….
While Dabi headed to the U.A. staff quarters., two conversations were happening in two very different…. places.
The first was on a street in Musutafu.
It was the same street where, more than a year ago; the Symbol of Peace had told a quirkless boy that he, too, could become a Hero.
It was almost late evening.
Midoriya was trudging home from the train station, his yellow bag slung over one shoulder, his head a chaotic storm of noise.
Black Whip. The Vestiges. Six more quirks.
His mouth was moving; muttering, processing, running through everything that had happened today at a speed that made his lips twitch and his eyes unfocus.
He walked right past a figure leaning against the wall without even seeing them.
"Watch where you're going, Deku."
?!Midoriya jumped, feet leaving the ground, bag swinging, the whole thing.
"K-Kacchan?!"
Bakugo looked like he had been waiting.
"What are you… how long have you been standing there?"
"I hate that look." Bakugo said, pushing himself off the wall. "That muttering, lost in your own head face. You seriously look like a crazy person. It's annoying."
Midoriya just stared, the air suddenly feeling thin. Bakugo didn't waste time with pleasantries.
"So, what was that?" he demanded, stepping closer. "Back there on the training ground, that green stuff that came out of your hands… is that a second Quirk?"
"I... it's... it's complicated." Midoriya stammered.
"Listen Deku, here's the thing that's been bugging me." Bakugo took another step, his red eyes locked onto Midoriya's face–
"You were quirkless your whole life. I know that better than anyone. Then suddenly you show up with awesome Quirk, and now there's another ability on top of that? That's a lot of crap to swallow for someone who couldn't even do a pull-up back in middle school."
Midoriya's brain kicked into emergency processing mode. His mouth started moving before his better judgment could get a hand on the wheel.
"No, no, it's not a second quirk… well, I mean, it looks like one, obviously, but it's actually more of an extension of my existing quirk? Like, the core power has these latent functionalities that are built into the framework of the original ability, and I'm just now starting to understand the mechanism behind how they manifest under high-stress–"
"Stop."
Midoriya's jaw snapped shut.
"You're doing that thing where you use a hundred words to say absolutely nothing," Bakugo said flatly. "And you've always been a garbage liar, Deku."
Midoriya's left eye twitched.
Bakugo looked at him for a long second, then his voice changed, a bit more direct.
"Who gave it to you?"
Midoriya blinked, the breath catching in his throat. "What?"
"The power, Deku. Don't play stupid." Bakugo's jaw tightened, his eyes narrowing into slits. "After the battle trial, you babbled some nonsense about getting your Quirk from someone else. I haven't forgotten."
He took a step forward, invading Midoriya's space. "So, who was it? Who handed you that power?"
The question landed on Midoriya like a physical weight, his mouth opened and nothing came out.
This wasn't Bakugo prying for leverage or looking for a way to ruin him; it was the only thing that mattered to him.
He needed to know, not the mechanics or the science, but the legacy behind it. It was the presence he was up against, because when he beat Midoriya, and in his mind that outcome was inevitable.
He wanted to understand whose shadow he was stepping out of.
Was it All Might?
Or was it Dabi?
Midoriya's expression flickered through a frantic cycle of panic and calculation. He tried to construct a cover story, starting one in his head only to abandon it when he saw Bakugo's eyes already stripping away the lie.
He opened his mouth, then closed it, the internal spiral visible in the way his shoulders hunched.
"I… the thing is… it's complicated." Midoriya stammered, his eyes darting to the floor. "There are reasons, Kacchan. I can't exactly–"
"Whatever. I don't care about your pathetic excuses." Bakugo cut him off, turning away with a sharp, violent motion
"Forget it. I am done here."
He started walking away, leaving Midoriya behind without a backward glance.
Midoriya stood frozen in his place guiltridden. His head was down, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white.
"All Might."
Bakugo stopped mid-stride, and spun around.
Midoriya was looking at him. But the nervous, fidgeting, over-explaining version of the boy was gone.
In his place stood someone Midoriya had only recently begun to discover.
His gaze was steady, stripped of the usual twitch and the constant apology that usually defined him.
"It's All Might." Midoriya said. "He gave me his quirk."
The confession sat in the air between them.
Bakugo looked at him; the boy he had known since they were four.
A quirkless kid who used to follow him around, who cried when the other kids pushed him into the dirt, and who stood back up every single time with that stupid, unbreakable look on his face.
And that kid, that 'worthless' kid; had received the power of the greatest hero who ever lived.
Something moved behind Bakugo's eyes.
"Now that's more like it." He said.
He grinned; all teeth and challenge, a refusal to stand second to anyone for any reason.
"I always said I would surpass All Might." Bakugo said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly promise. "But the old man is already fading, and beating a legend on his way out is one thing, but–"
He shrugged, turning his back and starting toward the light. "This works better. I will just have to break the person he thought was better than me."
His footsteps faded down the sidewalk.
Midoriya stood there alone; the realisation of what he had just done; revealing the world's most dangerous secret without a word to his mentor hit him.
"Fortunately, Kachaan doesn't seem to think of revealing it to anyone."
Of course, he won't. Because that was Kacchan.
Midoriya let out a short, shaky laugh, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand before hoisting his bag. He turned and headed home.
….
Meanwhile, in a place very close and impossibly far away, another conversation was happening.
