Pillars of Hope 4
Mission 4: It was just so-so
Disclaimer: Do not own anything.
Time travel stories have always been a mainstay of fanfiction. We all love stories about heroes. Stories about time-travel are especially great because we get to read how our beloved heroes go back in time and fixed their mistakes. Naturally they cause waves and bump into obstacles that they haven't met before, but this isn't that kind of story. This is a story about a side character, who inadvertently goes back in time, and how he chooses to deal with the new set of cards he has been dealt.
****PoH****
Song list
Rage of Dust – Spyair
****PoH****
"Are you sure this is the place?" Kaminari squinted dubiously between the man next to him and the plain door in a nondescript corner of the maze underground. By his estimation, this room was actually quite some distance from the heavy equipment he had detected in his earlier scan of the compound.
The man in the rumpled yukata mutely nodded as he turned the door knob of the worn-out door to reveal a painfully plain room. A single glance was more than enough to take in the bare walls, the practically untouched toys scattered all over the room and the centerpiece, a wide but undecorated bed and its occupant.
Kaminari's heart twisted at the little girl clutching her comforter like a shield as she stared at him and Tengai from behind a curtain of straggly white hair. He had already requested that Tengai remove his mask to make things slightly easier for all of them, but it didn't look like it had helped very much. Her wide eyes and dilated pupils shot between the two males standing outside her door, rife with fear, doubt, confusion and resignation that shouldn't have been on a Hero's face, much less a six-year-old.
This wasn't Flashback. This was Eri.
Like with Deku, it was clear that Flashback had not come back to the past either.
So…. he was here alone.
Whatever his feelings were on that particular topic, it wasn't the place to let them influence him right now.
He had a job to do.
As calm as he could, Kaminari stepped in to the room as he slowly unclipped his steel mask and hooked it onto his utility belt, a tuft of black, thunderbolt shaped hair hung down over his forehead while the rest of his blond hair stayed spiked back. He kept his hands up and visible, careful not to make any sudden moves, and spoke as gentle as he could manage without croaking, "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."
If he noticed Tengai going pale and doing a perfectly serviceable imitation of a goldfish at the realization that a kid that had barely even begun puberty had kicked both his and Rappa's asses one after the other, he did not let it show.
That said, his words didn't seem to reassure the young girl, if anything, it scared her even more as she burrowed even deeper into her comforter nest, and Kaminari's heart fell even further.
He had known Flashback for almost his entire Hero career, from when she had been first introduced to class 1-A in their first year at UA as Eraser Head's ward, and from there, he had had the pleasure of watching her grow into a confident, if naïve, young lady, a good friend, a gentle listener and a trusted colleague despite not even being twenty yet.
Granted, he hadn't been particularly close or friendly to her until much later on, but….
Watching her now, being so terrified of him, was causing his mounting anger to bubble and froth within his chest, but he let none of it show as he gently knelt a few feet from the bed.
"It's okay, I'm not here to hurt you." He repeated again as soothingly as he could, "I'm here to take you away from here to somewhere no one can hurt you again."
Crimson eyes dilated even further as she assessed him from a small hole in the blankets, as if wondering if she could trust him.
Kaminari didn't do or say anything else. He honestly didn't have a lot of experience in this department. He was a combat Hero, not a Rescue one. He specialized in breaking things, not fixing them. Most of the time, his… method of rescue involved knocking out the rescuee to shut them up and keep them from panicking or breaking something else so he could transport them somewhere safe before someone, usually Midnight, Creati or Uravity, bonked him up the head for being a "vulgar brute", but his instincts were telling him that he needed Flashback to make the next move herself right now.
Wait.
Fuck.
Midnight.
He made a mental note to deal with that mess later as the silence stretched between the two non-adults in the room until a quiet chirp came out from the blankets, "Re-Really?"
"Yep." Kaminari said as blandly as he could, "There are a lot of people out there who want you to be happy. They want to be your friends too."
"Fr-friends?"
"Friends." Kaminari promised.
A small white-haired girl in a rumpled hospital gown, the kind that were tied from the back for ease of access, tentatively emerged from the pile of blankets and comforters and slowly shuffled a little closer, her eyes were watering and filled with tentative hope, "Really?" She whispered again.
"I promise. You'll never come back here." Kaminari said thickly as he slowly leaned forward to gingerly pick the girl up.
