We have finally reached the end of this arc! It feels like it took forever ngl. After this we'll get to cool our heels for a bit, and I might post that pole on tumblr. I think we're well past the 2,500 mark now.
Everything was in shambles.
His mind raced a thousand miles an hour, but nothing he came up with was even remotely helpful.
Because of what they'd just witnessed.
The horror that He pressed down onto them. It had shattered any ideas that Shouto may have had that didn't involve getting away as fast as he could, taking the five people closest to them and running like the devil himself was on their tail.
Which.
In this case.
He might as well have been.
Because what else could that man be? Could he even be called a man?
He had wiped out a half a dozen pro heroes in the time it took to blink, dressed all in a fine black western suit, with his face covered by a faceless mask. He was horror from something out of a nightmare, the kind that even fire wouldn't burn away. And he was real. Not some figment that could be banished by waking up, not some monster that could be dismissed as fake.
Inky shadow and cold death pressed down on Shouto, chilling even his right side to his very bones.
He wanted to vomit, like he was a kid shivering from training too hard again. He felt weak and shaky in the face of such absolute loss. He wanted to curl up and wait for the horrors to pass, as if that had ever worked for even one second of his life.
But he couldn't do anything of the sort, because he had friends.
And they needed him. His quirk was most versatile, and the only one that was long range amongst them, for all the good it did.
He didn't just have to think about the friends crowded around him on all sides either. Yaoyorozu, Iida, Midoriya, Kirishima, and Hagakure, who somehow kept getting stuck with him. No, there were the ones they'd come to rescue in the first place.
Bakugou, Shinsou, and Suzume, were all in the middle of ground zero, vomited out of strange, inky liquid that spilled from nowhere in space at the behest of the floating man. He didn't get it. Teleportation, flight, something destructive. What kind of quirk did he have? Was he a Nomu, with more than one?
Whatever he was, he was a massive threat. And Shouto's other friends were well within striking distance of him. They were surrounded by enemies, but he couldn't do anything. They couldn't fight that thing that had emerged from the Nomu factory. They couldn't even use their quirks to fight. But they had to do something.
Something.
Then All Might descended, like an avenging angel, and slammed into the man. Who held him in place. Who matched him.
And Shouto had a sliver of an idea that they were all going to die here.
He banished it just as fast. No. They weren't going to die. They just had to think. Come up with a plan. All Might could take the man from the factory, but there was still the League of Villains to worry about, and their surrounded friends. If they could get in there somehow, make a distraction?
He looked over to see if anyone else had any ideas, or if they were all as bad off as he was.
Rubble shifted just behind them.
Shouto turned and pushed himself up on a pillar of ice, as quietly as he could manage. It lifted him just far enough to peak over the top of the stone wall that protected them from the explosion that had taken down all those pro heroes.
A hand pushed out of shattered stone and jagged rebar. A clawed hand. Another punched out a second later, and with a shudder of moving gravel and shrapnel, a familiar shape clawed its way out of the pile of devastation that had pushed up against their hiding place.
His teeth (his fathers teeth) were bared, and green venom dripped from them, leaving tracks in the dust that clung to his skin and made his black hair look more gray. A single red eye burned with dark intensity, and fixed on the group of people surrounding the three kidnapped students.
Shouto had never seen Yusada Kaname (or was it Kono Kaname? The news had said that was their father's name) in his hero uniform, but even in it he could recognize that face, and that intensity. Exactly like Suzume's.
He watched the snake-like hero creep down on silent boots, a shadow of gray, black, and dulled yellow against the shattered earth.
And before Shouto's very eyes Kono Kaname used his father's quirk, a Yakuza's quirk, to take down one of the most dangerous men Shouto had ever seen. Just as easily he turned on the other members of the League of Villains, who had faced down heroes and half a hundred hero students not one week ago, and decemate them. Fast, ruthless, and with the spinning movements that he associated with Suzume already.
Kaname ended the stand off in seconds, and stood before his sister.
Two children of the Yakuza.
If fate came at you swinging, wouldn't you fight back?
"Kaname."
His name slipped from her mouth, soft and stunned. Her brother was there, standing right in front of her. Bloody, furious, and bathed in a victory that she never could have imagined.
The older boy stepped towards her. He didn't hug her. There wasn't time yet, they were in the middle of the battlefield, and he was still dripping venom from his bloody mouth. Not all of its was Shigaraki's. His lip was split, and he kept rubbing his tongue against it periodically.
"We need to go," he told them, looking over the younger folks through his broken yellow visor. "Now, hurry up."
It's not a tone that Suzume was used to hearing from him. Kaname was serious, and all business right then. There was no trace of the idiot teenager who had called his little sister into the woods in the middle of the night because he thought he'd killed a frog.
There was Krait, the hero in training, apprentices to Gang Orca. The son of Kono Sanjirou, come to fetch his only sister.
"Right," all three of them agreed, their voices overlapping in a chorus. Even Katsuki didn't try to fight her brother on this matter, and that boy would fight the sun for shining if he got it into his mind.
Suzume glanced down at the League. Their bodies were prone, they were paralyzed or unconscious. Toga was staring very intently at her and Kaname, for all she couldn't move more than her eyes right then. A long slash cut through her arm, from Kaname's dangerous claws.
Suzume had the strangest urge to go bite her in petty vengeance.
"Can we really leave them here?" she asked, glancing up towards the sky. Neither AFO not All Might would intentionally hurt them, but it there was a lot collateral damage could do. Each punch generated an insane shock wave.
Even Suzume couldn't help being awed by the sight. It was like watching two titans come together.
