Two hands emerge from the walls.
One on either side of Jiro — extending slowly from the concrete as if the surface were water rather than solid matter, arms reaching into the hallway with patient, deliberate calm. One drifts directly into Jiro's line of sight, hovering just before her head. The other extends from behind her head. Both moving inward. Closing in toward her from opposite sides like something meant to fold around her entirely.
Jiro instinctively freezes, her breath catching.
Kaminari goes rigid.
Closer.
Ayaka's chilling voice drifts through the walls from no particular direction, calm, unhurried, and somehow more unsettling for it.
"You are very cautious, Jiro."
The hands close in on either side of her head.
Kaminari snaps out of the shock all at once, electricity surging up both arms as he crosses the distance in three steps and reaches for the nearest wrist —
The arms vanish.
He grabs empty air.
The concrete is solid and undisturbed, as if nothing had ever come through it.
Jiro's eyes snap open. She and Kaminari look at each other, then around the corridor, both breathing too fast, both searching for something to look at.
"That was admirable… chivalrous, Kaminari."
Ayaka's voice comes from behind them.
They turn.
She stands at the edge of the darkness where the corridor meets shadow, just far enough that Kaminari's electricity catches the outline of her, light tracing her shoulders and the calm line of her expression. Hands folded in front of her. Watching them the way someone watches something they find quietly interesting.
Kaminari doesn't answer her.
The electricity around his arms dims. He reaches sideways, grabs Jiro's hand, and runs.
Straight to the door. He hits the handle, wrenches it open, pulls her through, and slams it shut behind them with a bang that rattles the frame.
He leans back against it, chest heaving.
Then, very quietly —
"…Please don't come through the door."
He isn't sure if he's talking to the door or to Ayaka. Either way, the door stays a door. He takes that as a win.
Jiro slides down the wall beside him until she is sitting on the floor, one knee up, head back, eyes closed.
"That girl," she says, "is absolutely insane."
"Both Adachis," Kaminari manages between breaths. "They're both crazy." He gestures broadly at nothing. "The whole family. Completely —" the gesture trails off into vague, exhausted defeat — "gone."
"How is she even doing that?!"
"I don't know, and I don't want to know."
Kaminari leans forward, bracing his head against his knees, trying to steady his breathing, when a heavy bang from behind makes him lurch forward. He turns to find a solid black barricade now sealed across the frame, embedded, and immovable, as if it has grown there.
His shoulders drop.
"…We're trapped."
Jiro opens one eye. "We didn't exactly have much of a choice."
She looks at the barricade for a moment.
Then something shifts in her expression, the exhaustion still there, but underneath it something harder and more certain.
She pushes off the wall and stands.
"But I've had enough of the hallway nonsense," she says. "I want to finish this."
Kaminari looks at her for a second. Then he straightens beside her.
"Yeah." He rolls his shoulders. "Me too. Let's end it."
They nod at each other once and turn toward the room.
***
The smoke is everywhere.
Grey and thick, it swallows the room from floor to ceiling, reducing visibility to barely a step or two in any direction. The air tastes faintly sharp, strange, chemical in a way that sits at the back of the throat without announcing itself.
They spread apart as planned, keeping enough distance that Kaminari's electricity won't reach Jiro, but close enough that they can still make out each other's outline through the grey.
Kaminari lets the current rise around him, not discharged, just present. A steady pulse of yellow pushes the closest layer of smoke back and casts a faint glow across the nearest metre of floor.
They move carefully. Slow steps. Eyes tracking every shift in the smoke.
A shape in the corner, Kaminari's arm goes up, just a collapsed ceiling panel, half-buried in grey.
A sound from the left, Jiro's jacks extend and sweep, nothing, just the building settling.
They circle the room's centre, checking angles, finding nothing. The smoke gives up no shapes. No movement. No presence.
Then Kaminari turns toward Jiro and sees it.
A silhouette.
Tall. Still. Standing directly behind her in the smoke, close enough that it could have reached out and touched her shoulder.
"BEHIND YOU —"
Jiro moves without hesitating, jacks snapping to the speakers on her legs in one motion, a pulse of sound erupting outward behind her in a tight, focused wave. The smoke destabilises, churning apart in a violent spiral —
Nothing.
The space behind her is empty. The smoke resettles slowly, curling back into the space where the shape had been.
Jiro turns back to Kaminari, jaw tight. "Bait," she says flatly. "She's just —"
She loses her footing.
Not a stumble.
More like the floor briefly stops cooperating. She lurches sideways and catches herself, but only just, one hand flying out as she tries to stabilise, the motion comes sharp and involuntary.
Kaminari is already moving, electricity vanishing as he reaches her in two steps, hand on her arm, steadying her.
"Hey — are you okay?"
Jiro presses her free hand to her temple, brow furrowing.
"I don't…" She shakes her head once. "I don't feel so good."
"What do you —"
"It's taking effect… Momo."
Ayaka's voice cuts through the haze. They look up.
She stands a few feet away, exactly as composed as she was in the hallway, hands folded in front of her chest. Watching them. Waiting.
Jiro steadies herself. "What's taking effect? What do you mean?"
Ayaka raises one finger and draws a slow circle in the air, a quiet gesture that takes in the room, the smoke, all of it.
"You don't think this is just smoke, do you?"
"Wha —"
The floor moves again. Or the room does. Or the smoke does. Jiro can't tell which, only that her footing goes unreliable in a way she can't compensate for, her balance simply deciding it is no longer interested in cooperating. Kaminari's grip tightens on her arm.
