Author's Note: Hey everyone! Just dropping by to ask what you all thought of this chapter. For now, I'm leaving it as a draft, but if you guys like it, it'll become permanent (though I might still tweak a few things if needed). Either way, thank you so very much for your continuous support for this story!
By the way, I doubt I'll be able to drop any new chapters next week since I have college finals. I'm a Computer Science Engineering student, in case anyone was curious, so I'm going to be in full-time study mode! That aside, please keep supporting and commenting on the story—I absolutely love reading everything you write!
Let's continue:
I had always wondered what exactly that "ceaseless wheel" was that the Lich talked so much about in the show. Now that I am him, I finally understand it in all its twisted magnitude.
I stopped dead in my tracks, standing directly on the surface of the water. The ocean churned beneath my feet, yet I remained motionless. The reason I was in this predicament was obvious: planes had completely stopped flying across international airspace due to the bomb threat, leaving me with no choice but to travel by water to reach my destination.
I closed my eyes for a moment, letting the waves lap against my legs as I recalled that wheel. A wheel so magnificent, perfect, and terrifying all at once. It is the wheel of creation, the wheel of life, death, incarnation, and harmony—a cosmic gear kept in perfect synchronization. I, as the Lich, am the personification of death and the reincarnation of that very force. However, I am not naive. I know perfectly well that out there, something stronger than me truly exists... there is always something stronger than me in the fabric of the universe. But that is precisely why I am preparing, optimizing every single shred of my being for what is to come.
I opened my eyes. I shed my false human guise and allowed my true essence to flow. The water around me instantly began to boil as my skeletal skull was fully exposed, crowned and surrounded by that dense green fire dancing violently over the raging sea. Steam clouded my vision, but my spectral voice echoed with the strength of an ancient abyss.
"—Life is but fuel for the grand design..." I began to recite, extending my bony hands toward the horizon, initiating the ancestral incantations that bound death to the flesh of this world. "—Exmoriar, exorior, rictus et cinis. O rota infatigabilis, carnem vellere, spiritum vertere. I am the beginning of the end, the molder of fallen clay. Let the flesh die so the essence may return to the source, and let the wheel turn once more under my command. Revertere ad nihilum, renasci in caote..."
I chanted these spells mostly because I was maximizing my power, adapting the Lich's magic to this new environment. However, as the cursed words poured from my mouth, I felt a gaze. A gaze completely different from any I had ever experienced before. It wasn't the scrutiny of a military satellite or a hero's distant hatred. It was something... superior.
"—What is this?..." I muttered, cutting off the mystical incantation dead in its tracks.
I looked all around, floating atop the rough waters. I was genuinely confused, as my magical senses detected no living presence for miles. The radar was completely clear. Until it happened.
My mind went completely paralyzed, frozen in time. A fleeting yet devastating projection manifested directly within my psyche. It was incredibly fast—a cosmic blink—but the sheer force behind that image made me tremble from head to toe. The primal terror that consumed me was so intense that my legs gave out, forcing me almost by instinct to bow in absolute submission.
Four piercing red eyes. Glasses.
It was only a split-second flash, but that gaze... the cold, infinite superiority with which it stared down at me chilled me to the bone.
I fell to my knees right on the surface of the water, sinking only a few centimeters as I breathed heavily, utterly derailed and confused. The green fire on my skull flickered, weakening from the shock.
"Golb?" I thought, my mystical heart racing a mile a minute. "Why would he look at me here? Wait... did he have glasses? What if it wasn't him directly, but Betty? Golb-Betty?"
My mind was spinning at full speed, trying to process the implications of the deity of absolute chaos from Adventure Time setting its sights on this universe of heroes. Slowly, the heavy breathing of my vessel and the wild energy of the Lich began to calm down in a slow, forced manner.
I remained in absolute silence in the middle of the ocean, hearing nothing but the crashing of the waves, breathing over and over until I finally managed to regain a bit of control and compose myself.
