[ALL MIGHT — TOSHINORI YAGI]
The child's body hit the wall and Toshinori saw it happen and did not process it in the way that professional experience processed combat events.
He processed it in the way that twenty-five years of choosing this life and accepting the losses it produced had trained him to process things — which was to say he did not process it at all. He filed it in the part of himself that operated on timer delay, the part that would open in the quiet after, and he turned back to the Nomu.
The Nomu was already moving.
He hit it.
The hit was not tactical. The hits after it were not tactical. The Shock Absorption was a limit and limits had edges and he had spent his entire career finding edges, and the Nomu's Shock Absorption had a threshold at which the absorption mechanism could not cycle fast enough to distribute the force before the next impact arrived, and he found that threshold at the eighty-second consecutive strike and did not stop at the threshold but continued past it, because Yami Ichigo had looked him in the eye last night on a phone call and said I'll be ready and then had spent his first month of school keeping that promise in every training session and every debrief and every single context in which Toshinori had watched him figure out, quietly and without complaint, how to be enough in a world where he started from nothing.
The two-hundredth strike landed.
The Nomu's regeneration was fast. The regeneration was not faster than the rate at which All Might was now producing damage because the threshold had been located and the threshold was the answer and every punch after the threshold was the answer at increasing volume.
Three hundred, Toshinori counted, and on the three-hundredth strike the Nomu left the plaza.
Through the dome roof. Upward, in the specific terminal trajectory of something that had received a final instruction from physics and was now following it without resistance. The dome's reinforced ceiling parted. Daylight, real April daylight, came through the gap in a column that illuminated the ruined plaza and the fountain and the crack lines and Recovery Girl's arriving kit and the students on the perimeter who had come through from the other zones and were standing at various distances from the crater in the wall.
Shigaraki looked at the hole in the ceiling.
He scratched his neck.
Kurogiri's warp opened.
"Next time," Shigaraki said, and the voice was addressed to the space All Might occupied rather than to All Might specifically — addressed to the symbol, not the person — and then the warp took him and the remaining League members through and the USJ was quiet for the first time in twenty-three minutes.
All Might's hero form lasted thirty-two more seconds.
He made it to the stairs before it failed, which meant none of the students who had just arrived saw Toshinori Yagi's body in the specific state that post-hero-form presented after that kind of expenditure. He sat on the bottom step with his arm across his knee and breathed in the particular careful way that bodies required when they had operated at a hundred and twenty percent of their documented sustainable output for an extended period.
His left arm was still extended at the elbow. He made himself lower it.
The system prompt he used for internal accounting — the private version of the public smile, the ledger he kept of costs and outcomes — produced a number he didn't want to examine yet. He looked at the hole in the roof instead.
The child moved me six inches, he thought. Six inches.
He had not registered the shove happening until after the Nomu's fist arrived in the space the shove had vacated. The calculation of what Yami Ichigo had known, and when he had known it, and what he had intended to do about it, was a calculation that Toshinori would conduct with full attention when the adrenaline's residue allowed for full attention.
Currently the adrenaline's residue was doing what it did after a fight at this level: holding everything in amber. Processing deferred.
Recovery Girl arrived at a run that was remarkable for someone of her stature and age, her kit bag over one shoulder, her cane clicking fast on the plaza floor. She scanned the space in the practiced sweep of someone who had been called to more scenes than she should have needed to be called to across forty years of hero support work, and she went to the injured students first — there were five with visible injuries, Aizawa the most severe — and did not immediately go to the crater in the wall.
When she did go to the crater in the wall, she checked it twice.
[CLASS 1-A — TRAINING FIELD EVACUATION ROUTE, FORTY MINUTES LATER]
The evacuation moved at the pace that shock set, which was slower than it looked and quieter than a group of twenty students should be.
Kirishima walked with his hands at his sides and his hardening active and neither of these things connected to a purpose. He'd tried to put them away — the hardening — when they reached the evacuation route, and the hardening had stayed, because apparently his body had made a decision that the current situation required a physical state and wasn't ready to revise it.
He punched the concrete wall at the evacuation corridor's first bend.
