The Mountain Zone had become a graveyard of silent stone and static. The air was thick with the acrid, biting scent of ionized oxygen—the lingering ghost of Kaminari's 1.3-million-volt discharge.
Below the ridge, the twenty villains Loki had outmaneuvered lay in various states of unconsciousness, their bodies twitching occasionally as the last of the electricity left their nerves.
Loki Hargreaves stood at the precipice, his fingers curled so tightly around the edge of a jagged rock that his knuckles were white as bone. He wasn't just tired; he was experiencing a metabolic collapse. Every Snap he had performed in the heat of the ambush had been like a withdrawal from a bank account that was already overdrawn.
His vision was a kaleidoscope of blurred edges and emerald static, and his pulse hammered a frantic, uneven rhythm against his eardrums.
"Loki-san! Your breathing... it's shallow," Momo Yaoyorozu said, her voice cutting through the fog in his mind. She stepped toward him, her own crimson suit singed and dusty. On her back, she carried the senseless Kaminari, whose face was still locked in that vacant, "whee" expression.
Jiro stood beside her, her earphone jacks plugged into the ground, her face etched with a grim, focused intensity.
"I am merely... gauging the acoustics of the room," Loki rasped. He tried to pull himself up into his usual regal posture, but his knees buckled. He caught himself, the silk of his green trench coat rustling.
"Loki-san, we have to move," Momo urged, her voice steady despite the visible tremble in her hands.
Loki adjusted his monocle, the glass cracked in a spiderweb pattern. "The exit... is compromised," he rasped, pointing toward the stairs. "The mist villain is guarding the door. If we head up, we're cornered. If we head down..."We head into the jaws of that monster,"
Jiro finished, her earphone jacks twitching. "Jiro said, her voice trembling. "I can hear the vibrations from the center. It's not just fighting. It's... something else. Something heavy. Something that isn't breathing right."
Loki looked toward the central plaza. Below them, through the rising smoke and dust, he could see a flash of black hair and the fluttering of a grey capture scarf. Shota Aizawa—Eraserhead—was a blur of motion, a lone wolf fighting a pack of hyenas.
"The Director cannot abandon his cast," Loki whispered, a flash of his old arrogance flickering in his exhausted eyes. "We go to the plaza. We provide support from the shadows. If Aizawa-sensei falls, none of us leave this stage alive."
As they navigated the jagged rocks toward the center, the perspective changed. From the ridge, the villains looked like ants. From the ground, they were giants.
As they reached the base of the mountain and entered the ruins near the central plaza, the sound hit them. It wasn't the sound of a hero fight. It was the sound of an industrial accident.
CRUNCH.
The sound of stone being pulverized. The sound of a human body being slammed into concrete.
Loki peered around a fallen pillar. His heart stopped.
At the center of the plaza, Shota Aizawa—the man who had stood like a wall between them and the darkness—was being dismantled.
His clothes were shredded, his goggles lay crushed on the ground, and his blood was a dark, spreading pool on the white tiles.
Shigaraki Tomura stood with his shoulders hunched, his fingers scratching incessantly at his neck. His eyes, visible through the gaps of the severed hand on his face, were fixed on the carnage.
"Twenty... thirty... forty..." Shigaraki muttered, his voice a dry, papery rasp. "The trash is being cleared out. But the boss isn't coming.
The game is glitching, Kurogiri."
"The children are more resilient than expected," the mist villain replied, swirling beside him. "And Eraserhead is... a problem."
Aizawa was a whirlwind of calculated
violence. He snapped the arm of a brute, kicked another into the dirt, and used his binding cloth to pull a third into a head-on collision with a concrete pillar. But for every villain he downed, two more took their place. His hair was floating, his eyes bloodshot from refusing to blink.
"Eraserhead... you're really cool," a voice rasped."He's cool," Shigaraki remarked, his voice devoid of any empathy. "But you are not a god. Look at you. You're slowing down.
Loki's gaze shifted to the speaker. A man—no, a creature—made of pale blue skin and covered in severed hands. He moved with a twitchy, erratic energy that made Loki's skin crawl. This was Shigaraki Tomura. He wasn't a villain from a textbook; he was a child with the power of a god and the empathy of a plague.
Beside him stood Nomu.
Up close, the creature was an abomination. Its skin was the color of a bruise, and its muscles were unnaturally thick, bulging in ways that defied anatomy. Its brain was exposed, pulsing rhythmically as it held Aizawa's head against the pavement.
Loki, Momo, and Jiro reached the edge of the plaza just as Nomu lunged.
The speed was incomprehensible. Aizawa didn't even have time to blink. In one second, he was fighting three thugs; in the next, the Nomu's massive hand had crushed his face into the pavement. The sound of the impact—a sickening crunch of stone and bone—echoed through the entire facility.
"Sensei!" Midoriya's scream was the catalyst. The green-haired boy, along with Asui and Mineta, had been watching from the water zone.
