The battle overall hadn't been going well at all for the villains. Shigaraki could hear the the distant sounds of battle from the disaster zones and (judging by those sounds) the battles weren't in the criminals favors. To top it all off, Eraserhead was decimating his goons, and All Might hadn't even had the decency to show up to the party. Tomura scowled.

However, just in time to lighten his bad mood, Shigaraki spotted an opening finally appear in Eraserhead's battle. He charged. Aizawa turned around, capture weapon at the ready. "The final boss!" He shouted, ready for this to be over. He was panting heavily, unused to so much physical exercise.

"First it was 24 seconds. Then it was 23. Then 15, and now 11 seconds." Aizawa grappled Shigaraki while the villain was speaking, nearly sending him to the ground. "You hide it well behind your goggles, but I found your tell. It's your hair." At that moment, Aizawa's hair dropped. "You're having to blink more often, and for longer." The cloth of Aizawa's shirt began to fade to a sickly grey. Shigaraki's hand was clasped tightly around it. Slowly, the shirt peeled away to reveal a decimated elbow, shin and muscle falling away almost to the point of showing bone.

Eraserhead reactivated his quirk in a millisecond, tossing the man-child leader away from him. He was long since used to the sight of his own blood (he has been in this profession for years after all,) but to have a whole arm incapacitated so quickly...

He dodged an attack from another goon, dispatching the few of them quickly.

"You are kinda outta your league." Shigaraki climbled up from where he had fallen on the ground. "Your quirk isn't suited for long drawn out battles. Yet knowing this, you leapt in to save your students without hesitation." The villain actually giggled. "You really are so cool!" He soundled like little more than a hero fanboy, though Aizawa highly doubted he was. The giggling stopped, and seriousness returned to Shigaraki's voice. "... oh, by the way, I'm not the final boss."

Shigaraki's hand drifted to point over Aizawa's shoulder. The older man didn't even have time to blink. The world went black and red as the mutant hand closed around his face.

Tomura watched, mildly entertained, as Nomu tossed and beat Aizawa like a limp doll again, and again, and again. "You can erase people's quirks. That's irritating, but nothing impressive. When faced with true devastating power, you might as well be a quirkless child." Nomu snapped the man's arm to prove the point, breaking it as easily as you break a straw trying to remove it from the paper packaging. There was no question that, even with his quirk erased, this Nomu was as strong as All Might.

Arriving to make his bad mood return, Kurogiri materialized by his man-child master. Shigaraki turned his head marginally. "Kurogiri, did you manage to kill Thirteen?"

"The rescue hero is out of commission, but there were students I was unable to disperse, and one of them got outside to warn the facility."

The two fell silent for one moment, save for the growing grunts and gasps from Shigaraki as he vigorously began to scratch at his neck. "K u r o g i r i," he growled, "you fool!" His scratching increased tenfold. "If you weren't our warp gate I would tear apart every last atom in your body!"

The scratching suddenly ceased with a irritated gasp. "... there's no way we can win if dozens of pros show up to stop us... game over... back to the title screen, and I was looking forward to finishing this today." He slumped with a curse. "Let's go home." He hated leaving games before they were finished: even if he had ways to end the game later, it still felt like rage-quitting now.

Kurogiri began opening up his mist for a new portal, but then hesitated. Nomu was acting very strangely. His head was following something, like a cat's head follows a toy: he was growling, even full-on snapping at thin air, his sharp jaws closing on nothingness. Shigaraki was about to snap at Nomu, tell him to retreat, when he too saw what was bothering the mutant.

An odd heat haze was aggravating Nomu. It flickered around, assumingly trying to attack. It was hard to properly view as it was always moving and its physical form kept stuttering out of reality.

Nomu lifted his hand off of Eraserhead to swipe at the haze. He let out an awful scream in challenge.

To Shigaraki's and Kurogiri's surprise, the haze wasn't intimidated by the the scream. Instead, it charged once again at the monster.

Or... was it Tomura's imagination, or did only a small part of the haze leap forward? And, (was it still his imagination,) could he just barely see a hand reaching out in the haze for its smaller counterpart?

