From high above the collapsing rooftop, Hawks immediately recognized that the situation had broken entirely out of control. Seeing the concrete floor disintegrate beneath Hiro's foot and watching the massive, violent waves of silver and purple energy erupting from Nozomi, the pro hero didn't hesitate. He sent a rapid swarm of his fiercest crimson feathers diving straight into the thick purple haze. The feathers wrapped securely around the unconscious silver-haired villain, hoisting his limp body into the air, and carried him away at maximum speed toward an open, deserted area outside the commercial grid.
On the crumbling roof, the structural steel groaned under the crushing weight of Nozomi's expanding aura.
"Kage! Aegis!" Tokoyami shouted, his voice heavily muffled behind the dense form of Dark Shadow, which was still wrapped tightly over his face. He watched the building fracture further as dust and debris began to fall through the massive hole Hiro had left behind. "We must depart! The structural integrity of this tower is failing!"
Tokoyami commanded his shadow to extend downward, aiming to grab Hiro from the fractured ceiling below while wrapping its other claw around Nozomi. But the moment Dark Shadow's misty hands neared the twins, the sheer, passive density of their overflowing soul-flux acted as an absolute physical barrier. The chaotic, roaring silver and purple energy generated an immense localized pressure field that instantly repelled Dark Shadow, violently snapping its claws backward with a harsh hiss.
'Nozomi... lock it down... just for three seconds!' Hiro's voice tore through their telepathic link from the floor below, his teeth grinding in pure agony as his veins burned with silver fire.
'I'm trying!' Nozomi shot back, her pitch-black eyes wide and intense as she forced every single ounce of her enhanced mental calculation speed to clamp down on her core.
Forcing their lungs to seize, the twins executed a massive, synchronized mental override. For three painful seconds, they forcibly compressed the roaring soul-flux back into their chests, the silver and purple flares dimming just enough to create a brief, desperate opening in the atmospheric pressure.
"Now, Dark Shadow!" Tokoyami roared, seizing the millisecond.
The shadow entity lunged forward with its newly optimized velocity, its claws wrapping securely around Nozomi's waist and tearing Hiro out from the collapsed ceiling below. With a single, explosive heave, Dark Shadow threw both twins completely off the crumbling skyscraper, launching them through the midnight air in the exact direction Hawks had flown.
The cold night air whipped past them as they fell across the city skyline. Mid-air, through the blinding haze of their own unsealing energy, the twins spotted the wide, open expanse of a deserted municipal park. Hawks was already there, hovering above the greenery.
They hit the center of the park with a cataclysmic thud.
Even without triggering an active attack, the sheer, uncompressed physical density of their landing completely reshaped the landscape. The ground violently buckled, creating a massive, ten-foot crater that sent shockwaves tearing through the dirt, uprooting ancient trees and shattering the nearby concrete walkways into fine dust.
"Kage! Aegis! You need to suppress the output!" Hawks yelled, his voice strained as he touched down on the edge of the crater.
But the twins couldn't even answer. Their powers were completely activating on their own, their muscles locking up so violently that they couldn't even move a single muscle to stabilize themselves. Their unsealed soul-flux began violently mutating the local weather patterns. A sudden, unnatural hurricane-force gale erupted directly from their bodies, the sky above the park darkening into a swirling vortex of thunderless silver lightning and freezing rain.
"Eve! We need a containment matrix right now!" Hiro managed to choke out into his custom earpiece, his voice cracking from the absolute strain.
"Initializing emergency seal fabrication," E.V.E.'s calm voice hummed through the static of his earpiece. "I am configuring high-density suppression paper seals based on your soul-flux signatures. Fabrication will take approximately two minutes. Please maintain structural stability."
"Two minutes?!" Hiro barked internally, his energy flaring again.
Suddenly, a massive, unguided gush of kinetic wind tore outward from Nozomi, threatening to flatten the surrounding forest. Hawks threw himself forward, his wings flaring into a massive defensive shield, using every single one of his crimson feathers to generate a counter-cyclone to redirect the blast skyward. The sheer velocity of the twins' passive output was forcing the Number Three hero to use his absolute maximum strength just to stay grounded.
Straining against the crushing pressure, his face turning pale as his boots skidded three feet back into the dirt, Hawks looked over at the locked-up teenagers. "Are you kids... doing this on purpose?!" he yelled through the roaring wind.
"No!" Nozomi managed to squeeze out through her gritted teeth, her pitch-black eyes fixed on the sky.
