Chapter 4: The Breaking Point
The safehouse smelled like old coffee and wet wool. Rain sheeted down the single grimy window, turning the world outside into a grey blur. Aizawa had left hours ago, swallowed by the storm to make contact through channels so dark even Bakugou didn’t want to know. Yaoyorozu was in the makeshift comms nest, headphones on, monitoring police bands and news feeds for any ripple from the mountain. The silence was a physical weight.
Bakugou sat at the scarred metal table. He hadn’t moved in three hours. He hadn’t slept in seventy-two.
The data drive lay on the table in front of him, a sleek, black rectangle. He’d placed it there after they’d stumbled back, soaked and silent. He hadn’t let go of it for the entire trek, his grip so tight the edges had left angry red indentations in his palm that were only now fading. His clothes were still damp in places, chilling his skin. He didn’t feel it.
He just stared at the drive.
Kirishima moved around the periphery of the room, a restless red shadow. He’d made coffee no one drank. He’d straightened maps that were already straight. He’d tried talking, once.
“We need to look at it, man. That’s what he gave it to us for.”
Bakugou hadn’t responded. His eyes were fixed, unblinking, on the little piece of tech. It was the last thing Izuku’s hands had touched. The final act. The price.
The images played on a loop behind his eyes. Not the fight, not the mainframe. The aftermath. The sickening, settling silence of the mountain after it finished collapsing in on itself. The utter finality of that sound. He kept listening for it in the patter of the rain.
“You’re freaking me out,” Kirishima said, his voice low. He pulled out the chair opposite with a grating screech and sat down. He leaned forward, trying to intercept Bakugou’s thousand-yard stare. “Blink, damn it. Say something. Yell at me. Anything.”
Bakugou’s eyes flickered, just once, to Kirishima’s face, then back to the drive. His voice, when it finally came, was a dry, rusty thing. “What’s there to say?”
“I don’t know! How about we start with what the hell we do next? That thing’s a live wire. We need to see what’s on it.” Kirishima’s knuckles were white where he gripped the table edge. “Sitting here like a statue isn’t honoring him. It’s wasting the time he bought us.”
A muscle in Bakugou’s jaw ticked. The words ‘honoring him’ echoed stupidly in the hollow space inside his ribs. There was no honor in it. There was just a hole where something loud and persistent and annoyingly fundamental had been, and now there was static.
“He knew,” Bakugou said, the words quiet and terrible. “The whole time he was typing. He knew he wasn’t walking out. That’s why he gave it to me. A dead man’s switch.”
“We don’t know that he’s–”
“We do.” The finality in Bakugou’s tone cut the air. “You felt it. The whole mountain came down on that chamber. Nothing gets out of that.” He finally moved, leaning back in his chair, the legs groaning. He looked at his hands, the scrapes and bruises from clawing at unyielding rock. “He set the charges. He chose it.”
Kirishima had no rebuttal. He’d felt it too. He slumped, the fight going out of him, replaced by a heavy grief. “Yeah.”
Silence filled the room again, thicker now, shared.
Another hour bled away, marked only by the rain and Yaoyorozu’s occasional soft keystrokes. Bakugou’s stillness had become something eerie. He wasn’t processing. He was marinating in a poison of his own making—regret, fury, a guilt so old and deep it had fused to his bones.
Kirishima watched him. He saw the minute tremors in the hands resting on the table. He saw the utter lack of awareness in his eyes. This wasn’t strategizing. This was decay.
Enough.
He stood up, the chair legs shrieking against the concrete floor. He walked around the table. “Up.”
Bakugou didn’t react.
Kirishima planted a hand on his shoulder. “I said up. You’re moving. Now.”
“Piss off.”
“No.” Kirishima’s grip tightened. “You smell like a sewer, you look like death warmed over, and you’re sitting in a puddle of your own damn misery. You’re going to take a shower. You’re going to put on clean clothes. Then you’re going to come back here, and we are going to look at that drive. That’s the job. That’s what’s next.”
For a second, Bakugou’s eyes cleared, flashing with familiar, volatile heat. “You don’t give me orders.”
“I do when you’re checking out!” Kirishima shot back, his own temper fraying. “He’s gone, Bakugou! I get it! It tears me up too! But he’s gone, and we’re not, and that thing on the table is the only piece of him left! You think he wanted you to just sit here and rot with it?!”
