building, then a billboard, then-
“Is… is that…?” Kamui began.
“ENDEAVOR?” Death Arms finished.
The burning sphere descending toward them was intense. Not just light, but heat, washing over the street in oppressive waves. Fire swirled around it, too bright to look at directly, so hot the air screamed.
Silhouettes? None. Shape? Only: sun.
Only one hero they knew walked around like a portable furnace and thought “collateral damage” was spelled H-E-R-O-I-C.
“Everyone back away!” Kamui shouted, his wooden voice somehow managing to sound panicky.
“Why!?” Death Arms yelled, still braced to punch another spike out of existence. “This is our chance to pile on attacks!”
Kamui snapped his branches out, wrapping them around Death Arms’ waist and yanking him back anyway. “Do you have a death wish!? Endeavor’s coming through!”
Mt. Lady’s eyes widened. “Oh, he’s here? Ugh, now the news is gonna forget I was even on this case.”
The ball of fire roared closer.
Overhaul stared.
(That’s not Endeavor,) he thought, cold clarity cutting through his confusion. (That’s her.)
But the heroes didn’t know that.
Death Arms had one arm thrown over his eyes, teeth gritted as the heat beat against him. Kamui’s branches retracted, pulling him and Death Arms to relative safety behind a partially intact building. Mt. Lady crouched, making herself a bigger shield in case the blast wave did something stupid like try to kill people.
The flaming sun hit Overhaul like a dropkick from God.
The impact crumpled the street, shockwaves rippling outward in a circular wall of heat and pressure that shattered windows for blocks. Cars lifted, spun, and clanged back down. People were thrown off their feet even behind cover.
Kamui’s grip on Death Arms faltered, both of them skidding back across asphalt.
“Endeavor’s taking this very seriously!” Death Arms yelled over the roar. “Guess he doesn’t like this guy!”
“He’s trying to keep his new Number One spot secure!” Mt. Lady shouted, hair whipping, as she dug her heels into the street and leaned forward into the wind. “You know how it is! Public image, explosion count-"
Inside the pillar of fire, Overhaul screamed.
It wasn’t fear.
It was rage, pure and undiluted, mixed with the white-hot terror of his phobia.
Also agony. He was on fire after all
Fire everywhere. Heat everywhere. Dirt and ash and burnt everything touching him, coating him, clogging his mask filters. He tried to disassemble it, tried to break apart the flames, the heat, the particles, to reassemble them into something clean, something controlled.
Blaze didn’t give him that chance.
She moved inside the inferno like a dancer, a streak of pink and gold. To the heroes outside, the sun was a solid mass; to her, it was home turf.
“You like taking people apart,” she said, her voice reverberating through the flames, echoing in Overhaul’s ears. “Let’s see how you enjoy being dismantled.”
Her foot, wreathed in fire, slammed down on one of his mutated arms.
It burst into ash.
Overhaul lashed out reflexively with another.
She grabbed it, her gloved hand blazing, and pulled.
Flesh didn’t tear, exactly. In this weird, half-Overhauled state, his body sprang apart like it had always been waiting for the cue. The arm came off in a spray of half-disassembled matter.
Overhaul howled.
Outside, the heroes just heard a muffled shriek through the roaring.
“Endeavor’s really laying into him,” Death Arms mumbled, eyes wide. “Isn’t this kind of… brutal even for him?”
“Villain fused with civilians,” Kamui panted. “If he doesn’t neutralize him completely, he’ll just keep-"
Inside, Blaze stepped forward.
Overhaul tried to pull himself together, literally, but the fire ate his reconstructed limbs faster than he could reassemble them now, Sol energy interfering with his Quirk’s precise control.
He lurched toward her, one intact arm stretching out, fingers splayed, aiming for her or for the ground, anything he could touch to gain leverage.
Blaze caught his wrist.
His eyes widened.
She smiled. “No.”
Her flames surged up his arm, burning, not destroying him instantly, but slowly enough that he could feel it, that he could feel the cells unraveling, the nerves screaming.
Petty? Yes.
Satisfying? Also yes.
She yanked.
His arm came away in a messy flash, disintegrating fully a second later, scattering into glowing embers.
Overhaul stumbled, now largely limbless. His monstrous composite body was reduced to a charred torso with a head attached, half his mask melted, hair singed.
He tried to reassemble himself from the remains around them, but Blaze’s flames had damaged the matter at a fundamental level, Sol fire burning the Quirk factors themselves.
“You think you’re Eri’s father,” Blaze said, stepping closer, fire swirling around her like an angry storm. “You’re not. But for the record—”
She raised one foot.
She looked him in the eye.
“This is for her.”
