Chapter 2: The Lesson Plan
The air in the lab still smelled of burnt ozone and melted plastic, a scent that clung to the back of Katsuki’s throat. He’d stared at the carbon scoring on the server housing for ten full minutes, tracing the faint, spidery radial pattern with his eyes. It was his. Not a perfect copy, but a damn good one. The subtle variations in the burn depth, the way the blast hadn’t quite concentrated the heat at the epicenter… it was the work of someone who had studied his early work intently. Someone who’d seen him when his control was more anger than precision.
“We’re drawing a crowd,” Kirishima murmured, nodding toward the lab’s main entrance where two uniformed cops were arguing with a man in a cheap suit, their voices a low, aggravated rumble.
Yaoyorozu slipped her forged ID badge back into her pocket. “We have all we can get here. The tranquilizer chem-analysis is running. The blast pattern is documented. Staying is a risk.”
Bakugou gave one last, lingering look at the destruction. It felt like looking at a photograph of himself from a time he hated. He jerked his chin in a stiff nod. “Fine. We’re gone.”
They slipped out through a maintenance corridor Yaoyorozu had mapped, emerging into a dank alley cluttered with overflowing dumpsters. The rain had stopped, leaving the city steaming under a blanket of humid haze. The neon was softer now, diffused.
They’d made it three steps.
“Theatrical exits were always your specialty.”
The voice came from above, dry and flat as old paper. A figure dropped from a fire escape, landing in a silent crouch before straightening with a weary, practiced grace. His black capture weapon was loose around his shoulders, his hair longer and more unkempt than they remembered, streaked with more grey. His eyes, however, were exactly the same—heavy-lidded, bloodshot, and missing nothing.
“Aizawa-sensei?” Kirishima’s posture went rigid, a student caught out after curfew despite being a decade older.
Shota Aizawa didn’t smile. He rarely did. His gaze swept over them, pausing on Yaoyorozu’s guilty flinch, on Kirishima’s defensive stance, finally settling on Bakugou, who was glaring with a defiance that was pure instinct.
“You trashed a crime scene. Tampered with evidence. Interfered with an active investigation.” He listed the offenses without inflection. “Idiots.”
“We didn’t–” Kirishima started.
“The note,” Aizawa interrupted, his eyes locked on Bakugou. “The one that ‘disintegrated in the rain.’ Did you really think the security camera on the adjacent rooftop was purely decorative?”
Bakugou’s hands sparked. “Get to the point.”
“The point is you’re charging down a path blindfolded, and you’re going to get everyone around you blown up. Again.” The words were harsh, clinically delivered. They landed like physical blows. “You’re coming with me. Now. No arguments, or I suspend all three of you on the spot and let the Commission pick through the bones of your careers.”
Yaoyorozu opened her mouth, likely to cite a regulation, but thought better of it. Aizawa’s aura of exhausted authority was a tangible force. He turned and walked, not checking to see if they followed. They did, a grim, silent procession.
He led them not to a police station or a hero agency, but down into the city’s underbelly. Through a rusted grate, down a ladder into a utility tunnel that smelled of earth and stagnant water. Then through a hidden door disguised as a concrete support pillar, its mechanism opening with a hiss of pressurized air.
The space beyond was a cavernous, low-ceilinged room. The air was cool and still, thick with dust. Faded, peeling posters of All Might in his prime were tacked to the walls next to complex quirk theory diagrams. Weights and cracked training dummies littered a corner. It was a ghost town of their adolescence.
“One of the old UA emergency safehouses,” Aizawa said, flicking a switch. A bank of monitors on a cluttered desk hummed to life, casting a pale blue glow. “Decommissioned. Forgotten. Useful.”
He typed a command. The monitors flickered, splitting into multiple feeds. On the left, grainy security footage showed the Minato tech theft, time-stamped. On the right, a digital scan of a mission report from their second year at UA. The geographic coordinates matched.
Aizawa hit a key. The footage changed to the Roppongi lab breach. He pulled up another file. A third-year urban rescue exercise. The mapped patrol routes and strategic points overlay the lab’s location almost perfectly.