He yanked Bakugou to his feet. There was no resistance. Bakugou was disturbingly pliant, his body moving but his spirit somewhere else entirely. Kirishima propelled him towards the small, dank bathroom at the back of the safehouse, shoved a towel and a change of clothes from his own pack into his arms, and pushed him inside.
“Don’t come out until you’re human again,” Kirishima said, and slammed the door.
The bathroom was tiny, tiled in cracked beige. A single bare bulb overhead. Bakugou stood there, holding the bundle, listening to the hollow roar of blood in his ears. He saw his reflection in the smeared metal mirror above the sink. Hollow cheeks. Bloodshot eyes. A stranger.
He fumbled with the shower taps. The pipes knocked, then groaned, then spat out a stream of water. He didn’t test it. He just stripped off his filthy, stiff clothes and stepped under the spray.
It was scalding. Near-painfully hot.
He didn’t adjust it.
The water hit his skin like needles, turning it an immediate, angry red. It poured over his head, into his mouth, his eyes. It beat against his skull. The heat was a brand, a punishment, the only thing sharp enough to cut through the numb fog.
He braced his hands against the slick, cold tiles of the wall, head hanging, letting the near-boiling water cascade down his back. The physical sensation was immense, overwhelming. It flushed the chill from his bones and replaced it with a feverish agony.
His breath hitched.
The images came back, not as a loop, but as a crashing wave. Izuku’s scarred hands on the keyboard. The greenish light on his determined, desperate face. The way he’d said “Kacchan” at the end, not as a taunt, but as… a plea. A final, fragile connection. The roar of the collapsing mountain. The silence after.
And before that. Years and years of before that. The rooftop. The fighting. The stupid, endless rivalry. All the times he’d dismissed him, shouted him down, told him to give up. All the times Izuku had gotten back up, smiling that stupid smile, eyes full of a faith Bakugou had never understood.
Faith in him.
Why?
The question tore out of him, a raw, soundless thing that broke in his chest.
He saw the mainframe screen again. The genetic mapping. The progress bar at 97%. PRIME CANDIDATE. His quirk, his power, laid out like a schematic for theft. And Izuku, who’d spent a lifetime analyzing quirks, who saw deeper than anyone, had seen this coming. He’d tried to warn them. He’d gone in alone when no one listened.
Why didn’t I see it sooner?
The thought was a detonation.
A guttural, ragged scream ripped from his throat, torn from some deep, wounded place he never showed. It was lost in the drumming water, muffled by the steam. He slammed a fist into the tile. A sharp, sickening crack—of tile, or knuckle, he didn’t know.
He did it again. And again.
“Why didn’t I SEE?!” he roared, the words shredding his throat. Each word was a hammer blow of his fist against the unfeeling wall. “Why didn’t I… WHY COULDN’T I JUST…”
The sentences wouldn’t form. There were no words for this acid mix of guilt and rage and a grief so profound it felt like a physical amputation. It was all just a torrent of noise and violence against himself and the indifferent ceramics. The scalding water burned his skin, his knuckles were split and bleeding, washing pale pink swirls down the drain, and he welcomed it. It was a focus. It was a feeling.
He slumped forward, forehead pressing against the broken tile, the hot water pounding the back of his neck. The screaming dissolved into harsh, shuddering gasps for air that weren't quite sobs. His body trembled with the spent adrenaline, with the awful, unavoidable truth.
He’d been so focused on being the strongest, on winning, on looking forward, that he’d never looked back at the person who’d always been there, trying to tell him something. And now that person was gone, buried under a million tons of rock, leaving behind only a secret on a drive and a silence that would haunt him forever.
The water began to run cold.
He didn’t move for a long time. Until the last of the heat was gone and the spray was just a chilling drizzle. Until the shakes subsided into a deep, exhausted stillness.
Slowly, he pushed himself upright. He looked at his hands. Bruised. Swollen. Bleeding. He turned off the taps.
The silence in the tiny room was absolute, ringing. Steam curled towards the ceiling. He dried off with mechanical movements, the rough towel scraping his burned skin. He pulled on Kirishima’s clean, soft clothes. They smelled like fabric softener and nothing else.
He opened the bathroom door. Steam billowed out into the cooler main room.