She was incredibly light, and he could feel her bones sticking out underneath that hospital gown. She was light enough for him to carry with just one arm. Feeling her shiver in his grasp, Kaminari unwound his red scarf with his free hand and wrapped it around Eri.
Once he was done, he couldn't help but smile at the inquisitive look coming from the red eyed Eri-burrito at the headphones around his neck that had previously been hidden under his scarf, so he took it off and plopped it onto Eri's head and turned it on.
Her eyes went wide again as music suddenly began playing, blocking out everything else.
Her head began to adorably bob in time with the music.
Standing up, Kaminari sighed with some relief as he clipped his mask back onto his face and turned back to Tengai.
"Let's go."
This time, he didn't bother to hide his anger.
Tengai shivered as the eyes of the steel mask sparked to life with an angry amber light.
Amazingly, or rather, unsurprisingly, depending on who you asked, the journey back out of the maze and compound went completely smooth without any interruption whatsoever. Which was why Kaminari stopped Tengai just before both of them left the main compound.
"Before we go through, there's something I want to talk to you about."
Tengai, expecting the worst, immediately took one step away from Kaminari, prompting the blond hero to roll his eyes, "I'm not going to kill you." He snarked dryly, "I'm not Overhaul."
"O-Okay?"
Sensing Eri's confusion and worry at their sudden halt, Kaminari stroked her back gently and nodded reassuringly to her before he looked back at Tengai.
"Unfortunately, your boss, and the rest of your colleagues are probably going to be waiting for us behind this door." Kaminari rapped one knuckle on the wooden doors, "So I'm going to give you two options."
Tengai eyed him shrewdly, "What are they?"
"I won't ask you to fight them." Kaminari replied bluntly, "But I don't really trust you not to attack me from the back either. So option 1 involves me knocking you out for now and keeping Eri with me while I tangle with them." He shrugged as Tengai blanched and continued, "I don't like this option either, but I'm not strong enough to keep you in check while I deal with all them at the same time. Plus, I can't do anything fancy if Eri's with me and I'd really prefer if Eri didn't go anywhere that jackass within the next decade."
"What's option 2?"
"You help me take care of Eri and double back into the compound where its safer until I'm done with your friends." Kaminari jerked one thumb back the way they had come from.
Tengai scrunched his brows in confusion, "I don't get it. You just said you don't trust me. That option doesn't stop me from just taking her and joining them afterwards to stab you in the back anyway." He pointed out.
"Yeah, I know." Kaminari nodded, "You've been cooperative so far, and your partner wasn't such a bad person either, violent tendencies aside, and even that much is actually pretty normal for a lot of Heroes. So I'm gambling on the fact that neither of you really like being Overhaul's peons. This is your chance to get away from that, and based on your actions so far, I'm willing to give you that chance." The blond elaborated simply, "As long as you don't join the fight, I'm willing to close a blind eye and let you leave after all this."
Hekiji Tengai snorted, "You talk as if you can beat everyone out there AND Overhaul at the same time. There's probably at least fifty yakuza that stay here, not counting the remaining members of the Eight Bullets and Overhaul himself."
"I can." Kaminari stated simply, "The only question here is how far I have to shove my foot up their collective asses before I'm done"
Tengai blinked at the blunt statement, "Alright…." He said slowly, "Assuming you succeed, you won't report me to the police? You'll let me walk away?"
"If you wish. I'll even give you some insurance." Kaminari smiled from behind the mask as he retrieved a couple of round objects from his utility belt and passed it to the pepper haired man.
Tengai stared at the items the masked man had given him, "This is…. A lemon?"
It looked like one, it smelt like one and it felt like one.
It was a goddamned lemon.
What the hell was he supposed to do with these?
"Technically those are shock grenades."
"…"
First it was chopsticks, and now it was a lemon.
Did this guy have some sort of weird fetish for stuff found in a kitchen or something?
The incredulous look on Tengai's face now said that he currently doubting Kaminari's earlier assertions and his sanity in general.
Kaminari rolled his eyes again, because he sure as hell wasn't about to explain a joke from the future.
Plus, he was kinda offended.
It hadn't been easy to find a bunch of high-capacity capacitors and jury rig them with impact detonators, so he only had five of those blasted things.