"We'll have to. Rescue is the priority. Move it, come on. Out of the blast zone. Everyone else is rousing now too," Kaname ordered, shooing all three of them away from the downed villains. He didn't seem overly concerned with any of them, or with the fact that one was actively bleeding from his throat.
But Kaname would know his quirk, and what it did, best.
"Hold on," Katsuki spun around to hold a hand up, stopping Kaname. "What about Best Jeanist? He's down!"
"Leave the evac to Mt. Lazy," Kaname flicked his hand at Bakugou. "We have contingency plans, even if none of us imagined this happening. Follow me, and stay low. Right now we need to get out of All Might's way. Before-"
A flash of black and red.
They all dove away as fast as they could, with Kaname grabbing Hitoshi and taking him down with him.
The forceful quirk activation lanced through Magne, and any hesitation Suzume had vanished.
She sprinted away from the paralyzed League, towards her brother and her classmates. Out of the crater. They had to move.
The League went tumbling through darkness while Kaname swore, but there was nothing they could do to stop it.
Outside of the crater there were damaged buildings, a felled city, but the lions share of it all was around the nomu factory. They wouldn't be safe inside of the buildings, but they would be safer on the streets. People inside would need to be rescued, and collateral damage was a major factor with AFO's long range quirks.
Kaname climbed quickly out of the blast zone, towards one of the still standing buildings. Suzume was on his heels, while Bakugou blasted his way to the top fast.
Kaname turned, and offered his hand to her.
Her brother looked down at her, and it was only then that she realized that the cut on his face was worse than she'd thought. The blood wasn't just dripping to his eye. It was in his eye. She couldn't tell the full extent of the damage, but that didn't matter.
Because her brother wasn't just injured. His eye was split open and gone.
And she.
Couldn't do anything about it.
Rage and helplessness tore in her chest, and she grabbed his hand so tight it could have broken a glass. He hauled her up like it was nothing, and it was all she could do not to grab his face and demand triage right then and there.
As if her own side wasn't soaking the black dress in blood.
Maybe it was the bloodloss that made her do it.
Maybe it was raw, stupid fury.
Maybe it was her father in her veins, everything he had done and everything he had given to them.
Or it could have been All Might behind them, a damnable man who had come to save her with a fucking hole in his stomach.
Whatever it was, she stopped at the edge of the crater.
Words from a lifetime ago echoed in her mind.
When you take a life two people die, them and the person you used to be.
The person I used to be is already dead. Who will I become now?
There was a gun in her hand. Rage was singing in her veins.
She turned, cocked the hammer, and shot in one smooth move.
It was glancing but it still struck.
And the life support system shattered across All For One's neck.
There was a twist of black and a blast of wind. All Might yelled her name, and blue and red moved across the sky before something intercepted before he did.
No, not intercepted.
Something lanced through All For One's stomach, and knocked the wind off course.
Suzume gaped. The earth twisted and shattered before coming together again to beat into the side of All For Ones head. That time he knocked it aside with a vengeance, shattering the re-made pillar. His arm bloated and curled grotesquely, but the slamming blow was blocked by three fast rising pillars of etch-marked stone. Not all of it was brought down into the roiling pit of recreation, plenty went rocketing away.
There was a tap of a cane on the ground, and the stone and shrapnel that was was flying like meteorites towards the buildings around the crater slowed down to a crawl through the air. Each one inched forwards, like they were travelling to their destination through molasses, and each one glowed faintly white.
Suzume looked towards the sound, the world shifting beneath her feet.
Osachi standing, two horns curling above his head like an ogre of myth, with his cane in hand. His face is weathered with age, older than when she'd seen him last, but his jaw is set in determination and his red, red eyes are solidly locked on All For One.
They gather around him. Men in suits, some with bird masks on their lower faces. Some without. Some are armed. Some have only their hands, or backpacks.
Rio stands at one side of him, proud and firm in a deep resolve.
Kai is crouched on his other side, his bare hands pressed to the ground that splits and reforms beneath his will. Tendrils of cement and metal roil across the edges of the main crater like the thousand arms of a kraken, ready to swallow AFO up. .
The message is clear.
They have drawn a line in the sand, and this is it. This is where All For Ones destruction stops.
And All Might moves.
Words come to her then. Words that she hasn't thought of in a lifetime.
"In our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."
The betrayal was anathema to her, who had trusted so few people, so few adults especially. But here was the man who took her father, who told her to give up, standing like a bulwark before damnation. Here were men who humored her path, and sold her father, had come together to hold the line.
And Shigaraki? Had that verse become truth for him, after their talk? Had he seen through the veneer of hate smeared rose glass that floated between he and All For One?
Or was the cloying grip of death still wrapped so firmly around his throat, that he could scarcely breath his own breaths?
Suzume can see other people. Men she's known for her whole life, and heroes in costume that she's never encountered before, shifting through the wreckage and pulling people out. Every time AFO gets close to the edge of the crater, or tries to distract All Might with bystanders lives, the attack is stopped by Kai and Osachi, by Rappa smashing stone into powder, by Hekiji's barriers, by Tabe fucking eating whatever is thrown his way. It doesn't stop the shock waves, not by a mile, but it's better than it would have been.
It's better than Suzume knows it should be.
AFO sways faintly in the sky and Suzume knows without having to look that Deidoro is somewhere, but his range must have increased if he can affect someone as far from anyone else as AFO.
Suzume can only watch as the Yakuza move, gathering victims, clearing houses and destroyed buildings with a terrifying efficiency.
It feels like she's in the twilight zone, and yet this is the world that she lives in.
A world that is real.
A world that is changing.
A world that she has changed.