Inside Midoriya and One For All.
The vestige space had changed since the last time Midoriya had been pulled into it.
The formless dark was still there; vast, limitless, without walls or floor or sky, but now it had furniture.
Eight chairs were now arranged in a loose semicircle, each occupied by a figure.
From the first user to the seventh and this was new.
For most of One For All's history, the vestiges had been exactly what the name implied: traces.
They were echoes, fragments of memory preserved in the Quirk like photographs pressed between the pages of a book.
They couldn't speak, couldn't interact; they were merely residual data, the psychic impressions of the dead.
But in the last few months, things have changed.
Coinciding with Midoriya's accelerating development, and with Black Whip's manifestation, the connections were forming faster than anyone had predicted.
The vestiges had solidified, taken shape and gained enough substance to hold conversations.
Of course, they still couldn't talk to Midoriya at will.
That seemed to require specific conditions; emotional extremes, altered states of consciousness, moments where the barrier between the wielder and the power thinned.
But among themselves, in the space between Midoriya's awareness, they could now communicate.
Daigoro Banjo; the fifth was the first to speak.
"ALRIGHT! Let's talk about the new kid!" He slammed his palms together. "You all SEE that?! Tell me you saw that! Black Whip! First try! It moved just like mine, except… and I can't stress this enough… it's WAY more 'funky' than mine ever was! The raw output is off the charts!"
He jabbed a finger at the semicircle.
"He is naive."
The voice came from two chairs down.
Kudo, the Second User.
His expression was a cold blend of disapproval and studied indifference. "He is too soft, the type who tries to save everyone, pushes his own body to the brink for civilians, nearly tore himself apart because he couldn't accept even a single loss. And in a real war that kind of thinking doesn't win battles, it just delays the inevitable and turns into a liability."
Bruce, the Third User, beside him, nodded.
He spoke less than Kudo, but his words carried the same weight.
"The one with the flame Quirk, they call Dabi. He has a compelling ruthlessness this power demands, and he would have been the stronger vessel."
"The flame kid turned it down." Banjo replied, rolling his eyes. "And do we really need to go through this again, because I am pretty sure we have already had this conversation."
"We will keep having it." Kudo said evenly. "Until I am satisfied with the outcome."
The authority in Kudo's voice was forged in an era where hesitation was a death sentence and idealism was a luxury for the dead.
"Did you already forget? He also has a quirk." said a quieter voice from further down the semicircle.
Hikage Shinomori; the Fourth user.
He sat apart from the others, the way he had sat apart from most things during his life.
A man who looked at the world, judged it broken, and spent eighteen years in seclusion strengthening a power he never once used against the enemy it was meant to face.
He avoided combat for a simple reason. He knew, with brutal honesty, that even with his quirk, [Danger Sense], he stood no chance against All For One.
So he focused on a single goal: making that power stronger for whoever came after him. He died in his forties, written off as old age…. At least, that was the belief until recently.
"We've discussed what happens when One For All inhabits a body that already contains a quirk." Shinomori said.
The voice of someone who had lived with the consequences of that question and died from them. "The power grows inside the wielder, accumulates, multiplies, and eventually, it begins to consume the vessel."
It was only recently, after connecting a few dots, that the truth began to surface.
While also obsessing, Yagi dug deeper, tracking down the medical and autopsy reports tied to Hikage Shinomori; and that was when everything finally came to light.
The semicircle went quiet.
Bruce and Kudo exchanged glances but didn't argue the point because they couldn't.
The evidence was sitting in front of them; Shinomori himself, dead at forty, killed not by All For One or any villain but by the power he had been entrusted with.
"So by some twist of fate." Banjo said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. "The most powerful quirk in human history can only be wielded to its full potential by someone born without any power at all."
"The one who has nothing is the one who can carry everything." the first user's voice came from the far end of the semicircle.
Yoichi Shigaraki, he hadn't spoken until now.
His form was the most defined of all of them; the original, source, and brother who had been given a power he didn't want by a brother who wanted to control everything.
"That's the paradox One For All has always carried. The strength of the powerless."
"It counts for something." Kudo said. "It doesn't count for everything."
"No." Yoichi agreed. "It doesn't, and he will have to earn the rest."
The semicircle sat with that.
Eight figures in eight chairs in the dark space inside a power that had been growing for generations, discussing the boy who would inherit all of it; or break under its weight.
Banjo broke the silence first, because Banjo always broke silences.
"So we have an agreement." he said, looking between them. "We watch, wait, and let him prove himself."
His gaze settled on Kudo and Bruce.
"And when he does… because he will, I am saying that now, you two stubborn old soldiers are going to shake his hand, pass on your Quirks, and admit you were wrong about him."
"We will see." Kudo said.
"That's not a no!" Banjo grinned. "I will take that! The meeting adjourned! Same time next manifestation, everybody!"
Nobody laughed, but none argued, either.
The vestige space settled into stillness, the chairs remaining as they were, the ninth seat empty and waiting, patient, for the boy who would one day sit in it and understand what it meant to carry the weight of eight lifetimes on his shoulders.
For now, that boy walked home; his eyes still red from tears, smiling like an idiot because his childhood rival had just grinned at him and, for the first time, called him a worthy opponent.
He had no idea what was waiting inside his own body, though he would find out soon enough.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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