….
Dabi hit the ground with the heavy, final thud of a man whose center of gravity had been forcibly uprooted. The impact drove the oxygen from his lungs, and knees nearly buckling under the sheer kinetic load.
His chest heaved in ragged, strained intervals, the steady, rhythmic of [Total Concentration Breathing], the foundation he had maintained since the portal opened, was fracturing.
His lungs felt like they were lined with glass, each pull of air a desperate attempt to satisfy a body that was reaching systemic failure.
"One down." he rasped, the words thick with the copper taste of blood, as he wiped his mouth with the back of a charred glove and forced his legs to steady.
"Now for-"
The sentence never reached its end as the second Nomu struck from his blind side, the impact landing with a sickening, wet crunch of ribs against reinforced muscle.
Before Dabi could even attempt to find his footing, the creature's momentum drove him through the three foot thick reinforced wall of the Conflagration Sector.
Concrete erupted in a spray of grey dust and rebar as they disappeared into the roaring simulation fire.
Inside, the environment was a hellscape of artificial ruin and very real heat.
Dabi barely managed to roll as Nomu's fist cratered the floor where his head had been a millisecond prior.
He surged upward, channeling a counterpunch aimed squarely at the creature's exposed brain matter.
The strike landed with the force of a hydraulic press, snapping Nomu's head sideways, but the creature didn't even blink.
It caught Dabi's follow-up kick, seized him mid-motion, and hurled him across the room like a rag doll.
He smashed through three burning support beams, his body a blur of motion until he hit a structural pillar with a crack that shook the entire building.
But Dabi didn't stay down.
He rose again before the dust settled, flames erupting from his palm in a concentrated blast that swallowed.
A concentrated blast calibrated at exactly 1,200°C swallowed the Nomu. For a heartbeat, the monster was a silhouette in a sun-bright inferno.
But as the flames thinned, the charred flesh simply healed itself back together.
….
In the observation deck, the students of Class 1-A were paralyzed with a mix of terror and awe. For the first time, this wasn't a hero lesson, it was a slaughter unfolding before them.
"That thing..." Jirou whispered, her hands trembling. "I can hear its pulse through the floor. It's too… mad."
Another impact shook the building as Nomu's fist drove into Dabi's stomach and lifted him clear off the ground before slamming him down again.
Kaminari winced as another impact shook the monitors. "He is taking hits that would level a building. How is he still standing?"
On the screen Dabi forced himself upright again, shoulders rising with a slow breath despite the blood running down his chin.
Nomu struck him again.
He staggered back and still stood.
Midoriya leaned forward slightly.
"…Look at his face."
The others followed his gaze.
Dabi was broken, one arm hanging at a grotesque angle, half-dislocated, his gear burned away to reveal skin beginning to char from within - yet, the corner of his mouth was lifted into a jagged, defiant grin.
Even Bakugo was in disbelief. "What a maniac… is he actually smiling?"
Midoriya felt a strange tightness in his chest as he watched.
After ten months of harsh drills, relentless conditioning, and combat exercises under Dabi, Midoriya had often wondered how someone who seemed so deceptively casual could push others so far beyond their limits.
Even so, this… This was different.
Midoriya had known Dabi was strong, anyone respected by All Might had to be, but he had never imagined anything close to this.
He glanced around the room briefly, noticing the stunned expressions of his classmates.
Most of them hadn't even heard the name 'Dabi' until a few weeks ago, and now they were watching him fight two monsters head-on.
Suddenly a memory surfaced.
….
All Might had quietly laughed at Midoriya's question. "Is Dabi strong?"
"Young Midoriya." he had said, resting a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Never judge Dabi by appearances."
Midoriya remembered blinking in confusion as All Might continued. "We sparred once. Obviously we couldn't go all out since we didn't want any of us hurt. But believe me when I say this..."
He had paused for emphasis. "Dabi's greatest strength is not his power."
Midoriya remembered tilting his head. "Then what is it?"
