….
Dabi instantly recognized the silhouette against the moonlight.
Gigantomachia.
The realization hit Dabi like a bucket of ice water.
Damn it, he thought, his jaw clenching tightly. I really managed to piss off the final boss.
All For One hadn't just sent a Vanguard Action Squad to test U.A.'s defenses. He had taken Dabi's interference at the USJ and the mall incident personally.
He wasn't holding back as he unleashed his most loyal, devastating weapon to ensure the mountain was ground into dust.
The villains standing in front of me can't control that walking natural disaster, Dabi analyzed, his mind racing.
Only All For One or Shigaraki can command Machia. They must have teleported him to the edge of the range to act as the ultimate fail-safe.
The distance between Dabi and the towering behemoth was quite far.
It would take Gigantomachia a few minutes to tear his way through the forest and reach the lodge.
I need to clear this hurdle first, Dabi concluded, his eyes locking back onto the Vanguard Action Squad. Deal with the small fires here, then figure out how to stop the mountain before it crushes my students.
Dabi swept his gaze across the lineup.
He didn't know their names, nor did he particularly care to learn them.
There was the hulking wall of muscle (Muscular) cracking his knuckles.
The bound psycho in the straitjacket with blade-teeth (Moonfish) drooling onto the dirt, a woman gripping a massive magnet (Magne), a kid in the gas mask (Mustard), and the theatrical magician (Mr. Compress).
But Dabi's eyes snagged on the sixth person.
The figure was unnervingly lean, standing around seven feet tall, with proportions that looked as though he had been physically stretched on a rack.
Strapped to his back was an oversized basket filled with rows of glossy, dense black spheres that hummed with a faint, static tension.
The face was obscured, but the signature purple spheres triggered a bizarre, buried memory.
Who is that? Dabi thought, his eyes narrowing.
He would get his answer soon enough:
Minoru Mineta.
The very same perverted, cowardly student that Aizawa had mercilessly expelled on the absolute first day of classes for zero potential and an irredeemable attitude.
The kid was utterly unrecognizable now, twisted, bio-engineered, and mutated into a freakish weapon by Dr. Garaki to serve the League.
The sticky spheres that had once been a joke were now clearly weaponized, humming with lethal potential.
But there was something strangely amusing about the situation.
Muscular, Moonfish, Magne, Mustard, Mr. Compress, and a mutated Mineta, all of their names start with 'M'.
It was a completely absurd observation to have in the middle of a battlefield, surrounded by villains and impending violence.
And if Dabi ever had a chance to sit down and think about it later, he would probably find the coincidence far weirder than the actual fight.
"What are you mumbling about, you son of a bastard?!" Muscular roared, the fibers of his quirk already tearing through his skin to form an armored carapace of raw meat. "Don't tell me you forgot me! I have been waiting for years to kill you son of–"
"Scold my old man, but don't bring my mum to it, muscle head." Dabi raised his hands, the air around him instantly warping as the temperature skyrocketed. "-and why do you think I will remember a low life like you?
A blinding, ultraviolet-white flame ignited across Dabi's knuckles, casting the entire forest into stark, daylight-bright relief.
"Worry not though." Dabi promised. "Every single one of you burns to ash today."
….
In an instant, the forest was transformed into a sea of blinding ultraviolet flame.
Dabi didn't intend to let a single piece of fodder slip past his perimeter.
He had explicitly promised that he would funnel the strays toward Aizawa, but that was before he saw the sheer numbers flooding the treeline, and long before a walking mountain began tearing its way out of the earth five miles away.
Plans change when the final boss drops onto the board early, and you don't leave loose ends behind you.
He dropped his stance, his lungs expanding as he pulled in a massive volume of air. The sharp, hyper-pressurized hiss of [Total Concentration: Sun Breathing] echoed over the screams of the charging mercenaries.
His blood oxygen spiked, his heart rate settled into a lethal, steady thrum, and his Spider-Sense bloomed, mapping the chaotic clearing into a perfect, three-dimensional grid of intent and trajectories.
"Kill him!" one of the grunts screamed, firing a barrage of automated assault rifle fire.
Dabi didn't even look, as his head tilted a fraction of an inch, his torso shifting smoothly as the bullets sliced through the empty space where his heart had been a millisecond prior.
His [Arachnid Genome] processed the threat, the trajectory, and the velocity before the shooter's finger had even fully depressed the trigger.
He stepped forward, and blue fire condensed in his right hand, compressing under extreme thermal pressure until it formed a solid, humming plasma edge; a sword woven from 2,000°C heat.
He moved, and it wasn't a sprint but a teleportation of sheer speed.
He carved through the frontline of thugs like a phantom, severing limbs that were instantly cauterized by the heat while weapons melted into slag before they could even be swung.
He had no interest in grand, explosive attacks that would burn through his stamina.
Instead, he employed devastating close-quarters combat.
He ducked under a heavy mutant's swing, drove a flaming knee into their sternum, and swept the plasma blade through three mercenaries trying to flank him, turning their armor to ash.
It was an effortless butchery.
He was going all out from the first second, a predator clearing the tall grass.
