….
At 5:30 AM, the mountainside was swallowed by a punishing, freezing fog. Aizawa's voice cutting through the lodge speakers was entirely devoid of human empathy.
"Every student on the clearing in five minutes. If you are late, you start the week behind."
When Class 1-A assembled, they weren't the raw, unpolished kids who had stepped onto U.A. campus months ago.
Under Dabi's unhinged, high-intensity routine, their combat reflexes had sharpened into lethal weapons.
They looked dangerous, but they also looked exhausted.
Bakugo stood with his arms crossed, jaw clenched so tight the tendons in his neck strained.
Midoriya was bouncing on his toes, his eyes clear but hyper-focused, his body humming with a strange, tightly coiled tension.
Once again, Dabi was nowhere to be seen.
"Quirk baseline assessment." Aizawa announced, holding up a digital tracker. "Over the last few months, your tactical efficiency, combat awareness, and reaction times have grown at an astonishing rate. Dabi's drills forced your bodies to adapt. But today, we are measuring raw, unmitigated capacity. Bakugo, step up. Re-do the pitch from the first day of school."
Bakugo ripped the softball from Aizawa's hand. He didn't waste time boasting. He dropped into a perfect, low-center stance, wound his shoulder back, and unleashed a concentrated, terrifyingly precise blast that tore the fog completely out of the air.
The device beeped. Aizawa turned the screen toward the class.
1,204.3 meters.
"Whoa!" Kaminari yelled, his eyes widening. "Over twelve hundred meters?! That's almost double your first score, Bakugo!"
"Don't get ahead of yourselves." Aizawa cut in, his voice cold as he shut off the screen. "Look at the data closely. Bakugo, your physical strength has increased, your stance is flawless, and your AP Shot compression allows you to eliminate air resistance. That massive leap in distance? It's entirely due to mechanical efficiency. You've learned how to spend every single drop of fuel in your tank without wasting an ounce of energy."
Aizawa stepped closer, his piercing gaze sweeping over the class.
"But the actual size of your fuel tank? The maximum amount of sweat your glands can produce before failing? It hasn't grown an inch. Dabi taught you how to use your quirk with perfect, lethal efficiency. But efficiency only gets you so far in a prolonged war of attrition. This week, we aren't learning technique. We are forcing your bodies to produce more raw power. We are breaking the glass to build a bigger reservoir."
"Listen up, 1-A!" Vlad King boomed as Class 1-B filed out into the clearing. "My class is here to close the gap! If you think your early combat experience gives you a permanent edge, you're mistaken!"
But the competitive smirk on Monoma's face died the moment he saw 1-A's specialized layout.
This wasn't standard training.
Dabi had already refined their basic mechanics; Aizawa and the Pussycats were here to break their biological caps.
Because Todoroki could already swap elements flawlessly thanks to Dabi's prior conditioning, his new torment was entirely different.
He wasn't just regulating his internal thermostat anymore, he was forced to use his fire to superheat Pixie-Bob's massive earth golem from the inside out, while simultaneously drawing the heat out of his own blood with his right side to prevent internal combustion.
Nearby, Bakugo–
–was outfitted with heavy, support gauntlets that actively restricted his sweat flow, forcing him to manually trigger explosions against the hydraulic pressure of the equipment.
Every blast rattled the valley, forcing his sweat glands to violently expand under severe internal resistance.
"These lunatics are freaking annoying." Monoma muttered, his jaw dropping as a concussive shockwave nearly took his legs out.
….
"Tokoyami, center stage." Tiger boomed, stepping into a terrifyingly heavy stance.
Dark Shadow emerged, immediately shrinking under the harsh morning glare. "The light caps my output, sensei."
"We aren't looking for brute strength today." Aizawa cut in, his eyes flashing a dangerous crimson. "Dabi noted your mobility is entirely linear. You rely on Dark Shadow to drag you horizontally. But its composition isn't bound by gravity. Dark Shadow, wrap his torso."
The shadow beast complied, coiling like a heavy snake around Tokoyami's chest.
"Now!" Tiger roared, throwing a massive, bone-shattering punch directly at Tokoyami's face. "Don't pull him away! Compress your density into the earth and force a vertical lift! Malleable mass can achieve flight!"
On pure survival instinct, Dark Shadow shrieked.
Its lower half flattened against the dirt like a high-tension spring before violently expanding upward.
The concussive release launched Tokoyami thirty feet straight into the air, entirely breaking his gravity-bound limits. He hovered, completely unstable for a fraction of a second, before dropping into an active defensive descent.
"Again!" Tiger yelled, bracing for the next impact. "Learn to mold the air pressure beneath you! Defy gravity!"
….
On the other side of the clearing, Midoriya was facing a different kind of hell.
He was standing completely still in the center of an erratic, high-speed bombardment from Pixie-Bob's earth beasts.
He wasn't using Full Cowling to smash them. His eyes were clamped shut, his knuckles whitening as he tried to force a spark from his second Quirk.
Come on, Midoriya thought through gritted teeth. Just fire…. Do what you did with Kota.
Thwack!
