The cobblestones under Stain's feet were dark.
Not with alley grime — with blood. Iida's, from the initial strike that the Bloodcurdle required, and the pro hero's from whatever had happened before Yami arrived. The specific color of it in the low light was the specific color that things were when all the light's warmth had been taken out of them.
He moved left, which created a line of approach that pulled Stain's attention away from the sword's current angle at Iida's throat. Not dramatically — the line existed as a tactical geometry, the kind Stain would process immediately, and the question was whether Stain would choose to maintain the Iida threat or accept the new line.
Stain turned to face him. The sword moved with him, not a retreat from Iida but a repositioning that kept both targets in his peripheral attention simultaneously. The motion had the economy of someone who had done this thousands of times and had reduced the unnecessary elements to zero.
He's fast, Yami noted. Faster than the Bakugo fight, faster than Deku's gear, faster than anything in the standard range.
He activated at four percent and closed the distance.
The blade came up at his approach with the specific angle of someone who had assessed his entry vector and was placing the response before he arrived — not reactive, predictive. He deflected left with his forearm, the fragment engaging at the contact point, and the deflection worked but the second blade (the shorter one, the one his entry-angle focus had not prioritized) came from the right and scraped his forearm before he cleared the distance.
Cold. Sharp. The specific sensation of a cut that was shallow by intent rather than by accident.
He's controlling how much blood he takes, the tactical brain noted. That's the mechanism. He took enough to have the option.
He didn't have time to finish the thought because Stain was already past the engagement point and repositioning, and the four percent speed didn't close the gap the way it needed to against someone who moved with this quality of economy.
Fire appeared at the alley's fire-escape entrance.
Todoroki had tracked the engine burns. Of course he had — Todoroki's observational capacity was not something the original timeline had exaggerated, and the same signs Yami had followed were readable by anyone who knew to look for them.
The fire created a barrier across Stain's retreat angle. Ice followed it — a wall at waist height along the alley's left side, forcing Stain's movement options into a corridor. The combination of two elements plus Yami's forward pressure created the overlapping coverage that three-person combat theory said should be sufficient.
Stain moved inside all of it.
He was not trying to escape. He was evaluating.
The thought arrived in Yami's mind between the third exchange and the fourth with the specific quality of a recognition that was late but still useful: he's testing. He's fought hundreds of people. He's seeing what we are.
The fourth exchange: Stain closed the distance to Yami from a position that should have been outside his engagement range, the blade moving on a line that Yami's newly developing combat instinct said was wrong-angle — not toward the center of mass, toward the right and upward — and Yami was already starting the evasion when the second blade, the short one, completed a different arc entirely.
He had two seconds to recognize that the evasion he'd started was exactly the evasion Stain had engineered him toward.
The sword hit cleanly.
The fragment engaged at the point of contact and absorbed exactly zero percent of what the fragment had no mechanism to address, because the fragment absorbed impact force and the sword's entry was not impact force, it was edge geometry and velocity on a line that the fragment's design had no answer for.
No answer.
The alley's cobblestones came up.
The cold of the stone against his cheek was the last physical sensation, and then there was no physical sensation, and then there was nothing.
[SYSTEM: Death Detected. Killer: STAIN — First New Killer. Tier classification: B. RNG Seed: 1.4. Processing...]
[TODOROKI — HOSU ALLEY]
The fire came out without a decision.
Both hands. Ice from the right, flame from the left, neither of them considered or restrained or filtered through any layer of thought about whose fire this was or whether this was the appropriate moment to use it. It was simply present because Yami was on the cobblestones and the thing that had put him there was three meters away.
Stain jumped back. The ice caught his right leg — a shallow freeze, not immobilizing, enough to leave a cut where it broke against skin. He bled from two ice cuts and didn't appear to register them as relevant information.
He looked at Yami's body on the cobblestones.
Then at Todoroki.
The Hero Killer's expression was not satisfaction. It was not triumph. It was the expression of someone who had performed an assessment and reached a conclusion and was filing the conclusion before deciding what to do with it.
Todoroki stood between Stain and Yami's body, flame in both hands at the intensity he'd had at the Sports Festival and hadn't had before it, and waited.
"A boy who cannot die," Stain said. His voice had the quality of a person making an observation rather than a statement — factual tone, the absence of emotion not because the emotion was suppressed but because the observation was preceding the emotion and the observation was not yet complete. "Choosing to stand between a blade and someone it was earned by." A pause. "Contradictory."
"Move," Todoroki said.
Stain looked at the body for one more second. "He cheats sacrifice," he said. "But he chose it anyway." He looked at Todoroki. "That's worth thinking about."
Then he was gone — not through the barrier, around it, through the gap on the alley's right that Todoroki's ice coverage hadn't sealed because his attention had been on Yami's body and the geometry had suffered for it.
Iida's Bloodcurdle wore off twenty-two minutes later. The pro hero's wore off in eight.
By the time Endeavor's forces arrived, the alley had three students who had been where they weren't supposed to be, one partially recovered hero, and a corpse that the police moved to the hospital when it didn't behave the way corpses were supposed to.
Todoroki sat with his back against the alley wall and his fire out and didn't say anything for the forty minutes between Stain's retreat and the official response arriving.
He didn't repeat to anyone what Stain had said looking at the body.
Not that night. Not in the hospital.
Not until he was asked.
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