One Week Later

Nagoya was burning.

The ancient city, now a modern metropolis of ten million souls, lay to the southwest of Tokyo. Often overlooked by foreigners in favor of Osaka to the west and Tokyo to the east, Nagoya was ancient by comparison, a city that had been witness to more of Japanese history than perhaps any other.

After all, it had been here where Oda Nobunaga had begun the campaign that would end the Sengoku Jidai after a century of ceaseless war. It had been here where two young upstarts named Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu had forged a dynasty in blood and ash, welding together the daimyo with force and guile until at last the Tokugawa Shogunate had been born.

This city knew war. It knew how the machinations of the great crushed the small—had seen the story play out over and over again in the blood that stained its old, tired stones.

Now war had come again. And Nagoya, as it always had, burned itself to ash to herald the end of one age, and the beginning of the new.

Three Great Houses were based out of Nagoya, each prouder and more deeply entwined with the city's bloody stones than the last. Each of them considered themselves the true rulers of the ancient city, and the others mere interlopers. Their rivalries ran old and deep, hatred stoked over generations, building, building, building.

Now it had snapped, and blood was running in the streets. One of the Great Houses was already dead, its entire line snuffed out like a candle by a single well-placed bomb carried by a paid-off member of the House Guard. Nobody knew who'd paid the man to do it. Now, the other two Houses were tearing each other apart, gunships and tanks ripping through the busiest parts of the city—and worse things, too. Skyscrapers burned like candles as explosions rocked Nagoya, streets rippling with gunfire and crackling with bombs, civilians fleeing in blind panic as tanks rumbled down tree-lined avenues. And every so often, interspersed with the more familiar sights of war—men in guns and dark uniforms, armored vehicles, the grumbling roar of a distant helicopter—the strange, unearthly sights of Quirked combat made themselves known.

An explosion crackled as it ripped through a squad of men wearing the insignia of House Yoarashi. The men barely made a sound as they fell, taken so utterly by surprise that there was no time to scream.

When they were down, the man who'd stepped out from the smoldering café gestured to another squad of soldiers—these ones bearing a symbol he'd known all his life. The insignia of House Yagi.

"The fuck you hiding in there for?" Katsuki Bakugo asked dryly. "All the fun's happenin' out here!"

The soldiers just stared at him. It wasn't often that one saw a Quirked combatant like Katsuki, even for the best of the best, after all. He was a singular man—one of the most lethal fighters of his generation. If he said so himself.

Still, they were seasoned soldiers, and a barked order from their commanding officer had them moving down the street again in a hurry. The Yagi House Guard's orders were quite simple: stop the fighting, evacuate civilians, and if one of the other Houses got trigger happy…well. The Yagi House Guard had come strapped for war.

That part was Katsuki's objective. He wasn't so good at evacuating civilians or maintaining order. He knew where his strengths lay, and how to play to them. So as the soldiers scurried down the road, he strode in the opposite direction—towards the biggest explosion he could see.

Some men built beautiful things. Some men protected others. Some men were leaders, icons, symbols. He wasn't. Katsuki Bakugo was a man you sent to break what needed breaking. Laws, battle lines, bones, it didn't matter. Just point him in the right direction and get out of his way.

He was just fine with that.

Katsuki chuckled to himself as, with a crackle of his palms, he flung himself into the air, easily achieving a kind of jerky, loping explosion-powered flight that ate up distance with ease. As he moved, he kept an eye out for anyone who might try and take a shot at him in the chaotic, freewheeling battle.

The radio in his ear squawked. "Something funny?" a familiar voice crawled.

Even though Ochako couldn't see him, Katsuki rolled his eyes anyway. It was the principle of the thing. Wouldn't have felt right otherwise.

"Other than the fact that you thought Japan would be less exciting than America?" he asked. "Nah. Just remembering you being so convinced that we wouldn't immediately find ourselves knee deep in the shit as usual."

Ochako huffed over their comms. "I resent that," she noted in an overly prim voice. "I tried to go straight. You're the one who kept right on chugging with your old habits."

Katsuki scoffed. "You're as straight as limp spaghetti, Uraraka," he shot back. "And you're the one who wanted to investigate that goddamn train."

Ochako just laughed. Over the comms, Katsuki heard the unmistakable CRACK of a Barrett .50 caliber anti-materiel rifle firing. Somebody had just gotten a very unpleasant—and very short—lesson in keeping your damn head down. And probably also never being within two kilometers of Ochako Uraraka if you valued your life.

Of course, advice like that was for lesser men than Katsuki. Sure, he wasn't bulletproof—wasn't any more resistant to bullets than anyone else, actually. Most quirks, even powerful ones, didn't help you on that front.

But that was fine. It just meant that you had to be able to kill everyone who might try to shoot you before they could get you. Which happened to be Katsuki's specialty.

As he came around a blind corner, he spotted another knot of soldiers not wearing Yagi uniforms. Which meant that they were free game.

Katsuki grinned viciously as he flipped in midair, and fired off explosions in both palms. He shot downwards like a bullet from a gun, right into the middle of the soldiers.

What happened next wasn't really a fight. It was far too one-sided. Katsuki brought a hand up, and a concussive blast knocked men off their feet and shredded their eardrums, smoke and heat scorching their lungs. And then the next explosion tore them apart.