Outside the sphere of fire, Kamui and Death Arms flinched as the inferno pulsed brighter, a dull WHUMP echoing through the area.
Inside, Blaze, who absolutely could have just left him there, made a choice based on pure, unfiltered spite.
She STOMPED down.
Hard.
Right on his crotch.
Technically, a part of his pelvis region made from a combination of his original body and unfortunate borrowed victims.
The plague doctor mask man emitted a strangled noise that transcended human registers, somewhere between a teakettle scream and a dying modem. His back arched, what was left of his limbs convulsing.
Blaze ground her heel slightly, just enough to ensure catastrophic structural… changes.
(And to be Petty)
“You don’t get to hurt children and then have any chance of making more,” she said, voice flat.
The Sol fire, fueled by righteous fury and a tiny bit of royal pettiness, ensured that whatever Overhaul rebuilt later, it would not include functional reproductive capacity.
Outside, Mt. Lady blinked as the fireball’s brightness momentarily doubled.
“…What was that?” she murmured.
“Probably Endeavor’s new ultimate move,” Death Arms said faintly. “Like a… Flame Comet or something.”
Inside, Blaze delivered the finale.
She stepped back, fire collecting around her fists, condensing into massive, spectral gauntlets of pure flame, each the size of a car.
And to make it worse she formed spears of fire
Incredibly detailed and incredibly sharp.
Overhaul, barely conscious, looked up in time to see a gigantic burning fist form above him.
And the Giant flaming spears forming around him ready to make him look like a kabob.
“Oh,” he croaked.
The fists and the spears came down.
The street shook, the fireball pulsing outward one last time, then beginning to collapse in on itself as Blaze reined in the energy.
To the heroes, it looked like Endeavor had just annihilated the villain.
To Blaze, it looked like Overhaul was very definitely not using his Quirk anytime soon.
Charred, limbless, smoking, he lay in a shallow crater, mask half-gone, pants mostly burnt away, the region in question sporting a very distinctive heel-shaped indent through the ash and ruined fabric.
The fire around them began to recede.
Blaze let the Burning Blaze form dissipate a notch, flames dampening from “star core” to merely “terrifying inferno.” Eri, still glowing softly, clung to her, eyes wide, hair crackling at the ends with residual power.
Blaze frowned, ears twitching.
She could hear shouting. Sirens.
Heroes.
She’d made a spectacle. Wonderful.
On the plus side, Overhaul was in no condition to argue.
On the downside, explaining any of this without revealing her entire existence and the Sol Dimension sounded… tedious.
She sighed.
“Let’s get you somewhere safe,” she murmured to Eri.
Eri blinked up at her. “…safe?” she echoed, as if testing the word.
Blaze’s expression softened. “Yes. Away from him.”
She gathered the Sol Emeralds close. The gems, having greatly enjoyed being used as an instrument of righteous smackdown, hummed in bright approval.
Outside, the heroes braced as the sun shrank.
“Endeavor’s finishing up,” Death Arms said. “Get ready for—”
The remaining flames collapsed inward, compressing into a smaller, dense sphere that shot upward suddenly like a flare.
There was no clear silhouette inside, no cape, no familiar flame beard. Just a blazing ball arcing into the sky, then streaking away horizontally at high speed.
Mt. Lady shaded her eyes. “Uh. Why’s he leaving?”
Kamui blinked. “Why wouldn’t he… stay? To debrief? Or… something?”
Death Arms squinted. “Maybe… the villain’s already neutralized and he’s got another incident? Or he’s trying to maintain mystery? New brand initiative?”
“Could be his edgy Number One phase,” Mt. Lady mused. “‘Too cool to talk to anyone.’”
They settled on that explanation because they had absolutely nothing better.
Kamui, panting, finally risked stepping closer to the epicenter as the residual heat dropped to survivable levels.
He peered over the crater’s edge.
“Is the villain…?”
Then he saw.
“Wait, his pants are burned off,” he said slowly. “Where’s his….”
He saw the indent that USED to be Overhaul's genitals
“…oh.”
Death Arms, curious, joined him.
He took one look, winced in instinctive sympathy, and immediately stepped back, folding his arms over his own lap.
“Oh, man,” he muttered. “Endeavor really did him dirty.”
Mt. Lady, at their hesitant expressions, leaned down too.
She looked.
She straightened slowly.
“I,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “am suddenly very happy I didn’t try to flirt with Endeavor during any of those talk shows.”
Kamui cleared his throat, color darkening at the edges of his wooden face. “W-we should restrain him and call it in,” he said, voice higher than usual. “He’s still alive.”
“In that condition?” Death Arms said. “I don’t know if that’s mercy or cruelty.”
