Someone was laughing. It was probably Izuku, but he couldn't be sure, because his hearing had been drowned out by the ringing in his head. The ringing had started immediately after he Decimated that Nomu, and he wasn't sure if it was because of the way his mind went blank and all his muscles relaxed as his Quirk worked by itself, or if it was the way that wind suddenly rushed over him as the pressure in the air returned and something crashed into his body, throwing him into the air. Things blurred past in a smear of colour, and Izuku felt nothing but the throbbing in his arm and the new stinging in his hands as he dropped onto the cold, hard concrete of the central plaza. His hearing was coming back, so that was cool. He heard a voice call out to him, muted and far away, but that was contradicted by Uraraka's face coming into view right in front of his face as he stared up at the ceiling of the USJ, meaning that he was probably laying on the floor in a heap, though he didn't feel any of that. That'd track, considering whoever was laughing, probably him, had stopped, and was now coughing as the wind was knocked out of them and they tried to regain it.
Uraraka picked him up off the ground and lifted him onto two feet. As his hand brushed something, Izuku felt his awareness snap back into sharp focus from the floaty, dreamlike filter he'd been experiencing everything through. Izuku ripped his hands away from Uraraka, hugging them close to his chest as he looked at her with wide eyes. Nothing happened, which made him wonder if he was correct in that his hand had bumped against her leg. Something had happened to Izuku's Quirk, he'd broken through something in his mind that pushed him past the limitation of needing five fingers for Decimation to activate, which meant that just a touch from any of his fingers should've activated it. Maybe that was wrong, though. He'd been able to Decimate Nomu with four fingers, but not Uraraka with the one or two fingers that had bumped into her while she helped him up, so what did that tell him? Izuku forced himself to think through the pain as he came to the conclusion that it mustn't be five fingers that are needed for activation, but the majority, meaning that one or two won't do the job, but three will. Izuku sighed his hastily taken breath out, relieved that he hadn't made a mistake that would've cost Uraraka her life. Izuku smiled shakily at that realisation, but froze when he saw Uraraka's horrified eyes move down to his hands.
Izuku looked down at his own hands to see that they were cracked and bloody. He winced, realising where that stinging was coming from, as the hand that had Decimated that Nomu had seemingly taken some of the effect onto itself, with the previously broken finger nowhere to be found and the skin ripped and split in jagged lines up halfway to his elbow. Most of the skin was there, but it was as if someone had taken strips of skin while he was still awake and struggling, and so it was uneven and warped. It had been a distant, foreign sensation, but now that Izuku saw it, the pain was unbearable, and Izuku collapsed back to his knees with a strangled sob. Uraraka followed him down, putting an arm around his shoulder and sticking with Izuku. He bared his teeth and pushed through the pain, ignoring it so that he could see what was going on. The white haired villain was still floating, but he looked more annoyed than the amused, and somehow simultaneously irritated tone he'd taken with Aizawa before. The villain was looking down at him with a nasty expression on his face, those ancient eyes cutting into Izuku's as he went to speak.
"You're alive, are you? Well, that was certainly the plan, but if one of my better Quirks won't put you down, then I suppose we'll have to experiment," the lower, calculating voice said. "You little fucking shit. I'm not gonna kill you, you're too special for that, but I'll get damn close!" the other snarled.
One of his better Quirks? Izuku picked up on that phrasing, and wondered what he meant by that. Surely, this villain couldn't be saying that he had multiple Quirks. That was impossible, it was against everything they knew about Quirks. It was the whole reason that they were called 'Quirks', because each person had only one and they were entirely unique to that person and that person alone. It was nonsense, really, the idea of having multiple Quirks, but what had that attack been, then? Izuku was sure it was the floating villain that had blasted him into the air before, but his Quirk was seemingly the power to float, so what? Sure, a single Quirk could do both those things, but that blast had felt like pure air pressure sent in a condensed attack at him, and the villain wasn't floating as much as he was standing on thin air. If it was one Quirk being used, then it would be something like air manipulation, where the villain had to warp air currents to float, and then that would make sense, but that wasn't it. The villain was floating independently of the Quirk that he'd used to attack, and the only way for a human to float is with a Quirk, so that meant that the villain had to be right. This person had more than one Quirk. That, paired with the horrid feeling that Izuku got whenever he looked into those eyes that knew more than they should, forced a single, terrible question into Izuku's head.
