After what felt like an endless plunge through a vertical void, All For One landed heavily on both feet. The impact echoed with a damp, cavernous thud. The supervillain straightened up, calmly brushed off his jacket, and cast a circular glance at his new surroundings. His eyebrows furrowed slightly. He was not in a royal stone-carved crypt, nor in the dark dungeons of a fortified keep. All around him stretched immense cylindrical galleries, built from dark, weeping bricks, where brackish and stagnant water flowed.
Sewers. Large, modern, almost industrial sewers.
"Sewers..." All For One murmured in a pensive voice, finding it particularly bizarre for a world that was supposed to be purely medieval. "The Author lacked consistency in his layers of reality."
But what caught his attention the most was not the anachronism of the setting, but what littered the ground. Everywhere around him, the gallery was cluttered with a bizarre assortment of debris: chunks of dressed stone from the castle that had collapsed, but also fragments of carriages, shattered swords, and long streaks of frozen alphabetical characters floating in the air like luminous dust.
And in the middle of this debris lay bodies. All For One stepped forward, intrigued.
These were not soldiers. They were the corpses of grotesque creatures glitch-monsters similar to the one they had fought in the forest, only smaller. Their shapes were asymmetrical, made of disproportionate limbs and completely corrupted graphical textures. They had been literally slaughtered. Their remains were slowly pixelating before being absorbed by the black water of the sewers.
The brick floor was split in several places by deep impacts, craters that left no doubt about the identity of whoever had caused this carnage. All For One let an amused smile reshape his lips. Grey had passed through here, and he had clearly pulled no punches in carving his way forward.
All For One was about to set off to find Grey, tracing with his eyes the path of destruction that sank into the galleries. But just before he could take his first step, a sinister clicking sound, mixed with damp, erratic footsteps, echoed behind him.
The supervillain calmly pivoted on his heels. In the dim light of the sewers, several massive, distorted silhouettes emerged from the brackish water. They were more glitch-monsters, identical to those lying on the ground, their bodies flickering with unstable lines of code. They growled, but their movements were hesitant, almost trembling. All For One let out a mocking laugh as he observed them.
"Surely these guys must have been frightened seeing Grey slaughter their friends..." he said to himself, easily detecting the terror emanating from these digital anomalies.
But cornered and seeing another intruder facing them, the creatures finally gave in to their survival instinct. With a shrill howl that saturated the echo of the gallery, the monsters lunged at him, claws first. The fight broke out instantly.
Freed from the chains of the script and exhilarated by his brand-new freedom, All For One did not yield an inch. The first monster tried to crush his skull with a huge pixelated hand. With a fluid movement, All For One dodged the attack to the side. Capitalizing on the beast's momentum, he grabbed its arm. Instead of using raw physical strength, he projected his will into the creature's code: in an instant, the monster's arm froze, turned into an unreadable font, and then shattered like glass. The monster shrieked in pain as its altered limb dissolved into thin air.
A second glitch, swifter, leaped from the ceiling of the sewers, claws bared. All For One simply looked up, a cruel smile on his lips. He held out an open hand and, adapting to this world, made a horizontal swiping gesture, mimicking the action of closing an obsolete page. **[CLOSE]**. An invisible shockwave cut the monster's momentum dead in mid-air. The creature froze, its body doubling in a frantic glitch before being purely and simply deleted from reality. The last surviving monster, terrified by the ease with much its companions had just been swept away, tried to backtrack and flee into the tunnels.
"Oh no, none of that with me," All For One murmured in a playful tone. "The show is just getting started."
With a casual yet disconcertingly fast step, he caught up with the fleeing creature. He placed his hand on the monster's back. Rather than deleting it, he amused himself by modifying its texture parameters. Under the pressure of his fingers, the beast's digital flesh liquefied, turning into a puddle of bricks and mud that integrated directly into the sewer scenery. Within seconds, the gallery fell silent again. All For One adjusted the lapels of his jacket once more, barely out of breath.
"Well," he said, turning toward the path Grey had taken. "Now that the warm-up is over, let's go catch up with our young friend."
