The ravine was worse than the word implied.
Kendo stood at the edge, wind pulling at her ponytail, looking down into a drop that had to be at least eighty feet, jagged rock walls streaked with moss and loose scree, a thin ribbon of river visible far below.
"So," Pixie-Bob said cheerfully, hands on her hips, "you're all going to get down there."
A beat of silence.
"…And back up!" she added, as if that were the fun part.
Monoma, predictably, was the first to protest. "With respect… and I do mean some respect… that looks less like training and more like a liability lawsuit."
"That's the spirit!" Pixie-Bob beamed like he'd complimented her. "No ropes, no shortcuts. Use your quirks. That's the entire point! most of you have never had to actually problem-solve your way down a rock face under pressure. Today, you will."
Mandalay stepped up beside her, arms crossed, voice calm and clear enough to carry over the wind. "We'll be watching from multiple points. If anyone's in genuine danger, we intervene immediately. But short of that… figure it out yourselves! This is exactly the kind of scenario you might face in the field, minus someone conveniently on hand to save you."
Tiger, further down the line, was already demonstrating proper anchoring technique on a boulder for anyone paying attention, which was mostly Tetsutetsu, nodding along with far more focus than he usually managed in actual class.
Kendo looked over the edge again. Her stomach did a slow, unpleasant roll.
'Big Fist doesn't exactly do finesse, she thought. Great for punching things. Less great for climbing.' She mused.
She glanced sideways at Kodai, whose expression suggested she was thinking something similar.
"Any ideas?" Kendo asked.
"A few bad ones," Kodai admitted. "You?"
"Not yet..."
One by one, the class began picking their way down. Tetsutetsu just turned to steel and more or less walked straight down the rock face, ignoring gravity's opinion on the matter through sheer stubborn density. Monoma, after several loud complaints, ended up copying Tetsutetsu's quirk halfway down and immediately regretted it when it turned out not to suit vertical rock faces at all.
Kendo watched, filed away techniques, discarded most of them as useless for her own quirk and finally settled on something stupid and simple: enlarge her hands, punch handholds directly into the rock face as she went, climb down her own improvised ladder one brutal fistful at a time.
It was slow. It was exhausting. By the time she reached the halfway point, her arms burned and her knuckles were scraped raw despite the hardening and sweat had soaked clean through her shirt despite the mountain cold.
But it worked.
"Not bad, Itsuka!" Ragdoll called down from somewhere above, her voice carrying oddly clearly for the distance. "Rough stats wise, but functional. I like functional."
Kendo didn't have the breath to answer, just gave a thumbs up and kept punching her way downward.
By the time she hit the riverbed, legs shaking, hands throbbing, most of the class was already down, sprawled across rocks in various states of exhaustion.
"Alright!" Pixie-Bob's voice rang down from above, amplified somehow, cutting cleanly through the wind. "Now climb back up! Different route this time, no repeating handholds!"
A collective groan rose from the riverbed loud enough to startle a bird out of the treeline.
The climb up was worse. Kendo's arms were already spent, her improvised handhold method slower the second time since half the rock face was already cratered from her own fists and she had to find fresh ground. By the time she hauled herself back over the ridge, she was shaking, drenched in sweat and fairly sure her hands would ache for a week.
Tiger was waiting at the top with water bottles, handing them out like a proud, oversized coach. "Good work, all of you. That's exactly the kind of adaptability we wanted to see."
Kendo drank half the bottle in one go, then dropped onto the grass beside Kodai, both of them staring up at a sky gone gold with late afternoon light.
"I hate this camp already," Kodai muttered.
"You'll survive."
"We just got here and we're already doing some nonsense." She sighed.
By the time dinner rolled around, which was curry that everyone had to make themselves… though, Class 1-A had finally arrived… the whole class had the particular loose, punch drunk energy of people who'd been thoroughly wrung out physically. Conversation was easy, a little giddy, the kind of camaraderie that came from shared suffering.
After making her own curry, Kendo ate mechanically, only half listening to Tetsutetsu recount his rock face descent for what had to be the fourth time, her eyes drifting periodically toward the far end of the table.
Aoyama picked at his food and said almost nothing the entire meal.
She caught Kodai following her gaze at one point, raising an eyebrow in silent question. Kendo just shook her head slightly. "Later."
As the sky started bruising toward dusk and people began drifting off toward the cabins to shower and collapse, Kendo lingered near the treeline instead, watching Aoyama slip away from the group early, alone, heading toward the edge of camp where the cabins gave way to open dark.
She thought about the tracker in her bag. About a rooftop, a silent hand, a promise she hadn't gotten an answer to yet.
She thought about what Dante had said and a scarf soaked through with someone else's blood, metaphorically if not literally, and decided she was done filing things away for later.
Kendo set down her empty bowl, and started walking after him.