Chapter 39: What Heroes Do!

The blue fire closed in all around him.

Ten meters of clearance became eight. Became six. The trees at the edges were already burning, bark splitting, sap boiling, branches curling inward like fingers over a flame. Manga's eyes watered from the heat alone. The skin on his forearms felt tight, shrinking, pulling against the muscle underneath. Every breath scorched the inside of his nose.

Manga stood at the center of it.

The villain stood across from him. Scarred. Stapled. Dead-eyed. Blue flames licking between his fingers.

His throat was gravel. Three days of training camp. Hours of quirk exercises that had left his vocal cords raw and swollen. Every word he spoke now cost something, and he had maybe a handful left before speaking became bleeding.

The fire wall shrank to four meters.

He had one word in him that mattered right now.

"Bari-bari."

The onomatopoeia left his mouth like a crack of thunder. The characters formed in the air, bright and jagged, the sound of lightning and peak performance and a machine running beyond its redline. He clutched it in his fist and everything changed.

Energy flooded his muscles. His skin crackled with visible arcs, blue-white lines tracing his forearms, his shoulders, his legs. His heart rate spiked. His pupils dilated. Every fiber in his body went from resting to absolute maximum output in the span of a single breath, every cell firing at 100%, every system pushed to its ceiling.

The villain's eyes narrowed.

Manga vanished.

He went through the fire wall. The flames licked his arms and his graphic tee burned at the edges and the heat seared across his skin like sandpaper, but his body was running at peak capacity and the pain barely registered. He crossed the burning threshold in a single step and was inside the villain's guard before Dabi could raise the heat.

The flame villain's left hand came up. Blue fire bloomed in its palm.

Manga grabbed his wrist and twisted. The fire shot sideways into the trees. He drove his forehead into the villain's face. Stapled skin split. The man stumbled back, his free hand trailing blue flame in a wide arc meant to create distance.

Manga didn't give him distance.

He stepped inside the arc. His right hand caught the villain's jaw. His left drove into Dabi's ribs. The man lurched. He tried to fire point-blank, both palms igniting, but Manga was already rotating, pulling his arm across his body, using his own momentum to spin him off-balance.

Dabi hit the ground.

He rolled, fired from the ground, a jet of blue flame that scorched a line across the dirt where Manga had been standing a half-second earlier. Manga was already beside him. He stomped on the outstretched arm. Felt the bone break.

Dabi grunted as he fired with the other hand, a blast that nearly caught Manga. He narrowly dodged the stream of flames before grabbing Dabi’s arm and snapping it. Manga didn't stop there as he reached down. 

Grabbed the villain by the front of his coat. Lifted him. His broken arm dangled. Dabi fired at the ground beneath them, blue flame washing across Manga's legs, blistering, scorching, but Manga's body was at 100% and his grip was iron and his eyes behind the bubble were not the eyes of a boy who was going to let go.

The villain's dead eyes widened slightly.

"You wouldn't, kid. You're a hero, aren't ya?" He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The brat had to be bluffing.

Manga threw the punch. A straight right to the gut, the kind of hit that should've folded the man in half and dropped him to the dirt. A knockout blow. Nothing more.

His fist went through.

Up to the wrist. Through cloth and flesh and out the other side, with resistance so faint it felt like punching through wet cardboard. The villain's mouth opened. No sound came out. His body sagged forward against Manga's arm, the fire dying in both palms like candles being pinched.

Manga's bubble exploded with emojis. A skull. A scream face. Exclamation marks. Question marks. More exclamation marks. A rotating cycle of pure panic that lit up the burning clearing like a strobe light.

He ripped his fist free and stumbled backward, staring at his arm, staring at the body, his bubble cycling so fast the emojis were blurring together.

Then the body stopped being a body.

The skin lost color first, like wet paper losing its shape. The coat, the scars, the staples, the dead eyes, all of it softened and sagged and collapsed inward. The thing that had been a man ten seconds ago melted into a brownish slurry pooling between the roots of a burning tree, soaking into the earth until there was nothing left but a dark stain and the fading heat of blue fire.

Manga's emoji storm halted. The panic drained out of his bubble, replaced by a slow parade of question marks.

Normal people didn't turn into goo when they died... That much he was sure of. And the villain's quirk was fire, not... goo.

Then what the hell was that?!?!

He shook his head. He didn't have time to think about it. The forest was still burning. His friends were still out there. He could hear chainsaws somewhere to the east, grinding through wood, and something else. Screaming.

He shot forward.

