….
Aizawa Shouta strode through the darkened corridors of the lodge.
His mind was a frictionless machine, processing the variables of a nightmare scenario. Dabi's warning over the comms had been brief, but Aizawa didn't need a sprawling tactical briefing to understand the gravity of the threat.
The Vanguard Action Squad was here.
He had immediately hit the emergency alarms, waking Vlad King and the Pussycats.
Within three minutes, the lodge had gone from a quiet sanctuary to a fortified bunker.
"We don't have numbers, nor have quirk profiles on the villains." Aizawa barked, his capture weapon unfurling around his shoulders like agitated serpents as Vlad King joined him in the main hall.
"That is a massive disadvantage. We have to assume they brought heavy hitters specifically tailored to counter Pro Heroes."
"I have already triggered the localized distress beacon." Vlad King replied, his jaw tight. "Backup is on the way, but we are deep in the mountains. Even the fastest aerial response will take an hour."
"An hour minutes is a lifetime in a siege." Aizawa muttered. "But we know this terrain better than they do. Mandalay, use your Telepath to connect the staff. Keep the channels open. I want every student from Class 1-A and 1-B in the central dining hall immediately."
By the time Aizawa pushed through the heavy wooden doors of the dining hall, the room was filled with thirty-eight disoriented, panicked teenagers.
They were in various states of dress; some in pajamas, others having thrown on their tracksuits.
Aizawa did a visual sweep of his own class, his eyes snapping from face to face. Midoriya, Bakugo, Todoroki, Uraraka, Iida…
His heart dropped a fraction of an inch.
"We are missing two." Aizawa said, his voice slicing through the rising panic of the students. "Where are Hagakure and Aoyama?"
The Class 1-A students looked around, realizing for the first time that the invisible girl and the sparkling French student were entirely absent.
"They... Weren't in their rooms, Sensei." Ojiro stammered, looking alarmed.
Before Aizawa could dispatch Tiger to search the perimeter, the heavy double doors of the dining hall swung open with a violent creak.
Aizawa spun around, his hand instinctively flying to his capture scarf, ready to erase whatever monster had breached the building.
But the threat assessment died in his throat.
It was Hagakure?
And she was dragging Yuga Aoyama by the collar of his shirt.
Aoyama was a wreck or resisting.
He was practically dead weight, his knees dragging across the floor, his face buried in his hands as he wept with a pathetic, soul-crushing despair.
Aizawa's eyes flashed red. His initial instinct was absolute fury. "What the hell do you two think you're doing wandering outside during a total lockdown protocol? Do you have any idea–"
He stopped.
Aizawa was a veteran underground hero.
He had interrogated enough broken criminals and rescued enough shattered victims to know what absolute, fundamental trauma looked like.
Aoyama didn't look like a student who had simply broken curfew. He looked like a prisoner walking to the gallows.
"Sensei..." Hagakure's voice broke, echoing in the dead silence of the dining hall. "It's Aoyama. He... he is the spy."
The words hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.
Nobody could see Hagakure because of her Quirk, but they didn't need to.
Everyone in the room could feel the raw emotion behind her words. The shock, the hurt, the betrayal.
Between sobs and shaky breaths, she began recounting everything that had happened over the last few minutes, struggling to force the words out as the shock finally caught up to her.
The entire room went completely, horrifyingly still.
Class 1-A stared at the boy who had sat beside them in class, eaten lunch with them, and suffered through Dabi's brutal training regimes alongside them.
"Aoyama...?" Midoriya whispered, his green eyes wide with betrayal.
"This… Sparkling freak." Bakugo's palms began to smoke, his voice a low, lethal growl. "You sold us out?"
The air in the room threatened to ignite.
The shock was rapidly morphing into anger, panic, and devastation.
But Aizawa didn't have the luxury of playing therapist. He didn't have time to unpack the tragedy of a coerced teenager or soothe the broken hearts of his students.
There was a war outside.
"Quiet!" Aizawa barked, his voice snapping like a whip. He looked at the weeping boy on the floor, his expression hardening into cold, pragmatic steel. "Since Dabi said he will deal with this... then we let him. For now, we secure the perimeter."
