All Might landed the combination that drove the Nomu back five meters, and the bio-weapon's Shock Absorption did what it was built to do — bled off the kinetic force, distributed it, redirected it — but the momentum still existed as a physical quantity and it had somewhere to go.
The counter-charge was not a decision. It was physics.
Yami twisted out of Todoroki's grip at the exact moment the charge began, the same weight-transfer technique that had worked for ninety seconds against Bakugo in a building three weeks ago and which had improved marginally since then, and he was in the gap before the geometry resolved.
Not toward the Nomu. Toward All Might.
The hero's attention was on the Nomu's return trajectory. His weight was transferring for the answer to the charge. His right side was committed to the incoming strike's intercept position. The five-meter space between them was open for two seconds while the counter-charge covered the ground, and Yami crossed it in one point eight.
His hands found All Might's left arm and the shove was not large — three percent OFA in the lateral push, enough to move a standing person's weight off its center, which was enough — and All Might's body shifted six inches left from the counter-charge's target line.
The Nomu's fist arrived in the space where the hero had been.
It arrived in the space where Yami was instead.
There was no pain.
This was the first thing he'd noted about the previous two deaths, and it remained true: the nervous system's transmission speed was not fast enough to register damage at this scale before the damage ended the registration system entirely. The fist connected with his torso at a force calibrated to stagger a man who had spent twenty years in the world's most powerful hero form, and what it connected with instead was a fifteen-year-old with reinforced impact padding and OFA at three percent and a DUR stat of 10.8.
The contact took approximately seventy milliseconds.
The system logged the killer in approximately ninety milliseconds.
[New Killer Logged: Nomu-01, Classification: Modified Biological Weapon — Tier B+]
Yami was not there to read it.
The wall was thirty meters from the contact point, and the trajectory between them covered that distance in less than half a second, and the wall was concrete reinforced by the dome's structural support architecture.
Uraraka's scream was the first sound that Kirishima's arriving group heard when they came through the maintenance corridor — not the fight, not the impacts, not All Might's voice, but a sound that had nothing practiced about it, that came from somewhere below decision-making, and which told everyone in auditory range exactly what category of event had just occurred.
Todoroki stood where he'd been standing when the grip broke. His right arm was extended and ice was spreading across the floor in the unfocused radial pattern of someone whose control had slipped — not an attack, not a defense, just the power expressing the body's state because the body hadn't given it other instructions.
Kirishima stopped moving when he reached the plaza's edge. The momentum that had been carrying him and Kaminari and Sero through the connecting corridor died at the threshold. His hands were at his sides. His hardening was active but not applied to anything.
Bakugo came through the entrance from the north stairway at the same moment. His trajectory had the specific directness of someone who had been fighting through to the central space with a goal and had not yet had time to update for what the space currently contained. He came through the door and stopped. Both gauntlets down. Neither activating.
The crater in the wall was not large. The impact geometry of a point-force projectile against a flat surface produced a concentrated depression rather than a broad deformation. The spatter pattern around it was not blood — the force had been too total for that, the structure too disrupted for the biology to leave the usual evidence. It was dust and material and the architectural record of something that had happened faster than observation could track.
Kaminari made a sound that was not a word.
All Might stood in the center of the plaza. His left arm was extended in the direction the shove had come from — the muscle memory of responding to contact still present in the stance. The hero form's face was doing something that hero forms were not supposed to do, which was show the person inside it, and Toshinori Yagi's face was not the face of someone who had a composure reserve available for this moment.
"He'll come back," Todoroki said. His voice came out flat. He wasn't looking at anyone. "His quirk is resurrection."
Nobody answered.
"He'll come back," Todoroki said again, and this time it was uncertain whether he was saying it to the class or to himself or to the structural fact of the wall across the plaza.
All Might's hero form stood in the ruined plaza with his left arm still extended and his expression not doing what it was supposed to do, and the Nomu across from him was already recovering from the momentum of its own strike, and somewhere in the non-time of the void between death and resurrection, the system was doing math.
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