….
[Just Before Jin-Ho Saved Toya]
Enji Todoroki stands in his agency's training facility, demolishing practice dummies with calculated precision.
His flames burn hot and controlled, the result of decades of mastery. This place, this sanitized room with reinforced walls and temperature regulators, is where the Number Two Hero hones his craft now.
But it wasn't always this way.
There was a time when Sekoto Peak served as his training ground.
The mountain's isolation, its natural resistance to fire damage, the way the wind carried heat away from residential areas, it was perfect.
He had spent years there, pushing his Hellflame quirk to its absolute limits, building the foundation that would eventually earn him the title of Flame Hero: Endeavor.
He doesn't go there anymore.
His phone buzzes.
A message from his agency's front desk, something routine.
He ignores it, focusing instead on the burn patterns he is creating, the way his flames obey his every intention with mechanical precision.
That's when he feels it.
A shift in the air.
A change in temperature that has nothing to do with his own quirk.
Through the reinforced windows of the training facility, the sky in the distance shifts - not sunset, not clouds, but something else entirely.
Smoke.
Thick, black, rising in columns that seem to stretch toward the heavens themselves.
Enji's flames extinguish immediately as his attention snaps toward the source. His practiced eye calculates the distance, the direction, and his stomach drops.
Sekoto Peak.
For a moment, he stands frozen.
There is no reason to panic.
Forest fires happen.
His old training ground is isolated, far from residential areas. The fire department will handle it. This isn't his concern—
But something is wrong.
The smoke isn't dissipating.
It's intensifying, and beneath the black columns, even from this distance, he can see the telltale flicker of flames.
Blue.
The realization hits him like a physical blow.
No.
Enji doesn't remember leaving the training facility.
One moment he is staring at the distant smoke, the next he is running, sprinting through the agency's corridors with a speed that makes his staff jump out of his way in alarm.
"Sir! What's—"
He doesn't answer.
Toya.
His son had asked him to come to Sekoto Peak today.
On his day off, the invitation was delivered with desperate excitement, with a hope Enji hadn't seen in the boy's eyes in months.
"I want to show you how strong I have become, Father."
And Enji had refused.
Not explicitly, he would simply... not gone.
Stayed at the agency instead, telling himself it was the right decision - that showing up would only encourage Toya's self-destructive behavior.
And ignoring the invitation would send a clear message: stop training, stop burning yourself, accept your limitations, and move one.
Just like how he had moved onto his other son.
Enji bursts out of the agency building and launches himself into the air using his flames as propulsion.
The city blurs beneath him as he rockets toward Sekoto Peak with everything his quirk can provide.
Heat ripples off his body in waves, his hero costume already glowing from the intensity of his flames.
The mountain comes into view, and Enji's heart stops.
The entire peak is engulfed.
Blue flames, impossibly bright and hot - cover every surface like a living entity.
Trees explode from internal pressure as moisture boils instantly.
Rock itself begins to crack and melt under temperatures that exceed anything Enji has ever produced.
The air above the mountain shimmers and distorts, heat rising in visible waves that make the sky itself seem to warp.
This isn't a training accident.
This is an inferno that rivals the deepest circles of hell.
Enji lands on the edge of the devastation zone, where normal orange flames are just beginning to catch on trees that haven't yet been touched by the blue fire.
A crowd has already gathered - civilians from the nearby town, drawn by the spectacle, filming on their phones, pointing and gasping.
They see him arrive.
The Number Two Hero, wreathed in flames of his own, staring in horror at the mountain that's become a monument to catastrophic failure.
"Endeavor!" someone shouts. "There is someone up there! We saw—"
Enji doesn't listen, he is already moving.
The heat is unbearable even for him.
His own flames, which burn at temperatures hot enough to melt steel, feel like candles compared to the inferno consuming Sekoto Peak.
The blue fire burns so hot that it's creating its own wind patterns, sucking oxygen toward itself in a feedback loop that only makes it stronger.
He pushes forward anyway, ignoring every instinct that screams at him to retreat. His flames flare hotter, creating a bubble of marginally cooler air around him, not protection, just marginally less lethal temperatures.
"Toya!" His voice is hoarse, desperate. "Toya, WHERE ARE YOU?!"
The mountain doesn't answer. Just continues to burn with flames so bright they hurt to look at directly.
Enji's mind is racing through calculations he doesn't want to acknowledge.
Blue flames with temperatures exceeding 2,000°C.
Toya's body - so sensitive to heat that even mild training left burns, exposed to this for... how long? Minutes? Hours?
No one could survive this.
Not even someone with a fire quirk.
Especially not someone with a fire quirk as powerful and unstable as Toya's.
Enji pushes deeper into the inferno, his own flames struggling to maintain their protective barrier.
The heat is affecting him now, his skin reddening, his breathing becoming labored as the superheated air sears his lungs with each breath.
"Toya!"
Nothing. Just the roar of flames consuming everything they touch.
Behind him, Enji can hear sirens.
Fire trucks arriving, emergency services mobilizing.
They will be useless here.
Water would evaporate before it even reached the blue flames. Fire retardant would ignite on contact. This fire will burn until it runs out of fuel or burns itself out through sheer intensity.
There is nothing anyone can do but wait.
But Enji can't wait.
He searches frantically, his trained eyes scanning through smoke and flame for any sign of his son.
A body, clothing - Anything.
