Third Person POV
Silence.
Not the ordinary hush of a paused crowd — a bone-deep, stunned silence. Even the background din of battle felt muffled, swallowed by the weight of what was unfolding.
Only the sound of fists colliding punctured the air: a wet, grinding thud, the snap of sinew and the metallic ring of impact. The hulking Nomu and the battered boy traded blows like two titans locked in private ritual. Villains and heroes, students and teachers, all watched with the same hollowed-out expression. Their voices had been stolen, not by the purple-skinned monster across from them, but by the student who still stood.
Aaron's body was a roadmap of violence: bruises spread like dark landscapes, blood crusted his lips and trickled along his jaw, his shirt shredded and bone-deep cuts showing pale muscle beneath. Yet he did not stop. Each punch he threw had a purpose; each block was a precise counter, carved by calculation rather than brute instinct. He held position—he absorbed, returned, and kept his stance.
A minute had passed since Aaron had engaged Nomu. Sixty seconds that had felt like an hour. In the crowd, lines of faces blurred in shock as the impossible unfolded.
Shigaraki muttered, face contorting with something close to disbelief. "This… this can't be. Nomu is supposed to defeat All Might. He can't be defeated by this pest." His fingers scrabbled at his neck as if to keep the thought from crawling out. Denial pressed thick in his tone. Nomu was a creature forged to withstand All Might; a mere child holding it at bay was a reality Shigaraki could not swallow.
On the other side, doubt had crept into villains' hearts while the students and teachers knotted in worry.
"He won't be able to hold on like this."
"He's bleeding too much."
"He'll die if this keeps up."
The voices braided through the air, threadbare with fear. Aizawa's expression tightened: he believed in the plan, believed in the boy—but belief did not erase concern. He had seen Aaron's mind at work; the boy was sharp, ruthless in thought, and far too calm for the carnage he faced. Those qualities had kept Aizawa from intervening—part of his judgment was to let capable students act. Part of it was pragmatic: he himself couldn't push farther, and no other student had the blend of menace and technique required to face Nomu.
All Aizawa could do was wait. Wait for Aaron's signal, wait for the right moment to erase Nomu's quirks.
.........
'I can see it. I can see the opening.' Aaron thought as he narrowed his attention to the creature's rhythm. He scanned, analyzed: where Nomu breathed a fraction longer, where the armor flexed, the tiny lapse before a strike — the microscopic seam in a monster's logic. He mapped the route to the brain, a craven plan to crush the exposed nerve center with a single, terrible blow.
The longer he fought, the clearer his calculations became. His Clear Mind quirk narrowed his world to a razor focus: Nomu, the seam, the strike. Pain dissolved into irrelevance. The world receded. There was only the fight.
That laser focus, however, was a double-edged sword. Clear Mind didn't eliminate damage — it merely buried it. Aaron didn't notice the small, corrosive toll the trade was taking on his body. Blood loss, fractures, smashed ribs: they screamed inside him, but Clear Mind turned them into background noise. A child could crawl up and strike him down, and he might not flinch until it was too late.
Meanwhile, Nomu's combination of Super Regeneration and Shock Absorption meant bruises slid off him like rain. He could shrug away the violent arithmetic of Aaron's hits. Nomu's body simply rebalanced the energy; Aaron's strikes were swallowed, returned, buffered, rendered useless if the absorption held.
Still — Aaron learned. He adjusted. He used Kinetic Leak to siphon tiny amounts of incoming force into his own reserves through both hands, building a reservoir of stolen energy to be unleashed at the crucial instant. Each block was a little deposit into that cache; each absorbed strike was worth something.
He baited, feinted, and at last the seam widened.
He ducked a sweeping paw and launched himself upward. Right fist cocked, muscles primed, eyes blazing.
"NOW!" he roared, voice raw with everything he'd held in.
Across the field, Aizawa's pupils constricted. He'd been expectant; when he heard the shout his body surged into action. He opened his eyes wide — a razor focus of his own — and enacted his part of the plan. In the same breath that Aaron screamed, Aizawa erased Nomu's quirks.
A darkness hit the creature like a removed mask. Nomu's Shock Absorption flickered and died. The super-regenerative haze that had been knitting flesh together unspooled into nothing. For an instant Nomu was only flesh, only bone, without his forbidden boons.
