Lightning scarred the sky as Grey and All For One's battle raged across the broken world, reality warping with every clash. Fractals of black and white spiraled around Grey, while golden glyphs shimmered and danced in All For One's shadow. The air grew dense, thick with storm, with static, and with something deeper: a sense of being watched.
Between every collision, as the environment twisted and rebuilt itself, Grey couldn't shake the sense that something was wrong. He knew the source of All For One's newfound power, Eri's quirk, stolen and corrupted, letting him bend causality, undo wounds, and even erase mistakes. But beneath the terror of facing a living paradox, another dread gnawed at him:
Something was missing.
If All For One truly possessed this much power, why drag the fight on? Why push him away from the heart of the city, farther and farther from the house with every blow? Each clash, each step, felt less like combat and more like he was being guided, herded, and stage-managed.
Why was he alone? Where was Shigaraki? Where was the League?
Grey ducked under a storm of molten tendrils, fractals slicing back in a desperate counter. His breath tore through his lungs, each inhale feeling like it ripped away another memory: a flash of burning oil, a keyboard under his fingers, and Hana's smile glitching like a dying signal. Every rewrite cost him something. Every second this battle lasted, he lost a piece of himself.
It's dangerous to let this drag on, he realized, panic twisting in his chest. Every rewrite takes something from me. But why is he drawing me away? What am I missing?
And then, all at once, it clicked.
All For One's grin widened, eyes burning with ancient, hungry knowledge. He leaned forward, voice echoing with cruel delight.
"Oh! You finally noticed," he whispered, the words slicing through the storm. Then, with a savage rush, he lunged at Grey, laughter ringing out, raw and triumphant.
"But it's too late!"
Grey's body reacted before his mind fully caught up. He twisted, fractals bursting from his skin as he flung himself out of the path of destruction. The ground where he'd stood splintered, reality itself shattering in a spray of static.
Move. Now. Don't let him pin you down. Come on, keep thinking. Why keep pushing me away? It's a distraction… But for what?
He dropped low, rolling behind a warped pillar, fractals swirling defensively. Another blast of golden power tore past, close enough to singe his hair and set his nerves screaming.
Focus! If I lose myself here, if I let him corner me, everyone else pays the price. He's not fighting to win; he's fighting to buy time. Or to keep me away from—
Grey's eyes widened. The base. Hana. Shigaraki.
He pushed off, dodging another cascade of molten glyphs, heart hammering. This wasn't just about power. This was about what he was being kept from. About what he was about to lose if he didn't break the pattern now.
He's pulling me away from Hana. From the base. He's isolating me. Keeping me busy while the other moves.
Grey snapped his comm open, voice urgent:
"Hana! Listen to me, Shigaraki's not here because he's with you! He's coming for the base—"
Static answers. The signal flickers, glitching like broken glass.
"Hana? Damn it—"
******
The corridor shudders under the weight of chaos, raining shards of glass and static like broken stars. Hana staggers forward, one arm clamped against her ribs, breath rasping as alarms wail in fractured tones.
"Grey? What—"
The comm crackles, then dies.
Behind her, a voice slithers through the dust:
"Found you, anomaly."
Shigaraki's grin sharpened into something feral. His voice slithered through the fractured air, low and venomous:
"The author doesn't like typos."
The words hung like a verdict. Then his hand dropped to the ground.
Decay erupted in a violent bloom, crawling across the floor like a living plague. Steel buckled, concrete crumbled, and the corridor convulsed as if the earth itself recoiled from his touch. Walls sagged inward, pipes split open, and the air filled with the stench of rust and dust.
Hana staggered back, boots skidding on the trembling floor. Her pulse spiked as the ground beneath her feet began to dissolve into nothingness.
Shigaraki stepped forward, calm amid the chaos, his voice dripping with malice:
"Let's see how long you last."
Hana's pulse spiked—but fear hardened into steel. She planted her boots as Decay crawled toward her like a living plague.
The air shimmered, reality bending at the edges, glitching like broken glass. Colors bled into monochrome before snapping back. Her reflection lagged a heartbeat behind, then moved on its own, mirroring her rage.
She felt it, the fracture in the script. Continuum Sense surged through her veins, anchoring her to the original timeline. Edits slid off her like water on steel.
Her breath steadied. Probability bent.