"Look, there's a point I gave you those shock grenades. If you really think I'm about to lose, just throw it at a wall and stun yourself and Eri so that Overhaul won't think you were helping me. No one else knows what happened down there but you, me and Eri so he won't suspect you of anything if he finds you knocked out."
Technically, that wasn't quite true. The compound was littered with security cameras and the maze had been even more so, so he was pretty sure that Overhaul already knew everything that gone on down there. Fortunately, Tengai either didn't know about the security cameras, or hadn't thought about them yet considering the situation, so this was really just a symbolic gesture more than anything.
Besides, it wouldn't be necessary because he could beat this bunch by himself perfectly fine.
Even if good ol' All -For-One showed up, he still had 90% confidence of escaping together with Eri and Tengai if it came to it. Of course, he would also end up spending the next month or so in the hospital because his higher-level skills simply weren't meant to be used in a not-properly-trained 14-year-old body without doing serious injury to it (and it was one of the first things he had checked once he had come back, so he knew what he was talking about) but that was beside the point.
"Of course, if you decide afterwards that being one of the good guys isn't so bad after all, I don't mind vouching for you. I'm sure my employer wouldn't mind having your help."
Tengai's shoulders slumped, "I'm just a monk. I never wanted to be a yakuza or a villain."
"We can deal with your daddy issues later." Tengai glared at him venomously, but Kaminari ploughed on, "How are we doing this?"
"Gimme the girl." Tengai muttered sulphurously.
After a quick explanation and repeated reassurance to Eri, Kaminari passed the red burrito bundle to Tengai and watched the monk in the rumpled yukata hurriedly shuffle back in the direction they had come from before he turned back to the door.
He took a moment to take a couple of deep breaths before he pushed open the doors and stepped out into the night.
Tengai hadn't been too far off.
A brief head count told him that there were at least sixty people in the compound, blocking every conceivable exit. Standing slightly ahead of the other mooks were the guys in bird masks, with one of them standing ahead of the others.
That guy in the gaudy looking fur-lined jacket, Kaminari guessed, was Overhaul himself, aka the Final Boss, which meant that the bird masked retards behind him, were the remaining members of the Eight Bullets, aka, his elite mooks.
Unknown to Kaminari, he had included Chronostasis in to the Eight Bullets as well, but as far as the blond was concerned, there really wasn't much of a difference. Besides, math wasn't his strong point.
"Before we start, are you sure you want to do this?" Kaminari suddenly asked in a very serious tone warped by the synthesizer in the mask's mouthpiece.
Everyone in that courtyard stared at the armored man in the odd steel mask.
He was the one being surrounded here, right?
Why was he talking as if he was the one who had them surrounded?
"Hear me out," Kaminari continued blandly, "All of you are yakuza. Some of you didn't have a choice. Some of you joined because you had nowhere else to go. Some of you were being hunted. But all of you were accepted here. Until AllMight appeared at least."
There was a pause for them to digest his words. Overhaul continued to stand there silently, hands in his pockets with a tilt of the head as if he was curious in what the armored man had to say, "After that, some of you stayed because you were loyal. I can't and won't fault that. Some of you stayed because you wanted to help cock face over there make yakuza something to respected again. Something to be feared again. Again, I can't and won't fault that even though I don't necessarily like the idea."
Overhaul on the other hand, almost wanted to chuckle.
It had been a long time since someone had called him something like that straight to his face and walk away in one piece.
He did not expect this encounter to go any differently.
"What I do disagree with, however, is your leader's methods."
There was some uncomfortable shifting in the crowd at those words.
Seeing that, Overhaul immediately took a step out when the armored blond suddenly pointed at him.
"You. Shut up. I wasn't talking to you."
Overhaul jerked back in surprise at the sudden and venomous shift in the man's tone.
He turned around and continued to talk to all the yakuza gathered there, shifting right back to serious and sincere without missing a single beat as if he hadn't just politely told Overhaul to fuck off for a minute, "Whether all of you here have Quirks or not, I'm pretty damn sure none of you were alive when quirks were still a rarity two hundred years ago. In other words, none you even know how the yakuza worked back then at the height of their supposed strength. Nonetheless, cock face over there still wants to get rid of all quirks, or rather, all quirks other than those he has personally chosen."
He wasn't actually 100% sure about that part, it was mostly what he had inferred it from his conversations over the years with Deku and Flashback, and boy did that girl have a lot of trauma to talk about, but judging by the reactions he was getting, he probably hadn't landed that far off the mark.
