1
The echo of his silent triumph still vibrated in the very foundation of this dimension. The long-awaited liberation, the taste of which was sweeter than any physical food, was intoxicating. AFO's shard had been erased, digested, and assimilated, leaving behind only TNO's absolute, crystal-clear power over this metaphysical space.
But suddenly the perfect symmetry of his new world faltered.
As if an icy draft had burst into a tightly sealed crypt, the domain's barrier was breached. And, most notably, breached from the outside.
Such a powerful, pulsating will invading his domain was physically impossible to ignore. TNO's primal nature, that very greedy essence of a predatory quirk, instantly reared up. Every instinct within his multi-layered architecture screamed of only one thing: to grab, tear apart, and subjugate the foreign subject.
So, his calculation was correct. He had managed to attract someone's attention on the other side after all. AFO had built this cage to keep the prisoner inside, and the barrier's architecture simply wasn't programmed to defend against external interference; it was exactly this structural blind spot that TNO had bet on.
Thanks to his newfound absolute power over the landscape and the piercing sight of his Byzantine eyes, for which no obstacles existed in this space, he easily focused on the intruder.
About a kilometer away from him, right at the phantom border of the domain, stood a woman. Her dark hair swayed softly in the artificial wind, and she stood with her back to him, frozen in place. Her costume stood out and was absurdly similar to a hero's. This partly explained her strong, trained will, but only partly. A powerful, inexplicable positive +alpha energy protected the outer shell of her matrix core. It was his first time seeing a core so heavily charged with positive particles. His core, just like the core of AFO's shard, had a negative outer shell, which showed the nature of the quirk, its polarity, and the charge it carries. This affected a person's behavior and personality. This parameter showed how sincere and kind she was. He could smell from a mile away how toxic she was to his "double-minus nature".
TNO remained in his position, blending in with the surroundings, and began his cold observation. —"Why isn't she leaving? Can she really not leave my domain?» — His calculating, analytical mind immediately put a leash on the beastly urge to rush into an attack. First, he needed to gather data. He had to act with extreme caution.
Even at a distance of a whole mile, he could literally feel her will. It was an order of magnitude stronger, denser, and deeper than those pathetic fragments of power he had dealt with before. It was obvious that her «matrix» had transferred to this space not just a functional cast of a quirk or pale shadows of fragmented memories; it was something much more. A full-fledged, monolithic soul.
Nevertheless, her behavior was confusing. She didn't look at all like a hostile invader, a saboteur, or a cautious scout. The woman wasn't scanning the area for threats or preparing for a fight. She was simply... looking. She seemed to be driven only by pure, almost childish curiosity. She examined the endless meadows and the infinite blue sky with such awe and hidden greed, as if she were a deep-sea prisoner who hadn't seen the light of day for long, agonizing years.
Suppressing his premature jubilation, TNO lay low, like a snake before a strike, studying his uninvited guest with interest.
2
TNO began a cold calculation, weighing the chances in a potential head-on collision. Her soul shone with monolithic power, but this facade was deceptive. During the time spent in the crucible of endless battle, his Byzantine eyes had sharpened their gaze to a frightening acuity, and now he saw what was hidden from normal view. A barely perceptible ripple. Microcracks in the foundation. This woman bore the imprint of a deep, incompletely processed emotional shock. A familiar shade of brokenness.
These «fluctuations» emitted by her matrix, to use the terminology of the late AFO, directly testified to a critical desynchronization of her internal shells. Her mind and emotions were not working in tandem; they were waging a quiet, exhausting war with each other. And it was exactly this internal disharmony that created that perfect breach into which a blade should be thrust.