The mini heat haze made contact with Nomu, and reality snapped. The plaza was enveloped in a screaming void. Literally. Everyone in the plaza clasped their hands over their ears as the insanity bringing, inhuman, soul shattering scream ripped through their bodies: some began to cry from the sound that no human, animal, or machine could ever make. Even Tomura sank to his knees. The scream was horrible: maddening. If it went on any longer the frail humans caught in its grasp would snap themselves, flailing about in insanity. They wanted -n e e d e d- it to stop, just stop, ohpleasejustmakeitend--

Suddenly, the scream stopped, leaving an equally maddening silence in its wake. Sound slowly returned. Nearly everyone was crumpled on the ground, gasping for breath as their own wails of pain ended. Shigaraki was on his hands and knees, panting heavily. "W-w h a t... what a r e you?" Shaking, he lifted his head.

The heat haze had solidified... or rather, the heat hazes. One shadow form had tackled an eerily still and silent Nomu: energy seemed to be pumping from the mutant and into the shadow: another shadow was several paces away, hands clasping his skyward turned face as he silently continued screaming: the third was small, no larger than a child, crumpled on the floor with the trembling villains. Shigaraki looked closely at the minature shadow. Its hands were clasped around its neck, and a tell-tale jerking implied that it wasn't breathing right... if it even really needed to breathe at all.

Whatever it was that the villains now suddenly found themselves facing... these things weren't human... at least not anymore.

Tomura was the first to regain his breath and reason. "You... the one on Nomu... you seem like the leader." The shadow's head snapped around nearly 180 to level a dangerous look at Shigaraki. While it wasn't the same scream as before, the shadow let out a torrent of horrible noise that the villain could only assume was speaking. He felt his imaginary health bar go down a few bars just from hearing the unearthly sound. He swallowed hard. "It's an easy guess. That one there is clearly mad, and the other can't be more than a child."

The shadow snarled, hands still closed around Nomu's neck. Shigaraki resisted the urge to snarl back: this was a situation for smarts, not smarting off. "Listen, if you can even understand what I'm saying... that little one? He won't make it by the time you finish killing my Nomu there."

THAT got the shadow's attention. Its head snapped now to its younger counterpart. A distressed (but still maddening) cry came from the shadow, the figure torn between saving the little one or killing the beast. The small one's twitches were getting smaller and smaller.

"This isn't your fight," Shigaraki tried to persuade. "Save your kid, release my Nomu, and leave."

The shadow snarled again. It seemed bent on killing the mutant, but anyone could see that the child was its own. It was to avoid situations such as this that Shigaraki had sworn to avoid attachments: the tactically correct choice would be to abandon the child and kill the monster: but the heart would say to abandon the monster and save the child. Then again, if the child died, it could be that the other two would cease to be as well.

In its last few moments of strength, the child shadow lifted its hand toward the other shadow, as a toddler reaches for the mobile above its crib. One tiny, weak, pathetic little noise escaped the little shadow: a cry for help.

The first shadow forgot about the Nomu. Faster than the eye can process, it was by its child's side, scooping it up into its arms. It materialized next to the third figure (who was still screaming silently,) roughly tumbling into it. As all three made contact with each other once more, they vanished. Reality snapped back to the reality the fallen criminals knew.

It took the stunned criminals a moment to absorb what had just happened. The whole encounter couldn't have been more than 2 minutes, but it felt like it had lasted days, just caught up in the awful scream.

All that was left to imply that the shadows had ever been present, was a limp, amorphous heat haze. The villains all scrambled away from the heat haze once they saw it. Shigaraki wiped his chin: he had bitten his lip to stop himself from screaming earlier, and now was bleeding profusely underneath Father's hand. Air shuddered in and out of his lungs in astonished gasps.

"Kuroguri?"

"H-here, Tomura." The man of mist had never sounded so shaken in all the years he had helped raise the man-child leader.

Shigaraki looked down at his mutant weapon. "Nomu... get up." The beast twitched once... twice. "N o w." Slowly, haltingly, Nomu rose. He looked even more brain dead than before. His muscles seemed slightly deflated, but were regaining their normal size as the criminals watched. Tomura sighed, bringing his breathing back under control.

