The door of the shed did not stay shut.
In the fractured reality of the "Box," Yoshi Abara opened his eyes. The world was no longer a blur of golden light and righteous fury, it was a grid of distances, a map of gaps and proximity that only he could read. The pain in his head from All Might's headbutt was a dull, thudding rhythm, but he didn't let it settle. He reached into the air, pinched a fold of space, and split the distance.
In the blink of an eye, he was gone. He reappeared atop the jagged remains of a five-story office building two blocks behind All Might.
Yoshi stood tall, smoothing the silk of his black dress shirt. He didn't have time to linger on the memory of the shed, or the silk sister, or the Man of Iron. Those were ghosts for a quieter night. Right now, he was piloting a body that wasn't his, facing a god who was very much alive.
"You cannot win, ghost," a voice echoed in the attic of his heart. It was Nana Shimura, her presence like a flare of heat in the cold dark. "Toshinori will not stop. He is the Pillar. You are just the rot. He will cast you out."
Yoshi shut her out, pushing her voice into a corner of the subconscious where the Golden Child lay curled in a ball. "He's a Pillar," Yoshi whispered to the wind, his black eyes tracking the golden blur below. "But even pillars are held together by space. And space is mine."
He watched All Might turn. The Number One Hero's movements were incredible, but to Yoshi's dilated perception, they were beginning to look like the frantic buzzing of a bee trapped in a glass jar. Predictable. Linear.
All Might leaped. The air exploded as he closed the gap in a single, thunderous bound.
Yoshi didn't move until the golden fist was inches from his chest. He raised his arm, not to block, but to touch the air. He expanded the distance in a micro-second, creating a cushion of space so vast that the punch, despite its world-shattering force, spent its energy before it ever reached his skin. The shockwave still hit, but Yoshi utilized the momentum, shrinking the distance behind him to fly backward, landing gracefully on the roof of a parked car.
He needed to try something new. The "Ripple" was a blunt instrument, he needed a scalpel. He had spent so long in the dark thinking about how things were put together. He knew that matter was a lie. Everything was just atoms held together by the glue of distance.
If you remove the distance, the glue fails.
All Might landed in front of him, the asphalt cratering. He threw a powerful left hook, a move designed to pin Yoshi against the car.
Yoshi didn't dodge. He leaned into the strike, his fingers tracing a thin, invisible line through the air where All Might's bicep was passing.
"Split."
It wasn't a cut. There was no resistance, no spray of blood, no sound of tearing muscle. Yoshi simply commanded the space along that thin line to cease touching itself. Two neighbouring regions of reality were suddenly separated by a void of missing distance.
All Might's left arm didn't tear off, it simply lost its continuity. The forearm and hand continued their trajectory, sailing harmlessly past Yoshi's head, while the stump of the bicep remained attached to the hero's shoulder. The separation was surgically clean, a metaphysical divorce of flesh.
All Might froze. His blue eyes widened, not in pain, for the nerves had been split so cleanly they hadn't yet registered the trauma, but in pure, unadulterated shock. Yoshi was equally surprised, he hadn't expected the "Golden Child's" body to channel the technique so smoothly.
"What...?" All Might gasped.
But the shock lasted only a heartbeat. The hero's survival instinct, honed over decades of combat, took over. He didn't look at the missing limb. He swung his remaining right arm with a speed that exceeded anything he had shown before.
Yoshi flipped backward, the wind of the punch shearing the buttons off his shirt. He landed on the hood of the car and kicked off, expanding the distance of his stride to launch a heavy boot into All Might's chest. The hero flew backward, crashing through the storefront of the same clothes shop Yoshi had visited moments ago.
Yoshi landed, his black eyes scanning the wreckage. He saw two abandoned cars flanking the entrance. He reached out with both hands.
"Ripple: Compaction."
He shrank the distance between the two vehicles to zero. The cars slammed together like cymbals, with All Might caught in the middle. The screech of grinding metal was deafening.
But then, the metal began to glow.
A roar, more animalistic than human, erupted from the wreckage. The cars were blown apart, shredded into scrap metal by a sudden, violent burst of golden pressure.
All Might emerged. But he wasn't the man Yoshi had been fighting.
His eyes were no longer blue, they were stark white. His posture was hunched, his muscles twitching and rippling beneath his skin like a bag of snakes. The stump of his left arm was hissing, steam rising from the wound as the flesh began to knit itself back together. It wasn't the fluid regeneration of a mutant, it was a forced, jagged reconstruction, refusing to acknowledge the missing space.
"One arm is enough," All Might growled, his voice a guttural, manic rasp.
He didn't sprint, he vanished.
Yoshi felt the impact before he saw the movement. A slap, delivered with the force of a hurricane, sent him spiralling through the air. He smashed through a concrete wall, then another, his body a ragdoll in the wake of a beast.
He tumbled into the ruins of a library, gasping for breath. Something is wrong, Yoshi thought, pushing a fallen bookshelf off his legs. He's not aware anymore. He's gone into a trance. Primal instinct. But that regeneration... that shouldn't be possible.
He watched All Might enter the building. The hero didn't walk, he prowled. His movements were jagged, his body shifting and adapting to every micro-fracture in his own bones.
Yoshi realized the nature of the beast. All Might must have had a quirk, but digging through Midoriya's memory he was certain that he said he didn't. So if he did have one Yoshi believed he just didn't know.
Meaning the quirk wasn't a thinking man's quirk. It was a physical response to force. It locked his body into whatever state was necessary to survive the last blow. If he was cut, he became a thing that could not be cut. If he was broken, he became a thing that could not be broken.
It was Hercules against Artoria. The Unstoppable Force against the Invisible Blade.
