Ice cracked across concrete in a sound like a building settling too fast.
The first three villains went down before Yami had fully processed the threat geometry — Todoroki's ice sweep wasn't a wall or a defense, it was a directed freeze, each application targeted at a specific contact point, ankles and hands and a torso that made the mistake of being stationary for two seconds. The ice didn't build up from the ground like a barrier. It moved like water finding the fastest route to where it needed to be.
Yami processed this while dealing with the remaining three.
The first one came straight — big, augmentation quirk of the strength variety, the body language of someone who had won most of their fights by being larger than the other person. OFA at three percent in the knee that came up to meet the charge, redirecting the vector rather than absorbing it — the augmentation user went over rather than through him and hit the rubble behind.
The second had a reach extension quirk, arms telescoping at speed. Yami had seen this variety before, in a different context, at the moment he'd learned that the gap between reading a combat type and being inside it was not bridgeable by theory. He moved left — the arm tracked left — moved right — the arm hadn't reset yet, the extension was committed — and the gap was enough to close to inside the effective range and the follow-up elbow went into the joint where the telescoping mechanism had to flex.
The second villain made a sound and the arm retracted and Todoroki's ice covered the third one mid-lunge, which left six villains in the zone and all six of them accounted for.
The sixth — the one in the back who'd been watching the sweep — looked at the ice field and the two students standing in the middle of it and raised both hands.
Surrender was processed, filed, and moved past. No time to manage a captive. Yami looped the man's wrists with a restraint from the support pack built into the costume's side pocket — basic nylon strap, designed for exactly this scenario — and left him attached to a standing pipe.
"Fire zone is between us and the central plaza," Yami said. He was already mapping the facility layout against the physical evidence around him — the angle of the dome's support structure, the slope of the floor, the direction the rubble piles were oriented. The collapse zone sat at the facility's far end, the exact wrong position. "There's a maintenance corridor along the inner perimeter. Bypasses the worst of the flood zone. Takes us to the fire zone's edge."
Todoroki looked at him. "You've been here before?"
"No." True. "The dome's layout is standard for this facility type." Not quite true — he'd watched the tour footage and traced the architecture in his head approximately forty times across the past three days, late-night insomnia math.
Todoroki processed this and moved. He didn't ask a second question.
This was one of the things Yami had been cataloguing about him across the three weeks of class: Todoroki operated on the principle that someone's stated reason for a thing was their own business unless the reason directly affected outcomes. He would ask once, evaluate the answer's functional sufficiency, and file it. It made him efficient. It also made him readable in ways that other people weren't.
They moved through the maintenance corridor at pace, Todoroki's right arm lightly coating the floor ahead with a thin frost layer that Yami tracked as an environmental navigation marker — places where the frost met resistance indicated solid ground; places where it spread thin indicated structural uncertainty.
The corridor had water damage. Some section of the flood zone's systems had been breached early in the attack — the floor was slicked in a three-centimeter layer that made every step require conscious placement, and Yami's left knee was still flagging the landing bruise every time he shifted weight quickly. He managed it by leading more with the right and making the left feel normal.
Todoroki didn't slow his pace for the water. His boots didn't slip. Yami filed this under passive environmental compensation from someone who trains in ice generation and kept up.
The distant sounds of the facility sorted themselves as they moved. The specific crack-and-thunder of Bakugo's quirk from somewhere to the northwest — short bursts, controlled, someone in a fight they were winning. A deeper impact sound from the central direction, heavy and low-frequency, that was not a quirk and was not a falling structure. It had the quality of something enormous hitting something solid and neither thing yielding.
"Nomu," Yami said, quietly, because saying it helped.
Todoroki glanced at him. "You know what that sound is?"
"I know what it isn't. That's not a structural collapse and it's not a quirk." He kept moving. "Something very large hit something very hard."
They came around the maintenance corridor's curve and the central plaza opened on their left through a mesh observation grate — too far down and too far across to be reached from this angle, but visible. Aizawa was below, hair horizontal with Erasure, fighting in the open ground between the stairway and the fountain. Three villains around him, a fourth incoming. His movements were still fast but the efficiency was narrowing, the footwork trading economy for impact as fatigue compressed his options.
Yami's hand found the corridor grate without thinking about it. The metal was cold.
Aizawa took a hit to the ribs, used the impact's direction to pivot, and erased the incoming villain's quirk in the same breath. He was managing it. Still managing it.
Thirteen minutes since arrival, he estimated. All Might's window is three to four more minutes.
The Nomu stood at the plaza's far end beside Shigaraki, motionless. Waiting.
"They're stalling," Todoroki said.
"Wearing him down." Yami pulled away from the grate. "Come on."
They ran.
The fire zone's entrance corridor was hotter than the air outside it by thirty degrees. Yami felt it hit his face before the door finished opening — not the dry institutional heat of a building's defective HVAC, but the real heat of controlled combustion sustained in an enclosed space, with the pressure behind it that meant the fire was fed rather than contained.
Todoroki's right hand was already extended, frost spreading ahead of them on the floor.
"Two minutes," Yami said. "We cross fast."
"The ice won't hold that long in this temperature."
"I know. We don't need it to hold. We need it to exist long enough for our boots."
Todoroki's frost line moved ahead of them like a scouting party, and they followed it.
Halfway through the corridor, a shockwave rolled through the building's structural supports in a wave that cracked the tile underfoot and sent a section of mounted fire-suppression equipment off its brackets. Not a villain quirk impact. Something bigger.
Yami's teeth came together.
All Might had arrived.
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