Just when Izuku finally felt that he had a routine in place, when the alerts tapered off and he had actual time to swing by U.A. and run through disaster relief scenarios, when he finally figured out how to get whole sentences out in front of a mob of reporters and could smile easily anytime civilians approached him, when he had time for lunch and tea with his mother to catch up on the changes that came with being Number One, he felt it.
The air stirred. Power shimmered on the horizon. Space warped like molten plastic and disgorged a foreign lump into reality. A second sun shone upon the horizon, and a furious volcano rumbled with pent-up magma.
Izuku pressed the button on his intercom and told his secretary to have the HPSC brought on high alert. Then he called Nezu.
"The Marines are here."
"I see." After some furious keyboard typing, Nezu said, "I've erased all signs of Hatsume's presence here. I won't be able to erase yours."
"I don't plan on hiding. Let Mei know that I'm counting on her to finish them off."
Izuku turned on the news channel. It took twenty minutes for word to get out about the strange, massive ships, crawling with foreign military, lumbering towards the Japanese coastline. Akainu stood on the prow of the largest ship, eyes burning directly at Izuku through the camera. Izuku scowled back, grabbed himself a coffee, and waited.
A police barricade and dozens of heroes greeted the flagship as it rammed its way through a wooden dock. Metal ramps fell from the ship's sides with deafening clanks, and Marines scrambled, rifles on shoulders, boots stomping in rhythm and white coats gleaming in the sun, onto Japanese soil.
Akainu, not bothering with the ramps, leapt from the prow to the ground. Concrete cracked beneath his feet and bubbled into pools of lava. Steam curled from his shoulders like a shroud, and the air shimmered with every breath he took. The police reflexively crept back from the heat.
Endeavor, flames curling across his face and shoulders, attempting and failing to match Akainu's display, strode to the head of the police column. "You are trespassing upon Japanese soil. State your name and purpose."
Akainu looked down his nose at the number two hero. "I am Admiral Akainu, sent on behalf of the World Government to assess the state of your world and determine whether I am required to administer justice. I am also here to apprehend a wanted and dangerous criminal, the pirate Viridian, birth name Midoriya, wanted for murder, arson, theft, and known association with Gold Roger, among plenty others."
Izuku zipped through the television wire and snapped out ahead of the police line. Arms crossed, he said, "Bold of you to claim you're bringing justice here. I wasn't aware the Marines had any."
The Marines lowered rifles and drew swords. The police raised riot shields, and Heroes prepared their Quirks.
"Viridian," Akainu ground out. "Do you deny the charges?"
"My only crime was sailing on the wrong boat. Your crimes far outstrip my own."
"I am justice! Everything I do is in the name of establishing order. And you, Midoriya, pose an existential threat to the World Government. Come quietly, or I will take you by force."
Turning away from Akainu for the moment, Izuku told Endeavor, "Have everybody evacuate. That guy's stronger than All for One."
The heroes flames smoldered brightly. "You have a lot of explaining to do, Midoriya. If even a fraction of what they said is true…"
"I have done some of what they said," Izuku admitted. "But they would have killed me otherwise. Now go. Evacuate the area."
At Endeavor's signal, the heroes and police left the area. The Marines marched off, storming buildings and turning them into their forward base, while Akainu stared down Izuku.
"You know you can't win."
Izuku grinned. "I can't let you do to my people what you've done to everyone else."
"You will not stop us."
Izuku felt Observation Haki blare out a warning. He darted aside. Light pierced the space next to him, gouging a long trench in the ground. Kizaru stood, dusted off his fist, and said, "Oh my. You've gotten faster since the last time we met."
Izuku coated his fist with Haki and punched. Kizaru blurred aside and swung his arm. Despite Izuku's Haki, the blow clipped his head and flung him across the ground.
"But not fast enough," Kizaru finished.
Izuku pulled lightning from the sundered cables within the building. "We'll see about that. Gear Second! Rumble Gatling!"
Supercharged by the absorbed lightning, Izuku blitzed forward in a cloud of ionized fists. At first, Kizaru simply bobbed and weaved through the gauntlet. Izuku gritted his teeth and sped it up. Kizaru started deflecting punches aside and even blocked a few with Haki.
