Chapter 5: Hana's screens display damning evidence in flickering graphs - Bakugou's signature AP Shot attacks consistently veered 3.7 degrees off-target, while Izuku's adrenal response quadrupled during their closest grapple, the suit's sensors capturing minute tremors he'd never shown even in All Might's presence.
The silence in Sigma was absolute, a thick, pressurized thing after the storm of their clash. The only sounds were the dying hum of Izuku’s suit capacitors and the ragged, echoing draw of Bakugou’s breath. They stood twenty feet apart in the gloom, two statues carved from exhaustion and adrenaline.
Izuku’s body throbbed inside the armor. A deep, satisfying ache bloomed in his muscles—not the shattered pain of Overusing a Quirk, but the honest fatigue of exertion. His knuckles stung where he’d landed a glancing blow on Bakugou’s guard. The suit’s visor displayed a cascading readout of minor system alerts: hydraulic pressure spiking in the left knee actuator, a slight lag in the neural-link’s predictive algorithm during a sudden feint. Data. Clean, quantifiable feedback.
Across from him, Bakugou wiped a smear of grit and sweat from his brow. His gloves were scorched. He’d been… careful. Not cautious, never that. But precise. His explosions had been concussive blasts of air and light, designed to disorient and punish, not to penetrate or maim. He’d tested the suit’s integrity, its balance, its response time. He’d pushed Izuku to the edge of his reflexes, but he’d pulled every kill-shot.
“Your footwork’s sluggish on the pivot,” Bakugou rasped, breaking the silence. He wasn’t looking at Izuku, but at a scuff mark on the concrete floor. “The suit anticipates a linear dodge. You’re trying to curve. It fights you for a half-second. That’s enough.”
Izuku let the helmet retract. The cool, stale air of the chamber hit his sweat-slicked face. “I noticed. The learning algorithm needs more chaotic input. It’s too… logical.”
“Yeah, well, tell your fan girl to program in some crazy,” Bakugou grunted, finally looking up. His eyes were sharp, assessing. “It held up. Doesn’t feel like cheap crap. The shock dispersion is decent. Took a hit that should’ve rattled your teeth and you stayed standing.”
It was as close to praise as he would get. Izuku felt a weird, hollow pride. “Thanks, Kacchan.”
“Don’t.” Bakugou turned away, grabbing his water bottle from against the wall. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m making sure the bait isn’t completely pathetic.” He took a long swig. “We’re done. Systems reboot in twelve minutes. Get that thing off and let’s go.”
Back in his apartment, as dawn bled grey light through the blinds, the phantom memory of the fight played on a loop behind Izuku’s eyes. The speed, the impact, the clarity of it. It was different from One For All’s world-breaking power. This was a scalpel, not a hammer. And Bakugou… Bakugou had been a controlled demolition. Holding back. Always holding back.
Later that afternoon, Hana was a vortex of focused energy in Lab 3. The suit stood open on its rack, connected to a dozen different cables snaking into diagnostic consoles. Holographic screens floated around her, streams of code and vitals scrolling past.
Izuku had delivered the core data drives to her first thing, offering a tired smile and a mumbled thanks. He’d looked exhausted, but there was a new light in his eyes, a residual charge that made Hana’s heart do a complicated, fluttering thing. She’d just nodded, too nervous to ask for details.
Now, she was mining those details from the raw, unfiltered data. The suit recorded everything: G-force tolerance, reaction times, thermal output, neuromuscular feedback. It was a perfect, objective record of the fight.
She was looking for system stresses, for potential points of failure. And she found them. The knee actuator anomaly. The predictive lag. She made notes, her mind already spinning on refinements, on patches she could upload to the system’s core programming.
Then she opened the full biometric overlay, merging Izuku’s physiological data with the suit’s operational log. A timeline of the fight unfolded across her main screen in a cascade of graphs and numbers.
It was… strange.
Bakugou’s output was a masterclass in controlled fury. The explosive yield of his palms was dialled to exactly 34% below his known maximum, consistently. His movement patterns, while aggressive, avoided the lethal angles she’d studied in his public fight footage. He’d never once aimed a point-blank blast at the suit’s cervical connector, its most vulnerable point. Not even a feint.
He’d fought to test, to challenge, to bruise. Not to break.
That was interesting, but it was the other side of the data that made her stomach tighten.
Izuku’s vitals were a rocky landscape of peaks and valleys. Adrenaline spikes correlated with attack patterns, cortisol levels rose with sustained defense—all normal, expected. But there were anomalies. Sharp, pronounced spikes in heart rate and neural activity that didn't align with any tactical event in the fight log.
