Chapter 3: Izuku turns with glowing green data cables snaking up his arms, the system's defense protocol activating - the first successful quirk transfer blinking on screen: 'One For All - Extraction Complete'
The mountain ate sound. That was the first thing Bakugou noticed as they descended through the maintenance shaft Aizawa had pried open, its hinges screaming into the overwhelming silence of the rock. Their breaths were loud in their helmets, the only light coming from the bobbing beams on their heads. The air grew colder, drier, smelling of aged concrete and stale coolant.
They’d left everything that could ping a network back in the safehouse. Civilian clothes, dark and nondescript. No comms. No hero gear. Kirishima’s hardened skin looked almost grey in the gloom, his usual broad smile replaced by a tight line of concentration. Yaoyorozu moved with a gymnast’s grace, her eyes constantly scanning the tunnel structures. Aizawa was a shadow ahead of them, his movements silent, his occasional hand signals sharp and clear.
The shaft dumped them into a wider corridor, lined with rusted pipes and flickering, half-dead lumen strips. It was sterile, industrial, and utterly abandoned on the surface. But the floor was clean. No dust. A low, sub-audible vibration thrummed through the soles of Bakugou’s boots.
“Power draw’s coming from deeper in,” Aizawa murmured, his voice barely carrying. “This is just the shell.”
They moved as a unit, a well-oiled machine from a different life. Past empty storage rooms with coded locks, beyond a cavernous gymnasium where training dummies still stood frozen in mid-spar. It was a museum of their past, drained of color and sound.
Then the corridor ended at a massive blast door, sleek and out of place among the decay. A keypad glowed beside it. Red light.
“Secured,” Yaoyorozu whispered, peering at the mechanism. “Biometric and code. Recent install.”
“Can you–” Kirishima started.
“Not without setting off an alarm. The power’s live.”
Bakugou stepped forward, studying the door. His fingers twitched. A low-yield, shaped charge right on the seam could…
“Don’t,” Aizawa said, as if reading his mind. He was looking up. A small, black dome was mounted in the ceiling corner. “Motion-sensor. They’ll know we’re here the second we breach.”
“So we’re stuck,” Bakugou growled, frustration simmering.
A low, grinding hum echoed from the other side of the door. It cycled up, a deep mechanical groan, then settled back into the background thrum. A coolant cycle. Bakugou looked at the pipes running along the corridor wall, tracing their path. They snaked upward, into a ventilation grate near the ceiling.
He didn’t say a word. He just walked to the wall, planted a foot, and launched himself upward with a muffled pop from his palm. He caught the grate, the metal groaning in protest. One sharp tug and the screws sheared. He pulled himself into the dark duct, the others following without a sound.
It was a tight, claustrophobic crawl. The hum was louder here, the air warmer, carrying a chemical tang that made his eyes water. They crawled for what felt like miles, the metal vibrating beneath them. Finally, light—filtered, greenish light—spilled from a vent opening below.
Bakugou peered down.
The reactor chamber was a cathedral to forgotten ambition. The core itself was a monstrous cylinder of rust-streaked steel and darkened observation windows, rising through the center of the cavernous space. A gantry walkway circled it, and below, sprawled across the floor like a malignant chrome fungus, was the mainframe.
It wasn’t just servers. It was a sprawling, interconnected labyrinth of processing units, liquid cooling lines, and neural-network emulators, all pulsing with a sickly green light. Monitors lined the walls, displaying flowing lines of code, molecular diagrams of quirks, and real-time biometric feeds. One large screen showed a rotating 3D model of a human brain, with specific lobes highlighted and tagged. Another flashed with the words: ASSIMILATION PROTOCOL - PHASE 3: SYNTHESIS.
And in the middle of it all, standing at a central console, was Izuku.
He looked worse up close. Gaunt. The scars on his neck crawled up onto his jaw. His hands flew across the keyboard, fingers a blur. He was muttering to himself, the habit unchanged, the words swallowed by the room’s industrial drone.
“Holy hell,” Kirishima breathed next to Bakugou’s ear.
Aizawa pointed. Around the perimeter of the chamber, stationed at regular intervals, were figures in stark white armor. Not guards. Technicians. Their faces were obscured by full helmets, their movements efficient, focused on their own consoles. They hadn’t noticed the vent.
Bakugou’s eyes swept the room, calculating. Ten, maybe twelve hostiles. Izuku, dead center. His mind raced, strategies forming and dissolving. This wasn’t a fight. It was a data extraction. They needed to see what was on those screens.
As if on cue, Izuku slammed a key. A new window blossomed across the largest monitor. It was a profile. A hero profile Bakugou knew intimately. His own. Not his public one. This was dense with classified data: his quirk’s precise thermal output gradients, adrenal response limits, even the faint, lingering scar tissue from his kidnapping years ago that sometimes ached in the cold. A red banner flashed across it: PRIME CANDIDATE - EMITTER CLASS: DELTA.
“They’re not just predicting,” Bakugou whispered, the truth cold in his gut.
Izuku’s head snapped up. He didn’t look at the vent. He looked at a console across the room where a technician had suddenly stood, staring at a flashing alert.
