Ultra Responsibility (My Hero Academia X Spider-Man Reader)

Issue 100 - All Out War

All across Musutafu, the city was coming apart.

The gang war had stopped being a war between criminals and turned into something much uglier. Streets that had once only known sirens and distant panic now ran with open violence. The Faceless swarmed through crossings, shopping districts, side alleys, train platforms, office blocks. Masks were being forced onto strangers in the middle of the chaos, each fresh victim jerking and twisting as their identity was stripped away and replaced with blind, animal purpose. Friends turned on friends. Strangers clawed at one another. Families were ripped apart in the stampede of fear.

It was no longer about territory.

It was infection.

And it was spreading.

One moment a man would be shielding his wife behind an overturned car, and the next a pale mask would slap over his face and he would rise again wrong, body moving in horrible little jerks, voice gone, eyes empty behind that stolen smile.

Further up the district, a blast of fire tore around a corner and wrapped itself up the side of a building before bouncing off the glass in a roaring wave of heat and light.

Endeavour hit the street like a meteor.

Flames rolled off him in thick spirals as he landed in the center of a rushing crowd of Faceless, the force of it stopping them short without fully burning through them. He had to be careful. Had to keep the heat just low enough. Any more and these victims turned into casualties. Any less and they overwhelmed him.

His jaw tightened.

"It never ends," he growled.

Another wave came at him from both sides of the avenue, men and women in office clothes and school uniforms and bloodstained coats all lunging with the same dead devotion.

Endeavour moved first.

He burst forward in a streak of orange, shoulder-checking one Faceless through a shopfront while hooking another by the waist with a controlled jet of flame and throwing them into a lamppost. Two more rushed him from behind. He spun, heat flaring from his fists in a wide arc that forced them back without setting them alight, then drove one knee-first into the pavement hard enough to crack it.

He looked up and saw more bodies running in every direction.

Some were attacking.

Some were fleeing.

Some were too terrified to know which they were anymore.

He snarled under his breath. "I can't even tell who's an enemy and who's a civilian on the run."

A shadow swept over him.

Then feathers.

Red blades flashed down from above, slicing two Faceless off their feet before they could reach a group of trapped civilians pinned beside a newsstand.

Hawks touched down lightly on the hood of a wrecked car, wings spread wide and eyes already scanning three streets at once.

"Then maybe don't torch them too hard," he called. "Mindless drones or not, they're still innocent people."

Endeavour shot him a burning glare. "I know that."

Hawks raised both hands. "Just saying."

He launched again immediately, red feathers firing out in precise bursts. One cut a mask strap before it fully fused to a woman's face. Another hooked around a little girl's coat and yanked her out of reach of a charging Faceless. A third feather speared through the sleeve of a man trying to force a mask onto a police officer and pinned his arm to a traffic light.