Chapter Text
The tea had gone cold twenty minutes ago.
Izuku hadn't noticed. Neither had Inko. She sat across the low table from him, both hands wrapped around a mug she wasn't drinking from either, her eyes fixed on her son like she was afraid he'd blink out of existence if she looked away. Somewhere at the bottom of the bond, Feo Ul dozed, wings dim, small, spent, and hadn't stirred once since the fight ended. Izuku kept still around the quiet weight of them without quite realizing he was doing it.
"...and then the doors came down," he said. His voice had dropped. "The whole building shook. Everyone stopped. Even the Nomu stopped." He turned the mug in slow circles between his palms. "And then All Might was just… there. Framed in the doorway at the top of the plaza, light behind him."
Inko's breath caught.
"He jumped down between us and the villains. The ground broke where he landed." Izuku's hands went still. "And then he said it. But he wasn't smiling, Mom." His brow furrowed as he reached for the word. "He was… scowling. Like I've never seen on him. And he said 'I AM HERE!'"
Inko nodded slowly.
She had seen a few of those fights over the years. The ones the networks only aired once, late, where All Might's grin was nowhere to be found and the Number One Hero looked less like a beacon and more like the last thing standing between a city and the end of it. It was a scary look. She had never once wanted to see it pointed anywhere near her son. She quickly changed the subject.
"So," she said, letting out a breath. "You all have Jobs now."
The word still made Izuku flinch a little.
"Yeah." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Feo Ul used a power we'd never seen them use before. Something big. I was… I was knocked out for it, so I didn't actually see it happen." He glanced toward the armchair. "But Ochako says it was crazy."
"It was so crazy—"
Ochako had been folded into the armchair this whole time, a blanket over her knees, so quiet Inko had nearly forgotten she was there. Now she shot bolt upright, eyes wide with the memory.
"Feo Ul got, like, thirty feet tall!" Her hands flew apart to show the scale, nearly launching the blanket off her lap. "This huge, glowing fairy, out of nowhere. And they had this enormous staff, and they just," she swung an imaginary weapon in a great arc, “smacked the Nomu with it. Tore the whole thing clean in half, sent it flying, whooooooosh!. And then they floated down to Izuku, really gentle, and started to… fade.”
She deflated a little at the end.
"Like they'd spent everything they had doing it."
Eijiro leaned in from where he sat cross-legged on the floor, plate of leftovers abandoned on the rug beside him.
"Yeah, but here's the thing," he said. "By that point we all had Jobs. When Feo Ul got big, there was this, I dunno, wave? Rolled right off them." He gestured outward with both hands. "Felt exactly like Izu's aether, that same warmth, and it just washed over all of us, and we changed." His grin split wide. "I got an axe!"
"I'm a Monk now," Katsuki said from the couch.
Inko turned.
He hadn't shifted from where he was sprawled, arms crossed, but for once there was something almost solemn in his face.
“Not like… so I’ve been training like one, like Feo told me, but Auntie Inko," he went on. "I know things now. In my hands. Stuff nobody ever taught me." He flexed one hand slowly, watching it like it belonged to somebody else. "I'm a Monk now."
Inko looked between them, a little dazed. "And… you two?" she asked, glancing from Ochako to Eijiro.
"Astrologian!" Ochako announced, and produced, from somewhere, a single glittering star card, turning it once between her fingers before it dissolved into light. "I can heal wounds, and do kick ass Gravity magic!"
"Warrior," Eijiro said, thumping a fist to his chest. "Big axe, big anger, don't fall down. It's the best."
"And I unlocked Ninja," Izuku added quietly. "During the fight. My fourth Job."
Inko's eyes widened a fraction at fourth but she didn't ask. Not yet. Instead she reached for the pot, drained what was left in her cup, and refilled it to the brim, the very picture of a woman bracing herself for the rest.
She wrapped both hands around the fresh cup.
"All right," she said. "So. What happened after All Might arrived?"
For a moment, none of them answered.
Then Izuku set his cold tea aside and looked down at his hands.
"Nothing," he said quietly. "We didn't do anything. We couldn't."
Inko's brow creased.
"Feo Ul was gone. My aether was just… empty. Scraped down to nothing, even that new energy, the Limit Break thing, gone. Ochako had spent everything holding us together, and Kacchan could barely stand up straight. Eijiro was the only one still standing, and only because Hardening kept him from taking as much damage, and even then, it was starting to fail..." He shook his head slowly. "By the time All Might got there, there was nothing left in any of us. He took one look and told us to get back."
