I hit the base of the central fountain with a force that shattered the stone into a thousand jagged teeth.
The world didn't just go dark; it turned into a cacophony of white noise and agony. The air was punched out of my lungs so violently that my vision sparked with static. I tried to move, but my body refused the command. I looked down, and through the haze of a concussive fog, I saw my tactical jacket was shredded. My chest didn't look like a chest anymore—it was caved in, my ribs snapped like dry kindling. Every shallow, rattling breath sent a spray of red mist from my lips.
"Kanata!" I heard Ochaco scream. Her voice was thin, echoing as if she were shouting from the bottom of a well.
"Oh," a raspy, dry voice drifted over me. Shigaraki stepped into my blurred field of vision, his red eyes peering through the gaps of the severed hand on his face. "A brat who thinks he's a hero. You're getting in the way of the boss fight, NPC. Nomu, he's still twitching. Clean up the trash so we can wait for All Might in peace."
The Nomu didn't hesitate. It lumbered toward me, its massive shadows swallowing the light. Every step it took vibrated through the cracked pavement and directly into my shattered spine.
I was dying. This wasn't the "math" of a classroom or a mock battle. This was the cold, biological reality of total system failure. The "Negative Energy" I usually relied on was flickering, drowning in the flood of my body's own panic.
'I'm going to die here,' I thought. My vision was tunneling, the edges of the world turning black. 'I spent my whole life trying to be lazy, trying to just float through... and I'm going to end up as a stain on the floor because I couldn't grasp the one thing that mattered.'
I looked at the Nomu's fist, raised like an executioner's axe. Then I looked past it, at Aizawa-sensei, who was watching me with a look of pure, helpless horror.
The fear reached a breaking point, and then—it inverted.
In the face of absolute annihilation, the "noise" in my brain vanished. I stopped trying to force the calculation. I realized that Cursed Energy isn't a Quirk you "activate." It's a cycle. To create life from death, you don't just add energy. You multiply it. You take the darkness of your own end and you spin it until it has no choice but to ignite into something new.
Negative energy times negative energy.
Deep in the center of my shattered chest, the oily black current of my soul collided with itself. It swirled into a vortex, faster and faster, until the friction reached a point of transcendence.
Spark.
The energy didn't just turn warm; it turned white. It was the "Positive Energy" I had been chasing since I was four years old.
"Reverse Cursed Technique," I thought, the words a silent command in the theater of my mind.
I didn't let the light leak out. I kept it internal, flooding my mangled organs and shattered bones with the white-hot current. To Shigaraki and the Nomu, it just looked like I was lying still in the dust, a corpse waiting to be finished. They didn't see the jagged edges of my ribs knitting together with silent, microscopic precision. They didn't see my punctured lungs sealing or the internal hemorrhaging vanishing as if it had never happened.
The Nomu's fist swung down, intended to pulverize what was left of me.
I moved.
I didn't roll away. I sat up and caught the Nomu's wrist.
The sound of the impact was like a gunshot, but I didn't move an inch. My body was reinforced, healed, and surging with a level of power that felt like I had plugged my soul into the sun.
"You're heavy," I said, my voice coming out clear and steady, devoid of the blood that had been choking me seconds ago. I looked up at the monster, my eyes glowing with a faint, dangerous light. "But you're not heavy enough."
Shigaraki recoiled, his fingers digging into his own neck. "What? How are you standing?! You were crushed! Your chest was a crater!"
"I guess I'm just a fast healer," I said, a cold, sharp grin finally touching my face.
I let go of the Nomu's wrist and stood up, the white shimmer of the RCT still humming beneath my skin. I took that brilliant Positive Energy and fed it directly into the core of my Anti-Gravity System. I didn't want to make things float anymore. I wanted to make them suffer.
I flipped my palm toward the ground.
"Cursed Technique Reversal..."
The air around the Nomu turned into a physical weight. The pressure was so intense that the fountain behind me cracked again, the water being forced back into the pipes.
"...Gravity."
BOOM.
The Nomu didn't fly into the air. It was slammed into the concrete as if a skyscraper had been dropped on its head. A crater ten meters wide erupted instantly, the floor tiles vaporizing into dust. The creature's knees didn't just buckle; they shattered into the dirt. Its massive, exposed brain pulsed as the gravitational constant in that small circle tripled, then quadrupled.
"Stay down," I commanded, the output of my technique causing the very air to groan. "I've had a very long day, and I'm starting to get a headache."