What If Deku Became a Sith and Turned Evil

 

 

The wind howling across the rooftop of the nondescript apartment building tasted of ozone, exhaust, and the bitter tang of absolute finality.

 

Izuku Midoriya stood frozen, his scuffed red sneakers rooted to the concrete, his breath hitching in a throat so tight it felt as though he had swallowed glass. The sky above Mustafu was bleeding into a bruised canvas of twilight purples and harsh oranges, casting long, distorted shadows across the rooftop. But Izuku didn’t see the sky. He only saw the back of the man walking away from him.

 

The man who was supposed to be a god among mortals. The man who had been the anchor of Izuku’s fragile, desperate hope for the past fourteen years of his miserable, Quirkless existence.

 

"I cannot simply say, 'You can become a hero even without power,'" All Might’s voice echoed, devoid of the booming, theatrical warmth that usually accompanied his presence. Stripped of his muscular facade, reduced to a skeletal, blood-coughing specter of his true self, the Symbol of Peace sounded painfully human. Painfully practical.

 

"If you desire to help people, becoming a police officer is always an option," the gaunt hero continued, pausing at the metal door that led back down into the stairwell. He didn't turn around. He didn't look at the boy whose heart he had just crushed into a fine, irreparable powder. "They get mocked, but it is a fine profession. It's not bad to dream, young man. But you also have to consider what's realistic."

 

The heavy metal door groaned open. The hinges shrieked, a sound that seemed to reverberate directly inside Izuku’s skull.

 

And then, the door clicked shut.

 

All Might was gone.

 

Silence descended upon the rooftop, heavy and suffocating. Izuku stood there for one minute. Then two. He waited for the tears to come. He was a crybaby, after all. That was what Kacchan always said. Deku the crybaby. Deku the useless. Deku the Quirkless freak. The tears were his default reaction to the harshness of a world that had rejected him at the genetic level.

 

But the tears didn’t fall.

 

Instead, a strange, hollow void opened up in the center of his chest, expanding outward, freezing his veins and numbing his fingertips. He looked down at his trembling hands. In his right hand, he clutched his burnt, waterlogged notebook—Hero Analysis for the Future, Vol. 13. The pages were warped from where Katsuki Bakugo had blown it up and tossed it into a koi pond just hours earlier.

 

“If you want a Quirk so badly, there might be another way. Just pray you'll be born with a Quirk in your next life, and take a swan dive off the roof of the building!”

 

Bakugo’s words drifted through the corridors of his mind, cruel and acidic. For years, Izuku had rationalized the bullying. He had told himself that Kacchan was just passionate, that his explosive Quirk made him aggressive, but that deep down, they both shared the same dream. They both wanted to be like All Might. They both wanted to save people with a smile.

 

But what was there to save?

 

Izuku walked slowly toward the chain-link fence at the edge of the rooftop. He curled his fingers through the rusted metal links, feeling the rough texture bite into his soft, uncalloused skin. He looked down at the sprawling metropolis of Mustafu. Neon signs were flickering to life. Cars moved like sluggish blood cells through the concrete arteries of the city. Down there, millions of people lived out their lives, secure in the knowledge that they were part of the next stage of human evolution. Eighty percent of the population possessed a Quirk. They could conjure fire, manipulate gravity, stretch their limbs, read minds.

 

And the remaining twenty percent? They were obsolete. Evolutionary dead weight.

 

Izuku squeezed the fence until his knuckles turned entirely white. Consider what's realistic.

 

All Might, the man who preached that anyone could be saved, had looked a Quirkless boy in the eye and told him he was fundamentally unworthy of standing in the sun. He had confirmed what the doctors, the teachers, the bullies, and even Izuku's own mother had been saying all along.

 

“I’m sorry, Izuku! I’m so sorry!” Inko Midoriya’s weeping voice echoed in his memory, perfectly overlaying All Might’s hollow pragmatism. She hadn’t believed in him either. She had just apologized for giving birth to a defective child.

 

A dangerous, unfamiliar emotion began to stir in the frozen wasteland of Izuku’s chest. It wasn't sadness. It wasn't the pathetic, whimpering sorrow he was used to. It was something jagged. Something hot.

 

It was anger.

 

Pure, unadulterated, blinding anger.

 

He looked down at the notebook in his hand. The culmination of his obsessive, pathetic worship of the people who sat atop the societal hierarchy. With a sudden, jerky movement, Izuku threw the notebook. He watched it flutter through the air, tumbling over the side of the building, spiraling down into the alleyway below until it was nothing more than a speck of trash in the gutter. Exactly where it belonged.

 

Izuku turned away from the ledge. He didn't take Bakugo's advice. He didn't jump. He was too hollow to even consider it. He simply opened the heavy metal door and began the long walk down the stairs, leaving his childhood behind on the roof.

 

 

 

The streets of Mustafu were a blur. Izuku walked with his head down, his green hair casting a shadow over his vacant, wide eyes. The world around him felt detached, as if he were watching it through a pane of thick, frosted glass.

 

A teenager ran past him, casually levitating a soda can into his hand. A woman at a crosswalk briefly turned her hair into an umbrella to shield herself from a sudden, brief drizzle. Quirks. Everywhere. A constant, mocking parade of genetic superiority.

 

Society had built a caste system, wrapped it in bright spandex, called it "Heroism," and sold it to the masses. The heroes weren't noble protectors; they were just the ultimate winners of a biological lottery, enforcing a status quo that kept the weak firmly at the bottom of the food chain.

 

Suddenly, a massive explosion rocked the air, rattling the windows of the storefronts around him. Plumes of thick, acrid black smoke billowed into the twilight sky just a few blocks away. The distant wail of sirens began to harmonize with the screams of panicked civilians.

 

Normally, Izuku’s body would have moved on autopilot. His insatiable curiosity and desperate need to analyze hero tactics would have sent him sprinting toward the danger, notebook in hand, eager to study the Pros at work.

 

Today, his feet stopped.

 

He looked toward the smoke. He could faintly hear the booming sound of explosions—strangely familiar explosions, sounding remarkably like Katsuki Bakugo’s Quirk. For a fleeting second, the ghost of the old Izuku flickered to life. Someone is in trouble. A villain attack. I need to see...

 

But the heat of the anger in his chest flared, suffocating the instinct.

 

Why should I care? he thought, the inner voice sounding remarkably cold. Let the genetic lottery winners sort it out. Let the 'realistic' heroes handle it.

 

For the first time in his fourteen years of life, Izuku Midoriya turned his back on a cry for help.

 

He pivoted on his heel and walked in the opposite direction. He didn't know where he was going, and he didn't care. He just needed to be away from the noise, away from the crowds, away from the suffocating presence of Quirks.

 

His aimless wandering took him away from the bustling commercial districts and into the decaying, forgotten edges of the city. The towering glass skyscrapers gave way to squat, brutalist warehouses, rusted chain-link fences, and cracked asphalt overgrown with aggressive weeds. The sun had finally dipped below the horizon, leaving the industrial district bathed in the sickly amber glow of intermittent streetlights.

 

Eventually, Izuku found himself standing before a massive, corrugated iron fence. Faded, peeling signs plastered across the metal read: DANGER - CONDEMNED ZONE. NO TRESPASSING. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

 

It was the site of the old Mustafu Subterranean Mall project. Years ago, a massive sinkhole had opened up during the excavation, swallowing millions of yen in construction equipment. Rumors circulated that the workers had hit something deep underground—a pocket of toxic gas, or an unstable fault line. The project had been immediately abandoned, sealed off, and left to rot, a concrete scar on the edge of the city.

 

Izuku stared at the warning signs. He should go home. His mother would be worrying. She would be pacing the living room, wringing her hands, ready to smother him in anxious pity the moment he walked through the door.

 

He couldn't face her. Not tonight. Not when he had nothing left.

 

Seeking the absolute isolation of the ruined site, Izuku found a gap where the chain-link met the concrete wall. He slipped through, ignoring the rust that scraped against his black school uniform.

 

He emerged onto the lip of a massive, terraced crater. The remnants of the excavation plunged deep into the earth, a chaotic mess of rusted scaffolding, broken concrete pillars, and stagnant pools of dark water. The silence here was absolute, broken only by the rhythmic dripping of groundwater.

 

Izuku began to descend. He climbed down the broken concrete ramps, moving deeper into the shadows. The air grew noticeably cooler, carrying the scent of wet earth, iron, and something else—something sharp and metallic that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

 

Thrum.

 

Izuku paused, his hand resting on a rusted piece of rebar. He blinked, looking around the gloom.

 

Thrum.

 

There it was again. A sound that wasn't exactly a sound. It was more like a vibration, a rhythmic pulsing that bypassed his ears and resonated directly in the marrow of his bones. It felt like a heartbeat. A slow, heavy, ancient heartbeat buried deep within the earth.

 

He should have been terrified. A normal boy would have turned and run back to the safety of the streetlights. But Izuku felt completely devoid of fear. The void in his chest seemed to hum in harmony with the vibration.

 

He followed the sensation.

 

He bypassed the main excavation floor, crawling through a fissure in the rock wall that the construction crews had deemed too unstable to clear. He squeezed through the jagged opening, scraping his shoulders, the darkness swallowing him whole.

 

He crawled for what felt like hours, guided only by the intensifying pressure in his head. The air grew thicker, heavier, charged with an invisible static electricity that made his skin prickle.

 

Finally, the narrow tunnel opened up. Izuku stumbled forward, catching himself on his hands and knees.

 

He looked up, and his breath caught in his throat.

 

He was in a cavern, but it was unlike any natural cave system. The walls were perfectly smooth, almost like obsidian glass, as if the rock had been subjected to a heat so intense it had instantly melted and solidified. The cavern was a perfect dome, untouched by the construction crews, untouched by modern humanity.

 

But it wasn't empty.

 

In the dead center of the cavern sat a raised dais of dark, polished stone. And resting atop the dais was an object.

 

It was a pyramid, roughly the size of a grapefruit, constructed from a dark, metallic material etched with jagged, glowing crimson lines. The lines formed geometric patterns and harsh, angular runes that Izuku had never seen in any language textbook.

 

The object was the source of the heartbeat. It was pulsing with a sinister, seductive red light, casting long, bloody shadows against the glass-like walls of the cavern.

 

Izuku pushed himself to his feet. He felt a localized pull, a magnetic gravity dragging him toward the dais. The anger, the despair, the overwhelming sense of worthlessness that had consumed him on the rooftop... all of it seemed to sharpen, focusing into a razor’s edge as he approached the pyramid.

 

The object was singing to him. Not with words, but with emotions. It whispered of power. It whispered of revenge. It whispered of a world where the weak were not trampled, but where the strong imposed order upon the chaos.

 

Izuku stopped inches from the dais. The red light washed over his face, reflecting in his wide, emerald eyes.

 

"What are you?" he whispered into the dead air.

 

Touch it, a voice seemed to echo in the back of his mind. It wasn't a voice he heard with his ears; it was a thought placed directly into his consciousness. Claim your birthright.

 

Slowly, as if in a trance, Izuku reached out his right hand. His fingers trembled, not from fear, but from an overwhelming anticipation.

 

His skin made contact with the apex of the pyramid.

 

The reaction was instantaneous and violent.

 

A shockwave of crimson energy exploded from the artifact, knocking Izuku backward. He hit the stone floor hard, gasping as the breath was driven from his lungs. The cavern was suddenly bathed in a blinding, searing red light. The rhythmic thrumming escalated into a deafening roar, like a jet engine igniting in a closed room.

 

Izuku scrambled backward, his eyes wide in shock as the pyramid rose into the air, hovering a foot above the dais. The glowing runes etched into its surface unlocked, rotating and shifting like a complex, multidimensional puzzle box. The apex of the pyramid separated, and a beam of concentrated red light shot upward, hitting the ceiling of the cavern and fanning out into a holographic projection.

 

The particles of light coalesced, shifting and solidifying until a figure towered over Izuku.

 

It was the spectral projection of a man—or something that had once been a man. He stood nearly seven feet tall, draped in heavy, flowing robes of shadow and armored plates of dark alloy. His face was obscured by a terrifying, angular mask that resembled a grinning skull forged from black iron.

 

The temperature in the cavern plummeted. Izuku’s breath materialized as white mist in the freezing air. An oppressive, suffocating aura radiated from the hologram, a psychic weight so heavy it forced Izuku to his hands and knees. It felt as though gravity itself had multiplied.

 

The figure looked down at the cowering boy. When it spoke, the voice was a terrifying synthesis of velvet and grinding stone, echoing not just in the cavern, but directly inside Izuku’s mind.

 

"Fascinating," the specter rumbled. "A world completely isolated from the galaxy, steeped in ignorance, yet brimming with a mutated imitation of power. And amidst a planet of freaks and genetic anomalies... I am awakened by a broken child."

 

Izuku couldn't speak. He couldn't move. The sheer force of the entity’s presence was overriding his central nervous system.

 

The spectral figure descended, gliding smoothly until it hovered just inches in front of Izuku’s face. The empty, black eye sockets of the mask seemed to stare directly through Izuku’s flesh, peering into his very soul.

