Shigaraki's hand twitched again, barely controlled.
"I mean, really, make it make sense. You became the exact same piece of shit who broke you. Here you are, walking proof that abuse recycles itself."
"You really think he ever loved you?" I asked, circling.
His head cocked, confused for a second.
"AFO," I said. "You think that parasite adopted you out of care? No. He saw a dented toy, wrapped it in skin, shoved a dead man's dream in your spine, and called it purpose."
"You were his fallback plan, Tomura. Nothing else. A body. A vault. Something to keep warm until he slid inside. You are not a son. You are a seatbelt on his final ride."
His brows furrowed. He hated that. Not because it was false, but because it scraped the scab.
"Try something for me," I said. "K*ll yourself. Right now."
He blinked. Rage rising.
"Come on. Sn*p your own neck. Just do it," I said. My voice wasn't a challenge. It was a dare soaked in venom. "If you think you are free, prove it. St*b yourself in the chest. Right now. Let's see if you can do it without Master holding your leash."
He didn't move.
"Yeah. That is what I thought," I said, walking closer. "You are not your own man. You are his battery. You think you are in control? You don't even get to k*ll yourself without permission."
I see hesitation in his mind. Decay faltered like it forgot how to rot.
Oathbreaker was doing its job. Cracks in his conviction widened with every breath. The decay web around him thinned His eyes locked to mine, unfocused, twitching between fury and something worse... doubt. Oathbreaker was a skill I got recently, and used for the first time, but man, was it overpowered. As soon as I made Shigaraki hesitate on his ideals, his main quirk was cancelled.
I walked forward.
The others Quirks were still there, Air Cannon, Danger Sense... the full list, but they meant jack shit if Decay stayed off.
I stopped right in front of him.
That was when his face started changing. Like skin was peeling from the inside. Lips twitched. Eyes sunk. Voice rasped, lower than his usual chainsaw throat.
"Thank you," it said. "You allowed me to take control."
I snorted. "AFO. You finally poked your crusty head out the cum jar."
He smiled. Or tried to. It came out more like a death twitch. "Your interference... sped the merge. I should thank you."
"You should shut the fuck up."
"I mean, really. All this work, all this effort, turning Tomura into your little finger puppet, just so you could get clowned by a menace with a bat. You are not a demon, you are a parasite with nostalgia problems."
He opened his mouth. Then froze. Danger Sense flared like a bomb going off in his spine. His legs twitched. He wanted to move, no, AFO wanted to move. But Shigaraki did not. He stayed put. I saw it in his eyes. Some part of him wanted to feel it. Pain. Choice. Maybe freedom. That stubborn flicker. Resistance. He wanted to prove that the body was his. Not AFO's, his! He wanted to prove his freedom by stopping AFO from getting what he wanted.
Then snap, the vial came out of nowhere, stabbed straight into his shoulder.
His hand jerked. Swing wide. A swipe aimed to kill.
Too late.
Toru had already jumped back. She clung to my back, hands gripping tight.
"I am Ryuu's Blade, bitch," she said. "The Invisible Hero."
AFO's neck twisted like it was trying to snap from whiplash. "No!"
He roared it, but too late. The Quirk-Destroying Drug was already in. The vial hissed. The red spread through veins like cracked lightning under his skin.
"NO!" he screamed again. Not just pain. That was panic. That was decades of planning flushed down a toilet by a girl he couldn't see and a bat he couldn't predict.
He clawed at his shoulder like he could rip it out. Flesh peeled. Didn't matter. The compound moved fast. Nerve deep. System-wide.
Shigaraki's skin crawled, veins throbbing like worms under cellophane.
"Eri's little gift to you all," I said, stepping over the cracked bones of some poor Nomu that caught friendly fire. "For the last time, it was used for good. It will remove AFO from this world, for once and for all."
This was the plan from the beginning. We tested it on Machia. With her Quirk awakened, Toru could hide small objects with herself, turning completely invisible. Like how she slipped the drug into Machia's mouth, she stabbed Shigaraki with the drug.
Shigaraki hit the floor hard, knees grinding into shattered concrete, coughing out red like he forgot how lungs worked. The veins across his face looked like broken wires, red, twitching, alive. AFO's scream wasn't a sound. It was a fucking static glitch in the air. Fading. Failing. Fucked.
