The crack of Midnight's whip split the air.
"Go!"
The stadium became a living thing—fifty thousand throats surging into a roar, banners snapping, feet pounding metal bleachers. On the track, twenty students hurled themselves forward and the ground shuddered under them.
Bakugo didn't so much run as detonate. Each blast from his palms kicked him ahead with a concussive bark that rattled the starting line. He shouldered past a stranger without looking, smoke railing behind him as he grinned like the race belonged to him already.
Todoroki moved with no hurry and still outpaced the first wave. He pressed one hand to the earth and a sheet of ice surged outward, a glassy road blooming beneath his steps. Cold fog rolled up in gusts and the front rank of students stumbled, shoes skidding on his wake. He never glanced back.
Harry felt the Speed Burst take hold like a hand between his shoulders, shoving him forward. His robe—enchanted to carry no weight—snapped around his calves. He kept his elbows tight to avoid tangling with the pack, gaze fixed past the bodies and toward the hulking silhouettes ahead. A robot's shadow crossed the track like a falling ceiling. He slid a card from a sleeve pocket.
"Shield."
Light vaulted up before him just as a metal fist crashed down. The barrier rang like struck crystal. Cracks fled through the glow, and then it came apart in bright shards—gone. Harry cut left, the knuckles slamming into empty track where he'd been.
The first obstacle had woken.
Giant training robots—mock villains with paint-slashed faces—lumbered into the lane, hydraulics whining. Their footfalls landed with the weight of wrecking balls. Heads the size of family cars turned and whirred, cameras blinking to life inside plate-lashed sockets. Voices rasped from speakers: "Obstacle initiated. Detain. Detain."
A dozen quirks answered at once.
Bakugo arced upward, explosions cartwheeling him onto a robot's shoulder. He planted one palm against the head, the other behind him for thrust, and blew it apart in a white-orange flower of flame. Scraps of steel rained down in a glitter.
Todoroki swept his arm. Ice ran up a robot's legs and torso in jagged sheets, sealing joints as it climbed. By the time its arm moved to swat him, it was already a statue. He left it like that, glanced for the next lane.
"AND CLASS 1-A WASTES NO TIME!" Present Mic's voice rolled over the din, bright as a brass bell. "EXPLOSIONS TO THE LEFT, A BLIZZARD TO THE RIGHT—HOPE THOSE BOTS PACKED A SCARF!"
Midoriya ran in the lee of all that noise. For the first seconds his steps were wild, breath hitching, eyes flicking from arm to leg to dropping debris. Then something fell in the robot chaos: a panel of armor sheared off by a blast, a slab of steel as wide as Midoriya was tall. It skidded and spun, clanging to a stop beside him.
He stared one heartbeat. Then he grabbed the jagged edge and heaved.
It didn't lift. He tried again. The plate groaned up a handspan.
"WHAT'S THIS?!" Present Mic's wonder sliced clear. "MIDORIYA IZUKU—PICKIN' UP SCRAP IN THE MIDDLE OF A RACE?! IS THIS A CLEANUP CREW OR A COMPETITION, FOLKS?"
Laughter broke in patches. A few groans. Someone shouted encouragement even as they ran.
Midoriya didn't look at the stands. He set his feet, found the balance, and started dragging.
The robot line thickened. The next machine's arm scythed down through streetlight glare. Kirishima took two bounding steps, skin hardening until light flashed off ridges that weren't there a moment before. He planted his feet and met the blow with his forearms. The arm shuddered and stalled. "LET'S GOOO!" He drove a fist into the elbow joint; metal popped, cabling tore, and the forearm swung useless.
Yaoyorozu strode into space Kirishima made, breath steady. A length of polished metal thrust from the pale skin of her forearm—the beginnings of a polearm—then another. She fit them together in one practiced motion, the weapon snapping to full length with a click. The robot lurched to compensate for its missing hand and she thrust under its knee, using the shaft as a lever. The whole leg skipped, balance went bad, and the machine toppled open-mouthed to the track.
