The word Shigaraki said was: "Play."
The Nomu covered eight meters in less than a second.
The math of it hit before the movement resolved — not it's fast but the specific calculation of I know where it's going and there is one person in that path who cannot move quickly enough to get out of it. Aizawa was on one knee. His weight was on the good arm. The broken one was braced against his thigh. He was tracking the Nomu with Erasure active and the Erasure didn't matter, because the Nomu's speed wasn't a quirk.
Todoroki's ice wall erupted between them — eight feet of rapid crystallization, floor to three meters, the fastest construction Yami had seen him produce.
The Nomu's fist went through it.
Not around. Not over. Through — the ice shattered in a spray that filled the twenty meters between the pillar and the fountain with particles that caught the dome's light, and the Nomu's momentum continued into the space where Aizawa had been, and the hand that came down second would have been the kill, and Yami was already moving.
Four percent OFA in the legs, not a burst but a continuous pour that the body didn't have time to object to, and he hit Aizawa low and lateral — the kind of tackle that didn't look like a tackle, that was more collision with intent — and the Nomu's fist cratered the concrete where Aizawa's skull had occupied space three tenths of a second earlier.
The impact threw Yami into the pillar's base and Aizawa into the gap behind it, and the shockwave of the Nomu's missed strike was enough to pop Yami's ears and fill his mouth with the taste of blood from somewhere the impact had reached.
The crater was fifteen centimeters deep. Solid concrete, broken like a surface that had been introduced to the concept of localized seismic events.
Aizawa was down. Breathing. The pulse under his jaw when Yami got two fingers to it was steady and present in the way that registered as alive before anything else registered.
"You're heavier than you look," Yami said, which was not the thing he'd planned to say and which was apparently what came out when the body was operating on reflex.
Aizawa didn't answer. His chest moved.
Good, the tactical brain said. Now—
The USJ's main entrance doors came off their hinges.
Not opened. Off. Both of them, simultaneously, in the specific way that doors came off their hinges when something larger than the space allocated for them decided the space was a suggestion. All Might crossed the threshold at a pace that made the distance from entrance to fountain — forty-five meters — irrelevant, and the hero form at full output had a quality that Yami had experienced once before, on a beach in December, and which was different from the screen's version of it in the way that the sun was different from a photograph of the sun.
All Might caught the Nomu's follow-up punch with one hand.
The shockwave was not metaphorical. It was physical — a pressure front that rolled outward from the contact point and hit Yami in the chest like the building itself had coughed, and he was already braced against the pillar with his shoulder taking the load, and the pillar's base cracked, and Yami and Aizawa's unconscious body slid three meters across the floor despite neither of them moving voluntarily.
The plaza floor between All Might and the Nomu was concrete a second ago. Now it was a spiderweb of fracture lines radiating outward from the point where a hero's hand had stopped an engineered weapon's momentum.
Shigaraki, from the fountain's far edge, said: "Finally."
And he sounded satisfied, which was the most unsettling thing Yami had heard in the four months he'd been alive in this world.
He got Aizawa fully behind the pillar with both arms under the man's shoulders, which was harder than the training at Dagobah had made him think it would be, mostly because Dagobah's debris had the decency to stay still. His left knee was still flagging the warp landing bruise with every weighted step. His right shoulder had a new complaint, courtesy of the pillar contact, that was joining the earlier complaints in the specific symphony of you have been doing things your body asked you not to do.
He got Aizawa's back against the pillar's base, confirmed the breathing again, and turned toward the fight.
All Might and the Nomu were thirty meters away and the plaza between them had the geography of somewhere a disagreement had been expressed physically and in large amounts.
He needed to be in the kill zone. He needed to be there during a moment when the Nomu's attention was on All Might's positioning and the counter-attack trajectory made Yami a valid interception target. He needed to close thirty meters of open ground during a fight operating at a scale that made the Battle Trials look like sparring drills.
He started moving.
"What are you DOING?"
Todoroki's voice, from behind him. The specific quality of it — not quite shouting, not quite steady — was the voice of someone who had just watched two impossible events in rapid succession and was tracking a third incoming impossible event and filing an objection in real time.
Yami kept moving. The distance from the pillar to the nearest broken slab of plaza floor was ten meters of open space. He crossed it while the Nomu's attention was occupied with the sequence of blows All Might was delivering — three, four, a fifth that drove the bio-weapon backward four meters — and reached the broken slab without catching either combatant's immediate attention.
Two seconds, he estimated. The Nomu absorbs the momentum and counters. All Might reads the counter. There's a gap between the absorption completion and the counter-delivery where the target position is — here.
He was in position.
Todoroki's hand found his collar from behind.
"This is not a situation where you need to be closer," Todoroki said, and his voice had the specific flat quality of someone who had run the calculation and arrived at the same answer twelve times and was presenting it as a fact rather than an argument.
All Might's next combination drove the Nomu into the fountain's base. Water erupted. The Nomu's head went briefly below the surface and came back up, and All Might was already pulling back for the sequence that — in Yami's knowledge of this fight — preceded the moment that would shift the engagement's momentum.
"Let go," Yami said.
"No."
"Todoroki."
"No." The grip on his collar didn't increase. It didn't decrease. It held with the steady pressure of someone who had decided to be immovable on this specific point. "Whatever you're doing, don't."
The Nomu's counter began.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!