The floors of the underground base were separated by larger than normal amounts of space. As the result, they had walked up seven flights of stairs before they arrived on the fourth lowest floor of the complex. The Hunter stopped at the entrance to the floor; he peered through the small glass panel which gave vision into the corridor beyond. He didn't notice anyone outside so he tried to open the door. When it didn't open, he tried putting actual force behind it but no matter how much he pushed or pulled against it, it didn't budge.
"They probably welded the door shut. If they knew the monsters were down there, their first act would have been to cut off elevator access to those floors and then seal up the staircase." Said OCHAKO, mildly amused at the Hunter struggles.
It was then that they became aware of alarms going off in the corridor beyond the door.
"I imagine the rest of your friends are trying to fight their way to the lower floors as we speak. Now would be our best chance to break out and cause some real damage. Besides, if the door is welded shut then that precludes any chance of stealth anyway, so if you wouldn't mind..." he said gesturing to the door.
OCHAKO grinned and floated over to the door, she put one hand on the door and shoved it with a massive force of gravity. The door itself actually stayed intact, instead, the door frame was ripped out of its concrete housing and smashed into the far wall, leaving it embedded in it. The noise, of course, had been tremendous and already people were poking heads out of doors and patrols were running to the scene.
OCHAKO floated through the hole into the corridor, looking around. She could see several people looking out of doorways towards where the noise had come from, upon seeing her though they either fled wholesale away from her or slammed their doors shut.
"They probably think I'm one of the monsters from below," she thought amusedly.
Then in a sudden burst of movement, she glided up to a surprised guard that had just rounded a corner, liquid fire trailing from his fingertips. She grabbed a wrist in each hand and crushed each into shards. The liquid fire petered out and his hands were rendered useless, the guard screamed and tried to collapse but OCHAKO held him up by his tactical vest.
"Where is your leader?" she commanded simply after his screaming had subsided enough.
The guard looked at her in terror, his mouth moving but no sound coming out.
"Answer or I break your legs next."
The guard managed to stammer out, "Up one level in an operating room, she's operating on something left behind by the League last I heard. She wanted to get it out of the base before the heroes breached the floor."
OCHAKO cocked her head in interest. "How would she get it out if the heroes have already taken the upper floors?"
"The- There are warp pads on that floor," he said quickly, eager to give his interrogator anything she wanted.
OCHAKO turned up her lip in disgust, betrayal at the first sign of opposition. They truly were the scum of the earth, fully deserving of their fate.
"Thank you," said OCHAKO before reaching up, grabbing the side of his head and slamming him into the wall, killing him instantly.
She turned away from the body and started to make her way back towards the Hunter who had apparently run into several guards, their groaning or unconscious bodies scattered about. She ignored them as she approached.
"Their leader is up to one level in some kind of operating room. I think they might have found a Nomu that was on ICE and are trying to revive it," she said.
The Hunter merely nodded and made his way to the staircase.
They got up the stairs with no problem, and when the Hunter went to push open the door he suddenly dove out of the way as the door exploded. Immediately after,a second RPG missile came bursting out of the cloud of dust and debris right at OCHAKO. She merely slid to the side and the missile missed her by millimeters, instead impacting the wall behind her. The explosion and impact washed over her but did nothing. So, she merely glided out of the smoke and dust into the hallway. The Hunter had apparently divedthrough the doorway to avoid the explosion and was currently being set upon by some kind of praying mantis villain with mechanized limbs and another shooting darts of green glass at him from some kind of wrist-embedded launcher.
She noticed back behind the squad, therewere several people that looked tolooked likenon-combatants. Likely techs, researchers, or other maintenance personnel. They all ran towards a door at the far end of the hallway which was wide open. Unfortunately, she couldn't see what was inside due to the mass of fleeing people. Noting the door for later she turned her attention back to the oncoming squad when something hit her in the side with enough force to cause her to careen sideways.
