I was standing on the crest of several collapsed walls, looking out over the destruction. Most of the heroes who came to hunt me down were buried under tons of rubble created by their own sheer incompetence. Truthfully, they were pretty weak. Disposable, at best.
"It's a damn miracle someone from the Top 10 hasn't shown up," I thought, adjusting the lapels of my coat. "Then again, at this point, they're either dying a slow death from radiation poisoning, or the city is just in such total chaos that they don't even have the personnel to send."
I held out my hands and used Overhaul's restoration ability to clear away the clutter. The destroyed asphalt and concrete blocks restructured themselves in a matter of seconds, wiping the perimeter completely clean. With the area clear, I looked up at the night sky, fixing my eyes on the blades of the news helicopter hovering overhead and broadcasting my every move.
"What else do I need to speed this up? I just want to get the hell out of this world once and for all... though not before ruining the heroes' lives and, if I'm lucky, ripping All For One's head off," I pondered.
With a single jump, I launched myself into the air, cutting through the wind until I landed heavily on the aircraft's landing skid. I slid the side door open without the slightest effort.
"—And as you can see, the suspect on scene appears to be—"
The reporter went dead silent mid-sentence. The mic trembled in her hand, and her face fell the moment our eyes met.
"Y-You... you..."
"Hey there," I said, looking straight into the camera lens with icy calm.
I reached out my right hand and rested my fingertips against the woman's neck. She turned pale as a corpse, unable to utter a single word out of pure terror that she'd be instantly disintegrated.
"I need you to call every hero out there," I said, pronouncing each word slowly for the TV audience. "If they don't get down here, I'm going to start wiping out everything in my path. Including her."
I turned my head toward the cameraman, who was standing right beside us, completely frozen.
"Hey. You," I said.
"Y-Yes, sir!" the guy answered, stiff as a board.
"Keep rolling," I muttered.
My voice carried more than just sound; it packed a thread of mental energy. The cameraman's eyes turned dull and black for a second; his willpower broke completely, falling under my direct control to ensure the shot wouldn't be lost.
Before jumping out, I stared right at the reporter. Just for the fun of it, and for no reason in particular, I triggered a slight distortion from my palm onto her scalp, leaving her completely bald in the blink of an eye.
"Hope this is broadcasting in HD," I remarked, letting myself drop into the abyss to head back down to the street.
Up above in the helicopter cabin, the journalist hyperventilated as she tried to catch her breath, oblivious to the fact that the feed was still live for millions of viewers.
"Hey... are you okay?" she managed to ask, looking at the cameraman, her voice shaking.
"The Lord is everything... He is the ultimate manifestation..." the man muttered in a hollow, mechanical tone.
"Hey, you're scaring me... answer me..."
A sharp, unnatural crack echoed through the cabin. The cameraman's neck snapped around at an impossible angle, facing the camera with black eyes and a grotesque grin stretched across his face.
"Expect chaos," the puppet declared through the microphone.
Ignoring the spectacle unfolding in midair, I crossed my arms in the middle of the cleared street, waiting patiently to see what kind of prey they'd send next.
BAM!
A sharp, violent impact blew out of nowhere right against the bottom of my chin. The force of the hit sent me flying through the air, plowing through wall after wall on a blind trajectory through destroyed concrete. The shock of the hit was enough to make me spit up a mouthful of blood as I slammed into the foundation of a larger building—a minor nuisance, considering I didn't even need that biological fluid to keep going.
The entire building collapsed on top of me in an avalanche of rubble and steel beams. Without losing my composure, I pressed both palms against the mass of debris trapping me and activated Overhaul's deconstruction. The fractured concrete and twisted metal restructured in a fraction of a second, restoring the facade to its original state as if it hadn't taken a single scratch.
I pushed open the front door of the freshly restored building and stepped out onto the street with the ease of someone checking out of a luxury hotel. Looking up to identify my attacker, I ran into a rather peculiar figure.
Standing in front of me was Mirko, though her appearance was drastically altered. Her rabbit-like features were disproportionate, her eyes glowed with a feral edge, and the veins in her arms and legs bulged under her skin with abnormal tension—a clear lingering effect of radiation mutation in her system.
"Well, well," I said, giving her a few slow claps. "Look who we have here. The Top rabbit."
"Pff... Like I wasn't gonna show up with all the fucking noise you made," she growled, gritting her teeth while hot blood bubbled at her temples.
"Noise? Hmm, I prefer to call it chaos," I replied, dramatically throwing my arms up to the sky. "From this moment on, you can call me Chaos."
Mirko stared at me for a second in total disbelief.
"What kind of bullshit is that?" she blurted out before launching forward with enough power to crack the asphalt.