As for her quirk... The quirk was a truly unique diamond. It allowed flight. Without complex activators, without cumulative restrictions or hidden variables that his semi-divine, all-reading gaze could isolate. Just a blunt, crystal-clear vector of flight, submissively obeying the user's will. This wouldn't just be a good addition... it would be an ideal one to his growing arsenal. He had learned his weaknesses all too well while tearing AFO's shard to pieces, and his main Achilles' heel remained his vulnerability in the air. Deprived of a physical point of support to push off from, he couldn't sharply change his trajectory or dodge an attack in mid-air. This quirk would cover his blind spot once and for all.
True, here, inside his domain, he hovered easily and absolutely naturally, dictating his rules to the space. But out there, in the real world, where he wouldn't have such absolute power over space, such an opportunity would no longer present itself. However, the word «real» no longer sounded sincere in his mind. It would be more correct to call it «material». That was more honest. Without silly human hypocrisy. TNO had long realized that the universe was just a complex, multi-layered onion. The laws of physics change, perception changes, but the essence remains the same. Even in this «illusory» metaphysical space, one could inflict damage that would fatally tear flesh on the other side. Everything was too closely interconnected, and calling one world true and the other fiction was pure, primal ignorance.
But before baring his fangs, he needed to thoroughly study the victim. The inner instinct of an absolute predator suggested that a direct clash with such a dense matrix could result in unpredictable problems. She couldn't be broken head-on, at least not without losses. He had to act stealthily, with the calculating, poisonous cunning of a snake. No need to sell the skin before catching the beast.
Since she was in no hurry to leave and was so enchanted by the serenity of this place, since she was so vulnerable to simple human illusions... Well, he would play along with great pleasure. He would weave a web from which she would never escape.
3
Nana Shimura froze, looking around. The endless, lush green meadows smoothly merged on the horizon with the bottomless, clear sky. There was no doubt: she had ended up inside someone else's domain. And, judging by everything, the master of this place was the very same prisoner whom she had just freed by pure chance. The landscape absurdly resembled that serene screensaver from old operating systems, unnaturally perfect and frighteningly peaceful. And yet, despite the persistent alarm signal in her subconscious, this idyll managed to inspire a strange, hypnotic serenity. The mystery of this metaphysical space became a saving buffer for her, dulling the aching pain of her personal tragedy if only for a moment. Moreover, somewhere deep in her battered soul, a long-forgotten, achingly sweet, almost childish curiosity awoke.
She wandered aimlessly through the emerald grass, amazed by the colossal scale of this dimension. Yoichi's inner world, the domain of «One For All», had always seemed to her like a cramped, claustrophobic crypt, lacking in light and completely devoid of the slightest hint of nature. And here? Entire kilometers of breathing space. Did this boundless expanse reflect the true depth and monstrous power of its owner's will? If so, what had she even encountered? A mute question hung in the ringing air: where was the master himself hiding?
In the distance, atop a gentle hill, she noticed a lone tree. Coming closer, Nana recognized a sprawling sakura, lazily dropping its petals. And in its lacy shade... stood a set table, bursting with food.
Nana involuntarily swallowed a phantom lump in her throat. She had managed to forget not just the aroma, but the very sight of these dishes during those long, agonizing years spent in the damn prison that the successors' domain essentially was. They had no other fate, after all. Abandoned on the sidelines of history, forced to wander forever in the darkness of someone else's subconscious as tools passing on power... What appeared before her eyes now seemed like a mockingly beautiful fairy-tale decoration. After Yoichi's century-old darkness, this place looked like a true Eden.
Illusion or not, the thick, spicy aroma was slowly but surely shutting down her rational thinking. Crispy tempura, juicy yakitori skewers, hot okonomiyaki, steaming udon, golden gyoza, neat onigiri, and even simple, homey curry rice... To the human mind, this still life was devilishly tempting. And nearby, from an inconspicuous speaker, flowed a quiet, soothing melody.
Music. God, how long had it been since she just listened to music?
A suffocating wave of longing for her own long-lost life suddenly washed over Nana. She felt unbearably bitter realizing that such banal, everyday things had turned into an unattainable luxury for her. She was merely a decaying ghost of the past, starved for worldly joys.
