Chapter 90: The Emerald Beast and the Winter's Edge
Something fundamental broke inside Izuku Midoriya.
It was not the sound of a bone snapping or a muscle tearing. It was the quiet, profound fracturing of his own internal restraints. Looking at the blood pooling beneath his mentor, and the sterile, unfeeling apathy in Overhaul's golden eyes, the boy who only wanted to save people ceased to exist.
What took his place was a force of unfiltered ruin.
The vibrant, controlled green lightning that usually danced across his skin vanished for a fraction of a second. When it erupted again, it was no longer a tool; it was a storm. Jagged, violent arcs of emerald electricity whipped through the air, scorching the concrete and filling the cavernous chamber with the sharp, metallic tang of ozone. The sheer atmospheric pressure radiating from Midoriya's small frame caused the loose pebbles on the ground to levitate before disintegrating into dust.
Overhaul's eyes narrowed slightly beneath his plague mask. He recognized the shift. The boy was no longer trying to arrest him. The boy was trying to eradicate him.
With a sound like a thunderclap, Midoriya vanished.
He didn't run; he erased the distance. Midoriya reappeared directly in front of the Yakuza boss, his fist pulled back, glowing with an intense, blinding light.
Overhaul reacted with the honed, lethal reflexes of a seasoned killer. He slammed his white-gloved hand onto the ground. Instantly, a colossal, reinforced barricade of concrete and steel rebar erupted from the floor to intercept the strike.
It didn't matter.
Midoriya's fist collided with the wall. He didn't just break the stone; he pulverized it. The shockwave of the impact sent a localized hurricane through the underground chamber, tearing the hulking slabs into microscopic shrapnel.
But the cost was immediate and horrific. The sound of Midoriya's right arm fracturing echoed through the dust. The sheer output of his own power was tearing his body apart from the inside out.
Yet, Midoriya did not scream. He did not flinch. His eyes were wide, glowing emerald voids entirely devoid of pain or hesitation. He launched a savage kick with his left leg, shattering another instantaneous barrier Overhaul erected, snapping his own tibia in the process. He was a suicidal weapon, sacrificing his own flesh and bone for the singular purpose of tearing the villain to pieces.
Overhaul skidded backward, his coat billowing from the wind pressure of the boy's strikes. He maintained his cold, imposing aura, analyzing the rabid beast in front of him. He is destroying himself to reach me, Overhaul thought, his golden eyes calculating the trajectory. A rabid dog.
Overhaul's gaze flicked to the side. Shota Aizawa was still lying on the ground, completely paralyzed by Chronostasis's attack, his eyes wide and struggling to move.
The erasure factor is still on the board, Overhaul calculated. A loose end.
Without breaking eye contact with the incoming Midoriya, Overhaul simply tapped the floor with the heel of his shoe.
The concrete beneath Aizawa instantly liquefied, opening like a jagged, hungry mouth. Aizawa plummeted into the dark recess. A fraction of a second later, the floor violently snapped shut, sealing the underground hero in a featureless tomb of impenetrable stone. The threat of losing his quirk was entirely eliminated.
Midoriya roared, the sound tearing at his vocal cords, and kicked off the ground with his remaining good leg. He launched himself high into the air, pulling back his unbroken left arm for a devastating, one-hundred-percent downward smash that would completely level the entire chamber.
Overhaul looked up at the descending meteor. He didn't raise a wall. He didn't try to dodge.
Instead, Overhaul reached out his hand and violently grabbed Eri by the collar of her ragged hospital gown. He yanked the trembling little girl directly in front of him, holding her up like a human shield right in the path of Midoriya's apocalyptic strike.
Midoriya's glowing eyes widened in paralyzing dread.
If he completed the punch, the shockwave alone would instantly kill her.
With a guttural, agonizing scream, Midoriya forced his body to abort the attack mid-air. He violently twisted his torso, forcibly redirecting the immense kinetic energy away from the villain and the girl. The sudden, unnatural shift in momentum tore the muscles in his back and shoulder to shreds.
Midoriya crashed heavily into the abrasive concrete, his body skipping like a thrown stone before coming to a violent halt. He coughed violently, a spray of crimson staining the grey floor.
Overhaul dropped Eri to the ground. She scrambled away, weeping silently.
"Your predictable morality is a sickness," Overhaul stated, looking down at his own hands. "It is time to cure it."
Overhaul reached down and pressed his bare hand against the unconscious body of his subordinate lying nearby. He simultaneously pressed his other hand against his own chest.
The sound that followed was grotesque—a sickening, wet tearing of flesh, bone, and stone.
Overhaul disassembled himself and his subordinate, fusing their biological matter together with the surrounding concrete of the room. He expanded, mutating into a hulking, grotesque chimera. Four gigantic appendages, thick with twisted muscle and jagged rock, sprouted from his elongated torso. His plague mask fused directly into his flesh, turning him into an apex predator of the underground.
Midoriya struggled to his knees, his vision blurring, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides.
Before he could even draw a breath, the monstrous Overhaul swung one of his boulder-like fists.
The impact was cataclysmic.
The blow struck Midoriya directly in the chest. The force was so crushing, so unprecedented, that Midoriya was launched backward like a cannonball. He slammed into the thick, reinforced concrete wall of the chamber, shattering it completely, and was thrown violently into the adjacent, ruined room.
Midoriya crashed into the dark rubble, tumbling through the debris until he hit a broken pillar.