Setsuna reformed behind a boulder two hundred meters east of where she'd lost the blonde psycho.

All fifty pieces snapped back together in sequence. Legs first, then torso, then arms, then head. She was breathing hard. Her eyes scanned the treeline in every direction.

Nothing.

The crazy girl was gone. Vanished into the dark forest. Setsuna had split, covered three hundred meters of forest in under a minute, and found nothing. No footprints. No blood trail. No giggling.

"Damn it." She slammed her fist against the boulder.

She couldn't chase a ghost all night. Not when her friends were in trouble. Not when the forest was on fire and she could hear explosions and screaming from at least four different directions.

She turned and ran back toward camp.

Awase's legs were burning and it still wasn't enough.

Momo was over his shoulder, dead weight. Blood matted the hair on the right side of her head where the thing behind him had caught her with a hammer-arm before Awase had grabbed her and run. He'd been running ever since. Through smoke, over roots, between burning trees, his legs pumping harder than they'd ever pumped in his life.

The gravity training helped. Three months ago he couldn't have carried someone at her weight at this speed for more than thirty seconds. Now his legs were denser, his core stronger, his lungs bigger from months of working under pressure that made normal gravity feel like swimming in air. He was faster with her than he would have been without her before the training.

It still wasn't enough.

The monster was gaining.

He could hear it. The grinding of chainsaws chewing through the trees it didn't bother to dodge. The whine of drills spinning up. The thud of hammer-arms punching through trunks like they were made of cardboard.

A tree exploded behind him. Sawdust and splinters sprayed across his back. He didn't look. Looking back meant slowing down and slowing down meant dying.

Another tree fell. Closer. The ground shook.

He could feel the air displacement on the back of his neck. The thing was right behind him. Five meters. Maybe three.

He heard the chainsaw rev.

This is it, he thought. The arm was coming. He couldn't outrun it. He couldn't dodge with Momo on his shoulder. He couldn't fight it. He was going to die in a forest carrying a girl he couldn't save.

Something hit the Nomu like a freight train.

The sound was massive. A thunderous, concussive crack that Awase felt in his chest. The grinding of chainsaws stopped. The footsteps stopped. The whole forest seemed to hold its breath for a fraction of a second.

Then a body went through a tree.

It flew sideways, twenty meters through the air, hit a pine trunk, snapped it in half, tumbled through the debris, and crashed into the base of a second tree hard enough to uproot it. Bark and wood and dirt exploded outward. The Nomu's massive frame lay in the wreckage, its weapon-arms twitching, chainsaws still spinning against nothing.

Awase stopped. Turned.

Manga Fukidashi stood where the Nomu had been.

Both feet planted. Both legs coiled from the dropkick's extension, still in the landing recovery. His casual clothes were torn and scorched, burns visible across his chest and left shoulder. Blue-white energy crackled across his skin in arcs that jumped between his forearms and the air around him. His bubble was blank.

"Manga!" Awase gasped.

Manga glanced at him. Then at Momo over his shoulder. Then at the Nomu, which was already getting up.

"Get her out of here." Manga said. His voice was raw. Scraped. It sounded like he'd been gargling gravel.

"But..."

"I can't protect you both, man." He explained.

It was enormous. Standing upright, it was almost three meters tall, its torso a slab of grey-black muscle wider than a refrigerator. The weapon-arms fanned out from its shoulders and sides like the spokes of a nightmare wheel, chainsaws and drills and hammers retracting and extending in twitching mechanical rhythms. Its head, small and eyeless compared to the mass beneath it, sat on a thick neck that was level with the tops of the shorter trees.

Manga's head barely reached its navel.

It locked onto him. No intelligence behind those empty eyes. Just the biological directive to kill anything in its sight.

Manga ran at it.

The Nomu swung first. A chainsaw-arm, spinning at full RPM, sweeping at head height. Manga dropped into a slide. The forest floor was soft with mulch and ash, and his momentum carried him between the Nomu's legs, the spinning blade passing through the space his head had occupied a quarter second earlier. He came out behind it and drove his heel into the back of its knee.

The joint buckled. Just barely. The Nomu stumbled forward half a step before catching itself. It spun, faster than something that big should have been able to move, and a hammer-arm came down from above like a falling anvil.

Manga rolled left. The hammer cratered the ground where he'd been, throwing dirt and rocks outward. He popped to his feet and threw a running kick into the outside of the Nomu's ankle. Bone and sinew absorbed the impact, but the leg shifted.