Questions swarmed in her head. Who had shown her such care? The master of this domain? Then why was he playing hide-and-seek? «Maybe the food is poisoned?» a paranoid thought flashed, but immediately crumbled to dust. What an absurdity. She had forgotten that she was long devoid of flesh. A soul cannot be poisoned with arsenic.
Nana cautiously walked around the tree in a circle, scanning every inch of space. No one. Not the slightest hint of an ambush or trap. Giving in, she sighed heavily and approached the table. Her gaze glued to the bowl of udon. Thick steam rose from the rich broth, and the aroma imperiously tickled her nostrils. Right now, more than anything in the world, she just wanted to sit down and sweep everything off this table. The hunger of a human soul unconditionally defeated the cold calculation of a warrior.
Biting her lip, she carefully picked up the wooden chopsticks and hesitantly dipped them into the hot broth.
«Yoichi, that bastard...» a bitterly ironic thought flashed through her mind. «He never did anything like this for us. And I couldn't even ask, because I simply didn't know you could actually do this in a domain! Was it really so hard to satisfy a simple human desire just once?»
4
While the woman consumed the illusory food, TNO, having dissolved into the air thanks to his absolute power over the domain, silently watched her. He hovered above the emerald grass like an invisible storm cloud. And now, being in close proximity, he suddenly realized that this woman's face was familiar to him. Bright headlines from old news articles flashed in his memory.
Shimura Nana.
The heroine who fell at the hands of AFO several years ago. Of course, for the general public in those reports, her killer was featured only as an «unknown S-rank villain». But how the hell did she end up here?! Did this wandering soul, torn from its vessel, catch his call at the moment the barrier was destroyed?
Questions multiplied by the second, but so far everything was going absolutely perfectly. The simulation he created worked flawlessly. The temperature of the broth, the spicy smell of curry, the steam swirling over the plate—he had mathematically calculated every detail. Frankly speaking, TNO didn't even hope that such a cheap trick would work. He was sure that she would consider all this an obvious trap and leave, and therefore he was already preparing the next, much more sophisticated trick. But she... she froze over the table and began to eat. With such a disgusting, primal greed.
—"Human nature took over. How touching," — TNO chuckled poisonously to himself. —"Ha! Just look at her: she inspected the area for traps! So banal and cheap that it's sickening. Relying on normal vision in a metaphysical space is the pinnacle of ignorance!"
He barely suppressed the urge to laugh out loud, limiting himself only to a predatory smirk that distorted his invisible face. Was her mind so starved for worldly pleasures that it completely shut off all caution and combat instincts? There was no point in trying to satisfy her hunger in this place. It was impossible to satisfy physical hunger here. One didn't even need to breathe here; there was nothing to breathe, and no reason to. TNO himself had long discarded the concept of breathing, back during the protracted slaughter with the shard.
TNO's cold rationale began to build a tactic. He could strike right now, using the factor of absolute surprise. But there was a nuance: with a sharp movement, his camouflage became imperfect. The space around him would distort, giving off ripples, and footprints would inevitably be imprinted on the phantom grass.
A quiet, broken sob tore him away from these calculations.
He didn't even immediately understand where the sound came from, until logic told him there was only one independent source here. Nana Shimura was crying. Not physiologically; she had no tear glands. This projection of her body visualized what was happening right now in the core of her matrix. TNO pierced her with his purple eyes. The psychological dissonance inside her soul was rapidly growing, spreading like a crack on glass. It was the perfect moment to break her completely. He absolutely didn't care why she suddenly decided to whine instead of fleeing. Fate had gifted him a breach in her defense, and such opportunities do not forgive omissions.
Meanwhile, Nana continued to move the chopsticks mechanically, while two deadly truths slowly but inevitably reached her mind.
The first: no matter how much she swallowed this udon, the phantom food fell into a void. Satiety did not come, leaving only a sucking hole inside. And the second, much more terrifying truth: the realization of how low she had fallen for a fleeting sip of worldly pleasures. For such simple, banal things.
