The air inside USJ rippled like a pond struck by a thrown stone.
Kurogiri moved the instant Tomura's pale fingers twitched in impatience.
The black mist of his body gathered, elegant and lethal, knitting into a tall silhouette whose metallic collar caught the artificial light.
He glided—no footsteps, only a drifting gravity—as he appeared before the stairway where Class 1-A clustered behind Thirteen.
"On your guard!" Iida's voice was loud and precise, hands chopping the air as if he could carve a corridor through panic.
"We proceed to the exit in pairs. Maintain formation—"
A curtain of darkness unfurled in front of him.
Another swallowed the left aisle.
A third bloomed like a night-blooming flower across the right, swallowing railing and tile alike.
Black-purple portals opened three at a time, then six, then more, multiplying until they webbed the evacuation routes in hungry ellipses.
The edges hissed; distortions shimmered like heat mirages above summer roads.
Several students froze.
Even the air seemed to pause, tripping on the wrong note.
Kurogiri , voice smooth as lacquer. "Apologies, young heroes."
"It seems your journey here has come to an end."
"W-What is—" Sero's breath hitched.
"Those are… warps, ribbit." Tsuyu's tongue flicked in nervous habit.
"Everyone back!" Thirteen said sharply.
The clarity in her tone cut through the fog of fear.
She lifted a gloved hand. "Teleportation Quirk?"
He inclined his head as if she'd correctly answered a quiz.
"A creation of spatial gateways. Please do not struggle. You will only make it unpleasant."
Thirteen's visor tilted, stars reflected on curved glass.
"Then I have no choice." Her boots anchored.
The vents of her gloves flared open.
"Black Hole."
The world inhaled.
Air howled as if sucked down the throat of a storm.
Dust, loose pebbles, bits of paper, the subtle perfume of fear—everything rushed toward Thirteen's outstretched palm.
The black mist of Kurogiri's body tugged, wavered, pulled away from itself in ragged ribbons.
Ochako flinched, hair whipping forward. "Whoa!"
Jiro braced, hands cupping her ear-jacks against the gale. "Thirteen's amazing."
Kurogiri's eyes—a pair of luminous gold slits within the fog—tightened.
Not with fear.
"Black Hole, hm?" The politeness never left his tone.
"Then allow me to assist with… redirection."
A gate winked open behind Thirteen's back—
The hero's own singularity hooked backward and struck her like a phantom bullet.
The hiss turned into a tearing scream.
RRRIP—
Her white suit split open along the spine, fabric peeling like fruit skin under a knife.
The vacuum punched into the cavity.
Thirteen's body—no, the place where her mass is stored—wobbled, stuttered, then shuddered out of alignment.
"Oh no—Thirteen!" Momo was already moving, mind sparking, hands flattening against her exposed skin as if pressing a button.
"Polymer sealant."
A band of glossy material sprang into being under her palm and she slapped it over the torn seam.
The sealant caught, stretched, then tore under the continued pull.
"Not enough! I need more—more surface tension!"
Kurogiri's eyes softened in something like regret. "Please refrain."
Another portal yawned, this one angling toward the crowd like a hungry mouth.
Thirteen staggered, visor fogging. "H-Hurry… everyone…"
"Sensei, hang on!" Mina lunged, bright pink and brighter heart, fumbling for the split fabric. "I've got tape! I mean—Sero has tape!"
"I'm here!" Sero fired a strip like a lasso, slapping it across the breach.
The suction bowed it inward like a drumhead, sticky edges singing. "C'mon, c'mon—stick!"
"Ochako!" Kirishima shouted.
"Float the debris so it doesn't get sucked—"
"I can do that!" Ochako touched the railing with trembling fingers.
"Zero Gravity!"
Metal lightened, groaned, then lifted, easing the load on the seal and buying two precious breaths.
Tsuyu crouched low behind Thirteen, sticky fingers helping Momo press patch after patch. "Kero. Her suit's designed to hold a shape. Without it—"
"—she doesn't have a normal body to brace against the force," Momo finished grimly, sweat pearling at her temples. Another strip of emergency fabric bloomed in her grip.
"Jiro, sound off—anyone incoming?"
Jiro's earphone jacks pressed to the floor.
"Footfalls… below, and a lot of clanging. Sensei's still fighting. But—"
"But that portal's getting bigger," Toru squeaked, invisible but very, very present.
Her hands trembled in empty air. "It's going to swallow us!"
The gate's lip edged forward, swallowing steps and metal like a film of oil sliding over water. The line of reality was being redrawn right under their shoes.
