….
Deep within the subterranean labs hidden beneath Jaku General Hospital, the emergency klaxons were wailing a crimson alert.
Red warning lights bathed rows of glowing green stasis tanks in a sinister hue, pulsing in tandem with a structural shudder that echoed through the concrete.
Dr. Kyudai Garaki or Daruma Ujiko, sat entirely motionless in his leather swivel chair, his hands hovering over his keyboard as cold sweat dripped from his chin.
His bulbous goggles reflected the split screen of his multi-feed console.
On the right monitor, the main satellite cameras fed a live transmission of Kamino Ward.
Their plans were torn apart.
His master, the immortal god of the underworld…. was being dominated by All Might, all while under the eyes of a soar Blue Sun they had let go deeming as waste.
Even their future prospect, Tomura Shigaraki, was completely incapacitated high above.
"No... No, this is impossible!" Garaki squeaked, his voice cracking with pure panic as he clutched his mustache. "Master... Master cannot lose! His victory is absolute!"
On the left monitor, a local CCTV feed proved that a second nightmare had breached his own doorstep.
The Jaku facility was found out.
A force of top-tier Pro Heroes who had been held back from the Kamino battlefield were tearing through his upper security layers like a hurricane.
Leading the vanguard was Hawks, a blur of golden-brown feathers and razor-sharp plumage cutting through heavy steel blast doors with terrifying grace.
"Target secured on the lower levels." Hawks muttered into his communicator, his wings flaring as feathers pinning the fleeing lab assistants. "Move fast, and don't leave a single ongoing experiment in this room intact."
Flanking him, the Pro Heroes Ryukyu in her towering dragon form and Edgeshot surged through the breach, clearing away the structural defense.
Directly behind the frontline assault stood Sir Nighteye, adjusting his glasses calmly amidst the flashing red emergency lights.
Armed with detailed, real-time grid data fed to him by the sensor-quirk Hero Searchlight at the perimeter, Nighteye was perfectly directing the heavy-hitters through the lab's labyrinthine layout, flawlessly calling out traps and security choke points before they could even trigger.
"Take the western corridor." Nighteye commanded. "In exactly four seconds, an automated security partition will attempt to drop, so break it down immediately. The doctor is straight ahead because I've already seen his trajectory."
Garaki watched their advance, his breath catching in his throat.
He made no attempt to play clever tricks or frantically erase the terabytes of illegal genetic research, decades of stolen Quirk data, or the mainframe files detailing his master's ultimate goal.
The sheer shock of seeing his "immortal master" broken on the other screen had completely paralyzed his intellect. Instead, with a trembling finger, he hit a yellow toggle on his primary desk panel.
"Go! My precious masterpieces!" Garaki shrieked into his intercom, tears welling in his eyes. "Delay them! Protect the sanctuary! For the sake of the Master!"
With a pressurized hiss, three secondary storage chambers unsealed.
Thick, murky amniotic fluid spilled across the floorboards as a small pack of uncompleted, raw-prototype Nomu stumbled out into the dark corridors.
They were pale, missing their cognitive regulators, and running entirely on primitive, defensive combat loops.
Garaki didn't release them expecting victory because he knew they stood no chance against a coordinated assault by elite Heroes like Hawks and Nighteye, deploying them instead for one purpose: to serve as meat shields and buy him a few precious minutes before the heroes breached his final door.
If Dabi were to stand in that lab right now and look at Garaki's grand blueprints for the "ultimate goal," he would have laughed his absolute ass off.
Because of Dabi's knowledge of this universe, he understood the hilarious, pathetic truth about the world's most terrifying mastermind.
All For One wasn't some complex, multidimensional villain seeking a profound philosophical rewrite of human nature.
He wasn't evil for the sake of chaotic destruction, either.
The Symbol of Evil was simply an overgrown child driven by a pathetic, romanticized desire to fulfill a specific comic book role.
He wanted to be the Demon Lord (Maō).
Warped by the old comic books he had read with his brother Yoichi during the dawn of Quirks, All For One viewed the entire multi-generational war through the lens of a cheap fiction story.
In his mind, a grand story required a grand Villain to oppose the Heroes.
Just as All Might had chased the idealized symbol of justice, All For One had deliberately spent a century building an archetype of an "all-powerful devil."
He wasn't a politician but a force of nature acting out a script written entirely for himself.
His grand scheme to collapse society economically and socially wasn't born from genuine malice but served as nothing more than a mechanism to force humanity into his delusion.
By reducing the world to a wasteland where food, water, and power had become scarce, he planned to use his vast collection of stolen Quirks to provide those necessities himself, ruling not through fear alone but through absolute, manufactured dependence.
Yet, to achieve this feat and make his villainous comic book live forever, he had to conquer the one obstacle no mortal had ever beaten:
Time.
That was the cruel punchline of Tomura Shigaraki's existence.
