Shards of My Heart

by AnoiasLadle

Summary:

My Parahuman Academia…whether you've read one or both, here's a story for you!

With All for One and Shigaraki finally defeated, things at U.A. are gradually returning to normal. Izuku and Katsuki are finally faced with how to approach their feelings in a period of peace, when Class 2A's training exercise gets some surprise guests.

Meanwhile, Victoria and Lisa's group travel through Shardspace to visit Earth Aleph only for their journey to receive an unlikely detour to an earth they've never visited. Trapped in a strange universe with new mysteries, new heroes, and new kids to wrangle, they can never catch a break.

In a recovering Mustafu, worlds collide: Worm, Ward, whoops!

Notes:

Hello everyone.

This work is based on the worlds created by Wildbow and Horikoshi. I highly recommend checking out their original works.

This piece will be updated weekly, hopefully on Tuesday and Sunday evenings EST (when I can). Thank you so much for taking the time to read this story!
~AnoiasLadle

Chapter 1: Izuku

Slowly, Izuku’s heart settled into a normal rhythm. For too long each increasingly protracted period of calm had been punctuated by ever more dire cataclysms. Now, even the assurance that All for One and Shigaraki were finally gone couldn't completely quell the ghosts of panic haunting his nerves. And then there was the absence of the literal ghosts–the void left by the previous wielders of One for All who remained mysteriously silent. He couldn't shake the feeling that soon the next obstacle would appear or the next calamity would erupt. Things just couldn't be this easy, could they? 

But for now, somehow they were. In newly mended costumes, Class 1A attended class today for the first time since the final fight against All for One. Many of the parents had protested, Izuku knew his mom sure had, saying that the kids needed more time to recover. Some of the parents had threatened to pull their kids out of U.A., spurring another round of home visits with Mr. Aizawa and Present Mic while All Might recovered in the hospital. Still, they must have been pretty persuasive because in the end everyone was back, except for Mineta who had opted to resign from the hero course. Although he wouldn't have admitted it to anyone, Izuku was a little bit glad to see him go. 

The scars of the recent past, both physical and mental, would stay with them all for a long time, maybe forever. They were damaged. None of them were exactly the bright-eyed students who had first walked through these doors, but they were renewed with purpose and united in joint friendship. Together they knew they could do anything now. Because they already had. 

So the parents were probably were right about the students needing more time, but after the hospital and then two weeks of lazing around, playing board games with his mom and visiting friends in the hospital, Izuku was ready to return to U.A. He needed to keep on training if he was going to be the world's greatest hero, and although this month had been healing, he'd also mourned each passing second that delayed him from his dream. This was where he belonged: on the training grounds going through the paces of a rescue exercise in the U.S.J. The teachers were currently watching from afar, so they had space to horse around. He appreciated the thought, and it felt so good to stretch his limbs and think through the puzzles of teamwork and combat, and, if he was being completely honest, to simp over Kacchan. 

He’d said ‘I love you’ to Kacchan in the battle. It had just slipped out. Kacchan had called himself Izuku’s pet name to the lord of evil, oh, and had also sacrificed himself to save Izuku at least twice. They hadn’t talked about any of that, but it had to mean something. 

Could they officially be together by now if both of them hadn’t been rushed off to the hospital for intensive care? But maybe Kacchan’s intensity and that connection he’d felt had just been the heightened emotions of battle. Maybe he was reading too much into it, imposing his own dreams on any interpretation. 

Still, they’d been texting nonstop since he and Kacchan could hold a phone again, and the texts had been warm: warmer and more candid than Izuku had hoped. The two of them hadn’t really been able to connect much after that aside from a couple walks. Once, Izuku could have sworn Kacchan was about to kiss him, but turned away at the last moment, complaining about stitches that Recovery Girl hadn’t been able to remove yet. It left Izuku full of tantalizing questions and frustratingly few answers. He burned to pester Kacchan but didn’t know if it was a good time and didn’t want to be annoying or ruin whatever it was they had. He and Kacchan had almost died so many times; it was a miracle that either of them had survived to even think of the future. When was too soon to bring up all of the feelings buzzing around him?

Still when Kacchan helped him up after a nasty tumble earlier today, they’d remained holding hands much longer than necessary and when Izuku stared into Kacchan’s face he saw nothing but calm and maybe was that a blush? The moment was quickly marred when Kaminari got too close. Izuku quietly waited for another moment.

It was low-key and nostalgic, the way that they ran around laughing and half heartedly trying to save mannequins with creative uses of their quirks, more like a game than anything. Shinso had joined them for this exercise and Izuku knew they all hoped he would be enrolling permanently in Class A when they officially began year two at the end of the week. Japan was still putting itself back together, but of course that meant that heroes were needed more than ever. There would probably be little rest in the future, so they should probably make the most of this. 

After the chaos of the battlefield and helping with the destruction after Gigantomachia’s rampage, these rescues were nothing. They moved around in a pack by unspoken consent. Even Kacchan and Aoyama stayed with the group for once. 

Aoyama. That was a bit of a puzzle. Izuku was glad that he was there, but it seemed a fragile sort of truce. Nobody had the infrastructure right now to adequately address the huge influx of cases into the criminal justice system. Although Aoyama had been a hero in the big battle, Izuku knew that there would be some sort of consequences for his betrayal. As far as Izuku knew, Aoyama’s parents might still be in prison. For the time being though, he was allowed to stay in the class. 

At least they knew how to work together. Sato and Tokoyami worked together to carry mannequins out of the way of a fire in the Conflagration Zone, Tokoyami’s Dark Shadow quailing from the flames before Todoroki’s ice extinguished them. Yaoyorozu unfurled another specially treated emergency rope ladder, while downing a squashed onigiri. Shinso helped Sero use his tape and a couple sticks to make an impromptu stretcher, facilitating the ‘rescues’. Tsuyu and Shoji pulled off a couple of water rescues in the Flood Zone, effortlessly swimming out and hauling the mannequins onto Todoroki’s ice bridge. While Hagakure, Koda, Jiro, Aoyama, and Kaminari worked together to scout the Downpour Zone, Yaoyorozu and Tenya shored up damaged supports with materials from Creation. Kacchan blasted any falling debris to rubble and Izuku braced structures with Blackwhip. 

They approached the Landslide Zone, fanning out to tackle different obstacles, while still staying close enough to cheer each other on. Uraraka and Izuku ended up falling into step, working in easy teamwork. He launched her weightless self toward pieces of debris and used a tendril of Blackwhip to send the weightless boulders skyward. 

“Your quirk makes this almost too easy.” Izuku told her with a grin, after they removed a particularly difficult Jenga stack of rocks pinning a couple of mannequins to the rocky slopes. 

“Thanks.” Uraraka said, her eyes hooded with exhaustion, though a small smile flickered across her lips. She tented her fingers and closed her eyes, “Release.”

Where had their old banter gone?

Izuku didn’t know exactly what happened at the Gunga Villa site, but somehow Toga had wound up dead and Uraraka refused to talk about it. She’d been thinking a lot about Toga before the battle and while Toga’s confession had caught Izuku off-guard on Okuto Island, that had been before Sad Man’s Parade and the sea of clones. Seeing Uraraka smile, even briefly, was a small ray of hope: a sign that things could get better. 

Below them, Kirishima clapped and whistled as Ashido melted an escape tunnel through the site of a cave-in so that Tsuyu could use her tongue to extract the three dummies trapped inside. 

“Why does it have to be so hard? I suck at this rescue stuff!” Kaminari whined from a nearby ridge.

“But you make a great phone charger.” Todoroki deadpanned. “That might be helpful in a real rescue.” Izuku smiled. 

“Those are the last ones here!” Iida shouted, “Get situated everyone and let’s efficiently move on to the Ruins Zone!”

Everyone was in a good enough mood that no one bothered to tease Iida for his punctiliousness. As they moved on to the miniature city offering simulations of urban rescues, Izuku felt his cheeks hurting from the power of his grin. He’d missed this, all of them working together. There was nobody getting hurt. Nobody was at risk of dying: they were just learning together and appreciating the payoff from their first year of study. 

It really was too perfect. 

Chapter 2: Victoria

If someone had told teenage Victoria that she would be traveling through the space between dimensions to visit Taylor Hebert, the notorious villain from the Undersiders who had forced spiders down her throat, she would have laughed in their face. If they’d told her she would willingly be visiting while arm and arm with Tattletale, she probably would have laughed in their face before suplexing them into a wall. 

If someone had told a post-Gold Morning Victoria, she would have flown the fuck out of there after the Wretch tore off their arm. Sure it was better than facing…a certain person, but still. Even now, it wasn’t exactly a prospect that gave her the Engel warm-and-fuzzies. 

But Lisa had asked and Lisa rarely, seriously, asked for anything. 

So here they were, just a few scant months after the Infallible finally succeeded in rooting out the Machine Army, making interdimensional travel possible again without the threat of seeding other dimensions with self-replicating machine seeds. Lisa had wanted to slip through a portal unnoticed, but Victoria had insisted on going through the proper channels and somehow they’d received permission for this: a ragtag group of capes visiting Khepri of all people. Sure, Victoria knew that Taylor technically wasn’t a threat after Contessa’s bullets, but it still felt like an unnecessary risk. Why kick the hornet’s nest when the buzzing had finally died down?

Navigating the Shardspace was the least of her problems for once. Things had really calmed down in here once the cracks stabilized. Still, she tried not to look too closely at any of the crystal faces around her and instead focus on following Lisa’s directions. 

She flipped her perspective and started sliding down the crystalline slope in front of her, the others lagging behind. She always forgot that they had more trouble in this space, particularly Aiden and Kenzie with their shorter legs. It was a small group: just seven of them. 

Nobody else had wanted to come. 

Lisa was here for Taylor. Victoria was here for Lisa. Kenzie and Aiden wanted to go anywhere the two of them went, and Weld and Sveta were there to sightsee, to add another earth to their travels—as friends this time. Neither of them were particularly warm to Taylor either. As for Dennis, he probably had his own reasons for wanting to come. 

“Hey.” Sveta said as she caught up to Victoria, her tendrils rippling nervously, but not quite pulling free. The way that Shardspace deadened powers was disorienting. 

Victoria grabbed Sveta’s hand and gave it a reassuring little waggle, like she used to before Sveta got her new body. Gone were the days when her clunky prosthetic body would send her crashing into Victoria. Now Sveta moved with grace, finally looking comfortable in herself and rocking a vibrantly printed sundress over rugged leggings, the colors augmenting the striking blues, greens, and oranges of her new tattoos.

When Victoria looked over her shoulder, the others were a good distance behind them. It looked like Lisa was trying to wrangle the kids. 

“How are you doing?” Victoria asked Sveta, as they navigated a particularly spiky cluster of crystals flashing with images. Victoria looked away.

“Fine, I guess.” Sveta gave a little laugh, “Well, as fine as you can be in this place. I like it better here now, but it’s getting old.”

“Yeah, about that.” Victoria said. “I wanted to check in and make sure that you’re okay coming all this way and not seeing Taylor. I mean, I know you weren’t close, but it’s kind of the purpose of us getting through this, so I wanted to check in.”

Victoria had been doing a lot of checking in lately: checking in on the Majors. Checking in on the Patrol. On districts of the shattered city. On a sulky Damsel. On Carol. 

On Tristian. 

“You know I hurt her really badly once.” Sveta said quietly, and Victoria had to do a mental contortion to remember that they were talking about Taylor, not her mother, “Sliced down to the bone. I didn’t mean to, of course, and I didn’t really know her well at all. She carried me at the Cauldron Base before I, uh…before Doctor Mother…” Sveta paused. “I don’t want all those memories to come back now, not when I’m finally wrangling my past. So yes, I’m fine not seeing her. I just want to see the city again. I’m not even attached to Boston: mostly I just want to see a normal city. I’ve never really experienced just being a person in the crowd and being able to explore without worrying about accidental deaths or being recognized as a monster.” 

