Chapter 6: The Reunion
The world dissolved into a symphony of shattering composite and screaming metal. Bakugou didn't just breach the lobby; he carved a trench through it. Security bots became molten slag under pinpoint blasts. Reinforced barriers buckled, then flew aside like cardboard in a hurricane. He was a force of nature, a howling vortex of concussive fury leaving a scar of devastation in his wake, drawing every alarm, every camera, every ounce of the tower’s defensive fury straight to him.
He fought with a terrible, singing clarity. Every move was a calculated escalation, a baited hook. He let them herd him, channeling the responding squads of heavily armored guards away from the central elevator core, toward the broader exhibition floors. He needed the structural density, the space to be loud.
“Hostile is contained in Sector 7-B! All non-essential personnel, evacuate upward! Deploy suppression foam in corridor 7!”
He grinned savagely at the distorted voice over the PA, ducking a hail of tranquilizer darts that peppered the wall behind him. They were playing a containment game. Perfect. That meant their most sensitive areas—the sub-levels, the server farms—were being locked down, not abandoned. Kirishima and Yaoyorozu would be walking into a vault. Exactly as planned.
His earpiece crackled. Kirishima’s voice, strained. “We’re in. It’s a maze down here. Security’s thicker than the schematics showed. We’re having to cut our way through extra bulkheads.”
“Just get to the server core,” Bakugou grunted, spinning and unleashing a rolling blast that cleared a corridor of three gas-masked guards. The heat washed back over him, familiar and comforting. “I’ve got their full attention.”
“You sure about that?” Aizawa’s dry voice cut in. “Thermal is showing a significant mass moving toward the central data spire. They’re not all coming for you. They’re fortifying the heart.”
A cold trickle, unrelated to the battle heat, slipped down Bakugou’s spine. The tower was smarter than he’d given it credit for. It was compartmentalizing. He was a priority, but not the only one. He needed to be a bigger threat.
He changed tactics. No more channeling. He went for structural intimidation. He blasted the floor beneath a squad’s feet, sending them tumbling into the sub-level with a scream of rending steel. He aimed his next explosion not at the guards, but at the load-bearing pillar at the end of the hall. The detonation was a deep, shuddering whump that made the entire floor lurch. Dust and ceiling tiles rained down. The blaring alarms took on a new, panicked frequency.
“Structural integrity alert! Sector 7 compromised!”
That got their attention. The pressure on his position tripled. Good. Let them throw everything at him.
He fought his way, deliberately now, toward the central spire’s access points. Not to enter, but to threaten it. To be a looming, detonating shadow at its gate. He could see the reinforced doors to the secured elevator banks, flanked by a new wave of guards. These ones weren’t in standard armor. Their uniforms were skin-tight, biomechanical, with glowing conduits tracing their limbs. Their eyes held a flat, chemical sheen.
Quirk-enhanced. Like the ones from the police reports. Not stolen quirks, but augmented, drug-fueled copies.
The first one moved faster than sight should allow. A shimmer, and he was in front of Bakugou, a fist encased in crackling energy shooting for his throat. Bakugou swayed back, the shockwave from the missed punch blistering his cheek. He answered with a point-blank blast to the man’s chest. The enhanced guard flew back, his armored vest smoking, but he rolled and came up in a crouch, snarling. Durable.
“Fantastic,” Bakugou spat, palming two more. A brawl then. He could do a brawl.
He lost himself in the venomous dance. Explosions lit the smoky hallway in strobic flashes. The enhanced guards were strong, fast, tactical. But they weren’t him. They didn’t have a lifetime of furious refinement behind every move. He broke one’s augmented arm with a vicious, snapping kick. He superheated the air around another, triggering the fire-suppression systems in a deluge of chemical foam that blinded the rest.
In the chaotic cover, he saw his chance. One of the heavy security doors to the spire’s service access was dented, its mechanism sparking from the structural damage he’d caused. It wasn’t a clean way in, but it was a way. He needed to sell the lie that he was desperate to get inside.
