Mr. Nakata was having a surprisingly quiet evening.
The family's small supermarket was located on the outskirts of a mountain town, far enough from the major urban centers that news usually took a few days to become a local topic of discussion. At that hour, only a handful of customers were scattered throughout the aisles, picking out products or chatting near the registers.
Behind the counter, Nakamura was organizing a few invoices while an old television mounted near the ceiling broadcast the afternoon news.
"...authorities continue investigating the recent disappearances reported across various regions of the country..."
It seemed like just another strange news story on a strange day, the kind of thing people heard and then moved on from without giving it much thought.
Until the sound arrived.
At first, it was only a noise too distant to identify.
Nakata stopped sorting invoices and raised his head, frowning.
"A thunderclap? But it wasn't supposed to rain today..."
He remained silent for a few seconds, trying to decide whether he had heard correctly.
Then the sound grew louder.
That wasn't thunder.
It was a scream.
A scream so far away it should have vanished into the wind, yet it kept coming, growing louder, crossing the distance with absurd force, as if the very air itself were being pushed in his direction.
The supermarket owner dropped the invoices onto the counter.
"What the hell..."
The ground gave a slight jolt.
At first, it was almost imperceptible.
Then came another brief vibration, clearer this time, making the bottles on a nearby shelf clink softly. A package fell into the aisle beside it.
The news continued playing on the television, but now its voice seemed distant.
The ground shook again.
Not enough to knock anything over, but enough to make the jars on the shelves vibrate and force the man to take half a step back, his eyes widening as he looked around. The sensation was similar to a minor earthquake, the kind that lasted only a few seconds and left a person wondering if they had really felt anything at all.
He hurried out of the store, still wearing the apron tied around his waist, and stepped onto the sidewalk in front.
The street was calm.
Cars passed in the distance. A bicycle crossed the corner. An elderly woman walked by carrying shopping bags.
But the sound kept coming.
Now louder and clearer.
It was definitely a scream, but not an ordinary one. There was something immense within it, something so loaded with power that it made the hairs on the man's arms stand on end and his instincts scream in warning. He lifted his gaze and looked toward the mountains, trying to understand where it was coming from.
Then he saw it above the dark ridges, beyond the jagged line of peaks—a green light beginning to appear, faint at first.
And then stronger.
An emerald aurora, dense and pulsating, rising behind the mountains as if something were exploding on the other side of the range. The glow intensified for several seconds, illuminating the outlines of the peaks and painting the low clouds with green reflections.
The supermarket owner stood frozen in the middle of the street.
"What the hell is that...?"
----------------------------------------
Shigaraki barely had time to process what he was seeing.
When Ryo's arms closed in his direction, Shigaraki recoiled abruptly, taking several steps back and slipping out of the grab's range by the narrowest margin.
His eyes widened when he realized the boy had not only managed to move inside the zero-point field.
He was advancing toward him.
One of his feet finally struck the ground with force. The impact was small at first, but it came with a clear tremor, almost as if Ryo's body was trying to remember how to obey gravity.
The other foot followed soon after, planting itself firmly.
His shoulders slowly rose before his arms jerked open.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
Ryo unleashed a scream that exploded through the clearing with such intensity that it broke the sound barrier.
BOOM!
The shockwave swept across the entire area.
Leaves were torn from the trees and dust rose in a wide circle.
Shigaraki was thrown half a step backward, his eyes widening for the first time in pure shock as his eardrums burst. Toga and Mr. Compress felt the impact as well, both struck by the pressure of the scream and left dazed for a moment, as if their bodies had frozen before their minds could react.
Ryo was breathing heavily.
The green aura erupted around him again, pulsing in violent layers that seemed to compete for space with the white zero-point field.
The very air around him began to crackle.
The fissures across his body widened further, and from within them leaked an almost white-green light, like fire being forced out of a shell that had reached its limit.
Shigaraki watched the ground beneath Ryo's feet begin to change color and melt.
The color of the space around them was changing.
The zero-point field itself was becoming contaminated.
First near Ryo's body, then along the edges, then advancing toward the beam coming from Shigaraki's mechanical arm. The white distortion began to take on a greenish hue, as if Ryo's energy was pushing the very energy of space beyond Shigaraki's control.