Aizawa was still crumpled on the floor. Shigaraki wondered briefly how the wounded teacher had fared through the supernatural encounter.

Now what? Half of the crimimals seemed too shaken to muster themselves up for a fight. Was it still game over for them? Were the shadows a glitch in the code? Or an attack by a third party? Shigaraki didn't remember reading any files similar to the shadows in the documents they had stolen from U.A., so he doubted they were in league with the school.

Shigaraki felt his limbs tremble. Only now did he feel how much of his energy was been sucked out of his body by the encounter.

Opening his mouth to order Kuroguri to take them home, a colossal bang echoed through the USJ.

All Might had finally arrived.

Tomura sighed. "From one boss fight to another." He rose to his full height, Nomu and Kurogiri on either side of him. "Can't catch a break, can I? Guess we will be playing the level to completion today after all."

There was a blur of speed and light, Aizawa dissapearing from the ground and reappearing in All Might's arms. The hulking man sped the dying teacher up to where the children were scattered, deposited him gently, then returned to the plaza below for his fight. Shigaraki rolled his eyes as All Might gave a typical "have no fear" speech.

While he was speaking, All Might's gaze drifted over to the heat haze. He frowned at it. It seemed... oddly... familiar somehow. He tried to place where he possibly could have seen such an odd sight before...

All Might mentally shook himself. He would figure it out later; for now, he had to deal with the villains before him.

Shigaraki glared at All Might. The man was fast, and powerful, there was no question; but he wasn't as fast as he should have been. The Symbol of Peace was indeed weaker. And as such, when All Might rushed to attack Shigaraki, the man-child didn't even flinch. Nomu moved just as fast to block the blow. Shigaraki wisely stepped back a couple paces as Nomu and All Might traded blows, the foolish hero trying in vain to find a weakness. They zoomed across the plaza, attacking with vigor.

Shigaraki chuckled. "Kurogiri, be ready."

"It doesn't even matter where I punch you, does it?" All Might growled.

"That's because Nomu here has shock absorption, All Might. Whatever blow you land will be as nothing to him." Shigaraki once again sounded far too happy. "The only way you could defeat him would be to slowly gouge out his flesh... of course, I doubt he'll stand around and let you do that."

With a grunt and a thrown punch, All Might zipped around to Nomu's back. "Thanks for telling me how to beat him!" He wrapped the mutant tightly in his arms, snapping over backwards to bury Nomu in the brick of the plaza.

As he bent, however, Kurogiri made a move of his own. He opened wide a portal, the top halves of both Nomu and All Might falling through, leaving All Might stuck. Nomu's clawed hand was buried in All Might's side. Shigaraki giggled. "So you were trying to bury him in the concrete? Nice, but not good enough. Nomu is as strong as you are! That won't stop him." He giggled again. "Nice work Kurogiri! We've got him just where we want him... close the gate."

The warp gate began to close and Nomu tightened his grip. All Might was thoroughly trapped in the same situation the mutant was supposed to be trapped in. He let go of Nomu's middle, focusing instead on easing the vice-like grip. He snarled as the hands did not loosen. He turned his head to face the head villains, still struggling in Nomu's grip. "If this is your best attempt than you chose the wrong place to attack! Give up now!"

It was an empty threat: a last ditch effort to gain some ground in a clearly unfair situation.

Shigaraki's good mood evaporated. He began scratching at his neck again. "Kurogiri..."

The warp gate began to close as the man of mist materialized beside All Might. "Normally, I would hate having blood and viscera in my warp gates, but for a hero as great as yourself, I will make an exception." Nomu began slowly pulling All Might through the hole. "Since you were too fast, Nomu had to restrain you. Once you're halfway through, I'll squeeze the gate shut." It wasn't hard to imagine what would happen to his body once that happened.

The end of the line. All Might cursed himself for wasting valuable breath and time instead of finding a way to escape. He wiggled and pulled, but no slack came.

