Chapter 64: The Mirror, the Core, and the Awakening
The toxic rain hammered the ruined steps of the National Diet Building, washing away the remnants of the crimson Ideo-Trigger gas.
Izuku Midoriya and Katsuki Bakugo stood at the base of the grand staircase, their bodies aching from the residual strain of the near-overload, but their minds had never been clearer. Above them, hovering in the storm, Hawks provided aerial overwatch, while Lady Nagant's sniper laser cut through the dark from a distant rooftop.
Standing at the top of the stairs, completely unbothered by the rain, was Flect Turn.
"Your survival is an anomaly," the Humarise leader stated, his blue skin pale in the lightning. "But it changes nothing. You cannot touch me. The disease cannot harm the cure."
Bakugo didn't waste time talking. He blasted forward, launching himself up the stairs with a rapid sequence of explosions. "DIE!" he roared, swinging a devastating right hook aimed squarely at Flect Turn's jaw.
CLANG!
Bakugo's fist never connected. Millimeters from Flect Turn's skin, an invisible, conceptual barrier flared. The sheer kinetic force of Bakugo's swing, along with the explosive heat of his sweat, was instantaneously and flawlessly reflected.
Bakugo was violently thrown backward, hit by the exact force of his own attack. He crashed into a marble pillar, cracking the stone.
"Kacchan!" Midoriya yelled, rocketing forward at 20% Full Cowling. He didn't punch; he unleashed a sweeping kick, attempting to knock Flect Turn off his feet.
The result was identical. Midoriya's leg struck the invisible barrier, and the kinetic energy rebounded perfectly. Midoriya was launched into the flooded street, his leg throbbing with the force of his own kick.
Flect Turn didn't even shift his stance. "My Reflection is absolute. Kinetic energy, thermal energy, Quirks of all classifications—if it possesses an outward force, it is returned to the sender. You are fighting yourselves."
High on the radio tower, Lady Nagant narrowed her eyes. She fired a high-caliber armor-piercing round directly at Flect Turn's chest. The bullet hit the barrier, reversed its trajectory flawlessly, and shot back up into the sky, narrowly missing Hawks.
"He's right!" Hawks called out over the comms, banking sharply. "It's an automatic, omnidirectional reflection! We can't break it with blunt force!"
Bakugo pushed himself out of the rubble, wiping a trickle of blood from his chin. His crimson eyes locked onto Flect Turn's calm, arrogant face.
You are letting the fire dictate the vessel, Katsuki, the Sovereign's voice echoed in Bakugo's mind, a vivid memory from the Vestige Realm. Compress it. Do not let it bleed out of you. Pull the heat inward.
Bakugo looked at his palms. Usually, his explosions expanded outward—a massive, concussive wave of heat and force. And an expanding wave was easily caught and reflected by a broad barrier.
"Deku," Bakugo growled, his voice dangerously low. "The blue bastard reflects expanding energy. He uses a broad shield to catch the blast radius. So we don't give him a radius."
Midoriya stood up, the green lightning humming. He understood instantly. "You need a distraction to set the focal point."
"I need exactly one second," Bakugo confirmed.
Midoriya moved. He didn't attack Flect Turn directly. He used Blackwhip to grab the massive, shattered chunks of marble pillars around the staircase. He hurled them at the cult leader from every conceivable angle in a chaotic, sprawling barrage of debris.
Flect Turn sighed, his Reflection flaring continuously to repel the boulders. "Childish."
But behind the debris, Bakugo had already closed the distance.
He didn't wind up a massive punch. He brought his hands together, forming a tight cylinder with his palms, leaving only a microscopic, pinpoint opening. He recalled the terrifying mental pressure of the Sovereign's domain. He didn't let the nitroglycerin sweat ignite instantly. He held it. He compressed it.
The heat inside his palms built to catastrophic, agonizing levels. The light bleeding through his fingers wasn't orange; it was a blinding, incandescent white.
"What are you doing?" Flect Turn frowned, noticing the strange, lack of explosive noise.
"A.P. SHOT: SINGULARITY CORE!"
Bakugo released the pressure. It wasn't an explosion. It was a hyper-condensed, molecule-wide beam of absolute, superheated plasma.
The beam struck Flect Turn's Reflection barrier. Because the attack possessed zero blast radius and unimaginable, concentrated thermal density, the barrier couldn't cleanly "catch" the outward force to repel it. The plasma beam acted like a diamond-tipped drill against glass.
The invisible barrier shrieked, glowing a violent purple as it struggled to reflect the infinite pinpoint pressure.
CRACK.
For the first time in his life, Flect Turn's absolute defense shattered.
The plasma beam pierced the barrier, searing a clean hole directly through the cult leader's right shoulder. Flect Turn screamed in sheer, unadulterated shock, his concentration breaking entirely.
"Now, Deku!" Bakugo roared, his hands smoking.