There wasn't a nicer way of putting it. He didn't take them out, he didn't neutralize them. When he was done, what was left was no longer men. It was bits of men, plastered over the street and the shattered front window of what had once been a store. There wasn't malice in it—Katsuki wasn't a monster, he didn't enjoy this. But he didn't hesitate either.

If you asked him, all those euphemisms were the coward's way out of admitting what war was. War was, underneath all the drama and the pomp, about killing the other guy before he killed you. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't righteous, and no matter how you chose to fight it, sooner or later you would look a man in the eyes and watch him die spitting blood at you.

You could run from that fact. Some people did. They didn't make good soldiers, but maybe they were better people than Katsuki. Or maybe they were just cowards. He went back and forth on that one.

You could revel in that fact. Some people did that too. It ate them alive, sooner or later, rotted them from inside. Grow too comfortable with war, and something broke inside you, something fundamental. Katsuki had seen that plenty—had seen it on the faces of paramilitary men and mercenaries alike back in America, had watched men he respected slowly degenerate into animals that thrived on blood. He'd watched it happen to friends.

Or you could do the hardest thing of all—you could accept it, and not enjoy it, and do it anyway, because all the alternatives were worse. That's what Katsuki did. Sure, he was a callous asshole, a two-bit mercenary, a man who, yeah, got his kicks from blowing shit up and raising hell. But he didn't enjoy what he did. He was good at it, and he took pride in that, but he didn't relish killing. He was good at separating what he did from who he was.

Or maybe he was just batshit crazy. Always a possibility, that. Hey, no shame in admitting it. Some of his favorite people were batshit crazy too.

The Barrett CRACKed again, and this time it wasn't over Katsuki's earpiece. He whirled to find that an armored car had swung around another blind corner behind him while he'd been mopping up the last of the soldiers, and Ochako, from whatever skyscraper she'd floated herself atop, had put a round right through the thing's engine block. It had flipped the whole car, which now lay burning merrily half inside an abandoned boutique.

Katsuki's earpiece crackled. "Watch your fuckin' back next time, Blasty," his partner in crime snarked. "I got better things to do than save your ass."

Katsuki just chuckled. "Sure you do, Cheeks," he said dryly. Then, he went looking for trouble again.

It didn't take long to find it. A darkness boiled out of a half-collapsed building, taking a terrible, deadly shape, with claws the size of semi trucks and glowing yellow eyes. It was flanked by men in tanks and trucks, a helicopter buzzing overhead. Flashes of fire and smoke filled the air as another force—another House Guard, presumably—did battle with the enormous monster and its backup.

It was a pretty one-sided fight. The monster screeched, and batted aside a battle tank with a single blow, sending it careening into the air and through the glass facade of a building. Men died with each passing second under its claws, explosions and bullets picking off those who escaped.

A missile struck the beast in the side of the head, which only seemed to piss it off. Katsuki watched as the man who seemed to be the source of the shadowy monster—a short, oddly shaped man with an avian head—raised a hand, and the monster lunged towards the building the missile had come from. With a single strike, it ripped the building from its foundations, sending it crashing down in a shriek of twisted metal and shattered glass.

Katsuki had seen enough. He was always up for a fight, but there was a difference between a fight and a massacre. He knew damn well what his weight class was, and it was not building-sized shadow kaiju, thank you very fucking much.

Besides, he was pretty sure he recognized the man down there from one of those damn noble parties he'd snuck into. Which put this fight firmly above his weight class and his pay grade.

Luckily, he knew just the asshole to call to deal with this. Katsuki thumbed his earpiece.

"Yo," he said, "I got eyes on one of your fancy noble fuckers, rich boy. Bird head, giant shadow monster, looks pissed. He's in Iidamachi Ward, near Suji Street."

The voice that answered after a moment's delay was low, rough. It rose up like a monster from the depths, almost casual, but with enough lazy menace in it to send a chill down your spine.

"Got it," Katsuki heard over the radio. Curt. Laconic, even. Big bastard never was very talkative while he was working. Unless he got really fired up, that was. "Dropping in…thirty seconds."

Katsuki grinned, and hunkered down to watch the show. Down below the rooftop he was standing on, the battle raged on between the two Houses. But not for much longer.

It ended in the blink of an eye exactly twenty eight seconds later, with the impact of a falling star directly at the center of the raging battle.

Men screamed as they died, ripped apart by rampaging hurricane-force winds, sent flying into concrete and steel, impaled on jagged rebar or left smeared across the pavement. Tanks and trucks bounced like ping-pong balls, filling the air with the screech of rending metal as they broke.

And over it all, the wind roared and the green lightning crackled. The hum it made sounded almost content. Sated. Like a predator enjoying its meal—but one that would be hungry again soon. Always hungry.

The smoke cleared on a battlefield suddenly swept of all but a few survivors, the few lucky ones who'd been far enough away or protected enough not to join their comrades in decorating the walls of the nearby buildings. It revealed the man crouched at the center, wearing simple, dark clothing—made to not get in the way more than anything. This man didn't need armor. He barely needed protection.

Katsuki wondered sometimes, if he'd always known that the little wimpy boy he'd known as a child would become this thing one day, this living superweapon, this one-man army. He wondered if there was anything left of that boy in the monster he watched rise from the impact crater he'd left, if Titan still remembered reaching out to him in a river to pick him up.

