….
The artificial earthquake rolled through the Beast's Forest as a tectonic shudder that toppled pine trees and cracked the bedrock of the mountain itself.
Every single student, hero, and villain in the valley felt the tremor caused by the titan.
At the training lodge, the windows rattled violently in their frames; dust rained from the wooden rafters, but inside the barricaded dining hall, panic did not take root.
Months ago, a tremor of this magnitude accompanied by a villain ambush would have sent the first-years spiraling into terrified confusion.
They would have frozen, waiting for a teacher to tell them how to survive.
But Dabi had spent the last semester breaking that hesitation out of them, replacing it with lethal, hyper-vigilant efficiency.
When the unexpected happened, they at least knew what not to do. And surely panicking was part of it.
"We need to arrange a safety perimeter immediately!" Iida's voice cut through the rumbling dark, his arms chopping with rigid authority. "The building is defensible, but if we allow them to surround it, they can burn us out or collapse the roof!"
"He is right." Yaoyorozu stepped forward. "We divide the tasks based on Quirk utility. A mixed indoor-outdoor defense grid!"
The teams formed organically, a masterpiece of spontaneous coordination.
The non-combat and support-oriented students; Hagakure, Mineta's replacement Shinso, and several students from Class 1-B.
Remaining stayed inside the lodge, their job was to reinforce the barricades, establish a triage center for potential injuries, and ensure the captured spy, Aoyama, remained secure in the storage room.
The ranged fighters took the high ground.
Sero used his tape to swiftly hoist Yaoyorozu, Jiro, and 1-B's Vine-user Shiozaki onto the pitched roof of the lodge.
Within seconds, Yaoyorozu was fabricating mounted net-cannons and flash-bang launchers, effectively turning the roof into a fortified sniper nest.
The close-quarters combatants–
Midoriya, Bakugo, Todoroki, Kirishima, and the heavy hitters from 1-B, spilled out into the clearing, forming an interlocking defensive perimeter around the lodge's main entrances.
….
The young heroes didn't have to wait long, as the villains were just a few hundred meters away.
"My poison will incapacitate most of them before they can even react." Mustard muttered, checking the seals on his gas canisters and pulling his gas mask tightly over his face
"They won't even know they're breathing it in."
Moonfish's mechanical blades clicked together hungrily, his heavily bound body twitching in the brush like a starved animal. "Flesh... fresh flesh... show me the meat..."
Melting out of the treeline came the Vanguard Action Squad, flanked by the surviving mercenary grunts.
Dabi's initial slaughter in the deep woods had severely thinned their numbers, reducing a small army to roughly forty hardened thugs.
But standing at the forefront were the elites:
Muscular, Magne, Moonfish, Mustard, Mr. Compress, and the freakish, elongated freak that used to be Mineta.
Aizawa stood at the front of the student perimeter, his capture scarf drifting around his neck like agitated serpents.
He evaluated the threat matrix in a fraction of a second.
"The students handle the grunts and low level villains!" Aizawa commanded, his eyes flashing a dangerous crimson. "Vlad, Pussycats, we take the elites. Do not let those high-value targets break the student line!"
"Understood!" Tiger roared, immediately lunging toward the magnetic villain, Magne.
Aizawa launched himself directly at Moonfish, knowing the straitjacketed cannibal's blade-teeth would be a slaughterhouse against close-range students.
Vlad King intercepted the mutated Mineta, his blood manipulating into hardened shields to catch the corrosive spheres the creature kept blindly lobbing.
The clearing erupted into a massive, multi-tiered warzone.
Midoriya moved through the chaos like a green phantom, as he kept Full Cowling steady at 35%.
A mercenary charged him with a steel club.
Midoriya ducked the wide swing, pivoted on his left foot, and channeled power into his right leg for a sweeping, high-angle kick aimed at the thug's jaw.
The force launched him slightly into the air, clearing the immediate canopy of the lower trees.
At the apex of his jump, Midoriya glanced toward the northern mountain ridge.
?!!..what is that thing?!!
His breath completely stopped in his lungs.
Through the parting mist and the broken treeline, backlit by the pale moonlight, he caught a glimpse of the source of the earthquakes.
