The Nomu didn't just bleed; it vaporized. Where its shoulder and wing had been, there was only a blooming cloud of red mist and shattered bone.
The debris hissed past All For One's head, the wake of compressed air hitting him with the force of a physical blow. Even with the thermal resistance that came with Endeavors stolen quirk, the sheer friction of the passing star-like projectile fueled by a staggering amount of chakra charred the left side of his face to a blackened ruin, shattering his mask into dust.
As the chakra-saturated object buried itself into the foundations of the skyscraper's core, the compressed energy reached its critical limit.
BOOM. A thermal expansion hit the interior like a localized sun. The air ignited, a pressure wave blowing out the remaining floor-to-ceiling windows in a 360-degree radius as the kinetic energy of the projectile reaching Mach six went haywire.
The central support pillars, already weakened by the titans' clash, turned to dust. The skyscraper groaned, before the upper floors surrendered to gravity. Ten stories of steel and glass collapsed entirely vanishing into a mountain of dust and pulverized concrete. The dust cloud that erupted from the footprint was visible from Takinogawa Park. It was visible from the helicopter. It was visible on every screen in Japan showing the feed from that helicopter, a perfect gray-white column rising into the pre-dawn sky.
Not far away from the dust cloud the falling, two figures remained static for a heartbeat. All Might's vision was a blur of red and grey.
His vision was clouded with his own blood. The ringing I'm his ears was deafening. Worst of all, his right arm hurt like hell. 'What just ...' Turning, a familiar face fell into his eyes.
"Young Akutami?" Toshinori frowned immediately, assessing the situation.
"I see. That was you ..."
"Pretty much." All Might frowned at the answer and stood to his feet. "That was dangerous, but .... Thank you. If not for you, who knows what would become of me right now."
His gaze was fixed on the dust cloud.
"Unfortunately, this isn't over. Get to safety."
"Huh?" Yuta's face scrunched. "You want to do this alone?"
"I must." All Might spat out a mouthful of blood. "It's too dangerous for you to be here. You're just a student, and I promised your mother I would protect you ..." Yuta didn't look away from the settling dust cloud. His expression was a mask of grim, professional detachment that looked entirely wrong on a teenager's face.
"With all due respect, Sensei," Yuta said. "Please look at yourself." All Might froze. The reprimand he was about to give died in his throat.
For the first time in this chaotic night, he looked down at himself. The steam rising from his body wasn't just battle-heat anymore; it was the literal evaporation of his power. Blood soaked tattered uniforms, and a gaunt skeletal frame. With one look, All Might knew his muscle form was gone. What remained was a skeletal frame way too thin for his current oversized costume. 'That last hit ...'
The man's hands trembled slightly at his exposed state. The "spark" was out.
The silence that followed was deafening. High in the air, the news helicopter's high-altitude camera caught the new sight in high definition.
The towering Symbol Of Peace was gone. In its place and wearing his costume was a gaunt, dying man they barely recognized. In the Heights Alliance common room, the silence was absolute.
"No way..." Kirishima voiced out uncontrollably in the pin drop silence. "That's... Is that? ..."
The disbelief was apparent. That couldn't be ...
"That ... Can't be right .. right?" Nobody answered him.
In Takinogawa Park, Enji Todoroki watched the same feed on the same phone with the same one open eye. In Machida, Sir Nighteye was the same.
Mustafu, Kyoto, Osaka, Sendai, Yokahoma ...
Every citizen in Japan collectively halted, Hero and villain alike at the sight they never dared to even imagine becoming a reality.
The evacuees in Tokyo all stood motionless.
__
Meanwhile, on the rooftop of a darkened warehouse in Kanagawa Prefecture. The light from the billboard in the distance reflected on the eyes of Tomura Shigaraki. 'Is this what you meant?' He stood perfectly still, eyes fixed on the billboard flickering with the hollowed out image of the symbol of peace as he replayed his master's words to him tonight.
The weight of the moment settled over him like a shroud. For a moment, his eyes seemed to brighten with clarity. "Kurogiri."
He called out to the swirling mist behind him.
"Do you want to intervene Shigaraki?"
"Yeah. We can't be having Sensei captured now can we." The warpgate's eyes narrowed. "As you wish,"
He activated his warpgate then and there.
_
Tokyo – Ground Zero. The gray-white column of dust from the skyscraper's collapse was still settling when the air around All Might and Yuta began to ripple. The next moment, purple mist appeared and expanded into Warp gates. Dozens of them spiraled into existence at once, encircling both of them. From the voids, the muscular, brain-exposed mid-tier Nomu emerged in twos and threes.
