Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tartarus.

A name borrowed from Greek mythology. A name that inspired dread in the minds of criminals throughout Japan. A name known worldwide, at least in passing. The name of one of the most secure prisons in the world. Japan’s premier incarceration facility.

Deep beneath the surface of the sea, under steel and water and concrete, a blind man’s grin widened ever-so-slightly.

Tartarus. All for One’s current place of residence.

His plan was proceeding without any unexpected turns whatsoever. While it might have been preferable to avoid incarceration, it was by no means catastrophic. Garaki already had the original All for One quirk, and the dominoes were set to fall with Tomura. The only thing All for One needed to do was wait, and Tartarus couldn’t keep time from passing.

They couldn’t even try to kill him, either. His agents in the government were kicking up as much fuss as they could about potential self-destruct quirks he might hold, pushing for a delay to his execution. And even then, his prodigious durability suite was potent enough to handle most anything they tried to throw at him. Especially since he was focusing solely on defense. Turtle, for example, was a quirk that increased the user’s durability proportionally to how little they were moving. It wasn’t much use in battles, but in a place like Tartarus, where he was almost completely still?

It made him nigh-invulnerable.

His grin widened a bit more. All he had to do was wait, and his plan would ensure he ascended into veritable godhood. With Tomura’s body, he would usher in a new age, shaped by his own desires. His reign would be eternal.

He could see the light at the end of the tunnel. In just a few months, everything he’d spent decades setting up would be brought to fruition. He would have his new body, and would finally take back One for All. After that, he’d consolidate his power and take New Order, then the rest of the world. He would be an unstoppable god.

In a few months, that was.

He simply needed to wait until Tomura’s body was ready. And, his vast intellect having foreseen the possibility of capture, he’d made sure to bring along a few quirks to pass the time in addition to the combat loadout he’d been cultivating to use against the blond moron. Even in his diminished state, he’d had enough capacity in his ruined body for them.

The only question was which one to use first. It couldn’t be anything external, as the guards and cameras would see, which eliminated a handful of options, but he had brought enough to give him a wide range of possibilities. He could tap into the internet and look for new and interesting quirks, or…

He was feeling nostalgic for the comics of his youth. So instead of Technopath, he reached for a quirk he’d never actually used before. Taken from a distant relative of Sir Nighteye, Storyteller was a precognitive quirk that showed the user the “story” they were taking part in. It took several years to recharge, but he was given to understand that it was amazingly comprehensive. The previous owner had been instrumental in preventing a coup that All for One had tried to set off, and had avoided all of his assassination attempts until he’d gotten involved personally.

From his interrogation of the woman, All for One had learned that the quirk would center in on the “protagonist” of whatever overarching plotline the user was a part of, and would follow that person in the style of a story to the end.

And… he was curious. What would his victory look like? He’d spent so long in a broken, ruined body that trying to imagine being healthy was near to impossible, beyond the abstract. This quirk would show him. It would give him a solid goal to work towards, and would prove beyond all doubt that his plans would succeed.

All for One activated the quirk.

“People are not born equal.”

Was that… the Ninth? As a child? Well, the boy certainly fit the traditional image of a protagonist. That would make All for One the ultimate villain, wouldn’t it? The thought brought a small measure of happiness to his mind.

But then the quirk continued, and started getting faster.

“Quirkless.”

Yes, yes, he knew that already.

“Swan dive…”

Oh? Now that was interesting. Something he could use the next time the boy tried to fight him. Breaking him down into a shivering wreck would be enjoyable.

“No hope for him.”

So the Ninth had visited Garaki as a child. Interesting. That meant that there was a sample somewhere in Garaki’s extensive records. He’d have to look into that.

But then the quirk got faster.

“Medium-sized body— I am here— Without a quirk— Body moved before I— My quirk is yours to inherit!”

All for One settled himself in to watch the events unfold as they came rushing into his mind.

“Eat this!”

The quirk was completely autonomous, he realized. Once he started it, he couldn’t stop until the end.

No matter. He’d intended to watch the whole thing anyway.

“UA…”

All for One could see so many flaws in the school’s system. How had they churned out so many high-ranking heroes? It was beyond him.

“It won’t kill him if he dodges!”

Oh. Oh, that was an absolutely lovely psychological wound he’d be able to use to tear the Ninth apart.

“USJ— Kill the Symbol of Peace— I am here—”

The quirk accelerated. The Sports Festival was shown next, with All for One sneering at the audacity of UA to broadcast the abilities and weaknesses of all their hero students. It had led him to over a dozen quirks he would have missed otherwise, and was a downright stupid maneuver on their parts. He was thankful for it, but he refused to believe that Nedzu had missed such a glaring weakness. There was something else afoot. Perhaps the HPSC was meddling again.

“Gran Torino.”

Stain. It was good that Tomura had eventually gotten his convictions solid. It would make All for One’s eventual takeover much better.

UA’s final exam was up next. Nothing interesting. But the summer camp was where things had really kicked off. It was a shame that they hadn’t been able to recruit the Explosion boy, but with the knowledge gained from the Storyteller quirk, All for One would have several more opportunities and avenues to explore, and the brat was primarily a plan to draw out the heroes anyways.

The quirk accelerated, and it was getting to the point that All for One was having to dedicate most of his mind to simply processing the information instead of reacting to it. It was no real setback, he’d simply go over it all after the quirk was done.

He settled in his chair and let the quirk flow.

“It’s already been destroyed.”

No.

“This is the tale of how we’ll keep reaching out to help for all time.”

No, no, no.

For the first time in decades, the grin fell from All for One’s face without a battle to distract him. His breathing was ragged, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

NO, this was all WRONG! HE WAS THE DEMON LORD! HE WAS SUPPOSED TO WIN!

HE ALWAYS WON!

He gritted his teeth and took a deep breath of the oxygen-rich air, ignoring the searing pain in his lungs and throat.

What had gone wrong? His plans were supposed to be perfect. Why was the future-him making such shortsighted decisions? How had the heroes managed to counter him? How had they managed to eke out a victory?

(He had just seen how, hadn’t he.)

…

All for One felt a chill as a sudden thought came to mind.

Was the future immutable?

Were the events he’d seen set in stone? Was he somehow fated to lose to LITERAL CHILDREN?

He took another deep breath, his hands balling into fists in his straitjacket.

No.

No, that was impossible. The “him” in the quirk’s visions wasn’t acting on the information he now knew. The quirk must have shown him what would have happened had he never activated the quirk.

The future could be changed. That was good.

All for One let out a sigh of relief. The future could be changed. And that meant…

He could prevent his defeat from ever happening.

But that meant he needed to escape. Because the catalyst of his downward spiral, at least from what he could tell at a glance, was his transfer into Tomura’s body. The plan with Tomura needed to be scrapped in its entirety. All for One could regain his health in a different way.

Overhaul, perhaps. He’d always known about the quirk, but he’d never had sufficient leverage to force the man to heal him, and didn’t have the time to devote years (even with his accelerated learning and memory) to learning every intricacy of the human body in order to manually heal himself after taking it. Maybe if he gave the quirk to Garaki?

No, actually—Rewind. Yes, Rewind would do nicely. If he rescued her from Overhaul, it would build a personal connection that would endear him to her, and he could use that connection to manipulate her into rewinding him to his prime. He already knew that it was possible to rewind the body but not his stored quirks, as seen when the future-him had used the Rewind derived from the bullet. And the Permeation boy’s case proved the inverse was also possible.

All for One took a moment to marvel at the capability of the quirk that rewound time. He wanted it. No matter how much training he would have to do. But could it be activated on the user themselves? It was unclear. So, better to wait until the girl had healed him, then take it.

Still, he needed to escape to do anything. And escape from Tartarus was a daunting task, to say the least. It would be difficult even for him to go up against all the varied defenses possessed by the prison.

Certainly, Tartarus wasn’t the outright best. There were more secure prisons elsewhere in the world. But all of them were facilities devoted to individuals. Built for those miniscule few who could cause devastation beyond compare if left free—a fate All for One had avoided only through his high-ranking agents. Tartarus was a general-purpose prison, though that didn’t diminish its own security at all.

All for One’s breakout would be even further complicated by the fact that he only had his combat loadout and a few quirks for passing the time. If he had the full breadth of his vast stockpile available to him, he would simply be able to walk out without a care in the world. Unfortunately, the damage done by the muscleheaded troglodyte was far-reaching and severe. It limited his quirk’s capacity, limited what quirks he could use, and left him in constant pain.

Even more irritating was the fact that he’d have to escape secretly, if he wanted any modicum of peace and quiet with which to make new plans. He was far too public of a figure as it stood. For all intents and purposes it had to appear as though he had never left his cell.

No matter. He was All for One. He would escape anyway. It would simply take a bit more of a delicate touch.

If he was to escape without being detected, he would need to avoid any damage to the building, avoid being caught on cameras, and fabricate evidence that he was still present in the cell. Double would work for the last issue, but All for One didn’t possess Double at the moment, and Bubaigawara Jin was too far away for him to use Warping on him.

Kurogiri, however, had no range limits. And regardless of the fact that he was compromised, Kurogiri was a nomu, designed to receive orders from All for One’s Radio Waves quirk. Moreover, the Erasure brat wasn’t present to subvert All for One’s nomu yet, so Kurogiri’s flaws wouldn’t come into play.

The rest of the plan very quickly fell into place. After letting off an EMP, he’d only have around twenty seconds before the camera systems came back on, but that was plenty of time. His reflexes and perceptions needed to be leagues above anything approaching average to even have a chance of keeping up with One for All’s godlike speed and power. The guns wouldn’t have the time needed to activate.

The primary issue with his plan, and likely the reason he hadn't employed it in the future he’d seen, was that the speed quirks he would need to use were going to place a not insignificant strain on his already injured body. He would need to keep the ventilator with him — at least until he got to any of his hideouts, all of which were stocked with the equipment he needed. But that would leave evidence of his escape. How to go about… Ah. Right.

Double.

He would be leaving a clone of himself behind to prevent suspicions, but Double wasn’t limited to copying people. No, it could copy anything. The quirk could only make two things at a time, but he only needed the ventilator temporarily. He would leave the real equipment untouched in his cell, and use the copied one for the short time it would take to travel to his nearest hideout and set himself up. Simple and easy.

And as soon as he had a portable mask again? Well, he would be off to rescue little Eri from the big, bad yakuza. He’d seen that she wouldn’t have been rescued until the Work Studies, which were still a while off. After the provisional license exam, in fact. That would give him ample time to get to the girl. And…

Yes, why not Overhaul as well? All for One was going to need to be covert. Overhaul would take some time to master, but it was a surgical quirk with immense potential. Decay was a modified copy of it, after all. If the reverse-engineered copy was any indication, Overhaul might eventually be able to spread through separate objects, and be activated by any part of the body rather than just the hands. The effort it would take to get the quirk to that point was likely going to be significant, but the future he’d seen had taught him a valuable lesson.

This time, he would win. He was immortal, or at least was going to be. He would have all the time in the world to master any quirk he wanted, and there was no guarantee that a matter-manipulation quirk as powerful as Overhaul might ever appear again. Better to take it now and have it, rather than risking it be lost forever.

His new philosophy applied to quite a few quirks he’d rejected in the past on the grounds of them being too complicated. He would have to make a trip to collect them all once his body was stable enough to hold them.

Ah, but he was getting sidetracked. Back to the more immediate options: the Shie Hassaikai. Though if he was being honest with himself, they wouldn’t be putting up much of a fight. He was All for One. Even their quirks were mostly useless to him. The only interesting ones were Confession and Sloshed. Perhaps some of the others could be used by nomu, but they were redundant and would serve no purpose other than to take up space in All for One’s quirk if he took them for himself.

Confession was interesting in that it forced the target to respond. His own lie-detection arsenal was more than capable of sussing out untruths, but it was a more passive option. And that wasn’t even getting into the potential for using vocally-activated quirks. Sloshed, on the other hand, had potential as it could disorient anyone within a certain range. Reducing the threat level of any attacker was a valuable tool for All for One to have in his possession.

Crystallize and Energy Suck possibly retained potential as quirks for some of the nomu, but they would offer very little to All for One personally. And the rest? Useless, save for maybe Food. If and only if it could synergize with mouths he created with other quirks would it have any worth. Otherwise, it was a mere gimmick. He would steal it to confirm or deny his suspicions, but he wouldn’t keep it if the answer turned out to be no.

Returning to the wider view of things, there was quite a lot All for One would have to do once he escaped and rescued Eri. He’d been preparing for the plan with Tomura becoming his new self for years, and now that the entire plan was unsalvageable, he would need to start fixing things. Most of his networks had been made autonomous, as he’d expected a period of acclimation, which would make getting everything operating smoothly at one hundred percent efficiency a bit of a hassle.

More pressingly, he’d also need to come up with a new plan to regain his health. And beyond that, to shed the constrictions and limitations his first-generation body placed on him. Garaki’s improvements could only do so much. They’d determined that modifying a late-generation body would make All for One’s ascension to a singularity possible, which was why he’d begun cultivating potential candidates, but he was now determined to find a different path. He would not risk the vestige of the original person trying to subvert him. Tomura was likely a special case, given just how much All for One had strengthened his willpower and hatred, but he wasn’t going to risk it.

But now that that avenue had been shown to be… less perfect than they’d expected, how was he going to take his rightful place as the undisputed ruler of the world?

Restoring his original body was possible, but it would be a mere consolation prize. Rewind could bring him back to his prime, but he would still be limited by the inefficiencies and flaws in his first-generation body. No, he either needed to refine Garaki’s modification process to be capable of improving his own body to the degree necessary, or he still needed to take over someone else’s. And…

All for One shifted slightly in the uncomfortable stone chair, listening to the soft whirrs of the turrets as they tracked their targets: his heart and head.

And there was also the fact that One for All would rebel against him when he took it. Even a single vestige, New Order, was shown to be capable of putting up a serious fight against him. One for All had seven fully-formed vestiges that would all need to be suppressed or otherwise incapacitated for All for One to finally retake what was rightfully his: the Power Stockpiling quirk and his brother. He’d been counting on Tomura’s hatred being enough to overcome the lingering wills, but even if it wasn’t a moot point by now he’d learned that Tomura’s hatred wasn’t enough.

Furthermore, he was realistic enough to admit—as much as the admission pained him—that his own will alone would not be enough. Against any of the One for All vestiges individually, he would of course win. Even against two or three at once. But collectively, they were a force to be reckoned with.

Though, he suddenly realized, that was contingent on him even reaching the Ninth to steal One for All in the first place. The brat was quick and clever, and even if he could only use a fraction of One for All’s full power, that still placed him above most heroes out there.

One for All was simply that powerful.

And even though All Might was renowned for his strength, the real killer was the speed. One for All let the user move at velocities vastly exceeding the speed of sound, with the reaction times to match. All Might was famed for solving most cases in an “instant,” after all. It was the whole reason All for One had put so much work into Overclock and Number Six.

Unfortunately, that particular quirk was dependent on the oxygenation of the brain, and therefore was now utterly unusable by him in his injured state. Nevertheless, Number Six had demonstrated the potential of the quirk quite nicely. All for One was making do with other, more limited perception boosters and acceleration quirks, but Overclock could have meant the difference between defeat and victory in his calamitous battle against the Eighth.

Ah, but he was getting distracted by hypotheticals again.

His primary concern was ensuring he survived in the short term. After all, he would be placing a massive strain on his injured body by using the speed quirks necessary, almost to the level of another no-holds-barred fight with All Might. If he wasn’t careful, he could end up overloading himself, leaving himself incapacitated and the guards alerted.

Twenty seconds. He needed to make his entire escape in twenty seconds or less. Any longer and the redundancies in Tartarus’s systems would restart the surveillance and security systems. Twenty seconds to get Kurogiri and Twice to warp to him, to steal Double, create a clone of himself and the ventilator, and leave.

But it wouldn’t end there. The backlash to his body meant that his destination by necessity was going to be one of his hideouts with advanced medical facilities. He had several, scattered around the country, and even more outside of Japan, but in this case it was likely better to go with an option closer to home. If there were to be any unforeseen complications, or if the backlash proved to be greater than he anticipated, then it would be beneficial to be in a location with competent allies who could help.

And neither Kurogiri nor Bubaigawara Jin were medical professionals.

Ergo, All for One’s destination would be the secret facility under Jakku General Hospital. And if he timed his breakout to occur at night, the Doctor was almost guaranteed to be there.

