The day in Neo-Musutafu started like any other. From his desk located on the 90th floor of Towa Tower, Izuku Midoriya observed the city come alive. Anti-gravity vehicles zipped between shiny skyscrapers, resembling metallic fish swimming in a luminous river. It presented a scene of tranquility, hard-earned and treasured. Now twenty-five, Izuku's role as a hero revolved more around diplomacy and preventing disasters than engaging in fierce confrontations, as evidenced by the mountain of paperwork on his desk.
Then, everything shattered.
It wasn't an explosion or a quake, but a sound—a singular, piercing scream that seemed to cut through the air and embed itself in his very bones. It was a note of pure, excruciating discord that echoed in Izuku, a dreadful vibration causing his teeth to jar. The residual fragments of One For All in his mind awoke, stirred by a primitive, primal dread.
The Towa Tower creaked, a deep metallic wail of straining steel. The ground trembled beneath him in a sickening, unnatural rhythm.
"Status report!" he shouted, his voice piercing the eerie silence that ensued after the scream. His communications crackled to life.
"Things are bad, Deku!" Katsuki Bakugo's voice, raw and infused with the heat of battle, came through. "There's something happening at the Otheon exchange. The building... it's consuming people!"
Without a moment's pause, Izuku became a chaotic determination, an emerald streak that shattered the calm of the office. He launched himself through the reinforced glass window, eschewing the door; the boom of his exit rattled the city. The wind howled around him as he fell, the city's symphony drowned out by an escalating chorus of screams and chaos.
He landed on the ruined 70th floor, the impact cracking the concrete beneath him, and was confronted with a scene ripped from a nightmare. An office worker—a man Izuku faintly remembered as possessing a "Matter-Meld" quirk—had transformed into a grotesque amalgamation of flesh and architecture. His ribs fused with I-beams, intestines twisted around support pillars like monstrous vines. His face, a frozen mask of terror, was half-embedded in a wall, one eye lifelessly gazing at the room while his mouth formed a haunting, wet roar in the concrete.
Nearby stood Shoto Todoroki, a statue forged from ice and fire, his expression a controlled mask of rage. He extended his left arm, and a tide of creeping frost spread across the floor, a relentless cold that crystallized blood and rendered the writhing flesh rigid, snapping with sharp, definitive cracks. With his right hand, Shoto unleashed a focused beam of scorching air, incinerating the gruesome remnants, filling the air with the horrifying scent of charred flesh and burnt smell.
"It's not just him," Shoto said, his voice strained and tight, eyes reflecting a fear he seldom displayed. "It's happening everywhere. All at once."
To affirm his words, an uproar erupted through the city comms.
"A speedster on Otheon Highway just... disintegrated. We're finding body parts scattered for miles—"
"A pyrokinetic in Kasukabe district—his blood began boiling and exploded—there's nothing left but a smear on the pavement—"
"At General Hospital, a healer's quirk has reversed! She isn't just injuring them; she's unmaking them! Bones are... dissolving!"
They all sensed it then. As if the very essence of reality had faltered for a heartbeat. It was a shared disorientation, a grim realization that something fundamentally had unraveled. Quirks—the gifts of their era—had morphed into lethal curses.
Izuku's eyes scanned the shattered office, his mind racing for a pattern, a cause, anything. He spotted a courier outside, his body flickering like a malfunctioning hologram. The man's "Jump" quirk was failing, his whole form shifting unpredictably—one moment intact, the next his arm vanishing only to reappear several feet away, twitching. In the next moment, his torso blinked out of existence. His legs crumpled beneath him. A final, strangled scream erupted as his head flickered into a concrete pillar, bursting in a grim spray.
The shifting courier served as a foreboding omen.
