Chapter 80: Into the Inferno

Midoriya is on the rampage, and they no means to talk in down. So they must fight, even as he displayes entirely new abilities, they have to take him down before he burns it all down.

(Previously)

His legs splintered, collapsing into molten slag that lashed about across the ground like an exposed power line before fusing into a single, writhing mass. His chest split open with a thunderous crack, and vents ruptured along his sides and back, spewing flame, ash, and boiling vapor.

The cobra hood reformed—only to erupt, sending pieces of superheated rock flying all over, forcing Hado and Ryukyu to take cover as fire and green magna poured off his contorting and twisting body, before gaining shape and twisting back around him, as if the earth’s iron core was embracing in a storm of flaming tendrils, each one snapping, braiding, and calcifying into serpentine whips crowned by skeletal stone snake-heads with blazing emerald eyes.

His face mask fractured, segments grinding apart to reveal an unhinged, abyssal maw rimmed with obsidian fangs as his face increasingly pierces forward, losing its shape and becoming closer to that of a dragon's snout. All the while, his body was growing. Growing faster than his newly formed scales could keep up, leading to entire sections of his ever-growing, long, limbless body to be exposed to molten magma.

By the time it all stopped, what they saw wasn't their friend, student, or hostage but something that should have never crawled out of the hall. A giant whose body seemed as long as three freight cars, its head, paws, and back encased with jagged, ill-formed stone scales. The rest was hardly covered, and magma that stuck to the frame for no reason was exposed.

“Midoriya?” Hado whispered, hoping the response she would get was a positive one.

Instead, what she got was fire.

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Midoriya unleashed a Tsunami of flames, bright enough to light up the area, hot enough that the ground beneath the expanding wave turned into red-hot sludge. Hado didn't think as she raised her hands to counter, but in her mind, she realized she wouldn't have enough power, that the flames were too much.

“Texas Smash!” Lucky for them, All Might was around, a man who could affect the weather with a single punch. And he used that power to throw a punch which parted the coming wave of fire, but the rest passed by them, slamming into the crater's edges, licking at the rock and ruined buildings like ocean waves would the pier.

“Young Midoriya, listen to me, stop this!” All Might yelled to Midoriya, hoping he would heed, surrender, and allow himself to get the help he desperately needed. But he didn't see any awareness in his eye slots, the holes in his perpetually cracking and reforming dragon face, for his eyes housed nothing but instinct.

Instinct, which drove him to turn his head up to the night sky and let out an ear-piercing bellow, not a scream, not even a screech, but a bellow as if he was a volcano blowing its top. And just like a volcano, along with it came a fireball, a plume of smoke, volcanic ash, and shards of molten rock ejected high into the air.

The fusion fireball traveled high, higher and higher still, before exploding with the same force as his last move during the I-Island incident, temporarily lighting up the whole of Kamino. People who were fleeing from the battle turned in at the sight, wondering what it could mean or if perhaps Endeavour had arrived, but as they realised it couldn't be the number 2, the fireball's other effects came into being.

Raining down on them were hundreds of smaller fireballs, baseball-sized chunks of volcanic rock so hot they lost their shape and splattered onto anything and everything like slime, sizzling away as they released volcanic gas from their interior.

Midoriya turned back onto them and unleashed even more fire, his vents continuously bleeding while others sucked in air like a dying jet engine trying to restart.

All for One couldn't help but laugh like the monster he was at the sight of it, as all around him, nothing but smoke, ash, and fire ruled. It was fitting for the man who styled himself as a demon lord, who had brought Orodruin down on the people to unleash its wrath. “It’s too late, All Might. He can’t hear you.”

“You,” Ryukyu yelled as she battled against the flames, as Midoriya, who seemed dead set on killing them, either through flames, ramming them, or just tearing into them like a wild animal would a fresh carcass. “What did you do!” She demanded as this...this wasn't Midoriya. He wasn't this brutal, this destructive, and vicious. He wasn't speaking and clearly out of his mind, but why? His body should have burned away toxins and poisons like it would a cold and broken bones.

All for One couldn't focus on her, but on All Might, who charged at him and Gran Torino, both aiming to ensure he went down. Still, he was chatty when he was in a good mood, so even as he struggled against his rival and his mentor, he talked. "I gave him the power to burn your society to the ground and freed him of the inhibitions that held him back."

“You hear me, Midoriya? Burn it all!” he yelled out. None were sure if Midoriya heard it or not, but he must have been responding to the yell. Either way, he let loose another bellow that they could feel in their bones, followed by a fireball that missed Nejire-Chan and crashed beyond the crater, hitting a building.

Midoriya's regular attacks could have blown up a wall or two or even caused heavy damage to a building that size, but now, drugged out of his mind and on a supercharged rampage, his fireball dwarfed any he would have typically used. When it hit, it exploded, taking out the top four floors of the building in a spiral of expanding fire that consumed everything, leaving only ash and smoke.

“Nejire-Chan, keep attention off the city!” Ryukyu yelled as the smoke continued to build, making it hard to see things and forcing the Dragon hero to use her wings as fans, blowing away as much of it as she could. Midoriya just kept bleeding more, his body rumbling and groaning as volcanic activity continued to rise.

“What about the others?” Nejire-Chan called back, flying around Midoriya and trying to keep his attention on her, as when he tried to swipe at her, it meant someone else was safe. When he tried to chomp down on her, it gave others time. When he tried to unleash another fireball, she could fly up so it would aim into the sky.

"I can't get in contact; something's jamming my radio!" Ryukyu called out, as she was hardly getting any signal, just bits and pieces. She was sure she heard Endeavor at one point, but it was so garbled she couldn't make out what he said.

Looking at the smoke, she noticed it wasn't just smoke but also an increased level of volcanic gases. “We need some way to clear the smoke away.”

