Location: Gunga Mountain Villa, Sector Zero Stairwell
Time: Two Minutes Ago
FWOOSH!
Blue flames roared up the narrow concrete stairwell of the west wing.
Dabi sprinted backward down the steps two at a time, his scarred chest heaving for air as sweat stung his eyes.
Up on the landing above him, twenty Paranormal Liberation Front bodyguards threw themselves into the corridor to block the path.
"Hold the stairs with your lives!" the lead bodyguard shouted, firing a volley of hardened bone spikes from his forearms.
"...Lieutenant Dabi has to reach Sector Zero!"
CLANG! CLANG!
Thirty silver carbon-fiber cables shot down the stairwell like steel vipers.
Best Jeanist flicked his gloved wrists from the upper landing, weaving the cables around the bone spikes and yanking all twenty bodyguards off their feet in a single motion.
"You boys are in the way," Hawks called out, gliding right over the tangled pile of soldiers with two crimson feather-blades gripped in his hands.
"...Give it up already, Dabi!"
"...The upper caverns have fallen, and your communication lines are cut!"
Dabi snarled, slamming his boot against the bottom iron landing as he reached the sub-basement level.
'That damn bird and the denim freak haven't missed a single step since the roof came down,' Dabi thought, smoke pouring from the staples along his jaw.
'If I don't get those blast doors open in three seconds, they're gonna wrap me in steel wire.'
SHING!
Six of Hawks's sharpest feathers curved around the stairwell pillar and pinned the hem of Dabi's black coat to the concrete wall.
At the same time, Best Jeanist dropped down the center of the stairwell shaft, sending four thick braided cables straight toward Dabi's wrists.
"...End of the line, villain," Best Jeanist said firmly.
"...Put your hands down before I tighten the threads."
Dabi bared his teeth and raised his right palm to fire one last desperate blast of blue heat.
BZZZT!
Right behind the heavy iron blast doors of Sector Zero, a loud radio static crackled through the dark pit.
[...Come to me, Machia,] Tomura Shigaraki or All For One's raspy voice echoed clearly through the subterranean stone.
[...Right now, from here... I'll destroy everything.]
Hawks froze mid-glide, his golden eyes widening behind his cracked visor.
"...Wait a second, was that Shigaraki's voice on the radio?!" Hawks gasped.
"...The Jaku team was supposed to break his capsule before he woke up!"
RUMBLE!
Before Best Jeanist's cables could close around Dabi's wrists, the reinforced concrete floor beneath their boots buckled upward.
ROOOOOOOAR!
A deafening roar tore through the foundation of the mountain, shaking loose tons of ceiling plaster and steel rebar.
CRAAAASH!
The six-foot-thick concrete wall separating the stairwell from Sector Zero exploded inward in a shower of jagged boulders.
An eighty-foot-tall hand of solid muscle and gray stone armor punched straight through the wall between Dabi and the two Pro Heroes!
"Watch out, Hawks!" Best Jeanist shouted, whipping his carbon-fiber spools upward to form an emergency canopy over both of their heads.
BOOOOOOM!
Forty tons of collapsing tunnel bedrock slammed down onto Jeanist's cable shield, burying the stairwell in a blinding wall of gray dust and cutting off their path completely.
On the other side of the collapsed wall, Gigantomachia's massive fingers curled gently around the floor where Dabi stood.
Down in the dark pit below the giant's waist, Spinner, Mr. Compress, Himiko Toga, and Skeptic were already clinging tightly to the rocky plates along the monster's lower back.
"Grab onto his fingers, Dabi!" Spinner yelled over the falling rubble, reaching a scaly green hand out from between Gigantomachia's shoulder spikes.
"...The big guy smelled us in the pit and scooped us up the second Tomura called!"
Dabi didn't wait to be told twice.
He leaped onto the giant's massive thumb and scrambled up the rough, armored skin of Gigantomachia's forearm until he reached the broad dorsal spikes behind the monster's neck.
"Hold on tight, everyone!" Mr. Compress shouted, jamming his cane into a crevice between two stone plates on the giant's spine.
"...He's going straight up through the roof!"
Gigantomachia tilted his colossal head back, inhaled a lungful of underground air, and drove both monstrous fists straight up into the mountain ceiling above him.
--<>--
CRAAAASH!
