139: Plans and Executions (4)

Chapter 139: Plans and Executions (4)

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“Ugh…”

Izuku Midoriya grunted, slowly rising from the ground as looked around in confusion.

“What the heck?”

He was caught off guard seeing all the bodies hanging from the dead trees around him.

“The suicide forest…? No” He shook his head. “Is this a nightmare?”

Despite this looking way too realistic, Izuku still considered this a nightmare. Lucid dreams and lucid nightmares weren’t unheard of, after all. To prove his point, the dead bodies looked half-transparent, like ghosts. 

“Hahh…” Izuku sat on his butt, ignoring the gazes of the dead bodies with a shrug. “Am I unconscious? Did that Neji kid really kidnap me? Or was that part of this nightmare too?”

This was the scary part of lucid dreams and lucid nightmares. Sometimes, it’s hard to distinguish reality from dreams.

“Goddamn irritating.” Izuku rubbed his temple, shaking his head. Soon, he got an idea. “Hm… would entering my Astral Form get me out of this dream?”

That was indeed a possibility since entering Astral mode would mean his consciousness would jump out of his body, where his brain was creating this dream.

Deciding to do that, Izuku took a breath and activated his quirk. Immediately, a half-transparent copy of Izuku jumped out of his body while his physical copy limped down on the ground.

Though what Izuku wasn’t expecting was–immediately after he entered his astral form, the dead bodies hanging from the trees leapt at him, the ghosts wearing long white clothes flew at him at a terrible speed. Their mouths widened, revealing their spikey teeth as some of them went for a bite, while some went to scratch him with their claws.

"Mghng?!" Izuku's eyes widened as one of the ghosts wrapped its hands around his mouth, while the others grabbed his limbs. 

He released a few pulses of repulsion around here and there, but something like that couldn't even interact with these non-physical ghosts.

Izuku was merely left with his strength and was only hampering, yelling aloud as he struggled to free himself.

He didn't need to breathe here, but he still felt suffocated at the feeling of getting his mouth pressed. So instinctively he went for a bite on the ghost's hand. Shockingly, the ghost stopped moving and went limp which allowed Izuku to shake it off him.

The other ghosts noticed but they weren't intelligent enough to care and kept pulling Izuku's limbs in every direction, some biting and scratching him too.

It took Izuku a moment to realise how he managed to paralyse the first ghost. Stain's Quirk, mixed with his Astral Form, gave him the ability to paralyse these non-physical beings. The change here was, the ghosts couldn't bleed, but that was a good change since from the looks of it Izuku only had to lick their outer skin to paralyse them.

Grunting, Izuku endured the pain of getting his arms bitten, his legs scratched, and all four of his limbs pulled as if they were being torn apart. He instead moved his neck to somehow lick the ghost closest to him, who went limp and floated stiffly before Izuku shook it off.

Hope returned to his eyes and he went to do the same onto the others harming him.

It took him a long minute before he lessened the number of ghosts to only three. He was about to finish them off too, but right then he heard the sound of bones crackling with each other.

He looked at the source of the sound, the ground below him, just beside his limply lying body. 

Izuku's eyes widened as he watched skeletal hands dig out of the ground, grabbing his physical body's arms and legs and pulling them downwards. Shockingly, his body started to drown into the solid ground.

"Shit! What the fuck is this place?!"

This was no nightmare. This was a reality out of a nightmare.

Izuku kicked the ghosts with his legs and flew to his body where he created a [Repulsion Point] on both his body and the ground, causing his body to repulse the ground and levitate upwards, out of the skeletal hands' reach.

But because the hands were grabbing onto him, it levitating up caused the things that those hands belonged to get up on the surface too.

The things that were dozens of humanoid skeletons with red glowing eyes.

"Krrroa…!"

The undeads noticed Izuku's astral body and released his physical one as they leapt at him like an ocean wave.

"Fuck."

Izuku cursed, floating upwards to get out of the skeletons' reach. His spiritual body was hurting, but he still managed to float above their reach since they couldn’t fly like the ghosts.

Izuku was about to release a relieved sigh just when the forest began to sing a strange melody… a strange theme.

The theme belonging to Golden Age All Might.

Izuku watched with wide eyes as from within the woods, a pale skinned All Might with red eyes and a yellow-toothed grin walked in while wearing a distorted version of his golden age costume.

"A-all Might?!"

Izuku stuttered, but that wasn't all as a distorted Bakugo, in his middle-school uniform, also appeared from another corner.

