Chapter 7: The Traitor's Burden
The fall was short, a jarring impact on solid grating that sent a shock up Bakugou’s legs. He crumpled, instinctively twisting to take the brunt on his armored shoulder, Izuku’s dead weight landing half on top of him. The hatch above slammed shut, plunging them into a blackness so complete it felt solid.
For a long moment, there was only sound. The distant, hydraulic sigh of the tower’s inner workings. The drip of condensation. The ragged, too-loud sound of his own breathing. And underneath it, the shallow, worrying rasp from the body beside him.
Then, light. A sickly, intermittent green flicker from the ruin of Izuku’s right arm. Where the cables had been ripped free, the port was a mess of synthesized flesh and sparking wires, leaking pulses of emerald data like corrupted blood. It illuminated a grotesque still-life: Izuku’s pale, slack face; Bakugou’s own scraped and grimy knuckles; the damp, grimy floor of a utility tunnel.
“Damn it,” Bakugou whispered, the words swallowed by the dark. He pushed himself up, his body protesting from a dozen new aches. The fight in the core had been a frantic blur. Now, in the stifling quiet, the reality of it settled on him like the tunnel’s damp. Izuku was here. Alive. And broken in ways Bakugou didn’t have the first clue how to fix.
He hooked his hands under Izuku’s armpits and started dragging. It was ungainly, brutal work. Izuku’s boots scraped over the metal grating. The flickering green light jumped and danced with every lurching step, casting monstrous, moving shadows on the pipes that crowded the low ceiling. The air tasted of stale oil and something else, a sharp, ozonic tang that reminded him of the core room. Of the chair that had been meant to kill.
He had no idea where he was going. The tunnel was a claustrophobe’s nightmare, branching at odd intervals into deeper darkness. He picked directions at random, driven by a single, base imperative: away. Every hum, every distant clang, made his nerves jangle. They’d be coming. The system was wounded, its prize stolen. It wouldn’t stop.
He’d been moving for what felt like an hour, sweat plastering his undersuit to his skin, when the grip came.
It was weak, the fingers cold and trembling, but the sudden pressure around his wrist was unmistakable. Bakugou froze, mid-drag, his heart slamming against his ribs.
In the epileptic glow of the leaking arm, Izuku’s eyes were open. Not the flat, reflective screens from the core. These were hazy with pain, clouded, but they were his. They were trying to focus on Bakugou’s face.
His lips moved. No synthesized voice. This sound was raw, torn up from a dry throat, each word a labor.
“Kac…chan…”
Bakugou dropped to a crouch, Izuku’s shoulders resting against his knees. “Don’t talk. Save your strength.”
Izuku’s head lolled, but his grip tightened, a desperate anchor. “They… planted a tracker,” he croaked, the words barely audible. He tried to gesture to his own body, a pathetic twitch of his left hand. “In me. Can’t… outrun it.”
The meaning sliced through the fatigue, cold and sharp. The system wasn’t guessing. It was following a beacon. Their flight was a joke.
As if summoned by the confession, three precise dots of solid red light punctured the darkness ten yards ahead. They danced over Bakugou’s chest, then Izuku’s forehead, painting them both in stark, damning scarlet.
Targeting lasers.
A voice, filtered and calm, echoed down the tunnel from the unseen source. “Subject Zero. Stand down, Dynamight. There is no egress. Compliance prevents further deterioration of the asset.”
Asset. The word made Bakugou’s vision tinge red at the edges. Izuku’s eyes slid shut again, his strength spent by the warning. The green flicker from his arm seemed to pulse in time with the red dots.
No exit. A tracker in Izuku’s body. Hostiles with a clear line of sight.
The math was terrible. The solution was the only one he’d ever really trusted.
Bakugou looked up, past the web of pipes and conduits. The ceiling was low, maybe fifteen feet. But above the grate he stood on, he could feel a faint, steady draft of cooler air. A ventilation shaft? A duct? It didn’t matter.
He shifted, sliding his arms under Izuku’s knees and shoulders, ignoring the protest in his own muscles. He hefted him into a cradle hold. Izuku was lighter than he should be.
“Hang on, you nerd,” he muttered, his voice low. “This is gonna suck.”
He planted his feet wide, feeling the familiar, volatile warmth ignite in his sweat glands. The red lasers steadied, pinpointing his center mass. They’d expect a lateral dodge, a blast down the tunnel. They wouldn’t expect this.
With a snarl that was equal parts fury and effort, Bakugou unleashed his Quirk straight down. The twin explosions were thunder in the confined space, a concussive wave that blew dust and rust from every surface. The force launched them upward like a rocket.
He twisted in the air, shielding Izuku’s body with his own as his shoulder and back smashed through a layer of brittle composite panels and into a wider, cylindrical shaft. Cool, stale air rushed past them. He’d guessed right—a primary air duct.
He didn’t land. He fired again, a controlled, sequential blast from his free hand, turning their ballistic arc into jagged, ascending flight. He was a human missile, navigating by the shuddering light of his own explosions, Izuku a limp, crucial payload clutched to his chest.
The world became a roar of propulsion, the blur of passing grates, and the dizzying spin of trying to keep orientation in the dark shaft. Below, he heard shouts, then the distinct phut-phut-phut of silenced rounds pinging off the metal behind them. They were shooting up the duct.
“Try and keep up, you extras!” he yelled into the rushing darkness, a wild, defiant grin cutting across his face. He angled a blast to shear a corner, speeding them into a intersecting vertical shaft. The gunfire fell away, unable to match the angle.
He was flying blind, driven by pure, vertical momentum. The tracker was still in Izuku. They had maybe minutes before the entire tower’s security recalibrated to cut them off. He needed to get out, get to open sky, get to the exfil point Kirishima had mentioned a lifetime ago in the lobby.
A grating ahead, glowing with the faint, pollution-tinged orange of the city’s night sky. An exhaust port. His exit.
He aimed for it, tucking Izuku’s head down. With one final, ear-splitting detonation, Bakugou blasted the security grate into a shower of molten fragments and shot out into the open air, twenty stories above the neon-drenched city.