Her armor took the blow easily, so she turned and saw a small squad of villains bearing down on her, one having just punched her with an arm that seemed to be half machine. She watched in fascination as his extended arm cocked back into some kind of machine piston grafted into his arm. He went for another explosive punch with his other arm with doing the same with his legs letting him close the distance in a shockingly short span of time. The arm and fist exploded towards her face and she was forced to duck as it speared through the air where her head had been a second earlier. OCHAKO dashed forward and wrapped one hand around his throat and crushed it, his spine snapping like a twig. He collapsed to the ground and she looked up to see the rest of the squad similarly augmented by machine pieces grafted into their bodies.
It was like something out of a sci-fi movie as they unleashed a variety of technological attacks at her. One-shot lasers out of mechanical eyes, another sported a spear and shield constructed of light, another fired miniature missiles at her from shoulder-mounted launchers, and the one who looked like the leader had fingers that transformed into mini guns and were shooting sonic blasts at her from their backline.
She was forced to evade the sonic blasts as her gravity armor wouldn't be much use against it and had to give ground as the one with the shield and spear prevented her from closing in on the ranged attackers. She glanced behind her and saw the Hunter contending with a small group of people all of whom wielded a variety of weapons all constructed of geometric patterns of light. OCHAKO turned her focus back to her combatants and rushed the shield-bearer at blinding speed. She collided into the shield and despite feeling electricity arcing from it into her body she kept pushing. Her momentum carried them both down the hallway and collided with the laser eyes and missile shoulder villains. Their leader managed to dodge by a hairsbreadth, and she ended up speeding past him as she pushed all three of the other villains down the hallway.
She felt her left arm being cooked by the extreme amounts of electricity arcing over her gravity armor and so she threw all her power behind her momentum. There was another second of blistering pain as the electricity started to arc over her face, then it all crashed to a halt as they all impacted the far wall. There was a horrific noise of crunching bone and squelching of blood as they were crushed against the far wall, the two behind the shield-bearer either dying or being rendered unconscious from the high-velocity impact.
She drifted back away from the shield, deflected the feeble attack from the spear as the villain desperately tried to force her back, then knocked the shield aside. Now open to attack, at last, OCHAKO shot her right hand through his chest and into his heart, concentrating all her gravity armor around her arm and using it as a makeshift spear. As she pulled her arm free, however, a massive sonic blast crashed into her and she suffered an immediate concussion. The blast caused massive blunt force trauma through her entire body and for a few seconds she couldn't move as her brain became incapable of thought. She was dimly aware of the fact that there was no follow-up blast before she whited out.
She awoke a short bit later, disoriented and confused. She couldn't have been out for more than a minute at most and she was frankly surprised that she was alive. She slowly felt out her body, ensuring nothing was broken before attempting to move. She slowly flexed her body and then she slowly sat up and looked down the hallway. She saw the Hunter duking it out with two villains. One wielded twin whips of red light while the villain with sonic finger guns tried repeatedly to hit him. She watched in fascination as the Hunter weaved through the storm of attack, slowly closing in on the whip villain. When he had gotten close enough, he made a sudden flip forward, evading the next round of attack and on top of the whip villain, grabbing the villains head and driving it towards the ground as the villain fell backward. His head slammed into the ground and while he tried to move at first, he slumped backward unconscious.
Then the Hunter leapt away from the prone villain as a sonic blast hit the prone villain and he convulsed. He spun around and dashed at the villain, ducking, diving, and juking the villain's attacks until he had closed the distance. Then there was a flash of silver as the katana came up and down again. The villains screamed as his mechanical hands fell to the floor, red and black oily blood spilling everywhere. The Hunter wasted no time however and quickly beat the villain into unconsciousness. OCHAKO also noticed that the slow of oily blood had abruptly stopped, like some kind of valve had been turned.
OCHAKO got up fully and floated down the corridor towards the Hunter who was sporting several more injuries, though none were critical. As for herself, she would probably be sporting bruises all over her body in the coming days, but she could still move and fight which is all that mattered. As she approached the Hunter glanced at her and he seemed to relax a fraction, then he turned his attention to the unconscious villains scattered about.