"Is that what you really want? To be feared and respected by performing human experiments? By torturing children? That's not being a yakuza anymore. That's just being a straight up Villain."
Kaminari finished and observed the micro-expressions he could detect from the fidgeting crowd. A good half of them were now openly uncomfortable, their eyes were minutely shifting between him, Overhaul and the main gate, as if weighing whether it was worth it to stay and follow Overhaul's orders or make a break for it. The remaining ones seemed to be split between incredulousness and outright aggression or self-righteous anger.
"So I ask you again. Do you really want to do this? Do you really want to keep walking down this road?"
As he stood there waiting for a response, he saw Overhaul tear off his gloves and squat in one smooth movement, so when a multiple pillar of earth ending with spikes suddenly shot out of the ground, Kaminari did not flinch at all. He simply tilted his head and allowed one of the spikes to graze his armor-clad cheek, setting off spray of sparks while the others missed him completely.
Overhaul had obviously been expecting him to dodge.
Instead, he continued to ignore Overhaul, "Is this your response?" He gestured at the spikes.
"You won't get anything out of them." The guy in the fur lined jacket and bird mask interjected, his voice was silky smooth with confidence and amusement, "They know their place."
Kaminari only sighed. He knew of course trying to get them to change their minds while Overhaul was present was going to be futile, but at least, now he could say that he had given them a chance.
One chance.
No more, no less.
He finally looked directly at Overhaul.
Play Rage of Dust – Spyair
"Overhaul." He acknowledged.
Kaminari could distantly hear the anger unconsciously flooding his voice again despite the voice synthesizer.
"Stranger." Overhaul returned the acknowledgement with a wry smile even if it was hidden behind the bird mask, "Any more flowery words to share with us?"
"I do actually." Kaminari grinned humorlessly, "I really didn't want to deal with you right now. Honestly, if you weren't here, I would have been perfectly happy to let someone else kick your ass."
His right hand slowly lifted up to point straight at the man in the bird mask's face and the primary reason for all of Eri's suffering. Overhaul's eyes narrowed at the offensive gesture.
"But since you're here, just sit down for a bit."
The pointer finger folded back in and the middle finger rose instead.
"I'll play with you last."
He crossed his arms and jerked them back, causing two flat pieces of crudely sharpened metal to slide out from under the bracer like two rough and basic katars.
Kaminari pivoted in place and slashed away the spikes blocking his path and backstepped as a whole bunch of men practically leapt on him. A single glance assessed all of them before he directly ignored all of the weaker blows that wouldn't affect his footwork in favor for the largest fist headed towards him. A calm palm strike to the wrist redirected the fist before one blade sliced out swiftly, searing his opponent's guts and frying his nervous system in the process while he felt a series of glancing blows land on his armor before they promptly keeled over as well. Ignoring them, he spun in place and smashed an armored boot into another yakuza that had been creeping up behind him. The goon flew back into a bunch of other yakuza and the latent electricity already in his body promptly electrified them as well.
Idiots.
They already knew he had an Electricity based Quirk didn't they?
He knew Rappa and Tengai had already been informed before they had even met him.
Security cameras and all that jazz.
It went without saying that that he was wearing metal armor for a reason.
They knew that right?
His Quirk, super charged from draining an entire district's worth of electricity earlier, was now cycling throughout his body at full speed, anyone even touching him at this point had a better than decent chance of getting a heart-attack inducing jolt of electricity.
There was a reason why he had bothered to give these guys a warning when he hadn't bothered with the previous ones. Those he was perfectly capable of putting down non-lethally. But as much as he had trained since he came back, he had had only three days to do so, and despite the strength and speed he had regained, he was still nowhere near strong or fast enough to fight this many people simultaneously and ensure that no one died in the process. Not to mention, his body was still only physically fourteen.
There was only so much he could do with that at this point.
Hearing a loud whistling sound from behind him, Kaminari somersaulted up high to avoid a series of spikes, or needles of some sort that were being shot at him. Below him, the yakuza watched in a daze as the armored bland flamboyantly spun around in mid air before landing in a crouch, directly in the middle of another batch of mooks.
Kaminari didn't even bother to aim, he simply spun in a tornado of blades and electricity, slicing everyone around him in one go, the heat from his blades cauterized their wounds instantly before the electric fried their innards.
