It was finally over. Izuku had been a pro for a few years now and the League of Villains was finally gone. It felt like the entire world was able to exhale the moment that the hero Deku raised his fist in victory while Shigaraki stayed on the ground. They had been fighting against the PLF for years and had slowly dismantled the massive organization. Defeating Shigaraki himself had been the final blow needed to end the fighting and completely dismantle their forces.
However, there were definitely some that questioned if Shigaraki's death was accidental or not. But in the end it didn't really matter, no one was going to judge him for ending the life of that psychopath.
But a part of him was scared that All for One still had something else planned. He needed to know for sure that it was over, that he had truly destroyed All for One's criminal empire. He talked it over with his girlfriend Ochako and she reluctantly agreed with his plan.
Which led him to where he was now, walking into Tartarus to confront the supervillian.
To say the least things didn't go as planned. The moment he stepped in the man spoke up.
"Here to gloat?"
That should have been the first sign that things were about to go very badly. For all of his many wrongs and evils, the villain always remained oddly professional.
"No, I came here to discuss-"
"Shut up. Shigaraki was like a son to me. I raised that boy and you killed him. Did you forget that I still have Search? That I could sense every bone you shattered, that I could do nothing but watch as my child had his skull crushed in for the sake of your 'justice'?"
"He had to be stopped-"
"SHUT UP. I think you may be the only person I've hated more than All Might, and I truly despise that man. But I think I know exactly what to do about this. You see, I've always enjoyed thinking about quirks and their combinations. And there is one that I believe is the worst fate I could inflict on a person. And after all these years, I think I found the perfect recipient." He gave a wicked smile. "After all, I might not be able to take your quirk, but I can certainly give you some new ones."
Izuku fell into a battle stance, unsure of what All for One was about to do. Alarms were already going off in regards to the man's threat, putting the prison on lockdown.
The crippled symbol of evil shot forward, breaking all of his restraints, causing bullets from the turrets above to rain down on his body. His fingers turned to black spears and pierced the ballistic glass before just barely cutting into Izuku's flesh.
He didn't feel pain like he expected, instead it felt similar to when he received One for All, an overwhelming surge of power entering his body.
Barely audible over the gunfire, he heard the man muttering, "Mass Multiplication, Gills, Full Belly, Hyper-regeneration."
As guards entered the room, black liquid poured from his mouth, wrapping around him. And when he could see again he was falling. He could barely think. His body felt unbelievably heavy and his neck seemed to be tearing itself apart.
He could see Tartarus on the horizon, it seemed like a small speck from here.
Then he hit the water.
Izuku couldn't really move as his body continued to morph and adjust to the new quirks. It took him another moment to process that he was rapidly sinking despite his weak attempts at treading water. He just felt so weak, keeping himself afloat seemed an impossible feat as the surface grew further and further away.
Wait. Why wasn't he drowning?
He definitely had been underwater long enough to be dying. He raised his hand to his neck and things started to make sense. All for One gave him gills. Presumably he also was responsible for him feeling so heavy.
It took all his effort just to slow his descent. He was not built for swimming. Maybe when he was younger, but a mix of puberty and One for All made him a large and bulky man who was very dense. He'd learned from experience that he needed a high percentage of One for All to keep up with any water based heroes like Froppy.
It was hard to get a good estimate for how much heavier he was, but he would guess it was a lot. It made him think of the weights that UA had that increased your body weight by 50%. Based on that he would guess he was at least five times heavier than usual, but it was a hard thing to estimate.
It was certainly a fascinating quirk. While it had its clear disadvantages like drowning, he could see how it could be advantageous in a fight if you had a style based around a high mass. If someone used a sumo wrestling style they would be very successful, especially since they would have the increased weight without the need for increased fat reserves.
Then he realized that he'd gotten a lot deeper while thinking about quirks. That wasn't good. Well, if he wasn't drowning, and the quirk 'Full Belly' implied he wouldn't starve, then he would just have to wait until he reached the bottom, then he could walk back.
Then he realized two very major problems.
Which way was back to Japan? He definitely wasn't facing the same way he was when falling, so he wasn't sure which way he would need to go in order to get home.
There was a very very large trench directly underneath him. It was still very far down, but there didn't seem to be a great way to avoid it since it was in fact, very large. He could only see one edge of the trench in the distance, while on the other side of him he couldn't even see the dropoff, just an unending expanse of darkness.
On the plus side, he figured out exactly where he was. Since there was only one trench nearby, and that was the Japan Trench. The downside was that the knowledge didn't help him at all, because knowing where he was didn't particularly help when one is falling towards an inescapable trench that was eight km (about 5 miles) deep.
Before he had been confused as to how this was such a big deal. All for One made it sound like a living hell, but he would surely find his way back eventually. However, being stuck on the ocean floor and being stuck at the bottom of a trench were two very different levels of bad.
