….
"Young Dabi..." All Might managed, his voice thick, rough, and trembling. "You... you truly... did what I never could."
"Cut the melodrama, All Might." Dabi muttered flatly, though the razor edge in his voice lacked any real bite. "The kid is the one who reached him. Of course, I handled the hard part of extermination."
Beside him, Gran Torino gave a quiet nod and roughly wiped at his eyes with the back of his glove, his lips trembling as he stared up at the sunlit sky.
The villain that had murdered his dearest friend, Nana Shimura, had been defeated.
"You're every bit as stubborn as that kid who first knocked on my door, Dabi." Gran Torino rasped, a rough laugh breaking through his strained voice.
"Yeah, yeah. Save the eulogy for someone who's actually dead, old man." Dabi muttered dismissively, a faintest smirk pulling at his mouth.
A few paces behind them, half-hidden in the staging shadows, Endeavor stood rigid.
The Flame Hero's eyes were dull, hollow, and utterly dead as he stared at the eldest son he had once driven into fire and ruin.
Dabi's gaze passed over him for less than a second without lingering, treating the Number Two Hero as little more than an irrelevant man.
He didn't have time for a failed man when he had a family waiting for him.
"Stain is getting his ass kicked the second I find him!" a sharp, furious voice suddenly snapped from the medical cordon. "I clearly told that red scarf idiot to make sure his boss didn't go diving out of hospital windows again! What part of 'stay in bed' sounds like 'go fight a national calamity' to you morons?!"
Dabi stopped dead in his tracks.
Emerging from the staging tent with an exhausted nurse hovering helplessly at her side was Rumi Usagiyama.
She was wrapped in layers of medical gauze, limping with an uneven stride.
Her white hair was a wild, messy tangle, her long rabbit ears pinned flat against her head in irritation.
"Ma'am! Please, your stitches!" the poor nurse pleaded, waving a clipboard frantically. "You're supposed to be in recovery!"
"Shut it! I am fine! I will break his legs myself!" Rumi barked back.
The sarcastic mask Dabi had worn throughout the battle dissolved instantly.
He didn't make a witty comeback or mock her temper.
Closing the distance in three long strides, Dabi pulled her into his chest and wrapped his arms tightly around her waist in a desperate yet gentle embrace, careful not to put pressure on her bruised ribs.
Rumi let out a soft, breathy gasp.
The violent fury in her posture completely collapsed the second her face hit the crook of his neck, inhaling the familiar scent.
Her arms came up, locking fiercely around his shoulders as she buried her face into his coat. Around them, the frantic bustle of the staging ground ground to a halt, softening into a warm glow.
"Awwww!" Mina Ashido squealed, hopping up and down while clutching Uraraka's shoulders. "That is the most romantic thing I've ever seen in my entire life!"
"I-Is it okay for them to just hug like that in front of all these news cameras?!" Kirishima stammered, his cheeks turning bright red as he scratched his cheek. "Man... but that's so cool! He really came straight back to her!"
"P-Please maintain some decorum in public!" Iida flushed behind his glasses. "Though... as an instructor, ensuring the well being of his partner is an admirable display of character!"
"Shut up, four-eyes!" Bakugo barked, though his arms were crossed and a small, begrudging smirk was tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Take a picture, extras! It lasts longer!"
Shoto stood a few steps away, the faint chill on his hands finally melting into a smile as he watched his brother hold the person who kept him tethered to the world.
Beside him, Midoriya wiped a fresh stream of happy tears from his freckled face, sniffing loudly into his sleeve.
Rumi growled into Dabi's chest, though her ears twitched bright pink and she didn't loosen her grip by a single millimeter.
Dabi chuckled quietly, pulling her closer.
Slowly, Class 1-A, the arriving Pro Heroes, the relieved police squads, and the medical staff formed a loose, protective circle around them, their cheers echoing under the clear morning sky.
Battered, scarred, and exhausted, they stood together in the quiet warmth of a dawn they had fought so hard to reach.
….
Through the high-magnification scope integrated into her Quirk, Lady Nagant watched the fortress of the Hero Public Safety Commission cut into the morning horizon.
It was a monument of glass, marble, and deceit.
For decades, it had presented itself to the public as the shining beacon of justice and order, but Nagant knew every subterranean corridor beneath the executive floors.
