YOOO okay okay put the pitchforks down, I know its been 3 months, let me explain.
so remember how me and the boys were tracking cliffhanger-kun's disciples? the ones hunting the Inverted Spear of Heaven? yeah well they found it. used it to cancel the prison realm's seal and my man came out ANGRY. we've been at war for 3 months straight and I'd love to tell you we won but honestly we just signed a ceasefire cause both sides ran outta snacks lmao. part of the treaty says im allowed to post again, so here I am.
(real talk tho, life just happened. work + exams + my motivation folding like deku's arm, the usual combo. reading yalls comments while i was gone is lowkey what kept this story alive in my head so thank you for that fr, and im sorry for leaving you on a battle trial cliffhanger for 3 whole months, that was never the plan. cliffhanger-kun got me too ig)
also lowkey plot twist, part of why i vanished is i was cooking a whole roblox game 💀 horror game, you and the boys in a forest, something is hunting you, its live RIGHT NOW. (ttps://www.roblox.com/games/90544148231166/Escape-from-the-monster). go run it with the squad and tell me if you screamed, first person to clip themselves screaming gets a shoutout next chapter.
song of choice: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Pursuit ~ Cornered (a courtroom banger for a courtroom MC, put it on when the third battle starts, trust)
discord code is ttps://discord.gg/WmeZWDeZx9 , first 10 roles are looong gone.
and todays fun fact: the real reason Kenjaku spent 1000 years planning the culling game is cause he was bush camped by yuta for 1000 years
L yuta bush camping poor kenjaku get a life bro.
---
You can learn everything about a person by watching them lose.
Ren had spent a year watching people lose. First on a rooftop. Then in alleys, in basements, behind a podium with their own words closing around their throat. Losing was the most honest thing most people ever did.
Today, Class 1-A was going to lose in front of each other for the first time.
He was looking forward to it more than he wanted to admit. Which, since the vow, meant he had to admit it.
---
The monitor room smelled like twenty teenagers and fresh concrete.
All Might stood at the bank of screens, hero team and villain team earpieces distributed, rules explained. Fifteen minutes. Capture tape. The villains defend the fake nuclear weapon on the fifth floor, the heroes take it or take them. Midoriya and Uraraka stood by the entrance of the building looking like two people about to walk into a final exam they hadn't studied for. Which was funny, because one of them had spent ten years studying for exactly this.
"Who you got?" Kirishima asked. He'd appeared at Ren's elbow the way friendly people did, without any awareness that the space next to Ren usually stayed empty.
"Bakugo takes the fight," Ren said.
"Hmm, I thought that as well."
Ren just nodded.
The match started.
Bakugo went in through a window on the second floor and did something Ren had never once seen him do at Aldera.
He went quiet.
He moved through the corridors with his palms low and his steps measured, checking corners, controlling his breathing. Hunting. A year ago Bakugo Katsuki would have blown a hole in the front door and screamed Midoriya's name into the building because the performance mattered as much as the win.
Somebody had taught him what losing in front of people cost.
He put the thought with the others he wasn't ready to examine.
The pile was getting tall.
First contact happened in a third-floor corridor. Bakugo came around the corner with a right hook, the same right hook he always led with, and Midoriya was already moving before it finished, hands closing on the arm, hip turning, and Bakugo went over his shoulder and into the floor hard enough to bounce.
The monitor room made a sound like air leaving a room.
"He threw him," Kaminari said. "He THREW Bakugo."
"He read him," Ren said, mostly to himself.
On screen, Bakugo got up. And this was the part Ren watched closely, because this was the fork in the road. Old Bakugo would have detonated the entire corridor out of rage. This one rolled to his feet, reset his stance, and looked at Midoriya like a problem instead of an insult.
Then his face did something complicated, and the rage won anyway.
Some renovations take longer than a year.
The fight after that was ugly and fast. Explosion-assisted blitzes, Midoriya running, always half a step from being caught, buying time with corners and stairwells while Uraraka danced around Iida on the fifth floor.
Iida, for the record, had committed to villainy with the full force of his personality. He had swept the room of anything Uraraka could float, and he was doing a villain voice.
Then Bakugo raised the gauntlet.
All Might's voice went sharp over the earpiece. A warning.
Bakugo fired anyway.