The twins' power was completely overwhelming, pushing Hawks and Tokoyami to their absolute physical limits. Suddenly, their Elemental Manipulation triggered on its own. The moisture in the air instantly froze into thousands of jagged, floating icicles that shot outward in a chaotic, unguided storm. Tokoyami leaped in front of a falling line of trees, calling out his new technique.
"Dark Shadow! Armored Vest!"
The shadow entity instantly contracted, wrapping its dense, dark form completely around Tokoyami's torso like an impenetrable layer of armor. He used his enhanced close-quarters defense to physically shatter the incoming ice shards, his muscles groaning under the heavy kinetic feedback.
But the chaos didn't stop there. Nozomi's Divine Silhouette activated automatically due to the cellular acceleration. Five perfect, silver-glowing illusions of her form materialized around the park, each one unconsciously releasing a massive burst of raw soul-flux that tore through the landscape, creating miniature craters across the grass.
The twins were rapidly growing tired, their stamina severely draining from the massive, unchecked velocity of the soul-flux usage. Their breathing turned shallow, their bodies trembling as the energy threatened to tear their own cells apart.
"Fabrication complete," E.V.E.'s voice suddenly cracked through the earpiece. "Deploying automated delivery drones to your coordinates now."
Three high-tech laboratory drones rocketed into the park's airspace, carrying the finalized suppression paper seals. But the absolute catastrophe of the twins' overflowing energy created a localized pressure vortex so dense that the drones' stabilization systems began to fail, their metal frames sparking and snapping mid-air twenty yards away. They couldn't get close enough to deliver the payload.
"They can't breach the barrier!" Tokoyami called out, his shadow vest taking another heavy hit from a stray kinetic blast.
"Tokoyami, use the new move! Get those seals!" Hiro ordered through his earpiece.
Tokoyami didn't hesitate. Utilizing the aerodynamic matrices he had analyzed in the primary laboratory, he commanded Dark Shadow to expand outward from his vest into a pair of massive, condensed shadow wings. With a sharp, rapid hiss, he launched himself through the chaotic wind currents, his velocity doubling as he cleared the distance in a fraction of a second. He snatched the paper seals right out of the failing drones' claws and pivoted mid-air, rocketing right back into the center of the roaring storm.
Sprinting through the freezing rain, Tokoyami used every ounce of his raw grit to breach the twins' defensive field. With a powerful, desperate stride, he leaned forward and slammed the first two paper seals directly onto the backs of Hiro and Nozomi's necks.
SILENT SNAP!
The millisecond the high-density paper seals made contact with their skin, the chaotic silver and purple storms vanished into thin air. The howling winds died instantly, the silver lightning dissolved, and the twins' overflowing soul-flux was forcibly compressed back behind their original seals. Hiro and Nozomi instantly regained control of their bodies, collapsing forward onto their hands and knees as they gasped for clean air, their veins finally returning to normal.
Without breaking his momentum, Tokoyami sprinted toward the far edge of the park where Hawks' feathers had secured the unconscious silver-haired villain. They had placed the man's emitting palms directly into a shallow decorative pond, causing the thick purple smoke to be safely, continuously dissolved into the water before it could contaminate the atmosphere.
Tokoyami stepped up and slapped the final suppression seal directly onto the villain's forehead. The pulsing purple vapor emitting from his skin instantly cut off, his accelerated quirk permanently locking down into a dormant state.
The dead quiet of the midnight hour finally returned to the park. The landscape was completely unrecognizable—reshaped into a massive crater surrounded by shattered stone and frozen grass.
The sheer toll of the containment caught up to them all at once. Hiro and Nozomi slumped down into the dirt, their heads resting against the edge of the crater as they tried to recover their breathing. Hawks dropped out of the sky, his crimson wings completely exhausted as he sat heavily onto a broken concrete bench, while Tokoyami collapsed onto his back in the grass, Dark Shadow retreating into his chest with a tired coo.
For a long, silent minute, the only sound was the heavy, ragged breathing of the four heroes.
Slowly, Hawks wiped the cold rain from his face, his sharp eyes tracking the twins' perfectly serene, healed faces. Beside him, Tokoyami slowly sat up, rubbing his aching shoulders.
Looking at the two first-year students, Hawks and Tokoyami let out a long sigh, asking in the same, completely exhausted voice at the same time:
"Are you guys really interns?"
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