….
Rumi just dropped her center of gravity, her powerful legs coiling like high-tension springs.
"Let's see if that extra meat can save your life." she launched herself directly at the monster.
The sheer, suffocating intimidation radiating from her caused the battlefield to freeze. Irrespective of the scary display, a collective wave of relief washed over the U.A. students and Pro Heroes–
Backup had finally arrived; from the hovering chopper, ropes dropped into the clearing, and one by one, multiple heroes landed.
They also recognised that almost all of the backup is from the Reformed Ravagers Agency.
Stain, his blood-red scarf whipping in the wind, touched down alongside Spinner, Twice, and the rest of the specialized support team. With them being here now, the numerical disadvantage was handled.
Just as immediately as they landed, the heroes engaged the Vanguard Squad.
And seeing that, Midoriya turned his back on the incoming clash.
His green eyes locked onto the towering, corrosive pillar of purple spheres. The monstrous remains of Minoru Mineta.
He tightened his fists, the green lightning of One For All surging across his skin.
….
.
[At The Same Time]
Dabi's skin was burning and freezing simultaneously.
His internal organs suffered under the internal pressure of two fundamental forces of nature that, by every law of natural science, should have torn him apart at the molecular level.
Luckily, his now enhanced healing factor seemed to keep up with the changes that are happening within; except for the constant buzzing of his spider senses going super wild than normal.
However, he cannot feel any immediate danger with his surroundings.
Right there is still Gigantomachia; alive and walking.
But even then…. for some reason, he couldn't pinpoint the warning his senses are throwing at him…. It's as if… the danger is not present here…. but somewhere in another dimension…. eyeing at him….
…whatever, let's deal with this titan first….
He was alive. And for the first time in his existence, his body was in perfect, impossible equilibrium.
Five hundred meters away, Gigantomachia was continuing in his path.
However, just as Dabi's eyes landed darkly on the creature, the walking natural disaster felt an aching pain behind its back without any physical blow.
Suddenly, the air behind the behemoth changed.
And unlike the small spike in temperature throughout the battle; this time, it was a shift in much higher level.
?....? Gigantomachia stopped.
The mountain of muscle turned slowly, as its eyes landed back on Dabi.
The disappointment was quite evident within the titan; the insect was back, and it was brighter than before.
"You noticed it, huh?" Dabi prepared his stance. "But it's too late buddy."
He wasn't running, nor was he executing the ballistic, explosive leaps he had relied on throughout the fight.
He was flying again as his entire body was emitting a steady, blinding aura of ultraviolet-white plasma. He propelled himself slowly into the night sky above Gigantomachia, twin jets of concentrated flame keeping him perfectly aloft.
With his black coat charred and whipping in the violent updrafts, he looked like a dark angel wreathed in contradictory elements; fire and ice.
Below him, the giant snarled, its massive legs bending as it prepared to launch itself into the sky and crush him once and for all.
"Don't. Move."
The words weren't loud. They weren't shouted over the roar of the flames. They were just quiet, certain, and absolute.
!!??And Gigantomachia froze.
Gigantomachia possessed an enhanced Dog quirk, a sensory mutation that allowed it to detect the smell of emotions, track intent, and read the very soul of its opponents.
And what the beast smelled radiating from the tiny, glowing figure hovering above him was–
Death.
It wasn't anger, determination, desperate, or the clawing fury of a human fighting for survival.
All he could smell is… pure… inevitable ending.
It smelled like standing at the edge of an abyssal drop and knowing that stepping forward meant falling forever. It felt like watching a star collapse in the silence of deep space, understanding with absolute certainty that nothing could stop what was coming next.
For the very first time in its existence, Gigantomachia felt genuine, paralyzing fear.
All For One was terrifying in his power, his cruelty, and his absolute dominance.
But this was fundamentally different.
What Dabi seemed to currently possess doesn't just seem like a power; it instinct seemed to scream something otherworldly to Gigantomachia.
Hovering in the sky, Dabi raised both hands.
In his right hand, the ultraviolet-blue flames condensed, compressing inward until they shifted to a stark, blinding white. He compressed the plasma into a single, vibrating point where the sheer density of the heat became almost solid.
In his left hand, an unnatural frost bloomed. It was cold of such absolute magnitude that the ambient moisture in the air instantly crystallized into diamond-hard fractals, the temperature plummeting to approach absolute zero.
They shouldn't work together. Obviously there is Shota who possesses both ice and fire quirk, but internally they are two different quirks, and never actually mixed.
However, what Dabi is performing is to mix the two opposite natures. Everyone knows the impossible-
Fire and Ice. Yang and Yin.
Forcing them into the same space should have torn reality apart at the seams.
However, Dabi seems to be doing exactly that.
Breaking Reality.
The collision of absolute fire and absolute ice created something that shouldn't exist; a perfect sphere formed between his palms. It was blue, white, and glowing with an impossible, otherworldly light.
Inside the sphere, molecules vibrated at hypersonic speeds from the extreme heat, while simultaneously being locked into complete crystalline stasis by the cold.
It was a thermal paradox.
Matter was caught between states, unable to reconcile, building exponential pressure and energy that had absolutely nowhere to go except outward.
The sphere wasn't on fire. It wasn't ice.
It was both and neither; a completely new state of matter that existed in the physical world purely because Dabi's evolved, hybridized quirk commanded it to.
The forest around Gigantomachia began to freeze and burn simultaneously.
The trees instantly crystallized, while their inner cores simultaneously ignited from within, turning them into glowing, frozen torches.
