Chapter Text
The radar operator on the modified freighter saw it first.
A single contact, closing fast from the southeast.
There was no transponder signal. No flight plan. No radio acknowledgment on any monitored frequency.
Just a lone blip on the green screen moving at a speed that civilian aircraft didn't move at, and military aircraft didn't move at either.
Not at this altitude, not on this heading, and certainly not twenty-three minutes after an armed device had been placed aboard a cargo plane over international waters.
He stared at the screen, his face turning pale. The blip just kept coming.
"Contact," he muttered to no one in particular, and then louder, turning toward the rest of the crew compartment: "We have a contact!"
The leader stepped forward, leaning over the console. He looked at the screen, tracking the impossible closing speed.
His jaw set into a hard line. "How long?" he demanded.
"Ninety seconds," the operator said, his voice shaking.
The leader turned sharply back toward the cargo bay. "Suits on," he ordered. "Now!"
---
The hole in the fuselage appeared on the starboard side, right at the cargo bay level.
It happened suddenly and without a shred of warning, the way things always happened when something moving at the speed of the Jack suit decided that the side of an aircraft was not a structural consideration it was going to accommodate.
The impact was incredibly clean. The vibranium surface of the armor did exactly what Izuku had engineered it to do—distributing the massive kinetic energy evenly through its molecular lattice rather than transferring the shock to the plane's frame. Because of that, the opening was perfectly shaped by the silhouette of the suit rather than an explosion.
He was through the metal wall and standing on the cargo bay floor in the very same motion. The Jack suit's heavy boots locked instantly to the deck with a metallic clang, the magnetic couplings engaging the moment they touched the steel floor. Ally had added that specific feature to the design for aircraft operations, and right now, it kept him entirely anchored.
The cargo bay was massive, lit only by dim emergency lighting that made the whole space look like a disaster waiting to happen.
The bomb occupied the rear third of the space.
It was a massive, lead-shielded cylinder, bolted heavily to the deck at four points. It was covered in a web of wiring that was both more and less sophisticated than Izuku had expected.
It looked like a physicist's design with a soldier's crude wiring. Someone who truly understood the nuclear physics had handed the project off to people who only understood basic explosives, and the two approaches had been slammed together without nearly enough conversation between them.
There were six men waiting for him.
They were all wearing bulky hazmat suits—full NBC configuration. It was the kind of heavy gear that completely prevented quirk use, which meant they had come fully prepared for the toxic environment of an active device and had willingly sacrificed their quirks to do it.
Izuku had already accounted for that in his mission profile. What he hadn't accounted for were the assault rifles in their hands. That was a serious escalation from the device configuration he had been tracking, suggesting the plane had picked up extra security personnel somewhere between the island and its current position.
Through his visor, Izuku scanned their helmets.
Ally had her facial recognition software running before he even completed the visual sweep. The results flashed up across his HUD in the clinical format she always used for things she was presenting without commentary—which, in itself, was its own form of commentary.
"All six are confirmed members of the Hayashi cell," Ally’s voice hummed in his ear. "Current designation: dissolved. The cell's leader was killed in a joint operation between the JSDF and the HPSC six weeks ago. The operation was highly classified. This attack is their retaliation."
Six weeks ago.
Izuku filed the information away. The timing made perfect sense with the island staging operation.
They had spent four days visibly preparing on the island, but the actual logistics and planning would have started much earlier—likely within days of their leader's assassination.
He looked at the six men. The six men looked back at him.
For approximately one second, nobody in the cargo bay moved. The sudden intrusion had produced a towering figure in heavy, sealed, pale armored figure standing directly on their deck, and none of them had a mental category ready to process what they were looking at.
Then the leader shouted something that came out completely distorted through his hazmat helmet, and opened fire.
The others instantly followed his lead.
The cargo bay erupted into a deafening roar, filled with the harsh percussion of automatic gunfire at close range inside a hollow metal enclosure. The noise was amplified tenfold by the echoing walls. A hail of bullets flew through the air, landing on the Jack suit's vibranium-coated surface with the impact of things that had violently decided to matter, only to discover they didn't.
