The trail wound deeper into the trees than Kendo had expected, lanterns strung loosely along stakes every twenty feet or so…
It was just enough light to keep people from tripping over roots without actually making the woods feel any less unsettling.
She'd drawn a spot near the halfway point, tucked behind a wide pine with Setsuna crouched beside her, both of them stifling laughter every time footsteps approached from up the trail.
"You're way too excited about this," Kendo whispered.
"I'm always excited about this." Setsuna grinned. "It's the one time I get to use this for something other than gross out jokes."
Down the trail, voices approached, low and nervous.
Kendo recognized Uraraka's laugh first, a little too high, betraying nerves she was clearly trying to cover.
"You ready?" Setsuna whispered.
Kendo nodded, tension coiling in her legs.
The moment Uraraka and Tsuyu passed the marker, Setsuna's head detached cleanly from her shoulders and drifted out from behind the tree at eye level, grinning wide in the lantern light.
Uraraka screamed loud enough to startle birds out of the canopy.
Tsuyu, to her credit, just blinked and said something dry about it being "very effective" before dragging Uraraka onward down the trail, still shaking.
Kendo laughed despite herself, the sound genuine for the first time all evening.
"Okay, that was good," she admitted, once Setsuna's head had reattached and they'd settled back into position.
"I have a gift."
They ran the same routine three more times, small variations depending on who came through.
Sero laughed it off entirely, mostly annoyed. Kaminari nearly fell over backward.
Bakugo just scowled and told them both to knock it off, which somehow made it funnier.
By the fourth pass, Kendo's mind had started drifting again despite herself, thoughts sliding back toward the tree line beyond camp, toward Aoyama sitting alone in the dark, toward the tracker still tucked deep in her jacket pocket where she'd moved it before the trail started.
She checked it without thinking. Cold. Quiet. Same as always.
'He's fine', she told herself. 'You told him to talk to Aizawa. He'll do it. Or he won't, and that's on him now.'
It didn't sit right either way. She pushed it down and focused back on the trail.
The next pair through was Kirishima and Todoroki, and Setsuna was mid routine, head drifting out with a theatrical groan, when something changed in the air.
Kendo felt it before she understood it. A shift in pressure, subtle, the kind of thing you'd miss entirely if you weren't already halfway to paranoid.
The wind, which had been steady all night, seemed to catch and swirl for just a second too long.
Then she saw it.
Above the tree line, faint against the dark sky, a thin ribbon of purple smoke curled upward, catching what little moonlight filtered through the clouds.
"…Is that supposed to be part of the game?" Kirishima asked, following her gaze, voice uncertain.
Kendo's stomach dropped straight through the forest floor.
"No," she said. Her voice came out flatter than she meant it to. "It's not."
Setsuna's head snapped back onto her shoulders so fast it was almost comedic, if the moment had left any room for comedy at all. "Wait, seriously? That's not one of ours."
"It's not," Kendo said again, louder this time, already turning toward where the smoke was rising, tracing it back toward some point deeper in the woods, closer to the ridge where the older cabins sat half-hidden by the treeline.
Her pulse had gone loud in her own ears, drowning out the wind, drowning out Todoroki asking her something she didn't fully process.
'Purple smoke?'
She didn't know exactly what it meant. She didn't need to.
Every nerve in her body had gone tight and cold at once, some instinct older than reason screaming that this was wrong, that this was the kind of wrong that didn't undo itself.
Down the trail, she could hear Vlad King's voice rising sharply over the general chatter of students, sharp and commanding in a way she'd never heard from him before. "Everyone, stay where you are! Do not move from the trail!"
Too late for that. Kendo was already moving, cutting off the path, weaving between trees toward the source, Setsuna half a step behind her calling her name.
"Kendo, wait, we're supposed to stay on the—"
"Something's wrong." Kendo didn't slow down. Couldn't. "That's not part of the exercise, that's not anyone's quirk I recognise, that's—"
She stopped herself before she said it out loud. 'League.' Saying it felt like it would make it real too fast, faster than she was ready for.
Around them, the woods had gone strange, that eerie quiet that came right before something broke it. Even the wind seemed to have died down, like the whole forest was holding its breath.
Her hand found the tracker in her pocket without her quite deciding to reach for it, closing around the small cold shape like it might actually do something right now, like just holding it could summon him faster than whatever silent mechanism actually connected them.
'Please be close', she thought, not even sure who she was thinking it at. 'Please, please be close.'
Ahead through the trees, more shouting started, further off now, panicked and overlapping, and somewhere beneath it all a low groaning crash that sounded distinctly like something very large hitting the ground.
Setsuna finally caught up to her, breathless, face pale in the dim light. "Kendo, seriously, what is going on—"
"I don't know," Kendo admitted, and for the first time all night her voice actually shook. "But it's not part of the game."
The purple smoke thickened above the trees, spreading wider now, catching the moonlight in a way that looked almost beautiful if you didn't know better.
Kendo did know better.
So, she started running.