His knuckles didn't hurt. The wall got a small circular impression in it. He stood with his fist against the wall for three seconds and then took it back and kept walking, and Kaminari, who had been at his left shoulder, did not say anything, which was a version of Kaminari that Kirishima had never encountered before and which he was not equipped to process on top of everything else.
Uraraka was at the back of the group.
She'd been at the back since the heroes arrived and started the evacuation process, and she was walking but the walking had the specific quality of someone operating on the physical requirement to move forward without any of the decision-making infrastructure engaged. Her hands were at her collarbone, both of them, not quite touching her sternum but close.
She had watched Yami Ichigo pull her out of the rubble at the entrance exam while bleeding from both hands and had spent the first week of school finding a way to say thank you for a thing that she didn't fully understand yet. She had said thank you in a corridor outside a homeroom and he had said you already did by being here and she hadn't known what to do with that sentence and had stopped trying to unpack it and had simply kept showing up in the general direction of whatever it was.
The plaza. The wall. The geometry of the punch's arrival.
She walked and kept her hands at her collarbone.
Bakugo walked in the middle of the group, which was wrong in the way that the sky being green would be wrong — Bakugo walked at the front of things or to the side of things where the peripheral vision advantage was maximized, never the middle. He had not spoken since the corridor entrance. His gauntlets were on his back in their resting position. His face had the specific expression of someone who was doing something very careful with a large amount of something that didn't have a destination yet.
Todoroki walked alone.
He had said he'll come back twice in the plaza and had not said anything after the second time, and had kept his right arm slightly out from his body for twenty minutes after the involuntary ice spread, the posture of someone maintaining conscious control of a system that had recently expressed its opinion without being consulted.
The evacuation reached the exterior, where three pro hero response teams and a medical van and two news vehicles that the heroes were actively blocking had assembled in the facility's parking area. The students were directed to a covered staging area and given water and mylar blankets and the particular attention of adults who understood that what had just happened was a specific category of thing.
Recovery Girl came out of the facility fifteen minutes later. She had Aizawa's medical status on a tablet and a look on her face that Yami had once, in a different context, identified as clinical fascination masking something else. She set the tablet on the staging area's folding table and looked at the nineteen students and the empty space their peripheral awareness collectively kept returning to.
"He'll come back," Todoroki said to her. He was still standing at the edge of the group, slightly apart. "His quirk—"
"I know his quirk," Recovery Girl said. And then: "I set up a bed for him. When his timer clears."
She said it the way she had done things in Yami's one-room apartment four months ago — the way she had arrived with a kit bag and looked at a fifteen-year-old orphan who had just resurrected from clinical death in an empty UA arena and had examined him with the complete attention of someone who was going to understand this thing regardless of how long it took. The same quality. The same I've already started building the procedure.
Kirishima's hardening finally went off.
He didn't say anything. He sat down on the staging area's bench and stared at his hands.
The roll call was at six PM, after the hospital visits, after the police statements, after the point where the adrenaline's residue had been replaced by the specific exhausted weight of an afternoon that had not been ordinary.
Aizawa's video feed showed a hospital room — white, the angle of a tablet propped against a pillow, his left arm in a splint to the elbow and his face showing the particular quality of someone being medicated at insufficient levels because they'd insisted on doing administrative tasks. His voice had the normal flat quality, which was how they knew he was at least partially functional.
"Roll call," he said. "Respond when I say your name."
He went through the list.
Nineteen students answered. Each one in sequence. Asui's "present" had a quality to it that it hadn't had this morning. Uraraka's was quiet. Kirishima's was the loudest.
Aizawa reached the end of the register.
"Ichigo, Yami." His voice didn't change for it. He called it in the same flat register as every other name.
Seat 20 was a square on a roll sheet and a chair in a classroom and a back-corner position that had been occupied every school day since the first one.
Seat 20 said nothing.
"Twenty-three hours and forty-one minutes," Aizawa said — not to anyone specifically, not unkindly. The statement of a fact on a timeline he'd clearly already calculated. "Dismissed."
The video feed closed.
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