Izuku stood perfectly still. He let them empty an entire magazine each, because standing still under fire was a deliberate communication.
The message was simple: this is not going to work.
Then, one of them—the shooter on the far left, whose aim hadn't improved at all since his first burst—started tracking his weapon wildly. His bullets went wide and high, spanging loudly off the interior metal walls of the cargo bay.
One of those stray rounds hit the cylinder.
The sound it made was tiny—a sharp, metallic tick. In any other context, a sound like that would have been completely inconsequential.
But in this exact room, it was the sound of a bullet striking the housing of an armed nuclear device at an angle that violently shifted the structural stress right across the core connection point.
Ally’s voice cut through his earpiece before his HUD even had time to process the telemetry.
"WARNING: CRITICAL RADIATION LEAK DETECTED. FIELD EMISSIONS EXCEEDING FIVE THOUSAND REMS."
The red warning alarms inside Izuku's suit were not subtle.
Outside the armor, the very air in the cargo bay began doing things that air in cargo bays should never do.
A strange shimmer appeared—a visible heat distortion rippling right out of the cylinder's cracked breach point. It was the invisible, terrifying reality of ionizing radiation, flooding the room at a level that was instantly fatal to anyone without protection, and deeply concerning to anyone with it.
The six men were wearing standard hazmat suits.
But commercial hazmat suits were only rated for basic chemical and biological environments. They were absolutely not rated to withstand five thousand rems of direct gamma exposure.
Izuku watched their faces through their clear helmet visors. In an instant, their expressions shifted from aggressive determination to absolute terror. It was the look of people who had prepared for a very specific version of a suicide mission, but one that definitely didn't include a massive radiation leak at this scale.
The Jack suit's automated systems were already responding to the threat.
Izuku could feel the armor reacting—not through the suit's interior, which remained perfectly stable, but through the environmental readouts on his HUD. The sensors were registering the extreme external field intensity and the suit's heavy absorption response at the exact same time.
The gold-titanium lining was doing exactly what it was designed for. The massive gamma flux slamming into the armor's outer layer was being scattered safely across the heavy frame, the energy distributed evenly rather than concentrating on a single spot.
Simultaneously, the specialized NBC system sealed his internal atmosphere into a vacuum-tight lock, completely isolating him from the invisible poison filling the cargo bay.
The suit was incredibly heavy. Izuku had always known that—it was easily one of the heaviest armor in his entire Hall, because the shielding mass was distributed completely differently, built thick into the outer surface rather than just concentrated at the joint points.
But the sheer weight that made the Jack suit slow in the air made it, right now, the only thing in this cargo bay that wasn't a tragedy.
He was completely safe.
The six men around him were not.
---
"I don't have time for this," he said. The vocal synthesizers gave his words the deep, flat register of the suit's communication system. It was purely functional, completely devoid of warmth.
He moved.
The Jack suit was not built for speed the way the Classic was, nor did it have the fluid mobility of the Nightclub. Even more worse than that of the Striker.
What it possessed was sheer mass, backed by the enhanced speed of the serum. That combination produced a terrifying kind of force—not a flash of quickness, but something heavy moving with absolute, unstoppable momentum. He crossed the cargo bay in the time it took the nearest man to try and aim his rifle.
He swept his leg. The first man's guard shattered instantly, and he went down with the heavy thud of someone completely unprepared for the brute force behind the attack.
Izuku spun, bringing his forearm across at jaw level. The second man went cold before his body even hit the floor.
The third and fourth men drew knives—the secondary weapons of desperate people whose guns had failed them.
They rushed in from separate angles, moving with the coordination of a well-trained team. Izuku caught them both by the wrists at the exact same moment. The serum's strength handled the opposing forces effortlessly.
Using their own forward momentum, he slammed them hard into the steel bulkheads on either side of the room. The bulkheads dented under the impact. The third and fourth men did not get back up.
The remaining two completely broke. One bolted toward the compartment door, while the other lunged toward the cylinder.