Sunlight flooded over the five lieutenants as Gigantomachia burst out of the earth into the middle of the ruined Gunga Villa courtyard.
Clinging to a jagged horn on the giant's left shoulder, Skeptic tapped furiously at the cracked glass screen of his wrist terminal.
"...My connection to the lower sanctuary just went dead!" Skeptic screamed, his voice cracking over the wind.
"...Re-Destro's biometric tracker is pinned down on level three!"
"...Trumpet and Geten aren't moving on the map either!"
Skeptic scrambled two feet forward along the giant's neck and pounded his fist against Gigantomachia's thick ear armor.
"Hey, you giant brute, turn around right now!" Skeptic shrieked at the top of his lungs.
"...Re-Destro is trapped in the basement directly beneath your feet!"
"...Dig down there and crush the heroes holding him!"
Gigantomachia didn't even glance sideways at the screaming man on his shoulder.
With tears of pure joy streaming down his massive cheeks, the behemoth fixed his glowing eyes on the eastern horizon toward Jaku City.
"...Master... is awake!" Gigantomachia bellowed, his voice shaking the pine needles off the trees half a mile away.
"...Save your breath, Skeptic!" Dabi snapped, crouching low between two dorsal spikes as he looked back toward the outer rim of the crater.
"...That overgrown mole only listens to Shigaraki's voice!"
"...Even if you blew a horn in his ear, he wouldn't turn around for the Pope!"
"...Dabi's right, Tomoyasu," Mr. Compress said grimly, holding onto his top hat as the giant's muscles tensed for a sprint.
"...Look over by the police vans on the eastern ridge!"
Skeptic, Spinner, and Toga followed Compress's pointing finger through the smoke.
Three hundred yards away on the crater rim, Kaito stood beside a line of police transport trucks in his spotless white suit, looking straight up at Gigantomachia with two fingers resting on his dark glasses.
Cold terror shot straight down Skeptic's spine, instantly drying the sweat on his neck.
"...H-Hero X is standing right there!" Skeptic stammered, dropping flat onto his stomach behind the giant's neck armor to hide his head.
"...Forget about Re-Destro and Geten!" Spinner yelled, gripping the rock plates with both hands.
"...If this giant stops moving for five seconds, that guy in the white suit is gonna snap his fingers and turn all five of us into a comic book!"
"...Run, Machia!" Toga cried out, tears stinging the corners of her yellow eyes as she looked back one last time at the ruined mansion where Twice had died.
"...Take us to Tomura as fast as you can!"
--<>--
Location: Gunga Mountain Villa, Breached Crater Rim
Time: Present
ROOOOOOOAR!
Standing eighty feet tall in the center of the collapsed sinkhole, Gigantomachia planted his massive feet into the dirt and let out a second earth-shaking roar.
Along the edges of the crater, hundreds of surviving Paranormal Liberation Front soldiers who had been backing away from the Pro Heroes suddenly stopped retreating.
"...Look at the size of that thing!" a liberation fighter with a horn Quirk shouted, pointing up at the towering shadow.
"...It's the Disaster Walker from the inner sanctum!"
"...Grand Commander Shigaraki's bodyguard is awake!" another soldier cheered, raising his rifle into the air.
"...We're saved!"
WHOOSH!
Thirty yards behind Gigantomachia's heels, a pile of shattered stairwell concrete flew upward as Best Jeanist's carbon-fiber cables shoved the debris aside.
Coughing dust from his lungs, Hawks shot up into the air alongside Best Jeanist and pressed two fingers to his ear-comm.
"All squads on the mountain, listen up!" Hawks barked over the master hero frequency.
"...That eighty-foot giant is the secret weapon I warned the commission about in my reports!"
"...His name is Gigantomachia, and he's got multiple Quirks built into his body that make him grow bigger and stronger the more agitated he gets!"
"...Do not let him leave this mountain range! If he reaches a populated city, he'll flatten every building in his path!"
Down at the mouth of the western cavern, Pro Hero Mount Lady heard Hawks's broadcast through her headset and turned around in her sixty-foot giant form.
"Nobody's walking past my sector while the cameras are rolling!" Mount Lady shouted, sprinting across the crater floor with heavy, booming strides that shook the loose stones.
From the northern and southern ridges, Cementoss, Majestic, Fourth Kind, Death Arms, and Gang Orca immediately broke off from rounding up foot soldiers and converged on the sinkhole to back her up.
