Chapter 239 - God of Fire And Hell
Shoto ran on the ceiling, upside down, to avoid the bodies littering the ground.
A pang of the wall on his left fell in his wake, a white cloud of dust flying everywhere.
His sharingan slid to the hole from which two prisoners were tumbling from while fighting.
Shoto clapped his hands, and they both looked at him. His Sharingan twirled lazily as he ensnared them in a genjutsu.
Their eyes turned glassy : they stood up, arms lanky, running to the nearest exit.
In their mind, they were running from the wardens who wanted them to get back to their cell.
It was a far cry from Kotoamatsukami, but for people devoid of a chakra system – and, thus, unable to break out of genjutsu – it was more than enough.
Shoto acknowledged neither warden nor inmates, merely doing his job of getting out while sowing more chaos.
Had he purposefully oriented his explosion so that most of the cells' doors above his would burst open ? Yes, he did.
But he hadn't killed anyone – yet – so whatever the freed prisoners were doing wasn't his responsibility.
Shoto kept running through the corridors, shunshining to cover distance faster.
He witnessed a hollow-cheeked inmate looting bodies to find a weapon, saw crazed-eyed, corpse-like inmates ganging up on a single warden and beating him to death.
He ensnared them all in his genjutsu, pushing in their mind the need to gather and flee.
For those who were too weakened to even crawl, Shoto had an ice bullet ready for them.
He turned at a corner and saw an inmate sprawled out on the ground like a starfish, laughing hysterically, moving his arms and legs as if to make snow angels in a pool of blood.
His hand repeatedly hit the cheek of a body lying next to him as though he were slapping him : the corpse's tongue lolled out of its mouth, the tip licking the bloodied floor.
The ice bullet was ready, though the flash of blue hair made Shoto pause for a brief second he couldn't afford.
Dry spit running down his chin, hair messy and dirty, a huge grin splitting in face in two, Tomura Shigaraki kept rolling on the ground.
He laughed out loud, his eyes not even seeing Shoto.
'Sensei'
And he burst out laughing louder.
For people in such a state, death was mercy.
Blood spurted out like fireworks from his burst ear.
He stiffened then his head fell limply on the side, eyes bulging, a huge grin on his lips.
Shoto's eyes locked on a closed door, his eyes roaming over the words.
He stopped dead in his tracks, the familiarity of the name ringing alarm bells yet unable to fully remember where he'd heard it before a memory from his last life flashed in his mind.
He hesitated for a brief second.
He had to sow confusion and chaos ; yet if he brought him out, it could mean the death of hundreds of people if not more.
There was a part of him that knew it was wrong, and another, bigger, who was vindictive enough that he had to see the country that'd tried to imprison him for helping a friend on its knees.
Thus, Shoto opened Nine's cell.
*
There were two ways of activating God Mode : you could gather the heat from a boiling floor, take energy from it and activate your own transformation, or you could seek the energy from deep within yourself, reach in your 'power' core, and make your body reach never-heard-of temperatures, before using said power to activate God Mode and lit up the world like a light-bulb.
The second one was the hardest of the two as, if not treading carefully, you could melt from the inside out.
Enji had heard of a few people in their family who'd killed themselves that way, trying to master a stronger version of the God Mode yet ending up with their melted organs leaking out of every hole in their body in what would be one of the most excruciating forms of death.
Yet the second option was the quickest and, thus, that's what Enji did.
He braced himself, jaw clenched, fists closed, focusing on Jin Woo's shadowy form whose eyes were now fully black.
Lava was swirling and rolling at the lowest level of the prison, slowly melting away walls and people.
Today Enji would kill countless people – prisoners and innocents alike – to rescue his son.
He'd like to say that he felt guilty about it, but the last bit of his remorse had died when they'd put his eldest in a shoe box.
"You can still back down"
Jin Woo's voice was chilling, as though a thousand people were speaking simultaneously.
Enji's skin shattered.
Lava filled the cracks like water filling up a broken glass. Red and yellow lit up his broken face as if there was a glowing sun beneath his skin.
Lava poured from the cracks, covering his broken skin like a second layer : a fiery, living armor of barely solidified lava covered his whole body, fire erupting here and there in short, powerful bursts.
The heat he radiated was so strong all of the grass in a hundred-meter radius caught fire.
