….
"...I told him because I knew it didn't matter what he wanted to destroy. As long as you're standing here, Dabi-sensei... you would never let him lay a finger on anyone anyway."
In front of them, the storm finally died.
The violent crimson lightning flickered out as the berserk [Decay] field collapsed into harmless, drifting plumes of gray dust.
Tomura Shigaraki stood alone in the center of the crater, swaying on trembling, exhausted legs.
His costume was reduced to scorched rags, his skin blistered and bloodied, and crimson droplets dripped steadily from his cracked and ruined fingers.
The manic, bloodthirsty haze that had clouded his gaze since the USJ was completely gone.
The invisible strings that had puppeted his entire existence had been cut down to the root.
Slowly and painfully, Shigaraki raised his bruised, trembling head, looked down at his bloodstained hands that had carried the curse of a stolen life, then lifted his gaze toward the green haired boy and Dabi standing before him.
His dry, cracked lips parted.
Through the heavy, exhausted grief of a child finally waking from a lifelong nightmare, he spoke the very first words of the liberated Tenko Shimura:
"...It really was... all just a lie..."
….
Dabi stood tall, his eyes locked on the battered form of Tomura Shigaraki across the crater.
A silence hung over the basin.
The phantom puppet strings of All For One had been permanently severed, leaving behind only a broken child who had spent his entire life trapped within a manufactured nightmare.
Dabi slowly lowered his arms, letting out an exhale; fine microscopic tremors ran through his body.
The [Dragon Force] state, sustained through overdrive and elemental equilibrium, was approaching its time ceiling as his dragon scales flickered faintly, threatening to collapse back into his healed skin at any moment.
Across the crater, Tenko Shimura forced his trembling legs to hold his weight.
His ruby eyes, swollen and raw from the confrontation inside the vestige plane, burned with a bitter fury.
The laughing parasite inside him was dead, but the deep, agonizing hatred toward the society that had abandoned him and the underworld that had turned his life into a slaughterhouse still scorched his soul.
"I hate you..."
Tenko rasped, blood bubbling at the corner of his cracked lips.
"Yeah." Dabi muttered, the corner of his mouth pulling into a joyless smirk as faint wisps of steam curled off his knuckles–
"Understandble."
Dabi shifted his gaze slightly, his voice dropping into a flat command directed at the boy standing behind him:
"Midoriya."
"S-Sensei?"
"You said you trust me not to let this bastard lay a finger on anyone." Dabi said, his tone stripped of warmth–
"Well, I can't let that ridiculous confidence of yours go to waste. But we're not playing around anymore. Get the hell out of here right now if you don't want to be turned into collateral."
Midoriya didn't hesitate for a single heartbeat.
The atmospheric pressure inside the basin was already warping, the air vibrating violently as both fighters gathered the very dregs of their Quirks.
Midoriya channeled One For All at his stable threshold.
He kicked off the frosted dirt and activated [Float], lifting him off the ground as he propelled himself toward the steep glacier walls Todoroki had built earlier.
Because his mastery over [Float] was raw, he struggled to maintain forward thrust against the buffeting updrafts of heat and sub-zero air.
THWIP-CRACKLE!
Midoriya thrust both hands upward, shooting thick cords of [Blackwhip] out from his palms, and hooked securely into the ridges near the crest of the colossal ice wall.
Retracting the whips with the full torque of One For All, he slingshotted his body vertically, pulling himself up the frozen precipice.
He breached the top lip of the crater, but the crosswinds threw off his aerial balance.
Midoriya cut the propulsion, tumbling aggressively over the frozen ridge and hitting the rocky ground outside the perimeter with a hard, skidding THUD.
"Guh...!"
He rolled across the dirt, his elbows and knees scraping against the gravel as he absorbed the impact.
Bruised and covered in soot, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, panting heavily as he looked back over the rim of the basin.
Outside the containment line, his classmates were already moving.
Through the live broadcast feed displayed on the screens and the massive media billboards overhead, they had watched Midoriya get catapulted out of the active crater.
"DEKU!" Uraraka screamed, sprinting past the idling police vehicles.
"Midoriya!"
Iida barked, his engines flaring with bursts as he, Todoroki, Kirishima, and Yaoyorozu broke away from the staging area.
….
Down in the center of the pit, the two monsters were left entirely alone.
Both of them were running on absolute fumes.
For Tenko Shimura, this was the end of the line.
All For One's possession had cannibalized his internal organs, his bone marrow, and his cellular life span.