 

"I am Darth Vesper," the entity declared. "Dark Lord of the Sith. For three thousand of your local years, my holocron has rested in the dirt of this primitive world, waiting for a consciousness strong enough, and broken enough, to breach its seals. Tell me, boy. Why do you weep for a power you do not need?"

 

"I... I don't..." Izuku choked out, struggling against the psychic pressure. "I don't have a Quirk. I'm powerless."

 

Darth Vesper threw back his head and laughed. It was a cruel, hollow sound that offered no warmth.

 

"Quirks. Is that what the natives of this rock call their biological parlor tricks? Sweating explosives? Manipulating gravity through tactile pads? Growing appendages?" Vesper scoffed, his voice dripping with aristocratic disdain. "Pathetic. A random mutation of the flesh. A localized anomaly tied to the limits of your fragile biology. You mourn the lack of a parlor trick, child, when the very fabric of the cosmos courses through your veins."

 

Izuku stared, his logical mind desperately trying to process the impossible words. "What... what are you talking about?"

 

"Look into my mind, boy. Let me show you the truth of the universe."

 

Before Izuku could protest, Vesper raised a spectral, gauntleted hand and pointed a single finger at Izuku’s forehead.

 

A spike of agonizing pain pierced Izuku’s skull. His back arched, and his eyes rolled back as a flood of alien knowledge and memories poured into his unprotected mind.

 

He saw a galaxy spanning thousands of star systems. He saw massive ships of gray steel engaging in orbital bombardments. He saw warriors wielding blades of plasma—blue, green, and a terrifying, blood-red—clashing on battlefields of ash and fire.

 

And then, he felt it.

 

The Force.

 

It was an energy field created by all living things. It surrounded them, penetrated them, bound the galaxy together. But Vesper didn’t show Izuku the light, harmonious side of the Force. He dragged Izuku directly into the abyss.

 

Izuku felt the Dark Side. He felt the raw, unbridled power of emotion. He felt how fear, anger, hate, and suffering could be harnessed, twisted, and weaponized. It was a fire that burned away weakness. It was an engine of absolute subjugation.

 

The vision snapped back to reality. Izuku collapsed onto the stone floor, gasping for air, clutching his head. His mind felt as though it had been stretched and warped, filled with a horrific, beautiful new understanding of reality.

 

"You are not powerless," Vesper’s voice commanded, softer now, but infinitely more dangerous. "You are Force-sensitive. Strongly so. Your connection to the Dark Side is raw, untamed, fueled by fourteen years of humiliation and despair. Your society of 'heroes' could not sense it, because they are blind. They look only at the flesh, ignorant of the energy that binds the universe."

 

Izuku dragged himself up to a kneeling position. He looked at his hands. They were trembling, but not from fear. They were trembling with an energy he had never felt before. An energy that responded to the lingering anger burning in his chest.

 

"They told me I couldn't be a hero," Izuku whispered, the memory of All Might’s hollow eyes flashing in his mind.

 

"A hero?" Vesper mocked. "What is a hero, boy? A slave to the weak. A dog on a leash, begging for the approval of a society that despises him. They uphold a status quo built on hypocrisy. They allow the strong to be shackled by the morality of the powerless. Is that what you wish to be? A slave?"

 

"No," Izuku said, the word slipping out before he could stop it.

 

"They shunned you because you lacked their genetic mutations," Vesper continued, circling Izuku like a predator stalking wounded prey. "They called you useless. They told you to throw yourself from a roof. The one you idolized—the buffoon in the brightly colored tights—he looked at your suffering and told you to accept your mediocrity."

 

"He told me to be realistic," Izuku spat, his voice growing harder.

 

"I will show you reality," Vesper hissed. "The reality is that peace is a lie. It is a fairy tale told by the weak to keep the strong docile. The reality is that there is only conflict. And through conflict, we are forged into something greater."

 

Vesper stopped in front of Izuku, extending his spectral hand toward the holocron.

 

"I offer you a choice, boy. You can walk out of this cavern. You can return to your mother, accept your fate as a secondary citizen, and live a long, miserable life watching lesser beings bask in the glory that should have been yours."

 

The Sith Lord leaned closer, his voice dropping to a seductive whisper.

 

"Or, you can embrace the dark. You can learn the ways of the Sith. I will teach you to harness your hatred. I will teach you to bend the Force to your will. You will have power that makes their Quirks look like child's play. You will not save this diseased society, child... you will conquer it, and you will remake it in your own image."

 

Izuku stared at the glowing red pyramid.

 

Everything he had ever believed in was a lie. The heroes didn't care about justice; they cared about genetics and PR rankings. The society he lived in wasn't a utopia; it was a meat grinder that punished anyone who didn't fit the mold. All Might wasn't a savior; he was a gatekeeper, preserving the illusion.

 

If the light had rejected him, if the light demanded he remain weak and broken... then he would plunge into the dark.

 

Izuku looked up into the black voids of Darth Vesper’s mask. The boy who had cried over a ruined notebook on a rooftop was dead. In his place was a vessel waiting to be filled.

 

"Teach me," Izuku said, his voice cold, steady, and resolute.

 

"Say the words," Vesper commanded, his aura flaring with dark triumph. "The code of the Sith. Bind it to your soul."

 

The words materialized in Izuku’s mind, planted there by the holocron’s psychic link. He didn't just speak them; he felt them. He let the anger of Katsuki’s explosions, the sorrow of his mother’s apologies, and the crushing betrayal of All Might’s rejection fuel every syllable.

 

"Peace is a lie," Izuku began, his voice echoing in the chamber. "There is only passion."

 

He felt the temperature in the room drop further. The shadows seemed to lengthen, drawn toward him.

 

"Through passion, I gain strength."

 

He closed his eyes. He imagined the sprawling city of Mustafu above him. He imagined the U.A. High School, the bastion of hero society. He imagined tearing it down, brick by brick.

 

"Through strength, I gain power."

 

A physical sensation washed over him. It wasn't the warmth of a Quirk manifesting; it was an icy, electrifying current rushing through his veins. He felt the space around him. He felt the microscopic fractures in the stone, the flow of the groundwater miles away, the erratic life signs of the rats in the tunnels. He was connected to all of it, and he knew, with terrifying certainty, that he could crush it all.

 

"Through power, I gain victory."

 

He opened his eyes. He stared directly into Vesper’s mask, unfaltering.

 

"Through victory, my chains are broken."

 

Izuku took a deep, shuddering breath as the final line sealed his fate.

 

"The Force shall free me."

 

A blast of pure, dark energy radiated from Izuku’s body, cracking the stone floor beneath him. Dust fell from the ceiling. The Holocron pulsed violently, its light syncing with the erratic, furious beating of Izuku’s heart.

 

"Excellent," Darth Vesper hissed, his spectral form seeming to feed off the dark energy radiating from his new apprentice. "The path of the Sith is one of pain, isolation, and absolute domination. From this day forward, Izuku Midoriya is no more. He is a casualty of a weak world."

 

Vesper’s glowing red projection began to recede, drawing back into the pyramid.

 

"Take the holocron. Keep it hidden. When the sun rises, your training begins. We have much to do, my young apprentice. We must tear down this false society, and build an Empire upon its ashes."

 

The beam of light snapped off. The apex of the pyramid slid shut with a sharp click. The cavern was plunged back into darkness, illuminated only by the faint, pulsing glow of the runes etched into the metal.

 

Izuku stood up. He didn't feel tired anymore. The crushing weight of despair had evaporated, replaced by a cold, calculating clarity.

 

He reached out and picked up the holocron. It was heavy, cold to the touch, yet it hummed with a dormant, terrifying vitality. It fit perfectly into his scarred, uncalloused hands.

 

He slipped the artifact into his school bag, zipping it shut.

 

Turning his back on the dais, Izuku began the long climb back to the surface. He moved with a new grace, a silent economy of motion that he had never possessed before. The shadows of the tunnel didn't scare him; they welcomed him. They bent around him, cloaking him in their embrace.

 

When he finally emerged from the excavation site, the night sky was fully dark, choked with the light pollution of Mustafu. He slipped back through the rusted chain-link fence and began the walk back to his apartment.

 

He passed the same alleyways, the same storefronts, the same oblivious citizens flaunting their Quirks. But he didn't look at them with envy anymore. He looked at them with the cold, detached appraisal of a predator observing a herd of livestock.

 

Biological parlor tricks, he thought, a small, dark smirk playing at the corner of his mouth.

 

As he approached his apartment complex, he stopped by a puddle illuminated by a flickering streetlamp. He looked down at his reflection.

 

The messy green curls were the same. The freckles dusting his cheeks were the same. But as he stared into the murky water, the light caught his eyes.

 

They were no longer the soft, vibrant emerald green of a naive boy who dreamed of saving the world.

 

The irises had bled into a sickly, piercing, sulfurous yellow, ringed with a corona of burning red. They were the eyes of a monster. The eyes of a Sith.

 

Izuku blinked, and the yellow faded, the green returning like a perfectly constructed mask. He would need that mask. He would play the part of the timid, Quirkless weakling. He would smile, he would stutter, he would let Bakugo and the rest of the world believe he was nothing but a pebble in their path.

 

He would let them feel safe. Right up until the moment he wrapped the Force around their throats and showed them the true meaning of power.

 

Izuku turned away from the puddle and walked into his building.

 

Darth Deku had been born. And Hero Society was already living on borrowed time.

 

 

The disappearance of Izuku Midoriya was not marked by a sudden, dramatic kidnapping, nor was it heralded by a missing person’s report plastered across the evening news. It was a slow, quiet fading. Like a shadow retreating at noon, he simply ceased to be a presence in the world that had so thoroughly rejected him.

 

For the first few weeks, his mother, Inko, noticed the change in his posture. The nervous, hunched shoulders were gone, replaced by a rigid, almost terrifying stillness. The endless muttering that had scored the soundtrack of their home fell silent. He stopped watching the old video of All Might’s debut. He stopped eating with her, claiming he was studying in his room. When she tried to press him, she met eyes that were so vacant, so devoid of the warm, anxious light she knew, that the words died in her throat. She told herself it was just a phase. A teenage rebellion born from the heartbreak of realizing his Quirkless status was permanent. She gave him space, ignorant of the abyss he was throwing himself into.

 

At Aldera Junior High, his absence was a relief to the faculty and a minor annoyance to Katsuki Bakugo. Izuku stopped showing up entirely by the second month. The teachers marked him truant, assuming the Quirkless boy had finally succumbed to the statistical likelihood of his demographic and simply given up. Bakugo, engrossed in his own ferocious preparation for the U.A. Entrance Exam, only scoffed when he saw the empty desk. Fucking coward, Katsuki had thought, blasting a stray pencil into ash. Finally figured out his place.

 

But Izuku hadn’t given up. He had simply relocated.

 

Ten miles outside of Mustafu, bordered by a polluted, sluggish river, lay the Dagobah Municipal Beach Park. It had long been abandoned by the city, transformed by illegal dumping into a towering, rusted graveyard of broken appliances, rotting tires, and jagged scrap metal. It was a monument to the careless, throwaway nature of superhuman society.

 

It was here, amidst the decay and the forgotten rot, that the boy who was once Izuku Midoriya began to forge his chains.

 

 

 

"Again."

 

The voice of Darth Vesper did not echo aloud in the damp, salty air of the beach. It resonated directly within Izuku’s skull, a grinding, metallic command that brooked absolutely no hesitation.

 

Izuku stood waist-deep in the freezing, toxic water of the bay, the tide crashing against his shivering torso. He wore only a pair of ragged shorts. His skin, once soft and unblemished, was a tapestry of purple bruises, shallow lacerations, and the yellowing ghosts of healed fractures. His muscles burned with a lactic acid fire so intense it felt as though his veins were filled with molten lead.

 

"I... I can't," Izuku gasped, his teeth chattering uncontrollably as a freezing wave slapped against his chest. "My arms... they're tearing..."

 

"Pain is a construct of the biological shell," Vesper’s spectral form hovered above the water, unaffected by the wind or the cold. The glowing red projection of the Sith Lord glared down through his skull-like mask. "It is a warning system for the weak. You are not weak. You are a conduit for the Dark Side of the Force. Reach into the pain. Do not push it away. Wrap it around your heart. Let it infuriate you."

 

Izuku squeezed his eyes shut. He stood before a submerged, rusted-out skeleton of a heavy-duty pickup truck. For the last four hours, Vesper had ordered him to lift it using nothing but his mind.

 

"I don't have the strength," Izuku wheezed, his arms trembling as he held them out toward the submerged chassis.

 

"You rely on your muscles, like a common ape!" Vesper snarled, sending a localized spike of telekinetic pressure into Izuku’s skull, forcing a cry of agony from the boy’s lips. "Your muscles are nothing! The heroes of this world lift cars because their DNA mutated to grant them enhanced muscle density. They are bound by physics! The Force dictates physics! You are trying to move the truck. The truck is heavy. Stop thinking like a Quirkless victim!"

