We were close to ending today's shift when I suddenly got a call. The phone vibrated in one of my suit's inner pockets, a soft buzzing against my ribs that pulled me out of the staleness of patrol. The sun had already set. Night covering us like a blanket.
I looked towards Ryukyu.
"May I take this?"
"Go ahead," she replied as she came to a stop. Nejire wasn't with us anymore. She had gone on to single shift around two hours ago, her cheerful wave still lingering in my memory. I nodded at Ryukyu's words, my fingers wriggling into one of the openings in my armor, as they grabbed onto my phone and pulled it out.
The screen was bright. A name spread across iy. Nezu. I swiped to accept the call and placed it against my ear even though I didn't need to. Superhearing and all that.
"Good evening, Nezu. Is everything okay?"
"I'm fine, lad, just..."
Nezu went quiet. I could hear his breathing on the other side, the subtle shift of fabric as if he was adjusting in his chair. The silence stretched, so not wanting this call to go on longer than it should as I was still on patrol, I spoke up myself.
"What, Nezu?"
"Nomu."
My body tensed. Every muscle locked in place as if responding to some primal threat. My eyes darted around frantically, focusing on nothing at all. The buildings, the people walking past, the gentle sway of trees in the evening breeze, none of it registered.
All I could see was that moment at USJ. The blood on my hands. The hollow feeling in my chest when I realized what I had done. I didn't want to be reminded of the one I had killed, even if I had accepted it as a cruel reality. A necessary evil. A burden I would carry for the rest of my life.
The silence continued for a heartbeat too long before my voice finally found me once more.
"What about him?"
"The arm. It's been analyzed. Arthur, believe me, I know the only thing you don't need right now is more news, but Nomu..." He paused, and I could almost picture him closing his eyes, choosing his next words carefully. "It's not a he. It's an it."
My breath caught in that moment once more. The noise of the city fading to a dull roar in the background. Still, I spoke back, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears.
"What do you mean he's an it?"
"It," Nezu accentuated, as if trying to drive that point home, to hammer it into my skull until I understood. "Is a corpse. Bioengineered. It wasn't human. Of course, they didn't have the full body to work with, but it's conclusive. It's an it. It wasn't alive. A reanimated thing, with little to no brain function and sense of self. That's why it had to take orders. That's why they were named Nomu 1 and 2. They are its."
His words echoed in my mind, bouncing off the walls of my skull, trying to settle themselves squarely in the middle. Corpses. Reanimated. I was... horrified.
My grip on my phone tightened. The screen cracking beneath my fingers, spiderweb fractures spreading across the glass. I stopped myself before fully breaking it in two, forced my hand to relax, forced my breathing to steady.
"Who? Who would do that?"
"I have an idea. Arthur, the arm... it had multiple quirk factors."
Again my breath hitched. A name echoed in my mind, whether because of recency or instinct I couldn't say. All for One. The words sat on my tongue, but I didn't speak them aloud.
Ryukyu was at my side, her dragon eyes watching me, I didn't know if she knew about All for One but it was best not to say anything. I still remembered Nezu telling me how the information they had shared with me couldn't leave the room. None of them.
"Are you sure?" I asked instead.
"Sure as I can be."
I heard a new ring. Not from my phone. My head turned slowly to the noise, tracking the sound with my enhanced senses. It was coming from Ryukyu. She picked up her own phone and placed it against her ear, her expression shifting instantly. I could hear the voice on the other side. It sounded familiar. It dawned on me after a moment. It sounded like one of the people at the Hero Public Safety Commission.
"Requesting all assistance. Villain attack across all of Shibuya. I repeat, requesting all possible assistance. Multiple villains have been spotted."
Shibuya. Tokyo. The words hit me at once, snapping me out of my daze and back into vigilante mode, even my call with Nezu is nothing but an afterthought now.
We weren't far. Yokohama was a little over twenty-nine kilometers in a straight line from Shibuya. Given what part of the city we were in, it was closer to forty-two. I could make that in a little over nine seconds at my normal speed. With mana burst, I would get there even faster.
All my years as a vigilante rushed back at me. All the times I had crossed Japan. All the times I had changed routes, making them less time consuming, perfecting them slowly in my mind, month after month, season after season, year after year. Every shortcut, every rooftop, every gap between buildings I could slip through without losing momentum.
Nezu was still on the line, but I couldn't keep answering him. Not now. So I held off.
"Ma'am," I said, turning to Ryukyu. "May I go to Shibuya?"
Her eyes met mine. She knew what I was capable of. Most did. If there was anything I was known for it was my speed. She knew it too, I could get there before anyone else.
"You have your temporary license with you?"
I nodded, my hand instinctively moving to the pocket where I kept it.
"Then go on, boy. I'll catch up."
