….
The next thirty minutes ceased to resemble a standard skirmish.
It became a masterclass in hyper-aggressive evasion and tactical psychological warfare.
Dabi leaned entirely into the shrieking alarms of his [Arachnid Genome].
The needle-sharp warnings digging into the base of his skull weren't an annoyance, they were a cheat code, a real-time tactical map of the incoming destruction.
Winning a standard head-on clash with Gigantomachia was impossible.
Dabi knew that.
But completely dismantling the titan's focus? That was entirely on the table.
He stopped regulating his core temperature.
Blue flames erupted at absolute maximum output, uncontained and blinding, turning him into a localized supernova.
There were no more controlled strikes meant to conserve heat, and he was burning through his own limits, driving seventy tons of spider-enhanced force into a combat style that resembled a lightning storm.
He launched himself at the titan's rocky face.
Machia swung a fist the size of a shipping container, a blow meant to flatten landscapes.
But Dabi didn't take it.
Guided by his Spider-Sense, he did a mid-air twist, his boots grazing the passing knuckles as he used the displaced air pressure to rocket himself upward.
He rode the thermal updraft of his own flames, driving a white-hot heel straight into Machia's exposed scalp.
The kinetic force, backed by plasma-grade heat, actually shattered the outer layers of the giant's hardened skin.
"Anything else you got to show a walking landslide?!" Dabi's voice cracked through the roaring fire. "I've fought nobodies faster than you!"
Machia bellowed, a sound that shook the valley, and swatted blindly at his own head.
Dabi wall-crawled down the giant's massive shoulder, a blue-white missile tearing across the behemoth's torso to deliver a concentrated plasma counter-strike straight to Machia's left eye.
"GRRRHHAAAA….!" the titan roared, blinded and furious, momentarily forgetting the very concept of the U.A. students kilometers away.
The pattern locked into a brutal, grinding cycle.
Instead of trading blows Dabi was dictating the chaos.
However, the toll wasn't coming from Machia but from within his own body. The raw heat of his uncontained blue flames was cooking his own muscles, and the sheer velocity of his maneuvers was putting immense G-force strain on his bones.
Realizing he couldn't swat the fly in the open air, Machia shifted tactics.
His [Mole] quirk activated.
The ground liquefied beneath the behemoth as he burrowed underground to bypass the aerial annoyance.
Dabi didn't hesitate.
"Oh, for fuck's sake. Just like his master, the bastard's trying to hide like a rat." he muttered before diving straight into the collapsing sinkhole in pursuit.
They fought underground in a cramped, suffocating darkness.
Here, Machia's colossal size became a massive disadvantage, turning him into a clumsy, trapped target.
Dabi's Spider-Sense, however, let him navigate the pitch-black, collapsing cavern perfectly.
He moved like a ghost through the falling debris, leaving blinding trails of blue fire that scorched Machia's underside, using the tight space to bounce off the stone walls and strike from angles the giant couldn't anticipate.
But as minute forty approached, reality caught up.
When they finally broke back through the surface, Dabi landed heavily on a burned plateau.
His boots slipped, and it wasn't from a hit, but because his own knees momentarily buckled.
His body was giving out from the sheer kinetic stress and thermal feedback.
The [Super Soldier] genetics were keeping his organs from shutting down, and [Sun Breathing] was violently forcing hyper-oxygenated blood through his burning lungs, but his muscles were tearing themselves apart from the over-exertion.
'Ten more minutes.' Dabi calculated grimly, wiping ash and sweat from his face as he watched Machia haul his massive frame out of the dirt. 'Ten more minutes and my nervous system fries from the heat. I need to anchor him here, permanently.'
He didn't lower his stance because he was defeated but because he was setting a trap.
Dabi extinguished his propulsion flames.
He stood completely, perfectly still in the center of the clearing, letting his core temperature drop for a split second to consolidate every ounce of his remaining energy.
At the base of his skull, his Spider-Sense didn't just shriek, it practically deafened him, mapping the trajectory of Machia's incoming, earth-shattering down-smash.
He didn't dodge, as he waited for the absolute last millisecond.
As Machia's fist came down like a falling meteor, Dabi unleashed a compressed, omnidirectional shockwave of blue plasma directly upward, a Jet Burn channeled through his entire upper body.
The collision didn't sound like a strike but like the sky itself cracking open.
The concussive blowback of his own attack, combined with the edge of Machia's deflected fist, launched Dabi backward. He flew through the tree line, tumbling violently through the undergrowth before embedding himself into a cliff face at the edge of the valley.
Even miles away at the U.A. training lodge, they felt the shockwave rattle the floorboards.
Inside the crushed indentation of the cliff face, Dabi lay buried under shattered granite.
His vision was static-laced gray, and the ringing in his ears drowned out the forest and his left side was temporarily numb from the shockwave, and a couple of ribs were cracked from the sheer pressure of his own compressed blast.
