(Kata? POV – Shibuya Crossing)
Even now, I find it strange.
AFO, who has spent his every moment keeping as much distance between him and me as physically possible… who has never once dared to appear anywhere near me, suddenly slipping up.
A single Kurogiri portal, opening on I-Island. He'd hidden it well, making it invisible to my quirk with New Order, and before, it would have been more than enough.
But after my fight with All Might, I improved to counter this issue. I tuned my radar to register the distortion in atoms humanoids and Kurogiri's warp-gates cause in the air, even if I can't actually sense anything. So finding him would be easy… but with Foresight, he knew that. He probably knew he'd get caught.
'Annoying bastard.' I thought, when the portal, of course, hadn't been the real one. It was a Kurogiri clone made through Twice's quirk.
But even a decoy has the original's memories, and as soon as I caught it, I scanned its brain and learnt everything it knew.
Every base, from hidden bunkers to high-rise buildings in bustling cities, I found them all, then razed them to the ground.
There were numerous Kurogiri clones, each leading to Nomu ambush after ambush. Traps, dead-ends, fake AFOs…
AFO sacrificed his entire empire, and I didn't understand why. Regardless of his reasoning, none of it survived. And it didn't take me more than ten minutes to achieve, with travel being the bulk of the time.
And eventually, after exhausting every clone and trap…
"Found you." I say, appearing at Shibuya Crossing, looking directly at him.
I had thought that creating an absolute-zero field around Kurogiri might've been overkill, but given that he's unscathed, I realise it wasn't nearly enough.
'With Foresight, it would have missed no matter how big I made it.' I think, staring at where AFO stands.
Stare is generous. I can't actually see him, his body completely invisible. My Radar also can't sense him, using the miniscule distortion of his body to barely sense him.
'He even accounted for this?' I think, my red eyes staring at him, and Erasure doing nothing to his quirk. 'Did he acquire an invisibility quirk, or was it through New Order?' I ponder, before deciding it doesn't matter.
'How many futures did I have to kill you in…' I think clinically. 'For you to have seen this coming and prepared so thoroughly?'
The truth is, despite my analysis, barely a second has passed. By the time my mouth had barely finished the second word, my attack was already in motion.
'World Cutting Slash.' I chant internally.
A single vertical line splits the air in front of me. From the sky to the floor, and deeper still… through the clouds, pavement, and earth beneath, the fabric of space itself is cut open in a clean, silent seam centered exactly where AFO stands.
Then another. And another. Cutting off every direction he could possibly flee in. Above, below, and to every side, each cut as ruthless and indifferent as the last.
I don't stop at a few.
A hundred blooms outward, omnidirectional, and I feel… nothing, judging it insufficient and don't pause for a moment. A thousand. Ten thousand. The world in front of me becomes a lattice of severance multiplying so quickly even I give up on counting. Millions, maybe billions of intersecting planes of division, packed so densely that the space they carve isn't cut so much as erased, everything caught inside reduced to less than debris and dust, bordering toward the atomic.
The crossing comes apart in perfect silence, and for a moment the world simply seems to stop. The traffic and countless people are frozen mid-step in the intersection… and then it's gone.
The high-rises, the buildings, the cars, the whole roaring backdrop of Shibuya — every last piece of it in my line of sight vanishes at once, unmade.
I feel nothing for the people. While I don't care for them, being labelled a villain would be extremely inconvenient.
In an instant, I undo my attack, recreating the entire scene as if nothing ever happened… everything except AFO.
That is the only distinction that matters to me.
"That wasn't very nice… Kata." AFO says, his voice hoarse and rough now.
I don't answer. I was prepared for the slash to fail. After all, a cockroach that's survived this long wouldn't be easy to kill. And so, my next attack is already landing before he finishes the sentence.
'I can't tell how he survived, but it won't matter. I won't stop until he's dead.'
On the bright side, I detect what seems like a fine mist of blood and pulped tissue hanging in the air where a chunk of him used to be, meaning he wasn't unscathed.
Honing in on his location… I set it ablaze. The invisible blood mist instantly evaporates as a pillar of fire roars up from his position, thousands of degrees in temperature, swallowing the space whole.
And now, at last, Shibuya understands what's happening to it. The stunned pedestrians react, screams tearing across the intersection, as they scatter in every direction, as they realize the ground they're standing on is a battlefield.
I can't spare them much attention, already having decided that just this fire isn't enough. And before I can increase the temperature—
The fire bursts outward. A shockwave slams across the crossing and strikes my barrier, bouncing off harmlessly.
"Fire won't work." AFO says, sounding almost smug now. He seems entirely unaffected.
Then what little I can sense of him moves, diving into the fleeing crowd and accelerating to a speed no human body should reach.
'A speed quirk?' I think with narrowed eyes, immediately giving chase.
(AFO? POV – Shibuya Crossing)
'Terrifying.' I can't help but think, no matter how many futures I've spent preparing for this.
I tear through the crowd at a speed that liquefies the world into streaks, and still I can feel him behind me, like an unrelenting predator waiting for me to make a mistake.
