The sky over the city was a bruised, sickly violet, the first light of a cold morning struggling to pierce through the plumes of black smoke rising from the horizon.
Keigo Takami, Hawks, perched on the edge of a skyscraper's antenna, his crimson wings slightly flared to catch the shifting thermals. He looked like a predatory bird surveying a dying world. In his right ear, the sharp, cold crackle of an encrypted frequency cut through the distant sound of emergency sirens.
"Status report, Hawks," his handler's voice came through, devoid of any warmth. "The situation is deteriorating. Total breach at Mizuhashi and Akagura. And twenty minutes ago... we lost contact with Tartarus. Confirmed atmospheric and seismic anomalies. It's a mass breakout."
Hawks shifted his weight, his eyes narrowing as he watched a flight of military helicopters streak toward the coast. "Tartarus?" he whispered, his voice vibrating with a rare tremor of genuine disbelief. "That place was designed to be a tomb. How do you break a tomb in twenty minutes?"
"Because the security was built on the assumption of deterrence, not a concentrated, multi-pronged assault," the handler replied flatly. "No one had ever actually tried it before. We were complacent. And they have a warp gate, Hawks. They aren't just breaking doors, they're just walking in."
Hawks looked up at the grey clouds, his golden-brown eyes reflecting a deep, hidden exhaustion. "My skies... they aren't as clear as I once dreamt they'd be," he murmured to the wind.
"Save the poetry for later," the handler snapped. "Orders are as follows, Divert to the Akagura district. The perimeter has collapsed. Your priority is civilian evacuation and containment of low-to-mid-tier escapees. Other Top Ten are being scrambled to Mizuhashi and the shoreline."
"Akagura. Copy that," Hawks said, though he didn't move yet. He felt the feathers of his wings twitch, sensing the vibrations of a world that had just become much more dangerous. "Before I dive in... give me the highlights. I'm fast, but I'm not exactly built like Endeavor. Are there any 'heavyweights' I should be on the lookout for?"
There was a long, uncharacteristic pause on the other end of the line. The sound of rustling papers and frantic typing echoed through the feed.
"We have visual confirmation on two High-Class threats already clear of the Tartarus submerged zone," the handler said, their voice dropping into a grimmer register. "The first is King Fin. A Shark-mutant, Hydro quirk. In this environment, with the rain and the broken water mains, he is a god. If he catches you in a current, speed won't save you. He'll drag you under before you can even flare your wings."
Hawks nodded slowly. He remembered the old files. The monster who turned city blocks into whirlpools. "And the second?"
"Kazuo Hoshikawa. The one they call Meteor," the handler said. "He's forty-two now, but don't let the age fool you. He generates high-velocity projectiles, gravity-heavy meteors that crash with great force. He can fly, too. It took All Might himself when he came back to Japan after his campaign, to bring him down fifteen years ago."
Hawks felt a cold drop of sweat slide down his neck. "Meteor. I remember the news footage. He's the one who lost his family in the raid, right?"
"Doesn't matter." the handler said absentmindedly. "He is bitter, unyielding, and he has fifteen years of silence to make up for. If you see a shadow in the clouds, do not engage. He outclasses you in raw destructive output."
Hawks let out a jagged sigh, his fingers grazing the sharp edge of one of his primary feathers. "King Fin and Meteor. Legends of the dark ages, back in the same air. This is going to be a long morning." He hesitated, his voice dropping to a whisper. "What about Lady Nagant?"
He already knew who she was, she had come before him and he was taught about her as well as her fate. It was a deterrent, do not end up like this failure. Hawks wouldn't anyway, he was easily more marketable so there were certain things he wouldn't have to do that she suffered through. Didn't mean he didn't feel bad for her.
The silence from the handler this time was absolute. It was the silence of a grave.
"If you see Nagant," the handler said, their voice turning into a lethal, monotone command, "you are not to negotiate. You are not to contain. You are to execute her on sight. Use every feather you have. Do not let her find a perch."
"Understood," Hawks said, his expression hardening into a mask of professional detachment.
He stepped off the edge of the antenna, falling backward into the cold, morning air. He flared his wings, the crimson feathers exploding outward as he caught a gust of wind.
"Duty calls," he whispered to the empty sky.
___
It was 06:14 AM on a Tuesday in late July. The sun had barely begun to claw its way through the morning fog when the world as Japan knew it ceased to exist.
The League of Villains struck, they performed a surgical demolition of the state's security. It began at Mizuhashi Correctional, a low-security facility where the petty and the desperate were housed. It was the bait.
As the local heroes rushed to contain a flood of small-time thieves and arsonists, the second hammer fell on The Akugara Vault. There, the higher tier with many actual threats were unleashed into the morning commute.
The carnage was swift. Commuter trains were derailed, office buildings became rubble. If not for the desperate, high-speed intervention of Best Jeanist and Hawks, then there would actually be a death toll in those areas.
But while the heroes bled to save the streets of Akagura, the ultimate silence fell over Tartarus.
In twenty minutes of calculated violence, the "Impenetrable Tomb" was breached. The biometric dampeners that had held the nightmares of a generation in check were extinguished. For the first time in fifteen years, the ocean did not just hide the monsters, it vomited them back onto the shore.
