Phantoms Dance: Ch 7

The cards are more or less all on the table. The Heroes sprung their traps, Izuku has used his aces, and Shiggy is off screaming in a corner somewhere about the unfairness of going up against anyone beyond the average planning level of an elementary schooler.

All that's left is to see if the Sovereign can catch his fish before it slips the hook.

-Rain of Sins-

-Phantoms Dance: Ch 7-

Pawn Log 2: Shoto Todoroki.

As much as I want to immediately analyze Endeavor, I have to hold myself back.

Too eager, too quick, too angry and I might miss something important. I will not risk that.

So instead I'll (pardon the terrible pun) warm up with a quirk similar to his.

Shoto Todoroki, son of Endeavor, and owner of the worst named quirk I've ever seen. 

"Half-Hot Half-Cold". Really? I almost passed the thing over in the quirk registry when I hacked in and took a look, because there's no way such a powerful quirk has such a stupid name.

His right side makes ice, his left side makes fire. It seems simple, but the moment you apply math the whole thing breaks down into scientific impossibilities and self defying paradoxes. 

(Exactly like the nature of quirks as a whole, poetically enough.)

First off, fire means heat, and heat means energy- and with the amount he put out in his attack during the festival, that means a LOT of energy. Where is he getting this energy? Is it harnessed from the sugars in his body? Because if so, he's burning the things so efficiently that the number turns negative.

But we'll come back to that particular mathematical irregularity in a moment.

Ice. He can freeze things.

The way refrigerators make things cold, is by running cold liquid along the interior, which evaporates into a gas and absorbs heat, which is then pumped outside, where it's pressurized back into a liquid to have the heat radiated off.

The energy of heat is absorbed and moved, and the resulting lack of that energy makes it cold. It's simple physics.

But when Todoroki makes ice, where does the heat go? He's not absorbing it if he's freezing over, and with the sheer size of his glacier attacks, it would be very obvious if all that heat energy was being dispersed into some other area.

My initial theory was that the quirk absorbs the energy to release it later as fire, but again, using the ice causes him to become colder, not hotter, so he can't be absorbing it.

Which leaves the possibility that the quirk actively circumvents the law of conservation of energy, and his "making ice" is a side effect of total energy nullification.

Now with this theory of being able to create and destroy energy at will, we can walk back to my previous observation about those negative numbers and they would suddenly make sense. He can't be expelling thermal energy, because that would be making him colder, and one of Endeavor's greatest problems is that his quirk causes him to overheat, something his son's quirk almost certainly mimics, given how he freezes by using too much ice.

Of course, there's always the possibility that this could just be a particularly powerful quirk that I'm reading too much into. But on the other hand, it could be the power to redefine reality given to a petulant child "just because".

It might say something about just how far down this rabbit hole I've fallen, and how long I've been investigating the seemingly impossible nature of quirks, that the first answer would surprise me more than the latter.

-Rain of Sins-

Emerald eyes, mossy hair, a light splattering of freckles just barely visible above the villain's mask.

"Hey Kaachan!"

Bakugo's eyes widened in horrible realization.

"IZU-!?"

"Kuin! Middle! Now! "

Bakugo's breath was driven from his lungs as the bee girl slammed into him, and sent them both flying out the window.

He felt the glass shatter on his back, shards cutting into his shoulder, then the rain from the storm slammed into him, soaking him to the bone in only a few seconds, then more glass as they crashed through the window of the next building over.

The two slammed hard into the floor, separating as they rolled across the rough cement of the warehouse.

His training pounding in his ear, Bakugo was back on his feet as soon as he possibly could be.

The room was dark, illuminated only by the light from the windows. It was full of crates and boxes, dusty, untouched for who knows how long.

A flash of lightning briefly lit the entire room, and his eyes zeroed in on his opponent.

A short mutant girl stood on the other side of the warehouse, insect wings angrily flapping water off them, and a lone amber eye glowing in the dark like a cat's.

She smirked and stalked forward, her hips swaying hypnotically back and forth, with just enough momentum and heft to cause her ass to jiggle. Had he been Mineta, he might have been distracted. Instead his attention was completely locked on the cruel gleam in her amber orb.