He couldn't reach the thing's head. Couldn't reach its chest. Standing in front of this monster, his hardest punch would connect with its upper thigh. Every vital target that would end a fight against a person was somewhere above him in the smoke.

But Manga knew how to fight bigger opponents. You didn't fight on their level. You brought them down to yours.

The drill-arm jabbed at him from above. He sidestepped, felt the wind off the spinning bit on the surface of his bubble, and threw a strong low kick and the leg folded inward. The Nomu's stance widened. Its balance wobbled.

It swung three arms at once. Chainsaw from the left, hammer from the right, drill straight down. A cage of whirring metal closing around the space Manga occupied.

He wasn't there.

He'd already moved. Forward, ducking under the chainsaw's arc and pressing himself flat against the Nomu's shin. For a half second he was so close to the thing that none of the weapon-arms could reach him. They were designed for targets at range, not for something clinging to the creature's own leg.

He wrapped both arms around the Nomu's ankle and pulled.

The Nomu's foot came up off the ground. Its weight shifted backward. Its arms windmilled, chainsaws carving smoking arcs through the air, and for one breathless instant the entire massive creature teetered on one leg.

It caught itself. Slammed the foot back down. A hammer-arm came around in a short arc aimed at the thing stuck to its ankle.

Manga let go and rolled clear. The hammer hit the Nomu's own shin. The creature didn't react.

He circled. Fast. The Nomu turned to track him, but its bulk worked against it. Each rotation was a full-body commitment, all those weapon-arms swinging wide, and Manga was inside the turning radius, darting in and out, hitting the same knee, the same ankle, the same tendon. Three times. Five times. Eight.

The right leg was stiffening. The Nomu's gait was changing, favoring the undamaged side, its turns getting slower.

A chainsaw-arm clipped a burning tree and redirected toward Manga's ribs. He twisted but not enough. The spinning chain caught the fabric of his shirt and shredded it, the teeth kissing the skin beneath. A hot line of pain across his side.

Manga backed up. Circled. Hit the knee again.

The Nomu dropped to one knee, the damaged joint finally failing under its massive bio-engineered weight. Its body lurched forward. The weapon-arms caught the ground to stabilize, chainsaws chewing into roots, drills punching into dirt. Its head dipped.

Its head was at Manga's chest height.

Manga shot forward.

He threw a running lariat. His entire forearm, flexed hard, crashed across the Nomu's throat at full sprint. The impact snapped its head backward, its body folding over the clothesline, and its grip on the ground loosened. It rocked. Almost went over.

Its arms caught it again. It started pushing back up.

Manga lunged into the opening and grabbed the back of its head. His fingers locked around the base of its skull, and he dropped. Straight down, using his full body weight to yank the Nomu's head toward the earth, gravity and Bari-bari and months of training all channeled into one downward pull.

The Nomu's face hit the dirt like a piledriver striking bedrock. The impact cratered the ground. Its body folded over its own neck, legs coming up and over before crashing back down. The weapon-arms went limp for a fraction of a second, then started twitching, reaching, the chainsaws spinning back up.

Manga stomped on the back of its head. Drove it deeper into the crater. The Nomu's arms reached backward, and the joints bent further than they should have, further than any natural skeleton would allow. A drill-arm folded at the shoulder and jabbed backward, the spinning bit missing Manga's thigh by an inch.

He couldn't stay on top of this thing. The arms could still reach him.

He backed off. The Nomu peeled itself out of the crater and stood again. Slower now. The right leg was barely functional, buckling with every step, but it was standing. Still coming.

This thing didn't stop. It didn't process pain the way a person did. It didn't flinch and didn't hesitate. It just kept coming. And eventually one of those weapon-arms would find something that wasn't shirt fabric.

"MANGA!" Awase's voice. From behind. Close.

He'd told the dude to run.

Manga didn't turn. Couldn't turn. The Nomu was already swinging again. Hammer-arm from the right, chainsaw from the left, a scissoring attack that would have cut him in half at the waist if he hadn't dropped flat and rolled between the Nomu's legs. He came up behind it and kicked the bad knee hard enough to buckle it again.

He used the two seconds of space to look back.

Awase was there. Momo was propped against a tree thirty meters back, her head wound dark in the firelight. Awase was running toward Manga with his fists up and his teeth gritted.

"What the hell are you doing?!" Manga's voice cracked. Even those few words cost him.

"Class B sticks together." Awase said it like it was the simplest thing in the world. "No matter what."

The Nomu turned. Locked onto both of them. Charged.

