The city of Tokyo was a blur of grey and neon, reduced to a series of streaking lines as All Might pushed his failing body to a velocity that defied human sight. He was a golden lightning bolt in a world made of lead, his passage creating sonic booms that rattled windows and sent pigeons spiraling into the air.
He was searching. His eyes, sunken and shadowed, scanned the rooftops, the alleys, and the transit hubs. Mizuhashi, Akagura, and Tartarus had been emptied of their sinners, and by all logic, the surrounding cities should have been drowning in fire and blood.
But as he skidded to a halt atop a radio tower, the silence he found was more terrifying than a riot.
"Where are they?" he gasped, his chest heaving.
He had blitzed through four districts in six minutes. He hadn't even found the small-time arsonists or the petty thieves. The streets below were filled with panicked civilians and frantic police cordons, but the villains, the hundreds of monsters that had been vomited out of the prisons, were nowhere.
All Might stood at the edge of the tower, performing a lightning-fast 360-degree scan of the horizon. His mind raced. They aren't lingering. They aren't looting. They're being moved.
His eyes caught a flicker of movement in a narrow alley three blocks away. A pair of eyes, cold and predatory, had been watching him from the shadows of a fire escape.
In a singular, violent burst of speed, All Might launched. He didn't use the stairs, he simply ceased to be on the tower and appeared in the alleyway. The air pressure alone from his arrival blew the dumpsters back and cracked the brick walls.
But he was too late.
A swirl of purplish-black mist was already collapsing in on itself. All Might reached out, his fingers brushing against the cold, oily void just as a pair of legs in prison grey vanished into the darkness. The warp gate snapped shut with a sound like a vacuum seal, leaving nothing but the smell of ozone and a mocking silence.
"They're using Kurogiri to play keep-away," All Might growled, his voice a low, guttural rasp of fury.
He slammed his foot into the pavement, the concrete groaning and shattering into a deep crater under the force of his frustration. He was being handled. The League was tracking his location in real-time, using him as the center point of an exclusion zone. Every time he got close to a cluster of escapees, they were warped away to a different "stage." He was the strongest man in the world, and he was being rendered obsolete by a game of Hide and Seek.
He was on the losing front, and the gap was widening with every second he spent chasing.
Buzz. Buzz.
His phone vibrated violently in his pocket. He pulled it out, seeing Gran Torino's name on the caller ID. He flipped it open instantly.
"Torino! I'm in the Chiyoda district, I've lost their trail..."
"Toshino...!"
The voice that came through the speaker wasn't the sharp, grumbling bark of his mentor. It was frantic, ragged, and wet.
"Get... Tokyo... central... station..." Gran Torino's voice was interrupted by a sickening, gurgling sound, a wet, drowning noise as if his mouth and lungs were suddenly being filled with a heavy, pressurized liquid. "Water... he's... everywhere... Toshino... help..."
The line dissolved into a harsh, drowning static before the signal cut out entirely. The phone's screen went black.
"TORINO!" All Might roared, the sound echoing off the alley walls like a cannon shot.
He didn't think. He didn't check his limits. He didn't worry about the embers of One For All flickering in his gut. The "water" sound, it could only be one person. King Fin was in the heart of the capital, and he was drowning the only father figure Toshinori ever had.
All Might launched himself into the air, the shockwave of his departure leveling the alleyway. He became a golden streak of pure, unadulterated desperation, blitzing toward Tokyo Central with a speed that threatened to tear his very skin from his bones.
___
Tokyo Central was no longer a city. It was a mass grave of concrete and glass, a staged theater of absolute despair.
When All Might's boots finally struck the cracked asphalt of the central plaza, the impact didn't feel like a hero's arrival. It felt like a survivor falling into a nightmare. The air was thick with a fine, misty rain that tasted of salt and iron, the unmistakable scent of blood mixed with seawater.
The scene was a visceral, jagged horror. Bodies were strewn across the thoroughfare like discarded litter. He saw a man in a salaryman's suit, his hand still clutching a briefcase, a young mother draped over a stroller in a final, futile act of protection, and children, small, colorful shapes in the grey rubble that didn't move. Beside them lay the heroes who had tried to hold the line. They were broken, their costumes torn, their symbols shattered.
As All Might scanned the carnage, he saw them, the villains. A group of escapees stood over a pile of rubble, but before All Might could even cock his fist, a swirl of purplish-black mist blossomed beneath them. They vanished with a mocking silence. It was a game of Whack-a-Mole where the hammer was the strongest man alive and the moles were made of smoke.
A massive, rhythmic thud-crack echoed from a nearby dismounted parking garage.
All Might launched himself over a pile of overturned buses. In the center of the wreckage, the horror found a focal point. Wash, the Number Eight Hero, was a heap of dented metal and torn fabric, tossed aside like a broken appliance. In the center of the clearing stood the nightmare from the deep.
King Fin.
The shark-mutant was even more gargantuan than the reports suggested. His slate-gray skin was slick with a layer of pressurized water that shimmered like armour. He held Mirko by her powerful legs, lifting the Rabbit Hero, the fierce, indomitable woman who had never known retreat, and slamming her face-first into the concrete rubble. Over. And over. Each impact was a sickening, wet sound of bone meeting stone. She was limp, her white hair matted with dark crimson.
All Might's soul didn't just burn; it felt like it was being flayed raw.
"UNHAND HER!"
The roar was not the voice of a hero. It was the scream of a wounded god. All Might moved with a velocity that shattered the sound barrier in a localized vacuum. He struck King Fin square in his massive, finned chest. The impact was a thunderclap that sent the shark-villain hurtling through three concrete pillars and into the darkness of the lower parking levels.