Off to the side, the yakuza men who had ranged weapons and Quirks, were clustered and impatiently waiting for an opening to get a good shot in without hitting their comrades in the jumble of melee fighters in the process, heard several quiet thuds below them.
They looked down to find three…. Lemons (?) rolling around at their feet innocuously.
The men staring at the lemons didn't even have enough time to process what the hell they were looking at before said lemons promptly exploded into a wave of cracking purple electricity that immediately put another ten men down.
Meanwhile Kaminari continued to ignore a few more blows, focusing on dealing with any attacks that would disrupt his movement when the katar in his right hand was suddenly yanked off target by something invisible, and more dangerously, throwing off his entire rhythm when there was a thundering from the shaking ground that became louder and louder by the microsecond.
Kaminari reacted by twitching his pointer finger.
But nothing happened.
The blond was actually left dumbfounded and standing there like an idiot for a good second before a dump truck made of flesh and muscle rammed straight into his side, sending him flying with enough force to crash into a tree, straight through it and into the wall behind it while the human truck that had hit him was left kneeling on the ground, gasping and spasming at the electricity snaking through him from that brief moment of contact, but quite out of the fight yet.
The electric user exhaled with a whoosh as all the air was knocked straight out of him. He could also feel a shard of something sharp digging into his side and Kaminari blurrily reckoned that his armor had probably crumpled quite a bit from the sheer force of that hit.
Alright, so it appeared that he did have some leftover phantom muscle memory left over from the future.
They just didn't show up unless he was too busy to think about it.
Power Loader wasn't going to be pleased.
His cycling Quirk told him that nothing was broken though, everything still sounded fine…. more or less fine, and that was all he needed to know as he rolled away from another wave of sharp spikes when he suddenly lost his balance and fell over again. Confused, he shook his legs, but they refused to cooperate with him.
Blinking wildly, Kaminari hurled himself to the side to avoid a white spike (was that hair?) from behind and rolled until he found himself propped up against the wall, and used it to steady himself and scramble to his shaky feet.
His palms were sweaty, his knees wobbled, his arms suddenly felt like lead blocks and suddenly, he had a craving for snacks of some sort, preferably spaghetti, for some odd reason.
It felt like that one time he and his friends had gone on a weeklong blender after a particularly grueling assignment. Only, he wasn't actually drunk. He was still thinking fine, his Quirk was still working perfectly, but the numb and fluffy feeling basically killed his balance and affected his motor control.
It was a rather odd feeling, honestly.
Was it wrong to kinda like this? Kaminari absentmindedly mused to himself as amber eyes scanned the area and zeroed in on another one of the masked whackos that hadn't joined into the battle yet. Instead, the nutso was guzzling down on a huge bottle of what smelt like alcohol, and somehow cackling as he did so.
How the guy wasn't drowning on the spot was probably a minor medical miracle of some kind.
Kaminari sighed as he revised his estimates.
It was still within his margin of error, but if he wanted to sleep in his own bed tonight, bruises notwithstanding, then he would have to spice things up a bit.
"Nott baddd. Youuuu guys are better than I expected." Kaminari finally said into the brief lull of combat.
Fuck, he was even slurring.
The yakuza mooks still remaining stared at him with wariness and a healthy dose of fear; the electric fucker had carved his way straight through more than thirty men before three of the Eight Bullets, Chronostasis and Overhaul had to do a combo with each other before it finally stopped his rampage.
And he was still. Standing.
"You guys donnne with your warrrm up yet?" Kaminari frowned and slurred drunkenly again, his legs visibly wobbling as he leaned on the wall, "Do you need to rest a biiiit? Cossss I'm boutta kick it up a notch."
And he still sounded like he was the one who had them surrounded.
Two clangs resounded as the katars hit the ground and the blond reached behind him and slowly pulled out the two rods that had been strapped to his back instead.
"Nooo? Alllrayyttt!"
The pair of rather ridiculous homemade stun batons looked significantly less dangerous than the metal blades the armored man had been wielding, and some of the men found themselves heaving a quiet breath of relief.
Then rods they had originally thought was a stun baton or something, lit up with an audible 'fwwoomm' and all the yakuza there found themselves staring down at the business end of two gods-bedamned lightsabers.
….. Suddenly, the katars didn't sound like a bad thing overall.
