….
Everything happened so fast that nobody moved for a full second.
Nine, and Slice - all of them frozen, staring at the small blonde girl sitting in a pile of oversized clothes where a teenage villain had been standing a moment ago.
Rumi broke first, turning to Eri - her daughter lay on the ground, horn already shrinking, the golden light fading from her eyes, unconscious after exhausting everything she had.
She took one step toward her, but just then the doors burst open.
Aizawa came through first, capture scarf already deployed, goggles down, eyes blazing red.
Behind him - Present Mic, vocal cords already vibrating with a stored scream, and Vlad King, blood already drawn and hovering around his fists in hardened crimson gauntlets.
Reinforcements arrived finally.
Aizawa's eyes swept the room in a single pass - the destroyed walls, unconscious Eri, and a small blonde child in the pile of clothes, Rumi bleeding and barely standing, Nine near the balcony, Slice in the hallway, Chimera and Mummy down.
His quirk activated, Erasure, snuffing out every ability in his line of sight as Slice's hair fell limp across the floor, the energy in Nine's hands died, and the pressure in the room eased.
He was a fraction too late for Eri, since rewind had already completed, but everything else was locked down.
"Mic and Kan." Aizawa didn't raise his voice. "Lock down the hallway. We've got three hostiles down: mutant-type, bandage-type, and hair-type. Move in and secure them, restraints on, fast."
"ON IT!" Present Mic's voice thundered through the apartment, pure volume without his quirk, as he moved in on Chimera's unconscious body.
Vlad King went for Mummy and Slice without a word, blood hardening into restraints as he moved.
Nine assessed the situation in about two seconds….
Kurogiri was supposed to get them out of here right now but he isn't responding.
His front-line fighters were down - Chimera unconscious with cracked ribs and a collapsed airway, Mummy out cold with a broken jaw, Slice's quirk erased.
Toga was a four-year-old sitting on the floor.
His life-support system was compromised, one indicator dark and his breathing growing labored.
He could still fight, with abilities that functioned even under Erasure - raw physical strength and the accumulated enhancements his body had absorbed over the years.
But the Rabbit Hero was still standing, Eraserhead's eyes were on him, and two more heroes were in the room.
The math was done - He needed to leave immediately or else his people would have to…
He didn't get to finish the thought.
….
Rumi reached Eri first, dropping to her knees as her hands moved over her daughter's body, checking for wounds, for blood, for any sign of damage. She found none.
"Thank God… Thank God you are okay, baby." Rumi said, her voice hoarse. "I am sorry… Mama couldn't do better. I am so sorry."
Not a single scratch, the rewind had been directed outward, not inward, leaving Eri unconscious but whole as a breath finally escaped Rumi, sharp and unsteady, before she looked at Aizawa.
He was already there, crouching beside her, then Rumi transferred Eri into his arms carefully, the way you hand someone the most important thing in the world.
Aizawa moved in without hesitation, conducting a methodical check. She lay limp but breathing evenly, the horn already receded to its normal size.
Carefully, he also lifted the small blonde girl. She weighed almost nothing in his arms, her body slack with unconsciousness, swallowed in clothes far too large for her.
His eyes returned to Eri for a moment, scanning once more for any missed injury. Finding none, he let out a slow breath through his nose, some of the tension finally easing.
He didn't want to imagine what Dabi would do if anything had happened to her, the thought alone made him hold the girl a little more carefully.
Rumi rose to her feet, and something in the room shifted - nothing visible or measurable, yet impossible to ignore.
Aizawa sensed it, Present Mic stilled, even Vlad King paused mid-restraint as it passed through him.
Then Rumi turned toward Nine.
She wasn't shaking anymore, the frantic urgency of a mother protecting her child gone, replaced by something quieter, and far more dangerous.
Her one good eye fixed on Nine with the flat, focused intensity of a predator that has confirmed its young is safe and is now free to do what predators do.
Nine saw it too, raised both hands as a force of habit, an instinct to use quirks that Erasure had already shut down - and then realized they were dead.
…and it didn't work - no Air Wall, Bullet Laser, or weather manipulation.
Rumi closed the distance in a single bound and drove a full-force kick into his face, with no restraint, regard for the building or his skull. Nine blasted through the wall, tearing past plaster and rebar into open air, slamming into the courtyard below, bouncing twice before skidding to a stop near a zelkova tree.
The trunk split under the shockwave.
Rumi followed without pause, dropping a story and striking hard enough to fracture the stone beneath her feet.
She could have stayed inside as she knew his quirk, weather manipulation with lightning and wind, and that outdoors was his territory.
Still, she stepped out and gave him the advantage without caring.
She did not want a careful, tactical win or to wait for backup and play it smart. All she cared about was beating him into the ground herself.
Nine pulled himself up, and as he moved out of Aizawa's line of sight, his quirks returned, static crackling across his shoulders.
The sky above the courtyard darkened as clouds swirled in from nothing, lightning flickering through the sudden overcast.
"You should have stayed inside." Nine said, blood running from his nose and a split across his forehead, his mask cracked and one regulator no longer cycling. "Out here, I have–"
Rumi kicked again as Nine tried to block, an [Air Wall] forming between them that she drove through, her heel smashing into his raised forearms and sending him sliding backward across the courtyard, his boots carving grooves in the stone.
