ALL FOR ONE'S LAIR
Gorou awoke with a gasp. He was in a sterile, dark medical room. Tubes and wires were attached to him. His body was a map of pain. The memory of the green static, the impossible failure, was burned into his mind.
A screen flickered nearby. The face of All For One, smooth and calm, appeared. "Report."
Gorou tried to sit up, wincing. His voice was a broken rasp. "Master… It's Izuku. The boy you told about."
"I am aware of the disturbances. He has been a busy little revolutionary."
"No," Gorou choked out, terror in his eyes. "You don't understand. He's not a boy. He's not even human. He's… a ghost in the machine."
He spilled everything. The lagging steps. The phasing. The floor breaking on its own. The teleportation. The man who died from a touch that didn't touch him. The way Izuku spoke, like a system giving an error message. "He called himself a living cheat code. He said… he said the game is over. That the player has the developer console. He's rewriting the rules."
For a long moment, All For One was silent. His expression did not change, but the air in Gorou's room grew colder.
"Interesting," All For One finally said, his voice a soft, thoughtful murmur. "A quirk that bends reality itself. Not mere strength, but administrative access. How… utterly fascinating."
He sounded intrigued. Almost admiring.
"Master, he's going to destroy everything! He's unlocking prisons, burning the Commission—"
"He is burning the barn to kill the rats," All For One interrupted calmly. "A messy, but ultimately effective, strategy. My brother's successor has finally shed his naïve skin. He has become something new."
He paused, his smile lingering. "The strength he displays… It has the familiar flavor of that stubborn legacy, One For All. Yet, it is twisted. Corrupted. Not merely enhanced, but… rewritten. Has the stockpiling quirk finally mutated into something digital? Something that hacks reality itself? No matter."
His voice dripped with dark appreciation. "The result is the same. He operates on a simple, pure principle: the strong remaking the world as they see fit. In that, at least, he has become a true successor—not to my brother's pathetic dream, but to the only law that ever mattered."
He was wrong, of course, completely misjudging the source. This was no mutation of the old quirk he knew; in reality it wasn't a quirk to begin with, it was something entirely new, a glitch in the universe's code that he could not yet perceive.
"What do we do?" Gorou pleaded.
"We?" All For One chuckled, a dry, soundless laugh. "There is no 'we' in this new game, Gorou. You are a piece from the old board. And your usefulness is at an end."
Gorou's blood ran cold. "Master, no, I can still—"
"You brought me valuable data. For that, you have my thanks. But you have also been touched by his… code. You are a corrupted file. And corrupted files must be deleted."
On the screen, All For One's finger twitched.
Inside Gorou's body, a failsafe implanted years ago—a small, organic bomb woven around his heart—received its signal.
Gorou's eyes bulged. He looked down at his own chest. "N-no… please…"
"Do not fear," All For One said, his smile gentle and monstrous. "You are simply being… reformatted."
THUMP.
The sound was muffled, internal. Gorou's body jerked. A fine trickle of blood escaped his lips. His eyes went blank, fixed on the screen, on the smiling face of his master. Then he slumped back, dead.
All For One's screen went dark. In the profound silence of his lair, he steepled his fingers.
"A glitch god," he mused to the empty darkness. "How poetic. You seek to bankrupt the system, Izuku. But you forget. In the void after the crash, in the blank space of a reformatted world… that is where true kings install their new operating systems."
He leaned back. The chaos above was not his enemy. It was the perfect clearing of the field. Let the boy burn the old world down. All For One would be waiting in the ashes, ready to offer the survivors a new order. His order.
The game was indeed changing. And for the first time in centuries, All For One felt not threatened, but genuinely, terribly excited.
All For One sat in deep silence for a moment. Then, he turned his head towards a dark, blank monitor on the wall. It was not connected to any normal network. He pressed a button on his chair.
The screen flickered to life. It did not show a face. It showed only a dark, empty room, with a single, tall chair silhouetted against dim blue light from somewhere behind it. A figure sat in the chair, perfectly still.
"Master," All For One said aloud, his voice respectful.
"The reports are troubling," a voice came from the monitor's speaker. It was a man's voice, deep, calm, and carried a weight of absolute authority. It was the voice of someone used to being obeyed without question. "This is beyond a simple uprising."
"The variable has shifted," All For One confirmed. "The boy is not merely rebellious. He has become an external force. A glitch in reality itself. He is dismantling the system with a thoroughness we did not predict."
"A glitch?" the master's voice asked, a hint of cold interest in the tone. "Explain."
All For One relayed Gorou's dying report—the lagging steps, the phasing through attacks, the world itself breaking to aid him. "He operates on a level beyond quirks. He speaks of a 'developer console.' He rewrites rules."
