Across all forty-seven prefectures of Japan, the clock struck twelve-fifteen.
At that exact minute, two hundred police task forces kicked down the doors of corporate offices, city council chambers, and hidden assembly halls nationwide.
Hawks hadn't just leaked the coordinates of Jaku General Hospital and Gunga Mountain Villa to the commission.
His encrypted cipher contained the full membership registry of the Paranormal Liberation Front.
While the main strike teams stormed the mountain and the hospital, local Pro Heroes cornered sixty-two thousand civilian sleeper agents at their desks before a single warning call could go out.
--<>--
CLANG!
Up on the shattered second-floor walkway of Gunga Villa, Dabi flipped backward over the iron railing as three braided carbon-fiber cables sliced past his boots.
Across the hall, Best Jeanist raised both gloved hands to weave another dense net of steel threads.
Beside Jeanist's left shoulder, Hawks leveled two crimson feather-blades at Dabi's chest.
"Give it up, Dabi," Hawks called out over the electric guitar still blaring from the sky speakers above the roof.
"...You're boxed in with nowhere left to run."
Dabi bared his teeth, blue fire roaring up his scarred forearms as he backed toward the broken stairwell.
'The bird set us up from the very beginning,' Dabi thought, pressing a scorched thumb against the encrypted radio transmitter tucked inside his ear.
He opened the master command frequency linking all nine lieutenants across the mountain.
"Wake up, you idiots!" Dabi barked into the comm mic.
"...Hawks is a commission spy, and Best Jeanist is standing right in front of me!"
"Twice is dead, and the heroes have our entire tunnel map!"
FWOOSH!
Dabi hurled a wide wall of superheated blue flames down the corridor to blind their vision for two seconds, then vaulted straight down the collapsed stairwell into the dark lower levels.
--<>--
BZZZT!
Deep inside the subterranean command center beneath the mountain, Dabi's furious voice echoed out of the speakers on the central strategy table.
Skeptic nearly fell out of his rolling chair, his fingers shaking violently across his tablet screen.
"...Hawks sold us out?!" Trumpet gasped, his megaphone mask rattling against his jaw as he stared at the blinking red monitors.
"...Look at the exterior drone feed from the central courtyard!" Skeptic shouted, spinning his tablet around toward Re-Destro.
On the screen, the ten-thousand-man vanguard army in the main plaza lay completely flat inside a colorful street-art mural painted across the stone floor.
"...Hero X just wiped out ten thousand of our soldiers in two minutes flat while playing his own pop song!" Skeptic shrieked, pulling at his long dark hair with both hands.
"...He's treating our main stronghold like a joke!"
Re-Destro gripped his suit.
Purple stress marks crept up his neck and across his tall forehead as he stared at the painted crater.
"...Tomoyasu, run a facial scan on every Pro Hero along the ridge," Re-Destro ordered in a low, tight voice.
Skeptic tapped three keys on his console and pulled up the satellite recognition list.
"...Edgeshot, Kamui Woods, Yoroi Musha, Mount Lady, Fat Gum, Gang Orca, Midnight, and Cementoss are all up top," Skeptic read aloud, his voice dropping as he reached the bottom of the page.
"...Wait a second."
"...Endeavor isn't out there!"
"...Mirko, Crust, Ryukyu, and Eraserhead are missing from the mountain roster too!"
Re-Destro's eyes widened as the pieces clicked together in his head.
'If half of the Top Ten isn't at Gunga Villa, they split their forces,' Re-Destro realized, cold sweat out across his brow.
"...They're raiding Jaku General Hospital right now!" Re-Destro growled, slamming his palm onto the wheelchair control panel to lock his cybernetic prosthetic legs into combat mode.
"...Grand Commander Shigaraki is still inside the Doctor's capsule!"
"...Should we rally the remaining forty thousand soldiers in the tunnels and push back up to the surface?" Trumpet asked urgently.
"...And do what against Hero X?!" Re-Destro snapped back.
"...We can crush regular Pro Heroes all day long, Koku, yet none of us have a way to stop that white-suited monster from snapping his fingers and turning us into paper!"
Re-Destro grabbed the main microphone off the console and held the broadcast button down.
"All lieutenants, abandon the upper villa immediately!" Re-Destro commanded across every subterranean channel.
"...Do not engage Hero X!"
"...Break through the hero containment lines in the lower tunnels, converge on Sector Zero, and wake Gigantomachia!"