Under him the ground was black, charred, destroyed beyond repair : a few meters behind, the trees leading up to a patch of forest caught fire from within, burning like candles, leaves on fire crackling, crumbling bark turning to ashes.
Jin Woo looked up ; the sky turned fiery red, the ominous color spreading like wildfire among the clouds, the sun so intensely brilliant it looked like it would burst.
Everything, from the ground to the sky, was taking a reddish, fiery, hue, as though the whole world was catching fire.
Jin Woo looked down.
Enji, glowing like a dying star, was fully translucent, encased in a swirling armor of lava, his blue eyes fluorescent like overpowered light bulbs, his red hair now molten lava.
Jin Woo, still floating in the sky, cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders.
He raised his hands, and the world stilled.
"Monarch's Domain"
Shadows burst like a tsunami from Jin Woo.
They ran between the clouds and the top of trees, a thick layer of darkness separating the ground from the sky, encasing them – in a half-kilometer radius – void of obscurity.
Enji looked up at the dark blanket as it spread like a malevolent domain, chasing the light from the world : it was shimmery, so dark it looked blue.
It looked as if the world had turned upside down, Jin Woo turning the sky into a shady ocean, Enji an earthly sun that lit up the world around him.
The fire and the shadows clashed, none of them able to overpower the other.
Enji and Jin Woo seized each other, both inhuman creatures that had nothing to do with mortals.
They were gods among men, beings made to shatter the earth and destroy the sky.
Enji opened his hands, keeping his palms close to each other.
A core of swirling lava appeared, rings of fire gravitating around it, so hot that bits of translucent skin on Enji's palms turned crisp black and fell on the floor like snow.
He raised his hands, and the core shot up from his hands to Jin Woo at lightning speed, wind hissing behind it, world bending around it, chasing the shadows away as it ascended.
Jin Woo raised his hand : a shadow portal appeared in between him and the glowing orb, swallowing it in a pit of darkness. It closed behind it, devouring both heat and light.
"Is that-"
The space where the portal had closed burst like an imploding star, a shock wave of lava and light burning the very air in a loud, hissing pitch.
A ring of fire propagated like a mid-air earthquake, turning to ashes everything in its wake. Scorching wave of heat, it burned the top of trees and hit Jin Woo head-on.
A shadow wall rose between them but the blast broke through it easily and hit him straight in the gut, forcing the air out of him in a gasp, clothes catching fire.
He was sent whirling into the administrative section of the prison, destroyed the roof, and went through the only two surface-level floors.
A cloud of smoke rose, hiding Jin Woo from Enji's view.
Enji spun on his feet, lava hand intercepting Jin Woo's shadowy fist who'd have blasted a hole in his chest had he been a fraction slower.
Jin Woo was still rising from a puddle of darkness that had gathered right behind Enji, the shadows momentarily receding from his face as he cocked his head to the side :
"You won't win that one"
Enji grunted as the pressure applied against his open palm increased tenfold, the shadows flickering like thousands of tiny tongues on Jin Woo's knuckles, licking at the lava covering Enji before moving away, startled, as if burned and hurt, yet unrelenting.
Enji met Jin Woo's gaze head-on: Jin Woo pushed more and more, Enji's hand bending further backward until he felt his bones cracking.
Enji gritted his teeth, his translucent skin turning to glass, the blood in his body turning to molten lava, his fluorescent eyes, previously two beaming blue lights, now two laser-blue pits of fire.
Jin Woo's eyes widened and he let go of Enji, shadows draping over him, yet it was too late : Enji, head raised towards the sky, was as brilliant as a supernova, white light lighting him up from the inside as though he had the sun in his chest.
Blue lava shot up from every inch of his skin in a monstrous, devastating wave of scorching heat.
Jin Woo's shadows shot up as he was already waist down a portal when the wave hit him head-on, overwhelming him.
The barely standing trees were obliterated, ashes swooshed up towards the inky sky before they caught fire, and the nearby building, already half-molten, collapsed on itself like a wet mud castle.
The soil, already on fire, turned black, the heat so intense it destroyed until the smallest blade of grass, turning the ground infertile for as far as the heat could reach.
Blue lava hit Jin Woo's dome, burning away the shadows that tried to rekindle themselves as fast, lapping at the dark wall like sea foam and licking the sand, searching for a way to get out.