"I'll lock his feet in the ground!" Cementoss called out, dropping to both knees at the edge of the pit and slamming his blocky palms into the earth.
RUMBLE!
Four ten-foot-thick walls of solid concrete erupted around Gigantomachia's ankles and fused together into a massive gray pillory enclosing his lower legs.
At the same time, Pro Hero Majestic floated twenty feet off the ground, spinning glowing green rings of solid air around his forearms.
"Bind his wrists before he swings!" Majestic ordered, firing twelve large green rings that clamped tightly around Gigantomachia's thick forearms, while Fourth Kind and Death Arms leaped in to hammer the giant's kneecaps.
"Take a seat, big guy!" Mount Lady roared, throwing all sixty feet of her weight straight into Gigantomachia's chest and locking both hands around his armored lower jaw to force his head back!
THUD!
The impact sent a shockwave of dust rolling across the valley.
For two full seconds, Gigantomachia stood still under the combined hold of the Pro Heroes.
Then, slowly, the giant looked down past Mount Lady's blonde hair as if he were staring at a stray bush blocking a footpath.
"...Get out... of my way," Gigantomachia rumbled, the muscle mass across his shoulders swelling another ten feet wider as his endurance and pain-blocker Quirks kicked in at full power.
"...This is the quickest path... to meet my master!"
CRACK! BOOOOOOM!
With a single forward step of his right leg, Gigantomachia shattered Cementoss's ten-foot-thick concrete stockade into gravel.
Flexing his biceps once, he snapped Majestic's green binding rings like dry twigs, knocking Fourth Kind and Death Arms flying into the dirt.
Before Mount Lady could brace her boots, Gigantomachia reached up with his massive right hand and clamped all five stony fingers directly over her entire face!
"Mmph?!" Mount Lady muffled beneath his giant palm, kicking her legs wildly as he lifted her sixty-foot frame clean off the ground with one arm.
WHAM!
Gigantomachia slammed Mount Lady flat onto her back in the crater, stepped his massive foot right over her waist, and broke into a thundering, unstoppable sprint straight into the eastern pine forest!
CRUNCH! CRACK
Trees snapped like matchsticks as Gigantomachia plowed a hundred-foot-wide trench straight through the dense forest slope.
"UGH!"
Down in the crater behind him, Mount Lady groaned and tried to push herself up on her elbows, while Kamui Woods, Gang Orca, and Fat Gum sprinted out of the tunnels to catch up.
Running along the forested ridge parallel to the charging behemoth, Pro Hero Midnight cracked her whip against a fallen log and looked up at Majestic floating beside her.
"...Majestic, physical blocks aren't even slowing him down!" Midnight shouted over the roar of splintering timber.
"...He just tossed Mount Lady aside with one hand!"
"...If we want to stop a body that big, I have to get above his nose and put him to sleep with my Quirk!"
Majestic nodded grimly and swung his right arm toward her waist.
"...Climb onto my rings, Midnight!" Majestic called back, forming three flat green platforms of solid air beneath her high-heeled boots.
"...I'll launch you straight over his forehead!"
SWISH!
Stepping onto the glowing green air-rings, Midnight rode the rising platforms eighty feet up through the dusty tree canopy until she was floating directly ahead of Gigantomachia's charging face.
With her left hand, she grabbed the white sleeve of her costume and ripped the fabric wide open from wrist to shoulder.
Pink, sweet-smelling Somnambulist mist billowed out from her bare skin into the air current ahead of the giant's open mouth.
'Just breathe in one lungful of this, big guy, and you'll be out cold until tomorrow morning!' Midnight thought, leaning forward on the floating ring to guide the mist down toward his nostrils.
Through the thick clouds of brown dust and splintered pine needles swirling around the giant's shoulders, five dark silhouettes suddenly shifted between the jagged stone plates on Gigantomachia's back.
Midnight's eyes widened behind her red-framed glasses.
'...Wait—there are people riding on his shoulders?!' Midnight realized, her breath catching in her throat.
'With all the smoke and rock armor, none of us saw them from the ground!'
Up between Gigantomachia's dorsal spikes, Dabi stood up and braced his boot against a horn, looking straight at Midnight with a cold, mocking grin.
"...See what I told you, Compress?" Dabi called out, raising his right hand toward the floating heroine.