OCHAKO noticed that most of the villains were either missing mechanical body parts or had multiple limbs clearly broken. Even if they did wake any time soon, none of them would be in a fit shape to fight, let alone move. The brutality of it gave her a perverse pleasure, though she noted that killing them would have been far more efficient, not to mention easier.
Ignoring the prone villains and the Hunter as he started to bind his wounds with bandages he had pulled out of one of the many pockets he had, she made her way towards the far door that others had fled through. She blew the door out of its frame when she got to it and drifted inside, ready for an ambush or surprise attack. When she got into the room though, she stopped short. In front of her was a giant apparatus with mechanical appendages attached to a giant dais in the middle of the room. It must have been roughly 25 feet in diameter, with various panels comprising the floor and multiple cones of light positioned above it as a ceiling which sent periodically bursts of energy cascading across the tips of them all. The appendages also had cones attached to the end, lines of energy went from the cone tips into the dais itself, but they were unmoving. Finally, there were two massive objects on the left and right of the dais that looked like giant MRI machines but instead of holes there two long cones protruding out of them and towards the dais. These cones were glowing strongly and pulsed at regular intervals, she could actually feel her hair standing on end due to all energy in the air.
She shook herself out of her stupor and examined the room more closely, in front of the dais and a small set of stairs leading to it, large black and yellow warning markings on the floor surrounded the entire dais and large white letters in front of the warning lines read,
"PLEASE KEEP 5FT/1.5M AWAY FROM TELEPORTER AT ALL TIMES. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS."
"So, this is a more advanced version of the teleporter system that sent me to the bottom floors. That must be how they've eliminated the need for supply shipments and kept this place under the radar for so long." She thought.
The alarms were still clanging and this was clearly not the operating room, so she backed out of the room and returned to the Hunter who had just finished binding his wounds.
"Anything?" he asked looking up at her.
"Apart from a more advanced version of the teleporter system that sent us to the bottom, nothing. The operating room must be further down the other end of the hallway." She replied, slipping past him and making her way down the hallway.
The Hunter fell into step beside her and before long they got to a T-junction with the rest of the hallway continuing straight to a right turn, and the immediate right-hand turn leading down to a dead end with multiple doors situated along the walls. They opted to go down the first right and explore the dead-end first.
A mere look into the closest rooms told them that they were in the right hallway. The first rooms to the left and right were filled with empty pods, some of them being clearly vacated recently with wet spots around their bases. The next set of rooms above them were all general operating rooms with a variety of ceiling-mounted surgical tools and dozens of tables to conduct said operations. These were all empty however and while it was clear some of the closest tables been used, most looked like they hadn't been touched in years.
Finally, they got to the end of the hallway where a set of large double doors were situated. Large letters above the doors read "AUTHORIZED PERSONEL ONLY".
They were about to run in when there was a massive boom from somewhere above them that shook the room. Then it was as if a miniature earthquake hit, the entire facility was shaken and the lights winked on and off as some colossal event took place above them. They pressed themselves to the walls and let the quaking pass. They heard another boom, more distant though, and then everything went still and quiet once more.
OCHAKO had a guess that Bakuguo had just arrived at the frontlines and felt some relief at the thought. Though unless he had used his ultimate move there was no way he could unleash an explosion strong enough to simulate an earthquake. Only slightly concerned she turned to look at the Hunter.
The two of them looked at each other and then silently moved to either side of the doors. OCHAKO counted down from three with her hand and then they burst through the doors at once, coming face to face with an empty room. It was only slightly anti-climactic, as instead of the leader of the base in the middle of some hideous experiment they were met with what was likely the most technologically advanced medical room on the planet.
The place was lined from floor to ceiling with technology that looked far too advanced to actually exist, with an operating table surrounded by dozens of mechanical arms, each sporting tools neither of them had ever seen before. Lights winked on and off all over and a variety of chirps, beeps, and other electronic noises could be heard emanating from all sorts of strange devices. The floor around the table also seemed to be able to rotate as large grooves and tracks were inlaid in a circle around the table with a small spot clearly meant to be stood in. Blood was also spattered about the table, on the floor, and coated several of the implements held by the many mechanical arms.
