….
"You kids?!" Gran Torino barked, his sharp eyes darting between them.
"What are you doing here?! And how–"
Midoriya stepped forward, his hands flailing as he tried to explain everything at once.
"Ah! Gran Torino! You see, we... Well, we couldn't just stand by and do nothing, but then the bunker exploded, this terrifying 'villain' appeared out of nowhere, and then... and then..."
Midoriya's rapid-fire muttering dissolved into a stream of incoherent, nervous stammers.
Recognizing that Midoriya was too overwhelmed to deliver a proper report, Tenya Iida stepped up.
"Allow me, sir!" He declared, taking a deep breath to compose himself.
"To be clear: we formed a private retrieval team to rescue Bakugo and Todoroki. However, before we could initiate any plan, a monster of immense power appeared and neutralized Best Jeanist, Mt. Lady, and the frontline team in an instant! But before the situation could worsen, All Might arrived on the scene to engage the primary threat!"
Iida paused, looking back toward the massive glacier behind them. "And immediately following All Might's arrival, Dabi-sensei intervened! He single-handedly secured Bakugo and Todoroki, neutralized the secondary threats, and built this entire barrier to isolate All Might's fight from the rest of the sector!"
Gran Torino listened intently, his old face darkening slightly as the weight of the report settled in. His mind immediately went to the frontline heroes who had been caught in the initial ambush.
"Rumi is safe, right?" Gran Torino asked sharply, his voice carrying a heavy, protective edge. "Is Usagiyama alright?!"
To Gran Torino, Dabi wasn't merely a powerful U.A. instructor or one of society's rising pillars. He was the broken, dying boy Gran Torino had taken in and helped rebuild years ago.
Better than almost anyone, he understood how far Dabi would go to protect the people he loved, and he knew exactly how much Rumi meant to him.
If something had happened to her…
Midoriya nodded quickly, eager to reassure the old master. "Yes, sir! Rumi-san is completely fine! Best Jeanist and Mt. Lady were heavily battered, but they've been moved to the medical tents and are entirely out of danger!"
Gran Torino let out a long, heavy sigh.
The tension drained from his small shoulders, a small plume of white steam escaping his lips in the frost-bitten air.
Slowly, the old hero raised his head, his yellow-masked eyes tracking up the monumental side of the glacier until his gaze landed on a silhouette standing firmly at the apex, fifty feet above the battlefield.
'You have really grown up... haven't you, kid?' Gran Torino thought silently, a faint, proud smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Behind him, the Class 1-A students stood side by side, silently looking up at Dabi's dark figure framed against the clouds.
Each of them felt a turbulent storm of emotions churning in their chests.
A profound sense of pride in their instructor…
An absolute feeling of safety beneath his shadow…
Unshakeable confidence in the victory taking place below…
And the vivid, burning promise of a future where Heroes didn't have to destroy themselves just to keep the world turning.
More than anything else, looking at Dabi standing resolutely beside the Symbol of Peace, Midoriya, Bakugo, and Shoto saw something absolute.
A towering wall of strength to aim for, to climb, and to one day surpass.
And as the live news helicopters hovered above, zooming their lenses in from the sky, it wasn't just those kids looking up at Dabi's firmly standing figure.
The entire world was watching.
….
[Back To Battle]
The double-handed cross-chop plummeted like a meteor, dragging All For One straight into the concrete with an earth-shattering detonation.
The shockwave ripped outward, violently fracturing the absolute-zero ice bed and sending a concussive gale roaring up the sides of the towering spires.
Fifty feet above the cataclysm, Dabi stood at the precipice of his frozen perch, his hair whipped forward by the thermal updraft.
He didn't flinch, his eyes merely following the dust cloud billowing up from the abyss with complete indifference to the chaos below.
Behind him, Shigaraki's muffled choking had subsided into a hollow, rhythmic wheezing.
Pinned under a layer of frost, the apprentice stared blankly at the ice-covered ceiling, his mind utterly unraveling from the internal realization that his entire crusade of hatred was an orchestrated lie.
Down in the basin of the crater, the dust peeled back to reveal the Symbol of Evil.
All For One's pristine black suit was shredded, and his jaw-mask was violently warped, clicking in uneven, frantic intervals as his life-support systems struggled to re-calibrate.
Viscous dark fluid leaked from the broken seams of his helm.
Realizing his century-long body was being broken, the tyrant lunged upward, his composure dissolving into a dark desperation.
He no longer targeted just All Might but the entire architecture of the ward.
"If I must rebuild from the bedrock, Toshinori... then I will grind this sector to dust first!" All For One hissed.
The villain's left side mutated into a grotesque, multi-layered mountain of flesh, bone, and crackling crimson lightning.
He chained a terrifying combination of Tectonic Fracture, Inverted Gravity, and Hard-Light Drills, slamming his hands violently down into the earth.
The massive absolute-zero ice bed Dabi had laid down groaned before shattering into monumental, floating plates.