He launched himself toward it, a spinning wheel of fire blowing the damaged door clean off its tracks. He landed in a crouch inside a stark, cold service corridor. Different here. No carpet, no displays. Bare concrete, humming pipes, and the relentless, deep thrum of the tower’s technological heart. The air smelled of ozone and chilled metal.
This was the artery. And he was in it.
Alarms he hadn’t even heard before now screamed in this enclosed space—a high-pitched, digital shriek of ultimate violation. He ran, following the thickets of bundled fiber-optic cables and coolant lines that snaked along the ceiling, a trail leading directly to the core.
The roar of the lobby faded, replaced by the sterile scream of the alarms and the rushing of his own blood in his ears. The service corridor was a throat, and he was being swallowed. The throbbing hum in the walls grew louder with every step, a deep, mechanical pulse that resonated in his teeth. He rounded a corner and saw it.
The door wasn't marked. It was a seamless, metallic slab, framed by glowing blue coolant lines that pulsed like veins. The core. He could feel the static charge in the air lifting the hairs on his arms. He slid to a stop, his boots squealing on the polished floor, and pressed his back against the wall beside the doorframe. He could hear voices inside. Not guards. Technicians.
"---complete systemic lockdown initiated. All data channels are redirecting to the Blackline server. The breach in Sector 7 is contained to the structural shell."
"Get the final extraction protocols ready. We may need to purge and run."
Bakugou’s mind raced. Kirishima and Yaoyorozu were supposed to be here. They weren't. The door was still sealed. Plan was off the rails. He had two choices: blow the door and compromise the whole objective, or wait and hope his team emerged from the maze below. His teeth ground together. Waiting was static. Static was death.
Then, a new sound cut through the hum. From inside the core. A wet, guttural, half-choked whisper, layered with digital distortion. It was a voice he knew in his bones, a sound from a mountain of rubble that haunted every quiet moment.
"Kacchan..."
The air left his lungs. It wasn't a memory. It was here. Now. Behind that door.
Every directive, every ounce of tactical sense, evaporated. He turned and kicked the seam of the metal door, not with an explosion, but with all his reinforced strength. The lock sheared with a shriek. The door hissed open.
The Prometheus Tower's Core Server Room was a cathedral of cold light and information. Racks of servers formed silent, humming canyons, bathing everything in a neon-blue wash. The air was freezer-cold and tasted of ozone. In the center of the room, a massive, cylindrical mainframe throbbed with concentric rings of ascending data-light.
And there, at its base, was Izuku Midoriya.
Or something that wore his shape. He was slumped in a reinforced chair, his right arm horrifically fused with a chrome interface port. Thick, glowing data cables snaked from the port, burrowing into the meat of his bicep and vanishing into the mainframe. His skin was pallid, waxy, like something left in a jar. His hero costume was torn and stained. But his head was upright, his eyes open. They held no recognition, only a flat, green reflection of the scrolling code.
His lips moved again, the sound synthesized from a vocal modulator grafted to his throat. "Kacchan... run."
Bakugou stood frozen in the doorway, his sparking palms falling slack at his sides. The world narrowed to that single, impossible point. The kid in the river was an imitation. This... this was a profanity.
The two technicians in white coats scrambled back, their faces masks of shock. One fumbled for a console.
Before Bakugou could move, could think, the door behind him and the one on the opposite side of the server room slammed down with a final, thunderous clang. Magnetic locks engaged with a sound like a vault sealing forever. The external alarms cut off abruptly, replaced by an oppressive, silent hum.
They were trapped in the silent, sterile heart of the tower.
From shadowed aisles between the server racks, figures emerged. Not the enhanced guards from upstairs. These were different. Bulkier. Their armored suits were integrated directly with pulsating quirk-emitter units, crude and brutal looking. Wires ran from the units into ports at the base of their skulls. Their eyes were vacant, pupil-less screens of soft, green light.
