Chapter 65: The Ash, the Tower, and the Ultimatum
The National Diet Building did not collapse; it simply ceased to be.
Izuku Midoriya and Katsuki Bakugo burst through the grand marble entrance, their boots slamming against the flooded, toxic asphalt of Tokyo. Behind them, the massive, historic structure was violently, silently turning into a towering cloud of gray ash.
The decay was not crawling. It was a tidal wave.
"Don't look back! Keep moving!" Bakugo roared, ignoring the agonizing burn in his palms as he fired a continuous, rapid-fire sequence of explosions to propel himself forward at maximum velocity.
Midoriya was right beside him, Full Cowling pushed to a dangerous 45%, the Blackwhip tendrils anchoring into the surrounding streetlamps to violently slingshot him through the storm.
Behind them, emerging from the collapsing mountain of dust, was Tomura Shigaraki.
He didn't run. He bounded. His bio-engineered legs, boasting the raw physical strength of All Might, cratered the ground with every step. He was a horrific, apocalyptic silhouette. His flesh was actively tearing and weeping black blood, the 85% integration ripping his cells apart, but his white eyes were locked onto the two fleeing heroes with unadulterated, manic delight.
"You can't outrun the rot, little heroes!" Shigaraki's demonic, multi-layered voice boomed through the rain.
He slammed his hand into the street. The wave of decay instantly accelerated, chewing through the concrete, the abandoned cars, and the subterranean sewer lines.
High above, Hawks banked sharply through the dark clouds. "They're not going to make it! The decay radius is expanding too fast! Nagant, cover them!"
Lady Nagant, perched on a distant rooftop, didn't hesitate. Her mutated Swarm Rifle was still aching, but she forced the barrel into alignment. She fired three massive, high-caliber rounds directly at Shigaraki's center of mass.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Shigaraki didn't dodge. He didn't even raise his hand.
The bullets struck his chest, tearing massive holes through his torso. But the hyper-regeneration violently snapped the flesh back together before the bullets had even exited his back. He didn't lose a fraction of a second of momentum.
"He's a literal tank!" Nagant hissed, realizing kinetic force was entirely useless against a regenerating god.
"Sovereign! We need the door!" Hawks screamed into his comms, folding his wings into a dive. He shot past Midoriya and Bakugo, grabbing both of them by the harnesses of their tactical vests. With a massive beat of his crimson wings, Hawks hauled them into the air, pulling them inches away from the expanding gray dust that had just consumed the ground they were running on.
"The pinhole is open! Three blocks north!" Rin's panicked voice crackled back.
Hawks carried the two heavy heroes, his wings straining under the weight and the torrential rain. Below them, Shigaraki looked up, his white eyes narrowing.
"I have the sky too, bird," Shigaraki mocked.
He activated Air Walk and Rivet Stab simultaneously. Dozens of jagged, black-and-red tendrils shot upward like anti-aircraft fire, aimed directly at Hawks's wings.
"Hawks! Drop us!" Midoriya yelled, twisting in the hero's grip.
Midoriya fired a massive burst of Air Force from his fingers, deflecting three of the tendrils, while Bakugo unleashed an A.P. Shot that severed two more. But there were too many.
A black tendril grazed Hawks's left wing, tearing a massive gash through the primary flight feathers.
Hawks grunted in pain, his flight path violently destabilizing. The three heroes began to plummet toward the decaying streets.
"I see you!" A silvery-blue tear in reality ripped open directly beneath their falling trajectory.
Rin had dynamically shifted the spatial pinhole. Hawks, Midoriya, and Bakugo slammed violently through the dimensional gateway. Lady Nagant, having leaped from her rooftop, dove through a secondary pinhole a microsecond later.
As they fell through, Shigaraki landed on the rooftop directly above the closing rift. He plunged his decaying hand into the spatial tear.
Inside Aegis Prime, Rin screamed, her terminal sparking as a sliver of decay ash breached the Astral Nexus.
"Close it! CLOSE IT!" Aizawa roared.