That alone was shocking, but what really drew their attention was behind the table at the back of the room. In a large pod, suspended in a sort of fluid, was a small girl. Dressed in a white hospital gown that ran down to her feet, she had long white hair to match. Her eyes were closed and she was wrapped all over in bandages with several parts of her body immobilized by braces. Despite the gown and wrapping though, it was clear that she was emaciated, she had little to no muscle and fat anywhere on her body. The pod she was in had a long screen running along one side that displayed various health information.
OCHAKO felt something tickling the back of her memory, some report she had read years ago, shortly before the war broke out. She had to focus hard to recall the memory, Ochako had read the report before OCHAKO had existed and so everything from before her birth was difficult to recall clearly. Try as she might though, she couldn't recall the information and it made her aware of the fact that Ochako was starting to wake. She had maybe a half hour at best before the seal reasserted itself.
"We need to get her out of that pod and transport her to Mufustafu. Do have any idea how to get her out without breaking it open?" She asked the Hunter without looking at him.
When there was no response, she turned to look at him her mouth open ready to chew him out, but the words died in her throat. The Hunter's eyes were narrowed to slits, a faint red light emanating from them and a look of such hate and anger twisting his face that he looked more monster than man. It was at that moment that she saw the Hunter for what he was, what he must look like to the villains he hunted. Hate and vengeance given human form, trained by one of the vilest and yet most skilled men in Japan. Deep within herself, OCHAKO felt a memory stir, Ochako's one encounter with Stain. Not yet hardened by war, and desensitized to the violence that she would soon encounter, she had trembled in fear at the sight of Stain and his psychotic fanaticism.
She watched as he approached the pod and went to monitor at the side of it. He fiddled with the control board for a few minutes before taking his Wakizashi and wedging it between the monitor and the pod and popped it out of its socket. The hate and rage seemed to dwindle as he worked, instead, it was like he had condensed it within himself. Like wood to fuel his body through rage and hate alone. She watched as he messed around with the wires for a bit before returning to the monitor and inputting a series of commands. The monitor went black, and there was a pause while they both waited for something to happen. Then they noticed the pod was draining the fluid and slowly the girl was lowered to the floor of the pod in a heap. Several cables that had been attached to her body disconnected and retracted to the ceiling of the pod. Then there was a popping hiss and the pods exterior folded outward, giving them access to the girl inside.
"Good, grab the girl, and let's see if we can't find someone to program the teleporter to get us out of here. I'll cover us as we move." Said OCHAKO.
She had no intention of leaving, she still had to execute the base's leader and rendezvous with the rest of her squad. The Hunter however was a liability, and she wanted to get him out of her way, as well as away from the authorities. She approved of his crusade against villains, and while he was a fool for not executing those he found, letting his crusade end here would be even more foolish.
The Hunter gave her a sidelong look, obviously debating whether to listen to her but his reason won out in the end and he bent down to scoop the girl up into his arms. At that moment, however, a glow started to emanate from the wall to their left and someone stepped into the room from the wall. Everyone froze, the figure in some sort of white and red power suit paused mid-stride, OCHAKO stared in astonishment, and the Hunter knelt on the ground, arms extended towards the girl.
Nothing happened for a pair of heartbeats, then everyone exploded into motion. OCHAKO launched herself towards the figure and without enough maneuvering room was forced to turn it into a shoulder charge. The Hunter started to get up from his kneeling position, grabbing up his katana and wakizashi from the ground as he did so. The figure meanwhile pulled the last of their foot from the wall and caused a body-sized oval shield of red light to appear between them and OCHAKO.
OCHAKO smashed into the barrier and while her impact had enough force to cause several cracks to appear on the barrier it didn't break. Then the shield flashed and a reverse ripple ran through it coalescing on where her shoulder was touching the barrier and then she felt a force shoot her backward. She was sent towards the far wall at double her previous speed and force and she caused a massive crater to form where she hit the wall. Fortunately, she hadn't had enough room to generate enough force to actually break something on the rebound. She took a few seconds to pull her right arm from the wall and sped back to the fight.