Kirishima was right where he’d left him, sitting at the table, staring at his own hands. He looked up. He took in Bakugou’s raw, clean face, his wet hair, the quiet devastation in his eyes that had replaced the eerie void. He saw the bruised, broken knuckles.
He didn’t say a word. He just gave a single, slow nod.
Bakugou walked back to the table. He didn’t sit. He picked up the data drive. It was cool now. Just a piece of plastic and metal, heavy with consequence.
“Alright,” Bakugou said, his voice hoarse but clear. He tossed the drive to Kirishima, who caught it on reflex. “Plug it in. Let’s see what cost us everything.”
Kirishima caught the drive, the plastic warm from Bakugou’s grip. He held it for a second, his own expression grave, then turned to the makeshift workstation Yaoyorozu had cobbled together from spare parts. “Okay,” he said, his voice all business, a forced steadiness. “Let’s do this.”
Yaoyorozu slid into the chair beside him, her fingers already flying across a secondary keyboard, initiating a shielded virtual machine. “The drive could be encrypted, booby-trapped, or tagged. We’ll run it in a sandbox. Isolate everything.” A holoscreen flickered to life above the table, casting a pale blue glow on their faces. “Plug it in on my mark.”
The rain drummed a steady, ominous rhythm on the window. Bakugou stood behind them, arms crossed, a silent sentinel. He watched Kirishima’s thumb hover over the port.
“Now.”
The connection clicked. For three long seconds, nothing happened. The holoscreen remained a void of static grey.
Then, a single folder icon materialized. It was labelled, simply, “ICARUS_PROOF.”
“That’s it?” Kirishima muttered, leaning forward.
“Too simple,” Yaoyorozu whispered, her eyes scanning the data packets flooding her diagnostics. “No encryption. No rootkits. It’s… clean. He scrubbed it for transit.”
She double-clicked.
The folder exploded into a meticulously organized chaos. Dozens of subfolders, each with stark, clinical names: FINANCIAL_LEADS. BIORESEARCH_FILES. SECURITY_PROTOCOLS. TEMPLATE_CATALOGUE. One, near the top, was named PERSONAL_LOG_MIDORIYA_I.
Bakugou’s breath caught. His eyes locked on that one.
“Start with the catalogue,” he said, the order gruff. He needed to see the scope. He needed to see his own name in that cold, digital list.
Yaoyorozu complied. The folder opened. It wasn’t a list. It was a gallery.
Holographic models of human forms rotated slowly in the air, rendered in wireframe blue. Each was tagged. Some he recognized instantly: SHOTO_TODOROKI - THERMOKINESIS_DUAL. EIJIRO_KIRISHIMA - HARDENING_VARIANT. There was Ochaco’s, Tsuyu’s, Iida’s. Dozens of pros, all from their graduating class or the years immediately after.
He found his own.
It rotated slowly, an outline of his body. Lines of data cascaded beside it: metabolic rates, sweat gland density analyses, nerve conductivity charts. The red banner PRIME CANDIDATE glared. A secondary annotation read: SOURCE_ACQUISITION: PENDING.
“Pending,” Bakugou repeated, the word tasting like ash.
“They hadn’t taken it yet,” Kirishima said, a faint, relieved breath leaving him. “They were just… shopping.”
“Worse.” Yaoyorozu’s face had lost all color. She opened a file linked to the template. It was a schematic of a facility, different from the mountain. Lab spaces. Operating theatres. Stasis tanks. A flowchart detailed a process labeled “Surgical Quirk Factor Transplantation.” The estimated success probability was 34%. “They weren’t just going to copy it. They were preparing to… extract.”
The room seemed to tilt. Bakugou’s stomach clenched. He thought of a sterile table, his own body restrained, some machine mining his very DNA for parts. He looked away, focusing on the rain-streaked window.
“Open the financial leads,” he ground out.
That folder was a spiderweb. Shell companies, offshore accounts, dummy corporations. But the money trails, once highlighted by Izuku’s notes, began to converge. They all trickled back to a single, sprawling corporate entity: Prometheus Biomedical Holdings. A name known for charitable funding for quirk counseling and support tech for the disabled.
“A front,” Kirishima said, disgusted. “A really pretty, public-facing front.”