'Don't close your eyes,' he snarled at himself internally. 'Stay conscious.'
Through the crushing dark, he heard it, the heavy, rhythmic thuds of Gigantomachia turning around.
The giant was shaken, bleeding from his eye and heavily scorched, but with the annoyance seemingly silenced, his primitive programming was redirecting him back toward the camp.
"Ghahahahahaaa….!" Machia rumbled, taking his first massive step forward.
Like hell you are.
Dabi's hand snapped out, and he didn't wait to heal.
The [Arachnid Genome] wall-crawling ability locked onto the jagged face of the cliff, and with a feral, gritted-teeth surge of willpower, he pulled his frame out of the crater, hitting the dirt on his feet.
He was a mess, with scorched clothing fused to his skin, smoke rising from his arms, and blood dripping down his brow, yet his posture remained unbroken and unmistakably predatory.
He forced his trembling arms up, preparing to ignite his hands for one final, suicidal barrier of fire to cut the giant off.
But before his flames could spark, a sudden, electric surge of heat tore through his veins.
It wasn't the familiar burning agony of his quirk but something entirely different.
Cutting through the haze of exhaustion, text flickered sharply into his mind:
====
| [ARACHNID GENOME] – 71/100%
….
| [ARACHNID GENOME] – 78/100%
….
| [ARACHNID GENOME] – 81/100%
====
A violent, hyper-aggressive wave of cellular regeneration began to stitch his torn muscles back together at a speed that left the super-soldier serum in the dust.
The numbness vanished, and fatigue receded.
Dabi looked up at the retreating back of the giant, a dark, dangerous smile cutting through the ash on his face.
Round two.
As Dabi watched the evolution of his [ARACHNID GENOME], he felt his conscious and sensory worlds suddenly rupture and expand.
It wasn't that time had stopped, but rather that his perception had accelerated to a hyper-cognitive degree to match the system's rapid progression.
His awareness burst outward from his battered body like a radar pulse moving at impossible speed.
One kilometer.
Three.
Five.
Five kilometers in every direction lit up in his mind like a three-dimensional map, rendered in exquisite, terrifying detail.
He could feel everything, from the rustle of leaves and the deep movements of the earth beneath the mountains to the exact location of every soul within the forest.
Through that massive, omniscient web of sensory data, his mind swept over the U.A. training camp.
The battle wasn't the chaotic nightmare of the original timeline, and the U.A. students and staff held a definitive advantage, utilizing prepared, disciplined stances.
In the center of the lodge's clearing, his students were holding the line. Class 1-A and 1-B were fighting back-to-back, operating as a cohesive, lethal unit.
They were tearing through the remaining mercenary grunts with such efficiency that a sharp, bloody smile tugged at Dabi's lips, because they weren't just surviving anymore, they were winning.
To give the students room to breathe, the Pro Heroes had drawn the main threats, the elite Vanguard Action Squad, away from the center, carving out a wider perimeter near the tree line to keep the kids out of the lethal crossfire.
Tiger was locked in a brutal, close-quarters slugfest with Magne.
Vlad King was manipulating walls of hardened blood to contain Mr. Compress and shield the area from Mustard's drifting gas.
But Dabi's expanded awareness quickly snagged on Aizawa.
Eraser Head was fighting two opponents simultaneously, darting through the trees as his capture weapon snapped like a whip to deflect the chaotic, extending blade-teeth of Moonfish.
But it was the second opponent tagging along with the cannibal that drew Dabi's focus.
The mutated Mineta.
The creature was exceptionally tall and lean, moving with a jerky, disjointed gait.
Yet, contrary to its terrifying, bio-engineered appearance, its actual combat performance wasn't grand at all. It was fighting purely physically, throwing wide, heavy punches and clumsy kicks.
Aizawa was easily evading them, slipping under the creature's guard.
Yet, despite the monster's lack of martial skill, Dabi's radar could feel the staggering weight behind those strikes. Whenever a stray punch clipped a tree trunk, the wood splintered and shattered instantly.
But Aizawa wasn't pushing for a quick takedown.
Through the sensory map, Dabi could 'feel' the underground hero's tactical hesitation.
Aizawa's eyes were flashing red, continuously erasing whatever active quirk the creature possessed, but the physical mutation remained.
More importantly, Aizawa was watching the basket.
Strapped to the tall creature's back was an oversized woven basket, brimming with rows of glossy, dense black spheres.
Throughout the entire fight, the monster had never once reached for them or thrown a single ball, instead relying solely on relentless physical assaults while advancing in tandem with Moonfish's bladed attacks.
Aizawa was deliberately playing defensive, refusing to commit to a binding capture because he knew a trap when he saw one.
He was analyzing the static tension humming off those black spheres, waiting to understand the weapon before he engaged it fully.
'Still… they're holding their own.' Dabi realized, the tension in his chest easing just a fraction.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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