The Hunter meanwhile had closed the distance and was able to move around the shield, the figure, however, put one hand out and a line of gold light shot from a glowing point on her gauntleted hand to the Hunter at the speed of light. It hit him square in the forehead and then snapped like a string being pulled apart. The figure was evidently shocked by the event and the Hunter was able to easily thrust his katana straight through the extended hand with a spray of blood and sparks. He withdrew it quickly and went for a cut to the arm. However, another, smaller barrier the size of a large dinner plate materialized above her arm, deflecting the attack. However, this caused the body-sized barrier to vanish. Then the small arm shield changed shape instantly into a giant arm blade and the figure swung it across the Hunters chest causing a dangerous wound.
OCHAKO sped towards the figure, a punch aimed right at the figure's head. She was forced to re-orient herself sideways in the air mid-travel when the figure fired a burst of energy from her other hand. The blast missed her by inches and blasted apart a good portion of the wall behind her. She reached the figure and she slammed her first into the figure's helmet, sending the figure headfirst into the wall and getting lodged in it. OCHAKO reached out, grabbed the figure's legs, and pulled them out, then she spun around and threw the figure through the door frame and into the corridor beyond.
"GRAB THE GIRL AND GET TO THE TELEPORTER," OCHAKO yelled at the Hunter before blasting out of the room and into the corridor after the figure.
The Hunter ran to the pod and picked the girl up in his arms and turned towards the door, following OCHAKO at a fair distance while he waited for her to make an opening for him. The child's safety was far more important than slaking his desire to beat villains to near death.
OCHAKO got into the corridor to see the figure reach up and rip the now destroyed helmet from their head. Long blonde hair spilled out from the helmet back behind her as it was done up in a ponytail. Then seeing OCHAKO burst out of the room, she suddenly exploded into a ball of red light. Another barrier appeared between them and OCHAKO was forced to halt. When the ball of red light faded, the woman was clad head to toe in medieval battle armor made of red light with the power suit and everything else visible beneath it. The woman formed a buckler of red light on either arm and then she reached into her armor to the thighs of her power suit and two strange pistols popped out and into her hands. She brought the pistols up to face OCHAKO, she smirked, and the barrier between them vanished.
"Bring it hero bitch." she snarled.
OCHAKO just narrowed her eyes and launched herself at the foreign woman. The pistols discharged twin teardrop-shaped blasts of red energy. OCHAKO strafed to the right to avoid them but the blasts followed her and impacted her gravity armor causing her to crash into the wall instead. OCHAKO smacked a wall with one hand and sent a pulse through it. She ripped entire plates from the ceiling, walls, and floor and sent them flying at the woman was forced to erect a dome of red light and weathered the storm of debris as it came at her from all angles. OCHAKO launched herself forward and just pushed the dome of light backward, then she glided to the left used the debris and a well-placed kick to send the woman into one of the mass operating rooms. She dived into the room after the woman, giving the Hunter the room, he needed to make it to the teleporter.
The Hunter watched as Uravity pushed the woman out of the corridor and into an adjacent room. He took the opportunity to run down the hallway, being sure to hold the girl close to his chest and facing away from the room the ensuing fight was occurring. He got around the corner and saw the hallway was still deserted and ran to the teleporter room. He burst into the room just as some scientist or researcher was making his way to the teleporter dais. The Hunter dropped his katana and pulled out a small knife and threw it at the fleeing scientist's legs. It impaled his right leg, severing his Achilles tendon easily. The man fell to the ground screaming in pain and clutching his leg. The Hunter put the girl down beside the staircase and walked over to the man who was trying to crawl onto the pad. He reached down and grabbed the man by his collar and threw him back down the stairs. He walked down to the man who was screaming in pain and trying to get away from him. He went to the man and with one foot, flipped him onto his back and put his boot on his chest, keeping him in place.
"How do you change the destination of the teleporter?" he said to the helpless man.
When no answer was forthcoming immediately, he pulled out another knife and leaned down towards the man.
