….
[Back To Beast Forest]
The smell of incinerated flesh and melted steel choked the clearing.
Dabi flicked his wrist, the plasma blade extending from his knuckles slicing cleanly through the chest plate of a massive mercenary before the man could even swing his hammer.
The body hit the dirt, already turning to ash.
Out of the dozens of low-level grunts that had flooded the perimeter moments ago, barely a handful remained, and they were actively scrambling backward, dropping their weapons in sheer terror.
Dabi didn't chase them.
His breathing remained perfectly steady, the [Sun Breathing] rhythm filtering out the smoke and keeping his oxygen saturation at peak capacity.
He was taking out the small fries effortlessly.
It was a massacre, not a fight.
But his eyes were locked on the tree line directly ahead.
There, standing just beyond the edge of the blue flames, were the six priority targets.
Magne, Muscular, Mustard, Mr. Compress, Moonfish, and the tall, lean, twisted nightmare that used to be Mineta.
They were holding back, using the mercenary fodder to test Dabi's output, trying to gauge his stamina and look for an opening.
It was a smart play, but it was also incredibly annoying.
Dabi flexed his fingers, the white-hot fire dancing across his knuckles.
I could end them right now, Dabi thought, his mind mapping the kill vectors. Flash-step past Muscular, sever Compress's arms before he can reach into his pockets, ignite Mustard's gas tanks to create a localized thermobaric explosion that takes out the rest.
He wanted to beat the hell out of them and make them regret ever setting foot in his forest.
He lowered his center of gravity and coiled the enhanced muscles in his legs like high-tension springs, preparing to launch himself straight into the Vanguard Squad and end the threat in under sixty seconds.
?!!Then, his Spider-Sense shrieked.
This wasn't a warning about a punch, a bullet, or an attack emerging from the shadows.
It was a massive surge of existential dread that felt like a needle being driven into the base of his skull, the biological equivalent of an air-raid siren screaming at full volume.
The earth buckled.
Five miles away, the colossal, jagged silhouette of Gigantomachia blotted out the moonlight.
Dabi had assumed the monster was going to tear its way through the forest, ripping up trees and marching toward the lodge like a slow-moving natural disaster.
He was wrong, because with a deafening, tectonic groan, Gigantomachia bent its knees, revealing that the mountain-sized beast had no intention of walking.
It leaped, and the sheer force of the jump triggered a small earthquake, shattering the bedrock and launching thousands of tons of dirt and timber into the air.
The behemoth soared into the night sky, defying gravity, charting a massive, parabolic arc directly over the canopy.
And Dabi's hyper-accelerated mind tracked the trajectory instantly.
Gigantomachia wasn't aiming for Dabi, but the largest cluster of lifeforms in the valley.
The lodge.
No, Dabi's heart skipped a beat, a cold, suffocating terror gripping his chest.
If Gigantomachia landed on the lodge, it wouldn't be a fight.
The entire building, along with Aizawa, Vlad King, the Pussycats, and thirty-eight exhausted teenagers, would be instantly crushed under thousands of tons of falling muscle and bone.
There would be no survivors.
The logic materialised in Dabi's brain in a fraction of a millisecond.
Aizawa and the students could handle the Vanguard Action Squad.
They were fortified inside an enclosed structure, had the advantage of terrain, and Dabi had spent months training Class 1-A to be lethal, unyielding survivors capable of holding off six elite villains.
But absolutely none of them could survive that giant.
"You rats get a stay of execution." Dabi snarled, glaring at the Vanguard Squad.
He didn't hesitate, giving no thought to his stamina, the risk of fighting the final boss alone in the dark, or the reality that his backup was still forty-five minutes away.
Dabi killed the flames in his hands and funneled every single ounce of thermal energy down into his legs.
He threw his arms back, and a blinding, concentrated jet of blue-white fire erupted from the soles of his boots.
The propulsion was instantaneous and violent, and the ground beneath him melted into a crater of liquid glass as Dabi launched himself upward like a hypersonic missile.