“Intrusion,” the technician’s voice, filtered and flat, announced over the din. “Perimeter sensors in Sector 7. Security to my location.”
Alarms erupted. Not blaring sirens, but a piercing, digital shriek that cut through the hum. Red lights strobed across the cavern. The white-armored technicians moved, not for weapons, but for data drives, initiating swift shutdown sequences.
“Go, go, go!” Bakugou snarled, kicking the vent cover out. It clattered onto the gantry below. He dropped, landing in a crouch, already moving. Kirishima hit the ground behind him like a meteor, his skin hardening to jagged rock. Yaoyorozu and Aizawa followed, the latter’s capture weapon already unfurling.
The technicians scattered, disciplined but not combatants. Izuku spun from his console, his eyes wide with a panic that wasn’t fear for himself. He saw Bakugou. “No! You shouldn’t be here yet!”
“Surprise,” Bakugou spat, blasting past a technician who stumbled back. He was halfway to the central console. He needed to see it. He needed to know.
A white-clad figure stepped into his path, not with a weapon, but with a device—a slim, black rod with a pulsating blue tip. He pointed it. A low thrum resonated in Bakugou’s bones. His palms sparked, sputtered, and went out. A cold, hollow numbness shot up his arms. It was like someone had snipped a wire in his brain.
Quirk suppression. Advanced.
The technician leveled the rod again. Bakugou dove behind a server rack as a beam of blue energy crackled past, fizzling where it struck the metal. He looked at his hands. Nothing. Just ordinary skin. A primal, shuddering horror gripped him.
He heard a guttural roar. Kirishima, his hardening flickering unstable under a barrage of two suppression beams, was holding two technicians back by sheer physical force. Yaoyorozu had created a steel shield, but a third beam was slowly, inexorably dissolving it into gray slurry. Aizawa was a whirlwind, his scarf lashing out, but he had to keep his eyes on the shooters to erase the emitter quirks powering the rods, leaving himself open to others.
They were losing. Not to force, but to science.
Bakugou’s eyes darted to the main console. Izuku was back at it, typing frantically, pulling drives. He was ignoring the fight.
A suppression beam sheared through the server rack above Bakugou. He rolled as superheated metal dripped down. He was cornered. The technician advanced, the rod humming.
Then the room shuddered. A deep, tectonic groan came from the reactor core. A high-pressure coolant pipe directly above the technician’s head ruptured with the sound of a cannon shot, spraying freezing, green-tinged chemical slurry everywhere. The white armor corroded on contact, the technician screaming as he stumbled back.
Izuku had done that. He’d sabotaged the coolant lines.
“They wanted to control quirks!” Izuku shouted over the new, wailing alarms of a reactor in distress. He didn’t stop typing. Another pipe burst near Kirishima’s attackers, driving them back. “To regulate us! To make heroes safe and predictable!” He yanked a drive, slotting in another. The main screen flickered, windows flying open. “But I found the buried subroutines! The real project!”
Bakugou sprinted, ducking under a sizzling beam. He slid across the floor, coming up beside Izuku at the console. He grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around. “What did you find?!”
Izuku’s face was wild, lit by the strobes and the failing screens. His eyes held a devastated, furious truth. He pointed a trembling, scarred finger at the main monitor.
The window displayed a complex genetic sequence, labeled QUIRK FACTOR: EXPLOSIVE SWEAT (VARIANT BAK-01). Next to it, a progress bar: EXTRACTION SIMULATION: 97% COMPLETE. Below that, a simple, terrifying sentence: BIOLOGICAL TEMPLATE READY FOR IMPLANT.
“They weren’t just mapping how to nullify us, Kacchan,” Izuku said, his voice cracking with a terrible, weary rage. “They were mapping how to steal them. How to copy a quirk factor and implant it into someone else. Icarus isn’t a shield. It’s a pharming lab. They’re growing quirks in test tubes!”
The world narrowed to that sentence. The stolen tech for analysis. The bio-research for stabilization. It all snapped into a horrifying, perfect focus. This wasn't about control. It was about harvest. They were cataloging the most powerful, useful quirks their class had to offer, preparing to farm them like software.
A violent tremor rocked the chamber. A support beam near the ceiling buckled, raining concrete dust. The reactor’s hum became a pained, rising whine. Izuku’s sabotage was cascading.
“We have to go!” Kirishima bellowed, throwing a de-hardened technician across the room. “The whole mountain’s coming down!”
Izuku shoved a data drive into Bakugou’s hand. It was warm. “The proof. Every blueprint, every transaction, every name I could pull. Get it out.”
“You’re coming with us,” Bakugou said, his fingers closing around the drive.
“I can’t.” Izuku turned back to the console, typing a rapid command sequence. A new alarm, higher-pitched, joined the chorus. “I have to fry the core data banks. If I don’t, they’ll just rebuild from backups. They’ll have your template.”
“Let it burn!”
“It won’t be enough! The encoding needs a localized EM pulse from the main terminal!” He looked at Bakugou, and for a fleeting second, it was just them on that rooftop again, a lifetime of unspoken things hanging in the air. “I’m the only one who can do it. I’m… I’m not wired for this anymore.”