All Might caught Mirko before she hit the ground. She was cold. Her breathing was a shallow, bubbling hitch. He laid her down with a gentleness that felt like a prayer, his hands trembling as he looked at her shattered mask.
From the shadows of the wreckage, King Fin climbed back to his feet. He didn't look hurt, he looked exhilarated. He wiped a streak of dark, thick blood from his wide, serrated jaw and let out a guttural, wet chuckle.
"Well, well," King Fin rasped, his black, glassy eyes fixed on All Might. "The big one finally arrives. I was actually hoping for the fire-man, Endeavor. We have unfinished business. I've never been hit by the 'Symbol of Peace' before. It's... a heavy sensation. I think I like it."
All Might stood up, his tall, gaunt frame trembling with a lethal, concentrated fury. The golden embers of One For All flared with a desperate, blinding intensity, lighting up the grey mist of the car park.
"Surrender, King Fin," All Might's voice was a low, terrifying vibration that made the hanging fluorescent lights flicker and explode. "The next hit won't just send you back. It will end you. You cannot handle the weight of what I am about to give you."
King Fin bared his rows of teeth in a jagged, predatory grin. He raised his clawed hands, and the water in the air began to churn, forming a crushing, high-pressure vortex around his arms. "Maybe I can't. But maybe I won't have to."
A swirl of dark mist began to rise from the floorboards, curling around King Fin's legs like a serpent.
"NO!" All Might screamed.
He didn't wait. He didn't think about his limits. He blitzed forward, his right fist pulling back in a move meant to induce the silence of the grave. It was a punch that carried the weight of every child lying in the rubble outside.
"UNITED STATES OF....!"
The fist connected with nothing.
The warp gate snapped shut a millisecond before the impact. All Might's fist punched through empty air, the sheer force of the blow creating a shockwave that blew the entire roof off the parking garage. Concrete slabs were sent flying into the sky, and the pressure wave flattened the surrounding wreckage for three city blocks.
But there was no one to hit.
All Might stood in the center of the ruins, his arm outstretched, his fist still smoking from the friction. He looked around the silent, broken district. Mirko was bleeding behind him. Wash was unmoving. The villains were gone, pulled back into the safety of the void, leaving him alone with the ghosts they had created.
The terror finally breached the walls of his heart. It wasn't the fear of dying, it was the terror of being irrelevant. He was a god of a dead religion, a sun that could no longer burn the shadows away.
He threw his head back and let out a long, agonizing yell of pure, unbridled fury. It was a sound that carried across the ruins of Tokyo, a scream of a man who had been the Symbol of Peace for forty years, and was now realizing he was nothing more than a witness to its end.
___
In the grey, static-filled corridors of the Dark World, Yoshi Abara sat on the floor of a vacant hospital room, his back against the cold tile. For the first time, the apathy that defined his existence was replaced by a sharp, restless energy.
He had felt the tremors of the world above. Through Izuku's senses, he had seen the headlines, heard the panicked whispers in the hallways of the dorms, and felt the sudden, jagged shift in the atmosphere of the city. He hadn't expected the League to be this efficient. He hadn't expected them to tear the doors off the world's most secure cages so soon.
"Moving fast, aren't you, Shigaraki?" Yoshi whispered to the empty ward.
He closed his eyes, wondering how the "Champion" was handling the weight of a nation falling apart. He expected to feel Midoriya's usual brand of frantic, heroic desperation, but as he settled into the silence, a stray thought drifted through the fog of his mind, a fragment of a life he didn't remember living.
It wasn't a thought. It was a vision.
He saw a face. It was a face that mirrored his own, the same warm, brown skin, the same curve of the jaw, but the features were softer, framed by a cascade of thick, intricate braids. They were primarily a deep, ink-black, but several were dyed a striking, stark white, winding through the dark like threads of moonlight.
He felt a phantom sensation, a cool, gentle touch on his forehead, the smell of lavender and home.
"Play fair, Yoshi," the girl whispered. Her voice was like a song he had forgotten the lyrics to, full of a teasing, protective love.
Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the image shattered. The lavender scent was replaced by the smell of antiseptic, and the girl with the braids vanished into the grey mist.
Yoshi's breath hitched. He scrambled to his feet, his chest heaving. "What the hell... what was that?"
He clutched his head, his fingers digging into his scalp. He didn't have a name for the girl, but the void where the memory had been was suddenly filled with a suffocating, black tide of grief. It washed over him like a physical blow, making his knees buckle. His throat felt tight, and to his horror, he felt his eyes stinging, the hot, salt-heavy threat of tears he didn't understand.
"Stop it," he growled at himself, his voice cracking. "I don't... I don't feel things like this. I'm dead."
But the grief didn't stop. Instead, it intensified, doubling in weight until the hospital room seemed to tilt on its axis.
Yoshi's eyes widened as he realized the truth. The grief was coming from two directions at once. One was the ghost of a memory he couldn't grasp, but the other... the other was a roaring, external ocean of sorrow.
It belonged to Izuku Midoriya.
Upstairs, in the world of the living, the "Golden Child" had just seen the first images of the ruins of Tokyo. The grief was so massive, so absolute, that it was leaking through the floorboards of the subconscious, flooding the attic where Yoshi lived.
Yoshi stood in the center of the grey room, his slate-gray eyes wide with shock as he was buffeted by the boy's agony.
"You're breaking, aren't you?" Yoshi whispered, though his own voice was trembling.