The blast took out the corridor and most of the exterior wall. Smoke poured off the building on three screens at once. Half the class was on their feet. Kirishima was shouting at the screen. Nobody could see through the smoke, and nobody said the thing everyone was thinking.
Ren watched the screen and thought about scales.
He'd taken Bakugo's quirk once, for three hours, over a notebook. And here was that same quirk, aimed down a corridor at a person, at full yield. Judgeman would have had a field day. Unlicensed quirk usage, reckless endangerment, intent a coin flip between "win" and "erase."
But this was a licensed exercise, on a licensed campus, supervised by the number one hero in the world. Which made it legal.
The same act. A different room. That was the whole legal system in one image.
The end came the way it had to. Midoriya cornered, arm cocked, Bakugo closing in, and instead of aiming at Bakugo he aimed at the ceiling. The building's floors channelled the shockwave up like a chimney, and five stories above, Uraraka used the debris and a pillar and one shouted signal to turn the rubble field into a meteor swarm, and while Iida shielded his face she crossed the room and put both hands on the weapon.
"HERO TEAM," All Might announced, "WIIINS!"
Midoriya was on the floor of a wrecked corridor with an arm that was the wrong shape and the wrong colour. He was smiling. Unconscious people shouldn't smile.
Ren had watched plenty of people destroy themselves to protect a lie. He'd never watched someone do it to keep a promise. It looked different. He couldn't explain why.
Bakugo stood in the crater of his own blast and said nothing.
Just a fifteen-year-old staring at the spot where the win was supposed to be, running math that didn't come out in his favour no matter how many times he ran it.
Ren recognized the silence. He'd been fluent in it for months.
That's my doing too, he thought, and didn't know what to do with it.
---
They carried Midoriya to Recovery Girl. All Might gathered the class.
"Now! Who can tell me the MVP of this battle?"
Yaoyorozu's hand went up first. Iida fulfilled his role. Bakugo acted on a personal grudge. Midoriya's plan hospitalized him. Uraraka got careless at the end. The textbook answer. The kind that gets full marks.
"Precisely correct!" All Might boomed. He had clearly prepared none of it.
Then his eyes found Ren.
"Young Asano! You set the baseline for this class. Anything to add?"
Ren felt the vow settle in behind his teeth, the way it always did when someone handed him an open question in a room full of people.
"She's right about Iida." He paused. "Midoriya spent his own body to take the win. It worked because he meant it. And if that building were real, the gauntlet would have brought it down on the hostage. The weapon survived because UA builds to hero-exercise code." He looked at All Might. "You should mention that part. Nobody else will."
The class had gone very quiet.
All Might sweated through a smile. "An... extremely thorough addition! Yes!"
"Why does he talk like a judge," Kaminari whispered.
Jiro elbowed him.
---
The second battle took eleven seconds.
Team C, villains. Todoroki walked his teammate out of the building, touched the doorframe with one hand, and froze the entire structure from foundation to roof. Then he walked up five flights of iced stairs, past Sato frozen to the floor and Hagakure's empty shoes locked in the ice mid-step, and touched the weapon without changing his expression once.
The class lost its mind. Ren didn't.
He just adjusted a ranking he kept in a part of his head that most people would call paranoia and he called filing. There was exactly one person in this class whose output made his own numbers stop feeling comfortable, and that person had just ended a match without using half of himself.
Filed.
"THIRD BATTLE!" All Might held up the lots. "Team H as heroes! Team B as villains!"
Sero exhaled next to him. "That's us. Guarding the bomb with a giant in a suit. Honestly? Feeling good."
Yaoyorozu and Tokoyami were already talking quietly, heads together.
Ren buttoned his jacket.
---
The prep timer gave the villains five minutes with the weapon.
The bomb room was on the fourth floor, one main door, two windows, a ceiling of exposed beams. Sero was upside down in those beams within forty seconds, laying tape in a lattice across every approach, chattering the whole time because that's what Sero did with nerves.
"Okay so what's the plan, big guy?"
"You hold the ceiling. I stand next to the weapon."
Sero waited. "That's it? That's the whole plan?"
"Yes."
"Most guys would at least say something cool. Like 'nobody gets past me.'"
"Nobody gets past me."
"See, when YOU say it, it sounds like a weather report."