There was a long pause from the other room. Then, a soft, humorless sound, like a scoff. "How quaint. The child plays with cheat codes. But this chaos is not a setback, All For One. It is a gift. The barn is burning. Now we herd the cattle. We kill two birds with one stone. Use his hurricane to cover our own harvest."
"My thoughts exactly," All For One said, a dark smile in his voice. "The heroes are blind. The systems are dead. It is the perfect shadow to move in."
"Then move," the master commanded, his voice leaving no room for debate. "The boy seeks to bankrupt the system. Ensure we are the ones who buy the debt. Secure the Vault. Let the world blame the glitch."
The screen went black. The call was over.
In the distant, secure room, the master sat in his chair. The calm mask vanished the second the connection died.
His hands, resting on the arms of the chair, clenched. The expensive leather creaked under his grip. His body began to shake, not with fear, but with a furious, consuming anger.
He stood up abruptly, pacing a few steps in the dim blue light. His face, hidden in shadow, was twisted.
"So it followed that thing here as well," he hissed to the empty room, his voice low and venomous. "Of all the possibilities... of all the powers in this wretched world... it had to be 'that'."
He slammed a fist into the wall. The reinforced metal dented with a dull boom.
"I didn't think... out of all the things that could have manifested... it would be 'that'." He spoke through gritted teeth, each word sharp. "This complicates everything. It's a wild card. A paradox. It doesn't play by any rules. Not mine, not his, not reality's."
He stopped pacing, staring at a schematic of the world that glowed on another screen. The glowing points of chaos in America seemed to mock him.
"He doesn't even understand what he's truly wielding yet," the master muttered, a cold dread mixing with his rage. "But he's learning. Fast. If he gains full control... if he learns to truly rewrite the code, not just break it..."
He couldn't finish the thought. The implication was too vast, too threatening to all his carefully laid plans, plans that spanned across the world.
He turned back to his console, his movements now sharp with purpose. The anger was being forged into a decision.
"I need to do something. I need to act. Before he understands. Before he gains full control." His eyes hardened. "The game just changed. And I will not lose to a child playing with a god's power."
He began inputting commands, faster now. Plans within plans were being scrapped and rewritten. The distraction at the Vault was still useful. But a new, more urgent objective took priority: find the glitch, understand the glitch, and 'contain' the glitch. Before it was too late.
All For One turned his head slightly. "Tomura."
From the shadows of the chamber, Shigaraki Tomura stepped forward. His hands were still, no nervous scratching. His red eyes were fixed on his master's form. "I heard," he rasped.
"You understand what must be done?"
Shigaraki's lips peeled back in a grin that showed too many teeth. "The heroes are locked up. The streets are a war zone. No one's watching the back door." He lifted a hand, staring at his splayed fingers. "It's time to break the last toys. Just like you told me."
"Precisely," All For One said. "The chaos is the cover. Achieve the objective. Leave no evidence that it was us. Let the blame fall on the Izuku and his rioting masses."
Shigaraki nodded once, a sharp, jerky motion. "I'll use the pack. They're hungry for it." He didn't wait for further dismissal. He turned and walked into the darkness, his silhouette dissolving into the gloom.
Alone again, All For One let his smile return. On a secondary monitor, he pulled up a map. Not of Japan, but of a remote, fortified complex in the Swiss Alps, far from the American turmoil. Its designation: "Storage Facility Α-0. "The Vault.""" It held no prisoners. It contained relics, specimens, and raw materials deemed too dangerous or too valuable for any existing system.
It was also the secret master's primary interest. With the world's eyes on the American meltdown, and its heroes trapped in a dome, the path to the Vault was clearer than it had been in decades.
Shigaraki and his "pack" would provide one kind of distraction. But All For One began inputting another set of commands, activating long-dormant assets across Europe. The glitch god wanted to crash the system. All For One would ensure that when the screen went dark, he was the only one with the power to reboot it.
Shigaraki's "Pack"
Shigaraki walked into a sub-level of the lair that smelled of antiseptic and wet earth. The lights here were a dull red. He stopped before a row of massive, cylindrical tanks filled with green preservation fluid.
Inside each tank floated a body. These were not the mindless, hulking Nomu from the USJ attack. These were sleeker, more refined. Their mutations were precise, intentional. Each one was a masterpiece of stolen quirks, fused together for a single, deadly purpose.
This was the "Pack." Six of them. All For One's secret reserve, never deployed.
