….
Dabi leaned his back against the bark of a massive pine, his blue eyes cutting through the thick mountain mist to lock onto Yuga Aoyama.
He had been watching the kid since the moment the buses rolled out.
How does he do it?
The location of this camp was a strict, high-level secret, withheld from the students until their actual arrival.
On top of that, their phones had been confiscated the second they stepped onto the camp.
So how the hell were the villains going to tip the board?
Does the kid have a built-in GPS tracker in that ridiculous belt, or what? Dabi thought, his mind cycling through absurd theories to fill the gaps.
According to everything he had pieced together about All For One's network, Aoyama didn't have a direct, magical line to the demon lord.
In almost every scenario, his civilian parents acted as the mediators.
But there was no way a couple of terrified socialites were executing a real-time tracking leak from Tokyo to an isolated mountain range in the middle of nowhere.
Which meant Aoyama was either carrying a burner phone, or some kind of micro-transmitter was hidden right on his person.
Dabi had monitored him like a hawk during the hot springs and through the night. The kid hadn't done a single suspicious thing. He was just sweating, looking green around the gills, and staring at his boots.
But Dabi had already made up his mind.
It was time to deal with Aoyama.
Finally…
He had no intention of dragging this 'reluctant student traitor' drama out any longer than necessary.
He had already delayed it far too long.
But the real headache wasn't catching the kid, it was handling the aftermath.
Dabi had zero intention of hiding the truth from the rest of Class 1-A.
Aoyama was going to face the raw, unvarnished consequences of the path he had taken, whether he was forced into it or not.
I don't hate the brat, Dabi admitted to himself, watching Aoyama fumble with his sparkling navel laser. But he's going to get disciplined. Even if I have to break him a little to fix him.
Down on the clearing, the afternoon sun beat down like a physical weight, but the pace didn't slow.
Aizawa was moving through the roster with a lethal, hyper-efficient stride, entirely skipping the basic conditioning to force immediate evolution.
"Ashido!" Aizawa barked, his scarf drifting as he watched her dance around Pixie-Bob's constructs. "Your acid viscosity is perfectly stabilized, but your volume spray is a waste of stamina. Stop painting the field. Compress the stream into localized, high-pressure armor piercing rounds. Target the joints!"
"Sero!" he shifted his focus without pausing for breath. "Your tape output is maxed out. Your issue is deployment speed. If you can't anchor and swing within a half-second window, a high-tier villain will cut your line before you clear the dirt. Double your retraction rate!"
"Sato! The sugar rush burnout is a structural failure. You're over-loading your system all at once. Learn to micro-dose the intake to maintain a steady, baseline enhancement instead of crashing!"
"Kirishima! Your Unbreakable form is dense enough to take a tank shell, but you're dropping it the second the concussive shock passes. Maintain the hardened state through the impact. Absorb and counter!"
He stopped directly in front of Mina, Tokoyami, and Kaminari, his eyes narrowing. "Kaminari. You're still relying on that brain-frying max discharge because you're lazy. Your current assignment is to channel your voltage exclusively through your support pointers to create a localized stun-grid. If you short-circuit your own brain today, you're doing five hundred pushups with Tiger sitting on your back."
"Yes, sir!" Kaminari squeaked, his hands trembling as he tried to regulate his current.
….
It was deep into the night when it finally happened.
The sweltering heat of the summer day had lingered into the evening air, but the sweat pouring down Aoyama's face felt entirely different from the exhaustion of the other students.
It was the cold, suffocating sweat of sheer terror.
He followed the strict instructions he had received from his parents, gripping the sterile burner phone smuggled to him before the camp.
9:00 PM.
A one-way, pre-arranged window.
Just a brief exchange of landmarks and coordinates, with his parents acting as the terrified intermediaries for the demon lord.
It was a flawless, desperate protocol, and Dabi watched every single second of it from the branches above.
The moment the call ended, Aoyama lowered the phone, his hands trembling violently. But as he turned to walk back toward the lodge, the air around him grew completely frigid.
Dabi dropped from the tree line, landing silently in the dirt. His face looked drained, his blue eyes staring past Aoyama into the dark brush with a heavy, uncharacteristic tiredness.
"Sigh... What a disaster." Dabi muttered, his voice dripping with genuine disappointment as he looked in a seemingly random direction. "I did say I intended to reveal this to you guys eventually... but I would have definitely preferred a different situation."
Aoyama froze, his breath catching violently in his throat.