“Every theft,” Aizawa said, his voice a low monotone in the dusty silence. “Every single one lines up with a mission or training exercise from your time at UA. Specifically, missions where Team Four was deployed.” He turned to look at them, his face grim in the monitor light. “Bakugou, Midoriya, Kirishima, Yaoyorozu.”
The silence in the room was absolute. Kirishima sucked in a sharp breath. Yaoyorozu put a hand to her mouth. Bakugou just stared, the connections clicking into place with a series of sickening, mental thuds. The specific knowledge. The intimate mimicry. It wasn’t just about him and Deku. It was about all of them. Their past, their tactics, their old team dynamic turned inside out.
“He’s not just leaving a trail,” Kirishima whispered, horrified. “He’s… retracing our steps.”
“But why?” Yaoyorozu asked, her voice strained. “What is the objective? The items stolen seem unrelated unless…”
Aizawa punched another key. The central monitor switched to a live feed. It was a night-vision image, green and black, showing a familiar, bombed-out landscape of concrete ruins and mock city blocks.
“Ground Beta,” Kirishima said.
In the center of the feed, a figure moved. Taller, broader than the boy they remembered, but with a familiar, analytical stillness to his posture. He wore dark, functional gear, his face obscured by the low light and a high collar. He was placing something on the jagged stump of a shattered pillar.
The figure stepped back, and the camera, positioned somewhere high in the ruins, zoomed in.
It was a notebook. A simple, yellow, college-ruled notebook. The cover was frayed, stained. It lay open on the concrete.
The camera zoomed tighter, the image pixelating slightly. The page was filled with dense, analytical handwriting they all recognized. Interspersed with it, in angrier, spikier script, were comments in the margins. Notes on combo moves, power output limits, weaknesses.
One line was circled, hard, the paper nearly torn through by the pressure of the pencil. The live feed was clear enough to read it.
‘I’ll be number one - and you’ll watch.’
Bakugou’s own words, from a lifetime ago. A brutal, childish promise scribbled in the margin of Midoriya’s own hero journal.
The gloved hand of the figure reached into the frame once more. He placed a small, heavy-looking stone on the open page to stop it from fluttering in the night breeze. Then he turned, looked directly up at the hidden camera lens for a single, heartbeat-long second, and melted away into the shadows of the ruins.
The feed went static.
No one moved. The dust motes swam in the blue light of the monitors.
Aizawa broke the silence, his voice rasping. “He’s not just retracing your steps. He’s laying a trail of breadcrumbs made entirely of your shared history. And he’s waiting for you at the start of it.” He looked at Bakugou, his expression unreadable. “The question is, what do you find when you go back to the beginning? And what is he planning to show you?”
Bakugou was already moving, his boots loud on the concrete floor. He headed for the door they’d entered, his movements precise, lethal.
“Where are you going?” Kirishima called after him.
Bakugou didn’t slow down. “Ground Beta. Now.”
“It’s a trap. An obvious one.”
“I know.” Bakugou shoved the heavy door open, the dim light from the tunnel slicing into the dark room. He glanced back, his face a mask of simmering, conflicted fury. “But it’s my handwriting. My mistakes. He wants to have a conversation about the past?” A tiny, dangerous crackle of sparks danced across his knuckles. “Fine. I’ll give him a fucking conversation.”
He didn’t wait for the car. The door to the underground safehouse slammed shut behind him, the sound swallowed by the tunnel’s darkness. Kirishima’s shout was muffled, then gone. Bakugou’s palms sparked, a stuttering ignition in the damp air, and then he was moving.
He blasted down the tunnel, using controlled, consecutive explosions to propel himself like a hellish rocket. He shot up through the grate he'd come down, the metal screeching in protest as he shouldered it aside. The city air hit him, cooler now, the night sky a bruised purple. He didn't land. He angled his body, shifted his weight, and let the explosions carry him aloft.