"What the fuck—"
Shigaraki didn't finish.
The green coloration surged through the entire field in waves and reached him, enveloping Shigaraki's body in a greenish energy field that startled and frightened him. It was as if something was imposing itself over the original containment, forcing space to obey something else.
Ryo took another step, the melted ground behind him turning into green lava.
He didn't look like someone struggling to escape a prison.
He looked like someone forcing the prison to make way through sheer power.
The aura exploded again, denser, more chaotic, green flames bursting from his body in short jets while the cracks spread across his arms, chest, and face.
His eyes shone with such intensity that they nearly drowned out the rest of his features. His expression no longer seemed human in the conventional sense. It was concentrated hatred, pure fury, without restraint and without purpose beyond destroying everything ahead of him.
Ryo raised his fist.
The movement was slow at first, almost heavy, as if every muscle were being pulled from within.
Green flames climbed across his shoulder, back, and chest. The aura compressed around his right fist, growing larger as though it were being drawn into an invisible core. The ground beneath his feet cracked in lines that raced across the earth before disappearing beneath the foliage.
Shigaraki didn't have time to say anything else.
Ryo punched.
He threw his fist forward with everything he had.
The air tore apart in front of Ryo's hand, and the pressure of the blow swept everything away in a straight line. The colossal Nomu stepped in front of him on pure instinct, crossing its arms before its torso in a crude block. Shigaraki was still behind it, Toga a few steps away, and Mr. Compress farther back.
The Nomu's guard held for a fraction of a second before folding.
Its crossed arms were crushed backward, and the force of the punch exploded beyond it like a wall of destruction.
Shigaraki, Toga, and Mr. Compress were swept away along with the creature, dragged by the same tide of devastation that split the ground, shattered trees, and ripped up earth, stone, and wood across a massive stretch.
The entire clearing seemed to bend beneath the attack.
A massive column of dust, soil, and trees rose to the side as if the forest had been sliced apart.
A gigantic pillar of earth, dust, rocks, and trees surged into the air.
The small mountains on the horizon became partially obscured by the curtain that had been thrown upward, and the shape of the destruction formed an arc, almost circular, like an enormous slice torn out of the forest itself.
And Ryo stood at the center of the opening created by his own punch, his body still wreathed in green flames, breathing heavily, his eyes fixed in the direction where his enemies had been launched.
The dust still dominated the area when the first movement came from the middle of the destruction.
The Nomu, which had once looked like a living wall of muscle and violence, lay partially buried beneath shattered earth, broken trunks, and chunks of rock torn from the ground. Part of its torso had been obliterated by the previous blow, and the creature moved irregularly, trying to recompose itself amid the devastation.
Further ahead, Shigaraki was trying to stand.
His mechanical arm was damaged, part of its structure missing. One leg had been crushed and twisted in a horrific way. Cuts covered his body, his clothes were torn, and deep impact marks spread across his torso. Even so, he tried to get up, cursing through gritted teeth as if sheer anger could stitch his bones back together.
"Shit... shit... No... no, no, no...."
His voice died when something grabbed his leg with crushing force.
Ryo appeared before him like a green phantom.
The boy's hand closed around the injured leg with such force that it crushed it together with the bone, and Shigaraki's flesh hissed under the heat radiating from his hand.
Shigaraki let out a scream of pain before being dragged across the ground, pulled to the side as if he weighed no more than a feather.
Then Ryo slammed him into the ground.
Then again.
Then again.
Each impact made Shigaraki's head snap violently, his body scrape across the dirt, and his teeth grind from the shock.
His free arm tried to struggle, but there was no room for anything. With every drag, the friction and force tore away more pieces of the already shattered leg until, in one final spasm of movement and pressure, it separated completely from the rest of his body.
Shigaraki screamed again.
The momentum launched him forward through the trees.
Shigaraki was hurled like a weightless body, crashing through trunks and branches, breaking an entire line of trees before colliding with a massive boulder. The impact split the rock in half with a deafening crack.
When the dust settled around that area, Shigaraki emerged on the other side almost unrecognizable.