The concrete bedrock beneath the frost exploded, lifting chunks of earth the size of multi-story buildings into the sky as the gravity completely inverted.
"You won't tear down another inch of this world!" All Might roared, breaking into an absolute sprint straight toward the oncoming attack.
The battlefield transformed into a three-dimensional nightmare of rising stone and breaking ice.
Without the agonizing burden of a collapsing body or the need to shield nearby civilians from the blast radius, All Might was operating on a completely separate, legendary plane of power.
He possessed a massive reservoir of unspent reserves, moving at a hypersonic velocity that left golden afterimages behind.
All For One unleashed a maximum-yield barrage.
A wall of Air Cannons and Laser Torrents tore through the sky vaporizing the floating islands of debris and reducing steel to a continuous rain of liquid slag.
All Might twisted his torso mid-stride, slipping beneath the first wave with flawless, prime fluidity.
"MISSOURI... SMASH!" All Might roared, bringing his open hand across in a violent, horizontal chop.
The edge of his palm cut through the air like a blade, splitting the incoming hyper-compressed beam directly in two and sending the fractured energy arcing harmlessly into the spires.
He vaulted off a floating chunk of masonry, closing the distance instantly.
All For One sprouted a series of bone blades from his sides, swinging them in a blind arc to sever the hero's torso.
"OKLAHOMA... SMASH!"
Spinning like a golden cyclone, All Might used his massive rotational momentum to deflect the incoming spikes, shattering them into harmless splinters of bone and ash.
He emerged from the center of the vortex directly in front of the tyrant's face, his teeth bared in an unyielding, protective growl.
"TEXAS... SMASH!"
Driving a straight right fist dead center into All For One's face, the forward wind pressure detonated like a cannon blast. The concussive tunnel of air shattered the shield of the villain's helmet and flattened the swirling ash clouds above them into a perfect, massive ring.
All For One was thrown violently downward, crashing through a rising plate of bedrock.
He was visibly breaking, his stolen Quirks violently misfiring beneath the relentless strain.
Sensing the end of his borrowed life, the monster poured every remaining scrap of power into his right side, mutating his arm into a colossal, mountain-sized amalgamation of Springlike Limbs, Hypertrophy, Kinetic Booster, Rivet Stab, and Multiplied Yield.
The sheer mass of the grotesque limb created a powerful vacuum that began dragging the surrounding air and debris inexorably toward it.
"I WILL CRUSH YOUR LEGACY TO SPLINTERS, TOSHINORI!!!" All For One shrieked, driving the apocalyptic mass forward.
All Might stood on a solitary, floating block of concrete, his golden lightning arcing so violently that it rapidly melted the remaining frost beneath him.
Every last ember of One For All, carrying the accumulated hope and strength of eight generations, surged into his bicep.
"YOU NEVER UNDERSTOOD THE TRUE WEIGHT OF A LEGACY, ALL FOR ONE!!!"
With a deafening explosion of gravity that flattened the terrain beneath them into a clean, smooth basin of pulverized stone, All Might launched himself straight into the jaws of the oncoming attack.
The two ultimate punches collided dead center in the open air.
"UNITED STATES OF... SMASH!!!!!!!!"
The impact fundamentally warped the atmospheric pressure of Kamino Ward, creating an instantaneous, blinding dome of golden and crimson energy that split the clouds for miles in every direction.
All For One's massive, mutated limb violently splintered, the bone spikes shattering into dust and the flesh tearing away under the prime-level kinetic leverage of the Symbol of Peace.
The invisible wall of hyper-compressed air from All Might's fist punched cleanly through the collision vector, striking All For One squarely in the chest and dragging the Symbol of Evil down through the rising earth, cratering him deep into the bedrock of the abyss.
The resulting concussive shockwave slammed upward like a physical entity, tearing through the sky and surging straight over Dabi's elevated platform.
The roaring gale whipped violently through Dabi's dark hair, blowing it straight back from his forehead as his long coat snapped like a whip in the hurricane-force draft.
Dust and shimmering ice crystals swept past him, yet Dabi didn't so much as blink, his eyes remaining wide and utterly fixed on the spectacle unfolding before him.
A thrill of raw, intoxicating excitement flared across his features as a wide, fierce grin carved its way onto his face.
The unmistakable exhilaration of a warrior bearing witness to a titan operating at the absolute pinnacle of human power.
"So..." Dabi muttered, his voice barely audible over the roaring wind, yet laced with pure awe. "This is your prime... All Might."
He let out a single breath, half-white frost and half-blue steam escaping his lips as his blue system panel flickered in his peripheral vision, ticking upward from the sheer environmental absorption:
========
[GENETIC MILESTONE SYSTEM]
[PHASE - 1] - 100%
….
[PHASE - 2]
> [FROSTFIRE DRAGON SLAYER] - 39–>45%/100%
….
| LIFE SPAN LEFT: Calculating…
========
He glanced down at the broken villain at his feet, then looked out over the crystalline walls.
The old gods had finally settled their scores, but the apex of the food chain had already shifted.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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