"That'll mean blocking his air vents. As long as he can suck in air, he's going to keep leaking smoke and gas all over the place." Nejire-Chan called back, as Midoriya was just releasing it like a pressure cooker did steam. But that would make it worse, as if he could release this much without pause, it meant he had a lot in him or was creating too much for his supersized body to contain.

They try to block it, he'll rapture at best and explode at worst. They needed to kill his oxygen supply, but how?

Midoriya paused, an enraged bellow blasting out his jaws as he tracked them. Tracked All Might, Gran Torino, and All for One. Tracked the city around them. There was so much around him, so much to burn, but he couldn't hit them. Lashing out his tail, he let loose another bellow, but this was different. His body, visibly unstable, shifted. They saw something start to gather along his spine scales and through the gaps of his scales.

Electromagnetic plasma started to form within him and flow to his scales. Focused on his back, they could trace chords of lightning built, arching off his scales to another and growing in intensity as a faint shimmer formed around him. Molten streaks of what looked to be purple volcanic glass snapped outward and slammed into his body, while others just floated around him.

“What? But how-!” Nejire-Chan called out in shock, but Ryukyu saw the boy's jaws fall open. Along with the building up of flames, she saw lightning spiraling around the interior of his throat and jaws.

“Get down!” She called as she dived, Nejire down the same as Midoriya bellowed, firing off a hyper sonic attack from the improvised railgun his body had turned into. A giant slug of magnetized molten iron the size of a person.

It moved so fast that only All for One and All Might could track it, while Gran Torino saw it in bits and pieces. The hypersonic shot didn't just crash into a building; it annihilated it, its impact creating a hole in it and the next four buildings large enough to drive a car through.

But that wasn't the only thing that happened, to their dismay and morbid fascination. Along with the thundering bang of the shot breaking the sound barrier many times over, it was merely the leading shot, creating a vacuum as air rapidly filled in that space, allowing the subsequent fireball to follow after it, building in power and intensity as it went.

The result was that an attack twice as strong as All for One's opening move, which leveled buildings and left the place where the building had been nothing but rubble and flames.

Seeing Midoriya prepping another shot, Ryukyu didn't hesitate as she rammed him, taking the heat and shock from the millions of volts of electricity generated around him to keep him from pointing to the city again. “Keep his aim off the city!”

“Full Charge, output level 40. Nejire Wave!” Nejire-Chan quickly followed her mentor, flying low and aiming high. Still, she saw that as her attack was fired, Ryukyu wasn’t touching Midoriya, but was stopped several feet from him by an invisible force.

That same force field negated her blast of waves. However, it did push his head up high enough that when Midoriya fired it, the shot flew into the sky, parting clouds in seconds before another thunderous bang occurred, followed by a beam of pure flames shooting into the sky. Even with it passing harmlessly into the darkness, they could feel the heat from the beam of pure green flames as it made them sweat.

“He’s got some kind of shield, my attack isn’t reaching him!” Nejire-Chan called out as Ryukyu pulled back. Midoriya bellowed, lashing out with his tail, which the dragon heroine blocked, but still felt herself being moved back from the impact.

She heard someone yell out as she thought of a means through Midoriya's apparent defensive shield. “Take him down, men!” Quickly turning her head, she saw some of the police, most wounded, aiming their weapons at Midoriya. At that moment, she realized they hadn't heard Nejire-Chan as they fired.

The 2 dozen automatic weapons went off, sending hundreds of bullets towards Midoriya. They must have known it wouldn’t hurt him, but they perhaps believed it would slow him down and give him pause. However, Midoriya wasn’t in his right mind, and as for the bullets,

As they entered the halo around Midoriya, they rapidly slowed, heat bleeding off them. They suddenly yawned and spun off course, coming to a stop as if they had been shot into a pool of slime.

It didn't do a thing but alert Midoriya to the fact that they were moving people to burn, and Ryukyu could see it in his vacant eyes.

“Get out of here, now!” She yelled at them as she flew in front of the police right as Midoriya unleashed another overwhelming wave of flames. All Might was too busy to help as she desperately fanned the flames back, but she was still enveloped.

“Ryukyu!” Nejire-Chan called as her mentor fought to keep herself in check. Although her body wasn't built for flames, she had some flame resistance.

‘So hot!’ But even with that, she could feel the flames overwhelming her as she continued to beat them back till, at least, she emerged from the wave, smoking and covered in burns, mainly along her wings. Still, the cops were safe and had already started to get the hell out.

Midoriya paused, though she didn’t know for what, as he wasn’t thinking right now. The answer came when he slammed himself down into the rapidly heating earth, as the area she and Nejire-Chan were containing him in was growing hotter. Soon, standing there would be dangerous, much less touching it.

She expected him to try to speed this up and turn the crater into something akin to the area closest to an active volcano, but instead, his jaw unhinged, and he started to suck in rock, stone, and other debris. “He’s eating more rock!”

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“Warping plus Shock Inversion!” All for One used the two quirks, grabbing onto Gran Torino much like he had the League and used the old man as a shield against All Might's blow. The Symbol of Peace saw him in time t

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Like last time, I've just been focused on a WIP idea, which I know is dumb, as I'll probably never do anything more than just plot stuff for it, but dammit, it's like a nail in my brain, I just need to keep doing something with it. Hopefully, it spawns an idea worth a damn.

Now, this chapter won’t be as long as the previous one, but it ended up being even longer, as while it was more focused and aimed, there was a lot of action. Also, I'm pressed for time; however, it's something I poured a lot of thought into, as I've wanted to do this for months now, but couldn't just write it without…Shit, 79 chapters worth of context. Also, the chapter name isn't an accident. I know it's similar to Chapter 18; there is a point to it, which will become clearer as you read and see the next chapter.