All Smite

There was a peculiar quiet to the café at this hour—midmorning on a Tuesday, when the rush had long since passed and the few remaining patrons were either lost in the glow of their laptops or thumbing lazily through dog-eared novels. The air smelled faintly of roasted beans and honey, with a touch of lemon from the pastries behind the glass. A few students chattered at a back table, their laughter thin and irrelevant.

And in the farthest booth—half-shrouded by the trailing shadows cast through the wide front window—sat All Smite.

He didn’t belong here.

Not by dress—he wore his usual obsidian-black ensemble, tailored and pristine, with a long overcoat draped over the back of the seat like it had been flayed from the night itself. Not by presence—he didn’t slouch or pretend to blend. He sat, upright, hands folded before him on the dark wood table, every inch the conqueror in repose. Even the light seemed to avoid him, bending subtly around his frame as though fearful of disrespect. The staff had long since learned not to bother him unless summoned. No greetings. No small talk. No smiles. Just the steaming cup of oolong he never touched and the seat across from him that always remained empty—until it wasn’t.

He didn’t glance at the door when it opened, though he heard the bell above it ring clearly through the white noise. His ears picked up each footstep, each rustle of cloth, each sigh. But not the one he was waiting for.

His fingers tapped once, thoughtfully, against the porcelain rim of his cup.

It was not the tea. Nor the chairs. Nor the food. This place held no tactical value. It wasn’t positioned on a leyline of power or built atop a forgotten battlefield. It was simply a café, mildly charming and deeply irrelevant. Except for one thing. One reason. Or rather… one.

He would not name them. Not in thought. Not in word. To give shape to the fascination was to bind it, to make it smaller, and All Smite loathed diminishment.

They intrigued him.

Not by challenging him—no, that would be predictable. Nor by fearing him—that was a guarantee. They didn’t cower, but they didn’t seek to provoke either. They existed like a puzzle, one corner of the world that refused to fit neatly into his understanding. And All Smite, for all his destruction, was a man who craved understanding. Who devoured it.

He remembered the first time he saw them. Ordinary movements, ordinary voice—utterly unremarkable in all the ways that made it infuriating. But then… there was a glimpse. A flicker of something behind the eyes, something unspoken. It hadn’t been fear. Nor awe. It had been… awareness. And something deeper.

Recognition.

He didn’t know what they recognized. Him? The mask beneath the symbol? Or something else?

He needed to know.

So he returned. Not every day—he was a man with empires to rule, after all—but often enough that it became a ritual. He never spoke to them. Never approached. Just waited. Watched. Catalogued. And every time, they would arrive, and something would tilt inside him—not warmth, no. Something sharper. Edged. Compelled.

“Sir?” A hesitant voice. The waiter. One of the newer ones who hadn’t yet learned not to speak unless death was a desired outcome.

All Smite turned his head slowly, and the man paled instantly. “I was just—uh—your tea—it’s gone cold. Would you like me to—?”

“Leave it.”

The server scurried away, visibly trembling.

All Smite exhaled through his nose, barely a sound, and turned his gaze back to the door. He allowed his thoughts to wander—not a careless act, but a tactical one. He had learned much in these quiet moments. He planned while he waited. He listened to the world turning on its rusted hinges.

But always, always, part of his attention remained on that door.

The moment the dust settled from the first detonation, the robbers thought they were in the clear. Sirens hadn’t started yet, the civilian hostages were under control, and the bank vault door was slowly grinding open, spilling cold, metallic promise into the room. They congratulated themselves with cocky grins, unaware that a shadow far more dangerous than law enforcement was descending upon them.

All Smite stood outside the ruined façade of the downtown Kyōbashi Bank, posture regal and expression unreadable beneath the black-and-silver edges of his twisted version of a hero’s grin. Gone were the bright colors and shining hope of All Might. This was the Symbol of Evil, the world's Number One Villain. Draped in a high-collared coat like a general surveying his territory, the man cracked his neck slowly, the smile never quite touching the dead weight of his glacial blue eyes.