Monster. Accidents like the ones that had led Cauldron to drop her in a population center before she could control her tendrils. 

“What about you?” Sveta asked Victoria, raising an eyebrow “How are you feeling about this? It’s not too late to go exploring with me and Weld.” 

Exploring an alternate version of the city with Weld and Sveta would be fun, and Victoria could tell that Sveta would appreciate her presence to shatter some of the awkwardness around the pair, but she couldn’t. “I don’t feel great about it,” Victoria said, honestly, “but it’s something I need to do. It’s another step toward being a better version of myself.” She glanced back, where Lisa was stabbing a finger at Kenzie’s chest, her tone stern but not strong enough to carry, “And of course I want to support Lisa. I think this will be good for her.”

Sveta wrinkled her nose, “I still don’t get what you see in her.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to.”

Sveta shrugged, “All I want is whatever makes you happy, Victoria. I know that you’re good for her and almighty Titans, I hope that she’s good for you.”

“She is. You don’t have to worry. Trust me.”

Victoria waggled Sveta’s hand again before drawing level with Lisa. 

All of them had opted to wear casual clothes instead of costumes, trying to blend into Aleph. Lisa wore a pair of skinny jeans, a flowing black shirt, and dark grey combat boots, hair pulled back into a simple braid. Her eyes stormy. Lisa had finally calmed the kids down and was dry-swallowing a couple of pain relievers. She had the tiny trickle of her power that Shardspace allowed running this whole time to help them find their way. It probably also meant that she’d deduced Sveta’s comments, but none of that would exactly be news. 

Victoria gently touched the fine spray freckles on Lisa’s nose, jolting Lisa back to reality. 

“We there yet?” Victoria asked.

Lisa smiled, the shark-like snarky smile of when she was being clever. Obviously it would be another few hours yet. They couldn’t be close, it would be too easy just to… “Actually, yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes!” Lisa grabbed Victoria’s hand, kissing the fingers gently, before pointing to a formation nearby. The crystals there were dark, but Lisa looked even more excited. Victoria hoped that she wouldn’t be crushed by whatever state they found Taylor in. If Taylor was even alive. 

“This is it!” Lisa said, her bottle-green eyes shining even in the weird half-light. She stomped her feet adorably in her combat boots. 

Victoria gently kissed the faint scar on Lisa’s cheek. It would be okay. Somehow they’d get through this visit, and if Victoria got to do some Aleph shopping in any spare moments, well she wasn’t going to complain.

As Kenzie drew closer, the device clipped to her belt whirred to life and the crack appeared against the crystals. The rest of them gathered, relieved smiles. 

“Thank fuck..” Dennis whined, “I need to pee so bad.”

Victoria laughed again, releasing some of the strain of the long hike.  “Ready everyone?” She asked. 

Together they stepped through the crack and into a city. 

For a moment, Victoria just savored being in a city. The City, still unnamed, on Earth Gimel was becoming a bit more developed everyday, but it was still so achingly new that it didn’t feel quite real. It was too mass-produced, too well planned, and above all, too marinated in the aftermath of Gold Morning and the cracks. Boston though was a real city. Victoria had hungered to see it again from the first moment they started planning. 

But this wasn’t Boston. 

The buildings were all wrong. They were sleek and shiny, yet many had jagged cracks running up them. A few buildings had crumbled completely, littering the shocked streets with lumps of rubble. Glass littered the street like after a Shatterbird attack. Victoria frowned, had there been an earthquake? She could smell traces of smoke, but nothing that seemed immediate. The more she looked, the more details seemed off. And above her, what she’d initially thought was an overcast sky was revealed to be a roof, curving overhead and studded with industrial lights. They were in a gigantic bubble surrounding the whole area, the buildings and streets, the lake Victoria could see glinting in the distance, even some tiny excuses for mountains. 

What the hell? Where were they? This was clearly not a bustling city. 

There were a few people here, standing in a cluster a few hundred feet away. They were talking and some of their voices reached Victoria. That was all fine, she expected that their arrival would cause a stir, except…

Except that her time in the care facility as the Wretch had done nothing but given her time to think and learn. There was only so much cape knowledge even Victoria could glean from the internet, so she’d started soaking up everything she could, including some languages. And one of them was something she was hearing all around her in the frantic murmurs. Japanese. And those signs over the exits were all in kanji.

So much for Lisa’s navigation. Victoria allowed a little bit of her irritation to pulse through, as a treat. 

“Japan?” Victoria shrieked, “Lisa, you brought us to Japan? I thought we were aiming for Boston!”

She’d always wanted to visit Japan, but that wasn’t really feasible after Leviathan sank Kyushu well before Gold Morning decimated the rest. Gimel’s settlements just weren’t the same. This though wasn’t the time for casual sightseeing. 

“Um, Victoria.” Sveta said, but Victoria was too busy glaring at Tattletale. She let go of her hand.

“Is this some sort of joke? We slog all the way through Shardspace to go on vacation?” Victoria said, “I mean I’ve always wanted to go to Japan, you know that, but this was not on the itinerary!”

“Victoria!” Sveta said, louder, her skin parting slightly to release long tentacles, “Something’s wrong.” The kids were babbling by then.

“Yeah, I’d say something’s wrong.” Victoria said, frustration winning over the calm of the Warrior Monk, “We trusted Little Miss Always Right. Now look what happened? Do we get a plane or what? I can fly, but I’m sure not carrying all of you, no offense Weld.”

“None taken.” He said, “But I think we have bigger problems.” 

Victoria squinted. Some of those distant figures wore the unmistakable garish colors of costumes, while others were obviously Case 53’s. “Capes?”

“Sure looks that way.” Weld said. 

Sveta sighed, “Somehow I don’t think this is Earth Aleph.”

Oh, fuck. 

Lisa nodded, “Earth Aleph has some weak capes, but nothing like these. My best guess is that we’re in some new alternate earth that we missed when we catalogued all of them. How did it slip through? This is definitely Japan, but we’re in some sort of fake environment like a training center? And also Glory Girl,” She scowled at Victoria, “I got the coordinates through Shardspace from Dragon. This is not my fucking fault!” 

“They’re yelling something!” Kenzie said, bouncing up and down so that her space buns jiggled, “I don’t understand it but I wish I spoke every language ever! I wish I had more time and all my tools but Victoria wouldn’t let me bring them. Maybe I could reprogram my time camera to photograph the information into my head retroactively!”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Aiden said, while Kenzie stuck her tongue out at him. 

Victoria silently agreed with the little chicken. Tinkers never seemed to make any sense. She listened to the yelled Japanese, “I can’t tell what they’re saying. Do any of you speak Japanese?” Her long-forgotten textbooks had prepared her for politely ordering from restaurants. This was outside her range. 

Everyone else shook their heads. Damn. With all their skills, this suddenly seemed like a glaring omission. 

She looked at Lisa. 

“It’s all garbled bouncing off the walls.” Lisa spat. “And I’m pretty spent already. I wish I had more of my power available, but fuck, my head hurts already. I need more context. I should be able to communicate if they’d just be clear.” 

They all quieted down as a second shout rippled their way. 

“I definitely caught the word ‘you’.” Lisa said. “Sorry, not much to go on.” 

“Figures!” Dennis sighed. “When is your power ever useful when we need it? Oh yeah, it only conveniently works against the Protectorate and to help you cheat at cards!”

“Do you think they caused all this destruction?” Sveta asked, “It looks old, but they definitely have powers.”

“Heroes or villains, what do you think?” Victoria asked, “Or rogues.” She added after a pause. 

“Villains aren’t always so bad.” Lisa said, pouting at Victoria as Dennis fake gagged. He was resembling more and more his old self. 

“We don’t know their powers,” Victoria muttered, “and I don’t recognize them, which makes sense if this is another Earth. There are enough of them that they probably cover a wide range of powers.”

“They’re going to attack!” Lisa said. 

That jolted them. Victoria considered her outfit: she was wearing her Brockton Bay sweatshirt dress from Parian’s company: comfortable, but not the best for fighting in. At least she was wearing shorts underneath so she wouldn’t flash anyone. 

They all set down their bags. Sveta unraveled and removed her bag from within her body, depositing it on the ground.

“So they’re villains?” Dennis asked, “A whole mega cluster of teenage villains? This is the Undersiders all over again, but on steroids!”

Lisa shook her head, “This isn’t right. It shouldn’t be happening. How could there be another earth with powers that we never knew about? They should be located too close to Bet to miss.”

“I don’t know about ‘should’, Li, but it’s happening. That blond one and bird-head sure don’t look very heroic.” Victoria said. She glanced at Weld and Dennis, the other former Wards. “Standard defense formation C5?”

“What does that mean in not Protectorate-speak?” Sveta asked, elbowing Victoria a little too hard in the ribs. Sveta was still getting used to having elbows, so Victoria gave her a pass. 

“Protect the kids, that’s you.” She said, to Aiden and Kenzie’s groans. Not that she exactly expected them to listen, they were full-fledged capes after all and had been through worse, but she had to give at least the semblance of protecting them. As if Aiden didn’t have a prehistoric eagle to protect him and if Kenzie didn’t have a whole load of tinker-tech concealed somewhere, Victoria would wear socks with sandals. “Step two: circle up, let the ranged attack cover us.”

“That’s me I guess?” Dennis asked. “We don’t really have a ranged attack. Where’s Missy when you need her?”

Vista was always helpful, in any situation. 

“And read the situation.” Weld said, “Defend, don’t attack, and try not to hurt them. It’s supposed to be a defensive formation. They look young, so nothing that will cause permanent damage. Try to be gentle.” He assessed the numbers, “Well gentle-ish.” 

“Blah, blah, blah.” Lisa said, giving Victoria a little kiss to take out the bite of her statement, “I’ll let you know what I find out from my power.”

A cry of “Shine!” burst from the other group as a pair of figures sped toward them, achieving impressive speed though they seemed to be powered by explosions and sticky black strings.

“That means die.” Lisa said helpfully. Aiden whimpered. 

Victoria engaged her aura, trying to tune out her group so they wouldn’t be caught in the effect. They had a few moments before the exploding kid reached them. 

“Here they come!” Lisa said. She cracked her knuckles. “We’re in an alien world, we just hiked like five gazillion miles through the Firmament, and I need to pee, but hey there’s only twenty of them. Should be a piece of cake.”

Notes:

Thank you for reading and a special thank you to BigGoodWolf--thank you for letting me infect you with Parahumans and ramble about Shards <3

Chapter 3: Izuku

Notes:

Here's another Izuku---Lisa's first chapter will be up on Tuesday! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy!

A vertical rip in reality blazed in the fake downtown, stirring up dust, the edges of the crack blending into the lights above. Inside Izuku could dimly see a landscape of red and black crystal, filled with flickering images. Seven figures stepped through the portal to stand in the center of the U.S.J.’s Ruins Zone. 

Immediately sweat bloomed, all the tension springing back in an instant to set hooks along his spine. Was this one of Camie’s illusions? How would that get here? Or maybe it was a villain attack, but that couldn’t be right. They were safe. 

It was hard to see through the sifting dust and blazing lights, but these people seemed dressed in normal, casual clothing. Maybe it was a villain attack meant to catch them off guard, but then why bring the showy portal? 