There was no future, no escape, or medical recovery waiting for him, only the flickering, dying spark of his life force remained.
Yet, in his final seconds, his mind didn't picture All Might, his abusive father, or the grandmother who had abandoned his family.
Instead, fleeting memories surfaced:
Muscular's brutal hot-headedness, Magne's fierce defiance, Mustard's sharp cynicism, Mineta's strange but unwavering hatred, Mr. Compress's theatrical bows, and the band of discarded outcasts who had looked up to him simply because society had thrown them all into the trash.
'I just... wanted to make a world where they could breathe freely.' Tenko thought, a dry, bloody wheeze catching in his throat. 'If I have to burn in hell... I am dragging the strongest bastard down with me.'
Tenko dropped both hands flat against the pulverized bedrock.
Every scrap of his remaining life force, his grief, and his boundless hatred poured into his ten fingers.
The earth beneath shattered with a shriek.
A towering, fractal tsunami of unchained [Decay] rose thirty meters high, devouring solid bedrock, vaporizing steel rebars, and turning the foundations of the district into an ocean of black particulate.
Tenko's hands remained clamped to the ground, his fingernails peeling back as blood surged from his fingertips, pouring his absolute grief, his lost innocence, and the memory of every discarded outcast straight into the earth.
Dabi stood squarely in the path of the encroaching oblivion, his eyes narrowing into lethal slits.
He drew in a deep, seismic breath of [Total Concentration], filling every alveolus of his [100% PHASE - 1] lungs with hyperoxygenated air.
During the forest raid, he had used a crude, fledgling equilibrium of ice and fire to bury Gigantomachia beneath a mountain of frozen glass.
But that had merely been the birth of the state.
This act of channeling his awakened [Dragon Force] pushed that elemental contradiction to its ultimate, catastrophic apex.
He raised both hands.
In his right palm, an ultraviolet-white flame ignited, churning with the heat of an active nuclear reactor.
The plasma compressed down into a vibrating dense core exceeding thousands of degrees.
In his left hand, the atmosphere shrieked as sub atomic frost erupted, instantly dropping the temperature to absolute zero and crystallizing the air molecules into diamond dust.
The two extremes rotated side by side.
Dabi forced the opposing apexes of the universe into direct collision between his palms.
CRACK-SHATTER!
Reality warped at the epicenter.
The raw friction between absolute zero and stellar plasma created a swirling singularity that expanded into a multi-layered orb of blinding cobalt and incandescent white.
Matter inside the construct was trapped in a perpetual phase rupture: flash frozen into crystalline glass at one millisecond, only to be atomized into ionized gas the next.
The sheer atmospheric pressure radiating off the sphere shattered the surrounding bedrock into a ring of pulverized shrapnel before the attack was even released.
Freezing gale-force blizzards and blistering heatwaves spun off his silhouette.
High above the clouds, the media helicopters were thrown into chaotic, uncontrolled spirals.
"PULL UP! MAXIMUM ELEVATION!" the lead pilot screamed over the radio, wrestling the vibrating flight sticks as the tail rotor was caught in a wind shear. "THE ENTIRE ATMOSPHERE IS WARPING! FREEZING DOWNDRAFTS AND BOILING UPDRAFTS!! WE CAN'T HOLD HOVER!"
Across the nation, the live news feeds strobed with electromagnetic interference, static flickering across screens in living rooms, shelters, and command centers.
At the southern perimeter of Kamino Ward, Class 1-A stood.
"What... what is that?!" Kaminari stammered, throwing both arms up to shield his eyes from the blinding, incandescent glare that turned the sky into a radiant noon. "Is that an explosion?! A glacier?! What the hell is happening down there?!"
Beside him, Shoto Todoroki's eyes widened as the conflicting temperature waves washed over his face.
He recognised the attack.
"It's the same type of attack..." Shoto whispered, his voice trembling in a mixture of raw awe and disbelief. "In the forest... this is the exact same attack he used against that titan at the training camp... but this time, it's… seems even more powerful."
Shoto's breath caught in his throat.
Beside him, Katsuki Bakugo's teeth ground together as he tracked the expanding celestial light.
"That insane bastard..."
He spat, though the usual venom was swallowed by stunned realization.
Yet, despite the catastrophic danger, neither of them could look away.
It was terrifying, but it was also unspeakably, breathtakingly beautiful.
The swirling sphere hanging between Dabi's hands cast brilliant azure and crystalline white halos across the shattered basin, painting the dust and falling frost in shimmering diamond fractals that looked less like a battle and more like the birth of a brand new star.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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