"—What the hell was that?..." I whispered to myself, staring into the void with a new, unsettling certainty: the game had just gotten much bigger and far more dangerous than I ever imagined.
POV Change
On the other side of the ocean, at a restricted-access military base on the coast of Jersey City, the atmosphere was no less suffocating than in the bunkers of Japan. The sky over the Atlantic was a leaden gray, and the water near the docks gleamed with that persistent, unnatural green mist.
Cathleen Bate, known globally as Star and Stripe, stood on a floating metal platform, surrounded by dozens of U.S. Navy scientists protected in state-of-the-art NBC bio-containment suits. The area's radiation meters and reactors beeped endlessly in a chaotic, stressful hum. The government's conventional methods—chemical absorption agents, mass iodine, particulate filters—had utterly failed for days. The energy wasn't dissipating; it was simply eating through human technology.
"—The levels are still holding steady, Star," the lead scientist warned over the comms, his voice shaking from exhaustion. "If that mass of mystical energy reaches the main aquifer, cellular mutation along the East Coast will be irreversible. It's time for direct experimentation with your Quirk."
Cathleen clenched her fists, her imposing figure silhouetted against the toxic haze. She was deeply frustrated; the President of the United States had explicitly forbidden her from traveling to Japan to aid her mentor, All Might, under the excuse that "America must protect its own borders first."
"—Fine. We do it my way," Star declared firmly, stepping directly to the edge of the platform.
To clear an anomaly that defied the laws of physics, Cathleen knew theoretical guesswork was useless. She had to experiment with the rules of her Quirk on the fly. Taking a deep breath, she extended her hands, sweeping them through the air with authority.
"—From this moment on, the atmosphere within a hundred-meter radius will reject foreign radioactive energy!" she decreed, applying her first rule of New Order.
A burst of invisible pressure slammed into the green mist, but it only swirled, consuming the oxygen before closing back in even tighter. The gauges went wild again. Star frowned. She shifted strategies, trying to corner the mystical mass through a process of elimination.
"—An absolute vacuum will form within this perimeter!" she commanded on her second experimental attempt.
The air vanished instantly, creating a brutal suction sphere. The green radiation flickered, dropping a meager 5% before stabilizing again in the void. Scientists frantically logged data on their screens. This wasn't just a blast wave; it had a will of its own.
"—It's not yielding completely... it responds to matter," Star muttered to herself, realizing that to effectively interact with this garbage, abstract rules weren't enough. Her Quirk needed a physical, direct bridge. She had to touch it, temporarily fusing herself with the source of the problem.
Without hesitation, Cathleen leaped off the platform and landed directly on the surface of the contaminated water. She extended her bare palm and slammed it into the thick layer of liquid glowing with the Lich's residual green fire.
The exact second her skin made direct contact with the radiation, a surge of mystical static shot up her arm. The spiritual pressure at the dock plummeted, growing so heavy that the scientists in the distance dropped to their knees, suffocated by an invisible force that was not of this world. Star's blood ran cold for an instant; it was the exact same deathly pressure All Might had been describing in the classified reports from Yokohama.
Still, enduring the pain and biological revulsion, Cathleen roared with all her might, imposing her will over the energy coursing through her veins:
"—The mystical radiation touching my body will transmute into pure light and completely dissipate!"
The command of New Order echoed like thunder. Slowly, the green water beneath her hand began to lose its toxic glow, clearing up at a slow but steady pace thanks to the direct-contact rule. The experiments had worked; she had found a way to purge it.
However, the victory lasted only a breath. Just as the mist began to fade from the Jersey City coast, Star and Stripe froze completely in place, her hand still submerged in the ocean.
She felt something strange. Something incredibly bizarre and sinister.
Through the physical link she had forced to use her Quirk, the radiation wasn't just dissipating; it seemed to have acted as a live wire connecting her mind to something else thousands of miles away. Deep within her psyche, Cathleen didn't see the "Lich" or some ordinary villain... she felt the residual echo of someone else's terror—a vibration of cosmic panic that the Lich himself had suffered just moments ago in the middle of the ocean. She felt the abstract presence of four red eyes staring into the vastness, a gaze directed not at her, but at the very force she was trying to fight.