It was a pointless question in the end, because that wimpy boy had become, through chance or hard work or whatever twisted fucking joke passed for fate, the single deadliest man alive. Katsuki didn't think Izuku knew just how monstrous he truly was, when he dropped the act, when he stood tall amidst a burning city and let the lightning flow. He looked like something from another world. He looked like God.

And if there was one thing Katsuki believed, it was this: when God went to war, you took his fucking side. That was just common sense.

Grinning, he settled in to enjoy the fireworks.

Straightening fully from the leap that had sent him across twenty kilometers of burning urban sprawl in a heartbeat, Izuku looked across the cracked, smoking street at the leviathan of darkness that boiled from the cracked windows of the skyscraper, great talons tearing gashes in the pavement as the bird-headed Lord emerged from the ranks of his regrouping forces.

And it was a leviathan. Lord Fumikage Tokoyami, when he summoned his quirk in full form, put the old kaiju movies Izuku had once watched to shame. The enormous, yellow-eyed monster made of night was larger than the city block he'd emerged from, boiling in the smoke-blackened sky as jagged shapes coalesced into a single, titanic creature from a nightmare.

And all of it, all that power, all that death, flowed like a cloak from the back of the man standing in front of Izuku.

Wreathed in his own darkness, a monster towering above him into the scorching air of a dying city, Lord Tokoyami did not look like the young man Izuku had shared a pleasant drink with at a ball not two weeks before. But there was enough of that man in the Great Lord before him to make Izuku hesitate, if only for a moment.

As a result, Fumikage spoke first.

"Lord Izuku," he said in a voice that rumbled like thunder, and yet sounded surprisingly calm. "I take it your father sent you to kill me?"

Izuku watched that titanic, howling monster carefully, lightning crackling in the air around him. He returned Tokoyami's even, unbothered gaze. "My father sent me to end this," he replied flatly. "How it ends is up to you. With your death or your surrender, I don't care. But it will end."

Lord Tokoyami snorted. "How…magnanimous of you," he said dryly. "Either way, my House ceases to exist. Either way, your father gets what he wants."

Izuku frowned. "My father wants the fighting to stop," he said. "As do I."

Lord Tokoyami raised an eyebrow. "Does he?" he asked. "Do you? You stand to gain the most from it. Well? Is this what you wanted, Lord Izuku?"

He gestured around him, to the burning husk of a once-thriving city, to the shattered buildings and twisted steel, to the dead lying on the ground, blood spilling into the streets.

Izuku sighed. "Would you believe me if I said it wasn't?" he asked.

Lord Tokoyami held his gaze for a long, long time. The whole world seemed frozen as one man staring death in the face sized up another.

And then he raised an arm, and darkness cloaked it, tendrils of shadow melding man and monster together until they were indistinguishable from each other.

"No," he said reluctantly. "I don't. Because I can see the truth in your eyes. You're enjoying this, Lord Yagi."

Izuku watched as Lord Tokoyami summoned all he had, all he was, watched him turn from a man into a monster half a kilometer tall, enormous jaws parting to let out a bloodthirsty screech.

And then Izuku felt his lips curl up into a deadly little smile. Titan's smile.

"You know what?" he said, bemused. "Guilty as charged."

The lightning became him. He was a supernova, a brilliant ball of pure energy, howling as he went to war. That massive smoky claw came down, Tokoyami lunged, and Izuku moved. He struck Tokoyami like a bolt of pure power, sending the shadowy monster reeling, glass shattering and steel screaming as the force of the impact sent both men up, up, up over the burning streets of Nagoya.

Even as he did so, part of him was still stuck on Tokoyami's final words.

"Lord Yagi." It was the first time anyone had ever called him by his father's name. The first time he'd ever earned a comparison to the man who had helped build the system now tearing itself apart in the streets of Nagoya.

He wasn't sure he liked that.

Even then, going to war felt like coming home for Izuku—more than landing on the tarmac at Haneda Airport had, a scant few months ago.

This was who he remembered being. The man who breathed the ash, smelled the smoke, saw the blood. The man made of thunder, with lightning in his veins and death in his eyes.

Every motion he made was an earthquake, sending buildings toppling to the ground in showers of metal and brick and glass. Every blow, every dodge, every leap sent a hurricane of pure force smashing through the air, chopping holes in the thick smoke over Nagoya, flashing lights making men, women, and children trapped in the funeral pyre of Old Japan look up in horror and awe at the sight of something out of the storybooks—a duel to the death between Great Lords, a thing Japan had not seen in centuries.

That was for good reason. With quirks as strong as theirs—for Lord Tokoyami was no weakling to be dismissed out of hand—collateral damage wasn't merely inevitable, it was catastrophic. Tokoyami had become a monster made of shadow so vast he couldn't really be measured—his edges blurred into the thick smoke, made it hard to see where the monster ended and the dark began. The monster's screech tore the air apart, jagged jaws snapping as they hungered for Izuku's blood.

It was madness—the madness of war in its truest, purest form. No strategy, no master plan, no grand, elegant vision of victory. This was two men, flush with strength, trained to the ragged edge of possibility, tearing each other apart.

Tokoyami was big—but he wasn't slow, as Izuku might've expected. That shadow had no mass to it—no inertia. When he moved, he moved quick. He flowed through the air like a snake, claws ripping buildings from their foundations as he swung for Izuku. Every time he missed, he smashed holes into the burning city—an apartment block, a school, a public highway, all gone, crushed to pieces beneath claws larger than train cars.