Yes, Jakku was the best option. It was the Doctor’s pride and joy, his homebase, and the location of the largest quirk archive in existence. All for One and Garaki had made a few others for redundancy, but the one under Jakku was as near to comprehensive as was possible. All for One had felt a pang of dismay when Storyteller had shown him Tomura disintegrating the whole thing without a care in the world.

Yet more evidence as to why the brat wasn’t suitable. His immaturity had been dismissed as a non-factor, seeing as All for One and the Doctor had expected the former’s vestige to completely override Tomura’s mind, but it seemed their predictions were incorrect.

And again, it was a moot point. Tomura would never be getting All for One’s quirk.

Once at Jakku, All for One would take some time to recuperate from the backlash of the speed quirks, then head out to rescue Eri. After that, he’d have to lay low while building up Eri’s trust and faith in him.

Hmm…

From what he’d seen, the girl already admired heroes, having seen them on the television. And she had a far more intimate understanding of what villains were, due to her torture at the hands of Overhaul. If All for One wanted the girl to trust him at all, he would have to distance himself from her previous captor.

That was doable. He could play the law-abiding citizen while slowly chipping away at Eri’s faith in heroes. In fact, a more sedate, domestic life would help hide him, right in plain sight. When one thought of the Symbol of Evil, one thought of secret lairs, dark rooms in shady places, and more in that vein. Who would suspect the perfectly ordinary man raising a child? He’d obviously need to hide his injuries somehow, but there were numerous transformation or illusion quirks he could use to do so. And from there, he’d regain his strength, continue his projects, and eventually reach his destiny.

And unlike the version of the future he’d seen, this time he would win.

Chapter Text

All for One’s cell was quiet. Save for the constant puffing of the ventilator, there was no noise in the room. Still, even that tiny amount was enough for him to get an approximation of his surroundings. The echoes bounced off the walls, guns, cameras, and his chair, bringing all that information back to All for One.

Years of limited senses had given him more than enough practice to echolocate, even without a specific quirk active to detect vibrations. He wasn’t going to tempt fate more than necessary. He’d only activated the Storyteller quirk because it was entirely mental, with no external factors that could have been picked up by Tartarus’s sensors.

Later on in his imprisonment, when they had a baseline of his brainwaves, even that would have been impossible. But so soon after his capture, they had no way of telling that the sudden spike of brain activity was a quirk.

He was glad he’d chosen to use it immediately. He still had some leeway, and could think about activating quirks without setting off alarms. If he’d waited for too long, escape on his own might truly have become impossible, and he’d have to wait for Tomura.

And by then it would be too late. Tomura would have All for One’s vestige within him.

His room was a square box with only one, reinforced door. He hadn’t been able to see color for years—relying on yet another quirk if he ever needed to—but Storyteller had shown him that the color scheme was primarily white.

He knew from his own research that the guns were the least of the measures taken to keep prisoners secure. From metamaterials unknown to the public in the walls to time-locked doors all the way up to being capable of flooding the level, if required.

And in his diminished state, that could very well kill him. His lungs were damaged, locking out most of his respiratory quirks and making him reliant on artificially-oxygenated air. And that wasn’t even considering the water pressure.

Nevertheless, he’d be neatly bypassing each and every one of those contingencies. Having a warper, especially one as versatile as Kurogiri, was a force multiplier beyond compare. It was beyond disappointing that he was revealed to be compromised. All for One would have to take Warp Gate for himself. The time it would take to master it would be less than ideal, but taking the quirk aligned with his new philosophy anyways.

In any case, the time he’d selected for his escape was soon to be upon him. As he waited, he ran over the details one final time.

And froze.

All for One was immediately grateful he’d done one final check, because there was a great gaping flaw in his plan that could have ruined the whole thing.

He had no experience with Double.

He couldn’t count on being able to use the quirk immediately after taking it. If it required practice, he’d have ruined his only chance at remaining undetected. Twice would have to retain the quirk. Forced Quirk Activation piggybacked somewhat off the target’s own experience with their quirk, so he didn't have to throw out the entire plan and start over, but the fact that he had already made a mistake was concerning.

Then again, he hadn’t put his plan into execution just yet. He technically was still in the planning stage, and therefore hadn’t truly made a mistake.

Returning to his plan, he pondered what the change would mean for him. Twice keeping his quirk would obviously mean that All for One wouldn’t have it. And All for One wouldn’t be able to take it without destroying the copy of himself in Tartarus.

Unfortunate, but Garaki had already made a copy. All for One could take the copy, and if Garaki insisted on having access to the quirk then the Doctor could make another copy for himself. It wasn’t like he didn’t know how to. It would take time to create, but neither of them were in danger of death from old age anytime soon.

Were there any other parts of his plan that needed revision? No. It was workable.

All for One took a deep breath, filling his damaged lungs with as much air as he could, ignoring the searing pain with the ease of long practice. Then, after an exhalation, he took another, and a third, keeping his heartbeat steady and his mind calm.

Twenty seconds.

In a single instant, All for One brought his acceleration quirks to bear and let off a small electromagnetic pulse using Radio Waves. He didn’t want to set off a prison-wide security shutdown, merely the sensors in his own cell.

His mind burned.

Contact Telekinesis allowed him to undo his restraints. Even as he did so, he brought Radio Waves to the fore once more.

Kurogiri was a nomu. Each and every one of the created beings were designed to be capable of receiving orders from the Radio Waves quirk.

The order was sent. Kurogiri was to bring Bubaigawara Jin to All for One’s location immediately. Ragdoll had seen Kurogiri before All for One took Search, which meant that the quirk had stored the nomu as a target and let him inform Kurogiri of his location relative to All for One.

Three point four seven seconds had passed.

As a waft of fog, the beginnings of the Warp Gate, began to coalesce in his cell, All for One stood up. Accelerated as he was, the ventilator was useless to him until he released the quirks.

By the time the portal had finished forming, nine point nine three seconds had passed.

All for One didn’t wait for Twice to fall through. Reaching out himself, he pulled the duplicator into the cell and activated Forced Quirk Activation, focusing as hard as he could on his own self-image. As the viscous liquid began to swirl—painfully slowly—All for One activated Forced Quirk Activation again, this time focusing on the ventilator.

As the second swirl of liquid started building upon itself, eleven point seven seven seconds had passed.

As soon as his own clone was solid enough to move, All for One guided it into the chair, sliding it into the straps and affixing the mask onto its face. Another moment had all the sensors hooked up. To deal with the issue of durability, he poured the entire contents of a stamina stockpiler into a quirk called Adamant Midas, a quirk that allowed him to increase the durability of anything he touched at the cost of stamina.

The final step to ensure his clone would not be unmasked was one that never would have worked on any version of himself that had his standard defensive quirks active. But the double was new, and All for One had a few moments before it would be able to react.

He activated Hijack, and instead of controlling the body or riffling through the memories of the clone, he simply let seven words echo into the clone’s mind.

Twice clone. Do not reveal this deception.

With the clone in place and the orders given, All for One tapped the duplicated ventilator and levitated it next to himself as he put on the mask. Finally, he grabbed Twice—ensuring to brace his neck so as to prevent whiplash—and stepped through the portal.

One more order through Radio Waves had Kurogiri releasing the portal. And to All for One’s relief, he’d timed the operation well. The last traces of the fog would be gone before the cameras came back on.

He had escaped Tartarus, one of the most secure prisons in the world, in less than twenty seconds—even if just barely.

Hah.

All for One let the speed quirks drop, but didn’t have the time to take in his surroundings. He already knew that he was currently in one of the League of Villains’ hideouts—though no one was present at the moment.

He didn’t trust his vocal cords, and the backlash from the speed quirks would come crashing down on him momentarily. Instead, he activated Radio Waves one last time, ordering his warper to take him to the Doctor’s lab beneath Jakku General Hospital.

As the portal began to swirl around him, his lungs seared with agony, and his thoughts stuttered.

He barely had the time to make out Doctor Garaki’s shocked face and the vague hint of nomu growth tubes in the background before his conscious mind shut down.

All for One woke up.

An unfamiliar feeling. He’d long since moved past the need for something as mundane as sleep. Even so, his mind adapted within instants, and he reached for his sensory quirks.

He was sitting in the lab beneath Jakku. Good. He was hooked up to his standard life support equipment. Even better. Garaki was standing off to the side, nervously wringing his hands as he looked on in worry. Excellent.

His plan had worked.

He was free.

He’d completely and totally disrupted the path that would have led to his defeat, simply by virtue of being free. And as soon as he informed Garaki not to implant All for One’s quirk into Tomura under any circumstances, the last fraction of a chance that the aforementioned future could come about would be erased.

He took a breath of oxygen-rich air and let it out in a scratchy, hoarse laugh.

Garaki’s face lit up as the sound reached him.

“You’re awake!” he exclaimed, somewhat redundantly.

All for One’s laugh trailed off in a raspy chuckle.

“Indeed,” he affirmed. “As you’ve likely gathered from my presence, the plan has changed.”

Better to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible.

“Scrap the entirety of the transfer into Tomura,” All for One told Garaki. “I used Storyteller, and the plan will fail.”

“What?” the Doctor asked. “But all of our predictions—”

“Tomura’s personality would leach through,” All for One interrupted. “I will not allow myself to be tainted by the thoughts of an immature child. He could even wrest control. No.”

Doctor Garaki went silent for a moment, clearly engrossed in thought.

“Will we be using one of the backups, then?” he eventually asked.

“No,” All for One denied. “It is a fundamental issue. We need to find another method.”

Garaki’s face twisted in dismay.

“I was so sure!” he cried. “I thought this would be the solution!”

“Peace, Doctor,” All for One said. “We were very close. We will come up with a true solution. And in the meantime, I will maintain this body. I now know about some very interesting quirks, after all.”

Garaki’s expression flipped fast enough to give a lesser man whiplash.

“So Storyteller was as comprehensive as we suspected?”

“Everything we suspected and more. I witnessed the entirety of the Ninth’s ‘story,’ plus all the context needed. It was… most informative.”

“I see…” Garaki responded.

All for One leaned forward in his chair, his smile widening.

“Then let’s go over the new plan, shall we?”

Garaki smiled, pulling out a tablet, ready to start taking notes. All for One took another deep, pained breath, then began.

“Our current goal is secrecy. No one knows I have broken out of Tartarus, and I intend to keep it that way. I had Twice create a clone of myself to take my place. I will need to swap out some of my loadout for appearance-altering quirks, as I have tasks to do.”

He paused, then continued.

“Ah, and I regret to bring the unfortunate news that Kurogiri is compromised.”

“What!?” Garaki exclaimed in shock, eyes wide behind his decorated goggles.

“Enough traces of the base personality remain that if confronted by friends of Shirakumo Oboro, the original personality would resurface. And Kurogiri knows too much. I will be taking Warp Gate. Once I have done so, preserve the body. We may be able to fix him eventually, but it is not a primary concern.”

“Understood, Sensei,” Garaki confirmed with a nod. “But what about the League?”

“What about the League?” All for One scoffed. “They were to serve as a buffer to support Tomura’s growth. Since the plan with Tomura has been scrapped, they all have no value save as somewhat capable pawns.”

He paused.

“I may have a few specific tasks they can accomplish for me, but from now on they are no longer indisposable. Contact them and have them lay low for now - the police will waste their efforts looking for them, never even suspecting I have escaped.”

“As you say, Sensei.”

All for One leaned back in his chair, bringing one hand up to his chin. Garaki suddenly stopped, then asked a question.

“If you are going to continue on in this body for the time being, should I replace your original quirk?”

All for One hummed, then shook his head.

“The surgery would take too long. As I said, I have tasks to do. So long as I am careful, the weaker grasp over my quirks should not affect anything. Even so, I will be retaking it eventually, Garaki, so do keep it safe.”

Garaki nodded furiously.

“And even if I can’t use them now, let’s not pass over any more powerful quirks simply because they would take too long to master or because my body cannot currently hold them. I will have an eternity to master them once we find a way for me to reach singularity,” All for One continued.

The Doctor froze, then a grin slowly spread over his face.

“All those quirks we couldn’t give to the nomus because they were ‘too complicated’…” he muttered excitedly. “Finally, they get to shine!” A realization hit him, and his eyes widened once more. “What about Nine? The only reason we didn’t copy his was because of the sheer strain, right?”

“Nine?” All for One asked, amused. “He was the proof of concept for Tomura’s operation, yes? Useless now. Extract and preserve his quirk, and I’ll decide his fate then.”

“I will do so,” Garaki replied, adding the task to the list he’d been making on his tablet. “Though the pod can keep him in stasis for a while, so if there are any more pressing tasks Nine could be put off for a bit.”

“Oh?” All for One scoffed. “If the issue is capable manpower, we already have a solution. Bring me Mocha.”

For the first time since the beginning of the conversation, Doctor Garaki hesitated.

“Mocha?” he asked. “Ah, doubles of me, yes. But Mocha can do that by himself.”

“I have need of Double too,” All for One said, “And I cannot take the original without destroying the clone in Tartarus. You may keep a copy for Mocha if you desire, though.”

Garaki bowed his head.

“But before we get into more of the minutiae,” All for One continued, “I must explain the second major component of my plan.”

A nod from Garaki had the ancient supervillain moving forward without pause.

“I now know of a quirk that could bring me back to my prime,” All for One said as he leaned forward, a hungry tone drifting into his voice. “Rewind. It reverses biological things to previous states. And it is capable of rewinding my body without affecting my quirks or memories.”

All for One steepled his fingers.

“But I doubt this body can contain it. So, the user must be convinced to help me. Unfortunately, the user is a six year old girl being regularly tortured by Overhaul.”

Garaki winced, then looked contemplative.

“She already idolizes heroes,” All for One said, “and Overhaul’s treatment of her would make turning her to our point of view a long and difficult process. It will be far faster for me to rescue her and present myself as an ordinary person. I will adopt her, and nurture her gratitude until she would willingly heal me.”

“A genius plan as always,” Garaki said, smirking. “I can play the ordinary doctor for her, too.”

All for One nodded.

“Overhaul’s experiments have left her traumatized by medical procedures and experiments. It will take a gentle hand. Breaking her would be easy, but ultimately counterproductive. So, I will rescue her—and take Overhaul while I’m at it—and adopt her under a civilian identity. Shigaraki Eri rolls off the tongue nicely, don’t you think?”

“You would use your true name?” Garaki asked, surprised. All for One smiled. It was a cruel smile, the smile of someone who had seen every kind of atrocity committed in his name and merely laughed.

“Such a pity that awful ‘Tomura’ villain has the same name,” he mockingly recited. “No relation, I’ve checked, but that won’t stop the schoolyard bullies. But don’t worry, father is here and won’t judge.”

Garaki snorted.

“Isolating her further and drawing her back to you, I see.”

“It’s admittedly a long shot,” All for One admitted, dropping the lilt. “The schools I am thinking of sending her to are high-quality enough not to tolerate discrimination or ostracism like that. If it works? Good. If not? Well, it’s still a connection to me, especially once she solidifies her self-image and accepts it as her name.”

There were more connections All for One was planning to foster, of course. He would even go as far as to change the color of his eyes to red. He rather enjoyed the blank white he was born with, but changing them to red would help sell the story that Eri was his actual child. A legal adoption would let him truthfully claim to be her father in the presence of lie-detection quirks, and the similarities in appearance would hopefully prevent the question from ever coming up in the first place.

“The rest of the plan we can go over later. You will need to make an appearance in your civilian identity soon,” All for One reminded Garaki.

The portly man startled, checking the time and bowing to All for One in apology.

“Bring me Mocha and call for Kurogiri. I’ll leave a few clones of you to begin the work, then I’ll begin practicing with Warp Gate. I want to get this started as soon as possible.”

“By your command, Sensei.”

Between Double and Warp Gate, the former was the easier of the two quirks to become passably competent with. All for One knew that his inexperience with the quirk was still limiting him, but he had gotten to the point that he could consistently create doubles of most anything he had the measurements of. It took him far, far longer to create a clone than it would have taken Bubaigawara Jin, but that was to be expected. The man had years of experience. Something that couldn’t be trained away was the fragility of the clones, though. Garaki’s copy of Double was imperfect— it still allowed for theoretically infinite replication, but the clones were even more fragile than those of the original quirk. But for All for One’s purposes, that didn’t matter, as the clones weren’t going to be doing direct battle.

As promised, the first thing he’d done was to create lasting clones of Garaki.

Getting around Double’s “two items” limitation was surprisingly simple. While the user of the quirk could only create two doubles at a time, they could maintain any amount. Thus, All for One created two copies of himself. Each of those clones of himself went on to create a clone of Garaki, and another All for One. This pattern continued until the desired number of Garakis was reached, at which point the All for One doubles all broke one of their own fingers to get themselves out of the way.