What the fuck was this person, if they were capable of having more than one Quirk? There were absolutely people with more than one Quirk function, there was even one of those people in Izuku's class. Shoto Todoroki had the ability to harness the powers of ice and fire, as he'd demonstrated in the recording of the battle trial that the class had reviewed in foundational heroics. He could create ice, and then melt it with the control he had over temperature. Those were two very different powers, but it was absolutely one Quirk, since it seemed that he only had the ability to use each power on a different side of his body, the right for his ice and the left for his fire. Humans, despite being so much more than they'd been just two hundred years ago, still had limitations, hard lines that they couldn't cross. They were still just human. This guy, this thing in front of him was outside that, even more inhuman than the Nomu if he was saying that he had multiple Quirks. Izuku felt a shiver wrack his whole body as he thought about it, the whole idea just fundamentally disagreeing with everything he ever learned about Quirks.
And then again, they said that Izuku was special, and that they didn't want to kill him. What was that about? They thought he was special in some way, that was clear, but why? There was nothing that he had or could do for them that he could think of … shit. Did they think he was recruitment material because of his Quirk? That was just his luck. He really was being put through the ringer at UA. It was still just the first week, too. Honestly, Izuku's life was starting to get a little too complicated a little too fast for his liking. What happened to sitting by the pond with Uraraka and just having a conversation? Izuku knew this would be hard, but come on.
It looked like the floating villain was gearing up to attack again, but Aizawa broke out of what seemed to be a shocked trance in which he'd been numbly watching everything unfold. He must have activated his Quirk, because the villain stopped floating and fell to the ground, impacting hard as neither the villain nor Kurogiri had apparently foreseen that. The villain snarled, propping himself up on his hands and knees and pushing himself back up onto his feet in one fluid motion. He looked over at Aizawa with a frantic glare, his limbs shaking. The villain looked around with shaky, frantic motions, totally different from how he'd acted before. There had been no tremble in this villain's limbs, no spasms that betrayed the cold panic that clearly filled his eyes, now free of the weight of that unknowable knowledge that they'd held before. He finally settled on Aizawa across the plaza, and his eyes took on a dangerous quality to them. If looks could kill, Aizawa would have been done for. The villain glared at Aizawa with a fire in his eyes that Izuku had never seen before, like he wanted to burn Aizawa to ashes with just a glance.
"You took my Quirks. You're a fucking dead man, Eraserhead!" the villain roared, once again making Izuku's thoughts stop entirely as he tried to wrap his head around the idea of a person possessing multiple Quirks.
Izuku also realised, as the villain crouched low and seemingly prepared to break out into a sprint, that the white haired man had spoken with only one voice that time. He wondered what that meant, that the second, older voice disappeared when the villain's Quirks were Erased. Was that voice a Quirk? It seemed a little weird for this villain to have a Quirk, if he indeed could hold more than one, just to split his voice into two different, yet very similar phrases. What would be the point of that? Intimidation? Well, it kind of worked, but not nearly enough to justify it, in Izuku's mind, which told him that there had to be another reason for Aizawa's Quirk silencing that extra voice. Was it that the way the villain's body worked was just entirely altered by having multiple Quirks, and having them suppressed meant his body temporarily got to revert back to normal? Maybe, but Izuku couldn't be sure. There were so many mysteries around this one man that it kind of made Izuku's head hurt.
Everything seemed to fall silent as Aizawa planted himself in a sturdy looking stance in preparation for the villain's charge. There seemed to be something building in the villain, a certain power in the air around him that seemingly warped his face into a manic grin that showed as many teeth as possible. Then, the villain was gone. Izuku saw nothing except a small crater appear where he'd been standing an instant beforehand, and then the villain was in front of Aizawa, with his hand thrown back for a punch. Izuku shouted something, he didn't know what, because a sick feeling overcame him at the thought that he was about to watch his first real mentor die. Aizawa was the only good teacher he'd ever had, and he'd just decided that he was going to tell him that, so he couldn't die here. Luckily, the villain froze when a loud bang rang out from near the entrance, and everything seemed to come to a standstill as every eye in the USJ moved to see what had just entered the facility.
It was All Might. His large, muscular form stepped up to the edge of the platform up at the entrance, and Izuku could see clearly that he wasn't smiling, which sent a shiver down his spine. Everyone knew that All Might was always smiling, it was his gimmick. 'Those that can smile through a difficult time are the strongest people in the world' was one of his favourite lines to rattle off during interviews. His whole thing was that a positive attitude could literally save lives, and yet here he was, looking like an enraged bull staring down the matador waving the red cape. There was power in that stare, almost like the kind that Izuku had felt from the villain when he'd had his Quirks, but different. This time, that power brought a strange kind of comfort to Izuku as he sat there on the ground, cradling his mangled hand with Uraraka trying her best to support him. It felt like everything was fine now, because he was there. It was the first time that Izuku could really say he believed that catchphrase, but it rang truer than anything Izuku had ever felt before, so much so that a small tear came to his eye as he realised.
