Harry let his breath go and pressed a card flat to his palm. Lift gathered under his ribs and down his legs, invisible springs coiling. The ravine waited—wide and dark, wind whispering up its throat. He bent his knees and jumped.
The spell met him midair. For a heartbeat the world gave way, gravity loosening its grip just enough that his body remembered what it meant to be light. He drifted farther than the strength in his calves should have allowed and touched down on a broken pylon with the soft scrape of rubber on stone. Dust plumed and fell again. He didn't linger. Another push, another surge of Lift, and he was already leaping to the next narrow perch.
To his left, Todoroki's ice hissed into existence, a pale ribbon stitching the gap into something a human could trust. He ran with the balance of a blade on a whetstone, arms low, eyes forward. Frost skittered under his soles and held.
Behind and above, Bakugo refused to acknowledge the idea of falling. He ricocheted pillar to pillar, each explosion snapping the air into thunder that rolled across the ravine. Heat licked Harry's cheek as Bakugo blazed past overhead; a shower of gravel pattered around him.
Iida chose the clean line. Engines roared at his ankles. He hit a pillar center, drove off on the next beat, landed at the exact middle of the next—like his path had been measured in advance with chalk and string.
"Watch your landing stones," Jirō called behind Harry. Her earphone jacks pressed to the ground on the near side of the gap, eyes narrowed. "The ones with a hollow ring are cracked—skip them!"
Yaoyorozu's hand glowed, metal flowing into a compact grapnel with a tidy throw weight. She launched it to a pillar farther along, set the line, then waved two wavering students into a harness she fashioned from bandoliers. They slid one by one while she spotted their feet.
Sero slapped tape from pylon to pylon in clean snaps, swung once, then twice, then hurled himself like a slingshot to the far lip and rolled out of it laughing, tape spooling back to his elbows in a ribbon.
Harry focused on the rhythm—see, push, land, reset. Lift was a mutter under his pulse now, not a shout. The robe's permanent lightness made the spell's job easier; he chose his marks and kept moving. A pillar under his boot shifted with a brittle little sound. He shoved off before it thought to crumble.
Something scraped and shrieked behind him. Midoriya had reached the edge with his salvaged plate. He didn't abandon it. He jammed one jagged corner into a crack on the first pillar, tested the balance with a shaking foot, then levered it like a clumsy bridge to the next. It wasn't quick and it wasn't pretty; the metal screamed each time he twisted it loose and dragged it after him. Somebody in the stands said something cruel and laughed. The laugh faded when he made the next gap anyway.
Shoji's extra arms unfurled, catching a first-year from another class who'd misjudged a jump and slid, fingers clawing for purchase. "Got you," he said, simple as a handrail, and hauled the kid up to safety before leaping himself on a triangle of grip he'd made from his own flesh.
Tsuyu's tongue cracked out and latched to a jut of rebar far ahead. "Ribbit," she said under her breath, half to focus, and slingshotted, legs tucked, landing in a crouch and then bounding again.
Kirishima took a breath like a swimmer bracing for cold and hardened, every edge on him sharpening into jagged cuts. He didn't leap so much as clamber, punching grips where smooth concrete refused to offer any.
A fist-sized rock came off the far lip in all the traffic and tumbled toward Harry's collarbone. He flicked a card two fingers high and sent a thin Shield blooming above him. The stone smacked, bounced, and whirled away into the dark. He canceled the Shield the instant it held; the spell obeyed like a muscle.
Halfway. Three-quarters. The far side came up in a rush—the border where the stomach-knot of open air gave way to earth and noise again. Harry let one last Lift surge up his calves, found the clean edge with both feet, and ran two more strides to clear the crush of landers.
He didn't look back until he could. Midoriya was still coming. The plate slid, caught, wrenched. His forearms shook; blood brightened his knuckles where the metal bit. He muttered—numbers, odds, something like prayer—but his eyes were clear. He jammed the plate into the lip, levered himself across, and flopped onto the dirt on his side, panting. The crowd—cruel a moment ago—cheered because stubbornness deserved it.
They didn't get to enjoy the relief for more than a heartbeat. The course didn't allow it. As the mass of them funneled into the next stretch, the ground changed character—too flat, too neat, a quilt of square plates and suspicious seams. The far side glittered in the sun like a mirage.
"The minefield," someone said, and the word carried because it was exactly what it looked like.
Harry could feel the air change from cool ravine breath to heat already trapped between hidden charges and the sun. He shook out his hands, felt the ring warm on his finger, and made a fast decision.