Jin Woo tried to keep the heat in – even though the air was reaching unbreathable levels of hot – but he could not contain Enji's devastating power.
Far beneath Enji's artificial lava the ground rumbled, Japanese volcanoes waking up one after another, panicked scientists scrambling up to the nearest phone to warn about the incoming catastrophe.
A level seven earthquake shook Tokyo and its immediate surroundings, badly built buildings collapsing on themselves, cracks spreading through the streets, cars falling in wide crevasses, people screaming and trying to take cover.
For the first time in nearly seven hundred years, Mount Fuji woke up.
It started with a low rumble and a sudden puff of smoke exhaled by the crater, as though it were coming back to life.
Rubble ran down from its top down to frowning hikers ; the ground was shaking.
Then, without warning, a pillar of lava shot up from its crater, speckles coloring the clouds a deathly red.
People soaking in hot springs were ushered out quickly : the slowest were boiled alive.
Enji fell on one knee, breathing ragged, black spots dancing in his vision.
His lungs were so hot he feared they'd melt inside his chest, the outside layer of his skin burning away like paper, falling around him in charred speckles.
A few meters in front of him shadows surged forward and gathered in a black puddle.
Enji, still as bright as a white sun, blinked and raised his hand, willing the lava to devour it, but a cough shook him and he bent over, holding onto the swirling lava that moved as if it were alive around his ankles.
Soot dripped from his mouth, disappearing in the lava with a hiss.
Jin Woo rose from his shadows.
Half of his face was molten, his skull caved in as if someone had bashed it in with a hammer. There was no blood, only a dark, thick liquid dripping from his wounds like ink, falling down his clothes and disappearing within the swirling portal.
His eyes were glassy : he hit his last functional ear with the palm of his head, head cocked, as though he wanted to get something out of it.
The inky blood turned to a thousand whips that grabbed tightly onto each other, bubbling like monstrous flesh for Jin Woo was regenerating himself.
The ink turned to flesh then skin grew over it, filling the caved-in head as though it'd been nothing.
Jin Woo's eyes were sharp : there was no more arrogance, no more cocky act, no more misplaced confidence.
He'd underestimated a Todoroki : he wouldn't make the same mistake twice.
"Arise"
*
A/N :
Hope you enjoy the story for now because it won't last.
A pang of the wall on his left fell in his wake, a white cloud of dust flying everywhere.
His sharingan slid to the hole from which two prisoners were tumbling from while fighting.
Shoto clapped his hands, and they both looked at him. His Sharingan twirled lazily as he ensnared them in a genjutsu.
Their eyes turned glassy : they stood up, arms lanky, running to the nearest exit.
In their mind, they were running from the wardens who wanted them to get back to their cell.
It was a far cry from Kotoamatsukami, but for people devoid of a chakra system – and, thus, unable to break out of genjutsu – it was more than enough.
Shoto acknowledged neither warden nor inmates, merely doing his job of getting out while sowing more chaos.
Had he purposefully oriented his explosion so that most of the cells' doors above his would burst open ? Yes, he did.
But he hadn't killed anyone – yet – so whatever the freed prisoners were doing wasn't his responsibility.
Shoto kept running through the corridors, shunshining to cover distance faster.
He witnessed a hollow-cheeked inmate looting bodies to find a weapon, saw crazed-eyed, corpse-like inmates ganging up on a single warden and beating him to death.
He ensnared them all in his genjutsu, pushing in their mind the need to gather and flee.
For those who were too weakened to even crawl, Shoto had an ice bullet ready for them.
He turned at a corner and saw an inmate sprawled out on the ground like a starfish, laughing hysterically, moving his arms and legs as if to make snow angels in a pool of blood.
His hand repeatedly hit the cheek of a body lying next to him as though he were slapping him : the corpse's tongue lolled out of its mouth, the tip licking the bloodied floor.
The ice bullet was ready, though the flash of blue hair made Shoto pause for a brief second he couldn't afford.
Dry spit running down his chin, hair messy and dirty, a huge grin splitting in face in two, Tomura Shigaraki kept rolling on the ground.
He laughed out loud, his eyes not even seeing Shoto.
'Sensei'
And he burst out laughing louder.
For people in such a state, death was mercy.
Blood spurted out like fireworks from his burst ear.
He stiffened then his head fell limply on the side, eyes bulging, a huge grin on his lips.
