….
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?"
"Did the mechanism misfire?"
Behind them, Ryukyu slowly shifted out of her dragon form, her massive claws receding as her boots touched the metallic floorboards.
Her hand rested on her hip, her expression grave as she scanned the silent, red-lit room.
Edgeshot drifted out from the shadows of the corridor like a paper ribbon, his body instantly reassembling into his sharp ninja silhouette beside the main console–
"I thought for sure the whole place was about to come down on us..."
"....." Beside him, Sir Nighteye didn't answer immediately.
His posture remained rigid, his fingers resting lightly on the edge of the mainframe terminal as his mind aggressively cross-referenced the reality before him with the glimpse of the future he had caught through Foresight twenty minutes prior.
In that vision, he had clearly seen Hawks' feathers eliminate the doctor and watched the hand collapse onto the console.
But even in his vision's brief continuation beyond the doctor's death, nothing had detonated.
Because the immediate aftermath had appeared completely stagnant and devoid of secondary combat movements, combined with the slight blurriness that always crept into the edges of his vision, Nighteye had concluded that the strike force had successfully suppressed a self-destruct mechanism before it could arm.
A rare thread of doubt unraveled his usual absolute certainty…
Nighteye's fingers flew across the keyboard, attempting to bypass the encrypted locking loops.
Because Garaki was dead, his biometric heart-rate monitor had glitched, triggering a rapid, chaotic dump before completely locking down the mainframe forever.
Lines of data cascaded down his glasses, but they were fragmenting, dissolving into a void of deleted sectors right before his eyes.
"I can't get through." Nighteye muttered, his voice tightening as the screen violently flickered and died, leaving only a flashing red error code. "The encryption is actively wiping the server path... and it seems it was never meant to detonate a weapon here. Instead... it was transmitting an outbound signal, perhaps?"
Gran Torino stepped forward, his old face darkening as he slammed his foot down to ground himself–
"An outbound signal? To who? Where is it routing, Nighteye?"
"I don't know!" Nighteye breathed, his usual absolute composure fracturing as cold sweat broke out across his temples.
"Dammit!" Hawks hissed, his feathers vibrating with an immediate, instinctual alarm as he looked from the dead doctor–
"If it's not a bomb, what did that old bastard just do?!"
No one in the room could answer as a suffocating, absolute blind spot had just opened in the middle of what moments earlier had seemed like a flawless raid.
….
Miles away from the mainland, buried deep within the dark, sub-oceanic trenches of the Pacific, the absolute maximum-security prison Tartarus sat engulfed in its usual oppressive silence.
Within the lowest, most fortified tier of the abyss, the custom-made Nomu known as Kurogiri sat completely suspended in the center of a vacuum-sealed, reinforced glass cell.
Hundreds of high-tension carbon-fiber straps pinned his mist-like form, while a heavy brain-wave monitoring crown clamped tightly against his skull, ready to trigger neural dampeners the exact microsecond his brain waves even conceptualized the activation of his warp gate.
Suddenly, a hyper-encrypted, low-frequency radio burst bypassed the facility's outer shielding, grounding itself directly into the sub-dermal receiver embedded deep within Kurogiri's brain stem.
The sleeping beast's core programming violently unlocked a pre-progreamed protocol.
Kurogiri's glowing yellow slit-eyes violently flared, turning into twin narrow lines of blinding light.
Under the toughest, most unyielding security measures in human history, the restrained Nomu went completely berserk.
It started with an unnatural twitch of his shoulders that instantly caused the warden's master console to scream with low-tier alerts.
But within two seconds, the movement turned into a horrific, erratic thrashing.
Kurogiri's spine arched with a sickening, wet crack as his body completely overrode the physical pain limitations of a living being, pulling against the carbon fiber restraints with such raw force that the anchors welded into the concrete walls began to groan and warp.
WREEEEEEEN! WREEEEEEEN!
The crimson Tartarus alarms detonated in a synchronized wail, echoing through the sea-bound corridors.
"Inmate Kurogiri is showing unprecedented, exponential quirk-factor surges!" a technician shrieked into his headset, his fingers blurring across the lockdown overrides in a state of sheer panic. "Inject the sedatives! Max out the neural dampeners! Now! Now!"
"The dampeners are failing!" another operator roared from across the desk. "His vital signs are burning out! The signal is forcibly overclocking his entire nervous system, treating his body as completely expendable!"
Inside the dark cell, the pre-recorded command from his creator didn't sound like a thought but an absolute law, and although Kurogiri didn't scream because he couldn't, an impossible, suffocating mass of dark, foul spatial mist violently erupted from his mouth, his pores, and the seams of his neck, completely swallowing the suppressive machinery.