The same green as Izuku’s stolen power.
A synthesized voice, genderless and calm, issued from the mainframe itself. "Template secured. Subject Dynamight acquired. Begin pacification protocols."
The first guard lunged. His arm shifted, plates sliding, and a whip of crackling, green energy shot toward Bakugou’s chest.
Instinct took over. Bakugou pivoted, the energy whip grazing his armor and scorching the wall. He retaliated on pure reflex, a compact blast that blew the guard off his feet. But two more were already coming, their movements unnervingly synchronized. One’s fists shimmered with a familiar power-strengthening aura. The other’s legs crackled with green lightning.
They weren't just enhanced. They were puppets. Each one was a grotesque footnote ripped from Izuku’s playbook.
Bakugo’s shock curdled into a rage so pure it was quiet. His eyes snapped from the advancing guards to Izuku’s hollow shell at the mainframe. “What did they do to you?” he whispered, the words raw.
Izuku’s head twitched. The synthesized voice stammered, glitching. "Pro...tect... Kacchan... protocol conflict... error."
The guard with the strengthened fist swung. Bakugou ducked, letting the blow crater the server rack beside him. He came up inside the guard's reach, grabbed the wired unit on the man’s back, and ripped. Wires tore free, spraying sparks. The guard stiffened, the green light dying from his eyes, and collapsed.
“You’re using him as a goddamn router?” Bakugou roared, his voice echoing in the chamber. He wasn't talking to the guards. He was shouting at the tower, at the ghosts in the machine.
He fought, but it was a different kind of fight. It was claustrophobic and vicious. He couldn't use his biggest blasts without risking the mainframe, without risking the thing that was Izuku. He was fighting in a cage, against reflections of his oldest shadow. A bolt of green lightning seared past his head, and for a millisecond, he was back on a sparring ground at UA, laughing through the pain.
He wasn't laughing now. He grabbed a server blade, wrenched it free, and slammed it like a tomahawk into the knee joint of a lightning-leg guard. The guard went down silently. They never screamed.
His earpiece fizzed. Kirishima’s voice, strained and distant, barely punched through the room’s signal-damping field. “---ugou! We hit a dead end, it’s a decoy floor! The core’s above you! We’re trying to---”
The transmission dissolved into static.
“I’m in the core!” Bakugou shouted, knowing it was useless. He backhanded a guard across the face, feeling cartilage give way. “He’s here! Deku’s fucking here!”
"Stay... away..." Izuku’s glitching voice filled the room again, but the command wasn't aimed at Bakugou. The guards halted their advance for a split second, their head-units flickering. A struggle was happening in the code. A ghost in the machine was fighting its programming.
The mainframe’ voice cut back in, cold and imperative. "Override Subject Zero's executive functions. Prioritize template acquisition."
The guards surged forward again, their movements turning jerky, more violent. The conflict in the system was breaking them. Bakugou saw his opening. He wasn't here to destroy the core anymore. He was here to pull its plug.
He began fighting his way toward the central chair, toward the twisted interface that held his friend prisoner. Every step was paid for in explosions that were too close, in grazes from simulated One-For-All energy that left his nerves shrieking. He was almost there, close enough to see the strain on Izuku’s face, the tremble in his trapped arm.
The largest guard, a hulking figure whose entire body gleamed with a green, metallic sheen, stepped into his path. It raised a fist, the air warping around it with terrifying, familiar gravity.
"Fine," Bakugou spat, sweat and blood in his eyes. He planted his feet, his own palms glowing white-hot. "You want a template? I'll show you the original."
He didn't attack the guard. He dropped, sweeping his leg to knock the beast's footing, and rolled past him, coming up right before the mainframe cylinder. He looked at Izuku’s lifeless eyes, at the cables poisoning him.