Aizawa turned to the tape-dispensing hero student. "Sero, bind him. Use your tape and secure him to a chair. Lock him in the rear storage room."
"S-Sensei?" Sero hesitated, looking at his classmate.
"Do it, Sero!" Aizawa commanded. "We are in an active combat zone. I will not have an unsecured variable in the middle of our stronghold!"
Sero swallowed hard, his face pale, but he nodded. He quickly dispatched thick strips of tape, wrapping Aoyama securely.
The French boy didn't even struggle, as he just kept sobbing, utterly broken by his own actions.
With Aoyama locked away, the immediate tension in the room settled into a grim, hyper-focused reality.
Aizawa turned to the windows, his mind churning through the plan.
Do we stay in this enclosed space? he thought, grinding his teeth. The lodge is defensible. We can barricade the doors, trap the enemies in choke points if they try to breach.
But a fortress is just a cage if the enemy has enough firepower to bring the roof down on your head.
If they have a villain capable of area-of-effect destruction, fire, poison gas, or structural decay, staying inside this wooden box is mass suicide.
He was profoundly annoyed.
The situation was spiraling entirely out of his control. He hated playing defense when he was blind to the enemy's pieces.
But he had thirty-six students to protect, and he had to make a call.
Before Aizawa could give the order to fortify the walls, the decision was made for him.
The floor beneath their feet didn't just tremble but heaved violently, sending a sickening jolt through the entire building.
The heavy wooden beams of the lodge groaned in protest, dust raining down from the ceiling as a deafening, low-frequency rumble tore through the very bedrock of the mountain.
Students screamed, grabbing onto tables and each other to keep from being thrown to the floor.
"An earthquake?!" Kaminari yelled, clutching a pillar. "At a time like this?!"
Aizawa steadied himself, his eyes widening as he immediately realized it wasn't an earthquake because real earthquakes began with rolling P-waves, and this felt nothing like one.
This was a planned, concussive impact.
Something impossibly massive had just struck the earth.
He looked toward the dark forest beyond the windows, a cold knot forming in his gut.
Aizawa still wasn't aware of the full scale of the nightmare they had just been dragged into, but looking at the trembling glass, he realized the terrifying truth.
This might not have been just a targeted Vanguard strike, but a mini, all-out war.
….
Meanwhile, deep in the pitch-black canopy of the Beast's Forest, Dabi moved through the trees like a phantom.
His spider-sense was a constant, buzzing hum at the base of his skull, guiding him unerringly toward the source of the primary disturbance.
The trap he had meticulously laid was springing shut, but as he dropped silently from a high branch into a wide, trampled clearing, the reality of the situation came into sharp focus.
Standing in the center of the clearing were six distinct figures.
But it wasn't just them.
Behind the elite squad, melting out of the shadows and filling the tree line, were dozens of low-level thugs.
Grunts, mercenaries, and cannon fodder hired from the deepest gutters of the underworld.
Dabi's eyes widened for a fraction of a second.
That's actually a lot of people, he thought, assessing the sea of hostile faces. Where the hell did they manage to gather that many bodies on such short notice?
"Ah, the welcoming committee." a theatrical voice rang out.
Mr. Compress stepped forward, adjusting his top hat and bowing with an exaggerated flourish. "I must admit, we expected a bit more panic. But to send a single U.A. instructor to greet us? Are you sure you can afford to be here right now, my fiery friend?"
Compress tilted his mask up just enough to reveal a mocking smirk. "Because we brought a big guy with us, you know."
Before Dabi could even process the taunt, the world exploded.
A deafening, apocalyptic roar tore through the atmosphere, a sound so loud it physically hurt the eardrums.
The very earth beneath Dabi's boots buckled and cracked.
Five miles away, on the far edge of the mountain range, the tree line violently erupted.
A colossal, mountain-sized hand dug out of the earth, tearing pine trees by their roots as a towering, jagged figure hauled itself out of the subterranean dirt.
The monster's sheer scale defied logic, its roar echoing across the valley like a natural disaster given flesh.
Dabi instantly recognized the silhouette against the moonlight.
Gigantomachia.
The realization hit Dabi like a bucket of ice water.
Damn it, he thought, his jaw clenching tightly. I really managed to piss off the final boss.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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