Shigaraki's hands grew restless, his fingers clawing furiously at his neck as his mind spiraled into madness. "I see," he said, his voice dropping to a jagged whisper as he turned toward the massive, silent creature standing beside him. "Nomu. Kill him."
The anti-All Might Nomu instantly moved. Its massive, muscular frame blurred across the concrete as it swung a brutal backhand straight towards Gray's head.
Gray simply sighed. Moving with lightning-fast reflexes, he extended a single palm and caught the colossal hand effortlessly, the kinetic impact stopping dead in its tracks without pushing him back even a millimeter.
"Seriously," Gray said, looking past the monster's exposed brain straight into Shigaraki's bloodshot eyes. "I don't know what All For One actually sees in you, besides the whole part of using you as a psychological weapon towards All Might."
Before Shigaraki could even process how his ultimate weapon had been stopped with a single hand, Gray gripped the monster's overextended arm and casually launched the Nomu aside, sending it crashing violently through a thick concrete column.
"You know," Gray said, turning back towards Shigaraki. "I'm only just here to avoid the students actually dying today. They've only trained under my supervision for a mere thirty days so far. But if you guys keep trying me like this... I wouldn't mind going out of my way to completely get rid of you and your Sensei today."
"Ha!" Shigaraki started laughing hysterically. "Like you're actually strong enough for a thing like that! We saw the footage, you extra! We saw how you were struggling against All Might in the mountains! Even with your weird golden form, you only managed to land a single sucker punch on him! Don't try to act all high and mighty with me!"
Shigaraki dropped into a low combat stance, his hands raised to the sides. "Kurogiri, get ready! We are killing this guy right now before All Might even shows up! He pisses me off!"
Kurogiri's dense purple mist appeared to his side instantly. "Understood, Tomura Shigaraki."
"I warned you," Gray said, the casual smile disappearing as his expression turned serious. "You guys came into this facility trying to kill All Might, but you were also fully ready to slaughter a bunch of innocent kids to do it. You're obviously not my students, but it's time I teach you a lesson."
A dark warp gate silently appeared directly behind Gray's back. Sensing the spatial displacement, Gray turned around as the big Nomu he had just sent flying dashed forward out of the portal, its jagged teeth bared as it roared. Shigaraki also tried to use his Quirk to touch Gray while he was busy with the Nomu. He extended his hand to the side as Kurogiri opened a small portal, aiming it directly at Gray's back to decay him into dust.
But Gray effortlessly moved out of the way, and the hand missed entirely. Gray laughed, looking over his shoulder. "I told you, you're too weak."
Shigaraki clicked his tongue in annoyance, only to feel an agonizing pang of pain an instant after. Gray used his superior speed to break every finger on the hand Shigaraki had used to attack moments earlier. The bones cracked loudly, forcing the villain to screech in agony as he clutched his ruined hand.
Before Shigaraki could recover, the big Nomu closed the distance again. Gray stopped holding back his power completely. "This is the hidden trump card, right?" Gray muttered. "The one Nomu engineered to kill All Might."
Gray disappeared from his spot in a sudden blur. Before the creature's hand could even drop, Gray appeared directly beneath the Nomu. He threw a single, straight punch without holding back.
CRUNCH.
His arm passed cleanly through the Nomu's massive torso without slowing down a bit. Gray's punch didn't kill the Nomu since it has a super regeneration quirk. After Gray's punch, the Nomu fell back, clutching the hole in his chest, groaning as the massive cavity instantly began patching itself right after, blood and muscle fibers knitting themselves back together at an impossible speed.
"Yeah, he's a resilient one, alright," Gray said as he watched the Nomu get back up effortlessly, completely unbothered by the regeneration trick.
The biological weapon stood back up onto the pavement as Gray casually withdrew his arm. Shigaraki stared at the creature; the Nomu was supposed to tank hundreds of hits from All Might, but the shock absorption quirk didn't work... He thought Eraser Head might have something to do with it, maybe the underground hero had noticed the ambush and erased the Nomu's quirks at the last second, which is why the defense failed. He looked around the plaza, but he saw Eraser Head busy fighting another Nomu far away, his eyes and line of sight not even remotely focused on the main Nomu's position.