"And we listened," Ochako said softly. Not ashamed. Just honest.
"So we watched." Izuku's jaw tightened. "That's all we could do. We just… watched."
***
"Stand down."
All Might didn't look back when he said it. His eyes never left the creature.
"You've done more than enough today. All of you." His voice had lost none of that low, scraping weight. "Get clear. I'll take it from here."
Izuku wanted to argue. Every instinct he had left screamed at him to move, to help, to do something.
His legs simply refused.
There was nothing left to give.
So he did the hardest thing he'd done all day.
He backed away.
Across the plaza, Shigaraki's hand crept back up to his throat.
"…Fine," he rasped. "Fine, fine, fine. This is what I wanted anyway." His fingers dug in. "Nomu."
The creature's head twitched toward him.
"He's finally here." A grin cracked open beneath the severed hand. "So do the one thing you were built to do! WHAT WE CREATED YOU FOR!"
His voice climbed to a shriek.
"KILL ALL MIGHT!"
The Nomu screamed and launched itself forward.
All Might met it head-on.
They collided in the center of the plaza with a sound like the sky tearing in half. The shockwave alone flattened what was left of the fountains and sent every loose stone skidding to the walls. Thirty feet away, Izuku felt it punch the breath out of his lungs.
All Might's fist buried itself in the Nomu's gut.
A blow like that should have ended anything.
The creature barely rocked.
Shock absorption, All Might understood at once, feeling the impact drain away into that black body like water into dry sand. So that's the trick.
The Nomu's counter came like a swung wrecking ball. He crossed his arms, took it on the forearms, and was still driven back a full meter, heels carving trenches through the concrete.
He had felt hits like that only a handful of times in his entire life.
But something else registered underneath it. The creature was already frayed. Its movements dragged half a beat slow. When his knuckles split its skin, the wound was slow to close, sluggish, reluctant. Whatever these children had done before he arrived, they had done plenty.
“MY STUDENTS! Your hard work has left me a gift!" he called, striking again at the beast's face. "One I intend to capitalize on with all my might!”
The Nomu surged again.
This time, All Might did not try to finish it in a single blow.
He simply began.
Absorption, he thought, and drove a punch into its ribs. Not nullification.
Another strike. Another.
Everything has a limit.
The blows came faster.
And I am going to find yours.
"DETROIT—"
His fist hammered the Nomu's jaw.
"SMASH!"
Its head snapped sideways, and this time it rocked, half a beat slow to swing back.
That was all All Might needed to see.
He dropped his weight, tucked his chin, and began to weave.
His whole upper body swung low—left, then right, then left again—a deep, rolling figure-eight that carried his shoulders through a pendulum arc no man his size had any business moving in. Back and forth. Faster. Building momentum out of the motion itself.
Then the hooks came.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Each one erupted out of the bottom of that weave, alternating, unbroken, hammering up into the Nomu from an angle that changed every half-second. There was no rhythm for the creature to read, no still instant it could brace against, only that relentless, rolling barrage, blow folding into blow folding into blow. Ribs. Jaw. Sternum. Jaw again.
Somewhere at the edge of the wreckage, through the ringing in his skull, Izuku's exhausted brain supplied the name on pure reflex.
Dempsey Roll.
Of course. Of course the strongest hero in the world had a boxer's answer. Of course he fought, at the very end of his limit, like something out of a hundred-year-old American fight reel, all weave and pressure and relentless forward momentum, refusing to ever let the bell ring. And the shock absorption couldn't keep up. The blows were landing too fast now, faster than the thing could swallow, faster than it could rebuild. Torn muscle tried to knit and was ripped open before it finished. A regrown rib shattered the instant it formed.
Across the plaza, Shigaraki's scratching turned frantic.
"No. No, no! It absorbs that, it's supposed to absorb that!" he cried, fingers scratching at the skin of his neck and jaw.
"Absorption isn't infinite!" All Might's voice filled the ruined dome, and every student in the building heard it. "It has a ceiling! And I! Am going! To break through it!"
The weave tightened. The hooks came harder.
"PLUS—"
A blow that split the floor beneath the Nomu's feet.
"ULTRAAAAAAA!"
The creature staggered.
For the first time, it staggered.
Steam roared off All Might's shoulders now, thick and white and endless. His time was gone, Izuku could see it, the tremor spreading through the great frame, the edges of the man thinning by the second, but he hauled one more fist back anyway. The last blow. The finisher. Everything he had left, loaded into a single swing.
His body chose that exact moment to fail him.