"...We're taking the giant straight to Jaku City to protect Tomura!"
--<>--
BOOOOOOM!
Three levels below the main assembly hall, twenty mid-tier Pro Heroes blasted the steel security doors off the southern escape corridor.
"Hold the tunnel!" a burly hero with iron-plated skin shouted, charging forward beside a hero firing green capture foam from his wrists and another projecting high-frequency sonic rings.
"...Don't let the PLF brass reach the lower caverns!"
Down at the far end of the concrete passage, thirty liberation bodyguards raised their hands to fire back with bone-spur projectiles and electric discharge nets.
Trumpet stepped up behind his guards, inhaling deeply through his floating megaphone cones.
"Fight with everything you have, brothers!" Trumpet roared, activating his Incite Quirk as a wave of red vocal energy washed over the soldiers.
"...Every step you take today paves the road for liberation!"
Under the vocal boost, the thirty guards surged forward with doubled physical strength, smashing against the front row of mid-tier heroes.
Right behind them, Re-Destro stomped down the center of the hallway on his heavy metal prosthetic legs.
HISS!
Black, bulbous muscle mass erupted across Re-Destro's shoulders and forearms as he pushed his Stress Quirk straight to eighty percent output.
"Out of my way, commission dogs!" Re-Destro bellowed, swinging both giant black arms wide like wrecking balls.
WHAM!
A single sweep of his colossal fists tore through the green capture foam and knocked eight mid-tier Pro Heroes backward into the concrete walls, clearing a path toward the lower freight elevator.
"Keep moving toward Machia's pit!" Re-Destro barked at Trumpet.
SWISH!
Before Re-Destro's prosthetic foot could cross the elevator threshold, a razor-thin red and gray ribbon dropped straight out of an overhead ventilation shaft at the speed of sound.
"Foldabody: Piercing Claw!" Edgeshot's voice echoed from the ceiling.
THWACK!
Edgeshot's paper-thin body wove through the joints of Re-Destro's prosthetic knees and tripped the giant man onto one knee.
At the exact same second, Kamui Woods dropped through a crack in the tunnel roof right behind Edgeshot, thrusting both wooden arms forward.
"Lacquered Chain Prison!" Kamui Woods shouted.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
--<>--
SHATTER!
Half a mile away in the eastern subterranean sanctuary, every water main running along the cavern ceiling exploded at once.
Floating twenty feet in the air insid
e his heavy fur parka, Geten swung both gloved hands downward.
"...Freeze over," Geten whispered coldly.
CRACKLE!
Thousands of gallons of rushing pipe water froze solid in mid-air, expanding into a colossal, jagged glacier of razor-sharp ice spikes that surged down the wide tunnel and trapped thirty advancing Pro Heroes up to their chests.
'Re-Destro said to meet at Sector Zero,' Geten thought, turning in mid-air toward the rear stairwell leading down to Gigantomachia's cavern.
CRAAAASH!
Before Geten could dive into the stairwell, a sixty-foot-tall booted foot kicked straight through the upper brickwork of the sanctuary hall.
"Where do you think you're going, snow-cone?!" Mount Lady boomed, dropping into the underground chamber at full giant size and slamming both massive palms against the advancing wall of ice to stop it dead in its tracks.
Right between Mount Lady's ankles, Fat Gum and Gang Orca sprinted into the frost-covered hall, knocking aside the liberation soldiers guarding the stairs.
"...Hero X told me the news cameras were watching the west tunnel, and all I found down here is a giant freezer!" Mount Lady complained loudly, shoving the fifty-ton ice glacier backward toward Geten with her shoulders.
"...Fat Gum, Orca, grab that kid in the parka before my fingers get frostbite!"
--<>--
POP! POP! POP!
Down in the narrow rear supply tunnel leading to the deepest level of the mountain, Mr. Compress tapped his cane against three fallen concrete boulders blocking the path.
All three boulders shrank instantly into glowing blue marbles between his gloved fingers.
"Heads up back there, heroes!" Mr. Compress called out, flicking his wrist to launch the marbles down the hallway behind him.
"Release!"
BOOOOOOM!
The three boulders expanded back to full size in mid-air, plugging the tunnel behind them and blocking a squad of ten pursuing agency sidekicks.
Running alongside him toward the giant iron doors of Sector Zero, Himiko Toga hopped over a cracked pipe while Spinner carried a panting Skeptic over his broad shoulder.
