The bus had been completely normal.
That was the thing Yami kept coming back to during the forty-minute ride to the USJ facility — the complete normalness of it. Kirishima and Kaminari had argued about hero rankings with the specific circular logic of people who had been arguing about the same list since the first week of school. Bakugo had sat three rows up with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who had decided the bus's existence was a personal inconvenience. Uraraka had shared something from her phone with Asui and they'd both laughed, which had the specific quality of two people who'd already become something closer than acquaintances.
Momo had been reading.
He'd sat in the third row from the back and eaten the onigiri he'd packed — rice, salted kelp, nothing fancy — and thought about dying, and the onigiri had tasted like onigiri, and the bus had been completely, insistently normal.
The USJ dome came up over the last hill on the facility access road and it was not normal.
Even knowing the exterior dimensions — even having watched the canon footage dozens of times in his previous life — the building had the quality of an idea that had been scaled incorrectly. The dome sat inside a perimeter fence and the perimeter fence was itself large, and above it the structure bulged outward like a held breath, the observation tower at the top thin and angular against the April sky.
Twelve minutes, he thought, watching it through the bus window. Approximately. After Thirteen finishes the introduction.
Inside was different from outside in the specific way that architectural interior spaces changed the relationship between scale and presence. The disaster zones spread below the entrance platform in concentric sections — a miniature city collapsing into rubble at one end, controlled fire cascades at another, a surface of churned water visible across the central divide, and at the lowest point of the bowl shape the central plaza with its fountain and the sightlines to everything.
He stood near the central stairway and made it look like he was listening to Thirteen's safety briefing.
Thirteen was thorough. The voice through the helmet had the measured quality of someone who had thought carefully about what to say to a group of teenagers standing in a facility full of engineered disasters, and who believed the message was worth their full attention. Yami tracked the words at a distance — your quirks have destructive potential, the purpose of this facility is to turn potential to rescue capacity, my own power could kill you without intent — while his eyes moved across the central plaza.
The fountain was at the bottom of the stepped approach, surrounded by the open space that Kurogiri's gate would fill. Two minutes remaining, maybe three. Aizawa at the front of the group. All Might absent — running late, same as it should be, the same narrow window it had always been.
Everything on schedule.
Kirishima was talking to Kaminari behind him. He could hear Sero's laugh at something Ashido had said. Twenty students and two teachers in a building that was about to become a different kind of simulation than the one in the briefing.
The fountain erupted.
Not with water — the black fog pushed outward from the basin in a pressure wave that displaced air and light simultaneously, the specific purple-dark quality of Kurogiri's Warp Gate expanding until it was wide enough to walk through, and then wider than that, and then through it came Shigaraki Tomura.
On screen he'd registered as threatening. In person he registered as wrong in a way that hit the body before the brain finished the threat-assessment. The hands covering his arms and torso moved slightly with his breathing. His neck was already marked from scratching. The face beneath the disembodied hand had the quality of something that had been disappointed with the world for a very long time and had recently received confirmation that the disappointment was warranted.
Behind him, through the gate, dozens of bodies resolving from the portal into the facility's air.
"A teacher. And quite a few students," Shigaraki said, at a volume that carried across the space without apparent effort. He scratched his neck. "Are All Might's little pupils here?"
Aizawa's hair was up. Yami watched his teacher's eyes sweep the incoming mass and do the math of fifty-against-two-and-twenty, and watched the line of his jaw when the math came out.
"BACK — to the exit!" Thirteen's voice, carrying.
The fog moved.
The warp had a physics to it that nothing in the animation had communicated: a pressure change, a sudden directionlessness, the specific horror of not knowing which way down was going to be when the gate deposited you somewhere else. He'd braced for the flood zone — water, controllable, the canonical landing for students in the standard scatter pattern.
The collapse zone hit him in the elbows and one knee.
Concrete rubble. A section of standing wall at forty degrees from vertical. Unstable ground underfoot and the specific acoustic quality of a space where structural integrity was a suggestion rather than a fact. He pushed up from his hands and ran the body assessment in the two seconds before the zone registered as occupied: impact bruising on both forearms, left knee complaining, nothing structural.
Three meters to his left, frost spread across a slab of broken concrete.
Todoroki straightened up from his landing with the ease of someone who had trained for rough terrain — no visible hesitation, no reassessment, just immediate environmental scan. His right arm was already sweating cold air.
"Collapse zone," Yami said. Unnecessary confirmation, but establishing communication had value.
"Flood would have been the more logical scatter," Todoroki said, which was the most words he'd strung together in proximity to Yami since the first day of class.
"Warp wasn't methodical." Yami got up from one knee. The other was still reporting. He put weight on it and it held. "It scattered. We deal with where we are."
From three separate positions in the rubble field, figures stood up.
The collapse zone villains were the low-tier variety — quirks that had been useful enough to get recruited and specific enough not to waste on the central plaza. They had the disorganized coordination of people following general orders rather than a precise plan, which meant they were dangerous in the way that unpredictable things were dangerous and manageable in the way that limited things were manageable.
Todoroki said: "Stay close."
Then the ice swept out.
The warp landing had felt, for approximately half a second, like dying. The directionlessness, the contact with nothingness, the sudden arrival somewhere different — it was the wrong shape of the wrong experience but the overlap was enough that his body had flagged it before his brain confirmed it wasn't.
He noted this information and put it away.
The central plaza was on the far side of this facility. The warp had put them in the wrong position for everything he'd planned, which meant the plan had to adapt, which meant the first thing was to clear this zone and find a route.
The villains closed from three sides.
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