She synced the spikes to the suit’s audio and positional recordings.
The first spike occurred 4 minutes and 12 seconds into the session. Bakugou had closed the distance after a deflected blast, his body slamming into Izuku’s suit to grapple. A close-quarters struggle for dominance. The grunt of effort, the screech of composite plating against Bakugou’s armored bracer. A sharp, sudden inhalation from Izuku’s audio channel. His heart rate didn't just climb; it spiked, a jagged mountain on the graph. Neural activity in the motor and sensory cortex flared, then a subsequent, unusual activation in the limbic system—the emotional processing center.
The data was cold. Clinical. It told a story the cameras couldn’t.
Hana played the next one. At 7 minutes and 48 seconds. Bakugou had him in a lock, an arm wrapped around the suit’s neck from behind, applying pressure to the helmet seal. A testing hold, not a true choke. Izuku’s breathing hitched. His vitals skyrocketed again, the same pattern. Physical stress, yes. But layered on top of it was a neurological storm that had nothing to do with combat and everything to do with… proximity. Contact.
The final and most dramatic spike was near the end. They’d been separated after a series of rapid exchanges. Both were heaving. Bakugou had smirked, that old, fierce grin, and said something the audio didn’t quite catch. But the suit’s directional mic caught Izuku’s whispered, punched-out response: “Always.”
A two-second pause. Then Bakugou launched his final, rushing attack. And as he moved, Izuku’s biometrics didn’t show the calm focus of a fighter preparing a counter. They showed a brief, total systems overload—a white-hot flash across every monitor. It was the same signature Hana had seen in early quirk-sync studies, when two resonant abilities briefly interfered. But Izuku had no quirk. And Bakugou’s was explosive, not empathic.
It was the moment of impact. Not the physical impact, but the moment of recognition, of history crashing into the present. It was fear, and excitement, and something else, all tangled together into a single, unsustainable surge.
Hana sat back in her chair. The hum of the servers filled the silent lab. She stared at the graphs, the proof rendered in pulses and millivolts.
He had held back. Deliberately. Systematically.
And he had gotten under Izuku’s skin, into his nervous system, in a way no enemy ever could.
This wasn’t just data on a suit’s performance. This was a map of a ghost. The ghost of a rivalry that had shaped them, a friendship that had nearly killed them, a… something… that had outlasted a war and the loss of a quirk. It was raw, intimate, and she felt like a voyeur for having witnessed it, even second-hand through numbers.
She knew what she should do. Compile a report on the system’s performance. List the needed adjustments. Give Izuku the clean, technical readout.
Her fingers hovered over the console. To delete the biometric logs would be a violation of protocol. It would compromise the suit’s integrity. Aizawa would have her head. Izuku might never trust her again if he found out.
But to hand this over, to make this painfully private transaction a piece of filed data…
She thought of Izuku’s tired, hopeful eyes. She thought of Bakugou’s scowling, calculated restraint. This was theirs. This messy, brutal, silent conversation.
With a swift, decisive motion, Hane isolated the biometric and neural data streams. She created a new, encrypted file, labeled it with a meaningless project code, and moved the raw emotional evidence into it. Then she purged it from the main fight log.
The official record now showed only what it was supposed to show: suit performance metrics. The ghost was sealed away.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Her hands were trembling. A new notification popped up on her screen—an incoming message from the main security server. Routine network traffic scan for the overnight period. It had flagged a minor, encrypted data packet originating from the Sigma training ground perimeter sensors at 03:17 AM. Not an intrusion alarm. Just an anomaly.
The packet was tiny. A ping. A digital glance.
It had been automatically quarantined by U.A.’s firewall. The origin was masked, routed through a series of dead servers, but the target was clear: it wasn’t aimed at the school’s mainframe. It was aimed specifically at the localized sensor grid covering Training Ground Sigma.
Someone had been listening. Not with ears, but with something else. Something that could sense the unique energy signatures of a high-output explosive quirk and an active, piezoelectric combat frame vibrating through two feet of reinforced concrete.
The fight hadn’t been completely secret after all.
Hana’s blood went cold. Her earlier moral dilemma evaporated, replaced by a sharp, professional dread. She looked from the sanitized suit data on one screen to the security alert on the other.
They knew. Or someone did. And now, she had to decide what to do with that, too.
And now, she had to decide what to do with that, too.