All Might's smile had widened slightly.
"It's his refusal to give up."
He tapped Midoriya's chest lightly.
"That 'man' does not understand surrender. Even when his body reaches its limit, something in him keeps moving forward. That kind of determination is rarer than any Quirk."
….
Back in the present, Midoriya watched as Dabi staggered back to his feet again after another crushing hit that should have ended the fight.
And yet he stood.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Every time Nomu knocked him down, he forced himself upright with the same stubborn persistence.
Midoriya swallowed, realizing All Might had been right, Dabi wasn't winning through strength, but because he refused to stop, and then something strange began to happen.
The flames around Dabi started burning hotter.
Todoroki noticed it first.
"…the temperature just spiked?" he said slowly.
The flames around Dabi weren't spreading outward, but they were growing denser, their color deepening while waves of heat rippled violently through the air.
Yaoyorozu leaned closer. "How is that possible…"
Dark patches were spreading along Dabi's arms where the heat from his own flames had begun to char the surface of his skin.
Under normal circumstances any fighter would instinctively pull back.
Dabi didn't, if anything, the flames intensified.
Inside his body, something was changing.
The Super Soldier serum, stuck at [91%] for weeks, suddenly surged forward under the brutal pressure of combat, his bloodstream carrying the compound through every fiber of his body as the internal system that monitored the transformation reacted instantly.
===
[SUPER SOLDIER] - 91%
===
The temperature in the room surged to 1600°C as the blue flames sharpened into a piercing, electric cyan, and the concrete beneath Dabi's feet didn't just crack, it melted into liquid glass.
===
[SUPER SOLDIER] - 95%
===
The air hissed and snapped as atmospheric oxygen was ionized, and the flames darkened into a terrifying deep violet.
Dabi's dislocated shoulder, even though it was nowhere near healing, seemed less painful.
===
[SUPER SOLDIER] - 98%
===
The pain arrived like a detonation beneath his skin as it started to reconstruct.
Cells rewrote themselves mid-combat, muscle fibers tightening and reorganizing while bone density compressed into something harder and heavier.
Also his nerves began forming new pathways that accelerated every signal moving through his spine as his body tried to survive a transformation it had never been meant to undergo in the middle of a fight.
However, he didn't care–
"You want to see a real monster?"
Dabi's voice was no longer a rasp, it carried a low, resonant vibration that seemed to echo through the students' bones.
===
[SUPER SOLDIER] - 99%
[SUPER SOLDIER] - 100%
EVOLUTION COMPLETE!!
===
The flames around him underwent a violent phase shift, the electric cyan and deep violet collapsing into an ultraviolet-white that defied the visible spectrum.
At a sustained 2000°C, Dabi was effectively a mimic of the human-shaped sun.
Nomu lunged just like before…
…but as its fist entered Dabi's immediate radius, the laws of biology failed.
The air was so hot it achieved Thermal Dissociation - the water in the Nomu's cells flashed into steam, and its flesh vaporized into ash before it even made physical contact.
Dabi's vision sharpened into a terrifying clarity.
His early [Arachnid Genome] and fully developed [Super Soldier] processing merged, turning Nomu's sonic-speed punch into a slow, telegraphed arc.
Dabi caught the fist one-handed, the impact not crashing but resonating in a low-frequency thrum of absolute power.
Nomu's unblinking eyes twitched, and for the first time, the bio-engineered puppet seemed to register a superior predator.
Dabi tilted his head slightly.
"My turn."
Instead of throwing a wild haymaker, Dabi executed a solar-compressed strike, the flames around his fist collapsing inward to create a vacuum of extreme pressure.
The strike transferred cleanly through Nomu's torso. The creature was launched upward, its body punching through the dome of the USJ and shattering the reinforced structure as it hurtled into the sky.
Dabi didn't follow immediately.
For four full seconds, he stood still, watching, letting the distance build.
Then, with the slightest shift of weight, just the tip of his right foot igniting in a controlled burst of blue flame, he vanished.
