….
[Few Minutes Earlier]
They waited as Dabi stood, watching Midoriya's empty body stand motionless in the center of the training ground.
Aizawa was to the left, goggles ready, eyes fixed on Midoriya's hands for any sign of quirk discharge.
All Might in his skinny form is still watching from above; while someone else seems to join him.
Shinso stood ten feet from Midoriya, maintaining the connection, his expression focused.
Bakugo leaned against the wall, watching and hating every second of it.
But nothing happened; ten seconds, thirty and a full minute.
Midoriya's body stood there like a mannequin, breathing, blinking occasionally, completely vacant with no sign that anything was happening inside him at all.
Dabi tilted his head, waited another thirty seconds.
"Shinso, can you release him?"
Shinso snapped his fingers and Midoriya's eyes focused; a sharp intake of breath, his body jerking slightly as awareness flooded back in.
He blinked, looked around, and then at Dabi.
"Anything?" Dabi asked.
Midoriya shook his head. "No… I coul–"
He wasn't about to explain much given the situation he is currently in but Dabi understood the point.
So they tried again, Shinso put him under, held him there for two minutes, and released him.
Midoriya came back with the same answer; empty, blank, nothing.
A third time, same result.
Dabi stared at the sky for a few seconds thinking, then something clicked.
The sports festival.
When Midoriya had first touched the vestige space under Shinso's brainwashing, it hadn't been during a calm, controlled test.
It was during a fight, a moment where Midoriya was in danger of losing; of being walked out of the ring, and failing in front of his idol.
The desperateness, and emotional state are on another level; and One For All most probably has direct connections to the wielder emotions.
"Maybe it's not working because you don't feel the sense of danger?" Dabi said.
Midoriya looked at him. "What do you mean?"
"You're standing in a controlled training ground surrounded by pros, so nobody here is trying to hurt you and there's no real danger or pressure pushing you." Dabi said, his gaze drifting briefly toward the blond kid leaning to the wall with his arms crossed and that permanent look of hostility. "Your Quirk might respond, when something forces it to."
His lips curved, just slightly; a smile that Midoriya had learned to associate with his immediate future was getting significantly worse.
"Bakugo." Dabi raised his voice. "Looks like you won't have to just stand around after all."
"Why do I feel like you planned this from the very start?" Midoriya asked, his voice wavering with a suspicion that was promptly ignored.
Bakugo pushed off the wall, his eyes sharpened.
He didn't understand the full picture, yet he could feel the gaps, and the conversation happening over his head; but the part he understood was enough.
"About damn time." he said.
….
"S-Sensei, is this really okay?!" Midoriya stammered, his feet shuffling into a defensive stance as he looked at Bakugo, who was currently rolling his shoulders with terrifying enthusiasm.
"Relax, you're fine." Dabi said, leaning back against the perimeter wall with easy confidence. "Aizawa and I are right here, so nothing's going to go sideways."
"That suddenly sounds a lot less reassuring than it did a minute ago."
"Bakugo," Dabi cut in, his eyes narrowing as he fixed the blond with a steady look. "Don't hold back. Go all out. If you treat him like he's fragile, this won't work."
Bakugo's grin split his face. "Hah! Like you even needed to say it. I was planning on crushing him the second you mentioned his name."
"Midoriya." Dabi turned to him. "This time, don't fall back on Full Cowling, or Total Concentration Breathing. Strip away the techniques and the stabilizers. I want you to fight him with whatever is left when you have nothing but your own instincts and your back against the wall."
Midoriya's face went pale.
"Sensei, without Full Cowling I can't possibly–"
"That's the point."
Across the field, Bakugo was bouncing on the balls of his feet.
A part of him was annoyed, fighting Midoriya with this many handicaps felt like being told to arm-wrestle a toddler.
Where was the challenge?
Where was the satisfaction in beating someone who had been stripped of every tool that made him dangerous?
But underneath the annoyance, deeper down, in the place where his combat instincts lived, something else was stirring, a feeling. A sense that whatever Dabi was trying to pull out of the nerd, if it actually worked-
Something really interesting was about to happen.
And there were still things Bakugo needed to settle. Questions that had been haunting him since the Battle Trial, through the Sports Festival, and every day since that useless, quirkless nobody had shown up with a power capable of rivaling him.
How? That was the question that wouldn't leave him alone.
How did Izuku Midoriya; the kid who couldn't throw a ball, couldn't run a lap, or do a single thing that required physical ability, suddenly start shooting lightning out of his fists?
Where did it come from? People didn't just wake up with quirks like that.
But it all traced back to what Midoriya had said after the battle trial, something so absurd it refused to leave his mind; that he hadn't been born with his Quirk at all, but had received it from someone else.
A borrowed quirk?
The thing that had been driving Bakugo insane since the start of his high school, the gap, the sudden leap from nothing to something, had a stupid, simple explanation that somehow made everything more confusing.
From who? How? And why him?
Those questions had lingered unanswered because Midoriya never explained and Bakugo never asked.
Asking would have meant admitting he cared.
But at some point something else clicked; whether the power was borrowed, given, or stolen stopped mattering.
Because none of it changed the only thing that had ever been true for him. His path was still the same, to crush anyone in his way, push past every obstacle, and climb to the top on his own terms.
And Izuku Midoriya was standing right in his way.
He wasn't a background extra anymore. He wasn't the shaking middle-schooler who flinched under a hard stare, but a rival, an obstacle, someone Bakugo had to push through.