Soon, one by one people… people who he was scared of appeared one by one, and soon the forest was filled with Deku's nightmare.

"N-no…"

Midoriya stepped back in the air, his body shaking as the grinning All Might yelled, "Hey, you villain! I am here to punish you for your crimes!"

The ghostly All Might kicked the ground and appeared in front of Izuku with a gust of wind. Before Izuku knew it, his pale fist hit him on the abdomen and flung him across the forest, causing trees to break even though he was in his Astral body.

—★—

"No! Stop!"

"Aughh!"

"I am sorry- Argh!"

Neji watched the 'fight' happening below on the ground with his arms crossed.

‘Idiot.’

Izuku Midoriya believed he could get away after planning to kill his parents.

This is the result of it.

In this dungeon, Nightmares become reality. This is the place that made Neji scared of spiritual enemies back in the day.

At first, Neji wasn't sure if Izuku's nightmares would be formed or not since he wasn't The Gamer. But luckily, they indeed formed.

Neji watched as All Might, who was much much stronger than he was in reality, beat Izuku up into a plump.

'Guess that's how powerful the Deku hiding inside Midoriya thinks All Might is.'

Though the collateral damage was insane, Izuku wasn't dead by a single punch unlike what would have happened in reality. Bakugo and the others, whom Neji recognised as some low-grade bullies, were also hitting the kid pretty hard, and he was indeed taking damage. But from the looks of it, he was hurt more from their words than their attacks.

He was yelling sorry, forgive me, I won't do it again, and stuff like crying to his mother. But the monsters from his nightmares didn't stop.

Neji watched his fun for a while, but he knew he had to intervene before they killed him. After all, if the monsters killed Deku, then Neji won't get the rewards.

So Neji leapt downwards, still wearing his ring, as he closed the distance between him and Izuku.

Izuku, lying down on the ground and getting punched by All Might on top of him, who also kept speaking ill of him, watched Neji approach from the sky.

"Tch… don't tell me I also fear this guy enough to form a nightmare too?" he muttered under his breath, his teeth broken and his face swollen, which made a disturbing scene.

Hearing him, Neji chuckled.

"Poor guy." Neji said. "I am not a nightmare, I am the guy who created these nightmares… in a way, at least."

Neji said, hovering over Izuku who frowned, though that frown was shattered when All Might's punch hit him on the face.

"Kurai, eradicate them please," Neji spoke softly, to which Kurai nodded.

The nightmares were only strong against the person who they originated from, but against others, they were paper toys.

Kurai, with a flick of her death mana, obliterated them into dream particles, leaving a weirdly shaped Izuku stuck into the ground.

Izuku had wide eyes and was about to speak, but Neji came down, a white gauntlet forming on his hand, as he punched the kid after coating the gauntlet with blue energy.

"Fucking idiot." Neji scoffed. "Nice plans you had there, kill your classmates and their parents. Why? Just because you were born quirkless and they weren't."

"That's not-"

Izuku tried to protest, but Neji punched him again. 

Neji wasn't here to talk sense into him, nor argue with him, and neither did he have any revenge to take. He was just kinda pissed because this kid would have surely harmed and probably killed his parents if not for Toga’s information.

By now, this kid was beaten enough, but more importantly, spending too much time here would make Momo lonely in the club. So Neji decided to finish this right here.

Neji first grabbed Izuku and brought him back to where his body was floating. Neji yanked Izuku by his collar and shoved his consciousness back into his physical body.

After that, as Izuku's eyes leapt up in horror.

“Wait, stop! I-I can explain! I-I was brainwashed, manipulated-”

Midoriya started to stutter and beg, but Neji looked at him coldly while slowly coating his fist with Tremor. Without saying anything, Neji punched his fist right on top of Izuku's face, which felt like hitting cardboard just as his head burst like a watermelon.

The scene got gory, with blood splattered on Neji's face. But he felt nothing because of Gamer's Mind, and simply stared down with his eyes shining as he watched a few notifications of ‘Levelling Up’.

Then, something unexpected occurred… Something gleamed inside Izuku’s chest as the light then spiralled out of him and materialised into an item on the side.

It was a small glass bottle filled with a golden liquid.

“A Tier Potion?”

No, it was something more than that.

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Author’s Note: Maybe things would have ended differently if Neji tried to kill Izuku outside the dungeon as the world would try anything to save its favourite child. But that doesn’t matter now, because the annoyance is finally no more.