The vacuum-sealed glass shattered into thousands of flying shards as the Warp Gate Quirk didn't merely open a door but mutated under the devastating override signal.
It causes the dark mist to expand exponentially through Tartarus's reinforced corridors like a localized, growing black hole that completely ignores the damping fields, the surrounding ocean, and the metric tons of reinforced steel walls in its path.
The spatial rifts locked onto the vital signatures within the low-level cells, sweeping across the isolated, heavily restrained monsters of a bygone era before, in a single terrifying flash of absolute darkness.
Tartarus's highest-value inmate population vanished from their cages, pulled into a massive, multi-targeted spatial vacuum aimed directly at the frozen, cataclysmic coordinates of Kamino Ward.
The mechanical clicking of the dead terminal slowed down, its display fading into a cold, completely bricked black slate.
….
Back at the epicenter of Kamino Ward, the golden and crimson energy dome from All Might's prime-level strike was finally beginning to peel away from the atmosphere.
The geography of the sector had been violently rewritten.
The towering glacial spires Dabi had sculpted were heavily fractured, their reflective crystalline surfaces marred by deep spiderweb cracks and gray ash from the shockwaves below.
At the absolute base of the smooth, frozen basin, All For One lay completely cratered into the bedrock, his mask entirely shattered, revealing a horrific, sightless face that was coughing up a dark, viscous fluid onto the frost.
All Might stood twenty meters away, his colossal, muscular frame heaving with deep breaths.
The golden sparks of One For All still hummed across his knuckles, but the embers were settling, returning to a stable reservoir.
He had won, decisively breaking the devil of the old era without the burden of managing collateral damage.
Fifty feet above the ruins, Dabi stood at the very edge of his elevated platform, and beside him Tomura Shigaraki, who remained trapped within the encasing ice with no sign of breaking free.
Just then, Dabi's senses violently detonated at the base of his skull, far beyond the faint tingle he had come to expect.
PINNNNG–!
The needle-sharp warnings digging into his brain stem pointed neither toward All For One nor the Pro Heroes, but directly at the empty air in the center of the colosseum.
High above the shattered battlefield, hovering at a safe distance in the turbulent sky, a news helicopter swayed violently against the air drafts.
Inside, the news reporter held his headset tightly against his ear, his knuckles white as his camera crew aimed their high-definition lens straight down into the basin.
"W-Wait... what is happening?!" the reporter stammered into his microphone, his voice cracking in confusion.
Just seconds prior, he and millions of citizens tuning in across Japan had been ready to announce the absolute victory of the Symbol of Peace.
"Viewers... Please stay with us! All Might had just delivered what appeared to be the final, decisive blow... but something is forming in the center of Kamino Ward! A... a cloud of black mist?!"
His tone reflected the same utter bewilderment gripping the public; like everyone else, he had believed the nightmare was finally over, with no idea what was actually unfolding.
Down in the basin, it didn't start with the black, bubbling sludge of All For One's transport Quirk.
This was entirely different.
The air pressure inside the reflective amphitheater dropped exponentially in a microsecond.
A thick, foul violet-black mist violently ruptured out of thin air, exploding outward like a spatial fracture.
The anomaly grew with terrifying, unnatural speed, expanding from a single point into a massive, multi-tiered vortex that shrieked with a high-frequency, the unmistakable sound of Tartarus's automated security grids being violently torn apart from the inside out.
All Might's starlight eyes shrunk to pinpricks.
"This... Kurogiri?!" All Might muttered, a rare, volatile fury fracturing the baseline of his voice. "No, his cell was under complete sub-oceanic lockdown, which means Tartarus should have been completely inaccessible!"
The anger humming through All Might's muscular frame wasn't born solely from a tactical breach but from something deeply personal because.
Again, thanks to Dabi, he knew the ultimate tragedy of the League's mist villain.
Kurogiri wasn't a naturally born criminal but the desecrated, re-engineered corpse of Oboro Shirakumo, the deceased best friend and beloved classmate of his colleague, Eraser Head.
To witness All For One ruthlessly violating that boy's body yet again, treating a dead hero's soul like a disposable, overclocked remote control, pushed the Symbol of Peace past his absolute limits.
"ALL FOR ONE!!!" All Might roared–
"Even at the absolute end of your leash, you continue to desecrate the dead! Have you no shame?!"
"Toshinori..." All For One's broken, wheezing laugh rumbled from the depths of the crater, his bloodied fingers clawing at the frozen ground as he tilted his sightless face toward the pulsing vortex–
"The future... is never shaped by a single hand, and the doctor... merely executed our ultimate contingency…"
.
….
[To be continued…]
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