….
Dabi landed heavily on a wide plateau, boots skidding against the dirt, and checked his clock.
Fifteen minutes.
It had been fifteen minutes since he engaged Gigantomachia with constant movement, strikes, and desperate, high-wire evasion.
He glanced over his shoulder through the smoke-choked canopy.
The lodge and the camp were roughly five kilometers behind them now, and he had successfully acted as the ultimate bait, leading the giant far away from the students and into the deep wilderness.
But Machia showed absolutely no signs of slowing down.
Dabi's own condition, however, was deteriorating.
He looked down at his arms, and minor burns covered maybe ten percent of his body, angry red and blackened patches where his own ambient heat had gotten too close to his skin.
The [Super Soldier] and [Arachnid Genome] healing factors were working, rapidly shedding and rebuilding the charred cells, but the pain was a constant, biting static.
His stamina was still holding steady, his spider-physiology and super-soldier serum keeping him functional far beyond any normal human limits, but 'functional' wouldn't last forever against an opponent who viewed a fifteen-minute chase as a light stretch.
Then, his spider-sense suddenly spiked with a completely different, chilling urgency.
Machia had stopped chasing.
Dabi froze on the plateau, dropping into a defensive crouch.
The giant stood completely still amidst the ruined, burning pines, his massive, craggy head tilting slightly to the side like a confused dog listening to a frequency only he could hear.
Then, deliberately, Machia turned around, his face back toward the valley and back toward the camp.
"Ugh… annoying persistent bastard." Dabi breathed, the curse slipping out as a cold knot of pure dread settled heavily into his stomach.
Machia once again began to march, now even more driven by absolute purpose as he retraced the path they had just taken.
The beast had figured it out.
Somewhere in that thick, bioengineered skull, Machia had realized that the small, burning human annoying around him was nothing more than a distraction.
He had decided to completely ignore the annoyance buzzing around his head and return to completing his actual, master-given objective: wiping the U.A. target off the map.
Dabi's mind raced through his remaining options, and none of the answers were good.
He had kept Machia distracted for fifteen minutes of pure hell, but that bought time meant absolutely nothing if the giant just decided to walk away and crush the students now.
He couldn't lure or trick him anymore.
There was no choice left.
Dabi killed his hesitation, as he channeled a massive surge of thermal energy down into his calves and launched himself forward with everything he had, a streak of blinding blue light cutting through the forest.
He arced over the canopy, plummeted downward, and landed directly in Machia's path, his boots cracking the earth as he planted his feet firmly into the dirt.
"Stop." Dabi commanded, his voice deadly quiet.
Machia didn't even look down, and the giant just kept walking, the sheer vibration of his footsteps threatening to throw Dabi off balance.
"I SAID STOP!" Dabi roared, the sound tearing from his throat.
The restraints came off.
Ultraviolet-white and deep blue flames erupted across Dabi's entire body in a violent, volcanic surge.
This time, there were no controlled strikes, or effort to suppress the thermal backlash at the expense of his own body.
He unleashed his full output.
He drew in a breath so massive it sounded like a turbine spinning up, utilizing the [Total Concentration] breathing technique that he had relentlessly developed to its absolute, punishing limit over the years.
[Sun Breathing] was pushed to its maximum capacity, hyper-oxygenating his blood until his veins bulged and glowed with an internal, terrifying light.
The flames wreathing him became almost solid, shifting from a gaseous state into a dense, humming plasma. And the heat radiating from his body was so catastrophically intense that it turned the surrounding forest into an instant oven.
The moisture in the air flash-boiled into hissing steam, ground beneath his feet didn't just char, but vitrified, melting into glowing pools of liquid slag.
The pine trees within a ten-meter radius spontaneously combusted from the ambient thermal radiation alone, exploding into matchsticks without the fire ever touching them.
His entire body was now covered in films of violent, searing blue fire.
He was no longer a man standing in a forest, but a 'blue star' that had descended to the earth.
Gigantomachia finally stopped walking.
The beast lowered its massive head, its glowing, coal-like eyes locking onto the blinding speck of heat blocking its path.
Then, Machia charged.
Every nerve ending in Dabi's body fired simultaneously, an agonizing electric shockwave as his entire biology understood exactly what was about to happen.
The sheer mass bearing down on him was an extinction-level event.
Dabi lowered his center of gravity, sinking his boots deep into the melting earth, and met the charge head-on.
He drew his right arm back.
His fist, wrapped in hyper-compressed blue flame and backed by seventy tons of spider-enhanced, super-soldier strength, drove forward just as the giant reached him.
The resulting shockwave defied the laws of atmospheric pressure.
The collapsed inward before detonating outward in a devastating, spherical vacuum of white-hot energy.
In a single instant, fifty meters of towering forest ceased to exist.
Trees were reduced to burning splinters, and the bedrock beneath them shrieked and fractured before collapsing several feet into the earth as the violent displacement gouged a massive crater into the valley floor.
Physics is a cruel, unforgiving master, and despite Dabi's newly perfected biology, the mathematical reality of the impact had to go somewhere.
Dabi felt the exact millisecond where several bones in his body were shattered.
The force traveling down his arm was apocalyptic, and his left arm, which had braced the secondary impact of the giant's massive knee, snapped at the elbow with a sickening, wet crack that echoed in his own skull.