But even then, Tokoyami was no match for Izuku. Tokoyami hadn't earned every last drop of his strength, hadn't trained day in and day out just to be worthy of the power to shatter cities. He'd been born with it, had taken it for granted—and though he used it well, Izuku had earned it. He had trained. And he'd fought on the bloody edge of death time and again. Sacramento, Portland, Reno, El Paso—he'd fought in cities all across the western U.S., had had men try to slaughter him for every reason imaginable. Gold, God, creed and cause—he'd never cared why. He'd taken them all on.

When Izuku struck, it was with the force of a man who knew death like an old friend—one he had no plans to meet for a long, long time. Tokoyami—whatever monster he'd become—howled as a blow like a meteor impact smashed against the side of his massive head. He rolled with the blow, crushing a row of apartment blocks like children's toys beneath him. But the savage strike had done nothing but anger him. Whatever that shadow was, it was tough, and fueled by the tortured, twisting darkness of a city cast in smoke and flame.

Well, that just meant Izuku got a punching bag that could take more than one hit. That didn't happen too often.

The next hit was harder, straight to the chest. This one made shadow burn like coal as One For All's lightning scorched it, made Tokoyami screech as the sheer force of the strike shattered buildings and sent him reeling. Tokoyami tried to counter, but his claws sliced through empty air as Izuku saw the blow coming, bent his knees, and leaped a hundred feet into the air without even trying, the wind whipping at him as he left a shattered crater in the earth where he'd been standing.

The shadow monster looked up just in time for Izuku's downward blow to smash into its face. This time, the hit shattered the pavement of the road beneath Tokoyami, collapsed buildings on either side of the road, and caved the earth in on the subway that ran beneath the street, sending cars and bricks and bodies raining down into the tunnel, before all of it was crushed flat by the shadowy form Tokoyami had adopted, as Izuku literally hammered him through the road. Blow after blow rained down, each one ramming Tokoyami deeper into the earth, caving in the tunnel more, doing more damage to everything around them.

Izuku stood for a moment, surveying the area. Tokoyami was still struggling, but he'd bought himself a few moments—at the expense of turning every structure within a hundred meters to rubble. Even now, fire crept over twisted steel and concrete walls ten stories high on either side of him. Anyone who'd been in the path of the battle was almost certainly dead by now.

Izuku found he didn't much care. Most of the city was already burning anyway—and he'd done his best to steer the fight towards the parts of town he knew that the Yagi House Guard had already evacuated.

He turned his gaze back to his enemy. "Consider this your final warning, Lord Tokoyami," he said mildly. "I will kill you, if you keep fighting. But I'd rather not."

Tokoyami stopped moving for a second. The massive beast he was wearing like armor—his true body hidden somewhere deep inside the thick, inky blackness—turned to regard Izuku with its avian head.

"Of that, I have no doubt, Lord Midoriya," the beast declared. "Truly, you're just as vicious as your reputation. But I'm not foolish enough to trust the word of a man like you."

Izuku's eyes darkened. "So be it, then," he said, stepping forwards.

And that was when the tornado hit him.

Calling it a "tornado" was underselling it. It was a sheer wall of wind, so strong that Izuku simply couldn't keep his feet. He felt himself slip, and tucked into a ball, twisting and whirling as the wind sent him flying, ripping at his clothes and trying its best to tear the very skin from his body.

Izuku had no idea how far he went—just that when he finally did hit the ground again, it fucking hurt. He could already tell he'd have a full-body bruise after being flung full speed into the pavement, if not worse. But he was still alive, and that meant he couldn't stay down. Staying down in a fight was death.

Izuku rose to his feet, lightning already crackling in his veins, turning the whole world green.

Well. Not the whole world. The roaring of the flames saw to that.

Izuku glanced up. The windstorm had sent him—and, it seemed, Lord Tokoyami, too—into one of the densest, worst-hit parts of Nagoya; two sheer cliffs rose on either side of him, made of sky-scraping steel and glass. They were burning, burning so utterly that they were two walls not of steel but of fire; the two halves of a canyon of red and orange, melting the very pavement he stood on with their heat. The wind roared in his ears, superheated air whipping at his skin and clothes.

It wasn't just the fire shaping that wind. It was the howling, shrieking vortex at the far end of the street, a beast made of tornadic winds shredding everything in their path. They sucked up the air, and the flame along with it. A pillar of fire stretching a mile into the air, a hurricane in miniature glowing like Hell itself.

And at its center was a man. The wind didn't tear at his clothes, didn't rip him apart. It answered his call, like it would have a god of old. A god of wind, a god of war, a god of death.

Lord Inasa Yoarashi stared down at Izuku, his expression wry and deadly all at once. Around him, the very sky burned with hate.

"Well, if it isn't Lord Yagi's attack dog!" he jeered from the center of his personal cyclone. "Welcome to the party! Hope you don't mind if I throw my hat in the ring!"

Izuku stared up at the burning sky without flinching. He'd had fewer interactions with Lord Inasa than with Lord Tokoyami; the few he'd had left him with the impression of a brash, outspoken, sometimes crude man who nevertheless seemed quite straightforward and even likable. But that wouldn't stop him. Not when this man had gone to war. Not when his father had told him to make the fighting stop.

