The television in the hospital waiting room was muted, but the scrolling red text at the bottom of the screen spoke louder than any broadcast ever could.
Tokyo Casualty Count: 142 Civilians, 12 Pro-Heroes.
Izuku's mind replayed the images he had seen on his phone over and over until they were burned into his retinas. The skyscrapers of the Chiyoda district looked like jagged teeth biting into a smoke-filled sky. The news reports from that afternoon, barely twenty-four hours after the breakout, described a "calculated massacre." They spoke of the violence not as a riot, but as a harvest. The escapees from Tartarus and Akagura hadn't just fled, they had carved a path through the heart of the capital, leaving a trail of shattered glass and broken lives in their wake.
The anchor's expression had been one of hollowed-out shock. For the first time in human memory, the report had to acknowledge the unthinkable, All Might had been there, and the villains had still won. The Symbol of Peace had stood in the center of the ruin, and the world had watched him scream at an empty alleyway.
The nation wasn't just in mourning, it was in a state of psychic collapse.
Izuku walked down the sterile, white corridor of the hospital's Intensive Care unit. His footsteps were the only sound, a soft, rhythmic scuff-scuff on the polished linoleum. In his right hand, he clutched a small bouquet of white carnations and baby's breath, simple, inexpensive flowers he had bought from a vendor outside who looked too tired to even count the change.
He passed room after room filled with the sounds of the wounded, the low moans of pain, the frantic murmurs of doctors, and the occasional, sharp cry of a relative. Tokyo was overflowing, the hospitals turning into triage centers for a war that hadn't even been declared.
So many were injured, Izuku thought, his eyes fixed on the floorboards. So many people who were just going to work, or buying groceries, or catching a train. They didn't have quirks built for war. They didn't have masks to hide behind.
He stopped in front of Room 412. The heavy wooden door felt like a mountain he had to move.
"And one of those people..." Izuku whispered, his voice cracking like dry parchment. "One of the people in the way... was you."
He pushed the door open.
The sound hit him first, the rhythmic, mechanical hiss-click, hiss-click of a ventilator. It was a cold, artificial sound that made the air in the room feel thin and metallic.
Izuku's hand drifted to the doorframe to steady himself as he looked at the bed.
Inko Midoriya lay beneath a thin, white sheet, but she was almost unrecognizable. A thick, translucent tube was forced into her mouth, the machine beside her chest forcing life into her lungs with a soulless, plastic efficiency. Her head was a mass of white gauze, bandages wrapped so tightly they hid the gentle curve of her face. Her arms were cast in plaster, and more bandages snaked around her torso, stark white against the dark bruising that coloured her skin.
She looked small. She looked fragile, like a porcelain doll that had been dropped from a great height and glued back together by someone in a hurry.
Izuku's legs turned to water. The bouquet of flowers slipped from his fingers, hitting the floor with a silent, pathetic rustle.
He took one step forward, then another, his breath coming in short, jagged hitches. He reached out a hand, wanting to touch her, to hold the hand that used to ruffle his hair, to feel the warmth of the woman who had cried with him in their Musutafu apartment, but he stopped. He was terrified that if he touched her, she would shatter.
"Mom?" he whispered.
The machine only answered with a hiss-click.
Izuku's knees hit the floor with a dull, heavy sound. He collapsed into a heap at the foot of her bed, his forehead pressing against the cold metal rail. The grief didn't come as a cry, it came as a silent, violent convulsion of his entire body.
"I'm sorry," he gasped, the words bubbling up from a deep, black pit of emptiness in his stomach. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
He didn't know why he was apologizing. Was it because he wasn't there to catch her? Was it because the world he had chosen to join had finally hunted down the one thing he had left to protect? Or was it because, deep down, he felt that his very existence as the "Champion" had painted a target on the woman who gave him his name?
The guilt was a physical weight, a jagged shard of glass twisting in his gut. He thought of the "Golden Child" from the story. He thought of the Shadow in the attic.
His mother was lying half-dead in a room that smelled of bleach and failure, and for all the power of One For All, for all the strength of the Ninth Successor, Izuku Midoriya could do nothing but weep in the dark.
___
The common room of Heights Alliance was designed for forty students, but with Class 1-A and Class 1-B packed into the space together, it felt like a pressure cooker. The air was thick with the scent of stale coffee, unwashed gym clothes, and the sharp, metallic tang of fear. Outside, the specialized drones circled the perimeter with a relentless, mechanical hum, their red sensors blinking through the floor-to-ceiling windows like the eyes of watchful predators.
Izuku sat on the edge of a footstool, his hands clasped so tightly in his lap that his knuckles were bone-white. He felt physically ill. Every time he closed his eyes, he didn't see the common room, he saw the sterile white walls of Room 412. He saw the ventilator bellows expanding and contracting with a rhythmic, soulless hiss-click. The weight of his mother's fragile, bandaged form was a phantom pressure on his chest, making every breath feel like he was inhaling silt.
Beside him, the room was a storm of voices.
"We can't just sit here!" Kaminari shouted, his voice cracking with a high-pitched franticness. "The news is saying the escapees are forming gangs in the suburbs! Sensei! What are we supposed to do now?"
Shota Aizawa stood near the front entrance, his arms crossed, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. Beside him, Vlad King looked like a man trying to hold back a landslide with his bare hands.
"Nothing," Aizawa said. His voice was flat, devoid of the usual sharp authority. It sounded like exhaustion.
