Hot droplets of blood sprayed through the air, hissing as they scattered.
The sharp ring of metal echoed through the park.
Kirishima turned his head and let the blade slide off to the side. His blazing red eyes met Johannes’s, and Johannes clenched his teeth under that gaze.
Then Kirishima’s iron fist, driving in with a spray of blood, slammed into Johannes’s empty abdomen.
Even as he was knocked sideways, Johannes quietly watched the old swordsman who had never let go of his blade.
Only then did blood begin to trickle down from the long gash across his forehead.
Of all the skin on the body, the forehead was one of the thinnest. It had not been able to withstand the force and had torn open in a long line.
The impact had left his head swimming, too.
But that was the extent of the damage.
From the start, when the hand blocking the sword from the front had been pierced, he had deliberately taken the blade on his forehead.
The skin there was thin, but the bone beneath it was among the thickest in the skull.
He wiped away the blood covering his eyes and said, "I think I’ve won, old man."
"Are you the sort who gives up after taking one hit?"
Leaning on his sword to steady his shaking body, Johannes answered.
For fifty years, he had lived with his life balanced on the edge of a blade. How many times had he been cut, broken, and battered?
There had been times when he was ambushed and fought on with seven bullets lodged in his body. There had even been a time when he struck down a villain’s neck with his left arm hanging half-severed and useless.
The experience he had accumulated over the years was not meaningless. He knew that sometimes retreat was the wise choice, but if he could not retreat, he knew better than most what must be done.
If there was something worth protecting, then in the end, one had no choice but to keep fighting until the moment life was cut short.
Kirishima looked at the way Johannes raised his sword high, as if he were about to strike down from the ceiling again, and replied with lowered eyes, "No. You’re the kind who keeps fighting until death, and even after death. I misspoke."
"Hah. That’s fine. Young people make mistakes."
Johannes smiled warmly and looked at the young genius before him.
No, genius was not quite the word. With that face, he looked more like a demon.
No matter how he had wandered off the proper path and only found it again after turning sixty, he had never stopped moving.
What he had built while walking the wrong road still remained in his body as a kind of asset.
Was it not fitting that a talent capable of leaping over a wall built by more than fifty years in only fifteen should be described as demonic rather than human?
"Now then, let’s finish this. Like warriors."
"Gladly."
The clash happened in the blink of an eye.
The slash that even a first-time swordsman would instinctively make, the simplest and yet most powerful cut, fell like lightning.
The strike that carried decades of a swordsman’s history split the space beautifully and mercilessly.
The shield of reversal that had saved Kirishima’s life more than once so far did not miss the attack this time either.
His left arm drew a circle from the inside out, deflecting the descending fury into the earth.
At the same time, his right fist, which had dropped low, drove straight forward with stubborn force.
The fist, following its path without hesitation, buried itself in Johannes’s torso once again.
When the exchange ended in an instant, Kirishima stepped back.
"Ghk. Kgh."
Johannes dropped to one knee and coughed violently, leaning against the sword he had planted upright.
Even while spitting blood, he struggled to force his body back up.
What stopped the swordsman who would not halt until the moment his life ended was a heavy voice.
"You should stop here. If you were in perfect condition, perhaps there would be a chance, but with your body already taking two fatal blows, you have no hope of winning. I’ve been hurt quite badly myself, but not in a way that immediately cuts into my fighting strength. More importantly, is there any reason to throw your life away for some villain?"
"It’s not for some villain."
He stopped struggling and answered in the same heavy tone.
"Not a single sword stroke is too much to spend on those bratty children running wild and complaining that heroes are suffocating them."
Kirishima said nothing and simply waited for the next words.
As he expected, after a brief silence, Johannes spoke again.
"I have a granddaughter. The last trace left behind by my son and his wife, whom I barely took care of because I spent my whole life obsessed with the sword."
Johannes touched his abdomen, where all kinds of tangled pain were surging and twisting together, and continued.
Once he said it aloud, the face of his granddaughter, now only ten years old, came to mind.
He had been a man who should never have married, yet somehow he met a woman, married her, and had a child.
Even then, he never came to his senses, chasing only the sword his whole life. When he finally looked back, his wife had already passed away, and all that remained were his son, his daughter-in-law, and his granddaughter.
His cold-hearted son and daughter-in-law never even got to hear his apology before they died in an accident on the way to see him.