 

Izuku gasped, clutching his head.

 

"Why are you here, boy?" Vesper taunted, floating closer until the phantom chill of his aura froze the water around Izuku’s waist. "Did you come to the ocean to drown your sorrows? Are you thinking of the rooftop? Are you thinking of the golden idol who looked at you like you were a diseased insect?"

 

The memory flashed behind Izuku’s eyelids. All Might’s gaunt, pitying face. Consider what's realistic.

 

A spark of heat ignited in the freezing void of Izuku’s chest.

 

"Are you thinking of the explosive brute? The one who told you to take a swan dive off a roof? He is training, right now. He is growing stronger. He will go to U.A. High School. He will become a celebrated hero, showered in wealth and adoration, while you freeze in the filth of this beach. He will win. And you will be nothing."

 

"No," Izuku whispered, the word vibrating with a sudden, vicious intensity.

 

"Use it!" Vesper roared, his voice thunderous in Izuku’s mind. "Hate him! Hate the Symbol of Peace! Hate the mother who wept for your weakness! Hate the world that threw you away! Draw it in! Through passion, you gain strength!"

 

Izuku’s eyes snapped open. The sclera were bloodshot, but his irises had vanished entirely beneath a flood of burning, sulfurous yellow.

 

He didn't just feel anger. He became it. He felt the humiliation of every beating, the sting of every laugh, the crushing, suffocating weight of being utterly alone in a world of gods. He gathered that black, viscous hatred in his chest and forced it down his arms, channeling it through his fingertips.

 

He didn't try to lift the truck. He demanded that the universe move it.

 

The dark, polluted water around the truck began to bubble. The rusted chassis groaned, a horrific screech of stressed metal echoing across the desolate beach.

 

Izuku screamed, a guttural, terrifying sound that ripped his throat raw. His hands clawed upward in the air.

 

With a massive explosion of water and mud, the three-ton pickup truck erupted from the bay. It hovered ten feet in the air, water cascading from its rusted frame like a torrential downpour. Izuku’s arms shook violently, blood beginning to trickle from his nose due to the sheer cerebral strain, but he held it. He could feel the truck not as a physical object, but as a nexus of mass suspended within the invisible web of the Force.

 

"Yes," Vesper hissed, a purr of dark satisfaction. "Now... crush it."

 

Izuku clenched his trembling hands into tight fists.

 

High above the water, the truck imploded. The reinforced steel chassis crumpled like a discarded soda can. Windows shattered into dust. The engine block cracked and warped under an invisible, omnidirectional pressure of thousands of pounds per square inch. With a flick of his wrists, Izuku hurled the compacted ball of scrap metal onto the beach. It hit the sand with a concussive thud, kicking up a cloud of debris.

 

Izuku collapsed backward into the shallow water, gasping for air, the yellow fading from his eyes, replaced by an exhausted, euphoric green. He looked at his hands. They were raw and bleeding, but they hummed with a terrifying, limitless power.

 

"A rudimentary display," Vesper noted, hovering over the boy. "But a necessary first step. You are beginning to understand the chains that bind you. And how to break them."

 

Over the next ten months, Dagobah Beach became Izuku’s crucible.

 

He did not train like a hero. Heroes trained to endure, to capture, to protect. Vesper trained Izuku to dominate, to maim, to conquer. The Sith Lord was a relentless, sadistic taskmaster. He pushed Izuku’s physical body to the absolute breaking point, forcing him to use the Force to sustain himself when his muscles tore and his bones fractured. Izuku learned to feed on his own pain, using his suffering as a perpetual engine to fuel his connection to the Dark Side.

 

He learned to run faster than a speeding car, using the Force to propel his legs and cushion his impacts. He learned to leap three stories into the air. He learned to sense the microscopic vibrations of the world around him—the scuttling of crabs in the sand, the shifting of the tides, the emotional resonance of the stray animals that roamed the junkyard.

 

But Izuku’s greatest asset was not his newfound telekinesis. It was the very thing that had defined him as a Quirkless nerd: his mind.

 

Sitting in the rusted out shell of an old camper van that he had claimed as his sanctum, illuminated by the bloody light of the Sith Holocron, Izuku rewrote his notebooks.

 

Hero Analysis for the Future was burned. In its place, he bound a new tome in black leather. He titled it The Anatomy of Weakness.

 

"The Force grants precognition," Izuku muttered to himself one night, his pen flying across the page as he sketched a diagram of the Pro Hero Kamui Woods. "But precognition is only a fraction of a second. It's a reaction. True victory lies in prediction."

 

He pulled up a pirated video on a cracked smartphone he had salvaged and repaired. It showed Kamui Woods subduing a villain.

 

"Kamui Woods relies on Lacquered Chain Prison for crowd control," Izuku analyzed, his voice cold, devoid of the fanboy excitement that used to lace his tone. "The wood is dense, durable. But it's biological. It requires moisture. His movements always favor his left side when expanding his branches, likely due to a minor asymmetry in his Quirk factor."

 

Izuku’s yellow eyes flickered in the darkness of the van. "Sever the left arm at the shoulder before expansion. Or, apply localized, intense heat to the center of his chest, forcing the sap in his body to boil, rendering his wood brittle."

 

"You apply the tactical mindset of a Sith Assassin to the quirks of these costumed buffoons," Vesper noted, materializing beside him. "Good. The Jedi relied on instinct and dogma. The Sith rely on the exploitation of vulnerabilities. Every being has a flaw. Find it. Pry it open. And watch them bleed."

 

Izuku nodded, turning the page to a sketch of Katsuki Bakugo.

 

He stared at the drawing of his childhood tormentor. Bakugo’s Quirk, Explosion, relied on nitroglycerin-like sweat ignited by a spark from his palms.

 

"He needs to sweat," Izuku whispered. "He needs oxygen for the combustion. And his elbows take immense recoil damage if he overuses his power."

 

Izuku closed the book. He didn't need to write down how to kill Katsuki Bakugo. He had fantasized about it every night since the rooftop. He wouldn't fight Bakugo with explosions. He would fight him with a vacuum. A simple Force hold around the boy's forearms, clamping down on the sweat glands, followed by a telekinetic compression of the air around his hands. Without oxygen, no spark. Without a spark, Bakugo was just an angry, screaming teenager with weak joints.

 

The realization sent a shiver of dark ecstasy down Izuku’s spine. The monsters that had terrified him his entire life were nothing but biological machines. And he had just been handed the master override codes.

 

 

 

Month seven of his isolation brought the most dangerous lesson yet.

 

A heavy thunderstorm raged over Dagobah beach, lightning tearing across the black sky, illuminating the towering piles of trash like jagged mountains. The wind howled, whipping Izuku’s now shoulder-length, unkempt green hair wildly around his face.

 

He stood atop a mountain of crushed refrigerators, his arms extended, his breathing ragged.

 

"Telekinesis is the manipulation of the physical world," Vesper yelled over the storm, his holographic form cutting through the rain. "But Force Lightning is the manifestation of the Dark Side itself. It is pure, unfiltered malice rendered into energy. It cannot be summoned by mere anger. It requires hatred. Pure, concentrated, homicidal hatred."

 

"I hate them," Izuku growled, rain plastering his shirt to his increasingly lean, heavily scarred torso.

 

"You hate your circumstances!" Vesper rebuked. "You resent them! Resentment is the emotion of a victim. A Sith does not resent! A Sith destroys! Look into your core, boy! Find the one thing you want to eradicate from this universe, and let it consume you!"

 

Izuku closed his eyes. He bypassed Bakugo. He bypassed his mother. He dove deeper into his psyche, past the bullying, past the pity, until he found the core of his trauma.

 

A massive, towering figure. A shadow cast over society. The grinning, impossibly muscular form of All Might.

 

The man who smiled while the world rotted. The man who hoarded his power, dispensing it only to maintain a status quo that crushed the weak. The False God.

 

Izuku saw the smile. He imagined wrapping his hands around the Symbol of Peace's throat. He imagined watching that smile break. He imagined the terror in All Might’s eyes when he realized that a Quirkless nobody had brought the pillar of society crashing down.

 

A dark, icy void opened in Izuku’s chest. It was a hatred so profound, so absolute, that it transcended emotion and became a physical force.

 

He opened his eyes. They were completely gold.

 

Izuku screamed to the heavens, thrusting his hands forward.

 

It did not come out as a single bolt. A torrent of crackling, violet-blue electricity erupted from his fingertips. The lightning arced wildly, striking a rusted crane fifty yards away. The sheer voltage superheated the metal instantly. The crane groaned, turning cherry-red before the metal slagged and melted, the upper half of the structure collapsing in a shower of sparks and hissing steam.

 

Izuku fell to his knees, his hands smoking, the smell of ozone and burning flesh rising from his own fingertips. The pain was excruciating, but the high... the high was intoxicating. He had just projected death from his bare hands.

 

Suddenly, a sound broke through the fading thunder.

 

"Hey! What the hell was that?!"

 

Izuku’s head snapped toward the entrance of the beach. Three men were picking their way through the trash. They were local thugs, low-level criminals who used the abandoned beach to strip stolen cars. The leader, a hulking man with scales covering his face, was holding a heavy iron pipe. The other two had minor mutation quirks—one had extended, razor-sharp fingers, the other possessed eyes like a fly.

 

"Look at this," the scaly man laughed, tapping the pipe against his palm as they surrounded the base of Izuku’s trash pile. "Some little kid playing with support gear. That was a nasty shock, brat. Hand over whatever gadget you used to melt that crane, and maybe we won't break your legs."

 

For a moment, the ghost of Izuku Midoriya panicked. Three villains. He was unarmed. He needed to run.

 

But the ghost was quickly strangled by Darth Deku.

 

Izuku stood up slowly. The rain washed the blood from his nose. He looked down at the three men, not with fear, but with the cold curiosity of a scientist examining bacteria on a petri dish.

 

"Did you hear me, you little freak?!" the scaly man barked. "I said—"

 

Izuku didn't speak. He simply raised his right hand and pinched his thumb and forefinger together.

 

The scaly man’s voice cut off with a sickening gack.

 

The thug dropped his iron pipe. Both of his hands flew to his throat. His eyes bulged in absolute terror. He was lifted, slowly, agonizingly, two feet off the ground, his boots kicking uselessly at the empty air.

 

The other two thugs froze, their arrogant sneers dissolving into horror. They looked around, searching for invisible wires, searching for a pro hero.

 

"What... what's your Quirk?!" the man with razor fingers stammered, taking a step back.

 

"Quirk?" Izuku’s voice was barely a whisper, yet it carried over the rain, laced with a terrifying, ethereal echo. "I don't have a Quirk."

 

He tightened his pinch.

 

The sound of the scaly man’s trachea crushing was as loud as a gunshot in the quiet beach. The man’s neck snapped at a grotesque angle. Izuku released his grip, and the lifeless corpse plummeted into the mud, splashing the other two thugs with dirty water.

 

Izuku tilted his head, his yellow eyes locking onto the remaining men. "Run."

 

They didn't need to be told twice. Screaming in terror, the two thugs scrambled over the trash, fleeing into the night.

 

Izuku stood in the rain, looking at the corpse below him. He had just taken a human life. He waited for the guilt. He waited for the revulsion.

 

It never came. The only thing he felt was a grim, absolute certainty. The weak died. The strong survived. He had finally joined the ranks of the strong.

 

"You have shed your innocence," Vesper whispered from the shadows. "But a Sith is not fully forged without his weapon. The time has come to arm yourself."

 

 

 

By the ninth month, Izuku was ready. His body was lean, corded with dense, incredibly efficient muscle. His mastery over telekinesis allowed him to move with terrifying speed and silence, bending the light and sound around him to render himself practically invisible to the untrained eye.

 

But he needed a lightsaber.

 

The Holocron contained the schematics, but Earth did not possess the specific alloys of the wider galaxy. However, Izuku was a genius at adaptation.

 

Targeting a subsidiary recycling plant owned by the Detnerat Support Company—a corporation known for producing high-grade hero equipment and weapons—Izuku planned his first heist.

 

It was laughably easy. The security guards relied on cameras and physical patrols. They didn't anticipate a phantom.

 

Cloaked in the dark robes he had scavenged, Izuku scaled the sheer outer wall of the facility using the Force to stick to the concrete. He bypassed the biometric locks not by hacking them, but by using the Force to telekinetically manipulate the internal tumblers of the heavy blast doors, sliding the locking mechanisms open from the inside.

 

He glided through the facility like a shadow. When a lone night guard turned a corner, Izuku didn't kill him. He raised two fingers and brushed against the man's mind.

 

You saw nothing. The hallway is empty.

 

The guard’s eyes glazed over. "I saw nothing. The hallway is empty," he mumbled, turning around and walking away.

 

Izuku found the high-value scrap vault. He needed materials capable of containing and directing plasma heat that rivaled a star's core. He scavenged a casing made of a discarded tungsten-titanium alloy, designed for the exhausts of Endeavor's sidekicks. He stole military-grade focusing lenses, high-yield micro-power cells, and a magnetic containment emitter matrix from a dismantled plasma-cannon prototype.