Shoto's eyes locked on a closed door, his eyes roaming over the words.
He stopped dead in his tracks, the familiarity of the name ringing alarm bells yet unable to fully remember where he'd heard it before a memory from his last life flashed in his mind.
He hesitated for a brief second.
He had to sow confusion and chaos ; yet if he brought him out, it could mean the death of hundreds of people if not more.
There was a part of him that knew it was wrong, and another, bigger, who was vindictive enough that he had to see the country that'd tried to imprison him for helping a friend on its knees.
Thus, Shoto opened Nine's cell.
*
There were two ways of activating God Mode : you could gather the heat from a boiling floor, take energy from it and activate your own transformation, or you could seek the energy from deep within yourself, reach in your 'power' core, and make your body reach never-heard-of temperatures, before using said power to activate God Mode and lit up the world like a light-bulb.
The second one was the hardest of the two as, if not treading carefully, you could melt from the inside out.
Enji had heard of a few people in their family who'd killed themselves that way, trying to master a stronger version of the God Mode yet ending up with their melted organs leaking out of every hole in their body in what would be one of the most excruciating forms of death.
Yet the second option was the quickest and, thus, that's what Enji did.
He braced himself, jaw clenched, fists closed, focusing on Jin Woo's shadowy form whose eyes were now fully black.
Lava was swirling and rolling at the lowest level of the prison, slowly melting away walls and people.
Today Enji would kill countless people – prisoners and innocents alike – to rescue his son.
He'd like to say that he felt guilty about it, but the last bit of his remorse had died when they'd put his eldest in a shoe box.
"You can still back down"
Jin Woo's voice was chilling, as though a thousand people were speaking simultaneously.
Enji's skin shattered.
Lava filled the cracks like water filling up a broken glass. Red and yellow lit up his broken face as if there was a glowing sun beneath his skin.
Lava poured from the cracks, covering his broken skin like a second layer : a fiery, living armor of barely solidified lava covered his whole body, fire erupting here and there in short, powerful bursts.
The heat he radiated was so strong all of the grass in a hundred-meter radius caught fire.
Under him the ground was black, charred, destroyed beyond repair : a few meters behind, the trees leading up to a patch of forest caught fire from within, burning like candles, leaves on fire crackling, crumbling bark turning to ashes.
Jin Woo looked up ; the sky turned fiery red, the ominous color spreading like wildfire among the clouds, the sun so intensely brilliant it looked like it would burst.
Everything, from the ground to the sky, was taking a reddish, fiery, hue, as though the whole world was catching fire.
Jin Woo looked down.
Enji, glowing like a dying star, was fully translucent, encased in a swirling armor of lava, his blue eyes fluorescent like overpowered light bulbs, his red hair now molten lava.
Jin Woo, still floating in the sky, cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders.
He raised his hands, and the world stilled.
"Monarch's Domain"
Shadows burst like a tsunami from Jin Woo.
They ran between the clouds and the top of trees, a thick layer of darkness separating the ground from the sky, encasing them – in a half-kilometer radius – void of obscurity.
Enji looked up at the dark blanket as it spread like a malevolent domain, chasing the light from the world : it was shimmery, so dark it looked blue.
It looked as if the world had turned upside down, Jin Woo turning the sky into a shady ocean, Enji an earthly sun that lit up the world around him.
The fire and the shadows clashed, none of them able to overpower the other.
Enji and Jin Woo seized each other, both inhuman creatures that had nothing to do with mortals.
They were gods among men, beings made to shatter the earth and destroy the sky.
Enji opened his hands, keeping his palms close to each other.
A core of swirling lava appeared, rings of fire gravitating around it, so hot that bits of translucent skin on Enji's palms turned crisp black and fell on the floor like snow.
He raised his hands, and the core shot up from his hands to Jin Woo at lightning speed, wind hissing behind it, world bending around it, chasing the shadows away as it ascended.
Jin Woo raised his hand : a shadow portal appeared in between him and the glowing orb, swallowing it in a pit of darkness. It closed behind it, devouring both heat and light.
"Is that-"
The space where the portal had closed burst like an imploding star, a shock wave of lava and light burning the very air in a loud, hissing pitch.
A ring of fire propagated like a mid-air earthquake, turning to ashes everything in its wake. Scorching wave of heat, it burned the top of trees and hit Jin Woo head-on.
