**Chapter 11: Ambush**
Cid started walking toward them at his usual unhurried pace, cloak swaying. "This is it? Seriously?"
The low-tier villains charged anyway, crude Quirks flaring. Cid shrunk them all with the same ease as breathing. Two of them collapsed inward mid-stride, shrinking to doll size and hitting the cracked concrete with tiny, pathetic thuds. The rest kept coming, yelling about easy prey and how they were going to make the eyepatch kid regret showing up.
He kept walking, hands still in his cloak pockets. "You know, you could at least make this interesting. What's your plan here? Rush me trying to overwhelm me then get shrunk and call it a day?" He glanced at the nearest one, a burly guy with extra arms sprouting from his back. "Seriously, who sent you? This feels like a warm-up. You guys are pathetic."
The villain snarled something incoherent and lunged. Cid shrank him without breaking stride. Another one tried to flank. Cid glanced back and he shrunk. He was bored already, the whole thing feeling like cleanup duty rather than a fight.
'What is their plan here? These guys just throwing themselves at me doesn't make sense' cid thought.
The urban ruin zone stretched around him—twisted rebar, half-collapsed buildings, narrow alleys that should have been perfect for an ambush if the attackers had any brains.
Then the mist started rolling in.
'Fuck I just jinxed it didn't I'
It crept from the edges of the zone first, thin tendrils at the corners of his vision that thickened fast, like living smoke swallowing the alleys and cutting the light. Cid's eye narrowed. The air grew heavy, damp, and the visibility dropped fast. Within seconds he could barely see five feet ahead. The remaining villains' shouts faded into the haze, their forms blurring into vague shapes before vanishing entirely.
Shadows darted at the edges of his vision—fast, blurry shapes that vanished before he could focus. He stopped walking, cloak settling around him. "Okay… that's new, maybe they were just staling me."
A monster burst out of the mist, some hulking thing with claws and too many teeth and an exposed brain, dashing straight at him. Cid dodged on instinct, the creature's swipe whistling past his shoulder. It was gone again, swallowed by the mist before he could shrink it.
'Tch. That mutant has a speed Quirk. It's gonna be annoying with all this mist.' he thought
Then another strike from the left. He twisted, barely avoiding a set of razor claws that shredded the air where his head had been.
This continued for what felt like hours, due to the constant pressure and them not giving him breathing room. Every time he tried to focus on one shadow, another struck from a different angle. All he saw were blurs that whipped past him and attacking with hit and run tactics, a knife grazing his cloak and drawing a thin line of blood along his arm. He spun but the attacker was already gone. Another attacked from the opposite side.
Cid's breathing picked up. The cloak whipped with each sharp dodge. "Alright, this is getting annoying," he muttered, voice still calm but edged with irritation. He tried shrinking larger sections of the mist itself, but it just swirled and reformed, thicker than before.
A hulking shadow lunged from the right. Cid dodged, the creature's massive fist slamming into the ground where he'd just stood, shattering the concrete. He countered with a thought, shrinking the attacker's arm mid-swing, but the thing vanished back into the mist before he could finish it. Another blur struck from behind—pain flared across his shoulder as something sharp raked through cloth and skin.
He was moving constantly now, dodging on pure reflex, no time to think, no time to plan. Just react. The mist pressed in tighter, disorienting, the shadows darting faster. A spear of hardened bone whistled out of nowhere, he barley dodged it but it ended up grazing his side.
The pressure built, relentlessly. Cid's heart thumped harder than he liked, the lazy boredom long gone. This wasn't random. This was coordinated—speed Quirks, smoke screens, attackers who knew exactly how to stay out of his line of sight. Someone had planned this, studied how his quirk worked and planned to counter it.
He heard something heavy approaching from the right—fast, deliberate. Cid leaned hard to the side, trying to create distance.
Pain exploded through his chest.
A great, searing lance of agony punched straight through his left lung. He looked down. What looked like a massive claw that had pierced clean through him, bright red blood already soaking the front of his cloak. The world tilted. He coughed hard, a thick spray of blood splattering across his lips and chin in streaks.
*Dam… this whole setup was a trap and I didn't even take it seriously.*
The claw ripped free with a wet, sucking sound that echoed in Cid's ears like a final punctuation mark. His legs folded beneath him, knees hitting the cracked concrete first, then his back slamming flat against the ground. Blood pooled instantly beneath him, warm and sticky, spreading out in a dark circle that soaked through the fabric of his cloak. The attacker disappeared back into the mist that swirled overhead, thick and suffocating, but the world had already narrowed to the burning hole in his chest.
'Am I going to die… just like that?'
The thought drifted through his mind, sluggish and detached, like it belonged to someone else. His visible eye stared up at the hazy ceiling of the ruin zone, the twisted rebar and broken skylights blurring at the edges. Blood bubbled up his throat with every shallow breath, coppery and hot.
'Just because I was too lazy to even use all my power… or… was I just scared to go all out again… after what happened?'
The mist pressed closer, shadows darting at the periphery, but Cid's mind was already slipping backward, pulled by the pain and the blood loss into a memory he hadn't let himself touch in years.
-Flashback 10 years ago the day of
all might vs toxic chainsaw- ( all might vs all for one)
He was eight.
The city was on fire.