"I'd rather you surrender without a fight, Lord Yoarashi!" he called back. "Or better yet, take a number! I have my hands full at the moment!"

Behind him, a collapsed building creaked, shifted, and groaned as the dark beast buried beneath it stirred. Lord Tokoyami still wasn't down. If anything, he looked angrier than before. The enormous beast of shadow he'd become filled the other end of the burning street, leaving Izuku trapped between shadowy claws the size of buildings and a giant living fire tornado.

Lovely. He'd been starting to get bored.

As Fumikage began to close the gap again, Lord Inasa just grinned.

"Two for one deal on bastards I want dead?" he shouted back, voice amplified by the air itself. "Don't mind if I do! Apologies, Lord Izuku!"

The wind picked up. Izuku hissed as the air burned his skin.

"You sure don't fucking sound that sorry," he growled. Even as he said it, he was grinning ear to ear.

The lightning howled in his veins as Tokoyami charged and Inasa attacked. A wall of swirling fire screamed down the canyon of burning glass from one end, a shadow monster roaring down towards him from the other.

Izuku braced himself. This was gonna get interesting.

And then, as the ground shook and the sky burned, Izuku heard a voice on his radio.

"Mind if I join this dance, Lord Izuku?"

Izuku didn't bother answering. He knew who it was. And he knew better than to turn down the offer.

Inasa and Tokoyami struck. But just as they reached Izuku, a supernova exploded over Izuku's head.

A glacier taller than a skyscraper slammed into the ground between Izuku and the shrieking fiery wind from Lord Inasa. There was a sizzle as the ice melted, steam filling the air, but the glacier held. The fire washed over it like waves breaking against the rocks.

At the same time, Tokoyami's enormous form was bathed in fire, a fire hotter, more directed, more powerful than the flames raging through the buildings. The shadow monster screeched as it was forced back, raising its arms to protect its face as Tokoyami was scoured with a jet of fire.

Izuku glanced upwards, to where Shoko Todoroki herself had descended like an angel of death. She hovered half a hundred feet in the air, propelled by a jet of flame that she tucked beneath her like a ballerina balancing on her tiptoes, elegant and stately. Spikes and crags of ice spiraled off her right side like talons, her arm stretched out towards Lord Inasa, while a glowing sheet of flame rose from her left, nearly taking the shape of a wing.

Shoko glanced down at him as she descended, still floating serenely atop a pillar of flame. One eye glowed with heat, the other crackled with frost. Her lips curled into a smirk. The smirk of a woman who had mastered the world. The smirk of a woman with power once reserved for the gods alone at her beck and call.

The smirk of a Queen.

It took all Izuku's strength not to laugh out loud as she floated down to join him, putting her back to his so naturally he knew it could only be the combat training of Enji Todoroki. All this time, he'd thought himself unmatched, unrivaled, unequaled. It turned out he'd just been looking in the wrong places.

Shoko Todoroki, it turned out, was every bit as dangerous as she acted. And Izuku had to admit, when she was burning like the Goddess of Fire in the smoke of a city at war, he was so fucking attracted to her it wasn't even funny.

She smirked at him again, as if she could read his thoughts. "I take one, you take the other?" she asked sweetly, nodding her head at where Inasa and Tokoyami were regrouping on either side of them, preparing to attack again. "That sounds like a fair fight to me."

Izuku chuckled. "You know how long it's been since I was in a fair fight?" he asked.

Shoko shook her head.

Izuku's lips curled into a bloody grin. "Fucking years," he drawled, sounding more like a mercenary than he ever had in Shoko's presence before. "Two on one, it might've been. But with the two of us? This isn't even going to be close."

Shoko just grinned right back. "Do you feel like having a fair fight today?" she offered. "I could always go help with the cleanup efforts. Last I checked, there were a few Tokoyami Guard troops your friends hadn't slaughtered yet."

Izuku glanced at her. Then back at Inasa and Tokoyami.

"You know what?" he decided, lightning darkening the air around him. "No. No I don't."

Shoko didn't need to hear anything else. She turned her attention to Tokoyami.

"Lord Fumikage," she said pleasantly. "Fancy meeting you here! Might I take this dance?"

Tokoyami snarled. "Lady Todoroki," the beast made of darkness growled. "Is this what you wanted? Blood in the streets? All of us killing each other out of fear?"

Shoko's expression shifted, just a little. "It wasn't," she said, and someone who didn't know her might have believed the look of sorrow on her face. "But I know better than to try to convince you of that. We are well past the point where my words mean anything to you. All that's left is finding what pleasure I can in the opportunity I've been given."

"And what opportunity is that?" Tokoyami demanded.

Shoko's grin sharpened. "The chance to act out my lifelong fantasies of beating the arrogance out of a bunch of asshole lordlings," she said cheerily. Her fist ignited, a trail of flame burning in the dark.

She raised her hand, and ice and fire filled the street.

Izuku didn't pay attention to much of the fight; he trusted Shoko to watch his back. He had his own opponent to face. He stepped forwards, toward Lord Inasa, who grinned.

"I'm a lucky man, Lord Midoriya," the tall man with his shaved head declared. "I've been wanting a scrap with you since you pulverized Monoma!"

Izuku gave him a steely look. He wasn't particularly impressed by Inasa's bloody-minded eagerness, but the man's skill and power were undeniable. Even now, Inasa floated a hundred feet in the air, surrounded by a seemingly impenetrable wall of swirling wind. With his arms crossed and pillars of burning air whipping all around him, he still looked like a god.