She knew the incinerators used to burn classified execution orders and the cells where young children had been stripped of their names and forged into disposable government assassins.
Now, the grand fortress stood completely naked to the world.
Every elite Pro Hero under the Commission's direct leash had been mobilized across the nation, ready to face any unforeseen situation, from containing fallout from the Nomu strikes and securing prison transports to managing the disaster zone in Kamino.
Inside the towering administrative complex, the staff had devolved into pure chaos, swamped by a frantic storm of emergency calls from government ministries and international agencies demanding answers about Dabi's televised victory.
With the upper ranks absent, the perimeter was left in the hands of low tier private security contractors and automated exterior sentry guns that possessed neither the range nor the instinct to track her.
A dangerous smirk pulled at Nagant's chapped lips.
Her thumb clicked against her forearm, chambering a high velocity armor piercing round directly into the internal rifling of her flesh.
'You took your sweet time holding down the fort.' she thought, leveling her crosshairs toward the top floor executive suites. 'Don't take too long catching up. I am going to make sure they know their sins have finally come due.'
Nagant stepped off the edge of the steel beam.
A suppressed recoil burst detonated beneath her elbow, launching her across the open morning sky as she closed the final five kilometers to tear down her old masters from within.
….
Dabi stood anchored in the quiet warmth of Rumi's embrace.
He was relieved that the immediate crisis was over, the students were alive, the Nomu were neutralized, and the Villain that had haunted the country for a century had been reduced to ash.
Yet, as Dabi's tired turquoise eyes drifted over the cheering crowd, a sharp reality began settling into his thoughts.
'I messed up the timeline completely.'
Taking out the primary mastermind and incinerating All For One with his own hands had solved the immediate disaster, but it had derailed the natural trajectory of this world.
In the original course of events, the widespread destruction and the agonizingly slow awakening of society had forced Hero culture to reckon with its own rot.
Shigaraki's uncontrolled rampage had torn off the hypocritical mask of the system, forcing reform through bloody catastrophe.
Dabi believed genuine, lasting change could be achieved without burning the entire nation to the ground, but doing it cleanly demanded time, pressure, and effort.
And because he had eradicated the threat ahead of schedule, the rot remained festering beneath the surface.
He had no choice now.
If he wanted a stable future, he would have to roll up his sleeves and plunge his hands right into the filthy gutter himself.
He had always intended to take things slowly, easing into retirement, watching the kids grow up, and eventually leaving the administrative and political headaches to someone like Nezu, Hawks, or Aizawa while he quietly returned to his family.
'First things first….' Dabi calculated coldly in his head. 'Before I can dump the workload and walk away, I have to deal with the Hero Public Safety Commission. Nagant must be at their doorstep by now, and those bureaucratic bastards need to be dismantled before they try to pull something funny.'
Right as the dangerous thought crossed his mind, a sudden twitch disrupted the quiet hug.
Rumi's ears suddenly stiffened, rotating slightly on top of her head as her acute senses picked up the shifts in his pulse.
She didn't let go of his waist, but her head tilted back, her crimson eyes narrowing in suspicion.
"Hey."
Rumi muttered against his chest, her voice dropping into that dangerous, no nonsense grow–
"I can literally feel your heartbeat speeding up, Patchwork. Don't you dare tell me you're already scheming to run off and break something else before we even get home."
….
The first rays of the morning sun broke over the horizon of Kamino Ward.
A few hundred meters away, leaning against the side of an armored transport, Dabi's reformation unit was silently sweating bullets.
Stain stood his eyes darting cautiously toward the medical cordon where Rumi was currently chewing out the air.
Beside him, Spinner anxiously adjusted his sword hilt, while Gentle Criminal was hastily straightening his cravat with visibly shaking fingers.
Jin Bubaigawara was practically vibrating in place, clutching his head. "She looks furious! She looks completely calm! We're gonna die! We're totally fine! Boss Lady is gonna kick our teeth in for letting Boss jump through that hospital window! It was all my fault! It was definitely Twice's fault!"
"If she asks." Stain rasped, his voice dropping to a low, without breaking his deadpan stare. "Twice was the one in charge of the extraction perimeter."
"Hey! Traitor! That's completely fair!" Twice squeaked.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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