From the distant safety of the tree line, the mountain villa in the Gunga region looked exactly like the retreat of a man who had made his fortune and wanted absolute distance from the world.
Adam approached on foot at dusk, cloaked entirely under the Veil. The Hat's Travel function had dropped him a cautious two kilometers away. When dealing with a target capable of stealing abilities by touch, appearing directly on top of them was the kind of mistake a person only got to make once, regardless if he could steal anything. The house itself was surprisingly modest, built of dark wood with a wide porch and a gravel driveway that clearly hadn't seen a car in weeks. It was completely the wrong house for the massive, surging power bill Sage had been tracking across three different prefectures.
The true anomaly was buried deep underground.
[ Confirmed, Host. Whatever is under this hillside is enormous, and it is awake. The power draw I have been chasing for a month feeds something many levels deep, far more than the hospital or the island, and the movement in it never stops. They are not storing here. They are mobilizing. ]
Adam crouched low in the pine shadows, letting her analyze the structure. Over the next hour, a clear picture began to assemble from the low hum of the ventilation shafts, the rhythm of heavy footsteps, and the cold blue light bleeding through microscopic seams in the earth.
He could hear the continuous churn of many feet moving with absolute purpose and the steady, unyielding cadence of an underground facility running shifts around the clock. It was far too much movement, and far too organized, to belong to just the handful of thugs encountered at the high school.
[ I want to be precise about what I can and cannot give you, Host. I cannot see through this much rock. It would be best to infiltrate it to get more information. ]
An operation of this scale didn't just run itself. Someone was sitting at the absolute bottom of it issuing the orders, and the energy trail that had led him here was the exact same trail that had kept a half-dead emperor breathing for the last sixty years.
He's down there, Adam realized. At the deepest, most defended point, resting inside a medical cradle just like the one at the hospital. I'd stake the entire deployment on it. But I intend to confirm it with my own eyes before I do a single thing I can't take back.
[ And one more thing, Host, from the pattern of it. This is not a base he is hiding in. This place is a trap for you. I suspect he joined forces with the Meta Liberation Army early. ]
Adam sat with that reality for a long, cold moment.
He had eliminated incredibly powerful entities across different realms, including a living mountain just weeks prior. But raw power usually died because it was only strong in a few predictable ways. This was entirely different. An army's worth of quirks, if coordinated to function as a single machine, could grind down any opponent through sheer, systematic attrition, no matter how fast, durable, or precise they were. Even a body that never tired would eventually bleed out if subjected to enough minor cuts. It was a lesson Adam knew far too well to ignore from the other side.
Even at the absolute peak of this current kit, I cannot win an open war against a coordinated army and the mastermind organizing them. Not in the open, and certainly not all at once.
[ Agreed. A frontal engagement is a slow loss. I model your survival, not your victory. ]
So we don't fight their war. We cut the head off before the war can even begin.
He organized his thoughts methodically, letting each logical step earn the next. Go deep, not loud. He would use the Veil to blind their sensors, Shadowstep to cross the open distances, and absolute patience for everything else. He would slip down through the complex one shadow at a time until he was standing directly over the medical cradle, neutralizing the old man before a single order could be issued to the troops upstairs. Kill the general in his bed, and the army simply becomes a few hundred frightened people trapped in a mountain hole.
But he forced himself to look at the worst-case scenario, too.
If he triggered an alarm down there, if the extraction failed the way it usually does, he would be completely isolated at the bottom of an enemy fortress with an entire army of quirks waking up directly above him, complicating the kill on AFO. He needed the garrison looking toward the sky when the hammer dropped. He needed a massive surface distraction that wasn't tied to his position.
I need to involve the heroes, he decided. Not to fight him directly, but to create noise. A surface assault massive enough that every single weapon in this mountain points upward while I work in the dark.
[ The cleanest version, Host: locate him first, confirm the room with your own eyes, then leave quietly and arrange the surface event. Do not commit to the approach until you have seen the actual space he lives in. A trap you have walked is not a trap. ]
Then let's go take a look.
It took three grueling days.