Kizaru sighed with frustration. "Really now. That's getting annoying."
He swept low as a disc of light. Izuku threw punches down, but the light wove around them, leaving fist-shaped craters in its wake. Kizaru's foot flashed up, catching Izuku on his chin and smacking him into the sky.
Hiding the attack in the sun's light, Izuku swelled his fist up with extra power. He felt Kizaru blitz towards him and flung his fist down.
"Gear Third!"
The attack caught Kizaru head-on. The fist stretched downward like a clap of thunder, slamming into the street with the force and destructive blast of a bomb. Izuku hovered, fist outstretched, watching the ground beneath his fist carefully. He grunted as he felt his fist being pushed back.
"Every bit as troublesome as that rubber brat." Kizaru held back the enlarged fist with his forearm. "Should have expected that." Kizaru spilled glass mirrors across the ground. "Okay then, try not to die from this."
Izuku's eyes widened as he felt Haki warnings flash all across his body. His brain buzzed with static as he simultaneously calculated hundreds of different trajectories. His body dissolved into flickering electrons, scattering into a Haki-driven cloud an instant before hundreds of beams of light, tinged with Haki and bouncing from dozens of different angles from all the scattered mirrors, seared the air around him.
Izuku gritted his teeth as a few pieces of himself were incinerated out of existence. Once the assault ended, he pulled himself back together into a whole body, bleeding from multiple holes across his limbs. He looked down at Kizaru, only to find he had vanished.
The warning came an instant after Kizaru's fist smashed his jaw.
Spitting out a tooth, Izuku backpedaled furiously, ducking and waving as Kizaru threw his own gauntlet of attacks. Kicks bounced off reflective surfaces, striking at odd angles that felt fuzzy to Izuku's Haki, leading to him taking many glancing blows. And a glancing blow, coming at the speed of light, packed almost too much power for Izuku to weather.
"I've been looking forward to this for a while, Viridian," Kizaru said. "I had to fill out a lot of paperwork for that boat you destroyed."
Izuku snorted. "Maybe you should be a pirate then."
"Way too much trouble." Kizaru shook his head. "Far easier to work with the system."
"Your system takes slaves, crushes its people under its heel and slaughters anyone that resists. I refuse to accept it."
"Then be slaughtered like everyone else that opposed the World Government."
Kizaru's leg tapered to a sharpened edge. Izuku split himself around the attack too slowly, and blood trickled to the ground. Kizaru slashed again and again. Izuku forced Haki across his arms and front, planted his feet, and weathered the assault. Kizaru's arms morphed into solid hammers, and the blunted edges turned into hammer-blows upon Izuku's defenses. The solid hits rattled his bones. Izuku made his body more spongy, deflating under the attacks even as his Haki tempered the blows.
As Izuku focused on the frontal assault, the Haki covering his back thinned. Izuku sensed Kizaru's intention a fraction of a second before the Admiral disappeared from his sight. Izuku frantically threw himself apart, scattering into nearby wires and cables, as Kizaru's sharpened Shigan pierced the air with the sound of a gunshot.
Izuku thought he had dodged it, until he reformed and felt the hole through his back. Any deeper, and Kizaru would have hit a lung.
Realizing that he couldn't win up close, Izuku racked his brain for ideas. Single strikes would be comically slow to a man made of light, and anything spread out would be too weak to repel him.
His thoughts strayed to Doflamingo, the way his threads made approaching him all but impossible. Electricity wanted to travel, to move, he could hardly hold it in place. But, if he made it into a loop, the electricity could spin around.
Mimicking the flow of electrons in the wires all around him, Izuku wove a thread of electricity. It wobbled, but as Izuku's will settled into it, it formed a black band around him. The next one came easily, and soon, Izuku had dozens spinning around him.
Kizaru had hardly been idle watching Izuku play with his Devil Fruit. He threw a Haki-infused beam at Izuku. One band blocked it, bulging inwards as the powers clashed, while three others swung from the sides and snipped the beam. Light shattered in glittering motes as Izuku wove more bands around himself.
