Hood

A flap of skin grew over the creature's skull like a cowl, leaving only a pair of yellow eyes visible beneath it, an effect that recalled Kurogiri. Lift that covering away and the rest was far worse: bare brain tissue sitting exposed, warped red eyes, and a mouth crowded with long jagged teeth.

The body otherwise followed the standard Nomu template, though scaled up. Bulk defined it, along with an unusually long neck where oversized vertebrae pushed against the surface. Its coloring ran to a dark purple that read as near black, and nothing covered the musculature across the shoulders and throat.

The man who existed before Garaki's surgery was heavily built too. He carried shaggy black hair, teeth that already ran long, eyes that sat wrong in his face, and ink marked his left shoulder.

Obedience to its master came easily, and the Nomu made no secret of where its loyalty sat. Speech arrived haltingly, broken into stuttered fragments that never quite assembled into proper grammar.

What drove it was appetite for a real fight. Any hero it locked onto held its interest only until the moment they fell, at which point it simply started looking for someone tougher. Standing over a beaten Endeavor, it was already wondering whether the world held a stronger hero. That craving was inherited rather than designed, carried over from the body it was built from, a thug who had made his living in underground bouts.

It was not merely a brawler, either. During the fight it released lesser Nomu to tie up the heroes it considered beneath its attention, and it kept its head, the one place it could not afford to lose, guarded throughout.

As the prototype of the High-End line, this Nomu could stand against the summit of hero society and level city blocks on its own. Endeavor and Hawks, freshly ranked first and second, both came at it, and it shrugged off or healed through the flames while overpowering the Flame Hero outright, courtesy of six Quirks layered onto a rebuilt body. Late in the fight a spent Endeavor landed Prominence Burn on it; it tore off its own head to survive the blast and kept pressing, coming within reach of victory before the two heroes together finally put it down, with Endeavor rupturing his own limits to do it.

Strength came first among its gifts, extreme even measured against other Nomu. It could hang off a concrete tower by grip alone, and stacking Transforming Arms atop Muscle Augmentation and Power let it whip a stretched arm clean through a skyscraper and nearly drop the upper floors. It also drove Endeavor bodily through wall after wall. Speed matched the muscle: it read and evaded everything Endeavor threw, including a Jet Burn aimed at its back, called him slow to his face, and kept pace in the air with Hawks, whose velocity is his whole reputation. Flight came from folding its Transforming Arms into wings and firing the jets mounted at its shoulders.

Its intelligence was never measured precisely, but cohesive speech alone set it apart from every Nomu before it. It spawned decoys to occupy reinforcements while it hunted stronger prey, noticed when Endeavor's Hellflame output began to sag from overuse and understood what that meant, and twice saved itself by decapitation, launching the head clear of the fire.

Muscle Augmentation, its core Quirk, thickened the muscle fibers throughout its frame, boosting force and speed and letting the fibers work as heavy tendrils. Super Regeneration repaired anything done to it, from a point-blank Jet Burn to a badly scorched arm to being carved up by Hell Spider, and even total incineration was survivable so long as the head persisted. Endeavor eventually worked that out and closed the fight with PLUS ULTRA Prominence Burn, which left nothing to regrow from. Shoulder-Mounted Jets provided thrust. Transforming Arms let it reshape its limbs into elastic weapons or wings, a gift All For One handed over specifically to make it a fiercer fighter. Power let its body hold and dump raw physical force on demand, which is how Endeavor went through the top of a high-rise. Storage let it carry other creatures inside itself, at least nine Nomu, and release them whenever it chose.