By 09:00 AM, the prisons were empty, and the nation was full.
The morning news cycle was no longer a report, it was a potential casualty list. Hundreds of the most dangerous villains in human history, men like King Fin and Meteor, had vanished into the shadows, now operating in cohort with a League of Villains that had grown from a nuisance into an existential threat.
The reaction was a psychic break for society. On social media, the "Symbol of Peace" was no longer a comfort, his face was a target for a tidal wave of vitriol. Under the hashtag #WhereAreOurHeroes, millions voiced a jagged, terrified displeasure.
In the streets protesters stood outside hero agencies, not with notebooks for autographs, but with signs demanding accountability, their voices hoarse with a singular, terrifying realization...
The heroes are not enough.
For the first time in a generation, the clock has been forcibly turned back. The era of stability, the "Golden Age" of All Might, has been replaced by a regression into a primal chaos. Hero society no longer stands on equal ground with the underworld, it is sinking into the mud.
The monsters are home, the sky is falling, and in the fortified halls of UA, the saviours of tomorrow are waking up to a world where the rules of the game have been burned to ash.
___
The dreamscape was not like the cold, clinical hospital of Yoshi's making. It was a place of shifting white mists and echoes, a vast, quiet expanse that felt as though it existed in the heartbeat between seconds.
Izuku stood in the center of the fog, but he felt heavy. When he tried to reach for his face, his hands wouldn't move, a thick, ink-black void was wrapped around his torso and legs like a restrictive shroud, and a similar patch of darkness was pressed firmly over his mouth. He could breathe, but he was a silent witness.
In the distance, several figures stood shrouded in the haze. They were blurry, their features smearing like wet paint on a canvas, but their presence was immense. He was looking to where he may see Yoshi.
The boy wasn't there.
"He's not coming, Ninth," a voice said, clear and warm as a summer evening.
The mist parted, and a woman stepped forward. She was tall, with a dark ponytail and a cape that seemed to catch a wind that didn't exist in this place. She wore a confident, snarky half-smile, but her eyes held a depth of sorrow that made Izuku's chest ache.
"Yoshi decides not to stay with us," she said, her voice carrying a hint of playful disdain. "He's got his own little corner of your head to haunt. I think our 'company' is a bit too bright for his taste."
She walked closer, her boots making no sound on the misty floor. She looked at the black space covering Izuku's mouth and sighed softly. "I'm sorry I couldn't introduce myself properly before. I tried to reach out during that mess at the stadium, but the connection was... interrupted. It's hard to talk to you when you're carrying a passenger who wants to kick the door down."
Izuku stared at her, his muffled thoughts screaming the name he had just learned. Nana Shimura. The Seventh. All Might's teacher.
"I can see you putting the pieces together," Nana said, her expression softening into something maternal and fierce. "Yes. I'm Nana. And I'm sorry we have to meet like this, with you tied up and the world about to catch fire."
She knelt so she was eye-level with him, her hand hovering just inches from his shoulder, though she didn't touch him. Her face grew grave, the snarkiness vanishing.
"Listen to me, Izuku. When you wake up, the world you knew is going to be gone. The walls have been torn down. The League... they've done something that hasn't been done to such a scale in generations. They've basically opened the cages."
Izuku's eyes widened. He tried to speak, to ask what she meant, but the black void held fast.
"You are going to see a new world when you open your eyes," Nana warned, her voice vibrating with urgency. "A world where the villains are no longer in hiding. You feel like you aren't prepared, but you are. You have to be. If you feel that hesitation in your heart, you need to kill it immediately. We are heading into dark times, and the nation... it's going to need a Champion. Not a student. Not a kid. A 'Champion' who can stand when the pillars are crumbling."
She leaned in, her forehead almost touching his. "You're the one we chose, Izuku. Don't let the ghost in your head convince you otherwise."
The mist began to swirl violently, the dreamscape beginning to dissolve into the white light of the waking world. Nana started to fade, but she reached out one last time, her eyes shimmering.
"One more thing," she whispered. "When you see Toshinori again... tell him I'm proud of him. Tell him he did enough."
Izuku reached out a phantom hand as the black void finally snapped, the world rushing back in a deafening roar of reality.
"HAH!"
Izuku sat bolt upright in his dorm bed, his lungs burning as he gasped for air. Sweat licked his skin, his t-shirt clinging to his chest. His heart was a frantic drum, a rhythm of thump-thump, thump-thump that felt terrifyingly fast. He gripped his sheets, his knuckles white, staring at the familiar walls of his UA dorm room.
The sun was streaming through the window, a bright, beautiful morning that felt like a lie.
Outside his door, the hallway was no longer silent. He heard the frantic scuff of footsteps and the muffled, panicked voices of his classmates.
"I-I can't get a signal on the news sites, they're overloaded!" a voice cried out, it was Momo Yaoyorozu, her usual composure replaced by a sharp, high-pitched tremor. "Uraraka, did you see the livestream from the coast? The League... they hit the prisons. Even Tartarus."
Izuku froze, Nana's warning echoing in his mind. A new world.
A war was arriving at their front door.