His panicked mind scrambled to understand a single thing Dabi was talking about.
Reveal? To whom?
There were only two of them out here in the dead of night.
Him and Dabi.
But then, underneath the rustle of the leaves, his ears caught it – a faint, muffled crying voice coming from the shadows.
While his mind began to scream, completely refusing to accept the reality that his secret had been shattered into pieces right in front of him.
"S-Sensei..." Aoyama stammered, his voice cracking into a broken, terrified whisper as he backed away. "It's... j-just that... I had no choice... They will kill my parents!"
Dabi just took a slow step forward.
In a blind, panicked surge of adrenaline, Aoyama's survival instincts took over. "Forgive me!" he shrieked.
The ring of his belt ignited, firing a sudden, blinding beam of his Navel Laser directly at Dabi's chest.
Dabi didn't even flinch.
With a fluid, practiced motion, he simply brought his raw hand up, swatting the concentrated beam aside on pure reflex.
The deflected laser bounced violently off his palm, losing most of its momentum as it crashed into the dark woods. But as the stray light tore through the brush, a sharp, muffled gasp echoed in the air, followed by a shaky, choked sob.
Dabi's eyes narrowed instantly, as he had clocked a faint anomaly in the perimeter minutes ago, but he had been a second too late to intercept it.
Stepping in to block her would have meant letting the traitor bolt into the dark.
When the laser cut through the shadows, Toru Hagakure's appearance was abruptly dragged into the light.
Her Invisibility Quirk naturally refracted light to keep her hidden, but the intense, sudden exposure to Aoyama's high-output laser caused her quirk factor to violently glitch.
For a raw, uncovered second, the refraction shattered, revealing the distinct profile of her face; her wide, expressive teal-and-yellow eyes and thick, bushy eyelashes catching the fading light.
"Sensei…. I did keep an eye on him as you asked me to. But I never… never that it would be something like t-this…." She was standing paralyzed in the brush, tears streaming down her half-visible cheeks, her face twisted into a look of absolute, soul-crushing betrayal.
"Aoyama...?" Toru's voice trembled, breaking completely as her visibility flickered.
Aoyama collapsed to his knees, the burner phone slipping from his fingers. He covered his face, his sparkling persona completely dissolving into pathetic, ragged wails. "I am sorry... I am so sorry, Toru... I never wanted any of this..."
Dabi stood over them, the silence of the forest heavy and suffocating.
He picked up the discarded burner phone.
….
Meanwhile in the forest, unseen by students or heroes, the Vanguard Action Squad had gathered.
The specific coordinates had only been delivered a few minutes ago through All For One's network, but they were already in position, melting out of the shadows like ghosts.
"This is going to be so much fun! I can't wait to see them all panicking!"
"Hey, new guy, focus…" Magne snapped, his tone laced with a hostile, warning edge. "We have one objective tonight: capture Bakugo. Everything else is secondary."
The person he was directing his hostility toward was definitely an anomaly; someone Dabi would not recognize as part of the core League of Villains.
The boy was freakishly tall, standing around seven feet, but he was unnervingly lean. His body proportions didn't make a lick of sense, looking more like a stretched shadow than a man.
Strapped to his back was a bizarre, oversized basket filled with rows of glossy, dense black balls that hummed with a faint, static tension.
The new recruit simply tilted his head, his silent, obscured gaze fixed on the glowing lights of the distant lodge.
"I still think we should kill a few." Muscular rumbled, cracking his massive knuckles. "Send a real message to the public."
Mr. Compress adjusted his mask, his top hat catching the faint moonlight. "Let us maintain our theatrical grace, shall we? Splendid execution requires timing. We should begin soon."
Magne grinned, her grip tightening on her massive magnet weapon. "Finally. I was getting bored waiting around in these damp woods."
"My poison will incapacitate most of them before they can even react." Mustard muttered, checking the seals on his gas canisters and pulling his gas mask tightly over his face. "They won't even know they're breathing it in."
Moonfish's mechanical blades clicked together hungrily, his heavily bound body twitching in the brush. "Flesh... fresh flesh... show me the meat..."
As the squad began to scatter into their designated attack positions, Muscular lingered in the thickest part of the shadows, a dark, vicious smile spreading across his face.
The League had their orders, but nobody needed to know he had his own personal plans for one particular green-haired student.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
Author Note:
Visit Patreon to instantly access +1 chapter for free, available for Free Members as well. For additional content please do support me and gain access to +12 more chapters.
-->[email protected]/WrightBro