"If you're going to be that troublesome," Kizaru said, examining Izuku's fortress. "It might be better to let Akainu have his way with you. They want you alive, but, well, I don't think that's going to happen at this rate."
Izuku gritted his teeth. His defense might work against Kizaru, but he doubted it would hold against a volcano. He cast his senses around for any way to hamper Kizaru's movement and found it in the power cables.
Izuku sent a loop twisting towards Kizaru, languid and creeping, but buzzing like a chainsaw, all gnashing teeth and hissing sparks. Kizaru kept his eye on Izuku, anticipating the spear that Izuku formed between his fingers. As it streaked by, Kizaru lazily stepped aside. Izuku sprung his trap. Serrated wires pounced from torn cables, looping into cage bars that hemmed the area.
Kizaru's arm got caught between two strands. A spray of sparks, like a shower of knives, burst from metallic surfaces. Kizaru shifted and warped, still trapped by the Haki-tinged strand looped around his arm. Though he dodged all the knives, he missed the loop undulating across the ground. The toothy edges caught on his uniform, snapping the loop into place around his leg.
Pulling on both ends, Izuku pounced. With his arm and leg yanked in separate directions, Kizaru could only brace as Izuku threw a Haki-coated, sparking punch into his ribcage.
The Admiral grunted. Light formed in his left hand, and Izuku hastily backed away. It proved the wrong decision, as the Admiral threw it at the building. The electric cage winked out of existence as he scorched the metal out of the ruins. Another Haki-tinged beam severed the loop around his ankle, leaving him free once more.
Kizaru shrugged off his coat and shook his head at the ragged hole through the middle. "And I just got this one made. Now I'll have to file another requisition form."
Izuku ducked into the ground as a beam pierced the space where his head was. He Soru'd off of copper atoms and fried the insulation as he rammed himself through the metal. He popped up, threw a sweeping kick at the back of Kizaru's head. The Admiral ducked and aimed a cluster of beams up. Izuku decohered, dipped back into the metal, and rushed around.
Kizaru was gone when he went back up. He dipped into the ground, then yelped as Kizaru's fist shattered the ground, clenching with blackened fingers around the copper wire with Izuku's body.
With his chest and legs stuck in Kizaru's grip, Izuku sent an arm out and put all his spare power into it. "Gear Third! Thor's Hammer!"
Forced to pick between tanking an earth-shattering strike or letting Izuku go, Kizaru dropped the wire and blinked away. Izuku used his attack to propel himself across the city, driving himself towards a power station.
He had dipped so far into his reserves already and hardly left a scratch on the Admiral. In a battle of attrition, Izuku would run out of electricity even if he absorbed Japan's entire power grid. And in a battle of speed, nothing beat light. He needed power, vast overwhelming, and unstoppable.
Izuku felt the entire country through the power station. He felt every transformer, every cable, every appliance in every home.
And he sucked them all dry.
The power wanted out. It wanted to jump to every stray piece of metal, wanted to scorch the earth to glass, wanted to shatter the heavens and rain the pieces upon the broken land. Izuku crammed it in with raw willpower, darkening his skin as his chest swelled, his arms bulked up, and his legs reached All Might proportions.
"Gear Fourth," Izuku said, sparks hissing from his teeth. "Let's rumble."
Kizaru shot like an arrow, streaking across the city in a flash of light, arm outstretched for a devastating Shigan. Izuku flowed aside, threw a flurry of punches, and broke off as Kizaru's foot swung towards his chin.
Each of Izuku's punches rang with the clash of thunder. The air snapped, the clouds shuddered, and the air hung heavy with the sharp, metallic scent of ozone.
And yet, for every punch Izuku threw, he had to dodge two of Kizaru's. Izuku dodged by a hair and took glancing blows because the Admiral was too fast. Kizaru dodged by a hair because he had enough time to dodge lazily and counterattack.
Izuku howled with wordless rage. All this power, all his training, and he still couldn't measure up against the true monsters of the other world. He couldn't fall. Not there. Not now. Not with Mei and his mom and everyone else at his back. Not when he knew what the Marines and the World Government would do to his people. He had to move faster. Faster. Faster!
