….
[Unknown Location, High-Tech Laboratory]
["Doctor."] All For One's voice came through the communication device the way it always did. ["How are things progressing?"]
"Kurogiri has delivered Nine and his team to the target location." Dr. Garaki said. He stopped fidgeting the pen, and straightened. "They should be making contact with the Rabbit Hero any moment now. But, ah, Master, if I may be candid..."
["You always may."]
"I don't think this works. Nine's group against the Number Five Hero, in close quarters, where she is at her most dangerous?" Garaki's voice picked up speed the way it did when his analytical mind was running ahead of his mouth. "The probability of a clean extraction is... sub-optimal. Mirko's combat record in confined spaces is frankly absurd, and she will be protecting the child, which means she won't be fighting to win but to kill. That's a different animal entirely, Master."
["Mm."] All For One sounded like he was smiling. ["Perhaps. But I didn't send Nine because I expected a guaranteed outcome. If his team succeeds, wonderful. If they don't–"] A pause. ["Well. Then we will have learned something useful about what it takes."]
Garaki went quiet for a moment.
"The simultaneous operations are nearly ready to launch as well." he said, moving on. "Multiple low-grade Nomu deployments across the metropolitan sectors, coordinated timing. But I confess, I don't entirely follow the broader logic, Master. These Nomu... the Top Ten will neutralize them within the hour. Endeavor and Best Jeanist are already moving. So what exactly are we–"
["Reminding them."]
"I am sorry?"
["The hero community already suspects I have returned."] All For One's tone didn't change. ["But the public doesn't know..?"]
The static hummed.
["Tonight."] All For One continued. ["They feel it… chaos is no longer something that happens to others. Once that understanding settles into the public, once they feel in their bones that the era of peace is ending, it doesn't leave."]
["It grows and erodes trust in the system from the inside, which is so much more effective than attacking the system from the outside."] He paused again. ["Wouldn't you agree, Doctor?"]
"You've always had a talent for the long game, Master." Garaki's voice had that particular quality it got when he was genuinely impressed and slightly unnerved at the same time. "With the cities in flames, the local heroes will be pinned down. Response times to U.A. will be delayed by the sheer volume of civilian distress calls. The 'system' will be too busy putting out fires to notice the one we've started in their own backyard."
Garaki paused, his eyes flickering to a secondary screen. "Ah, one more thing. Our intelligence confirms that the hero Dabi is currently in the Osaka region. Given the distress signal from his students, he will almost certainly attempt to reach the Nomu engagement site. Depending on his travel speed, he could arrive within–"
["Good."]
Garaki blinked. "Good?"
["If he arrives, he arrives. Two high-grade Nomu against a man who nearly died at the USJ."] All For One's voice was pleasant. ["Today might be the day we remove that particular inconvenience from the board. He appeared out of nowhere, disrupted several carefully laid plans, and has been an irritation ever since. If Nomu finishes him… well. One less variable."]
"And if they don't?"
["Then we will have learned something useful about him, too."] All For One said it the way someone might say then we will try a different restaurant next time. ["Either way, the evening is productive."]
"Understood, Master."
Click-!
The line went dead.
Garaki set the communicator down, he looked at his screens - the tracking data, Nomu vitals, and the satellite feeds showing multiple points of engagement lighting up across the country.
Then his gaze shifted to the file on his secondary monitor:
[DABI: UNKNOWN]
The file was nearly empty, and that bothered him. All For One, his master, regarded Dabi as a minor nuisance - a pest that had wandered into the wrong room.
But Garaki wasn't so sure.
Something in the USJ data - the way Dabi evolved his quirk output in mid-fight, and the unnatural rate at which his combat instincts evolved - kept needling the Doctor's mind.
It was a pattern he had seen before, decades ago, but the pieces didn't quite fit the current board.
But the Master had spoken, and the Master was rarely wrong.
Rarely.
….
[Back to Izuku's Location]
Mom… I am sorry. You told me to be careful. You asked me to come home, and I promised I would. I am so sorry.
All Might… you gave me everything. I was supposed to be the vessel. I was supposed to carry the fire forward until I was worthy of the name. I wanted to see that future, I really did. But this is the only way I can protect it. Please… forgive me.