He hurled lightning, a jagged bolt ripping from the swirling clouds above and striking toward her center mass.
She twisted midair, felt the charge pass close enough to raise every hair on her body, and came down on him with a dropping axe kick that cratered the stone where he had been standing.
He had dodged barely by rolling to the side, firing twin Bullet Lasers from his palms.
One struck her across the forearm, but she neither flinched nor slowed, closing the distance in the next breath and driving a knee into his ribs, feeling something give on impact, then his corset cracked, and another indicator went dark.
Nine unleashed a gale-force blast that would have sent a normal person tumbling across the courtyard, but Rumi leaned into it, legs braced, and pushed through, her feet tearing furrows in the stone without losing ground.
"Wha-" Nine wheezed, blood in his mouth.
She answered with a spinning kick to his jaw that sent him airborne, his body slamming into a zelkova tree hard enough to split it in half.
She was on him before he hit the ground, meeting him midair and driving both heels into his chest, and when he crashed down, the impact cracked the ground in a spiderweb pattern that spread fifteen feet in every direction.
Inside the apartment, Present Mic and Vlad King finished restraining the last of Nine's team.
Chimera lay unconscious, bound in hardened blood, Mummy was wrapped in his own bandages, his jaw wired shut with a strip of capture scarf and Slice was face-down on the floor, her wrists locked behind her back.
Aizawa stood near the shattered wall, holding Eri against one shoulder and the small blonde girl against the other - Both were sleeping peacefully.
He looked out through the hole in the wall at the courtyard below and Rumi had Nine on the ground.
She was hitting him methodically and systematically, with a focused fury that no longer ran on adrenaline but on something colder.
Nine's lightning struck the courtyard twice more, trees splintered, stone exploded and scorch marks spread across the grounds like black veins.
Rumi took a bolt across her back, kept hitting him.
He threw an Air Wall into her stomach from point-blank range and she doubled over for half a second and then straightened and kicked him so hard he left a trench in the courtyard stone.
Present Mic came up beside Aizawa and looked out at the destruction.
"So..." He watched Rumi drive Nine into the ground hard enough to send a shockwave rippling across the courtyard. "Who's gonna stop her?"
Nobody answered as all three of them just watched in silence - it was clear they had no intention to interfere.
Out in the courtyard, Rumi kicked Nine through a stone bench that ceased to exist, and when he tried to stand, she put him back down. He tried to call lightning, but she closed the distance before it formed and hit him hard enough to scatter the clouds he had been gathering.
"Cementoss is going to have a rough week." Vlad King said, looking at the craters.
The fight ended about two minutes later, not because Nine surrendered but because his body finally gave out. His life support system failed with every indicator going dark, the regulators falling silent, and his mask cracked open on one side, while his stolen quirks guttered out one by one as his body lost the capacity to sustain them.
In the end, he was just a man on the ground, bleeding, broken, the white hair matted dark with blood.
Rumi stood over him, breathing hard, one eye swollen shut, her left arm hanging wrong, burns across her back and forearm, and blood from a dozen cuts drying on her skin. She looked down at him and wanted to keep going, every part of her still demanding it.
He had come into her home and put his people's hands on her daughter, standing in her living room and speaking of Eri's quirk as something to be harvested. But Eri was safe, asleep in Aizawa's arms without a scratch on her.
Rumi turned away and walked back toward the building, slow and limping on her burned leg, her good arm hanging at her side, and she did not look back at Nine.
….
Aizawa stood at the edge of the ruined balcony and looked out over the courtyard.
Emergency lights strobed across the campus, more heroes would be arriving soon - recovery teams, medical, administration.
Eri was still in his arms and the small blonde girl was tucked into his capture scarf, bundled up like a sleeping bag, resting against his other shoulder.
Toga, or at least what Toga had become.
A four-year-old, maybe less, her golden eyes closed, small hands clutching the hem of the scarf like a blanket.
Her face was round and soft and completely empty of everything that had made Himiko Toga dangerous.
Aizawa studied her for a long, quiet moment.
Then he adjusted the scarf around her shoulders, made sure she was warm and the fabric wasn't bunched under her chin.
Present Mic walked over, he looked at the blonde girl, then at Eri and Aizawa.
"She okay?" He meant Eri.
"Yeah…" Aizawa said.
"And that one?" Mic nodded at the blonde girl.
"Same, exhausted maybe. She will sleep for a while."
Present Mic looked at Eri again and the dried tear tracks on her face.
His expression shifted as several things moved behind his eyes - pride, grief, anger, all of them fighting for space.
And then he turned away and walked toward the far end of the balcony to check the perimeter, because he kept looking at the four-year-old girl who had just turned her own curse into a weapon to save her mother.
He was going to start yelling at something, and the building really couldn't take any more of that tonight.
Shota Aizawa watched her go, then looked back out at the courtyard, the destroyed trees and shattered stone, and the man lying motionless at the center of it all.
Rumi, a mother, was making her way back up to the apartment.
He could hear her footsteps on the stairs - uneven, heavy on one side, but steadily coming back home.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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