Three days of existing purely within the structural seams of a base built by a man who collected human abilities, where any one of those soldiers might possess a quirk capable of sensing his presence. Adam descended by fractions, securing one stairwell at a time, never lingering in a single shadow long enough for the environment to register him. He slept in cramped maintenance voids in tight, two-hour windows while Sage monitored the surrounding walls. He memorized the shift rotations, the patrol routes, and the exact spaces where the security cameras were. Surviving on ration bars and water from his own storage, he ceased to be a person for seventy-two hours, transforming into nothing more than a stray draft of cold air moving through the concrete.
He watched the army solidify, and the reality was far worse than the initial estimate from the surface. Frontline shock troops drilled in continuous shifts with wrapped hands, and a tier of hardened lieutenants carried themselves like seasoned killers. At least two hundred bodies, likely more, were packed into the lower levels with the cold patience of a military force waiting for a specific date.
And then, on the third level, holding a quiet court with a stillness that was worse than the manic rage Adam remembered, he spotted a face he had last seen going grey while he tore the heart out of it.
Shigaraki. The recognition landed cold and heavy. I killed him. I personally felt his heart stop.
[ Rebuilt, Host. The doctor's work. Whatever was left of him after the school, someone put back together and improved. He feels stronger than he did then. ]
On the third night, he finally reached the vault door.
It was the most heavily fortified bulkhead in the entire mountain, and Houseguest's Right failed to open it. No living person inside had ever willingly granted Adam access to the chamber beyond, and the pathway was brutally honest about that distinction. However, the parallel maintenance chase had been frequently accessed by the technicians servicing the life-support machinery. A wall was still just a wall, and Adam had spent the last month learning that physical boundaries were merely suggestions if you were patient enough to exploit the seams.
Using a microscopic gap that Decryption isolated from the internal airflow, he pressed his eye to the seam and looked directly at All For One.
The chamber was sterile, dimly lit, and filled with the rhythmic, mechanical clicking of medical equipment. A frail body lay inside the central cradle, wrapped in sterile dressings and tethered to a complex array of tubes. The ruined, featureless face was turned up toward a ceiling it could no longer see. Physically, he looked far smaller than the terrifying myth surrounding him—just a half-dead old thing surviving on artificial lungs. Yet even through the reinforced wall, he radiated a sheer, oppressive weight that made the hair on the back of Adam's neck stand up. It was malice with a pulse; an ancient apex predator that had long since forgotten the limitations of a normal human body.
There you are, Adam thought, his mind entirely clear of triumph. A century of taking things from people who couldn't stop you.
He stayed just long enough for Sage to map the structural dimensions, the tactical entry angles, the machinery, and the single, hulking High-End Nomu standing guard in the corner like a loyal statue. Then, he quietly melted back into the maintenance chase, ascending toward the surface. Above the mountain, the night sky was clear and entirely oblivious to the monster resting beneath it.
Reaching the relative safety of the tree line, he reached for the Hat, activated Travel, and went to find Nezu.
The principal welcomed him standing.
"You found him."
"Gunga region," Adam reported clearly. "A villa sitting on top of a hidden complex six levels deep, housing a literal army. Two hundred soldiers, fully organized, with the mastermind himself on life support at the absolute bottom. I can get to him, but I can't guarantee success, with two hundred quirks waking up behind me. I need the surface to explode. Deploy every hero you can mobilize, point every light and news camera at that mountain, and stage an assault so massive that nobody downstairs looks down. You don't need to win the fight. You just have to be the loudest thing in the prefecture for exactly one hour."
The office fell profoundly silent. When Nezu finally spoke, his voice was entirely stripped of its usual playful demeanor, revealing a cold, stark gravity Adam hadn't heard from him before: "You understand the sheer danger of what you are asking me to send people into."
"I do," Adam replied. "That's exactly why I'm giving you the real numbers instead of a smaller, watered-down figure that would be easier to say yes to."
Nezu took a slow breath, setting down a teacup he hadn't even tasted. "I will orchestrate a magnificent show, Varen-sensei. The grandest this nation has witnessed in a generation. Endeavor will undoubtedly demand to lead it, and I will let him believe it was his idea. When do you need the curtain to rise?"
"Give me exactly ninety minutes to get back into position. Then hit them like you mean it."
"We always mean it," Nezu said softly. "That is the fundamental tragedy of our profession. Bring us back a quiet world."
