The silence that followed the final explosion was louder than the blast itself.
Ground Omega was a graveyard of steel and concrete. To the north, a skyscraper leaned at a precarious angle, its skeletal frame groaning as gravity tugged at its weakened joints. Fires, fuelled by ruptured gas lines built into the simulation, licked the sides of the rubble, casting a flickering, hellish orange glow over the street.
Katsuki Bakugo stood in the center of the crater, his chest heaving with a rhythmic, violent force. His lungs burned with every breath, the air thick with the acrid scent of burnt hair and pulverized brick. He looked down at his palms, the skin was raw, weeping from the sheer output of the nitroglycerin he had forced through his sweat glands.
His eyes were wide, the pupils darting frantically as the adrenaline began to recede, leaving behind a cold, hollow dread. He looked at the pile of debris twenty feet away.
I... I didn't mean to go that hard, a voice whispered in the back of his mind. The gauntlet... the building... the height...
"Deku?" he croaked, his voice barely audible over the crackle of the flames.
He took a stumbling step forward. The sight of the unmoving, green-clad figure buried beneath the dust made his stomach turn. For one agonizing second, the "Monster" in Bakugo's chest went silent. A flash of a playground, a river, and a small hand reaching out to help him flickered across his vision.
Did I kill him?
The thought was a cold blade in his gut. If Midoriya was dead, the game was over. The Hero Course, the "Symbol," the rivalry, it would all evaporate into a murder charge.
Then, a sound broke the stillness.
It was a wet, jagged cough.
Bakugo froze. He watched as a cloud of grey dust puffed out from the rubble, followed by the sight of Izuku's chest rising and falling in a shallow, agonizing rhythm.
The dread vanished. In its place, the old, toxic armour of Bakugo's ego slammed back into place, reinforced by the trauma of the last few weeks. He didn't feel relief, he felt a surge of vindictive triumph. He spat a glob of blood-tinted saliva onto the scorched concrete.
"Damn straight," Bakugo hissed, his voice returning to a low, arrogant growl. "Always meant to win. You really thought... you really thought you could bridge the gap. With what effort? You're a bug, Deku. You got cocky. You forgot your place."
He began to walk toward the fallen boy, his boots crunching over the remains of a shattered window. As he got closer, the true extent of the damage became clear.
Izuku's hero costume was a ruin. The reinforced torso plating was cracked and blackened, the sleeves were gone, and the green fabric was stained a deep, ominous crimson. One of his boots had been blown off, leaving a bare, bruised foot resting against the jagged stone.
Bakugo loomed over him, his shadow stretching long and jagged across Izuku's broken form. He looked down at the "Champion" of UA, the boy who was supposed to save everyone.
'I never gave myself a hero name yet...' Bakugo thought, 'How about Dynamite.'
"Sounds good." He revealed a smile. "Dynamite. That's the name fitting for a hero like me. Lord Explosion God: Dynamite."
Izuku's eyes were half-open, glazed and unfocused, staring at the smoke-filled sky. Slowly, painfully, his left arm twitched. The fingers scraped against the asphalt, reaching out toward nothing, trembling with a high-frequency vibration that looked like a seizure.
"I..."
The sound was a whimper, a dry, rattling croak that seemed to come from a place deeper than his lungs.
Bakugo leaned down, his face a mask of cold contempt. "What was that? Want to beg now? Want to tell me you give up?"
"I... I... I need..." Izuku's voice was barely a whisper, a broken string of sound. "I... needed... a..."
His fingers curled into a fist, his knuckles white against the black soot.
The sentence never finished.
It wasn't an explosion. It was the PA system, boosted to a volume that made the very air vibrate.
"KATSUKI BAKUGO. CEASE ALL AGGRESSION IMMEDIATELY."
The voice was Nezu's, but it lacked any of the principal's usual warmth or civility. It was the voice of a judge delivering a sentence.