Izuku let his lips crack into a smile. Just a small one, one that bared teeth in a deadly promise.

"What I did to Monoma was child's play!" he shouted back. "If you want to live, you'll surrender and save me the trouble!"

Lord Inasa laughed. "Lord Midoriya, why the hell would I want to save you anything?" he shouted, voice shaking the air. "You want me dead? Come kill me yourself!"

Izuku grinned. "Now you're speaking my language," he muttered to himself.

He bent his knees. The wind howled. The city burned. Lightning filled the air.

He moved. The shockwave ripped buildings apart on either side of the street, snapped steel beams like toothpicks and sent a wall of debris hurtling in every direction.

In the blink of an eye, he felt Lord Inasa's wind tearing at him, and the battle began.

As it always did, the world around Izuku became…muted. Slow. Unimportant, easily ignored. All that mattered was him and his opponent. All that mattered was the fight.

All around them, a war was being fought; tanks and trucks screamed down the streets, helicopters and planes chopped across the sky. Explosions and gunfire crackled; men fell screaming, blood flowing, fires burning. Somewhere behind him, Shoko was fighting Lord Tokoyami, glaciers smashing into shadowy limbs, rivers of flame burning holes in the black. Her battle was a dance, a pirouetting, leaping swirl of movement and light. She wound knots around a colossal monster, eyes gleaming as she carved pieces of it away, on and on as Tokoyami's form shrank and his howls grew weaker.

But in the end, Izuku didn't care. About any of it. All Izuku cared about was twisting and ripping his way through each wall of air that Inasa hurled down that steel canyon, each howling vortex shredded by a swing of his fist. Shockwaves of pure force smashed into whipping winds, creating a chaotic hell in the burning streets of Nagoya.

Izuku didn't mind the chaos. It was his natural state of being. The questions, the fears, the constant second-guessing that was the legacy of his common birth—none of it remained. The sheer demands of survival cut it all away, left his soul lean and bare. Only a single truth remained, one that Izuku could tell Inasa knew just as well as he did.

Kill. Or be killed.

It was refreshing. Izuku was not a man of balls and parties. He could prance with the best of them, could veil his thoughts in honeyed words and trade pleasantries with the haughty and powerful. He could even, if forced to, engage in politics. But it wasn't his natural state of being. This was.

The sheer force of the wind Inasa summoned prevented Izuku from getting to the man and snapping his neck; instead, he fought his way down the street in powerful bounds and leaps, fighting his way from rooftop to rooftop.

He leaped from one roof just as a blade of wind pressure as wide as a city block tore the building in half at a single gesture from Lord Inasa. Izuku felt, rather than saw, the ten-story chunk of concrete, glass and rebar flip end over end and smash into its burning neighbors. But he was already in the air, a streaking comet of green lightning cutting a path through the smoke.

He leaped again, smashing a fist into the very air itself, and this time the whirling dome around Inasa parted, just for a second.

Inasa saw him coming, and the man flew upwards as if yanked by an invisible hook, passing safely out of the way of Izuku's strike.

Izuku didn't mind. He twisted in midair, and kicked out a sparking leg towards the ground. The wave of overpressure that followed rocketed him straight up into the air.

He smashed into the sphere of dense, rushing air that surrounded Inasa with enough force to carve a kilometer-wide hole into the thick smoke and clouds covering the city. He saw Inasa's eyes widen as the air shrieked with lightning and his defenses faltered.

But it was only a momentary lapse. Inasa whipped his hand around, and a four-hundred-mile-an-hour wind, almost half again as strong as the strongest natural wind ever recorded on Earth, sent Izuku flying. He felt his shirt shred; some of his skin, too. He kept laughing all the same, even as he found himself flung down to the city, smashing into a glass facade and carving a long, ugly gash down the side of the building until he skidded to a stop on the cracked pavement below.

Izuku rubbed at his jaw, feeling the reddened, scoured skin there. He'd be feeling that one in the morning. Air moving at four hundred miles an hour packed a serious punch.

He grinned to himself. "Been a while since I got slugged like that," he muttered. "Feels like the good old days."

The good old days. When he'd killed for a living. Soldiers, gangsters, tyrants, mercenaries. Innocents, too—he held no illusions on that front. Not every man he'd killed had deserved to die.

But that was the way of the world. And Izuku had grown calloused enough to accept that reality a long time ago.

He bent his knees. The world turned green. Above him, he saw Lord Inasa summoning stronger, faster winds, sending a downdraft at him powerful enough to scour the very ground itself down to bedrock, to shred every single building in the district down to its base particles and send every single one hurtling at him in a wall of debris to rip him apart.

But Izuku had always wondered how high he could get with one leap.

Time to find out.

He looked up again. He locked eyes with Inasa. He saw the man realize what was about to happen—watched a vision of the future play out in his eyes, stretching in the space between the seconds. He saw Inasa try to react, try to summon all he had, all he could bring to bear, watched him weave together interknitting layers of air pressure, commanding the very molecules to knit themselves into shieldwalls like medieval knights defending their lord.

But when Izuku let the lightning snap, when he leaped directly upwards with every drop of force he had, when he turned an entire district of Nagoya into shattered rubble and left a four-hundred-foot-wide crater in a single dismissive motion, there was not a power or a force or a God in all existence that could stop him.

