….
"So do me a favor and hold still." His grip tightened another degree, the creaking turning into something worse.
"You're my punching bag for the next thirty seconds."
He released Nomu's fists and before the creature could even begin to pull back, Dabi struck.
He delivered a precise blow to the dead center of its massive chest and his right fist rotating fully as his hips, shoulders, and legs channeled a mountain of kinetic force into a single, microscopic point.
Nomu absorbed it as its rubbery flesh rippled, dispersing the energy across its specialized cells as it was designed to do.
Its massive frame rocked, but it didn't break.
Dabi didn't wait, he struck again with his left, hitting the exact same square inch of flesh.
Then a right knee into the midsection, a left elbow across the jaw, and a right straight back to the chest.
Each blow built upon the damage of the last.
Instead of overwhelming its shock absorption with a single, massive explosion, he was stacking the damage.
With every impact, he fed thermal energy into the creature's system, forcing the quirk to process 2000°C heat alongside the physical force.
The temperature climbed and Nomu's skin shifted from a dull grey to a bruised red, then a glowing orange.
And Dabi's [Sun Breathing] acted as the regulator, perfectly managing his oxygen intake, muscle fiber engagement, and recovery time.
So, the barrage only accelerated: three strikes a second, then four, every blow landing in the same cluster, each one hotter than the last.
The color pushed past orange into a blinding yellow, then a searing white; the shock absorption still functioning, but the heat building faster than it could disperse, until Nomu's own body began to turn into a furnace.
"Already?" Dabi pulled back from a strike, visibly annoyed. "That's your threshold? Seriously? I was just getting warmed up and you're… come on. The one at USJ lasted longer than this."
The fat Nomu swung at him with both fists, a desperate, uncoordinated attack from a body starting to cook itself apart.
Dabi wasn't there.
Behind him, Midoriya watched through failing vision.
How? His analytical mind was still working, cataloguing, and trying to make the math add up even as his consciousness slipped.
Dabi is moving like he has an acceleration quirk.
But obviously he doesn't.
That's just his body - his muscles, reflexes, and breathing.
How is a human body doing that?
Dabi appeared in the air above the juggernaut, propelled by a burst of fire from his heels. He raised both hands, blue flames condensing between his palms until they turned a violent, blinding white.
"Sun Breathing. Thirteenth Form."
The fire between his hands went from blue to white.
"Perpetual Cycle."
The pillar erupted downward, a column of white fire that consumed the fat Nomu entirely precisely and contained, every flame directed, nothing wasted.
Every flame went exactly where Dabi directed it, and the fire burned what he wanted it to burn and stopped precisely where he told it to stop.
The regeneration and shock absorption tried to prevent it.
But they failed miserably… the input exceeded the system's capacity and the biological limit can't keep up anymore.
When the flames cleared, the fat Nomu was down.
Its brain was charred beyond any capacity for regeneration, and its body was still technically alive, but nothing behind the eyes would ever move it again.
Dabi landed softly, his breathing steadily…
…and just like that, two high-grade Nomu's were neutralized in under three minutes.
….
.
For a long moment, the underground warehouse was silent.
The three students stared at the man standing in the middle of the wreckage, two Nomu at his feet and not a scratch on him.
His civilian jacket half burned from the flight over, his hands still steaming, and he was not even breathing hard.
This was different from USJ.
Back then, they had watched Dabi struggle and seen him forced into the dirt, drag himself back up through sheer, agonizing refusal to stay down
He had nearly died, and that had been less than three months ago.
'When did he get this strong?' The thought circled Izuku's mind.
Even though the current two didn't seem as strong as the one that appeared at USJ, they are two of them.
They are sure if the two Nomu's had teamed up, they wouldn't have survived even a half second.
And Dabi had taken them apart like it was routine, the gap between two months ago and tonight was - it shouldn't be possible.
Shoto was thinking the same thing through the fog of his punctured lung and his broken ribs.
What happened to him?
"Holy shit..."
The voice came from Bakugo.
He was on his knees, his destroyed, blackened hands momentarily forgotten and he was staring at Dabi with an expression no one in Class 1-A had ever seen on his face: pure, unadulterated awe.
"When the hell did you get that stupidly strong?"
"Language…" Dabi said.
Then he turned to face them, and whatever calm he had held during the fight slipped off his expression like a discarded mask.
"And what the HELL were the three of you thinking?"
"We didn't... he was taken..." Izuku's voice was a threaded whisper as he tried to gesture toward Koda."We couldn't just wait for a permit to save him, Sensei."