Ren considered that. His father delivered life updates in the same tone he used for weather. Apparently it was hereditary.
"They won't come through the door," he said. "Yaoyorozu will have read my file. My file says don't fight me. So she won't."
"Then what's she gonna do?"
"Something better."
---
Yaoyorozu Momo had spent her five minutes doing math.
The file said Regeneration with an evolved secondary mutation. The apprehension test said 1,437 metres and a broken grip dynamometer. The conclusion wasn't complicated. You could put every trap, every net, every gas and flashbang she knew how to make in front of Asano Ren, and the only thing you'd learn is how fast he could walk through them.
So the math said: you cannot beat him.
Fine. Then don't.
The win condition wasn't Asano. It was a metal prop on the fourth floor. He couldn't be beaten but he could be moved, and there was exactly one lever in that building heavy enough to move him. She'd watched the entrance exam footage like everyone else. First place hadn't come from the robots.
It had come from the rescue.
"Tokoyami," she said, snapping the last piece into place, a matte-black sheet to deepen the corridor shadows, "I need Dark Shadow to do something dangerous."
"He lives for it."
"I need him to attack Sero. Loudly. And I need it to look like it's going to land."
---
It went like this.
Dark Shadow came up the stairwell at the ten-minute mark like a flood with a beak, tearing through Sero's tape lattice strand by strand, filling the corridor wall to wall. Sero fought it exactly right, staying mobile, swinging cross-beam to cross-beam, taping its limbs to the walls faster than it could rip free.
Then it stopped fighting the tape and went for him.
Sero was mid-swing. Airborne. A claw closing on the space where he was going to land.
Through the doorway, Ren watched, and it felt familiar.
The swing was real. The target wasn't. The talons were open where they should have been closing, and the arc was set to shred the tape lattice and miss Sero by half a metre. Dark Shadow was attacking the way a stage actor stabs someone. Committed from the shoulder up. Lying from the elbow down.
Make it look like it's going to land.
Ren had spent a year in rooms where people performed at him. Confessions. Denials. Tears on demand. He knew the difference between a thing and the performance of a thing the way his mother knew temperatures.
This was a performance.
Which meant the plan was a lie told with a quirk. And a lie needs exactly one thing to work.
An audience that can believe it.
Ren stayed where he was.
A diversion only ever says one thing: don't look here. The door was covered. The windows were taped. That left the walls.
Ren turned his head and looked at the western one.
The wall exploded. Inward, shaped, padded, aimed at a seam he couldn't have found with a blueprint and a week. Yaoyorozu Momo came through it in a cone of dust with her hand already extended toward the weapon, having done everything right.
The capture tape closed around her wrist before the dust settled.
She hadn't seen him move. The cameras hadn't either. One frame he was beside the weapon, the next he was beside her.
"How."
"Dark Shadow is a bad actor," Ren said. "It attacks like something that's afraid of being believed."
Tokoyami appeared in the doorway a moment later, cloak and shadow, the second half of the pincer arriving exactly on schedule.
Dark Shadow reached the threshold of the bomb room and stopped.
"Forward," Tokoyami said.
Dark Shadow did not go forward. It looked into the room, at the tall figure in the suit standing in the settling dust, and folded its wings flat against Tokoyami's back, and made a sound that a predator should not know how to make.
Tokoyami had spent his life restraining his quirk. Holding it back. Chaining it down.
He had never once had to beg it.
"I yield," he said quietly. "My partner refuses this room. I trust his judgment more than my pride."
"TIME'S UP!" All Might's voice came over the speakers half a beat late. "THE VILLAIN TEAM! WIIINS!"
---
The monitor room was silent.
After Todoroki froze the building, the silence had been awe. This one was something else. On the replay, a man in a suit won a hero exercise by standing still for eleven minutes, and twenty students watched it and leaned away from the screens without deciding to.
Their bodies did it for them.
"He didn't even do anything," Kaminari said.
"He didn't have to," Jiro said.
Bakugo watched the replay with his arms crossed. Ren, motionless beside the weapon while the diversion howled one room over. Ren, turning his head toward a blank wall two seconds before it stopped being a wall. Bakugo's palms usually crackled when he found something he wanted to beat.
They stayed dry.
He hated that they stayed dry.
When the teams came back, All Might called for MVP analysis. Nobody's hand moved.