"Everyone—move!" Iida commanded.
"Re-route! Protect Thirteen sensei—"
A voice cut across the cyclone.
It wasn't loud.
It didn't need to be.
"Basho Tenin."
Kurogiri's mist lurched.
One second, the black fog was composed and aristocratic; the next, it tore toward the students as if yanked by a planet with teeth.
The long metal collar at his throat dragged visible lines in his haze.
He slammed forward, hitting the stone with the crunch of punished steel and the bone-felt thud of impact.
THUD—
The place he struck was grotesquely appropriate: the outstretched hand of a shattered USJ statue, fingers splayed like grasping fate.
Dust exploded.
The portals around the stairs shivered and hiccuped, their edges stuttering.
"Nani…?" Kurogiri's tone cracked for the first time.
The sleek metal of his support brace spider-webbed with fractures; a hairline split gleamed like an exposed nerve.
His glowing eyes lifted—and met rings.
Pale concentric circles of impossible geometry stared back, unblinking, implacable.
The Rinnegan's gaze was an event horizon.
For a creature of fog, A Nomu , Kurogiri felt something he was not built to feel.
Fear.
Nagato stepped forward out of the shrinking dust cloud holding Kurogiri in his hand.
He didn't raise his voice.
"I've had enough of this."
Another invisible tug gripped Kurogiri by the throat.
The mist wobbled, the metal brace groaned, and fine cracks crawled outward with a sound like frozen lakes underfoot.
"Yamero—!" Kurogiri's voice distorted.
A portal half-formed by his shoulder blinked like a panicked eye and then collapsed as gravity betrayed him.
Below, Tomura turned his head with a scrape of fingers on the hand affixed to his face.
In irritation.
On the stairs, the students stared—first at Kurogiri pinned to a stone hand; then at the boy at the front of their class who had just ordered space itself to sit.
"Nagato…"
Bakugo's lips peeled back in a grin he didn't try to tame. "Heh. That's more like it."
Nagato didn't look away from the living fog. "Everyone," he said,
"leave. Bring others. As fast as you can."
"No!" Iida's engines whined in protest before his words even finished.
"Yeah , Its not manly to leave friends behind."- Kirishima interjected.
"We cannot possibly leave you here alone under assault from multiple villains. The probability—" Iida
"Yes-" Argued Momo.
"Who says I'm alone?" Nagato asked, not quite smiling.
Two shapes stepped to his shoulders in the same heartbeat.
Midoriya—green lightening crackling around him,—nodded once.
Bakugo—shoulders loose, palms already sparking—bumped a fist into Midoriya's with a small, explosive crackle.
"Hell yeah."
The tiny celebration hit like a spark in dry grass.
For an instant, it replaced fear with something else: recognition.
These three had been pulling away from the class since day one—not because they wanted to, but because gravity does what gravity must.
"I'm staying," Todoroki said, stepping forward without waiting for permission.
Frost whispered under his boots, a pale ghost of resolve.
"You're—" Iida stalled between duty and respect, eyes clicking left and right as if his brain were a metronome running too fast. "This is—"
"Please Everyone, You must leave." - Nagato said.
Toru's heart clenched.
Others wanted to interject.
But-
"This is the fastest way to get help," Momo cut in, voice steady despite the tremble in her fingers.
She'd already fashioned a rigid frame beneath Thirteen, an emergency stretcher with locking joints and padded grips.
"We carry Thirteen. We alert the pros. Then we return. That's the plan."
Ochako swallowed.
Her cheeks were pale, her mouth set. "Right."
"We'll be back, ribbit." Tsuyu's tongue flicked once.
"Please be safe, Nagato-kun," Toru said, the emptiness where her face should be tilted toward him.
Nagato inclined his head by a degree.
Promise.
Momo's jaw tightened, a diamond of resolve set in velvet. "Please hold. We will bring help." She secured the last strap over Thirteen's suit—Sero's tape layered with her polymer mesh to form a temporary carapace.
"Kirishima, front left. Sero, front right. Tsuyu and Ochako on the rear corners. Jiro, you're my ears—keep calling our path. Mina—watch the floors, melt any stray obstacles. Toru, stay close to the center. Iida—"
"I will lead." Iida planted himself at the point of the spear, engines humming with a patient fury. "If a portal opens, I will intercept."
"And if something gets through," Jiro added, "we scream and run faster."
A laugh stumbled out of Kaminari and died halfway, shame-bright. He nodded anyway.