"The big boss wants you gone." She purred seductively. "So I hope you didn't enjoy living all that much, bad boy."

Midnight had said attractive Villains would occasionally try this approach to throw you off balance, but he'd never expected to actually see it in person.

"Lady, I know what you're trying to do, but the Bee thing really fucking ruins it." Bakugo said. "It's creepy as Hell."

"Aww, you don't like my babies?" Kuin grinned, her smile all fangs, as the bugs in her hair began flying into the air, and one crawled out from behind her eyepatch. "That's fine, they don't like you much either."

Bakugo took a breath and focused himself. He could think about the Sovereign, about what he'd seen, later. RIght now he needed to survive.

He could only hope Shoto and Ibara could handle the Sovereign without him.

-Rain of Sins-

"Quirks have to be artificial." Izuku stressed, irritation in his voice. "Think about it for a second, your old classmate, Tsu, has frog DNA embedded into her own. That's what her "quirk" is, it's just frog DNA- mutant quirks are much more invasive in hijacking DNA sequences than emitters, just for context. Last I checked frogs and humans can't interbreed, it's physically impossible. So how did her ancestors get frog DNA in them? Hm? There had to have been human interference"

"They're not man made!" Ibara rebuffed.

"Okay, great claim, where's your evidence? What natural event started quirks? Or if that's too far for you, just try to debunk my previous observation about Frog DNA. How did that naturally happen?"

"The Lord works in mysterious ways." Ibara scowled at him, knowing her argument felt pitifully weak, even to her.

Izuku's eye visibly twitched.

"Okay, let's put a pen in that question, and come back to it later. What about Ida? He has engines in his legs. That's human technology! That's metal! He grew metal! Do you have any idea how difficult that is!? I struggle horribly with it, and I use quirks to cheat! Machinery isn't natural, and growing it inside of you is on another level of unnatural."

That one actually gave Shoto pause. All the Sovereign's arguments so far had been sound, but that one actually raised a lot of red flags. Actually, now that he was thinking about quirks, there were a lot of questions "ancient human intervention" could solve. 

How did Ururaka manipulate gravity? Evolution had never done that before, but history class said humans had. Gravity manipulation engines had been a developing part of the pre-collapse space program before, well, the collapse.

" Silence deceiver! " Ibara hissed. "The church preaches that all quirks are a gift from God, so no one should be hated or discriminated against for their power!"

"Yes and the Catholic church has never been wrong, or made a mistake, or been biased, or corrupt, ever before in all of its years since its founding in the late Roman empire." Izuku rolled his eyes.

"You're trying to get in my head. It won't work!"

Shoto disagreed but bit back his comment.

"You want to blind us with anger so we make a mistake and you can slip by us!"

"Well you're definitely not the ones I want to be fighting." Izuku said, his mind wandering back to the festival recordings. 

The boy had made a glacier the size of the stadium, and the girl had given Bakugo a run for his money, to the point that Cementoss had to replace the entire field after their match. They were honestly probably stronger than most of the pro Heroes they were waiting to arrive and save them.

"Why? Are you scared of us?" Shoto asked. "We are Heroes."

"No." Izuku lied. "I'm not scared, and you aren't Heroes."

"We are!"

"No you're not Heroes. You're nothing but spoiled children, given the greatest quirks in the world on a silver spoon, with everything you could possibly want tagged along as an added bonus. Recommended into UA, you didn't even have to take the exam! No, you were labeled as the best of the best without any effort…" He slid his eyes to Shoto. "…Without even having to use half your abilities."

Shoto winced

"You're the privileged few, you've never been looked down upon as lesser, never known what it means to struggle , what it means to give it everything you have and still fail , you've never had everything taken from you, and you certainly don't have the slight comprehension of what it means to hate someone with every fiber of your being ."

The Sovereign caught himself before he could go any further, and took a deep breath to keep his cool.

"Let me through, or I get serious. I've been stalling the entire time, and this is your last warning."