Explosions had rocked the skyline earlier that afternoon—distant, massive blasts that shook the ground and sent shockwaves rolling through the streets like thunder. No one knew what caused them. Adults on the news later called it "a villain attack of unprecedented scale," but to eight-year-old Cid it was just noise and heat and the sudden, terrifying collapse of the world he knew. Buildings crumbled in slow motion around him, concrete and steel raining down like hail. Flames licked up the sides of apartment blocks, glass shattering in glittering cascades. The air tasted of smoke and ash.
"Mom! Dad!" His voice was small and hoarse, lost under the roar of collapsing structures. He ran through the streets, his eyepatch had fallen off some where, the constant flood of visual data from his left eye making his head throb but giving him the only edge he had. He cold see the path of falling debris, the detailed crackes in the walls, where not to be standing. He ran and ran searching for his parents.
He spotted them two blocks ahead—his parents, pinned beneath a massive half of a building that had sheared off a high-rise. They were luckly under it in such a way where it didn't hurt them but they were traped. His mother's arm was reaching for him, her voice faint but calling his name telling him to run away. His father was half-buried, face turned toward him, eyes wide with fear and something else—pride, maybe, or hope that he would run away and be ok.
Cid didn't think. He just acted.
"Shrink!"
The piece of the high rise started shrinking rapidly until it was no bigger than a suitcase. It droped to the droped to the ground harmlessly. For one impossible second, relief flooded him. They were free. They were moving, scrambling toward him, arms outstretched.
Then the building beside it—the one that it had been bracing—lost its last support. A deafening groan split the air. Huge sections of concrete and rebar broke away, plummeting like meteors. Cid's left eye screamed with data: trajectories, angles of impact. He tried to shrink them too, one after another, frantic mental commands firing as fast as he could think. But there were too many. The pieces were too large, falling too fast. He stood there both eyes wide open, the full power of his Quirk flooding his vision until his head felt like it would split and blood was pouring from his nose and eyes.
It wasn't enough.
The first chunk hit his father with a sickening crunch, crushing him beneath tons of rubble. His mother screamed, lunging for Cid, but the next piece caught her mid-stride, slamming down on her in a spray of dust and blood splatering on his face. The final large slab came last, landing with a final, earth-shaking thud that buried them both completely.
Cid stood frozen covered in his mother's blood, in the middle of the street, smoke curling around him, the firelight painting everything in flickering orange and red. His parents were gone. Just like that. Crushed under the very debris he had tried to shrink to save them. The horror of it rooted him in place, his small hands still outstretched shaking.
He had caused it. By shrinking the building, he had destabilized the second building. His power—his "gift"—had killed them.
-Flashback end-
The memory snapped away as another cough wracked Cid's body, more blood spraying across his face. He was back in the ruin zone, flat on his back, the mist still swirling, the pain in his chest a constant, white-hot scream.
'Maybe…. it wouldn't be so bad to just fade away…'
The thought was tempting. Quiet. Easy. No more effort. No more responsibility. Just let the blood keep pooling and the world go dark.
'Ughhh… but then my classmates are still out there fighting. What kind of friend would I be if I just left them in this shitty situation?' he thought while he gritted his teeth.
Toru's bright laugh echoed in his head. Yui's soft "Hmm…" and the way she'd tucked that strand of hair behind her ear on the bus the moments they spent together. Then Kirishima's manly yells, Mina's energy, even Bakugo's scowl. They were scattered across the zones, fighting for their lives while he lay here bleeding out because he'd been too lazy to take the threat seriously.
'No. I wont'
Cid forced his visible eye open, staring up at the hazy ceiling. His hand trembled as he pressed it to the wound, feeling the ragged edges of the puncture. Blood seeped between his fingers, warm and relentless.
He tried to shrink it.
Nothing. The tissue was too damaged, too complex, the wound shifting with every heartbeat. He focused harder, narrowing his Quirk to the exact spot, visualizing the edges pulling inward. Still nothing. The blood kept flowing.
Again. And again. Each attempt weaker than the last as dizziness crept in from the blood loss. His breaths came shorter, shallower. The mist above him seemed to spin.
*l'Come on… work you stupid quirk ,work'
He pushed deeper, past the surface, past the muscle and tissue, down to the cellular level. The world narrowed to a single point of focus—the torn edges of his lung, the severed vessels, the leaking capillaries. He imagined shrinking the damage itself, collapsing the ruptured cells, sealing the gaps, forcing the wound closed at the smallest possible scale.
Something shifted like a dam that had been rusted shut budged ever so slightly .
The bleeding slowed. Then stopped. The ragged hole in his lung contracted, the tissue knitting together in a way that felt unnatural, almost surgical. It wasn't perfect—he could feel the strain, the temporary nature of it—but for now the wound held. It would last a few hours at most, maybe less if he pushed too hard, but it was enough.
Cid sat up with a groan, the world tilting wildly for a moment. Blood stained the front of his cloak, his hands, his face, the ground beneath him. Light-headedness made the mist swim, but he forced himself to his feet, swaying once before catching his balance.
He reached up, fingers finding the edge of his eyepatch. With a sharp tug he snatched it off, letting it fall to the ground. His left eye snapped open, the full power of his Quirk flooding his vision—every trajectory, every moving shadow in the mist was suddenly crystal clear. He could make out the next move they were going to make based on just the twitch of their muscles
[Image here]
He stared straight ahead at the hulking silhouette emerging from the haze—the monster with its brain exposed, massive and grotesque.
He wasn't done, he would finish them quickly and go help the rest of the class.