[ENG]Shoto Todoroki : Modern-day Terrorist

Chapter 151 - The Gala

I'd always believed that tiredness was a state of mind, a laziness of the soul that anyone could fight by sheer force of will.

But as the days went by, it seemed less and less likely that my mind would ever be able to separate itself from the heaviness that weighed on my muscles and clouded my vision of the world.

Sleep had become a rare delicacy, one I rarely indulged in, and only when the lines of my seals became loops before my eyes and the loops started oscillating like savages jumping around a bustum.

Chakra was supposed to be the source of all life, the vitality of a body, yet I was depleting my reserves so quickly that even eating like an ogre wasn't enough to replenish me.

My physical abilities hadn't diminished, but mentally I was at the end of my rope.

A few months. It was only a matter of a few months.

The idea of diving back into one of my old projects - that of storing Chakra in case of a major emergency - was tempting but dangerous.

Chakra needed a living being to exist: locking it away in an inert container was impossible.

Tsunade had managed to store it in her forehead, something I still couldn't explain.

Cells were made to produce a certain amount of chakra in a given period of time: perhaps she had managed to recover the excess produced by her body from a 'threshold' she had set herself, but I couldn't see how she had locked it inside her without her skull exploding.

The answer seemed to be thanks to Fuinjutsu, but I had no idea why.

The fact that I'd managed to synthesise a Sharingan out of Fuin alone - and without a real Uchiha to explain how a Sharingan really worked - led me to believe that I was excellent at it.

However, I was barely passable at iryoninjutsu and was incapable of revolutionising the field like Tsunade or Orochimaru: research was neither my favourite area nor my strong point.

I regretted having only a dusty old book to explain things to me: having a real teacher would have made such a difference.

If I'd had someone as competent as Jiraiya or Minato to teach me Fuinjutsu...

I pushed my bitter thoughts aside to drive away the beginning of my bad mood.

But still, if I'd had a teacher...

Anyway, even if I wanted to, I didn't have the time to concentrate on all that.

I have to end All for One in the next few months : I can't afford to let him play the 'long' game.

But before I could do that, I had to deal with a more pressing problem.

My eyes easily found Hawks among the glittering gowns and chiffon skirts.

Hawks was laughing, head thrown back, mouth wide open.

Halfway between us, two men toasted, their flutes of golden champagne glittering like crystal.

The moment their glasses touched, Hawks' face appeared to me behind a curtain of bubbles, distorted and malevolent, the hand he ran through his hair giving the impression of running into horns.

I didn't know if it was fatigue gone madness or the paranoia that sometimes distorted the shadows and faces at the periphery of my vision, but either way I was fine with it.

As long as the chaos in my brain managed to drown out my guilt, who was I to ask questions ?

My psychiatrist would have told me it wasn't healthy, but I didn't have time for something as trivial as 'mental health'.