Driven by a mix of terror and instinct, Midoriya charged. He didn't have a plan. He had a fist. "DELAWARE... SMASH!"
He leaped toward Shigaraki, the air pressure from his quirk rippling the water behind him. But before his fist could connect, Kurogiri warped the space. The punch was headed toward empty air.
Loki thought, his hazel eyes narrowing as a spark of emerald fire flickered in his pupils. He's going to kill the actor.
Loki stepped out of the shadows. His legs felt like they were made of wet paper, but he forced his spine to straighten. He had to be the Director. Even if the theater was burning, the Director does not slouch.
"How annoying," Shigaraki sighed, reaching out his hand to touch Midoriya's face. "The 'Truth' of this world is that you're all just experiencing points. Decay."
"Not on my stage!"
"Snap."
It wasn't the thunderous crack of the Mountain Zone. It was the sound of a dry twig breaking.
[The Jester's Snap]
Shigaraki's brain experienced a micro-second of dissonance. His hand, centimeters from Midoriya's skin, faltered.
In that heartbeat of confusion, Loki's hand moved with a grace that his trembling muscles shouldn't have possessed. He didn't reach for a deck; he reached for the only card left in his sleeve—a gold-rimmed King of Spades, stained with his own sweat.
Loki poured the last bit of his mana into the paper. Be a blade. Be the only truth in this room.
The card didn't spin; it flew straight, a line of lethal green light. It sliced across Shigaraki's reaching hand, cutting deep into the palm before the "Lie" collapsed and the card disintegrated into sparks.
"Gah!" Shigaraki pulled his hand back, blood—red and real—dripping from the wound. He looked at the cut, then turned his gaze toward the shadows where Loki stood. "Another one? A little brat in a suit? You... you hurt me. You broke my skin."
Loki stepped out from the ruins, his legs shaking so violently he had to lean against a fallen pillar. His monocle was gone now, his face pale and smeared with dirt. "A director... must always... edit the villain's entrance," he panted.
The atmosphere in the plaza shifted from chaotic to predatory. Shigaraki wasn't just annoyed anymore; he was offended.
"Nomu," Shigaraki whispered, his fingers digging into the skin of his own neck until it bled. "The boy in green... the brat with the cards... they're bugs. They're glitches. Delete them. Delete them all."
The Nomu turned.
To Loki, looking at the creature was like looking at a mountain that had decided to stop being a mountain and start being a butcher. Its exposed brain throbbed with a sickly, rhythmic pulse. It didn't have eyes—just a void where a soul should be.
Midoriya, ever the optimist of action, threw a punch. It was a One For All strike, a blow that should have leveled a building. The air pressure alone nearly knocked Loki off his feet.
THOOM.
The impact created a crater in the plaza. But the Nomu didn't even tilt its head. The punch landed in the center of its massive, purple chest, and the flesh simply... absorbed it. The muscle rippled like a dark pond after a stone is thrown, and then it stilled.
"Shock Absorption," Shigaraki laughed. "You can't punch a mountain into submission, hero. And your little card-trick friend?."Your cards won't cut him.
The Nomu swung a massive arm. Midoriya was sent flying, crashing into the ruins near Loki. The creature then turned its gaze toward Loki.
He tried to move. He commanded his legs to jump, to run, to do anything. But the "Weight" of the creature's presence was a physical pressure. It was the ultimate. The "Grand Illusionist" was finally out of tricks.
So this is the reality I've been hiding from, he thought.
He looked at the creature's brain, pulsating just inches away. He could see the veins, the raw, exposed tissue. He thought about his father, working late shifts. He thought about Lyra, waiting for him to come home and tell her another lie about how amazing his day was.
"I suppose..." Loki whispered, his voice steady even as his body failed, "this is where... the Director leaves the theater."
He didn't close his eyes. He refused to give the villains that much. He stared directly into the void of the Nomu's face, maintaining his noble, arrogant mask until the very end. He would die as the Director, even if the stage was empty and the lights were out.
The fist began its descent.
Loki could feel the air being pushed away from him, the sheer kinetic energy of the blow preparing to turn his bones into dust.
3... 2... 1...
BOOM.
The sound wasn't the end of Loki's life. It was the sound of the universe being rewritten by a power so immense that Loki's illusions felt like candlelight in a hurricane.
The wind didn't just blow; it roared. The Nomu's fist, which had been centimeters from Loki's skull, was suddenly caught in a grip of iron.
Loki looked up. The "Symbol of Peace" was no longer a man; he was a god of gold and blue. All Might's face was shadowed in a terrifying, beautiful fury. He didn't say a word, but the pressure of his presence pushed the villains back like a physical tide.
"The Director..." Loki rasped, a faint, delirious smile touching his blood-stained lips, "...is taking a break. The guest star... is here."
As All Might launched a counter-strike that shook the very foundations of the earth, Loki finally let his knees give out. He slumped against the fountain, the darkness of total exhaustion finally claiming him, knowing that for the first time in his life, someone else was holding the "Weight of the World."