An earthen fist clipped his shoulder, sending him tumbling through the dirt. He scrambled up, panting, frustration peaking.
Ever since that split-second activation at the lodge, Danger Sense had gone completely dormant.
He couldn't force it to trigger.
"Your mind is too loud, Midoriya!" Aizawa barked from the perimeter, scanning his vitals. "You're treating a subconscious survival reflex like a conscious command. Stop trying to find the trigger and let your instincts do the heavy lifting!"
Midoriya wiped blood from his lip, his green eyes flashing with an intense, quiet frustration.
He had a secondary weapon locked inside his own head, and right now, the lock wouldn't budge.
From a high cliff edge above the smoke, a silent little boy watched every single broken stone and brutal fall, his eyes locked onto Midoriya's trembling form.
….
By 4:00 PM, the camp was an absolute war zone of melted stone and shattered ice. Dinner was an unceremonious affair of self-prepared curry.
Todoroki, whose thermal control was now hyper-precise after a day of lethal regulation, lit the entire row of cooking pits with a lazy, perfectly calculated flick of his left index finger.
Kota walked through the camp, his small hands shoved deep into his pockets. He didn't sneer or run away this time.
His eyes simply scanned the raw, visible burns on Bakugo's forearms and the massive, trembling fatigue dragging at Midoriya's legs.
He had grown up believing heroes were just flashy public figures, but watching them bleed in the dark, away from the cameras and the applause, painted a completely different, heavy reality.
Later that evening, Midoriya spotted the small boy sitting alone on the northern overlook, staring down at the glowing lights of the lodge.
Quietly, Midoriya climbed up, holding a steaming bowl of curry.
"Brought you some." Midoriya said gently, settling onto the dirt beside him.
Kota didn't yell.
He slowly turned his head, his gaze transitioning from the food to the dark purple bruising on Midoriya's shoulder.
"Why do you do that to yourselves?" Kota asked, his voice carrying an unnaturally mature weight. "Train until your bones shake, and fight until you collapse."
Midoriya stayed quiet, letting him speak.
Kota's fists clenched tight against his knees. "I just didn't understand why anyone would willingly choose a life that breaks them. Today... I watched all of you. You're actually trying to become like Dabi. Like the people who stand between the monsters and the rest of the world. But it looks so miserable. Why torture yourself for a world that doesn't even see how much you're bleeding in the dark?"
Midoriya looked down at his heavily scarred right hand, flexing his fingers against the permanent, deep ache of One For All.
"Until a few months ago." Midoriya said softly, a nostalgic smile touching his lips, "I didn't have a Quirk at all, Kota. I was completely ordinary. Everyone told me to look at reality and choose a safe path."
Kota's breath hitched slightly. "A hero without power?"
"Yeah. Sounds impossible, right?" Midoriya chuckled, his gaze drifting to the stars. "But even when I was terrified, and even when people laughed... every time I saw someone crying, or every time a shadow loomed over someone who couldn't protect themselves, my legs would move before I could even think. It wasn't about a grand title. I just couldn't bear the thought of letting someone face the dark alone."
He turned to Kota, his green eyes radiating an unbreakable, quiet intensity that made the little boy freeze.
"Your parents didn't choose that life because they wanted to suffer, Kota. They looked at the people in this valley, looked at you, and decided your peace was worth every single scar they would ever take. They weren't playing a safe game, and neither are we."
Midoriya stood up, dusting the dirt from his uniform and leaving the warm bowl of curry right where it was.
"We train this hard because when the night comes, and the monsters actually show up... we want to be strong enough to make sure the people we protect never have to see how hard it was to save them."
He offered a small, reassuring nod before turning back down the mountain path, leaving Kota alone on the cliffside with the sudden, staggering weight of what true heroism actually meant.
….
Meanwhile, where was Dabi this whole time?
He hadn't stayed behind in Musutafu, and he certainly wasn't lounging in some staff room.
There was no way in hell he was leaving his students exposed out in the mountains when he already knew the impending villain strike.
He was out there in the dense treeline.
But for all his calculation, an unfamiliar, irritating knot of unease was tightening in his chest.
He couldn't shake the question of how to handle what was coming.
Did he step back, trust the grueling training he had put them through, and leave them to smother the smaller fires on their own?
Or was that the exact kind of naive arrogance that would make him regret the choice for the rest of his life? All For One didn't play by a syllabus.
As Dabi's eyes scanned the smoky clearing from the shadows, his gaze lingered on Midoriya, who was currently taking a brutal bruising from Pixie-Bob's constructs.
He watched the kid's microscopic twitches, the sudden, hyper-reactive shifts in his center of gravity right before a strike landed.
He has unlocked it, Dabi thought, a dry, cynical smirk touching his lips.
He had already fully put the pieces together the previous night in the hot springs when the kid practically tried to bury himself alive in the water after a stray comment.
Midoriya had a second Quirk now, some kind of hardwired danger radar.
Dabi leaned back against the bark of a massive pine, crossing his arms as his blue eyes narrowed through the leaves.
The kid was still trying to force it open with his mind, acting like a typical over-analytical nerd. He had no idea his teacher had already clocked the anomaly.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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