"Wait." Shoto blinked, and glanced at Ibara. "I thought we were stalling him?"

The answer to his question came in the form of a giant lizard beast crashing through the wall at over 20 miles an hour, screaming indecipherable gibberish in pure rage.

Todoroki's eyes ballooned in recognition of the thing that went toe to toe with All Might , and swung his arm in panic.

A glacier sprung into existence, freezing half of the room solid, but that might as well have been nothing but paper to Jeremy. It snagged him, stopping his momentum, before he flexed his arms and shattered the ice around him and began smashing his way through the ice at only a slightly lower speed than before.

Icicle spears shot up from the ground to skewer him, but it might as well have been toothpicks stabbing a brick. Most shattered, and Jeremy didn't even seem to notice the few that pierced his thick hide. He smashed through an impromptu ice wall and batted a spinning ice drill out of the air and jumped at Todoroki.

Over a thousand pounds of mutant flew through the air with all the grace of a drunk dying penguin, but the accuracy and speed of a missile.

A skeletal hand of terror gripped Shoto's spine, its touch colder than his quirk ever could be, and froze him in place. The beast's shadow fell over him, and he could feel the reaper's breath on his neck, it's scythe hanging over him.

Memories flashed before his eyes, his mother, his siblings, his classmates, even his father's rare smile when he was proud, and training. So much training, countless hours pushing his mother's quirk to it's limits, of persevering even as his limbs froze and his lungs burned.

All of his training, all of his lessons, all of his power, useless in the face of an opponent so far above him he couldn't even put it into words.

The beast fell like the blade of a guillotine, but was knocked aside at the last moment by a torrent of thorns and leaves.

Ibara's vines, every last one of them, slammed into Jeremy, wrapped around him, and thrashed him against the floor.

Jeremy growled and pushed himself to his feet, despite the vines trying desperately to hold him down, and began walking towards Shoto, as if the countless vines restricting him limbs so thoroughly you could barely see them, weren't even worth noticing.

He marched over to Shoto, towering over the boy enough to fully envelope him in his shadow, and raised a single hand overhead.

Shoto's mind finally caught up to him and he realized what was about to happen at the same moment Ibara did. The vines covering Jeremy panicked and snaked upwards, abandoning the mutant's chest and legs to concentrate entirely on the raised arm, while others wrapped around the main mass and anchored themselves into the ground. Shoto conjured a thick wall of ice to shield himself.

Jeremy swung.

Ibara screamed as her vines were ripped from the floor, and she was pulled forward by her head with enough force to have her tumbling through the air.

Shoto couldn't even make a noise as the blow slammed into his side, even cushioned by the layers of thick leaves Ibara had gown on the outside, and slowed down by the vines and the wall, he heaved up a wave of blood as he was thrown violently across the room, landing with a sickening crunch on his shattered ribs.

"SHOTO!" Ibara screamed in horror.

Jeremy let out a victory roar that turned into a yelp of pain as thick thorns exploded from the vines all along his arm. He growled and swung his arm, forcing Ibara to let go unless she wanted to be turned into a paddle ball again.

The vines pulled back, sprouted more thorns, and striked forward again, like vipers.

They bit into its flesh like bladed whips, concentrating on ripping open weak points like armpits, back of knees, and the groin.

Jeremy howled as a thorn stabbed into his right eye, and clamped a hand across his face to shield both of them. Then he tensed, and all the thorns that had been tearing into him snapped as his skin changed.

The leathery scales sharpened into angles, in a way that seemed so similar to Kiroshima's hardening quirk, Shoto could barely believe his eyes.

"No. Not trying to control. I have succeeded in controlling quirks."

The Sovereign's words from earlier echoed in his mind, and a horrible realization dawned on Shoto.

That wasn't similar to Kiroshima's quirk, that was Kiroshima's quirk!

Shoto could only watch in horror as Jeremy slowly advanced on Ibara, having to go off of smell with its eyes squeezed shut, pushing her further and further into a corner.

"No you're not Heroes. You're nothing but spoiled children."

Shoto's hand weakly crept forward along the ground, and shot another spear of ice, but it shattered against the iron scales just like the rest.