 

He returned to his camper van on Dagobah beach before dawn, laying the stolen components on a filthy, oil-stained workbench.

 

"I have the casing. The power source. The emitter," Izuku said, looking at the Holocron resting on a rusted crate. "But there is no Kyber crystal on this planet. The weapon cannot be focused without one."

 

The Holocron pulsed, a deep, rhythmic thrum.

 

"You are correct, apprentice. This planet is devoid of Kyber," Vesper’s voice echoed. "But my Holocron is not merely a repository of knowledge. It is a reliquary."

 

The red lines of the pyramid shifted. A small, hidden compartment near the base slid open. Inside, resting on a bed of dark velvet, was a crystal.

 

It was roughly two inches long, jagged, and completely colorless. It looked like a piece of shattered glass, yet it hummed with an innate, living energy. Izuku reached out, and as his fingers brushed the crystal, a jolt of pure, harmonic energy shot up his arm. It felt... warm. It felt like hope. It felt like the light.

 

Izuku frowned, pulling his hand back as if burned.

 

"A Kyber crystal is alive," Vesper explained, a tone of dark reverence in his voice. "It is naturally attuned to the Light Side of the Force. It seeks harmony. Peace. It resists the Dark. To wield it, a Sith must bend the crystal to his will. You must break it. You must dominate it until its spirit shatters and bleeds. Only then will it serve you."

 

Izuku picked up the crystal. It felt cold now, trembling in his palm, as if it sensed the malice radiating from him.

 

He sat cross-legged on the floor of the van, placing the crystal on the floorboards in front of him. He closed his eyes and extended his hands, hovering them over the stone.

 

He reached out with the Force, grasping the crystal with his mind.

 

Instantly, his consciousness was violently yanked from his body.

 

Izuku found himself standing in a void of pure, blinding white light. The air was warm, smelling of summer rain and his mother’s cooking.

 

Stop, a voice echoed in the light. It wasn't a human voice; it was the collective consciousness of the crystal, singing a song of peace. Turn back. There is still good in you.

 

Visions began to materialize in the white void. Izuku saw himself as a four-year-old, sitting in front of the computer, eyes shining with pure joy as he watched All Might save a hundred people from a disaster.

 

This is who you are, the crystal pleaded. You wanted to save people. You wanted to bring hope.

 

"Hope is an illusion," Izuku snarled, projecting his mental avatar forward. The dark aura of his hatred began to seep into the white void, staining the floor beneath him black.

 

The crystal fought back. It changed the vision. Izuku was standing in front of Katsuki Bakugo, arms spread wide, tears streaming down his face as he protected a crying boy from the bully.

 

You were brave, the crystal sang. You had the heart of a hero before the world broke you. You can heal.

 

"Healing is for the weak!" Izuku roared. He drew upon every ounce of his suffering. He remembered the sludge villain suffocating him, the feeling of slime forcing its way down his throat while the heroes stood on the sidelines and watched him die. He remembered the crushing weight of All Might’s words on the roof. He remembered the hollow, pitying look in his mother’s eyes.

 

He gathered the black, venomous energy of his trauma and unleashed it like a tidal wave against the white light.

 

NO! the crystal shrieked, the sound like shattering glass in his mind.

 

"Submit!" Izuku screamed, his mental avatar grasping the essence of the crystal. "You are mine! Your light is a lie! I am the shadow! I am the master!"

 

He poured his hatred, his fury, and his endless, suffocating isolation into the crystal. He forced the stone to experience the agonizing despair of a Quirkless boy in a superhuman world. He made it feel the heat of Bakugo's explosions, the sting of a thousand insults, the coldness of All Might's rejection.

 

The white void began to crack. Bleeding lines of crimson spider-webbed across the sky of his mindscape.

 

Please... the crystal whimpered, its song of peace dissolving into a discordant scream of agony.

 

"Break!" Izuku commanded, crushing his hands together in the physical world.

 

With a final, catastrophic shatter, the white void collapsed. A torrent of violent, blinding red light consumed everything.

 

Izuku’s eyes snapped open in the physical world. He was gasping for air, sweat pouring down his face. The interior of the van was bathed in a sinister, bloody glow.

 

He looked down at the floorboards.

 

The crystal was no longer clear. It was a deep, mesmerizing, furious crimson. It pulsed with a heavy, aggressive heartbeat, perfectly synced to Izuku’s own. It was no longer singing a song of peace. It was screaming a song of war.

 

Izuku smiled. It was a terrifying expression, devoid of any warmth.

 

With practiced, telekinetic precision, he levitated the bleeding crystal, the stolen emitter matrix, the power cells, and the tungsten casing into the air. He didn't use tools. He used the Force, assembling the intricate, microscopic components within the casing with his mind.

 

The pieces snapped together, fusing under the pressure of his will. The heavy, dark metal cylinder dropped into his waiting hand.

 

It was elegant. Brutal. A weapon of a more civilized, and infinitely more violent, age.

 

Izuku stood up, wrapping his fingers around the hilt. His thumb found the ignition stud.

 

He pressed it.

 

Snap-hiss.

 

A blade of pure, crackling crimson plasma erupted from the emitter. The air in the van instantly grew hot, the smell of ozone heavily perfuming the confined space. The blade didn't just hum; it growled. It sounded like a caged predator, angry and desperate to consume.

 

Izuku swung the blade. It sheared through the heavy steel wall of the camper van with absolutely zero resistance, the metal glowing orange as the plasma vaporized it instantly.

 

"It is done," Vesper’s voice echoed, thick with dark triumph. "The chains are forged. The weapon is drawn. Who are you, my apprentice?"

 

Izuku stared at the red glow reflecting in his yellow eyes. The terrified, stuttering fanboy was dead. Burned away in the crucible of the Dark Side.

 

"I am the shadow that breaks the false idols," Izuku whispered. "I am a Lord of the Sith."

 

He deactivated the blade, plunging the van back into darkness.

 

"I am Darth Deku."

 

 

 

The morning of the U.A. High School Entrance Exam dawned bright and clear, mocking Izuku with its perfection.

 

Thousands of hopeful teenagers swarmed the massive gates of the prestigious academy, their faces flushed with excitement, anxiety, and the arrogant certainty that they were destined for greatness. They wore various middle-school uniforms, chattering loudly, comparing Quirks, taking selfies in front of the towering glass structures of the hero course buildings.

 

Among them walked Katsuki Bakugo, hands shoved deep into his pockets, his crimson eyes glaring daggers at anyone who dared step too close to him. He was a tightly coiled spring of explosive potential, fully believing he was walking into a building that he would one day own.

 

A few yards away, a girl with a round face and perpetual blush, Ochaco Uraraka, stared up at the H-shaped building in awe, slapping her own cheeks to hype herself up. A tall boy with engine pipes protruding from his calves, Tenya Iida, marched with robotic precision, already reprimanding a student for littering near the gates.

 

They were the future of hero society. The next generation of costumed enforcers.

 

A mile away, standing on the edge of a communication tower overlooking the U.A. campus, a figure watched them.

 

Izuku wore a heavily modified, dark armored tunic, woven from stolen, fire-retardant kevlar mesh, draped beneath a tattered, hooded black cloak that billowed violently in the morning wind. A dark rebreather mask covered the lower half of his face, concealing his scars and giving his breathing a mechanical, intimidating hiss.

 

Through the macro-binoculars he had scavenged, he zoomed in on Bakugo’s face. He saw the sheer arrogance radiating from his former friend. He panned over to the massive, imposing gates of U.A., a monument to a society built on the exclusion of the weak.

 

They thought they were safe. They thought their walls of reinforced concrete and their legions of Pro Heroes could protect them from the consequences of their own cruelty.

 

They were wrong.

 

Izuku lowered the binoculars, slipping them into a pouch on his utility belt. He reached down to his hip, his gloved fingers brushing against the cold metal of his lightsaber hilt.

 

The Force swirled around him, a tempest of dark, chaotic energy that bent the very light and air on the rooftop. He could feel the thousands of life forms in the school below. He could feel their hope.

 

It tasted disgusting.

 

"Enjoy your exams," Izuku whispered into the wind, his voice heavily modulated by the mask into a deep, mechanical growl. "Enjoy your little games. Play hero while you can."

 

He unclipped the lightsaber from his belt. He didn't ignite it. Not yet. It wasn't time. The grand stage had not yet been set.

 

He turned away from the gleaming spires of U.A. High, pulling his hood deeper over his golden, sulfurous eyes, and stepped off the ledge, allowing the Force to catch him as he plummeted into the shadows of the city below.

 

The era of heroes was approaching its twilight. And the dark was coming to claim the sky.

 

 

 

The Unforeseen Simulation Joint was a marvel of modern superhuman engineering. A colossal, domed structure constructed on the sprawling campus of U.S.A. High School, it was designed to perfectly replicate a multitude of disaster scenarios. Inside its reinforced glass walls lay a ruined city zone, a mountainous terrain, a shipwreck-strewn aquatic center, and a raging fire zone. It was a playground built for gods-in-training.

 

On this particular Tuesday morning, the dome hummed with the eager chatter of Class 1-A. Twenty students, the absolute elite of their generation, stood near the entrance plaza, clad in their freshly tailored hero costumes. They were bright, colorful, and brimming with the naive, untested optimism that society had meticulously bred into them.

 

Katsuki Bakugo stood near the back of the group, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw set in a permanent scowl. His costume—a militaristic ensemble of black and orange, complete with massive, grenade-shaped gauntlets—felt heavy, a comforting weight against the constant, buzzing irritation in his skin. He was surrounded by extras. The half-and-half bastard, Todoroki, who thought he was better than everyone else. The bespectacled freak, Iida, who wouldn't stop barking about regulations. The gravity girl, Uraraka, who looked like she belonged in a petting zoo, not a battlefield.

 

Fucking weaklings, all of them, Bakugo thought, a tiny spark popping from his palm and singeing his thick gloves.

 

Yet, beneath his aggressive posturing, a strange, hollow itch gnawed at the back of Katsuki’s mind. A shadow that he refused to acknowledge. It had been nearly a year since the Quirkless loser, Deku, had vanished from the face of the earth. No goodbye. No tearful breakdown. Just gone. A part of Katsuki was relieved; the pebble in his path had finally realized its place and rolled into the gutter. But another, deeper part of him—the primal, combative instinct that drove his Quirk—felt a bizarre lack of closure.

 

"Listen closely, everyone," the soft, synthesized voice of the rescue hero, Thirteen, echoed across the plaza, snapping Bakugo out of his thoughts. The hero stood in their bulky astronaut suit beside the tired, scruffy form of Shota Aizawa, their homeroom teacher. "Before we begin our rescue training, I have a few things to say. Or rather, one, two, three, four... maybe five things."

 

As Thirteen launched into a speech about the lethal potential of Quirks and the responsibility of heroism, a subtle, almost imperceptible shift occurred in the atmosphere.

 

Aizawa felt it first. The underground hero’s eyes narrowed, his posture stiffening beneath his layers of capture-scarf binding. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a smell. It was a drop in barometric pressure, accompanied by a sickening, metallic taste in the back of his throat.

 

Down in the central plaza, directly in front of the massive water fountain, the air began to warp. The light fractured, bending inward as a speck of profound, inky blackness materialized.

 

"Aizawa," Thirteen muttered, taking a step back.

 

The speck expanded with the sound of tearing canvas. It blossomed into a swirling, chaotic vortex of purple and black mist. It wasn't a natural phenomenon. It was a door.

 

And from that door, the nightmares poured in.

 

First came a pale, sickly young man covered in disembodied, grayish hands, his eyes burning with a childish, manic malice from between the fingers of the hand clasping his face. Beside him stood a hulking, unnatural abomination. It was a mountain of dark purple muscle, its brain completely exposed beneath a dome of scarred tissue, its beak-like mouth hanging open to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth.

 

Behind them, a veritable army of thugs, mercenaries, and societal rejects spilled out of the portal, wielding crude weapons and flexing terrifying, unregistered Quirks. They numbered in the dozens, fanning out across the plaza with predatory grins.

 

"Gather together and don't move!" Aizawa barked, his voice slicing through the sudden, terrified murmurs of the students. His hand flew to his scarf, pulling his yellow goggles over his eyes. "Thirteen, protect the students!"

 

"What is that?" Eijiro Kirishima asked, taking a hesitant step forward, his skin hardening into jagged rock. "Is this like the entrance exam? Has the training started already?"

 

"Don't move!" Aizawa roared, a ferocity in his tone that froze the class in their tracks. "Those are villains."

 

The word hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.

 

Villains. Not training robots. Not simulated disasters. People who wanted to kill them.

 

"Eraserhead and Thirteen," the hand-covered villain, Tomura Shigaraki, rasped, scratching his neck violently. "According to the schedule we acquired, the Symbol of Peace was supposed to be here. Where is he? Did he undergo a change of plans? Well, maybe if we kill a few kids, he'll come out to play."