And as far as he could tell, he also wouldn't be able to die, since drowning and starving weren't an option plus hyper-regeneration would probably stop any injury related death. Which is usually a good thing. Not dying is almost always a good thing. But right now it seemed like 'not dying' was kind of the entire point of All for One's attack. He would be trapped in a trench, alone, with no way out, for the rest of his probably very long life.
He tried to swim to reach the edge of the trench in view before he fell in, but it was just too far to get to. It grew darker and darker as he finally sank below the underwater cliffside he could see in the distance. Well fuck.
As he kept sinking further and further, bruises began to appear and disappear across his entire body as the water pressure exceeded the durability that came with One for All. He learned a fun fact about hyper-regeneration. Rapidly healing a wound hurts just as much as getting it.
His entire body ached as it felt as if he was being crushed from all directions. He hadn't even reached the bottom yet and his bones started snapping just to be healed over and over.
The only thing he could see was brief moments of green lightning from his quirk before his eyes were crushed again.
The only sound was the explosion from his eardrums being broken again after being healed.
All he could taste was the blood from his lungs collapsing and rebuilding themselves.
All he could feel was pain from every single nerve being triggered. There was nothing else.
It seemed like an eternity of agony before he realized he had already hit the sand at the bottom.
How long had he been falling? How long had he been laying on the ground? It seemed like it could have been anywhere between a few minutes and a few days. He tried to move, but crawling across the ocean floor with constantly shattering bones is very difficult. So he started to travel a few centimeters at a time, dragging himself through the sand.
He let himself get distracted analyzing his new quirks, trying to focus on something, anything, other than the pain.
Even though he had five quirks now he hadn't died or mutated like a nomu. He assumed it had to do with his holding of One for All, which was already a mix of multiple quirks. It raised an interesting question on how many quirks he could hold. If they figured out how nomu were created, would they theoretically be able to give Izuku as many quirks as possible?
He was pretty sure that the 'Gill' quirk did more than just give him gills since his skin wasn't pruning. So, while having gills was the most obvious mutation, it was more like his body was waterproof, and not harmed by any side effects that came with prolonged exposure to water.
Hyper-regeneration also had some interesting aspects to it. One thing was that it wasn't immediate. It would take a few seconds after the injury occurred before it would kick in and heal everything at once. Which meant in a situation where he was constantly being injured, he could time when he would have a fully healed body for a moment. There would be a wave of pain from all the bones healing at once, and that was when he had his chance to move.
He was pretty sure that the quirk wouldn't have been able to keep up in a normal situation, eventually letting him die. But since One for All automatically fuses with the user's quirk(s), the regeneration was likely getting supercharged and continually powered by his own quirk.
He grabbed what felt like an outcropping of rock, charged One for All to 100% in his arms and launched himself forward like a torpedo. He could feel he got moved around by the current while off the ground, but it still seemed like a better form of transportation than crawling.
He kept at it, launching himself over and over in time with the pulses of healing, just hoping to make some kind of progress to get out of this trench. He felt himself grow exhausted but he didn't care, he just had to keep moving. When he landed once again and let himself recover and heal his perpetually broken bones he saw something horrifying.
In that moment of having eyes that had yet to burst, he saw his own tracks. The deep markings of his fingers embedded in the rocks. The sand parted around where he dragged his body.
He'd gone in a circle.
He'd been moving for what felt like days (or maybe an hour? time was very hard to keep track of), but made absolutely no progress. Well maybe not none, it didn't seem like he was back to where he fell, just to some point on his path.
He stopped trying to move and just sobbed, but the tears just mixed in with the endless ocean around him. He was so tired and wanted to sleep, but it was hard to do that when his body kept cracking under the pressure of the water above him.
Izuku screamed into the endless void, not expecting a response.
He heard a soft voice from behind him that was clearly Ochako's. "You need to sleep, you know it's not healthy to be awake this long."
He looked around for the source of her voice. "Where are you? How long have I been down here?"
No sound came out in any meaningful way, but she still heard him. "I think you already know where I am. And it's been long enough to start hallucinating the woman you love."
He collapsed into the sand, his spine snapping and leaving him paralyzed and numb until the next wave of healing.
He didn't know how much time passed until he fell asleep. Time didn't seem to exist down this deep, but eventually he succumbed to exhaustion, no matter how much pain he was in.
Izuku woke up after a short but very appreciated rest. He took some time to think about his situation and how best to go about it. During this time he realized two things, one that brought him hope and the other crippling despair.
First, he noticed that the time between his bones shattering under the pressure of the ocean was getting longer. Everytime a bone breaks it heals a little bit stronger. This means over time he'll be able to move more and be in less constant pain, which are both great changes. The downside being that it meant he got even denser and heavier, making any movement harder and slower, but he'd take that over the constant shattering.
