….
Rumi Usagiyama, Mirko, stepped forward, their senses on high alert.
For a full minute, her crimson eyes scanned the shifting light dancing across the crystalline structure. Then, her breath hitched.
Deep within the luminous, translucent core of the egg, a silhouette was suspended in a void of perfect, painless balance.
"He's in there." Rumi pointed out. "...he is actually inside that crystal?"
Hearing this, Twice didn't hesitate. "Inside? Hold on, Boss! I will break you out! Let me stay out here, it's safer!"
Before anyone could stop him, Twice rushed forward and lunged to touch the smooth surface of the crystal.
The moment his fingers brushed against the pulsing blue aura, a violent tongue of fire snapped outward like a defensive serpent.
"YAAAARGH! FIRE! HOT, HOT, HOT!" Twice shrieked, instantly recoiling.
The blue flames clung to his skin, chewing through his suit in seconds.
He began running back and forth across the clearing like a total lunatic, flailing his hands wildly in the air, trying to shake the incinerating heat off.
Spinner quickly rushed over with a torn piece of debris to help him smother the stubborn, supernatural fire out before it could claim his entire arm.
Yet, as Rumi closed the distance herself, a rogue wave of the exact same blue fire lashed out toward her, and did absolutely nothing.
The heat brushed against her skin like a harmless, warm summer breeze, refusing to singe a single hair on her body.
It was an impossible, targeted immunity, as if the evolving power inside the chrysalis recognized her presence and actively chose to spare her from its wrath.
Realizing that Dabi was undergoing a process far beyond a normal quirk awakening, Rumi snapped out of her bewilderment and turned back to the vanguard, directing their focus logically.
….
Pulling out her communicator, Rumi established contact with the main camp, expecting a status update on the remaining threats.
Instead, the jagged voices on the other end delivered the unexpected news: a mysterious villain with a special quirk had suddenly materialized amidst the chaos, extracting all the captured villains and kidnapping two UA students - including Shoto Todoroki.
While the other students scattered across the training grounds had received Mandalay's telepathic broadcast, the signal had completely failed to penetrate this deep into the clearing.
The raw, crushing energy radiating from Dabi's metamorphosis was creating an atmospheric disturbance, completely scrambling external communication frequencies.
Hearing the news, a white-hot, feral fury took hold of Rumi.
Her anger bypassed reason.
Dabi had literally broken his own body, pouring his blood, sweat, and entire soul into this brutal fight to protect his students, and now, while he lay incapacitated, some opportunistic bastards had swept in and ruined everything.
It felt exactly like pouring freezing water all over his hard work.
She didn't just speak into the communicator, she tore into it, her voice dripping with the raw, foul-mouthed aggression of a wild animal.
"Are you bastards dynamic-dead or just completely incompetent?!" Rumi roared into the receiver, her thumb white-knuckled against the button. "Dabi almost burned himself to a goddamn cinder keeping those kids breathing, and you morons let them just walk away with his younger brother?! What the hell were you doing, standing around and playing target practice?!"
On the other end, Aizawa tried to cut in, but Rumi cut him off instantly, her voice scaling into a furious snarl.
"Shut the hell up and listen to me, Eraser!" she barked, baring her teeth. "I don't want to hear your pathetic excuses! You're supposed to be underground heroes, the elite, and you let a single extra drop in and make fools out of all of you?! If you can't even secure a perimeter after the heaviest hitter on the field did the damn job for you, then what good are any of you?! Dabi threw away his own safety for those brats, and you let it go to waste!"
Once her explosive burst of fury finally ran its course, Rumi slammed her jaw shut and forced herself to breathe.
Venting wouldn't save the kids, so her cold, predatory instinct took the wheel.
"Listen up." she snapped, her tone dropping into a lethal, commanding rasp. "We're cleaning up your goddamn mess. The first priority is getting the remaining kids out of this zone, and then we're pulling Dabi back. If any more of those League freaks show up to finish him off while he's like this, I will personally tear them to shreds."