"You cheat character!" Shigaraki yelled at the top of his lungs, his voice cracking with pure, unadulterated hate as he backed towards the fountain, his broken fingers throbbing. "What the hell did you do!? What kind of Quirk is that!?"
Meanwhile, elsewhere, the students had their hands full. Izuku, Tsuyu, and Mineta had landed on the water, the splash throwing them right into the center of the Shipwreck Zone. Tsuyu had pulled Izuku and Mineta out of the water almost instantly, her powerful frog tongue and fluid movements making quick work of the aquatic environment as she launched them both safely onto the deck of the boat, climbing up after them a few seconds later.
Around a dozen villains appeared around the shipwreck, their heads popping out of the water as they surrounded the vessel. "Damn! She's fast! I couldn't get to the kids before she pulled them out!" one of them hissed. "It doesn't matter; let's just destroy the ship and get rid of them as soon as possible!" another villain called out to the rest, his hand transforming into a blade as he hacked at the hull.
Mineta instantly panicked. He started crying frantically, grabbed a bunch of his purple head spheres, and aimlessly threw them onto the deck. Izuku, meanwhile, thought hard about what to do. Thanks to his grueling days in the training dimension, he could now comfortably hold Full Cowl at 18%, but if push came to shove, he could safely push it to 25% for a brief time. His body was getting exponentially stronger by the day from Master Roshi's conditioning, and after Gray threw him directly to Garp and Zephyr Sensei, his muscle fibers had started getting more and more used to holding his own power without tearing apart.
But he was still very far from All Might's level. He could throw a few wind-pressure punches, but they weren't strong enough to catch the scattered villains floating in the moving water off guard. He checked his suit pockets. Gray had given every single student a small pouch of Senzu Beans before they entered the portal in case of extreme emergencies. Izuku didn't want to break his arm, but looking at the sinking ship, he knew he had to clear the zone.
Making up his mind, he grabbed both Mineta and a calm Tsuyu. "Hold tight!" he told them.
Turning on his Full Cowl at 25%, he launched them all high into the air with a leap. Once they were suspended directly above the center of the water zone, Izuku looked down and told Mineta to keep throwing his sticky balls rapidly into the water below. Pulling his right arm back, Izuku focused, letting the limiter break as he made his entire arm surge to 100% of One For All before shouting in his mind: 'SMASH!'
The punch instantly sent a colossal, towering wave of pressurized wind straight down toward the water's surface. It unleashed a massive kinetic shockwave that violently churned the water, causing the whirlpool to instantly suck up all of Mineta's floating purple balls and tightly bind all the thrashing villains into one massive, helpless clump.
The three students landed back in the water right after the pressure wave cleared. Izuku's right arm was completely broken and dangling, the skin bruised purple from the 100% output, so Tsuyu quickly grabbed him and swam fast to the safety of the plaza shore.
"Midoriya-chan, here, eat the bean," Tsuyu said, holding a green Senzu Bean directly to Izuku's mouth the second they hit the concrete steps.
"Thanks," he said weakly before eagerly chewing and swallowing the bean.
The bean's magical properties kicked in instantly. A warm energy flushed through his torso, and his broken arm completely fixed itself right up, the shattered bones snapping back into perfect alignment and the dark bruises vanishing in a fraction of a second. Izuku moved his arm around in a wide circle. Not feeling anything wrong or sore in his muscles, he stood straight up. "Let's go. I trust Gray-san to not have to worry about the main plaza, but we should go check on the other disaster zones."
"These god damn extras!" Bakugo roared from the Collapse Zone, blasting another groaning villain straight into a crumbling concrete wall.
"Bakugo!" Kirishima called out from a few feet away, his skin hardened into sharp stone plates. "That was the last one in this sector! We should move out and regroup with the others!"