"Talk, or I swear I will sever every finger you have before I kill you." He snarled
The man was shaking in fear as he clutched his useless leg and the Hunter smelled the scent of urine.
"You use the console in the corner to input the coordinates, the system will handle the elevation and make sure you don't end up in a wall, please don't kill me I'm just a technician." he all but sobbed out through tears of fear.
He growled in annoyance, he didn't know the coordinates to the Mufustafu Hospital and his composure was fading with his loss of blood.
"Put in the coordinates for the Mufustafu Hospital, or it's the fingers," he growled out at the technician.
The technician, scared out of wits, was dragged across the floor to the console and dropped over it. He shakily brought up a map of Japan on the console and input the appropriate coordinates, then flipped several switches and pressed the activation button.
The teleporter flashed in a large arc of energy across it then after several moments, the arms started to move and positioned themselves close to the entry point of the teleporter dais. The Hunter grabbed the technician and with his vision now going blurry, choked him out from behind until he passed out and then let him drop to the floor. Then he reached down picked up the girl and dragged himself and the girl onto the dais. During this time, the arms with cones attached to the ends started to move around him, as if he were being scanned. Which he reasoned he probably was. When he finally stood on the dais properly, he put the girl down onto the dais, and an electronic female voice spoke up from hidden speakers.
"PLEASE DO NOT MOVE FROM YOUR CURRENT POSITION. TELEPORTATION IN 10 SECONDS, REMEMBER TO NOT HOLD YOUR BREATH OR TOUCH OTHER PEOPLE DURING TRANSITION. TRANSITION IN 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1."
There was a sudden burst of light and then they were gone. Only to materialize next to what could only be described as a miniature sun, minus the heat. The Hunter screamed in pain as the light was so bright it felt like needles had been shoved into his eyes. He fell to his knees, trying to shield himself as best he could from the light.
Then the light was gone as suddenly as it appeared. He groaned as he felt his chest wound pulse in pain from his attempt to shield his eyes by curling in on himself, and could only stare into the sky as he felt his consciousness fading. Despite his fading consciousness, he registered a sense of shock as a woman appeared in his vision, wearing a small bikini. Her skin was glowing with golden light and her shining amber eyes examined him and the child beside him over with a well-trained eye. She started talking to him but he just couldn't understand what she was saying. He tried to speak, but nothing came out and he finally faded into the darkness.
As OCHAKO rushed through the cloud of dust and debris into the room she took several more bolts of energy that came in from every angle. She used the mass of metal plating to block most of the blasts but several got through and she crashed into the ground. She instinctually dodged the follow-up attack coming and she shot herself to the right, sliding across the floor and dodging the literal energy beam that blasted into the ground a moment later. When the blast faded, she saw a molten crater full of slag burning, had she not dodged, it was likely she would have been incinerated.
"Well damn, if you aren't good. Guess you aren't an angel for nothing then, but that will make my crushing of you all the better." Said the woman from where she stood, her two pistols were glowing red and now with two glowing cables running from the pistols to the back of the power armor.
"Well, you're certainly well informed, but I'm afraid I can't say the same of you." Said OCHAKO. As she got up, she made sure to put one hand on the ground and run a pulse through the room, getting ready to bring the whole room down on top of the woman.
She wasn't sure what it was, but for some reason villains had some kind of condition where they just had to chime in with their thoughts. Not that she was complaining, it could actually be very informative at times, though it was usually just a giant waste of time.
The woman just smirked again and then the front of her power armor opened up like a flower and OCHAKO saw a pulsing red orb of some kind of energy before it flashed and a red wave shot out in all directions. It washed over her before she could move but nothing happened. She stood there, puzzled for a few moments before it clicked. She couldn't feel the room with her quirk anymore. She felt a small stab of panic and she immediately touched a nearby table, but nothing happened. It was like her quirk was being opposed by an equal and opposite force.
"Like it? I've been developing it for the better part of a day. I didn't know if I'd be fighting you or not but you were definitely in the top five of the list of 'most dangerous people in Japan.' A wave emitter that prevents you from using your quirk on anything other than your own body. I didn't have enough time to work that one out." Said the woman looking delighted at the fact her device worked.
