They eventually stumbled on Bakugo and Todoroki while they were in the middle of a fight, backs pressed almost against each other in a clearing scorched black in a rough circle, facing down a man in a checkered mask who kept flickering in and out of view like he wasn't fully committing to being anywhere at all.
"Watch it," Tetsutetsu muttered, pulling Kendo to a stop at the tree line. "This looks tricky."
Kendo studied the man for a second.
Something about the way he moved set off every instinct she had, unhurried, almost theatrical, like he found the whole situation mildly entertaining rather than dangerous.
"Careful," she said, quiet. "He's not panicking, he's very clearly pretty good."
A wave of Todoroki's ice shot out low across the ground and the masked man simply vanished sideways out of its path without seeming to hurry at all, laughing softly behind his hand.
"Oh, this is fun," he said, voice smooth, almost delighted. "Really, truly. You two are much more interesting than I expected."
"Shut up and hold still," Bakugo snarled, already lunging with a blast that should have caught him square in the chest. It didn't. The man simply wasn't there anymore, reappearing a few feet to the side, still smiling behind his mask.
Kendo stepped out from the tree line without fully deciding to, Tetsutetsu right behind her despite the fresh wound along his ribs.
The man's head turned toward her immediately, and something in his posture shifted, a kind of pleased recognition that made her skin crawl before he'd even said a word.
"Well, well." He tilted his head, mask catching the moonlight. "There you are. I was starting to wonder if I'd have to go looking."
Kendo's stomach dropped straight through the forest floor.
"You know me?"
"Oh, I know plenty about you, Miss Itsuka Kendo." He said her name like he was savoring it. "Enough to know Tomura's going to be thrilled I found you first."
Todoroki's eyes flicked toward her, sharp and questioning, but there wasn't time to explain.
The man moved, fast now, no longer bothering with the lazy theatrics, and Kendo barely got her arms up before he was on her.
"Kendo, get out of here!" Tetsutetsu threw himself between them, steel fist swinging, but the man simply stepped through the gap like smoke, already past him.
Bakugo cut in from the side with an explosion that finally forced the man to actually dodge properly, buying half a second, and Todoroki followed with a wall of ice meant to box him in entirely.
It almost worked. For one breathless moment the man was actually cornered, back against a solid sheet of ice, three of them closing from different angles.
He just smiled wider.
"Almost," he said, sounding genuinely delighted. "Really, truly almost."
His hands came together in front of him in a smooth, practiced motion, and Kendo had half a second to realize what was happening before the world around her compressed into nothing.
…
Her hearing came back first. But it was muffled, distant, like she was underwater.
Then light, dim and strange, refracted at odd angles like she was looking through glass.
Kendo tried to move and found she couldn't, not really, not in any way that made sense.
Her limbs felt wrong, folded up somewhere that shouldn't have existed, panic clawing up her throat even though she couldn't quite locate her own throat to scream through.
Outside, faint and warped, she could hear voices. Bakugo shouting something furious.
Todoroki, sharper, colder.
And underneath it all, that same smooth, pleased voice, closer now than either of them.
"There we go," the man said, sounding satisfied. "One marble, one troublesome hero-in-training. Tomura's going to owe me for this."
'A marble?' Kendo realized, distantly, horror creeping in slow and thick. 'He compressed me into a marble…'
She tried to scream. Nothing came out that she could hear, just a strange pressure against whatever passed for her body now, folded impossibly small.
"Let her go!" Tetsutetsu's voice, closer, furious, followed by the crack of something colliding with something else.
"Ah ah." The man's tone stayed maddeningly calm. "Wouldn't want to drop her, would you? No telling what happens to the contents if the marble breaks at the wrong moment."
A pause. Kendo felt, more than heard, the moment everyone froze.
"You wouldn't," Todoroki said, voice tight.
"I might not have to, if you all just calm down and let me leave peacefully." A soft laugh. "Really, this is so much easier than I expected. I do so love it when things go smoothly."
Kendo's mind raced, trapped in whatever strange half existence the marble had folded her into, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except listen to her own capture happening around her like she was already somewhere else entirely.
'The tracker', she thought desperately. 'It's still in my jacket. It's still on me. He'll know. He has to know, right?!'
She didn't know if that was true. She didn't know if the compression had somehow severed whatever connection the device relied on, didn't know if Dante was even close enough for it to matter at all.
Outside, the fighting had gone quiet, tense, a standoff she couldn't see the shape of.
"Smart," the man said finally, approvingly. "Very smart, backing off. I really would hate to lose such a lovely prize over a misunderstanding."
Another beat of terrible silence.
Then, faintly, she felt it, a strange lurch, like the world itself folding again, and she understood with sick clarity that he was compressing himself too now, wrapping his own escape around the marble that held her, making them both vanish together into whatever gap he used to move.
The last thing she heard, distant and fading, was Tetsutetsu's voice, raw and desperate, shouting her name into a clearing that no longer held her at all.
Then there was only the muffled dark, the strange folded pressure of her own trapped body, and the slow, creeping certainty that wherever she was going next, nobody who cared about her was going to know where to look.