Could they be ‘friends’ of All for One who had come here to seek revenge, at the site of their first interaction with the League? The League had looked similarly relaxed right before they fought. Izuku’s thoughts began to whirl, his breaths coming shallow. The situation was just too creepy, too perfect. Today was a day when their class was alone, without any teachers, and still in the process of healing. If there was any time to strike, it would probably be today. But he didn’t recognize any of these faces. Maybe that was the point, ensure that the students wouldn’t have the advantage of knowing their opponents' quirks. 

All at once, like a switch flipping, the portal shut off, leaving the two groups at opposite ends of the street. 

“Who are you?” Ashido yelled, loud enough that Jiro and Shoji, bedecked in ears, winced. 

The opposing group was still talking amongst themselves and ignoring them, which seemed like a bad sign.

“Let me try again.” Ashido said, before cupping her hands and hollering, “Who are you? Are you here for practice?”

“It has to be part of the setup, right?” Tsuyu said. “With all the extra defenses there’s no way villains would have made their way onto campus. We’re supposed to have sensors to detect intruders, ribbit! I don’t hear any alarms.”

“I agree with Tsuyu.” Koda ventured. They all quieted down to hear him. 

“I don’t think anything’s impossible anymore.” Kirishima said, “The Principal’s smart and he designed this place well, but they said that security’s kinda been more lax lately. I mean, villains have attacked us here before and they’re more focused on getting the academic buildings in shape again.”

“Perhaps it could be part of the scenario…” Iida started, but Shoji shook his head.

“It doesn’t feel right and that’s not a teleportation quirk that we know.” Shoji said, “They aren’t H.U.C.’s. They sure don’t stand like civilians and they’re not in need of rescue. But whether or not it’s part of the scenario we’re probably supposed to engage them, the question is how.” 

They nodded in mutual agreement. 

“Why can’t anything be easy?” Kaminari whined. 

“This was posited as a simple scenario. I know our teachers let chaos occur on occasion, but they’re not cruel.” Yaoyorozu said, then seemed to acknowledge their classmates’ incredulous looks, “I mean usually they aren’t this cruel. Chances are that this is a real emergency. If it is, the teachers probably already know, unless one of the intruder’s quirks messes with electronics. I suppose no one has a phone?”

They all shook their heads. No use risking them getting broken during a simple training session. 

“We should go out there and kill them before they take the fight to us.” Kacchan said. “Get the jump on them and pummel them until they tell us what they’re here for.”

Conversation erupted as half the class tried to talk over the other half. They’d been through too many fights recently. Izuku shuddered as the perfect day crashed and burned into another crisis. Still, he could at least make sure they all got out of this okay.

“What to do?” Iida mused, “We must strategize carefully.”

Still, even if they were villains, there was that little thrill of learning new powers, new dynamics. If he didn’t recognize any of them, that meant that either they were new to the scene or that they weren’t dangerous enough to make a name for themselves yet. That was a good sign: maybe they could take them down easily. They had the numbers advantage after all. And even though many of them were still healing, they had an awful lot of experience for students. But then there was a third option as well. What if they were simply villains who’d been functioning in the underground, villains who preferred to remain anonymous and secret but still had the experience to be dangerous? Their small numbers were a point in favor of that option: an elite hit squad. There seemed to be kids as part of the group, he was pretty sure of that, which didn’t sound like any of the options. Maybe they really were lost civilians, but lost civilians didn’t take battle stances after appearing in a secure area. 

He stopped, noticing a few of his classmates' eyes on him. Oh, he’d been muttering, again. 

“Go on, nerd.” Kacchan said, nudging him, “Speak up.”

Izuku gulped, trying to rein in his thoughts, scattered by the casual contact. “I think…Iida, you should go for help again.” Izuku said, “In case the teachers can’t see. These villains probably know our quirks, even if we don’t know theirs. Todoroki, can you try to immobilize them, maybe with Tsuyu? And Shinso, look for an opening for Brainwashing? I think the rest of us should try to engage, but be careful. Does that sound good?” He asked, looking at Kacchan. 

Kacchan didn’t wait around for everyone’s agreement. 

“Let’s go kill them!” Kacchan roared, firing himself toward the interlopers with one gauntlet. He snagged Izuku’s hand in his free hand and towed him along, forcing Izuku to use Float to avoid dragging his face in the cracked asphalt. 

Although Izuku admired the grace and Kacchan’s easy assurance that Izuku could handle himself, he would have preferred being asked to come along for the ride, instead of being yanked along like a sack of rice. Still it was very gallant and Izuku felt a little bit of excitement that Kacchan had chosen to touch him, crowding out the dread. Over the blood rushing in his ears he barely heard Iida’s plaintive “Get back here! We haven’t finished planning!” 

“Get out of here and go get help, you shiny idiot!” Kacchan yelled back, “We’re depending on you!” He looked forward again, “Now die!”

Izuku clutched Kacchan’s sweaty gauntlet and hoped it wouldn’t detonate. He used Float and Blackwhip to speed up their progress.

As they approached, Izuku felt a sudden wave of fear, sharp as a slap. It roared against his nerves, encouraging him to turn around, but he grit his teeth. He felt Kacchan’s hand tighten briefly in his and then Kacchan growled, “Ready Dek…Izuku?”

“Yeah!” Izuku said, heart fluttering at the utterance of his name, barely wondering what he was supposed to be ready for.

“Be safe, nerd.” Kacchan said, and threw Izuku at the unassuming blond lady whose aura of fear made Izuku want to curl up in a ball. But he’d faced more than a little fear. He could do this. 

He took a deep breath and readied Air Force at 8%.

Chapter 4: Lisa

Notes:

Hello! The next chapter will be out on Sunday. Thank you for reading!

And thank you to BigGoodWolf for teaching me proper formatting <3

She watched in amusement as the angry blond kid threw the little green guy in the bunny outfit straight at Vicky. That kid clearly didn’t know what he was getting himself into. As the rabid blond veered toward Weld, Lisa darted in the other direction and dragged her kids behind a fake bus shelter. 

From the meagre cover, Lisa could see the rest of the horde approaching, although one tall figure in shiny silver armor was beating a retreat. No, not a retreat: he was going to get help. They had people they could rely on for backup nearby, watching through cameras. Cameras. 

Lisa looked up. There: the glinting lenses of several cameras nestled against the roof of the building. She quirked a finger at Aiden. “Hey, Chicken?”

He looked up at her and quit his bitching about being dragged, “Yeah?”

She pointed out the cameras and Aiden’s giant Haast's eagle flew off at his command, presumably to go destroy some tech. Kenzie wouldn’t like that, but it needed to be done. A few pigeons who’d been stuck in the rafters of the building also flew off in pursuit. Hopefully that would buy them some time and they wouldn’t regret the lack of an accessible surveillance network later. 

Eh, if they needed to, Kenzie could kludge something together. 

Kenzie was scrabbling around with some tools that she’d produced from…somewhere. Right, she had those dumb little phone case tools. Lisa watched as Kenzie unearthed one of her godawful eye spikes and started fiddling with it, while Aiden zoned out, focusing on controlling his birds. 

Good, that set a few defensive measures in motion. The phony bus shelter offered some protection, but wouldn’t be enough to conceal them in the long-term. With so many adversaries, the fight would spill over to them eventually, particularly if these capes could count. Lisa felt at her waist for her gun and ended up groping empty air. Oh, right, she had decided that bringing a weapon from another dimension would look bad to the folks in Aleph. Lisa cursed the imbecile that was her past self. 

Okay, no gun. Fine. Not for the first time, she wished that her power was the kind of Combat-Thinker prowess that lent itself to absolutely Contessa-ing her way through a fight. Instead, all she got was a power that overwhelmed her with the information that she was overmatched. She didn’t have a weapon and her power didn’t exactly protect her in a fight. That was fine; she was used to it. Time to play armchair general. 

At least Aiden was getting a chance to be useful. Initially she hadn’t been keen to let Chicken Large come on the trip, but any worries she’d had about losing that gigantic bird were easily quashed now that the animal was coming in useful. Plus, it was good to see the Chicken standing up for himself. 

Her little guy was growing up. 

Now, if only she had thought to arm herself. She still had her backpack, but she had deliberately packed light. Why lug a duffel across dimensions when there were better stores on the other side? She essentially just had snacks and a couple changes of clothes, unless she could brain these teens with her half-empty canteen. With her luck, that would backfire spectacularly. She could potentially make a weapon from the metal and glass littering her surroundings, but she didn’t need a power to know that any weapon made of broken glass would mess her up in the process. 

Lisa nudged Kenzie with a shoe, “Hey Lookout, can you rustle me up a weapon?”

Was it a little fucked-up to ask the twelve year old for a gun? Maybe, but Lisa could deal with fucked-up once they were out of danger.

Kenzie didn’t even look up, “I’m kinda busy! I’ll try and see what I can do, but somebody, I’m not saying who, wouldn’t let me pack all my tools and I don’t have a lot to work with here!” She smacked the ground with a miniature screwdriver, sending up a puff of dust, “And the ground is a terrible place to work! Why can’t you ever have us fight in a place without dirt?” 

She returned to her work muttering to herself. Lisa shook her head and picked up a chunk of brick. It would have to do. Tinkers could be so damn useful, but take away their equipment and they were helpless as anyone unpowered. Of course in her experience of fighting Tinkers, separating them from their gear was not easily achieved. 

Lisa peered around the shelter, surveying the battlefield. Things were starting to heat up. Clockblocker had tried to set up a screen of frozen objects to shield the group, but without the wires on his costume, the spread was haphazard. Instead of the sheets of paper that he would usually use, Clocksie was limited to whatever was in his pockets and backpack: some tangled earbuds, a couple granola bars, some receipts, a couple shirts, a few chunks of asphalt from the nearby cracks, and some smaller things that Lisa couldn’t make out. It wasn’t much, but it did confuse the rival capes, slowing their head-on charge. As she watched, the first of the objects timed out and started to fall, but by then Clockblocker was charging after a boy in a hideous yellow costume, freezing him in place. 

She watched the blond guy shoot another intense explosion from the palm of his hand. Ice grew up around the heroes’ feet, only to be shattered by the Fragile One or Weld. It sprouted again, faster this time, and again was shattered. A rippling vibration ripped through, rattling the buildings and upsetting Sveta’s balance, but otherwise did little harm. Moments later, a boy swiped at Sveta with his hefty tail. A laser shot past, carving a swathe across the ground that Weld had to dodge and evade. More figures were trying to duck around the barrier of frozen objects and approach the group from behind, but Sveta unraveled and blocked their progress, her tendrils twisting in all different directions, grabbing, dragging, and gently restraining people. 

Sadly the teenage combatants did not have the consideration to line themselves up and attack one by one for Lisa’s viewing pleasure. Regardless, Lisa could tell that the first pair seemed to be the real contenders here. Everyone else was good, but those two were in a league of their own, though they weren’t a patch on battling Titans. The angry blond was currently frozen in place, face locked in a snarl. He would thaw soon, but for at least ten seconds he was no threat. 

The kid was around Chastity’s age and wore a sleek mask like he wanted to seem dangerous. Adorable. He created explosions, but how? How well could he control them? Explosive sweat, her power told her, collected from the pores of his palms. His costume was too warm for the weather. He needed to sweat in order for his power to work, which begged the question of how he kept hydrated. Gross. He couldn’t use too much at once or he’d hurt himself. He was being careful in this fight. He was recovering from an injury to his chest and shouldn’t be up fighting. 

Shouldn’t be up fighting? That sounded promising. Lisa pushed a little further, her headache deepening into something more profound. 

Heart problems. Tenacious. Brutal. Never feels good enough. Must win at any cost. 

Snoozefest, were there any potential weaknesses they could use? No matter. Though costumed shapes swarmed over the field, her group seemed to have everything handled over there. 