The result was a good dozen copies of Doctor Garaki in the lab, and the real All for One’s Double quirk was still free to be used. Simple and easy. Oh, a lesser villain might balk at the idea of intentionally killing off clones of themselves. All for One scoffed at their weakness. He was secure enough in his own identity.

Yes, Double was provisionally usable. Warp Gate, on the other hand…

There was a reason he’d never taken it before, and it wasn’t just that he wanted the League to have a minder. Oh, from the moment he realized that Warp Gate was a warp quirk with nigh-unlimited range he’d planned on taking it eventually. But Kurogiri could use it instinctively, and such a complicated quirk would take All for One ages to master. After his battle with All Might, he and Garaki had determined that his body was beyond salvaging. He’d shifted all his plans towards his new body, which meant that leaving Warp Gate with Kurogiri was the better option.

Nevertheless, Kurogiri’s flaws had necessitated that All for One take the quirk and put Kurogiri’s body into stasis. Now, he had to try and work out how to become as proficient with it as his nomu.

His ever-present smile tightened slightly as the swirl of fog he was focusing on once again failed to create a portal, dissipating into nothing. Still no luck.

His sludge warp was much easier to use. As it targeted individuals, all he had to do was ensure he had a clear mental image of the person he wanted to warp and the destination—be it bringing them to himself or sending them away—then activate the quirk. Warp Gate, on the other hand, was a point to point portal, not specific individual teleportation. It needed an entirely different mindset.

The coordinates needed were pathetically simple to acquire. Even if he didn’t have Mental Calculator, he was more than capable of calculating them himself. No, the issue seemed to lie in getting the two locations to connect. He’d gotten to the point of manifesting the signature dark fog at the destination, but still hadn’t managed to open it into a portal.

Scoffing, he tried again. Gesturing with a hand wreathed in black fog, he focused on two specific locations on either side of the lab.

The fog was silent, but his Infrared quirk let him see the two swirls of cold that appeared as he flexed the quirk. He’d once again gotten the structure of the portal to form, but how to connect them?

What was a portal? A shortcut in reality, a warp, a tube.

He had two locations. He had the entrances. The apertures of the tube. He just needed the intervening space to disappear. With a flex of will, he tried dragging the portals towards each other.

His grin widened as he felt a response from the quirk. He could feel the two locations overlapping each other.

Progress.

In between practice sessions with Warp Gate, All for One took the time to indulge in his favorite hobby: Looking for new and interesting quirks. He’d even managed to continue doing so after the loss of his eyes, using a custom-made screen that replicated the text through precisely-controlled heat, letting his infrared quirk read it as easily as Garaki would read a newspaper.

To say that his network was expansive was akin to saying that the ocean had some water in it: Technically true, but a vast understatement. Even taking into account the massive damage All Might had done to All for One’s criminal empire in Japan, his was still the most far-reaching in existence. It didn’t quite span every country of the world, but a lesser man could be forgiven for thinking that it did.

He’d long since set up automated filters to scan through quirk registrations. The algorithms were far from perfect, and quirks often slipped through the cracks, but it did its job in filtering out most of the trash quirks. The remainder were left for him to peruse at his leisure.

Since the beginning, he’d searched for powerful quirks that would cement him in his rightful place as the ruler of the criminal underworld. Quirks for attack, for defense, for maintaining his empire.

When All Might managed to injure him, healing quirks were moved to the highest priority. Self-regeneration quirks, biological redundancy quirks, quirks to monitor his health, and quirks to try and fix the horrible scarring. Eventually, they found Super Regeneration, but by then it was five years too late. His injuries had already scarred over, preventing the immensely powerful regeneration from being able to bring him back to his glory.

Since his escape from Tartarus, All for One had been going over the lists, searching for illusion quirks, transformation and disguise quirks, and more healing quirks. Of course, he knew of several of the former from seeing the story, such as Glamour or Hologram, but he would have preferred a disguise with a little more… substance.

Of course, he already possessed several such quirks, but they were older quirks, limited in scope and scale. He could use them if he needed to, but it would take a combination of several quirks, and it would be much simpler if it turned out that there was a single quirk that could do all the changes itself.

There was a multipurpose transformation quirk he had seen though Storyteller—Manifest. It wouldn’t work for his current needs, but it was still interesting.

It was a transformation quirk with enormous potential. Its only drawback was that the transformation time and power was limited by the time it took to digest consumed substances. But he’d seen the boy eat quirk-generated crystals, which meant that Manifest wasn’t limited to foods.

He made a note to retrieve the quirk if he could ever plausibly have the boy suffer an unfortunate accident. But that was a more long-term goal, and didn’t solve his immediate need for a disguise. He would continue his search.

As for healing quirks, he now knew of a few that could potentially help. Setting aside Rewind—as it was the whole reason he was going through the effort of faking a law-abiding civilian identity—and of course Overhaul, which shared the same issue of being a catch-22, there was also Cell Activation. Two versions of it, in fact. One limited to individuals of type A blood, and one capable of being used on anyone.

With his existence now more public, he needed to be very careful about not letting people turn up missing their quirks. Most of the time, this was pathetically simple, as all he had to do was kill them after he took the quirk in question.

But healing quirks were rare enough that he didn’t want to end the bloodline. He could only imagine what kind of healing quirk might be produced a few generations in the future. So in this case, if he wanted the quirk without killing the original wielder, he needed to find a way to undetectably copy it.

All for One pondered the issue for a few minutes.

Garaki could, with All for One’s assistance, copy a quirk fairly quickly. By himself, the scientist would need to perform complex surgery and it would take months for the stabilization period to pass. But with All for One’s quirk, that time could be cut down to as little as a week, in some cases.

He could work with a week.

Garaki had his fingers in countless medical facilities, orphanages, and most importantly, quirk research labs. It had been an uphill battle getting into those, as the government’s restrictions on quirk research were strict to the extreme, but they had managed. If one of those research labs reached out to the Shimano family with the stated intention of trying to study the Cell Activation quirk to try to improve medical technology, then All for One could take the quirk during the “study” and pass off the inability to use the quirk as a temporary side effect of some procedure or another.

He could actually have the lab do a real study as well. Getting a patent on an artificially replicated quirk-derived healing device would bring in billions. It was admittedly another long shot, but a mass-producible quirk effect, especially one as sought-after as healing, was practically the holy grail of hospitals worldwide.

He would bring up the idea once Garaki returned. In the meantime, he turned his attention back to his search. While Storyteller was quite expansive, it wasn’t a replacement for the time-tested solution of hacking into quirk databases.

Unfortunately, there weren’t many options. Healing quirks were rare, after all. And even then, some quirks only tangentially related to healing would be dubbed “healing” quirks to boost the user’s chances of employment.

A significant number were quirks that could aid in diagnosis, which were all redundant in All for One’s case. He’d found a ridiculously comprehensive quirk in his initial search for healing quirks after his battle with All Might, simply named “Vitals,” which could be summed up in one simple statement: If it could be detected and/or measured by a medical procedure, the quirk told him about it. In short, it was a quirk that instantly told the user the result of any medical test so long as they knew the basics of how the aforementioned test worked, letting them bypass actually performing it. It also only worked on the user. Still, with how much All for One had learned about medical procedures—by necessity—it told him much indeed.

Also on the list were a few toxin-filtering quirks—also redundant—a sterilization quirk which sounded interesting until he realized it referred to the user’s saliva, a quirk that let the user turn their nails into scalpels and their hair into suture thread, and a few other minor abilities.

The only interesting thing he’d seen so far was a body hopping quirk, but it was bogged down by so many restrictions as to be useless. It only worked if the target was willing, and a member of the user’s immediate family. It also was targeted by sight, which was just adding insult to the injury.

All for One scoffed. He had a better method of body hopping anyways. More widely applicable too.

He continued going down the list, his mood slowly growing gloomier as he only found increasingly-worthless quirks. He knew better than to get his hopes up, but—

He froze, then grabbed the screen and read the quirk description he’d just seen again.

A girl with an aura that repaired either inorganic or organic things in the vicinity? One that worked on the user? And it corrected scars!?

How did Garaki and his future self miss this? HOW?

Such a quirk would have been invaluable, and he refused to believe that both the future him and the Doctor had overlooked it. So why didn’t it come up in Storyteller? He’d been searching for a quirk that corrected scars for years!

He switched his focus to the quirk registration, pulling up as many details about the holder as he could. It was incredibly new, only registered hours earlier. And—

And the user’s house was almost directly in the path the League would have been using to flee the prefecture, had he not told Garaki to order them to lay low.

All for One’s hands curled into fists as he rapidly connected the dots.

The League would not risk witnesses as they fled. Both Dabi and Tomura would have no qualms killing a child.

Chance. The quirk had only survived due to blind luck.

Growling to himself, All for One stood, his life support leaping into the air beside him as he flexed his quirks. Setting the screen and computer to the side, he considered the empty tanks in the lab before shaking his head. Best to save them for actual projects. There was other stasis equipment at other, less important facilities. He picked up an aerosol spray dispenser labeled “sedative” from a nearby cabinet, then walked out to the center of the lab. Dragging Warp Gate to the forefront of his mind, All for One wrenched open a path through space, leading directly to the house in question.

Some idle part of his mind noted that he’d successfully used Warp Gate. He ignored his victory, focusing on his goal. It was nighttime. All four members of the family were asleep. A mother, father, older sister, and the holder of the Repair Aura quirk.

One by one, he sprayed a tiny dose of the sedative he’d brought, then lifted them all with one of his gentler telekinesis quirks. They wouldn’t wake for hours.

When he got to the youngest, he took her quirk the instant he verified that the sedative had taken effect.

He used Warp Gate again, opening a portal to another of the labs he owned, this one used less often as Garaki simply didn’t like the local restaurants. Still, it was kept fully operational, and was capable of producing nomu just as the main lab in Jakku was.

Which meant that it could keep humans alive and asleep for years on end, if necessary.

All for One prepped four tubes. It was the same issue as with the Cell Activation quirk. Such a quirk could be exponentially more powerful two or three generations down the line. But he needed the quirk as soon as possible, and dealing with the family disappearing for a few months before reappearing without any memory of the time gone was an acceptable cost.

Once they were all situated, he created a lasting clone of Garaki, and explained the situation, his mind still whirling through possibilities and the thrill of potentially having solved his issues early the whole while. Drawing up Warp Gate one final time, he returned to the primary lab and sat back down in his chair.

The moment of truth was upon him.

All for One activated the Repair Aura quirk, flipping the mental switch to “organic” instead of inorganic. For an instant, he felt a warmth pulse outwards, then each and every one of his scars began to crawl.

Ants. Biting, twisting, burrowing into his skin. In his throat. His lungs.

Shuddering, he yanked the quirk back down as quickly as he could, taking a deep breath to steady himsel—

That…

He’d familiarized himself with his condition over the long years since his injury. He knew exactly how much a deep breath should have hurt him.

He took another breath, confirming what he already knew.

The pain was ever-so-slightly lesser.

The difference was tiny. Infinitesimal. It would take months with the quirk active twenty-four seven to fully heal himself.

But it worked.

Slowly, All for One began to laugh. It built and built, until the echoes reverberated through the entire lab.

It worked.

He would still be moving forwards with his plan for swaying Eri. Irrespective of the fact that he now held an alternative, the Repair Aura was too slow to be the primary plan. And he refused to allow Rewind and Overhaul to slip through his fingers. Both of them would be his.

Mustering his willpower, All for One activated Repair Aura again, picking up his customized thermal screen and computer as he did so.

He had work to do, after all.

Chapter Text

Garaki had not yet finished the second iteration of the portable life support mask. That, in and of itself, wasn’t anything unexpected; the first version that All for One had worn during his battle with the Eighth in Kamino had taken a while to fabricate, and while the Storyteller quirk had shown that Garaki made a second mask for All for One eventually, he’d broken out of Tartarus much sooner in this timeline. The Doctor simply hadn’t had enough time to do so.

One of the duplicates of the Doctor had begun fabricating it as soon as All for One had explained the new plan, but it would still take another day or so before it was ready. All for One had factored the delay into his plan. After all, when he rescued Eri, he wanted to present himself as a kindly father figure rather than a terrifying, faceless villain. He would spend the day searching for and taking disguise quirks—while he and Garaki had already harvested several over the years, he would need to sacrifice a decent percentage of his current loadout to be able to contain the array of quirks needed for the disguise he wanted. The vast majority of quirks were exceedingly limited, after all. He’d taken the best he could find over the years, but the stock he’d kept from his earlier years was always going to be outstripped by similar quirks from the present day.

His search was a never-ending task. He had to always keep looking to keep up with the rate at which quirks increased in complexity and power over the generations. It was one of the reasons he needed to reach a controlled singularity.

So while he did have an alternative available should he fail to find a better option in the single day he had, he would vastly prefer using a disguise quirk sourced from the current generation. Over half of his quirk’s storage limit was filled simply with the quirks required to let him remain capable of matching the Eighth. Strength enhancers, durability enhancers, quirks to improve his reflexes, quirks to let him see and hear, quirks to dull the pain, and more. His issues were compounded by the fact that he was still using the copy of his quirk. While the base functions were essentially the same, it had a slightly lower storage limit and weakened his grasp on his quirks. He would be able to avoid a revolt like the one he’d witnessed in Storyteller, but that still left him with limited options as to how many quirks he could hold at once.

Leaning back in his chair, he scrolled through the list of disguise and transformation quirks he’d aggregated from the various quirk registries available to him. Given that he was going to be wearing the mask, his initial thoughts were to use either an illusion-type quirk or perhaps a targeted invisibility on the mask, with a transformation quirk affecting his head and face underneath.

Then again, if he was going to have Eri heal his original body, showing an injury that needed to be healed would sell his story better. The full mask might be too much due to its intentionally menacing design, but if he simply carried a miniaturized ventilator he could meet Eri while wearing a simple ventilator like the ones used with his stationary life support equipment in his various hideouts and labs. It would be a very obvious visual tell, and Eri knowing that All for One required life support would allow him to freely use it in her presence without causing too many questions.

He’d already purchased and prepared the house where they would live, using the excuse that his previous home had been destroyed in Kamino. It wasn’t even a lie, as he’d spent enough time at the Kamino hideout for it to be considered his place of residence. Still, in the interest of staying hidden, he’d purchased the house using clean money, under a civilian identity by the name of Shigaraki Zen. The matching surname would simply be an “unfortunate coincidence,” and he hadn’t used his true personal name in well over a century. The only One for All user who would be able to recognize it would be his brother, and his brother wouldn’t be able to speak to the Ninth just yet.

Though speaking of his civilian identity, he would have to maintain whatever disguise he rescued Eri in during the time he spent in her presence. She would be at school for a significant fraction of most days, but he couldn’t simply discard the disguise after the rescue itself. Perhaps he could fabricate a reason for him to gain the scarring after the fact? The lack of eyes and ears would be tricky, though, and he had to ensure his public appearance was dissimilar enough from his actual appearance, which was now unfortunately public knowledge after his battle with the Eighth.

The goal would optimally be achieved through minimalism. He didn’t need an omnicapable transformation quirk that would let him reshape his body to the limits of his imagination—though such a quirk would absolutely be taken if he found one—when his disguise was going to be fairly similar to his current form, with just enough divergence to be a separate person. Two or three weak quirks would put far less of a strain on him, taking up less of his limited storage space.

Eyes, ears, nose, scarring, build, coloration, and hair. Those were the factors involved. He could already change his build though tiny applications of muscle-growing strength enhancers or a muscle-compressing strength enhancer. And if he overlaid a mouth generated by his quirks on top of his real one, he could regain a customizable nose. That just left the eyes, ears, scars, coloration, and hair. As a last resort he had a few color-changing quirks he could use, but they were incapable of the nuance of the gradients a human body required and would trigger a significant uncanny valley effect.

Returning to his quirk registry search, All for One manually disabled the algorithms that filtered out the trash quirks, and searched the descriptions for keywords connected to “hair,” “eyes,” or “disguise.” The resultant list was exceedingly long, and he already knew that ninety-nine percent of the results would be useless, but he wasn’t going to risk passing over a quirk that would solve his current issue with minimal impact just because it was too weak or narrowly-focused for him to ordinarily consider it.

He didn’t feel particularly enthusiastic about reading through several million quirks activated through eyes to find one capable of creating them, though.