The arm simply… stopped. Locked halfway up. The enormous shape of him faltered, his spirit willing, but his body unable to keep up, and for one endless, horrible heartbeat All Might did not move at all, fist frozen in the air, feet planted, utterly still.
Spent. Out of time. Stuck.
And the Nomu, staggering, stumbling, dragging itself upright on ruined legs—
—leapt.
It threw itself forward at the one target it had been built to destroy, jaws stretched wide, arms flung open. And All Might couldn't lift his guard. Couldn't step back. Could only stand there, locked in place, steam pouring off him, as the thing made to kill him closed the last few feet between them.
Then, a flash of yellow light above and behind them, casting shadows.
Izuku knew that light. By now, everyone in their class did.
Melissa. Aegis Force.
It came with a CRACK like a thunderclap at ground level, Aegis Force detonating off the broken concrete as its owner hurled herself into the air. Izuku felt it in his teeth and in the soles of his feet.
She cleared the party in a single bound. Cleared All Might. Rose up over the ruined plaza wrapped head to heel in blazing gold lightning, hair streaming, already turning, already inverting at the peak of her arc, and came down. "APOGEE—"
One leg whipped up and over, her heel arcing across the top and falling toward the Nomu's lowered skull.
Toward the Nomu’s exposed brain.
That soft, glistening ridge of grey riding naked on top of the creature's head, the one part of it that nothing, in the entire brutal length of the fight, had managed to touch.
Melissa's heel found it. "HAMMER!!"
The axe kick came down like a dropped guillotine, every ounce of Aegis Force riding behind it.
There was a single wet, final, sickening crunch, and the Nomu's exposed brain burst.
Grey and black sprayed across the cratered plaza. The enormous body went slack in the very same instant, every straining muscle releasing at once, and the whole monstrous thing folded to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut clean through.
It did not get up.
It did not twitch.
It did not begin, slowly and horribly, to stitch itself back together.
It simply stopped.
Melissa landed in a low crouch beside the ruin of it, one fist to the ground, the white light of Full Shielding still crackling around her shoulders before it began, slowly, to bleed away.
For a long moment, the entire USJ was silent.
Across the plaza, Shigaraki stared at the corpse of his masterpiece.
And began, very quietly, to make a sound. From that distance, Izuku honestly couldn't tell whether it was laughing or screaming.
***
Back in the living room, Inko sat very still.
"Melissa," she repeated slowly. "Which one is Melissa? The loud one, who kept messaging you about your aether?"
"That's Mei," Izuku said quickly. "Melissa's the other one. Quieter. She's the one who keeps Mei from blowing up more stuff than she already does."
"She dropped out of the sky in her new move, Full Shielding," Ochako said, with the hushed reverence of someone recounting a miracle, "and kicked the Nomu's brain clean out of its skull. To save All Might.”
Inko pressed both hands flat to the table, steadying herself against the sudden tilt of the world.
"…And none of you thought to lead with that?"
"You wanted it in order," Katsuki pointed out.
"You're right. I did want it in order." Inko drew a slow, careful breath and reached, once more, for the teapot.
It was empty. She stared into it for a moment.
"So," she said. "The monster is dead. All Might is standing, barely. Melissa is a hero." She set the empty pot down with great deliberation. "And that terrible man is still in the building."
Four heads nodded.
"What," Inko asked, with the weary steel of a mother who has already survived one impossible afternoon and can feel the next one coming for her, "happened next?"
For a moment, Izuku just turned his cold mug in his hands.
"Then," he said, "everybody else showed up. All at once."
***
Shigaraki was already moving, that dry, hitching not-quite-laugh spilling out of him as he came off the plaza's far edge, one hand rising, four fingers spread, drifting toward the spent shape of All Might like he already knew nobody left standing could stop him. He was half right. None of them could. But the plaza had stopped belonging only to them. A sound like a glacier splitting tore across the facility and a wall of ice erupted from the ground between All Might and the villain. A jagged blue-white rampart that punched up out of the broken concrete and kept climbing, thick as a bank vault, frost boiling off its surface into the ruined air.
Shigaraki's outstretched hand slapped against it. Ice hissed and blackened where his fingers landed, crumbling to dust in a spreading, rotten circle, but there was so much of it. Meters thick. It decayed and decayed and did not break, and behind it All Might stood untouched.
At the mouth of the nearest stairway stood Shoto Todoroki, palm pressed flat to the ground. "Get away from him," he said.