It was reckless. It was traceable. It burned through his stamina like paper. He didn't care. He wove between skyscrapers, a streaking comet of light and sound, his trajectory a straight, violent line towards the city's outskirts where the old training grounds lay. The wind ripped at his clothes, whipped the breath from his lungs. Below, the streets were ribbons of light, the cars carrying his friends—and Aizawa—stuck in the grid of traffic and protocol.
He made it in eighteen minutes.
He landed hard in the center of Ground Beta, the impact cratering the asphalt under his boots. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the fading echo of his descent and the low hum of distant city life. The ruins stood like broken teeth against the sky. The air was still. Cold. It smelled of old concrete, dried weeds, and something else—ozone, but not his own. A faint, green-tinged hum of energy that had long since faded from the world.
Deku was gone. The spot on the shattered pillar was empty save for that single, heavy stone.
But the air screamed. It vibrated with the ghost of him, a presence so recently departed it hung in the space like a shout. Bakugou’s own breathing sounded too loud. He approached the pillar, each step deliberate. The yellow notebook lay there, a stark, familiar artifact. The stone was smooth, cool from the night.
He knelt. He picked the notebook up, his movements uncharacteristically slow. The cover was soft with age, the edges frayed. He opened it to the page held down by the stone.
His own adolescent handwriting glared back at him, angry and definitive in the gloom. ‘I’ll be number one - and you’ll watch.’ He remembered scribbling that. He remembered the hot, corrosive feeling in his chest that prompted it, the need to carve his dominance into Deku’s own sacred text. Seeing it now, isolated on the page, it looked so small. So pathetic.
His fingers, calloused and rough, traced the indentations on the paper. They ghosted over the violent circle that surrounded the words, the near-tear from the pencil’s pressure. He could feel the ghost of that old fury, but it was distant, buried under years of quieter, more complicated regret. It had been so long since he’d seen this. Since he’d allowed himself to remember it so clearly.
“Reminiscing on old memories?”
The voice cut the silence from behind him. It was deeper. Rougher, like stone worn smooth by a relentless river. It held no teenage crackle, just a calm, weary steadiness that was somehow worse.
Bakugou didn’t startle. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, his grip on the notebook tightening just once before he forced his hand to relax. He stood, turning slowly.
Izuku Midoriya stepped from the shadow of a collapsed wall. He was taller, his shoulders broad under a simple dark jacket. His hair was a wild, dark tangle, a few strands of silver catching the faint ambient light. Scars, old and new, mapped a brutal history across his hands and up his neck. His eyes were the same impossible green, but the frantic light was gone, replaced by a stillness that was profoundly unsettling.
They looked at each other. Thirty minutes. That’s what they had.
“You left a trail of my greatest hits,” Bakugou said, his own voice grating. He tossed the notebook onto the pillar. It landed with a soft slap. “The shitty blast patterns. The tranq formulas. Even the goddamn mission coordinates. You rebuilding our yearbook or something?”
“I needed you to see the pattern before anyone else could,” Izuku said. He didn’t move closer. His hands were tucked into his pockets. “I needed you to understand it wasn’t random. It’s a blueprint.”
“For what? Your villain origin story? ‘Prove it.’ Prove what, Deku?” The old name erupted from him, tasting strange and sharp on his tongue.
Izuku flinched, just a tiny twitch at the corner of his eye. It was the first crack in his composure. “Prove you can see it,” he said quietly. “The loop. They’re taking things, Kacchan. Specific things. The processor designs from Minato can run predictive quirk-analysis algorithms. The bio-research from Roppongi mapped stabilizing compound chains for volatile emitter-types.” He took a slow breath. “Our types.”
Bakugou’s mind, always tactical, always connecting dots, spun the pieces. Tech to analyze. Bio-data to stabilize. A cold knot formed in his gut. “Someone’s building a weapon.”
“They’re building a counter-weapon,” Izuku corrected, his gaze unblinking. “A system designed to predict, nullify, and subdue specific quirks. Starting with the ones they have the most comprehensive historical data on. Our class. Our team.” He finally pulled a hand from his pocket, gesturing vaguely at the ruins around them. “The data isn’t just from old missions. It’s from here. From every spar, every match, every time we ever fought each other. It’s the most detailed combat profile of our capabilities that exists.”