Her fingers froze over the keyboard. The sterile calm of the lab suddenly felt suffocating, the hum of the servers morphing into a predatory drone. That tiny, encrypted packet was a whisper in a silent house. It meant someone was standing outside the window.
Hana didn’t know exactly what was happening. But she knew that the suit was supposed to be kept quiet. And she also knew someone snooping around the security system wasn’t good.
She quickly ran to call Aizawa.
Her sneakers squeaked on the polished floor, the sound absurdly loud. She bypassed the comms system on her desk—too slow, too traceable—and fumbled her personal cell from her pocket. She scrolled past messages from friends about homework, her thumb slippery with cold sweat.
The phone rang once, twice. Each tone was a torture.
“This is Aizawa.” His voice was gravel wrapped in sandpaper, blurred by sleep or exhaustion.
“Sir. It’s Ishikawa. In Lab Three.” Her words tumbled out in a rushed whisper. “There’s a security alert. From last night. From Sigma.”
The line was silent for a beat too long. She heard the faint rustle of fabric, the creak of a chair. “Explain.”
“An encrypted data ping. At 03:17. It targeted the perimeter sensor grid specifically. It was quarantined, but it… listened.” She forced air into her lungs. “It was looking for activity. It found it.”
“Understood.” His voice was suddenly clear, all sleep stripped away. “Do not touch anything. Do not log any further analysis. Walk away from your terminal now. Come to my office. Use the secondary stairwell, not the main corridors.”
“But the suit’s data, I was just—”
“Now, Ishikawa.” The line went dead.
The walk was a nightmare of ordinary sounds. The distant laugh of students from a classroom, the clang of a locker, the echo of her own heartbeat in her ears. Every person she passed became a potential threat, a blank mask hiding behind a friendly face. She kept her head down, arms clutched around herself.
Aizawa’s office was as sparse and uninviting as the man. The only light came from a single desk lamp, pooling on stacks of incident reports and making the shadows in the corners seem deeper. He was already pouring two cups of terrible, black coffee from a drip machine when she entered.
He didn’t look up. “Close the door.”
She did, the click of the latch sounding final. He pushed one cup toward the edge of the desk for her. “Sit. Start from the beginning. Omit nothing.”
She sat, the chair cold through her thin pants. She told him about the suit diagnostics, the performance data. She mentioned, vaguely, that Bakugou’s combat metrics were “subdued compared to his public records.” She did not mention the biometric ghosts she had buried.
Then she detailed the security alert, the nature of the packet, its precise targeting. Her voice steadied as she fell into technical specifics; it was easier than talking about heart rates and limbic systems.
Aizawa listened, sipping his coffee, his eyes dark and unblinking. When she finished, he let the silence stretch, letting it press down on her.
“You did the right thing calling me immediately,” he said finally. He didn’t sound pleased. He sounded resigned. “The ping confirms a hypothesis. They have a quantum-listen array. Expensive, black-market tech. It doesn’t break firewalls. It detects unique energy disturbances through barriers—like a quirk’s resonance, or the specific piezoelectric frequency of a certain support suit.”
Hana’s stomach dropped. “So they know he was there. They know about the suit.”
“They know something powerful and new was being tested in a shielded facility last night. They can infer.” He set his cup down. “This was inevitable. The moment you activated that frame in a controlled environment, you created a signature. Bakugou’s explosions provided the perfect cover noise, but also a beacon. They were scanning for him, and found a curious echo.”
He leaned forward, the desk lamp carving harsh lines under his eyes. “The question is about response. They’ve shown their hand. A gentle probe. They’re being cautious, which means they’re uncertain. We can use that.”
“How?” Hana's voice was small.
“By controlling the narrative. We feed them a story.” Aizawa’s gaze was pitiless. “We let them ‘discover’ that U.A. is developing a new generation of combat frames for quirkless security personnel. A prototype was being stress-tested by a visiting pro, Dynamight. It’s a plausible, boring truth.”
“And Sensei?”
“Remains a teacher. His involvement is minimal, a consultant for the fit. The data you compile for ‘leaking’ will support this. Performance metrics only. Nothing linking it uniquely to him.” His eyes narrowed infinitesimally. “Was there anything else on the logs? Anything atypical that would contradict that story?”
The buried file seemed to burn a hole in her conscience. The ghost in the machine. She saw the spike on the graph, heard the ragged breath in the audio. Always.
“No, sir,” she said, her throat tight. “Just suit performance data. And Bakugou holding back.”