However, getting Dabi out seemed tricky in his position.
Because the supernatural blue flames violently repelled anyone else who attempted to touch the chrysalis, a standard physical lift by the vanguard was impossible.
But Twice's painful mistake had revealed a crucial detail, the fire's protective malice seemed targeting living tissue while leaving inanimate matter untouched.
"Hey, look at that! The fire doesn't give a damn about rocks or metal!" Twice yelled, holding his heavily bandaged hand close to his chest while Spinner patted down the remaining sparks. "It only hates us! It actually loves me, it was just a warm hug!"
"Shut up, Twice." Spinner groaned, shaking his head. "Look, if the fire doesn't react to objects, we can use the extraction gear from the transport chopper."
"Exactly." Rumi muttered, a harsh grin splitting her face as she looked at the towering structure of burning ice. "If we can't touch him, we will just drag the whole damn mountain with us."
Stepping right up to the chrysalis, Rumi ignored the swirling blue aura that parted seamlessly around her.
She wrapped thick, industrial-strength steel cables and specialized towing ropes securely around the base of the frozen egg. Harnessing her immense, rabbit-derived leg strength, she braced her boots against the scorched earth.
The muscles in her thighs bunched and rippled as she prepared for the absurd weight.
"Hmph! Get ready up there!" Rumi shouted toward the hovering helicopter.
With a fierce display of pure effort, she hoisted the colossal crystalline egg entirely off the bedrock, using her terrifying physical power to swing the guiding lines up to the vanguard's transport, securing the massive chrysalis as a hanging payload.
"Take us up!" Rumi ordered, leaping onto the landing.
Suspended safely beneath the chopper, the burning monument of ice and white-hot fire swayed against the dark night sky as they cleared the area, charting a direct course toward a heavily fortified, secure location where Dabi could finish his evolution undisturbed.
….
The perilous aerial journey from the decimated crater back to the relative safety of the UA campus was anything but smooth.
Multiple times, the violent, shifting thermal currents radiating from the chrysalis destabilized the aircraft.
The ropes strained under the immense, shifting mass, forcing the pilot to make two tense, emergency landings just to reinforce the rigging before the entire payload plunged out of the sky.
When the transport finally touched down on U.A. grounds, the medical and engineering teams took one look at the incoming case file and immediately assembled their top quirk specialists and materials scientists.
They set up a perimeter around the burning, frozen anomaly, unloading advanced equipment to analyze it.
An hour later, the verdict from the lead researcher was uninspiring: they were completely clueless.
"We have absolutely no frame of reference for this structure." the lead specialist muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. "The molecular density defies our understanding of thermal dynamics. Honestly, we might just have to wait it out and tell the heroes we have no way in–"
"Sigh… I am just reminding you, it's better not to say the same thing to the Rabbit hero." Aizawa interrupted from where he stood against the wall.
His arms were tightly crossed, and despite his own heavy injuries, he completely refused to leave the room. "Unless you want her to kick you through that wall, find a practical answer."
Desperate to show results, the technical crew tried everything.
Donning specialized, heavy-duty fireproof jackets to ward off the encroaching heat, a brave team stepped up with high-grade industrial diamond-tipped drills, attempting to crack the side of the crystalline shell.
The screeching roar of metal against the surface echoed through the laboratory, but when the dust cleared, all they had managed to leave behind were a few insignificant, shallow scratches.
"Just what the hell is happening with him now?"
Aizawa muttered quietly to himself.
….
Inside the dense crystal, Dabi lay completely motionless, suspended in a void of perfect, painless balance.
His heart was still beating a steady, rhythmic thrum, but to all external appearances, he was deeply comatose, completely locked away from the physical world.
But inside his mind, the darkness shattered.
Dabi's consciousness abruptly woke up somewhere else entirel–
.
….
[To be continued…]
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