"I'm not leaving you here again," he said, his voice low and fierce. He reached for the thickest data cable at the interface port. His fingers wrapped around the cold, glowing line.
He didn't know if pulling it would kill Izuku, free him, or trigger a full system meltdown. He just knew he had to break the connection.
Before he could pull, Izuku’s real hand—his left, trembling and free—shot out and grabbed Bakugou’s wrist. The grip was weak, human. The synthesized voice glitched, breaking apart into something almost like the scared kid from so long ago.
"Don't... it's a... trap... it's all a cage..."
Behind him, the synthesized mainframe voice announced with serene finality, "Extraction sequence initiated. Neutralize the template."
The room filled with a new, rising whine as panels on the mainframe cylinder irised open, revealing not servers, but rows of needle-like injectors gleaming under the lights. They were pointed at Izuku.
They weren't just storing him. They were harvesting him. Continuously.
And the sealed exits began to vibrate, as something huge on the other side started cutting its way in.
The vibrating door silhouetted a sparking cutting tool beginning to carve a molten circle through the metal. Time wasn’t frozen; it was accelerating, collapsing in on him. Izuku’s weak grip on his wrist, the whine of the injectors, the grinding breach behind him—they formed a vice squeezing his skull.
He looked into Izuku’s glitching eyes. "A cage doesn't mean I leave you in it, idiot."
BAKUGOU PULLS THE PLUGS ANYWAYS AND YANKS HIM AWAY FROM THE CHAIR AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, GRITTING HIS TEETH.
He didn't gentle his grip. He wrapped both hands around the slick, glowing cables fused into Izuku's arm and pulled sideways. The sound was wet, a sickening tear of synthetic tissue and ruptured connectors followed by a sharp, digital scream from the mainframe. Izuku’s body came free with a jerk, collapsing forward into him, a dead weight steaming from the ruptured port. Bakugou caught him, the impact driving the air from his own lungs.
He staggered back, hauling Izuku over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. The freed cables writhed on the floor, spraying arcs of corrupted data-light. The mainframe’s calm voice shattered into distorted fragments. "Subject—eeeee—zero—disconneeeeect—containment breach—"
HE TRIES TO TELL HIS TEAM BUT IT KEEPS STATICING AS WE SWITCH TO THEIR POV HAVING TO FIGHT PEOPLE AND TRYING TO MAKE OUT WHAT BAKUGOU SAYS
His free hand slapped at his earpiece as he backed away from the advancing guards and the shuddering door. "Kirishima! The plan's scrapped, I've got him—"
The signal dissolved into a blistering wave of static.
Deep in the sub-level maintenance warren, the air was thick with the smell of ozone and burned metal. Kirishima threw a hardened shoulder into a security bulkhead, buckling it just enough for Yaoyorozu to slide a thin, created pole through the gap and lever it.
"He’s—" a voice, Bakugou’s, crackled violently in their ears and died.
"What?" Kirishima barked, shoving the door open. A stun baton slammed into his hardened side from a waiting guard. He grunted, grabbed the weapon, and snapped it over his knee.
"—Ku—" The voice again, just a syllable, washing out into a digital tide.
"Bakugou we can’t—" Yaoyorozu tried to respond, ducking as a spray of containment foam shot over her head. She created a broad shield, the impact thudding dully against it.
"What— I can’t hear Bakugou— do you copy?" Kirishima drove his fist into a guard’s stomach, his focus split between the fight and the broken voice in his ear. A fist glanced off his temple. He saw stars.
The line fizzed, cleared for a single, crystal-sharp second.
"IT’S DEKU! HE’S ALIVE!"
The voice wasn't triumphant. It was a raw, snarling transmission of pure shock. Then the line went dead, not with static, but with a hollow, terminal pop.
Kirishima froze. The guard he was grappling with head-butted him. He didn't feel it. He looked at Yaoyorozu across the chaotic corridor. Her eyes were wide, her shield wavering. The word hung between them, impossible and seismic. A green-haired corpse that wasn't Izuku flashed in Kirishima’s mind, replaced now by that shredded, desperate voice.