A shadow wall rose between them but the blast broke through it easily and hit him straight in the gut, forcing the air out of him in a gasp, clothes catching fire.
He was sent whirling into the administrative section of the prison, destroyed the roof, and went through the only two surface-level floors.
A cloud of smoke rose, hiding Jin Woo from Enji's view.
Enji spun on his feet, lava hand intercepting Jin Woo's shadowy fist who'd have blasted a hole in his chest had he been a fraction slower.
Jin Woo was still rising from a puddle of darkness that had gathered right behind Enji, the shadows momentarily receding from his face as he cocked his head to the side :
"You won't win that one"
Enji grunted as the pressure applied against his open palm increased tenfold, the shadows flickering like thousands of tiny tongues on Jin Woo's knuckles, licking at the lava covering Enji before moving away, startled, as if burned and hurt, yet unrelenting.
Enji met Jin Woo's gaze head-on: Jin Woo pushed more and more, Enji's hand bending further backward until he felt his bones cracking.
Enji gritted his teeth, his translucent skin turning to glass, the blood in his body turning to molten lava, his fluorescent eyes, previously two beaming blue lights, now two laser-blue pits of fire.
Jin Woo's eyes widened and he let go of Enji, shadows draping over him, yet it was too late : Enji, head raised towards the sky, was as brilliant as a supernova, white light lighting him up from the inside as though he had the sun in his chest.
Blue lava shot up from every inch of his skin in a monstrous, devastating wave of scorching heat.
Jin Woo's shadows shot up as he was already waist down a portal when the wave hit him head-on, overwhelming him.
The barely standing trees were obliterated, ashes swooshed up towards the inky sky before they caught fire, and the nearby building, already half-molten, collapsed on itself like a wet mud castle.
The soil, already on fire, turned black, the heat so intense it destroyed until the smallest blade of grass, turning the ground infertile for as far as the heat could reach.
Blue lava hit Jin Woo's dome, burning away the shadows that tried to rekindle themselves as fast, lapping at the dark wall like sea foam and licking the sand, searching for a way to get out.
Jin Woo tried to keep the heat in – even though the air was reaching unbreathable levels of hot – but he could not contain Enji's devastating power.
Far beneath Enji's artificial lava the ground rumbled, Japanese volcanoes waking up one after another, panicked scientists scrambling up to the nearest phone to warn about the incoming catastrophe.
A level seven earthquake shook Tokyo and its immediate surroundings, badly built buildings collapsing on themselves, cracks spreading through the streets, cars falling in wide crevasses, people screaming and trying to take cover.
For the first time in nearly seven hundred years, Mount Fuji woke up.
It started with a low rumble and a sudden puff of smoke exhaled by the crater, as though it were coming back to life.
Rubble ran down from its top down to frowning hikers ; the ground was shaking.
Then, without warning, a pillar of lava shot up from its crater, speckles coloring the clouds a deathly red.
People soaking in hot springs were ushered out quickly : the slowest were boiled alive.
Enji fell on one knee, breathing ragged, black spots dancing in his vision.
His lungs were so hot he feared they'd melt inside his chest, the outside layer of his skin burning away like paper, falling around him in charred speckles.
A few meters in front of him shadows surged forward and gathered in a black puddle.
Enji, still as bright as a white sun, blinked and raised his hand, willing the lava to devour it, but a cough shook him and he bent over, holding onto the swirling lava that moved as if it were alive around his ankles.
Soot dripped from his mouth, disappearing in the lava with a hiss.
Jin Woo rose from his shadows.
Half of his face was molten, his skull caved in as if someone had bashed it in with a hammer. There was no blood, only a dark, thick liquid dripping from his wounds like ink, falling down his clothes and disappearing within the swirling portal.
His eyes were glassy : he hit his last functional ear with the palm of his head, head cocked, as though he wanted to get something out of it.
The inky blood turned to a thousand whips that grabbed tightly onto each other, bubbling like monstrous flesh for Jin Woo was regenerating himself.
The ink turned to flesh then skin grew over it, filling the caved-in head as though it'd been nothing.
Jin Woo's eyes were sharp : there was no more arrogance, no more cocky act, no more misplaced confidence.
He'd underestimated a Todoroki : he wouldn't make the same mistake twice.
"Arise"
*
A/N :
Hope you enjoy the story for now because it won't last.