Midoriya bypassed the shattered barrier in a blur of green lightning. He drove a 20% Detroit Smash directly into Flect Turn's solar plexus. The cult leader folded in half, his eyes rolling back as he was launched off the steps and crashed into the flooded courtyard, completely unconscious.
"Target down," Hawks confirmed, swooping down to bind the cult leader. "Go! Nagant and I will hold the perimeter! Find the vat!"
Midoriya and Bakugo didn't wait. They sprinted up the grand staircase and burst through the heavy oak doors of the Diet Building.
The interior of the building was a hollowed-out cavern of dark marble and shadows. Following the tactical telemetry provided by the Astral Nexus, the two heroes navigated the labyrinthine corridors, descending deep into the subterranean archives.
The air grew thick, smelling of ozone, formaldehyde, and the unmistakable, metallic tang of blood.
They reached the heavy titanium blast doors of the lowest sub-basement. Bakugo placed his palms flat against the metal, using a concentrated blast to melt the locking mechanism. Midoriya kicked the doors open.
They burst into the subterranean laboratory.
It was a chaotic nightmare of severed cables and sparking supercomputers. But in the center of the room, illuminated by a sickly, pulsing green light, was the massive life-support vat.
"We found it," Midoriya breathed, pulling his arm back, preparing to smash the glass.
But something was wrong.
The bio-luminescent fluid inside the vat wasn't calming. It was boiling. The chaotic battle on the surface, combined with Lady Nagant's conceptual bullet severing All For One's astral connection earlier, had caused the life-support machinery to catastrophically malfunction. The integration process hadn't stopped; it had been violently, artificially accelerated.
A digital monitor on the side of the vat flashed in frantic red numbers.
INTEGRATION: 85%... WARNING: CELLULAR INSTABILITY DETECTED.
"Deku, the glass!" Bakugo yelled, realizing the fluid was turning black.
Before Midoriya could throw his punch, the massive, reinforced glass of the vat didn't just break—it exploded outward with the force of a bomb.
Thousands of gallons of boiling, black-tainted fluid washed across the laboratory floor. Midoriya and Bakugo shielded their faces from the flying glass.
The thick steam slowly cleared.
Standing in the wreckage of the shattered cradle was Tomura Shigaraki.
He was horrific. The 85% integration had pushed his body past the limits of human biology. His physical form was massively muscular, but it was actively tearing itself apart. Thick, black blood poured from jagged, weeping fissures across his chest and face. His white hair was matted to his skull.
He looked up. His eyes were devoid of pupils, glowing with a hollow, absolute white void.
The sheer, apocalyptic pressure radiating from his body was suffocating. It felt as though gravity itself had doubled in the room.
"You..." Shigaraki's voice was a demonic, multi-layered rasp that vibrated in the marrow of their bones. "...you broke my master's tether. You stole my sky."
"Die!" Bakugo roared, launching a massive explosion directly at the villain's face.
Shigaraki didn't dodge. He simply raised a hand. A massive, concussive shockwave of Air Cannon erupted from his palm, instantly snuffing out Bakugo's explosion and throwing the explosive hero violently backward into a server rack.
"Kacchan!" Midoriya yelled, extending his Blackwhip to bind Shigaraki's arms.
Shigaraki caught the dark tendrils with his bare hands. He didn't decay them. With terrifying, raw physical strength that rivaled All Might in his prime, Shigaraki yanked the tendrils, pulling Midoriya toward him at blinding speed.
Shigaraki's other hand, all five fingers extended, reached for Midoriya's face.
Danger Sense violently stabbed Midoriya's brain. It wasn't a warning; it was a screaming, blinding klaxon of absolute death.
Midoriya canceled the Blackwhip instantly, dropping to the floor and sliding under Shigaraki's lethal grasp. He unleashed a 20% St. Louis Smash directly into Shigaraki's knee.
The villain's leg fractured, the bone snapping backward. But in less than a second, the hyper-regeneration violently snapped the bone back into place, sealing the flesh.
"You are too slow, little hero," Shigaraki whispered, looking down at Midoriya.
Shigaraki slammed his foot into the floor.
The gray wave of Decay erupted outward. Without the Sovereign's domain to shield them, the decay was absolute. The concrete floor, the supercomputers, and the steel walls instantly turned to ash.
"Move!" Bakugo roared, grabbing Midoriya by the collar and blasting them both backward toward the shattered blast doors.
The decay chased them, chewing through the corridor as they desperately retreated. They realized with horrifying clarity that this was not a fight they could win. They were in the dark, unbuffed, facing an awakened god of destruction who could erase them with a single touch.
"Hawks! Nagant! We have to abort!" Midoriya screamed into the comms, watching the corridor turn to dust behind them. "The King is awake! Retreat to the pinhole!"
The decapitation strike had failed. The Emperor of Decay had opened his eyes, and the final stage of the apocalypse had officially begun.