Dust choked the air. The silence in the new room was heavy, broken only by the sound of Midoriya's ragged, wheezing breath. Every single bone in his arms and legs felt like crushed glass. He couldn't move his fingers. He couldn't feel his toes.
Slowly, painfully, Midoriya turned his head to the side.
Lying just a few feet away in the rubble was Mirio Togata. The third-year student's vibrant hero costume was torn to shreds, soaked in his own blood. He was unconscious, beaten within an inch of his life from a battle he had fought before Midoriya even arrived.
The sight of Lemillion—the brightest, strongest hero candidate in the school—lying broken in the dirt finally shattered the last remnants of Midoriya's endurance.
A small, trembling shadow appeared in the jagged hole Midoriya had been knocked through.
Eri stumbled into the ruined room. Her bare feet were cut and bleeding. She looked at Midoriya's shattered body, then at Mirio's unmoving form. The sheer weight of the tragedy broke her completely.
She fell to her knees in the dust, burying her face in her small, bandaged hands, weeping with a sorrow that was too heavy for a child to bear.
The looming, grotesque shadow of Overhaul appeared in the breach behind her.
"I'm sorry!" Eri cried out, her voice cracking, echoing through the broken concrete. She didn't run to Midoriya. She turned around, facing the towering monster, and bowed her head in unconditional surrender. "I'll go back! I'll be good! I'll let you do whatever you want! Just please... please don't kill them! Stop hurting them because of me!"
Midoriya heard her words. They were a dagger twisting directly in his heart.
He was completely immobilized. His limbs were useless, shattered beyond repair. But the fire inside him refused to be extinguished.
Tears of pure, unbridled rage and devastating impotence welled in Midoriya's wide green eyes, spilling over his bruised and bloodied cheeks. He couldn't stand. He couldn't punch.
So, he used the only thing he had left.
Midoriya drove his face into the dirt. He ground his teeth together with such ferocious, hateful intensity that his jaw ached. He bit down on the abrasive concrete dust, his expression twisted into a snarl of sheer fury at his own weakness. He wanted to chew the earth itself. He wanted to tear the world apart with his teeth because his hands had failed him. He had failed Nighteye. He had failed Mirio. And now, he was watching the little girl surrender her soul to a monster just to save his worthless life.
Overhaul looked down at the boy biting the dirt. The villain's fused, monstrous face twisted in profound disgust.
"Even now, your spirit refuses to die," Overhaul's distorted voice rumbled, vibrating the loose stones around them. "It is a grotesque anomaly. I will eradicate it entirely."
Overhaul raised one of his stone-fused arms high into the air. The shadow of the descending executioner's blow fell directly over Midoriya's head. He aimed to crush the boy's skull into the pavement, ending the nightmare once and for all.
Midoriya could only watch the shadow fall. The tears continued to track through the dirt on his face.
The monolithic arm swung down.
It never made contact.
In a fraction of a millisecond, the ambient temperature of the entire underground ruin plummeted to a bitter, subzero void. A thick, blindingly white mist of rapid condensation flooded the floor, swirling violently around the rubble.
The descending arm of stone and flesh stopped dead in mid-air.
Overhaul's golden eyes widened. A thick, jagged, breathtakingly beautiful layer of solid, ethereal blue ice had instantly encased his entire striking arm, locking the joints, freezing the muscle, and cementing the limb to the ceiling above. The sheer cold was so intense it burned.
Then came the sound.
Step. Step. Step.
Slow, rhythmic, and incredibly heavy footsteps echoed from the dark corridor behind the ruined wall. The sound carried no panic, no urgency, and no fear. It was the sound of chilling, unwavering authority.
From the shadows of the swirling, freezing mist, a tall figure emerged.
His dark trench coat flared lazily behind him, catching the frigid wind. His hands were tucked casually into his pockets. Thick, white steam hissed from the micro-vents on his collar, curling around his jawline.
Eri stopped crying, her large, ruby eyes widening in awe as the freezing mist parted around the newcomer like an obedient servant.
Midoriya, his face still pressed against the dirt, slowly lifted his head. His tear-filled green eyes widened in profound shock.
Aokiji Kuzan stopped walking. He stood directly between the towering monstrosity of Overhaul and the broken form of his classmate. He did not look up at the monster. He looked down at the boy in the dirt.
Aokiji's dark eyes were devoid of his usual laziness. They were sharp, piercing, and completely devoid of warmth.
"What an unheroic sight, Midoriya..." Aokiji's voice was a low, freezing drawl that cut through the tension of the room like a razor blade.
He slowly pulled his right hand out of his pocket.
"Why is your face in the dirt?" Aokiji asked, his tone perfectly even, carrying a weight that demanded an answer. He slowly swept his gaze over the weeping little girl, the bloodied form of Mirio, and the horrific situation they had been pushed into.
Aokiji let out a slow, frosty breath, the mist pluming in front of his face.
"And letting a sweet girl cry over you like this..." Aokiji added, his dark eyes locking onto Midoriya's, offering no pity, only an unbreakable, ironclad resolve. "Raise your head, partner. We are heroes."
Overhaul roared, violently flexing his remaining three arms, shattering the surrounding concrete to break free from the ambient frost.
Aokiji didn't even flinch. He didn't look at the screaming monster. He simply raised his right hand into the air. The freezing mist violently coalesced, compressing into a razor-sharp, hyper-dense blade of solid, diamond-hard ice in his grip.
The Ice Prince had arrived, and he was ready to dismantle the nightmare.
.
.