Whoever the true master of this place was, he was not just a monster. He was a sophisticated sadist who was openly mocking her right now. Mocking a broken, pathetic woman who had completely lost her main battle. A loser who died a dog's death among concrete ruins and lost her own family.
And now this invisible puppeteer had simply thrown her a bone. And she, like an obedient, starving mongrel, pounced on it, wagging her tail.
Nana seemingly saw herself from the outside: hunched over the bowl, swallowing fake broth half-mixed with phantom tears of humiliation. A pathetic, worthless imitation of a hero. A shadow of former greatness, unworthy even of her own name.
5
The shadow of self-pity that flashed in her mind became that very catalyst. The perfect breach in her defense.
The illusion shattered into pieces without a single sound. The aromatic udon, the appetizing tempura, the wooden table, all of this crumbled into gray ash in an instant, immediately caught by a suddenly rushing icy wind. The sakura above Nana's head turned black, and its delicate pink petals turned into razor-sharp obsidian blades, crashing down in a deadly rain.
Nana Shimura reacted instinctively. Even through the veil of humiliating tears, her combat reflexes, honed by years of battles, worked flawlessly. She sharply jumped back, dodging the hail of blades, and at that very second the gravity in her control zone faltered; she activated her quirk, hovering a meter above the ground.
— Who's there?! — Her voice broke, but immediately grew stronger, filling with familiar steel. Grief gave way to cold concentration.
The air a dozen meters away distorted; the invisibility vanished, revealing the figure of this dimension's ruler. A pair of piercing, Byzantine purple eyes stared at her with undisguised, almost scientific interest. He appeared as a humanoid silhouette of absolute blackness, defined only by the violet glow of his eyes. It was an image that suggested true emptiness—the absence of any specific form, personality, or physical body. He was nothing. Nothing with a capital "N." His absolutely white hair reached just to his shoulders, but it floated as if endowed with its own life, as if it were underwater. With eyelashes as white as snow.
— What a pathetic sight, — TNO's voice echoed loudly across the endless meadow, distorting in space. — A dead heroine whining over an empty bowl. Your mind is so starved, Shimura Nana, that you forgot the first commandment: there are no free meals in hell.
— What...WHat the Hell... — The woman stepped back a couple of steps, amazed at the wondrous creature that appeared before her. She could not call it anything other than a creature.
— Yeah. You are exactly in Hell.
— How do you know my name? — Nana clenched her fists, her projection became denser, her will stabilized. — Another lap dog of «All For One»? —She could clearly sense several quirks within the lord of this domain.
—AFO? Funny. No! — He categorically rejected.
He missed just a little bit the human connection. It was comparable to boredom. It was pretty boring here without people. And finally, he had the chance to just chat.
—It's been so long since I've chatted with... not quite living, but still people,— He said, fluttering his legs as if in amusement, as he flew around her.
—To answer your question, I'm something of an axiom. This world's first and last hope for salvation. Not just this one, but others as well...— He waved his hand dismissively. —Ah, you wouldn't understand!
— I have no idea what you are, but I distinctly sense a few quirks within you. Did the AFO give them to you as a reward for your service?
— Um...No! I thought about chatting a little longer, but it seemed time was running out, and my interlocutor was uncooperative and rather careless. — He turned his head to the blue sky; somewhere out there lay an exit to the material world, beyond the boundary he could clearly sense. He needed to escape the domain and into Nomura's body as quickly as possible.
Her words were bold, but TNO only chuckled coldly. He did not go for a head-on attack. Instead, he smoothly waved his hand, and the domain's landscape went crazy.
The endless green meadow reared up. The grass turned into stiff whips, trying to entangle her legs, and the ground itself went in waves like a stormy sea, depriving Nana of even a hypothetical point of support. TNO moved with lightning speed: he glided over the distorted waves of the earth, using the geometry of his own world as a springboard. He appeared from the flanks, delivered whipping, probing strikes with the rushing energies of quirks, and immediately retreated into blind spots.
