The first villain hit the concrete before the echo did.
His jaw went sideways on impact. That was going to need surgery.
Izuku was already moving.
The second one was closer than he'd calculated. Knife in hand, held wrong. Thumb over the top of the grip, wrist cocked back like he was planning to push rather than slash.
'Dude. Come on.'
He stepped inside the reach, drove an elbow into the man's sternum, and hooked his ankle on the way down. The knife clattered to the concrete before the man finished falling.
Third guy had an emitter quirk. Some kind of hardened projectile, marble-sized, fired from the palm. He'd been charging it since Izuku entered the group.
That was the problem. He'd spent four seconds building a shot instead of moving, which meant Izuku had watched the charge glow build for four full seconds and had already closed to a distance where the shot angle was useless.
He caught the man's wrist on the extension and redirected it. The projectile hit the far wall. One knee to the solar plexus and the man folded.
The fourth tried to run.
Izuku let him get eight steps. Then he crossed the distance and swept his legs. Nothing hard. Nothing permanent. Just the ground, doing what gravity promised.
He stood up. Rolled his gauntlet wrist.
41%.
'Four down. And I don't think those were all of them.'
He heard it. Not footsteps. The sound that came before footsteps. The collective intake of breath and scuff of repositioning that happened when a group was deciding to move.
He turned.
They came from three structures at once.
Twelve. Maybe more.
Four with blades. Two with quirk-active hands already glowing. The rest using numbers as their primary strategy.
They'd seen what happened to the first group. Some of them were scared. All of them had decided that scared together was safer than scared alone.
'That's sweet. That's wrong, but it's sweet.'
41% charge. Twelve targets. Mixed range and close quarters. Three minutes minimum at this spacing, and he'd waste charge on misses.
The math was simple.
He lowered his hands.
'Sorry about this.'
The temperature drop was immediate. Total. Like a door opening into a space that had never known warmth. The air turned dense. The concrete beneath his feet darkened in a spreading ring, the color draining out of it like heat leaving a body.
One of the villains in the back started saying something. Stopped halfway through.
Izuku said one word.
"Hunt."
The Hound came through the dark beneath him. Just suddenly there. Violet eyes burning. Body assembled from cold and pressure and shadow.
For a fraction of a second it was still.
Then it moved.
Too fast to track. Too fast to react to. The first villain in its path went down before the scream started. The scream didn't finish.
The formation came apart. Not tactically. Just individuals trying to process what was happening and finding that by the time they figured it out, the situation had already changed.
One ran left. The Hound was already left.
One fired a blast quirk into the dark. It hit nothing. The cold that came back from that direction was answer enough.
Izuku stood still and watched.
The Hound's path was efficient. Roughly the pattern he'd projected. Grouped targets before isolated ones.
Mostly.
It took the man on the far right two beats later than it should have. The deviation was small. Three, maybe four meters of unnecessary arc before it corrected. Like it had been briefly interested in something else.
His stomach tightened.
'You did that on purpose. You went somewhere I didn't send you.'
The cold in the zone had dropped another degree.
The sound of the last impact was dense and final.
Then there was no more movement in the Ruin Zone except his own.
He recalled the Hound.
The resistance was there. That slight drag. The pull lasting a beat longer than last time.
Like it didn't want to come back.
He looked at what the Hound had done to the first man. The damage was more than necessary. More than what he'd authorized. The shadows had been... thorough.
'We're going to have a problem, you and me. I can feel it.'
The ozone smell faded. The cold stayed.
He walked.
Out of the Ruin Zone. Through a gap in the broken facade. Up a crumbled concrete incline to a point where the dome opened up below.
The central plaza spread out thirty meters down. Portal gone. Water displaced. Concrete cracked from the breach.
He saw Aizawa. Still fighting. Ground-level. Moving with the desperate efficiency of a man running on reserves that were almost gone.
He saw the Nomu. Six meters from Aizawa.
He knew what that distance meant.
His mana registered the creature again. That same wrong signal. Dead flesh forced into motion. The violated frequency that made his power recoil.
He looked at it.
'There you are.'
TO BE CONTINUED