The corridor on the second floor was twenty meters long, both ends visible from the midpoint, and Yami was at the midpoint when the stairwell door at the north end came off its hinges.
Not opened. Off its hinges. The door hit the opposite wall, slid down it, and came to rest against the baseboard with the casual authority of a thing that had not been consulted about the decision to remove it from its frame.
Bakugo walked through.
In the monitoring room, Yami knew, All Might was watching. Twenty other students were watching. Aizawa was probably watching with the specific quality of attention that had been a fixture of Yami's life since the Apprehension Test.
Bakugo looked at him and the expression was not what it would be on screen. It was closer — more specific, less animated, the contempt present but not the only thing present. There was an assessment quality underneath it, the active processing of a person who had been in enough fights to begin gathering information before the first exchange.
"Resurrection quirk," Bakugo said. His voice echoed in the corridor. "And you're standing on the second floor blocking a hallway."
"I am," Yami confirmed.
"Trying to give Glasses enough time to do something upstairs."
"Yes."
Bakugo looked at him for one more second with the expression of someone verifying a calculation. Then he raised his right hand and fired.
The blast came from the right palm — exactly where it always came from, exactly the angle the anime had shown in every first-engagement clip Yami had accumulated across two years of watching on a laptop in Osaka. He moved left. The explosion hit the wall where he'd been standing and left a scorch mark the size of a dinner table, and Yami was already moving into the counter — he'd mapped the follow-up, the upward palm strike that came after the opening blast when the target moved, the trajectory that the right arm naturally fell into after the full extension and retraction sequence.
His elbow connected with Bakugo's forearm guard on the upswing.
Not a winning hit. A redirect — he'd gotten the contact point right and the timing close enough that the upward blast went into the ceiling rather than his face, and the plaster rained down between them, and for a fraction of a second Bakugo's eyes were the specific width of a person who has had something happen that they did not anticipate.
"The hell do you know my moves, extra?"
The question had fury in it and something else, something more focused and less comfortable than fury.
"Second swing goes high when the first one misses left," Yami said. "You demonstrate it every time you practice."
That was the cover story, deployed in real time. It was plausible — barely. Bakugo's jaw tightened.
Then the patterns stopped working.
The ninety-second window was not approximate. It was specific — at one minute and thirty-two seconds, Bakugo stopped attacking in recognizable sequences and started attacking in the way that Yami understood, intellectually, that real fighters fought: not in patterns at all, but in responses, each action generated from the current state rather than from a rehearsed chain. The blast angles became unpredictable because they were no longer optimal — they were varied, deliberately, the way a smart opponent varied things when they'd identified that their opponent was reading predictability.
Yami had expected adaptation. He had not expected it to be this fast.
The problem with knowing someone's fighting style from an animated series was that the anime had smoothed the person into legibility. It had selected for the moments that communicated character. Bakugo's actual fighting style, in a real corridor at real speed against a real target that was responding, contained everything the anime had shown and several things it hadn't, including the way his propulsion explosions changed the geometry of the space in three dimensions, the way he used the narrow corridor as a tool rather than a constraint, the way he tracked Yami's eyes rather than his hands.
The gauntlet shot came from an angle Yami hadn't pre-mapped and hit him in the left shoulder and the force of it went through the impact padding and through the shoulder and expressed itself as a pressure wave that his body absorbed mostly through the wall behind him.
The wall did not enjoy this process.
He went through it.
Plaster. Dust. The structural support of the next room rushing at him. He got an arm up in time to soften the contact, OFA flickering at three percent through the forearm on instinct — not strategy, just the body reaching for whatever leverage existed — and landed in what had been a simulation of a storage room, surrounded by training props and broken wall material, with his ears ringing slightly from the impact and his left shoulder running a detailed report on the experience it had just had.
Functional, he assessed. Bruised. Not broken.
He got up.
Bakugo was at the hole in the wall, not through it yet, and the pause was the pause of someone recalibrating. The person who'd just been hit through a wall was standing up in the time it took to finish the motion of breaking through it, and that was either an impressive display of resilience or — Bakugo's eyes had the sharpened quality of someone adding data points — evidence of something.
"Your quirk," Bakugo said. Not as an attack. As a question that hadn't decided yet whether it was going to be spoken aloud.
"Doesn't turn off," Yami said. "You'd have to kill me to stop me showing up."
The words landed in the corridor between them and did what he'd intended them to do, which was reframe the engagement without explaining anything. Bakugo crossed the threshold.
The next four minutes were Yami losing continuously and with full awareness of what he was doing.
He wasn't fighting to win. He was fighting to cost time — to make every meter of the building expensive, to put himself between Bakugo's movement and the upper floors in enough sequential positions that the stairwell access became a series of problems rather than a clear path. He absorbed two more impacts that would have floored a normal person and got up from both of them, because OFA at three percent meant his body absorbed force better than it should and because the impact padding was doing its designed job, and because the pain was loud and specific and manageable in the way that pain he'd chosen was always more manageable than pain that arrived without invitation.
"Villain team has secured the weapon. Trial over."
All Might's voice, through the speakers. Uraraka had gotten past Iida.
Bakugo stopped. Stood in the corridor above Yami, who was currently on one knee with his left hand braced against the floor and his right shoulder communicating its opinions loudly. The explosion-user looked down at him with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously, and none of them were the uncomplicated contempt from the opening of the fight.
"You're not strong enough to have gotten up that many times," Bakugo said.
"Here I am though," Yami said.
Bakugo left. He didn't say anything else.
The monitoring room debrief happened back in the main classroom, class assembled in rows, All Might standing at the front with the tactical footage still accessible on a tablet in his enormous hands. He went through each team in order.
Iida's defense: thorough analysis, commendation for structural setup, noted the weakness Uraraka had found in the coverage.
Uraraka's approach: identified the adaptive routing that had bypassed Iida's primary line.
Bakugo: All Might's voice carried something between admiration and careful phrasing. "Raw power appropriately deployed. Tactical adaptation under novel circumstances — notable." A pause. "However. A fighter who relies on overwhelming force to bypass problems rather than solve them will encounter problems force can't bypass."
Bakugo's expression from three rows up was the expression of a person who considered this deeply wrong and was in the process of deciding how to be wrong about it quietly.
Yami's entry came last.
"Ichigo," All Might said. "Your team lost. Your position was ultimately held at the cost of allowing the primary objective to be taken. However." He paused. "Tactical engagement sustained against a power-class opponent at significant disadvantage, over a period sufficient to materially affect the battle's timeline, using evasion and environmental positioning rather than direct power comparison. That is intelligent heroics." Another pause, smaller. "Despite power disadvantage—"
The pen Bakugo was holding snapped cleanly in two.
No one commented on this.
In the locker room afterward, Yami peeled the costume off his left shoulder and looked at the four palm-print-shaped bruises developing across his upper body in the amber-brown of impacts that had gone through the padding. He pressed the worst one experimentally and his body confirmed: bruised, functional, approximately two to three days until the coloring peaked.
Four bruises, he thought. Traded for three minutes of real information about how Bakugo Katsuki actually fights.
He put the exchange in the column labeled worth it and started getting changed.
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