The card game had been going for forty minutes and Ashido was cheating in a way that was technically within the rules and ethically unsupported by any convention Yami could identify, and Kaminari hadn't caught on yet.
He watched this from the middle of the bus and thought about nothing relevant for approximately four minutes, which was the longest consecutive stretch of not-thinking-about-the-attack he'd managed since the Training Camp announcement.
The mountain road had the quality of a road that had been built by people with strong opinions about the correct relationship between infrastructure and terrain, which was that terrain won. It curved. It curved again. The bus driver navigated it with the specific expertise of someone for whom this route was routine and the passengers' relationship to physics was their own concern.
"Your draw," Momo said.
He drew a card. She had three cards left and he had eight, which was a communication about the card game's current state that he accepted. Momo played with the same precision she applied to everything — the game wasn't interesting to her in itself, she played with the investment she applied to any situation where execution quality mattered. Which was everything.
He'd told her three weeks ago: something might happen at camp. I think villain activity is possible. Not more than that. She'd asked one question — how confident are you? — and he'd said moderately, which was a lie by understatement so significant that the word lie barely covered it. She'd accepted this and started building equipment.
The concealed tracker was a flat disc at the back of his left shoulder blade, secured inside the collar of his training top. She'd created it in the library two days ago, handed it to him without ceremony, and said thirty-minute check intervals the way people said remember your sunscreen. The communication relay was in her own kit — a modified device that could punch signal through the forest's dead zones by bouncing off a repeater she'd also built, because Momo Yaoyorozu's response to we might be in a dangerous situation was to create infrastructure.
He looked at his eight cards.
"You're not paying attention," she said.
"I'm paying attention."
"You played a seven of clubs on a hand that was looking for pairs."
He looked at the card he'd just placed. She was correct. He picked it back up.
The cliff happened without announcement, which was how the Pussycats operated — the bus stopped, Aizawa said your survival exercise begins now, and then the ground moved.
The earth wall that launched the class off the cliff was Pixie-Bob's work, and the quality of it was the quality of a person who had been doing this specific exercise for enough years that the technique had no waste in it. Yami went off the edge with seventeen other students and felt the Beast's Forest's upper canopy arrive faster than welcome.
Three percent OFA absorbed the landing's initial impact, the Shock Absorption fragment covering the remainder, and his feet hit a tree branch at the correct angle to redirect into a controlled descent rather than a fall.
The overlay: high. High. Mandalay and Ragdoll at the cliff edge, already moving to observe. High. The forest itself registered nothing — no human signatures in the immediate radius.
He'd landed forty meters from two other students. The earth monsters Pixie-Bob was apparently running simultaneously were already visible through the trees — rough humanoid shapes of compressed soil moving with the particular intentionality of something that had a directive rather than a consciousness.
Four hours to camp, his memory supplied. This is the gauntlet.
He started moving.
Camp arrived with the specific quality of a destination that had been earned rather than reached. The clearing with the Pussycats' lodge, the outdoor facilities, the stone fire pits — all of it was correct against the map he'd been building from background imagery in his memory, and the correctness had the faint unreality of encountering a place you'd seen from outside the context of existing in it.
The class distributed across the communal spaces with the efficiency of people who were tired and hungry and had learned through a semester of cohabitation how to share limited space without negotiations. Yami found a position at the perimeter of the campfire where the light reached but the heat didn't overwhelm, ate his dinner faster than was polite, and spent thirty minutes walking the camp's outer boundary under the pretext of stretching.
The forest to the north had the quality of deep-summer woods at dusk — the cooling that didn't quite arrive yet, the first insects, the specific depth of a tree line when the trees were old enough that the canopy was continuous. He tracked distances against the map in his head. Two miles north from this point, the ridge. That was where the Vanguard Action Squad would establish their staging position.
Four days.
"You're doing the thing," Kirishima said.
He'd appeared from the direction of the campfire without Yami registering his approach, which was Kirishima's particular talent — not stealth, just the ability to move through social spaces without producing the kind of friction that announced most people's presence.
"What thing."
"The standing-alone-looking-at-the-dark thing." Kirishima sat down on a log at the clearing's edge and looked at the treeline with him for a moment. "You do it a lot."
"I like the dark."
"Sure." Kirishima's tone indicated he was accepting this answer in the category of answers that are technically valid without endorsing it as complete. He slung an arm around Yami's shoulders — the casual weight of it, the familiar contact that had started the day he'd come back from the USJ and which had, over the months, become a thing Kirishima did without apparently thinking about it. "This is gonna be the best week ever," he said.
Yami thought about four days. About the forest at night with Dabi's blue fire in it and Toga somewhere in the dark with a syringe and Muscular doing what Muscular did to anything that moved.
He smiled.
Not performing. Kirishima's conviction about the week had the quality of something that deserved a real response, and the response was a smile, because not smiling would have been a crime against the moment and against the person who had created the moment.
"Yeah," he said. "Probably."
The campfire behind them popped and sent sparks up into the dark above the clearing, and Kaminari's ghost story was audible from forty feet away and was objectively terrible and Ashido's response to it was audible from even further.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!