Sunlight floods the room all at once.
The smoke stirs, finding the opening, beginning to drift slowly toward it, thin tendrils curling out through the empty frame, pulled by the pressure difference, unhurried and vague.
Momo floats behind Ayaka, the other two hovering alongside her. She looks at the slow crawl of smoke toward the window and tilts her head slightly.
"Would you mind clearing the room?"
Ayaka glances back at her.
"Whatever you say, my lady."
She raises one arm toward the window. The moment it drops back to her side —
Every trace of smoke in the room hurls itself out through the opening at once, not drifting, not thinning, but gone, wrenched outward in a single violent exhalation as if the room had just exhaled everything it was holding. The grey is replaced by clean afternoon light in the space of 00a second.
The room settles.
The canisters, the dampening rods, the barricades still sealing the door, Momo's work, undisturbed and orderly, the only evidence that anything had taken place here at all.
Momo surveys the room for a moment. Then she extends two fingers toward the window in a small, unhurried gesture.
"Off you go, mule."
Ayaka laughs, quiet and genuine, and the two unconscious students drift obediently through the open frame and out into the open air above the training ground. Momo follows them through, and stepping from the dim of the building into the full afternoon light makes her pause briefly, before she glances down through the sealed mask at the ground below and begins the slow, unhurried descent.
The three of them sink through the air at their own pace, the two unconscious students trailing on either side of Momo like very unfortunate balloons, all of them drifting downward through the afternoon light with the patience of leaves finding the ground.
Ayaka steps up onto the window rail.
She looks out.
Then she steps off.
Gravity takes her immediately, no resistance, no performance, and she drops. Clean and fast, her posture unchanged, her expression unchanged, hair lifting away from her face as the wind rushes up to meet her. She falls past the three hovering figures without acknowledging them, plummeting the full five floors with the specific calm of someone who has simply decided this is how she is getting down.
A foot from the ground, she stops.
The air beneath her compresses, and the force that comes with a falling body at speed kicks out in every direction at once. A sharp whump. A ring of dust and loose grit blows outward across the ground around her.
She hangs there for one clean second.
Then her heel clicks against the ground.
She takes a step forward and begins to walk.
Momo reaches the ground a moment later, transitioning from hover to stride without breaking pace, falling into step beside Ayaka as naturally as if they had simply been walking all along. She reaches up and unclips the mask.
Behind them, Kaminari and Jiro drift along in silence, still unconscious, bobbing faintly in the air a foot or two above the ground, trailing after the two of them without a care in the world.
***
The room on the fifth floor sits empty.
No movement. No sound. Just the dampening rods still embedded in the ceiling, the canisters arranged in their perfect outline along the walls, and the barricaded door standing sealed and undisturbed. The afternoon light falls through the open window frame in long, clean lines across the floor.
The smoke is gone.
The students are gone.
Everything is exactly as it was.
Then —
BANG.
The door to the room explodes open.
A U.A. support drone shoulders its way through the frame with the energy of something that has somewhere to be and a very important job to do. Its treads roll across the floor with sharp, purposeful clack-clack-clack sounds. A small yellow beacon on its head spins twice. It stops in the centre of the room, straightens, and announces in a bright, professional tone:
"U.A. SUPPORT UNIT SEVEN, ARRIVING TO ASSIST INJURED STUDENTS DENKI KAMINARI AND KYOKA JIRO AND PROVIDE MEDICAL TRANSPORT TO —"
It stops.
It looks at the room.
The room looks back.
A faint breeze drifts through the open window. Somewhere in the building, something creaks.
The drone turns its head slowly left.
Then right.
Then left again.
The yellow beacon on its head stops spinning.
Several long seconds pass.
The drone sets down the stretcher it had been clutching with a clunk that echoes through the empty space. It looks at the stretcher. It looks at the room. It looks at the stretcher again.
Then, in a much quieter voice than before, it says:
"…Years of academy training. Wasted."
It stands very still for a moment, communing privately with whatever passes for feelings in a support drone.
A second drone pokes its head around the doorframe.
It takes in the empty room. The perfect ring of canisters. The rods in the ceiling. The first drone standing motionless beside an unused stretcher in the middle of it all.