Glowing amber eyes scanned the remaining members of the Eight Precepts from behind the cold steel mask as the tension in the atmosphere around them built up to a crescendo when the glowing hot blades were suddenly ripped out of his grip again and shot across the courtyard to the short guy with the rat like face while the guy in the white poncho begun to sprint at him the moment the lightsabers had left his hand.
Surprised, but far from caught off guard this time, Kaminari flicked his ring finger and the plasma cutters suddenly began spinning madly mid-flight while he withdrew a number of needles and flung them at White Poncho.
The guy let himself fall over backwards, allowing the needles fly over his head harmlessly while he slid closer to the armored intruder when two white spikes shot out from under the hood in a blur.
Kaminari swerved aside drunkenly to avoid the sneak attack before one armored hand shot out mid swerve, caught the spikes from the side and yanked. Hard.
There was a loud yelp from the man in the white poncho and Kaminari offhandedly realized that the spikes actually WERE hair. Strangely elastic hair, but hair nonetheless. Not that that stopped him from promptly backhanding the plague mask. The man squawked in pain and stumbled back from the impact before he was yanked back into range again by his hair, right into a fierce armored knee strike to the face that broke more than a few important things, before Kaminari pulled him into another kick to the gut before pushing off the wall the other way around into a spinning hook kick that hit him so hard that he was sent him flying into the opposite wall all the way on the other side of the courtyard, leaving a tuft of white hair still in Kaminari's armored fist.
The attacks had been so fast and smooth that the others hadn't even had a chance to use their Quirks or help the guy in the white poncho before he was down for the count, leaving the others wondering if the armored blond's drunkenness had all been an act or something.
On the other side of the courtyard, the skinny rat like man whose name Kaminari didn't know had received a fistful of super-heated plasma from the wildly spinning lightsaber instead of the hilt he had expected and 4 fingers hit the ground with a series of meaty thuds as the blade of super-heated plasma kept in shape by a powerful electromagnetic field sliced clean through flesh and bone alike with a quick splash of blood before the incredible heat cauterized the open wounds near instantly, probably cooking a good chunk of the guy's hand in the process, not that the blond hero particularly cared at this point. The other plasma cutter went spinning wildly, missing his neck by a hair's breadth.
As the skinny man's horrified screams reverberated around them, Kaminari casually lifted up one hand as the remaining Bullets watched dumbfounded when the spinning plasma cutters automatically flew back to him. Catching them by the hilt with a single finger on each hand, the blond twirled it around a as much as he could manage with the alcohol Quirk affecting him, adding to the momentum and spinning it even faster until they were practically two discs made of blinding light and then with another flick of the wrist, he sent the circles of fiery death whistling out again.
Yelps of shock and surprise were added to Toya's anguished cries as everyone took evasive action, dodging or throwing themselves to the ground to avoid death by decapitation. However not all were fast enough.
There was a loud squeal as Kaminari's primary target, the tall lanky guy with the alcohol Quirk and his largest threat amongst this bunch of idiots in Kaminari's professional opinion, suddenly found himself unarmed.
Literally.
Deidoro's eyes rolled up in to his head and his terrified squeal petered off into a confused rattle as he fainted dead away from the pain and shock.
With the tall lanky guy down, the numb and fluffy feeling immediately disappeared and Kaminari could stand properly again. He subtly twitched his ring fingers once more.
The flaming discs of death roared across the front yard, shearing off limbs and body parts, crossing once, before boomeranging straight back to Kaminari as if by magic, where it spun around him once before landing back in his palms with a satisfying "thwap".
The remnants of Overhaul's goons stared at the steel masked man with a mixture of shock, apprehension, anger and a rather healthy dollop of fear as three of their strongest members had been taken out in an instant.
And the guy hadn't even taken a single step away from the wall yet.
A shadow loomed up from beside him and Kaminari's eyes closed resignedly as he suddenly heard something wooshing through the air.
There was literally only one person left who could sneak on him, because Overhaul wasn't the hugging type, so it wasn't difficult to guess who was the culprit.
He dropped the plasma cutters onto the ground, his control over his Quirk simply wasn't good enough yet to cycle it through his body in order to protect it and maintain his plasma cutters at the same time, before his arms shot up in a guard from both sides as two huge gorilla arms closed around him and began to squeeze, "Let's see how long you can last! Those blades of yours are useless from this close! I'll suck the life straight out of you! Hahahahaha!"
