Chapter 75: The Cold Paramedic and the Orca's Invasion
[National Dagoba Arena - The Disaster Zone]
The massive steel gates groaned in protest as they slowly parted, revealing a sprawling, apocalyptic landscape. The artificial city had been thoroughly devastated. Plumes of thick, acrid smoke billowed into the artificial sky, and the air tasted heavily of pulverized concrete and electrical fires. Sirens wailed in the distance, a chaotic symphony of simulated panic.
"Class A! We move as a unit!" Tenya Iida's voice chopped through the noise, his engines already humming. "Prioritize the heavily populated residential zones! Midoriya, take the vanguard!"
"Right!" Izuku Midoriya nodded, green lightning crackling around his legs as he bounded into the ruins.
"WHERE ARE YOU, VICTIMS?!" Katsuki Bakugo roared, completely ignoring Iida's tactical formation. He launched himself into the air with a violent explosion, followed closely by Kirishima and Kaminari. "I'LL SAVE YOU WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT, YOU EXTRAS!"
Aokiji Kuzan stood near the back of the group, watching his classmates scramble like hyperactive ants. He let out a slow, frosty sigh, his hands buried deep in his trench coat pockets.
He didn't follow the main group. Instead, he veered off toward the industrial sector—a tangled graveyard of twisted steel girders and massive, unliftable concrete blocks. It was the kind of heavy-duty disaster zone where raw muscle wouldn't be enough.
He navigated the wreckage with a lazy, almost shuffling gait. The micro-vents on his collar hissed softly, regulating his internal temperature.
"HELP! PLEASE, SOMEONE HELP ME!"
The desperate scream echoed from beneath a collapsed overpass. Aokiji ambled over, his expression utterly blank.
Pinned beneath a massive, five-ton concrete support beam was an elderly man—a professional actor from the Help Us Company (H.U.C.). His makeup was flawlessly applied to look like severe bruising, and his acting was painfully convincing.
"My leg!" the old man wailed, reaching out a trembling hand toward Aokiji. "I can't feel my leg! Please, hero! You have to lift it!"
Aokiji stopped a few feet away. He looked at the massive concrete pillar. He looked at the old man. His dark eyes betrayed zero emotion.
"Hold still," Aokiji said, his voice flat and unbothered.
He didn't crouch down to offer words of comfort. He didn't smile to reassure the victim. He simply pulled his right hand from his pocket and placed his bare palm flat against the dusty gravel.
Crackle... Hiss.
The temperature around the rubble plummeted instantly. The old man gasped as a creeping frost spread over the ground.
Instead of trying to lift the five-ton pillar with brute strength, Aokiji utilized pure, calculated physics. Directly beneath the massive concrete block, dozens of micro-pillars of hyper-dense ice began to grow upward from the bedrock. They didn't shoot up violently; they expanded with agonizingly slow, mechanical precision.
They acted as perfect, frictionless hydraulic jacks.
With a deep, grinding groan, the five-ton concrete beam was silently and smoothly lifted off the ground by the rising columns of ice, causing zero vibration or secondary trauma to the victim underneath.
Once the beam was high enough, Aokiji flicked his wrist. A perfectly smooth, slick sled of ice formed directly beneath the old man's body. With a gentle tug of cold air, the sled slid backward, pulling the victim completely clear of the wreckage in one fluid motion.
Aokiji stood up, dusting the gravel off his pants.
The old man lay on the ice sled, entirely safe from the rubble. But as the subzero temperature of the ice seeped through his clothes, he began to shiver violently. His teeth chattered together like castanets.
"H-H-Hey!" the H.U.C. actor stuttered, breaking character for a fraction of a second to glare at the U.A. student. "W-What kind of rescue is this?! I'm freezing to death over here! A hero is supposed to smile, reassure the victim, and keep them warm! This is terrible bedside manner! I'm deducting points!"
Aokiji stared down at the shivering old man. A long, visible plume of white mist escaped his lips as he exhaled. He looked thoroughly unimpressed.
"How annoying," Aokiji drawled lazily, turning his back on the actor to scan the rest of the zone. "You're not crushed into a pancake anymore. Count your blessings and wait for the medics."