Behind them, on her knees in the rubble, Ochako lifted her planisphere. It barely answered her. The constellation inside it flickered, guttered, very nearly went out, she was down to fumes, to the last few drops of aether she had left in her, but she forced it to turn anyway, teeth gritted, and dragged one final spell up out of the dark. Cool light spilled across the plaza. It wasn't the roaring star from before. This was smaller. Softer. A gentle, refreshing wash that settled over All Might and the exhausted students all at once, like the first clean breath after a fever finally breaks.
All Might's swaying steadied.
Just enough to stand tall.
"That's… all I've got," Ochako breathed, and swayed. Eijiro caught her shoulder before she could tip over.
And from the high ground at the plaza's rim came a different sound entirely.
A deep, heavy chunk of machinery working, then the deafening bang! oof said machinery firing.
Momo Yaoyorozu had not moved from behind her field gun the whole time. She reloaded it after her previous volley, and then waited, with a patience Izuku would think about for weeks afterward, for the single moment the mist villain's attention slipped.
The Nomu was dead. Todoroki's ice had thrown the plaza into an uproar. Kurogiri's portals were flickering open and shut everywhere at once, scrambling to pull the still conscious villains out of danger.
His attention slipped.
Momo fired.
The foam shell crossed the plaza in a blur and slammed dead-center into Shigaraki's chest.
It burst on impact, not into fire, but erupting outward in a dense, swelling mass that swallowed his torso, tore him off his feet, and pinned him thrashing to the cracked concrete beneath a hardening white mountain.
"KUROGIRI!"
The shriek cracked straight down the middle, and for just a second, under all the theatrics, Shigaraki's voice sounded younger. Smaller. More frightened than anything he'd said all day. "Get us out! Get us OUT, now!"
The mist answered.
A wound of purple-black split open across the plaza floor, yawning wide beneath the trapped villain. The foam. The rubble. Shigaraki himself.
All of it dropped into the dark and was gone.
The portal sealed shut behind them with a sound like a held breath finally let go.
And then, nothing.
No Nomu. No villains. No monologue.
Only smoke, and settling frost, and a plaza full of children who had somehow, impossibly, survived.
All Might let out a long breath.
"…It's over," he said, very quietly. Then, softer still, almost to himself: "You did it. Every one of you."
***
For a while, Inko didn't say anything at all.
She looked at the four of them, her son, cross-legged and hollow-eyed; the blonde who had been his oldest friend and first partner; the girl and the boy who had both captured her son’s heart. She reached for Izuku’s hand.
"You survived," she said. Her voice wobbled. "All of you walked out of there."
"We did." Izuku turned his hand to hold hers back. "Everybody in our class did. Every single one." He swallowed. "That's the part that matters."
Inko squeezed hard, and let herself simply believe that for a moment.
Then her gaze drifted, the way it so often did, to the empty air just past Izuku's shoulder, the spot where a certain small, glittering presence was usually hovering.
"And Feo Ul?" she asked, softer now. "Where are they, in all of this? Are they… all right?"
Izuku went still.
He reached inward, along the bond, the way he was still learning how to do—and found them exactly where they had been all afternoon. A small, warm weight. A faint flicker of wing. Present. Whole.
Just very, very tired.
"They're here," he said quietly, one hand drifting up to rest over his own heart before he quite meant it to. "I can feel them. They spent nearly everything they had, back at the USJ, so they're resting now. Way down deep, where it's quiet." A small, fond smile tugged at his mouth. "They'll be absolutely insufferable about it when they wake up."
Inko let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something wetter, and reached over to smooth his hair back from his forehead, the way she used to when he was small.
"Then let them rest," she murmured. "They've earned it." Her eyes moved around the room, over the Monk, the Astrologian, the Warrior, and her son, the whole impossible, exhausted lot of them. "You all have."
***
The bar was quiet, the way it only got after everything had gone wrong.
Kurogiri stood behind the counter, polishing a glass that did not need polishing. His golden eyes drifted now and then toward the young man wearing a groove into the floor.
Shigaraki Tomura had not stopped for twenty minutes.
"It isn't fair." He raked his nails down his neck, hard enough to leave welts. "You were there. You saw it. They cheated, Kurogiri. Every single one of them cheated."
Kurogiri said nothing. He had learned when nothing was the safest answer.
"The floating one just healed everybody. Poof. All that damage, gone, like it never happened. That's not a Quirk, that's a cheat code." Scratch. "And the green one. Shadows. Lightning. Swords out of the air. Pick a power. That's the rule. That's how it's always worked."
His voice began to climb.