"CREATION AND HARDENING—TEXTBOOK TEAMWORK!" Mic whooped. "TAKE A BOW, KIDS—NO, ON SECOND THOUGHT, KEEP RUNNING!"
A crackle answered from the next lane. Kaminari planted his feet and flung both hands toward a robot's chest. Lightning stitched the distance, nerves in his arms sparking visibly beneath skin. The robot locked up with a sound like a dying refrigerator and fell flat on its face.
Kaminari wobbled. Smoke curled tips of blond hair. "Ow—okay. That was… that was a lot." He shook his hands and grinned weakly.
"OOPS—MAYBE DIAL IT DOWN A NOTCH, DENKI!" Mic laughed. "THAT HAIR WAS DOING FINE BEFORE YOU DEEP-FRIED IT!"
Iida didn't fight at all. Engines screamed at his ankles in bright blue cones. He threaded between legs and falling scrap with metronomic precision, never breaking stride, every step the same length like a ruler had drawn his path. He passed under a robot's reaching hand with a breath of clearance and never flinched.
Tsuyu's tongue snapped like a whip, catching a shattered streetlamp frame. She slingshotted herself past a descending fist, legs tucked, landing frog-light beside a toppled robot with a quiet "ribbit," then bounded again.
Mineta yelped and threw sticky orbs at anything that looked like it might kill him. One landed on a robot's heel; the machine tried to step and yanked its own foot back, stuck to the track with a rubbery squeal. Mineta braced his feet and squeaked as a second orb glued his hand to his own head. "Why—why is my life like this?"
Jiro swept into the lane beside Harry, earphone jacks snapping out like darts. She stabbed a jack into a robot's knee seam and winced, sweat breaking over her brow as vibrations rattled up cables into her body. The joint juddered apart. "Little help?" she shouted without looking.
Harry had already flicked a Speed Burst under his boots. The floor rushed toward him and then past as the spell kicked; his breath hitched in his throat. He took two long strides and slid a Shield between Jiro's shoulder and a metal panel that would have introduced her to the ground by force. The panel shattered against light and scattered.
"Thanks," she breathed, voice thin.
"Go," he said. He was already moving again.
They broke the first knot of machines with sound and frost and light. The air boiled with heat from Bakugo's blasts and fog from Todoroki's ice. Robotic torsos lay scattered like knocked-over mannequins, white frost climbing bared hydraulic pistons, acrid smoke cooking sweet from burnt insulation. A cheer ran the length of the stands when a trio of robots—frozen, then punched, then levered—fell together like a slow domino show.
Harry ran through falling shadows. A steel hand scoured the track to his right and he felt the shock through the soles of his feet. Another robot went to one knee ahead, and he cut left to avoid its face-plant, robe skirting a snow-bright sheet of Todoroki's ice. The cold breathed against his calves. He could feel the temptation, even in the rush—throw a flashbang, blind the cameras, scare the front-runners. But this wasn't a fight to win with tricks. It was a straight line to survive.
A broad shape slid into the corner of his eye: Midoriya, red-faced, dragging the salvaged plate. The metal left shining scratches on the ice and track both, a straight glittering line behind him. Midoriya's jaw worked as if he were chewing through numbers and fear in equal measure. He muttered and pulled and nearly stumbled when a fallen wrist joint rolled under his heel. He didn't drop the plate.
"STILL DRAGGIN' THAT SLAB, HUH?" Mic barked, equal parts disbelief and delight. "THIS KID'S EITHER PLAYIN' FOUR-DIMENSIONAL CHESS OR HE'S THE MOST STUBBORN HUMAN BEING ALIVE. FIND OUT IN TEN… NINE… EIGHT…"
More students poured through the gap the lead group had torn. Shoji's many arms lifted two classmates clear of a slip on the ice; Sero slapped tape across a crumbling chassis to stop it from rolling into someone's legs and used the same tape to slingshot himself forward. Ashido skated across Todoroki's path on a smear of acid-slick, arms pinwheeling with delighted laughter as she drifted around a robot knee like a figure skater cutting a tight loop.