His punches broke the sound barrier. Kizaru had to give them a wider berth. Attacks went without a punish and Izuku felt himself falling into a rhythm. He moved before Kizaru threw his fist, cleanly sliding from a dodge into a kick, blocking and throwing an uppercut. He reacted before a punch was thrown, using Kizaru's own momentum against him as the Admiral's fast-as-light attacks missed and left him open to Izuku's deliberate, well-timed attacks.
On Kizaru's end, the Admiral felt his advantage slipping through his fingers. He moved faster, he could see it, how Viridian's limbs moved like steel paddles through honey, how his own punches outsped his opponent, yet against all reason, he found himself on the back foot. Whenever he thought he dodged an attack, it had changed course. He thought a punch would connect, only for the pirate to bend back and kick into his ribs. Even though he was faster, he felt seconds behind his opponent.
He knew what it had to be. Observation Haki, so keenly honed that Viridian could read the flow of battle. Kizaru inwardly groaned as he thought of all the paperwork he'd have to fill out about the pirate's new capabilities as a gleaming, blackened fist, tinged with purple flecks of something greater than Armament Haki, ballooned into a pile driver and smashed his face flatter than a board.
It sounded like a missile screaming death and destruction, cleaving the air, leaving a visible pressure wave in its wake. Kizaru soared as a comet, trailing streaks of light, towards the Marines' vessels. When he touched the ground, rather than bouncing off, his sheer kinetic energy shoved the ground out of the way, blasting a tidal wave of dirt and concrete high into the air. The Marines all shouted, bracing themselves, and frantically turning their ships out of the Admiral's path.
Akainu, arms crossed, stamped one foot. The dirt wave melted into magma and stalled. As the Admiral slid towards him, Akainu's foot blackened. He held his boot out, and Kizaru's chest folded over it.
Kneeling before the fallen Admiral, Akainu looked him over. His breath came in rattling gargles, and a trickle of blood left his lips. His nose was flattened, trapping the blood inside, and his skin was already turning a brilliant shade of purple.
"Beaten by a single pirate. And a whelp at that. If the Elders wouldn't throw a fit over it, I'd have you demoted back to a cabin boy until you whipped yourself back into shape."
Kizaru let out a gasping cough. "Did you plan this from the start? Have me soften him up so you could take the credit? And I thought Aokiji was the cold one."
"Save your pathetic mewling for Sengoku. I have no patience for it."
Stepping over the fallen Admiral, Akainu strode across the torn ground towards Izuku. Izuku waited for him, arms crossed, still smiling, but struggling to hold in the power. Sparks crackled from his feet and shoulders, and with each outburst, Izuku's frame shrunk. Haki receded from his extremities, shrinking up his arms and legs, and as it shrunk, power poured out of Izuku like a popped balloon. Soon, he shrunk back down to his regular size, drooping with exhaustion, but still smiling and crossing his arms.
"It's over," Akainu said. "Submit, or I'll beat you within an inch of your life and hurl you into Impel Down myself."
Izuku curled his fists and put them up. "So long as I'm breathing, it's never over."
Akainu cracked his knuckles. The ground grew soft and warped as the space around him heated up. "Sounds like something I should fix."
Izuku gathered the last of his electricity in his hand. He knew he had no chance against Akainu. He knew the Admiral would drag him back to the other world, throw him into Impel Down, and slam the Sea Prism door shut behind him. But he couldn't back down. Not with Mei on their bounty posters, not with his mom a potential target, not with all of Japan counting on him as their number one hero.
All he could do was trust in Mei, in Nezu, and in the other heroes.
Just as he was about to loose his last lightning bolt, a solid wall of electromagnetic force slammed into him from behind. The charge fizzled out between his fingers, and Izuku sank to his knees, nearly dissolving into a pile of electron goop.
Gasping for air, Izuku turned his neck to see what had hit him. Hawks stood over him, holding a pair of gleaming cuffs.
"What…" Izuku tried to speak, but his tongue drooped, fumbling the rest of his words.
"No hard feelings, Midoriya," Hawks said flatly. "Just orders."