"Ally, track the one at the door," Izuku ordered, letting him run.
He went after the man by the cylinder. The bomb was the only variable that mattered right now.
The leader was backed flat against the bomb's housing. His hazmat suit was visibly fogging up—the extreme temperature change from the radiation leak was ruining his visor's seal, which was failing under a field intensity it had never been tested to withstand.
In his hand, he held a detonator. It was a manual toggle with a heavy, lead-shielded casing, built specifically to function at close range in high-radiation zones.
His face was pale and slick with sweat. He clutched the toggle like a man who knew it was his absolute last piece of leverage. "Stay back!" he yelled. His voice came through the visor distortion thin, terrified, and desperately trying to hide it.
Izuku just looked at him.
He looked at the toggle, then at the cylinder behind the man, and finally at the visor seal that was going to give out in a matter of minutes anyway.
He closed the distance in three heavy steps. The man’s thumb twitched toward the switch. Izuku was faster.
His armored hand clamped over the toggle before the thumb could complete the motion. In a split second, the detonator wasn't a detonator anymore. The Jack suit’s crushing grip completely pulverized its structural integrity, reducing the device to a crushed handful of scrap metal and wires.
He set the leader down against the cylinder housing with the deliberate care of someone placing a fragile package where it would easily be found. The leader slid helplessly to the floor and didn't move. He had clearly run the math on his remaining options and realized he had none left.
The cargo bay finally fell silent, save for the blaring radiation alarm.
Izuku walked over to the cylinder. "Structural breach at the primary core housing," Ally reported. "The firing trigger leads are intact. The breach is at the containment interface—the stray bullet displaced the seating by about four millimeters. It's enough to compromise the shielding, but it didn't trigger the actual firing sequence."
A short pause. "The device is leaking, but it isn't armed to detonate. Those are two entirely different problems."
"I know," he said. "Give me the wiring diagram."
His HUD instantly overlaid a detailed schematic of the bomb. Ally had pulled it from data she’d gathered on the cell's known technical contacts, cross-referencing it with the physical layout her sensors had been mapping since he breached the hull. The primary firing sequence glowed bright red. The trigger leads were a specific pair of wires right at the top of the assembly.
He extended his right index finger.
A precision laser torch bled from the tip of his gauntlet.
It wasn't a weapon; it was a surgical tool, perfectly calibrated for the millimeter-level work of slicing through wires without disturbing the surrounding mechanics.
His hand was entirely rock-steady. The serum had given him a lot of things, and among them was the absolute stability of a hand that suffered no involuntary tremors, no adrenaline spikes, and no physical anxiety—even while standing inside a leaking nuclear device at thirty-five thousand feet.
He neatly sliced the first lead. Then the second.
Reaching into the assembly housing, he found the core contact point and pulled the core free. He used the exact amount of extraction force the HUD had calculated against the unstable state of the bomb.
The radiation alarm kept ringing. The toxic field hadn't vanished; the physical breach in the shielding was still there, which was a mechanical issue rather than an electrical one. But as he held the glowing core in his gauntlet, the suit's heavy gold-titanium shielding absorbed the direct contact, automatically adjusting to contain the threat.
On his HUD, the device indicators shifted from red to amber. Then, as the armor's NBC containment field wrapped fully around the extracted core, the lights turned a steady green.
"Device deactivated," Ally confirmed. "Fukuoka airspace is secure. The ambient field intensity in the cargo bay is dropping. At the current dissipation rate, the bay will be safe for hazmat-equipped responders in about forty minutes."
Izuku looked down at the unconscious men scattered across the floor, then at the leader slumping against the cylinder.
Finally, he looked out through the gaping hole in the fuselage. The dark night sky stretched out before him, with heavy clouds churning below and the distant, glowing lights of the Fukuoka coast shimmering on the horizon.
He let out a slow, controlled breath into the pressurized air of his helmet.
