The fire zone's exit corridor was still smoking when they cleared it.
The connecting passage to the plaza's upper observation level ran along the dome's inner wall, a maintenance catwalk above the stairway cascades that gave sightlines down into the central space without direct access. Yami's boots hit the metal grating and he was already looking over the railing before he'd fully stopped moving.
Below them — thirty meters down, the full width of the central plaza visible from this angle — Aizawa was still fighting.
This was the first fact. The second fact, arriving half a second later, was that still fighting was doing significant work as a description. His left arm was bent at an angle that arms did not naturally occupy, the result of something that had happened in the time since Yami had seen him through the maintenance grate. His goggles were gone. One lens shattered on the concrete three meters from where he was standing. He was using his right arm and his feet and the Erasure in his eyes, and the three villains he hadn't neutralized yet were giving him the specific wide berth of people who had watched him neutralize the others and were recalibrating.
The blood on the concrete was a different kind of data than the anime's depiction of the same scene. The anime had communicated serious injury through visual shorthand — a certain amount of red in a certain pattern. The actual concrete below had the specific geography of a real person who had been bleeding for several minutes while continuing to move, the smear and scatter of it reflecting the fight's choreography in a way that made Yami's hands tighten on the railing.
I knew this was going to happen, he thought. The thought did not produce the steadiness he'd expected it to. Knowing and seeing used different processing pathways.
"He's been holding them without support for too long," Todoroki said. His voice had the flat quality of assessment rather than emotion, but he was gripping the railing too.
"Two minutes," Yami said. "Maybe three." He scanned the plaza.
The Nomu was at the far edge of the fountain, motionless, its posture the specific stillness of something that had been told to wait and had no opinion about waiting. The brain case was visible at this angle — exposed, the biological engineering of it evident in a way that the two-dimensional screen had never quite communicated. Beside it, Shigaraki stood with one of the hands from his body covering his face, the rest arranged over his arms and chest, scratching his neck with the hand not occupied by the face-hand.
All Might wasn't visible in the plaza.
Yami tracked the sound landscape. The shockwave that had rolled through the building three minutes ago had been large. There had been a second impact after it, smaller, which he'd classified as structural rather than combat. He couldn't locate where All Might had entered the building from this angle.
The timing is off, he accepted. Something delayed him after entry. He's here — the shockwave was him — but he hasn't reached the plaza yet.
This was the deviation the meta-knowledge hadn't flagged because the meta-knowledge had been distilled from an animated thirty-minute episode that cut between locations for dramatic effect. Real time was continuous. All Might might have entered through a different access point and be fighting a different cluster of villains before reaching the central space. The shockwave meant arrival, not arrival-at-correct-position.
The plan had always depended on All Might engaging the Nomu. The Nomu engaging Yami required the Nomu to be in combat, to be uncontrolled enough to strike without Shigaraki's explicit direction, to perceive Yami as a valid target.
If All Might arrived while Aizawa was still standing, Shigaraki might delay the Nomu deployment. If All Might arrived and immediately pulled Aizawa out of the line of fire, the engagement geometry changed entirely. There were too many variables and Yami was on an observation catwalk thirty meters above the floor he needed to be on.
"We need to get down there," he said.
Todoroki's attention moved from the plaza to him, a brief alignment. "You want to engage those villains."
"I want to be on the ground." He scanned the catwalk's options: a maintenance ladder at the far end, probably forty seconds at running pace, ending at the stairway's mid-level rather than the plaza floor itself. Another thirty seconds minimum to reach Aizawa's position.
Below, Aizawa's right boot found a villain's solar plexus and the villain folded. Two left. His arm's angle hadn't changed — broken, functional enough to use for balance and blocking, not functional enough for a proper grip. He was fighting on the remaining capacity and it was narrowing.
"If we jump down to the stairway cascade—" Todoroki said.
"Two-story drop to concrete stairs." Yami was already moving toward the ladder. "Your ice could—"
"Create a ramp, yes." Todoroki was following. "Give me six seconds."
They moved.
Todoroki's ramp was not elegant — a rapid crystallization sweep downward from the catwalk railing that produced a functional if steep surface, the ice already sublimating at the edges from the fire zone heat that was still bleeding into the corridor's ambient temperature. Yami went down it feet-first with one hand on the rail and the other maintaining contact with the ice surface, and the friction at the bottom was not ideal, and he hit the stair landing rolling rather than landing, and the roll turned into a standing recovery that his left knee protested loudly.
He was on his feet by the time Todoroki landed cleanly beside him.