"...The pros are so busy staring at the big guy's body, they had no idea we were sitting up here!"
FWOOSH!
A roaring jet of superheated blue fire blasted straight out of Dabi's palm, incinerating Midnight's pink sleep mist in mid-air before a single drop could reach Gigantomachia's nose!
"Midnight, pull back!" Majestic yelled from forty feet below, trying to yank his green air-rings backward.
Before the rings could move a foot, Mr. Compress leaped onto the tip of Gigantomachia's highest shoulder spike with three glowing blue marbles pinched between his fingers.
"Allow me to curtain-call your little performance, madam!" Mr. Compress shouted, flicking the three marbles straight above Midnight's head and snapping his fingers.
"Release!"
POP! POP! POP!
Three five-ton chunks of compressed concrete masonry materialized in mid-air ten feet above Midnight!
CRACK! WHAM!
The first concrete block smashed straight through Majestic's green air-ring beneath her boots, while the edge of the second boulder clipped Midnight squarely across her left shoulder!
"Gah!" Midnight gasped.
The impact knocked the wind out of her lungs and sent her tumbling helplessly backward out of the sky.
Down on the torn forest trail fifty feet directly below her falling body, twenty fleeing Paranormal Liberation Front soldiers who had been running in Gigantomachia's wake looked up through the smoke.
"Look up there, that's the U.A. teacher who knocked out our squad with sleep gas!" a scarred PLF fighter with steel-bladed forearms shouted, pointing up at Midnight plummeting through the broken branches.
"...She's falling right into our lap!" another soldier with a plasma-spear Quirk roared, leveling his glowing hands toward the sky alongside nineteen of his comrades.
"...Kill her before she hits the ground!"
Falling fifty feet through the smoke with her left arm numb and blood blurring her glasses, Nemuri looked down at the twenty raised weapons and glowing Quirks waiting to impale her on impact.
'...I'm spinning too fast to catch a branch,' she thought, squeezing her eyes shut as the ground rushed up to meet her back.
'...Majestic and Mount Lady are too far behind to reach me in time...'
The tip of the closest plasma spear came within six inches of the back of her neck.
Right at that exact millisecond, a crisp, unmistakable sound echoed straight across the entire eastern forest.
SNAP.
Every single sound in the woods stopped dead.
--<>--
POOF.
Midnight didn't hit the ground or the waiting blades.
She landed flat on her back onto something soft, springy, and warm suspended six feet off the forest floor.
Blinking her eyes open behind her crooked glasses, Nemuri looked down at her hands.
Floating directly beneath her waist was a bright pink, two-dimensional comic-book cloud outlined in thick black marker, complete with the word 'SOFT!' printed across its fluffy edge in bold yellow letters.
"...Huh?" Midnight breathed, touching the flat cartoon cloud in total bewilderment.
Slowly, she raised her head.
Standing calmly in mid-air two feet in front of her floating cloud with his back turned to her and his left hand tucked neatly into the pocket of his spotless white slacks was Hero X.
For the past two months, Nemuri had watched this man's face on every television screen in Japan and heard the students at U.A. talk about him non-stop, yet seeing his broad white shoulders hovering in front of her in person made her heart skip a beat.
Down on the trail ten feet below Kaito's white leather shoes, the twenty PLF soldiers who had been ready to murder her half a second ago stood frozen like statues.
Kaito hadn't even glanced down at them.
CLATTER. CLATTER.
Without a single word being spoken, all twenty terrified villains dropped their weapons into the ground, fell straight to their knees, and laced their hands tightly behind their heads in complete surrender.
Kaito turned his head slightly over his shoulder, looking down at Midnight on the pink cloud with a warm, easy smile behind his dark glasses.
"Good thing I was watching the tree line," Kaito said casually, raising his right hand toward her temple.
"...You alright there, Miss Midnight?"
SNAP.
At the light snap of his fingers, the bleeding cut on Midnight's forehead vanished completely, replaced by a tiny, colorful cartoon band-aid sticker with a smiling cat drawn on it.
Midnight touched the painless sticker on her forehead with two fingers before she let out a shaky, relieved laugh.
"...Well, now," Midnight said, resting a hand against her chest as her racing pulse finally slowed down.
"...The boys at the faculty office told me you liked cutting it close, Hero X, yet I have to admit... that was one heck of a catch."
