MHA: Lust Quirk

The stairs were cracked. Cosmetic stone, molded to look natural, split open where the railing had been torn out of the ground. A chunk of it lay at the bottom of the steps with blood on the edge that wasn't his.

Ryo took the stairs three at a time. Tsuyu was beside him, low and quiet, moving on all fours down the incline with a speed that made the stairs irrelevant. Midoriya was behind them, one hand cradling his broken finger against his chest, the other braced against the wall for balance.

The central plaza was worse up close.

From the edge of the Shipwreck Zone it had been distant, someone else's emergency. Down here it was sound and smell and the air tasting like ozone and dust and copper. The fountain in the center of the plaza was still running, water arcing up and falling back in a pattern that nobody had turned off because nobody was thinking about fountains. Around it, scattered across fifty meters of cracked concrete, lay the remains of Aizawa's fight.

Thirty bodies. Maybe more. Scattered across the plaza in piles and singles. Some groaning. Some not. One had landed across a decorative bench and the bench had broken under him and he was just lying in the wreckage with his mouth open and his eyes shut. A woman with crystalline growths on her arms was face-down near the fountain's base, her arms still sparking faintly, capture scarf marks around her wrists so deep the fabric had cut skin.

Aizawa had done this. Twenty minutes, seventy villains, one man with a scarf and a Quirk that let him say no.

And it hadn't been enough.

The Nomu was standing in the center of the plaza. Ryo had seen it from above. From above it was a big thing, dark-colored, brain exposed. Up close it was worse. Three meters tall, maybe more, with a bulk that didn't belong to anything that had been born. Its skin was black and tight over muscles that looked manufactured, stapled to a frame that someone had designed in a lab. No face. Just a beak-like mouth and the brain, pink-gray and glistening, bulging from an open skull like the top of its head had been removed and nobody had bothered closing it back up.

It was holding Aizawa by the face.

One hand. The Nomu's hand covered most of Aizawa's head, fingers wrapped around his skull, and it was pressing him into the concrete with the slow, mechanical force of a hydraulic press. Aizawa's capture scarf trailed in the dust. His goggles were shattered. His left arm was bent backward at the elbow, a break so complete that the forearm hung perpendicular. His right arm was reaching up, fingers clawing at the Nomu's wrist, trying to pry free, and every time he pulled, the Nomu's arm didn't move.

A low grinding crunch from across the plaza. Bone flexing under pressure it was never meant to take.

Shigaraki Tomura was standing behind the Nomu, near the fountain's edge. Scratching his neck. The dead hand over his face shifted when he tilted his head, and through the gaps between its fingers red eyes tracked the destruction with the flat attention of someone watching a loading screen.

Next to Shigaraki, Kurogiri's mist rippled. His yellow eyes shifted toward the students on the stairs and then back to Shigaraki. He said something Ryo couldn't hear.

Shigaraki stopped scratching.

"One of them got out?"

Kurogiri's response was too quiet to catch. Shigaraki's hand dropped from his neck to his side and he stood very still. Then his fingers went back to the raw skin and started again, faster.

"That's not fair." Louder now. Thin and whiny and itchy with frustration. "That's not how this was supposed to go. He wasn't supposed to leave. We planned this. We came here and we planned this and All Might isn't even here and now one of them LEFT and it's going to be game over and I didn't even get to-"

He stopped. His head turned. The hand-mask shifted and those red eyes found the three students at the bottom of the stairs.

His shoulders dropped. His chin came up behind the dead fingers of the mask.

"Oh," Shigaraki said. Quiet. "Okay. If the game's ending anyway, I should at least take a party member with me."

He took a step toward them. Then another. Casual. His arms hung loose at his sides and all ten fingers were spread wide and there was nothing in his posture that suggested hurry. He had all the time he needed because the three kids in front of him were students and the Nomu was right behind him.

Tsuyu was at Ryo's left shoulder. She'd risen from her crouch at the base of the stairs and was standing on two feet, frog-eyes enormous, locked on Shigaraki. She was close to Shigaraki. Closer than either Ryo or Midoriya.

Shigaraki's head tilted again. The hand-mask's dead fingers framed his eyes and his eyes found Tsuyu and stayed there.

"You," he said. "The frog. You look soft."

He lunged.

It was faster than his walk had promised. His right hand came up, all five fingers spread, reaching for Tsuyu's face with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this before and enjoyed the part where it worked.

Ryo was already moving.

He'd rehearsed this in an empty apartment the night before, shadowboxing against a scenario he couldn't tell anyone about, and the rehearsal worked. Not cleanly. But enough.

He got between them. Shigaraki's hand was close enough that Ryo could see the chapped skin on his knuckles and the dirt under his fingernails. Four fingers closed on Ryo's right forearm. The pinky curled half a second behind the others. If all five made contact at the same time, his arm would disintegrate. Skin, muscle, bone, gone.

Ryo caught Shigaraki's wrist with his left hand and squeezed.

Four fingers on his forearm. The pinky hovering a centimeter above the skin. Not yet. Not all five.

Then the fifth finger landed.

And nothing happened.

Five dry fingertips against the skin of his forearm, pressing in. No decay. No disintegration. Just pressure, five points of it, like being grabbed by someone with very cold, very dry hands.

