The office of Ryo Inui, known to the public as the Pro Hero Hound Dog, did not smell like a hospital, and for that, Izuku was profoundly grateful. Instead, it smelled of cedarwood, dry parchment, and the faint, earthy scent of the tea steeping in a ceramic mug on the corner of the desk.
Izuku sat on the edge of a high-backed leather chair, his feet flat on the floor, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his school hoodie. He looked at his shoes. One of the laces was frayed, a minor casualty from the hallway scuffle with Bakugo.
He had come here with a silent vow of defiance. Not the loud, explosive defiance of his rival, but a quiet, stubborn wall. He didn't want to be "processed." He didn't want his trauma categorized and filed away into a UA cabinet. Most of all, he didn't want to talk about the "Dark World," or the way Yoshi's voice felt like a sliver of ice sliding down his spine, or the way his own skin sometimes felt like a cage.
A low, gravelly huff pulled him from his thoughts.
Hound Dog wasn't wearing his muzzle. His muzzle was hanging on a brass hook by the door, a grim reminder of the beast the man kept on a leash for the sake of the students. In the dim light of the office, the teacher looked less like a hero and more like a tired man who had seen too many children break.
"You've been staring at that loose thread for six minutes, Midoriya," Inui said. His voice was a deep, resonant rumble that seemed to vibrate in the floorboards. "If you're waiting for me to bark, I'm off the clock."
Izuku bit the inside of his cheek. He had planned to stay silent. He had planned to let the hour bleed away in a stalemate of stubbornness. But as the silence stretched, the weight of his own politeness began to itch. It felt wrong, disrespectful to a man who was genuinely trying to help, even if the help felt like a bandage on a gunshot wound.
"I'm sorry," Izuku whispered, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be... difficult."
"You aren't being difficult," Inui replied, leaning back. The leather of his chair creaked. "You're being a teenager who has had the world dropped on his head. We can talk about the fight with Bakugo. Or we can talk about why you haven't slept more than three hours a night as it says written down here."
Izuku's fingers tightened in his pockets.
"I don't know how to be here," Izuku said, finally looking up. His emerald eyes were bloodshot, circled by shadows that looked like bruises. "I named myself 'Champion' because I wanted so be as great as All Might and even the school... I want to be a pillar. But pillars don't shake, do they?"
He pulled his right hand out of his pocket. It was trembling, a fine, high-frequency vibration that he couldn't stop, no matter how hard he gritted his teeth.
"It's my mom," he confessed, the words tumbling out before he could catch them. "I go to see her at the hospital. I sit by the bed. I listen to the ventilator, that rhythmic hiss-click, hiss-click, and I just... I fall apart. I start shaking so hard I think I'm going to break the chair. I feel useless, Sir. I have gotten so much stronger throughout the year and I couldn't even be there when my own mother needed me."
Inui didn't interrupt. He didn't offer a platitude about how it wasn't Izuku's fault. He simply listened, his yellow eyes steady and calm.
"Tell me about her," Inui said softly. "Not the woman in the hospital bed. Tell me about Inko Midoriya."
Izuku blinked, caught off guard. "What?"
"Describe her to me. When you think of 'home,' what do you see?"
Izuku looked away, his gaze drifting to a flickering shadow in the corner of the room. For a second, he thought he saw a pale, Nigerian-Japanese boy standing there, watching him with cold, envious eyes. He shook the thought away and focused on his mother.
"She's... she's small," Izuku began, a ghost of a smile touching his lips before vanishing. "She's much shorter than me now. She used to worry about everything. If I tripped and scraped my knee, she'd cry harder than I did. She hums when she's nervous, usually the old All Might theme song, even though she knows it makes me cringe."
He took a jagged breath, the memories flooding in. "She makes the best katsudon. She always gives me the biggest piece of pork because she says I'm 'growing,' even though I've stayed the same height for a year. Her hands are always warm. Even in the winter, her hands were like little heaters."
As he spoke, the shaking in his hand didn't stop, but it changed. It wasn't just fear anymore, it was the raw, jagged edge of grief.