The moment the quirks left him, Aaron's fist met target.
AAAHHHHHHHHHH!
His punch drove home with the crushing inevitability of a meteor strike. It landed square on Nomu's exposed cranial mass and then continued—as Aaron's arm followed through he dragged that head down, hard, slamming skull into earth with a thunderous BOOOOOOM.
The sound swallowed the world.
Nomu's body went slack. The monstrous posture, the twitching reflex of machine-like survival — all of it drained away. Brain matter whitened and oozed; the creature's ribs fell in a slow, terrible exhale. The hulking form collapsed like a toppled statue.
Aaron did not pause. In the seconds after the impact he reached down, hands steady despite the storm in his veins, and plucked the freed quirks from Nomu's inert body. He took them — coveted and cold — and stored them into himself.
Smoke curled upward from the crater where their duel had ended. Everyone present wore the same wide-eyed expression of disbelief, the kind that remaps memory: Did that just happen?
Aaron straightened, primal victory blistering across his features as he stood beside Nomu's ruined shell. He had done it—taken the quirk, defeated the engineered terror. He deactivated Clear Mind. The protective lens that had sustained him snapped away like a film pulled from a wound.
Reality returned with bone-jarring force.
Pain detonated through him in a waterfall of sensation: the raw, absurd amount of pain; the dizziness from blood loss; the hot stab of fractured ribs; the screaming ache of broken bones. Shock reared up like a tidal wave. He staggered, then crumpled.
For a beat he simply stood frozen, pupils rolled back, aura gone. He did not move. Blood coated him, eyes wide but unfocused, the world a narrowing tunnel.
.........
Shigaraki's voice cut the stillness. "This can't be happening. This is… this is just impossible! THIS MUST BE AN ILLUSION!" He shrieked, the noise fraying with raw panic.
"I WILL KILL HIM!" rage mangled the words as he finally slipped past the brittle veneer of composure. His face was a mask of fury and denial.
Kurogiri snapped from his trance, calculating coldly. 'This boy needs to die. He's a variable not accounted for.' The villain's mind searched for solutions, for contingency.
Before any decision could fully form, Midoriya blurred into view: Full Cowling at 5%, he slid beside Aaron from the left, a wall of desperate concern on his face. On Aaron's right, Bakugo strode forward with a thunderous glare—anger at himself for being unable to help earlier, and fury masked as reckless protectiveness.
Snow exploded into the air as Shoto placed a massive wall of ice between the two sides, foot planted, breath steaming. One by one, the students formed a ring around Aaron. Momo and Koda knelt and gently laid his broken body down. Momo's hands moved from her pockets to the first-aid kit she'd created, already springing into action with precise efficiency—bandages, antiseptic, the little mechanical devices that could staunch bleeding. Koda's calm presence steadied the frantic motions.
Shots of tentativeness hummed through the small circle—students leaning in, giving space, whispering encouragement. The battlefield's roar softened around them as the priority shifted from fight to life.
Shigaraki charged toward the ice wall with wild abandon, but before he could clear the frozen barricade, a portal bled open in the air before him. A hand—someone's hand—shot out and arrested his forward motion.
"We need to leave now," Kurogiri said quickly, voice ruthless with cold practicality. "With Nomu gone, we won't accomplish anything here. All Might is not present; other heroes will arrive any second. One student escaped—he likely called for help."
His counsel touched on the practical; it was a retreat, yes, but one with purpose, another opportunity looming. Shigaraki's eyes flicked toward the name Master like a tether; mention of him pried free a sliver of obedience. He glared back at the ice, then grunted, sliding into Kurogiri's opened portal. The rest of the remaining villains followed: retreat, regroup, and the promise of future violence.
As the villains dissolved through rifts, their forms swallowed by purple mist, the field exhaled. The living remained—wounded, exhausted, stunned, but standing. The students closed ranks around Aaron, a human shield of trembling resolve.
In the aftermath, Aizawa looked less like a teacher and more like a man who'd seen the razor's edge of fate and stepped back whole. He kept his face a mask of professional calm, but his eyes betrayed something else: the calculation of one who had seen a child shoulder what most adults could not.
On the grass, the little circle of survivors worked in quiet urgency. Aaron lay pale as moonlight, heroic and broken. Rescue had arrived, and the war for that afternoon ended with equal parts triumph and cost.