"Y-Yeah. Plan. Love plans."
"Go," Nagato said.
They didn't want to go.
Not at first.
They wanted to run.
They had to run.
But their shoes were lead and the stairs were quicksand and the knowledge that they were leaving friends to face monsters tasted like metal and chalk in their mouths.
For each of them, the unwillingness had a different shape:
Ochako's fingers hovered an inch above the stretcher rail before she clenched and grabbed. She liked fun.
She liked cheap lunches.
She liked floating a couch because it made someone laugh.
But in the roaring light of the USJ, she hated the way her quirk made her weightless while the decision to leave felt heavy enough to snap her spine.
She stared at Nagato's back, at Midoriya's concerned face, at Bakugo's wicked grin, and thought: 'If I had just a little more power, I could anchor them to safety instead of running from danger.'
She looked down at Thirteen—that blank, unmoving shape inside a white shell—and whispered, "We'll come back. I promise."
Momo had the answers to tests and the names of chemical chains mapped like constellations across her mind.
She did not have answers for this.
Her creation quirk tingled at her skin, hungry for a command. Shield? Spear? Net? She could make any of them.
None of them felt like enough when the enemy was space and fear.
So she fell back on doctrine. and Her voice didn't shake when she repeated, "Return with help. Execute."
But in the private room of her thoughts, a single sentence wrote itself on an empty chalkboard: 'If something happens to them while I run, I will never forgive myself.'
Jiro already knew how fear sounded.
It sounded like a heart a little too fast and a breath a little too shallow and a footfall out of rhythm and It sounded like villains below stamping time to a wrong song.
It sounded like Kurogiri's voice finally cracking when Nagato said he'd had enough.
She hated that sound, and she hated that the stairwell was echoing her own pulse back at her, and she hated that leaving felt like muting a song that was about to explode into the chorus. 'We will come back.'
Mina had trained herself to smile through everything.
She smiled when the first portal opened and smiled when Sero's tape slapped down and held. She smiled when Nagato spoke like a boss from a final level But her smile trembled now, and she tucked it away like a note you don't want anyone to see.
She flexed her fingers, acid stinging her palms—not enough to drip, just enough to remind herself she could melt through something for once instead of letting it melt her.
Toru was invisible, and now that felt like a curse.
She wanted to be seen.
She wanted to be a flag planted on the line that said we don't move.
And For the first time someone could see her.
Now , the one who can see was in danger and she couldn't do anything instead of praying. "Come back," she whispered. "Come back with us in one piece."
"Come back to me."
Kirishima's teeth clicked.
He'd always imagined heroism as a fist and a shout and a wall of abs you could run a truck into and hadn't imagined being told to lift and carry and leave But when Momo said, front left, he was there, and when the stretcher listed, he took it all with a grunt and a grin that felt like a splint holding something broken in place.
"Manly thing to do is bring help," he told himself, because he had to name it something manly or it would taste like quitting.
'I'm pathetic. I vowed to never run away but now-'
"Move out!" Iida commanded.
They moved.
The class peeled away in a tight, awkward procession, the stretcher at its core like a precious, fragile heart.
As they passed Nagato, Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki, each of them stole a piece of them with their eyes—a borrowed courage, a borrowed stubbornness, a borrowed rage—and tucked it into pockets to carry down the stairs.
Kurogiri struggled, portals birthing and dying like panicked fish.
Nagato's gaze flicked, and each time the fog gathered intent, gravity smothered it.
The metal brace creaked again, another delicate crack whispering along its circumference.
"You should not have come for students," Nagato said simply.
"We came," Kurogiri replied, voice rasped into something ugly, "to invite a Symbol to die."
"Then you chose the wrong bait."
A scrape of skin over brittle hand interrupted them.
Tomura had climbed halfway up the rubble slope, the hand over his face canted; the eye between its fingers glittered.
He scratched at his neck as if trying to dig out a thought with his nails.
"NPCs shouldn't get to talk like that," he said, as if explaining a game mechanic to a stubborn tutorial.
"It's cheating."
He looked at the trio blocking his path.
His path to kill.
"Hnn." The sound he made was half laugh, half cough.
"If you are soo eager to die, then , I'll let you meet the weapon."
"The weapon to kill ALL MIGHT!"
"Nomu!"
The hulking figure at his shoulder stepped forward, the brain-crowned skull stippled with veins, its obsidian hide glistening. It did not ask questions. It did not have questions.
Aizawa, below, smashed another villain into a pillar hard enough to make pebble rain.