"I look at her now," Izuku's voice dropped to a jagged whisper, "and she looks so fragile. Like she's made of glass. And I realize... I'm not ready. I'm fifteen. I'm supposed to be annoyed that she's overprotective. I'm supposed to be coming home to her complaining about the laundry. I'm not supposed to be deciding which machines stay plugged in. It's too early. It's just too early."
The tears finally spilled over, hot and silent, tracking through the grime and exhaustion on his face. He felt like he was drowning, much like the people in the Chiyoda district.
Inui leaned forward, placing his large, calloused hands on the desk. "Grief is a ghost, Midoriya. It follows you because it's made of the things you didn't get to say. You're shaking because you're holding a decade's worth of words in your throat, and you're terrified the ventilator will stop before you can let them out."
Izuku wiped his eyes with his sleeve, looking small in the oversized chair. "What do I do? I can't even talk to her. The doctors say she can't hear me."
"Maybe she can't. Not yet," Inui said. He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a simple, leather-bound notebook. It was blank, the pages crisp and white. He slid it across the desk toward Izuku.
"This is your assignment. Not for the school. Not for Nezu. For you."
Izuku looked at the notebook. "What is it?"
"A bridge," Inui replied. "Every time you think of something you want to tell her, a joke, a frustration, a memory of a meal, or just how your day went, write it down. Every time the shaking starts, put a pen in that hand and move it. Write to her as if she's just in the other room, waiting for the laundry to dry."
Izuku reached out, his trembling fingers touching the leather cover.
"Don't wait for her to wake up to start the conversation," Inui said, his voice firm but kind. "Build the bridge now. So that when she does open her eyes, you aren't standing there with a mountain of silence between you. You'll have a book full of reasons why you stayed strong."
Izuku picked up the notebook. It felt surprisingly heavy.
"Thank you, Mr. Inui," he whispered.
"Get some sleep, Midoriya," the hero replied, his eyes softening. "The world can wait until tomorrow. But your mom... she's always been proud of you. Don't let these troubling times make you forget that."
___
On the center of the table in the administrative room in UA, a holographic map of the Chiyoda district glowed in a sickly neon blue, marking the "Dead Zones" where King Fin had levelled city blocks.
Shota Aizawa sat with his chin resting on his interlaced fingers, his eyes bloodshot and fixed on a single empty chair. It was the chair at the head of the table, usually occupied by a man whose presence filled the room like a radiator. Now, it was just a void.
"Has there been any word?" Midnight asked, her voice uncharacteristically small. She wasn't wearing her usual provocative hero costume, she was in tactical light gear, her face pale under the harsh LED lights.
Nezu, perched on his high-chair with a cup of tea that had long since gone cold, nodded once. "I have had brief, encrypted contact with Toshinori. He is… functional. He is operating on the periphery of the Tokyo ruins, tracking the movement of the Tartarus escapees. He assured me he is 'fine,' though we all know his definition of the word is flexible. He promised to return to the campus soon, but for now, he is our eyes in the dark."
"He's a target," Vlad King grumbled, his large arms crossed over his chest. "Just like the kids. If the League finds out the Symbol of Peace is wandering the streets in that state..."
"He knows the risks, Kan," Aizawa cut in, his voice like grinding stones. "But we aren't here to talk about a man who won't listen to reason. We're here to talk about the students. Nezu, the Commission is breathing down our necks. They want to see 'results' or they're going to fold UA into the military's Special Quirk Division. We lose the school, we lose the kids."
Nezu set his tea down with a sharp clack. "Precisely. Let us begin. Proposals for the restructured Special Exams. We need a format that prepares them for the current climate of 'The Harvest.' Ideas?"
"Standardized Rescue Operations," Thirteen suggested, her voice echoing through her helmet. "We use Ground Gamma. Simulate the Tokyo flood zones. Focus on evacuation speed and triage."
"No," Aizawa countered immediately. "Too passive. The League isn't going to wait for them to finish bandaging a civilian. If they focus on rescue without combat awareness, they're just putting more bodies in a pile."
