The lizard writhed in pain beneath the hulking body that had dropped from the sky.
Kirishima looked down at Spinner and clicked his tongue.
"What, you’ve got less grit than I expected, lizard. If you’re going to go on about ideals, you should be able to get over at least this much."
"Urgh, you bastard!"
With a mocking smile, he pressed down harder with the foot planted on Spinner’s back.
To Spinner, it felt like being crushed under a massive block of iron, and he couldn’t even speak.
The force grinding down on his spine and ribs made even breathing a struggle.
Kirishima’s ridicule came down on him without mercy.
"Tch. That’s how the world works. If you succeed, it’s called a revolution. If you fail, it’s called treason. That’s why anyone who wants to change the world needs power. So, lizard, which one do you think you’ll be remembered as? A revolutionary, or a traitor?"
Kirishima had been sneering at him, but when he felt the pathetic struggling beneath his foot—less spirited than a newborn lamb—his expression hardened.
"Looks like traitor suits your taste. Then die."
"Won’t you let Spinner go!"
Just as Kirishima was about to put more force into his foot and knock him out, the Villain called Big Sis Mag used the lull in the fight to throw himself forward.
He managed to raise the weapon wrapped in cloth and, shouting, aimed it at Kirishima.
White vapor suddenly billowed from his whole body, and Kirishima’s gaze turned toward him.
A red glow bloomed across his slowly turning face.
At the sight of that fierce, flickering light, somehow both distant and violent, the Villain faltered.
It felt like watching an old horror movie.
Then a deep, sunken voice, like something leaking up from hell, drove that feeling home.
"Did you do something? My apologies. I’m not the type to fall for cheap tricks like that. First, I’ll put this one to sleep."
Kirishima lightly kicked Spinner in the back of the neck.
It was a dangerous move, but he was confident he could do it without killing the lizard.
Leaving Spinner limp behind him, he launched himself forward and reached the other Villain in an instant.
"I’m not in a very good mood right now. So just go to sleep."
He held back on the power, but the jab lost none of its speed as it grazed the Villain’s jaw.
There was nothing the man could do.
As his consciousness drifted away, a whisper full of malice reached him.
"Be grateful there are other people here while you pass out. If it had just been the two of us, I’d have crushed you flat and turned you into scraps of meat."
It wasn’t an empty threat.
The words, packed with vicious killing intent like the fangs of a beast with its jaws wide open, were completely sincere.
The man sensed that instinctively, and the realization left him dumbfounded.
How could someone like that be a Hero?
He thought they had chosen the wrong target for today’s kidnapping—the one they had marked as someone with the potential to become a Villain.
Whatever he might have thought after that, his shocked brain was already beginning to shut down.
His vision went black, and he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
Kirishima picked up the fallen Pixie-Bob, handed her over to Tiger, and said, "I don’t think the situation is simple. It sounds like there are at least four battles going on. I can’t say for certain, but I’m probably close."
Tiger accepted her in silence, then said, "So what are you planning to do?"
"What do you mean, what am I planning to do? We need to send her back to the facility!"
Mandalay cried out as if the very idea were absurd.
Tiger calmly tried to reason with her.
<q>Let’s think about this coolly. We’re short on numbers. If we assume one person absolutely has to stay behind and guard the facility, that leaves five. Out of those, Pixie-Bob is already out, and we haven’t been able to contact Ragdoll. That means we’re already down to three. And you heard him—there are battles in four places right now. So where exactly do you plan to go, and what do you plan to give up?"
"That..."
Mandalay’s face turned grave.
Honestly, Tiger was right.
No matter what they chose, something would be left uncovered.
The Villains they had fought were anything but easy opponents.
To be blunt, if every attacker was at this level, splitting up and searching for them one by one could be dangerous in itself.
A Hero could not shrink back in fear of danger, but when the price of defeat was the children’s lives, they could not afford to cling to appearances either.
As if helping her accept it, Tiger asked Kirishima another question.
"Besides, judging by how strongly you smell of blood, you’ve already been fighting. And not lightly, either. You won and came here, I take it. Was your opponent strong?"
"Yes. Strong enough that if it had been the others, they probably wouldn’t have lasted even once before being killed."
"Right. You’re the reason you beat them and made it back. Admit it, Mandalay. We don’t have enough hands right now, and this kid is outside the standards of what a student should be. We don’t need to keep trying to protect him at all costs—and we shouldn’t."