The fight broke out in an explosion of pure speed. Mirko closed the distance in a flash, throwing a descending axe kick with her right leg. I shifted my torso just enough to keep her from splitting my shoulder, feeling the blast of compressed air brush past my cheek. Taking advantage of her momentum, I extended two fingers and grazed her exposed thigh; the flesh on her leg tore open in a clean gash from the deconstructing matter, sending her biting the dust.
Yet, the woman didn't even flinch from the pain. She used her arms to pivot on the pavement and hooked my ankle with a savage sweep, taking me down. Before I hit the ground, she drove a knee straight into my ribs that echoed like splintering wood.
I rolled a few yards, feeling my ribcage crushed. The sensation was strange, almost entertaining. It had been a while since I'd tested the biological durability of an organism built strictly for physical combat. With a quick touch of my hands to my own chest, Chisaki's bone and muscle structure reassembled in an instant, leaving me good as new.
"Not bad for a mutated animal," I said, getting to my feet.
"I'm not done with you yet, you bastard!" Mirko roared.
She lunged again, this time chaining together a relentless barrage of high and low kicks. I chose not to rely on wind or telekinesis; I wanted the full experience of going toe-to-toe against a genetic predator using nothing but the matter around us. I dodged three consecutive strikes, took a hard hook right to the cheekbone that knocked me back two steps, and countered with a sharp slap to the air that restructured the asphalt beneath her feet, sprouting stone spikes that drove right through her left calf.
Mirko screamed in rage, not pain. With suicidal ferocity, she snapped the stone spires off using her other leg and tackled me by the neck, driving me headfirst into the wall of a storefront. The impact made my spine pop.
Through my host's distorted vision, I watched her panting above me. Her breathing was ragged, her skin burning with radiation fever, and several deep wounds lay open on her body from my Quirk. It looked like an even match on the surface: we were both bleeding, both landing destructive blows, and the street around us kept getting turned to rubble after every exchange.
But the difference was night and day. While she burned through her last reserves of life with every charge, I was simply rebuilding this meat suit every time it broke, enjoying the weird thrill of fighting a killer rabbit before turning her lights out for good.
A torrent of scorching flames burst out without warning, burying me in a tide of absolute heat. The extreme temperature incinerated the container's biological layer in seconds; Chisaki's skin melted like cheap wax, shrinking into a black, smoking crust.
"Endeavor!?" Mirko gasped, shielding her face with her battered forearms to block the glare.
"Don't ask me... to just stand by and watch," the Number Two Hero answered, emerging through the smoke as he spat a thick glob of blood onto the pavement.
"I thought you were... you know, out of commission," the rabbit said, barely pushing herself up and wiping her mouth with the back of her glove.
"I'd rather give my life in battle than let this bastard burn the city to ashes," Endeavor declared, his eyes burning with blind determination.
"You think he's dead? I doubt anyone could survive that heat," Mirko questioned, checking the spot where the fire was still crackling.
"It's likely, but we can't lower our guard until—"
The hero couldn't finish his sentence. The inferno started pulling back, sucked toward a central core. The fire shifted to a dull sapphire blue, almost greenish, and from the heart of the combustion, a skeletal silhouette stepped out at a steady pace. A bare skeleton, bathed in flames, was walking among the embers.
"What the fuck...?" Mirko muttered.
Endeavor's eyes went wide, frozen in horror.
Before the disbelieving eyes of both heroes, the biological matter began to restructure out of thin air. Internal organs, muscle fibers, and nerve bundles wove human structure back over the charred bones. Within seconds, skin covered the bare frame once more. However, the restructuring underwent a mystic alteration: from the right side of the forehead, a twisted, greenish horn sprouted, breaking Chisaki's features.
"Sorry for the delay," I remarked, tilting my neck with a dry pop. "I have to admit, your fire is impressive, Endeavor. But to destroy me, you'd need more than just heat... though I'd better keep the details to myself."
I turned my torso and stretched like I'd just woken up from a nap. By reflex, both heroes looked down at my exposed body, but all they found in the pelvic area was a smooth void, completely featureless.
"Oh, come on," I said, cracking a mocking smile. "We have to keep things decent. Imagine if kids are watching the live stream—that'd be in pretty bad taste."
"..."
"..."
"Let's kick his ass," Mirko stated, clenching her jaw until her teeth ground together.
"Gladly," Endeavor replied. His fiery aura exploded into a volcanic blue blaze, warping the surrounding air from the sheer density of the heat.
"That's the spirit," I grinned.
The air collapsed in a deafening boom. Endeavor charged forward like a blue meteor, blasting a ten-meter-wide stream of concentrated fire that roared straight at me. At the same time, Mirko used the visual cover of the fire attack to circle around, bouncing at hypersonic speed between the neighboring walls to position herself in my upper blind spot.