Bones were broken in multiple places.
His breathing came in shallow, uneven gasps, nearly nonexistent.
A punctured lung made his chest rise and fall with great difficulty.
But somehow, he was still conscious.
And that seemed worse than dying.
Mr. Compress appeared shortly afterward among the wreckage, injured and stripped of the elegant composure he had possessed moments earlier.
His top hat was gone from the otherwise impeccable appearance he usually maintained.
"What the hell was that..." he muttered, staring at the devastation around him.
The first thing he saw was Toga.
She was lying ahead, unconscious, blood running down her scalp and scratches covering her face.
Mr. Compress immediately approached to check on her.
"Hey, are you alive...?"
That was when another scream from Ryo tore through the forest.
Once again sounding like it wanted to rip apart the surrounding vegetation.
Mr. Compress turned instantly.
Something shot past him like a black-and-red blur and crashed into a rock behind him.
It was a piece of Shigaraki's leg.
Or what remained of it after being thrown with such violence that it exploded against the stone, leaving it in a grotesque state—formless, useless, and unrecognizable from the sheer destruction.
Mr. Compress froze for a second.
Then he heard the sound of heavy footsteps emerging from the dust.
Ryo charged toward Shigaraki, his eyes shining like beacons.
He reached the two halves of the split boulder, planted his hands between them, and shoved them apart, opening a path through the stone as if it were paper.
Before Shigaraki could understand what was happening, Ryo was already standing before him.
The boy grabbed him and lifted him horizontally into the air.
Shigaraki tried to react, but his body simply refused to function.
Ryo then slowly began tearing him in half.
Shigaraki screamed as his body gave way, splitting into two under Ryo's strength. The sound came out hoarse, drawn out, desperate, before being drowned by the animalistic roar erupting from the boy's throat.
"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
Blood splattered across the ground and over Ryo's chest, but he continued holding the two halves while screaming like a monster.
Mr. Compress covered his mouth with his hand, unable to believe what he was seeing.
A few meters away, among the trees, Midoriya had arrived only moments earlier.
He stood frozen, horrified, staring at everything with wide eyes.
"T-Takeda...?"
But the enraged boy heard him.
Ryo slowly turned his head toward him.
His expression was completely unrecognizable. His eyes glowed with an intense green light. The aura around his body still trembled like living fire.
Midoriya felt his entire body go cold, taking a step backward before the thing he had once called a friend.
Before anyone could do anything, the Nomu appeared again.
The creature burst out of the dust completely regenerated, heading straight for Ryo. It struck him with a powerful punch, the force of the blow causing a trail of destruction nearly equal to the one Ryo had created moments earlier.
Ryo vanished into the path of devastation.
The Nomu immediately followed after him, charging on all fours like a hunting beast.
Midoriya stared at the scene for a moment that felt far too long.
Then the strength left his legs.
He collapsed onto the ground, breathing heavily, unable to take his eyes off the spot where Ryo had been thrown.
Iida and Todoroki arrived at the original clearing, and what they saw made both of them stop instantly.
The area had been completely devastated. The ground was split open in deep trenches, and trees had been ripped out by their roots. Further ahead, the earth stretched into a long, massive line of destruction that pushed deep into the forest and practically disappeared over the horizon.
The width of the devastation was enough to fit several city blocks side by side, and its length was so absurd that it took Iida a few seconds to realize it could cross the equivalent of ten football fields in a row before finally ending.
"This is where that explosion happened a little while ago..."
Todoroki said nothing.
His eyes were fixed on the path of destruction cutting through the forest.
Behind them, rapid footsteps began approaching.
Aizawa arrived first, with Ragdoll at his side, followed by Violet and Tony. All four stopped the moment they saw the devastated clearing.
Tony looked around, then at the shattered ground, then at the corridor of destruction stretching far into the distance.
"What the hell happened here?"
Aizawa didn't answer. He walked straight to the center of the clearing and crouched beside a dark stain on the ground.
Blood.
He placed two fingers near the mark, his eyes narrowing as he examined it.
Ragdoll immediately grew serious.
"I'm going to check on the students nearby."