"You’re not wrong, but..."
Seeing that Mandalay was still hesitating, Tiger asked Kirishima one more thing.
It was the question that would settle the decision.
"Answer me honestly, exactly as you see it. Kirishima. Among everyone here right now, where do you think your strength stands?"
Kirishima thought about the question for a moment, then bared his teeth in a grin.
Blades were clashing from every direction, explosions were booming, the air was thick with the smell of burning and some unknown gas—what place was there for modesty in a situation like this?
Brushing back his hardened hair, rough like a lion’s mane, he spoke the truth.
"The strongest. At this moment, unless someone on All Might’s level shows up, I’m confident I won’t lose. Even if All Might did come, I could at least stall him for time."
"No exaggeration?"
"None. That’s exactly how it is. If I truly commit myself—if I fight prepared to die, and to kill—then I can take on anyone. Unless they’re a very special case."
In the darkness, with red light pouring from his eyes, the boy spoke of death, and Tiger felt a complicated bitterness rise in him.
He could tell Kirishima was not bluffing.
But even so, what adult—what Pro Hero—would welcome a situation where they had to rely on the strength of a fifteen-year-old?
Tasting that bitterness, he spoke.
"I’ll trust you. Then move. Aizawa already gave permission for you to fight, but that was only meant as permission to protect yourself. In the name of the Pro Hero Tiger, from this moment on I authorize Kirishima Eijiro to engage the enemy without restriction. Save our side, and put every enemy down. I don’t care what methods you use. I’ll take responsibility for it!"
"Tiger!"
Mandalay cried out almost like a scream, but he paid her no mind.
The battlefield was wide, and there were too many people to protect.
And because they had scattered so widely for this stupid test of courage, they could not simply rush to one specific area and save everyone there.
Special circumstances demanded special measures.
Everything Tiger had seen from Kirishima so far told him the boy was not one to boast.
If he said he could do something, it was because he could. If he could not, he would say so plainly.
In fact, no one else here was capable of blasting themselves into the sky with sheer wind pressure.
If they could not afford to hide away Kirishima’s abnormal combat power just because he was a student, then the answer was simple: let him loose.
No matter how frightening or savage a beast he was, he was their beast.
His fangs and claws were aimed entirely at the enemy.
Tiger’s role was to remove the shackles holding him back.
"What are you waiting for? Move, now! We’ll tie these ones up and follow after you."
Kirishima stared silently at Tiger, a man nearly as large as himself.
He could feel the concern for a student hidden beneath that fierce face, and he nodded.
"Then I’ll go on ahead. Good luck."
"Good luck to you too."
With that brief exchange over, Kirishima kicked off the earth once more and leaped into the sky, quickly disappearing from the scene.
Tiger watched him for a moment, then began binding the unconscious Villains.
At the same time, Yaoyorozu struggled to hold on to her fading consciousness.
Meeting someone from Class B named Awase and helping him had been all well and good, but then they had been ambushed afterward.
<q>I let my guard down too much. In a place like this, I should have assumed an attack could come from anywhere..."
From where she clung to Awase’s back, her vision shaking up and down, she saw the pursuing Nomu behind them.
From its muscular upper body, it had produced arms fitted with all kinds of vicious weapons—chainsaws, drills, and more—and it chased them while swinging them menacingly.
Awase ran as hard as he could, but the difference in speed between him and the Nomu was obvious.
In the end, the moment came when it caught up and they could no longer avoid the attack.
At the very least, he twisted his body so he would be hit before Yaoyorozu, then pulled her free from where she was clinging to him.
"Aah! Somebody help us!"
He screamed, but the Nomu’s drill did not stop.
As the spinning blade rushed right up to his face, he reflexively squeezed his eyes shut.
That was when salvation came flying in.
"Ah. So I came to help. I couldn’t hear clearly, but this side seemed the most urgent, since someone kept screaming."
The attack that had served him so well until now—dropping from the sky—did not work this time.
As Kirishima’s foot came down toward it, the Nomu instantly sprang backward.
The corner of his mouth curled upward.
"Huh, you dodged? More importantly, are you two all right? Yaoyorozu looks hurt. Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner."
"I-I’m all right. Thank you for coming."
"Aah! Kirishima! Thanks!"
"Yeah."