Aizawa watched her for a long moment, then gave a single, slow nod. “Good. Build that bland, convincing dataset. I’ll handle the conduit to make it found.” He stood, a signal of dismissal. “They took a listen. Now we’ll give them an answer. One that keeps Midoriya in the background.”
Hana stood, her legs unsteady. The plan was cold, logical. It should have been a relief. But as she turned to leave, a chilling afterthought slithered into her mind.
The probe had been at 03:17 AM. They had stopped training at 03:48. The entire session had been thirty-one minutes long.
What if the ping wasn’t just a listening attempt?
What if it was a timer?
What if it was a timer?
The thought iced Hana’s veins. She stopped in the hallway, her back against the cool concrete wall. The ping wasn’t just a snoop. It was a mark. A start point. They hadn’t just been listening.
They’d been calibrating.
She fumbled her phone back out, her fingers clumsy. She pulled up the raw security log she’d glanced at, zooming in on the timestamp: 03:17:04. The session in Sigma had begun at 02:53. The fight had lasted thirty-one minutes. They’d stopped at 03:24.
The ping landed exactly twenty-four minutes after they started. In the middle of the most intense exchange, when Bakugou had him in that lock, when Izuku’s vitals had screamed.
It wasn’t gathering a baseline. It was taking a sample during peak output.
To set a countdown for what?
Her breath hitched. She shoved off the wall and half-ran, half-stumbled back towards the support lab. The main door hissed shut behind her, sealing her in the sterile, humming quiet. The suit stood inert in its bay, a monument of silent potential.
Her eyes darted to the main analysis console. The sanitized data was still up. The ghost file was hidden. And the security alert window glowed beside it, a tiny, ominous star.
She had to know. She had to look deeper.
Ignoring Aizawa’s order to walk away, she dropped into her chair. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, calling up sub-routines and network forensic tools usually reserved for the security course. She isolated the quarantined packet, not trying to open it, but mapping its structure.
It was sleek. Efficient. It had a recursive encryption shell that would fry itself if tampered with. But its metadata was a road map. It hadn’t just been sent to the sensor grid. It had been sent from a mobile relay, a ghost node that had piggybacked on a civilian telecom signal for a fraction of a second before vanishing.
It was a needle in a haystack. But she had the needle.
She cross-referenced the relay’s faint carrier wave signature with the public network towers around U.A. It was a triangulation game, a digital hunch. The signal strength suggested proximity. Very close proximity. Within five hundred meters of Sigma’s external wall.
Someone had been parked in a vehicle, or sitting in a nearby building, with a million-yen piece of illegal tech, waiting for a specific frequency to light up their screen.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. This wasn’t a vague maybe. This was a stakeout.
She pulled up a map of the surrounding area, superimposing the estimated signal origin. It highlighted a bland section of service road and a small, privately-owned storage facility that rented units to local businesses. The kind of place with no cameras, paid in cash.
A perfect listening post.
The timer question gnawed at her. If they had a sample of the suit’s energy signature from the fight, what was the deadline for? Manufacturing a counter? Tracing its power source? Or… knowing when it would be vulnerable again?
The next scheduled systems reboot for the Sigma grid was tomorrow night. Same two-hour window.
A cold, logical terror locked her joints. They hadn’t just discovered activity. They’d bookmarked it. They’d know the precise, predictable maintenance window when the shields were most relaxed. They had thirty-one minutes of combat data to study.
They knew the suit’s rhythm now. And they might be planning to dance with it.
She stared at the map, at the blinking dot of the estimated relay position. This was beyond her. This was a professional surveillance operation. Aizawa needed this, now. But the thought of saying it all out loud, of making this terrifying hypothesis real, choked her.
She reached for the lab’s secure landline, the one with the direct encrypted line to Aizawa’s office. Her hand hovered over the receiver.
The main lab door hissed open.
Hana jumped, a small gasp escaping her. It wasn’t Aizawa.
It was Bakugou. He was still in his casual clothes, a dark zip-up hoodie and jeans, but his posture was all coiled tension. He must have come straight from the dorms or the gym. His eyes, sharp and impatient, scanned the lab and landed on her, on her doubtless pale face and wide eyes.
“You,” he said, striding in. His voice was a low growl, ignoring the sterile quiet. “I need the stress readings on the thoracic plate from the last grapple. The one at the seven-minute mark. Felt a weird resonance in the armor on my end. Want to know if your toy picked it up.”
He was all business, but his presence was an earthquake in the quiet room. He stopped a few feet from her console, his gaze flicking to the screens. He saw the map. He saw the network schematics. His eyes narrowed.