"Where does he think he's going?!" Muscular roared, shielding his eyes from the blinding flash of the takeoff.
The truth was that all his swagger and confidence around Dabi had been little more than an act.
The physical wounds from their previous encounter had long since healed into scars, but the psychological damage remained as fresh as ever, haunting his sleep often enough that nightmares had become a regular occurrence.
That was exactly why he was here.
For revenge.
And according to the information he had received, a certain boy connected to those memories was currently at the camp as well.
Whose involvement in the humiliation and suffering Muscular had endured was impossible to forget.
"To his death." Mr. Compress murmured, adjusting his mask as he watched the streak of blue fire tear into the sky, chasing the shadow of the falling giant. "Come. Let us proceed to the lodge. The main act is waiting, and it would be terribly rude to keep our audience in suspense."
The Vanguard Action Squad began to move through the thick, shadowy brush of the Beast's Forest, their forms melting into the darkness.
But at the absolute front of the formation, ignoring the tactical spacing Mr. Compress had suggested, the new recruit was already walking.
The freakishly tall, stretched, and unnervingly lean figure moved with a jerky, disjointed gait that didn't look entirely human.
Strapped to his back was that bizarre, oversized basket filled with rows of glossy, dense black spheres that hummed with a sickening, static tension.
Muscular, whose blood was already boiling with the frustrated adrenaline of missing out on a fight with the blue-flame user, scowled at the back of the silent giant.
"Hey, newbie!" Muscular shouted. "Are you trying to skip the ranks again? You think just because you're tall you get to lead the charge? Want me to kill you before we even find the brats?"
The tall figure didn't stop or even turn his head.
He just kept walking, his silence an absolute, infuriating void.
That blatant disrespect enraged the battle-junkie.
Muscular snarled, closing the distance in two massive, ground-eating strides, and reached out to violently jerk the freak to a halt by his shoulder.
But the moment Muscular's heavy, armored hand clamped down, the physical sensation was entirely wrong.
Instead of bone or muscle, it felt soft, yielding, and highly pressurized.
It felt exactly like he was catching a rubber ball.
Muscular blinking, his thick brow furrowing.
He was absolutely certain there hadn't been any kind of sphere on the recruit's shoulder a fraction of a second ago.
It had simply popped up from his back, migrating across the flesh to intercept the grab.
Before Muscular could even process the biological impossibility of it, the black sphere ruptured.
It didn't just stick, but violently combusted into a highly concentrated, corrosive acid.
"AGHHHHHHH?!" Muscular shrieked, his voice tearing at the seams.
He stumbled backward, desperately shaking his hand as the acidic sludge melted straight through his hardened, quirk-enhanced muscle fibers, eating down to the bone with a terrifying, sizzling hiss.
The agony was blinding, forcing him to drop the remnants of the ruptured ball onto the forest floor.
The tall figure finally stopped.
Moving with a slow, mechanical stiffness, the mutated recruit turned around. He completely ignored Muscular's agonized roaring, his attention entirely focused on the corrosive sludge dripping onto the dirt.
Slowly, he reached down, picked up the remains of the melted sphere with long, multi-jointed fingers, and carefully dropped it back into the basket he was carrying.
Muscular, cradling his smoking, half-melted hand, looked up, fully intending to beat the living hell out of this freak, regardless of Mr. Compress's orders.
But the moment he locked eyes with the recruit's face, the threat died in his throat.
It was perversely creepy, a disgusting, horrific desecration of human biology that made even a seasoned killer like Muscular physically recoil.
The face was a warped, stretched nightmare of what had once been Minoru Mineta, the cowardly U.A. student expelled on his very first day.
His eyes were bloated, bulging from his skull and entirely mapped with thick, jagged red veins.
His mouth hung wide open in a slack, unhinged gape, thick ropes of saliva continuously dripping from his chin down onto his chest.