 

The mist villain, Kurogiri, expanded, his body ballooning outward to envelop the entrance. "I am afraid I cannot allow you to leave."

 

What followed was chaos. Aizawa hurled himself down the grand staircase, plunging directly into the sea of villains. His Quirk, Erasure, systematically deactivated the powers of the frontline thugs as his capture weapon whipped through the air, breaking jaws, shattering ribs, and neutralizing threats with brutal, mathematical efficiency.

 

But it was only a matter of time.

 

Up by the entrance, Kurogiri’s mist engulfed the students. Bakugo and Kirishima leapt forward, explosions and hardened fists tearing through the shadow, but the mist simply swallowed their attacks. In an instant, the portal fractured space, scattering Class 1-A across the various disaster zones of the USJ, isolating them, dividing them for the slaughter.

 

 

 

Down in the central plaza, Aizawa was losing ground.

 

He was breathing heavily, sweat stinging his eyes beneath his goggles. He had incapacitated nearly thirty men, moving like a phantom, never staying in one place long enough to be surrounded. But the strain of keeping his eyes open, constantly erasing multiple Quirks, was tearing at his optic nerves.

 

He ducked a massive, stone-coated fist, pivoting and slamming his elbow into the attacker's throat, when a hand suddenly clamped down on his right elbow.

 

Aizawa’s eyes widened. He looked back to see Shigaraki standing impossibly close.

 

"You're cool, Eraserhead," Shigaraki whispered. "But you have a tell. Your hair falls when you blink."

 

A blinding, agonizing pain shot up Aizawa’s arm. The fabric of his sleeve disintegrated into dust. The skin, muscle, and bone of his elbow followed, flaking away in dry, agonizing chunks. Aizawa screamed, throwing a desperate punch with his left hand, forcing Shigaraki to retreat, but the damage was done. His right arm hung uselessly, the joint decayed to the bone.

 

"Nomu," Shigaraki commanded casually.

 

Before Aizawa could even turn his head, a force like a freight train slammed into his side.

 

The air was driven from his lungs in a bloody mist. Aizawa crashed against the concrete, his vision swimming. The hulking, brain-exposed monster—the Nomu—loomed over him. With horrifying speed, the beast reached down, grabbed Aizawa’s remaining good arm, and snapped it backward like a dry twig.

 

The snap echoed across the plaza. Hidden behind a rock in the nearby shipwreck zone, Minoru Mineta clapped his hands over his mouth to muffle his terrified sobbing, while Tsuyu Asui watched in paralyzed horror.

 

The Nomu didn't stop. It straddled Aizawa’s back, grabbing his head, and slammed his face into the concrete floor.

 

CRACK.

 

"You can erase Quirks," Shigaraki mused, walking over to watch the carnage. "But that's useless against overwhelming physical strength. Nomu here is the bio-engineered anti-Symbol of Peace. He's as strong as All Might himself."

 

The Nomu lifted Aizawa’s bloodied, shattered head, preparing to smash it down a second time.

 

And then, the temperature plummeted.

 

It did not happen gradually. In the span of a single heartbeat, the climate-controlled air of the USJ shifted from comfortably warm to absolute, biting arctic zero.

 

A thick, unnatural frost bloomed across the surface of the water fountain. The windows of the ruined city zone iced over with jagged, fractal patterns. The ambient sounds of the facility—the humming generators, the roaring fire zone, the cries of the scattered students—were suddenly swallowed by an oppressive, suffocating vacuum.

 

Shigaraki stopped scratching his neck. He exhaled, and a cloud of white mist plumed from his lips beneath the severed hand.

 

"What...?" Shigaraki muttered, looking around. "Is it Todoroki? Did Kurogiri send him to the wrong zone?"

 

But this was not the localized chill of a cryokinetic Quirk. This was a psychic weight. It pressed down on the chests of everyone in the facility.

 

In the landslide zone, Todoroki froze mid-step, his half-frozen enemies forgotten. The hair on his arms stood on end. He felt a primordial terror grip his heart, an instinctual scream in his DNA telling him to run.

 

In the ruin zone, Katsuki Bakugo lowered his gauntlets, his crimson eyes widening as a cold sweat broke out across his forehead. The air felt thick, viscous, like wading through deep water.

 

Back in the plaza, the remaining conscious thugs began to back away, clutching their weapons with trembling hands.

 

The Nomu, a mindless beast bred only to obey and destroy, paused. It released Aizawa’s head, its exposed brain twitching as it let out a low, confused gargle. It turned its massive, bird-like head toward the shadows beneath the grand staircase.

 

A rhythmic, terrifying sound echoed from the darkness.

 

Step. Step. Step.

 

It was the sound of heavy boots on concrete, slow, deliberate, and entirely unbothered by the chaos of the invasion.

 

Coupled with the footsteps was a breathing apparatus.

 

Kooo-pahhh. Kooo-pahhh.

 

A deep, mechanical, hissing inhalation, followed by a synthetic exhalation. It sounded like a predator stalking through the deep ocean.

 

From the absolute darkness beneath the entrance stairs, the shadow detached itself.

 

A figure stepped into the dim light of the central plaza. He was draped in a voluminous, tattered black cloak that seemed to absorb the ambient light around it. Beneath the cloak, heavy, tactical armor woven from dark kevlar covered his torso and limbs. His face was entirely obscured by the deep cowl of his hood, save for the lower half, which was covered by a brutal, metallic rebreather mask, etched with subtle crimson lines.

 

The figure stood no taller than an average teenager, yet the aura he projected made him seem like a towering, insurmountable monolith.

 

Shigaraki stared at the newcomer. "Who the hell is this? Kurogiri! Did you let a Pro Hero in?!"

 

A vortex of mist materialized beside Shigaraki. "Tomura Shigaraki, I assure you, I did not transport this individual. The sensors outside did not detect any breach. It is as if he simply... manifested."

 

The cloaked figure did not speak. He simply turned his head, the darkness of his hood scanning the plaza. The remaining low-level villains, emboldened by their numbers, began to rally.

 

"Hey! Who do you think you are, kid?!" a man with a mutation that turned his arms into massive, spiked clubs shouted. "You want to play hero?! You picked the wrong day!"

 

The thug roared, charging at the cloaked figure with his spiked arms raised.

 

The figure didn't adopt a fighting stance. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't even shift his weight.

 

He simply raised his right hand and flicked his wrist.

 

An invisible shockwave of concussive force exploded outward. The charging villain was hit with the kinetic equivalent of a speeding locomotive. He didn't just fly backward; his chest cavity caved in with a sickening crunch. The man was launched through the air at supersonic speed, crossing the entire plaza before slamming into the reinforced steel doors of the fire zone.

 

He did not get up. He did not even twitch.

 

Dead silence fell over the plaza, broken only by the mechanical breathing of the cloaked intruder.

 

Kooo-pahhh. Kooo-pahhh.

 

Shigaraki’s eyes widened behind his mask. "What was that? A telekinesis Quirk? An impact Quirk? Nomu! Wait."

 

The other villains, terrified but desperate, decided to swarm him. "Get him! He can't take all of us!"

 

Ten thugs rushed the cloaked figure simultaneously from all sides. Blades, fireballs, and elongated limbs lashed out in a coordinated assault.

 

The figure let out a low, mechanical chuckle.

 

He extended both hands, his fingers splayed wide.

 

The air itself seemed to freeze. The ten villains stopped mid-charge, suspended six inches off the ground. Their momentum was instantly nullified. They thrashed wildly, their eyes bulging as an invisible, omnidirectional vice gripped their bodies.

 

"Your reliance on your biological mutations makes you predictable," a heavily synthesized, demonic voice echoed from the rebreather. It was a voice devoid of humanity, dripping with absolute contempt. "You possess power, yet you lack discipline. You are street trash."

 

The figure slowly clenched his hands into fists.

 

The results were horrific.

 

Bones snapped like dry kindling. Several villains screamed in agony as their arms and legs were telekinetically broken and bent backward at grotesque angles. One villain, whose Quirk allowed him to stretch his neck like a snake, found his throat tied into a literal knot by invisible hands. Another, preparing to vomit acid, was violently crushed inward, forcing the acid back down his own lungs.

 

With a dismissive sweep of his arms, the figure threw the broken bodies aside. They slammed into the ground, into the fountain, into the concrete walls, eliminated in a matter of seconds without the figure taking a single step.

 

Class 1-A students hidden around the facility watched in absolute, paralyzed horror. This wasn't the heroic subjugation they were taught. This wasn't arrest and detainment. This was slaughter. This was surgical, effortless extermination.

 

"Hey, hey, hey!" Shigaraki scratched at his neck furiously, drawing blood. "What are you doing? You're ruining the game! You're breaking the NPCs! Who are you?! Are you a hero, or just some arrogant vigilante freak?!"

 

The cloaked figure turned his attention to the blue-haired villain.

 

"A hero?" The synthesized voice mocked, laced with dark amusement. "Heroes are slaves to a diseased morality. I am the cure."

 

The figure raised a single finger and pointed it at Shigaraki.

 

Instantly, Shigaraki felt an invisible, icy hand wrap around his windpipe. His feet left the ground. He clawed at his throat with his four fingers, careful not to use his pinky, gasping for air. The pressure was immense, slowly crushing his trachea.

 

"Tomura!" Kurogiri panicked, surging forward to engulf the cloaked figure.

 

The figure didn't even look at the mist villain. He simply held out his left hand and unleashed a violent blast of Force Repulse. The kinetic wave tore through Kurogiri’s mist, completely scattering the villain's physical form and sending his metal neck-brace skidding across the concrete.

 

"Nomu!" Shigaraki gargled, his vision going black. "KILL HIM!"

 

The Nomu shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and abandoned the unconscious, bleeding Aizawa. It moved with blinding speed, a purple blur that crossed the plaza in a fraction of a second, raising a fist capable of leveling a skyscraper.

 

The cloaked figure released Shigaraki, who collapsed to the ground, coughing violently.

 

As the Nomu’s fist descended, the cloaked figure finally moved.

 

He didn't try to block. His precognitive sense—the whispers of the Dark Side—traced the trajectory of the monster’s punch milliseconds before it happened. He simply sidestepped, pivoting on his heel with the fluid grace of a dancer. The Nomu’s fist slammed into the concrete where he had been standing, detonating a crater twenty feet wide and sending a shower of debris into the air.

 

Interesting, Izuku thought, his mind working at hyper-speed behind the mask. Extreme density. Shock absorption to mitigate the kinetic recoil of its own strength. But its brain is exposed. A design flaw, or a necessary sacrifice for thermal venting?

 

The Nomu recovered instantly, spinning around and swiping its massive claws at Izuku’s head.

 

Izuku ducked under the swing, the wind of the strike rattling his hood. He used the Force to glide backward, hovering slightly above the ground, putting thirty feet between him and the beast.

 

"You think you can dodge forever?!" Shigaraki wheezed, pushing himself up. "Nomu has shock absorption! Physical attacks won't work on him! He is the ultimate violence!"

 

Izuku reached to his belt beneath his cloak. His gloved hand wrapped around the heavy, dark tungsten hilt.

 

"Physical attacks rely on blunt force," the synthesized voice echoed. "They rely on the structural integrity of flesh against flesh."

 

He unclipped the hilt, bringing it up to chest level.

 

"I do not rely on flesh."

 

Izuku pressed the ignition stud.

 

SNAP-HISS.

 

A beam of pure, furious crimson plasma erupted from the emitter. The sound it made was terrifying—a deep, resonant, hungry hum that vibrated in the teeth of everyone watching. The ambient temperature of the plaza immediately spiked, the arctic chill replaced by a searing, oppressive heat. The red light painted the concrete plaza in the color of fresh blood, reflecting off the dark visor of Izuku’s rebreather.

 

Shigaraki stared at the weapon. "A plasma sword? You think a toy is going to stop him? Nomu, tear him apart!"

 

The Nomu roared, charging forward with reckless abandon.

 

Izuku didn't retreat this time. He adopted a high guard, gripping the lightsaber with both hands, the red blade humming furiously beside his ear. He fed his anger, his disgust for the creature and its creators, directly into the Kyber crystal. The blade crackled, spitting stray sparks of dark energy.

 

The Nomu lunged, extending both arms in a bear hug designed to crush Izuku’s spine.

 

Izuku dropped beneath the creature’s guard. With a flick of his wrists, he swung the lightsaber upward in a vicious, diagonal arc.

 

There was no resistance. The plasma blade, burning hotter than a star's corona, sheared through the Nomu’s dense, bio-engineered muscle tissue at the molecular level. The shock absorption Quirk was completely useless; you cannot absorb a cut that cauterizes as it separates.

 

The Nomu’s right arm and left leg were severed from its torso in a single, fluid motion.

 

The creature hit the ground hard, its momentum sending it skidding past Izuku, leaving cauterized, smoking stumps that smelled of burnt ozone and roasting meat.

 

"What?!" Shigaraki screamed, his eyes wide in disbelief. "No! That's impossible!"