Adam used Travel to return to the mountain's shadow. Knowing the storm that was about to break over the hills, he slipped back down into the concrete dark one last time, waiting beside a sleeping emperor for the sky to start screaming.
It took the heroes exactly seventy minutes to mobilize, and when they hit the mountain, they hit it with absolute authority.
Adam felt the initial shockwave travel through a hundred meters of solid bedrock—a sudden, violent tremor in the building's infrastructure. Alarms began blaring instantly, but he let the noise wash right past him as the garrison scrambled upward to reinforce the surface, running directly into a wall of overwhelming light and heroic force. Sage fed tactical updates straight to his vision: helicopters circling overhead, a tight perimeter of top-tier Pro Heroes, a massive column of scorching fire that could only belong to Endeavor, and commands echoing over loudspeakers. The trap All For One had painstakingly constructed for a single stealthy intruder had been completely overwhelmed by an actual war.
Down in the medical vault, the old man opened his eyes.
Adam felt the shift immediately, like the drop in atmospheric pressure right before a massive storm. The life-support machinery altered its mechanical rhythm, and the guarding Nomu shifted its head. From the depths of the cradle, a thin, dry, and entirely undisturbed voice spoke—a voice that hadn't needed to hurry for a century.
"So. He brought friends after all."
A second voice emerged from the shadows, deferential and composed entirely of dark swirling mist. "The perimeter is crawling with heroes, master. Endeavor is leading the charge. They have not breached the lower thresholds yet."
"No," All For One murmured in agreement. "They are merely loud. Being loud is the luxury of those who want to be seen winning." The old man paused, and Adam, pressed tightly into the seam of the wall, felt a cold, sweeping awareness drift across the room like an invisible hand searching for a draft. "But what of the quiet one? The phantom who has been taking my things... he isn't on the surface with the cameras, is he?"
"I cannot locate him, master."
"No. Neither can I." A faint touch of genuine amusement, almost an appetite, filtered into the dry voice. "It has been forty long years since something successfully hid from my senses. Kurogiri, we are evacuating. Let the boy have his army and his fire. I did not survive a century by standing on the target someone else drew for me. Transport us to the coast site. Nomu go and entertain our guests."
A swirling vortex of purple-black mist tore open in the center of the laboratory. The heavy Nomu blasted the doors out and rushed out to meet the heroes. The old man and his gatekeeper prepared to vanish.
As the dark mist expanded to swallow them, Adam stepped directly out of the wall and into its shadow.
He didn't fight the pull. He had spent three days training his body to be nothing more than a natural extension of the building's architecture, and the warp gate was just another door. He stepped through it exactly like a guest who had always belonged there. The freezing vacuum of the warp swallowed him along with the others, and the world folded inside out.
They materialized inside a sprawling, subterranean concrete chamber that reeked of sea salt and damp air. Half of the industrial overhead lights were completely dead. The medical cradle settled heavily onto the floor, and the mist slowly coalesced back into a man-shaped void.
Suddenly, the old man lay perfectly still within his bandages, his senses flaring.
"Kurogiri," All For One whispered softly. "Do you perceive that?"
The mist shifted its form, searching the darkness. "Master?"
"We brought a passenger along with us." The featureless, blind face turned slowly toward the shadows, locked on with an ancient instinct older than sight. "Hello, quiet one. I cannot see you, or perceive a single trace of your quirk. You hitched a ride." The dry voice warmed with a horrific intensity. "I am going to thoroughly enjoy taking you apart to see how you function."
Adam offered no reply. He was already mid-stride.
Lunging directly out of the cradle's shadow, his hand shot toward the wrapped chest of the emperor, speaking the word he had carried through three days of silence.
"I came, I saw, I recorded."
His cross-Sequence power locked onto the fundamental engine of All For One—the core ability anchoring all the others—and Adam pulled with everything he had.
The power bucked. It didn't resist like the Nomu or the giant; it resisted like a heavy vault door slamming against a human shoulder. A solid century of accumulated weight, iron will, and pure malice slammed back against his spiritual grip, causing it to skid completely off the ability. A violent backlash surged up his arm, striking his chest and vaporizing a full third of his internal energy reserves in a single, blinding instant.
The extraction had failed.
And All For One now knew exactly where he stood.