That was enough for greetings.
There were still plenty of enemies around who needed their limbs torn off.
Kirishima prepared to rush the creature.
Then Yaoyorozu handed him something.
"I trust you, Kirishima, but if it looks like it might get away, please find some way to get this into that monster’s body. You can do that, right?"
Looking at her eyes trembling with pain, Kirishima said nothing.
Instead, he clenched the unknown object in his hand and nodded.
At that moment, the Nomu turned and started running.
"You want to challenge me in a race?"
Kirishima immediately gave chase.
Even without using that still-unnamed method of gaining energy through explosions, the difference in speed was clearly in Kirishima’s favor.
The problem was that the creature was no pushover either, and it made excellent use of the trees as obstacles while it ran.
After covering a considerable distance in a short time, Kirishima heard children’s voices mixed with the voices of Villains up ahead and made his decision.
Another explosion went off in his Quirk factor.
His powerful body jolted under the immense strain.
His bones and muscles twitched faintly, and every involuntary muscle except his heart stiffened as if it might stop at any moment.
Even with pain raging through his whole body, Kirishima did not stop. He kicked off the earth again.
His body, dyed red, wrapped itself in a storm and tore past time itself as he chased the Nomu.
The instant Kirishima’s sharp fingertips pierced the creature’s back, the cramped field of vision full of trees suddenly opened wide.
The Nomu tumbled forward from the impact, and in front of it stood a group of Villains.
"Hm? That’s... ah, the primary kill target. Looks like the Nomu couldn’t finish him off."
"We were planning to retreat anyway, but that one is too much for us to kill on our own. Let’s head to Dabi immediately."
Hearing the exchange between the Villains, Kirishima first took stock of the situation.
Midoriya, Shoji, and Todoroki were the allies here, but Midoriya was effectively out of the fight for now.
With one arm and one leg in splints, there was no way he could fight properly.
If both arms had been injured, maybe there would still have been something he could do, but losing mobility because of a leg injury was fatal.
As Kirishima narrowed his eyes, a man dressed in a suit that looked like something out of the nineteenth century spoke to him.
"What a shame. Looks like you came to help your friends. As it happens, I just gave your friend a little present myself."
Standing before the crack in space created by that familiar warp Quirk, the man mocked the children in a sly voice.
"It’s one of the basics of magic, you see. Whenever someone openly shows you something, it’s only because there’s something else they absolutely do not want you to see."
He lifted his mask slightly and stuck out his tongue.
There were two marbles resting on it.
With eyesight sharper than an eagle’s, Kirishima saw the figures trapped inside them.
Tokoyami and Bakugo lay unconscious within, and he instantly decided how he needed to move.
The moment he kicked off the ground with his powerful legs, a black crack opened right in front of him.
Kirishima gritted his teeth and sharply changed direction.
Based on what had happened last time, that warp gate could not be resisted.
If it sent him far away, things would become a serious headache.
Fortunately, he was not the only one moving.
From the distant brush, a beam shot out and shattered the tasteless man’s mask.
The marbles on his tongue dropped to the ground from the impact, and Shoji and Todoroki threw themselves forward at once.
Fortunately, Shoji managed to catch one safely.
But Todoroki’s outstretched hand sliced through empty air.
"How sad, Todoroki Shoto."
Instead, the patched-up man slowly sneered, clutching the marble he had snatched away.
He spoke to the one beside him.
"Confirmed. Release it."
"Got it. That laser just ruined my show."
The moment he did something, the marble turned back into a person.
Sharp, ferocious eyes. Hair blasted into a wild mess, as if he had taken an explosion head-on.
It was Bakugo.
Grabbing Bakugo by the throat, the man said in a low voice, "No problem."
At that instant, Kirishima crossed the crack and charged at him with everything he had.
Midoriya also forced his broken body into motion, activating [Full Cowl] as he leaped in.
Bakugo looked at his childhood friend racing toward him and said, "Don’t come, idiots."
The storm born from the two boys’ fists tore through every tree in a straight line and smashed them apart.
But Bakugo was gone.
The Villain who had kidnapped him was gone too.
Midoriya let out a grief-stricken roar.
"A-ahhhhhh!"
Kirishima stood still and placed a hand on Midoriya’s head.
The taste of first defeat was bitter.
So bitter it made him want to find someone—anyone—and tear them to pieces.
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