"...Did Dabi make it down the stairs yet?!" Spinner huffed, his scaly green chest heaving as they reached the bottom landing.
"...He's right behind us on the west ramp!" Skeptic wheezed, slapping both hands onto six concrete support columns lining the chamber entrance.
"Anthropomorph!"
CRUNCH!
The six concrete columns twisted and sprouted thick stone arms and legs, transforming into six ten-foot-tall faceless stone puppets that stood guard in front of the iron doors.
"...Jin's really gone, isn't he?" Toga whispered, her yellow eyes wide and glassy as she gripped her combat knife tightly against her sweater.
"...Hawks killed him."
Nobody answered her as Spinner kicked the side access hatch open, dropping them straight into the dark, cavernous pit where a mountain of a man lay sleeping in the dirt.
--<>--
Location: Jaku General Hospital, Subterranean Morgue Lab
Time: 12:22 PM
Two hundred miles east of Gunga Mountain, the underground corridors beneath Jaku General Hospital shook with the sound of heavy explosions.
While Endeavor, Crust, Ryukyu, Aizawa, Present Mic, Gran Torino, and X-Less fought their way through the outer security gates, Mirko had sprinted half a mile ahead of the group at full speed to keep Doctor Kyudai Garaki from shutting down the lab.
WHAM!
Kicking the final bio-hazard door off its hinges, Mirko skidded into the massive central incubation chamber and bared her teeth in a fierce grin.
"Found ya, baldy!" Mirko barked, locking her golden eyes onto the old man in the white lab coat standing beside the towering amber cylinder holding Tomura Shigaraki.
Behind his thick round goggles, Doctor Garaki trembled with rage as he slammed his fist onto the red emergency release switch on his desk.
"...You wretched heroes ruin seventy years of my life's work!" Garaki shrieked, watching two large green preservation tanks at the front of the platform hiss open.
'Should I had just send one High-End Nomu when testing Hero X last time? I'd have five High-Ends guarding this room today!' Garaki fumed internally, biting his lip until it bled.
HISS!
Out of the two shattered glass tanks stepped the only two completed High-End Nomus left in the doctor's collection Eleph, whose massive trunk-like facial tendons writhed around its exposed brain.
And Silent, a sleek, long-limbed creature with sound-absorbing vents lining its ribsflanked by four unfinished Near-High-End Nomus.
"Tear her limbs off, Eleph! Silent!" Garaki screamed, pointing a shaking finger at Mirko.
"...Buy me five minutes to drain Tomura's capsule!"
ROOOOAR!
Eleph lunged forward first, expanding the monstrous muscular tendons on its face into five whip-like battering rams that smashed down at Mirko's head, while Silent glided silently around her blind spot to slice her spine open.
Mirko didn't back up an inch.
'Four weeks of tearing up training mountains with X's USB manual,' Mirko thought, her grin stretching from ear to ear as her thigh muscles coiled like steel springs.
'Let's see how you ugly freaks handle my new style!'
TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP!
Her boots struck the tiled laboratory floor ten times in a fraction of a millisecond.
"Shave!"
SWISH!
Before Eleph's tendon whips could touch a single white hair on her ears, Mirko vanished completely from the spot, leaving only cracked floor tiles behind as the whips shattered the empty concrete.
She reappeared three feet behind Silent's back.
"Luna Kick!"
CRACK!
Her heel slammed straight into Silent's ribcage, launching the High-End across the lab into a row of computer banks.
At the same time, the four Near-High-Ends leaped at her from all four corners of the platform, their claws stretched wide to pin her down.
Mirko kicked the soles of her boots straight against the empty air beneath her feet.
"Moonwalk!"
BOOM! BOOM!
Two sonic booms popped beneath her heels as she launched herself thirty feet straight up toward the laboratory ceiling, flipping effortlessly over the colliding Near-High-Ends without a single scratch on her skin.
Spinning like a buzzsaw in mid-air above the monsters, Mirko swung both muscular legs in a blazing, full-force scissor arc.
"LUNA RANKYAKU—DOUBLE WIND BLADE!"
SHING! SHING!
Two crescent-shaped blades of hyper-compressed vacuum wind shot out from her kicking legs, glowing bright white as they tore downward across the laboratory floor.
SPLAT! CRASH!
The twin wind blades sliced cleanly through all four Near-High-Ends and severed Eleph's trunk tendons and Silent's arms in a single pass, pinning the mutilated monsters flat against the back wall!