"Call Tsukauchi," he said. "Tell him I left a package for him at thirty-five thousand feet. He's going to need an NBC team to secure the plane's hull. Let him know the crew is alive and the device is completely deactivated. Mention that this was the Hayashi cell's retaliation—he'll understand the context immediately."
"Composing the message now," Ally replied. "Also, Izu... you should know that a hero response team reached the aircraft's projected intercept point about four minutes ago. They are currently approaching from the port side."
Izuku turned his helmet toward the hole in the wall. "Who is it?" he asked.
"Ryukyu, Endeavor, Crust, Nejire Hado, and—" Ally paused for a beat. "Touya Himura."
Izuku went completely quiet.
"He's been a pro hero for about four years now," Ally said, her voice dropping into a quiet, informative hum. "I've been tracking his status since his debut."
"So have I," Izuku replied softly.
He didn't say anything else. He simply activated his boot thrusters.
The Jack suit was noticeably slower in the air compared to the nimble Classic armor, but it was far from stationary.
With a clean, heavy clunk, the magnetic couplings released from the steel floor plates, exactly the way the system was engineered to do.
He angled his body upward and shot out through the gaping hole in the fuselage, leaving the ruined cargo bay behind.
---
The night sky at thirty-five thousand feet was freezing, perfectly clear, and pitch black.
The moment Izuku cleared the aircraft's hull, he oriented his sensors and spotted them immediately. The hero response team was closing fast from the port side, flying in a tight tactical formation. They had clearly been told they were rushing toward a nuclear crisis, and they had organized themselves to handle the absolute worst-case scenario.
Ryukyu was in her massive dragon form, her wide wings beating against the thin air as she carried the heroes who couldn't fly on their own at this altitude.
Endeavor was generating his own lift, hovering within a blazing column of his own making.
Nejire Hado spiraled through the sky, moving in that unique, controlled pattern she used to maintain high speed.
But it was the figure on the far right of the formation that drew Izuku’s attention.
He was flying at a deliberate distance from the rest—a position that clearly spoke of someone who wanted to watch all angles and respond to any sudden surprises. He had snow-white hair, and he was surrounded by a fierce, bright blue-white flame that looked completely different from Endeavor's harsh orange fire.
Izuku had known Touya had been a pro for years. He had seen the filings in the municipal hero registry long ago.
The heroes spotted the him at the exact same moment he pinned them on his HUD.
Ryukyu’s heavy wingbeats slowed down, her massive shape braking in mid-air. The rest of the group spread out slightly, executing the automatic tactical adjustment of experienced pros who had arrived at a high-stakes scene only to find a strange, towering figure in pale, gold-tinted titanium stepping out of a hole in the very plane they’d been scrambled to save.
Izuku could see their postures change instantly through his visor—that specific, tense readiness heroes used when a situation was completely unresolved.
He knew he had about three seconds before someone panicked or started demanding answers.
So, he spoke first. "The threat is already neutralized," Izuku said. He routed his voice through the suit's external speakers, cranking the volume so his words cut clean through the howling, high-altitude wind.
"The device is completely deactivated. There are six suspects unconscious inside the cargo bay. You will need an NBC team to secure the hull before anyone enters—the radiation field is still elevated, but it's dropping fast. Detective Tsukauchi has already been notified."
An absolute silence fell over the mid-air assembly.
Ryukyu stared at him, her great dragon eyes wide as she tried to process the massive gap between scrambling her entire team for a nuclear apocalypse and arriving to find a stranger had already fixed it.
Endeavor was glaring at him with that fierce, burning intensity he used when he was measuring someone's raw capability. It was the look of a man who had spent his entire life judging people against his own impossible standards, and he was currently applying that standard to the figure before him.
Touya was staring at the specific gold-and-titanium design of the Jack suit with a very different expression. His eyes were wide with a highly specific realization—one he was absolutely not going to say out loud in front of four ranking pro heroes, no matter how much experience he had under his belt.
Crust had raised his shield on pure reflex, but now he was lowering it with slow, careful deliberation, trying to manage the awkward transition from being ready for a brutal fight to realizing the fight was already over.