Star yanked her hand out of the water, falling backward onto the floating platform as she gasped desperately, cold sweat soaking her face and her pulse spiking to alarming levels.
"—Star, what's wrong? The radiation levels are dropping! It worked!" the scientist shouted over the radio, celebrating the success of the experiment.
But Cathleen wasn't listening. She stared at the palm of her hand, which was trembling uncontrollably. The strongest woman in the United States looked out toward the Atlantic horizon, primal terror painted in her eyes.
"—What the fuck was that?..." she whispered, her voice cracking, the pressure in her chest refusing to fade. "And whatever started this... was just terrified of something bigger."
POV Change
The UA Ground Gamma training gym felt more suffocating than ever in the dead of night. The air smelled of pure burnt ozone, stale sweat, and the heaviness of a secret that could no longer be kept in the shadows.
Around the track, which was shattered from impacts, All Might's inner circle watched the boy's every movement intently. The secret of One For All had finally been revealed to the elite heroes present: Gran Torino, Sir Nighteye—who analyzed every posture with mathematical coldness—Eraser Head, Midnight, Present Mic, and Ectoplasm. There was no longer time for academic subtleties or midterm exams; the global crisis forced them to push the machinery to its limits, driving Izuku Midoriya to a level bordering on the inhuman.
"—What percentage are you managing to retain at the end of the kinetic path?" Midnight asked, approaching slowly as she handed him a clean towel and helped him stretch his leg muscles after an grueling day of continuous training.
"—Fifty-five percent... stably," Izuku replied, exhaling a breath of hot air and letting his tense muscles relax for the first time in hours.
That staggering progress in such a short time wasn't a divine miracle. It had been made possible thanks to the Quirk of a general studies student whom UA had recruited in an emergency under a strict confidentiality agreement: a Quirk that allowed for the instantaneous regeneration and reconstruction of damaged muscle tissue, paying the price with severe, crushing mental fatigue. Izuku left every session with his brain fried and his temples throbbing in pain, but with his body intact enough to break itself all over again the next day. It was a torturous pace, but a necessary one.
"—And the other Quirks?" Eraser Head asked with a raised eyebrow, crossing his arms as his tired eyes scanned the performance logs held by Sir Nighteye.
Izuku swallowed hard, feeling his throat tighten from the pressure.
"—I have Blackwhip and Float about seventy percent mastered for aerial combat," the green-haired boy explained, looking down at his gloved hands. "With Smokescreen, I can cover the perimeter without suffocating myself, and... Gearshift along with Fa Jin (kinetic energy accumulation)... those are still a work in progress. I don't have full control over them yet. The inertia of the blow throws off my trajectory, and the molecular acceleration almost dislocates my shoulders if I activate them at the same time. But... I'm working on it. I'm on it."
The silence that followed his words was crushing. Izuku could feel the gazes of all the teachers locked onto him—not as instructors evaluating a promising student, but as wartime generals placing the fate of the species on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old. The weight of being the successor to One For All had always been immense, but ever since the Yokohama bunker exploded and All Might returned with the warning that a mystical monster named the Lich had marked him for death, that weight had become a concrete slab crushing his chest every single night.
There was no room for error. If he failed to assimilate the Quirks of the past users, the entire world would fall into that "wheel of death" Nezu had vaguely warned them about. Izuku could feel the urgency in Gran Torino's bloodshot eyes, in Nighteye's somber expression, and in Aizawa's unusual severity. They all wanted to protect him, but they all knew he was the only real line of defense against a force that neither science nor heroes could comprehend. His body ached, his mind was on the brink of collapse from the mental toll of the regeneration Quirk, but the memory of the Lich's gaze in his nightmares wouldn't let him stop.
Izuku just sighed as he kept pushing forward.
End of Chapter 17.