The sphere between Dabi's hands grew; from the size of a basketball; to a car; to a house.
The light became blinding, washing out the shadows of the entire mountain range. It was deep into the night, the pale moon hanging quietly overhead.
But a second sun had just appeared in the sky over Nagano.
Blue.
And unspeakably beautiful.
….
Five kilometers away, in the U.A. training camp, things were unfolding quite differently.
With backup having joined them the tides have completely shifted, despite the mutated quirks of the villains.
The Pro Heroes from Reformed Ravagers Agency had single handedly taken care of the most villains, and at the absolute center of the counter-offensive was Rumi Usagiyama leading them.
Obviously when Dabi isn't around, she is the next in line boss to them, and followed by Stain, dispute not being an official part of the agency. Heck, even their leader Dabi isn't officially part of the agency; he actually cannot join any agency for the matter of fact.
Anyway, they have no problem following Rumi. She is fully capable and strong enough to have their trust. Even now, she was everywhere at once, a white blur of pure, unadulterated violence destroying anything and everything in her path.
Things were being taken care of almost a bit too easily.
In fact, after her chilling promise to settle the score, the fight with the newly mutated, heavily armored Muscular hadn't even lasted two minutes.
It was a one sided beatdown.
All Muscular had in the battle going in his way was his loud mouth, which only further fueled Rumi's rage to destroy him farther.
All the members of Reformed Ravagers had a sweat tickling down their neck, when they heard the agonizing and painful groaning of the villain; and let's not even mention what the teenagers felt at that moment.
Still they couldn't help but be amazed by her powers.
During the whole battle of two minutes, she moved with such speed that Muscular couldn't land a single counter. She shattered his differences right through his biggest strengths driving a spinning heel into his jaw that fractured his skull, and finished it with a dropping axe kick knocking him off.
Now, the muscle headed villain was laying completely motionless at the bottom of a trench, looking exactly like a piece of wet, bloody paper pasted to a concrete wall.
With the heavy-hitters of the Vanguard Squad incapacitated, bleeding out, or scrambling to retreat, only one true anomaly remained on the battlefield.
The Purple Tower.
The grotesque, towering mutation of Minoru Mineta had ceased to be a simple pillar of expanding spheres. Driven by the quirk-enhancing drug and the shattered, twisted remnants of his own psyche, the mutation was evolving in real-time.
Midoriya, Aizawa, Bakugo, and the rest of the students had tried every method possible to contain it.
Aizawa's [Erasure] couldn't reach the original body buried deep within the mass. Bakugo's explosions only splattered the highly corrosive acid across wider areas. Midoriya's powerful kicks were rendered useless; striking the mass was akin to punching a tidal wave of battery acid.
But containment was no longer the primary issue.
It wasn't just expanding anymore.
Mineta was suddenly able to control them.
The purple tower shifted, its structure morphing from a static pillar into a writhing, sentient wave of sludge and moved with creeping malice.
The spheres melted together, forming viscous, stretching tendrils that reached out like acidic hands. On impact, it absorbed the organic matter of the forest, expanding its mass as it dragged itself toward the students.
"F-Flashy..." a distorted, gargling voice echoed from the depths of the purple sludge, the sound bubbling up through the acid. "Why... only the flashy ones...?"
"Get back!"
Aizawa roared, his capture weapon snapping out to yank Jiro and Kaminari out of the path of a sweeping, acidic tendril. The moment his scarf touched the sludge, the specialized carbon-fiber alloy began to aggressively sizzle and melt.
"Sensei, I think it can track us!" Midoriya shouted, keeping Full Cowling active as he bounded backward.
The acidic mass surged forward, moving with a horrific, fluid speed.
It surged up the trunks of the remaining trees, melting the timber into black ash and incorporating the carbon into its own dark-purple body. Faces, grotesque, warped imitations of Mineta's crying, jealous visage, briefly bubbled to the surface of the sludge before popping and melting back into the mass.
"Give me... the spotlight..."
"Like hell you get the spotlight, you freak!" Bakugo roared, launching himself into the air above the mass. "AP SHOT: AUTO-CANNON!"
He fired a rapid, concentrated barrage of explosions directly into the center of the wave. The blasts tore massive holes in the sludge, raining purple acid down upon the clearing.
But the moment Bakugo's explosive barrage stopped, the acidic gaps sealed instantly.
Within a fraction of a second, the mass formed a colossal, grasping hand aimed directly at Bakugo while he was still suspended in mid-air, completely vulnerable to the counterattack.
Before Bakugo could twist his body to fire a desperate evasive blast, a casual voice cut through the hiss of the melting earth.
"Tsk… Some students Dabi got here…. Couldn't even take care of one minion."
Rumi walked over to their side of the clearing, her stride relaxed, completely unbothered by the towering bio-weapon threatening to dissolve the forest.
Behind her, the rest of the misfit squad filtered into the defensive perimeter.
Stain, Twice, and Spinner stepped forward, their weapons drawn, while the support team hung back, efficiently securing the immobilized Vanguard villains who had survived Rumi's initial massacre.
"Anyway, I don't see Dabi anywhere here?" Rumi asked, placing a hand on her hip as she scanned the terrified faces of Class 1-A.
Just then, a massive acidic tendril whipped out from the sludge, aiming a lethal blind-spot strike directly at Rumi's exposed back.
"WATCH OUT!"
Bakugo yelled, trying to warn her as gravity dragged him back toward the earth.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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