….
"Snap the hell out of it! This isn't the damn time or place for you to lose your mind!"
Bakugo's rough grip on Midoriya's collar rattled him physically, but inside the deep, boundless expanse of the One For All vestige realm, a completely different storm was raging.
The metaphysical space, usually a quiet, echoing void lined with seven glowing thrones, now trembled beneath an overwhelming wave of emotional resonance.
Floating in the center, the vestiges of the previous wielders stood side by side, their translucent bodies glowing against the dark.
But for the first time in ninety years, the atmosphere inside the vestige realm wasn't defined by the desperate tension of an impending war.
It was defined by a profound, disorienting sense of disbelief.
All of them could feel it through the spiritual link connecting the origin of their power to the main Quirk factor across the battlefield:
The end of All For One was seconds away.
"He…. is…. dying..?" Banjo, the Fifth user, muttered, his arms hanging limp at his sides as he stared into the swirling smoke of the vestige floor–
"All For One... he is actually done for?"
It was the moment every soul in this realm had longed for, the one they had bled, suffered, and ultimately sacrificed their lives, youth, and families to make possible.
For decades, the law of One For All was absolute: this torch was passed from hand to hand solely to build a strike heavy enough to shatter the demon king.
They had all believed, with absolute certainty, that Izuku Midoriya was meant to be the final vessel who would carry out that sacred duty.
And yet, the end was arriving before Midoriya ever stepped onto the final stage; and it was all happening because of one single, impossible anomaly:
Dabi.
"We thought One For All was the only key." En, the Sixth user, said softly. "Believed that no one outside this chain could ever stand against him..."
"...and it seems we were wrong." Kudo, the Second user, cut in, his sharp eyes narrowing as he looked toward the horizon of the realm–
"No single man could have ever killed him alone."
The realization settled heavily over the predecessors.
It was humbling.
Almost surreal.
The grand, tragic cycle of One For All was being closed not through a sacrificial suicide charge, but through the terrifyingly unyielding intervention of a man who refused to let anyone else play the martyr.
Yet, as the impending death of All For One settled in, the weirdness in the atmosphere shifted into something far heavier.
The truth about Tomura Shigaraki, his manufactured [Decay], his stolen Quirk, and the cruel manipulation of a child forced to wear the hands of the family he had unknowingly killed.
In the deepest corner of the vestige realm, Yoichi Shigaraki, the First user, stood completely motionless.
Tears silently streamed down his face as he stared at his palms.
Beside him, Nana Shimura was on her knees, her shoulders shaking violently as she wept into her hands, her weeping soul sending shockwaves of grief straight into Midoriya's nervous system.
Shigaraki wasn't merely a villain, but the ultimate tragic monument to their failure.
He was the living proof that for every year All For One remained free, innocent lives were turned into monsters.
"Tenko..." Nana sobbed, her voice cracking with a grandmother's unbearable heartbreak. "My poor, sweet Tenko... What did he do to you...? What did I leave you to face...?!"
"Is there... anything?" Yoichi whispered, his voice carrying a desperate ache. "Is there anything left in this world... that can be done for that child?"
The question hung over the vestige realm like a lead weight.
Even Daigoro Banjo and the Third user, who had always taken a hardline, pragmatic stance on eliminating threats, remained silent.
They were Heroes at their core.
No matter how hardened they had become through war, none of them could look at a grandchild of their fellow comrade whose entire life was rewritten by a demon and simply feel nothing.
The pity was overwhelming, suffocating, and terrifyingly real…
But that's about it.
'He's a lost cause...' a part of the Fourth user, Hikage Shinomori, thought rationally.
'...but he was just a child.' the collective heart of One For All screamed back.
"DEKU!"
Bakugo's harsh scream finally snapped Midoriya back into the physical world.
The green sparks crackling around his boots violently dispersed into thin air as Midoriya gasped for breath, his chest heaving as if he had just surfaced from deep water.
Tears were still pouring freely down his freckled cheeks, but his eyes slowly regained their focus, locking onto Bakugo's furious face and Shoto's watchful expression.
"Kacchan..." Midoriya rasped, his voice raw, catching in his throat. "Shoto..."
"What the hell was that?!" Bakugo demanded, not letting go of his collar, though his grip loosened slightly as the wild Quirk energy subsided. "You looked like you were about to blow a fuse!"