I smiled at her answer. This really was the best agency I could have chosen. My heart thrummed in my chest, mana bursting in my legs, gathering like a coiled spring ready to release.
And then I was moving, springing forward, driving myself with ten times my usual speed. This explosive power was something I think I would never get used to. The way the world simply ceased to exist in that instant of acceleration, the way everything became nothing but motion and direction.
The surroundings didn't blur around me because of my speed. If anything, they slowed. I could see everything. Each individual blade of grass bending in the wind I created. Each droplet of moisture suspended in the evening air.
The instant ended, but I kept pushing it just like I had done at USJ. I held onto that expanded moment, stretched it until it screamed.
The roads, buildings, trees, grass, people, animals, cars, all that was between where I stood and where I was going became a singular sensation. And then I stopped.
I stood on a building, my feet finding purchase on the edge of a rooftop I had been on hundreds of times before. I was in Shibuya. Sound didn't catch up immediately. There was no sonic boom aside from the one I had released at Yokohama to get here.
When my eyes landed on Shibuya, I realized I was already late. Later than I should have been. The streets below were in chaos. Fire raged from shattered storefronts. People ran in every direction, each distinct, in volume, length and pitch. Smoke billowed upward in thick black columns, obscuring the first stars that had begun to peek through the darkening sky.
I prepared to go down, but my eyes took in everything first. And what I saw made my blood run cold.
The villains. Brains for all to see, veins pulsing against the organ. Thick hides that looked more like armor than flesh. Vacant eyes that held no no thought.
They were... Nomus.
Multiple Nomus. Tens of them, that I could count from this vantage point, scattered across the district. Each one was tearing through everything in its path with mindless brutality, following some unseen directive that I could only guess at. Heroes that had been nearby were already beginning to engage.
I brought my phone to my ear once more.
"Lad, you there?"
"Nezu," I interrupted, "are you sure the Nomus aren't alive?"
As I asked the question, I remembered USJ. My own fight against them. My speed had been compromised by one of their quirks. They had been troublesome because of too many factors. Still I remembered.
Their sheer apathy. I remembered them as artificial. There was no spark of change in their hollow eyes. No chance of a better tomorrow. Not because they were villains. Not because they were monsters.
It was because they weren't anything.
They had been pulled from their eternal slumber, corpses that should have rested in peace, and turned into this by... No. Don't jump to conclusions. All Might said he killed him. Perhaps it was someone else. Someone who could engineer quirks. The possibilities were numerous, and none of them good.
Finally, Nezu replied. His voice was steady.
"They aren't. They are walking corpses. I'm sorry for dropping this news onto you, but I thought you'd like to hear it. I know how... traumatic it was for you."
Traumatic. I almost laughed. Such a small word for such an enormous thing. The feeling of taking a life, even one that had been trying to take those of others, it had plagued me, even though I had accepted it, even though I knew it was a necessary sacrifice.
But now...
"Thank you, Nezu. Truly." I answered back, turning my phone off and leaving it on the roof where I stood. I would come back for it later.
Fire raged below. People screamed, their cries piercing through the chaos like prayers to gods that couldn't hear them.
Tears fell down my eyes, hot and bitter, tracing paths down my cheeks as I looked upon the devastation. But they weren't tears of fear. They weren't tears of sorrow. They were tears of... relief.
No holding back. Not this time.
"I'll return you to your eternal slumber once more."
The words left my lips as a whisper, a promise spoken to the dead that walked below. They deserved peace. Whatever they had been before, whoever they had been before, they deserved better than this mockery of existence.
I unsheathed Excalibur. She shone brightly in my hand, she always seemed excited to be used. It was her purpose after all. The ultimate offense.
My heart burst with power. Everything slowed once more, that familiar dilation of time that came with pushing myself to the absolute limit. The flames froze mid-flicker. The screams became distant echoes.
And then I was there. I now stood in front of a Nomu, one of green hide and leathery bat like wings that sprouted from its back. I looked into its eyes, searching for something, anything that might make me hesitate.
I saw nothing.
Excalibur met the Nomu's neck. It met no resistance. Tendon, muscle, and bone strained to stop the edge, the biological imperative to survive kicking in even when there was no mind to direct it. They failed. The blade passed like a hot knife through butter.
Black blood, thick and smelling of copper, spewed from the neck. Some of it landed on my armor, warm and heavy, sliding down the surface in dark rivulets.
The Nomu's head rolled on the ground. Dead.
A/N: Damn Arthur can't catch a fucking break these last two days huh. Either way, with no hope of a better tomorrow, Arthur will kill them, because that is all he can do. Return them to the peace of death.
And if Arthur doesn't hesitate nothing can stop him. No quirk. No nomu. Nothing. Kinda terrifying when you think about it lol.
See you next time. Prolly soon. Author out.