"Move," Kirishima said, his own voice low and guttural. He stopped holding back. He became a battering ram, tearing through the hallway toward the nearest vertical shaft. "We go up. Now."
SWITCH TO BAKUGOU AGAIN HAVING TO FIGHT OFF MORE PEOPLE, AND TRY TO GET OUT…
The molten circle in the door blew inward with a shower of sparks. The figure that stepped through wasn’t a guard. It was a hulking industrial labor suit, retrofitted with hydraulic pincers and a cockpit glowing that same hateful green. The enhanced guards fanned out, blocking the other aisles.
Bakugou adjusted Izuku’s dead weight on his shoulder. His friend’s breathing was shallow, a faint rasp against his neck. There was no clean way out. Only through.
He fired a concussive blast at the floor near the labor suit’s feet, not to damage it, but to kick up a swirling fog of vaporized coolant and shattered floor tile. In the blindness, he moved. He wasn't Dynamight the headline hero. He was a kid from Aldera fighting dirty to protect his idiot friend.
He used the server racks as cover, weaving through the canyons of blue light. A guard lunged from his left. Bakugou ducked, letting Izuku’s dangling legs take the brunt of the tackle. The guard recoiled, startled by the contact with the precious "Subject Zero." Bakugou used the hesitation—a brutal upward explosion under the man’s jaw.
The labor suit turned, its pincers crushing the server rack Bakugou had been behind moments before. He ran, not away, but parallel to it, leading it on a chase that wrecked the core’s pristine symmetry. Alms flashed on every terminal: CRITICAL DATA STREAM INTERRUPTED. He’d broken more than a connection. He’d wounded the system.
He saw it then, in a fleeting gap between aisles: the chair. The injector needles had slammed home into the empty seat, pumping their reservoirs of a glowing, emerald fluid into the void. The liquid pooled on the synthetic leather, smoking and eating through it.
THE CHAIR WAS A DEATH TRAP, IF HE HAD BEEN TO SLOW… THEY WERE HOPEING FOR BAKUGOU TO SAVE IZUKU
A cold understanding settled over him, colder than the room’s air. The lockdown, the guards herding him, Izuku’s warning—it was all staging. They weren’t just harvesting Izuku. They were using him as live bait, the one stimulus they knew would override all of Bakugou’s tactical sense. They’d placed his oldest friend, alive and suffering, in a mechanism designed to kill its occupant the moment he was removed, betting everything that Bakugou wouldn’t be able to watch it happen. They’d banked on his rage, his regret, his stupid, unwavering need to fix what he’d once broken.
They'd bet right.
He’d played their script. He’d walked into the cell and sprung the trap. And by pulling Izuku free a split-second before those needles fired, he’d stolen their prize right out of the jaws of their mechanism.
A strange, grim calm cut through the panic. They wanted a template? They’d gotten a variable.
He angled his run toward a section of wall where thick coolant lines converged behind a reinforced window. Not an exit. Infrastructure. “You wanted a show?” he muttered to the room, to the ghosts in the machine. He planted his feet, braced Izuku’s weight, and aimed his free palm at the junction. “Here’s your goddamn curtain call.”
The explosion wasn't his biggest. But it was precise. It cracked the window and sheared through a primary coolant line. A geyser of icy, pressurized chemical coolant erupted into the room, a white, billowing torrent that swallowed the nearest guards in an instant, freezing their augmented limbs and swallowing their screams. The labor suit staggered back, its sensors blinded.
In the chaos, Bakugou saw his chance—not an exit, but a descent. A maintenance hatch in the floor, warped open by the blast. He didn't know where it led. He just knew it was away. He dropped through the opening, Izuku a heavy, breathing anchor in his grip, as the freezing flood and the green-lit shadows consumed the room above.