I didn't move. I extended both palms forward and deconstructed the compressed air and asphalt beneath my feet. A massive barrier of molten stone and dense material surged from the ground, absorbing the direct hit of Endeavor's Hell Curtain. The blue flames melted the stone into instant lava, but Overhaul's continuous restructuring kept the shield intact.
"NOW!" Endeavor roared, pumping up the power to force me to keep my hands busy.
In that microsecond, Mirko dropped from the sky with a lethal Luna Ring, slamming the weight of her two mutated legs directly into the back of my neck. The impact broke the sound barrier. The hit smashed my head against the molten wall, shattering the liquid stone and destroying my vessel's right cheekbone.
Without giving me a second to breathe, Endeavor broke off his ranged barrage and closed the gap in a blue flash. His fist, wrapped in Prominence Burn, slammed into my solar plexus, incinerating the newly formed flesh and driving me into the pavement in a crater of glowing matter. The coordination was flawless: Mirko followed up with devastating stomps to my head while Endeavor pumped blue fire directly into my chest cavities through his fists.
The entire ground collapsed in an eruption of magma and shrapnel. The mix of brute force and divine heat turned the body into a shapeless clump of melted tissue and exposed bones in the middle of a blue hell.
Both heroes leaped back, panting heavily as the ambient heat melted the window frames within a two-block radius.
"Did... did we get him?" Mirko asked, dropping to one knee, her lungs burning.
In the center of the glowing crater, the mass of scorched flesh and dry bone popped again. The horn on my head remained untouched among the embers. A low, guttural, overlapping laugh echoed out of nowhere.
"Keep trying," I said, as the liquid matter on the ground reassembled onto my body with terrifying fluidity. "We're just getting warmed up."
"Fuck! What the hell are you!?" Mirko screamed, staggering back as she stared at her right hand, completely shattered and useless after that last hit.
"Me? I told you... I'm chaos," I answered with dead simplicity, not moving an inch from my spot.
They both kept coming at me with frantic desperation. I took hit after hit, but with every impact, my body adapted to their attack patterns. I adjusted. I could feel evolution flowing through my veins; the Enchiridion's magic vibrated with the essence of the Quirks stored inside me. The greater the chaos, the greater the magic flow, and the more magic... the more power. Power. Power. More power, a guttural voice echoed in the back of my mind while a grin spread across my face.
Taking advantage of an opening, Mirko managed to catch me with a brutal axe kick that buried me several yards under the asphalt.
"Now, Endeavor!" the rabbit roared, leaping away from the point of impact.
Endeavor didn't think twice. Taking advantage of me being trapped underground, he channeled the entirety of his fire reserves and unleashed a devastating blaze. The column of blue fire turned the surface into a sea of glowing lava. It was the most powerful attack he had pulled off in his entire career.
However, neither of them noticed the distortion behind them.
Manipulating the surrounding matter from the depths, I restructured a thick wall of concrete and steel behind Mirko, launching it forward like a massive sledgehammer that pushed her straight into Endeavor's volcanic stream.
"Fuck! Endeavor, stop!" the woman managed to scream, but her momentum had already put her on a collision course with death.
The fiery torrent caught her head-on. Endeavor cut the flames instantly, but the shockwave of compressed air knocked her straight into the molten crater where I was standing. She hit the ground hard, her body scorched by her own ally's fire, clinging to her last breath of life.
"Mirko!" Endeavor yelled, taking a step forward.
He stopped dead in his tracks, his pupils shrinking in horror.
From the bottom of the crater, a skeletal arm emerged from the boiling earth, gripping Mirko firmly by the throat.
"No... Run..." she whispered with the last bit of strength left in her lungs.
Before Endeavor could react, the heroine's biomass began to disintegrate and merge with mine. Mirko's tissue, muscle mass, and bone structure were violently absorbed into my host body, fusing into a single organism.
"What the absolute fuck...?" Endeavor choked out, unable to process the monstrosity in front of him.
A thick curtain of smoke and biological vapor covered the crater. From inside the haze, the echo of slow, heavy footsteps started beating against the embers.
"Mirko...?" the hero muttered, his voice cracking.
"She's not here anymore," a dual, distorted voice echoed from the shadows.
As the fog cleared, the new form stood exposed before the broadcast cameras. The right side of the face kept Kai Chisaki's features, while the left side showed Mirko's rabbit-like traits and dark skin, woven together in symmetry. The matter of my own flesh restructured quickly to cover the exposed areas, forming a layer of dense tissue. I'm a monster, not an exhibitionist.
I looked at Endeavor with a split smile, soaking in the Number Two's mental breakdown.
End of Chapter 22.