The understanding was a physical blow. The thefts weren’t about the items. They were about the data behind them. The safehouse monitors flashed in Bakugou’s memory—every theft aligned with a past mission. A catalog of their growth, their strategies, their weaknesses.
“Who?” Bakugou snarled, a low heat building in his palms.
“I don’t have a name. Just whispers. A group that thinks the age of unpredictable, overpowered heroes is a liability. They want a switch to turn us off.” Izuku’s jaw tightened. “They’ve been collecting for years. From old agency servers, discarded training logs, sealed incident reports. I only caught the scent because they got greedy. They started taking physical prototypes, and I noticed the pattern in what was missing.”
“So you decided to play tour guide through our tragic past? Why not just send a fucking email?”
“Because they’re watching the official channels!” Izuku’s calm finally fractured, his voice rising with a hint of that old, desperate intensity. “They’re inside the Commission, Kacchan. Maybe inside the agencies. Any direct contact and they’d know I’m onto them. They’d vanish. This… this was the only way to get a message directly to you that they couldn’t intercept. Through our history. Through the things only we would understand.”
He took a step forward now, his eyes blazing in the dark. “The notebook. The blasts. The notes. It was all to make you look, to make you come here, so I could tell you to your face.” He stopped, the space between them charged and thin. “They’re not just coming for me. They’re coming for everything we built. And they’re using our own story to do it.”
Sirens, faint but growing, wailed in the distance. The thirty minutes were bleeding away. Izuku’s head turned slightly, tracking the sound. His time was up.
“What do you want from me?” Bakugou asked, the question leaving him stripped bare.
Izuku looked back at him, and for a second, the years fell away. It was just a painful, desperate hope. “I want you to prove I’m not crazy. I want you to prove you see it too. And then I want you to help me burn their system to the ground.”
Headlights sliced through the perimeter fence, engines groaning as vehicles screeched to a halt. Doors slammed. Voices shouted.
Izuku faded back a step, into the deeper shadow. “They’re here. Your call, Kacchan.” His form dissolved into the ruins, becoming just another part of the wreckage. “Always has been.”
Bakugou stood alone as Kirishima, Yaoyorozu, and Aizawa converged on his position, their flashlights cutting erratic paths through the dark. They found him staring at the empty space where a ghost had been, the yellow notebook at his feet, the weight of a war he never asked for settling squarely on his shoulders.
The flashlights pinned him in their cold white circles, turning the dust he’d kicked up into a swirling galaxy. Kirishima’s voice cut through the silence, sharp with relief and accusation. “What the hell, man? You just took off! We thought–”
“You saw him.” Aizawa stated it, didn’t ask it. He stood at the edge of the light, his capture scarf shifting in the faint breeze. His eyes weren’t on Bakugou’s face, but on the empty shadows beyond, already analyzing the escape routes.
Bakugou didn’t answer. He bent, snatched the yellow notebook from the ground, and tossed it to Yaoyorozu. Her hands fumbled the catch. “Analyze that. For prints, paper source, age, any microscopic traces. Everything.”
“Is this… his?” she asked, holding it like it might combust.
“It’s ours,” Bakugou corrected, his voice hollow. He finally looked at them, the adrenaline leaching away, leaving a cold, heavy sediment in its place. “He was here. He said thirty minutes. He used it.”
Kirishima stepped closer, lowering his voice. “What did he say?”
The sirens were at the gate now, official engines rumbling. Bakugou’s mind was a split screen. On one side, Izuku’s scarred face, the grim certainty in his eyes. On the other, the glitching security feeds from the safehouse, each theft a pin on a map of their past. The two images slammed together, forming a terrible, coherent picture.
“He’s not stealing tech,” Bakugou said, the words tasting like ash. “He’s collecting evidence. Someone else is building something. A system. To predict us. To nullify us.” He met Aizawa’s gaze. “Starting with our class. They’ve been mining our data for years. From missions. From here. He says they’re inside the Commission.”