He brought one of his weaker mental speed-enhancing quirks to the surface, only using a somewhat light degree of acceleration to prevent the drawbacks from coming into play. Overclock would have been an infinitely better choice, but his condition necessitated compromises, after all. Garaki had the quirk preserved for when All for One was fully healed, and he looked forward to the day when he could replace his current array of speed quirks with a single quirk both more powerful and less straining than the entire combination.

The scrolling text would have been an illegible blur to anyone else. All for One was merely annoyed he couldn’t go faster.

Twenty-three minutes into the search, the scrolling text slammed to a stop, letting All for One bring up the individual entry of one specific quirk. Auto-Barber. It allowed the user to style their hair and facial hair to any naturally-achievable formation, and kept it in that style no matter what. Hair would grow if it was missing, but the growth would stop entirely once the style had been restored.

All for One’s minor inconvenience had been rewarded rather quickly, it seemed. This one, hyperspecialized, pathetically miniscule utility quirk was a perfect fit for his current needs. Even better, the user lived in Venezuela, which meant that All for One could freely take it without worrying about any sort of real reprisal. The country’s government had been all but nonexistent ever since a third of the country had been blasted into a scorched crater thirty years prior.

He made note of the details, and continued his search, mentally sighing at the sheer number of quirks remaining. He knew that there existed quirks that let the user create functional eyes. A handful of his own quirks could do so as side effects. But the fact that the eyes created by his own quirks were side effects meant that they were unsuited for his purposes. He needed eyes alone, not lovecraftian masses of body horror. The effect was a simple enough one that he was confident enough in saying such a quirk almost certainly existed, but the issue arose in All for One actually locating the aforementioned quirk. Even after narrowing down the search terms to “create eyes” or variants thereof, the list was still long.

And even after he found a quirk for the eyes, he still needed some form of color-changing quirk, to hide the scarring if nothing else. As he’d already established, his existing color-changing quirks would not be sufficient. No, he really needed one capable of incredibly detailed subtleties. That or he needed to invest in makeup…

Or perhaps…

All for One brought up another search, this time looking for the keyword “makeup” in the vast lists he had access to. Scrolling past thirteen varied quirks that created varying forms of makeup, All for One paused on the fourteenth entry, his smile widening. The quirk was called Vanity. It was a quirk that allowed for minor transformation — specifically, it allowed for any transformation that could theoretically be achieved through mundane makeup.

All for One audibly scoffed at the description. Whoever wrote it obviously had no idea just how much of a difference makeup could create. All for One had interacted with enough assassins, spies, and various infiltrators to know just how powerful and solid a disguise a small amount of makeup could make. Vanity was not a minor transformation quirk. It was practically perfect for disguises, made all the better given that it actually transformed the user rather than simply applying actual makeup products that could theoretically be removed. All for One made a note of where the quirk’s bearer lived. He would retrieve it in short order.

His nose, build, scarring, coloration, and hair were accounted for, leaving only eyes and ears. He was certain he’d find a quirk for the first, and if he was being honest the ears could be entirely cosmetic. He could still hear using his suite of sensory quirks, so his disguise would simply need to appear to have ears. And finding a cosmetic addition like that would likely be a good bit easier.

At the rate his plan was proceeding, he’d have enough time to find and acquire all the necessary quirks for his disguise before the time came for Eri’s rescue. If the winds of fate continued to blow favorably, he could even get in a bit of practice. His acting would need to be flawless, after all.

Crimson irises flashed in the reflective silver of the mirror in front of All for One as he took in his face with actual eyes for the first time in over half a decade. His hair was still white, but he’d compressed his overall body slightly. He’d dropped about twenty centimeters and wasn’t as outwardly muscular, though he was still well above average in both regards. All the differences added up to create the image of a man who looked similar—but not that similar—to All for One.

“Well, Doctor?” he asked. Doctor Garaki nodded in reply.

“If you claimed to be All for One, I would believe you, but without that I would merely dismiss the similarities as coincidence.”

“Perfect,” the Symbol of Evil chuckled.

He picked up the clear plastic mask of the ventilator and put it on, levitating the life support unit on his left side with a lazy wave of his hand. Standing from his chair, he grabbed an elegant walking cane made of dark brown polished wood with his right hand and leaned on it, considering his appearance in the mirror once more.

“Yes, I think I’ll take the cane,” he mused. “A feared supervillain would never be seen acting like an invalid. I couldn’t possibly be All for One. Plus, this will help sell the story to Eri. I’m obviously injured, after all.” All for One’s posture suddenly gained more weight as he released one of his physical enhancement quirks, slumping slightly as he actually began to support himself using the cane. “Like so,” All for One continued, smirking. “Is there anything else you can think of, Doctor?”

Garaki hummed in consideration for a moment.

“What quirk is your civilian identity going to possess?” he asked.

“Overhaul,” All for One replied. “Under a different name, obviously, but it’s such a useful quirk. Plus, possessing Overhaul will let me practice with it while acting the part.”

“And the girl’s trauma won’t interfere with that?”

“That remains to be seen,” All for One admitted. “I will need to admit my true quirk to her if I use Overhaul in her presence anyways, so I plan to spin it as ‘doing good with the quirk to spite Chisaki’s villainy,’ but if she reacts too badly I can reevaluate.”

He could go to Italy and grab Alchemy, for example. He was planning to get it at some point anyway. Or, if he needed to have a quirk immediately, he could live with pretending that Event Horizon was his quirk. It was a broad enough quirk that he could get away with using a good dozen other gravity and space-warping quirks under its umbrella, anyways.

“One of my doubles can create a bag for the ventilator, then,” Garaki noted, motioning to the floating device beside All for One.

“Ah, yes,” All for One said. “Good point.”

The floating machine would be a bit of a giveaway that something wasn’t quite as it seemed, if his quirk was supposed to be contact-based matter manipulation. Still, for the rescue itself it wasn’t that much of an issue. If he ended up needing to present Event Horizon as his quirk he could continue to levitate it, but he would need to be careful so as to not arouse too much suspicion. He was used to using his quirks as he pleased, and would need to be vigilant while in his civilian guise.

Still, he was All for One. He would not fail.

All for One turned back towards the mirror, looking himself over again. The eyes might not have been the biggest difference, but they were the most notable, at least to him. His eye color had occasionally changed due to various quirks he used, but he really did prefer the blank white eyes he’d been born with. He’d always ensured his eyes wouldn’t permanently be changed.

And now here he stood, possessing eyes for the first time in six years, and he had deliberately altered the color semi-permanently. Needs must, he supposed. He wasn’t going to skimp on his disguise out of something as vacuous as vanity. And the crimson wasn’t that unpleasant. He could get used to it.

He blinked, intentionally widening and squinting his new eyes a few times. Really, the only reason he’d never put serious effort into regaining eyes was that his sensory suite was outright better than standard human senses. Plus, he had been planning to abandon the broken and outdated body anyways, so he’d never seen the need to put in more work fixing it than necessary. He had needed to be able to match the Eighth in combat, but that had practically been the only requirement.

Now that that plan to transfer his mind into Tomura’s body had been scrapped, All for One was going to need to restore his body to his prime as he searched for a new method to achieve a controlled singularity. His ultimate goal hadn’t changed, after all. Taking in Eri would be the first step towards restoring his body, but he and the Doctor would still be working towards All for One’s goal the whole while.

Moreover, the relative quietude of laying low as a civilian would keep the heroes off of his trail, giving him and Garaki all the more time to spend researching. The League of Villains would serve as an adequate distraction, too. A few of them would need to be preserved as possible pieces of future plans, but for the most part they were all now expendable, as he’d already told Garaki. Magne and Spinner were utterly worthless. Compress could still be useful. Twice was only good for his quirk, which All for One and Garaki had already copied. Toga was a mildly competent infiltrator, but her quirk could be put to far better use by some of All for One’s other agents. Dabi was nothing more than firepower, good for pure destruction and little else. And finally, Tomura might be useful in the future for his relation to the Seventh, but other than that he was still an immature manchild. And even then, All for One had already revealed the familial connection to the Eighth, so the value of that connection was rather low.

All for One certainly wouldn’t intentionally be killing them, but he would no longer coddle them to ensure they survived and stayed out of the hands of the heroes. He would only intercede to prevent the original Double quirk from being lost. The clone taking his place in Tartarus was sustained by it, after all. If Twice died, All for One’s escape would be revealed, which he could not allow to happen. A nation-wide manhunt would be supremely inconvenient.

Twice and Toga were a package deal, though… Bah. The infiltrator shouldn’t be in frontline combat anyways, in his opinion. All for One would simply need to nudge the pieces on the board a bit to ensure that Twice and Toga remained out of the line of fire.

But all of his plans for the League of Villains were things he would be putting into effect after he had rescued Eri.

“You have the blueprints for the Shie Hassaikai compound?” All for One asked the Doctor. He was fairly sure the answer was yes, but it didn’t hurt to make sure.

“Of course, Sensei,” Garaki replied. “There haven’t been any changes to the building since the change in leadership. The old plans we have are still accurate.”

All for One and Garaki were aware of the Shie Hassaikai. It would be harder to find a criminal organization that All for One wasn’t involved in or aware of in some form than the inverse. Back before the coup, they had been useful in keeping the number of unaffiliated, loose criminal gangs down. After the coup, they had begun supplying Trigger, which only made All for One take more note of them. He kept tabs on every organization that researched quirks, after all, and Trigger was a drug specifically made to affect quirks. The production of the quirk-destroying drug had managed to slip under the radar, but had All for One remained free in the original timeline, he would have come down on the yakuza group like the fist of a god.

Chisaki Kai was an obsessed maniac, and All for One didn’t take kindly to people trying to destroy what was his. Quirks were the sole purview of All for One and no one else.

He turned and moved over to the nearest computer, his cane making steady thumps as he walked. Bringing up the relevant files, All for One considered the layout of the compound. He didn't know exactly where Eri was imprisoned, but there were really only a few realistic possibilities. She would be fairly close to a lab, and basic human needs meant she needed a restroom. Labs, especially those for quirk research, had specific requirements as well.

There were only a handful of rooms that could possibly be converted to a lab. Accounting for those, there were only three rooms that could plausibly hold All for One’s soon-to-be daughter.

“And you’ve begun tracking down the rest of the group?” All for One asked.

“Most will be at the compound today, Sensei,” Garaki said. “The info brokers are tracking down the rest as we speak.”

“Very good,” All for One said.

As satisfying as it might be, All for One couldn’t simply walk in, breaking through the doors and peons in his way alike as he went to rescue Eri. No, he was going to have to be methodical about it. Eri was going to be rescued, yes, but All for One couldn’t risk any hint of Eri not being his biological child getting out. Each and every person who knew about the girl would need to be silenced. Overhaul himself as well as his elite enforcers, the Bullets, would be present at the compound. However, there were others who knew about Eri, namely the mooks who worked in the main compound, the ones who would take “care” of the girl on a day-to-day basis. The ones who brought her food and toys to keep her alive and compliant.

All for One wouldn’t have to eradicate the entire yakuza group—something he was mildly thankful for, as they were somewhat useful—but just about all of their higher-ups needed to go. It would likely be beneficial to the crime group in the end — if they pivoted away from Trigger and the like, they would likely survive longer. Plus, they had Nighteye after them, which meant that Nighteye wasn’t tracking down any of All for One’s more important holdings.

“I will be taking Silencer Field with me for the rescue,” All for One informed Garaki. “It should help keep them unaware.”

The drawback of the quirk would be irritating, but All for One would push through. Silencer Field was a quirk that allowed the user to place large, invisible “orbs” of silence anywhere in their field of vision, though it required the user to hold their breath the entire time the fields were active. With All for One’s lungs in such poor shape, it would be painful—but not impossible—to keep the yakuza from ever knowing that they were under attack.

Garaki waved over one of his clones, who was subsequently sent off to retrieve the quirk in question from the archive.

“And you have prepared a counter for Overhaul, right?” Garaki asked, the slightest hint of hesitance breaking through the eagerness on his face.

His worry wasn’t unfounded. While Adamant Midas should theoretically protect from Overhaul’s disassembly, it wasn’t something All for One had ever actually tested, for obvious reasons. He couldn’t simply assume it would work.

“Shadow Tendrils,” All for One stated, still smiling. Garaki nodded, the hesitance gone. The quirk would allow All for One to hold Overhaul in place, and the tendrils themselves were selectively tangible, meaning that even if Chisaki noticed the attack, he wouldn’t be able to stop it. “Now, are there any quirks you’d like me to pick up while I’m there?” he asked.

Garaki hummed, bringing a hand up to brush his mustache as he deliberated.

“You’re already planning on taking Confession and Sloshed. Crystallize might be useful for one of the nomu, and perhaps Energy Suck, I suppose.”

“Food as well,” All for One clarified. “It may synergize with the mouths I make, but if not then a nomu can have it. Anything else?”

“No, that’s it.”

All for One nodded, then set his cane down and concentrated. His hair bled to black, eyes muddied into a dark brown, and his height dropped even more. He paused for a moment, then a large burn scar appeared over his left cheek, stretching down onto his neck. Doctor Garaki cocked his head to the side, slightly confused.

“In case we miss a camera,” All for One explained to the Doctor. “I will need to meet Eri in my civilian guise, but there’s no sense in potentially burning the identity by getting caught doing crime before that.”

“Ah, of course,” Garaki responded. All for One chuckled, shrugging off his suit jacket and setting it on his chair.

“The hospital keeps clothes in stock for the patients, yes?” he asked. Garaki’s eyes lit up in understanding.

“Yes, they do. What do you want?”

All for One grimaced, looking at his suit jacket longingly.

“Anything but a suit jacket. Something more casual, perhaps?”

“Most of what we have would look like a salaryman’s attire,” the Doctor clarified. “But I can check if there’s anything else.”

“Do so,” All for One told him. “I will still be wearing this underneath, for when I switch disguises, but if you can find—” he shuddered “—a sweater, that will do.”

He would suffer through the first part of the rescue in the disguise. Thankfully, his identity as Shigaraki Zen would allow him to return to his suits. While the general public dress code had become far more lax after the appearance of quirks, the standard for business settings was still the same. He would blend right in with the innumerable office workers saturating the cities.

Garaki nodded before sending a message to the clone posing as his public identity in the hospital above to arrange for the clothes to be sent to the supply closet in the morgue the entrance to the lab was disguised as.

All for One had upped the level of secrecy. Now, instead of a mysterious locked door, the entrance was a simple walk-in closet, full of cleaning supplies for the morgue. It would help prevent the lab from being revealed like how All for One had witnessed in Storyteller’s vision.

Soon enough, a dark brown sweater had been left in the closet for him. All for One stared at it in mild distaste, but pulled it on over his more formal shirt anyways.

“I believe that’s it,” he announced. Garaki nodded, sitting down at his console.

“I will be monitoring from here,” he told All for One.

The dark clouds of Warp Gate swirled into existence. It was time to rescue Eri.

Chapter Text

Unfortunately, All for One thought to himself, being thorough can be incredibly boring.

As yet another yakuza mook rounded the corner, All for One breathed in and activated Silencer Field. The nameless mook paused, likely confused as to why all the noise around him had suddenly stopped. He began to turn to look around, but it was far too late. All for One extended an arm, grabbed the fabric of spacetime, and twisted. The minion’s head instantly turned into a pulp as the spatial distortion twisted his skull and brain alike, and his body fell soundlessly to the floor.

Though it was somewhat nostalgic, All for One admitted to himself. The quirk, not the activity. He’d had Spatial Helix practically since the very beginning. Some might have thought it odd that a first-generation quirk was still useful and effective when compared to the quirks of more modern times, but those people would be wrong. Quirks grew in complexity and power over the generations. First generation quirks were simple, with no extra frills, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be powerful. Quirks strong enough to be considered world-ending had been cropping up for centuries.

Flicking his hand, he sent the corpse and blood through the nearest door, into the same closet he’d tossed all of the other yakuza mooks he’d disposed of into. A few more passes with the telekinesis quirk ensured there was no evidence of the murder left out in the hall.

All for One exhaled, letting the orb of silence dissipate. He ignored the burning in his lungs. He’d finally taken out enough of the patrolling idiots that there was a gap large enough for him to make it all the way to Chisaki without anyone finding him in the compound.

He might have been disguised, but there was no need to take unnecessary risks, after all.

Stepping out of the alcove he’d been standing in, All for One strode down the hallway with purpose. The various decorations were more tasteful than he’d expected, but he knew that would soon change as soon as he entered the featureless grey tunnels of the underground, hidden portion of the compound. He could see the entrance just up ahead, his infrared senses easily highlighting what would otherwise be an unsuspicious wall.