"DO NOT TAKE ANOTHER STEP TOWARD Izuku Midoriya. DO NOT ACTIVATE YOUR QUIRK. THE EXAM IS TERMINATED. IF YOU PROCEED ANY FURTHER, YOU WILL BE REMOVED FROM THE PREMISES BY LETHAL FORCE AND FACE PERMANENT EXPULSION FROM THIS ACADEMY."
"What the Fuck!!!"
___
The void did not have a floor. It did not have a ceiling. It was an infinite, suffocating expanse of oil-black ink, cold enough to freeze the breath in Izuku's lungs. But it wasn't silent.
In the background, a sound was playing, a low, rhythmic track of weeping. It wasn't just one person, it was a chorus of sobs, layered over one another. It was the sound of a four-year-old crying in a playground, the sound of a ten-year-old sobbing into a burnt notebook, and the sound of a fifteen-year-old gasping for air in a hospital waiting room. It was a symphony of Izuku's life, playing on a loop in the dark.
Inside this hollow space, Izuku felt small. His body didn't feel like the muscular, lightning-scarred vessel of One For All. He felt tiny, his limbs soft and his eyes too large for his face.
Why? The voice in his head was high-pitched, fragile, the voice of the boy he used to be. Kacchan, why didn't you ever want to be my friend?
The void rippled, and a memory flickered into existence like a dying lightbulb. They were four years old. Bakugo stood on a stump, his palms popping with the first, tiny sparks of his quirk. Little Izuku was right there, his face flushed with a genuine, sparkling joy. He was clapping his hands, jumping up and down, his voice filled with a pure, unadulterated devotion. "You're so cool, Kacchan! You're going to be the best hero ever!"
Izuku had been his biggest supporter. He had been the one who watched every move, who studied every spark, who followed three steps behind like a moon orbiting a planet. He had offered his heart on a silver platter, and Bakugo had spent the next decade using it for target practice.
Another flash of memory, sharp, stinging, and smelling of burnt sugar.
Izuku was ten. He had spent months secretly reading books on Japanese Sign Language. He had seen Bakugo's ears ringing after a particularly loud training session, seen him wince at the sound of his own explosions. He had walked up to Bakugo behind the school, his hands moving nervously, signing: [I learned this. Just in case you ever go deaf from your quirk. I can be your voice.]
He had thought it was a kind gesture. He had thought it would show Kacchan that he cared, that he was looking out for him.
The memory blurred as the physical sensation of the slap returned. Bakugo's palm had connected with his cheek, a small explosion searing the skin and sending Izuku into the dirt. "Don't look down on me, you quirkless piece of trash!"
The crying in the background grew louder, the pitch rising.
I just wanted to play, Kid-Izuku whispered in the dark.
He remembered the park. He remembered the beach. They used to play "Heroes." They both wanted to be All Might. They would run through the sand, capes made of old towels fluttering behind them. In those moments, Izuku felt whole. He thought he had a friend. He needed a friend so badly that he had convinced himself the burns were just "accidents" and the insults were just "words of encouragement."
Kacchan was his sun. He was the most amazing person in Izuku's world. All Might was a god on a screen, distant and untouchable. But Bakugo... Bakugo was there. He was real. He was the first hero Izuku had ever known.
But heroes aren't supposed to make you want to die, Izuku thought, the realization hitting him like a physical blow.
His inner world, the fragile architecture of excuses he had built to survive Musutafu, began to collapse. The black void started to fracture, jagged white light bleeding through the cracks. The "crying" track reached a crescendo, a dissonant scream of ten years of repressed agony.
"What do I need?" Izuku shrieked into the dark, his voice finally shifting back to his teenage self, raw and broken. "What do I want? I just... I just needed a friend! Why couldn't we just be heroes together? Why?"
He fell to his knees, his hands clutching his head as the memories of the suicide-baiting, the "swan dive," and the hospital bed crashed over him like a tidal wave.
"What... did you... need?"
The voice didn't come from the void. It came from everywhere. It was distorted, layered with a static hiss that sounded like a radio between stations. It was Yoshi Abara's voice, but it was feral, stripped of its apathy and replaced by a cold, hungry demand.