He stopped being a man. He stopped being Lord Midoriya. He stopped being the Heir to the House of Yagi. Now he was a lightning bolt, a singular point of unstoppable, unimaginable power, shooting into the sky faster than the eye could track.

He struck Inasa like the fist of God. The man's defenses shattered, his masterful control of his quirk ripped away. His eyes bulged out as Izuku plowed into him, sending the two of them up, up, up through a colossal gap in the clouds and smoke that formed from the sheer force of their passage.

They went higher. And higher. Izuku could feel the wind whipping at them, the cold eating at his flesh as Inasa let out a deranged, delirious laugh.

For a fraction of a second, some eight thousand feet in the sky, so high up that the burning city below looked like a child's model, the flashes of explosions and the walls of flame consuming whole districts were reduced to little pinpoints and glowing embers. Such a distant little war. Such a pretty little lie. For a fraction of a second, Izuku felt weightlessness tug at his gut, Inasa still bent around his fist.

And then they fell. They fell down, towards the burning city, Izuku twisting Inasa around so that the man was beneath him, the two of them biting and clawing and struggling as the battle degenerated. It wasn't about winning anymore. It wasn't about Houses or nobles or politics. It was just about survival.

And that was a fight Izuku would never lose.

They struck the ground. Inasa hit first.

Fumikage Tokoyami, Great Lord of Nagoya, was coming apart at the seams.

Everything hurt. Burns and cuts littered his body, thin layers of shadow trying to armor him; he knew better than to trust that protection. Not after what had already been done to Dark Shadow.

It had been a fight like nothing else he'd ever seen. He'd not been defeated by superior power, or even by a disadvantageous matchup with a quirk that exploited his own powers' weakness to light. He had been disassembled, carved apart piece by bloody piece, had fire nip at his heels and slice away at his flesh, burning a little more away every time. A slow, endlessly patient battle. A destruction so complete that there could be no victory, and no escape.

Fumikage stepped back further, commanding dark claws to rise threateningly as a shape wreathed in flame and ice together followed him slowly, patiently, into the alleyway he'd retreated down. Fumikage tried his best to look threatening, gritting his teeth and raising his claws.

The monster at the end of the alley just chuckled. "You're not fooling anybody, Lord Tokoyami," Shoko Todoroki said pleasantly, eyes glowing with reflected fire. "We both know you're at the end of your rope."

As if to prove it, she raised her hand, and fire filled the alley. A jet of pure, concentrated fire like a rocket's exhaust swallowed Fumikage whole.

Moving on years of hard-earned instinct, Dark Shadow protected him. Inky blackness layered over Fumikage's skin, mere inches thick now, instead of a hundred feet of seething dark like it had been just a few minutes ago. It was all gone, burned away by that terrible fire.

Dark Shadow screamed in Fumikage's mind as the heat and the light tore into him. Fumikage wanted to join him, but he knew if he opened his mouth, it would let the fire into his lungs. He could only curl up, and pray to whatever god would listen for the fire to stop eating at him.

His prayers went unanswered. The fire grew hotter. Dark Shadow's screams grew weaker.

And then the fire stopped. Fumikage fought just to stay on his feet, gasping for air as the alleyway smoldered.

Shoko's boots clicked on the concrete as she advanced. "Your resilience is commendable, Lord Tokoyami," she said, sounding genuine, but with a hard edge to her voice that made it clear that the time for play was long over. "But you've lost. The only choice you have left is how you're going to lose. You don't have to die today."

Fumikage held her gaze. He didn't respond to her words. Instead, he asked, in a voice raspy with pain and smoke, "Why us, Lady Todoroki? Why my House? We had no quarrel with you."

Shoko snorted. Her eyes were cold, but simmering, too; there was a light in them that was almost playful, to match the ever-so-slight upward twitch of her lips. Just like her betrothed, she was enjoying this.

"Who do you mistake me for, Lord Tokoyami?" she asked. "This isn't the fulfillment of some personal grudge. This is something far more serious. My intended and I are ending the war you so foolishly started."

Fumikage staggered on his feet. "We…we had no choice," he hissed. "Lord Yoarashi was going to—"

Shoko rolled her eyes. "Spare me," she said lightly. "I listen to quite enough paranoid ramblings already."

She raised her hand, and burned him again.

This time, Fumikage did scream as the fire seared Dark Shadow's flesh—and his beneath it. The flames broke, and for a second he thought it was done.

Then Shoko burned him again, a jet of flame pouring from her palm at point-blank range. And then again. Every few seconds, she broke the steady flow of fire, as if to make sure Fumikage hadn't died yet.

It was hell. It was hell in milliseconds, stretched out into hours of flaming agony. And still, Fumikage stood. Shadowy claws tried to reach for Shoko, up through a river of flame, until they burned away to nothing and his fingers were exposed to the fire's hungry touch.

The sheer force of the fire brought Fumikage to his knees. The next time Shoko stopped, he looked up at her, charred, smoking.

"Please," he gasped, throat scratchy from smoke and ash.

Her eyes were cold as steel. She raised her hand.

"You will surrender," she repeated. "You want it to stop? That's all you need to do."

Fire filled the alley again. This time, Fumikage didn't hold back the screams.