"Happy to help," Kaito chuckled.
THUD! THUD!
Back down the torn forest trail, Mount Lady, Majestic, Hawks, and Best Jeanist skidded to a halt around the surrendered soldiers, letting out a huge collective breath of relief when they saw Midnight sitting safely on the floating cloud.
"...Midnight! Thank goodness you're in one piece!" Majestic called out, lowering his hands as his green rings faded.
"...Hey, took you long enough, X!" Mount Lady huffed, leaning her giant hands on her knees to catch her breath as she wiped dirt off her chin.
"...I thought you were staying back by the police vans!"
Kaito looked over at the sixty-foot heroine and shrugged his shoulders with an amused grin.
"Hey, I was trying to be polite and stay on the sidelines so I wouldn't hog all the commission raid points and shrink your bonus checks this month," Kaito joked lightly, pointing a thumb down the demolished forest path where Gigantomachia was still crashing through the trees three hundred yards ahead.
"...Though since that overgrown mole-man and his passengers just tried to drop five tons of concrete on a U.A. schoolteacher, I'm officially clocking back in."
Up ahead down the mountain slope, Gigantomachia hadn't slowed down by a single mile per hour.
Clinging to the giant's dorsal spikes, however, Dabi, Mr. Compress, Spinner, Toga, and Skeptic looked back through the broken trees and saw the white-suited figure floating above Midnight.
"...H-he's right behind us!" Skeptic shrieked, clawing at Gigantomachia's stone skin in sheer hysteria.
"...Run faster, you stupid monster!"
"...Don't look back!" Dabi roared at Gigantomachia's neck, blue fire flaring wildly around his shoulders.
"...Go straight down the cliff to the highway before he folds the space!"
Back beside Midnight's floating cloud, Kaito raised his right hand to chest height.
"Sit tight for ten seconds, everyone," Kaito said smoothly.
SNAP.
In less than the blink of an eye, Kaito vanished from the air above Midnight.
STEP.
He materialized thirty feet off the ground directly in front of Gigantomachia's charging face, blocking the center of the forest path with his left hand still resting casually inside his trouser pocket.
"...What the—he's already in front of us?!" Spinner gasped, nearly losing his grip on the giant's horn.
Seeing the tiny white figure hovering directly in the shortest path between him and Tomura Shigaraki, Gigantomachia's glowing eyes burned with blind fury.
"OUT OF MY WAY, SMALL MAN!" Gigantomachia bellowed, raising his colossal eighty-foot right arm high into the sky and swinging his stone-armored claws straight down to crush Kaito into paste!
The wind pressure from the descending giant palm flattened the grass fifty yards in every direction.
Floating right under the shadow of the eighty-foot hand, Kaito pushed his dark glasses half an inch up the bridge of his nose with his left index finger and raised his right hand.
SNAP.
WHOOOOOOSH!
A massive, shimmering wave of neon cyan, magenta, and gold grid lines exploded outward from Kaito's fingertips across a full two-mile radius of the mountain range!
In a single heartbeat, the entire eastern forest, the sky overhead, the shattered mountain ridge, the watching Pro Heroes, and Gigantomachia himself folded inward like a giant kaleidoscope.
Just like a living, pop-art mirror dimension, two miles of reality transformed into a shifting, surreal landscape of floating geometric cubes, comic-book halftone panels, and glowing neon skyways suspended in mid-air.
Inside this folded world, everyone could still breathe, speak, and move their limbs normally, yet Kaito controlled every single angle of the space around them.
THUD!
Three inches in front of Kaito's nose, Gigantomachia's descending eighty-foot claw slammed dead against a floating, transparent neon-pink geometric panel that refused to budge a single millimeter!
"...Grah?!" Gigantomachia grunted in confusion, pushing all of his monstrous weight against the floating panel in mid-air without being able to move his hand forward an inch.
Standing calmly on an upside-down neon street sign floating level with the giant's knuckles, Kaito looked right past Gigantomachia's frozen fingers at Dabi, Mr. Compress, Toga, Spinner, and Skeptic clinging to the monster's back.
A relaxed, playful smile crossed Kaito's lips.
"...Sorry to hold up the bus, guys," Kaito called out clearly across the glowing pop-art sky.
"...Mind if I check your tickets before you leave the mountain?"
--<>--
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)