Aizawa didn’t blink. The shouting from the perimeter grew louder. “Proof.”
“That’s what the thefts are!” Bakugou’s control snapped, a short, sharp burst. “The processor blueprints, the bio-research—it’s all parts of the same machine. He’s been hijacking their acquisitions to show us the blueprint. To warn us.”
Yaoyorozu’s face was pale in the artificial light. “That’s… an extraordinary claim. If there were a conspiracy of that scale, even a whisper–”
“There isn’t a whisper,” Aizawa interrupted, his tone final. “There’s a ghost and a pattern. That’s not enough for anyone. Especially not with Midoriya’s current status.” He rubbed his eyes, the gesture profoundly tired. “To the outside, this is simple. A vigilante, possibly turned villain, with an intimate knowledge of pro heroes, is executing high-level thefts and taunting his primary rival. He is the story. Not a shadowy cabal.”
The weight on Bakugou’s shoulders turned to ice. He saw the trap, perfect and inescapable. Izuku had known it too. It’s why he’d used their history, a language only they could hear. Anyone else would just hear the ramblings of a criminal.
“We need to move,” Kirishima said, eyeing the approaching lights. “Before we have to explain why we’re at my ex-vigilante childhood friend’s creepy rendezvous point.”
They retreated back through the ruins, a tense, silent unit. They didn’t go to the streets. Aizawa led them through a drainage culvert that emptied out two blocks away, where Yaoyorozu’s car sat under a burned-out streetlamp. The drive back to the underground safehouse was wordless, thick with unspoken questions.
Back in the dusty blue glow of the monitors, the atmosphere had changed. The room wasn’t a refuge anymore; it felt like a bunker. Yaoyorozu immediately set up a small sterile field on the desk, donning gloves to examine the notebook. Kirishima paced, the sound of his boots a nervous tempo.
Aizawa leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “Start from the beginning. Every word.”
Bakugou did. He recited the conversation in brutal, clipped sentences. The predictive algorithms. The stabilizing compounds. The data mining. The target on their class. When he finished, the only sound was the hum of the servers.
“He’s quirkless,” Kirishima said, the fact settling in the room like a physical object. “He said it. After everything. How is he doing any of this?”
“How did he do any of it before?” Bakugou shot back, but there was no heat. It was a genuine question. The kid who broke his bones to keep up was now moving through the world without that power, yet he was still three steps ahead of everyone.
Yaoyorozu looked up from the notebook, her magnifying headset pushed onto her forehead. “The paper is over a decade old. Consistent with notebooks sold at the UA store during our first year. The handwriting is authenticated, both sets. The marginalia… it’s a timeline of your development. But there’s something else.” She pointed to a nearly invisible series of faint indentations on a later page. “Pressure marks. From writing on a sheet that was on top of this one. I can enhance it.”
She produced a delicate graphite stick from her wrist and lightly shaded the page. Letters emerged from the ghost impressions.
Project: Icarus. Phase 2. Asset Acquisition Log. Authorization: Sigma-Seven.
Beneath that, a list. Item names. The Minato processor design was there. The Roppongi bio-compounds. Three others they didn’t recognize. And next to each one, a date and a code: S.R.F. - 04. S.R.F. - 04.
“Sigma-Seven,” Aizawa repeated, his voice dangerously soft. He pushed off the wall and moved to a terminal, his fingers flying across the keys. Security clearance prompts flashed and were bypassed. “It’s a procurement authority code. Deep within Special Research Finance.”
“What’s S.R.F.?” Kirishima asked.
“Secured Research Facility,” Aizawa said, his eyes scanning the scrolling data. “There are dozens. But the ‘04’…” He stopped. Pulled up a map. It was an older schematic, labeled UA Annex 4: Decommissioned. The location was in the mountains, three hours north. Ground Gamma.
“An old training facility,” Yaoyorozu whispered. “They repurposed it?”
