Chapter Text
The patrol had been quiet. Too quiet. Katsuki Bakugo’s instincts, honed by relentless training and Deku’s paranoid mutter-strategies, were buzzing. He flew a grid pattern, eyes sharp on the streets below.
“Report,” he barked into his comms.
“All clear on the southern sector, Kacchan,” Deku’s voice came back, calm but with that familiar undercurrent of focus. “But… the pedestrian flow on Main and 5th is lighter than the traffic cams predicted for this time. It’s a minor deviation, but…”
“But it’s a deviation,” Katsuki finished, scowling. The nerd saw patterns in everything. It was annoying. And usually right. “Swing around. We’ll converge on the west end of the textile district. Something feels off.”
“Roger.”
They were two blocks apart when the screaming started.
Not screams of terror. Shrieks of raw, startled pain and confusion. A localized chaos erupted on a small, tree-lined plaza a block ahead of Deku’s position. Katsuki’s HUD zoomed in.
A civilian—a man in his twenties—was writhing on the ground in the center of the plaza. From his body, jagged, spear-like crystals were erupting in wild, uncontrolled bursts, slicing into benches and trees, causing pedestrians to duck and run. A Quirk malfunction. A bad one.
“Deku! Plaza, due east of you! Quirk malfunction, civilian in distress, potential bystander casualties!”
“I see it! Moving in!”
Katsuki watched as the green streak pivoted instantly. Of course. This was Deku’s specialty. A precision rescue, a scared civilian, a contained but volatile threat. It demanded the nerd’s empathy and his surgical control of Blackwhip. Katsuki hovered, scanning.
His comms crackled. “Kacchan, I’m engaging. The civilian appears to be in immense pain, possibly externally triggered. I’m going to extract and stabilize.”
“Fine. I’ll secure the perimeter. Yell if you need a blast.”
He dropped lower, eyes not on Deku’s efficient, whirling form as he dodged crystal shards and extended tendrils of Blackwhip, but on the surrounding rooftops. Something still felt… off.
A flicker of movement. A slender figure on a rooftop two blocks over, near the silent, hulking mass of the old textile yard. Hands raised, fingers moving in precise, rhythmic gestures. Not towards the plaza.
Towards him.
The sound hit Katsuki not as a wave, but as a spike driven directly into his inner ear.
It was a frequency beyond hearing, a pressure that violently disrupted his equilibrium. The world spun on a nauseating axis. He tumbled from the sky, catching himself with a wild, off-balance explosion that scorched the sidewalk.
Sonic Quirk. Precision targeting. They weren’t after the nerd in the plaza. The plaza was the distraction.
He rolled to his feet, head pounding, vision swimming. “Deku! It’s a trap! The plaza is a–”
His comms emitted a piercing, digital shriek before dying to static. Jammed. With a frustrated growl, he ripped the device out of his ear, letting it hang uselessly from his headpiece.
The slender villain dropped from the roof, landing lightly. A mountain of a man followed, landing with a ground-shaking thud that spoke of immense density. They didn’t speak. They advanced with chilling coordination.
Katsuki’s mind, fogged by the disorienting sonic attack, clicked into a cold, brutal clarity. What’s their plan? Lure the nerd away with a rescue… isolate me. But why?
Rage, clean and bright, burned through the vertigo. They thought they could take him?
Katsuki scoffed, and didn’t wait around to find out. He exploded forward, not at the sonic villain, but at the giant—the obvious close-quarters threat. A right hook aimed for the jaw, packed with the force of a close-range explosion, strong enough to shatter concrete.
The giant didn’t dodge. He took it head-on.
The impact was wrong. It wasn’t a crunch. It was a thud, deep and resonant, like hitting the trunk of a centuries-old oak. The force dissipated across the man’s shoulders and chest. His head barely snapped back.
Shock absorption… or density manipulation.
Before Katsuki could recoil, the sonic frequency shifted. It became a thick, oppressive blanket of sub-audible sound, pressing down on him, slowing his movements as if he were underwater. The giant’s hand, slow but utterly unstoppable, closed around his right wrist.
Katsuki snarled and detonated a point-blank blast in his palm. Fire and heat washed over the giant’s arm. To Katsuki’s horror, the grip only tightened, unfazed.
He’s got to have a weak spot.
From the corner of his eye, Katsuki saw a woman step out from the shadows of an alley. She moved with an unnerving grace, her eyes locked on his. She raised a hand, fingers aimed like a scalpel.
He knew that look. Analysis. Targeting. He jerked his body, using the giant’s hold as a pivot point, and kicked off the man’s chest, aiming a blast at the woman before she could carry out her plan. The sonic waves twisted, deflecting the explosion upwards, dissipating into nothingness in the sky.
But he’d moved. Her shot missed.
He was buying milliseconds. Thinking. The sonic guy was the conductor. The giant was the cage. The woman was the finisher. He had to break out somehow.
He stopped fighting the giant’s grip. Instead, he let himself be pulled in, and headbutted the man square in the face. No explosion, just pure, reinforced kinetic force. The giant’s nose flattened with a wet crunch. He roared, finally showing pain.
The grip loosened. Katsuki wrenched his arm free, skin tearing against rough, stone-like skin. He was turning, palm glowing for a long-distance AP shot aimed at the sonic villain, when the woman’s fingers finally brushed the back of his exposed neck.
It wasn’t pain.
It was a total, silent system failure.
The world didn’t go dark. It went… null. The brilliant, constant internal map of his own muscles, joints, and tendons—the proprioception that made him a master of aerial combat—was simply erased. His left leg buckled. His right arm, primed to fire, swung wildly off-target, the blast harmlessly lighting up the sky.