She focused on Vicky, who was weaving through the air, followed by the green haired boy. Another flyer–Vicky must be enjoying that. Even from a distance, Victoria was radiant in the midst of the fight, something in her coming alive. Lisa knew it was a part of herself that Victoria tried to mask, the keen violent edge inherited from her teenage Glory Hole years, but sometimes it popped out like a sharpened claw. The green haired boy seemed to be holding his own, but doubtless he was getting more than he’d bargained for. Lisa smiled ruefully, whether a smackdown in a bank or a scolding about tidying up, nobody went for the jugular like Victoria Dallon. 

Except perhaps for herself. 

The two of them battled back and forth in the sky. The green haired boy, Midoriya Deku, her power told her, kept trying to ensnare Vicky, but she kept adjusting the shape of her forcefield to break free. He could fly and had the black strings, and by the look of those punches he was some sort of Brute. Super strength, if not superior durability. He must be a grab-bag cape of some sort.

She wanted to push more and learn, but there were too many details floating around and she doubted whether anyone would hear her over the noise. Better to do what she could to protect herself and the kids. She couldn’t risk becoming incapacitated, particularly after using her power so much in the Firmament to navigate. When they escaped, she’d need any remaining spoons to get them back through to Aleph instead of this backwater dimension. Still, there was so much information that she needed and it was her only real tool in this situation. Sometimes she really wished that her power could be slightly more accommodating. 

She sighed. Break time was over: it was time to get back to work. 

While the flashy offensive group was probably drawing a lot of attention with their tendrils and flying and time hijinks and whatever the hell Weld was good for, eventually someone would notice that half of their group was missing from the fray. While the bus shelter was pretty good cover from one side, it left them exposed everywhere else. Unless these teens had the IQ of dirt, and Lisa wasn’t holding her breath on that one, someone would come looking for them. Possibly someone had seen their giant ass eagle fly off and could pinpoint their exact location. 

In hindsight, possibly not her best idea. 

“Yo,” Lisa nudged Kenzie with the toe of her boot, “any progress on that weapon I asked for?”

The girl grunted and didn’t answer. 

Lisa sighed and nudged her a little harder, “It’s been all of two minutes since I last checked in, so I know you have something. Don’t pretend like you don’t hear me. Don’t make me kick dirt over your…” she hesitated. She didn’t know what most of the weird circuit boards and five dimensional camera parts Lookout was working with actually were, “stuff.” She finished. 

It was such a weak threat, but it had the desired effect. 

“Nonononononono!” Kenzie said, all in one breath. “I have made some stuff, but not the weapon yet, okay? I adjusted the eye spike into a camera that can bounce people’s actions through four dimensions so we can see them before they happen–it’s something I had in the works already. I want to work on something to make projections, but I just don’t have the time!”

Lisa ground her teeth, “So basically you made another time camera? Is that really the priority right now?”

“Kenzie’s making good stuff!” Aiden said, “Don’t yell at her.”

“I’m…” Lisa said, then lowered her voice to an approximation of calm, “I’m not yelling at her, Chicken, I’m just emphasizing that sometimes we need to get our priorities straight. Like sometimes in a dangerous situation we need tools to actually get ourselves out of that situation.”

“She is though.” Aiden said with perfect sincerity, to a backdrop of shouts, screams, metallic clanking, pulsating vibrations, and the groan of tortured ice.

“Thanks Chicken!” Kenzie said, then cocked her head. “Oh! Time camera’s online. It’s going to be buggy, but people are going to be coming for us soon! See!” Kenzie said, “It’s already useful!”

“Where?” Lisa asked.

“Here, here. Like for us.”

People coming for us. 

“Well when are they coming?” Lisa was surprised it had taken them so long. 

“I don’t know.” Kenzie said, “I didn’t get a chance to calibrate it all the way because someone kept bothering me when I was trying to work on my totally important project, and it’s completely fine because of course things are happening, but I don’t kick you when you’re doing your work and force you to stop. So I don’t know, but it looks greenish purple, so soon? Maybe?”

Lisa rolled her eyes: yeah, real helpful, Kenzie. So they had hostile capes with unknown offensive powers coming for them at some nebulous future time, and Lisa had a halfbrick. She couldn’t hide behind the preteens either, particularly as neither of them were good at close-combat. Fuck. 

“Okie, dokie.” Lisa said, with exaggerated patience, “I’ll just stay here and cover your retreat unarmed and defenseless. The two of you are going to skedaddle and get your asses under some real cover. Stay together and all that. Take out some of them if you can. Try not to hurt anyone too bad though, or I’ll take away your snack privileges. Okay? Be safe. Love you.” She shoved them away and for once they didn’t argue. Little shits probably were happy to be unsupervised. 

She didn’t have long to wait before a guy with yellow, not blond, hair and a little black choker came creeping around the edge of the bus shelter. From the lightning bolt marked in his shitty hair, Lisa made the amazing deduction that he must be an electricity type. Sometimes people were such idiots. Could he make it easier for her? Not that it meant she could defeat him, but it was a first step. 

Unless it was meant to throw her off. 

Eh, she’d find out soon enough. She didn’t want to waste her power on something like that, not with her headache in the process of tearing through the thin barriers of pain medication. Maybe after she had this guy hostage she could figure out what was going on. 

Yellow Hair seemed a little surprised to see her there alone, but started pointing his hand at her, a strange contraption on his wrist. Tinker-tech? Fuck!

Lisa gave up and used her power. A system to disperse the guy’s electricity using projectiles. Was he also a Tinker of some sort? Lisa couldn’t stand the idea of dealing with another flipping Tinker, not when she was already babysitting Kenzie. He didn’t seem to have the right vibe though. Could she knock away the projectile and foil his aim? Maybe, but she watched stray sparks fizz along his hairline. 

So he didn’t just emit electricity as projectiles, but also through contact. Could he conduct through the ground? Yes. There had to be a reason he wasn’t doing that right now. Did he just want to spook her? No, it wasn’t about intimidation. The buffoon couldn’t control his power, so there had to be a teammate nearby who he didn’t want to shock with an indiscriminate attack. Somewhere out there was another person, sneaking up. 

Lisa cursed. 

She needed something to distract Volts so she could buy the kids some time and hopefully keep the other assailant away. What nearby was an insulator? All she had were smooth unforgiving surfaces and glass. Here there wasn’t even any trash because it wasn’t a city, just a stupid simulation of a city inside of the U.S.J., which conveniently shared an acronym with Universal Studios Japan, which…

Interesting, but not helpful at the moment. Lisa forced her thoughts to change tracks. 

She needed to focus on communication and maybe find something to use. If these kids were villains, that was fine. Villains always had something that they wanted. But there were also the little details gnawing at her that didn’t seem quite right. 

She needed some answers. What did she have to go on? 

This kid was part of a pack and had a stupid, fucking electricity power. Perhaps she could get him talking about that. Electricity. What was Japanese for electricity? She wished her agent would form the connections faster. Why when each of the parasites consumed a world’s worth of energy did hers have to be so shitty? She tried to lay out the pieces and make it as easy for her power to connect the dots as possible. She knew French was électricité, Hindi was bijalee, Korean was jeongi, Mandarin was diàn, and Japanese? Japanese was…

“Denki?’ She asked. 

The guy stopped short, finger frozen on the trigger of his little shooter, mouth falling open. 

She’d meant to just gab onto something to distract him, but her power informed her that she’d got more than she bargained for. Lisa grinned. Jackpot. What were the odds that this guy’s name was ‘electricity’ as an electric cape? It seemed a bit on the nose, but it was a windfall for her.  

“Denki…” Kaminari, her power supplied, “Kaminari.” What a stupid name.

If the guy looked shocked before, now he looked absolutely pants-pissingly confused. Lisa mentally downgraded the guy’s intelligence to somewhere between Oni Lee and a Spree clone. That was okay, she could use that. He mumbled something and her power allowed her to translate with only the merest increase in the severity of her headache: “How do you know my name?”

He’d bitten her hook, clumsily baited as it was. Gotcha.

She almost, almost, made a remark about it being as plain as a tattoo on his forehead, but thought better of it. This was not the time to make enemies, although diplomacy was such a drag. 

Lisa pushed a little bit harder and her head started throbbing in earnest. She spoke slowly, each word arriving independently, aware that one wrong word might send her power down the wrong track. “Not important.” She said, the deflection from her power coming as second nature. She forced out one of her trademark sly smiles past her pain in her temples, “Are you…”

“What are you doing here? Are you villains?” Denki asked, before she could get the words out. “Why are you fighting us?”

“Because you attacked us first!” Lisa said. “We’re not villains.” She lied, she wasn’t sure what she was anymore, but she didn’t need to tell this little piece of shit that. 

He looked relieved, enough that all the pieces Lisa had been too busy to consider clicked into place. 

Oh fuck. 

She’d thought that all the kids looked like they were exactly the same age: around 16 to 17, like a high school class. They weren’t a group of wannabe Undersider-esque villains: these were high school students. Was this their version of the Wards training camps? No, it wasn’t a field trip. This was Japan–their school year was ongoing, which meant that high school was in session. Ergo, somehow, impossibly, this was a high school. U.A. High School to be precise. They’d dropped into Musutafu, in a training facility for heroes. The kids had been injured recently. They were jumpy after fighting a big battle. All for One…but that wasn’t important to Lisa right then. What was important was that the students were stressed and traumatized, likely to overreact and attack if, per se, a strange group of unknown capes moseyed out of a rip in space. These kids weren’t thinking clearly, but neither was Lisa’s group. These kids were students training to be heroes and the Gimel capes had interrupted their class. 

Crap. They were fighting heroes after all. Vicky would be so mad when she found out. 

Denki said something else, but the pain of using her power exploded to the point that Lisa had to stop. Double crap. The words stopped coming. “Oh, fuck. Fuck that.” She moaned, clutching her head. So much for their conversation. Just when she was finally getting some intel.  

Surprisingly, Denki’s face brightened, “You speak English?” He asked in halting, but perfectly understandable English. 

Maybe he wasn’t so dumb after all. 

“Yeah.” She said, “Congratulations, apparently you do too. So if you’re heroes, can you fucking stop attacking us? Just saying: not very heroic of you. We’re literally just passing through.”

From the look on his face, Denki probably wasn’t impressed with her glowing witticism, “We are heroes!” He said, “We weren’t trying to attack you, but why are you here?”

“Nuh uh.” Lisa said, “Don’t give me that crap.” Okay fine, her diplomacy wasn’t going to win her any prizes, but she deserved to let off a little steam with the throbbing behind her eyes, “You were the ones who attacked us first, so you have some explaining to do.”

Denki winced, “We’ve been through a lot, okay?” 

“No shit, everyone has!” Lisa said, with a bit more bite than was strictly necessary, “You don’t get to use that as an excuse. Was ‘die’ supposed to be a friendly greeting?”

He groaned, “I know it doesn’t look good, but can you believe me when I say that he’s just an asshole, like the meanest hero you’ve ever met? I swear the rest of us are friendly. Come with me and we’ll fix this, okay?” 

But Lisa was already shaking her head. 

“Nah. You seem like you’re nice and all, Sparky, but I’m not going anywhere with you. Fool me twice and all that. You haven’t won my trust this easily, not by a long shot. I’m not coming anywhere near you, you human taser.” She raised her halfbrick, “But, you’re coming with me.”

Now that she knew they were heroes, and students at that, it was clear that they were holding back. There would be no lethal force invoked here. Lisa was wondering how she’d sidestep Denki and alert the others when a long, sticky, and above all juicy tongue whipped around her and catapulted Lisa into the air.