“What is all this?” he asked, the question dropping like a stone. “This isn’t suit data.”
Hana’s mouth was dry. Her mind, so sharp with data, fumbled for a lie, for an excuse. All she could see was the spike on the graph that coincided with his grip, the ghost she’d buried. And now the real, physical threat circling the school’s walls.
The words tumbled out, high and strained, cracking with a fear she couldn’t control.
“Sir… something happening again huh? Is… is Sensei in trouble?”
She hadn’t called him ‘Dynamight.’ She’d defaulted to the same title of fraught respect she used for Izuku. Her eyes were glued to his, pleading, desperate for the professional hero to have an answer, to make the looming shape in the data go away.
Bakugou went very still. All the irritable impatience bled from his face, replaced by a frightening, focused calm. He didn’t look at the screens again. He looked only at her, reading the sheer, undisguised panic in her expression.
“What did you find?” he asked, his voice dangerously quiet. It wasn’t a request. It was an order.
She pointed a trembling finger at the map, at the blinking dot. “The ping from last night. It wasn’t random. It originated from here. Less than half a kilometer away, during the fight. It was a targeted sample. They were right outside.”
She took a shuddering breath, the worst of it finally breaking through. “I think it was a timer. I think they were marking the schedule. The systems reboot in Sigma… it’s a repeating window. They know it now.”
Bakugou’s jaw clenched. A faint, acrid scent of nitroglycerin seeped into the ozone-heavy air, a subconscious threat response. He leaned over her shoulder, his eyes scanning the forensic data on the screen with a brutal, tactical speed. He saw the signal triangulation, the storage facility layout.
“They know the suit exists. They know its rough capabilities. They know when the room is soft.” He processed it aloud, each point a hammer strike. “And they know he’ll be back to train in it. It’s the logical next step.”
He straightened up, his hands curling into fists at his sides. The casual hero was gone. This was the war-hardened strategist, the one who had survived a battlefield of superpowers and treachery. “Aizawa knows?”
“I told him about the ping. Not… not this yet. I just figured the location out. And the timer… it’s just a theory.”
“It’s not a theory,” Bakugou cut her off, his voice flat. “It’s pattern recognition. They’re gathering intel for an acquisition. Or a dismantling.” He turned his burning gaze on her. “Did you tell Deku?”
“No! I came straight to you—to Principal Aizawa, I mean, and then I came back here and—”
“Good. Don’t.” He pulled out his own phone, a rugged, modified device. He didn’t call Aizawa. He sent a single, cryptic text. A location pin, probably. Then he looked back at Hana. “Sanitize this terminal. Now. Wipe the external search. Leave only the original alert log you showed the hobo.”
“But he told me to—”
“He told you to walk away. You didn’t. Now clean it up. If they’re this good, they might have a way to see if we’re digging back.” His command left no room for argument. It was the voice of someone used to operating in grey areas, where following orders exactly could get you killed.
Hana, numb, obeyed. Her fingers executed the commands, erasing her digital footsteps, leaving the console as if she’d just stared at the initial alert in fear.
Bakugou watched the screens go blank, one by one. His expression was granite. “They’re planning to hit the next training session,” he stated, the conclusion inevitable. “They’ll assume the pattern holds. They’ll be waiting in that storage facility or somewhere close, ready to move when the sensors dip.”
He finally looked away from the screens and directly at Hana, his red eyes intense. “You’re going to tell Aizawa about the location. Only the location. You came back, you double-checked, you triangulated it. The timer idea is mine. Got it?”
She nodded, mutely. He was taking the heat for her disobedience, for the frightening leap in logic.
“And you,” he said, pointing a finger at the suit in its bay. “You’re going to make a tweak. A big one. For the next session. I don’t care how. Introduce a massive, anomalous energy spike exactly… twenty-three minutes in. Something that doesn’t match the previous signature. Make it look like a system malfunction, a capacitor flare. Can you do that?”
Hana’s mind, brilliant and adaptive, seized the tactical request. She pushed her fear aside, latching onto the technical problem. “A directed EMP pulse from the chest array? Low yield, but it would scatter their sensors, look like an overload. It would blind them for a critical window.”
A grim, approving smirk touched Bakugou’s lips. It held no warmth. “Do it. We give them a sample, then we burn their ears. And then,” he said, turning to leave, his voice dropping to a low, vicious promise, “we see who comes out of the shadows when the signal goes dead.”