"Given the greatest quirks in the world on a silver spoon, with everything you could possibly want tagged along as an added bonus. Recommended into UA, you didn't even have to take the exam!" 

"Ib ar a!" He croaked, the pain in his lungs causing his voice to crack. 

Another icicle slammed into Jeremy, this one even weaker than the last. The Lizard didn't even notice, and just kept advancing towards Ibara.

She was going to die! That thing was going to kill her, and there was nothing he could do.

Nothing he could do…

"No, you were labeled as the best of the best without any effort…"

There was… one thing…

"…Without even having to use half your abilities."

Agony erupted along every available nerve as he gritted his teeth, pushing himself upright into a sitting position. With a violent cough, a crimson torrent surged from his lips, cascading to the ground in a grim, shallow pool.

Pushing through the pain he lifted his arm- his left arm. The arm he had sworn to never use. The arm that was cursed by Him .

"This is ridiculous, Shoto." His father's words echoed in his mind as heat began building in his fingers. "You're being childish, is your petty pride really worth sacrificing half of your power? You'll never be the best Hero you could be with one hand literally tied behind your back."

White spots danced in his vision as the fire grew. One of his broken ribs had punctured his right lung, he could feel it every time he took a breath, and how he could take in less air every time.

"I don't care why you don't use your fire abilities, just that you're content with the decision, and happy." Endeavor's sneering mockery was washed away by the kind and compassionate voice of the only person who genuinely cared enough to stick with him even after he pushed her away. 

"I forgive you Shoto."

A tidal wave of fire crashed into Jeremy, causing the lizard to roar in agony. His hardened scales were useless against flames that burnt through them, his regeneration turned against itself as meat was consumed as fuel for the fire, his shock absorption worthless against heat that boiled his eyes and organs from the inside out.

Ibara's vines reeled back in shock, before seizing the opportunity and diving back in. They wrapped around the beast's legs and yanked them out from under it, toppling the screaming mutant to the ground.

Slowly, agonizingly, Shoto pulled himself to his feet, and blasted another wave of fire at Jeremy.

"Shoto!" Ibara called out in relief and wonder. "You're using your fire!"

"I am." He coughed, and gave her a bloody smile. "I'm not going to put my pride before you again. I made that mistake once, I'm not going to repeat it."

At those words Ibara's face lit up like a Christmas tree, you'd never have guessed she was beat up and bleeding from the genuine happiness on her face.

Shoto found himself mirroring it instinctively, and found that the pain in his chest was softened by a strange warm and fuzzy feeling. Was this what it felt like to have friends?

It was… nice.

…Was that black gas always there?

That warm fuzzy feeling was replaced by burning raw agony, as a dark metal spike speared through his chest.

"What a remarkably powerful quirk you have." The Sovereign of Sin mused in fascination as he withdrew his tail and let Shoto fall to the ground like a sack of meat. "I'll be taking several samples of it with me."

"SHOTO!" Ibara screeched in horror and shot her vines at Izuku, but was tackled to the side and pinned down by a still smoking Jeremy.

"Oh hush, don't be dramatic." Izuku rolled his eyes as he kneeled down and began extracting blood samples. "I didn't hit anything vital, and Heroes have survived waaay worse before. Captain Plasma got cut in half a few years ago, and he survived just fine. He even got robot legs from I island, although he never said if they replaced his junk."

" LEAVE HIM ALONE!" She trashed madly against the claws holding her down.

"Keep her still buddy. I just need to get my samples and I'll be over in a minute to give her a sedative."

"You- You- " Ibara shook, vibrating with righteous fury, and strained against her bonds hard enough to pop her joints. Then she froze, perfectly still, and sagged like a puppet with her strings cut.

Tears streamed from her face and dripped to the floor. In her darkest hour, Ibara did what she always did. She leaned her head back, and prayed.

"O Lord our God, most mighty and merciful father, I thine unworthy servant, once more approach thy presence. I have failed you father, failed to protect your flock from harm; yet I beseech thee, for the sake of those who have never known your love, I beg you to lend me a fraction of your infinite strength! 