Chapter 5: Izuku

Notes:

Hello, happy weekend! The first Katsuki chapter will be out on Tuesday. I hope you enjoy :)

At some point, as a vigilante, fighting villains had all become routine. As much as he hated the idea of diving into a fight, once the opportunity was in front of him, the rest of his fears receded. The tingling thrum of Full Cowling ignited across his body, charging him with the power and strength of One for All in a barely manageable outpouring. He knew what to do. Even after a month lazing in a hospital bed and then being pampered by his mom, it just took a flip of his usual mindset to enter the fight. He was doing this to protect his friends and, of course, he was doing this for Kacchan. It would be okay. They would both come out of this okay. They had to. 

He would make sure of that. 

This lady likely wasn’t a top tier villain. Maybe she was one of the splintered, surviving members of the P.L.F. who hadn’t engaged with the final battle or a villain who had escaped during the chaos? Perhaps she was a mercenary. Either way, despite the pounding aura of fear, she didn’t have any armor. He didn’t want to hurt her, just prevent her from hurting anyone else. Air Force was a good compromise: a warning and a targeted strike that wouldn’t completely annihilate her like even a toned-down smash could. 

The comforting sound of a blast told him that Kacchan had also entered the fray. Izuku figured that he would take this villain down quickly and restrain her with Blackwhip, then wait for Sero’s tape or Todoroki’s ice to immobilize her before focusing on the others. Easy enough. 

It didn’t go as he’d planned.

Moving faster than he expected and without any discernible effort, the woman blocked his jet of air. He tried a second time, keeping his distance, and had the same result. Not even her hair rustled in the breeze, which was a little bit spooky. 

Izuku tried using Blackwhip to ensnare her, but she dodged the tendrils and then, to his surprise, she pursued him into the sky. 

The fear waxed and waned, but never truly went away. Just when Izuku felt that he’d gotten used to it, a fresh burst would catch him off guard. She didn’t seem to have a ranged attack, but he didn’t really have one that worked against her. At a distance they stalemated. The only thing to do was to get in close. 

Izuku dove back toward the woman, using Blackwhip braced against the fake ruins to change direction. He tried to snare her too, but the woman was indefinably slippery. He couldn’t get a grip and sometimes it felt like extra, ghostly hands were grabbing at him or prying apart his Blackwhips. 

He needed to raise the power if he seriously wanted to have a chance against this woman, but that could mean risking cataclysmic levels of damage. Sure Recovery Girl could probably fix them, but smashing people to a pulp just to get some healing really didn’t appeal to Izuku. Besides, the teachers would be here soon and would hopefully be able to nullify this fight. He just needed to hold out until then, while keeping this flying tank away from the rest of the class.

How ironic that he might lose this fight because he was too powerful. What a way to go from the quirkless dreamer he’d been before he met All Might. 

There did seem to be a pattern to the way the villain fought. None of his hits seemed to faze her at all, like she was using Kirishima’s Hardening, however, after every punch she’d waver and evade before engaging him again with a flurry or grabs and holds. She wasn’t punching, he noticed, just blocking him and seeking to contain him. 

It didn’t make sense: why would a villainous mercenary avoid punches? Could it be that she was new and wasn’t an accomplished fighter yet? But her reflexes and precision begged otherwise. 

He steadily increased the intensity of his attacks from 8% to 20% and although she evaded some, none of them seemed to hurt her at all. Was she invulnerable? How many quirks did she have?

Izuku wondered if All for One had gifted these superfluous quirks to her, like he had with Lady Nagant. Izuku hadn’t really thought much about those particular aftereffects of the fight. Would there be other assassins after him, given quirks and tasked with permanently removing One for All from the planet before Izuku could really hit his stride, much less find a permanent successor?

Now that he was thinking about it, this woman’s sheer confidence and dangerous poise did remind him of Lady Nagant.

Izuku glanced down at the battle on the ground, where Class 1A seemed to be holding their own. He noticed that Uraraka, darting and weaving, seemed to be embroiled in a game of tag with the red haired man. She was on the defensive but didn’t need his help. 

He needed to focus on his own fight. 

Izuku grabbed the villain again with Blackwhip, trying to hold her far enough away that she couldn’t strike him. Plus with that fear he wasn’t really excited about getting her up close. Even that went haywire. Instead of being towed away, the villain grabbed the black ropes of energy and yanked with superhuman strength that belied even her fit frame. He came crashing towards her and fired off Air Force, but missed. Izuku winced: too much more of that and he risked injury. He needed to watch his arms, that was the condition his mom had made for him to go back to school, and Hatsume hadn’t fixed his bracers yet. He tried Shoot Style, aiming a kick at her chest where it was unlikely to severely damage her. She caught his foot in her hand, brutally arresting his momentum and absorbing the energy of his kick. To his surprise, the slipperyness surrounding her disappeared and his whips wrapped around human flesh, not whatever shell or forcefield she’d been using. 

Was that it? Had he won?

Izuku hurried to wrap her tighter, cocooning her like a spider, only for all his Blackwhip to suddenly get shoved away by a rapidly expanding invisible something. With a rip, she tore free as if he was trying to contain her in cobwebs. 

He launched himself away as what felt like a mouth latched onto his ankle. With one kick at 20%, the thing released and he was free. 

She had to have some sort of forcefield, but what shape was it? Why had it gone away and why did it come back? He’d hit her with attacks before. Was it the way he’d hit her? The specific spot? Maybe he could test it. 

But the way she fought…flight and super strength, yet with a bit of hesitation, it all reminded him of himself. A weird sense of déjà vu settled on him.

As he intercepted a grab, he ran through the mental checklist of One for All’s quirks. Sometimes there were too many to keep track of, with the flip in thinking he’d gained in blossoming from zero quirks to seven in the span of two years. He really didn’t want to use Gearshift if he could avoid it and Smokescreen would just cloud the sight of his friends. He was already trying to use Blackwhip and Float, of course. He’d tried using Fa Jin to help with kicking off of objects and changing direction, but he didn’t want to hurt this woman too badly if he didn’t have to. And…

Danger Sense. That was what he was missing. 

During this whole fight, even with the scary powers being used, he’d never been pinged by Danger Sense. Had it really only taken a month for him to grow rusty and forget a whole portion of his quirk? Shinomori would not be pleased. 

Why wouldn’t this woman spark Danger Sense, when she was clearly fighting him? Was it a situation like with Toga? But this lady didn’t seem attracted to him and Izuku couldn’t imagine that happening twice. He felt the fear pulsing out, but maybe that made the whole fight feel more dangerous than it was. Was she…going easy on him and trying to be gentle like he was for her?

He shook his head: that was ridiculous. No villain would do that. 

Izuku and the villain grappled close together again and the girl said something to him in what might have been Japanese, but it sounded garbled and the accent was strange. She switched to what sounded like English. He wished she would slow down like they had on I-Island so that he could understand better. He really had been neglecting his studies the past few months, although he supposed he had an excuse for that. Still, he chided himself. A hero must always be prepared, and All Might was fluent in English. 

“I don’t understand.” He said in English, hoping he had the vocabulary right. 

The woman nodded, like she understood. The invisible force was grabbing him again and he used One for All again at 20% to shatter the hard barrier. 

She didn’t sound particularly angry when she’d been speaking, just out of breath and frustrated. The thought was distracting enough that the woman seized an opening to grip Izuku’s costume and toss him a few hundred yards. Izuku managed to stop the rotation, but Float only slowed his headlong fall into an inelegant tumble, crashing to the asphalt. 

Izuku took a moment to assess the situation as he rolled to his feet. The villains were putting up a good fight, but with only seven of them, it should have been a breeze for Class 1A to mop them up.

It was not a breeze.

“Hello, uh, little friend.” Koda called to the dinosaur of a bird flying around the U.S.J., “Fly away, okay? Please don’t hurt us. Hey! Stop damaging the cameras!” The bird ignored him, though it shrieked as another one of Jiro’s vibration waves tore through. The vibrations were weaker than before her injury, but still plenty effective. 

“My Anivoice isn’t working.” Koda wailed. 

“Try something else!” Shoji’s voice called from somewhere nearby, “Mice? Insects? Are there any bugs nearby?”

Shinso tried his capture cloth on the tattooed woman, who had peeled up and dissolved like Edgeshot, except that instead of a single thin thread, she became a whirling mass of tentacles. Only her face remained intact, a pale oval thin as a mask. Izuku heard Shinso scream something at the woman, but she didn’t respond, managing to evade each of Shinso’s attacks with the capture cloth while refusing to be Brainwashed. Each of her flat ribbons seemed to be able to move independently: simultaneously ripping away streamers of Sero’s tape, though some of her tendrils caught. 

Yaoyorozu herself stood near Izuku’s landing site, ripping the wrapper off a protein bar. She had figured out that although they swelled his size, metal objects temporarily immobilized the metal man as they stuck to his skin. She threw frying pans one by one as she created them, but she couldn’t keep that pace up forever. The metal guy was morphing the extra mass into a giant hammer, all while absorbing blows from Kirishima. At a shout, Izuku’s classmates all backed away and a wall of flame engulfed the metal man. Just like Tetsutetsu, his metallic skin began to glow but he didn’t seem to care. 

Izuku wondered briefly where Hagakure was and was rewarded by a flash of light that made Dark Shadow howl. 

He couldn’t see Kacchan anywhere, which worried him. Of course Kacchan was a capable fighter, but all it took was one mistake for everything to go horribly wrong. 

Uraraka had ceased her game of tag and was now holding perfectly still as if she had become a living statue. She wasn’t breathing, her eyes glassy and sightless. Izuku gripped her arm but there was no reaction, her flesh stony. Did one of the villains have a quirk like Rock Lock’s, but for people? He hoped that she would be okay.

Izuku was about to spring back into the air when the red haired man ducked out from behind a frozen Sato to tap Izuku’s arm. 

Immediately the red haired man disappeared. Everyone around them shifted as if they’d all teleported, but none of the heroes or villains seemed concerned. None of them even seemed to notice that anything was wrong, but Izuku did notice one of the objects, which had previously been frozen, drop out of the air. Those had also been touched by the red-haired man, he was pretty sure. 

What just happened to him was clearly a contact-based effect of a quirk. Izuku glanced around and saw Uraraka and Sato still standing completely motionless, as frozen as those objects hanging in the air. Ah. 

The redhead’s quirk wasn’t something that immobilized objects, as Izuku had first thought. No, it had something to do with time. How long had he been out and why had he revived sooner than Sato or Uraraka? He had so many unanswered questions if his hunch was right. It was such a unique quirk! He’d never seen anything like it and his fingers itched to take notes, but this was not the time. 

The red haired man himself struggled on the ground, encased in a net–likely Yaoyorozu’s work. Each movement he made only tangled him further, the net constricting around him and leaving no chance to use his time-stopping touch. 

With no warning, Uraraka unfroze. She stumbled, blinked a few times, glanced at the net, and turned to Izuku with an apologetic frown. “Hey Deku! I’ve been thinking, does this whole thing feel wrong to you?”

More wrong than being attacked by villains and frozen in time? The unnecessary retort died at Izuku’s lips. He knew what she meant. “Yeah, I don’t sense any danger, and it feels like they aren’t trying to hurt us. They’re really acting defensively for the most part. Do you think that we read the situation wrong?”

“Yeah, I suppose we were a bit jumpy. It’s hard to tell with everything going on, but it looked like at least two of them are kids.” Uraraka said. ”We should regroup.”

Around them the battle raged and Kacchan was still missing. Izuku’s first response was to go find him, but Kacchan wouldn’t welcome a rescue, particularly if the villains might not be as villainous as they’d first thought. Shame burned his cheeks. 

Izuku nodded.

Chapter 6: Katsuki

Notes:

I hope you enjoy! Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. It's Katsuki time!