"And the fairy. The giant glowing fairy. Where does that go on a registration form? What box do you check?" He spun and flung a hand at the empty room. "And then the girl who dropped out of nowhere and kicked my Nomu's brain out of its skull. My Nomu. It was engineered to be perfect! To kill a weakening All Might! It had shock absorption. It had everything." His breath hitched. "He wasn’t weakened at all!”
“Tomura Shigaraki, maybe it was defeated by whatever the students did. All Might did say they’d left him a gift,” Kurogiri said, hands still polishing the glass.
“Like that’s any better? All Might didn’t actually kill my Nomu, a pack of first-years took it apart like it was made of paper, because they all cheat, and nobody is stopping them? That's a million times worse!"
He sagged against the counter, chest heaving, fingers still twitching at his throat.
The television in the corner turned itself on.
Shigaraki went still.
No channel. No picture. Only a soft grey static, and out of it, a voice. Calm. Warm. Patient.
"Tomura. You're upset."
Some of the venom drained out of him at once, replaced by something smaller and more careful. "Sensei. The Nomu, it was supposed to—"
"I saw." A pause, unhurried. "You lost. That's all right. Losing teaches you things winning never will." The static shifted. "You learned today that this new power does not obey the rules you know. It heals what should not heal. It cuts what should not cut. It unmakes things built to be unbreakable."
"It's cheating," Shigaraki muttered.
"It's an opportunity." Now there was a thread of amusement in it. "You are not the only one who felt what woke in that building today. Power like that leaves a mark. It calls to things."
Shigaraki frowned. "What things?"
"I have taken the liberty," All For One said, "of inviting a guest."
The static held a moment longer. Then the television clicked off on its own, and the bar went dark.
Not ordinary dark. The lights did not fail. The dark arrived, welling up out of the corners of the room, drinking the neon and the bottle-glow until only the counter remained, a small island in a sea of black.
Kurogiri's hand tightened on the glass.
In the center of the room, the darkness folded. It did not tear the way his portals tore. It simply gathered, drawing inward, taking shape with an obscene and unhurried grace, and where there had been nothing at all there was now a figure.
Tall. Draped head to foot in robes the color of a moonless night, their edges bleeding a faint, sickly gold. A deep hood hid where a head should be. And where a face should have been there was only a sigil, a single intricate glyph burning deep arterial red, hovering in the shadow of the hood, turning slowly, watching without eyes.
For a long moment, nobody spoke.
Then the figure tipped its hood the smallest fraction, and when it spoke the voice was neither man's nor woman's, neither young nor old. It was vast. It was serene. It filled the little bar the way the ocean fills a shell.
"How curious," she said. "So small a world, and so starved. So little aether left breathing in it. And yet here you all are."
Shigaraki's nails had stopped moving. For the first time in hours he had forgotten his own throat.
"Who," he managed, "are you?"
"I have worn a great many names." The red sigil brightened as she considered him. "The last of them was Altima. You may use it, if you like. Names cost me nothing now."
"You died," Kurogiri said. Not quite a question.
"I was killed." The correction was mild, but the sigil flared a shade hotter as she made it. "On a world called Eorzea. Not so very long ago, as I once counted such things. Six months, by the turning of this world's sun."
Something almost like offense colored the vast, calm voice.
"A mortal did it. A soldier in borrowed armor who named himself the Shadowhunter. Gaius Baelsar." She let the name sit in the air like a splinter. "I walked between the stars while his forebears still feared the dark. And he cut me down in an afternoon, and thought that was the end of me."
"Was it not?" Kurogiri asked softly.
"I expected oblivion. I found the void instead. Endless. Cold. Patient. Content to hold me until the last light in creation guttered out." The glyph pulsed, slow as a heartbeat. "It did not get the chance. I had drifted only months when something reached down into all that nothing and touched me."
She drifted half a step closer, robes pooling soundlessly across the floor.
"A thread. A warmth. Aether, old and familiar, the breath of a world that still draws breath. It called to me across the dark, and I followed it here. To this starved little place, where the aether has only begun to bloom." The sigil turned and fixed on Shigaraki. "And to you."
Silence.
Shigaraki looked at the burning sigil. At the robes. At the dark still pooled around the edges of his bar.
"Sensei sent you," he said slowly.
"Your teacher opened a door. I was already standing at the threshold." Something in the serene voice sharpened to a fine, cold point. "The power that humiliated you today, child. The magic you called cheating. I knew it before your kind learned to strike flint from stone. I know what it is. I know where it comes from." A pause. "And I know how to take it apart."
Shigaraki's ruined mouth began, very slowly, to smile.