The propulsion was instantaneous, a shaped detonation beneath him that sent his body skyward, closing the gap in less than a heartbeat.
He reappeared directly in front of the tumbling Nomu.
Mid-air with no footing, his hands had been empty a second ago, but now heat poured from his palms in a rigid, elongated stream, the flames condensing under sheer willpower and temperature differential into a solid-state plasma edge.
In his free hand, a blade of burning blue emerged for the first time in this fight, humming at a frequency that split the air around it.
And then he unleashed everything.
[Sun Breathing - Thirteenth Form: Perpetual Cycle]
All twelve forms, combined into one continuous sequence.
Each movement flowed into the next without pause or recovery, slashes into arcs, arcs into thrusts, thrusts curving back into slashes, every strike layered over the last, building momentum, heat, and pressure in an unbroken chain.
The final strike landed square against Nomu's sternum, for a fraction of a second, the world fell silent.
Then the energy detonated, lighting up the sky.
Flames carved through the air in precise, overlapping patterns, each successive form compounding the thermal damage of the one before it.
Nomu's regeneration activated, healing, cells dividing, but the cycle gave it nothing to work with.
Every layer of new flesh was annihilated before it could finish forming.
The healing factor was simply being outrun, crushed beneath a level of destruction it was never built to handle.
Then the movement stopped.
Dabi hung in the air for a single suspended moment, blade dissolving into embers around him. Below, what remained of Nomu had already gone limp.
The lifeless body began to fall.
Its descent was just a dead weight tearing through the air before slamming into the ground.
The impact carved a crater on contact, concrete folding inward before bursting outward in a violent ring of debris as dust and shattered stone surged up
Dabi followed a moment later…
He killed his momentum just before impact, boots touching down at the edge of the crater as residual heat bled off his body in fading waves of blue. The flames that had engulfed him thinned, flickered, then settled into stillness.
For a long second, nothing moved.
At the center of the crater, the Nomu lay twisted into itself, its frame barely holding shape. Its regeneration pulsed once, a feeble ripple across its exposed muscle, then stopped.
Every cell had been cooked past the point of viability, and no amount of engineered recovery could rebuild from nothing.
Dabi exhaled slowly, shoulders lowering as the last traces of heat peeled off him like steam.
It was over.
….
Silence fell over the USJ.
Everyone - villains, students, even Aizawa - still in the middle of subduing the last few attackers near the plaza, stopped and looked toward the smoke rising from the ruined building.
At the center of the ruined plaza stood Dabi, breathing hard inside a scorched circle where the ground itself turned into molded paste of glass.
Ashido spoke first.
"…Is it over?"
Dabi glanced toward the fallen Nomu.
"Finaly…" he said. "You bird bastard."
"KILL HIM! KILL HIM NOW!"
Tomura Shigaraki's voice was a jagged, high-pitched shriek that shattered the quiet. He was scratching his neck with manic ferocity, blood trailing down his collar.
The ground beneath the Mountain Zone erupted.
The first Nomu, the one Dabi had buried earlier, burst from the rubble.
It had undergone a Stress-Triggered Mutation, its muscles bulging into grotesque, vein-covered mountains. It moved faster than the eye could track, a blur of black shadow hitting Dabi with the force of a freight train.
The impact sent Dabi hurtling through the reinforced masonry of the Mountain Zone. The wall collapsed, a hundred tons of stone and rebar burying him in an instant.
"Ahahaha! AHAHAHAHA!"
Shigaraki's laughter echoed off the dome, hollow and terrifying. "That's what you get for stepping out of line!!! No one survives that! No one!"
In the observation area, the hope that had just begun to bloom in Class 1-A vanished.
"No..." Uraraka whispered, her knees hitting the floor.
"He can't be-"
"There's no way." Kaminari said, his voice hollow as he stared at the dust cloud. "Even him... nobody could take a hit like that after a fight like that."
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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