'More? So many of them?' All Might's head swept around only to find them surrounded. "Young Akutami, get back!" All Might's right hand ballooned into his muscle form again.
Even in this fragile state, the instinct to stand in front of a student was a reflex he couldn't kill.
'This is Kurogiri's warpgate, isn't it?' Yuta on the other hand, wasn't listening.
His eyes grew colder at the sight of the familiar warpgate that once sent him into the ocean. He clasped his hands together just as the Nomu came over.
"Underworld Swamp."
In an instant, the earth everywhere outside a three-meter radius from where they stood erupted. The solid asphalt liquefied into a swirling, black whirlpool of mud and gravity. The five dozen Nomu rushing toward them didn't even have time to shriek; they instantly lost their footing, their massive bodies sinking into the mire as if the street had turned into a hungry throat.
Following which, the swamp snapped back into solid granite. The Nomu were gone, fused into the foundation of Tokyo like a macabre art installation, only their twitching heads and shoulders remaining above the surface.
'That's about five or six dozen.'
Yuta thought as he released the hand seal he made just for the hell of it. 'If I didn't know any better, I'd think the system secretly slipped in an Earth Style affinity alongside those bloodlines.' With that, he turned his gaze to All Might who was currently starring blankly at the earth. His expanded arm slowly deflating.
Seconds passed. All Might looked at the field of neutralized monsters, then back at the boy who caused it. 'He just ...'
High above, the news helicopter hovered over the scene. The reporter, Fujiwara Sae, was stammering, her professional mask finally shattering.
"I... Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how to describe what we just witnessed!" she said into the microphone, the camera zooming in on the hooded figure standing amidst the frozen Nomu.
"Dozens of those creatures... Similar to the same ones that appeared in Hosu were just defeated in a single move!"
"... As of the moment, he is currently standing beside the symbol of peace. Has anyone identified this Hero yet? Who is ... Oh no ..."
The camera focused on a figure in the distance emerging from the ruins of the commercial building. ".. huh?" Yuta's head snapped toward the footprint of the collapsed skyscraper.
Through the settling dust two hundred meters away, All For One stood with a raised hand.
The villain's face was a nightmare—the left side a blackened crater of scorched flesh where the "railgun" had grazed him. 'Shit!'
The air around All For One's palm distorted. "Flame Cannon."
A concentrated pillar of fire pressurized by a massive Air Cannon was already screaming toward them. A horizontal comet of destruction.
The earth rose up, a wave on a far greater scale than his previous display.
Gigantic, jagged pillars of stone erupted from the ground in a lightning-fast line, shooting toward the incoming blast. The pressurized air met the stone teeth mid-flight.
BOOM!
The collision created a thermal explosion, turning the sky over Tokyo was to a curtain of orange and grey. The shockwave from the collision between the Earth Spears and the Flame Cannon had turned the intersection into a pressurized oven.
Stone shrapnel, practically superheated, whistled through the air like stray bullets. High above, the news helicopter pitched violently in the thermal updrafts. For several seconds, the world could see nothing but the shifting haze where the stone pillars had met the flame cannon.
Fujiwara Sae gripped her seat, her eyes fixed on the roiling sea of fire below.
"We... we've lost visual! The heat is staggering, even from this altitude. The status of All Might and the unknown hero is unknown ..." She stopped as the dust below began to settle.
What came into view was the sight of a massive crater free of any form of debris in the center of the battlefield. And right near the edge stood a dome of jagged earth. It looked like a natural rock formation until the surface began to spiderweb with cracks. With a heavy, rumbling sound, the stone shell fractured. Large slabs of rock fell away, disintegrating into dust before they hit the ground.
From the wreckage, two figures emerged. Steam erupted from their bodies—All Might's from the literal evaporation of his spent power, and Yuta's from the sheer friction of the impact he had just absorbed. The upper half of his padded gear had been vaporized by the backdraft, leaving his torso bare and crisscrossed with fresh, red burn marks that rapidly knit itself back together before one could properly notice.
In merely a second, all injuries of any sort were gone. The camera's zoomed in a second later barely seeing the regenerating flesh before everything was good as new. The helicopter's camera caught his face in high-definition.
"Wait," Fujiwara gasped, her face filled with disbelief "That... that's not a pro. That's ..." Feeling the burns disappear instantly, Yuta felt the heated air brushing against his exposed skin.
'Sigh!' His face remained expressionless at the sight of his destroyed upper torso. 'How am I not surprised.'
"Well, well," a distorted, mocking voice chuckled from above drawing his attention.