Chapter 12: The Rising Tide
The escape was a symphony of ice and thunder. Shoto Todoroki did not dare look back for more than a second. The single, fleeting image of the horned, raging boy atop a moving mountain of sand was burned into his mind. His focus was absolute, his body moving with the fluid grace of a master athlete. Beneath his feet, a path of slick, shimmering ice constantly extruded itself, a desperate bridge across a chasm of certain death. The air rushing past was frigid, a cold wind of his own making, yet he could feel the radiating pressure of the tsunami behind them.
The sound was the worst part. It was a constant, deafening roar—the sound of a billion tiny stones grinding against each other, a sound of the earth itself being torn apart. It was the sound of absolute annihilation.
"Is it still behind us?!" Hagakure's disembodied voice shrieked near his ear, her gloved hands gripping his uniform with a terrified strength.
"Don't look back," was all Todoroki could manage to say, his jaw tight with concentration. He could feel the vibrations through the soles of his boots, a tremor that ran up the length of his ice slide. It was gaining on them.
In the Ruins Zone, Katsuki Bakugo was having the time of his life.
"Is that all you've got, you damn extras?!" he roared, a feral, joyous grin plastered on his face. He blasted another group of terrified villains with a percussive explosion, sending them flying like bowling pins.
Kirishima Eijiro, his body hardened to its limit, stood back-to-back with him. "Man, you're on fire, Bakugo!" he yelled, deflecting a blow from a villain with a pipe. "But maybe save some for me!"
They were a perfect duo of overwhelming offense. They hadn't been scattered or intimidated; they had charged headfirst into the largest group of villains they could find and had been systematically, joyfully dismantling them. They felt invincible.
It was Bakugo who felt it first. A low, deep tremor in the ground, completely different from the shockwaves of his own explosions. "The hell?" he grunted, pausing his assault.
Then they saw it.
Cresting over the top of the crumbling, multi-story buildings that made up their zone was a wave. A colossal, churning, impossible wave made not of water, but of solid earth and sand. It blotted out the light from the dome's ceiling, casting a huge, terrifying shadow over them all. The villains they were fighting stopped, their jaws agape in shared, dumbfounded horror.
Bakugo's shock lasted only a second, replaced instantly by furious, indignant rage. He could not comprehend, would not accept, a power that so casually dwarfed his own.
"WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!" he bellowed, not in fear, but in pure offense. He turned to face the oncoming tsunami.
"Bakugo, wait! We need to get out of here!" Kirishima yelled, his bravado finally cracking in the face of the impossible sight.
But Bakugo didn't listen. "A little sand isn't gonna stop me!" he roared. He crouched low, his palms crackling with explosive energy. "DIE!"
He launched himself into the air and unleashed a focused, powerful blast. A massive, fiery explosion erupted on the face of the sand wave, gouging out a crater dozens of meters wide. For a moment, it seemed to work. But the wave was too vast, too immense. It was like trying to stop the ocean with a firecracker. The sand simply flowed, filling the crater in seconds, and continued its inexorable advance, completely unhindered.
Bakugo stared, his grin gone, replaced by a look of stunned disbelief. Kirishima hardened his entire body, planting his feet and bracing for impact. The shadow fell over them, and then the roaring tide hit, swallowing them and the ruins and everything else in a grinding, suffocating darkness.
From the edge of the Flood Zone, Izuku Midoriya, Tsuyu Asui, and Minoru Mineta had just managed to escape the villains in the water. They stood on the shore, catching their breath, their eyes scanning the chaos in the central plaza. They saw their teacher, Mr. Aizawa, on the ground. They saw the hulking Nomu standing over him. They saw Shigaraki scratching his neck. And then, they saw the wave.
Midoriya's mind, a machine built for analysis, struggled to process the scale of what he was witnessing.
"What… what kind of Quirk is that?" he whispered, his voice trembling. "The sheer volume of material… to control it with such speed and power… it's… it's like All Might…" He trailed off, the comparison feeling both apt and blasphemous. Who could possibly possess that kind of catastrophic power?
"It's heading for the center, kero," Asui stated, her usual calm demeanor strained. Mineta was already sobbing, convinced they were all going to die.
They watched in horror as the sand tsunami, having burst from the Landslide Zone and crashed through the Ruins, finally poured into the central plaza.
The villains who had been regrouping after their defeat at Aizawa's hands had only a moment to register their doom. A triumphant grin on one's face turned to a slack-jawed O of terror. They looked up from their beaten foe to see a moving mountain of earth bearing down on them. Panic erupted. They tried to run, but there was nowhere to go.
The wave hit with the force of a tectonic plate shift. The sound was a deafening roar of grinding stone. The plaza floor cracked and buckled under the weight. The low-level villains were swept away, their screams instantly silenced as they were buried, crushed, and consumed by the indiscriminate, churning tide.
The wave finally slowed, coming to a rest, transforming the wide-open plaza into a landscape of treacherous, shifting dunes and canyons of newly-formed rock. In the center of it all, a high plateau of sand had formed, and on its peak stood the architect of the destruction.
Gaara was no longer recognizable as the quiet boy from the entrance. The sandy horn on his temple was now longer, more twisted. A cracked, carapace-like mask of hardened sand had spread to cover the entire right side of his face, leaving only one eye visible. And that eye was no longer a calm, empty teal. It was a slitted, golden pupil in a sclera of pure black, and it burned with a malevolent, ecstatic glee.
Shigaraki stared, his hand frozen mid-scratch, his face a mask of pure fury. This was not his plan. This was not his beautiful, carefully constructed game. This was a chaotic, glitched character wrecking the entire server.
"What is that IDIOT doing?!" he shrieked, his voice cracking with rage. "He's taking out my pawns! My EXP fodder! WHOSE SIDE IS HE ON?!"
As if in answer, the transformed Gaara threw his head back. When he spoke, the voice that emerged was a horrifying duet—his own, buried deep beneath a new, dominant voice that was rougher, deeper, and rasped like stones grinding together.
"FUN! SO MUCH FUN!" the new voice roared, echoing across the now-silent plaza. "THEY BROKE ME! SO LET'S BREAK EVERYTHING! MORE! LET'S BREAK MORE!"
The golden eye swiveled, scanning the battlefield for new toys. It passed over the terrified students, over the furious Shigaraki, and then it settled on the scene at the base of the plaza stairs: the downed form of Shota Aizawa, and the hulking, motionless form of the Nomu standing over him.
The tension in the USJ became a palpable, three-pronged thing. There was the immediate, murderous threat of the Nomu poised to finish off Aizawa. There was the cold, strategic malice of Shigaraki, now furious at his loss of control. And there was the new, terrifyingly unpredictable power of Gaara, a raging, semi-conscious demigod of destruction who had just reshaped the entire battlefield.
Midoriya stared, his heart hammering in his chest. His teacher was about to be killed. A monster of unimaginable power was loose. And he was standing on the shore, helpless, a terrible, desperate urge to do something warring with the paralyzing terror in his soul.
Everything was hanging on a knife's edge, waiting for the next move.
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