"What about a Battle Royale?" Present Mic offered, though he looked like he hated the words as they left his mouth. "Class 1-A versus 1-B. High intensity, quirk-to-quirk combat. Force them to sharpen their offensive capabilities."
"Nah," Vlad King sighed. "And it results in nothing but predictable rivalries. It doesn't teach them how to handle a villain who is 78 years old and eats flesh for breakfast. It doesn't teach them how to survive a sniper from ten kilometres away."
The room fell into a cycle of rejection. Cementoss suggested fortification drills, it was deemed too stagnant. Ectoplasm suggested mass-combat against clones, it was deemed too predictable. Every idea that had worked for decades was now being held up to the light of the "Sports Festival Massacre" and found wanting. The world had changed its rules, and the traditional curriculum was a relic.
"Every one of these ideas assumes the students have the luxury of a 'front line,'" Nezu spoke up, his small paws tapping a rhythmic beat on the table. "They do not. The 'Harvest' has turned the entire nation into a hunting ground. A student is attacked at the grocery store, at the hospital, in their sleep. They are being hunted not for their quirks, but for the points they represent on a scoreboard."
Nezu stood up on his chair, his black eyes glinting with a dangerous, sharp intelligence. He swiped his paw across the holographic interface, and the map of Tokyo vanished, replaced by a dark, enclosed schematic of a labyrinthine structure.
"I call this," Nezu whispered, "the 'Monster in a Box.'"
The faculty leaned in.
"The Commission thinks our students are soft, children playing at being hero," Nezu explained. "We are going to show them otherwise. We will seal the students into a high-density, multi-environment 'Box' a combination of Ground Omega's ruins and the underground containment levels. They will be tasked with a primary objective: protecting a VIP through a three-kilometre extraction point."
"And the 'Monster'?" Midnight asked.
"The Monster is us," Nezu said. "But not as teachers. We will be the hunters. We will not use 'test' logic. We will use 'predator' logic. I will authorize the use of high-output support gear. Snipe will use live-tracking rounds. Ectoplasm, you will not hold back your numbers. Aizawa, you will hunt them from the rafters with the intent to restrain and 'eliminate' them from the exam."
Aizawa's eyes narrowed. "You're talking about a slaughter, Nezu. If we go at them at 100%, they'll break."
"If they break here, they live," Nezu snapped, his voice suddenly cold as ice. "If they break in the streets, they die. The 'Box' will be rigged with sensory deprivation triggers, random blackouts, sonic blasts, and simulated 'Harvest' broadcasts to mess with their psyche. We will force them to make the 'Triage Choice': Do you save the civilian, or do you use your teammate as a shield? Do you follow the law, or do you do what is necessary to survive?"
Nezu looked around the room, his gaze lingering on each hero. "We will record it all and send it to the Commission to watch. We will show them that Class 1-A and 1-B are not just students anymore. They are a Joint Task Force. They are the 'Monster' that the League should be afraid of."
The silence that followed was heavy. It was a complete departure from everything UA stood for. It wasn't about being a "Symbol." It was about being a survivor.
"It's brutal," Midnight finally said, her fingers tracing the edge of the table. "It's going to haunt them."
"The students must learn to fight in the dark. They must learn that a hero's blood is just as red as a villain's." Nezu said, his voice softening just a fraction.
Aizawa looked at the schematic, then at the empty chair of All Might. He knew Nezu was right. The time for being a school was over. UA had to become an anvil.
"I'm in," Aizawa said, his voice a low growl. "But if I see one of them truly snapping, I'm pulling the plug. Commission be damned."
"Agreed," Vlad King said, his face grim. "If we're doing this, we do it right. No holding back. Let's see what these 'monsters' are made of."
One by one, the teachers nodded. The decision was made. The "Special Exams" were dead, in their place, the "Butcher's Gauntlet" was born.
Nezu sat back down, picking up his cold tea and taking a slow, deliberate sip. "Excellent. I will inform the Commission. Let us prepare the 'Box.' The harvest is coming, and I intend for our students to be the ones holding the scythe."