"Don't tell me what to do!" Bakugo snapped, his face twisted in a deep scowl as he violently wiped a smudge of soot from his cheek. He was incredibly upset deep down. During the chaotic crossfire, he had actually managed to get clumsily hit once by one of the random thugs. It wasn't anything serious or painful at all; the blunt blow had done significantly more damage to his psyche than anything physical. 'I can't believe I let my guard down against a nobody...' he thought bitterly, his palms sparking with residual explosions. 'Hopefully only Kirishima was here to see that shit.'
Back at the main plaza, Gray continued effortlessly dodging and blocking the Nomu's heavy attacks, his hands steady as he tracked the creature's robotic movements. Mirko had been fighting her Nomu for a few minutes now. But when she saw that the one Gray was fighting seemed noticeably stronger and faster, she abruptly broke formation and dashed straight toward Gray's position.
"Hey! He looks way stronger, so swap with me!" she called out with a grin.
She spun and threw a devastating, high-speed kick straight toward the big anti-All Might Nomu. But unlike her previous targets, the massive creature didn't move an inch under the impact, its specialized Shock Absorption Quirk completely dispersing the kinetic force of her strike. Gray stood motionless, watching as his enemy was suddenly hijacked right out from under him. Sighing, he turned his head toward the second Nomu Mirko had just abandoned. He casually pointed a single finger and blasted the creature to dust with a quick Ki blast, vaporizing the monster before its brain could even register the threat. With that out of the way, he simply sat down flat on the concrete steps and watched Mirko fight.
"A little help here!" Aizawa suddenly yelled for help from across the plaza.
The underground hero had stubbornly held off the third and final Nomu by himself, but he was rapidly reaching his physical limit. Overusing his erasure ability nonstop against a horde of criminals had left his eyes heavily irritated, and his body was growing noticeably more tired and sluggish with every passing minute.
Gray appeared directly in front of him less than a second later. Moving with supernatural, fluid speed, he drove a brutal uppercut straight into the monster's chin. The sheer, raw physical force of the impact completely detached the Nomu's head from its body, sending the severed skull bouncing away across the pavement. Gray hovered in place for a few seconds, carefully observing the limp torso. Not seeing it regenerate its tissue like the other Nomu, he relaxed his stance and sat back down on the concrete stairs, focused on Mirko's high-speed brawl.
Every time Mirko came close to being hit by the creature's fists, Gray felt something incredibly weird deep in his chest. His body instinctively wanted to move on its own to leap across the pavement and protect her from the impact. He reached over and pressed a hand to his chest, his brow furrowing.
'What is this...?' Gray thought, confused by the sudden sensation. 'This hadn't happened before.'
He kept watching the fight closely, his gaze locked on her rapid movements. He felt his heart beat faster and faster against his ribs with every close dodge, the ambient tension in his veins rising by the second. Once he saw the Nomu successfully grab Mirko's leg mid-air, Gray moved without thinking.
In a single, blinding flash of speed, he materialized right in the center of the clash. He formed a sharp, humming blue Ki blade along the edge of his hand and severed the Nomu's thick arm in one fluid slice before the monster could even pull her down or do anything else. Moving on pure reflex, he instinctively caught Mirko mid-air, cradling her athletic frame securely against his chest before landing smoothly back onto the cracked asphalt.
Coming back to his senses a second later, Gray's face started heating up, a sudden flush of warmth hitting his cheeks.
'No way...' he thought, his mind racing as his heart rate kept accelerating while she looked up at him in surprise. 'I guess we have been spending a lot of time together lately, with the training dimension and the non-stop sparring at UA... but feeling like this just because she's in a bit of danger... Damn Saiyan genes!'
He knew the warrior race's biology was hardwired to be drawn to strong, unyielding, and fiercely independent partners who could match their intense drive, and looking down at the fierce, panting rabbit heroine in his arms, Gray realized his race instincts had made their choice long before his brain could even process it.