Shigaraki placed a hand on the glass of the first tank. Inside, a feminine figure with skin like obsidian and hair that moved like liquid shadow opened eyes that were solid white. "The world is loud with breaking things," Shigaraki whispered, a mad glee in his voice. "Time for you to hunt."
He moved down the line, activating the release protocols.
The first, codenamed 'Silence'.' Its quirk: a permanent, spreading null-field. Where it walked, all other quirks sputtered and died. Not erased, but suppressed, as if the very air refused to allow their function. It was a walking dead zone for powers.
The second, codename 'Echo.' It could perfectly copy any quirk it witnessed, not just one at a time, but multiple, stacking them for a short, devastating duration. It was the ultimate counter-puncher.
The third, codename 'Mirage.' It projected perfect, tangible illusions that could interact with the world. It could create walls, weapons, or even copies of people that felt and fought like the real thing.
The fourth, codename 'Graft.' It could touch organic matter and reshape it at a molecular level—healing, melding, or horribly transforming flesh and bone. It was their medic and their torturer.
The fifth, codename 'Anchor.' It manipulated gravity in a localized area, creating crushing fields or zones of weightlessness.
The sixth, codename 'Pulse.' It emitted waves of psychic disruption that caused confusion, paralysis, and sheer, mind-breaking terror.
As the fluid drained and the glass slid open, Shigaraki looked at them with pride. They were not mindless. Their eyes held a cold, animal intelligence. They obeyed him because he was the master's voice, and because he promised them ruin.
"The target isn't a city," Shigaraki told them, his raspy voice echoing in the chamber. "It's the evidence. The physical backup. The Commission's Central Data Archive in Virginia. It's buried under a mountain, with its own power and life support. The heroes think it's safe. The boy's riot hasn't reached it yet."
He grinned. "We go in while they're all looking at the burning towers. You smash the place. Destroy every server, every hard drive, every paper record. Leave nothing. Make it look like the rioters or one of the boy's followers did it in the chaos. Without that data, even if the boy wins, history starts from zero. And whoever controls the past…"
The Pack understood. They were weapons of absolute erasure.
Shigaraki was confident. This wasn't a brute force attack. This was a surgical strike with the perfect tools. Let the glitch boy have his reality hacks, he thought. He's fighting in the open. We are cutting the past out from under him. He won't see it coming.
The Vault – Swiss Alps
On his monitor, All For One zoomed in on the schematics of Storage Facility A-0, "The Vault." It was more than a fortress. It was a tomb for things the world had tried to forget.
The secret master's voice echoed in his mind. Our key lies there. The glitch operates on code. The Vault contains the original compiler.
The contents list was a catalog of nightmares and miracles:
Specimen Z-01: The preserved, dormant body of the first recorded human to ever manifest a quirk, kept in cryo-stasis. Its genetic material was considered the Rosetta Stone of quirks.
Artifact Γ-7: A meteorite fragment that radiated an unknown energy, theorized to be the extraterrestrial trigger for the Quirk Singularity event centuries ago.
The Damascus Scrolls: Ancient texts predating quirks, written in a language no one could decipher, but which shifted and changed when viewed by someone with a mental quirk. They were believed to be predictions or instructions.
The Soma Stockpile: Vats of a unique, self-replicating biological paste derived from Specimen Z-01. A single injection could, in theory, rewrite a person's quirk factor entirely or amplify it beyond any known limit.
Containment Unit Ψ: This was listed with no details, only a blacked-out file and a warning: "Cognitive Hazard. Do not perceive directly."
For the secret master, this was not a raid for weapons. It was a scholar entering a library of ultimate truths. The glitch power Izuku wielded was an anomaly, a new, unpredictable variable.
The master believed the answers to understanding it, and more importantly, controlling or countering it, lay within the Vault. The power to rewrite reality? The Vault might hold the first draft of reality's rules.
With the global hero system in tatters and America a blazing distraction, the elite, automated defenses of the Vault were isolated.
All For One's European assets—a mix of mercenaries with transport quirks, hackers, and a few high-yield energy projectors—were already moving. Their job was not to fight the Vault's guards, but to open a door for exactly six seconds. A door the master himself would step through.
The master, now calm again after his angry outburst, looked at the live feed of the Vault's exterior. A blizzard was raging around its peak. He smiled. 'The boy has a developer console for the present,' he thought, his confidence restored. 'But I am going to steal the source code for reality itself. Let's see whose rewrite is more permanent.'
Both Shigaraki and the master moved, each believing utterly in their plan. One aimed to erase the world's memory. The other aimed to claim its genesis. They were sure these moves, hidden in the shadow of Izuku's grand, violent spectacle, were the unseen knives that would decide the true fate of everything.
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