Next chapter will be out on Sunday :)

Also, it's the 3rd of December! "Heather" by Conan Gray is one of the songs I listened to while brainstorming this fic

It took about ten seconds for Katsuki to find out that the shitty robot man wasn’t affected by his explosions. Whether AP Shots or Point-Blank Stun Grenade, the heat and light just didn’t seem to faze him. The force made him rock a bit, but that was about it. The knockoff version of Real Steel must be as heavy as a refrigerator. Much as Katsuki itched to stay and pound the man into aluminum foil, he knew that this was a terrible matchup. He withdrew, grimacing, to let Tokoyami take a try. As if the birdbrain had a chance. 

Izuku had his own fight against Goldie well-in-hand, so the best thing for Katsuki to do was to protect the others in his good-for-nothing class. 

Katsuki aimed for the peel-apart mobster, but in midair he impacted something hard and small, right to his thigh, sending him spinning out of control. A projectile: were the villains shooting at them? He tumbled and rolled, using his explosions to arrest his momentum and cushion his fall against the asphalt. From the ground, he squinted and saw the offending object hanging in the air: some sort of fucking candy bar still encased in its shiny wrapper. 

How had a cheap-ass candy bar been enough to rip him out of the air? It didn’t even have any momentum. Maybe it was a quirk like Rock Lock’s, freezing objects in space? If so, a candy bar was a weird-ass choice. Maybe it only worked for small or light objects? Fucking loser excuse of a quirk. 

His thigh throbbed with what would likely be an epic and extremely ignoble bruise. He’d got lucky; if it had been sharp, the frozen object would doubtless have sliced right through him. A whole slew of similarly frozen random objects were spread out around him, anchored in space  As he watched the red haired man pulled a sock out of his backpack and held it up. When he removed his hand, the sock remained hanging in the air. Izuku would have a field day with this. Katsuki grinned: now at least he had a good idea of what a few of the villains’ quirks were: some kind of hardening or metal manipulation, tentacles, locking objects in place, and the flying/fear package villain Izuku was fighting. There had been three others, but Katsuki didn’t see them. Hopefully the rest of Class 1A could manage to cover his back and prevent him from being blindsided.

Growling in frustration, Katsuki dodged around the stationary objects, firing explosions at the tattooed woman, only for Sato, the big lug, to get in the way throwing useless punches at the rippling tendrils in a sugar-fueled fugue state.

Katsuki barked out a quick, “Watch out, you idiot!” before approaching from a different angle.

Sure fighting as a large group gave them the numbers advantage, but it also meant devoting attention to avoid murdering each other with friendly fire. Class 1A was full of dolts whose quirks were only applicable to niche situations, or who couldn’t strategize to save their asses. Although not everyone could have a quirk as awesome as Katsuki’s, why didn’t the idiots just take the time to think? It didn’t cost anything. It was why he’d rather fight alone or with Izuku, who he could trust to be smart enough to synergize with Katsuki, instead of getting in the way. 

The tattooed gangster unspooled like a ball of yarn, or like…Edgeshot, but more like a tangle of many intersecting ribbons than one long strand. Each ribbon was edged with gnarly zipperlike teeth. As layer upon layer of the villain unwound, Katsuki could see tiny, shriveled organs pulsing beneath the face, which hung in the morass of tendrils like a mask. The ribbons speared out in all directions, reaching farther than Katsuki expected.

Okay, so her tendrils were like Blackwhip: fast, flexible, and good at grabbing things. They seemed to be pretty strong and she was currently using them to fend off Dark Shadow as Kirishima charged the metal man. Fine, he had enough experience countering Blackwhip: should be a fucking piece of cake. The best strategy would be to stay out of the villain’s reach and target her vulnerable head. He’d try not to do too much damage, but it was easier to beg for an apology than wind up dead. 

But a tendril snapped out and gripped Katsuki securely by his arm. He pounded the tendril with explosions, which only made it constrict tighter. Then, ground became sky as the villain threw him. 

This time when he landed, ribcage aching more than he cared to admit, he was mere feet away from the red haired man. Sato stood beside him, frozen like the frigging candy bar had been. As the redhead turned to face him, Katsuki’s fist hit the man in the face.

Katsuki blinked. One moment he was punching the red haired man and the next, the man was gone. Had he teleported? Katsuki’s fist followed through and he almost fell over. Suddenly the entire scene of the battle was different. The fight had moved farther away. It was like someone had hit fast forward on the fight and skipped ahead. Or it was like time had been paused for him alone. 

Katsuki grinned. 

Time, that was it. The red haired asshole froze things in time, not in space. That was how he immobilized objects in the air: they weren’t falling because they didn’t exist in the normal flow of time, and that seemed to mean that nothing could alter those objects either, at least while the effect lasted. It made a kind of sense: after all, how could something damage an object when there wasn’t time for the damage to occur? Apparently those objects didn’t have to be small, considering this Pause-n’-Play guy had frozen a whole-ass Katsuki, but there was some sort of a time limit on his quirk. There had to be. Otherwise there would be no reason to let Katsuki thaw while still in the middle of the fight. The question was how long that limit was.

Uraraka was frozen near him, and so was Sato, which was weird because Sato had been tagged before Katsuki. Otherwise the battle had moved on, away from the maze of frozen objects. Somebody had destroyed some of the overhead lights and Tokoyami was completely swathed in a growing Dark Shadow, reveling in the dimness. Katsuki should probably keep his distance to avoid weakening Tokoyami’s delicate quirk. With all of the movement he couldn’t see Izuku, but the nerd could hold his own against these B-listers.

The same pocket junk that made it hard for the heroes to move was also trapping the villains in place, although some of the objects were beginning to fall. Ashido’s acid had about as much effect against the shitty robot as Katsuki’s explosions, so now she was trying to tag the time guy from a distance with Acidman. Good luck, Katsuki thought, although he wondered if Pause-n’-Play could also freeze the acid in place. Maybe Pinky could trap the red-haired bastard that way, in a cocoon of time-stopped slime. 

Yaoyorozu sprinted past, straight toward the time guy, which seemed uncharacteristically stupid until she threw a large net. Katsuki had to admit that it was a decent plan: the net completely swathed the man, trapping him. The mesh was too small for him to touch anything through and it was weighted at the ends so that it draped evenly. If he froze the net in place, he’d just end up trapping himself worse. While he was down, Yaoyorozu added several larger weights to her net.

Yaoyorozu looked fucking exhausted. She’d been creating a lot of things today and must be near her limit.

 “Go!” She said to Katsuki, “These are only four out of the seven! Find the others!”

Katsuki could do math. “Don’t give me orders!” he muttered. But it was a good idea. He wasn’t needed here.

He blasted himself above the ruins for a better view of the battle, just in time to watch a tiny green shape arc through the air. Katsuki waited just long enough to watch Izuku catch himself with Blackwhip and Float, before surveying the situation. Asui and Kaminari seemed to be handling one of the other villains, and Katsuki really didn’t want to team up with either of them. Shoji and Koda were going after another of the missing three.

The third: where was the third? He scanned the cracked façades, and…there: a dark skinned girl in a blue dress and tights crouched down by the edge of the fake city block.

“There you are, you fucker.” 

She saw him coming and fled down a side street, hurrying so fast that she dropped a piece of junk. Katsuki smirked. He could easily outpace her dinky little legs. He jetted towards her, only for what he’d mistaken as a dropped machine part to grab onto him with a bunch of cables, trapping him again. Fuck!

This was, Katsuki reflected while squirming on the ground, not how he’d expected his day to go.

The morning was fucking fantastic. Kirishima had been there with a hug, which Katsuki’d pretended to endure even if he was grateful. He and Todoroki staged some pretty freaking awesome rescues and Kaminari had even been less annoying than usual. Katsuki was glad that the rest of the class was all okay, really, although he wasn’t about to make a big song and dance about it. 

He’d finally just had time to hang out with Izuku again and maybe the nerd was finally receiving some of the signals he’d been sending. Really what else did Deku want: a straight up confession of love? If so, fuck that. Katsuki had basically done that twice now and each time not even a flicker of realization made its way through Izuku’s adorably dense skull, even when the thought of Izuku had pretty much brought Katsuki back from the dead. Well there was Edgeshot too, Katsuki supposed, but besides that. And then there was that time last week when Izuku had started rambling about how excited he was to finally see all their friends again and train, casually calling him ‘Kacchan’ in the way that short-circuited Kasuki’s brain. It had been all Katsuki could do not to kiss the nerd. 

Excluding the years of bullying, which he had to admit was a pretty big ask, Katsuki had basically done all the legwork so far. 

That night at Ground Beta, fighting Izuku had cracked Katsuki open like eggshell, spilling his guts all over the pavement. All of the buried feelings he’d been having for Izuku for so long suddenly snapped back into perfect relief. It was confusing and terrifying to suddenly realize he had been so wrong. Izuku was a lesson in contradiction: soft yet tough, hopeful yet damaged, brilliant and yet such a doofus. Over the months since, getting to know the nerd better, despite all the stress, had made Katsuki happier than pushing Izuku away ever had. He wanted to keep that up and let their relationship get closer still, if Izuku even wanted him like that. It was a stupid hope considering Izuku was already the most important person in his life.

Still, he couldn’t make things too easy for Izuku. For one thing, Katsuki was fucking well-worth fighting for, he was sure of that. He also didn’t want to be the one forcing them together, considering their past. It was time for Izuku to take the lead, and if he was being completely honest, Katsuki wanted Izuku to chase him like he always had, except this time Katsuki wouldn’t push him away.

Izuku was many things: quirk geek, freaking nerd, soft and squishy, dangerously compassionate, willing to put others before him in any situation and yet somehow capable of melting Katsuki’s hard-won craggy exterior with a single word, but he wasn’t stupid. Maybe Izuku was playing coy or maybe he was politely telling Katsuki to fuck off…Katsuki didn’t fucking know. Unless Katsuki had read the situation totally wrong...no, fuck that. He knew there was something between them, even if he’d never felt like this for anyone before. It was time to tell once and for all whether Izuku had any interest in him, or was dumb enough to ignore Katsuki’s affections. 

And then of course all those plans had to get sidetracked by idiot villainous extras showing up and freaking everyone out. 

Katsuki ground his teeth. After fighting Shigaraki in the Coffin in the Sky and even going toe-to-toe with All for One, he was not about to get his ass handed to him by a preteen. Heart stitches or no stitches, he was the fucking Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight and he was not going down easy, despite his abysmal performance so far today. 

He writhed until he finally managed to blast the box attached to the cables. By the time he shucked off the bindings and followed the little villain, she was crouched by the main thoroughfare in the shadow of a balcony, feverishly fiddling with weird little tools on something that was squat and metallic with lots of little tech pieces and looked suspiciously like a bomb. 

It was clear by now that the villains weren’t actively trying to hurt them; if they were, they were really fucking bad at it. Maybe they were trying to keep them contained until a bigger threat arrived. Maybe his analysis was wrong and they were about to set off a bomb. Katsuki figured everyone would be mad if he hurt this little shit too badly, but nothing said that he couldn’t do a bit of intimidation. 

“You’ll pay for that, you little shit sack!”

As he lunged forward, the girl, he saw now she was about eleven or twelve, pulled something long and sharp out of her eyeball. His stomach gave an inadvertent lurch. How had that fit in her eye? It was longer than her head, but there was somehow no damage or blood. 

His heart couldn’t take Cluster, but he could at least see how this shrimp liked Stun Grenade. He readied a shot in her direction, but the moment he took to shake off some sweat and dial down the intensity of his blast cost him. A blinding blaze of light erupted from the girl’s hands and everything went white.

