Both of them made their way over to and then jumped on top of the railing at lightning speed, only to be met with the sight of the small crater below being empty.
"Where'd he go?"
"Below us."
...
He was about to jump down to ground level, only for a massive crashing sound to be heard below.
Then the entire ground under them shook, and the railing, as well as the entire section of the train rail they were standing on literally, began to fall out from under them.
In the brief second before the reality of it all began to set in, Izuku felt a strange sense of deja vu.
Mina moved first, jumping from the now-falling railing over to the nearby buildings, and from there made her way down to ground level.
Izuku made the less gracious, but also simpler move of just jumping down directly to the ground.
That he jumped also meant he hit it after the entire structure slammed into the ground, making everything around it shake from the force of tons of stone hitting the ground, and countless pieces of smaller rocks sprayed all around like shrapnel.
Izuku didn't take notice, his black suit making all of them feel like raindrops.
His focus was instead on his foe, as he landed on his feet and whirled around.
It was a scene of complete and total chaos.
The pillars that their foe had ripped down were now just a part of a gigantic pile of rubble, mixed with the crashing concrete from the section of the bridge the train rails were located on.
Izuku thanked his lucky stars that this had happened later in the day because if this had happened while the streets were full, the death toll would have been in the hundreds.
As it was, he could only hope no one had been crushed to death by the tons and tons of rubble that had suddenly come crashing down.
As he stared at the pile of rubble, Mina jumped down beside him.
"He's still alive right?" She asked in a resigned tone.
He briefly closed his eyes and felt everything around him. At least as far as souls went.
And sure enough, he felt one inside the rubble, something in pain, but very much alive and strong and… Wait… No, there was something different about this one. Something very, very different. Something WRONG.
-Wait… Is that… Well, would you look at that! It's undead.-
The alien sounded almost bemused.
"What?" Izuku asked in a whisper.
Then out of the rubble, an arm shot out, punching a hole in the giant rock it was under.
-It's a corpse that someone has modified to walk around, and do their bidding. Actual fucking necromancy. An abomination against all things living.-
Izuku's eyes went from the emerging foe to Venom, and then back to his foe. He knew full well that Venom had seen his fair share of things across the universe… But necromancy was out there, even by the standards he had learned to accept after bonding with him.
-We should have seen it back during the invasion with the big guy. But we were too distracted by the pajama guy and his hatred that shone like the sun.-
Izuku wanted to ask a question, but he was interrupted by the man… No, the living CORPSE, launching itself at him with high speed.
It wasn't anything compared to the likes of Black Cat and Mina though.
A large, sideways sweep of one of those long, elongated arms came crashing towards him.
He did not dodge though. Instead, he brought his left forearm up to block.
A loud smacking sound echoed down the street as the arms collided with enormous force, the force of which shot down Izuku's spine, and almost lifted him off the ground.
He'd prepared a decent stance and glued himself to the ground though, so he wasn't going anywhere.
Neither was his foe.
Like a snapping eel, his arm shot down from its guard position to close around his foe's arm, making sure he wasn't going anywhere.
He could feel the skin, bone, and muscle break under his grip.
The enemy roared and brought his other hand up, prepared to slam into him from the other side.
It wasn't able to think, Izuku realized.
If it was, it would have realized Izuku would just do the exact same thing he had done with the other arm.
As it was, it never got the chance to bring the arm down.
"CRAAACKKKK!"
Mina's heel slammed into the shoulder of the offending arm with such force that Izuku saw bone protrude from the wound.
Then, she used the spot she had just brutalized as a point to plant her feet and jump to regain distance from her foe.
Still holding one arm in his vastly stronger grip, and the other just having become utterly useless for the time being, Izuku lifted his leg, and with a side kick with all his titanic strength behind it, he planted his foot into the blood-covered zombie thing.
Right between his legs.
The full kicking force of someone who could easily have kicked a football to the top of a skyscraper.
As he made contact, he let go of the arm, and as so, as he felt, more than heard the two small cracks beneath his heel, his foe flew through the air from the force of the blow and slammed back into and once more being buried beneath the rubble from which he had just emerged from.
Then, Izuku immediately followed that up by webbing him and the entire bit of rubble in a cocoon of black mass.
Mina once more came up beside him, as over in the rubble, their foe slowly began recovering, before ripping through his webbed cocoon.
Still, as their enemy staggered to his feet again, he did not do so with the simple yet effective power he'd done the first time.
Instead, the monster moved very, very awkwardly as it staggered towards them, with both his legs out to the side making him look like nothing so much as a crab.
Undead or no, the thing was clearly still able to feel pain.
"Man… I really, really hate fighting regenerators." Mina said in a resigned, yet also angry tone, her look as she glared at their foe being way, way more intense than Izuku would have expected. "But at least he's nowhere near the level of Tokage, so it's not like fighting Wolverine. He's still affected by pain too though, so that's good. That means he can't just shrug off blows and keep attacking while healing."
"Any advice?"
"Eh, we just gotta keep pummeling him until he stops getting back up. Healing quirks always have a limit, and the key to beating them is to keep beating them until you reach that limit. At least that's what mom always said. Also, we got to make sure we don't accidentally kill him while doing so. Then we web him up and move on."
It was a good plan.
However, Izuku also saw a glaring problem with it.
Namely that he had no idea how long it would take before the… The Zombie's healing quirk went out. In fact…
"Any idea how long it will take before he stops moving Venom?"
What he really wanted to ask was the nature of reanimating corpses. Was there stuff he should know about that? Weaknesses, hidden powers, or the like?
Of course, with Mina being there, he had no way of actually asking that question out loud.
As it was, Venom gave him an answer but did not elaborate on what he really wanted to know.
"Given how he's struggling to repair his balls, we'd say he'll probably go down after 10-15 minutes of a good and brutal beatdown."
15 minutes.
This guy was dangerous, but not immensely so. At least not to him or Mina, who he could easily tell both were more than capable of beating the tar out of him.
Izuku was stronger than this guy, and frankly, from what Izuku had seen, it was not by a small margin either. Meanwhile, Mina was ludicrously faster, and was more than capable of causing grievous injury to the man… Zombie… Whatever he was.
But despite the difference in power, the two of them would be stuck with him until he stopped healing.
All the while other villains roamed the city, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it before they had dealt with this guy.
And when they were done with this guy, it would be the same story again somewhere else. He really could only be one place at a time.
...
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