It was a silhouette that defied biological logic, a walking mountain of jagged muscle and bone, tearing through the ancient forest as if the trees were brittle toothpicks.
A monstor…. No…. A titan?
Midoriya hit the ground, landing in a crouch, his green eyes wide with sudden, suffocating terror.
The Vanguard Squad wasn't the main event, but just a distraction.
"Dabi-sensei..." Midoriya whispered, staring into the dark woods.
Because right now, the only thing standing between that walking apocalyptic titan and the camp could only be possible by one man…. and he is surely no less than a titan himself.
….
Three kilometers away–
Dabi stood in the direct path of the oncoming titan.
He had unleashed a massive, sweeping arc of ultraviolet-white fire, creating a towering wall of plasma that stretched across the valley floor.
The heat was so intense it instantly vaporized the ambient moisture in the air, creating violent, howling updrafts that turned the immediate forest into a raging inferno.
The ground beneath his boots had liquefied into molten glass under the sheer intensity of the heat.
"GUUURRR…! GRRRUUUUU!"
Gigantomachia stepped into the clearing.
It stood before the towering wall of 2,000°C blue flames, its massive, craggy head tilting slightly as it registered the heat barrier blocking its path to the lodge.
Then, Gigantomachia looked down through the flames, locking its burning, coal-like eyes on the tiny human maintaining the wall.
Unexpectedly it just started walking straight forward, stepping directly into the white-hot plasma as if Dabi's Quirk simply didn't matter.
Dabi's eyes narrowed slightly as the giant bulldozed through the barrier.
The flames licked at Machia's thick, rocky hide, scorching the outer layers of skin, but the beast's multiple durability and pain-nullification Quirks simply absorbed the damage.
It was taking damage, yes, but at a rate so negligible it wouldn't stop the monster before it crushed the camp.
"Talk about a bull standing in the heavy downpour." Dabi muttered, killing the massive fire wall to conserve his oxygen.
You couldn't overpower a mountain, or win a war of attrition against a beast that could fight for forty-eight hours without sleep.
He needed to change the tactics of the engagement.
So it turned into a high-stakes game of hit-and-run aggro management.
Dabi lowered his center of gravity.
Gigantomachia swung a fist the size of a transit bus, aiming to flatten the annoying bug in its path, but Dabi wasn't there.
Guided entirely by his Spider-Sense, he launched himself backward a millisecond before the impact.
The giant's fist hit the earth, creating a crater that swallowed a dozen trees in a shower of splintered wood and displaced dirt.
Dabi didn't land on the ground, and his boots made contact with the vertical trunk of a massive redwood tree.
Using the adhesive properties of his evolving genome, he stuck to the bark, sprinting straight up the vertical face of the timber like it was flat pavement.
He reached the canopy, bounded across the gap to a sheer rock face overlooking the valley, and anchored himself sideways against the cliff.
He was moving through the three-dimensional terrain with impossible, fluid grace, treating gravity like a suggestion rather than a law.
Gigantomachia pulled its fist from the dirt, turning its massive head back toward the lodge in the distance. The beast had orders to crush the target, and it was single-minded in its devotion.
Dabi pushed off the cliff face, dropping into a freefall directly above the monster's head. As he fell, he compressed his blue flames into a dense, vibrating sphere of plasma between his palms.
He unleashed the concentrated blast point-blank, striking Machia directly in its right eye.
"GRAAAAAAAH!"
The giant roared but it wasn't a sound of agonizing pain, a bellow of profound, thundering annoyance. It was the exact sound a human might make when stung by a particularly persistent hornet.
Machia swung a massive hand upward, swatting at the air where Dabi had been.
But Dabi's Spider-Sense was keeping him a fraction of a second ahead of every physical movement.
He fired a burst of flame from his boots, arresting his fall and redirecting his momentum horizontally and landed lightly on a high branch fifty meters away as Machia's hand swiped through empty air, destroying the top half of the cliff face in the process.
The beast glared at him, its scorched eye already beginning to regenerate.
It took a step toward Dabi, then stopped, its rudimentary programming fighting its annoyance, and turned back toward the camp.
Oh no you don't, Dabi thought. I am not letting myself out of your sight.
Dabi wall-crawled rapidly down the tree trunk, launching himself across the gap.