 

The Nomu shrieked in confusion rather than pain. Its hyper-regeneration Quirk activated. Muscle tissue began to bubble and expand from the cauterized wounds, attempting to reconstruct the missing limbs.

 

"Regeneration," Izuku observed aloud, turning to face the crippled beast. "A localized cellular hyper-proliferation. Fascinating. Let us test its limits."

 

Izuku stepped forward, raising his left hand. He reached out with the Force, gripping the Nomu’s massive body and lifting the three-ton beast effortlessly into the air. The monster thrashed, its newly regenerating arm swiping at the empty space.

 

Izuku brought the lightsaber back. With a series of blindingly fast, surgical strikes, he went to work.

 

Slash. Slash. Slash.

 

He severed the newly forming limbs. He sheared off the creature's beak. He thrust the blade directly into the Nomu’s chest, piercing its multiple hearts, twisting the hilt to maximize the internal cellular devastation. The creature howled, a terrifying, gurgling sound as its internal organs were vaporized.

 

Finally, Izuku withdrew the blade. The Nomu hung in the air, a smoking, twitching lump of ruined flesh, desperately trying to regenerate from catastrophic, unrecoverable damage.

 

Izuku looked at the exposed brain.

 

"A mindless beast," Izuku whispered. "A puppet. Return to the void."

 

He swung the crimson blade in a horizontal arc.

 

The Nomu’s upper skull and exposed brain were cleanly severed. The massive body dropped to the concrete with a heavy, final thud. The regeneration stopped entirely. The ultimate bioweapon, the anti-Symbol of Peace, was dead, dismantled in less than two minutes by a boy who hadn't even broken a sweat.

 

Silence reclaimed the USJ, thicker and more oppressive than before.

 

Shigaraki fell to his knees, his hands trembling violently. "No... no, no, no... my Nomu... my cheat code..."

 

Just as the dust began to settle, the reinforced doors of the ruin zone at the edge of the plaza were blown open.

 

"Die, you villain scum!" Katsuki Bakugo roared, blasting his way out of the wreckage, followed closely by Kirishima and Todoroki.

 

Bakugo landed in the plaza, his gauntlets smoking, a feral grin on his face, ready to take the fight to the boss. But the grin faltered.

 

He looked at the scene before him. The scattered, broken bodies of the thugs. The bleeding, unconscious form of Mr. Aizawa. The smoking, dismembered corpse of the Nomu. Shigaraki on his knees, shivering in terror.

 

And standing amidst the carnage, illuminated by the hellish red glow of a crackling energy blade, was a cloaked figure.

 

Bakugo’s red eyes locked onto the figure. The cloak. The mask. It was an intimidating visage. But as Bakugo watched the figure slowly deactivate the glowing red blade—the plasma receding into the hilt with a sharp hiss—he noticed the stance.

 

The figure stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, slightly pigeon-toed. His shoulders were hunched, just a fraction, in a defensive posture that favored his left side.

 

It was a stance Bakugo had beaten into the dirt a thousand times.

 

"Hey," Bakugo called out, his voice betraying a slight tremor he immediately hated. "Who the hell are you?"

 

The cloaked figure slowly turned his head to look at the explosive blonde.

 

Beneath the mask, Izuku smiled. It was a twisted, sadistic smile that never reached his eyes. He recognized the aggressive posturing, the explosive sweat, the arrogant jut of Bakugo’s chin.

 

He had waited a year for this moment.

 

Izuku reached up with both hands. He unclasped the heavy, tattered hood, letting it fall back against his shoulders. Then, his gloved hands moved to the rebreather. With a sharp click, he disengaged the locking mechanism and pulled the metal mask away from his face, dropping it to the concrete.

 

Bakugo stopped breathing.

 

Kirishima gasped. Todoroki’s eyes widened in genuine shock.

 

The messy, untamable green curls. The constellation of freckles dusting the pale cheeks. The scars—new and jagged—crisscrossing the jawline.

 

It was him.

 

But it wasn't him.

 

The timid, watering emerald eyes were gone. In their place were twin suns of burning, sulfurous yellow, ringed with an angry crimson corona. They were the eyes of a predator who had finally cornered its prey.

 

"D-Deku?" Bakugo whispered, the nickname slipping from his lips like a curse. All the bravado, all the explosive confidence, vanished in a single, terrifying instant.

 

"Hello, Kacchan," Izuku replied. Without the mask, his voice wasn't a mechanical growl. It was soft, calm, and lethally smooth. "I see you made it into U.A. How is the hero business treating you?"

 

"You..." Bakugo took a step back, his brain short-circuiting. He looked from Izuku to the slaughtered Nomu, to the terrified League of Villains. "You don't have a Quirk! You're Quirkless! What is this?! What kind of trick is this, you damn nerd?!"

 

Anger, a familiar, hot anger, flared in Bakugo’s chest, replacing the confusion. He ignited small explosions in his palms. "Did you team up with these villains to get back at me?! Did they give you a Quirk?! I'll kill you!"

 

Bakugo launched himself forward, leading with a massive right hook, aiming an explosion directly at Izuku’s face.

 

Izuku didn't blink. He didn't ignite his lightsaber. He simply raised his left hand.

 

Bakugo’s momentum stopped dead. He was suspended in mid-air, a foot off the ground, frozen mid-punch. The explosion in his palm died instantly.

 

"What... what the..." Bakugo strained, his muscles bulging, but he couldn't move a single inch. It felt as though he had been encased in solid steel.

 

"Still the same loud, predictable brute," Izuku sighed, walking slowly toward the suspended boy. "Still relying on your explosive sweat. You think a minor chemical mutation makes you superior."

 

Izuku stopped right in front of Bakugo, their faces inches apart. Bakugo could see his own terrified reflection in Izuku’s glowing yellow eyes.

 

"You told me to take a swan dive off the roof, Kacchan," Izuku whispered softly, the Dark Side swirling around them, chilling the air. "You told me to pray for a Quirk in my next life. But you were wrong. Quirks are a crutch for the weak. A genetic fluke."

 

Izuku raised two fingers.

 

Bakugo gasped as an invisible pressure clamped down on his throat, restricting his airway. He clawed at his neck, his legs kicking uselessly.

 

"This is the Force, Katsuki," Izuku said, using Bakugo’s real name for the first time in his life. "It binds the universe. It dictates gravity, space, and time. And I have bent it to my will."

 

"Midoriya!" Kirishima yelled, hardening his arms and rushing forward. "Let him go! What are you doing?!"

 

Izuku didn't even look at Kirishima. He simply flicked his wrist. A wave of telekinetic force slammed into Kirishima and Todoroki, sweeping them off their feet and throwing them fifty yards backward, burying them beneath the rubble of the ruined city zone.

 

"I am showing him the reality he so deeply cherishes," Izuku continued, turning his attention back to the choking Bakugo. "The strong devour the weak. You spent your whole life pretending to be a god, Kacchan. But compared to the Dark Side, you are nothing but an insect."

 

Izuku tightened his grip slightly. Bakugo’s face turned purple, his eyes rolling back in his head. The explosive boy was entirely helpless. The power dynamic of a decade was reversed in an instant, and it was entirely humiliating.

 

Just as Izuku prepared to crush Bakugo’s windpipe, a massive explosion rocked the main entrance of the USJ.

 

The heavy steel doors were blown completely off their hinges, flying through the air and crashing into the entrance stairs.

 

A massive, hulking figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the bright sunlight of the outside world. He wore a pinstriped yellow suit, though his muscular frame looked ready to burst from the seams. He wasn't smiling.

 

"IT IS FINE NOW," a booming, thunderous voice echoed throughout the entire dome, vibrating the very foundations of the facility. "I AM HERE!"

 

All Might had arrived.

 

The Symbol of Peace stepped into the USJ, taking in the carnage. He saw the battered students, the unconscious Aizawa, the terrified villains, and the slaughtered Nomu. Finally, his eyes landed on the central plaza.

 

He saw a cloaked boy holding a dying Katsuki Bakugo suspended in mid-air with an invisible power.

 

Izuku slowly turned his head to look at the massive hero. The yellow eyes bored into All Might’s blue ones.

 

For a fraction of a second, All Might felt a cold shiver run down his spine. The boy’s face... he recognized those freckles. He recognized that green hair. It was the Quirkless boy from the rooftop ten months ago.

 

But the energy radiating from the boy was not human. It was a suffocating, concentrated malice that rivaled, perhaps even exceeded, All For One.

 

"Let the boy go, villain!" All Might commanded, his voice tight with suppressed fury as he prepared to launch himself forward.

 

Izuku scoffed. The sound was dismissive and utterly devoid of fear.

 

"The false god arrives, right on schedule," Izuku muttered.

 

With a careless flick of his hand, Izuku deactivated the Force Choke. Bakugo dropped to the concrete like a puppet with its strings cut, gasping violently for air, coughing and clutching his throat.

 

Izuku didn't try to fight All Might. Not today. The audience was too small, the stage unprepared. Today was simply an overture.

 

"Keep your broken society for a little longer, Symbol of Peace," Izuku’s voice carried across the plaza, amplified by the Force to ensure every single person in the dome heard him. "Gather your heroes. Build your walls. It won't matter."

 

Izuku reached down, picking up his rebreather mask and snapping it back into place, concealing the twisted smile that stretched across his face.

 

"The shadow has fallen. And your sun is setting."

 

Before All Might could even twitch his leg muscles to sprint, Izuku bent his knees. Drawing deeply upon the Force, he unleashed a massive, telekinetic jump.

 

The concrete beneath his boots shattered. Izuku rocketed upward with the speed of a fired artillery shell. He flew straight up, passing the central chandelier, aiming for the massive glass dome of the USJ ceiling.

 

"Wait!" All Might roared, leaping after him.

 

But Izuku was too fast. He drew his lightsaber, igniting the crimson blade mid-air. With a spinning flourish, he slashed through the reinforced, quirk-resistant glass of the dome as if it were wet tissue paper.

 

He shot through the hole, disappearing into the bright blue sky above the U.A. campus.

 

All Might landed on a metal crossbeam just below the shattered ceiling, staring up at the empty sky, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles bled.

 

Down in the plaza, Shigaraki laughed, a hysterical, broken sound, as Kurogiri quickly wrapped him in mist to escape before the Pro Heroes arrived in force.

 

Katsuki Bakugo lay on the concrete floor, staring blankly at the smoking, slaughtered corpse of the Nomu beside him. He couldn't hear the sirens approaching. He couldn't hear Kirishima calling his name.

 

All he could hear was the mechanical breathing. All he could see were those burning, yellow eyes.

 

Deku wasn't just a villain. He was a monster. And they were all completely powerless to stop him.

 

 

The aftermath of the Unforeseen Simulation Joint invasion did not just shake the foundations of U.A. High School; it sent a seismic tremor through the very bedrock of superhuman society.

 

For the first time since the rise of All Might, the invincibility of the Pro Hero paradigm had been violently shattered. The media cycle was a relentless, looping feed of terror. Grainy, zoomed-in footage from the damaged security cameras of the USJ played on every screen in Japan. It showed the slaughtered, dismembered corpse of the Nomu. It showed the bruised, bleeding bodies of Eraserhead and Thirteen. But mostly, it showed him.

 

The media had dubbed him the "Crimson Swordsman."

 

He was a phantom. A cloaked nightmare wielding a weapon of impossible heat, wielding an invisible, telekinetic power that defied every known law of Quirk classification. The internet forums were ablaze with conspiracy theories. Was he a secret government experiment gone rogue? A foreign mercenary? An alien? The complete lack of a Quirk registry match only fueled the hysteria.

 

Inside the heavily fortified walls of U.A. High School, the atmosphere was one of suffocating gloom.

 

In the faculty conference room, Shota Aizawa sat wrapped in thick, white bandages, both of his arms secured in heavy casts, his right eye permanently damaged by Shigaraki’s decay. Across from him sat Toshinori Yagi—All Might—in his skeletal, deflated form. The Symbol of Peace was staring down at his large, bony hands, the silence in the room pressing against him like a physical weight.

 

"We ran his face through every database on the planet," Principal Nezu said, his usually cheerful, squeaky voice replaced by a grim, measured cadence. The chimera tapped a small paw against a holographic projector on the table. The image of the boy without his mask, his sulfurous yellow eyes glowing with malice, hovered in the air.

 

"Nothing," Nezu continued. "Or rather, nothing that makes sense. The facial recognition flagged a ninety-nine percent match with a local middle school student who went missing nearly a year ago. Izuku Midoriya. Fourteen years old. Officially registered as Quirkless."

 

Toshinori flinched. The word Quirkless hit him like a physical blow. He remembered the rooftop. He remembered the boy clutching a burnt notebook, his green eyes desperate for a single shred of validation. Consider what's realistic.

 

"That's impossible," Vlad King grunted, crossing his massive arms. "Quirkless kids don't suddenly manifest the ability to telekinetically crush a dozen men and butcher a bio-engineered monster in two minutes. The records have to be forged."