"…Did they leave already?"
The first drone turns to look at it.
"They left already."
The second drone processes this.
"…Did you run here?"
A long pause.
"I ran here."
The second drone retreats slowly back around the doorframe and says nothing further.
The first drone picks up its stretcher, tucks it under its arm with great dignity, and rolls back toward the exit.
The yellow beacon resumes spinning.
Clack-clack-clack.
The door swings shut behind it.
The room returns to silence.
***
The two drones make their way back down through the building in the particular quiet of units that have accepted their situation and moved on from it professionally.
They reach the stairwell landing between floors and begin their descent.
Then footsteps.
Both drones stop.
They turn simultaneously toward the corridor behind them.
The footsteps continue, getting closer. An irregular rhythm, not the measured roll of support equipment or the even stride of a student. Something smaller. Bouncier. Each impact hitting the floor with a weight that seems disproportionate to whatever is making it.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
A small figure hops around the corner and into view.
It stands barely two feet tall, a compact, boxy little unit with a rectangular torso, two short arms, a head the size of a fist, and feet. Enormous feet. Feet that constituted perhaps sixty percent of its total volume, wide and flat and somehow the first and last thing you noticed about it, the kind of feet that suggested whoever designed this robot had very strong opinions about stability and had perhaps overcorrected.
It hopped along the corridor with the cheerful, purposeful energy of something that had somewhere to be and no particular awareness that it was being watched.
The first drone went very still.
Something sparked behind its optical sensors.
The beacon began spinning at twice its normal speed.
"MEDI-UA SUPPORT UNIT INCOMING —" it announced, at a volume entirely unsuited to a corridor, and broke into a run.
The second drone stared after it.
Then, with the resigned energy of a unit that had already had a very long day, it followed.
The tiny bot heard them coming. It turned its oversized head, regarded the two approaching medical drones for approximately one second, and then simply hopped sideways, not fast, not urgently, just... out of their direct path, and continued down the hallway as if nothing had happened.
The first drone skidded to a stop in the space the tiny bot had just vacated.
It looked down at the floor.
It looked at the tiny bot, now several feet away and still hopping.
It dropped the stretcher.
The stretcher hit the floor with a clang that echoed the length of the corridor.
"YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE —"
It lunged.
The tiny bot hopped left.
The first drone crashed into the wall.
It peeled itself off, reoriented, and lunged again.
The tiny bot hopped right.
The drone skidded past it on the floor tiles, arms outstretched, grasping nothing.
"GET BACK HERE —"
Hop.
"THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN WELLBEING —"
Hop. Hop.
"MEDICAL ASSISTANCE IS MANDATORY —"
The tiny bot rounded a corner. The first drone rounded it three seconds later at full speed, clipping the wall on the turn. The sound of impacts and increasingly desperate medical announcements continued to echo back down the hallway, you will not escape. Please cease evasive manoeuvres, this unit is authorised to pursue, fading slightly with distance but not, notably, stopping.
The second drone stood beside the abandoned stretcher.
It watched the empty corridor where its counterpart had just disappeared.
It looked at the stretcher on the floor.
It looked back at the corridor.
"…Are we medical bots," it said quietly, to no one, "or are we wildlife management."
It picked up the stretcher.
Clack-clack-clack.
It followed.
***
In the monitoring room, nobody speaks for a moment.
Then Sero says, very carefully:
"She just… stepped out."
"Fifth floor," Kirishima confirms.
"Like she was stepping off a curb."
"Fifth floor," Kirishima says again.
Ashido has both hands pressed to her face. "And then she just — stopped. A foot from the ground."
"Off nothing," someone mutters.
A brief, collective silence from Class 1-A.
Tokoyami stands with his arms folded, watching the feed with quiet intensity. On screen, Ayaka and Momo cross the training ground side by side, two unconscious students drifting behind them at a leisurely height.
"She bears the weight of four," he says, voice low.
No one responds immediately.
"Herself. Yaoyorozu. Kaminari. Jiro." A pause. "And yet she walks as though unburdened... as if gravity itself has relinquished its hold."
Dark Shadow peers out from behind his shoulder.
"...Is that normal.?"
Nobody answers.
The silence is answer enough.