"Empower me, Lord, to save your children! Empower me, Lord, to rise above the weakness and limits of mine flesh! Empower me, oh glorious Lord, to act as thy shield, thy bulwark to protect your- ack! "

Ibara cut off, hacking as seven shots of pure Entropy shot into her system, and Izuku's boot slammed into her head, knocking her out cold.

The Sovereign of Sin panted heavily as he stared at her, blood vials left unfinished and scattered on the other side of the room. Wearing his thick winter coat that kept him comfortably warm in the frigid temperatures of the origin lab, he shivered at the sheer sense of wrongness that crept along his spine.

Every fight or flight instinct he had screamed at him, and he frantically glanced about, for some thing he knew, logically, wasn't there but that he could feel staring at him.

After a tense few seconds, the feeling dissipated, and Izuku let out a sigh of relief.

"...I'm grabbing my vials, then we're getting out of this room." He said slowly, chewing on his lip. " Then we're going to kill Endeavor."

"Hamk!" Jeremy barked enthusiastically.

-Rain of Sins-

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Izuku walked down the winding corridors at the deepest level under the building, and followed the trail of chaos.

Blood was splattered on the walls, spent bullet cases clattered underfoot, bodies lay crumpled in heaps, and dust (Shigaraki's doing, no doubt) powdered everything.

The fighting here had been intense, so much so that the structure had been damaged enough for rain water to start leaking all the way down here.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Villains and Heroes alike were strewn across the floor, but unlike elsewhere in the building armored HPSC troops accompanied them.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

He was on the right track.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Jeremy let out a low growl as the tunnel opened up to reveal an enormous concrete cavern. It was completely bare except for the pillars that supported the ceiling and a set of railway tracks running through the middle of the room and out two tunnels.

Oh, and also all the bodies. Those weren't usually supposed to be there.

Squloush

Izuku paused at the sensation of stepping in a thick liquid that was very much not blood, and looked down to see a pool of purplish black sludge.

"...So Kirogiri's gas becomes a liquid on death? Interesting."

He collected a quick sample before continuing to the tracks, stepping over a half dusted cowboy hat with a small Safety Commission logo on the side.

Jeremy dropped to all fours and began sniffing the ground as they got near the train tracks, almost like a dog. Izuku reached into his coat and pulled out a small sealed bag that he opened and held out to Jeremy.

The nomu took a deep smell of the burnt scrap of Endeavor's uniform that Izuku had salvaged from the festival attack, and growled in affirmation.

"So he was here. Good. I'm not going to be caught by another bait and switch." Izuku smirked under his mask and pulled out his lab phone, panning it down both tunnels.

"East tunnel has more recent thermal readings. That's the way it went." The Villain pocketed his phone and climbed onto the nomu's back. "Let's not keep them waiting any longer."

He hesitated a moment, swallowing down the tangled mess of emotions that built in his gut as he gazed into the endless dark of the tunnel.

"Jeremy. Chase."

The beast roared and took off in a dead sprint that could rival All Might.

"You can run Endeavor…" The Sovereign of Sin whispered to himself as he rode into the abyss. "But you can only prolong the inevitable."

-Chapter End-

Am I implying that Ibara's religion might have a bit more to it here? Ehh, I mean, what's the point of playing Bloodborne or a Cthulu-esk game if the eldritch things beyond understanding that the cult worships turn out to not exist. We've seen weirder things in MHA cannon, and it's not like it's a main point of the story anyway, let Ibara have her Old Testament God in the background. I mean, 'glowy light from above" isn't part of her quirk and we see her do it all the time in the show.

Besides, between all the Chrisian allegories in cannon (AfO has holes in his hands, like Jesus, author alludes to him being the literal antichrist, among other things), and the foreshadowing I've been doing with Izuku's projects (the big flag, it's literally named "rapture", hello?) there's a lot of readers who already guessed this little subplot in the comments. So shout out to y'all!

*Sips Hot Chocolate*

Next chapter- Izuku vs Endeavor (Rematch).

You don't want to miss it.