Rin slammed her bleeding hands onto the console. The spatial pinhole violently snapped shut, neatly severing three of Shigaraki's fingers as it closed. The fingers fell onto the silver glass floor of the Spire and instantly crumbled to harmless ash, separated from their host.
The four elite Vanguard operatives lay on the floor of the command hub, gasping for air, covered in toxic mud, their bodies battered and broken. The decapitation strike had failed.
Rei Arata looked down at his finest knights. He looked at the severed fingers turning to dust. The Emperor was awake.
On the surface world, Tomura Shigaraki stood alone in the torrential rain.
He looked at his severed fingers. In seconds, the bone and flesh violently regenerated, restoring his hand. He laughed—a deep, echoing sound that vibrated with the collective malice of the underworld.
"You lock your doors, Sovereign," Shigaraki whispered to the empty, decaying street. "But you cannot lock away the world."
Shigaraki turned his gaze toward the center of the city. Looming in the dark, toxic storm was the iconic, towering red-and-white steel lattice of Tokyo Tower.
He didn't run toward it. He floated.
As he approached the massive structure, he reached into the vast, screaming library of Quirks inside his head. He found the one All For One had used to orchestrate his empire from the shadows.
Radio Waves. Shigaraki clamped his hands onto the massive steel struts of Tokyo Tower. He didn't decay it immediately. Instead, he used the colossal steel structure as a makeshift, global antenna.
He amplified the Radio Waves Quirk, forcefully overriding every single un-encrypted satellite, television broadcast, emergency radio frequency, and smartphone on the planet.
In Aegis Prime, the holographic war tables in the Sovereign's Spire violently flickered. Rin gasped, trying to block the signal, but the raw output was too massive.
The monitors shifted to a live, global feed.
The entire world—from the refugees huddled in Aegis Prime to the international leaders in Geneva, from the heroes mobilizing on I-Island to the civilians in New York—was suddenly staring at the terrifying, blood-soaked visage of Tomura Shigaraki.
His white, pupilless eyes stared directly into the camera lens, looking into the souls of billions.
"Winged Sovereign," Shigaraki's demonic voice echoed from billions of speakers simultaneously. "You built a beautiful cage. You took my master's toys. You think you are the god of a new world."
Shigaraki panned the broadcast, showing the massive, towering structure of Tokyo Tower beneath his hands.
"But a god is only as strong as what he protects."
Shigaraki's hands flared with a sickly, gray light.
On live, global television, the world watched as the 1,000-foot-tall Tokyo Tower—the enduring symbol of Japan's resilience—instantly, violently turned to dust.
It didn't collapse; it vaporized. Millions of tons of steel simply blew away in the wind, a massive cloud of gray ash erasing the landmark from existence in less than three seconds.
The world held its breath in absolute, paralyzing terror. The sheer scale of the Decay was unfathomable.
Shigaraki turned the broadcast back to his own bleeding, smiling face.
"You blocked my decay from your sky, Sovereign," Shigaraki rasped, his voice dropping to a lethal, intimate whisper. "But your dimension is anchored in my country. And my country is surrounded by water."
Shigaraki pointed a decaying finger at the camera.
"You have exactly twenty-four hours to lower the Total Domain Shutter. You will open the gates, and you will surrender the crown to me."
Shigaraki's smile vanished, replaced by a cold, absolute void.
"If you do not open the sky... I will walk to the coastline. I will place my hands into the Pacific Ocean. And I will decay the sea."
The broadcast violently cut to static.
Inside the Sovereign's Spire, the silence was absolute.
Midoriya, Bakugo, Aizawa, and Hawks stared at the dead monitors. The realization of the ultimatum hit them like a physical blow.
If Shigaraki decayed the ocean, it wouldn't just destroy Japan. It would trigger a catastrophic, global ecological collapse. Tsunamis of gray dust. The vaporization of marine ecosystems. The literal end of the world.
He was holding the entire planet hostage to force the Sovereign to open the gates of heaven.
Rei Arata stood at the head of the table. The cosmic fire in his chest burned with a chilling, absolute stillness.
He had saved his city. But the Demon King had just declared war on the Earth.