"Midoriya." Shoto said softly, his hand remaining steady on his shoulder. "What happened?"
Around them, Uraraka, Iida, and the rest of Class 1-A moved closer, their expressions filled with deep concern.
Midoriya looked past them, turning his head toward the towering ice wall shielding the inner basin.
Through the spiritual link fading inside his chest, he could still feel the echoes of Nana's crying and the thrashing, broken soul of Tenko Shimura trapped inside Dabi's ice glacier.
….
.
For three agonizing seconds, a suffocating silence hung over the planet.
Millions of viewers across Japan, North America, Europe, and Asia held their breath, their eyes glued to the towering public displays, handheld screens, and television monitors.
The camera mounted on the lead news chopper quivered in the turbulence, capturing the thin, skeletal figure standing at the epicenter of a crater that looked like a fallen meteor site.
Then, the world exploded.
In the giant pedestrian scramble of Shibuya, thousands of people who had been frozen in sheer terror suddenly burst into deafening, hysterical cheers.
The public threw their arms around each other, sobbing uncontrollably into each other's shoulders; businessmen in sharp suits dropped their briefcases onto the pavement and fell to their knees in tears.
High school students screamed until their voices cracked, waving their arms at the massive LED billboards towering over the intersection.
"HE DID IT!"
"ALL MIGHT! ALL MIGHT! ALL MIGHT!"
"THE DEMON IS DEAD!"
Inside studio newsrooms from Tokyo to Washington D.C., news anchors completely lost their professional composure. Anchors who had spent the last hour speaking in trembling tones wept openly on live broadcasts, ignoring their producers screaming in their earpieces.
"Ladies and gentlemen... he... he did it!" a veteran news broadcaster choked out, wiping tears from his face as the live video feed showed Toshinori's raised fist. "The Symbol of Peace has standing! Despite everything... despite his form... he has defeated the grand villain of Kamino Ward! I repeat, the villain is down!"
In hospital rooms, patients stood up from their beds to press their faces against the screens.
Down in the evacuation shelters, entire families held each other in relief, the suffocating shadow of absolute doom lifting from their chests in a single, glorious instant.
Even behind the police barricades at the outer perimeter of Kamino, emergency personnel, officers, and weary heroes threw their helmets into the air, weeping and shouting in unbridled triumph.
The hero who had carried the entire world on his back had done it again.
The nightmare was over.
...Or so humanity desperately wished to believe.
High above the cheering world, isolated atop the shattered rock spire, the atmosphere was dead, arctic quiet.
Inside the dense, triple-reinforced glacial block Dabi had raised, the manic thrashing of Tomura Shigaraki had suddenly, completely stopped.
The boy's bloodshot, vacant red eyes were fixed on the crushed corpse in the crater below.
His chest no longer heaved, and his limbs hung limp within the sub-zero ice as the revelation that his murdered family, manufactured Decay, and entire existence had been nothing more than a puppet show orchestrated by All For One dismantled every defense mechanism in his mind.
Tenko Shimura was no longer a Villain, a Leader, or a Symbol of Destruction.
He was a completely broken, catatonic child sitting in total mental darkness; and that was the exact opening the devil had spent decades preparing for.
Down in the crater, as the physical brain of All For One flatlined and his heart took its very last beat, the physical law of Quirks took effect.
In this universe, a Quirk factor is more than a source of power, and it also carries the user's mind, known as a vestige.
By transferring the [Decay] Quirk into Shigaraki years earlier, All For One had done far more than grant the boy a Quirk. Hidden within it, he had secretly implanted his primary dormant mental vestige deep inside Shigaraki's soul.
Under normal circumstances, a person's individual willpower acts as an unyielding firewall, keeping foreign vestiges locked away in the subconscious.
Shigaraki's bottomless, burning hatred had become his greatest shield, forming a wall so impenetrable that All For One's dormant vestige could do nothing but watch from the darkness, unable to seize control.
But now? The truth had burnt that firewall to absolute ash.
Shigaraki's willpower was gone, leaving his mind completely defenseless.
'Thank you for the body, Tomura...'
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
Author Note:
Visit Patreon to instantly access +1 chapter for free, available for Free Members as well. For additional content please do support me and gain access to +12 more chapters.
-->[email protected]/WrightBrothers