Her gaze became distant for a moment as she activated her Quirk, Search.
Tony and Violet watched in silence.
It only took Ragdoll a few seconds.
Then she raised her gloved paw and pointed toward the horizon, completely tense.
"Takeda is over there."
Everyone turned.
Deep within the forest, far beyond the destroyed clearing, explosions were still going off. Massive amounts of earth were being launched into the air, entire waves of trees were collapsing and flying apart, and the sounds of a brutal battle reached them in muffled bursts.
Ryo and the Nomu were fighting on the horizon.
Aizawa heard Ryo's furious roar in the distance.
His expression darkened.
"Shit..."
He immediately turned to Iida and Todoroki.
"You two. Head back to the camp."
Iida straightened at once.
"But sir, we can help—"
"Now is not the time for that!" Aizawa raised his voice. "Go back!"
"But Takeda-kun is in danger!"
"And I said go back!"
The pressure in his voice made Iida take a step back, surprised by the desperate tone of his teacher.
Todoroki tilted his head slightly.
"Understood..."
Aizawa pointed at Tony.
"Escort the boys."
Tony nodded.
"Right."
Aizawa turned toward Violet.
"You. Be ready to use your shields to restrain someone if necessary."
She looked confused for a second, but the urgency in his voice erased any doubts.
"Got it."
Aizawa then turned back to Ragdoll.
"Is there anyone else nearby?"
Ragdoll closed her eyes again and focused.
Information flowed through her mind rapidly. One by one, names, positions, and conditions.
"Midoriya is a few meters away from the fight."
Aizawa frowned.
"What is that kid doing over there?! This isn't the time to play hero!"
Violet, who had been looking toward the forest, quickly turned to Ragdoll.
"What about Dash? Where's my brother? He wasn't at the camp when we left."
Ragdoll hesitated before searching for Dash.
Her silence lasted only a moment, but it was enough to make Violet tense.
The feline heroine's eyes widened for a second, and her breath caught before she managed to inhale again.
"What..."
Violet grabbed her shoulders immediately.
"What is it? Where is he? Is he okay?!"
Ragdoll pointed, unable to hide her own surprise.
Toward a crater not far from them.
Violet followed her finger and saw a torn piece of Dash's clothing caught on a nearby rock.
Her face went pale.
"N-No..."
But Ragdoll's hand lowered slightly in the next instant, now pointing toward the ground below.
"He's... down there."
Aizawa and Violet looked down in confusion.
"Below?" Aizawa repeated flatly.
Ragdoll focused again.
Her eyes flickered with concentration.
"He's coming up!"
Before anyone could ask another question, Dash was spat out of the earth as if the ground itself had rejected him.
The blond's body shot upward in an uncontrolled motion, thrown several meters above the crater before beginning to fall back down.
Violet reacted instantly.
A shield bubble appeared beneath him and enveloped him in midair before he could hit the ground.
"Dash!"
She pulled the shield toward herself in one swift motion and immediately dispelled it, catching her injured brother in her arms.
The world seemed to stop for a second as she saw the condition he was in.
The purple aura surrounding Violet began to flicker and spread outward, evaporating into particles as she held him.
Her brother was wrecked.
Both of his arms were crushed at unnatural angles, unrecognizable beneath the torn clothing, and his abdomen had suffered a severe wound that pierced through part of his body and stained everything red. He was unconscious, breathing weakly, his face covered in dust and dried blood.
Aizawa's eyes widened as he approached.
"Dash!"
He examined the boy's condition before grimacing at the severity of his injuries.
"We need to get him back to camp. Now!"
Violet stared at him for a second.
"No."
Aizawa looked back at her.
She lifted Dash in her arms again, but only briefly. Her shield bubble reappeared around him, supporting him carefully like a suspended capsule.
Then she handed him over to Aizawa.
"You two take my brother back to camp."
Aizawa took the boy, still wrapped inside the shield, trying to understand the sudden change in her tone.
"Take him to Jack-Jack. He'll treat his injuries."
Aizawa narrowed his eyes.
"Hey—"
"Do it now!"
She shouted at him, silencing him instantly.