The Sea Prism cuffs clicked shut. Izuku felt his body bounce back into its original shape, and the whiplash nearly made him vomit. Hawks dragged him onto his feet and walked up to Akainu.
"Given the charges laid out before us, we hereby disavow Viridian, civilian name Izuku Midoriya, as a professional hero, and remand him into the custody of the wronged nation. We will not tolerate thieves and murderers among our nation's heroes."
Izuku didn't understand. He didn't exactly deny what they said, but simply taking the word of the Marines? No trial, no evidence, just handing him over without the tiniest bit of hesitation? Was it because of the villains at the USJ that they were willing to believe them?
They hit him with Mei's invention. The one meant to stop All for One after he stole his Devil Fruit. The one that the HPSC practically strong-armed Mei into handing over. The one they didn't give back after Izuku beat the villain.
The one that takes an hour to charge up its EMP.
It hadn't even been twenty minutes since the Marines laid out the charge. As a matter of fact, it was just over an hour ago when he called to put them on high alert. The HPSC had been planning to stab him in the back since that moment, probably ever since he became the number one hero. But why? Why make him the number one hero when they were planning this? Why betray him at all?
Akainu grabbed him by the throat. Izuku hissed through his teeth as the Admiral's molten grip seared his skin. Hawks remained carefully blank-faced at the sight of smoke curling around Izuku's head.
"Your compliance has been noted," Akainu said, "And you shall be forgiven for harboring this fugitive, given you are equally compliant in bringing the other one to justice."
After a short pause, Hawks replied, "I shall inform my superiors."
Indignation rose in Izuku's chest. How dare he? How dare they? He should rip these shackles off his wrists, cave in the Admiral's chest, rip off Hawks' wings, slaughter the Marines, smash their ships, and call down lightning upon the HPSC until nothing remained but a smoking crater. Even with the cuffs suppressing his strength, even exhausted as he was from fighting Kizaru and taking an EMP knife to the kidneys, Izuku could feel a spark, glimmering in his hands, a whisper of power that would bow to no man, accept no chains. He could rip his way free, beat down Akainu, and then…
Then what? Be the number one hero? Go back home, whichever world that meant? Find Luffy again, or stick with Mei, or go off on his own?
His dream was dead, stabbed in the back like he was. And now, he had nothing left to fight for.
The spark flickered and died.
And Izuku hung his head.
Akainu, sensing all the fight leaving his prisoner, smiled and withdrew his hand. He turned to the Marines and shouted, "Load him up. I want him in his own personal cell before sundown."
The Marines dragged him into the brig, shoved him to the floor, and kicked him for good measure. Izuku felt the entire ship thrum as its dimension-crossing engine roared to life, felt space suck him threw a straw and spit him back out. On the other side, the air felt crisper, tinged with the scent of salt and adventure, but it held no joy for Izuku.
He did not fight as the Marines paraded him up the steps of Impel Down. He did not fight as they stripped him out of his hero costume. He had no further use for it. He did not fight as they marched him down the five levels of Impel Down, past jeering catcalling pirates mocking the new unlucky arrival even as Warden Magellan doused the worst offenders in caustic poison. He did not fight as he walked past the inmates of the sixth level, the lowest of the damned, pirates and criminals so terrible that their very existence had to be buried beyond the reach of eyes, ears and records.
He did not fight as the bars of his cell slammed shut.
A/N: and meanwhile, the HPSC is congratulating themselves on saving the world and getting rid of their biggest obstacle to maintaining control over the hero industry. I'm sure that they will definitely not suffer any consequences for this whatsoever. :)
Also, guess who's still picking tomatoes. In November. I'm no farmer, but I'm pretty sure tomatoes aren't supposed to be growing in November. I haven't done a thing to those plants and they're happy as clams.
AxtheAxolotl318: "*Marines show up in the one piece world but in the usa near Stars and stripesStars and Stripes who knows amarican and japanese tropes and can tell their from another wolrd looking to take hers over*
S using New order: No poweror item from another world can work within a 300 mile radius around me
Marines who sent all their second most powerful people: Why can't i do anything to her?!"
Bardothren: As funny as that would be, Haki would probably still work anyways.