"You oka —"
His own vision tilts.
The edges of the room soften in a way they hadn't before. He blinks hard, which helps for approximately one second.
"What's — what's going on —"
The answer comes from the smoke.
Not from Ayaka.
The voice that comes through the grey is wrong in a way that takes a moment to process. Flattened.
Resonant.
Pushed through something that strips it of its usual warmth and turns it into something that arrives in the chest rather than the ears. Every word deliberate. Measured. The voice of someone who has already calculated how this ends.
"You've been inhaling a sedative compound. In trace amounts, harmless. In the quantities now present in this room, it will render you unconscious within approximately thirty seconds. It will not cause any lasting harm."
A shape moves in the smoke.
A silhouette, walking toward them, slow and unhurried, growing more defined with each step. The red motes of Momo's quirk activation drift around her hands like embers, casting shifting light across the grey. In each hand, a large canister, trailing dense smoke that rolls down her body and spreads across the floor. The mask covering her face is large and sealed, the kind designed for exactly this environment, and it turns her voice into something mechanical and certain.
The red light from the canisters' creation catches her in fragments as she moves closer. The clean lines of her costume, the set of her shoulders, and the mask make something that is already composed look like it belongs to a different register entirely.
She stops a few feet from them.
"What," says Kaminari, struggling to keep his eyes from deciding they are done, "the hell."
Jiro's grip on his arm tightens.
"You've been in that smoke for long enough," Momo says, the mask flattening every soft edge from her voice. "You have perhaps a few seconds of consciousness remaining."
She lowers the canisters and tips them gently with one foot.
They roll across the floor and come to a stop against their shoes.
Jiro stares down at them, then up at Momo. Her expression cycles through something, not quite disbelief, not quite acceptance, the specific feeling of someone who has survived an entire haunted building full of spatial manipulation and psychological warfare and is now losing to smoke.
"Seriously," she says.
The word carries everything it needs to.
Her legs go first. Not dramatically, just quietly, the strength leaving them in one even motion, as she goes down with it, head dropping forward, eyes closing before she fully reaches the floor.
Kaminari catches her on the way down and lowers her gently. He holds her there for a second, kneeling, blinking hard against the tilt in his vision.
Then he sets her down carefully, straightens, and stands up.
Yellow electricity sparks across his torso, unsteady, rising and falling with his breathing, but present. He takes a step toward Momo and Ayaka. Then another, swaying slightly but moving, jaw set.
They don't move.
They watch him without alarm, no shift in stance, no adjustment. Simply present, arms relaxed.
Three more steps.
The electricity around him builds now, raw and spreading, reaching outward as it does when it has nowhere to focus —
Something falls from above.
Black rods hit the floor in a tight ring around him, one after another, embedding into the concrete in a perfect circle with Kaminari at the centre, spaced evenly, covering every angle. They strike the floor with short, clean sounds and go still.
The electricity leaps toward them immediately.
It hits the nearest rod and stops spreading, diverted, dragged downward, every current that has been building across Kaminari's body now flowing along the path of least resistance straight into the ground. The rods pull it cleanly, efficiently, draining the charge away from the air around him as fast as it rises.
Kaminari looks at the rods.
Then at his hands.
The electricity fades. His hands are just hands. The room is very quiet.
He looks up at Momo and Ayaka, processing this with the remaining seconds available to him.
Then his knees go, and he goes down sideways, landing on the floor beside Jiro with a sound that is almost peaceful.
Silence settles over the room.
Momo and Ayaka look at him for a moment.
"He has potential," Ayaka says.
Momo glances at her.
"If Brother helps him —" Ayaka continues, looking at the unconscious Kaminari with something that is almost a professional assessment — "his output could become something significant. He just needs someone to teach him how to use it like it's actually his."
Momo is quiet for a moment.
"…Perhaps," she says.
The red motes around her hands fade slowly.
The room settles into stillness, smoke drifting, canisters resting on their sides, two unconscious students on the floor, quiet in the way that only comes after something has been thoroughly, carefully, and entirely planned.
***
Momo and Ayaka stand in the stillness of the room.
The smoke has no intention of settling. It hangs thick and grey, drifting in slow directionless currents, the canisters still leaking quietly where they came to rest. Kaminari and Jiro lie on the floor, unconscious, breathing evenly.
Ayaka looks at them for a moment.
Then Kaminari rises.
Not dramatically, simply upward, steady and unhurried, lifting off the floor the way something might drift in still water. Jiro follows a second later. Both of them hover a few feet off the ground, still completely unconscious, Kaminari's arm trailing at his side, Jiro's hair hanging loose beneath her.
Momo doesn't comment on this. She folds her hands in front of her and rises alongside them, quiet and composed, lifting until she's level with the other two, as if this is simply how she prefers to stand.
Ayaka walks to where the window used to be.
The barricade filling the frame is solid, panels that had been created to slot perfectly into the existing structure, fitting without a gap or excess, no bolt required. She doesn't slow down. A foot away, she extends her hand toward it.
The space between her palm and the barricade compresses.
What hits the panelling doesn't move like a fist. It moves like a wall of displaced reality, a mass of space slamming into the surface all at once. The barricade doesn't break outward. It punches through, the panels and the frame both driven clean out the other side in a single violent motion, spinning out into open air.
A moment passes.
Then the sound arrives from five floors below, a heavy metallic crash against the ground.
Sunlight floods the room all at once.