He pulled on One For All - not from a limb, but from the source.
Seventy. Eighty. Ninety.
One hundred…
His body began to come apart, blood vessels rupturing across his chest and arms as something deep inside failed, a spreading wrongness he couldn't even name.
Still, he pushed further. Because he knew it wasn't enough.
A thousand …and one millio–
The temperature spiked.
So sudden and violent that even as his body shut down, organs failing, vision darkening, throat crushed, Midoriya still felt it:
Heat? And, blue flames?
Immediately, the thin Nomu's hand began to loosen on Midoriya's throat.
The grey, corded fingers snapped open involuntarily, as the arm attached to its shoulder became a pillar of incandescent blue.
It sheathed the creature's entire forearm in a flame so predatory and concentrated that the oxygen in a five-foot radius vanished into a vacuum of white-hot vapor.
The creature shrieked back in pain, lurched backward, its hyper-regeneration firing in a desperate, frantic cycle.
thud-!
Midoriya hit the ground.
Through the grey static eating the edges of his sight, he saw something appear between him and the Nomu.
'Dabi-sensei…'
His vision was fading… coming back… and fading again.
'He is here….'
Dabi was breathing hard. The sharp, rhythmic pattern of [Total Concentration] pushed to its maximum - his lungs working at a capacity that would have ruptured a normal person's respiratory system.
He had crossed hundreds of kilometers in minutes, launched himself through the sky using his own fire as thrust, and landed between his students and two bioengineered killing machines without slowing down.
But it was his face that told you everything you needed to know about what was about to happen.
In the final seconds of his descent, he saw everything - the underground facility in ruins, the orphanage exposed through shattered walls, his students broken and bleeding across the ground.
Shoto, coughing up his life on the floor.
Katsuki, hands ruined, still refusing to stop blasting.
And Izuku - suspended in that grey grip, throat crushed, his body trembling with a suicidal surge of One For All, one heartbeat from erasing him completely.
One second, Dabi's eyes moved across the wreckage, and the bloodied floor.
It settled on the three teenagers who had been fed into a meat grinder and had the audacity to keep fighting anyway.
His hands were shaking, and surely it wasn't out of exhaustion.
"How dare you." he said.
His voice was quiet and that was the wrong part.
Dabi yelling was Dabi being Dabi - sharp, biting, and in command.
Dabi quiet meant something else entirely.
"How fucking dare you lay a hand on my students."
The two Nomu oriented on him.
The thin one was still burning, its arm regenerating in fits and starts, the blue fire clinging to the new tissue and burning it away again as fast as it formed.
…and the larger juggernaut, which had been grinding Bakugo into the floor, turned its vacant, bulbous eyes toward Dabi.
Whatever passed for intelligence inside their dark, modified skulls, the threat assessment in the room had just been changed.
Dabi didn't look at the Nomu, his gaze shifted over his shoulder instead.
"Midoriya." His voice was a flat, terrifyingly level line and the rage beneath it wasn't gone. "How bad is Koda?"
"He is exhausted, but–" Midoriya was on his knees, gasping, barely conscious. "He is not… he's not seriously injured, he's–"
"Better…" Dabi turned his back to them, facing the Nomu once more. "Now just get behind me and sit the hell down."
The response was instantaneous.
Midoriya dragged himself backward with his one working arm.
Shoto crawled, ribs grinding, blood in his mouth.
Even Bakugo - a boy who considered 'compliance' a personal insult - found himself moving.
He stood on trembling legs, his ruined, gore-slick hands hanging at his sides, and retreated behind Dabi's shadow without a single word of protest.
Koda was already behind them, pressed against a collapsed pillar, shaking.
The thin Nomu attacked first.
It moved with that sickening, physics-defying velocity: the same blur-and-vanish trick that had been dismantling the students for the last ten minutes.
Reappeared in Dabi's blind spot, its clawed hand already mid-swing, aimed with mechanical precision at the base of his skull.
Dabi's [Spider-sense] had already caught it, and left hand blocked the attack cleanly.
He caught the creature's wrist out of the air without so much as turning his head.
CRUSH!
His fingers closed and the bones underneath compressed and broke.