They collided in the center of the library. It became a blur of violent, high-speed exchanges. Yoshi used his smaller frame to flip around the golden giant, delivering elbows and knees enhanced by distance-expansion. Each hit landed with the sound of a tectonic plate shifting, but All Might didn't flinch. He only got faster. Every time Yoshi hit him, All Might's body adapted to the force, becoming denser, more resilient, and more lethal.
Yoshi spun in the air, his fingers tracing another line. "Split!"
He caught All Might's leading leg. Again, the limb fell away in a clean, bloodless separation. All Might plummeted to the ground, but even as he fell, his body was already hissing. The leg didn't just reattach, the space itself seemed to be forced back into alignment by the hero's sheer, stubborn existence. He stood back up on the regenerated limb before Yoshi had even landed.
"He heals at the same pace... or," Yoshi whispered, his black eyes narrowing. "It's not healing. It's a reset."
Yoshi went in for a shattering punch, expanding the distance at the point of impact, the same move that had levelled Bakugo.
All Might didn't move. The punch landed squarely on his jaw, a blow that should have decapitated a normal man. All Might's head didn't even snap back. He took the force, his body absorbing it, adapting to the "Distance Punch" in real-time.
All Might countered with a simple, straight jab. Yoshi tried to expand the distance to protect himself, but All Might's fist moved quicker than the expansion.
The punch caught Yoshi in the stomach, sending him flying backward through a spinning ventilation turbine. He hit the ground, rolling, his mind racing at the speed of light.
I see it now, Yoshi thought, spitting out a mouthful of blood. His adaptability is reactive. It responds to force. If I hit him with a hammer, he becomes an anvil. If I hit him with a sword, he becomes a shield. But my Split... my Split doesn't use force. It uses logic. It uses the removal of space.
All Might roared, a sound that shook the very glass in the windows of the Box. He was a force of nature now, a golden god of instinct.
Yoshi stood up, his face a mask of cold determination. He needed to speed it up. He needed to overwhelm the reset.
They blurred together again, a chaotic dance of destruction. They tore through a city block in seconds. A skyscraper groaned and collapsed behind them as they traded blows in the air. Yoshi was using his environment, shrinking the distance between falling debris and All Might's head, creating a rain of concrete that the hero simply shattered with his aura.
Yoshi snapped his fingers.
The sound produced a sharp, localized vibration. Yoshi reached out and caught that vibration, expanding it in a focused cone toward All Might.
"Ripple: Burst."
The air screamed. All Might's eardrums burst instantly, blood trickling from his ears. His entire body rumbled, his internal organs vibrating at a frequency that should have turned them to jelly.
All Might stumbled, his white eyes flickering. But then, the hissing began again. His body adapted to the vibration, his density shifting to dampen the frequency. Within seconds, the "Sonic Rupture" was doing nothing but ruffling his hair.
Force won't work, Yoshi realized. Even high-frequency force. He is the ultimate survivor.
"But you're still a man," Yoshi said, dodging a blow that levelled the building behind him. "And a man needs to be in one place to function."
Yoshi came up with a final, desperate gambit.
He flickered through space, appearing upside down in the air above All Might. The hero, trapped in his beast-like state, looked up, his white eyes empty of everything but the hunt.
Yoshi snapped his fingers again. A distraction. A sound for the beast to follow.
As All Might lunged upward, his hand outstretched to crush Yoshi's skull, Yoshi activated his final technique. He didn't target All Might's body. He targeted the space surrounding him.
"Singularity."
Yoshi clenched his fist. The space around All Might began to fold inward. It wasn't a black hole, it was a spatial collapse. The air, the light, and the distance itself were compressed into a single, localized point.
Because the "Singularity" didn't pull the body as a whole object, different parts of All Might were caught at slightly different spatial depths. His right arm, his left leg, and his head were cleanly detached as their shared space collapsed.
There was no blood. No tearing of flesh.
All Might's limbs and torso remained floating in a region of distorted, shimmering geometry, the "Wrong Space." In this pocket of reality, gravity didn't exist, and orientation was a myth. All Might's white eyes were still open, his mouth still open in a silent roar, but he was no longer a coherent being. He was a collection of displaced parts, existing in a place where his "Adaptability" had nothing to fight against. There was no force to adapt to, only the absence of a 'where.'
Yoshi dropped to the ground, his knees buckling. The Golden Child's body was screaming in protest, the strain of the Singularity nearly tearing Izuku's own muscles apart.
He watched as the floating limbs of the Number One Hero slowly drifted, suspended in the shimmering distortion of the Wrong Space. All Might was still alive, but he was effectively erased from the battlefield.
Yoshi backed up, a slow, triumphant smile spreading across his face. He wiped a smear of blood from his lip, his black eyes shining with a dark, satisfied light.
"So," Yoshi whispered, his voice echoing in the silent ruins. "That's the Number One. The Pillar. The strongest man alive. Tough son of a bitch."
All Might wasn't dead, when the space corrected itself his body parts would simply float back to itself, as long as they are not too far away.
He let out a short, mocking laugh. He had done it. He had taken the Golden Child's vessel and used it to dismantle the greatest hero the world had ever known. He was the Shadow that had swallowed the sun.
But then, the smile died.
Yoshi's face suddenly twitched. A violent, agonizing spasm racked his body. He gasped, his hands flying to his head as a wave of foreign, crushing emotion flooded his mind.
Yoshi's expression shifted. The cold, apathetic mask of the ghost shattered. His features contorted into a look of profound, soul-shattering grief. His eyes widened, filling with tears that he was slowly beginning to understand were his.
Then his voice came out in a strangled, horrified sob.
"No..."