Time seemed to unfreeze from that moment of realisation from all parties involved, and Aizawa stumbled back and onto the floor from the pure force of the villain's charge. That was something else, too. How had that villain accomplished that when his Quirks were Erased? The charge had been something out of All Might's arsenal, and yet he'd been able to do it when his Quirks had all been null and void under Aizawa's stare. What the hell was this guy?
All Might appeared in the plaza instantly, all of the remaining thugs and lower-level villains dropping to the ground as they were knocked out by a gust of wind in the vague shape of a man racing around the plaza and coming to a stop in front of the white haired villain, who was pushed back but held out against the overwhelming force of All Might. As the villain stumbled and worked to regain his footing, All Might leaned down and helped Aizawa to his feet, his mouth moving silently from Izuku's distance. Aizawa gave a stiff nod, and then said something back, which caused All Might's eyes to move over to Izuku and Uraraka, who were still over by the edge of the Flood Zone. All Might and Aizawa froze as they locked onto the two of them, as if they'd forgotten they were there. No, it was something different. They were just now noticing something, and their eyes were subtly moving up from what he could see. Izuku looked up, but didn't see anything, just the ceiling. When he looked back down, his head moved in such a way that his hair, loose and messy after getting blasted by air, fell in front of his eyes slightly, and made him gasp at what he saw.
With his good hand, Izuku held a handful of his hair out in front of his face, and saw that what had previously been a sort of bluish-grey was now stark white, similar to the villain's. It was also unbelievably dry, so dry that Izuku was scared that if he tugged on it any more it would fall out, so he let go of it with a slight nervous jump and looked over at Uraraka, who was similarly looking at it, but with a kind of resigned look as opposed to shocked. So, that meant it had to have been that way for a while, but for how long? Had it been his Quirk evolving that had done it? Izuku recalled that his hair had turned its previous colour from a kind of forest green after his Quirk initially awakened the first time, so was this the same thing? He met Uraraka's eyes and saw that she had to have been terrified by everything that had gone wrong today, so tried his best to smile through the pain.
"I think we should go," he said through gritted teeth.
"I don't think so," the villain's colder voice said, returned due to Aizawa's fumble. "You're not leaving," said what seemed to be the natural voice of the villain.
At the villain piping up again, All Might snapped to face him, his fists clenching and beginning to tremble slightly. Aizawa cursed under his breath, putting his goggles back on. The problem was, All Might's arrival and blitz of the villains in the plaza had kicked up a lot of dust, and his initial strike on the white haired villain had just increased the amount of particulate debris in the air. That meant that Aizawa didn't have a proper line of sight on the villain, meaning he couldn't activate his Quirk. That didn't seem to matter to All Might, though, who took a few steps forward with a dropped jaw and raised eyebrows. The slight trembling in his fists had extended to his arms, and now Izuku was sure what it was. All MIght was afraid. That couldn't be, All Might was never afraid. Except, he was. The Symbol of Peace and Justice was terrified, and it showed through clear as day. Just who was this villain, who was faster than sight without a Quirk, who apparently had more than one Quirk, and who had the means to kill the man who'd been the number one hero for thirty five years.
"All for One!" All Might yelled, so clear that it carried over to Izuku and Uraraka. All for One?
"Oh, you do recognise me in this form. I was worried that you wouldn't be able to tell that it was me. Yes, I have acquired a new vessel, as you made necessary after our last confrontation. You wounded me so badly that I had to vacate the body I'd used for a hundred and fifty years, All Might, so you should be proud. I bet your dear departed predecessor, as pathetic as she was, would be as well!" the villain, who was apparently named All for One based on how he reacted, rambled. "I was wondering when you'd show up. This game was starting to get interesting, but these extras are just fodder. Grunts. Eraserhead is fun, and that kid over there was somehow able to kill my Nomu, but this was all for you. You're the real boss, so let's get going, All Might, you piece of filth, government-sponsored thug."
Izuku didn't see what happened next, just that the mist parted to reveal that the villain, All for One, was gone, and that prompted All Might to disappear as well, both seemingly moving towards each other so fast that they vanished. Then, an overwhelming force washed over the whole plaza, pushing Izuku and Uraraka back into the water and sending them tumbling across it as they retained momentum like a stone skipping over a lake's surface. Izuku could've sworn he saw Aizawa being thrown like they were, but before he could confirm that, Izuku finally passed out from the blowback of the All Might and All for One's clash and and the pain from the injuries he'd been racking up all this time.