"There you are," the mastermind breathed with absolute delight.
The purple mist flared instantly as Kurogiri moved to warp them away again, but Adam had half a second of recovery and spent it instantly. Snapping out of the physical recoil, he drove a devastating fist straight into the heavy brass collar welded to Kurogiri's throat—the singular anchor holding the cloud to a physical form. His overhauled muscles put the full weight of his new hundred-and-twenty-ton baseline behind a strike his old body could have never thrown.
The metal armor caved in completely. The warp gate shattered mid-formation, and Kurogiri was launched across the concrete chamber in a spray of unraveling, chaotic mist, failing to rise clean.
Then, the counterattack hit.
All For One didn't need sight to locate his target; he simply flooded the entire chamber with raw, compressed force. A devastating shockwave of air erupted from his outstretched palm like a cannon blast, catching Adam square in the torso and launching him violently into the far concrete wall. The Quiet Coat dispersed the kinetic impact across its entire specialized weave, but Adam could still feel the sheer pressure vibrating through him.
Massive spikes of solid bone erupted violently from the floor where he had stood a millisecond before. The old man was actively sitting up in his cradle now, tearing life-support tubes away as his frail body channeled a dozen stolen strength quirks simultaneously. He didn't bother aiming; he simply saturated the entire room with pure destruction, letting the environment execute the work for him.
The structural pillars splintered into dust under the overlapping weight of blind, devastating quirks. Amid the collapsing chaos, the old man gathered spring-like limbs and a massive kinetic burst to launch himself straight through the crumbling ceiling toward the surface and the open sky, moving faster than a half-dead thing had any right to move.
He's breaking out to get maneuvering room, Adam thought, spitting concrete dust as he scrambled to his feet. He fights better in the open air where he can saturate the angles. Fine by me. So do I.
Leaping into the ruptured shaft, he used Shadowstep to ascend the escape route in thirty-meter bursts, going from shadow to shadow faster than the falling debris. He breached the surface onto a jagged, grey headland beneath a low sky just a fraction of a second before All For One cleared the rupture.
The emperor soared into the open air, surrounded by a swirling corona of stolen kinetic energy. For a single, perfect second, he was framed against the pale clouds with absolutely nothing to hide behind.
Adam met him mid-air, channeling his entire physical strength into a single, devastating descending blow.
The hundred-and-twenty-ton blow folded All For One sideways, launching him a hundred meters straight through the reinforced concrete walls of the abandoned facility's main building. He tore through one wall, then another, burying himself deep within the heart of the structure as the facade sagged.
Adam slammed onto the rocky ground, refusing to let the momentum fade.
Sage. Relocate us to the island facility now, while he's disoriented. We don't know what other surprises he has rigged here.
Sprinting through the rubble, he picked him up before the mastermind could reassemble the compressed air around his body, and triggered the Hat's Travel function.
The universe opened once more, this time entirely on Adam's terms.
They came out onto the jagged grey stone of the offshore island facility—the exact location Adam had walked through four days ago, with no one left alive on the rock to hear the noise.
Upon arrival, Adam immediately drove All For One face-first into the stone yard, a maximum-weight strike that cratered the bedrock and would have instantly ended any natural living creature in the world.
It failed to end this one.
The emperor recovered with terrifying velocity, a cocktail of stolen regeneration factors instantly knitting his shattered bones back together even as they fractured. A synchronized surge of physical enhancers, spring-muscles, and kinetic boosters erupted outward, blasting Adam off his chest and sending him skidding across the loading yard.
Adam rolled through the momentum, popping back up to his feet just as a half-dozen elemental attacks fanned out toward him: blades of compressed air, jagged bone spires, and a sweeping wave of a corrosive substance that rotted the solid stone upon contact.
[ I am fully inside his quirk now, Host. Decryption is actively mapping the core engine while he exerts it. Every second he spends fighting me allows me to read his spiritual source deeper. The next recording theft will land much stronger. ]
Then I'll keep him furious.
It was easily the most brutal engagement of the entire deployment, yet it wasn't even close to the longest, simply because neither combatant could afford an extended war of attrition. Adam couldn't completely outmaneuver an opponent utilizing a century's worth of stolen human adaptability. Conversely, All For One couldn't pin down an opponent he fundamentally couldn't perceive. To the old man's senses, Adam was a literal ghost, a terrifying void in the hunter's century-old certainty of being the apex predator.