Johannes had stood beside the coffin as his son and daughter-in-law were buried in the ground, holding his granddaughter’s hand, and made a vow.
He would raise this little child so that, no matter what happened, she could live a happy life.
"It was last year. That child started getting sick. They said her Quirk factor couldn’t be contained. I don’t know the details. I tried training her myself, but she couldn’t control it at all. I spared no expense and tried every method I could think of, but nothing worked."
When he imagined his granddaughter repeatedly transforming into a grotesque form as her transformation-type Quirk ran wild, then returning to normal again, it felt like tears might spill from his eyes.
Even the old swordsman who had fought all his life was, in the end, still a grandfather to one child.
"Then, when I had more or less given up, some bastard came to me. He said the person he served could solve my granddaughter’s problem. If the problem was a rampaging Quirk factor, then all they had to do was give her another Quirk that would be fine even if it went wild. Then they could drag things out and train her to control the Quirk factor."
Kirishima narrowed his eyes.
Those were words he knew all too well.
He had no idea how the man who had once ruled like a king in Japan had found and recruited a former hero hiding away in Germany, but for Johannes, whom he had actually met, it had been worth it.
"It will sound foolish, I know. And it’s true that if you don’t believe it, there’s nothing I can do. Setting aside whether it was even possible, a villain saying he’ll cure my granddaughter? He’d be lucky if he only used her as he pleased and didn’t stick a knife in my back."
"I understand. If it were to save the life of someone precious to me, I’d be prepared to do anything."
Kirishima understood Johannes’s feelings.
If his parents’ lives were in danger, he could do anything.
Even if he had to tear the world apart, he would save them.
To him, his parents mattered more than the world.
"That’s the reason I lent my sword to those men. I’ve told you everything as promised. They were after some kind of Quirk enhancement device, or something like that. Cough."
Johannes coughed up blood and collapsed onto the spot.
Kirishima scratched his chin at the sight of a man who looked as if he had aged ten years in the span of a moment.
His sharpened senses caught the fact that fighting was still going on somewhere else in the building.
He wanted to help in some way as a fellow warrior, but there was no method available to him.
Then, just as he was about to move toward the battlefield on the other side, a memory surfaced of a staff member who had once handed him a comic and asked if it was fun.
Apparently, there were even people who made weapons that erased Quirks using a child’s body tissue.
And there had also been someone who bragged endlessly about how a certain child could rewind time, and even rewind only specific parts of it, calling her cute and pretty the whole time.
It felt like he had found the answer.
If the problem was a rampaging Quirk factor, then all he had to do was get rid of the Quirk factor.
"Old man. How is your granddaughter’s condition? She’s not on the verge of dying today or tomorrow, is she?"
"Why are you asking that?"
He frowned and asked back, but there was expectation hidden somewhere in his eyes.
"It may be difficult right now, but I think I might be able to cure her within a few months. The price may be that she loses her Quirk, though..."
"What did you say!"
Johannes sprang to his feet and shouted, then immediately grabbed his abdomen again and grimaced.
Kirishima gave a bitter smile at the sight and answered, "There is someone with that kind of Quirk. I can’t track her down right now, but I should be able to meet her within a few months."
"Are you certain?"
"I can’t say it’s one hundred percent. But yes. I’m almost sure."
Kirishima could not say with certainty that he would meet the child the staff member from his past life had spoken of.
If things followed the comic’s story, then they would naturally meet, but he had no idea how the flow of this world had changed because of his interference.
Still, if it was an event important enough to be treated as a central incident in the comic, then it probably would not pass quietly.
He said, thinking that no matter what happened, he would intervene and save the child.
"For now, that’s the situation. So what will you do? If I were you, I’d let go of the villain whose existence is uncertain to begin with, and whose next move is impossible to predict even if he does exist..."
"Yes. That’s what I should do. I should take the hand of someone I can trust."
Johannes answered without hesitation.
He had leaned on a villain and joined in their crimes even while knowing it was foolish, simply because he had no other choice.
And now that Kirishima seemed certain, even if the odds were slim, his heart was leaning that way too.
He decided to trust the person with whom he had shared his sword, just as his heart told him to.
"That’s a relief. A real relief..."
"I see. Then I’m going ahead first, since it looks like my friends are still fighting."