"No!" he screamed, voice shrill. "This is not the end yet, Ryuu Midoriya! I will come for your head! I promise, you, your family, everyone you know will die a painful death!"
I ignored it. That last part? Not a threat. A tantrum.
His head twitched once. Twice. Like a dog trying to shake off water. The fight drained out of him like someone pulled the plug on rage itself. The red in his veins dimmed. The twitching stopped. AFO was gone.
No demon. No legend. Just a seatbelt on a corpse's ride to nowhere. And even that broke.
And Tomura Shigaraki looked up like he finally woke up in his own grave.
He stared at his hands. At the skin. The fucking Master. Gone. Just him now. Just a man soaked in blood and shame, kneeling in what used to be a hospital and was now a goddamn crater of regret.
The others caught up behind me, Mirko, Ryukyu, Izuku, Aizawa, Endeavor, Gran Torino. The whole damn lineup. They just looked at him. With just pity. Cold, dry, and final.
Rest of Class 1-A and 1-B formed a semi-circle around me.
I sat in the middle of the crater. My back ached like hell. My knees were screaming. Eyes dry. Breath short. WildCard Ex Machina was cracked near the grip, smoking from that last swing.
They stared. Some stunned. Some tense. A few like they were still waiting for Shigaraki to get up.
I wiped blood from my face. I think some was his.
"He dead?" Red Riot asked. Voice too hopeful.
"No," I muttered, glancing at the twitching meat sack. "He is in there somewhere, stewing in his own piss and ego."
Kendo looked like she wanted to speak. Didn't.
Toru was crouched next to me, bruised but fine.
"Bat still works," she said.
"Of course she does. She got your genetics."
She snorted a laughter.
Bakugo stood at the edge, arms folded, scowling. "You done monologuing or should we come back later?"
I looked up at him, smiled.
"Depends. Want a front-row seat to the psychoanalysis of a sad crusty orphan turned walking STD?"
He huffed, I ignored him.
My arms went numb. My head felt like a grenade mid-pull. Vision doubled, then tripled. Everything got quiet, like the world hit mute.
Guess that was my cue to clock out.
I do not remember the exact moment I passed out. Somewhere between Toru's thighs and Momo's fussing, maybe when I tried to say something sarcastic but the blood in my mouth came out first... I blacked out.
---
When I woke up, something was crushing my chest.
"Ryuu. Wake up."
Eri was perched on my chest like a paperweight, her face hovering way too close. Her breath smelled like strawberries, and judging by the sticky spot on my cheek, she was eating them not long ago.
I groaned. "Off."
"No," she said, crossing her arms.
"Get off."
"You died."
"I didn't."
"You looked dead."
"I was asleep. Big difference."
"You were broken."
"That part is fair."
Mom was slumped at my bedside, head on the blanket like she was guarding my corpse for a week straight. Her arms were limp, but her grip? Still iron. Like if she let go, I would vanish.
Door creaked open.
Momo walked in, IV bag in one hand. A stack of worried faces followed behind her. None of them said anything. Toru leaned into the wall like she was waiting for my smartass to reboot. Mina peeked behind her, already mouthing something I didn't care to read. Jiro looked half-awake. Tsuyu blinked. Uraraka nodded like I was late to a meeting. Toga looked way too entertained to be here for medical reasons.
Their eyes shot open.
"You are awake."
Toru and Toga jumped the same second. Momo yanked one, Tsuyu the other. They still managed to wake Mom.
She didn't say a word, just latched on like I owed her a hundred hugs. My spine cracked loud.
"You are crushing my soul."
"Good," she mumbled into my chest. "You can't die again."
"I didn't die."
"Shut up."
Toru wiped her face. "Don't do that again. Ever. You freak."
"Noted."
Toga climbed on the bed without asking. "I thought your guts exploded."
"They tried. I won."
Mina poked her head in. "Is he stable, or are we throwing confetti at a corpse?"
"I am sitting upright," I said. "You think ghosts have this much swagger?"
After hugs, sobs, and someone definitely wiping snot on my arm, they piled on my bed like a damn cheer squad that had seen too much war.
"What the hell happened? And how fast did you accept Toga?"
Toru clicked her tongue. "You were out for a week."
I sat up more. "That can't be."