He fired a rapid succession of compressed plasma lances, targeting the beast's exposed scalp, the joints behind its knees, and the sensitive tissue inside its massive ears.
Thwack. Thwack. Sizzle.
Every time Machia tried to pivot toward the students, Dabi blasted him in the face.
It was a lethal, high-wire act of precision warfare.
Dabi stayed in constant motion, never occupying the same space for more than a heartbeat.
Up cliff faces, across trembling tree canopies, swinging along rocky outcroppings that Machia was forced to clumsily navigate around.
The giant charged, enraged by the constant, burning stings.
It barreled into the densest part of the forest, blindly smashing through the terrain to catch the blue phantom darting around its head.
Dabi led him on a furious chase, deliberately weaving through the thickest topography to use the environment as a buffer.
He was weaponizing the forest against the giant, forcing Machia to waste energy destroying the terrain while keeping those massive, city-leveling fists far away from Class 1-A.
Dabi fired another blinding flare of concentrated plasma directly into the beast's line of sight, the flashbang effect of the blue fire momentarily washing out the monster's vision as he swung violently underneath a falling oak tree.
The mountain leaped, defying gravity with a horrifying agility, its massive jaws snapping shut on the empty air where Dabi had been floating just a fraction of a second prior.
The sheer kinetic force of the beast's jaws clamping together generated a localized shockwave that stripped the remaining leaves from the surrounding canopy.
Dabi hit the ground rolling and immediately pushed off, his legs acting as high-tension springs, and he led Gigantomachia toward the jagged, treacherous inclines of the mountain range.
Narrow passes and steep ravines that the colossal monster had to forcibly shoulder its way through, crushing ancient stone into powder with its sheer bulk.
These were cliff faces that required meticulous, agonizing climbing for any normal human, but Dabi bypassed the vertical challenge entirely, his evolving [Arachnid Genome] allowing him to wall-crawl effortlessly up the sheer drops.
Frustrated by the evasive maneuvers, Machia roared, a sound that physically rattled the bones in Dabi's chest, and charged even faster.
But Dabi wasn't just running blindly, he was using his flames as tools.
As he scaled the stone walls, his turquoise eyes darted across the rock formations, analyzing stress points and structural weaknesses.
He targeted cliff faces that were already compromised by centuries of natural erosion, firing hyper-concentrated beams of 2,000°C heat directly into the fissures.
The intense thermal expansion caused the moisture inside the stone to flash-boil, cracking the bedrock and triggering massive, localized rockslides.
Hundreds of tons of boulders crashed down into the narrow passes, forcing Gigantomachia to halt his charge and either smash through the debris or go around, buying Dabi precious seconds.
He didn't stop there, and created forest fires, stringing up literal curtains of ultraviolet-white fire across the valley gaps.
He blocked the easiest paths, forcing the giant to choose between burning through the superheated plasma or finding alternate, slower routes.
Each delay, detour, and rockslide was another few meters of distance gained from the camp, and another vital moment for Aizawa, Vlad King, and his students.
But Machia wasn't a mindless animal, but a bioengineered war machine, and he was learning.
The ground beneath Dabi's boots suddenly liquified.
Machia's Mole quirk had activated, allowing the behemoth to burrow deep underground and shift through the subterranean rock as easily as a fish swimming through water.
Each emergence caused violent earthquakes that buckled the terrain. Dabi could only avoid the catastrophic eruptions through the piercing, needle-like warnings of his spider-sense.
The first underground attack almost claimed his life.
Machia erupted from directly beneath a sheer cliff face Dabi had been horizontally sprinting across.
The solid stone bulged and exploded outward, and only his spider-sense's urgent, agonizing screaming at the base of his skull gave him the split-second warning needed to push off the wall and leap clear.
He soared backward into the open air just before the giant's hands burst through the stone where he had just been.
From that moment on, his spider-sense had become a constant, maddening background noise.
It was a symphony of existential dread, with danger lurking beneath the earth, closing in from behind, and radiating from the very direction Machia was heading, leaving forward as the only remotely viable path.
And in the Beast's Forest with a monster on his heels, even that was a highly relative definition of 'safe'.
Dabi landed heavily on a wide plateau, boots skidding against the dirt, and checked his clock.
Fifteen minutes.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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