Harry risked one glance up—blue sky cut into rectangles by the stadium roofs, banners trembling, a thousand cameras drinking every second. His ring felt warm around his finger. He palmed another Speed Burst, waited half a heartbeat for the robot to commit to a swing, then pushed the card. Wind shoved his back and he slid under the swing, the knuckles ringing off metal behind him.
"POTTER!" Mic shouted, catching the moment as if he'd been waiting. "NO BOOM, NO ICE—JUST CLEAN FOOTWORK AND TIMING! LOOKS LIKE THAT SATCHEL AIN'T JUST FOR SHOW!"
The robots began to thin. The last few stands failed one after another—frozen stiff, shorted out, knocked to their knees and pushed—until the race found open track again. Bakugo had taken the lead and carried it like a dare to anyone behind him to try and rip it away. Todoroki ran not two strides back, breath ghosting silver. Iida traced a perfect line in third. The rest strung out, messy as a comet's tail—clumps and pairs and lonely runners pounding a beat that wouldn't match the stadium's.
Midoriya dragged his plate past the last of the robot wreckage and stumbled into cleared track. The crowd didn't know whether to laugh or chant his name, so some did both.
Kirishima jogged at Harry's shoulder long enough to flash a grin. "Dude, that robe is sick!"
Harry huffed something like a laugh and fixed his eyes ahead.
The track bent and ran harder toward the stadium's far side. Heat bled away from Bakugo's smoke trail; the cold that clung after Todoroki's work faded into sun. For a dozen seconds there was only the thud of shoes and the raw pulling of breath. Even Present Mic, who could talk air out of glass, let the race noise stand on its own.
Then the ground fell away.
The path should have climbed and curled back again to the left. Instead it ended in open air. A ravine tore through dirt and buried concrete, deep enough that the bottom drank light rather than returned it. Far below, broken rebar stuck out like a nest of rusted needles. The only way forward lay in an improvised constellation of pillars and busted pylons, jutting from the gouged earth in no sane pattern, most too far apart for any normal legs to cross.
The sound in the stadium shifted: the roar bent lower, like wind taking a new course.
Students skidded to a ragged stop at the edge. Dust kicked from heels fell and never seemed to hit anything. Someone swore softly. Someone else laughed in a way that wasn't laughter.
Midnight's whip cracked again—not to start them this time, but to draw eyes back to the rules they'd been too busy to forget.
"Obstacle two," she called, and her voice, magnified to the rafters, rang bright. "The chasm."
Present Mic found his pitch again, but when he spoke it threaded the moment rather than shouting it down. "There it is, folks. Four stories to think about your life choices. You can jump. You can build. You can fly—if you've got the nerve. One wrong move and it's not just your score that's dropping."
Todoroki didn't hesitate long. Ice breathed out from his soles, a fine blue-white line skittering over empty air, knitting itself into a narrow foot-bridge that thickened as it went. He tested it with his weight like a man stepping onto a frozen pond, then ran.
Bakugo spat a laugh and didn't wait for any bridge. He threw himself into space with a blast that painted the broken pillars with light. The shockwave dug at the dust around the students at the edge and tugged hair and robes backward.
Iida stepped back, measured, and then engines flared. He went in clean, hands folded like a runner crossing a finish line. His feet found the first pillar, the second, third in three-syllable cadence.
Jiro's jaw tightened; she pushed her earjacks into the ground, listening for vibrations before picking her route. Yaoyorozu's hand glowed—metal flowed, the start of something like a grapple taking shape in her palm.
Harry let his breath go and pressed a card flat against his palm. The familiar tug of Lift swelled in his legs and under his ribs, a pressure like invisible springs coiling tight. The ravine yawned wider the longer he stared at it, a black mouth ready to swallow anyone who faltered. He forced his eyes away from the drop and bent his knees, letting the spell's push gather, ready to launch him into the air.
Behind him, breath pained but steady, Midoriya shifted his grip on the plate, its edge biting his fingers until they went white. He looked at the far side as if the distance were another equation to solve with too many missing pieces.
Harry didn't know if Midoriya's plan would work—whatever it was. He didn't have to. He only had to make his own next step.
He set his foot and jumped.