Manga met it. He vaulted off the monster's buckled joint, using it as a springboard to drive his own knee under its jaw. The impact sent the Nomu crashing backward into the dirt. It scrambled right back up, mindless and relentless, but the right leg was finally dead. It couldn't charge anymore. It could only drag the ruined limb behind it in a lurching, unnatural hobble.

Awase threw a rock at the Nomu's head. It bounced off like a pebble off a truck. But it turned. Looked at Awase. Started toward him.

Manga threw himself between them. He shoved Awase backward and backpedaled with him, keeping his body between the welding kid and killing machine. The Nomu followed, but the bad leg was barely holding. Each step was a lurching half-fall that bought them seconds.

He couldn't put this thing down with his fists. Not anytime soon. He needed something that didn't care about durability.

He needed to use one of the words he'd hoped to never use on someone.

"Listen to me." Manga's voice was quiet. "I have one more thing that can deal with that, but I can't hold it and fight at the same time. I need you to deliver it."

"What?"

"I'm going to create a word. Do not touch it with your bare hands. Don't let it touch your skin. If you do, it will break every bone in your body."

Awase's face went pale.

"When I give it to you, weld it to that thing's body. Anywhere. Chest, back, arm, leg, doesn't matter. Just make contact and weld. Once it's bonded, it'll activate."

"How do I hold it without touching it?"

From thirty meters away, something slid across the dirt toward them. A pair of gloves. Thick rubber. Industrial grade.

They both looked.

Momo was conscious. Barely. One eye open, the other matted shut with blood. She was leaning against the tree with one hand pressed to her head wound and the other extended from creating the gloves. She'd been listening.

"Go..." she said. Her voice was a whisper.

Awase grabbed the gloves. Pulled them on.

The Nomu was coming. Trees snapping in its path. Forty meters. Thirty.

"Boki-boki."

The word left Manga's mouth and blood followed. His throat spasmed. The vocal cords that had been raw and swollen contracted around syllables that felt like swallowing broken glass. But the characters formed. Bright, sharp, violent little symbols that hung in the air for a half second before solidifying into a physical object in his hand.

It was small. The size of a fist. The characters for "snapping" and "cracking" pulsed across its surface like a heartbeat.

Manga held it out. Awase took it in his gloved hands.

"Only when I make the opening," Manga said. "Move in and stick it."

Twenty meters.

Manga stood up. Blood still dripping from his bubble. Energy still crackling across his skin, dimmer now, his body feeling the strain of running at maximum output.

He ran at the Nomu.

It swung the chainsaw. Manga ducked under the arc and kept going, sprinting past the creature's hip, letting its own rotation carry the weapon-arm wide. He came around behind it and drove a running kick into the back of the destroyed knee.

The joint that had been barely holding finally gave. The right leg folded completely. The left knee hit the dirt a half second later as the Nomu's weight shifted too fast to compensate. Both knees down. Its massive body pitched forward, the weapon-arms catching the ground, chainsaws and drills chewing earth.

Manga was already climbing.

He vaulted onto the Nomu's back, using its bent posture like a ramp, scrambling up between the weapon-arm mounts. The arms reached for him. A chainsaw folded backward. A drill swiveled. But he was faster, and for the one second it took him to reach the neck, the arms were a half-beat behind.

He locked in the front facelock. Both arms around the Nomu's head, chin trapped in the crook of his elbow. He threw his legs forward off the Nomu's back and dropped.

The slam drove the Nomu's skull into the earth. The ground exploded. Dirt, rocks, root fragments sprayed outward. The Nomu's body slammed flat, chest-first, the weapon-arms splaying limp for a critical two seconds.

Face down. Arms out. Back exposed.

"NOW!"

Awase was already moving.

He closed the distance in three steps. The gloved hands holding the Boki-boki pressed against the Nomu's exposed back. His quirk activated on contact. Weld bonded the onomatopoeia to the Nomu's body at the atomic level. The characters sank into its flesh like a brand being pressed into hide, merging with the tissue, becoming part of the thing it was about to destroy.

Awase threw himself backward.

A weapon-arm twitched. Started to rise.

The Boki-boki activated.

The sound was unlike anything either of them had ever heard. A chorus of snapping and cracks. Hundreds, happening simultaneously, overlapping into a single grinding, percussive noise that lasted less than a second and contained the sound of every bone in the Nomu's body breaking at the same time.

Its spine started first. The vertebrae fractured in sequence from the base of the skull to the tailbone, each one snapping like a green stick, the connective tissue between them tearing. Then the ribs. Then the arms. Then the legs. Every joint, every long bone, every plate and process and ossified surface in its body shattered simultaneously under the force of a word that meant "multiple snapping."