When Shoko finally stopped, Fumikage could no longer rise. He just knelt there, all Dark Shadow's protection gone, nothing left to save him from the flames. The next attack would leave nothing left of him but ash.

In his mind, he heard a whimper. He wasn't sure if it was him, or Dark Shadow.

Shoko stepped closer again, utterly confident, utterly in control. "Allow me to make this clear," she said. "You are going to die, Lord Tokoyami. I will burn you alive. I will scour every trace of your House from this earth. Unless you surrender yourself and your House Guard. Do that, and you have my word that you will live."

Fumikage coughed. "As a captive," he rasped through smoke-filled lungs. "A pet on your leash."

Shoko grinned, and did not deny it. "You will not be harmed, Lord Tokoyami, I swear it," she said sweetly. "You'll be far more useful that way, as a carrot to show the other squabbling fools the wisdom of surrender."

Fumikage swayed on his knees. "And the stick?" he asked weakly.

Shoko's smile was all fangs. "Lord Yoarashi's fate at the hands of my intended will do marvelously," she assured him. As if on cue, a rumbling earthquake filled the city, one that Fumikage felt in his teeth. Such a force could only come from one man.

Fumikage blinked wearily, and when he opened his eyes again, he found Shoko's left palm inches from his face, starting to smolder.

Feeling utter terror clench in his belly, Fumikage looked up at Shoko, and saw only ice staring back. She would do it without hesitation, he realized in that instant. She would burn him to ash, and lose not a single wink of sleep over it.

To think, he'd spent his whole life watching this woman at balls and parties, seeing her simper and smile, dancing to beautiful music, all the while knowing that exactly this lurked beneath.

Shoko Todoroki was a monster. The kind of monster one could only hope to appease.

"I will have your answer, Lord Tokoyami," Shoko said coldly. "Our forces have likely wrapped up their pacification of the city by now, and Izuku and I have…other commitments to attend to. You will surrender, or you will die. I should imagine your choice will come quickly."

Fumikage stared into those cold, mismatched eyes, watched that hand smolder and smoke. For a moment, he considered choosing death. Surely it would be preferable to life as Shoko Todoroki's prisoner.

But that required more courage, he soon found, than what remained in him after being pummeled so thoroughly first by Izuku Midoriya and then by Lady Todoroki. There was simply not enough strength left in him to choose the noble way out.

So instead, eyes still locked on that burning hand, Fumikage whispered, "I surrender."

Shoko tilted her head. "What was that?" she asked. "Louder."

Fumikage glanced up at her. He had never hated anyone more than he hated Shoko Todoroki in that moment. But there was no point. She'd won. She'd won completely and utterly, and he had nothing left to fight with. So he did as she said. "I surrender," he said, louder this time.

Shoko smiled, then, and it was terrifying. Bright and pleasant, as if she hadn't been slowly killing Fumikage for the past ten minutes. "See, that wasn't so hard," she cooed. "Now, sit tight for a minute. I'll have some of my troops escort you to quarters suitable for a prisoner of your station shortly. Until then…"

Fumikage didn't hear what she said. He'd already passed out.

At the bottom of the fifty-foot-wide impact crater, Lord Inasa coughed weakly as Izuku rose from where he'd landed on the shattered rubble. There was blood on his lips. He didn't seem able to move. His limbs were twisted, broken. His back wasn't bending right.

And still, he had that dull little smile on his face.

"Damn," he chuckled. "Hell of a fight. Guess you…really are as good as they say, Lord Midoriya."

Izuku's footsteps crunched on shattered glass and pulverized concrete. One after another, after another. His approach was slow, steady. Inasa didn't move. He couldn't move. Izuku came towards him at the leisurely pace of death itself. Inevitable. Unstoppable.

There was no more roaring in his ears, no more laughter, no more crackling flames. No more savage joy. Only the final, cold silence of victory, and the bloody, rib-cracked coughing of a defeated man.

Izuku stood over Inasa, looking at the tall, well-built man as he lay broken atop a pile of concrete and rebar. Lightning hummed in his blood as he met Inasa's eyes.

"Say the word," Izuku said softly. "Tell your troops to surrender, and you live."

Inasa was quiet for a long, dangerous moment. Izuku thought he might accept.

Then, Inasa smiled at him. The same smile Dabi had worn, that day in America. The smile Izuku had seen a hundred times before. Wide, hateful, bright. Unafraid. It was the smile of a man who was no longer scared of death—because fear was useless when there was no longer any escape from it.

"Nah," Inasa croaked through shattered ribs and ruined lungs. "Sorry, Lord Midoriya, but I ain't gonna be your trophy, sittin' in a cell for everyone to gawk at. That ain't no way for a man to live. End it."

Izuku said nothing. His eyes revealed nothing. He was a blank, featureless lightning storm, cast into shadow by his sheer power. He did not control the beast—he merely rode it. He was Titan, as he had always been.

He met Inasa's eyes. He nodded. Perhaps it was mercy. Perhaps it wasn't. Titan didn't care. He would do the same thing either way.

As Izuku raised his fist, Inasa spoke one last time.

"If it turns out there's an afterlife," he rasped, blood dribbling from between his lips, "Find me when you get there, yeah? First round's on me."

Izuku didn't answer. Lightning wreathed his fist. He saw it reflected in Inasa's glassy eyes.

He brought it down.

The wet crunch of bone and flesh filled the air.