[Sector 3 - The Friction Zone]
A few blocks away, the rescue operation was far less controlled.
Shoto Todoroki was attempting to melt down a tangled mass of steel rebar to free a trapped civilian, his left side radiating intense, controlled heat.
Suddenly, a catastrophic gale of wind tore through the street.
The hurricane-force gust completely extinguished Todoroki's flames and violently scattered the rubble, sending heavy debris flying dangerously close to the victims.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Inasa Yoarashi landed heavily on the pavement, his eyes burning with furious intensity as he glared at Todoroki. "Your flames are too close to the civilians! You lack the burning passion of a true hero!"
Todoroki's eyes narrowed into cold slits. "You just blew debris directly at them. Keep out of my way."
Standing on the roof of a nearby ruined building, Aokiji watched the two powerhouses clash. The palpable friction between the wind user and the half-cold, half-hot prodigy was making the air itself feel unstable.
Aokiji rubbed the back of his neck, sighing.
"Teenagers and their drama," Aokiji muttered to himself. "Absolutely exhausting."
[The Terror Alarm]
The rescue operations were finally finding a rhythm. The H.U.C. actors were being systematically evacuated to the first-aid zones by Iida and Midoriya.
But then, the atmosphere shifted.
The standard, pulsing yellow emergency lights of the arena suddenly snapped off. A heartbeat later, the entire dome was bathed in a sinister, blood-red glow.
BZZZZZT! BZZZZZT! BZZZZZT!
A new siren blared—a harsh, guttural klaxon that triggered a primal sense of dread in the pit of every student's stomach.
"Attention all examinees," Yokumiru Mera's voice echoed over the PA system, though even his sleepy tone couldn't hide the gravity of the announcement. "A massive villain syndicate has appeared and commenced a large-scale attack. Heroes must continue the rescue and evacuation protocols while simultaneously suppressing the terrorist threat."
Before the students could even process the rule change, the eastern boundary wall of the arena detonated.
KABOOM!
The reinforced concrete exploded outward, sending massive chunks of debris raining down like meteorites. A thick, impenetrable cloud of grey smoke poured into the disaster zone.
Heavy, synchronized footsteps echoed from within the smoke.
Stepping through the breach was the Number 10 Pro Hero, Gang Orca.
He didn't look like a hero. Wearing a pristine, custom-tailored white suit with a blood-red tie, his towering, monstrous killer-whale mutation made him look like the ruthless don of a terrifying mafia syndicate. Behind him marched dozens of "minions"—men in matching suits wielding heavy cement-firing rifles.
Gang Orca stopped. He slowly turned his massive head, his unblinking, predatory eyes sweeping over the scattered, terrified students.
VMMMMMM.
Without lifting a finger, Gang Orca released a low-frequency sonic wave. The air physically warped around him. The sheer, suffocating pressure of the hypersonic attack hit the frontlines, paralyzing the weaker students, dropping them to their knees in sheer terror.
"Now then," Gang Orca's deep, rumbling voice vibrated through the rubble. "Can you protect the weak and fight me at the same time?"
The students retreated, their instincts screaming at them to run from the apex predator.
But at the very front lines, standing directly in the path of the Orca's invasion, three figures had not taken a single step back.
Inasa Yoarashi, the wind roaring around his fists.
Shoto Todoroki, his right side frosting over and his left side igniting.
And a few meters away, standing atop a shattered concrete block, was Aokiji Kuzan.
Aokiji watched the mafia boss hero and his army of minions. He let out a long breath, handing a final, shivering H.U.C. victim off to a passing medic.
He stretched his neck, a loud pop echoing from his vertebrae.
Crackle.
Moisture from the dusty air violently condensed around his right hand. The localized drop in temperature was so severe that the dust itself froze in mid-air. Within a second, a lethal, jagged dagger of subzero ice materialized in his grip, glowing with a pale, ethereal blue light.
The micro-vents around his collar and sleeve hissed aggressively, bleeding off thick plumes of white steam that curled around his face, obscuring his lazy, half-closed eyes.
"Well," Aokiji whispered, his voice carrying clearly through the ringing silence of the battlefield. "Playing paramedic was starting to make me sleepy anyway."
.
.