"I don't know!" Izuku screamed, tears streaming down his face, disappearing into the black ink of the floor. "I don't know!"
"WHAT DID YOU NEED, IZUKU MIDORIYA?"
The voice was louder now, a thunderous, vibrating roar that shook the very foundations of his subconscious. The white light through the cracks intensified, blinding him.
Izuku's mouth fell open. His breath hitched. The image of Bakugo, not the boy on the playground, but the monster over him in the ruins, the one who told him to go see his mother in a coma, seared into his mind.
He realized it then. He hadn't needed a friend. A friend was someone who stood beside you. But he had been drowning since he was four years old. He had been reaching out from the water for a decade, and the person he reached for was the one holding his head under.
Izuku's eyes snapped open in the void, glowing with a terrifying, incandescent emerald fire. He tilted his head back and let out a scream that shattered the darkness.
"I NEEDED A HERO!"
___
The dust of the final explosion was still swirling in the alleyways when Toshinori Yagi, the man the world called All Might, vaulted over the final perimeter wall. He had been waiting for the signal to start his role as the "Monster," but the silence from his earpiece had become deafening.
As he cleared the last rooftop, his heart plummeted.
The simulated district was a charnel house. A warehouse had been levelled, steel cables lay snapped like dead snakes across the asphalt, and smoke, thick, black, and smelling of a desperate, hateful power, choked the air. This wasn't the "controlled stress" Nezu had designed.
He spotted them in a crater of shattered concrete. Bakugo was standing, his silhouette jagged and trembling, looming over a motionless form in green. Above them, a drone hovered, Nezu's voice crackling through its speakers with a chilling authority: "...back away. Do not take another step."
All Might didn't use a graceful landing. He slammed into the street like a falling star, the impact shattering the pavement and sending a shockwave that forced Bakugo to stumble back.
"WHAT THE FUCK!" Bakugo screamed, his voice a raw, hysterical shriek. He clutched his smoking arm, his eyes wide and bloodshot as he stared at the Symbol of Peace. "Where did you...?!"
"What happened?" All Might's voice wasn't the heroic boom of a mentor. It was a low, terrifying rumble that vibrated in the buildings around them. He looked from the destruction to the bruised, bloodied face of Bakugo. Silence followed, punctuated only by the crackle of fires.
"I ASKED WHAT HAPPENED!" All Might roared, his blue eyes flashing with a desperate, golden fire.
"Toshinori!" Nezu's voice cut through the drone's speakers, frantic and distorted by static. "Listen to me! The systems have been hacked, we've lost control of the Box! You must secure them immediately! Bring Midoriya to the hospital wing and keep Bakugo under guard! The security gates are..."
Nezu's voice drowned in a wave of white noise, but All Might didn't hear the end of the sentence. His eyes were fixed on the boy in the crater.
Izuku Midoriya was standing up.
He didn't move like a boy with broken ribs. He didn't groan or reach for his side. He rose in one smooth, liquid motion, his limbs moving with a terrifying, mechanical grace. He stood tall, his head bowed, his tattered cape fluttering in the hot wind.
"Young Midoriya?" All Might stepped forward, his hand outstretched. "Are you alright? Can you hear me?"
The boy didn't answer. Instead, he tilted his head to the side. A sharp, audible crack-crack echoed through the ruins, a violent, rhythmic neck-snap that Izuku had never performed in his life.
He lifted his head.
All Might gasped, freezing in his tracks. The emerald warmth of Izuku's eyes was gone. In their place were two pits of endless, light-consuming black, voids that looked like they belonged to a corpse. The mouth on Izuku's face didn't smile, it simply sat in a line of cold, apathetic boredom.
"Yoshi Abara." All Might whispered, his voice trembling with a sudden, bone-deep dread.
The boy in green didn't blink. A shimmering distortion in the air shook the space around him for a fraction of a second.
Then, in a blink of an eye, the crater was empty. Izuku was gone.