Aizawa was twenty meters ahead, fighting two villains. One of them had a metal-hardening quirk — his arms had converted to something dense and heavy, which he was using as a club. The second was faster, a speed-type, circling for angles. Aizawa's Erasure was holding the metal-hardener's quirk off intermittently — two, three seconds at a time, reverting the arms to flesh while the man's own momentum became a liability.
The speed-type dove left.
Yami moved into the speed-type's path without thinking through the decision — combat geometry logic, the same thing that had made him step left against Bakugo's opening blast, the same weight-transfer the Apprehension Test sprint had been quietly improving since April. He got a shoulder into the speed-type's chest on the diving approach, took the impact across his own momentum, and the man went sideways rather than reaching Aizawa's exposed flank.
The speed-type scrambled. Yami stayed on him.
Three percent OFA sustained — not a burst, a continuous application across his arms and legs that made his movements sit about fifteen percent above what they should be at his baseline, and the speed-type had a speed quirk but not an endurance one. The exchanges were short and brutal and Yami took a hit to the cheekbone from an elbow he didn't get out of the way of fast enough, and the cheekbone made its opinions known, and he took the pain and kept contact.
Todoroki's ice enclosed the metal-hardener's feet at the same moment Aizawa's Erasure held — the man's arms returned to flesh, the ice grounded him, and Aizawa put him down with the efficiency of someone spending their last reserves accurately.
The speed-type ran into Todoroki's ice wall, redirected, and stopped when the frost swept up to his knees.
The plaza went quiet.
It lasted two seconds.
Across the fountain, Shigaraki's head turned toward them. His scratching slowed. He took in Aizawa on one knee with a broken arm, two UA students, the dozen or so villains that had been deployed and were now either down or frozen, and the central plaza that had been supposed to be the site of a conclusive statement about what the League of Villains could do, and the scratching resumed faster.
"More students," he said, to no one in particular. Then, to the Nomu: "That's fine."
The Nomu's head turned.
Yami had six seconds of watching it assess the plaza from its stationary position before the threat geometry locked: the Nomu was looking at him.
Not at Todoroki, whose ice had just eliminated two villains efficiently. Not at Aizawa, who was the established combatant it had presumably been deployed to neutralize. At Yami, who had entered the space and was currently standing in the closest proximity of the three of them to the Nomu's position.
Wrong reason, some part of his brain noted. But the geometry still works.
Aizawa's hand closed around Yami's wrist from behind.
"Don't," his teacher said. The word came out abraded by blood loss and exertion and something else, something that wasn't quite an order and wasn't quite a plea. "Don't."
The Nomu moved.
It crossed the fifteen meters between them in less time than Yami's plan had allocated for the crossing.
The plan had assumed he'd have a second to brace, to commit to the position, to make the choice with full awareness. What he got instead was the leading edge of something engineered beyond human parameters arriving at his location at a speed he could perceive and not meaningfully respond to, and Aizawa's hand pulling backward on his wrist, and Todoroki's ice wall erupting from the ground between them and the Nomu's path.
The ice wall lasted one point two seconds. It was enough to slow the approach, not stop it.
Then the shout from the stairway above them.
"I AM HERE!"
All Might landed in the central plaza.
[Threat Detected: Nomu — Classification: Modified Human, Enhanced. Recommended Action: Evade]
Late, Yami thought, watching All Might's arrival convert the plaza's geometry entirely — the Nomu's attention pulled like a compass needle toward a bigger magnetic field, Shigaraki's posture shifting from satisfied to recalculating, the whole weight of the engagement redistributing in the three seconds it took for the Symbol of Peace to cross the space between the stairs and the fountain.
Aizawa's grip on his wrist hadn't released.
"I told you," Aizawa said, and his voice was the specific flat quality of a man communicating something past the point of anger, past the point of exasperation, into the territory of just needing the thing to be understood. "Don't."
"I know," Yami said.
His cheekbone was swelling. He could feel it happening in the way injuries announced themselves after adrenaline started thinning. The left knee was a consistent secondary complaint. All Might was engaging the Nomu twenty meters away, the exchange producing percussive impacts that Yami felt through the floor rather than heard.
His plan had required him to be in the Nomu's path alone, without interference, without All Might's arrival pulling the primary target. He was currently alive, next to his injured teacher, watching from the wrong position.
Alive, he noted, with the particular flavor of a man cataloguing an outcome he hadn't fully prepared for. Still two skill points. Still no fragment.
Todoroki was at his left. Aizawa at his right with a broken arm and blood on his face. Across the fountain, All Might and the Nomu traded hits that were measured in building vibration rather than human scale.
Yami kept his position and waited for the situation to produce its next instruction.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!