The emperor compensated the only way he knew how: by completely saturating the battlefield with wide-area destruction, making precision aim entirely irrelevant. Adam countered by using Shadowstep and the Veil to constantly occupy the spaces the destruction had already passed through, letting the specialized weave of his coat eat what got through while his new body carried him through gaps that would have killed anyone else.
Suddenly, as Adam was punching him, All For One ceased trying to crush him and reached out to consume him.
A massive cage of solid rib-bones erupted violently from the earth, clamping shut around Adam mid-stride and trapping him within a calcified cage. Before he could slip free, the old man's hand slammed flat against the bone bars, extending the terrifying mechanism that had devoured a hundred heroes, attempting to forcefully rip Adam's power out of him.
The conceptual theft found absolutely nothing to grasp.
There was no native quirk factor inside Adam to steal. There was no biological genetic marker, no spirit-anchored signature that the engine recognized or knew how to grip. The old man's ancient power closed around a soul that was built entirely outside the rules of his universe, sliding off uselessly—the exact same way Erasure and every other local limitation had slid off him before. For the first time in a hundred years, the villain encountered an entity his authority fundamentally did not apply to.
The featureless, blind face went entirely slack, registering an emotion Adam never expected to witness on it: pure, unadulterated confusion. Almost fear.
"What are you," the emperor breathed.
"A stalker," Adam said evenly, and Shadowstepped right through the structural bars of the cage.
Reappearing instantly at his flank, Adam delivered a sweeping kick that took All For One entirely off his feet. As the villain hit the stone yard, Adam slammed his palm flat against the ground and channeled Overhaul through the island's concrete floor.
The concrete and rusted iron rebar surged upward like liquid waves, wrapping securely around the emperor's thin limbs before solidifying into an absolute cast of reinforced earth, binding him at every major joint. It would only hold him for a few seconds, but seconds were all Adam required.
He placed his open palm directly against the center of the wrapped chest.
"I came, I saw, I recorded."
This time, with Sage reading the quirk from the inside, the villain's focus fractured, his body bound, and his century of absolute certainty entirely broken—the theft did not skid.
It tore.
The ability All For One was ripped out of the villain's soul like a tooth being extracted from a jaw, roots and all. The concrete cast now held nothing more than a frail, ordinary human frame that no longer possessed the supernatural scaffolding keeping it intact. The cellular regeneration halted instantly, the passive durability vanished, and every single ounce of trauma the duel had written into the old body came due in a single second. The master of the underworld began, slowly, to expire on the cold rock of the island he had abandoned.
He didn't scream or rage. He merely turned his ruined face toward Adam, his fading voice finding a dry, rattling chuckle.
"A hundred years," he whispered. "And it concludes with you." He took a long, shallow, wet breath. "Whatever you are... the next phase of this world will not favour you for holding my power. I was barely its master. You—"
Before he could articulate the warning, his time completely ran out.
The stolen power Adam now held within his system was an absolute horror.
He felt the sheer, crushing weight of it the exact microsecond the theft concluded—a spiritual density that had nothing to do with physical mass. It felt like a century of swallowed abilities and consumed souls compacted into a volatile engine, pulsing against his internal spirituality like a live detonation. It wasn't docile; it possessed a hundred years of ravenous appetite and deep malice, and with its master suddenly removed, the quirk immediately clawed toward the nearest source of energy it could grip: Adam himself.
He dropped to one knee on the cold stone, his teeth ground tightly together as he held a cosmic bomb by its pin.
[ I have secured the perimeter of the ability, Host. Hold your focus. Do not attempt to wield or manifest its contents yet. The accumulated hoard is the danger, not the core mechanism itself. He fed this power for a century until it learned his specific hunger and became an extension of his identity. I am going to purge it completely. ]
Do it fast.
Sage instantly directed Rewind, focusing its energy onto Adam's spiritual plane with a surgical precision she had never used before. She targeted the stolen quirk itself, driving its internal timeline backward.