Dabi's eyes flashed, a predatory, sapphire glint. "A permit? I don't give a damn about a permit, Midoriya. I care about the fact that I almost had to tell your family that you died in a fucking storage unit because you couldn't tell the difference between 'bravery' and 'suicide'."
The irony of him swearing a second after correcting Bakugo wasn't lost on them, but no one was suicidal enough to point it out.
"The orphanage." Shoto wheezed. "Are they..."
Dabi's expression changed, just for a second and the anger was still there but it made room for something else.
"They're evacuated. I saw the staff getting the last of them into the transport when I crossed the perimeter." His hand rested on Izuku's shoulder with careful restraint, barely any pressure. "You bought them the time they needed."
He looked at Izuku's eyes, which were wet and vacant with shock. "You did good, but don't you ever make me 'run' that fast again."
He moved to Shoto Todoroki.
Dabi's eyes tracked his injuries - the way the kid was breathing, holding himself, and the discoloration spreading across his right side.
"Broken ribs, at least four, a punctured lung on the left, frostbite on your right arm, and second degree burns on your left." He studied Todoroki's face. "You ran both sides at full output until your body started shutting down, didn't you."
"I had to." Shoto said his voice was flat, which meant he was in more pain than he was showing.
"Yeah."
Dabi didn't argue with that as he moved to Bakugo and he looked at his hands for a long time.
"You're going to need a specialist." Dabi said, his voice unusually quiet. "Probably more than one surgery. You pushed the recoil further than the bone could carry."
"Is that so..." Bakugo's voice was uncharacteristically quiet.
Dabi stared at him for another second.
Then he stood up, positioned himself between his students and the rest of the building - between them and any entrance, angle, and direction something could come from.
His spider-sense was running at full capacity, scanning for threats, finding none.
The Nomu were down and nobody else was coming.
But he stood there anyway.
"We're going to have a very long, and unpleasant talk about this." Dabi said, facing outward, watching the perimeter.
He pulled out his phone, the screen was cracked - the flight over hadn't been kind to it - but still functional.
"I need to call this in. Aizawa is going to lose his mind, the media is going to treat this like a circus, and Nezu..." He paused, a weary sigh escaping him. "Nezu is going to implement twenty new safety protocols, every single one of which I will have to read and sign."
Sirens sounded in the distance, faint at first but closing in as someone reported the explosions, the fire, and the collapsing building.
"When the pros get here." Dabi said. "You tell them everything exactly as it happened. Just the facts, what you saw, did, and in what order. Understood?"
"Yes, sensei." Izuku said.
Shoto gave a single, pained nod.
"...yeah." Katsuki Bakugo said, which for him was as close to a salute as it got.
From behind the collapsed pillar, a small voice spoke up.
"Thank you." Koji Koda said, his voice quiet but clear after staying silent through the entire fight, pressed against the rubble and watching everything. "All of you… for coming to save me."
Dabi had sensed him long ago and chose not to call it out, knowing he was unharmed.
"That's..." Midoriya smiled, the expression looking out of place on his battered face but still genuine. "That's what friends do."
"Tch. Next time don't get kidnapped." Bakugo muttered. "Making us haul ass all the way out here for you..."
"I am… I am sorry, I will-"
"He's saying you're welcome." Shoto interrupted flatly.
"THE HELL I AM, ICY-HOT!"
Dabi stood guard as the sirens drew closer and helped close in.
He didn't join the bickering, because his mind was stuck on the worse possibilities:
One second later, and Izuku would have released One For All at full output from his core, no limb to channel it through, or control, just everything at once, enough to tear his body apart beyond recognition.
Dabi's hands were still shaking, not from the fight, because the fight had been easy, embarrassingly so compared to USJ, compared to what those same Nomu would have done to him two months ago.
But none of that meant a damn thing if he was a second too late. If he had arrived to find a dead sixteen-year-old, all the power in the world wouldn't have been enough to pay the debt.
That was too close to his comfort zone… that can never happen again.
He looked at them.
Izuku. Shoto. Katsuki.
They were not strong enough yet to survive something like this alone or to win without someone stepping in at the last second.
Starting tomorrow, training is going to change… It was going to get harder and more brutal.
They were going to hate him for it, and he was going to do it anyway, because the alternative was standing over a grave and knowing he could have pushed them harder.
But that was tomorrow.
Tonight, he just stood guard while the sirens got louder and the paramedics got closer.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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