The USJ was supposed to be a controlled environment—a playground of simulated catastrophes. But as we stood in the center of the plaza, the air didn't feel simulated. It felt wrong.
The pressure dropped. It was a sharp, sudden dip that made my inner ear pop.
[Air Attunement: 20.10%]
[Warning: Atmospheric Disturbance Detected]
"Thirteen! Protect the students!" Aizawa's voice sliced through the air, devoid of its usual lethargy.
In the center of the plaza, a swirl of purple-and-black mist began to unfurl. It wasn't smoke, and it wasn't a gas. It felt like a tear in the fabric of the space itself—a vacuum that was trying to swallow the light.
"Is this part of the training?" Kaminari asked, his voice shaking.
"No," I said, stepping forward. I felt the earth beneath the plaza tiles. It was vibrating with the footfalls of dozens—no, hundreds—of people. "The weight is too high. There are over seventy signatures emerging from that rift."
The "League of Villains" stepped out. At their head was a man covered in severed hands, and beside him, a mountain of black flesh with an exposed brain: the Nomu.
"Thirteen, Aizawa, get them out of here!" Vlad King roared, stepping in front of Class 1-B. "Takeda, Kendo, lead the retreat to the exit!"
But we weren't going anywhere. Before we could turn, the mist—the villain known as Kurogiri—spiraled upward, appearing instantly between us and the heavy reinforced doors.
"I'm afraid I cannot allow that," the mist hissed. "We are the League of Villains. And we have come to see the Symbol of Peace breathe his last."
"Scatter!" Kendo yelled, but it was too late.
The mist exploded outward, a dark vortex of warping space that swallowed both classes.
The Downpour Zone
I hit the ground hard, my boots skidding across wet concrete. I wasn't at the entrance anymore.
The sky above was a fake, swirling grey. Rain lashed down in sheets, blurring my vision. This was the Downpour Zone—a simulated city district caught in a permanent tropical storm.
"Is everyone okay?" a voice called out through the rain.
I wiped the water from my eyes. I wasn't alone. Standing nearby were Itsuka Kendo and Shihai Kuroiro (the boy from 1-B who could merge with shadows). But we weren't the only ones here. From Class 1-A, we had Fumikage Tokoyami and Koji Koda.
"We're separated," Tokoyami muttered, Dark Shadow flickering around him, agitated by the gloom. "The mist... it was a warp quirk. We've been dispersed throughout the facility."
"We have bigger problems," I said, dropping into a low stance.
From the shadows of the flooded buildings, villains began to emerge. These weren't the "elite" we had seen in the plaza. These were street-level thugs—men with jagged blades for fingers, a woman with a water-pressure quirk, and a brute whose skin looked like wet scales.
"Look at the kids!" the scale-man laughed, splashing through the six-inch deep water. "Easy pickings. Let's finish them before the boss calls us back."
"Kendo, take the left," I commanded. My voice was cold, matching the rain. "Tokoyami, use Dark Shadow for aerial coverage. Kuroiro, find a shadow and stay out of sight until I give the signal."
"Who put you in charge?" Tokoyami asked, though he was already summoning his shadow.
"Physics did," I replied.
I closed my eyes, letting the "Downpour" wash over my senses.
[Water Attunement: 6.20%] [Environmental Synergy: High]
In the forest simulation, I had "bossed" the water around. I had used Air and Earth to force it to move. But Vlad King's words—and the freezing pond—had changed my perspective.
Stop fighting the cold. Join the flow.
The scale-man lunged at me, his fist aimed at my throat. I didn't move my feet. I didn't even use Rooted Stance.
I just breathed.
As his fist came within inches of my face, I reached out and touched the rain. I didn't "displace" it. I moved the thermal energy.
[Technique: Phase Shift - Flash Freeze]
The rain falling between me and the villain didn't just turn to ice. It formed a jagged, razor-sharp lattice in mid-air. The scale-man's fist slammed into a wall of crystalline spikes that hadn't been there a millisecond ago.
"Gah!" he shrieked, pulling back his bloodied hand.
I didn't stop. I stepped into his space, my hands moving in the fluid, circular motions of Ba Gua. But this time, the water followed me.
Because I wasn't fighting the rain, it became an extension of my arms. I swung my hand in a wide arc, and the sheets of water falling from the sky gathered into a heavy, liquid whip.
I didn't use Air to hold it. I used the surface tension of the water itself, reinforced by a tiny, high-frequency vibration from my Earth Attunement.
The water-whip hit the scale-man with the force of a falling tree. The weight of the liquid, focused into a narrow line, sent him flying backward into a brick wall.
"He... he's controlling the rain?" Koda stammered, watching as I dismantled two more villains with nothing but the environment.
"No," Kendo said, her hands growing to the size of boulders as she swatted a knife-user aside. "He's just part of it."
The battle in the Downpour Zone was a massacre, but not the kind the villains expected.
Between Tokoyami's Dark Shadow and Kendo's brute strength, the thugs were being pushed back. But I was the one they were afraid of. Every time they tried to group up, I'd shift the thermal energy of the flooded street.