A hundred years of stolen human factors and accumulated malice began to unwind. The consumed quirks were systematically released from the core engine like a long-held breath, dispersing into the ether and fading into nothingness. The crushing spiritual weight bled off rapidly, and the volatile mechanism shrank back, reversing toward the exact state it had occupied at the very beginning of its existence. It rewound to the exact millisecond it first woke up: clean, pure, and representing nothing more than a newborn capacity to give and to take, devoid of hunger.
The violent pulsing ceased.
The power resting within his active slot was now small, quiet, and perfectly stable—a power with entirely empty hands. It had surrendered the entire historical library of stolen quirks, but Adam felt the loss of that vast arsenal without a single flicker of regret. The library had been the bomb; the clean quirk was the actual prize.
[ It is fully stable, Host. Completely docile. And I can officially confirm our hypothesis from the rooftop. The core of the quirk carries an intrinsic fragment of the cosmic authority of Theft, matching the exact register your pathway operates upon. It doesn't fight your soul; it integrates perfectly. It seats within you better than any ability we have recorded from this universe, because at the structural root, you and this quirk speak the same fundamental truth. You are finally holding the mechanical solution to your three-slot limitation. ]
Adam knelt on the stone for a moment longer, stabilizing his breathing as the purified engine hummed smoothly within his soul. Below the cliffs, the grey sea continued its steady churn. The tyrant who had dominated the underworld was now nothing more than a still shape bound in concrete, and the world above still had no idea it was finally free.
Now, Adam thought, rising to his full height and turning toward the mainland mountains. Now I go dissolve the rest of his machine, and bring down the curtain.
He activated Travel.
He materialized back into the Gunga battle a hundred meters directly above the epicenter of the conflict, and the situation was catastrophic.
The heroes had committed to the largest tactical show of force in a generation, but the villain garrison had countered them with two hundred erratic quirks and zero hesitation about unleashing them into a crowd. The entire mountain face had been transformed into a hellscape of blinding fire, churning dust, and the unmistakable, desperate roar of a battle where both sides have abandoned any expectation of surviving. Endeavor's scorching flames held one fracturing flank, while a thin defensive line of Pro Heroes anchored another. But the villains possessed overwhelming numbers and the remnants of a highly coordinated strategy. They didn't realize their emperor was already dead, so the machine he left behind continued to grind forward.
Adam dropped directly into the heart of the crossfire and began, with clinical accuracy, to take them apart.
He located the source of the multiplying numbers first.
[ Decryption has isolated his position, Host. Center-left, positioned behind the second collapsed retaining wall—he is generating human duplicates faster than the heroes can neutralize them. Remove him from the equation, and the numbers on this field cut in half instantly. ]
Adam Shadowstepped through the smoke, crossing the distance in three precise jumps, and materialized directly behind a slender man in a patched trench coat who was completely surrounded by copies of himself. He didn't need to use the Hat's recording mechanism for this; he had the AFO now.
Reaching out, he placed a firm hand on the real Jin Bubaigawara, reaching into his spiritual signature with All For One exactly as the old man would have. The purified quirk responded instantly, smoothly extracting the Double factor and seating it within Adam's system without a single trace of the chaotic hunger that used to define it.
The man collapsed forward, instantly reduced to a single, blinking individual who looked around like someone waking from a long nightmare. Across the entire expanse of the mountain, every single duplicate clone instantly dissolved into soapy foam, and a full third of the enemy army vanished from existence.
The heroes immediately felt the pressure lift and surged forward to exploit the gap.
Witnessing his numbers dissolve without understanding the cause, the reconstructed Shigaraki bared his teeth, extending his hands to unleash the ultimate devastation Garaki had engineered his body to channel.
The decay didn't manifest as a simple touch this time; it erupted outward as a massive, sweeping wave of raw disintegration. The expanding white ring ate the rocky ground, dissolved the broken stone walls, and raced toward a dense cluster of struggling heroes. It was on track to vaporize a dozen of them instantly.
Adam arrived first.
Slamming down onto the earth directly in the path of the advancing decay, he drove both palms into the dirt and channeled Overhaul. Where Shigaraki's wave unmade matter, Adam's hands restructured it at a radically superior velocity. He threw up a massive ridge of fused stone, followed instantly by a second barrier behind it, and then a third.
