The clearing was bigger than it looked from the bus window.
Kendo stood with her duffel slung over one shoulder, turning in a slow half circle to take it all in properly.
She saw Wooden cabins ringed the treeline in a loose crescent, weathered but sturdy, smoke already curling from one chimney despite the mild weather.
Past them, the ground sloped down toward the sound of rushing water… the river she'd heard earlier, wider than she'd expected, cutting a silver line through the valley floor.
Beyond that, mountains climbed in every direction, dense with pine, the kind of green that looked almost black in the shadowed folds.
It smelled like sap and cold stone. Nothing like the city.
"This is way more remote than I thought it'd be," Kodai said beside her, craning her neck to look up at the ridgeline.
"That's kind of the point," Kendo murmured. Isolated. Defensible, in theory. Fewer distractions, fewer people to accidentally hurt during training. She catalogued it anyway, the sightlines, the tree cover, how far the nearest access road probably was… and then caught herself doing it and frowned.
'You're being paranoid,' she told herself. 'It's a training camp.'
She believed it about as much as she believed anything these days.
Monoma was already loudly boasting. Tetsutetsu shoved past him toward the gear pile with an armful of duffel bags, grinning at nothing in particular. Somewhere behind Kendo, Awase and Kaibara were arguing about whether the river would be cold enough to actually hurt.
It felt, for a moment, almost normal. Almost like any other class trip.
Then a voice cut through the noise.
It was warm, a little sing song, carrying easily over the chatter despite not sounding like it was trying to.
"Alright, settle down, kittens! Introductions first, unpacking after."
Kendo turned.
Four figures stood near the largest cabin, and even from a distance it was obvious they weren't ordinary teachers. The woman in front had thick, dark hair styled into two curling tufts that looked uncannily like cat ears, whiskers painted across her cheeks, a build that suggested serious physical strength packed into an otherwise unassuming frame.
"Pixie-Bob," Kodai murmured, reading off a laminated info sheet someone had handed out on the bus. "Earth based quirk. And that's Mandalay next to her, the Telepath. Ragdoll's the one with the… huh, weird eyes. And that's Tiger, obviously."
Tiger was hard to miss. Easily the largest of the four, striped fur, a build like he could bench-press the bus they'd just gotten off of. He gave a friendly wave to the assembled students, though his expression was mostly hidden behind a mask.
"Welcome to the Wild, Wild Pussycats' training grounds!" Pixie-Bob announced, striking a pose that half the class immediately started snickering at, though she seemed either not to notice or not to care. "We've partnered with U.A. for years now, and let me tell you… this mountain does not go easy on visitors."
"She means that literally," Mandalay added, voice calmer, more measured. Her eyes swept the crowd once, slow and assessing, and for half a second Kendo felt distinctly like she was being read rather than looked at. "We'll be running quirk-enhancement training over the next several days. Real terrain, real difficulty. No holding back, because that's how you actually grow."
"And if anyone gets themselves seriously hurt trying to show off," Tiger added, in a voice far gentler than his size suggested, "we will absolutely tell your parents exactly how it happened."
A ripple of nervous laughter went through the group. Kendo found herself smiling despite everything. It was a real one, small but genuine.
Ragdoll stepped forward next, and something about her quirk made Kendo's skin prickle faintly, though she couldn't place why. The woman's eyes flicked across the crowd, almost scanning, cataloguing each student in turn with an expression that was friendly but strangely focused.
"Search-type quirk," Ragdoll said cheerfully, apparently answering a question nobody had asked out loud. "I can track people, read their stats, that sort of thing. Comes in handy for search and rescue drills. Or," she added, a little more mischievously, "for finding out exactly who's slacking off during training."
A groan went up from somewhere near the back.
Kendo's hand drifted, almost involuntarily, to the strap of her bag. The tracker was in there. Encrypted, Dante had said. Untraceable except to him.
She wondered, with a small cold twist in her stomach, whether a Search-type quirk could see through something like that.
'Probably not,' she told herself. 'Different kind of tracking entirely. Stop being paranoid.'
Mandalay clapped her hands once, drawing the group's attention back. "Alright! Cabins are already assigned… check the board by the mess hall. Drop your things, get changed into training gear, and meet back here in twenty minutes. First activity starts before lunch."
The class began to disperse in a loose, chattering mass, dragging bags toward the cabins. Kendo fell into step beside Kodai, half-listening to her friend speculate about what "real terrain, real difficulty" actually meant in practice.
She glanced back once, toward the treeline, toward the mountains rising dark and endless behind the camp.
Somewhere out there… twelve feet of range, she remembered him saying once, half to himself, like he hadn't meant to say it aloud, Dante and whatever he was becoming these days might already be watching. Or might not be anywhere near here at all. She had no way of knowing. That was the whole point of the arrangement, wasn't it. Radio silence until it wasn't.
She hated it a little. She understood it more than she hated it.
"Kendo." Kodai's voice, closer now, faintly amused. "You're drifting off."
"Sorry." She forced her attention back, adjusted her grip on the duffel. "Just taking it all in."
"Uh huh." Kodai didn't look convinced, but she let it go, veering off toward the cabin board to find their names. "Come on."
Kendo huffed something like a laugh and followed her, pushing the mountains and the silence and the small cold weight in her bag to the back of her mind, at least for now.
Twenty minutes later, gathered again in the clearing in training gear, Pixie-Bob grinned wide enough to show teeth and gestured broadly toward the treeline.
"Alright, kittens! First test of the day… everybody, follow me to the ravine!"
Kendo's stomach dropped slightly at the word ravine, but she squared her shoulders and fell into step with the rest of her class, trying very hard not to think about anything waiting for her out past the edge of the map.