Ryo looked past Shigaraki's hand-mask and saw the red eyes widen.

Behind them, on the ground, face smashed into concrete, left arm broken, right arm pinned under the Nomu's foot, Aizawa's remaining eye was open. Glowing red. His hair floating upward in the way it did when Erasure was active. He'd found Shigaraki through the blood and the dust and the shattered goggles and he was erasing the Quirk that would have turned Ryo's arm to nothing.

Shigaraki looked down at his own hand on Ryo's forearm. His fingers twitched. Nothing happened. He looked at Aizawa. At the red eye. At the floating hair.

"Oh," he said. "That's cheating."

His other hand came up, five fingers spread, reaching for Ryo's face. Ryo twisted, still gripping the wrist, pulling Shigaraki sideways-

The Nomu moved.

Ryo didn't see it. He heard displaced air and then the plaza tilted and his ribs compressed and there was a sound that was his own body hitting something solid at a speed his brain couldn't track.

Stone pillar. Decorative, thick, part of the fountain's surrounding walkway. He hit it with his back and went through it. The pillar cracked in half and the top section came down after him and he was on the ground behind it with dust in his eyes and gravel under his palms and a ringing in his ears that ate every other sound.

Spine: intact. Skull: intact. Ribs: wrong. Several of them, left side, stabbing when he breathed but not grinding, which meant cracked, not broken through. His right arm was still attached. His left hand, the one that had been gripping Shigaraki's wrist, was empty. The impact had ripped his grip away.

He was lying on his back in a pile of broken stone. The sky through the USJ dome was artificial blue. A sprinkler head in the ceiling, far above, had a bird sitting on it. A sparrow that had gotten in through the ventilation. It was watching the plaza.

-Tsuyu's tongue around his waist on the ship, the wet pressure of it tightening when she jumped, her skin warm through the wetsuit where her arm pressed against his ribs-

He blinked. Gone.

He pushed himself up. His ribs screamed. The Nomu was walking back to where Aizawa lay, and Aizawa's red eye was dimming, and Shigaraki was standing where Ryo had left him, five fingers flexing, rubbing his wrist where Ryo had squeezed it.

Shigaraki looked at Ryo. Tilted his head.

"You grabbed me," he said. He sounded curious. "Nobody grabs me. That's new."

The Nomu reached Aizawa. It picked him up by the right arm this time, the one that had still been reaching, and Ryo heard the elbow give before Aizawa made a sound. The arm broke and Aizawa's head dropped and his Erasure died and the Nomu slammed Aizawa into the concrete one more time, face-first, and left him there.

Ryo got to one knee. The broken pillar was behind him and the dust was still settling and his ribs were a bonfire every time he inhaled. Tsuyu was to his right. Her eyes on Aizawa. Her mouth a thin line.

Midoriya was shaking. His broken finger, his pale face, his teeth clenched so hard the tendons stood out in his neck. He was looking at the Nomu and his free hand was curled into a fist and Ryo knew that look. It was the look of a kid working out how many bones he was willing to break.

"Don't," Ryo said. His voice came out flat. Not enough air behind it.

Midoriya's jaw worked. He didn't unclench his fist.

Shigaraki was still looking at Ryo. He scratched his neck. Blood under his fingernails now.

"You're interesting," he said. "What's your name?"

Ryo didn't answer. He didn't have the breath for it.

The USJ doors exploded inward.

Not opened. The doors, massive steel things built to withstand quirk-driven disaster simulations, blew off their tracks and flew across the entry plaza and embedded in the concrete. The sound hit Ryo's chest before his ears caught up.

A figure stood in the doorway. Enormous. Blond. Jacket and tie, no costume, like he'd come from a desk.

All Might wasn't smiling.

Ryo had watched this man across hundreds of episodes. He always smiled. It was the thing he did because a dying woman had told him to, and he'd spent thirty years not stopping. He smiled when he fought. He smiled when he bled.

He was not smiling now.

He stepped forward. The tile cracked under the step. A structural crack, the material giving under force it wasn't built for. He said nothing. He crossed the plaza in a time frame that Ryo's brain refused to parse. One second he was in the doorway and the next the remaining conscious villains in the plaza were unconscious and Aizawa's body was cradled against his chest and Ryo felt a hand on his shoulder the size of a dinner plate and then the hand was gone and he was sitting against a wall near the stairs and Tsuyu was next to him and Midoriya was next to her and Aizawa was lying on the ground between them with his chest moving.

All Might was in the center of the plaza. Alone. Facing the Nomu.

Shigaraki was giggling. The sound was high and wet and wrong. "He came," Shigaraki said. "He actually came. Okay. Okay okay okay. Nomu."

The Nomu's blank eyes fixed on All Might.

"Kill him."

All Might planted his feet. His eyes found the Nomu's exposed brain.

"Have no fear."

His voice filled the building. Deep. The kind of deep that Ryo felt in the floor through his back and his cracked ribs and the wall he was leaning against.

"For I am here."

Tsuyu's shoulder was touching his. Small and solid and warm through the wetsuit. He didn't move away from it.

The Nomu charged. All Might met it head on.

The impact shook the building.