He had never been a cherished successor or a beloved son but nothing more than a vessel groomed by All For One to one day have his own consciousness overwritten.
The goal was never to pass on a legacy, only to steal another life and continue the performance forever, turning his twisted villain fantasy into an eternal reality.
However, it was never meant to happen…
With or without Dabi's transmigration.
….
Down in the Kamino crater, All For One lay broken in the dirt, his grand narrative shattered by an opponent who already knew his lines.
In the Jaku labs, his primary pawn of his plans sat paralyzed under the cameras as the countdown to his arrest ticked away, and high above on the ice platform, Dabi simply stared down into the smoke, a smirk playing on his lips.
For a century, the supreme villain had forced the world to follow his script, but someone else had just taken the pen.
The uncompleted prototype Nomu barely lasted ninety seconds.
Armed with the precise blueprints mapped out by the sensor-quirk heroes at the perimeter, the strike team bypassed the structural dead ends of the facility.
Hawks' primary wing blades sliced through the raw muscle tissue of the meat-shields, clearing a path for Sir Nighteye and a detachment of heavily armed police to breach the final sliding blast door.
The heavy steel slammed into its brackets.
The heroes flooded the subterranean inner sanctum, weapons raised, completely cornering the chief doctor of the league.
"Step away from the console, Kyudai Garaki!" Edgeshot voice echoing off the metallic walls. "Keep your hands where we can see them! You are completely surrounded!"
The Heroes intended to capture him alive.
The historical log of stolen quirks, the biometric data of the Nomu factory, and the direct testimony of a man who had lived in the shadow of All For One for seventy years was too valuable to destroy.
But the doctor had other plans.
His immortal master had just fallen in Kamino, and his lab had been completely destroyed into ruins.
Looking at the approaching forces through his bulbous goggles, his tiny frame began to shake with a frantic resolve.
"Surrender...?"
Garaki squeaked, his hand slowly hovering over a heavily shielded red button dead center on his primary desk panel.
"To you? You think you have won because you tore down my lab? You cannot erase destiny!"
Sir Nighteye's eyes sharpened behind his glasses.
He had meticulously calculated every single possibility of this raid.
Before they had even crossed the threshold of Jaku General Hospital, he had triggered his quirk, Foresight, to look a few hours into the immediate future of his vanguard, Hawks.
Nighteye understood his limitations better than anyone.
Long-term visions stretching months or years into the future gradually lose their fidelity, dissolving into fragmented scenes stripped of context and precise timing, whereas short-term visions.
Especially those covering the next few minutes of combat, remained exceptionally clear and accurate.
Because each activation carried a strict twenty-four-hour cooldown, he had chosen this window with absolute discipline.
He had watched this exact room unfold in his mind's eye barely twenty minutes earlier, and it wasn't supposed to be blurry.
But right now, looking at the doctor's fingers over the red button, an anomaly struck his perception.
"Hawks! Intercept him now!" Nighteye roared, his stoic composure fracturing as a cold sweat broke out across his temples.
Nobody understood what was truly going on.
In that split-second vacuum of information, Hawks didn't hesitate.
Assuming the red trigger was a self-destruct mechanism designed to bury the raid team and the entire hospital beneath a mountain of concrete rubble, the Number Three Hero immediately committed to a lethal strike.
SHOOF!
He flew at high speed while a dozen rigid, steel-sharp golden feathers detached from Hawks' wings, cutting through the air like a firing squad.
"Stop–!"
Hawks hissed, his teeth bared as he threw his full physical weight forward into a sprint.
The feathers struck with terrifying, pinpoint accuracy.
Thud! Thwack!
Multiple razor-sharp shafts drove straight through Garaki's chest and shoulders, pinning his body violently back against his leather swivel chair.
Blood erupted from the seams of his lab coat, his breath escaping his lungs in a final, wet gasp as his eyes rolled back beneath his goggles.
Kyudai Garaki was dead before his chair stopped spinning.
But his hand had already fallen.
In that final microsecond of life, the doctor's palm had cleanly slammed into the red interface, depressing the trigger all the way into its housing.
A heavy, mechanical CLICK echoed through the subterranean chamber.
A suffocating, absolute silence fell over the laboratory.
Hawks skidded to a halt in front of the console, his chest heaving, his eyes wide as he looked down at the depressed switch.
Behind him, Nighteye, the officers, and the accompanying Heroes stood completely frozen, a collective wave of cold sweat soaking through their uniforms.
Five seconds passed.
Ten seconds.
Nothing happened as no alarms wailed, or thermal countdowns flashed across the master console, and the ceiling remained intact instead of fracturing beneath a hidden explosive charge, leaving the laboratory exactly as it was, bathed in the stagnant, pulsing red glow of the emergency alerts.
Hawks slowly lowered his guard, his remaining feathers hovering in a protective formation around his frame.
"Nighteye..."
Hawks muttered, his voice tense, low, and sharp. "What did he just turn on?"
.
….
[To be continued…]
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