Aizawa didn’t answer. He cross-referenced the code with recent budget allocations. His expression went utterly blank, a sign of profound danger. “The funding for Facility 04 was officially suspended five years ago. But the utility feeds, the network activity… it’s live. It’s consuming more power than the Tokyo central server farm.” He turned to look at them. “Someone is running a city beneath a mountain. And they’re paying for it with black budget lines even I can’t fully trace.”
“Icarus,” Bakugou said. The name felt cold in his mouth.
“The boy who flew too close to the sun,” Kirishima murmured.
“Not a boy,” Bakugou corrected, staring at the schematic on the screen. “A system designed to clip our wings.” He thought of Izuku’s warning. They want a switch to turn us off.
Aizawa’s terminal chimed with a priority alert. He opened it. It was a secure Commission broadcast, marked for all top-ten agencies. The subject line was clear: URGENT: VIGILANTE ACTIVITY AND DATA THEFT.
The attached file was a dossier. It was expertly compiled. It linked the two thefts with forensic analysis—highlighting the matched blast patterns and tranquilizer formulas. It included grainy, manipulated images of a figure in dark gear near both scenes. The figure’s face was unclear, but the build was right. The analysis concluded with a high-probability assessment: the perpetrator was Izuku Midoriya, utilizing stolen support gear and insider knowledge to target the hero system that had rejected him.
The final page was a revocation of his former hero license and a standing order for his detainment on sight. It was signed by the head of the Hero Public Safety Commission.
It was the perfect frame. It used just enough truth to sell the lie. It made Izuku the villain, and any investigation into the stolen items would now be an investigation into him, not what he was trying to expose.
“FUCK,” was all Bakugou could say before turning on his heels and walking out.
Stupid quirkless nerd… still charging head first even without his quirk anymore… Bakugou punched a metal pillar that vibrated the foundation. He’s quirkless but still trying to help and doing it better than most heroes with quirks.
He was torn. Izuku was defined as a villain/vigilante type. He was a pro hero… but if what Izuku said was true, then the organization that gave him that license, that he’d bled for, was building the cage he’d be thrown into. His fists clenched at his sides, the sparks dying before they could ignite. The law said one thing. The truth, the shitty, complicated truth he’d just heard in the ruins, said another.
He looked at Kirishima, Yaoyorozu, and Aizawa, who had followed him out into the tunnel. Their faces were etched in the low light, waiting for his lead. They were heroes. He was a hero. The path was supposed to be clear.
“This is so fucked up,” he breathed, the words leaving him deflated.
Kirishima walked over and put a solid hand on the pillar next to Bakugou’s head. “Yeah. It is. So what’s the play, Dynamight? We follow the order?” He didn’t say it like a challenge. He said it like a real question.
Bakugou looked at his friend’s hand, then at his own scraped knuckles. He saw the notebook in Yaoyorozu’s grip, the ghostly imprint of Project Icarus. He heard Izuku’s voice, not the desperate kid from the past, but the weary, scarred man from the ruins. Your call, Kacchan.
“No,” Bakugou said, pushing off the pillar. The decision crystallized, cold and hard. “We follow the evidence. Our evidence.” He looked at Aizawa. “You got a way into that mountain that doesn’t trip an alarm?”
Aizawa’s mouth was a thin line. “Maybe. It’ll require going completely dark. No agency support. No comms. If we’re wrong, it’s not just our careers. It’s prison.”
Yaoyorozu closed the notebook, her face set with a determined calm. “If we’re right, and we do nothing, it’s the end of everything we swore to protect.”
Bakugou nodded once, a sharp, final gesture. He started back toward the safehouse, toward the maps and the schematics. “Then we don’t get wrong. We get proof they can’t ignore. The kind you can’t fabricate.” He glanced back at the tunnel leading to the world above, to his rank, his reputation, the clear lines he’d lived by. He turned his back on it. “We go to Facility 04. We see what Icarus really is.”
He didn’t wait for agreement. He knew what theirs would be. They followed him into the blue glow, the door sealing shut behind them, closing out the world that thought it had the story figured out. The real one was just beginning, and it was buried under a mountain.