"Yaoyorozu," Ren said.
Everyone looked at him. She'd lost. Her wrist was still red where the tape had been.
"Hers was the only plan today that started from reality. Everyone else planned around me, or pretended they didn't have to. She measured the problem, found the one win condition that didn't require beating anyone, and executed it in ninety seconds through a load-bearing wall." He paused. "It failed on one variable."
"Which one?" Yaoyorozu asked. Her voice was even. Her notebook was already open.
"Me," Ren said.
He didn't elaborate.
She wrote something down anyway.
---
The rest of the matches happened.
Kirishima and Tsuyu dismantled Aoyama and Ojiro in a fight where the most dangerous thing on the field was Aoyama's commentary. Kaminari opened his match by frying his own brain in the first thirty seconds and spent the remainder giving a thumbs up in a corner while Jiro won two-versus-one and looked personally embarrassed the entire time.
All Might wrapped the day, told them they'd all exceeded expectations, and left fast. If you were the kind of person who tracked such things, he was about forty minutes from a hard deadline.
Ren was the only person alive who tracked such things.
In the changing room, Sero dropped onto the bench next to him. Dust in his hair, tape burns on both forearms, grinning anyway.
"Most relaxing win of my career. You stood in one room for eleven minutes and I did cardio for both of us."
"You held a corridor alone against a quirk that outweighs you," Ren said, pulling his tie loose. "That was the match. I ended it. You held it. Good job."
Sero blinked at him. "Huh. You don't say stuff you don't mean, do you."
"No."
"Yeah." Sero pulled his gym bag over. "I'm keeping you."
Ren didn't have a response for that. Sero didn't seem to need one.
Across the room, the usual space had opened around Ren's locker. The polite, unconscious metre of it. Sero sat inside the metre like he hadn't noticed it existed.
Ren noticed.
---
Evening. His room. Homework.
His phone buzzed.
**Isaac:** *DAY 2 REPORT. how was it. did you stretch. how's the left trap. did you make friends. answer in order.*
**Ren:** *loud. yes. fine. one.*
**Isaac:** *ONE????? WHO. NAME. HEIGHT. QUIRK. DOES HE STRETCH.*
**Ren:** *sero. tape elbows. probably not.*
**Isaac:** *TAPE ELBOWS. his connective tissue must be INSANE. ask him about his shoulder mobility protocol. actually don't, I'll write him one. I'm writing him one right now.*
**Ren:** *you've never met him*
**Isaac:** *DETAILS. this is what friendship is, Ren. you'll learn.*
Ren put the phone down. Almost smiled. Noted that too.
Then, out of habit, he checked the template.
50.00%.
Six weeks. He'd hunted through the 9th District at two in the morning and it hadn't moved. He'd studied until the statutes blurred and it hadn't moved. Today he'd won a hero exercise without spending a single unit of cursed energy, in front of the number one hero in the world.
It hadn't moved.
"What do you want from me?" he asked the template.
He closed the laptop and sat there for a moment, in the quiet, cataloguing the day the way he catalogued everything now. A win. A true answer. A partner who sat inside the metre.
None of it moved the number.
Whatever the wall was made of, it wasn't this.
He put it with the rest.
The pile was getting tall.
---
*"—forty-one days now. Forty-one days with zero confirmed Arbitrator activity, the longest gap since the incidents began. Officer, I'll ask you what the whole country is asking. Where is he?"*
The HPSC director's face didn't move. *"We are not lowering our posture. Patrols remain tripled. Curfew enforcement continues."*
*"Some of our viewers are saying it's over. That he's dead, or he's fled the country."*
*"Individuals like this do not simply stop."* A pause, one beat too long for television. *"In our assessment, there are three possibilities. He is dead. He is detained. Or he is preparing for something. And I will remind your viewers that we have found no body and detained no one."*
The panel went to commercial on that.
Somewhere in Musutafu, the most wanted man in Japan finished a worksheet on hero liability law, set his alarm for six, and went to bed at nine.
His coach's program said nine hours was non-negotiable.
---
bye bye leave a comment or 2 or smt try out the game pls i need players 😭
(ttps://www.roblox.com/games/90544148231166/Escape-from-the-monster)
again join the discord if u havent cuz why not
ttps://discord.gg/WmeZWDeZx9 and cya till next time