The warp gate was getting smaller and smaller: Nomu was pulling him further and further in: Shigaraki kept staring, refusing to miss a single moment of the end. The grand finale had arrived. The end of the Golden age of peace was here! One more minute and--!

An explosion rocked the plaza. Kurogiri was knocked onto his back by a war-cry screaming teenager who was yelling "DIE" over and over again. A flurry of ice flew across the plaza, enveloping Nomu halfway. Todoroki stood calmly by. "One of your poorly trained thugs told me you're here because you think you can kill All Might." The ice halted right before it reached All Might, allowing him to finally wrench his way free.

Kirishima came plunging out of the air with a war cry of his own. Shigaraki dodged out of the way with ease, the yelling tipping him off to an attack. "Dang it," he mumbled, "that was gonna be so cool."

"Guess I found your body this time!" Katsuki cackled.

"The symbol of peace will not be defeated by delinquents like you," Shoto spoke, cool as ever.

Shigaraki tensed up, frustrated. Every time it looked like he was getting on top of the situation, something came to mess it up. First it was Eraserhead plowing through his goons, then there was that... that abomination, and now these children had him and Kurogiri pinned (quite literally in Kurogiri's part.) "How could you let these brats take you down so easily," he addressed the man of mist. "You've gotten us into a real jam here."

Katsuki scoffed. "Ya got careless ya dumb villain; it wasn't hard to figure you out. Only certain parts of you are made of that warp gate: you use the mist to hide your actual body as a distraction, thinking that makes you safe. That's why we missed." Kirishima's and Bakugo's first attacks had been wild, a careless retaliation. They had been nowhere near the villain's body. "But if you didn't have a body in there somewhere, then you wouldn't be wearing this neck armor, would'ja? You're not immune to physical attacks if they're well aimed."

Kurogiri shifted, trying to find a way to take the brat of a child hero off of him. He grunted and stilled when said child hero set off a series of minature explosions as a warning. "Don't move!" Katsuki laughed. "You make any funny moves and I'll blow your hide up so bad that they'll be piecing you back together for weeks!"

"Ohhh that doesn't sound very heroic!" Kirishima sent Katsuki a teasing look, but he was slightly concerned. He would have been more concerned if he could see how often Katsuki was blinking to erase the flaming memories from his eyes.

Shigaraki was silent for a long pause. His hands were folded. "... they escaped uninjured and captured my two strongest men. Kids these days really are amazing. They make the league of villains look like ametures... can't have that." He turned to face his abomination. "Nomu."

With a distraught screech, Nomu pulled himself from the portal. His muscles and joints pushed against the ice encasing his body, until his body shattered like dropped popsicle. He limped and called around, missing both an arm and leg. His eyes rolled pointlessly in their sockets until they landed on All Might. All Might threw his hand out in front of the children, yelling for them to stay back. Nomu's body began to regrow before their very eyes.

"What is this?! I thought you said his quirk was shock absorption!"

"I never said that was his only power: he also has super regeneration." All Might grunted, already feeling the dip in his power levels just at Shigaraki's words. "Nomu has been modified to take you on at even 100% of your power. He's basically a highly efficient punching bag that hits back. Now, to free my method of escape... get him Nomu."

The beast moved before anyone could even blink. The direct area where Kurogiri was erupted in a cloud of dust: the force of the impact blew the other children away, tumbling head over heels. Kirishima felt his blood run cold. "Bakugo!" The dust cleared slightly to reveal, "Bakugo? Whoa, you managed to dodge that?"

"What? No I didn't. Shut up." The explosive blonde had fallen onto the floor, looking just as dumbstruck as his two classmates.

"But... then how did you get over here?"

The three fell silent with a shocked gasp. It was obvious how Bakugo had been spared after all. They turned to face the nearby wall.

All Might was standing there, side bloodied, arms thrown up in a defensive pose, coughing blood. The great hero looked haggard.

Shigaraki sighed. "So you protected the child, huh?"

Looking up with a snarl, All Might spat out, "these are kids and you didn't hold back?!"