Quietly forcing the door open, he walked through the threshold and beheld exactly what he’d expected. Storyteller hadn’t lied, and the Shie Hassaikai’s underground base was mostly dull stone. Really, it wouldn’t kill them to at least put some paintings or carvings on the wall to give it some more depth. Chisaki could have done it in moments using his quirk, so it wasn’t like it would have cost anything, either.

All for One continued down the hallway towards where his beyond-human senses told him the nearest person was, musing on the quirk he was about to take. Overhaul was so versatile! Contact matter manipulation that went down to the molecular level. Unfortunately, it required a significant amount of practice, not to mention extensive scientific knowledge, to use it to its fullest extent. Oh, anyone would be able to reshape the earth into spikes or change the shape of ordinary objects with enough time and effort devoted towards practicing with the quirk, but healing? No, that would require the user to know the human body down to the tiniest detail.

A similarly complex quirk was the Yaoyorozu girl’s Creation. It required her to know the atomic configuration of her creations, after all. But other than that, the quirk could create just about anything, with only one caveat. She couldn’t produce living beings. A better comparison quirk for Overhaul might be Alchemy, then, since it could create and alter living—

All for One froze, almost tripping over his own feet right there in the middle of the halfway.

Alchemy could be used on living beings.

Valdo Gollini had specifically used his quirk to alter his own appearance, even without any enhancements to the quirk.

All for One clenched his fists, trying his best not to curse aloud and ruin his stealth. He couldn’t even say that he’d forgotten it existed. He’d even brought up the quirk himself when he was discussing options for his civilian identity!

He’d wasted all that time searching for disguise quirks when there was, in fact, an omnicapable transformation quirk that could let him reshape his body as he pleased.

No. He shook his head. No, it was understandable that he’d overlooked the disguise capabilities of Alchemy. All for One had just escaped from Tartarus, and he was still assimilating all of the new information that Storyteller had given him. It was inevitable that he’d forget a few things until he went through everything he now knew and made sure to account for that information in the plans he made. It was a mistake, true, but not one that would harm his plans overmuch.

All for One continued down the dull underground hallway with renewed intensity. He needed to rescue Eri and take Overhaul. Afterwards…

He already had a functional disguise, so he wasn’t going to be running off to Italy immediately. No, he’d ensure Eri got settled into her new home, and catch her up academically to the point that she could be enrolled in school. That would keep her busy for most of each day, leaving All for One with plenty of time to focus on his own work.

…Now that he was thinking about it, nearly all of the members of the Gollini family he’d seen through Storyteller had rather useful quirks. He’d have to take them too. But that was a plan for later. In the present moment, he had a different, infinitely more important task. The feared Symbol of Evil was going to become a young girl’s one shining beacon of hope.

How amusing.

All for One quickened his pace, accommodating for the short amount of time he’d lost when he’d had his realization regarding Alchemy. He’d removed enough of the patrols that he had some leeway, but again, there was no need to be reckless. Being reckless was what caused him to lose, in the future he’d seen through Storyteller. He’d gotten overconfident, thought his plans infallible, and took a few risks too many. He’d done some thinking as to what could possibly be the reason that he’d made so many obvious errors, and had eventually concluded that his judgment in that future had been compromised by the fusion, with Tomura’s immaturity leaking into All for One’s mind and infecting his genius with the boy’s ineptitude. It was the only explanation that made any sort of sense. All for One would never have made those mistakes if he was of sound mind. It was unthinkable. All for One won. Always.

But even if All for One was never going to risk his mind like that in the real timeline, he would make sure to avoid all of the mistakes he’d seen his future self make. Storyteller had granted him an immense amount of information, much of which he’d never have been able to acquire by normal means. He now knew more about his enemies’ motivations, goals, and abilities than they themselves did. He knew how strong they were now, and how strong they could grow to be in the future. And, knowing that, All for One could make perfect counters to each and every one of the hero brats that tried to get in his way.

All for One finally came to a stop right before a closed door. His quirk-derived senses easily told him exactly what was on the other side: Chisaki Kai, alone, bent over a microscope. All for One took a breath, then set down a silencing field over the door. Opening the door, he stepped through. Chisaki hadn’t noticed anything was wrong yet. His back was to the door.

Sloppy, All for One mentally chided, reprimanding the lesser villain for the mistake. The consequences would show up in just a second.

All for One activated another quirk, and dark tendrils started creeping upwards from Chisaki’s own shadow. They were somewhat odd to look at, as they obviously had depth and existed in three dimensions despite not seeming to reflect light. The expected optical illusion caused by near-perfect light absorption wasn’t present, which made the educated mind pause and take note.

But the specificities of the quirk’s appearance did not matter. The tendrils lashed upwards, curling around Chisaki’s hands and forcing them up and into the air. The man began to cry out, but All for One narrowed his eyes and enveloped the man in a second field of utter silence. No one would hear anything.

Crossing the short distance that remained between him and his first objective, All for One calmly reached out and set his hand on Chisaki Kai’s forehead, relishing the utter terror present in those trembling golden eyes. The germaphobe attempted to flinch back, but the shadowy tendrils held him fast, and Chisaki began to break out in hives.

All for One mentally scoffed, shaking his head. But as much as he wanted to explain to the pathetic waste of space in front of him just how insignificant he was, All for One wasn’t going to wait and monologue. So instead, he simply wrenched Overhaul out of Chisaki’s body, red light flaring as the quirk eagerly jumped to a more deserving owner. Chisaki’s eyes rolled back into his head as he suddenly lost consciousness.

All for One scoffed, dropping both fields of silence to do so. There were only a few more things to do before he got Eri and left.

The dark fog of Warp Gate coalesced in the air, two portals appearing in the air. One was large enough for a human to walk through, but the other was small, barely the size of a dinner plate. Tugging with the shadow tendrils, All for One positioned Chisaki so that both of his arms were extended through the smaller gate, then let it close.

The arms were shorn off instantly, falling into the container that All for One had ensured was ready and waiting back at the lab before he’d left. All for One then cauterized the stumps. He and Garaki were going to study Overhaul, and it wouldn’t do to lose access to the original source of the quirk.

As if summoned by the thought, Doctor Garaki stepped through the larger portal. Or, to be a bit more accurate, a copy of Doctor Garaki stepped through the portal. The original was busy coordinating all of the rest of the copies, and was a bit too cowardly to place the real him on the front lines, as it were.

“The lab is yours, Doctor,” All for One said. Garaki looked around, zeroing in on a computer on top of a desk over on the side of the room.

“Of course, Sensei. I’ll have a few more of me come through to help. We’ll grab all of his data, and preserve Chisaki for later study,” Garaki eagerly replied.

“Very good,” All for One said.

Walking back out of the room, All for One closed and locked the door. Garaki would handle the acquisition of Chisaki’s research and the body of the man himself, which meant that All for One was free to go after the next targets. The Eight Bullets. They all knew about Eri, after all. That meant that they couldn’t be left alive.

Confession, Sloshed, Food, and Energy Suck… Crystallize for one of the Nomu… Perhaps he’d take Strongarm as well? It would be redundant for him, of course, but one of the more physically-inclined Nomu might find some use for it. The rest were worthless to him.

As he walked down the hallway, All for One smiled. It was not a friendly smile.

It was done. Chisaki had been taken back to the lab, and the Garakis were working on organizing all of the research data they’d stolen from the man. The Eight Bullets had all been tracked down and killed, with a few of their quirks being taken for better purposes before they died. He’d ended up taking Strongarm in the end. It was a force multiplier he could use to—forgive the pun—let a Nomu punch above its own weight class. All for One chuckled as he walked down the final hallway towards a certain specific locked door.

Finally, it was time to rescue Eri.

His second disguise slipped off of him like the morning fog dissipating in the light of the newly-risen sun, with his hair fading back to white, the scar disappearing, his height shooting back up, and his eyes gleaming a brilliant crimson. He’d already checked for any cameras, and he was free to reveal himself. Or rather, the self he was going to be for the foreseeable future, that was.

Soon enough, “Shigaraki Zen” stood in the hallway, ready to perform a civic service in his role as an upstanding citizen.

He consciously reigned in his emotions, adjusting his stance and forcing his smile to shift to a more natural, gentle expression. He was well aware of the effect his mere presence could have on the weak-willed, and knew how to manipulate them through it. In this case, he wanted to make a good impression. He wanted Eri to trust him. He needed to seem powerful but benevolent.

All for One opened the door and beheld the small form huddled on the bed. At the sight of him, she flinched slightly. Less than optimal, All for One dryly thought to himself. But it wasn’t unfixable. He crouched down slightly, making sure to avoid any sort of confrontational body language.

“Hello, Eri,” he greeted gently. She blinked at him.

“Hello…?” she asked. When he made no move to continue towards her, she tilted her head to the side in confusion. “Who… Who are you? Does O-Overhaul want…?”

“My name is Shigaraki Zen,” All for One said. “And no. I do not work for Chisaki Kai. I’m not here to hurt you. Quite the opposite, in fact! I’m here to rescue you.”

Eri uncurled slightly, glancing up at All for One’s face again before her eyes darted away, seemingly afraid to make eye contact for too long.

“Are you a hero?” she asked, her voice still hesitant and halting.

“Not exactly, but I have worked with heroes in the past.” Albeit either unwittingly or unwillingly on their parts. “I actually work with scientists more, though. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m rescuing you.”

Something shined in her eyes for just a moment. A tiny spark of hope flared before another wave of doubt and fear washed over it.

“Wh-What about him?”

She was almost certainly referring to Chisaki. Her primary torturer. Her jailor. Her kidnapper. But it would be best to make certain anyway. He couldn’t risk bungling this first impression, after all.

“You mean Chisaki?” he asked. Eri nodded silently, her hands grasping her thin, dirty dress. The movement seemed to be instinctual. Chisaki truly had put effort into drilling fear of him into Eri’s mind. That would have to be gently expunged. All for One would not allow Eri to be hindered by psychological issues. “He’s gone, Eri,” All for One said. The young girl’s eyes went wide.

“Gone? He- He- Is he really…?”

All for One nodded as he slowly walked over to the foot of her bed and carefully sat down, still making sure not to make any sudden moves.

“My quirk is special, you see,” he began. He was going to need to be honest, here. Lying would only serve to set up feelings of betrayal later on. All for One needed Eri to trust him, and that meant sincerity. “It lets me take other quirks.”

Eri’s eyes seemed to defy physics as they widened even further.

“So you… took his?”

All for One gently nodded.

“Indeed. Chisaki will never again be able to hurt anyone with Overhaul. And just to make up for all the bad he did, I will be using it to do good.”

“B-But it just hurts people…” she trailed off, her gaze snapping away from All for One as she curled into herself again. He’d have to break that preconception quickly.

“No quirk is evil, Eri. Quirks just let people do things. It’s what people do with their quirks that’s good or evil.”

Eri’s breath hitched, and she shuddered as tears began to well up in her eyes.

“Then… Am I evil? I… I… Papa—”

Fuck.

“No,” All for One firmly denied. “No, you’re not. That’s completely different. Tell me, did you want to hurt him?”

She shook her head as she sniffled, desperately trying to hold back the tears.

“Then it was an accident. It was not your fault, Eri.”

The sniffles turned into full-on crying, her body racked with sobs as she reached out and clung to All for One’s proffered arms. He hugged her, rubbing small circles on her back as he gave her a quick visual health check. There weren’t any obvious injuries, but he knew that Overhaul’s reassembly wouldn’t leave wounds, so the lack of injuries wasn’t as reassuring as it might have been in other circumstances.

All for One would have to have Garaki give her a checkup. Though, thinking about it… he’d need to supervise. Garaki was a genius, true, and he could play the ordinary doctor, but All for One wasn’t going to risk the excitable old man accidentally triggering Eri’s phobias of experimentation. For all Garaki was the closest thing to an omnidisciplinary doctor, he still struggled with social interaction and stressful situations. Better to personally take hold of the situation, and prevent the issue from ever arising.

All for One continued to hug Eri, murmuring reassurances as he let her release all of the pent-up emotional pain she’d been repressing. At this point, he was just waiting for—

Golden light flared. Finally. Time to prove that he could help her.

Eri instantly pushed away from him, her eyes wide with fear.

“I—No… My curse might hurt you!”

All for One smiled. In contrast to his usual expression, this smile was friendly. It was indulgent, gentle, and calming. Never let it be said that All for One couldn’t seem nice if he wanted to.

“It’s all right, Eri,” he said, reaching out towards her. “Remember what I said my quirk was?”

As soon as he touched her forehead, he tugged on her quirk, removing it from her as gently as he could before instantly giving it back. Eri’s horn briefly vanished before reappearing, much smaller than before. Taking and returning the quirk would reset the stockpile of whatever it was that she needed to rewind things. The golden light went out.

Eri froze, eyes still wide. Carefully, she reached up and poked her horn.

“You… You made it stop,” she breathed. “My curse didn’t hurt you.”

“Quirks aren’t curses, little Eri,” All for One gently urged. He couldn’t have her believing something so silly, especially considering that quirks were his primary focus. “Chisaki lied when he told you that. He just wanted you to be afraid.”

“But… I hurt people,” she repeated in a small voice.

“Accidentally,” All for One stressed. “Your quirk is powerful, yes, but you just need to practice to be able to control it. Then, no one will ever be hurt by it ever again. In fact, your quirk could help so many people.”

“Help…?” she asked hesitantly.

“If someone’s hurt, you could rewind them to before they got hurt. You could heal people, Eri.”

Eri looked down at her hands. She seemed to be having a minor existential crisis over the fact that she could, in fact, be helpful. That her ability could be valued. That she could be valued.

“I…” she began, “I don’t know how…”

All for One gathered the small girl into a hug.

“It’s alright,” he said. “I can help teach you.”

“Could I… come with you?”

“Of course, Eri. Of course.”

Purple fog swirled into existence, and when it cleared, the room was empty, leaving no sign that a young girl had ever occupied it.

He would only bring up the topic of adoption later on, once she had settled into her new life and was stable enough to both recognize and understand the implications of adoption, but it was there in that room that she had truly become Shigaraki Eri.

His plans were progressing exactly as he had expected. Glancing down at the girl clinging to him, All for One smiled. It wasn’t his usual knowing grin, but neither was it a constructed facsimile of kindness. It was, perhaps, something in between.

Two weeks after he’d rescued Eri from the clutches of Chisaki Kai and his yakuza group, All for One sat on a wooden chair overlooking a grassy yard dotted with a few trees. His life support box was sitting in a specially-crafted holster on the armrest, and he was wearing his standard formal suit. Out in the yard, Eri was creeping up behind a butterfly, trying not to scare it into the air.

On All for One’s left, a holographic screen displayed Doctor Garaki, who was sitting in his public office, and wasn’t wearing any of his mad scientist gear.

“Well, Doctor?” All for One rumbled in English, keeping one eye on Eri. “How is she?”

“I ran the tests like you asked, Mister Shigaraki,” Garaki began, keeping up the image of an ordinary doctor reporting to a concerned parent. He was using the Western convention for names and honorifics, given exactly where All for One’s house was located. “And you were right to bring her to a checkup. Whatever those villains did…” he trailed off, tutting in disapproval. To his credit, the doctor was actually a rather decent actor. Despite knowing the man personally, having worked with him for decades upon decades, All for One could only barely see through the act. Taking a breath, Garaki continued.

“She doesn’t have any specific injuries, per se. But she’s malnourished, her marrow’s at a truly horrifyingly low level, she’s anemic, she’s missing her entire gut microbiome, her immune system is compromised, and more. The specifics are in the document I have sent you, it’s too long to read out. But while she may seem fine right now, I suspect she’ll have chronic pain later in life. It’ll likely show up fairly early, within the next five years or so.”

All for One frowned. That was unacceptable. He was All for One. He was the most powerful man in the world. What would it say about him if he couldn’t raise a child as well as some piece of random human trash? He would not allow his daughter to grow up in crippling pain. No, her life would be representative of his power. She would have unknowing access to the full extent of his entire empire. He would not accept anything less.

“I trust you’re already planning out a treatment?” All for One asked, his voice as soft as silk as the tiniest hint of a threat creeped into his tone. Garaki blinked nervously, then furiously nodded, the facade of his public face faltering slightly in the face of the glimpse of All for One’s true identity.

“Of course, Mister Shigaraki!” Garaki replied, recovering from his small lapse. “She needs to replenish her gut microbiome as quickly as possible. I’ll prescribe probiotics, but I recommend you add some fermented products like kefir and yogurt to regular meals as well to help re-seed.”