There was no soul behind those eyes, or humanity, just the vacant, hungry stare of a weaponized biological puppet forged in Dr. Garaki's laboratory.
"What the f–"
Muscular whispered, taking an involuntary step back, the sheer, uncanny horror of the creature overriding his bloodlust.
….
High above the dark canopy of the forest, the wind screamed past Dabi's ears with deafening force.
He was pushing his propulsion to the absolute redline, streaking through the dark like a hypersonic missile.
The crushing G-force of his own acceleration was enough to induce a blackout in a normal human, but the rhythmic, pressurized hiss of [Total Concentration: Sun Breathing] kept his blood hyper-oxygenated and his consciousness razor-sharp.
He was ascending at a terrifying, near-vertical angle, his eyes locked onto the massive, eclipsed silhouette of Gigantomachia.
The beast had reached the apex of its impossible jump and was now beginning its catastrophic, parabolic descent straight toward the valley where the training lodge sat.
As the mountain-sized monster made landfall, it brought utter destruction to the earth.
The impact again triggered another minute earthquake, shattering the bedrock and atomizing thousands of tons of timber.
A shockwave of dirt, shattered stone, and debris erupted outward like a bomb blast.
As the debris cloud finally began to settle, Dabi killed his upward thrust, hovering in the smoke-choked air.
For a single, agonizing second, he processed the sheer absurdity of the math in front of him.
Every instinct in him, every survival reflex honed by the [Arachnid Genome] and years in the underground, screamed that engaging Gigantomachia was going to be a nightmare.
He knew the monster's lore perfectly.
The giant was All For One's ultimate fail-safe, a walking natural disaster that could fight continuously for forty-eight hours without a second of rest.
It possessed a hide thick enough to shrug off concentrated artillery fire, raw physical strength capable of leveling city blocks with a single swing, and a movement speed that had absolutely no business existing in a body of that mass.
Meanwhile, Dabi was just one man, and entirely human-sized.
Can I even fight that thing?
He thought, his jaw clenching as he watched Machia effortlessly bulldoze through the thickest part of the forest, treating ancient oak trees like brittle toothpicks.
He tracked the beast's trajectory.
Machia's path was a straight, uncompromising line angled directly toward the camp where Aizawa and the thirty-eight exhausted students of Class 1-A and 1-B were sheltering.
There was no time for doubt.
Currently, Dabi was hovering in the air roughly level with the giant's upper chest.
Because of the lingering dust and his relatively microscopic size, Machia couldn't see him yet, but the beast's massive head was already turning, blindly searching for the source of the intense heat signature radiating from Dabi's body.
Dabi took a deep breath, filling his lungs to capacity, and let his voice carry through the forest, enhanced by the natural acoustic properties of the mountain valley.
"HEY!" Dabi roared, the sound cutting through the grinding crunch of falling trees. "UGLY! YEAH, YOU! THE DISCOUNT KAIJU!"
Dabi killed his hovering thrusters, allowing gravity to drop him precisely down to the monster's eye level.
He floated right in front of the creature's massive, jagged face.
At the base of his skull, his Spider-sense was shrieking, firing off non-stop, agonizing warning spikes as it registered the sheer, overwhelming proximity of an extinction-level threat.
Machia was right now maybe three kilometers from the camp.
A few minutes of walking for a beast this size.
Looking directly into the craggy, scarred landscape of Machia's face, Dabi took another steadying breath.
Gigantomachia stopped his advance.
The monster slowly tilted his head, his massive eyes, glowing like banked, burning coals in the darkness, focusing entirely on the tiny, scarred figure floating in the air and shouting at him.
"You want the camp?" Dabi asked, his voice dropping into a lethal, terrifyingly calm register.
Instantly, ultraviolet-white flames erupted along both of Dabi's arms, the temperature spiking so violently that the surrounding air warped and hissed.
The fire blazed bright enough to turn the night into stark, daylight-bright relief, casting long, dramatic shadows across the ruined valley.
"You're going to have to go through me first."
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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