The walls of reassembled earth absorbed the disintegration, holding the line a single body-length away from the shocked heroes. The white decay scaled the barriers, eating through the stone, but Adam generated new reinforcements faster than the power could dissolve them. He remained on his knees in the rubble, a solitary wall-builder against a tide, holding until the decay wave finally guttered out, leaving Shigaraki standing exposed and screaming in the center of his exhausted reserves.
All right, Adam thought, checking his margins. Let's even the playing field permanently.
He reached for the replication quirk he had just extracted and deployed it with a level of scale its original owner could never have conceived, flooding his spiritual reserves straight into Double.
He didn't manifest one clone, or three. A dozen identical Adams stepped smoothly out of the billowing smoke, followed instantly by two dozen more. Each duplicate carried the specialized coat, the Veil, the overhauled physique, and Sage's analytical vision—every single clone functioning as a fully realized instrument rather than a hollow shadow. They fanned out across the mountain face like an absolute certainty.
Where the villain army had previously struggled against a single invisible phantom, they were suddenly confronted by thirty identical, impossible entities. The clones swept through the remaining defensive lines like a receding tide, securing the field.
It ceased to be a battle and transformed into a systematic closure.
Adam neutralized Shigaraki himself, the original body walking right through the last remaining pockets of decay to pin the reconstructed successor to the earth. He extracted the awakened Decay quirk cleanly via All For One, leaving the broken young man completely empty but alive. He extracted the blue flames from the scarred villain throwing them, identifying it as a highly potent tool for his collection. He extracted the spatial compression trick from the theatrical villain, who immediately raised his hands in surrender the moment thirty identical Stalkers synchronized around his position.
He then fielded his clones into the collapsing lower levels where frontline heroes were taking heavy casualties against the remaining High-End Nomu. As each monster was brought down, Adam used his AFO to harvest their quirks, seating a fresh Super Regeneration tier and a Shock Absorption cleanly into his expanded system. A toolkit engineered for the long game did not leave exceptional hardware on the floor.
By the time the dust finally settled over the Gunga hills, the villains were entirely cuffed, unconscious, or dead. The subterranean cradle was completely empty, and an underground hero named Stalker stood at the epicenter of the greatest security bust in modern history.
The national reckoning consumed days, and the public narrative was kept significantly simpler than the reality, the way history always treats a war.
The villains had been shattered in a single evening. The shadow tyrant who had governed the underworld for a century was dead. The League of Villains that had terrorized UA High School was entirely dismantled. At the center of every front-page report, begrudgingly credited by Endeavor himself and confirmed by the Hero Commission, was the enigmatic night hero who had located the impossible fortress.
They allocated him the lion's share of a victory that had required many heroes to secure. Adam accepted the political credit exactly the way Nezu had instructed him to—offering flat, brief sentences completely devoid of technical details, letting the media cameras capture a man in a Victorian suit who was, as far as the public would ever know, simply extraordinary at his job.
Sage projected the final tactical accounting across his vision while the news trucks were still clearing the perimeter. For the first time since his deployment, Adam didn't read the data like a cold ledger; he just sat back and looked at the flow of his evolution.
The purified All For One core engine recorded in the slot, flanked by Overhaul and Rewind. Seated comfortably within his own chassis were the newly acquired assets: Double, the awakened Decay, high-output blue fire, spatial compression, and the reinforced regeneration and shock absorption, plus some minor quirks Sage had picked off the final line of Nomu and villains. It was a versatile kit.
[ The entire board is completely clear, Host. Objectives B, A, and S are officially closed. The tyrant you were deployed to eliminate is dead. There is not a single remaining parameter on this deployment that you have not successfully fulfilled. ]
Adam stood on the shattered ridge of the mountain in the fading evening light, finally allowing himself to feel the internal quiet of a finished contract.
Almost finished, he corrected, clean checklist forming in his mind. There was no grimness left in his thoughts—only the execution of a job he intended to finish flawlessly. There is still a rogue doctor out there who kept that monster breathing. There is an old hero named All Might who deserves to live out his days in a body that doesn't constantly hurt. Then there is a woman across the Pacific who has one of the most powerful quirks ever seen. And finally a little girl named Eri to whom I owe a permanent solution.
[ Noted. ]
AN: If we get to 500 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 700, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123