He followed the trail of broken bricks and residues of deleted monsters, walking at a leisurely pace. At the end of the tunnel, the darkness of the sewers suddenly gave way to an immense subterranean cavern.
Emerging into the room, All For One stopped dead, his face frozen in surprise.
Grey was there. He was waiting for him, standing at the edge of the abyss, but his posture was particularly bizarre. The young man was not trying to destroy the castle's foundations and was not trying to force his way through. He stood motionless, his arms hanging loose, staring straight ahead at a pure, blinding white light that floated at the center of an immense, transparent sphere of energy.
All For One stepped forward, breaking the silence with a voice laced with feigned irony to mask his astonishment:
"Well, Grey... Why didn't you start the festivities without me? I saw you slaughtering everything that moved on your way here, after all."
Grey did not look away from the light. His voice resonated, calm but with absolute gravity:
"I was just waiting for your opinion regarding this thing... or rather, this individual."
All For One raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised by what Grey had just said. The supervillain expected to find the digital core of this dimension, a massive system anomaly, or a gigantic glitch-monster acting as a guardian. But Grey had just announced to him that it was a person, a living being, and not a simple line of code or some digital entity trapped inside this sphere.
Grey then took a deep breath and began to lay out a unsettling theory, making suppositions out loud:
"Observing this sphere with my perception Quirk, I started asking myself questions... What if this entire world wasn't just a computer program? What if this dimension was created through someone's thoughts and consciousness? I'm beginning to wonder if the 'Authors' don't take real people, from their own world on Earth, to use them as engines. From the memories of these people, and following the imaginary universes invented on their planet like this tale of chivalry the Authors establish new dimensions. What we see there, at the heart of the sphere... is a human soul. A real person whose mind serves as an effigy and a pillar to hold this reality in place."
All For One stared at the white light for a long moment, his ironic smile fading to give way to an expression of intense calculation. He took a step toward the sphere, crossed his arms, and turned a piercing gaze toward the young man.
"Your supposition might be right, Grey..." he began in a low, articulate voice. "But there lies a small problem in your logic. Even if this individual knows the story, a single person cannot, all by themselves, be able to create an entire imaginary world. The human brain has its limits. To build an entire dimension, it would take at least several individuals who have seen the same thing, or who have known the same story, to gather all their ideas and then create a stable version.
Otherwise, in this context, the world a single soul would create wouldn't be a world as vast, complex, and real as the one we've seen. It would be more of a small, delimited space, restricted to the brief and hazy memories that this person can recall."
All For One stepped even closer to Grey, his dark eyes shining with a glint of intellectual defiance.
"So tell me, Grey... If your theory is correct, how would you describe the world we come from? That world of superheroes, our original reality? It's a world that you describe as being that of an anime from your time, a work you watched on Earth. Do you truly believe that a single person trapped in a sphere would be enough to sustain the entire Quirk society, every back alley of Musutafu, and every citizen?"
Grey remained silent. All For One's words echoed in his mind. He began to think intensely, connecting the pieces of the puzzle, and suddenly, an illumination struck him.
"You're right, All For One..." Grey began, his voice rising above the dull rumbling of the cavity. "In fact, look around us. Ever since we arrived, we've encountered inconsistencies. Monsters that glitch, scenery that disappears, and we've always had this lingering feeling that this world is unstable. Your logic confirms my theory perfectly! As you said, a world made by a single person will be unstable and incomplete. That perfectly explains the world we are currently in! This individual is alone in sustaining this reality, and it's collapsing."
Grey then turned a meaningful look toward the supervillain, pushing his reasoning to its climax:
"But as for the world of *My Hero Academia* we come from, if it turns out our theory is right, its stability means we might need to go there to see if there is a core there too. A core fed by a much more massive collective unconscious. In the meantime, in this current context, what's left for us to do is extremely dangerous... but our only option is to wake this individual up."
All For One let his predatory smile reappear. The young man's audacity and the danger of the situation flattered his taste for chaos. Shutting down the pillar of a collapsing dimension just to see what lay behind the curtain... that was a gamble he could not refuse.