"Students!"He was exhausted.
The villains kept on coming.
"Keep moving!" Iida barked, legs pistoning.
Ochako almost tripped, caught herself, breathed out.
Her stomach sloshed with adrenaline. "You okay, Thirteen? We're getting you out—"
Thirteen didn't answer.
Under the patched suit, emptiness hummed faintly. I
"Keep her steady," Sero muttered. "Tape holds. Tape—yeah. Holds."
Back on the platform, Bakugo cracked his neck. "You look like a trash bag with eyes," he told Kurogiri conversationally.
"Might be the first villain that's literally garbage."
Kurogiri's slits narrowed. "Your lack of decorum—"
"Is gonna be the last thing you think about," Bakugo finished, palms barking a short, percussive snap that sent pebbles skittering.
"Bakugo," Midoriya said, tone caution and coiled spring.
"The collar. If we disrupt it, the mist might destabilize."
"Yeah, I got eyes, nerd."
Todoroki's frost crept in a thin sheen toward Tomura's boots.
"The villains are here" he observed.
Behind them was Nomu.
"I want to fight this one!" - Bakugo.
"Kacchan! Me first."- Midoriya.
"Noo , I said first."
"Pwease??"- Midoriya
"Ughh! Okay! But only once! and for 15 minutes only!"- Bakugo.
"Thans a lot Kacchan! I'll definatly pay you back for this favour!" " Yoshaa!"
Nagato looked and sighed.
The Nomu took a step; Nagato's head tilted a fraction and the step became a stumble, the knee misjudging where the floor ought to be.
Tomura's grin trembled.
Not with fear.
With irritation. "Stop breaking the map," he hissed. "Play fair."
"You entered a school full of children," Nagato said. "Fairness does not interest you."
"Hah." Tomura scratched hard enough to draw a bead of blood at his neck.
He licked it absently.
"You talk like an endboss. That's fine." He spread his fingers. "I like breaking those the most."
Below, the unwilling exodus pressed on.
They passed a window cut into the curved wall. Through it, the Flood Zone glimmered—a glittering false lagoon churned by panic.
A villain like a spiny eel lashed the water, sending sheets of spray against glass.
Another villain's laugh traveled wet and muffled. "Come out, little fishies!"
"Don't look!" Jiro snapped. "Eyes on the path."
"But—" Mina's voice hiccuped. "They need help."
Momo's breath wavered once, then steadied. "We will come back with pros. We cannot help if we are dead."
"For now, we escape."
Back above, Kurogiri tried to warp sideways.
Crack.
"Still trying?" Nagato murmured.
Kurogiri's reply was a cascade of smaller portals, trying to chew him out of the grip of physics.
Nagato blinked once.
The portals died like candleflames in rain.
Bakugo barked a laugh. "Heh. Guess space just met someone meaner."
Midoriya was already charging himself.
Todoroki shifted, frost whispering, the first ghosts of vapour coiling from his left side. "Try not to blow up the entire platform."
"No promises," Bakugo said, grinning wider.
The Nomu crouched, a taut spring of meat and engineered violence.
The tendons in its neck stood out like hawsers. It launched.
Nagato's rings tightened.
"Go!" Iida yelled—down below, far away, too close.
The exit sign finally flared at the end of a corridor like a small, sanctified miracle. "Almost there!"
"Wait!" Jiro flung her jacks into the air. They hummed—a bat's keen, a sonar sweep. Vibrations returned—footsteps ahead, two o'clock, fast.
"We've got incoming from the right corridor!"
"Portal?" Momo asked.
"No. Man with metal steps—heavy. Not someone we know."
Kirishima's grip tightened. "Then if it's a villain—"
The corridor ahead exploded inward as a muscular thug with steel-plated shins barrelled through, eyes wild.
"Found you little rats!" He swung a kick at head height that would have rearranged anyone's face into modern art.
Kirishima hardened—skin stone-red and diamond tough—and took the kick on his forearm, grunting. "Gotta do better than that!"
"Back!" Iida ordered, engines whining as he pivoted on one foot and side-kicked the thug's ankle.
The steel guard rang like a bell; the man's balance broke and he pitched sideways.
"Now!" Mina smeared a quick line of acid where his palm would slap to catch himself.
It hissed, he yelped, and his hand didn't catch; he thumped the floor instead, stunned.
Sero taped him to the wall in three crisp slaps. "Package delivered."
"Move!" Momo said, eyes already up, scanning. "Next corner—left!"