A man stepped out of the ruined entryway to check the perimeter—one of the robbers. The poor bastard caught a brief glimpse of the towering figure at the sidewalk before All Smite was just there. No wind, no thunderclap, no buildup—just presence.

"Ah…" All Smite’s voice was low, full of disappointed amusement, like a parent finding a child drawing on ancient scrolls. “I must commend your ambition. Truly. Attempting to rob a bank is such a quaint display of human desperation.” He leaned forward just a hair. “But I wonder… who told you this was your playground?”

The robber barely had time to scream before a black-gloved hand was around his face, lifting him off the ground like a bag of rice. Bones cracked. The man’s scream turned wet and garbled before All Smite flicked him aside like garbage, sending him crashing through a nearby car windshield with a shriek of metal and glass.

Inside the bank, chaos erupted.

“Who the hell is that?!”

“That’s All Smite! That’s the fucking Symbol of Evil!”

“Why the hell is he here?! We didn’t hit a government vault!”

“You idiots—you hit his bank!”

In the vault room, the leader of the operation—a bald man with mirrored lenses and a cybernetic jaw—froze as he watched the closed-circuit feed. His trembling finger hovered over the detonator meant for the last layer of locks. “Oh no,” he muttered. “Oh no no no—pull the gear! Pull it all! Get the haul and move!”

But it was too late.

The vault door behind them didn’t open with their explosives. It peeled outward, like paper in the hands of a god. All Smite stepped through the gap, immaculate and unbothered, not a speck of dust on his obsidian vestments. He gazed around at the panicked crew with slow, calculating menace.

"You're standing in the wrong story," he said, voice silky with menace. “This isn’t some petty heist. This vault doesn’t belong to the government. It doesn’t belong to a bank. It doesn’t even belong to you.”

He took a step closer, eyes narrowing as his lips twisted into something too cruel to be called a smile.

“It belongs to me.”

One of the thugs raised a rifle and fired—three rounds in rapid succession, screaming fear more than tactic. The bullets slammed into All Smite’s torso—and fell. Flattened, spent. His hand shot out, grabbing the shooter by the neck so fast the man didn’t realize he’d been moved until his back cracked against the marble ceiling, embedded like a grotesque chandelier.

Another robber tried to run, but All Smite moved again, his silhouette streaking across the floor in a haze of speed. He grabbed the runner by the ankle mid-sprint, slamming him down hard enough to crater the floor. He didn't even look down at the crumpled mess.

“I’ll give you all credit,” he said, finally addressing the remaining crew, most of whom were now either weeping or pissing themselves. “It takes a unique kind of idiocy to try and steal from me. Courage without calculation—heroism in reverse.”

He gestured at the vault behind him, a shimmering, high-tech sanctum lined with sealed drawers and unmarked cases. “This isn’t money you tried to steal. This is an arsenal. Research. Leverage. Lives.” His voice deepened. “Mine.”

The leader, glassy-eyed and trembling, fell to his knees.

“We didn’t know, I swear, we—we thought this was a government front—! No one said it was yours—!”

All Smite crouched in front of him, tilting his head.

“Do you think ignorance absolves you?”

“I—I—please, we’ll disappear—we’ll never—!”

“I don’t want you to disappear.”

All Smite reached out, a single finger tapping the man’s temple.

“I want you to remember.”

And then he pushed. Not with strength—though there was plenty of that—but with something deeper. One For All. Twisted. Transformed by his malevolent will. The man screamed as his body arched, veins glowing like molten steel under his skin. His memories, pain, and fear were being overwritten with a single, eternal understanding:

Do not steal from gods.

The city burned behind him.

Glass crunched under All Smite’s boots as he stood in the center of a cratered street, surrounded by flickering firelight and the scent of scorched metal. The air was thick with dust and the copper tang of blood. Sirens wailed distantly—too far, too late. A hero lay broken at his feet, their costume torn, their mask shattered, body limp like a discarded doll. Still alive, barely. A warning more than a corpse.

