….
Within a second, Dabi's heightened perception swept across the battlefield, mapping every villain and hero, analyzing their physical condition, and categorizing threats by immediate priority.
To his right, All For One was dragging his broken body up against the ice wall, stolen [Hellflame] crackling across his torso like a blood-red shroud.
Dabi wasn't worried about the fire; compared to the current All Might, that stolen flame was nothing.
The only real issue was All For One using his newly stolen [Warp Gate] Quirk to pull off a last-second escape.
Dabi had no intention of allowing the old tyrant to slip away.
Then, there were the liberated Tartarus convicts.
Dabi understood how this prison break had occurred.
Tartarus never possessed the technology to permanently nullify or erase Quirk factors.
Its absolute lockdown relied entirely on heavy physical restraints; massive iron cuffs and biometric 'Iron Maidens'; paired with an automated electronic security grid that triggered lethal automated turrets the moment Quirk energy was detected.
When Dr. Garaki pressed that yellow toggle in his lab prior to his death, the outbound radio-frequency signal had short-circuited Tartarus's standalone security system..
With the automated defenses dead, the monsters of the lower trenches shattered their physical restraints not caring the wounds they inflicted on them.
They just wanted to escape this prison and walked straight into Kurogiri's multi-targeted warp, unbothered where it was connected.
Yet, looking at Nine, his squad, and the rest of the escaped prisoners, Dabi felt no pressure. High-tier bosses or not, he knew he could lock down or incinerate them in a matter of seconds.
And the only reason he wasn't still doing that is killing them in front the media would do no good to them.
Beyond them lay Endeavor.
Currently, the Flame Hero was the single most vulnerable target on the field.
However, the man himself doesn't even realise the fact that his Quirk was gone. He was still kneeling in his own blood, stubbornly mistaking the hollow, ice-cold void in his chest for physical shock.
'Focus….' Dabi warned himself, his eyes shifting upward. 'The old man and the prison trash can wait. The real disaster... is right above me.'
High on the melting ice tower, Tomura Shigaraki was marching down toward him like a ravenous, unhinged phantom.
Every step Shigaraki took erupted in a continuous, deafening CRACK.
The absolute-zero frost, and the solid bedrock beneath his feet instantly decomposed upon contact, turning into a cascading waterfall of fine grey dust that blanketed the slope.
Right now, Shigaraki's mind was clearer than it had ever been in his entire life.
It was like a switch had been flipped inside his head.
The immature, tantrum-throwing brat who whined about gaming and scratched his neck in frustration had vanished completely, as if that persona had never existed at all.
In its place stood an absolute void.
Trapped beneath the ice, forced to process the revelation that his entire life was an orchestrated lie designed by All For One, Shigaraki had initially sought a target for his agony.
Take revenge on All For One?
Destroy the mastermind who was the cause of every drop of despair, trauma, and blood he had ever spilled?
But what about the world?
What about the hero-centric society that had turned a blind eye to a starving, blood-stained child wandering the streets?
People had walked past young Tenko Shimura, averting their eyes, assuming a hero would eventually come to handle it; leaving him lost in the dark until he fell directly into the clutches of the devil who ruined him.
That had always been Shigaraki's ultimate justification.
Master had wronged him, yes, but what had the world ever offered him?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
...Except, as he stared down at the man standing below the spire, his grand justification shattered like thin glass.
Dabi.
Shigaraki remembered when his master had first brought the burned boy to Dr. Garaki's facility.
For a full year, the doctor had tended to Dabi.
Back then, young Tenko hated him.
He had hated Dabi with a burning, almost childish jealousy for stealing even a fraction of his master's attention, and that hatred had only deepened over the years as Dabi rejected All For One's offer and turned his back on the dark path laid out before him.
Yet had chosen to become a Hero, found a real family, and now stood in the light, smiling and living like a normal human being; as if the tragic abuse of his past had never happened to him at all.
As Shigaraki marched down the decaying ice, turning the world to dust with every stride, he finally understood the true root of his consuming hatred for Dabi.
It wasn't disgust, but pure envy.
Seeing Dabi thrive made Shigaraki question his very existence.
He wanted Dabi to buckle, fail, to lose everything, and to fall into the exact same pit of villainy as himself.
Shigaraki needed Dabi to become a monster so he could prove to himself that the dark path he had been 'forced' into was the only choice available for the broken.
If Dabi could suffer the absolute worst of Hero society's rot and still choose to build a bright, heroic future... then Shigaraki's entire crusade was nothing more than a pathetic, self-pitying excuse.
"Society abandoned you too..."
Shigaraki rasped, his voice sounding like dry gravel grinding together as blood trickled from his cracked lips–
"His father destroyed him... hero society destroyed him... So why... WHY IS HE PROTECTING THEM?!"
His red eyes, devoid of any remaining humanity, locked onto Dabi with lethal focus.
"How can you bleed for them...?" Shigaraki muttered to himself, his fingers twitching violently as [Decay] pulsed outward in black fractals. "How can you smile with them...? Could I... could I have done that too, if I gave the world one more chance...?"
The thought lasted for a fraction of a millisecond before his psyche completely detached from reality.
The psychological overload reached absolute zero.
Shigaraki stopped caring.
He didn't care about All Might or All For One, his dead father, his grandmother Nana Shimura, or even the family he had decayed as a child. Nor did he care about reforming society for the marginalized or becoming a savior for outcasts.