Three ribs on his left side caved inward instantly, the bone fracturing under the crushing deceleration.
His internal organs slammed violently against his ribcage, protesting the sudden, massive transfer of inertia.
A thick, choking spray of dark blood erupted from his mouth, vaporizing into red mist against the superheated plasma wreathing his face.
He couldn't hold the ground.
Dabi was launched backward, effectively turned into a ballistic projectile.
He tore through the air at bullet-speed, crashing backward through the trunk of a massive oak tree.
The wood exploded, but his momentum didn't even stutter and smashed through a second tree, then a third, a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth in rapid, violent sequence, his body acting as a human wrecking ball.
His flight finally ended when he slammed back-first into the sheer, vertical face of a granite cliff at the edge of the valley.
The impact cratered the stone deeply, spiderwebbing the rock face for ten meters in every direction.
Dabi hung there in the center of the indentation for a fraction of a second, suspended by the crushed stone, before gravity pulled him. He fell face-forward into the dirt, entirely enveloped in a thick, choking cloud of pulverized rock and wood dust.
Silence fell over the ruined clearing, but back at the epicenter of the crater, something impossible had happened.
Gigantomachia had stopped.
For two full, agonizing seconds, the walking natural disaster actually ceased moving forward.
The giant's massive, tree-trunk-sized toes had dug deep trenches into the vitrified earth, violently arresting his forward momentum.
He hadn't been thrown backward as his mass was far too great for that, but his charge had been completely, unequivocally halted.
The unstoppable force had met a wall, and for the first time in the beast's engineered existence, the wall hadn't immediately shattered.
At the base of the cliff, buried under falling gravel, Dabi's vision was a swimming ocean of black and red static.
Breathing felt like dragging jagged glass through his lungs.
His left arm was once again broken.
Then, the heat started, but it wasn't the heat of his Quirk, a deep, violently itchy, boiling sensation spreading from his bone marrow outward.
The [Super Soldier] serum, operating at a flawless 100%, went into maximum overdrive. But it wasn't working alone anymore.
The [Arachnid Genome], which had climbed from 69% to 71% over the course of the battle, triggered a profound and aggressive cellular response.
The healing didn't feel magical, but brutal.
Dabi gritted his teeth, a low, guttural groan tearing through his blood-stained lips as his biology forcefully corrected itself.
He could actually feel the muscle fibers in his shattered arm pulling tight like high-tension steel cables, dragging the snapped bone back into alignment.
CRACK.
His elbow snapped back into place with a sickening pop, and although the bone was still fractured and the surrounding tissue severely bruised, the rapid calcification process was already knitting the worst of the damage back together in real time.
The internal bleeding in his chest ceased as ruptured vessels sealed themselves shut. The bruised organs expanded, flushing the trauma out through a hyper-accelerated metabolic burn.
Slowly, agonizingly, a hand emerged from the rubble.
Dabi dragged himself out of the crushed stone, leaving a dark, heavy trail of blood smeared across the dirt.
He planted his right boot, bracing his right hand against his knee, and forced his spine straight.
Every muscle screamed in protest, but the newly reinforced ligaments held firm.
Through the drifting smoke and dust, Gigantomachia slowly lowered his massive arms.
The giant peered through the haze, his burning, coal-like eyes narrowing as they locked onto the base of the cliff.
Machia was staring at him with an expression that defied the creature's usual mindless aggression.
It was a mix of primitive surprise, dark interest, and a heavy, rumbling annoyance.
The bug had actually stung him, and it was still moving.
Dabi stood fully upright, swaying for only a fraction of a second before his stance locked into place.
He spat another mouthful of blood, wiping his chin with the back of his trembling, soot-stained hand.
"Okay." Dabi wheezed, the sound accompanied by a wet rattle that was already beginning to clear as his lungs repaired themselves.
He rolled his recently-snapped left shoulder, wincing at the harsh pop of cartilage. "I think I can keep this up for a long while."
He looked up at the towering, jagged silhouette of All For One's ultimate enforcer.
The monster possessed endless stamina.
It could bulldoze cities, ignore artillery, and fight for days. But standing there, bleeding into the dirt, Dabi realized exactly what his role was tonight.
The single, human-sized wall standing in the dark between a living catastrophe and two classes of fighting students.
Ultraviolet-white and deep sapphire flames reignited, exploding outward with a violent, roaring intensity.
"GRRRRRRHHHHHHUUUUUUUU!!!!!"
Machia felt the heat, and the giant's massive jaw unhinged, revealing rows of jagged, boulder-sized teeth, and a roar tore from its throat that physically shook the remaining trees.
The beast pounded its massive fists against its chest, the earth shuddering under the display of dominance, before dropping its shoulder for another charge.
Dabi didn't flinch.
He simply widened his stance, sinking his boots deeper into the melting glass of the earth, drawing in a massive, hyper-oxygenating breath that fueled the nuclear furnace in his blood.
Let's see who breaks first, Dabi thought, his eyes burning with an unholy, defiant blue light.
Gigantomachia charged again, the ground churning beneath his stride.
Dabi planted his feet, raised his fists, and prepared to make the monster pay for every single inch in blood and ash.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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