 

"They aren't," Aizawa rasped, his voice raw. "I looked at him. During the attack. I used Erasure on him right before he crushed Bakugo's throat."

 

The room went dead silent. Eraserhead’s Quirk was absolute. If he looked at a person, their Quirk factor temporarily short-circuited.

 

"And?" Toshinori whispered, dread pooling in his stomach.

 

"Nothing happened," Aizawa said, his visible eye darkening with the memory. "My Quirk activated perfectly. But he didn't even blink. Whatever he is using... it’s not a Quirk. It doesn't originate from a genetic mutation. The rules don't apply to him."

 

Toshinori closed his eyes. The guilt was a living, breathing thing inside him, gnawing at his diminished organs. He had created this. Through his own negligence, his own blunt, careless pragmatism, he had taken a boy who worshiped heroes and pushed him into the abyss. And the abyss had forged him into a monster.

 

"We must increase patrols," Nezu concluded, his black eyes unreadable. "We must protect the students. Because whoever this Izuku Midoriya is now... he is not hiding. He is hunting."

 

 

 

Deep beneath the neon-drenched streets of the Kamino Ward, in a subterranean facility masked by shell corporations and forgotten sewage lines, a different kind of meeting was taking place.

 

The air in the warehouse was sterile, smelling of formaldehyde, ozone, and the synthetic hum of heavy machinery. Row upon row of massive, cylindrical glass tubes lined the walls, each filled with glowing green amniotic fluid and the suspended, twitching bodies of experimental Nomu.

 

At the far end of the cavernous room, hooked to a massive, gothic array of life-support monitors and oxygen synthesizers, sat the Emperor of the Underworld.

 

All For One.

 

The two-hundred-year-old warlord was a ruin of a man. His face above his upper lip was a scarred, featureless mass of scar tissue, entirely devoid of eyes, a nose, or ears. A heavy, industrial mask fed oxygen directly into his damaged trachea. Yet, despite his crippling injuries, the aura of absolute, terrifying power he radiated was undiminished.

 

He sat in his reinforced chair, listening.

 

Standing before him was Kyudai Garaki, the mad genius behind the Nomu project. The squat, bald doctor was wringing his hands, looking at a tablet filled with rapidly scrolling data streams. Beside Garaki stood Tomura Shigaraki, his arms crossed, furiously scratching at his neck.

 

"It's a glitch," Shigaraki hissed, his voice raspy and petulant. "It's an anomaly. He had a gadget. A support item. That's the only explanation. He cheated."

 

"Tomura," All For One’s voice echoed through the room. It was smooth, cultured, and resonated with a terrifying, paternal warmth. "A king does not throw a tantrum when he encounters an unexpected piece on the board. He analyzes it. He captures it. Doctor, what did the telemetry from the USJ Nomu record before its... unfortunate termination?"

 

Garaki adjusted his thick goggles, clearing his throat nervously. "M-Master, the data is... baffling. The Nomu's shock absorption was completely bypassed. The weapon the boy wielded emitted a plasma field contained by a magnetic envelope, burning at approximately twenty thousand degrees Celsius. But that is not the most alarming part."

 

Garaki pressed a button, projecting a holographic graph. "The Nomu's internal biometric sensors recorded the boy's telekinetic output. Master... there was no localized biological thermal spike. When a human uses a Quirk, their body temperature rises, heart rate shifts, and stamina depletes due to the strain on the Quirk factor. The boy experienced none of this. He lifted three tons of struggling muscle, and his vitals remained resting."

 

All For One tilted his featureless head. For the first time in five years, since his catastrophic defeat at the hands of All Might, he felt a genuine spark of intrigue.

 

"No Quirk factor?" All For One mused, tapping a tube extending from his arm. "Eraserhead's power failed. The boy commands an energy that does not abide by the laws of genetics."

 

"It's impossible!" Shigaraki snapped. "Everything is a Quirk! He's just hiding his activation requirement!"

 

"There is no such thing as impossible, Tomura," All For One corrected gently. "Only that which we have not yet stolen. If this boy possesses a power that supersedes the biological limitations of Quirks... imagine what I could do with it. Imagine what you could do with it, my boy."

 

All For One leaned forward slightly in his chair, the machinery hissing as it adjusted to his movement. "Kurogiri."

 

The mist villain materialized from the shadows, bowing deeply. "Yes, Master."

 

"You have his face. You have his name," All For One commanded softly. "Find him. Do not engage him in combat. Simply extend an invitation. Tell him that the ruler of the shadows wishes to meet the shadow that broke the USJ."

 

"And if he refuses?" Kurogiri asked.

 

All For One smiled beneath his mask, a terrifying stretch of ruined tissue. "Offer him the one thing a child intoxicated by his own power cannot resist. Offer him an audience with a god."

 

 

 

Izuku Midoriya did not need to be found. He had been waiting for the invitation.

 

He sat cross-legged on the rusted roof of his dilapidated camper van on Dagobah Beach. The sun had long since set, plunging the massive junkyard into darkness. He wore his casual clothing—dark cargo pants and a black, sleeveless turtleneck that exposed the heavy, jagged scars crisscrossing his muscular arms. His lightsaber hilt hung securely at his belt.

 

In front of him, resting on a rusted oil drum, the Sith Holocron pulsed with a rhythmic, bloody light.

 

"He is searching for you," Darth Vesper’s voice echoed in Izuku’s mind. The spectral projection hovered above the pyramid, its skull-mask locked onto Izuku. "The parasite. The one who calls himself 'All For One'."

 

"I know," Izuku replied, his eyes closed in deep meditation. The Force swirled around him, a sensory net that stretched for miles across the city. "I can feel his presence in the underworld. It is like a massive, rotting tumor in the Force. He is a localized nexus of stolen power. He reeks of stagnation."

 

"He is the alpha predator of this primitive world," Vesper noted. "For two centuries, he has hoarded the biological mutations of the weak, cobbling together an arsenal of parlor tricks. He believes himself invincible because no flesh-bound mortal can match his stolen versatility. He believes he is a god."

 

Izuku opened his eyes. The sulfurous yellow irises cut through the darkness of the beach.

 

"There are no gods," Izuku whispered, a cold, predatory smile touching his lips. "Only the Force. And those who bend it."

 

"He will try to take your power. He will try to absorb you, just as he has absorbed thousands of others," Vesper warned, though there was a dark, expectant thrill in the Sith Lord’s voice. "This is the crucible, my apprentice. The Rule of Two demands that there can only be two Sith at any given time—a master to embody the power, and an apprentice to crave it. But the Rule of Two also demands absolute supremacy. You cannot build an Empire while a rival king sits upon a throne of shadows."

 

"He is not a king," Izuku said, standing up. He reached out and the Holocron snapped shut, flying seamlessly into his waiting palm. "He is a scavenger sitting on a pile of stolen garbage. I will show him what true power looks like."

 

Just as Izuku slipped the Holocron into his pocket, the air ten feet in front of the van began to warp.

 

The barometric pressure shifted. A speck of blackness rapidly expanded, tearing the air open into a swirling vortex of purple and black mist.

 

Izuku didn't flinch. He didn't reach for his lightsaber. He simply crossed his arms behind his back and waited.

 

The glowing yellow eyes of Kurogiri manifested within the mist. The villain looked at the boy standing on the van. Even without the terrifying cloak and mask, Kurogiri felt a profound, instinctual chill run through his misty form. The boy’s presence was a suffocating weight.

 

"Izuku Midoriya," Kurogiri spoke, his voice polite but strained. "Or do you prefer the moniker the media has assigned you?"

 

"My name," Izuku said, his voice calm and melodic, yet laced with a psychic edge that made Kurogiri flinch, "is Darth Deku. Izuku Midoriya died a long time ago."

 

Kurogiri bowed slightly. "Darth Deku, then. I represent a man of immense resources and power. The true architect of the underworld. He watched your performance at the USJ with great interest. He extends an invitation to his sanctuary. He wishes to discuss an alliance."

 

"An alliance," Izuku chuckled, the sound dry and humorless. "All For One does not seek alliances. He seeks assets. He seeks additions to his collection. He sees my power, and his greed compels him to possess it."

 

Kurogiri’s eyes widened slightly. "You know of my Master?"

 

"I know the shape of the rot in this city," Izuku replied, stepping off the van. He didn't fall; he used the Force to gently float to the sand below, landing without a sound. "Take me to him. Let us see if the boogeyman lives up to his myth."

 

Kurogiri hesitated, a rare feeling of apprehension washing over him. He was bringing a viper into the nest. But an order from All For One was absolute. The mist villain expanded the portal. "Step through, if you dare."

 

Izuku walked forward, his posture relaxed, his yellow eyes unblinking, and stepped into the void.

 

 

 

The transition was instantaneous. The smell of salt and rust was immediately replaced by the clinical, chemical stench of the Kamino warehouse.

 

Izuku stepped out of the portal, his boots clicking softly against the polished concrete floor. He stood in the center of the massive room, surrounded by the glowing green tubes of the Nomu. He did not look at the monsters. His eyes locked immediately onto the figure sitting on the throne of machinery at the far end of the room.

 

The air in the room was dense with malicious intent. Izuku could feel the dozens of Quirks humming beneath All For One’s ruined skin. It felt like standing next to a nuclear reactor that was slowly tearing itself apart.

 

Off to the side, Shigaraki stood up, his red eyes burning with pure, unadulterated hatred.

 

"You," Shigaraki hissed, scratching his neck so hard blood began to pool under his fingernails. "You arrogant little brat. You killed my Nomu. You ruined my debut."

 

Izuku didn't even turn his head to look at the blue-haired villain. He simply flicked his wrist in Shigaraki's direction.

 

A localized blast of telekinetic force slammed into Shigaraki’s chest. The villain was thrown backward, flying thirty feet through the air before crashing into the metal base of a Nomu tube. Shigaraki slumped to the floor, gasping for breath, completely immobilized by a sudden, crushing psychic pressure pinning him to the ground.

 

"Hush, child," Izuku said softly, his eyes never leaving All For One. "The adults are talking."

 

"Fascinating," All For One rumbled, clapping his massive hands together in a slow, deliberate rhythm. The sound echoed off the high ceilings. "No physical activation. No visual tell. A seamless application of kinetic force. Tomura is impetuous, but I must admit, I share his frustration regarding the Nomu. It took Doctor Garaki years to synthesize that creature."

 

"It was a flawed design," Izuku replied, taking a slow step forward. "A mindless brute reliant on biological durability. A blunt instrument. Against the precision of the Force, it was nothing but meat waiting to be carved."

 

"The Force," All For One repeated, testing the word on his tongue. "A curious term. I have lived for two hundred years, Izuku Midoriya. I have seen the dawn of the Quirk era. I have seen every permutation of human mutation. Emitters, Transformations, Mutants. I have categorized them, dissected them, and collected them. Yet, my vast library has no record of 'The Force'."

 

All For One leaned forward, the mechanical breathing of his respirator loud in the quiet room.

 

"You are a marvel, my boy. You have achieved a level of power that threatens the very pillars of this society. But you are young. You lack infrastructure. You lack the resources to truly dismantle All Might’s world. I offer you a seat at my table. Stand beside Tomura. Become one of my vanguard. In exchange, you will allow me to study this... Force of yours. You will allow me to understand it."

 

Izuku stopped walking. He was twenty feet away from the warlord.

 

He reached out with his mind, brushing against All For One’s consciousness. What he found made him smile. Beneath the two centuries of cultivated arrogance, beneath the mountain of stolen power, Izuku sensed the truth.

 

"You are afraid," Izuku observed, his voice cutting through the hum of the machinery.

 

All For One’s posture stiffened infinitesimally. "Excuse me?"

 

"You project the image of a god," Izuku continued, beginning to pace slowly, analyzing the room. "You hoard the mutations of others to mask your own fundamental hollowness. You look at me, and your Quirk—your instinct—cannot categorize me. For the first time in a century, you are looking at something you do not understand. And it terrifies you."

 

Doctor Garaki gasped from his terminal. "You insolent brat! How dare you speak to the Master that way!"

 

Izuku ignored the doctor. "You don't want an alliance. You want to touch me. You want to activate your parasitic Quirk and rip my power from my soul, adding it to your collection. You want to consume me because you cannot control me."

 

All For One was silent for a long moment. Then, a deep, rumbling chuckle vibrated from his chest.

 

"You are highly perceptive, Midoriya," All For One said, the veneer of benevolent paternalism dropping entirely, replaced by a cold, absolute malice. "It is true. I am a collector. And I have decided that your power belongs in my collection. If you will not offer it willingly... I will simply take it."

 

All For One moved.

 

For a man hooked to life support, his speed was horrifying. He didn't just run; he combined a spatial warping Quirk with a kinetic enhancement Quirk. In a fraction of a millisecond, All For One crossed the twenty feet between them, his massive right hand completely engulfing Izuku’s face.

 

Got you, All For One thought.

 

He activated All For One. The Quirk that had defined his two-hundred-year reign. The Quirk that allowed him to reach into the very genetic code of a human being and rip their Quirk factor from their DNA, assimilating it into his own body.

