….
Osaka City - Streets Outside the Facility - 3:15 AM
….
The paramedics loaded the students into ambulances.
More vehicles were arriving: fire engines, heavy-rescue squads, and a secondary wave of police.
Heroes from local Osaka agencies were landing and rushing in, quickly getting busy with rescue operations.
Local Osaka pros were landing in sequence too.
Higari Maijima, the Excavation Hero, was already directing a team of responders toward the structurally unstable zones of the orphanage.
Shoto lay on a stretcher. He tracked the sky, then the road, his eyes narrowing.
He noticed something, the expression of the resume teams seemed worse, and the sheer volume of distress signals echoing across the city's streets are telling something more than one attack.
"Sensei..." Shoto raised one hand, pointing weakly past the ambulance.
Dabi followed his gaze, and nearby, the paramedics were struggling with Bakugo.
"Oi." Bakugo rasped, craning his neck to glare at the sheer number of responders. "The hell is this? Why is half the prefecture here for two bird-brains?"
"Because this place wasn't the only target tonight." Dabi said.
The paramedic stabilizing Midoriya's shattered arm looked up, eyes wide behind her goggles. "You didn't hear? It's a coordinated surge, and a total five distinct attacks across the Kansai region - Hosu, Central Osaka, Nara. It's been a bloodbath for the last hour."
"Who..." Midoriya's voice was barely there, the oxygen mask fogging with each shallow breath. "Who's handling the other sites..."
Dabi already had his phone out, scrolling through news feeds that were updating faster than he could read them.
….
[BREAKING: Multiple Villain Attacks Across Kansai Region - Pro Heroes Mobilized]
[Endeavor Defeats Nomu at Hosu Shopping District - Casualties Reported Minimal]
[Evacuation Underway in Nara as Pro Heroes Contain Ongoing Threat]
….
"We need to move these students…" the lead paramedic barked, slamming the first set of doors. "Osaka General is already prepping the trauma suites."
"Go." Dabi commanded, he didn't offer a platitude or a goodbye. "I will be at the hospital before you finish the intake."
The ambulance doors slammed shut, sirens cutting through the pre-dawn darkness as the vehicles pulled away, and Dabi watched them go until the lights disappeared around the corner.
A police officer approached: a young sergeant, his boots shuffling nervously on the gravel.
He kept adjusting his cap, his eyes darting between the two massive, charred corpses of the Nomu and the man who had created them.
"Ah… excuse me, sir. The students…. What's the status?"
"Heading to Osaka General." Dabi said, skipping the preamble. "We've got three U.A. first-years in critical condition. One with multiple compound fractures and systemic organ stress from Quirk overuse, another with four broken ribs and a punctured left lung, and a third with catastrophic damage to both hands that will require immediate reconstructive surgery, while the fourth, Koda, is physically unharmed but in severe shock."
Dabi didn't stop there, he walked the officer through a clinical, high-speed briefing: two High-Grade hostiles, Quirk profiles (High-Speed Regen and Kinetic Absorption), duration of engagement, and the exact coordinates of the neutralized targets.
Every fact was delivered with the accurate precision of a veteran - no fluff and ego boasting, just data.
The officer's pen flew across his notepad, then slowed.
It stopped entirely as he looked up, a flicker of professional hesitation crossing his face.
"Sir, according to my records these students are first-years, which means they don't have provisional hero licenses yet, do they?"
Dabi looked the officer in the eye, his blue gaze as cold as the morning air.
"Then, technically, under the Quirk Restriction Laws and the Emergency Response Act, their involvement would be classified as unauthorized use of their abilities, especially considering the extent of the property damage and the…"
"Stop." Dabi took a single step forward.
It wasn't an aggressive move, but the officer flinched as if a blade had been drawn.
"Let's play a game of 'technically,' Sergeant." Dabi said, his voice calm but carrying a hard edge as he motioned toward the shattered remains of the orphanage behind them. "Technically, there were thirty-two children inside that building, and that high-speed model over there was seconds away from turning them into a casualty report, and technically my students didn't engage a villain at all - they held a breach in the perimeter that your 'licensed' professionals failed to secure."
"I understand the sentiment, sir, truly, but the HPSC is going to look at the hospital bills and the property damage and–"
"The HPSC can send the bill to my office." Dabi cut in, his voice steady, eyes flashing with a cold, controlled intensity. "But before anyone files anything, you might want to check regional dispatch, because you've got five active warzones across Kansai right now, with Nomu tearing through shopping districts in Hosu and causing damage in Nara."
He held the officer's gaze, not raising his voice, but making every word land.
"My students didn't break the law - they held a line that would've collapsed without them, and if you still want to file an 'Illegal Quirk Use' report against three kids currently in a trauma ward for doing the job your system failed to handle, go ahead and do it, because I will make sure the media receives that report along with the footage of the civilians they pulled out alive."
The officer's throat hitched.
He looked at his notepad, then at the smoking ruins, and finally back at the man. He slowly clicked his pen shut and tucked the notepad into his breast pocket.
"The, uh... the scene is still being processed, sir. I will list them as 'Assisting Civilian Witnesses' in the preliminary brief."
"Wise choice." Dabi muttered.
He turned away, his mind already drifting from the bureaucracy to something that had been bugging him for a while.
There was an itch under his skin - a frantic screaming in his nerves that wanted him to be everywhere at once.
"Is it due to [Arachnid Genome]?"
He wondered, his eyes tracking a police helicopter banking toward a fresh plume of smoke in the distance.