"...I-impossible!" Doctor Garaki gasped, stumbling backward over his wheeled chair as his jaw dropped open.
"...She cut down two High-Ends from thirty feet away without even touching them?!"
Dropping down from the ceiling onto another mid-air Moonwalk step, Mirko rocketed straight toward the tall amber glass cylinder holding Tomura Shigaraki just as Endeavor, Crust, Aizawa, Present Mic, Gran Torino, and X-Less burst through the lab entrance behind her.
"Mirko, wait—you aren't even injured?!" Crust yelled in amazement as he ran into the room.
"Save the compliments for later, Shield-boy!" Mirko laughed, bringing her steel-plated heel straight down onto the top of Shigaraki's glass tank at maximum speed.
"Special Delivery... Casket Smasher!"
CRAAAASH!
SPLASH!
The thick amber cylinder shattered into a thousand pieces, dumping gallons of yellow chemical fluid and Tomura Shigaraki's pale, motionless body straight onto the cold laboratory tiles.
Wires and breathing tubes tore cleanly out of Shigaraki's chest as he rolled to a stop without a pulse.
"...No! Tomura!" Doctor Garaki wailed, dropping to his knees beside his console just as Aizawa's red eyes flared behind his goggles.
"...Your Quirk's erased, Garaki, and Present Mic already smashed your backup servers," Aizawa said flatly, wrapping his gray capture weapon tightly around the old doctor's wrists.
Down by the shattered base of the platform, Pro Hero X-Less stepped up beside Shigaraki's limp body to secure him, while Endeavor, Crust, Mirko, and Gran Torino surrounded the desk.
"...Check his vitals, X-Less," Endeavor ordered, the flames around his face lighting up the dark room.
"...His chest isn't moving, and his heart's completely stopped," X-Less reported, reaching down toward Shigaraki's shoulder.
Up above the ruined capsule frame, a severed high-voltage power cable that had been pumping extra hospital generator current into the tank swayed back and forth on a broken bracket.
Snap.
The bracket gave way, dropping the live, sparking cable straight into the puddle of conductive chemical fluid pooling under Shigaraki's back.
ZZZZT!
Five thousand volts of raw electricity coursed straight through the liquid and into Shigaraki's stopped heart like a massive defibrillator.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Inside the dark void of Shigaraki's mind, the surgery progress had already reached eighty-eight point four percent before the glass broke.
Instead of waking up groggy or confused from an incomplete operation, the electrical jolt fused All For One's vestige and Tomura Shigaraki's consciousness together in instant, razor-sharp clarity.
Shigaraki's red eyes snapped wide open.
"...Cold," Shigaraki whispered, his raspy voice echoing clearly across the silent laboratory.
"...It's way too cold in here."
Before X-Less could fire his eye laser, Shigaraki's right hand shot upward and grabbed the edge of X-Less's red wool cape.
"Get back, X-Less!" Gran Torino yelled, jetting across the platform at blinding speed and yanking X-Less backward by his collar.
RIP!
The red cape tore cleanly off X-Less's neck half a millisecond before the clasp could decay, saving the hero's life as Gran Torino tumbled across the floor with him.
Standing up slowly in the puddle of fluid with his white hair hanging over his face, Shigaraki draped the stolen red cape over his bare shoulders and looked calmly around the room at Endeavor, Mirko, Crust, and Aizawa.
"...You heroes really thought breaking the glass five days early would save you?" Shigaraki asked softly, a cold, composed smile curving his scarred lips as he knelt down on one knee.
"...Look how clear my head feels, Doctor."
"Stop him right now! Don't let his hands touch the floor!" Gran Torino screamed at the top of his lungs.
Endeavor raised his blazing fist to fire a point-blank Jet Burn, while Mirko kicked off the tiles with Shave.
They were half a second too late.
Shigaraki laid all five fingers of his right hand flat against the laboratory floor.
CRACKLE!
A wave of gray cracks exploded outward from his fingertips in all directions at terrifying speed, turning the concrete floor, the glass tanks, and the pinned Nomus into fine gray dust on contact.
"...The decay is spreading through objects that aren't even touching his hand!" Aizawa shouted as the walls of the laboratory began dissolving into powder around them.
"...And if the cracks touch your boots, it spreads straight to your body! Everyone get off the floor!"