I'd freeze the water under their feet to make them slip, then instantly boil it into a blinding cloud of steam.
[Fire Attunement: 3.80% -> 4.10%]
[Thermal Conductance Leveling Up...]
I was feeling it now—the "Flow." The divide between the elements was a lie. The heat I took from the ice went into the steam. The vibration of the earth gave the steam its direction. The air carried it all.
"Takeda! Behind you!" Kuroiro's voice echoed from a shadow.
A villain with a specialized water-gun quirk had emerged from a rooftop. He fired a high-pressure stream of water—enough to cut through steel—directly at my back.
I didn't turn. I didn't need to.
I reached out my hand behind my head.
[Technique: Molecular Anchor]
I didn't block the water. I grabbed the "Physics" of the stream. I matched the frequency of the high-pressure water to the frequency of my own Rooted body.
The jet of water didn't hit me. It wrapped around my arm, its momentum being absorbed and redirected into a spiral. I spun on my heel, using the villain's own pressure against him.
I sent the stream back up at the rooftop, but I added a Phase Shift.
The water left my hand as a liquid, but halfway to the roof, I stripped its heat. It hit the villain as a solid block of ice the size of a cannonball.
BOOM.
The rooftop edge shattered. The villain was gone.
Silence fell over the Downpour Zone. The remaining thugs looked at each other, then at the fourteen-year-old boy whose clothes were bone-dry despite the torrential rain.
(I was using a thin layer of high-pressure air to keep the water from touching my skin—a trick I'd picked up from Genji's "no-breath" training).
"Monster..." one of the villains whispered.
"I'm not a monster," I said, stepping toward them. "I'm just a student. And you're trespassing."
The Plaza: The Final Stand
"We need to get to the plaza," I said, turning to Kendo and Tokoyami. "The heavy hitters are there. Aizawa and Vlad King are fighting alone."
"But the mist villain is blocking the way!" Tokoyami argued.
"He's not a mist," I said, looking toward the center of the USJ. "He's a gateway. And gateways have hinges."
We sprinted toward the central plaza. As we emerged from the Downpour Zone, the scene was horrific.
Aizawa was on the ground, his arms broken, his face pinned into the dirt by the Nomu. Vlad King was fighting off a dozen villains at once, his blood-quirk creating a red perimeter around the remaining students.
Midoriya, Asui, and Mineta were in the water, watching in terror as Shigaraki—the hand-man—approached Aizawa to finish him.
"Kurogiri!" Shigaraki rasped. "Clear the way. All Might isn't coming. Let's kill these brats and leave."
The mist villain began to swirl around the plaza, preparing to warp the students away to their deaths.
I didn't look at Shigaraki. I didn't look at the Nomu.
I looked at the Mist.
[The Great Flow: Final Analysis]
[Target: Kurogiri (Space/Mist Quirk)]
[Weakness: Physical Core / Thermal Displacement]
"Kendo! Throw me!" I yelled.
"What?!"
"Throw me at the mist! Use everything you've got!"
Kendo didn't hesitate. She grew her hands to their maximum size, scooped me up, and with a roar of effort, launched me like a human javelin toward the swirling black vortex that was Kurogiri.
I was flying through the air. The villains looked up, confused.
"Another brat?" Shigaraki sneered. "Kurogiri, warp him into the fire zone."
The mist opened a portal in my path.
But I didn't fall through it.
Mid-air, I used Vacuum Pockets to change my trajectory, twisting my body around the portal's edge. I reached into the center of the dark mist.
I didn't look for a person. I looked for the Heat.
Kurogiri's mist felt cold—unnaturally so. It was a void of energy. To maintain a portal, he had to be keeping a massive amount of spatial energy in a state of delicate stasis.
I slammed my palms together inside his "body."
[Technique: Thermal Supernova]
I didn't create a fire. I took all the heat I had "stored" from the Downpour Zone—all the thermal energy I had stripped from the villains and the rain—and I dumped it all into one cubic inch of space.
The reaction was violent.
Mist is a gas. And when you heat a gas instantly by several thousand degrees, it expands.
BOOM.
A massive, white shockwave erupted from the center of Kurogiri. The mist didn't just scatter; it was physically blown apart by the internal pressure. A small, brass neck-brace—the physical core of the villain—was sent spinning across the plaza.
"Ugh!" A muffled, human cry came from the vanishing smoke as a thin man in a suit tumbled onto the concrete.
The portals closed. The retreat was cut off.
I landed on the ground in a crouch, my hands smoking, my skin red from the thermal feedback.
Shigaraki froze. He looked at Kurogiri—his only way out—lying defeated on the ground. Then he looked at me.
"You..." Shigaraki hissed, his fingers twitching. "You're not on the list. Who are you? What Quirk is that?!"
"I have a minor Quirk, Shigaraki," I said, standing up. My legs were shaking, but the Earth was beneath me, and it was steady. "Im this good because I have a very good understanding of the Flow."
Then, the doors of the USJ blew off their hinges.
"I AM HERE!"
All Might had arrived.
But for the first time in his life, he wasn't the only one who had saved the day.