"Jack-Jack can take better care of him than any first aid kit, so move!"
Ragdoll was still trying to process everything, looking from Dash to Violet and from Violet to the battlefield in the distance.
Violet took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.
When she raised her head again, her eyes were changing color.
The purple aura began rising around her once more, weak and gentle at first before exploding in the next second. Within moments, her entire body was surrounded by a brilliant, vibrant pressure, and her calm expression had completely vanished.
Her eyes became consumed by an intense violet glow.
Her face hardened into a cold, serious, furious expression.
Aizawa saw her take a step forward and tried to stop her again.
"Violet!"
She didn't stop.
"Wait! You can't go like this! You don't understand the real problem with going there!"
She only turned her head slightly, still looking toward the horizon where the forest trembled.
"I'm going to pay someone a visit..."
Aizawa clenched his jaw.
Before he could say anything else, the purple aura erupted around her in a brief flash before launching forward.
The air split apart behind her as she surged toward the war zone on the horizon, leaving behind the destroyed clearing, Aizawa holding Dash in his arms, and Ragdoll standing in absolute silence.
----------------------------------------
Ryo and the Nomu collided at such incredible speeds that, to anyone watching from a distance, all that remained were green flashes and shockwaves tearing through the air. Every clash came with an explosive impact that ripped up the ground, shattered entire trees, and left deep craters behind.
Ryo was completely out of control.
There was no hesitation left. No more attempts to restrain his strength or measure his blows. He moved on instinct, like a furious beast that only knew how to attack, pursue, and destroy anything that threatened himself or his friends.
His eyes, consumed by green light, no longer looked human.
They were literally beacons carrying the purest form of his fury, locked onto the Nomu without wavering for even a second.
The creature answered in kind.
Every blow from the monster was brutal and intense, driven by a primitive urge to crush and kill. The Nomu's massive body sank into the ground with every advance, yet it continued pushing forward, forcing the forest to yield beneath its weight.
During one head-on collision, Ryo landed a clean punch directly into the creature's torso.
The impact launched the Nomu away like a projectile.
The giant tore through multiple trees, carved a straight trail of destruction, and only stopped when it slammed violently into the side of a mountain. Part of the slope collapsed on top of it in an avalanche of stone, bark, and earth.
Ryo didn't stop to confirm the result.
He had already charged forward again.
The Nomu emerged from the wreckage with its entire body trembling and began running along the mountainside.
Ryo followed behind like a green bolt of lightning.
Entire tree trunks were ripped from the ground with his bare hands and hurled in straight lines toward the Nomu, cutting through the air like improvised spears moving faster than bullets.
The Nomu twisted its body mid-run and caught one of the trunks headed toward it.
Gripping the thick wood with both hands, it spun the trunk around its own axis using the momentum of its sprint and hurled it back at Ryo.
The tree came like a missile.
Ryo met it head-on, only for the trunk to split in two upon impact, exploding into fragments and splinters that scattered through the air. The collision failed to move him even a single inch. His body endured it effortlessly, burning away the debris with the green aura that continued growing around his skin.
But the shattered remains of the tree exploded into a cloud of black smoke as they burned, blocking his vision for a brief instant.
Giving the Nomu an opportunity to appear overhead, its fist already loaded.
The arm came crashing down.
Ryo crossed his arms on reflex.
BOOM!
The entire ground was crushed.
The layer of earth beneath them fractured in every direction. The shockwave carved out a massive crater and flattened the surrounding vegetation as if an invisible wall had swept across the forest. The thunderous impact echoed far enough to make the surrounding terrain tremble.
Ryo, however, remained standing.
The blow pushed him back, but it didn't bring him down.
His hand instantly clamped around the Nomu's leg.
The creature had no time to react. Ryo yanked the leg with brutal force, spun his own body, and hurled the Nomu sideways into the ground.
The creature's enormous body struck shoulder-first and back-first, carving a wide trench through the terrain as though a colossal blade had scraped across it. The shockwave and wind generated by the motion spread outward, destroying rows of trees around them.
The Nomu punched Ryo's arm with its free hand, forcing him to release its leg before delivering a blow straight to his face, barely moving his head in the process.