Light fractured as she raised her hand. From the distortion, a blade bloomed, pure energy crystallizing into steel, humming with defiance. Its edge shimmered like a tear in reality, vibrating with raw intent.
Hana gripped the weapon, eyes blazing, and spoke with a voice sharp enough to cut the storm:
"Try me, if you dare."
******
The corridor trembled under Hana's defiance, her blade humming like a tear in reality. Shigaraki's grin faltered for the first time, crimson eyes narrowing as the anomaly surged against his Decay.
But far from the chaos, silence draped the eastern wing of the base like a predator's shadow.
A figure slipped through the maintenance hatch, boots whispering against steel. Her steps were light, almost playful, as if the alarms screaming in the distance were nothing more than music. The dim lights flickered, painting her borrowed face in fractured tones.
Kaori's face.
Himiko Toga smiled beneath the stolen skin, her eyes glinting with manic delight. She twirled a scalpel between her fingers, humming softly as she moved deeper into the base.
"So many secrets… so many pretty faces to wear," she whispered, voice dripping with sugar and venom. Her gaze flicked toward the server room door, where the hum of encrypted data pulsed like a heartbeat.
"Let's make this quick… before they catch me."
The eastern wing was silent, a stark contrast to the chaos shaking the rest of the base. Dim lights flickered as Toga glided through the corridor, wearing Kaori's face like a stolen mask. Her steps were soft, almost playful, the hum of servers pulsing like a heartbeat behind the walls.
She pushed open the lounge door and froze.
Kaori sat at a table, calm as a blade, eating cake. Her posture was relaxed, her eyes half-lidded, but the air around her thrummed with quiet menace. She looked up, met her own face, and didn't flinch.
Instead, Kaori lifted a finger.
"Wait."
She took another bite, slow and deliberate. Chewed. Swallowed. Wiped her mouth with a napkin. Then she rose, smooth and silent, her chair scraping softly against the floor.
No hesitation. No words. She lunged.
The clash was instant, brutal, and silent. Steel kissed steel as Kaori's blade met Toga's scalpel in a shower of sparks. The table flipped, crashing against the wall. Shadows danced across shattered glass as they moved like predators, knives flashing, code and blood colliding in a storm of precision.
Toga laughed, breathless and delighted, her voice dripping with manic sweetness:
"You're even cuter than I thought."
Kaori didn't answer. Her eyes were cold, her strikes merciless, every movement honed to kill. Her blade carved through the glitching air, each strike sending out a ripple that warped reality around them. With every clash, the lounge shuddered, walls flickering between pristine and cracked, ceiling lights pulsing, then popping in showers of sparks. The hum of servers in the walls surged, data streams stuttering as the script itself twisted under the strain of two living anomalies.
The table, already upended by their first exchange, splintered further as Toga vaulted over it, feet kicking off into a roll that left gouges in the tile deep enough to expose flickering code beneath the surface. A painting on the wall dissolved from a cherry blossom landscape to a static-filled void, then snapped back again, the frame askew.
Where Kaori's blade struck, the lines of the room seemed to bend, edges going sharp, then blurring, as if the world couldn't quite decide what version of reality to display. Shadow and light fractured into jagged mosaics, Toga's laughter echoing off every surface with doubled, tripled voices.
Toga's scalpel nicked a chair, and for a heartbeat the object duplicated, two chairs occupying the same space, one flickering with Kaori's blood, the other with Toga's. Both combatants' reflections overlapped in every fragment: Kaori's eyes were cold, and Toga's were wild.
The fight was no longer just physical. The world around them became an extension of their battle, a room caught in the crossfire between identity and chaos.
Kaori pressed her advantage, blade humming, slicing through a wall that flickered between drywall and endless code. Toga spun, giggling, her stolen face flickering between delight and hunger.
For a moment, neither girl seemed fully real. The room was their arena, their mirror, and their weapon.
Toga giggled, spinning away from a lethal slash, her voice echoing like broken audio:
"Oh, this is fun! Let's see which one of us the story keeps."
Kaori's blade hummed as she anchored herself, forcing her advance toward Toga like water sliding off steel. Her breath steadied, her stance sharpened, and her eyes burned with lethal resolve.
"I don't care about the story."
She lunged again, faster, sharper, her blade carving through the glitching air as if cutting the script itself.