Secondly, The rock he was up against wasn't there when he'd finally succumbed to sleep. That meant the current moved him while he was sleeping. It didn't matter how far he was moved, what really mattered was that he no longer knew what direction he needed to travel. Trying to find the path he'd been making, when he can only move inches at a time and can only see a couple feet by the light of One for All whenever his eyes are intact, is very time consuming.
Would he lose any of his minimal progress every single time he fell asleep?! His previous strategy just didn't leave a clear enough trail for him to even hope of finding it again. So he'd have to give up on his jumping strategy, it was faster but it was an absolute necessity to keep moving in the same direction. Otherwise he really could spend an eternity going in circles. It didn't matter where he was going as long as he kept making progress towards a side of this accursed trench.
He picked a random direction in the unyielding darkness and began crawling again as the unending pain and pressure made every moment agony.
Moving forward felt pointless. He was probably going in circles or at the very least was going the opposite direction of any progress made before sleeping. But he had to try. The only thing worse than having his body impode over and over as he dragged himself across the ocean floor, would be to accept the endless torture and not try to escape.
He kept moving and eventually ran into something. He thought it was another rock cluster he was going to need to climb over when he realized what it was.
A massive whale skeleton sat in front of him, stripped of any nutrients and left behind. He felt an odd kinship with the skeleton. They both were defeated then left here when the world was done ripping off everything useful.
He had given everything to being a hero and saving everyone he possibly could, so why was no one coming to save him? Did they know where he was? Did they even care?
It wouldn't be the first time an injured pro-hero was seemingly ignored and forgotten by society when they were no longer useful. Was that why no one had come to rescue him from this torture? He'd already beaten the big evil that everyone was scared of, so they didn't really need him anymore, did they?
Maybe it had just been longer than he thought and they had to give up searching? How long had it been anyways? By his guess it must have been at least two or three months.
As he curled up and tried to sleep within the skeleton of the long dead whale, it had been just under a week.
He woke up still within the massive skeleton. He didn't want to leave. Moving made everything hurt more than it already did, and he liked having the whale bones around him to assure himself that the current hadn't swept him away.
Would it really matter if he just stayed where he was? He was probably just going in circles anyways, so why not just give up?
"Well that's not very Plus Ultra of you."
He turned and looked at Uraraka, who was sitting on a nearby whale rib.
He shook his head, "You're not really here."
"Well, yeah. I thought that was obvious. But real or not I'm still right."
When the water pressure damaged his eyes once more, he realized that he still saw her, standing in the inky nothingness that greeted him betweens waves of healing.
"C'mon, it's time to go. No use wasting your time laying around here."
He was probably crying at this point, but it was hard to tell underwater. "I can't do it. I just… I just can't."
"Ohhhh, well that's my mistake. I thought I was talking to the Deku who never gave up, not the Deku who only gives up if it's really difficult. That's my bad. Maybe we'll need to modify the motto to 'Plus Ultra, unless it's too hard'."
"Ok, ok, I get it. But where would I even go? I don't know what the right direction is."
"Well, you could have just asked. Since you broke one of the bones when you ran into this spot, we know you need to go that way to keep going the same direction as before."
"Do I have to? It hurts so much 'Chako."
"I know darling. But it's not going to get better if you stay where you are. You have to keep going, no matter how hard it is."
So he started to crawl once more.
Dragging himself through the sand and rock as Ochako cheered him on whenever he wanted to give up.
He felt too weak to use One for All, so he simply pulled himself through the unending darkness. He had no idea how far he had gone, or how far he still needed to go, but at least his hallucinations remained optimistic. It was like Hell included a personal coach that made sure he did his best, even if his body was in a constant state of implosion.
He tried to keep track of time by counting how many times he had fallen asleep, but falling asleep was uncommon. Sleep terrified him so much. At least when he was awake he had his hands on the ground and could feel that he was moving in one direction.
He could never trust that he awoke where he collapsed unless there was the rare occasion of bumping into something distinguishable.
Maybe that was what was driving him insane the fastest. The fact that nothing changed. The darkness, the pain, and the sand beneath him were the only things there.
Izuku stopped thinking for a moment when he saw a pretty light. It had been so long since he had seen a light other than the green lightning One for All.
It was blue and absolutely amazing and beautiful. He missed colors so much.
The pretty blue light was so small and so far away, but he needed to find it.
With a renewed vigor he clawed his way across the ocean floor with the singular goal of seeing the pretty blue light.
He needed it.
He couldn't go back to not seeing anything but darkness. He didn't care that he was going in a totally different direction than before. Even the smallest splash of color would be worth it.
Hope you all enjoyed this first chapter. Fun fact, I wrote the first and second chapter a year and a half ago and then just forgot it existed. I found it the other day and decided to edit it and post it because why not. If people find it interesting I'll write more for it.