They all looked at me like I just asked if All Might was quirkless. Only if they knew.
"I wasn't even injured-"
Mom smacked my head. "Your brain shut down because it hit the limit."
I rubbed the spot, stared at my palm like answers were hiding in the bruises. Maybe they were. Using everything at once, stacking passives, full system load… yeah, fair.
"So… what is the situation? Shigaraki, Commission, AFO?"
Momo shrugged, like she was too tired to care about the mess anymore. "Shigaraki is in Tartarus. No Quirk. Just next in line to rot with his Master. Garaki spilled everything after we handed him over. Shigaraki had the real AFO. Nine and AFO was just a knockoff running on fumes."
Nejire picked up. "Commission threw a fit. Some heroes acted 'out of place.' Whatever. Didn't matter. Your setup with the drone footage, press lines, data leaks, it worked. The second the videos hit, public support flipped. Commission got dragged. Bad. People started asking."
Toru sighed, sliding a pack of wet wipes across my chest like that would fix the bruises. "The plan worked too well. The public flipped fast on them."
She nodded at the TV, muted, where some suit from the Commission was getting eaten alive on a news panel.
One clip played on loop across every news station, the Commission's Vice Chair being shouted down by survivors.
"You called my brother collateral!" someone screamed.
"You sent kids to die!"
Cameras didn't cut away. No edits. No spin. Just raw fury hitting a suit who ran out of excuses.
Momo glanced at the screen. "That was watched two million times in one day."
Mina tossed a popcorn kernel in her mouth. "Two mil by lunch. Yikes."
"They tried pushing back. Real fast. But the minute the videos hit, it stopped being about heroes or villains. People saw the cracks. Saw the blood. They didn't like what was underneath."
I snorted. "Guess when your skeleton closet is big enough to host a rave, it is hard to keep the door shut."
Mina added, "They tried pulling strings. Government didn't care. Not with the number of people coming forward in your name. Some big names too. Once that flood started, everything old came crawling out. The mess with Hawks, Dabi, Shiketsu, the overseas labs, they couldn't sweep it under anymore. So the whole damn board got yanked."
Uraraka clapped, beaming, "They shut the whole thing down," she said. "Once everything hit public, they couldn't contain it anymore. Every old case, black sites, killings, cover-ups, every hidden file, people went digging, and the truth didn't exactly leave room for excuses."
I looked around the room. Eri still had her little hands squished against my face. My cheeks were numb. I did not say anything. Momo kept talking.
"They built a new agency," she said, not looking up. "Half of it is civilian-run. The other half is the current top ten heroes. Equal seat share, equal veto power."
"No Commission strings?" I asked.
"No strings," she answered. "Nezu is part of it. He already wrote two reforms and probably booby-trapped the first meeting."
"The old control setups is no more." Toru added, "You can actually tell someone to fuck off without losing your license now."
"I waited years for that."
"You used to do it anyway," Jiro said, leaning back. "Now it is just not illegal."
Toga looked at me. Eyes wide, stupid grin barely held back. I knew that look. She wanted to jump me, tear her shirt off, or both, but Mom was still next to the bed and half the class was around us like I was the last turkey leg at dinner.
"Twice and I got cleared," she said.
"They even said he was sane," she added, glancing at the TV, then away. "Your medicine worked. His mind is back. He is out there helping people now. The real kind. No masks."
---
They talked about other things too, while the light from the TV flickered useless across the room. Most of the villains were either dead, locked up, or so deep underground no one bothered looking anymore. A few stragglers popped up here and there, but Izuku, Bakugo, Todoroki, and the rest were still running active. It was smaller clean-up, nothing that needed full team deployment.
That night, Mirko and Ryukyu visited. They did not bring flowers. They kicked the damn door open. Mirko stomped in first, saw Ryuu awake, shirtless under the blanket, bruised but alive, and the second others were away and Ryukyu stepped out to get coffee, she pounced.
No warning.
She straddled him like a bar fight and kissed him like she wanted to break teeth. Ryuu delivered, of course. When Mirko limped out an hour later with her hoodie zipped wrong and one sock missing, her legs barely held up.
Izuku and the others dropped by a bit later. They asked how he was, listened to Toru retell the final fight with way too much flair, and after some awkward jokes and nods, they left.
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