All for One nodded, violently cursing Chisaki’s germaphobic idiocy in his head. The man was a scientist. He had to have known that humans needed their gut bacteria to live healthy lives. For him to specifically reconstruct Eri without her gut flora… it was pure, needless, inefficient cruelty. The brainless idiot had risked her life. It was all the more moronic when one remembered that Eri had been a key component of Chisaki’s plans. To wit: he was a shortsighted fool.

“The marrow and anemia are a bit trickier to solve, but they are fixable, I assure you,” Garaki continued. “There is a procedure that can fix both, which will also reverse all of the accumulated damage from malnutrition.”

“A procedure…” All for One repeated, rolling the word on his tongue. Garaki had better not be talking about anything close to the procedures used to make the Nomus. Those procedures were nowhere near gentle.

“It’s nothing as bad as you’re imagining, I assure you,” Garaki hurried to clarify. “She’ll need a stem cell transplant to help fix her marrow. We’ll grow a culture of her own stem cells in the lab, and we’ll modify it before implantation so that it grants her some temporary regeneration to fix the rest of the damage. It’s based on a quirk effect, and it’s completely safe. She’ll feel woozy for about four days after the implantation, but the only other possible side effect is a loss of hair color, and…” he trailed off.

“And her hair is only a shade away from pure white anyways,” All for One finished for the doctor. Even if that side effect did come into play, it would only make her look even more similar to All for One. All in all, it seemed that Garaki had truly figured it all out. Of course, that just meant that All for One would need to go over each aspect of the plan with the finest possible comb. It was impossible to account for every variable, and his usual style of setting many plans in motion where even just one succeeding would be beneficial would not work in this situation. Eri was a singular existence, and could not be risked.

“What else would the procedure affect, Doctor?” All for One asked. “I may just be a businessman, but I know enough about medicine that regeneration couldn’t possibly be that localized.”

Garaki blinked, his face clearing in relief.

“Ah, of course, sir! Those aren’t classified as negative side effects, but as the expected results of the treatment. In addition to fixing the damage, the regeneration will boost her physical state overall while it's active, and even once it runs its course, she’ll be left healthier than she would have been at her baseline. She’ll be a bit more fit than average for children her age, but not to a degree that it’ll affect her daily life. Likewise, her neuroplasticity will be improved, though this won’t be as noticeable as she’s still a child and therefore still has her own natural neuroplasticity. More importantly, her immune system will be boosted, and she’ll gain nigh-permanent immunity to any disease she’s exposed to during the four days the regeneration is active. I was planning to discuss options in that regard with you later.”

All for One’s (quirk-created) eyebrows shot up. Immunity to diseases? That sounded quite useful indeed.

“This sounds like a very advantageous operation, Doctor,” he said. This next bit was important. All for One knew his new house was in range of cameras, and he needed to keep up the image of a civilian. “If it’s so beneficial, why isn’t this used more often?”

Garaki looked mildly embarrassed. Good acting.

“Well, sir… The procedure is legally still experimental. But we’re sure it’s safe, we’ve tested it! We’re working with a quirk research company who did the study of the Cell Activation quirk—what the regeneration is based on—and while we’re sure it’s safe, it’ll be a while before it can become mainstream. It’s also… fairly expensive. Not for you, sir, but it’d be infeasible to mass-produce what I’m offering you. If you agree to the procedure, you would have to sign a waiver declaring that you know it’s experimental, and that you consent to having the patient’s anonymized data being used in our research paper.”

All for One hummed, his lips drawing tight.

“I don’t know…”

Garaki looked panicked for an instant, purely for the benefit of anyone spying on the call.

“I, ah, well… Mister Shigaraki, you’re the owner of a quirk research company yourself, yes? If you want, we could reach out and make this a joint venture, perhaps? Jakku Hospital is a pioneer in experimental quirk-based treatments. I’m sure we could convince our current partner to share their research with your company. You would be able to do it all in-house.”

Shigaraki Zen sighed, his eyes becoming stormy. He, as a civilian, had a carefully constructed reputation that he needed to uphold. He was the owner of a highly-regarded quirk research company. One popular enough that others regularly tried to gain access, though varying means. The company was real, as were its results. The owner had simply been… reclusive until very recently, with almost no pictures existing anywhere. All for One had several such identities set up, ready and waiting for whenever they were needed. To assume the identity was as easy as slipping on a new suit.

“So, this is yet another attempt to gain a partnership. Using my family, no less. What company is it this time?”

“I-I can’t share that information, sir,” Garaki squeaked. “I’m just the messenger. But I swear to you, the procedure will help her. And! And your, ah, location, would help avoid any legal complications.”

Shigaraki Zen’s eyes narrowed.

“In plainer terms, I-Island’s laws are laxer than Japan’s,” he growled, restating the Doctor’s implication. This whole conversation was fun! He could get used to playing the concerned, powerful parent. “Fine. Have your partner company send the details to mine. I’ll look it over personally.”

As Garaki furiously nodded, All for One held back a chuckle as he ended the call. He owned each and every party involved in this whole scheme. Both quirk research companies, and Jakku General Hospital, through Garaki. It made it so much easier to manipulate the situation while still seeming like the companies were fighting.

He’d had one of his legitimate quirk research companies reach out to the Shimano family, offering a not insignificant sum of money in exchange for allowing a study of the Cell Activation quirk. And results had been very quick in showing. Science like that was usually rather slow—he’d ordinarily expect months before they had anything usable rather than the one and a half weeks it’d taken before they had a working prototype. Apparently, the Cell Activation quirk was just… easy to understand? He hadn’t asked for the full details, as he’d been busy squaring away loose ends caused by buying his new home.

Shigaraki Zen’s company, then, would be a perfect opportunity for the smaller company. It wouldn’t look suspicious from the outside, and they all could brush Eri’s treatment under the rug. Especially considering his company was based on I-Island, and therefore was subject to far less strict experimentation laws. Even if it was eventually discovered, it was perfectly reasonable for the owner of the company to use his influence to help his family. No one would think twice of it.

Glancing up at his yard, All for One took in the skyline. Yes, I-Island was rather beautiful. Moreover, it was a safe location for Eri to grow up in. Violent crime was all but nonexistent on the artificial island, with most of the criminals focusing on more white collar ventures. And all of the ne'er-do-wells focusing on corporate espionage and the like meant that no one was going to try to mug someone in the streets, nor take human hostages. I-Island was the safest place in the world for someone to grow up, and as he’d already established, All for One wasn’t going to settle for subpar when it came to his current most valuable asset.

Eri hadn’t been officially enrolled in public school just yet. All for One was still getting her used to a more sedate life, and was personally homeschooling her up to the level she ought to be for her age. Equally as importantly, he was taking the time to ensure Eri knew that his quirk was something she needed to keep secret. She could easily understand the idea that some people would try to use people for their quirks given her own experience, and had promised to keep it a secret from everyone to try and keep the same thing from happening to All for One.

Her determination was adorable.

Apart from teaching Eri, All for One had spent some time finalizing the details of his identity as Shigaraki Zen. Apart from the long and tedious process of making sure all of the paperwork was legally airtight, All for One had finally decided on the quirk he was officially going to have. He called it Alteration. The ability to change things from one state to another. He’d intentionally left the description in the quirk registration incredibly vague, and had backdated the file so that it seemed like it had only ever been updated back when it first manifested. The lack of details would be excusable given that at the time he was supposed to have been a child, unaware of his quirk’s intricacies, and had apparently simply never bothered to update it over the years.

He’d be able to use a significant portion of his accumulated quirks under the umbrella of “Alteration,” Overhaul and Alchemy prominent among them. And speaking of the latter, he ought to go and acquire it sooner rather than later. It would free up more of his quirk’s storage, and improve his capabilities overall.

But first, he was going to finish setting everything up for his new life. He knew that Valdo Gollini would have survived for months if he never broke out, and he was powerful and cunning enough that the butterflies set in motion were highly unlikely to change that. All for One had time, and could retrieve the quirk at his leisure.

On the whole, things were going quite well. His plans were proceeding apace, the heroes remained unaware and fumbling in the dark, and All for One was getting ever-closer to his goals.

All for One smiled. The winds were blowing his way, and the forecast showed a tornado on the horizon.

Chapter Text

The still-unnamed experimental quirk-based regenerative healing procedure did, in fact, end up bleaching Eri’s hair a little. It was very close to white beforehand, but afterwards there was no hint of any other color in her hair. Eri herself liked the change, somewhat surprisingly. All for One had been prepared to offer hair dyes if she preferred her original off-white shade, but Eri seemed to have conceptualized the color change as part of “cleaning away” all of the bad that Chisaki had done to her.

All for One had clarified the misconception, but Eri had stubbornly stuck to her original decision. She preferred the new color, and All for One certainly wasn’t going to argue.

More pressingly, the procedure had been a complete success. All of the physical damage done by Chisaki’s experiments had been reversed. The girl was the very picture of health. The mental damage was a wholly different matter, though, and would take more time and care to heal. Still, she was in a much better environment, and All for One was exploring options for therapy. He himself had studied psychology occasionally through the years, but he was no professional, and trying to play therapist on top of the rest would cut into his own time.

No, his primary task would be establishing his civilian identity on the island. He was Shigaraki Zen, owner of a quirk research company known as Helix Biotech. He’d moved to be closer to the company’s headquarters on I-Island after his previous apartment in Kamino had been destroyed in All Might’s final battle. For publicly-unknown reasons, he’d overseen a joint project between Helix, Jakku General Hospital, and a smaller, less impressive quirk research company known unimaginatively as Metagene, whose sole claim to fame was being old enough that they had been founded way back during the dawn of quirks, when they were still known as Meta Abilities.

Plain and simple.

But to make it believable, he would have to actually put effort into his public identity’s career. He couldn’t remain in the shadows, especially not with the backstory he’d set up. So, he would need to be seen managing the company. Plus, since he was now on I-Island, he would need to personally network a little as well. He might even find some scientists whose morals were loose enough they could be brought into All for One’s employ! Garaki was a genius, but more bright minds would be a welcome addition.

Back to his original point—His plans for the Cell Activation quirk. He’d ordered Metagene to contact the Shimano family rather than doing it through Helix. He got a copy of Cell Activation either way, but spreading out the achievements the public would be aware of would prevent suspicion from arising. Moreover, Helix was known for how advanced it was. There wouldn’t be any eyebrows raised if Helix managed to eke out more utility from Metagene’s research.

Helix would be the one that released the commercial product, and it would bring in billions. A quirk-derived general “healing” procedure would revolutionize medicine. Of course, they wouldn’t be releasing the version that Eri had benefited from. It was immensely resource-intensive, and drew in too much of Garaki’s less-than-legal research. No, the public version would be a much simpler effect, and would draw solely on the Cell Activation quirk and existing, public scientific knowledge. It wouldn’t confer immunity to diseases, and the overall regeneration effect would be much weaker. Still, hospitals worldwide would desperately fight to get their hands on it, and that demand would grant Helix virtually unlimited resources.

All for One would be able to bring Helix to the absolute cutting edge of science without any mysterious donors or unreplicable breakthroughs. No, this would be perfectly legitimate, and would let All for One continue his research while hiding in plain sight. Again, Garaki was a genius, but relying on a single scientist for everything would leave countless avenues unexplored. Having his varied companies actively working on All for One’s personal goals would exponentially improve results.

For the foreseeable future, he was going to be more focused on science than his criminal empire. Of course, he would never allow his grasp on the underworld to slip, but he was dedicating himself to his goal and would be using everything he had to get there.

Sitting at an unadorned desk, in a fairly spartan office, All for One sat back in his chair and smiled.

Eri was at school, leaving All for One’s schedule open for his own work. Or rather, Shigaraki Zen’s work. He was building his presence as the owner of the company, the loss of his original home being the supposed catalyst for his newfound extroversion. After all, if he was supposed to be an intensely private individual, it would have seemed odd for him to start making public appearances. He needed a reason, which his backstory neatly provided.

He’d begun showing up in-person, checking in on the various lines of research being investigated by Helix’s scientists, and—as evidenced by where he was sitting—had gained an office in the primary building, though it was still rather empty and would take some decoration to make it feel natural. That was fine. He would use it as a talking point in the opening discussions.

And speaking of…

Three knocks resounded in his office, the man All for One had been watching pace up and down the hall finally having mustered the determination to approach the door.

“Come in!” Shigaraki Zen said. The door didn’t creak open, no matter how thematically appropriate that might have been. The office was new, and the hinges were well-maintained. Standing there in the doorframe was a shorter man in a lab coat, his scruffy beard and unkept yet short hair indicating he cared a great deal more for his research than his appearance. And given his nervousness, he wasn’t exactly a socialite, either. He was carrying a thick folder in one hand, and his other was toying with a pen, in what was likely an unconscious tic.

“Doctor Zen Shigaraki?” he asked. Zen (as he needed to start thinking of himself, at least while in character) nodded expectantly. “I’m Doctor Santiago Chavez. I was told you wanted an, uh, overview of the situation and general procedures here?”

“Indeed,” Zen agreed. “Now that I’m not working remotely, I suspect I’ll be a bit more involved in the day to day operations of the company, especially with the newest joint project with Metagene. I’ve been given the letter of the law, but I’m not as familiar with the scientific culture and unspoken rules here on I-Island. Please, take a seat,” he said, gesturing to the chair on the other side of his desk.

Doctor Chavez sat down and set the folder on the desk between them.

“Well, I-Island’s purpose for existing is to foster scientific progress. So most of the laws are focused on facilitating that, albeit with some regulations meant to prevent mad science. Given that Helix focuses on biotech, especially quirks, we need to be careful about human testing, especially getting informed consent. There’s been a few incidents where someone tried to bait a lawsuit, but they almost never succeed.”

Zen nodded. He’d known about those. He had to, as the owner of the company.

“Yes, I recall.”

“In the scientific community,” Doctor Chavez continued, “Helix is highly regarded, but you need to avoid the topic of engineered diseases. It got hushed and didn’t make the news, but a few years back it turned out someone’s wife of five years was actually a plant, part of a honeypot scheme to get access to the equipment needed to create a bio-plague.” He shuddered. “She didn’t get anywhere close to success, but it’s still a sore subject for a lot of the scientists, since the paranoia it stirred up broke more than a few relationships.”

Zen nodded again, thoughtfully. Doctor Chavez slid the folder across the desk towards him.

“I’ve printed out summaries of all of the ‘big things’ still in recent memory. Lots of scientists can be… prickly about the more explosive failures, especially if they spent months proclaiming how their invention would change the world,” Doctor Chavez said, his tone slipping towards obvious sarcasm near the end. Perhaps he was affected personally by one such event? It was the most likely explanation.

“I’ll be sure to read it over,” Zen said, picking up the folder. “And on a personal level - what should I be aware of when interacting with individuals?”

Doctor Chavez pursed his lips together, obviously thinking.

“Well, most people forgo titles after initial introductions, except in official settings. Everyone’s a doctor, it just gets really redundant. Ah… Constructive criticism or at least some form of input is expected at demonstrations, even if it’s just ‘I don’t know enough to comment’ or something to that effect, and, um… Oh! You’re from Japan, right. I-Island usually uses the given name then family name format, but the computer systems are flexible enough to do whichever. Technically English is the official standard, but lots of people followed David Shield’s example and are at least passable in Japanese as well.”

Doctor Chavez’s eyes suddenly widened in realization.

“Ah, and… Given the most recent project, expect David Shield to visit sometime soon.”

“Oh?” Zen asked. “I was under the impression he was studying the effects of Trigger? Wasn’t the Expo attacked recently by villains who wanted to steal the higher-grade samples?”

The official stories didn’t even hint at the existence of the Quirk Amplification Device. No, Wolfram and his crew were painted as a pack of criminals who simply wanted better drugs. They supposedly bribed a research assistant to help them, and got exceedingly, exceedingly lucky. The rest was just the standard official fluff. “We are rectifying this heinous security breach, the collaborator has been apprehended,” et cetera.

All in all, the attack on the Expo had been fairly contained. The only major property damage was to the upper levels of the tower, and casualties had been kept low due to Wolfram co-opting I-Island’s own defenses, which were mostly nonlethal. At least, when on the default settings.

“David Shield has been looking into replicating quirk effects technologically for more than ten years,” Doctor Chavez began to explain. “Healing quirks especially. I’ve heard gossip that there’s been a few breakthroughs based on Metagene’s research, and once the news reaches him he’ll reach out.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Zen replied. “Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Then thank you for your time,” Zen said, dismissing the scientist with a nod. Doctor Chavez nodded in turn, then somewhat quickly left the office.