He couldn't pin it on anything else - this visceral, sensational pull to leap into the fray and save everything in his line of sight.
It felt less like duty and more like hunger.
Buzz–!
Dabi's phone buzzed and he pulled it out from his pocket.
[Shota Aizawa]
"Great." Dabi exhaled, his thumb hovering over the green icon. "Here we go - I can already hear the lecture about 'unauthorized deployment' and 'reckless endangerment.'"
But when he swiped to answer, the lecture didn't come. There was only a heavy, jagged silence - the kind of dead air that wasn't empty, but filled with the sound of someone holding their world together with both hands.
"What happened?"
["Can you move somewhere with fewer people around you?"] Aizawa's voice was flat.
"Wh–yeah, hold on." Dabi didn't argue, he stepped away from the cluster of shouting officers, the yellow tape and into the deep shadow between two industrial shells. "Okay, you can talk."
["Listen to me carefully and don't interrupt, because I need to get this out before you decide to move."] Aizawa took a breath that sounded like a rasp. ["Nobody is critically injured, both Eri and Rumi are safe, an–"]
"Injured? What do you mean injured? What happened at the campus?"
["Dabi, just shut up and let me finish."]
"Was there a breach? Was–"
["A group attempted to take Eri from your apartment tonight."] Aizawa cut through. ["Rumi engaged them, five hostiles, and the situation has been contained, with all of them now in custody."]
["Eri is unharmed, not a single scratch on her, and Rumi is with Recovery Girl; she's stable and conscious, but she is injured, so listen to me - it's over, and the situation is under control."]
"....."
Aizawa was talking to nobody.
["Hello?"] Aizawa pulled the phone back to check the screen, saw the call was still connected, and tried again. ["Hello? Dabi… hello?"]
The phone was on the ground.
It lay face-up on the cracked screen in the shadow between the buildings, the speaker emitting a tiny, tinny version of Aizawa's frantic voice to the empty air.
Two steps from where the device had landed, the pavement had buckled.
A fresh crack split the ground, deep and radiating outward in a starburst pattern as if something extremely heavy or fast had launched from that exact spot with enough force to shatter the street.
In the sky above Osaka, everyone stopped.
The police, the paramedics, the media crews in their hovering helicopters, and the locals watching from their balconies - they all tracked the same thing.
It looked like a shooting star going the wrong way, rising from the earth into the sky, trailing blue white fire and accelerating with a roar like an overfed jet engine. It climbed past the buildings, past the helicopter, past anything in the Osaka skyline should reach, then banked hard toward the east, toward Tokyo, and vanished.
If Dabi had been angry before about his students, the Nomu, then what he felt now had no name in any language he knew.
Someone had crossed his threshold, had stood in the room where Eri slept, and had forced Rumi to bleed just to keep that danger from reaching his daughter.
….
"Hello? HELLO?" Shota Aizawa stared at the phone, the call still connected with no one on the other end.
"...He didn't even hang up. He just left."
Vlad King stood in the jagged mouth of what used to be the apartment's hallway.
He reached out, plucked the phone from Aizawa's hand, and pressed it to his own mask.
"Hello? Dabi, this is Snipe, can you hear me?" he said, waiting for a beat before pulling the phone back to check it. "Yeah, the line's still open, but there's no response."
"When has that man EVER explained himself to anyone?" Aizawa's voice was flat, exhausted. "He just does whatever he wants. Always and every single time. He hears two sentences, decides he has enough information, and then just…" He made a gesture that encompassed the concept of a person launching themselves into the sky without finishing a phone call. "That. He does that."
Vlad King handed the phone back, and they stood there for a moment in silence.
"So." Vlad King said. "How long until he gets here?"
"From Osaka? At the speed he was probably moving when he left?" Aizawa did the math and didn't like the answer. "Not long enough."
"Not long enough for what?"
"For any of us to figure out what to say to him when he sees the apartment."
They both turned to look, and the apartment resembled something violently torn apart rather than lived in, with the drywall gouged by deep, predatory claw marks.
Rumi's blood was a dark, erratic spray across the floor and up the plaster; the exterior wall was simply gone, revealing the craters in the courtyard below. Eri's bedroom door was a splintered wreck, the hinges twisted like taffy, and her mattress had been ripped open in the struggle.
"Right." Vlad King exhaled. "I am going to go check the perimeter again."
"You checked it ten minutes ago, Vlad."
"I am gonna check it again and very thoroughly this time around. And preferably from a location that isn't in his direct flight path." He didn't wait for an argument as he turned and vanished into the shadows of the stairwell.
Shota Aizawa stood alone for a moment, the situation was technically under control.
Nine's team is in custody with Chimera, Mummy, and Slice restrained and unconscious, while Nine himself is being loaded onto a reinforced transport.
Rumi was with Recovery Girl, and Eri slept unharmed in his capture scarf beside the small blonde girl, what remained of Toga, clutching the fabric.
Everything was handled.
"I need to go check on them." he said, already moving. "Because if Eri destabilizes again and her horn spikes, I have to be there to suppress it, so that's the priority."
It was a valid priority but also a very convenient reason to not be the first person Dabi saw when he landed in a state of fury that was likely registering on seismographs across the Kanto region.
"Hey… HEY!"
Vlad King's voice boomed from the end of the corridor as he saw Shota retreating.
"Where the hell are you going?! Someone has to be here when the Ghost lands! Someone has to explain the... Shota! Are you seriously just–"
Nobody was listening to him.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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