“The perfect cover,” Yaoyorozu agreed, zooming in on a transaction log. “Massive ‘research grants’ funneled into the Icarus project. Payments to the security contractors who manned the mountain facility. Payoffs to local officials to ignore seismic activity.” She looked up. “This is a conspiracy. Not a rogue cell. A funded, corporate-sponsored operation.”
Bakugou’s gaze drifted back to the lone personal log. His heart thumped a slow, heavy rhythm against his ribs. “Open Midoriya’s file.”
Kirishima looked at him. “You sure?”
“Now.”
Yaoyorozu clicked it. It wasn’t a written diary. It was an audio file, timestamped from just a week ago. A spectrogram visualization wiggled on screen. She hit play.
Static, then a shaky, exhausted breath filled the safehouse.
“Log entry… I don’t even know. Ninth? Tenth?” Izuku’s voice was thin, strained. He sounded so tired. “The suppressors they’re developing… they’re based on parasitic quirk theory. Not negation. Mimicry. It’s the first step.”
There was a long pause, the sound of rustling papers.
“They think I’m cataloguing weaknesses for security protocols. They give me access because I’m… compliant. Useful.” A bitter, hollow laugh. “They have no idea what I’m really building in here. A backdoor. A map of their whole rotten kingdom.”
The sound of typing, frantic.
“I saw the procurement list today. Surgical suites. Neural interfaces. They’re moving to Phase Three. They’re going to start trials soon. I think… I think they’ve already identified the first viable donor.”
Another pause. His voice dropped to a raw whisper.
“It’s Kacchan. Of course it is. Highest output. Most versatile combat application. They have his entire life on a server. Every fight, every medical scan since UA. They’re ready for him.”
Bakugou went very still. The rain sounded like white noise.
“I can’t let that happen,” Izuku’s voice firmed, resolve bleeding through the fatigue. “I’ve loaded the core meltdown protocol. The data is copied. I just… I need to get it out. I need them to see.”
The recording crackled. There was a new sound in the background of the old file—the distant, rhythmic beep of a facility scanner.
“Someone’s coming. I have to—”
The audio cut off abruptly.
Silence, thick and suffocating, swallowed the room. The ghost of his voice lingered.
“He was buying time,” Kirishima finally said, his own voice thick. “He stayed in the lion’s den to get us this.”
Bakugou turned from the screen, walking to the window. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass. The city lights below were blurred smears in the storm. He saw Izuku’s face in the reflection, superimposed over the rain. Not the scarred, haunted man from the reactor. The determined, stubborn kid from their first year, charging into a fight he couldn’t win because it was right.
He had always been charging. Bakugou had just been too loud to hear the direction.
“Prometheus Biomedical,” Bakugou said, the name flat and deadly. He turned back to the room, the temporary fracture in his eyes sealed over with something colder, harder. A purpose. “That’s the heart. That’s where the money and the orders come from.”
“It’s a fortress,” Yaoyorozu warned, pulling up schematics of their corporate headquarters. “More secure than the mountain. It’s where their real research, their clean-side operations, would be.”
“We’re not going in the front door.” Bakugou’s mind was moving now, pieces clicking. “Izuku didn’t just give us an accusation. He gave us a map. Financial leads, security protocols, personnel files.” A fierce, grim light sparked in his gaze. “We find a thread he left. We pull it. We unravel them from the inside.”
The exterior door slid open with a hiss, bringing in a gust of wet, cold air and the smell of ozone.
Aizawa stepped inside, water dripping from his dark coat. His face was etched with a deep weariness, but his eyes were sharp. He took in the scene—the holoscreen, the drive, their expressions.
“The mountain is being written off,” he stated, his voice a dry rasp. “News is calling it a catastrophic, long-predicted geological event. No rescue operations. No investigation.”
He shrugged off his coat, his gaze landing on the rotating wireframe models on the screen. He didn’t look surprised.
“I made contact,” he continued, walking to the table. “My source confirms Prometheus is the nexus. But there’s a problem.” He looked at each of them. “They know the data is gone. They don’t know who has it. Yet. But their response has already started.”
“What response?” Kirishima asked, standing up.
Aizawa’s jaw tightened. “They’re accelerating the timeline. My source heard whispers. ‘Donor acquisition is now a priority. Secure Primary Template.’” His dark eyes found Bakugou’s and held them. “They’re not waiting for a quiet abduction anymore. They’re coming for you, Bakugou. And they’re coming hard.”