The mountain offers nothing but devastation.
Time loses meaning.
Minutes feel like hours as Enji forces himself through temperatures that would kill anyone else.
His hero costume is scorching, his skin blistering despite his natural resistance. He is operating beyond safe limits now, beyond rational thought.
He just needs to find his son.
Eventually, he doesn't know how long later, the blue flames begin to die down.
Not extinguishing, but running out of fuel.
The mountain has nothing left to burn, rock has been reduced to slag and trees are ash. Even the air itself seems exhausted.
The temperature drops from 'instantly lethal' to merely 'unbearable'.
Enji continues his search, now moving through a landscape that looks like the surface of another planet. Everything is black or melted or both. The ground is still hot enough that his boots leave impressions in softened rock.
He searches for hours.
And finds nothing.
No body, bones, fragments of clothing or personal effects. Just complete and total obliteration.
The realization is somehow worse than finding remains would have been.
Toya was here - burned, and the flames were so hot, so all-consuming, that they left nothing behind.
Not even ash. Just... absence.
Complete erasure.
Enji's legs give out.
The Number Two Hero, Flame Hero: Endeavor, kneels in the ruins of Sekoto Peak, staring at emptiness where his son should be, and something inside him breaks in a way that no amount of fire could ever cauterize.
The blue flames are gone now. The mountain is silent except for the distant sound of emergency responders setting up a perimeter they arrived too late to matter for.
Toya is dead.
His son is dead.
Dead because Enji didn't show up when he was supposed to, and because didn't know how to have a conversation with him.
However, there are no tears.
The realization settles over him like ash, coating everything, making it impossible to breathe.
He wanted to create the perfect hero. Instead, he created a funeral pyre so complete it left nothing to bury.
He stays until the mountain is completely cold.
Until there's nothing left of the blue flames but memory.
Until he's certain, beyond any doubt, that his firstborn son is gone forever.
And when Enji Todoroki finally stands and walks away from Sekoto Peak for the last time, something fundamental has changed in him.
Not for the better and toward redemption or understanding.
But... broken.
The Number Two Hero returns to his agency that night and doesn't speak of what happened.
Doesn't process it, allowing himself to feel the full weight of what his absence cost.
Instead, he focuses on Shoto.
His youngest son, his last chance. The only project that still has potential.
If Toya failed because of a weak body that couldn't handle his powerful flames, then Shoto - with his perfect combination of fire and ice - will succeed where his brother failed.
He has to.
So he doubles down. He decided to train Shoto harder, pushing him further.
Eliminates every distraction, every weakness, every possibility of failure.
He tells himself it's necessary. That this is what needs to be done to create the perfect hero.
He doesn't tell himself the truth: that he is running from a mountain that burned blue, from a son who died waiting for his father to show up.
The Sekoto Peak incident is officially classified as a tragic training accident. A young boy with an unstable fire quirk who lost control during unsupervised practice.
No blame is officially assigned.
But Enji Todoroki knows the truth.
He knows exactly who killed Toya Todoroki.
And that truth burns hotter than any flame he will ever produce for the rest of his life.
….
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the mountain:
Three figures move through the cooling devastation.
They are not heroes, or emergency responders.
Low-level operatives from a network so vast that even they don't know who they really serve.
They call him 'the Master' because saying anything else feels dangerous.
None have seen his face or dare ask his name.
All For One's agents.
He has been watching the Todoroki family for months now, understanding their dynamics better than anyone outside that household.
He sees the patterns others miss, the way Endeavor pushes his children, the way Toya burns himself in desperate attempts to gain approval, the way the entire family structure teeters on the edge of catastrophic failure.
When reports came in of blue flames on Sekoto Peak, flames visible from the city itself - All For One recognized opportunity.
A powerful fire quirk user, traumatized and abandoned by his hero father, left for dead in the ruins of his own power?
Perfect material for recruitment, and for reshaping into something useful.
The oldest of the three spits into the dirt, the saliva hissing on contact. "This is madness." he mutters. "Whole mountain is cooked. What the hell are we even looking for?"
"The kid." the second one says, voice muffled behind his scarf. "The one the Master said might still be alive."
They search for two hours.
And find nothing.
"Sector three, clear." the first agent reports through his radio.
"Sector one, nothing." another confirms.
The third agent, the leader, scans the area where the fire seemed to originate, where the blue flames had been most intense.
"Did the fire... completely consume him?" the second agent asks, his voice uncertain.
The leader frowns.
"Keep searching." he orders. "Check the perimeter, maybe he tried to run, collapsed elsewhere."
They expand their search pattern, moving beyond the primary burn zone. They check the nearby stream, water sources are common last-ditch survival attempts. They investigate the treeline where the fire hadn't fully reached.
Still nothing.
After four hours of searching, the leader has to accept the impossible: either Toya Todoroki was completely vaporized by his own flames, or…
Or someone else got here first.
But that doesn't make sense.
"We are pulling out." the leader finally says. "There is nothing here."
"What do we report to the Master?" the second agent asks.
All For One will receive the report and dismiss it as a missed opportunity.
Nothing more.
The world will believe Toya Todoroki died on Sekoto Peak, consumed by flames so hot they left nothing behind.
And in a way, they are not entirely wrong.
The Toya who climbed that mountain - desperate, abandoned, burning with the need for his father's approval, did die there.
What survives is something else entirely.
….
.
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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