They ran, hearts in their throats, fear snapping at their heels like a dog.
On the platform, the dog had many more teeth.
Kurogiri made one more bid for composure.
"Young Master," he rasped, trying to abide by the shape of the hierarchy he'd sworn to. "The targets—"
"Shut up," Tomura said mildly, eyes never leaving Nagato's.
He tilted his head.
"You're not part of the script. But that's fine. Mods can be fun."
Tomura's hand twitched.
The Nomu lunged. Bakugo moved.
"DE—"
A green blur.
Midoriya moved.
"SMASH!"
Two detonations overlapped—one explosive, one sonic—a concussive duet that shoved the Nomu sideways mid-pounce.
It skidded, claws scoring a brutal geometry into the tile.
Todoroki's frost surged—clean, controlled, a ramp born under the Nomu's feet that betrayed traction and redirected momentum.
The monster hit, slid, and buried knee-deep in an instant glacier.
"Nani?! He wasn't flown Back even at that?!" - Bakugo
"H-huh? He is absorbing the Impact?!"
Midoriya shouted, air burning in his lungs.
"Oi fire-ice freak , freeze the villains around sensei."
"I'm trying," Todoroki snapped said.
Then suddenly a villain named - FourArms , a mutant quirk.
Red skin , four yellow eyes and four arms , lunged at Bakugo- "I'm gonna rip ya apart!"
Time seemed to slow around Bakugo as he raised his hands and without looking at the jumping villain he said - "Shut up."
BOOOM
The villain was blasted away and hit the structure's wall hundred metres away with a loud boom.
Tomura giggled.
"That one's fun," he said to no one at all.
Kurogiri tried to move again.
"Yield," Nagato advised.
"I don't—" Kurogiri's gaze flared. "—know that word."
"Learn it."
Down the corridor, the exit doors banged open with the undignified joy of salvation.
Fresh air—real and indifferent—slapped their faces.
The distant chatter of the campus was a different planet. Somewhere above, an alarm howled a new note.
"Out!" Iida commanded, voice breaking into something human on the edges. "We are out!"
Momo did not stop moving.
"We get distance," she said. "We find our Teachers—anyone. Ochako, Tsuyu—keep the stretcher stable—"
"On it," Ochako said, dizzy with relief and guilt in equal measure.
"Kero," Tsuyu breathed. "We go back."
Jiro spun, jacks skimming the air as if to pull sound that would tell her everyone still inside was okay."Hurry."
Toru's hand wiped at a face no one could see.
The glove came away wet. "Please be safe," she whispered again, to the boy framed in her memory.
"Kirishima!" Sero panted. "You okay, man?"
"Hard as ever," Kirishima said, trying to laugh and failing.
He looked back once.
Just once.
"Be manly," he told the air. "Be more manly than me."
They ran into the light.
On the platform, the light felt far away.
Tomura slid down a step and squatted on his haunches, resting his chin on the back of his knuckles as if watching a cat toy.
"Keep playing," he murmured to the Nomu. "We'll break them apart piece by piece." His eye slitted happily.
Midoriya and Nomu were locked in a barrage of punches.
On the other side , Some villains jumped on the trio.
Bakugo's answer was an explosion sung in profanities.
He rocketed, braked at an angle that would have shredded mortal wrists, and slammed both palms into a Villains ribs.
BOOM— The shockwave jellied the Villain's organs for a heartbeat. Barely alive.
Todoroki's frost shot up its spine, spidering into a forest of spears that caged some villains. "Huff"
Kurogiri made a last, desperate choice. If he could not escape gravity's hand, he would bring gravity's master to him.
A portal yawed open under Nagato's feet, a hole cut into the stage of the world with a surgeon's hand and a murderer's dream.
Nagato's rings narrowed. "Unwise."
He dropped anyway.
For the span of a blink, Tomura's smile sharpened into triumph.
For the span of the next blink, the portal inverted—edges folding, inside out, reality refusing the operation as if it had been printed on the wrong kind of paper.
The hole spat Nagato back out upward, and he landed where he'd begun with the quiet finality of a period at the end of a sentence.
Kurogiri's collar split with a final, musical crack.
He gasped—sound tearing—and caught himself against the statue's palm, the elegance finally gone from his voice. "Young Master—"
Tomura didn't look.
He stood.
Kurogiri fell immobile.
Nagato took one step forward.
He was alone on the platform and was surrounded was dozens of villains.
The floor complained softly under his heel.
"Shinra Tensei."