Because Mirko hadn't lost an arm or leg to the High-Ends, nobody in the room was crippled or immobile.
"I've got stepping stones!" Crust roared, firing six hexagonal green shields out of his arms into the open air above the crumbling floor.
"Bounce off my shields and head straight up the elevator shaft!"
"On it!" Mirko barked, grabbing Present Mic and X-Less under her arms and kicking straight up through the collapsing ceiling with Moonwalk, while Endeavor grabbed Aizawa, Gran Torino, and the tied-up Doctor Garaki and rocketed upward on two pillars of white-hot fire!
"Shoot Style Shield; Hop!" Crust yelled, kicking off his own floating green shields in mid-air to follow right behind Endeavor's flames as the entire underground laboratory and the empty Jaku General Hospital building above it crumbled into a massive, mile-wide crater of gray dust!
CRUMBLE. CRUMBLE.
BAAM. BOOM.
--<>--
WHOOSH.
As the dust cloud settled across the ruined wasteland of Jaku City, Tomura Shigaraki stood completely alone in the center of the gray crater, his red cape fluttering in the wind.
Looking down at his belt, he pulled out the small metal case of Quirk-Destroying Bullets he had taken from the lab desk finding half of the vials crushed by the falling debris and three intact capsules remaining.
Tucking the surviving bullets into his waistband, Shigaraki or All For One bent down and picked up a battered black portable radio transmitter lying in the
He pressed the broadcast switch, sending his voice straight across the encrypted wavelength to the receiver strapped around a sleeping giant's neck two hundred miles away.
"...This body feels incredible," AFO said calmly into the microphone, looking out toward the horizon where the heroes had escaped.
"...It's time to start the party."
"...Come to me, Machia."
"...Right now, from here... I'll destroy everything."
--<>--
Location: Gunga Mountain Villa, Outer Crater Perimeter
Time: 12:28 PM
SNAP.
Outside the eastern rim of the Gunga Mountain crater, Kaito snapped his fingers and turned a group of forty surrendering liberation soldiers into a neat, flat sheet of laminated poster paper.
He handed the lightweight sheet over to a tired mid-tier Pro Hero standing beside a police transport van.
"Stack that one in the back seat with the others, man," Kaito said with an easy smile.
"...Once you guys drive them down to the prefectural detention center tonight, I'll pop by and let them out inside the cells."
"...T-thank you, Hero X!" the mid-tier hero stammered, taking the sheet holding forty grown men with two fingers.
"...You just saved us three hours of handcuffing!"
'Edgeshot, Best Jeanist, and the others have the tunnels nearly locked down, and nobody on our side has taken a life-threatening hit,' Kaito thought, sliding his left hand back into his pocket as he glanced down into the valley.
'No need for me to hog every single arrest when the pros are doing their jobs.'
RUMBLE!
Without warning, a deep, subterranean tremor shook the entire Gunga mountain range from five hundred feet below the bedrock.
Up in the floating 2D skybox a thousand feet overhead, the forty-five U.A. students stumbled across the transparent floor as the distant mountain ridge began to split down the middle.
"...What is that shaking?!" Uraraka gasped, grabbing onto Tsuyu's shoulder inside the box.
"...Cementoss isn't using his Quirk right now!" Midoriya shouted, pressing his face against the glass floor as the southern end of the shattered mansion collapsed into a sinkhole.
ROOOOOOOAR!
A deafening, earth-shattering roar ripped straight up through the mountain crust, blowing thousands of tons of granite boulders and pine trees high into the noon sky.
Out of the gaping chasm tore a colossal, eighty-foot-tall behemoth of pure muscle and jagged jaw-armor, clutching a crackling black radio against its chest as Dabi, Toga, Spinner, Mr. Compress, and Skeptic clung onto the giant's broad shoulders!
"...Master... called for me!" Gigantomachia bellowed, his booming voice rattling the clouds across three miles of forest as he turned his massive head toward the east.
Down by the police vans on the outer ridge, Kaito stopped walking and turned around.
Resting two fingers against the bridge of his dark glasses, Kaito tilted his head back to look up at the eighty-foot giant towering over the trees and raised a single eyebrow.
"Well, now," Kaito murmured lightly as the wind blew past his white suit.
"...Should I sub again?"
--<>--
A/n: I have a new book released, check it out.
[One Piece: From Spin-Spin Fruit to Golden Spin]
--<>--
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(9 Advanced Chapters)