Nejire just stood there by Ryukyu's side, her mouth hanging open slightly. It was her classic expression for when a situation completely exceeded any of the questions she had prepared.
Izuku looked at each of them for exactly one second, confirming his HUD indicators showed they had all received and understood the data.
Then, he pointed a heavy armored finger downward toward the cargo plane. The aircraft was still flying steady on its course; the automated autopilot system Ally had hijacked through the plane's own controls was keeping it in a safe, controlled descent toward a coastal holding area where the military could intercept it.
"The package is yours," Izuku said flatly.
He tilted his body forward. His thrusters slammed into full output.
The sonic boom hit a half-second after he was already gone—a sharp, concussive CRACK that rippled through the cold sky.
The sudden pressure wave rocked Ryukyu’s massive wings, sent Nejire into a quick mid-air correction loop, and caused Crust to violently bring his shield back up on pure instinct.
By the time the shockwave faded, the Jack suit was nothing more than a tiny, receding speck of gold-and-pale-titanium light, completely vanishing past the horizon.
Touya watched the light disappear into the dark. He didn't say a single word.
---
The estate grounds were completely quiet when Izuku finally walked across the courtyard.
The Guardian had already reclaimed the Jack suit's heavy armor plates during his high-speed approach.
The donning system had run through its standard sequence smoothly, and the automated radiation protocols were currently running a deep decontamination cycle inside the Helicarrier's hangar bay.
Now, Izuku was back in his everyday clothes. His frames were resting on his nose.
He had been gone for exactly forty-one minutes.
He opened the door and stepped into the main house.
Izumi and Shiori were standing in the living room, their eyes glued to the television screen in the corner. The news feed was running at a high volume, filling the room with the frantic, loud energy of a broadcast that had just broken a massive story and was throwing every available reporter at it.
The screen showed a live reporter standing on a dark vantage point along the Fukuoka coast. Behind her, aerial footage showed the cargo plane in a slow, controlled descent, with a tight formation of military fighter jets flanking it as an escort.
A bright red banner flashed across the bottom of the screen: NUCLEAR TERRORIST THREAT INTERCEPTED.
The news anchor was talking with the forced, professional calm of someone delivering terrifying news that wasn't fully resolved yet, explaining that a rogue cell carrying a nuclear device had been stopped over international waters.
Then, just two minutes later, the headline flashed and updated: HEROES CONFIRM DEVICE NEUTRALIZED. SUSPECTS IN CUSTODY. FUKUOKA AUTHORITIES REPORT NO RISK TO PUBLIC.
The two girls were standing completely still in front of the television.
The moment the front door clicked, they both turned around to look at him.
---
He had time to register their expressions—the specific quality of them, what was in them, the particular texture of two people who had been standing in front of a news feed about a nuclear threat for the last several minutes.
They had understood exactly what kind of suit the Jack armor was. They had understood that he had been up in the air in it.
Then they crossed the room. They hit him at approximately the same moment.
Not separately. Together—Izumi from the left and Shiori from the right, throwing both arms around him at the same time.
It was the kind of hug that did not negotiate its intensity and did not perform anything. It was simply the full, unmanaged expression of two people who had been frightened for forty-one minutes and were finally done being frightened.
He caught them. He stood in the entrance with both of them and held on with the same weight he always had—the full, unhurried weight of someone who was exactly where he was supposed to be. He was quiet, because the quiet was what the moment required.
Izumi's face was buried against his shoulder. She wasn't crying.
She was doing that specific thing she did when she had decided she wasn't going to cry and was applying the full force of that decision. It meant her breath was uneven, her hands were gripping the back of his shirt incredibly tight, and she wasn't saying a word because saying anything would have completely broken her composure.
Shiori had her arms around him with her face turned slightly. She was completely still, the way she always got when something heavy had landed and she was simply being present with it, not requiring the moment to be anything other than what it was.
Izuku looked over Izumi's shoulder at the news feed. Device neutralized, the red banner read.