"I didn't have much choice: that blonde one was threatening my companion. Don't act like you didn't hear the death threats. These children are no angels. You act like you can get away with being as violent as you want if you say its for the sake of others... well you know what All Might? That ticks me off. Why do some people get to decide that some violent acts are heroic and others villainous? Casting judgement as to what is good and what's evil? You think you're the symbol of peace? Heh! You're just another government issued pawn of violence. And violence always breeds more violence: I'll make sure the world understands that once you're dead." It was a surprisingly well-worded speech for one so clearly immature.

All Might wondered for a second if Shigaraki had any intel on how the hero society was truly run. If he knew about some of the other pro heroes's actions hid from the media...

"You're nothing but a lunatic. Criminals like you always try to make their actions sound noble; but in the end you're as selfish and violent as you accuse me of being."

Shigaraki snarled. All Might had him figured out.

The bystanding children murmured amongst themselves, readying for battle, meaning to assist their teacher. However, All Might stopped them before they could move: he instructed them to leave for safety. After all, the top pro hero was there to save the day.

Giving a disdainful sniff at the interaction, Shigaraki ordered his two lackeys to kill All Might and leave the children to him.

"... let's clear this level and go home."

Nomu and All Might charged. Shigaraki, quite fast himself, sped forward to attack the three children who barely had time to react before he was upon them.

Just as he was reaching for the first one, Todoroki, an all too familiar heat haze burst to life right in front of the three. Shigaraki back-peddled away furiously: there was no way he was entering that awful void again; not while his hands still shook to remember it.

It was at that moment that All Might and Nomu first struck each other. The blast of wind was powerful, strong enough to send Shigaraki tumbling backwards. The heat haze persisted. From their perspective, the three children could see a tall shadow: its arms were spread out, protecting them from the howling winds.

All of the air in Katsuki's lungs vanished, leaving him gasping. The closest he had ever gotten to properly seeing his stalker was occasional split second sightings: now, within the space of an hour, he'd seen the ghostly apparition twice, with it currently centimeters from his face at this moment. He couldn't hear Todoroki or Kirishima murmuring in apprehension of who/what the shadow was: he couldn't hear Shigaraki arguing with All Might about how to defeat Nomu.

In a daze, he slowly reached out a hand. Gently, hesitantly, Katsuki brushed just the outside of the shadow's shoulder, lost in a daze. Reality stretched and bent: Bakugo could feel his hand on the shoulder of the shadow while they were also dozens of meters apart: the world fell into a rushing yet peaceful storm of blacks and greys: silence fell over him, like a weighted blanket, enveloping him in a nerve wracking yet blissful calm. The shadow, still bodily facing away, protecting Katsuki from the enslaught of wind, turned his head to look at the child. One glowing red eye locked onto Katsuki's own. The eye was wide with surprise, with a cresent shape that gave it a permenately sad look. He never wanted to break eye contact with the shadow: his whole body wanted to be lost in the sad surprise of the shadow. Katsuki so desperately wanted to know what all the person before him knew to make him so incredibly mournful.

Then, another figure over the first shadow's shoulder appeared. The red eye vanished, and Katsuki found himself staring at the second form. It stood between the first shadow and where All Might and Nomu were fighting. It was watching with an obvious hunger at Katsuki. He tightened his grip on the first shadow's shoulder in fear. The child suddenly felt that the wind wasn't the only thing the first shadow was protecting him from.

The shadow with sad red eyes gave a warning growl: its sound was as nails on chalkboard. The second shadow halted. Snorting in turn, it turned its attention to its fellow counterpart. They went back and forth, inhuman and unearthly noises being traded as normal speech.

Katsuki was frozen in place. His world felt like it was being bent further and further until he began to think it was about to shatter.

Suddenly, he felt a strange push at his legs... as if a child was trying to knock him over. Shifting to look down, Bakugo unconsciously lifted his hand from the shoulder of the first shadow. The second the contact had ended, reality popped back to the world he knew. Katsuki found himself gasping on the ground of the plaza, Kirishima and Todoroki hovering over him with concern: he hadn't been breathing throughout the interaction. The heat haze was still before them, but flickering rapidly. All Might had just landed a finishing blow on Nomu, sending the monstrosity flying.