The impact echoed through the forest and sent a ring of compressed air blasting backward, shattering trunks and breaking the ground behind the creature.
But Ryo didn't even step back.
He simply turned his face forward again, eyes still locked on the monster as he forced the fist away from his face.
And then the two began trading punches.
Strength against strength.
Fist against fist.
The Nomu advanced, and Ryo answered. Ryo struck, and the Nomu struck back. Every hit generated shockwaves that devastated the surroundings. The earth trembled beneath them, splitting apart and rising under the strain.
Their hands collided at a single point in the center of the battlefield.
The impact locked both of them in place for a moment.
Ryo pushed.
The Nomu pushed back.
The struggle became a brutal contest of pure strength, both trying to crush the other backward with outstretched arms.
But it was clear that Ryo possessed an overwhelming advantage over the Nomu.
His green aura drove the creature backward as he roared.
The ground behind the Nomu began to warp under the pressure.
The monster's face remained hidden behind the skull mask, but the muscles across its entire body bulged with effort. Even so, little by little, the creature began absorbing part of Ryo's own aura.
Fragments of green energy flowed into the Nomu's body.
The creature's swollen veins began taking on an intense green glow.
Electrical sparks appeared between the monster's muscles and shoulders, crackling through the air with small flashes of light. Its entire body began vibrating, as though it were adapting in real time to what it was receiving from Ryo. Every moment that Ryo's green power pressed against it seemed to give the Nomu a better response, harder, sharper, stronger.
Ryo noticed.
And responded by becoming even angrier.
The aura around him exploded with even greater violence.
The green flames already pouring from his body grew larger, denser, and more erratic. The air around the boy trembled. The cracks across his body widened, and from within them emerged a new color amid the green, something between yellow and white, so intense it looked as though a miniature sun burned behind them.
The heat rose to extreme levels.
The green light surrounding his body merged with that vivid yellow until the glow resembled a star on the verge of collapse, the ground beneath Ryo's feet already beginning to melt.
Then a thermonuclear pulse erupted from his body.
His own form releasing pressure in every direction at once.
The entire forest was swallowed by an ultra-heated wave.
Trees exploded into ash within moments. The ground split apart into molten trenches, transforming everything around the epicenter into a mass of glowing lava.
High above, Violet, who had been flying toward the battle, widened her eyes at the explosion on the horizon.
The wave dissipated a few dozen meters away from her, still hot enough to make her instinctively pull back through the air.
When the light finally faded, the landscape had changed completely.
Ryo stood in the middle of a pool of lava.
The surrounding vegetation had vanished.
His clothes had been almost completely disintegrated. The boy remained standing at the center of the chaos, breathing heavily.
But directly ahead, the Nomu was still standing.
The creature trembled in nearly imperceptible frames, its body leaving trails and afterimages as though its movements themselves were out of sync. Veins bulged beneath its skin in a brilliant yellow, and electrical sparks continued crackling around its shoulders, arms, and chest.
Then the Nomu roared.
Its aura erupted around its body once more, now charged with the same intense, ultra-heated energy that looked eerily similar to...
...Ryo's?
----------------------------------------
(A/N: Sorry for the delay in updating. I had to deal with some documents my boss sent me on Saturday, and I ended up spending Sunday taking care of them. On top of that, in the middle of all this, I prepared and made GIFs to make this chapter more immersive for you all, and I hope you enjoyed them.
Before I go, I'd like to clarify something about Violet's powers.
She doesn't have psychic powers or anything like that. What you're seeing is simply her using her force fields. While reading the few Incredibles comics that exist, I discovered that she could create multiple small force fields. I looked at that and thought, what if she could make force fields as small as atoms and surround her body with them?
And that's how we get this version of Violet, who is capable of flight, have extreme durability, and have a pseudo-super strength. She can also create constructs with this ability, and I'll show that on the next chapter.
Did you really think I was going to kill Dash, huh?
I don't pull punches that low.
You might as well put him as the first person of the "Safe From Death" list because I have no plans to send him to the heaven's great buffet.
Anyway, I won't drag this author's note out any longer. Until the next update!)