'Who erases an entire city block the moment he arrives?' I curse internally. New Order alone would never have saved me from that first slash. All I managed was to hold my own atoms roughly in their proper arrangement as they were diced apart, and pray hyper-regeneration could stitch the pieces back before I died. The fire took my skin off after that. And now, I'm running with exposed, cauterized muscle, knitting itself closed even as I move.
By any honest accounting, I am already halfway to becoming a corpse, and this fight has only just begun.
I cut left on instinct, and where I stood a moment ago, an absolute zero dome spawns and erases the air, the pavement, and everything else instantly. The ground responds a half-second later, heaving up as though the fault beneath the city had snapped clean, then splitting, then rushing upward into walls that fold in to cage me.
I don't slow down. I can't slow down, so I hit the wall shoulder-first, my muscle swelling with a stockpiled strength quirk, and his telekinesis diffuses at the exact point of contact where I break through, and as I slip free into open air… a wall of six vehicles comes hurling toward me faster than sound.
'Impact Recoil.'
As the cars crash into me, the force is reversed. The cars crumple inward before being blasted away from me in every direction, and my path is clear again, despite the ache I feel all over my body now.
I note, even now, bleeding continuously from multiple grievous wounds, that not one of those vehicles was occupied. He cleared them first. Every civilian in the blast radius, moved a fraction out of harm's way in the same instant he weaponized their cars.
'Still guarding your reputation and playing the hero.' I sneer. 'What a hypocrite.'
But that's a good thing for me. Every second of this was curated. And I have watched him do it across more futures than he could imagine. And now, I can predict his behaviour.
'He can't sense my condition.' I think, and it's the one card I have left. 'If he could, he'd have known the fire nearly finished me, and probably would have simply used it over and over until I stopped moving.'
But I know that ignorance won't last. With each passing moment, he's learning. Every attack is a question, and how badly it hurts me is the answer. It's cold and methodical. I'd applaud it if I weren't on the receiving end.
And the ending couldn't be more clear… an attack built from every weakness I've shown, all of it arriving at once, just so he can overwhelm New Order and any other quirk I could use.
'Not much longer.' I think, almost peacefully, as attacks hammer down around me. Explosions, lightning, flame, plasma, crushing pressure, bone-deep vibrations. Partway through, his cape transforms into black spear-like tendrils that lash out at me. Two spike into my arm and stay there, trying to pin me down. So I do the only thing I can, and rip it off. If only to buy a little more time.
Because that's all this ever was. I never intended to win, or survive… only stall the clock.
And before long… the questions stop as he finds his answer.
"It's over." Kata says, his voice flat, but certain.
I don't even see the final blow, only feel it as it arrives.
Fire erupts in front of me, an inferno coiling around my body, and through it, in the same breath, his spatial attack cuts through my waist, my arms, and my legs. Vibration follows, rattling what's left of me apart from the inside, and then the world itself caves in as earth, concrete, and torn metal hammer in from every direction at once. A single engineered instant with every escape already sealed.
BOOOM!!!
The impact is strong enough to rattle my mind as my body gets buried, crushed at the heart of a mountain of debris, coughing, and bleeding from every place a body can bleed. Hyper-regeneration tries its best to restore the damage, but it's far too slow. And the only reason I still live, is due to bloodlet, which helps with blood loss.
'This is the end.' I accept calmly. And despite that… I smile.
A thin, wet laugh works its way up through my punctured lungs, but I don't stop it. Because I've earned it. He doesn't know. He can't know. To him, this is the end of the game. An inescapable checkmate.
"I… win…" I rasp weakly.
Little does he know… this game doesn't end with checkmate.
************
A/N: Hello Everyone! How are you all? If you've enjoyed the chapter and book thus far, please consider leaving me some comments, reviews, or power stones. It really helps the book out.
So, to be completely honest, I don't know how good this chapter is💀. For me, it was quite difficult to write. Mainly because AFO was genuinely out of his depth😭🤣, and the way I wrote it. I'm more used to continuous POV, happing in the present tense, so messing around with the ordering of time kinda messed me up.
And genuinely found it hard to make this fight as entertaining as I'd like. The burdens of an OP MC.
But, for some clarifications, Yes, Kata was using Erasure. From his perspective, as nice as his quirk is, he can't let ego get in the way, and decided to try nipping it in the bud. As for why AFO was so prepared, it's because he's seen the future, and knows all the attacks that are coming, I guess.
I'll be the first to admit, I stretched the absolute limit of the BS I could come up with so this dude survived just a little longer😭, but now, the fight is over.
And actually, I'm sure some of you would've figured out, given the clues👀, so what do you think? I was worried of people figuring it out the previous chapter and it being a huge cliff, but yeah, if you suspect it, it probably is. Hopefully you think it's more fun than some short summary as to why (and yes, I hate it when I try to be mysterious too😭. I'm not good at it, since I just like yapping, but anyway...)
You can also read 10 chapters ahead and support me at [email protected]/AMV_WEAKLY
That's all from me. Hopefully you enjoyed, and have a wonderful rest of you day/night 😁