Chapter 33; calmness of sand.
For seven, long, impossible seconds, the world held its breath. The roar of the crowd, the frantic energy of the chase, the strategic calculations of forty teams—all of it was snuffed out, replaced by a profound, deafening, and absolute silence.
The U.A. Sports Festival stadium, a moment ago a vibrant green field of competition, had become a silent, miniature desert.
Team Midoriya stood alone in the center, an untouched island in a sea of still-settling sand. All around them, the aftermath of Gaara's instantaneous gambit was laid bare. Dozens of students, members of the weaker, less-prepared teams, were scattered across the sandy expanse. They were pulling themselves from the soft, deep grit, their cavalry formations shattered, their headbands lost, their faces masks of utter, dumbfounded confusion. They were not hurt—the sand had pushed them, not crushed them—but they were unequivocally, comprehensively defeated. The race for them was over.
The silence was first broken not by a voice, but by a sound of cracking ice.
Near the edge of the arena, a jagged, crystalline dome, now half-buried in sand, shattered outwards. Team Todoroki emerged, shaking grit from their gym uniforms.
"Whoa…" Kaminari breathed, his eyes wide as he surveyed the sandy wasteland. "What was that? Did we… win?"
"We have qualified," Yaoyorozu corrected, her expression a mixture of awe and deep analytical concern. "But we did not 'win'. That was… an unprecedented and terrifying application of a Quirk."
"Such a wide-scale, indiscriminate attack lacks strategic precision!" Iida declared, though his voice lacked its usual booming confidence.
Todoroki said nothing. He simply stared across the sand at the solitary team in the center, his gaze fixed on the red-haired boy. His own plan, the cold, logical 'culling' at the start of the race, had just been replicated and amplified a thousandfold. It had been rendered a child's gambit in the face of this… absolute declaration. He had been outmaneuvered and overpowered in a way he had not thought possible. A new, dangerous, and deeply intriguing variable had just been violently inserted into his calculations.
Elsewhere, another pocket of survivors stirred. A shimmering, transparent box of solidified air dissolved, revealing the four members of Team Monoma. Tetsutetsu and Shiozaki stared, speechless, but Neito Monoma began to laugh. It was a wild, unhinged cackle of pure, twisted glee.
"Wonderful! Simply wonderful!" he crowed, clapping his hands together. "So Class 1-A has a true monster among them after all! Not just a pretty-boy prodigy or an angry, barking dog! This… oh, this makes crushing them all in the final round all the more satisfying!"
Team Bakugo was not laughing. They were stuck waist-deep in the sand, their formation unbroken but completely immobilized. Kirishima was looking around, trying to find a positive spin. "Man, that was crazy… but hey! We're still up! We qualified, right Bakugo?"
Bakugo did not answer. He was shaking. Not from fear, but from a rage so profound, so absolute, that it had gone past sound. He was staring at Gaara, his teeth gritted so hard his jaw ached. He had been denied. Denied his fight, denied his chance to hunt down Midoriya, denied his chance to prove his own overwhelming strength. The entire game had been stolen from him before he'd even had a chance to play.
It was the voice of Midnight, hesitant and filled with an uncharacteristic disbelief, that finally sliced through the thick, stunned atmosphere of the stadium.
"The… the teams…" she stammered into her microphone, her own eyes wide as she scanned the field. "All teams… except for four… have been rendered immobile or have lost their headbands…" She took a shaky breath. "The Cavalry Battle… is… over?"
The quiet uncertainty in her voice was all it took. Present Mic, in the announcer's booth, exploded.
"WHAAAAAT?! OVER?! IT'S OVER?! THE CAVALRY BATTLE HAS CONCLUDED IN THE FIRST TEN SECONDS! THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE! WHAT DID WE JUST WITNESS?!"
His scream broke the spell. The crowd, which had been holding a collective breath, erupted. The sound was a chaotic, disbelieving roar of excitement, confusion, and pure, unadulterated awe. They had come expecting a battle. They had witnessed an execution.
In his office, Best Jeanist stared at the screen of his laptop, his posture perfect, his face an unreadable mask. His sidekick was stammering beside him.
"Sir… his… his control…"
"This is not raw power," Best Jeanist said, his voice a low, clinical hum of analysis. "That was the application of overwhelming force with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. He did not harm a single student, yet he defeated dozens. He did not just end the match… he dictated the very terms of reality." He leaned closer, his eyes narrowed. "Fascinating."
In his private box, Toshinori gripped the armrest of his chair, his knuckles white. He was not cheering. His heart was filled with a profound sense of both pride and deep, chilling concern.
To use such a massive, field-altering technique… and to do so for a defensive purpose… he thought, his eyes fixed on the small, still figure in the center of the sand. He protected his team. He protected the ten million points. But the sheer scale of it… he is still walking on a razor's edge between absolute control and utter catastrophe.
In the eye of the storm, Team Midoriya was frozen. The roar of the crowd, the voice of the announcer, the stares of the world—all of it was a distant, muffled buzz. Their universe had shrunk to the four of them, standing alone in a desert of their protector's making.
Uraraka was the first to find her voice. It was a trembling, awestruck whisper. "G-Gaara-kun… what… what was that?"
"A truly impressive display…" Tokoyami rumbled, his voice tight. Dark Shadow was peeking over his shoulder, its wide, yellow eyes fixed on Gaara, for once completely silent. "A true revelry in the abyss of power…"
Midoriya stared at Gaara's back. He was processing it all—the absolute defensive power, the instantaneous strategic solution, the fact that this quiet, broken boy had just saved them all with a move that could have killed them all. He opened his mouth, but a thousand questions fought their way to his lips and none of them escaped.
Gaara slowly turned to face them. The fierce irritation in his eyes had faded, replaced by a serious, focused calm. A faint sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead, and he took a single, deep breath—the only signs of the immense effort his move had cost him. He looked at the shocked, speechless faces of his teammates.
He said nothing. He did not need to.
His action had been a statement, a thesis on power delivered in a language of sand and silence. It said: You asked for my strength. Here it is. You asked for a shield. I am that shield. As long as I stand, you will not be touched.
He had not just redrawn the battlefield. He had redrawn himself in the eyes of the world. He was no longer just the villain from the USJ, or the mysterious newcomer. He was a force, an undeniable, terrifying, and utterly unpredictable power.
And the next round of the festival had just become infinitely more dangerous for everyone else.