The bus had exactly one empty seat on either side of him.
Nobody had arranged it that way. It just happened. The unconscious geometry of twenty teenagers recalibrating their understanding of a classmate.
'I have become the weird kid. The actual weird kid. Not the old Izuku weird kid who muttered about heroes. The new weird kid who put Bakugou in the dirt and smells like ozone.'
He sat with his headphones on, watching the road through the window. The conversations around him were running at lower volume than they had before the Battle Trial. Not silent. Just quieter in his direction.
Tsuyu was sitting across the aisle.
She'd been looking at him for about forty seconds before she said anything.
"Midoriya." Flat. Direct. The way she said everything. "Your power feels wrong."
He took one side of his headphones off.
Looked at her.
Most people would've softened that statement. Added a qualifier. "I don't mean to offend, but" or "it's probably nothing, but." Tsuyu just said the thing. He respected the hell out of that.
"Yeah," he said. "It does."
She considered that for a moment. Then she turned back to face the front. Apparently satisfied. Or at least finished.
'She's not wrong. It does feel wrong. That's kind of the whole problem.'
He put the headphone back.
***
The USJ dome was enormous. Purpose-built. Every dimension chosen for function. The ceiling was high enough to generate its own weather if the precipitation zones were running.
Izuku mapped it while Thirteen talked. Three elevated platforms. Two choke points at the central plaza. A railing system on the second level that would hold maybe four hundred kilos before the mounting points gave out.
The flood zone had a concrete lip for elevation advantage. The collapse zone had exposed rebar at the far end. Bad footing for anyone running.
'It's a rescue facility. It's also a really good place to kill people if you're creative about it.'
'Jesus. When did I start thinking like that.'
The lights flickered.
One second of brown-out across the entire facility. Overhead panels dimming, returning.
Izuku stopped mapping.
The fountain in the central plaza began to distort. The water surface pulling inward, moving against its own momentum.
The air pressure changed.
The portal opened from the center outward. Black mist. No light source, no sound, no draft. A seam appearing in the space between one breath and the next, and then a crowd of people stepping through it like they'd been waiting just behind the world.
'Oh. Oh shit. This is the USJ attack. This is actually happening.'
Aizawa's voice cut through the room.
"Stay in formation. Do not engage independently."
He was already moving before he finished the sentence.
The class fractured. Everyone breaking along their own panic lines. Hagakure grabbed Ojiro's arm without looking. Kirishima's skin hardened from the shoulders down, the sound of it like gravel. Kaminari started talking fast, mostly to himself, volume rising.
Izuku looked at the mist.
He looked at Shigaraki. Pale. Layered in hands. Fingers moving against each other like he was managing something internal and losing.
Then he looked at the Nomu.
The mana hit him first. Before his eyes processed what they were seeing, the cold in his chest flinched. Contracted. Like touching a hot stove but in reverse. Something in his power recoiling from what it was reading.
What came back was wrong.
Wrong the way a word looks wrong when you've read it too many times. The shape refusing to resolve into something that made sense.
Dead tissue. That was the surface. But dead tissue that hadn't been allowed to stay dead. Packed and stitched and forced back across a threshold it had already crossed. Not by any principle Izuku recognized. By something crude and external and completely unconcerned with what the body had been before.
His mana recognized it the way an immune system recognizes a pathogen. Not similar to what he did. A violation of what he did.
'That thing was a person once. Someone took a person apart and reassembled the pieces like spare parts.'
His stomach turned. Actually turned. Not a clinical observation. Genuine revulsion.
'That's what my power would look like if I didn't give a shit. That's the version without the rules.'
Aizawa dropped into the plaza alone. Capture weapon out. Moving toward Shigaraki without hesitation.
Izuku watched him go. He knew how this played out. He'd watched this episode. In the show, this was where everything went wrong.
'He's going to get hurt. He's going to get hurt bad and there's nothing I can do about it from up here.'
Kurogiri moved.
The warp mist expanded without warning. Suddenly everywhere. Black fog flooding the plaza, directionless, no exit.
Izuku had half a second.
'Can't fight a warp. The warp goes somewhere. Somewhere is workable.'
He stopped resisting.
The world came apart. No darkness, no falling. Just spatial logic disappearing, the place between two points that had no floor or ceiling or duration.
Less than a second.
Felt longer.
Concrete.
He hit it clean. Weight distributed. Knees absorbing. One hand down, then upright.
The Ruin Zone. Open. Grey. Quiet.
Broken facades on three sides. Exposed rebar in the far structure, orange with old rust. Ground fractured in long diagonal lines.
Dead air. No echo. The kind of place that had forgotten what sound was.
He checked the gauntlet. 58%. Hairline fracture had spread two millimeters since yesterday.
'Still works. Probably.'
He adjusted the discharge up one setting.
Seven of them. Spread across the zone in a loose cluster. Not a formation. Just proximity. The way people group up when they're waiting for someone else to go first.
Two with blades. One improvised weapon. Four quirk-based.
'Undisciplined. Uneven spacing. Two on the left standing too close. The one in the back is the leader. He's watching the others instead of me.'
The temperature dropped with each step he took toward them. The ambient cold bleeding through his skin.
One of them noticed.
"Oi — it's just a kid—"
The first man had a knife and two inches of height on him. He was already lunging when Izuku stepped inside the arc.
He'd read the lunge from the shoulder. He'd been reading it for three steps.
The gauntlet connected with the jaw.
The shockwave cracked outward through the ruin and came back off three walls.
TO BE CONTINUED