Quirkless. He could walk through their suppression fields. He could trigger the meltdown they couldn’t afford to stop.
Another explosion, closer. The floor pitched. Yaoyorozu cried out as a section of the gantry collapsed. Aizawa’s scarf snagged her, pulling her to safety.
Bakugou stood frozen. The drive burned in his palm. The mountain roared around them. The boy who flew too close to the sun was going to burn with it.
Izuku offered a small, broken smile. “Prove it, Kacchan. Prove I wasn’t crazy. Get that to the world.” He turned, his shoulders squaring, and brought his hands down on the final key.
The reactor’s whine shot into a scream. All the screens went blinding white, then died. The chamber plunged into near-darkness, lit only by erupting electrical arcs and the fiery bursts of failing pipes.
“BAKUGOU, NOW!” Aizawa’s command cut through the chaos.
Kirishima’s rock-hard hand clamped around Bakugou’s bicep, yanking him backward. “We have to live to tell this, man! Come on!”
He was pulled away, stumbling over debris, the image of Izuku at the terminal, backlit by the fury of a dying machine, searing itself into his mind. They ran through the crumbling corridors, the mountain convulsing around them, the warm metal drive the only solid thing in a world that was falling apart. The truth was in his hand. And the cost of it was buried behind them, in the dark.
The tunnels rejected them, bucking and spewing dust like a living thing in its death throes. Concrete slabs sheared from ceilings, forcing them into frantic, stumbling detours. Bakugou ran on instinct, the drive a searing brand in his clenched fist, Kirishima’s grip a relentless anchor on his arm.
“Left, go left!” Aizawa’s voice, ragged and urgent, cut through the apocalyptic roar.
They swerved into a narrower maintenance artery, the air choked with pulverized rock. Light—actual, grey, pre-dawn light—speared through a haze of dust ahead. An emergency exit, its door hanging crookedly from one hinge.
Yaoyorozu reached it first, shoving the mangled metal aside with a pained grunt. Cold, clean air flooded in, a shock to their chemical-scorched lungs. They spilled out onto a rocky slope, stumbling into the biting wind of the mountain's exterior.
The sound outside was different. Muffled. A deep, grumbling complaint from the earth itself.
Bakugou whipped around, chest heaving. The exit was a dark, square mouth set into the mountain's granite face. From here, it looked static. Unchanged.
Then the mountain shrugged.
A deep, internal thunder rolled, vibration traveling up through the rock into their feet. A crack like a giant's bone snapping echoed from deep within. Not an explosion. A structural collapse.
From the outside, it was just a few rocks tumbling down the slope, a fresh puff of dust venting from the exit. A minor rockslide.
Bakugou’s eyes widened.He knew. The feel of it in his soles, the specific, sinking finality of that sound—it wasn’t an isolated blast. It was the spine giving way.
“No.”
He was moving before the thought finished, legs pumping back toward the dark opening.
“NO, THAT’S—HE’S STILL IN THERE!”
The dust cleared for a second. The entrance was gone. Not blocked.Gone. A fresh, scarred cliff face of shattered granite and compacted rubble had sealed it over completely, the edges still smoking with pulverized stone.
He reached the wall of debris, his hands scrabbling at the rocks. They were massive, interlocked, weight immeasurable. His fingers tore on sharp edges, leaving smears of red on the grey stone. He hooked his hands under one boulder, tendons standing out in his neck, and heaved. It didn’t budge. A pebble skittered down.
“Shut up and help me!” he roared over his shoulder, voice cracking. “He can’t be trapped—he—”
Kirishima was there, his face ashen, hand coming down not on the rock but on Bakugou’s shoulder. His grip was iron. “Bakugou.”
“Get OFF! He’s in there, you idiot, we have to—”
“BAKUGOU!” Kirishima shook him, hard. The raw, desperate fear in his friend’s voice finally cut through. “It’s too late, man! Look at it!” He gestured violently at the mountain face. “If we go in there… the whole mountain could fall on us, not just the building!”
Bakugou stared at the rock. He felt the truth of it. The instability. One wrong shift and they’d be adding more bodies to the tomb. The fight drained from him, leaving a cold, hollow void. His hands fell to his sides, bloody and useless.
“And what about Deku?” The question came out whisper-thin, stripped of all its usual heat. It wasn’t a challenge. It was a plea.
Kirishima had no answer. He just held onto Bakugou’s shoulder, his own jaw clenched tight.
Aizawa stood a few feet back, staring at the sealed mountain. His face was a mask of grim acceptance. He had calculated the odds in an instant and found them absolute. Yaoyorozu had turned away, a hand pressed over her mouth, her shoulders trembling silently in the dawn light.
Bakugou sank to his knees on the scree. The drive dug into his palm.The proof. Izuku’s final, furious act.The cost.
He sat there as the morning light grew, revealing the full, silent scale of the entombment. The mountain looked peaceful now. It gave nothing away. He stared until his eyes burned, waiting for a secondary explosion, a sign, any sign at all that something had survived in that dark.
Nothing came.
Only the wind, whistling through the new scar on the mountainside.