At the back of the room, Bakugo stands a step apart from the rest, arms folded, jaw set. He watches the screen without expression — Ayaka walking the way she always walks, unhurried and even, like she has nowhere to be and all the time she needs to get there.
Something makes him glance sideways toward Izumi, who stands among the students a few feet ahead.
Izumi turns at exactly that moment.
Their eyes meet.
Bakugo looks away immediately, jaw tightening.
'Does this bastard have eyes in the back of his head?!' he thinks, with considerable irritation directed at no one in particular.
***
The doors open.
Ayaka and Momo walk in and stop just short of their classmates. Behind them, Kaminari and Jiro drift through the doorway and settle gently into the space between the two groups, hovering a foot off the ground, still completely unconscious, leaning against each other like a pair of very tired commuters.
The class stares.
A faint light blooms along the back of Momo's right hand, the particular glow of her quirk activating close to the skin, warmth travelling upward before gathering at her fingers. It fades as quickly as it arrives, and when it does, she is holding a small glass vial.
She steps forward, kneels on one leg in front of the floating pair, and uncaps it. She holds it carefully between them, just beneath their noses, briefly.
The effect is immediate.
Both of their faces scrunch at the same time.
Around them, a few of the nearest students catch the faintest edge of something sharp and medicinal on the air, there and gone, impossible to place.
Kaminari's eyes open.
He stares at the ceiling for a full three seconds.
"...what," he says.
"A mild stimulant," Momo says, rising smoothly back to her feet. "The sedative compound wasn't a heavy dosage, calibrated specifically so that recovery would be quick and clean. You'll feel slightly groggy for perhaps ten minutes."
Jiro's eyes open a moment later.
She lies still for a second, the way anyone does after unconsciousness, taking slow stock of where she is, what she's looking at, whether any of it makes sense. She turns her head to one side. Classmates. She turns her head to the other side.
Kaminari is right there, close enough that she nearly bumps noses with him.
They both go very still.
Then both of their faces turn red at approximately the same speed.
Jiro sits up immediately, which she clearly regrets, pressing two fingers to her temple as the grogginess objects loudly to the sudden movement.
"I — that was —" She clears her throat. "The smoke. I inhaled too much of the —"
"Right, yeah, same," Kaminari says, very quickly, rubbing the back of his neck and finding something fascinating to look at on the floor beside him. "The smoke. Obviously. Very disorienting."
"Extremely."
"The whole thing was very —"
"Disorienting," Jiro says firmly.
"Yeah."
A beat.
"Glad we're on the same page," Kaminari adds to no one in particular.
Momo watches this exchange with a carefully neutral expression. Then she turns her head to the side.
Ayaka stands a few feet away with her hands clasped behind her back, wearing the particular smile of someone who is very much enjoying something and would like everyone to know it while maintaining complete deniability.
She senses Momo looking and turns. The moment their eyes meet, she raises both hands in a small, innocent shrug.
'Nothing to do with me.'
Momo studies her for several seconds.
Ayaka holds perfectly still. Not blinking and not moving. The smile doesn't waver. A statue could not be more uninvolved.
Momo sighs quietly and shakes her head.
By the time she looks back, Kaminari and Jiro have gathered themselves into something resembling composure, or at least the determined performance of it. Jiro stares at the floor with her arms crossed. Kaminari has both hands in his lap and is nodding slowly at nothing.
"Smoke," Jiro says finally, to herself, in the flat tone of someone filing a formal complaint with the universe. "We lost to smoke."
"A compound delivered via smoke," Momo corrects, her attention drifting back to them with the gentle precision of someone who considers accuracy a kindness. "There is a meaningful difference."
Jiro looks at her.
"Is there," she says.
"The engineering involved was quite extensive."
"Jiro," Kaminari says, beside her, with the solemn gravity of someone who has recently been unconscious on the fifth floor and has not yet fully processed his feelings about it. He pauses.
"I think… we got completely cooked."
Jiro puts her face in her hands.
A ripple of laughter moves through the class, not unkind, the specific warmth of people who are genuinely glad it wasn't them and are self-aware enough to know it could easily have been.
Ayaka, standing a few feet away and watching the room settle back into itself, notices someone step up beside her.