All Smite didn’t look down at them. He didn’t need to. His work was meticulous, cruel in its precision. The kind of devastation that didn’t kill the spirit outright—but hollowed it out, left it echoing with failure. He exhaled softly, a slow stream of breath that seemed to still the very air. His coat fluttered behind him like a shadow made of silk.

Then came him.

Endeavor.

Blazing through the smoke, jetting over the ruined street with rage incarnate written in every inch of his body. Flames poured off his shoulders like a crown of vengeance, blue and white-hot, eyes locked onto the figure standing so arrogantly amidst the ruin.

“All Smite!” Endeavor roared, voice shaking windows. “This ends now!”

All Smite didn’t move. He simply turned his head, slowly, gaze flickering up to meet the firestorm approaching like one might acknowledge an oncoming storm—inevitable, dramatic, ultimately unimpressive.

“Enji Todoroki,” he said, the name curling from his tongue like a spell, like a dismissal. “Still dragging the weight of a title you never earned.”

Endeavor hit the ground hard, cracking the pavement, heat rippling out in waves. The flames curled around his fists, dancing with fury. “You put Crimzone in a coma,” he snarled. “That was a child. He’s barely been a pro for two years!”

All Smite tilted his head slightly, eyes empty and glacial. “Then he should have stayed in school.”

And then Endeavor charged.

A blast of fire so intense it turned the nearby traffic lights into slag exploded outward as Endeavor closed the gap in an instant. His fist, sheathed in flame, shot toward All Smite’s jaw with the full force of the Number One Hero’s fury.

It never landed.

All Smite shifted—just a twitch of muscle—and the punch went wide. A gust of displaced wind slammed into nearby debris, blowing out the windows of a nearby building. Then All Smite's hand moved. Not with speed. With certainty. A single palm against Endeavor’s chest, and suddenly the fire hero was airborne—launched backward like a missile, crashing through a half-collapsed bus stop and skidding through the concrete.

All Smite didn’t follow. Not right away.

He walked.

Measured steps. The sound of his heels tapping the ground echoed louder than the flames trying to regather around Endeavor’s form.

"You burn so brightly, Enji. But tell me…" he said as he approached, eyes narrowing, voice dark with curiosity. “Is that to cast light for others… or to blind yourself?”

Endeavor roared, surging to his feet, smoke billowing off his cape. “You don’t know me.”

“I know exactly what you are,” All Smite replied, raising one hand as One For All coursed through his frame in a corrupted, oil-slick shimmer. “A man who mistook power for purpose. A father who raised a weapon. A hero who chased shadows because he couldn't bear to look at his own.”

The heat exploded again. Endeavor’s flames burst forth in every direction as he launched himself upward, flipping in midair and aiming a superheated kick downward. “Prominence BURN!”

The beam tore down like the wrath of a god.

But All Smite was no man.

And he was beyond gods.

The moment before impact, All Smite vanished from view—reappearing behind Endeavor mid-flight. He grabbed him by the collar and slammed him into the ground so hard the earth itself cracked in a spiderweb of shattered stone.

Smoke billowed. The air sizzled.

Endeavor coughed blood, eyes wide with disbelief. “How…?”

All Smite leaned down, voice barely more than a whisper in the inferno. “Because I stopped fighting for the approval of a broken world, Enji. And you never did.”

He rose again, tall and untouched, the flicker of power crawling through his veins like lightning through obsidian. “I didn’t come here to kill you,” he said, stepping away. “Not today.”

Endeavor tried to stand, trembling, face burning with rage and shame.

“But you came here to prove you were worthy of your rank,” All Smite continued, his back now to the fallen hero. “And I’ve already proven you’re not.”

He paused.

Then turned his head just slightly, a single eye visible.

“If you want to come again, bring your son. He, at least, knows what he’s fighting for.”