All justifications, all grand philosophies, and all desire for salvation burned away into ash.
"I don't care anymore..." Shigaraki whispered, a wide, terrifying, skin-stretching grin splitting his pale face as he reached the base of the crumbling platform–
"No heroes, villains, master or legacy..."
He slammed both palms directly onto the frozen bedrock of Kamino Ward.
"JUST DECAY!"
His objective was no longer to become a Symbol of Fear to counter All Might.
Tomura Shigaraki had reached his ultimate, purest form:
He was going to destroy everything in his sight. He was going to become the–
Symbol of Destruction.
The instant Shigaraki's palms slammed against the ice bed, black, fractal decay detonated outward in a web of disintegration.
The ground shrieked as bedrock and absolute-zero frost alike dissolved into a sweeping tide of fine grey ash, rushing straight toward the floor.
Dabi's brain mapped the entire battlefield in micro-seconds, locking onto his objectives by strict priorities.
Priority one is to secure Enji.
That old man was kneeling directly in the trajectory of the advancing ash tide; and his situation is far from normal, and his mind completely blind to the fact that his power was gone.
Leaving him there meant an instant death sentence.
Nevertheless, Dabi didn't bother with a gentle rescue.
Pivoting sharply on his right heel, he erupted a razor-thin pillar of dense glacial ice directly beneath Endeavor's boots.
Before the Flame Hero could even comprehend the sudden elevation, Dabi swept his left arm in a violent arc, detonating a superheated thermal updraft right behind the ice structure.
The resulting thermal jet propelled Endeavor; crumpled, bloody, and utterly bewildered; high into the air, launching him cleanly over the fifty-foot tower toward the staging zone where Gran Torino and the medical teams were waiting.
"Stay out of my way, Enji."
Dabi muttered under his breath, not bothering to watch the man clear the wall.
He immediately focused on his second priority:
Sever Decay.
Without a millisecond of dallying, Dabi slammed his right palm into the bedrock, driving absolute-zero frost straight into the path of Shigaraki's advancing wave.
The two forces collided.
Decay tried to rot the frost, but Dabi poured out sub-zero ice faster than the molecular breakdown could advance.
The sheer volume of ice created a massive, elevated fault line that snapped the terrain apart, severing Shigaraki's physical contact with the rest of the battle field.
Shigaraki's decaying wave hit the structural gap and stalled out, leaving the maniacal boy isolated at the apex of a crumbling, marooned mound.
Dabi the moved onto his next priority-
And that is to neutralize the Tartarus Mob.
Taking advantage of the split terrain, Nine and his squad led the swarm of escaped Tartarus convicts in a flank attempt against Dabi.
Nine's prison outfit glowed as purple forcefield bubbles expanded around him and red lightning crackled across his fingers.
"Don't turn your back on us, brat!" Nine bellowed, firing a combined barrage of laser torrents and air blasts.
"You're crowding my space." Dabi said coldly, his glowing eyes shifting to the mob.
He dropped into a low, stable [Breath of the Sun] stance, inhaling deeply as white frost misted from his nose and blue steam rose from his skin.
Swinging his arms in a fluid, 360-degree sweep, Dabi unleashed an expanding nova of dual-element [Frostfire].
A circular shockwave of blinding blue fire and sub-zero frost erupted outward like a ring blast.
Instantly, the extreme heat vaporized Nine's laser beams in mid-air, while the freezing shockwave shattered his forcefields and flash-froze the moisture inside the prisoners lungs.
In under three seconds, the secondary horde was swept off their feet, their lower bodies flash-frozen and locked solid to the bedrock in unbreakable glacial blocks.
Nine dropped to one knee, his body going numb from the extreme temperature shock before he could even call down his storm clouds.
Up on a pile of shattered masonry near the rear, Lady Nagant lowered her rifle-arm, letting out a breath of white steam.
"Clean…" she remarked softly. "Didn't even give them room to draw a breath."
"Impressed?" Dabi asked, giving a wink. Then he added. "You know…. apparently, almost all of the Hero's are currently on deployemnet…"
"...!you mean?"
"Oh, I need to focus on something else! See ya…"
Lady Nagant's eyes widened in realisation as she understood Dabi's implication; and she also understood he was letting her go.
And that was enough… enough for her to reignite the revenge she was suppressing inside her, despite being free for a few minutes. She only waited because she could see that Dabi could kill her if she made a wrong move.
And now with clearance from the man himself, she sprinted away towards a specific direction, where the government body of Hero society lay.
HPSC HQ.
On the other hand, Dabi still wasn't done yet.
He needs to stop All For One.
With the prisoners frozen, and Shigaraki marooned on his island of rot, Dabi shifted his full focus back to the main villain.
All For One was battered, wheezing, and covered in his own blood under All Might's brutal offences.
Yet Dabi maintained a clear caution in his approach.
Keeping his left hand ready to blast frost, Dabi stood guard over the clearing; ready to freeze any spatial warp portal or surprise rivet tendril the Symbol of Evil might try to deploy in his final moments.
The battlefield was reset.
The Tartarus scum were neutralized, Endeavor was removed, Shigaraki was contained, and Dabi held the entire perimeter; giving All Might the clean, undisturbed stage to bring down the villain of the century.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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Author Note:
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