Chapter 7: Izuku

Notes:

Next chapter will be out on Tuesday :)

Izuku retreated with Uraraka back to where some of the class were regrouping. The blonde woman did not give chase, just continued hovering imperiously over the battlefield, pounding them with her aura of fear. 

As soon as they got close enough, Yaoyorozu pulled Uraraka and Izuku into the huddle with Ashido, Shoji, Aoyama, Jiro, and Shinso. "Something's wrong!" she said, “Or rather I think that we…I mean I…was wrong.” He hadn’t seen her so flustered since the autumn. 

“They're not villains are they?" Izuku asked, hoping he was wrong. 

Yaoyoruzu shook her head, “It’s good to know you came to the same conclusion. I’m afraid we were a bit hasty.” She turned her back, using Creation as she spoke over her shoulder. “Our thought was that we could propose a truce. If they don’t agree, perhaps then we use force, but Shinso, are you ready?” She handed the simple megaphone she’d made to Shinso, “You shouldn’t need your vocoder as they don’t know your quirk. This is just to amplify your voice.”

“I asked a question earlier.” Shinso said, “Either they’re wise to my quirk or maybe…”

They all started at a sudden commotion, ready to defend themselves, but it was just Tsuyu hopping around one of the nearby buildings. A soggy captive trailed her like a captive balloon with an extra helping of mucus. Kaminari followed her at a jog. 

“Good work, Tsuyu!” Izuku cheered.

Tsuyu retracted her tongue and Kaminari gasped in a final breath, “About that, Midoriya….” Tsuyu said, “We found out that these people…”

“Aren’t villains.” Uraraka finished. 

Tsuyu nodded, “Yeah, I’m glad we’re all on the same page, ribbit!”

“This lady speaks English.” Kaminari panted, “She’s…kinda rude though. She used to speak shitty Japanese and now she just says her head hurts.”

They all turned to the captive. The woman was younger than Izuku had realized, maybe in her early twenties. She really wasn’t too much older than them. Her blonde hair was matted to her skull with mucus. 

“English!” Ashido moaned, “I hate that class.”

“Me too.” Shinso muttered. Ashido offered him a fist bump, and after examining her hand for a moment, Shinso hesitantly returned the gesture. 

“We do need information though.” Yaoyoruzu said, “And we need it quickly, before anyone gets hurt.” If they hadn’t already. 

Izuku was usually okay at English, and Yaoyorozu was passable, but they all knew who in class was best at the language. 

“This is my time!” Kaminari gloated, “Prepare to be saved by the awesome linguistic abilities of Chargebolt!” 

“Oh no,” Jiro groaned, “We’re having him take the lead? Are we really that desperate?”

Silence. 

“I think we are.” Tsuyu said. 

Kaminari deflated a bit, but turned to the captive woman. They spoke back and forth for a bit before Kaminari turned back to report. The woman seemed exasperated, but she had sat up and was de-sliming herself. Tsuyu was busy rinsing her mouth.

“She says her code name is Tattletale.” Kaminari reported, “She said it’s none of our business why they’re here and her mission is secret. They’re from the United States and came here by accident. They didn’t expect us and they got blindsided.”

“That’s not good enough though.” Shinso said, “Are we supposed to believe they’re really here, attacking us, by mistake? Why can’t she just tell us why she’s here?”

Kaminari repeated the question to the woman. 

“Ugh.”

“What?” Izuku asked, concern rising like Float.

“Oh, nothing. She’s just kind of annoying.” Kaminari complained, “Skipping the insults, she says she can’t right now without her team and that we don’t have time for this and we need to stop it now and a bunch of other stuff. They don’t want to hurt us, but uh, she says her team is way stronger than our lame-ass heroes and they’ll really start turning up the heat if this goes on too long.”

Not the most useful interrogation, it brought up so many more questions than it answered: like why did Tattletale’s team mistake them for villains when Class 1A’s faces were known worldwide? How could they teleport perfectly to the middle of the school grounds without trying? It just didn’t make sense. Why did everything have to be so secretive? 

Izuku hoped they could get those answers later, but concern for his classmates twisted his guts. They had to end this fight. And then hopefully the teachers would be here soon with Iida…

All talking ceased as a scream exploded from nearby, eclipsing the other sounds of battle.

Chapter 8: Katsuki

Notes:

Happy Tuesday! These are short chapters, so I'm posting four at once. I hope you enjoy--the next one will be out on Sunday!

Katsuki rubbed his eyes, hoping the puny villain wouldn’t try for a sneak attack before he could regain his sight. Flashes and glare didn’t usually bother him—how powerful was that shit?

When he tried to move, his whole brain throbbed. His palms were slick, ready to fire, but…fuck, he couldn’t risk setting off the bomb or burning an ally. He’d already had way too many lectures after burning Hagakure. There were too many freaking idiots in his class and now that Balls for Brains was gone, he found he actually cared about all of them. 

Minutes stretched on, excruciating, with distant sounds of battle urging him to act. Any moment he expected an enemy to lay hands on him. Just when his vision was starting to come back, a scream ripped through the battle, followed by some miscellaneous shouts. Everything suddenly sounded a lot more chaotic. Katsuki glanced over to the main fight, where Koda had amassed a pretty good sized swarm of insects. The villains were all losing their shit. Katsuki laughed: were they all freaked from a few bugs? What losers! It was like Present Mic all over again. Sure that many insects would be enough to give anyone the heebie jeebies, but this was a fucking battle. Shit happened, especially with quirks. At some point you just had to put on your big hero costume and learn to fucking deal with it. 

He glanced back at the villain, who was fiddling with something again. This time though, even with his crap vision, he could see her expression shift. Was she…smiling?

In any case, it was a perfect opening to finally get the upper hand. 

Chapter 9: Victoria

The spreading wave of bugs moved with unnatural deliberation. They didn't form swarm clones or move with quite the unison Victoria was used to, but there was no doubt that somebody was controlling that roiling stew of black bodies. There was only one Master Victoria knew of with insect control as her schtick, but it couldn’t be her. It just couldn’t, could it? This wasn’t even on the right earth and she didn't have her powers and what would Taylor fucking Hebert be doing in Japan? 

Dennis screamed. Sveta was frozen, the kid with freaky elbows half trussed in her tendrils and still kicking. Even Weld looked stunned. 

Fuck! Could one of these kids have insect powers?

There weren't really that many bugs, but her hands shook, her breaths coming quick and shallow. She thought she'd grown past this. She was Antares, perfectly in-tune with her Shard. Logically, it couldn't be Taylor. Likely someone just had a similar power, but her body was fully in reaction mode. 

What the hell was Lisa thinking?

Keep calm. She had to keep calm. Victoria splayed the ribs of her forcefield and sent the Fragile One to go kill the bugs, curling up in a defensive ball in midair. Her forcefield gave her a quick squeeze before she left. 

Victoria forced herself to breathe, waiting for the moment when wasps would clog her windpipe. 

Chapter 10: Izuku

Izuku looked in the direction of the scream. It seemed Koda had given up on birds and was relying on bugs instead, like Shoji had suggested. Sure there were a lot of bugs and Izuku had never been the biggest fan of insects, but this reaction seemed...extreme. Did these attackers all have a phobia? In that case it would be cruel to continue.

The birds who had been circling purposefully began to squawk and fight with each other, losing all direction. 

Izuku glanced over at the woman who called herself Tattletale, and was surprised to see that even with the tide of the battle shifting, she looked…elated?

"Taylor?" She asked.

Chapter 11: Lisa

Lisa heard Dennis’s scream. She watched the swarm gather. She watched, but all she could see was…

“Taylor?”

Taylor, delicately depositing mosquitoes on coat sleeves to eavesdrop and monitor enemy movements. Taylor, speaking with the buzzing, chirruping voice of the swarm. Taylor, spawning off swarm clones to distract an Endbringer. Taylor, arranging an assembly line of insects to be dipped in capsaicin. Taylor, pouring over reports from her territory in her cozy apartment, as thousands of spiders worked in concert to weave replacement costume parts. Taylor, reading that stupid biography about the Triumvirate, her bugs combing her hair and dragging over choice snacks with silk strings.

A deep and pulverizing sense of loss as Taylor moved on to her dream of being a hero. 

Taylor’s cold, stylized face on posters, wreathed in a swirl of butterflies.

And of course, Taylor: her mind devoured by her agent after Amy’s tampering, crying though she didn’t seem to realize it, controlling her new human soldiers with the precision she once wielded with her insects as everyone started to finally work together.

Could it be Taylor? It should be impossible, but was anything truly out of their reach? They ate impossible for breakfast. 

Maybe, just maybe, Taylor had found her way back. 

Lisa needed to know. She needed to jump over that cliff of knowledge. Forget her agent. Forget limits and headaches and consequences. The only thing that mattered, the only thing thrumming through her body was the urgent need to know. It was like she was another insect in the swarm, pulled along, all autonomy stripped away. It wasn’t an option. It was a need.

If there was even a chance, she had to take it. 

Her head blazed with agony, but she pummeled her power into action. Who was controlling the bugs? Was it Taylor? Was there any conceivable chance that it was Taylor? Could it be?

No.

She’d known that would be the answer, but the frigid finality of it still rocked her. She pushed harder.

No, it wasn’t Taylor. Of course it wasn’t; Taylor didn’t have a power anymore. This was something else. Animal control—Anivoice, a power of some rock-headed kid named Koda. He could control animals. He could control insects, not as well as Taylor, but this was his doing.

Lisa wanted to pulverize the little punk. He’d done nothing but have the misfortune to have a passenger, but she itched to smash that stupid craggy face in. To scream at the alien gods who could tunnel through dimensions and yet couldn’t, wouldn’t, give an inch. It hadn’t been much, but for a moment she’d had a crumb of hope. But no: it wasn’t Taylor, because of course Taylor was off in Earth Aleph, if she was even still the Taylor that Lisa knew.

The aftereffects of using her power left her retching, her muscles convulsing. And through the pain Lisa watched as the swarm completely coated the struggling Clockblocker, hundreds becoming immobilized from his power, entombing him even further. As Weld and Sveta stopped, gazing at the mass of insects in raw horror, in ignorance of the teen heroes converging on them.

As Vicky shouted and swatted at the insects before curling up and going still.

That jerked her out of her torpor. Beneath the pain, thoughts moved slowly, but she still managed to move her lips, an enormous effort that left her even more nauseated. “You need to stop this now.” Lisa rasped to the teens around her, begging them to understand. 

The purple-haired boy raised a megaphone to his lips. 

Chapter 12

Notes:

Hello, thank you for hanging with me. The next chapter will be up on Tuesday--hope you have a nice night!

His costume wasn’t made for tying people up, but Katsuki made it work. He unfastened one of the bandoliers that usually held his sweat grenades and bound the little villain's arms and legs as she squirmed. Whatever her quirk was, it was clearly too shitty for combat. Out of respect for her as an opponent, Katsuki tried to make the bindings tight, but not uncomfortably so. Out of respect for when she’d tried to kick him in the nards he let out a few warning explosions and kept a hand aimed at her face, exuding his best aura of malice. 

She kept saying something, but Katsuki didn’t understand and that only fueled his rage at this whole situation, because fuck this. This, this was why foreign language classes only helped so much in the real world. All of his English class vocab was too polite for a hostage situation. And now here he was, helpless to figure out key information. Damn it all. 

His vision still danced with black spots from the girl’s camera flash.

Then there was the tech: Katsuki wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. He’d considered smashing it or blowing it up, but that would be a really bad idea if it was a bomb. He settled for chucking the stuff in a nearby building and moving his hostage slowly towards the place where he’d seen a lot of the class converging. Maybe he could get some of them to watch his charge so he could re-enter the fray and quit being a damn babysitter. 