“Endeavor nearly cooked a Yakuza to death,” Mt. Lady murmured, pulling out her phone to snap a quick picture before immediately feeling bad and tucking it away. “Media’s gonna have a field day.”
As Kamui’s wooden branches gently restrained what was left of Overhaul, sirens wailed louder, police cars finally making it through the chaos.
Above, the blazing sphere that they all assumed was Endeavor shrank into the distance, carrying one very confused, very traumatized little girl and one very furious, very drained cat princess who still had no idea she wasn’t in Sonic’s world.
Blaze didn’t stop until the city was a blur beneath her and her lungs burned, not from lack of air (since, technically, she didn’t need to breathe much in this form), but from the strain of holding the Burning Blaze state longer than she usually liked.
She finally let herself arc downward, aiming for the nearest rooftop that looked unoccupied and structurally sound enough to handle a small sun landing.
She hit the concrete with a crack, fire dispersing outward in a ring before evaporating.
The transformation bled away.
Her fur dimmed from hot pink back to lavender. The flames on her cuffs and tail receded into fluffy white, her coat shifted back to purple. The Sol Emeralds slowed their orbit, their glow dropping from “supernova” to “annoyingly smug night-lights.”
Blaze exhaled, steam hissing through her teeth, shoulders sagging with sudden exhaustion. She was still strong, still more powerful than most, but the Sol Emeralds always took their tithe.
Eri, still in her arms, blinked as the roaring heat receded to a comfortable warmth, her own protective aura settling into a faint, shimmering halo only visible if you looked closely.
The flaming dress soothed into an orange-red fabric that looked like a little sundress with a subtle flame pattern at the hem. Her bandages were gone, replaced by clean, faint white scars that would fade with time, especially if the Sol energy had anything to say about it.
They stood there in the rooftop silence, broken only by the distant city hum.
Blaze finally looked down at her.
“Are you hurt?” she asked softly.
Eri stared up at her, red eyes enormous. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again.
“I…” Her voice came out tiny and hoarse. “I don’t… know.”
Blaze’s expression gentled. She knelt, setting Eri carefully on her feet, still keeping both hands on her shoulders for balance.
“Do you feel pain anywhere?” Blaze prompted. “Your arms? Legs? Chest? Head?”
Eri shook her head slowly. “It… it doesn’t hurt,” she said, as if this were a surprising new development.
“Good,” Blaze said. “That’s good.”
Eri looked down at herself, at the new dress, fingers brushing the fabric. “My clothes…” she whispered.
“The Emeralds helped,” Blaze said, glancing at the Sol Emeralds, which did an “oh, don’t mind us, just casually altering reality” spin. “They don’t like it when innocent people get burned. They intervened.”
Eri nodded very slowly, though she clearly understood maybe three percent of that sentence.
She looked back up at Blaze.
“You… burned him,” she said.
Blaze’s tail flicked once. “Yes.”
“Are… you a villain?” Eri asked, not accusatory, just bewildered. In her world, people who hurt others were villains. People who hurt her were called “necessary,” “family,” “boss,” but also, secretly, villains.
Blaze actually laughed, a soft, short sound, surprised out of her. “No,” she said. “I’m a guardian. And a princess. And, apparently, someone who just assaulted a local criminal in front of half a city.”
Eri didn’t know what to do with most of those words, but “princess” landed.
“Like… from stories,” she whispered.
Blaze tilted her head. “Yes,” she said. “Though the stories rarely mention the paperwork.”
She looked over the edge of the building.
From up here, the earlier chaos was just a distant smudge: smoke, flashing lights, the tiny movement of heroes and police and bewildered civilians.
Blaze squinted.
“…Strange,” she murmured. “I’ve never seen Sonic’s world this densely populated. Or with so many empowered humans.”
One of the Sol Emeralds bumped her cheek.
(Wrong place,) it pulsed, if you knew how to read gemstone passive-aggressive.
Blaze swatted it lightly. “Not now.”
She scanned for any familiar landmarks. None. No Station Square. No recognizable shoreline. No giant statues of Sonic (yet; give it a decade).
She frowned. “Did we overshoot?” she mused aloud. “Another continent?”
Eri hugged herself, looking at the edge nervously. The height made her dizzy. “W-where… are we?” she asked.
Blaze opened her mouth, then closed it. She wanted to say “Sonic’s world.” She assumed it was. But the more she looked, the more off it felt. The skyline was wrong. The language on the billboards she could see was… similar to what she’d seen in some cross-dimensional documentation, but not what she’d expected.
Her instincts, the same ones that told her when someone was lying, nudged her.
Not home.
Not his home, either.
Somewhere else.
Blaze’s stomach sunk just a little.
“…A city,” she said finally, opting for the one truth she was absolutely sure of. “One I don’t know yet.”