"For what it's worth," Ally’s voice chimed in from the living room speaker, using the specific volume she reserved for talking to the room rather than any one person, "the Jack suit's radiation shielding performed perfectly within its rated parameters throughout the entire deployment. He was never in danger from the radiation."
Izumi's grip didn't loosen an inch. "And from the detonation?" she asked against his shoulder. Her voice was incredibly even.
A heavy pause filled the room.
"The Jack suit is rated for the contamination envelope of an active device," Ally said quietly. "It is not rated for the actual detonation envelope."
Izumi pulled back just enough to look at him.
He met her eyes. "The device didn't detonate," he said softly.
"Because you stopped it."
"Yes."
"But if you hadn't—"
"I did."
She looked at him for a long, quiet moment with that stubborn expression she got when she was deciding whether to argue with something that was technically true but completely insufficient. She decided not to argue. But she didn't let go of him, either.
Shiori spoke up next: "You planned for it."
He looked over at her. "For which part?"
"For the possibility that it might actually happen," she said. "You built the Jack suit for extreme radiation zones. You built it thinking about this exact category of situation." She held his gaze with the steady certainty she always brought to things she had pieced together from available evidence. "And Ally is telling us the suit wouldn't have survived a blast."
"It wouldn't have," Ally confirmed.
"So you built it knowing it wouldn't survive the worst-case scenario," Shiori said, her voice dropping. "Knowing you might go in anyway."
Izuku was quiet for a moment. "I considered it a hypothetical," he said. "The suit was built for general radiation containment. Not for this specific—"
"He considered it a hypothetical and built a suit for it anyway," Ally interrupted, using that precise tone she used when she was stating a fact but clearly had feelings about it. "Which is the exact same thing. He builds for hypotheticals because hypotheticals have a non-zero probability of becoming real."
"Ally," he warned softly.
"You do," she insisted. "It's one of your better qualities, Izu, and also occasionally a deeply concerning one."
Izumi looked back at the news feed. She looked at the red banner, the footage of the fighter jet escort, and then back at him.
Without saying another word, she wrapped her arms right back around him. It was the only answer she had for the version of this conversation she was currently capable of having, and he received it exactly as the answer it was.
A small rustling sound echoed from the hallway.
Eri was standing in the doorway. She had come downstairs because the television was loud, the living room lights were on, and the estate at this hour was never usually configured this way. She had the soft, sleepy look of someone who had woken up to find the house completely different from how she left it and had come to investigate.
Yuki was right beside her, her tail swaying gently and her amber eyes wide and alert with the immediate readiness of someone who had been fast asleep thirty seconds ago but was now fully operational.
They looked at Izuku. They looked at Izumi's arms around him, then at Shiori's, and finally at the breaking news banner in the corner.
Eri took in the entire scene for a silent moment.
Then, she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him from the front, because that was where the open space was and she fit perfectly into it. She held on with the focused certainty of a child who didn't have the full context of the situation, but understood perfectly that the situation required her presence.
Yuki looked at the group arrangement for approximately one second.
Then, she launched herself at the general assembly. She didn't target any specific person; she just targeted the concept of the hug, landing right in the vicinity of Izumi and Shiori's arms. She made herself a component of the whole with the cheerful efficiency of someone who didn't need a detailed briefing to understand that this was exactly where she belonged.
"Why are we hugging?" Yuki asked from somewhere in the middle of the huddle, her bright, unique voice muffled by their clothes.
"Because Papa was gone and now he's back," Eri explained from her spot at the front. It was matter-of-fact. The complete version of the truth.
"Oh," Yuki said. Then, with the full weight of her agreement: "Yes. That."
He stood in the entryway of the estate he had built, surrounded by the four people who had assembled around him in the specific configuration of a family who had decided that proximity was the only correct response to the current situation.
The news feed kept running silently in the corner, broadcasting details about a nuclear device that had been neutralized at thirty-five thousand feet, while the river outside just kept moving through the dark.
He let his arms hold all of them tight. He didn't say a single word.
There was absolutely nothing to say that could improve on this.