Shigaraki was visibly trembling with rage. Murmuring insanely about All Might cheating, he began to claw at his neck once again, more vigorously than before. All Might challenged him, making the man-child stumble slightly.

Bakugo wasn't really listening though. His mind was still absorbed in the opposite reality he had temporarily fallen into. The deafening silence from before was all that was filling his mind.

Kiri was hovering over Bakugo while Todoroki sent out some warning sheets of ice to ward off the recuperating villains. "C'monn Bakugo, now really isn't the time..." he gave the other boy a small shake. The lost look in Katsuki's eyes was just as worrying as the panic attack from the other day: Kirishima feared that perhaps another panic attack was about to come on, which was the last liability they needed at the beginning of a fight.

Kurogiri had calmed and rallied his man-child master, the goons were waking rapidly and clambering to their feet, All Might wasn't making a move, and Katsuki was still sitting limply. Kiri felt his stomach turn cold, and he didn't think it had anything to do with Todoroki's powers.

Looking around in desperation, Kirishima tried to spot even one thing to give him a spark of hope.

His spark came with the sound of a gun being rapidly fired and the sight of Shigaraki crumpling to the floor. The pro heroes had arrived. Snipe took down an enemy with every bullet: Present Mic took out a large suave of them with an ear shattering yell: Ectoplazm sent out his copies to fence in the straggling villains: one by one the pros spread out across the facility, taking down criminals by the dozens.

Shigaraki back-peddled again. "The pros are here... it's game over for real. Let's go home and try this again when we-" he didn't get to finish his sentace as three more bullets found their way to him before Kurogiri could shield him. The man of mist tried to warp them to safety, but Thirteen had found a boost of strength, unleashing Black Hole on Kurogiri once again. Shigaraki sent a crazed glare at All Might. "I may have failed in defeating you this time, but your days are numbered! All Might, you so called symbol of peace, I am going to kill you!"

The warp gate closed, and the two villain leaders vanished. All Might hid in his cloud of smoke and dust to let himself deflate in peace.

... and the battle was over.

Katsuki finally blinked, returning to reality. He found himself being enthusiastically hugged by an overly relieved Kirishima. On any other occasion, he would have thrown the other boy off with a yell and explosion; but upon hearing Kiri's near teary gasps of "we're alive, we're alive, we're alive," all Bakugo could do was awkwardly pat the red-head on the shoulder and murmur, "yeah... we are."

His sight landed on his stalker. The form was fading fast. For a split second, three figures could be made out. But then the moment was over. The heat haze vanished. The pro heroes swarmed the building.

"Yeah... we're alive. Somehow."

A/N

Well this chapter really did not want to be written. But I suppose delay is made up for by length and cool crap happening. I actually ended up shortening and cutting quite a bit of the episodes for this because yall should know these scenes by now, and because if I didn't this would be suupppeeeerrrrr long and boring.

Anywho... dem shadows huh? A lot of you guys have been making guesses that are only partially right. Allow me to clarify some things.

First, Izuku is quite dead. (I've been pushing this in almost every chapter yall.) His body got atomized. There really isn't any coming back from that. Second, he didn't have a quirk; no power of his own to save him via plot armor.

That should clear that up. Of course, that doesn't directly tell you anything of the shadows themselves, so lemme hear those new theories so I can refuse to directly answer them!

Speaking of answering theories, comments!

SteampunkDragon987, interesting idea, but sadly not. I direct you to the above. (However that is similar to another au idea I've recently come up with. Not sure if I want to write that au or use another form of media.)

CadB, not quite. Bakugo is quite secretly nerdy, and he took up Izu's journals when he died; but Hayate is just smooth and smart.

So! Who are the three shadows? How is it that on the outside they seem as one person? What was the first shadow doing to Nomu? What were they talking about? Why was Bakugo spared from the torment the villains went through? Why does the first shadow have such sad red eyes?

So many questions I don't plan on getting to any time soon. For now, we move on to the tournament arc.

So Long Lovies!