He did not try to crush her with brute force, as AFO did. He was like a snake, weaving a pattern around his victim.
Nana blocked the strikes with power incredible for a spirit. TNO noted with slight irritation, but also with admiration, that her matrix was absurdly durable. It was not just the stubbornness of a hero. Behind her back, there seemed to stand an invisible monolithic wall of an alien will, an echo of that very legacy about which he still knew too little. Her will repelled the natural pressure of his domain.
— You didn't answer! — Nana parried another lunge, casting aside a clot of energy, and soared even higher. — Who are you?!
TNO froze at the top of a frozen wave of earth, looking at her from the bottom up.
— I am the master of this place. — His lips curved into a predatory smile, and his purple eyes flared. — My name is The New Order. Shin Chitsujo[1]. And you, heroine, will soon become part of my order.
Nana felt a chill run down her non-existent spine. There was none of AFO's theatrical, oppressive malice in this creature. In him, there was a cold, calculating emptiness and absolute, primal greed. He looked at her not as an enemy, but as a resource. A tool that needed to be dismantled and appropriated.
— Dream on, bastard, — she spat.
Realizing that on the ground she had not a single chance against the one who controlled the very reality of this place, Nana activated «Flight» at full power. Her soul bolted upward, away from the domain's gravity, ignoring the laws of physics. The woman was not stupid: she intuitively understood how such metaphysical spaces worked, and decided to apply this knowledge, rushing towards the invisible border, to where she came from.
TNO wasn't going to let the prey go that simply. He soared after her, easily cleaving the air of his dimension, and rushed in pursuit. However, he quickly noted one annoying truth: in the sky, she was simply faster. Her quirk gave her absolute, crystal-clear speed and maneuverability, which he could not yet match on equal terms.
— "Why can't I just intercept her at the barrier?" — flashed a cold, calculating thought. Direct teleportation inside the domain, as well as time manipulation, still remained inaccessible to him. These were incomprehensible, blocked variables, complex puzzles inherited from the defeated AFO shard. Tasks that he had yet to solve. He possessed colossal power over the landscape here, but he still couldn't just take and tear space itself with a snap of his fingers.
That is exactly why she was inexorably slipping away.
While Nana, clenching her teeth, focused all her attention on breaking through the domain's mental barrier, TNO built a new architecture inside himself right on the fly. Since he couldn't catch her physically, he would put a leash on her trail. He summoned the «Black Hand», one of his servant quirks. It was absolutely cleansed of the previous owner's will. An obedient, silent, perfect hound, woven from obedient gloom.
A thin shadow cord, barely noticeable in the gray light, burst from TNO's back. It darted after the fleeing heroine not to inflict damage, but with the jeweler's precision of a surgeon.
At the very moment when Nana broke through the mental border of the domain and her figure began to dissolve in a flash of white light, the «Black Hand» reached its target. The shadow whip wrapped around her ankle, instantly tightening into a taut, invisible metaphysical knot. The other end of this cord fused permanently to TNO's own core, turning into the thinnest, unseen thread stretched across dimensions.
The sky over the domain collapsed, returning to its pristine, deceptively calm blue color. Nana Shimura disappeared.
TNO remained standing on the meadow alone. He didn't scream in rage, didn't curse her escape. Instead, he slowly raised his hand, looking at the thin phantom thread disappearing into nowhere. He felt its tension. He felt the pulse of her matrix on the other end of this line.
— Fly, Shimura Nana. Fly as far as you can, — TNO said softly into the ringing silence, with a frightening calmness. — Your quirk is too good to leave to you. And now... I know where to find you.
[1] 新秩序（しんちつじょ / shin chitsujo） — "new order" (often used in politics or ideologies, such as "new world order")