"Now then, I'm Dr. Maeko. Iwas the sole apprentice to the esteemed Dr. Garaki and the greatest technological mind the world has ever seen since his passing. And I gotta say, I am looking forward to dissecting you and figuring out how you work inside and out." She said before aiming one of the pistols at OCHAKO and firing off a red beam of energy.
OCHAKO glided to the side, dodging by centimeters, and then shot at the woman. The woman ended the first laser and brought her second pistol to bear and fired off another beam. OCHAKO dodge this one by lowering herself to the ground and while scraping across it and tried grabbing the woman's legs. The woman just jumped into the air and hovered there as she started firing off salvo after salvo of red energy beams and random bursts of teardrop-shaped energy bolts that she couldn't avoid. that left molten slag in their wake whenever they hit something. The women's storm of energy was so quick that OCHAKO couldn't approach easily and was forced to fly around the room dodging what she could.
While she couldn't dodge the teardrop-shaped bolts of energy, she was able to figure out a pattern to the shots eventually. When her next window came, when the woman was switching from lasers to teardrop bolts, she struck. She had been building up her gravity the entire time she had been dodging and when her window came, she struck like lightning. She threw her entire quirk behind her and the room became a blur as she shot across the room like a bullet. She struck the woman clean the chest and continued forward. She pushed the woman through the wall, into the hallway then into the opposite set of rooms, and all the way to the opposite end. When she was about to collide with the villain into the opposite wall she stopped in mid-air and reversed direction. The woman smashed into the wall, leaving a large crater and a series of cracks in her armor at the back. The woman ripped herself out of the wall quickly but not fast enough to dodge as OCHAKO smashed into her feet first. She was sent into the wall again, and while she wasn't flattened like OCHAKO had been hoping, the armor had been shattered. OCHAKO moved in to unleash a series of attacks on the woman while her defenses were down but was met with a rapidly growing ball of red light. She swerved hard to the side and collided with a table before turning to look at the ball of the light.
The woman had a mad look in her eye as she held it out in front of her and grinned maniacally.
"You know what? Fuck you." The orb flashed and it started to contract.
OCHAKO had seen a quirk once that did something similar in the war and knew what was coming. The orb would contract and then detonate, how big the explosion would be OCHAKO didn't know but she was fairly certain she wouldn't be able to outrun it in such a confined space. She had three seconds at best remaining based on how fast it was contracting. She grimaced as she knew what she had to do. She ran towards the orb while holding her right hand away from her body and focused her remaining strength around it. The gravity grew so dense that it started to warp space around it, making looking directly at it difficult and impossible to see the hand as light itself was bent around the hand.
"Ultimate Move: Singularity" the thought thundered through her mind and she felt Ochako awaken fully, though not fully aware. The giant expenditure of power jumpstarting her awakening and she had only seconds remaining before she was inevitably pulled back into Ochako's psyche.
She ran forward, thrust her hand into the contracting orb, and then released all the pent-up gravitational force around her hand. It was as if reality split apart at the seams, tears in space formed, arcing forward into the orb and by extension into the woman. The explosion was caught up in the expanding vortex of gravity and shunted away from OCHAKO. The combined explosion and gravitational vortex ripped a portion of the interior of the mountain apart. When the smoke and dust settled, OCHAKO was left standing in an expanding crater away from her, strange swirls and holes were bored into the earth at random intervals and parts of the earth were burning from the explosion.
She stood staring out into the maw of destruction for a few moments before her legs gave out and she hit the ground face first. She hadn't had to use that move in over a year and while she couldn't feel it at the moment, she knew her entire right arm would be a torn-up mess. It was a dangerous skill, on par with Bakugo's ultimate move in both potential power and horrific drawbacks. It was something she had developed during the height of the war and had only had cause to use a handful of times. Every time she had used it though, she had passed out shortly thereafter, the strain it put on her body and mind was enormous and meant she could be easily killed while unconscious.
As she lay unable to move, she took a deep rattling breath and then promptly passed out.