Behind his mask, Kaminari rolled his eyes despite the fact that he could literally feel his stamina decreasing by the second even as the surprisingly sneaky giant's embrace began to get stronger and stronger, clearly this guy's Quirk let him sap them out his opponent, but required physical contact to activate.
He was big and strong, but that was about it. His speed left much that be desired and he couldn't think of a single worse Quirk matchup for this guy other than him.
Put simply, "Suck on this, bitch."
The blond didn't even bother for finesse this time. He lit up like a firework and poured enough power into the big guy to barbecue his brains.
As Rikiya, the last of the Eight Bullets standing, slowly collapsed like a rotten shack, the steel masked man tilted his head in a curiously birdlike gesture, "Who's next?"
As one, every single yakuza left standing shared a look full of camaraderie, understanding and agreement before they turned around and started sprinting, crawling, limping or hopping for the closest exit.
Kaminari picked up the plasma cutters again and pointed one straight at the only person left: Overhaul.
"As promised. You're last."
Overhaul stared back expressionlessly.
Inwardly, he was honest enough to admit to himself his chances did not look good.
He wasn't an idiot.
The blond was incredibly fast and strong for someone so short.
So much so, that Overhaul was starting to have some very serious doubts that the blond's Quirk was electric based rather than something like a body enhancement.
He could already tell that his earth spikes were far too slow to get the armored man. By the time he reached down for the floor, the man who been keeping an eye on him the entire time would have already moved and closed the distance.
He himself wasn't fast enough to get in close and touch him.
And even if he did, the other man was far too skilled to give him that kind of opening without punishing him for it.
His only option left was…. He covertly glanced at the closest body to him. Luckily it was Deidoro, who was also the only one whose Quirk seemed to affect the armored man in any significant way.
Less luckily, Deidoro's unconscious body was five steps away.
There were roughly twenty steps between him and the electric fucker.
Bracing himself, Overhaul had barely put one foot out when he heard the now-familiar, and terrifying, whistle of a spinning plasma cutter slicing through the air.
There was only one, so the blond was still holding the other.
In almost slow motion, he took another step, when he felt the heat of the plasma cutter already searing his back rather than his sides as he had expected.
In a brief flash of realization, Overhaul knew that the blond was aiming for his neck.
The electric fucker was going for a kill shot rather than for his limbs like he had been doing for everyone else.
Overhaul threw himself to the ground and the plasma cutter whistled straight above his head barely a moment later. There were now barely two steps between him and Deidoro, but now that he was on the ground, he was moving even slower and he could already hear the clanking footsteps of the blond's cracked armor.
The good news was that that plasma cutter was now out of the picture and it would need to make a turn before it became a threat again.
The bad news was that if he continued to try for Deidoro, he would encounter the boomeranging blade from the front again.
Gambling that the blond would not realize his ploy, Overhaul continued to feint another step, only to spin around at the last moment and lunge at the blond with both hands.
That was when he realized that the blond had already guessed what was going to happen, because he was already in mid overhead strike.
In that split second, Overhaul grit his teeth and promptly decided to sacrifice one arm, he could fix it anyway, rather than his neck and….
"Got you."
Overhaul gasped in pain as he felt, in torturingly slow motion, an impossibly searing heat suddenly pierced him from the back out of nowhere.
How? Overhaul wanted to roar as the heat sheared his left arm straight off, that had been way too fast for the blade to boomerang back, before the plasma cutter from the front cut off his right arm and Overhaul decided it was better to stop thinking. It hurt too much.
The returning plasma cutter slapped back straight into the blond's empty hand, before Kaminari used it to finish off the combo with a V shape slice that sheared off Overhaul's legs at the knees with disturbing ease.
Time returned to normal speed as Overhaul fell to the ground in mind numbing, agonizing pain, armless and legless, when an armored foot placed itself on his throat.
"You know…. I really thought you would be more difficult to fight. Everyone's been hyping you up quite a bit ever since I heard about you," The armored man's electronically altered voice warbled conversationally, "But honestly?"
He stylishly spun the plasma cutter once before burying it straight in Overhaul's gut, searing a good chunk of his intestines to ash and severing his spine from the waist down.
"It was just so-so."
And everything went dark for Overhaul.
****PoH****