 

He reached into Izuku’s soul. He expected to find a glowing nexus of mutated energy, waiting to be plucked.

 

Instead, he found the void.

 

All For One’s consciousness was violently dragged into a metaphorical abyss. There was no Quirk factor. There was no genetic light. There was only an endless, ancient ocean of black and red energy. It was a power so ancient, so unfathomably vast, that All For One’s stolen Quirks felt like a single drop of water trying to comprehend a hurricane.

 

And in that ocean, the Dark Side looked back at him.

 

A psychic shockwave of pure, condensed hatred rebounded back through All For One’s arm. It wasn't just a failure to steal; it was a violent, metaphysical rejection.

 

"GAAAAH!"

 

All For One shrieked—a sound of genuine, unadulterated agony. He ripped his hand away from Izuku’s face as if he had just plunged it into a blast furnace. He stumbled backward, clutching his right arm, smoke pouring from his fingertips as the nerves in his limb were completely fried by the dark energy.

 

Izuku stood exactly where he was, entirely unharmed. A cold, demonic smile stretched across his face. His yellow eyes burned with triumphant malice.

 

"You cannot steal what is not a Quirk," Izuku whispered, his voice resonating with the power of the Dark Side, shaking the glass tubes around them. "The Force does not belong to biology. It does not belong to your pathetic genetics. It belongs to the universe. And it answers only to me."

 

Izuku raised both of his hands and shoved them forward.

 

FORCE REPULSE.

 

A spherical shockwave of telekinetic energy detonated from Izuku’s body. The sheer concussive force was apocalyptic. The concrete floor buckled and shattered. The blast hit All For One squarely in the chest, lifting the massive warlord off his feet and launching him backward.

 

All For One crashed through his own life-support machinery, severing tubes and sparking electrical cables, before slamming into the reinforced steel wall of the warehouse with enough force to dent the metal.

 

The shockwave continued outward, shattering every single glass tube in the room. Millions of gallons of green amniotic fluid exploded outward in a tidal wave, washing over the floor. The unfinished Nomus spilled onto the concrete like dead fish, twitching mindlessly.

 

Doctor Garaki screamed, ducking behind his console as shrapnel rained down around him.

 

"Master!" Shigaraki yelled, freed from the telekinetic pin by the blast, struggling to stand up on the slippery, flooded floor.

 

All For One pushed himself out of the crater in the wall. His suit was torn, and his breathing mask was hissing frantically, leaking vital oxygen. The rage radiating from him was palpable. It was a dense, suffocating miasma of fury. He had not been struck like this since his battle with All Might.

 

"You... arrogant... worm," All For One gasped, raising his right arm.

 

His flesh began to bulge and mutate violently. Springlike Limbs. Kinetic Booster x4. Strength Enhancer x3. Air Cannon.

 

His arm ballooned into a massive, grotesque amalgamation of muscle, metal, and compressed air. He aimed the swollen limb directly at Izuku.

 

"DIE!"

 

The Air Cannon fired. It wasn't just a blast of wind; it was a localized hurricane, a column of compressed kinetic destruction wide enough to engulf a city block. It tore through the warehouse, ripping up the concrete floor and vaporizing the dead Nomu in its path, screaming toward Izuku at the speed of sound.

 

Izuku didn't flinch.

 

His right hand dropped to his belt. His thumb found the ignition stud.

 

SNAP-HISS.

 

The crimson blade erupted, cutting through the dim, flooded warehouse with a blinding, hellish glare. Izuku brought the lightsaber up, dropping into a wide, grounded stance, and channeled the Force through his boots to anchor himself to the bedrock.

 

The Air Cannon hit him.

 

Instead of being obliterated, Izuku used the lightsaber to cleave the kinetic blast in half. The plasma blade, burning at impossible temperatures, disrupted the compressed air, splitting the shockwave around him. The hurricane force tore past him on either side, destroying the walls behind him, but leaving Izuku standing in a perfect, triangular pocket of absolute safety.

 

"What?!" All For One roared, witnessing his ultimate attack completely neutralized by a glowing sword.

 

Izuku deactivated the blade, sprinting forward. He used Force Speed, becoming a green and black blur. He crossed the flooded warehouse in the blink of an eye, completely bypassing All For One’s massive, mutated arm.

 

Rivet Stab! All For One panicked, manifesting dozen of black, tendril-like spikes from his fingers, whipping them at Izuku with lethal precision.

 

Izuku didn't even use his lightsaber. As the tendrils approached, Izuku spun, weaving through them with precognitive grace. He raised his left hand and caught the final tendril inches from his face, gripping it with telekinetic force.

 

"You rely on stolen tools because you have no core!" Izuku shouted, employing Dun Möch—the Sith art of psychological warfare—to break the warlord’s focus.

 

Izuku pulled violently on the tendril. The telekinetic yank was so massive it physically pulled All For One off-balance.

 

Izuku ignited his lightsaber mid-spin. He brought the crimson blade down in a vicious arc, severing the Rivet Stab tendrils at their base. All For One screamed as the feedback of the cauterized appendages shocked his nervous system.

 

"You are a magpie!" Izuku taunted, moving with the fluid, lethal grace of a dancer, striking at All For One’s defenses. The warlord hastily manifested a barrier of hardened air, but the lightsaber sheared through it effortlessly, scoring a burning slash across All For One’s chest armor.

 

"Collecting shiny baubles to hide your own impotence!" Izuku slashed again, aiming for the legs. All For One used an impact recoil Quirk to launch himself backward, desperately trying to create distance.

 

"You call yourself a god, but you are just a crippled old man clinging to the scraps of lesser men!"

 

"SILENCE!" All For One roared, losing his cold, calculating demeanor entirely. He was fighting a ghost. A phantom who bypassed all physical defenses, who couldn't be touched, who couldn't be stolen from.

 

All For One combined every offensive Quirk he had left in his failing body. He aimed both of his hands at the ceiling, activating an earth-manipulation Quirk combined with an explosive multiplier.

 

The ceiling of the subterranean warehouse began to collapse. Massive chunks of reinforced concrete, steel girders, and tons of earth rained down, threatening to bury them all alive.

 

Izuku looked up. He didn't try to dodge. He simply deactivated his lightsaber and raised both of his hands toward the falling sky.

 

He didn't just push the rubble away. He caught it.

 

Hundreds of tons of concrete and steel stopped mid-air, suspended by the sheer, unadulterated willpower of a fourteen-year-old boy. The strain was immense. Izuku’s muscles trembled, the veins in his neck bulging, a trickle of blood escaping his left nostril.

 

But as he held the crushing weight of the earth, he felt the pain. He felt the strain. And he fed it directly into the Dark Side.

 

He looked at All For One, who was staring in absolute, paralyzed horror.

 

"My turn," Izuku whispered.

 

With a guttural roar, Izuku swept his arms to the side, throwing the hundreds of tons of rubble away, clearing the space above them.

 

Then, he extended his hands toward the Emperor of the Underworld.

 

Izuku did not summon telekinesis. He summoned his absolute, uncompromising hatred for the society that had birthed this monster.

 

FORCE LIGHTNING.

 

A massive, blinding torrent of violet and crimson electricity erupted from Izuku’s fingertips. This was not the erratic spark of an electric Quirk. This was Sith Lightning—a manifestation of the Dark Side designed to bypass physical durability and inflict absolute agony upon the soul.

 

The lightning engulfed All For One.

 

The warlord’s screams were deafening, a harrowing sound of pure torment that echoed throughout the ruins of Kamino. The dark energy bypassed his shock absorption Quirks. It bypassed his durability Quirks. It struck his nervous system directly.

 

The immense heat melted the industrial mask fused to his face. The life-support tubes sparked, caught fire, and exploded. The synthetic oxygen tanks on his back ruptured, blowing a hole in his suit.

 

Izuku held the lightning for ten agonizing seconds, pouring every ounce of his dark malice into the blast.

 

Finally, he lowered his hands.

 

The lightning ceased. Smoke poured from All For One’s ruined body. The massive warlord stood swaying for a moment, his melted mask hissing violently, before his knees buckled.

 

The Emperor of the Underworld collapsed to the flooded, ruined floor, twitching helplessly, completely crippled, unable to draw a proper breath.

 

Silence descended on the warehouse, broken only by the dripping of amniotic fluid and the crackling of small fires.

 

Izuku stood panting slightly, lowering his arms. He looked at the fallen god. He had done what All Might could not. He had utterly broken All For One, not with a punch, but with absolute subjugation.

 

"NOOOO!"

 

A feral, screeching scream broke the silence.

 

Tomura Shigaraki had snapped.

 

Seeing his Master, his father figure, the invincible god of his world, reduced to a smoking, twitching heap by a boy his own age broke whatever fragile sanity remained in the villain’s mind.

 

Shigaraki lunged at Izuku from behind, leaping over the rubble, his hands outstretched, all five fingers extended, intending to decay Izuku into dust.

 

"I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL ROT YOU TO HELL!" Shigaraki shrieked.

 

Izuku didn't turn around until Shigaraki was three feet away.

 

His precognition traced the trajectory of the attack perfectly. Izuku simply pivoted on his left foot, stepping smoothly out of the direct path of the lunge.

 

As he turned, his right hand whipped the lightsaber off his belt.

 

Snap-hiss.

 

The crimson blade ignited and swung in a flawless, horizontal arc in less than a quarter of a second.

 

Sssshhkt.

 

The sound was sharp, sickeningly clean.

 

Shigaraki’s momentum carried him past Izuku. He stumbled and fell to his knees in the puddles of green fluid.

 

He looked down at his arms.

 

From the mid-forearm down, there was nothing.

 

His hands—the hands that carried his Quirk, the hands that he used to cling to the decayed remnants of his family, the hands that were the source of his entire identity—were gone. They lay on the floor a few feet away, the flesh instantly cauterized by the plasma blade.

 

It took a full three seconds for Shigaraki’s brain to register the catastrophic loss.

 

Then, he began to scream. It was a high, keening wail of absolute, incomprehensible despair. He fell onto his side, thrashing in the water, clutching his smoking, sealed stumps against his chest.

 

Izuku deactivated his lightsaber, clipping it back to his belt. He looked down at the writhing, sobbing Shigaraki with eyes completely devoid of pity.

 

"Your power relied entirely on physical contact," Izuku said softly, walking past the broken boy. "A massive evolutionary oversight. Consider it a lesson in humility."

 

Izuku continued walking until he stood over the wheezing, paralyzed form of All For One. The warlord was barely conscious, his remaining eye socket rolled back, fighting for every breath through his melted mask.

 

Izuku could kill him. It would take only a thought to crush his neck. But death was too merciful. Death was a release.

 

Izuku reached down, grabbing All For One by the collar of his ruined suit, and dragged his massive body out of the puddle. He dragged the former Emperor across the room, leaving a trail of ash and water, until he reached the high, mechanical throne overlooking the warehouse.

 

Izuku effortlessly tossed All For One’s massive body to the base of the throne, leaving him slumped against the metal steps like a discarded piece of garbage.

 

Then, Izuku climbed the steps.

 

He turned around and sat down heavily on the throne of the Underworld.

 

He rested his arms on the armrests, looking out over the absolute devastation he had wrought in a matter of minutes. The Nomu project was destroyed. The League of Villains was crippled. The Emperor was broken.

 

Off in the corner, Kurogiri manifested, trembling violently, his misty form flickering with fear. Near the server banks, Doctor Garaki slowly crawled out from behind a console, raising his hands in absolute surrender, terrified of the boy on the throne.

 

"The Rule of Two," Izuku’s voice echoed across the ruined chamber, amplified by the Dark Side, demanding the absolute attention of every conscious being left alive. "There is no room for rival kings in the shadows. There is no room for scavengers."

 

Izuku leaned forward, his yellow eyes burning like twin stars in the gloom.

 

"The era of petty crime is over. The era of the Yakuza, of street thugs, of the League of Villains playing video games with society... it ends today."

 

Izuku pointed a finger down at the wheezing All For One. "Your Master is dead. I am the architect now. You will serve the Sith, or you will join the Nomu in the ashes."

 

Kurogiri was the first to move. Slowly, terrified of the consequence of hesitation, the mist villain glided forward and dropped to his knees before the throne, bowing his head completely to the floor.

 

Doctor Garaki swallowed hard, looking at his broken, two-hundred-year-old benefactor. The doctor was a man of science, a man who worshiped power and evolution. He had just witnessed the absolute pinnacle of power. Trembling, Garaki fell to his knees as well.

 

Only Shigaraki remained defiant, sobbing and screaming obscenities into the concrete, mourning the loss of his hands and his destiny.

 

Izuku smiled, leaning back into the cold metal of the throne.

 

"Good," Darth Deku whispered, his voice a chilling promise that would soon envelop the entire world. "Rest and repair what you can. Gather your remaining resources. Because tomorrow, we do not hide in the shadows."

 

He looked up, as if he could see through the miles of earth, straight toward the U.A. campus.

 

"Tomorrow, we tear down the Symbol of Peace."