All for One briefly mused as to why his request for a general “How-To: I-Island” had been delegated to someone who wasn’t that comfortable with social interaction. Perhaps a result of more local workplace politics he simply hadn’t been exposed to yet. But far more interesting was the information Chavez had brought.

All for One slid the folder to the side for the moment and sat back in his chair, resting his chin in his hand as he thought. David Shield was interested in healing quirks, and had been since before the Eighth was injured. All for One was willing to bet that the reason rested in the conspicuous absence of Melissa Shield’s mother. All for One had briefly investigated the Shields back when he first joined up with All Might, but hadn’t turned up anything interesting. David Shield was a genius in his own right, and didn’t rely on any stepping stones to reach his position.

The presence of a child certainly implied the existence of a mother, though, and David Shield was married. Moreover, she didn’t have a death certificate, last he checked. He regularly made himself aware of the state of anyone close to the Eighth, in case the death of a friend opened up a psychological crack he could attack.

Perhaps a medical condition, then? Some terminal illness or other slow killer. It fit the facts.

And really, if David Shield was going to visit, All for One could simply ask the man himself. Maybe…

Maybe, if he was desperate enough…

All for One’s smile widened. It would be such a wonderful irony if he, the original supervillain, managed to get the Eighth’s personal inventor to work for him. Unknowingly, of course, but it would still serve to amuse.

He refocused on the present moment. It would be amusing if it happened organically, but it was still risky, given the inventor’s closeness with the Eighth. All for One wouldn’t actively pursue it simply for a moment of petty levity. His current identity was too valuable to throw away.

In the meantime…

All for One opened the folder and began to read. Social blunders would be annoying to work his way out of, and regardless, he would always prefer to have a better grasp of the background he was working in.

“And this one?” All for One prompted, his voice expectant but not harsh.

Eri narrowed her eyes at the paper in front of her, glaring a hole through the equation All for One had indicated. They were both sitting at a table with papers strewn before them. Eri’s homework, to be precise. The young girl was holding a pencil, which she regularly tapped against her horn as she thought.

“Eleven,” she finally declared. “Because it’s subtraction, not adding in the pareseth— paren-thingies.”

“Parentheses,” All for One corrected. “And you’re correct. Just one more page and we’ll be done with math for tonight.”

Eri was making very good progress. Especially considering that Chisaki hadn’t seen it necessary to educate her at all. She’d picked up a smattering of scientific terms, but mathematics, history, language, and the rest? She was still somewhat behind. But she was making progress. Case in point: she, at six years of age, was solving mathematical equations with parentheses and operators rather than picture problems involving counting how many melons someone bought at a store.

Part of it, All for One thought, was that she genuinely enjoyed being in school. It was giving her social interaction with her own age group, and was letting her act her age without fear of reprisal for what was likely the first time since she’d been taken by the yakuza. She could play, learn, and hopefully learn to laugh while making friends.

It was good to see that Eri was acclimating to the new, much healthier environment she now occupied. All for One needed to gain her trust, and ensuring she was healthy was the first step towards that goal.

Tap, tap, tap, went Eri’s pencil against her horn as she stared the last two problems on the page into submission.

The second step in All for One’s plan for Eri would revolve around her quirk. Specifically, teaching her to control it. Because even if her quirk wasn’t the whole reason he’d rescued her, her quirk would be a danger to both herself and the ones around her if she couldn’t control it. Moreover, giving her control of what she’d regarded as an involuntary curse would help empower her.

Of course, the second phase of the plan wasn’t going to come into play for a while. She was still far too fresh to freedom, still traumatized and adjusting. But perhaps next year? A year could feel like a long time, especially to younger people. Going a full year without incident, having a full year of freedom to draw strength from, All for One was confident that Eri would be capable of pushing past her psychological blocks and beginning to willingly practice with her quirk. He would frame it as something beneficial for her—and it would be. Even if All for One managed to get his hands on a quirk to cancel out Rewind there was always the possibility of incidents so long as it remained uncontrolled.

Speaking of, Erasure would be the best option, but would be incredibly risky to acquire. Erasure Spot would also work. Neutralization would likely work, but the fact that it required contact made it a little riskier for whoever was babysitting Eri. All for One paused. A babysitter? The idea was sound—he himself couldn’t always be at Eri’s side without using Double and risking someone noticing that he was in more than one place at once. Plus, a parental figure constantly looming over her would stifle her. But a babysitter, or bodyguard rather… Hmm. All for One shelved the thought for further consideration later, as Eri had just finished her math homework.

“All done!” she beamed, turning to him. All for One gave her a gentle smile, nodding.

“Well, clean-up first, then you’re done,” he corrected. Eri pouted at him as she collected the papers from the table and put her pencil away.

They usually saved math work for last, given how advanced she was in the subject. The other subjects could occasionally take her some more time to puzzle through. Language was of particular note, given that she was learning two at once so early. Japan did still mandate that students learn English starting around age ten, but given that All for One was raising Eri on I-Island, he wanted her to be completely fluent in both.

“What’s gonna be for dinner?” she asked. All for One thought for a moment.

“A multicultural abomination,” he finally answered. “Grilled lamb with yogurt sauce, sauerkraut with split peas, miso soup, and a salad made of whatever I find in the fridge.”

Eri blinked at him.

“Is it… good?”

All for One chuckled.

“I have absolutely no idea! But I know that each part is usually good on its own, and I’ll taste it first to make sure it’s edible, don’t worry.”

The flavors were going to be very odd. But his primary concern was focused on encouraging Eri’s gut microbiome to regrow. He could return to more traditional meals once she wasn’t in danger. Until then, Japanese-Mediterranean-Polish fusions would serve.

Standing up, he tucked the small box containing most of his life support into the specially-made pocket on the inside of his suit, taking care to prevent any of the cables leading up to his throat from tugging. Garaki had made a more civilian-friendly version of All for One’s mask for him to use while in public. It was actually fairly unobtrusive - simply a few small tubes attached to ports in his neck. He’d foregone the ventilator portion of it, as he wasn’t doing anything strenuous, and it would just attract attention.

“What are you going to do while I cook?” he asked.

“Read my book!” Eri replied eagerly. All for One nodded as Eri scooped up the school supplies and homework to put them all away. He himself turned towards the kitchen and began walking. He had work to do.

As he began to prepare the meal, he heard Eri hop onto the couch, presumably with her newest book in her hands. Taking in the scene as a whole—All for One in the kitchen, Eri quietly sounding out English words in the room next to him—All for One smirked. Even if he dropped his disguise, he suspected the Eighth would have a hard time accepting the evidence of his eyes, should he have been there to witness it. And that was why All for One’s plan was so effective.

The feared Symbol of Evil, in a kitchen, making lamb chops? A preposterous idea. All for One would just have to continue doing what he already was doing, maintaining the image of a happy, peaceful family.

Later that night, once Eri had been put to bed, All for One briefly checked in with Garaki. The Doctor was still going through the data they’d taken from Chisaki. Despite the nigh-unlimited manpower Double offered, the lab itself only had so much space, and moreover, too many of the same mind, thinking the same thoughts only served to slow things down. When they needed to brainstorm or analyze, the Garakis intentionally tried to diverge from each other somewhat so that they didn’t spend all of their time repeating what had already been said. It would take a while longer before all of Chisaki’s research was organized and assimilated into their own knowledge base.

The other projects were proceeding apace. Nine’s Weather Manipulation quirk had been extracted and was ready for All for One to retrieve at any time. He had decided not to needlessly burden his broken body, no matter how powerful the quirk was. Once he was healed would be a different story. The Repair Aura quirk had been copied, and the family of civilians had been sent right back to their house. They would have no memory of the time since their kidnapping, but there was nothing that could trace it back to him, especially since all of their quirks were seemingly untouched.

The League… The League was getting antsy. Tomura in particular was impatiently demanding to know what the next move against the heroes would be. If he didn’t settle down, All for One would send the group on a few “missions” to distract the heroes, but they certainly weren’t a priority any longer. Perhaps he’d send Toga and Twice to do some form of surveillance or infiltration to keep them out of the line of fire… he did need to ensure that Twice remained alive, after all, but he was the only one All for One would make an effort to save.

On second thought, perhaps Compress might be added to the list. He was competent, possessed a useful quirk, and had experience the others lacked. He would make for a more useful asset. The others were merely pawns: perhaps useful to have, but not something to be upset about losing.

All for One had far, far better agents he could rely on.

Though as he went through the list, he was reminded of a thought from earlier in the day. That of a babysitter or bodyguard for Eri. First and foremost, they would need to be competent. That cut most of the list in one swoop. Though to be fair, the skills required for bodyguarding and taking care of a child did not share that many commonalities with the skills required for assassination, infiltration, manipulating governments, or other espionage. Secondly, he would want them to be capable of empathizing with Eri. They would be so much more effective if, beyond simply as a requirement of their job, they themselves wanted to protect her.

The list was getting worryingly short.

One of his assassins technically met both qualifications, but she had a major god complex and would likely do more harm than good to Eri’s sense of self-worth. There was also the coordinator of one of his information networks…

All for One suddenly paused. Assassin.

Tsutsumi Kaina. Lady Nagant.

She was disillusioned enough that she would work for him, but wasn’t fully devoid of hope. Moreover, she could definitely empathize, and was absolutely competent. The only issue was that she was currently incarcerated in Tartarus.

Hmm.

All for One made a note to himself to investigate whether or not it would be feasible to covertly extract her from Tartarus. He would look into it in the morning. Presently, he was about to go to sleep himself. He didn’t need it, but he was committing to the act. If his productivity was hampered he could always use a Double. But for the moment, he was somewhat curious. After all, he hadn’t truly slept in years, not counting unconsciousness and medical sedation.

Laying down on his bed, All for One closed his eyes and let a quirk fade into the background of his collection. An unfamiliar heaviness instantly swept over him, and his mind briefly spun before he fell soundly asleep.

Dark fog rushed by his face, a fell wind bringing screams and curses to his ears as he distinctly felt the sensation of falling. With a jolt, he opened his eyes, staring out at a vast stone expanse below a featureless sky, separated only by the ever-present murk.

He began to walk forwards, his shoes clicking loudly on the stone below.

Soon enough, the screams coming from ahead of him began to quiet, though the noise from behind and to the sides showed no signs of lessening. There were shapes in the fog. Some were half-formed, only vaguely bipedal. Others were clearly human, distinct enough he could make out each and every detail of their faces. Whispers reached him. Fragments of statements, individual insults.

The vestiges weren’t fully conscious, he knew. It varied from individual to individual, but most were barely imprints. Memories without a mind to act. They threw condemnations at him in endless, repeating loops, like a video on repeat. They all still held some measure of will, though. He knew well what they could do if he faltered. He had seen it.

Some were cognizant enough to take note of his approach, glancing up at him before cringing away as far as the fog would permit them to move. Their insults were the most creative. That, or they remained silent. But even they were not truly aware.

But some…

All for One came to a halt before a woman in a torn dress sitting on the ground, half-wreathed in the fog, her unkempt hair covering the tops of her shoulders. On her left arm, two protrusions of bone grew. She looked up at him calmly, meeting his eyes.

All for One flexed his willpower, demanding that the environment change. A tremor rocked the stone ground as cracks appeared around the two before they both shot upwards on a swiftly-growing pillar. All for One spared a glance down the side. After a moment, they were far enough up that he couldn’t hear the screams anymore. The pillar came to a halt, leaving them at a vantage point high enough that they could see the entire collection of vestiges below. Finally, he turned back, meeting the woman’s gaze as he slowly took a seat. Both remained silent for a full minute longer. Finally, the woman slightly tilted her head to the side, raising a questioning eyebrow at All for One.

“You know, most people don’t wait centuries to give their parents grandchildren,” she began. “Also, when do you plan to inform Yoichi that he’s now an uncle?” his mother asked.

Chapter Text

All for One blinked, nonplussed.

His mother held a straight face for a few seconds longer before a small smile tugged at her mouth.

“You know,” All for One stated. It wasn’t an accusation, nor a real question, just a simple observation of fact. His mother knew both that All for One had adopted Eri, and more pressingly, she knew that she was his mother.

Her face fell slightly.

“I always suspected,” she said. “I’ve been here the longest, after all. Storyteller just confirmed my suspicions.”

“So you all saw it here, too?” All for One asked. His mother gave him a so-so motion with her right hand.

“Yes and no. Most here don’t have enough of a mind to be able to process it. The more awake ones would have known that you were seeing the future, but not the content. I suspect I could only see it due to our shared blood causing quirk interference. There’s some common DNA in Spearlike Bones and All for One the quirk, after all. Maybe a tertiary, or even quaternary effect. Unexpressed in me, obviously, but present nonetheless.”

All for One (the person) stared at his mother, nonplussed for the second time in as many minutes.

“I think…” he carefully began, “we might be getting ahead of ourselves.”

His mother’s eyes widened suddenly, her lips drawing into a line as she nodded.

“Your original question,” she finally started again. “I always suspected. And I think you did too, on some level.”

All for One raised an eyebrow, curious as to what his mother was hinting at. She gave him a wry smile.

“My name is Shigaraki Taeko,” she said. “And you even got the kanji right, too.”

As he processed her words, a distinct part of All for One’s mind noted that this was the first conversation in a hundred and seventy years where he’d been put so far on the back foot.

“Taeko,” he muttered. “The first with a quirk, and you’re named Taeko. How… appropriate. That’s…” he shook his head. “That is the worst cosmic joke I have ever heard.”

“I laughed too,” she agreed, nodding. “But speaking of names, you willingly chose Zen. All,” she stressed, tacking on the English translation to hammer the point home before continuing in Japanese. “And you’re trying to lay low?”

All for One brushed off the teasing with a snort, his expression becoming more serious as he refocused on the original topic.

“So, you alone saw Storyteller’s vision.”

His mother nodded.

“I’ve always been more… awake. Like I said, probably quirk interference. Your will suppresses most of the vestiges here, but it just…” she waved a hand through the fog, dispelling it. “Slips off of me if I struggle.”

“I never noticed any differences while using…” All for One carefully began. He’d used Spearlike Bones for his entire life, save for one specific year where he’d let a minion borrow it.

“I usually sleep,” his mother told him. “But I’ve spent long enough awake that I’ve picked up on the new science, and I try to keep up with current events. There were a few actual scientists in here at one point too. More recent vestiges are the most… put together. Before your will starts eroding them over the years. You could probably hold a conversation with Search.” She paused, her eyes darkening a fraction. “Cell Activation and Repair Aura… a vestige won’t even have the potential for consciousness until the mind is fully developed—exceptions are rare—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to look at.”

Her gaze grew intense.

“I made sure all of the children… slept. Do not wake them.”

All for One’s face hardened. She may have been his mother, but to outright give him an order? Regarding his quirk?

“Copies are fine,” she continued before he could interject. “A copy is a vestige of a vestige — practically nothing there at all. Furthermore, given what I’ve seen, I suspect you are capable of taking a quirk without any vestige at all, or taking a quirk along with a full, conscious vestige if you tried.”

All for One considered the prospect, his previous irritation forgotten in the face of such an interesting idea. Reducing the wills that would fight against him would only serve to benefit him. But there was another salient point he had noticed.

“You’re a copy. So is nearly everyone here,” he pointed out.

“Resonance,” his mother countered. “There’s only one me. The original All for One quirk is currently dormant, but it’s the primary existence, and will supersede the copy you’re using. Once it’s active again, I’ll… let’s use the word reconcile… and the copy of me here will simply be a faded vestige.”

“Quick answer,” he said.

“I’ve studied quirks for as long as you have,” she retorted, “and I have a better viewpoint.” I know your quirk better than you went unsaid, but All for One knew it was there. His mother paused for a moment. “So when you take Rewind to help her practice, take the copy, not the original,” she firmly ordered.

All for One’s mind flashed to an image of Eri wandering the endless stone expanse. Alone. The quirkspace was a representation more than anything else, and he couldn’t always be “present” within it. She would be alone. Beset by fog and surrounded by the vitriol of the other vestiges he possessed, even if it was directed at him rather than her…

Not a healthy environment for her to be in, the analytical portions of his mind clinically noted.

He’d already established that his current plan required that Eri be kept both physically and mentally healthy. She, therefore, would not be subjected to the quirkspace, no matter that she was apparently too young to have a conscious vestige. Slowly, All for One nodded in reply to his mother’s words.

