Inheritance of Giants

When the Levee Breaks

They left in silence, the reporters gone and the streets dark and empty. The house they arrived at was dark, void of life. When the lights turned on, Inko made way to the kitchen and began angrily making food, like a switch had flipped in her head.

Inko made way to approach his Ka-san, but Ace stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. "Not now, Izuku," Ace whispered.

They both disappeared into Ace's room where Izuku immediately got on to the computer and searched up Chicago.

[No results]

Izuku furrowed his brows and made a confused sound, drawing Ace's attention.

"Chicago?" Ace muttered with a frown. "How'd you learn that name, Izuku?"

"It was in the vision I had during the trial. The song triggered it," Izuku whispered, gaze still locked on the blinking cursor.

Ace's frown deepened. He pulled the chair closer but didn't sit.

"You saw Chicago?" he said again, but slower this time. Lower.

Izuku turned to look at him.

"It wasn't just a city, was it?"

Ace was silent for a long moment. Then he reached past Izuku and slowly closed the search tab.

"No. Not anymore."

Izuku's brows furrowed. "But why is it gone? Why can't I find it? How does a whole city vanish from history?"

Ace finally sat down, resting his elbows on his knees, face drawn with something Izuku had only seen once before — when Ace had thought he'd let someone die.

"It didn't just vanish," Ace said. "It was deleted. Every archive. Every public system. Burned out of the SSSP logs, overwritten in civilian history. Even Ide doesn't talk about it — and you know he talks about everything."

"But why?" Izuku asked. "Why hide it?"

Ace hesitated but let loose an explosive sigh. "There are... several reasons, but, well, I don't know how much it applies to the actual reasons, but that's... where I was found."

"What?"

"Yeah," Ace answered, not looking Izuku in the face. "Nobody really knows that much about Chicago, heck, I don't know more than what I just said. I just reiterated what Ide said to me.

"I had been found among the wreckage by your mother during an evacuation signal from the SSSP outpost there at the time. It fell, unfortunately. One of the only failures in SSSP's history, but I was... somehow there. I- I don't know the full story behind it, so I can't answer everything for you, sorry."

Izuku sat very still.

The air in the room seemed to compress — not with tension, but with gravity. With meaning. With the echo of something unspoken for too long.

"You were found... in Chicago?" he repeated, voice thin.

Ace nodded, still avoiding his gaze. "Yeah. Pulled out of the ruins. Wrapped in some sort of containment cloth. My body temp was something like... three thousand Kelvin. Should've been impossible. Should've been dead. But I wasn't."

"Ka-san found you?"

Ace gave a small, humorless chuckle. "Yeah. Apparently she was part of the recovery detail. Back before she quit active fieldwork. She never told me why she was there. I never asked."

Izuku's thoughts spun like a gyroscope.

A city deleted from history. A fallen outpost.

A child-shaped weapon pulled from the ashes.