Izuku launched forward, One For All crackling with green energy. He noticed a woman at a shattered window, hands clasped over her face. A faint red glow seeped through her fingers. Recognizing her quirk—"Light-Beam"—he observed the skin on her cheeks beginning to peel back like damp paper. He sprang into action, a blur of movement, seizing her arm and feeling an intense, searing heat emanate from her bones. He pulled her back, using Float to guide her safely to a relatively clear patch of street below. She landed screaming, her eye sockets now two gruesome voids from which the last of her lethal light had burst outward.
The failure cut deep. He saved her physical form, but not her essence.
A wall caved inward, raining debris upon him. A man staggered out, his body an unsettling mass of jagged, calcified armor. His "Hardening" quirk had spiraled uncontrollably, bone spikes erupting from his skin, transforming him into a monstrous, spiked juggernaut. He charged with a bestial roar. Izuku acted without hesitation, channeling a precise 5% of One For All, striking with brutal effectiveness to shatter the bone armor and send the man sprawling. Blood gushed from numerous wounds, yet he remained alive, unconscious and finally still.
A few blocks away, the distinct sound of Bakugo's explosions pierced the chaos. Izuku dashed toward the noise, finding his longtime friend locked in combat with a villain called "Copycat." However, this was no ordinary confrontation; the villain was twitching erratically, and each convulsion caused warped, unstable duplicates to rip free from his flesh. Some detonated in sprays of gore, while others melted into grotesque patches on the pavement. Bakugo became a tempest of destruction, his explosions clearing immediate threats, yet for every duplicate he obliterated, two more emerged.
"We can't save everyone!" Bakugo roared into his comms, his voice strained with simmering despair. "This isn't an attack! It's a slaughter! We need to control this!"
"Control what?!" came Ochaco Uraraka's frantic voice from somewhere amid the chaos. "These are just people! They're suffering!"
As if to underscore her words, a mass of writhing vines slammed against a nearby building, cracking its facade. Shoto grappled with a hero named "Botanica," whose body had transformed into a writhing bundle of thorny tendrils and carnivorous plants. Shoto erected a wall of ice, but it began to crack under the relentless assault of the living nightmare. With a grimace, he unleashed a powerful vortex of hot and cold air, a mixture of flash-freezing and incineration that shattered the monstrous flora, silencing Botanica's inhuman wails.
Together, Izuku, Shoto, and Bakugo formed a defensive triangle in the central plaza, a small bastion of sanity amidst the encroaching chaos. Surrounding them, a convergence of "glitched" individuals created a horrifying resonance. A gravity-manipulating woman sobbed, her power drawing everything into a suffocating sphere of debris and bodies. A child, no more than six, floated in the air, emitting a blinding, silent light that vaporized anything in its path. A man with a "Molecular Breakdown" quirk stumbled forward, his steps unmaking the ground beneath him, leaving trails of emptiness in his wake.
Suddenly, the air in the plaza distorted. Light bent, sound ceased, and a sphere of impossible, shifting colors erupted into existence— a Singularity. It was an anomaly in reality, a void where the laws of existence dissolved. Those near it didn't scream; they simply vanished, erased without a trace.
Izuku, Shoto, and Bakugo propelled themselves onto a rooftop overlooking the chasm, feeling utterly insignificant against the vast, silent unknown. Izuku's Danger Sense, which had been ringing a high-pitched alarm in his head, fell ominously quiet. The danger wasn't absent; it was so immense and fundamentally wrong that his quirk could no longer comprehend it.
He stared into the swirling abyss and felt the echoes of his predecessors—the remnants of One For All—recoil in primal terror. This wasn't a villain; it wasn't a bioweapon; it wasn't a natural disaster.
This was an ending.
He glanced at Bakugo, whose fierce, explosive demeanor had shifted to one of grim understanding. He turned to Shoto, whose stoic expression had turned pale, his ice and fire seemingly dimming before the sheer impossibility of the anomaly.
A chilling realization settled deep within Izuku's soul, cold and absolute.
"It's not an attack," he murmured, the words barely audible amidst the chaos. "It's the quirks themselves. They're unraveling."