He hadn't lost because of weakness. He had lost because he underestimated the nerd.
Bakugo wasn't making the same mistake twice.
"Whenever you're ready, Deku." Bakugo said, as his palms were sparking.
Midoriya raised his fists.
"Go." Dabi said.
….
The fight didn't last long.
Without Full Cowling, and Total Concentration, Midoriya was slower, weaker, and softer than everything Bakugo had spent years training to destroy.
His usual analytical mind was still working, reading Bakugo's movements, predicting attack patterns, identifying openings; but his body couldn't execute fast enough to capitalize on any of it.
Bakugo's first explosion caught him in the guard and sent him skidding back five meters.
Midoriya recovered instantly, trying to circle left. He read the next feint perfectly, but he still ate the follow-up because his legs couldn't carry him out of the blast radius in time.
A right hook from Bakugo connected with his shoulder and spun him, and an explosion to his midsection doubled him over.
Midoriya tried to counter.
He timed the gap between Bakugo's recovery frames, found the window, and committed to a strike with everything he had.
It was a perfect read.
But his fist hit the air, because Bakugo had already adjusted, and the counter-explosion caught Midoriya in the chest and put him on his back.
He got up, tried again with the same tactic, read the pattern, found the angle, threw everything he had into a low tackle that should have caught Bakugo off-balance.
Bakugo simply sidestepped, caught the boy by his collar, and slammed him into the ground with a sickening thud.
It went on like that.
Midoriya's mind kept reaching the right answers, but his body failed to keep up, identifying the correct response only to execute it a fraction too late, spotting openings without the speed to capitalize on them, and with every exchange ending the same way.
Every exchange ended with the same sound: Midoriya hitting the floor.
And with every repetition, Bakugo was getting more heated.
"Come ON, Deku!" Bakugo grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him upright. "Is this IT?! Stand up straight! Give me SOMETHING! I didn't come out here to kick around a ragdoll!"
He shoved Midoriya back, his palms smoking.
Bakugo came at him again, faster and harder. But even through the frustration and the demand for more, he held back.
He would have died before admitting it, but his explosions were landing without reaching full power, his strikes were connecting without targeting anything vital, and he was driving Midoriya to his absolute limit without crossing the line into breaking him.
It was the most disciplined Bakugo had ever been in a fight, even if it looked like a massacre to the untrained eye.
"That's enough." Dabi called out. "Take a break, Midoriya."
Bakugo pulled back instantly.
He turned away, smoke still curling from his fingertips, and began muttering a string of insults about wastes of time and useless nerds.
Midoriya collapsed to his hands and knees. His breath came in ragged, burning hitches as the sheer physical toll caught up to him.
His arms already bruised, his uniform was scorched and torn, and every muscle in his body felt the weight of its own limitations.
Off to the side, Aizawa had pulled Shinso away from the center of the grounds.
Throughout the fight, he was demonstrating the mechanics of the capture scarf; how to hold it, build momentum through movement and the loops, while Shinso watched unexpressively.
Dabi's gaze drifted across the training ground until it landed on All Might, who was standing off to the side in quiet conversation with Nezu; and though he could already guess the nature of that discussion, he chose to ignore it for now.
Midoriya remained on the ground, still catching his breath, when something else drew his attention.
"Sensei," Midoriya croaked, looking up at Dabi. "Is Shinso-kun... is he being trained by Aizawa-sensei?"
Dabi glanced toward them before speaking. "It's not official yet, but I recommended him to Aizawa because the kid's got the right temperament."
He said, pausing as he watched Shinso attempt a trial throw. "I have also spoken to Principal Nezu, and while the details are still being worked out, Shinso will be allowed to participate in the final exam. And since Class 1-A has an open spot after that first-day expulsion. If he proves himself, he has a chance to transfer in."
He looked at Midoriya.
"But he has still got a long way to go, because the General Education course doesn't cover combat training. So physically he is starting from zero, and that means everything from here on out is going to be an uphill climb for him."
Midoriya watched Shinso work. The purple-haired boy threw the scarf, watched it go limp and miss the target, and then immediately re-coiled it. There was no frustration on his face, only a grim persistence.
His mind drifted back to the sports festival; standing across from Shinso in the ring, hearing his voice and feeling the brainwashing take hold, but more than that, he remembered the look in Shinso's eyes.
It was a look he recognized from his own reflection in the years before he met All Might.
"Must be nice, being born with a 'heroic' Quirk. Some of us weren't so lucky."
The bitterness in those words had stayed with him.
It was the frustration of someone who had the drive, the intelligence, the will to be a hero, yet had been placed in the wrong box simply because his Quirk didn't look the part.
And now Shinso was here, on a U.A. training ground, learning capture techniques from an underground hero.
He was fighting for a place in the Hero course through nothing but persistence and a refusal to accept what he'd been handed.
'Also, didn't Dabi-sensai also get transferred similarly? And unlike Shinso, he didn't even have a mentor to guide him. How hard must he have worked.'
Midoriya glanced down at his own hands; bruised, scraped, still trembling from the beating Bakugo had just given him.
Shinso didn't have One For All, or Total Concentration or any of the advantages Midoriya had been given.
Yet, he was pushing forward with only what he had.
So what was Midoriya's excuse?
He pushed himself to his feet.
"Sensei." he said, and though the exhaustion hadn't left his voice, something beneath it had changed. "I can start again…."
.
….
[To be continued…]
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