====
| [ARACHNID GENOME] – 30/100%
====
Even at 30%, he sensed the attack coming before Nomu had finished deciding to make it, through its intent.
His body, rebuilt through the [Super Soldier] was more than capable to process, and react in time.
He still hadn't turned around.
Dabi rasped. "What did I expect from a lab-grown birdbrain? The last batch of Nomu actually had some weight to them. What are you? The budget model? The scrap they send out when the real projects are busy?"
He twisted the creature's wrist, to the point, the entire forearm separated at the elbow, tendons snapping, bone pulling free from the socket.
Dabi tossed the severed limb aside as if it were a piece of trash.
The thin Nomu shrieked, a mechanical keening of pure shock. It tried to blur away, its hyper-regeneration already budding pink, raw tissue from the stump.
Dabi's right hand came up.
Blue fire condensed, it flowed along his fingers, compressing under the sheer force of his will until it achieved a physical, razor-sharp density.
It shaped itself into a blade.
A sword.
The lines were clean, the edge a shimmering, ultraviolet white.
It burned at temperatures that should have made cohesion a physical impossibility, yet the fire held its shape because Dabi commanded it to.
[Sun Breathing. Seventh Form - Sunflower Thrust]
He moved, however, it wasn't in one particular direction.
His body seemed to split into a dozen flickering phantoms - afterimages trailing behind him, each one vibrating at a slightly different frequency, a slightly different angle.
It wasn't a cloning quirk, but was a lethal application of raw, [Super Soldier] speed combined with deliberate, rhythmic variation.
Each shift in his velocity left a visual echo that Nomu's hyper-accelerated perception couldn't distinguish from reality.
The thin Nomu's head jerked left, right, then snapped back.
Its predictive systems were screaming, unable to lock onto the real Dabi because all of them were him - fractions of a second apart, all converging on the same kill-point.
The fire-blade hissed through the air.
In a single, fluid rotation, the sword sheared through Nomu's remaining arm at the shoulder.
Before the limb could even touch the floor, a second, inverted cut took both legs at the knee.
thud-!
The Nomu dropped.
Within seconds, it was a truncated, twitching mess laying on the ground.
Its regeneration fired frantically, trying to rebuild four severed limbs simultaneously, but the blue fire cauterized the cells at a molecular level.
Dabi was already above it. He had pushed off the cracked floor without breaking stride, using a localized burst from his heels to gain height.
He came down like a falling star, the blade driving straight into the exposed, pulsing brain case.
The plasma sword punched through the reinforced skull. Blue flames flooded the interior cavity, an inferno of 2000°C overwhelming the biological regeneration entirely.
The tissue charred, blackened, and turned to ash within the bone.
The Nomu's body seized once, went rigid, and then slumped into a heap of dead meat.
It didn't get back up.
Eleven seconds - Start to finish.
The larger Nomu roared.
The sound shook debris from the ceiling and made the ground vibrate.
It charged - massive, unstoppable, fists swinging with enough force behind them to turn concrete to powder.
Dabi dismissed the sword, the blade dissolved into formless sparks and was extinguished.
He turned to face the juggernaut with empty hands, neither dodging nor adjusting his stance.
The fat Nomu's right fist came down with the weight of a skyscraper. Dabi caught it with his right palm.
The left fist followed a micro-second later, a blow meant to pulverize a human chest, and Dabi caught that, too.
The impact generated a concussive shockwave that exploded outward in a perfect circle - dust, glass, and chunks of masonry were launched like shrapnel.
The ground beneath Dabi's boots cratered, the concrete spiderwebbing as he sank three inches into the floor.
He didn't give an inch.
The 100% [Super Soldier], and the 30% [Arachind Genome] physical powers are far superior, than any Nomu.
Dabi looked at the grey, corded fists locked in his hands.
Then he looked up into the creature's vacant eyes.
"Shock absorption, right?" He tilted his head, his grip tightening until the Nomu's knuckles began to creak and groan. "I have been wondering exactly where my ceiling is these days..."
He smiled and it had zero warmth in it.
"So do me a favor and hold still." His grip tightened another degree, the creaking became something worse–
"You're my punching bag for the next thirty seconds."
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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