"Nothing?" Itsuka Kendo stepped forward from the Class 1-B cluster, her fists clenched. "The whole country is a mess. The prisons are empty, Tokyo is a disaster zone, and the Pro-Heroes are being warped around like chess pieces. We have training and we'll have our provisional license's soon! We have to do something."
"You are students," Vlad King barked, his voice echoing off the high ceilings. "The directive from the Hero Commission and Principal Nezu is absolute. You are to remain on campus. You are to follow the standard school schedule as it is presented to you. We are not turning this academy into a child-soldier factory."
"School things are going to go as they are supposed to?" Hanta Sero suddenly burst out, standing up so quickly his chair clattered to the floor. His face was twisted in a mask of raw, jagged grief. "My dad is in the hospital, Vlad-sensei! He was in the Akagura district when the bridge collapsed! He's in a coma, and I'm supposed to sit here and do... and do algebra?"
The room went deathly silent. Sero's outburst was a mirror to the pain Izuku was hiding, and it sent a ripple of visible distress through the gathered students.
"That is exactly why you are staying here," Vlad King said, his tone softening but remaining firm. "Your emotions are all over the place. You are compromised, Sero. A hero who fights with a heart full of unbridled rage or grief is a hero who gets themselves, and the people they are protecting, killed. We are keeping you here for your own safety."
"It's only a matter of time," Kendo muttered, her eyes fixed on the floor. "The League isn't going to let us stay in this bubble. They hit Tartarus. You really think they're going to be scared of a school gate they've already hit before? It's only a matter of time before we have to get involved anyway."
"Then that time is not now," Aizawa said, his gaze lingering on Izuku for a fraction of a second too long.
Izuku felt a surge of bile in the back of his throat. He didn't want to deal with the arguing. He didn't want to hear about policy or safety or "school things." He wanted to be back in that hospital room. He wanted to pull the hero student mask off his face and just be a son again. The conflict in the room felt small and petty compared to the sound of that ventilator.
"Look! Turn it up!" Mineta... no, it was Sato who pointed at the massive television mounted on the wall.
The volume was turned up, drowning out the shouting. The news anchor, a man who had been a staple of the morning broadcast for years, looked unnervingly calm. He was sitting in a darkened studio, a flickering digital graphic behind him.
"We have just received a direct transmission from a source claiming to represent the League of Villains," the anchor said, though his eyes were glazed and unblinking. "They have a message for the newly liberated citizens of Japan. They are calling it... The Great Harvest."
The graphic changed. A leaderboard appeared on the screen, designed with the flashy, colourful aesthetics of a video game. At the top, in bold, jagged letters, it read: EARN YOUR KEEP.
"The rules are simple," the anchor's voice continued, though it was beginning to distort, sounding more like a recording played through a dying speaker. "The League offers sanctuary and power to any who prove their worth. To move up the ranks, you must collect trophies. Killing a UA Alumni... a graduate of the 'Hero Factory' is worth five points on the board. These are the fakes who built this wall, they must be the first to fall."
The students gasped. Across the country, thousands of retired and active heroes were being turned into prey with a single sentence.
"And for the new generation..." the anchor's face twitched. "Current UA hero students are worth one point. For now. As the game progresses and the targets grow, the points will change. But for today... let's see who our contestants are."
The screen began to scroll through a high-speed montage of student ID photos.
Izuku felt the air leave his lungs. There was Iida. There was Uraraka. There was Bakugo, looking fierce and arrogant in his photo. Then, his own face appeared, Izuku Midoriya, his green eyes looking into the camera with an innocence that felt like it belonged to a different person.
The common room erupted into a chaos of antsy, terrified behaviour. Ashido gripped her own arms, her skin turning a shade paler. Tokoyami's Dark Shadow emerged involuntarily, hissing at the screen. People were shaking, their eyes darting to the teachers, looking for a protection that no longer seemed possible.
"This is illegal!" Aizawa roared, his eyes flashing red as his hair rose. "We will win a massive payday against that station for putting the kids' faces up like that... get that TV off!"
But before Vlad King could reach the power cord, the news anchor's face began to... ripple.
It wasn't a quirk of the signal. The man's skin began to melt and slough off like warm wax, dissolving into a grey, viscous liquid. From beneath the dissolving mask of the middle-aged man, a girl emerged. She was short, with blonde hair tied in messy buns and a pair of sharp, glinting fangs. She wore a high school cardigan that was stained with something dark.
"Oops!" she chirped, looking directly into the camera with a manic, golden-eyed glee. "My disguise fell off! It's so hard to stay in one skin when everyone is so... interesting!"
She blew a kiss toward the camera, her fangs baring in a jagged grin. "See you soon, one-pointers! I can't wait to see what you look like when you're leaking!"
A swirl of purplish-black mist erupted behind her. In a heartbeat, the girl and the studio vanished, leaving the screen to flicker back to a "Signal Lost" test pattern.
The silence that followed was different than before. It wasn't the silence of grief, it was the silence of the hunted. The dorms no longer felt like a sanctuary. They felt like a cage with a target painted on the door.
Izuku stood up, his legs feeling strangely steady despite the cold void in his stomach. He looked at the black screen, then at his classmates, his fellow "one-pointers."
"It doesn't matter what the Commission says," Izuku whispered, his voice cutting through the quiet like a blade.
"What?" Aizawa asked, turning to him.
Izuku looked his teacher in the eye, and for a second, the green emerald of his irises seemed to catch a cold, grey light from within.
"It doesn't matter if we're ready," Izuku said. "It looks like we've been pulled into the fold now. The game has started, and we're the prize."