The King of Heroes: Null/Virtue

Roar of Change

As Toshinori watched from the stands, he felt what many in the audience couldn't. His Enhancement Magic was second only to Izuku's, and in many ways, his precision exceeded the NULL Lord's. His lean body and his senses were so finely tuned that he felt the changes in both Izuku and Himiko.

"His Aura didn't change at all... yet he feels different... Like he saw something..." Though he didn't know it, Toshinori detected the shift in Izuku's perspective, his prescience. "But Himiko has certainly changed. With all her Items, she just barely managed to match Izuku's strength for a time. Or... did she?"

Izuku hadn't exactly been pulling his punches. He aimed for the quickest end to the fight possible, but when he failed to end it there, the fight seemed to drag on.

Himiko's Lumina and Aura continued to grow, further and faster. At the same time, it was like her entire demeanor shifted. The uneasy look in her eyes, the dullness that followed her around from the council, it all vanished. "Don't tell me... Izuku, did you plan for this to happen? This is... absurd. Without her Items, before this, several of the strongest Onyx here could've beaten her. She couldn't survive the Infestation Zone on her own. But now... What have you inflicted upon yourself, Izuku?"

*******

This was not what Izuku had intended, at least not from the start of the battle. He wasn't stupid. He needed to win this fight. But that was the problem with time, it was so fluid that even prescience couldn't control it.

Free will was, in a lot of ways, like quantum mechanics. No matter how finely you studied it, there would always be some sort of variation. There was always chaos.

Izuku, when his senses weren't being muddled by debuffs, could see dozens of timelines for a single moment, and those dozens would split off into even more dozens. It gave him a treasure trove of information that no one else would ever have. But it also meant that there was no definitive way to determine future actions. He could narrow down the timelines to the most likely, and his own actions could guide him into the preferred timeline, but it was no means a perfect system.

So despite preferring this timeline over many others, it wasn't perfectly ideal. His goal of keeping Himiko from brashly using Zeta was accomplished one way or the other, and he even managed to "open her mind" a bit. It would make her less gullible to the council and other influences, but it wasn't guaranteed, she could still be manipulated. There were even a few timelines where Izuku got tricked by the council, with prescience. Free will was that influential on events.

But at the end of the day, this was the timeline he'd chosen, because everything else was worse. He was, unironically, estimating the lives lost in every timeline and choosing the one with the most people saved, and a bright future even beyond what he could see. Winning the battle from the start would've resulted in the best timeline ultimately for various reasons, but he failed and had to go with Plan B. So despite Izuku appearing to be somewhat evenly matched with Himiko... that was a lie. He'd led everything here, right to the Virtue Factor.

Thanks to his future memories, Izuku knew exactly what it was. The Virtue Factor, by merging your Soul and your physical flesh, created a Spiritual Life Form. Not only did this enhance Magic by evolving each form when used, but the aging of the Soul would in turn strengthen the body. It wasn't nearly as strong of a growth rate as the NULL Factor, or One For All, but it meant that Himiko would also get stronger over time. On top of that, no fatal injury could be inflicted on her unless it hit her both Physically and Magically at the same time, or was Pure Damage. If you hit her with only Physical, she'd regenerate that part of her body, and if you only hit her Soul, it wouldn't cause any damage.

The evolutions of the Magic were unique, pairing with the User's Soul for some sort of special ability with that Magic Form.

Thankfully, Himiko only had the two Forms of Magic, and while the Virtue Magic evolved the Rune Magic, it didn't evolve the Magic cast with Rune Magic. So all Izuku needed to worry about was what those two Forms, Blood Magic and Rune Magic, would become.