Katsuki collapsed to his knees, body a foreign, unresponsive object. He was still conscious, still raging, but trapped in a prison of uncoordinated flesh. He saw the giant’s bloodied face loom over him, felt the cold clamp of a heavy-duty suppressor cuff around his neck, silencing the popping on his palms. Then, a second one on his wrist.
Ah… fuck.
He dazedly watched the green lightning in the plaza two blocks away, still dancing, still trying to save a man who didn’t need saving.
Idiot… he thought, with a fury that wasn’t for the other. Don’t you dare come after me.
Izuku had the civilian wrapped in a cocoon of Blackwhip, insulating him from his own runaway Quirk. The crystals had stopped growing. The man was sobbing, incoherent.
“It’s okay, you’re safe, I’ve got you,” Izuku said, his voice steady even as Danger Sense pricked faintly at the base of his skull. Something was wrong. The malfunction had spiked too suddenly. The man’s vitals, read by a support-item gifted to him by Hatsume, showed extreme stress, but not the neurological cascade of a typical loss-of-control case.
“Kacchan, the civilian is secure but the cause is suspicious.”
Static.
“Do you copy? Kacchan?”
The prick of Danger Sense became a jolt. Not for him.
He looked up towards the textile yard just in time to see a familiar orange blast light up the sky—wild, off-target. A miss. Kacchan never missed.
Then, nothing.
The civilian in his tendrils went limp, sobs ceasing. Izuku lowered him gently. The man’s eyes were clear now. Empty. An actor.
It was all a stage. And he’d played his part.
Cold dread washed through him, followed by a wave of incandescent green energy.
45%.
He didn’t think. He moved, a sonic boom of pure speed tearing across the two blocks. He arrived in time to see the massive villain sling Katsuki’s inert form over a shoulder. The explosive hero was muzzled, cuffed, but his eyes were open. Burning with a silent, volcanic rage.
Who were these villains, that they were able to capture Kacchan so easily?
“Give him back,” The hero said, his voice low, crackling with power. The air around him warped with green lightning. “Who do you work for?”
The slender villain—the sonic manipulator—flicked his hands. A wall of concussive sound hit Izuku, not to harm, but to halt. It was like running into a rubber wall. He skidded back, feet tearing grooves in the asphalt.
The giant began to move away, carrying Kacchan.
Izuku’s mind, usually a whirlwind of analysis, was a single, focused point. Save Kacchan. He feinted left, then used a burst of Fa Jin to zig-zag right, Blackwhip lashing out not at the villains, but at the fire escape of a nearby building, yanking himself on a chaotic, unpredictable path overhead.
He was above the giant, diving, a green meteor aimed to break his grip.
The sonic villain knew what he was doing. The frequency changed, becoming a high-pitched shriek that disoriented. Izuku winced and quickly wrapped an insulating layer of Blackwhip over his ears, but pushed through.
He was an aerial meter away from tackling the giant when the woman’s hand rose. She didn’t aim at his body, but placed her hands directly on Katsuki’s dangling, unresponsive arm. Then, looking directly at Izuku, her fingers on Katsuki’s skin twitched. The body, slung over the giant’s shoulder, suddenly convulsed violently, like the jerking of a puppet, back arched in a painful-looking spasm.
The sight of Kacchan’s body being used, violated as a prop, hit Izuku with a psychological shockwave more effective than any sonic blast. He faltered. For a fraction of a second, his dive stuttered, focus shattered by the instinct of protective fury and horror. In that moment, his target shifted, and he raised a fist to land a punch on the woman touching Kacchan.
It was the opening the giant needed.
The giant didn’t try to hit the fastest, strongest student at UA. He didn’t have to. With the singular most important asset he had that Izuku, in that moment of rage, forgot to account for: the body he was holding. With not a grunt of effort, the giant swung Kacchan’s limp, twitching form into Izuku’s path.
Izuku’s eyes flew wide. His fist, charged with 30% of One for All, was already in motion, aimed where the woman’s head had been. Now, Dynamight’s torso was in its place. He had a nanosecond to choose: strike through, potentially shattering the boy’s ribs, or abort.
It was hardly a difficult decision.
With a shout, he diverted the force. The green lightning flared wildly as he discharged the energy upwards in a harmless, skyward blast that shook the buildings around them. He was vulnerable for half a second as he scrambled to catch Kacchan’s body.
Half a second was all they needed. The woman took a single, smooth step forward—closing the gap. Her hand hovered centimeters from his skin, and the world dissolved.
It was a neural hijack, but not of his muscles. It was a targeted assault on his occipital lobe and vestibular system. His vision fragmented into blinding, swirling static. His sense of up and down inverted. He was falling, but also spinning, but also perfectly still. He tumbled to the ground, taking Kacchan’s body with him.
Izuku heard footsteps approaching. In a panic, he forced Blackwhip to erupt blindly from his back and released a cloud of purple fog with a hisssss. A tendril connected with something—cloth, an arm. He pulled with all his might.
He heard a grunt. The woman. He had her.
He tried to reel her in, to grab her, to stop the onslaught. But his body wouldn’t obey coherent commands. He was still blind, still spinning.
Her hand found his forehead. A touch, gentle as a mother’s.
“Sleep,” she commanded.
This time, the command was total. Not just his vision or balance. It was the quiet, final flip of a master switch in his brainstem. Conscious thought ceased. One For All’s lightning guttered and died.
The last thing he was aware of was the feeling of being lifted, and the faint, familiar scent of nitroglycerin and sweat from the form draped beside him.
Then, nothing.
Sorry, Kacchan.