“I’ll need to investigate taking quirks without vestiges,” he eventually murmured.

“With your original quirk,” his mother clarified. All for One looked at her, wordlessly urging her to continue. “There’s a qualitative difference to the vestiges. The copy you have isn’t a perfect recreation. If it’s actually possible—and it may not be—I suspect you would need to use the original.”

“Interesting,” he mused. “Perhaps later, then. It would take too long to reacquire it now.”

“So long as you keep it in mind,” his mother said.

The two of them sat in silence for another minute. It wasn’t lost on All for One that both of them were skirting around the topics that most of society would have condemned. But honestly, the quirk theory was so much more interesting!

He’d finally found another intellectual peer! His mother had left her origins in the dust behind her and had grown to become one of the most knowledgeable individuals regarding quirks in existence. It was such a gratifying piece of trivia. But finally, an unanswered question began to nag at him.

“Not that I wouldn’t prefer to keep theorizing,” he began, “but you did mention my brother.”

His mother nodded, her eyes focused on nothing in particular.

“Not entirely a joke,” she said, answering the implied question before All for One could get around to actually asking it. “The quirkspaces connect whenever you try to steal One for All.”

All for One’s expression fell flat.

“As you yourself mentioned earlier: I am in hiding,” he dryly stated. His mother’s gaze slid over to meet his eyes, and he suddenly realized that he recognized the tiny glimmer he saw deep within them.

“I only just got confirmation that the two of you were actually my sons,” she replied, her voice equally as dry. “A suspicion and centuries of rationalizations do not compare to confirmation,” she all but snapped. “I want to speak with him.”

It wasn’t quite insanity. All for One knew what insanity looked like. No, the glimmer he saw was the first few pieces of kintsukuroi holding her together. Made of hope, desperation, and the unique mindset a fractured mind brought forth. She’d been in the quirkspace for a very, very long time, he realized.

“There are any number of ways you could get Midoriya Izuku back on I-Island without arousing suspicion,” she continued. “Invite UA back to make up for the Expo. Invite Midoriya to a study for healing repeated broken bones. Manipulate Melissa Shield into inviting him. Convince David Shield you can help heal All Might—he’ll bring Midoriya.”

She shook her head.

“You really don’t even need him here. You have Warp Gate. You know where he is.”

“And they know All for One is securely locked in Tartarus, which means Shigaraki Zen cannot be him, no matter how similar they look,” All for One countered. “I will not willingly throw away half of the protections around my identity on a whim.”

She stared at him.

“You haven’t given up your goal of taking One for All, have you?”

“No?” All for One incredulously replied. How could she even ask that, knowing what she did?

“Then you will come into contact with him again,” his mother argued. “And it will be Midoriya, as it’s too powerful to be passed to another wielder. But even so, he’ll just get stronger over time. The sooner you act, the safer it will be. The Eighth pulped your skull. Even with all your preparations, what do you think the Ninth at the height of his power would be able to do?”

“Impact Recoil, Reflect, Shock Absorption, MB Duality, Super Regeneration, Turtle, Durability Up—” he cut himself off in a snarl. “I can withstand One for All’s full output indefinitely.” He paused. “When I’m healed,” he added. Overconfidence was what led to his downfall. He needed to be self-aware.

“Let’s say that’s true. Could you beat him? You know full well One for All’s energy protects the wielder from just about everything. No real mental effects, no scrambling his nerves with electricity, no making him feel drunk with Sloshed or the like, portals won’t close around his body… It’s not like you decided to use your fists against All Might just for fun,” she snarked. She sighed.

“Just… see if you can. Please.”

All for One took a deep breath. Realistically, could he gain access to Midoriya Izuku to let his mother speak with Yoichi?

Yes. Easily.

But could he do so without compromising his identity, or more importantly, the fact that he was free?

All for One considered the issue. The best answer he could come up with was a very uncertain maybe. It would require misdirection, conspiracy, and enough luck to build a maneki-neko the size of I-Island, but maybe it was possible.

“Maybe,” he repeated aloud. “I will put forth serious effort into seeing if it is possible. That is all I can promise you.”

“Thank you,” Shigaraki Taeko—the first quirked human in existence, the technical eldest person “alive,” his mother—told him as the mist around them began to swirl. The quirkspace pulsed, then the fog rushed in.

All for One woke up.

As he sat up, he brought forth the Insomnia quirk once more, banishing the last traces of the grogginess caused by mornings. As he began moving through the standard morning preparations, All for One thought. His mother—Shigaraki Taeko, his mind whispered—had given him a task a lesser man might have thought impossible.

All for One was not bound by the limitations of lesser men.

But even so, it would be difficult. Furthermore, it would be made all the more challenging due to his injured state. After another moment of consideration, he reaffirmed his original decision. He’d continue his original plans, and wait at least until his current body was fully healed before making any attempts at One for All. It would be the height of foolishness to try to take on a stronger One for All in his weakened state when he’d already been caught off guard by the Eighth’s lesser version in his prime.

So, his most pressing issue was still that of caring for Eri.

Repair Aura might have been slowly trying to undo the damage, but as he’d already discovered, the rate at which it worked on injuries as old as his was so slow that it would take months and months with the aura active constantly to fully heal him. He was keeping it active when he could, but it took significant concentration, which he wouldn’t be able to spare when his focus was needed by his more short-term tasks. Therefore, Eri was still his best option for restoring his current body to his prime. It would take time to get her comfortable enough to use her quirk, and even more time after that to train her to use it, but it was by far All for One’s best option.

Returning to a thought he’d shelved the day before, All for One considered everything he knew about the assassin-hero known as Lady Nagant as he walked out to make Eri breakfast. And beyond that, he mused on what Storyteller had shown him about her.

She was ruthless. Efficient. One of the best wetwork operatives the Hero Public Safety Commission had ever produced. She was competent. She was among the world’s top five snipers, and what was more, she didn’t rely on a quirk that guaranteed hits like two of her peers in that list. She was exceedingly skilled at infiltration. She was intelligent. She had carried out covert assassinations undetected for years despite her bullets quite literally being unique to her, so she could definitely hide her presence.

But most importantly, she still had a conscience. Her younger, more naive, optimistic outlook had been crushed and tarnished over the years, but she still cared. Even better, she cared at a base level, and saw through the corruption of Hero society rather than parroting the propaganda that had been pushed onto the masses over the years. She wouldn’t reject him simply because he was a villain. And if he could convince her that he was doing the “right” thing—practically a foregone conclusion, considering he would ask her to protect an innocent child—then she would do her utmost to help.

So, his initial conclusions had indeed been correct. Tsutsumi Kaina, the former Pro Hero Lady Nagant, would be a perfect bodyguard and caretaker for Eri. But if he wanted her to take up the job, he would have to make the offer. A minor issue there barred him from moving forwards: Tsutsumi Kaina was incarcerated in Tartarus.

Thankfully, his own experience definitely proved that it was possible to break out of Tartarus.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked Eri. Breakfast had been uneventful, and mostly quiet. Eri still was hesitant to open conversations, and All for One supposed he’d been visibly lost in thought.

Eri nodded, and the two of them set off. He would drop her off at her school before continuing his own commute to Helix’s building.

Unfortunately, breaking himself out of Tartarus was a slightly different issue than breaking someone else out, especially if he wanted to maintain secrecy. But there were commonalities between the two that he would need to account for regardless.

Obviously, All for One would need to use Double to make a copy of her to stay in the cell. That part would need to be handled during the actual escape itself, as Double required the user to know the dimensions of the thing they were copying, and All for One had already verified that it did not work on the information he’d acquired through Storyteller.

He’d hoped that he might have been able to create a copy of some of his allies from much later on in the timeline, which would have given him an exponential boost, but Double apparently required measurements taken in reality. It was a shame, but even the best of quirks had their limits. Trying to copy an individual across timelines was apparently beyond the capabilities of Double, which raised some interesting questions about how exactly the quirk used the measurements. After all, an ordinary human mind was incapable of holding each and every detail of an object in mind simultaneously. Did Double have some sort of inbuilt “scanning” function, and the information the user focused on simply targeted the quirk? But if that was the case, then copies would always be up to date with the real version. Or, no— Perhaps the action of the user taking the measurements prompted Double to scan the target, and the quirk saved the data to be used later, recalled by the user’s recollection of the measurements like a mnemonic? That seemed the more likely answer. If that were the case, then Double functioned rather similarly to Search, albeit that Search continuously monitored its targets. Still, maybe there was a common ancestor?

He was veering into a tangent. Back to the problem at hand.

So, All for One wouldn’t be able to prepare the copy ahead of time, which made the timing somewhat more strict. After all, his copy of Double wasn’t perfect, and he was slower than Bubaigawara Jin. Barely a handful of seconds… He could theoretically do it in time.

He would still be using all of his speed quirks to make sure each he made the most out of each and every last second.

Getting the copy into the cell—and conversely, getting Tsutsumi Kaina out of the cell—would be easily handled by Warp Gate. The only issue, then, was ensuring that the swap remained undetected. All for One would need to deactivate the sensors of the cell, and while he easily did it for his own cell through Radio Waves, he had been in the cell at the time. Such an attack from the outside alone could knock out the entire monitoring system, but that would be incredibly obvious. Moreover, it wouldn’t buy him anywhere near enough time. If he set off an electromagnetic pulse to disable the surveillance systems prisonwide, it would be back up in less than five seconds. In his own escape, he’d not simply turned off the power, but had damaged the circuitry of the actual sensors in the room watching him.

Given that Tartarus’s security was obscenely thorough, the material the sensors were made of (and all mounted weapons too, for that matter) had self-repair capabilities. But it took a bit longer to rearrange the matter than it would have to simply flip the power back on. So no, an exterior electromagnetic pulse wouldn’t work.

No, but perhaps…

Perhaps he’d take a hint from the future, in this case. He’d been trying to avoid the mistakes that led to his defeat, and most importantly had prevented his mind from being infected by Tomura’s immaturity and idiocy, but even a stopped clock was right twice per day… After all, while the original All for One quirk was still stored safely away, waiting for him to have enough time to reacquire it, he did have a Double-created clone in the prison. There was no shared consciousness, but he would still be able to communicate with the copy, unless it had made a mistake. Unlikely, considering the copy had his mind. So, a coordinated attack… Not to facilitate a mass breakout, but a surgical, individual extraction.

Yes, it would be feasible.

He would need to stop by Jakku beforehand to swap out a few quirks in favor of the loadout he was planning on using, but that wouldn’t be much of a hassle. But the breakout itself… Hmm. On a school day, specifically while Eri was at school, would be best. And not on a day where he had any important meetings at work. He’d be sending a copy in his place to avoid suspicion, of course, but he generally preferred to have the important conversations in person. Hearing about it secondhand, even from a copy of him, wasn’t the same, as even if he used Mindwalk to view the copy’s memory it wouldn’t properly connect the experience with all of the right sensory and emotional cues. It made recalling the details slower.

So the breakout wouldn’t be happening until after tomorrow, when his meeting with David Shield was scheduled.

If anything, Chavez had understated just how interested the famous inventor was in healing quirks. Less than twenty-four hours after Helix’s internal network confirmed the validity of the procedure, there was an email sitting in Shigaraki Zen’s inbox welcoming him to I-Island, and asking when he was available for a meeting in-person.

Notably, this was before Helix had even begun planning any sort of public announcement of the success or publishing the research paper. Gossip among the scientists apparently spread faster than Tomura’s Decay, and while All for One was mildly amused he was also somewhat concerned about the nonexistent operational security. It might have been an outlier due to just how impactful a mass-producible quirk-derived healing effect would be, but still. For the news to have spread across practically the entire island already? The employees of Helix were either supremely loose with what they knew was information covered by their NDAs, or there was an actual security breach somewhere.

Which, if it was the latter, would be… troublesome. All for One had already gone over how he was planning on using his legitimate companies to advance his personal interests. Having the details of each and every research project Helix undertook broadcasted to the academic world would offer chances for more attentive parties to pick out patterns. Enhancing the human body, and especially enhancing quirks, was a research direction monitored closely by the various agencies who claimed to try to keep the peace.

All for One would arrange for a quiet investigation.

In the meantime, the next major event on his schedule was a meeting with a very renowned inventor. All for One was rather eager to see what information he could pull out of the man. It was going to be fun.

“Good morning, Doctor Shield!” Shigaraki Zen greeted his visitor, giving him a polite bow. He was getting better at maintaining his identity even in his head.

The visitor in question was indeed David Shield. He had apparently cared about the meeting enough that he went out of his way to care for his appearance—his ordinarily-messy brown hair was combed somewhat, and his clothes were all neat and unwrinkled, with no trace of wear or the damages a lab could inflict. He’d even polished his glasses!

“Good morning, Doctor Shigaraki,” David Shield said. “Please, feel free to call me David.”

Zen nodded magnanimously.

“David, then. Likewise, please call me Zen. I’m still getting used to the Western convention, but my family name is unfortunately not as uncommon as I’d have thought.”

“Of course! Yes, I’ve heard about that group of villains. My sympathies for any mistrust or skepticism you must have faced. But I’d say your company’s accomplishments might go a long way towards overshadowing that villain’s reputation.”

Oh, David Shield was rather eager to get to the topic right away, it seemed. Such a blunt segue… Perhaps it was simply the less politeness-obsessed culture, but the lack of any sort of preamble was telling. Zen smiled and nodded.

“News travels fast, it seems. We haven’t even published the paper just yet.”

The inventor gave Zen a sheepish smile.

“Well, my own interest isn’t much of a secret. And the suddenness of the joint project between Helix and Metagene was a bit unusual, so people took note.”

“Credit to the research teams,” Zen deflected, “they’re the ones who put in the work to get results so quickly. We’re still verifying the tests and results, but it all looks very promising.”

David nodded eagerly. But then he seemed to catch himself, schooling his face into something more professional.

“My apologies, I’ve done this all out of order.” He shook his head slightly in self-recrimination. “Welcome to I-Island,” he said. “Helix Biotech is well-known here, so I heard about what happened. It’s terrible that your old home was destroyed, but I’m glad to see you’re unharmed.”

“Mostly unharmed,” Zen clarified, tugging at his collar to reveal the tubes attached to his throat. “It made an older injury worse, but I’ll live.”

David blinked.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”

Zen waved it off.

“I’ll live. And who knows, maybe Helix’s new focus will end up fixing me eventually.”

Some energy returned to David’s posture as Zen himself directed the conversation back towards what David really wanted to discuss.

“From what I heard, you’re holding a practical panacea,” he leadingly began.

“Not quite so encompassing as that,” Zen replied. “Oh, it’s still an incredible step forward in medical technology, but it has its limits. The quirk it’s based on works by enhancing natural healing processes. It’s quicker and better than the body’s natural abilities, and can even fix some things that ordinarily wouldn’t be possible, but it’s not full-on regeneration or anything.”

“I see,” David said. “But still, replicating a quirk like that…”

Zen nodded.

“This will make waves, I’m aware. That is—if it makes it through all the red tape in any sort of reasonable time.”

The two of them shared a chuckle. Bureaucracy, the bane of any inventor. Zen was steadily building camaraderie, shoring up a sense that David Shield could relate to him. And as far as he could tell, it was working. Good!

But still, David Shield hadn’t exactly shared the reason why he was looking for healing quirks and the like. Some, obviously, could be explained by the injury All for One had left on the Eighth, but the inventor’s interest preceded that battle. However, the way he’d deflected earlier in the conversation, sidestepping the actual reason and just stating that his interest was an open secret made Zen hesitate to outright ask. It was obviously personal, and despite the progress he’d made, this was their first conversation. To lose so much progress by being hasty would be a setback.

“You know, I was looking into how quirks affect the body recently,” David said, drawing Zen’s attention back to the conversation at hand. “And is the effect purely biological?”

Zen smiled, leaning in. He’d build a working relationship with the inventor, and leave enough hanging that the meetings would continue.

“I obviously can’t share too much,” he began, “but there are a few things…”

It would take time for this plan to come to any sort of close. But knowing David Shield personally, having secondhand access to all of the man’s vast resources, would be a boon beyond measure. Moreover, it would be yet another point of leverage that he could utilize against the Eighth. That much was definitely the lesser consideration, though. As Shigaraki Zen’s reputation and connections grew, it would be harder and harder to pin any suspicion of him being connected to All for One onto him. And all the while, he would be working, getting closer and closer to his goals.

It wasn’t inevitable, and he wasn’t going to tempt fate by implying that it was. But he was being careful, and turning all of his vast resources towards this plan. He would succeed. He would make sure of it.