But while the Beast's Forest burned, a different kind of war was stalling out in Musutafu.
….
Inside the principal's office at U.A. High School, the atmosphere was suffocatingly tense.
Nezu stood on his desk, his small paws clasped behind his back, his black, bead-like eyes locked onto the glowing monitors displaying the map of Nagano Prefecture.
The distress signal from Vlad King had hit their encrypted servers exactly twenty-five minutes ago.
The coordinates were confirmed, and the Vanguard Action Squad had breached the supposedly airtight perimeter of the training camp.
By all standard protocols, the response should have been instantaneous. U.A. maintained a fleet of small, high-speed tactical helicopters fueled and ready for exactly this kind of nightmare scenario.
Yet, the helicopters were still sitting on the tarmac.
"Still no clearance." All Might growled, his skeletal hands gripping the edge of Nezu's desk, his knuckles stark white. "The police dispatch is claiming a 'logistical gridlock,' and the Hero Public Safety Commission is stonewalling the airspace authorization. They say they need to verify the threat level before sending a specialized strike force across prefectures."
Nezu's whiskers twitched. "Verification? When two Pro Heroes and an entire class of students have triggered a Level-S distress beacon?"
It didn't make any logical sense.
Musutafu was situated in the Shizuoka Prefecture, while the Beast's Forest lay deep within the mountains of Nagano.
The straight-line distance between the two locations was roughly 150 to 200 kilometers.
The helicopters waiting outside typically cruised at speeds of 200 to 250 kilometers per hour.
A flight would take approximately forty-five minutes.
Every single minute they spent arguing with bureaucrats was a minute Dabi, Aizawa, and the students were fighting for their lives in the dark. Twenty-five minutes had already been lost to this 'unexpected delay.'
Nezu's mind raced through the variables, calculating the exact odds of such a catastrophic failure occurring organically.
The probability was zero.
"They are doing this on purpose." Nezu said, his voice dropping its usual cheerful pitch, turning into something cold and terrifyingly sharp.
"What?" All Might looked at him, stunned.
"The Commission. Nezu clarified, his eyes narrowing at the monitors. "Or at the very least, moles within the dispatch network acting on All For One's behalf to stall our response. But I suspect the HPSC is deliberately dragging their feet. They view Dabi and his autonomous operations as a threat to their control. If Dabi takes heavy losses tonight, or if U.A.'s reputation bleeds in the mud, it gives them the leverage they desperately want to tighten the leash on all of us."
It was a sickening, ruthless political game being played with the lives of children.
Nezu reached forward and slammed his paw down on a heavy red button on his console.
"To hell with their clearance." the principal snarled. "We are not waiting for permission to save our students."
….
Outside U.A., on the reinforced helipad, the tactical choppers idled, their rotors whining with a deafening, rhythmic thwip-thwip-thwip.
The strike team was gathered, heavily armed, fully suited, and losing their minds.
"How long are we supposed to wait here?!" Stain roared, his hand gripping the hilt of his katana so hard the leather groaned. His blood-red scarf whipped violently in the downdraft of the rotors. "We've been standing on this tarmac for ten minutes! Those kids are being hunted!"
"Patience, Chizome." Spinner muttered, though his own reptilian tail was lashing nervously across the concrete. "If we fly into restricted airspace without clearance, the military will shoot us down before we cross the mountain range."
"Let them try!" Twice panicked, gripping his head. "No, wait, getting shot down sounds terrible! Let's just steal a car!"
A few meters away, Gentle Criminal and La Brava stood near the hangar doors.
They weren't boarding the choppers.
Dabi had issued a strict, non-negotiable contingency plan before he ever left for the camp: If the world went to hell, someone utterly loyal had to stay behind to guard Eri and Toga.
Gentle and La Brava had sworn to turn the temporary faculty housing into an impenetrable fortress. Nobody was getting near those girls tonight.
But the most terrifying presence on the tarmac wasn't Stain's roaring anger.
It was Rumi Usagiyama.
The Rabbit Hero stood near the open bay doors of the lead helicopter, neither screaming nor pacing, punching walls, or kicking craters into the concrete.
She was simply standing there in complete, unsettling silence.
Her arms were crossed, her crimson eyes locked on the dark horizon stretching toward The Beast's Forest.
Her long white ears were pinned completely flat against her skull; the absolute, undeniable biological sign of a predator that had bypassed anger and entered a state of cold, calculated murder.
Stain looked at her, and even the Hero Killer felt a chill slide down his spine.
The silence radiating from Mirko was so heavy it felt like it was suffocating the air around her, and whoever was responsible for keeping her grounded right now was going to pay in blood.
Suddenly, the encrypted comms on the pilot's dashboard crackled to life.
[This is Principal Nezu,] the voice echoed through the headsets of every hero on the tarmac. [The bureaucracy has failed us. I am officially invoking U.A.'s emergency executive override. Clearance is granted. Fly. Fly now.]
Rumi didn't say a word. She just stepped onto the chopper.
"Finally." Stain hissed, leaping into the cabin alongside Spinner and Twice. "Tell the pilot to redline the engines. We're going hunting."
.
….
[To be continued…]
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