Out of nowhere the giant eagle flew down towards him, cruel pounces ready to bite into his skin. Great, another target for Katsuki to blast. He raised his arm and…

“Stop!” Shinso’s voice yelled in English, “We do not want to fight you! We are heroes! Um, to authenticate this message, Tattletale says that Imp is a butt, whoever Imp is.” He repeated the same message in Japanese, but it seemed slightly shorter.

Before the echoes could even die away, the fighting ground to a standstill, accomplishing all that Katsuki’s blasts had not. Koda’s insects dispersed and the pounding fear, which Katsuki had forgotten was artificial, disappeared. The girl beside him stared up at him with surprised eyes and quit her struggling. Katsuki readied an explosion, but even the eagle wheeled and flew away. 

“Good one!” Kaminari called from somewhere. The idiot. 

“He didn’t use his quirk.” Izuku muttered. Katsuki jumped. Somehow Izuku had managed to sneak up to his side. 

“I didn’t use my quirk.” Shinso called back, “They just stopped on their own.”

“It was smart to use Shinso.” Izuku said, “Because then he could Brainwash anyone if they didn’t follow through. But it worked! They were heroes after all; it was all just a big misunderstanding, Kacchan! The fighting’s done.” Together they worked on releasing the little captive girl, which was trickier than Katsuki had expected because he’d tied damn good knots. Occasionally their hands touched as he and Izuku tugged, until the straps fell away. 

As people yelled back and forth across what had been a battlefield, Katsuki realized Izuku was holding his hand, “The fighting’s done!” Izuku repeated. 

“We weren’t ever in any danger Izuku.” Katsuki said, wondering what he was supposed to read into this. He couldn’t feel Izuku’s touch through glove and gauntlet, but he’d know that fucked-up hand anywhere. 

Izuku’s wide, honest face grinned up at him, tears in his eyes, “It’s over, Kacchan. We’re okay.”

And Katsuki realized that Izuku had been worried, worried that somehow this was another life threatening villain battle, surging on the tails of the last one. Maybe worried that Katsuki would be hurt again. He flushed. The damn nerd. 

Katsuki pulled Izuku into a rough hug, overwhelmed at his own feelings of relief. The fight was a farce, but he still felt victorious, “Yeah, it’s over.” Katsuki said thickly. Eyes fixed on the girl they’d released, even as he held Izuku close. “The fight is, at least. But we still have to figure out what the fuck is going on.”

He tried to savor the moment while it lasted, his chin nestled in Izuku’s curls. Every second was a tense, electric one as he waited for Izuku to pull away, but he didn’t. Hesitantly at first, Katsuki pushed his luck and stroked Izuku’s back, waiting as everyone else figured out their shit.

 

 - - - - - -

 

The strange ‘heroes’ recovered their members, some of them glaring at the U.A. students. Well Katsuki glared right back. Sure they had a few scrapes and burns, but it was their own fault for showing up unannounced in the middle of a training exercise. What was a pack of English speaking heroes doing in Japan anyway, much less at their school? All of Star and Stripe’s remaining goons had taken off weeks ago and, as far as he knew, the United States was a fat fucking mess right now. Whatever their ‘mission’ had been, they were much too ready for a fight. Katsuki didn’t trust them, at least not until they could clear some things up. 

The rest of the class chattered and Izuku muttered beside him about quirks and strategies, but all Katsuki could focus on was how useless he’d been in this fight. He was supposed to be the best; that was the whole fucking point of being Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight. Yet, he’d failed to make an impact on the shitty robot or tendrilled mobster. Pause-n’-Play had frozen him in time, and even the little squirt with the gear had managed to blind him. All that he’d managed to do was capture an elementary schooler. To his surprise though, nobody else in his class had fared much better, at least until the bugs arrived. 

Kaminari was lording it up in his role as interpreter: proof that any crumb of power granted to that idiot was too much. Katsuki wasn’t sure how much he trusted Kaminar’s interpretations, even checked by Yaoyoruzu and Todoroki. The other group didn’t seem up for socializing. For once the rest of the class seemed to share his doubts, so they mostly chatted amongst themselves. While Goldie, the fear blonde, occasionally said incomprehensible words in mangled Japanese, she mostly was hovering over the other blonde one, the one who called herself Tattletale.

Finally Sato unfroze and Yaoyorozu had to launch into a whole other round of explanations for the dolt. Aside from some bruises and scrapes, Class 1A was in pretty good shape. Katsuki had to admit that the tentacle lady had thrown him almost gently, though he had a vivid weal and small cut on his arm from where the toothed edge of a ribbon had sliced him. His chest hurt, but that was nothing new. More annoying than anything, his eyes still stung and his head pounded from the flash, but there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage to his vision. Izuku had, for once, minimized damage to his arms. Maybe the nerd was finally learning to take care of himself. 

Aoyama shivered in half a costume. Somehow during the fight his armor had gotten stuck to the metal man. Although the little girl’s tools and Todoroki’s fire had managed to detach Aoyama, the left arm and part of the back of his costume were slowly absorbing into the man’s metallic skin.

Katsuki also still wasn’t sure how he felt about Aoyama. Sure Izuku trusted him again and Aoyama had been useful setting the trap for All for One, but Sparkles had also been a traitor from the very start. He compounded it by being so fucking weird: an enigma flitting around like a damned dragonfly. And Katsuki couldn’t forget that Aoyama’s info was the whole reason he’d been kidnapped by the League back during their stupid little training camp. He was never going to live that down, although at least it got the extras in the streets to finally shut up about the sludge villain. Izuku might expound about the heart of a hero and the value of standing together, but Katsuki knew that, at heart, Aoyama was a selfish bastard. Worse, he was a coward. The guy may occasionally come in useful, but Katsuki kept one eye on him, just in case he ever tried anything again. 

Though they’d broken the hug, Katsuki retained Izuku’s hand as long as he dared, straining for any sign of how Izuku felt about it. There were too many damn extras around for him to feel comfortable for long. He didn’t want to push the nerd too hard at the wrong moment and fall into old patterns, and he definitely didn’t want to become a spectacle for all the class busybodies. He’d already noticed some side-eye from Todoroki and Asui, but neither said anything. Mostly though, he didn’t want to get burned by Izuku and ruin the progress they’d made. 

He hated that he was afraid, but there were stakes here that there just weren’t with other people. Katsuki didn’t really care what a bunch of extras thought of him, so he let them have a piece of his mind. Izuku though: Izuku was increasingly becoming a different case, one where Katsuki did care. A lot. 

They all jumped as a piercing, “YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!” shook the U.S.J., driving nails through Katsuki’s headache. Jiro clapped her hands over her ears and Tattletale retched.

By the entrance, several Ectoplasm clones spawned off, riding a cresting wave of cement like an imminent tsunami. Aizawa limped in, his hair standing erect, his one remaining eye flashing red, next to a fountain of grasping vines. Flying body parts whizzed past them. A carpet of mushrooms crept across the ground, which engulfed the strangers up to their waists.

The teachers had finally arrived, and they hadn’t come alone.

 

 - - - - - -

 

Katsuki got bored during the explanation to the teachers and the other class. There was too much yapping in these types of situations: shouldn’t everyone be doing something useful like questioning the self-proclaimed American heroes? Present Mic had asked for the bare basics and then gone over to chat, but it didn’t seem like much of an interrogation was happening. Katsuki wondered what the teachers were all waiting for. 

Iida jogged up in his ridiculous armor. “I apologize that it took me so long, but I do believe that I did the name of Ingenium proud.” he said, his bearing as stiff as the broomstick up his ass, “I could not find our teachers anywhere at first! They were having a staff meeting, can you imagine that? How irresponsible is it to leave students unsupervised while using dangerous quirks, in particular while we’re so far from campus?”

“Hey man, we were fine!” Kirishima said, clenching a hardened fist. “Together we proved how tough we are and that we can hold our own, teachers or no teachers!”

It was enough to make Katsuki roll his eyes. Somehow he’d missed these dorks? “We just fought a fucking war, Four Eyes. I think we can take care of ourselves.”

Iida sniffed, irritably chopping at the air, “Perhaps, but there is such a thing as following the correct procedure—they are our teachers after all! None of them were even pretending to pay attention to the cameras. In a case like this, where the unthinkable actually occurs, it is a severe breach in protocol. I think you would be singing a different tune if it went any other way here. I found Class B first and then it took some time to coordinate the buses.”

Katsuki knew that battles were always shorter than they felt, but he still couldn’t believe all of that had fit within half an hour. It was still well before lunchtime, which meant that their morning rescue exercise was technically still in session. 

“I’m so glad you found them, Iida!” Izuku said, then his expression shifted, “...Oh. Uh, hi Monoma.”

“Oh, if it isn’t the famous Class A. It’s so good to see you finally getting humbled! All you jerks in Class 1A think you’re so incredible, but we had to come to your rescue!” Copy said, each syllable slathered with condescension. Just a look at his smarmy grin was enough to make Katsuki’s hackles rise. 

“But we didn’t need…” Todoroki began. 

But Katsuki interrupted him, “We didn’t need any of you losers!”

“That’s not what your precious class president said.” Copy said, “Just think, the great Class A couldn’t even win a fight against other heroes! What’s wrong with you? At least Class B, as the  superior class, has the acumen to think before blindly charging into a fight!”

He turned to Katsuki, “Oh, I did hear that you did something! Who could have thought that the loose hand grenade could manage to defeat a little kid?” His cackles set his entire body vibrating.

Beside Katsuki, Izuku made a little whining noise, like a dog strangled by a leash. Katsuki was about to storm over there and fry the moronic magician’s face when Big Hands beat him to it, with a smack. “Sorry everyone.” She smiled, as if she wasn’t restraining the struggling sleezeball, “It’s so good to see you! We should all catch up sometime. I hope we can train together again soon, well, after all of this is sorted out! Later!”

She dragged the Copy guy away.

“But we didn’t need them to rescue us.” Todoroki said, as if he had to get the statement out, “They weren’t trying to hurt us. It was all a misunderstanding and we have more raw firepower than them.”

Sometimes Half and Half could be so dense, “Yeah, yeah.” Katsuki said, “Don’t get your weenies in a twist. Someday we’ll bail those bastards out of trouble and he’ll be begging us for help for a change.”

“I hope not, but wish that All Might was here.” Izuku sighed, and grasped Katsuki’s hand again, short circuiting some of his brain cells. “He’d know what to do.”

“I am here.” 

Katsuki winced. Even before his most recent fight with All for One, All Might had been in rough shape: kind of like a sad Halloween ornament left out for the rain. Now he somehow looked worse, especially with the bandages. He rolled slowly, in a wheelchair, but that did nothing to discourage that familiar flutter of wonderment from whenever Katsuki saw All Might in the flesh followed, just as doggedly, by the usual flash of guilt. He was accompanied by Recovery Girl. Aizawa and Present Mic strolled over to meet them. 

“And I am here!” The Principal said, springing from the depths of Aizawa’s capture cloth like a possessed jack-in-the-box. 

Katsuki winced again, but with a different flavor. Why couldn’t their principal at least pretend to be professional sometimes? Still he had to grant the rodent-thing a bit of respect after destroying Raccoon Eyes and Dunce Face in the finals last semester and planning the whole U.A. Defense system. And of course, it was Nezu who let them all go after his Deku when Izuku had almost lost himself. He held Izuku’s hand a little tighter. He saw Shinso and Ashido glance their way, but neither said anything. 

All Might smiled slightly, before turning his attention to the other teachers, “Thank you all for the update about the situation and for waiting for me. I’m ready to learn more about these wayward heroes.” 

Notes:

This piece was inspired by and proofread by BigGoodWolf. Thank you for always believing in me!