Eri processed that.
“That man,” Blaze continued, voice hardening slightly, “is he important here?”
Eri froze.
“His name?” Blaze prompted gently.
Eri’s mouth opened, but the word stuck.
If she said his name, would he appear? Would she be dragged back? Would all of this—this warmth, this unknown rooftop, this cat princess with fire for hair—vanish like a dream?
She looked at Blaze’s face.
There was something… solid there. Like the ground after it stopped shaking. Like a hand that held and did not hurt.
“K-Kai,” she whispered. Then added, quieter, “They call him… Overhaul.”
Blaze’s ear twitched. “Fitting,” she muttered. “He certainly enjoys taking things apart.”
She filed the names away. They tasted like rotten metal in her mind.
“All right, Eri,” she said, trying the name for the first time. It rolled nicely off the tongue. “Here is what we’ll do. I need to understand this world. I need to know who’s in charge, what the rules are, and who I just maimed in public.”
Eri winced slightly. “You… hit him… there,” she said, tiny hand hovering vaguely in front of her own dress, not quite willing to point.
Blaze’s cheeks colored beneath her fur. “Yes, well,” she coughed. “He deserved worse.”
Eri considered that for a long moment.
“…Okay,” she said.
Blaze blinked. “Okay?”
Eri nodded. “He… hurt a lot of people,” she said. “And… and he said I hurt people too. Because of… of my Quirk.”
There it was again.
That word.
Blaze had heard someone say it in the street earlier, she recalled. Something about a “Strong Quirk” when a man lifted a car to clear a traffic jam.
She’d assumed it was their term for special abilities.
“Quirk,” she repeated. “That’s what you call your powers?”
Eri nodded. “He… uses his Quirk to… take things apart. And put them back. He… he…” Her voice trembled. “He used it on me. A lot.”
Blaze’s hands burst into flame.
Not intentionally.
Just… rage.
Eri flinched, but the fire around Blaze’s fingers softened, turning from sharp, bright orange to a calm, warm glow.
Blaze took a slow breath, extinguishing it. “Not on you,” she said. “Never on you.” She paused. “If I can help it.”
Eri’s throat bobbed. “You… you won’t… send me back?” she whispered.
Blaze met her eyes. For a moment, the entire weight of her royal upbringing, her duty, every lecture about interference in other worlds, hammered at the back of her mind.
You don’t belong here.
You have responsibilities.
You don’t know their laws.
This isn’t your fight.
But she saw how scared Eri was
Blaze was a princess.
Princesses made hard decisions.
“I don’t know this city's rules,” she said slowly. “I don’t know who is trustworthy, or what they will try to do with you. But I know one thing.” Her eyes flared. “I am not giving you back to him.”
Eri’s shoulders trembled.
Something like a sob hitched in her chest, then strangled itself halfway out, unused to being expressed.
Her face crumpled.
Blaze panicked internally.
Oh no. Tears. She could fight gods but small children crying was on a completely different difficulty curve.
She awkwardly patted Eri’s head. “There, there,” she attempted, sounding like someone reading from a “Reassurance For Beginners” manual..
Eri made a wet hiccup sound.
Blaze tried again, more gently this time, stroking through the tangled, dirty hair. “You’re safe,” she said, hoping it was true. “I promise.”
Then, very slowly, the corners of Eri's mouth twitched upward.
It wasn’t much.
It wasn’t a full smile.
It was the ghost of one. The unfamiliar muscle motion of a face that hadn’t had any practice.
Blaze’s heart twisted.
“There,” she whispered. “That suits you better.”
Eri blinked, touching her own cheek like she could feel the difference from the outside.
“Now,” Blaze continued, standing and offering Eri her hand. “Let’s find somewhere with food. And information. Preferably in that order. Saving the world is much easier on a full stomach.”
Eri hesitated, then took the hand.
Blaze pulled her gently to her feet.
She glanced at the Sol Emeralds.
“And you,” she added, “need to stop playing fast and loose with coordinates.”
One Emerald dipped, projecting the psychic equivalent of a sheepish grin.
Another bobbed like it was absolutely making no promises.
Blaze rolled her eyes and stepped to the rooftop’s edge, Eri’s small hand firmly in hers.
Below, the city of heroes and quirks and very confused Pro Heroes bustle I qon, blissfully unaware that a foreign princess with the power of a sun and absolutely zero context for their society was about to drop into their world’s most complicated child custody case.
“Ready?” Blaze asked.
Eri swallowed.
She looked at the open sky, at the drop, at the hand holding hers, at the faint embers still dancing in the princess’s eyes.
“…Yes,” she whispered.
Blaze smiled.
They jumped.