"Go on ahead. I’ll rest a bit and follow later."
"No need. Tall guy."
"Kirishima, are you hurt?"
Just as Kirishima was about to move, Todoroki and Bakugo came over from the other side.
Both of them stared wide-eyed at Kirishima, whose face was stained red with blood flowing from his forehead.
Kirishima had been injured in all sorts of ways before, but this was the first time they had seen his [Hardening] split straight through and his skin cut open.
Johannes, who had been sitting before the upright sword, slowly forced himself to his feet.
Todoroki and Bakugo tensed at the sight, but Kirishima raised a hand to stop them.
"No need to be so alert. He’s an ally."
"Since when do allies slice each other’s foreheads with swords?"
Bakugo relaxed out of the stance he had been about to launch into, but still snapped a remark.
Kirishima grinned and replied, "He was an ally who used to be an enemy. Now he’s our strongest ally."
"Huh? Stronger than you?"
"Maybe even stronger than me. He’s a swordmaster, after all. He’s different from me, since I have to be more careful inside a building."
To Todoroki’s puzzled question, Kirishima bared his sharp teeth and said it plainly.
At Kirishima’s praise, Johannes gave a bitter smile and said, "It doesn’t sound very convincing coming from the friend who beat me. Still, if you’re going to lift up an old man who’s past his prime this much, I suppose I should do something about it."
He picked up his sword and walked slowly to the wall.
After glancing around as if measuring something, his blade moved at a speed the eye could not follow.
Bakugo, seeing Johannes as if his stance had simply changed in an instant, asked, "Hey, old man?"
"Looks like you didn’t see it properly."
Just as Bakugo was about to say something in annoyance at Johannes’s words, the neatly cut outer wall tilted inward.
Bakugo frowned as the wall collapsed in a cloud of dust.
"That’s why I told you to speak politely. Is Teacher Johannes your buddy or something?"
"Shut up! That was polite enough!"
"Just how monstrous is your standard for polite in that head of yours? Tch."
Watching Kirishima click his tongue and roughly rub Bakugo’s head, Johannes let out a small laugh.
He was reminded once again that the owner of that absurdly powerful, demonic talent was, at the end of the day, only a fifteen-year-old boy.
He spoke to the promising youths who would likely have a brilliant future ahead of them.
"Hngh. I’ll rest a bit before heading up. You all go on ahead. My stomach’s in a mess after taking that beating from Kirishima."
Kirishima looked a little embarrassed at that.
He probably had broken several ribs by feel, and he wasn’t sure whether Johannes would be able to rejoin them later.
"If it’s too much, you don’t have to come up. Don’t push yourself and make things worse."
"It’s not that bad. This is a little funny. Not long ago, we were trying to kill each other, and now you’re kindly worrying about my body."
"It’s not as if I fought you because I hated you. Our positions were just different."
Johannes answered with a faint smile instead of words.
Kirishima nodded and leapt out through the broken wall.
Todoroki and Bakugo followed after him in their own ways.
At that moment, the building shook violently.
When Kirishima looked up, he saw the upper floors of the massive structure mutating all at once.
What entered his eyes, sharper than an eagle’s, was a man surrounded by all kinds of metal, wearing some strange device on his head.
As he ran upward, he spoke into the panel.
"Midoriya. Can you hear me? What’s going on? And who’s that bastard up there?"
"Ki, Kirishima. This is bad. All Might..."
At the desperate voice, Kirishima dug his feet in and pushed harder as he climbed the outer wall.
Reaching the ceiling at terrifying speed, he saw a massive metal pillar flying toward All Might.
Without hesitation, he blocked the path in front of All Might.
"Get crushed already!"
The moment the villain’s voice rang out, Kirishima calmly judged the speed of the incoming pillar and swung his arm.
A deafening blast rang out, and a huge cloud of dust rose into the air.
"All Might!"
Midoriya’s anguished cry cut through the thick dust.
When the cold night wind cleared the cloud away, metal pillars were scattered all around All Might and Kirishima.
Not a single one had dared touch either of them.
With red light flashing in both eyes, Kirishima stood among the embedded metal pillars and said quietly, "You’re noisy. If you’ve got time to scream, shouldn’t you be throwing another punch?"
The crooked smile on his face was truly arrogant, and yet there could have been no expression more fitting.
The demon who brought victory had descended onto the battlefield.
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