The Nomu didn't scream. It didn't have brainpower to comprehend what was happening to it. Its body simply collapsed. The weapon-arms went still. The chainsaws stopped. The drills stopped. The hammer-arms hung limp at angles that bones didn't allow, because there were no bones left to allow or disallow anything.

It hit the dirt like a bag of wet sand. A pile of meat and skin and lifeless weapon attachments arranged in a shape that used to be bipedal and was now just... a heap.

The forest went quiet.

Manga stood over it. Breathing hard. The crackling energy across his skin had dimmed to a faint shimmer. Blood still tracked down his bubble. His hands were shaking.

Awase stood five meters away with the empty gloves still on his hands, staring at what they'd done.

"What..." Awase swallowed. "What was that word?"

"Something I never wanted to use..." Manga said. "Please keep it a secret for me. I don't want to scare the others."

He looked at the Nomu. That was definitely the kind of word you kept locked away. Because if people knew you could do that with two syllables and a handshake, they'd stop seeing a hero and start seeing something else.

"Let's get the girl that lost to Kendo to safety." Manga said. He forgot her name.

They went back for Momo. Awase lifted her onto his shoulder again. She was still conscious, barely, her one open eye tracking Manga as he walked beside them through the burning forest. He was limping now. The adrenaline was fading and the burns and the chest impact and the raw throat were all checking in at once.

"Fukidashi..." she said. Her voice was a whisper.

He looked at her.

"Thank you."

He gave her a smile and a faint, tired thumbs-up emoji that lasted two seconds before fading back to white.

They walked toward the lodge.

…

The real villains were gone.

Nobody saw them leave. The forest emptied of everything except fire and smoke and injured children. Somewhere in the darkness, the actual members of the Vanguard Action Squad slipped out of the Beast's Forest and vanished into a country that would be looking for them by morning.

At the lodge, Aizawa held the area. Students trickled back in ones and twos and threes, some walking, some being carried, some being dragged. His eyes scanned each one. Counting.

Vlad King went into the forest.

He found them scattered across a kilometer of burned and gassed woodland. Some were alone. Some were with classmates from the wrong class, 1-A and 1-B mixed together in the way that hadn't happened on this trip until now.

Setsuna found Manga at the eastern edge of the forest.

He was sitting on the ground with his back against a tree. His clothes were destroyed. Burns across his chest, his left shoulder, his forearms. His right hand was swollen and purple where a bone might be fractured. His bubble formed a small smile emoji when he saw that she was safe.

He was breathing in short, shallow gasps. His body had been pushed beyond its limits and was now handling the damage.

She sat down next to him.

Shoulder to shoulder. Close enough that he could feel her warmth and she could feel his, and for a long moment neither of them said anything because there was nothing to say that the proximity didn't already communicate.

"You're an idiot for letting some chumps hurt you this badly..." She said finally.

He weakly chuckled.

"You went looking for fights. In a forest full of villains. With your throat already damaged from training. You could have hidden. You could have gone back to the lodge. You could have done the smart thing and let the pros handle it." She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the burning treeline. "But you didn't. Because you're the coolest, most heroic, most worrisome bastard alive and you couldn't just sit still while people were in danger."

He just smiled.

She leaned her head against his shoulder.

"Don't do it without me next time or I’ll kill you."

His left hand, the one that still worked, found hers.

They sat there while the forest burned down around them.

Fifteen minutes after the last of the fighting ended, rescue workers and firefighters arrived at the Beast's Forest.

Out of the thirty-nine students who'd been attacked, fifteen were in critical condition thanks to the gas that a single villain had flooded through the woods. Eleven had other injuries of varying degree, from burns to lacerations to broken bones. Thirteen got off without a scratch.

None were missing.

Of the six pros on site, one, the cat-themed hero Pixie-Bob, had suffered a serious head injury in the opening minutes of the assault. Another, the search specialist Ragdoll, couldn't be found. Her last known position turned up nothing but a massive bloodstain soaked into the dirt.

On the other side, three of the villains were arrested at the scene. A muscle-augmenting brute who'd been taken down on the far cliff by a Class A student. A blade-toothed convict wrapped in vines. A gas-generating boy who'd been knocked out by a steel fist.

The Nomu was recovered at a secondary site. Its body was intact. Every bone inside it was powder.

But besides those, the remaining villains vanished without a trace.

The summer training camp everyone had been looking forward to ended in the worst imaginable way.