Lightness was already part of him; Lift had carried him over the chasm. He layered the push again, gentler this time, ready to ride the force instead of letting it surprise him. He took the first step.
Todoroki moved like a draftsman drawing a line. A narrow rib of ice grew under each footfall, disarming a patch of ground with frost's patience. The blast caps under his steps cracked and spit harmless vapor as he passed. He widened the path only enough for himself.
Bakugo laughed, because of course he did. He set off two mines on purpose with quick, hard steps and rode the shockwave, palms detonating behind to correct his path. Dirt geysered around him in a brown halo. He went faster. The crowd yelled something halfway between fear and delight.
Iida treated it like a metronome exercise. Engines pulsed—one, two, three—each placement precise between seams, every stride identical to the one before it. Little flashes kicked up along his line where he was too close; he adjusted by millimeters and never broke cadence.
Harry took longer bounds than his legs should've been willing to offer. Where a step clipped a trigger and heat belched up, Lift unscrewed some of the blast, let him float through the ugly part of the arc and land light on the other side. One mine buried a bit shallower than the rest went off right under his trailing heel and slapped his robe hard enough to sting; the Feather-Lite enchantment did its quiet job, and he rode it instead of fighting it.
Jirō didn't test the ground with her feet at all. She dropped both earphone jacks and listened—the world under the minefield was noisy as a pan of oil, the fizz and pop of pressure waiting for a chance. She mapped the dead seams in her head and moved like a drummer stepping through an old beat. "Left, then two small rights," she muttered for anyone in earshot. Two students from another class stuck to her shoulder and made it ten meters farther than they would have.
Kaminari, to his credit, decided not to blow himself up. He crept, mouth taut, static crawling over his arms in nervous little twitches, placing each step like a chess piece. When he did set one off by mistake, it was a small pop that tossed him backward onto his rear and left him blinking dust out of his eyes; he scrambled up and kept going with a shaky laugh.
Yaoyorozu didn't gamble. She built. Plates slid out of her palms in a darkened steel, two at a time, and she laid them as stepping stones, biting her lip at the cost. Shoji took one side of her work and Sero took the other, adding tape where plates wanted to rock, and they made a narrow corridor that two at a time could use if they trusted their balance and her judgment.
Mineta cried, then swore, then laughed in a weird way that probably should've worried someone. He threw sticky balls ahead of himself at what he decided were safe patches and hopped to them like a frog playing the world's most poorly thought-out version of hopscotch. At one point he misjudged the length of his own arms and ended up crouched on two orbs too far apart, tiny legs shaking. "I hate this," he announced to nobody, and the mine two feet away agreed by blasting a divot into the air. He squeaked, pinwheeled, somehow didn't die, and crab-walked to the next safe mark.
Harry kept his eyes on the rhythm of his own jumps and on the bodies around him. A mine's concussion doesn't care whose badge you wear; he threw a quick Shield across a kid from 1-B whose heel was about to find something eager and ugly. The swelling air hit the light and spread sideways instead; the kid flinched and nodded thanks without taking time to say it. Harry only had so many spells today and less time than that; he flicked the Ring and let the Shield go.
He was almost used to the sound by then—the double-pop of a mine and Bakugo answering it with a bigger pop of his own. Dirt turned to smoke where Todoroki's cold walked. Iida's engines sang their clean note under everything.
And Midoriya—still dragging the plate. He'd hauled it across the chasm like a stubborn promise. He dragged it into the minefield and then stopped. For the first time since he'd grabbed the thing, he set it down on purpose. He looked at the ground the way a person looks at a map they know is lying to them. His hands trembled. Then they didn't.
Harry saw it in the tilt of Midoriya's jaw: the click of a plan that scared him even as it relieved him. He wasn't close enough to hear anything he might have muttered; he didn't need to.
Midoriya dragged the plate to a knot of seams where the ground looked especially smug. He crouched, forced his breath out, and slammed the metal down flat.
The mine under it went first. The ones beside it decided they were invited. The shock slammed into steel instead of soft ankle and threw the plate upward with a noise like a door ripped off a house in a storm. Midoriya jumped after his own idea and caught the edge as it rose. For a terrifying second he was only hanging there and faith was doing most of the physics. Then the blast sequence underneath hit a sweet spot. Fire ran down the seams in a rippling chain. The plate bucked and then rocketed.
He went with it.
Harry felt it as much as saw it—the freight of air that shifts when something big moves too fast where it shouldn't. Midoriya streaked above the minefield, teeth bared in a grimace that was not a smile, hair blown flat, eyes wide and locked on the narrow slot of sky ahead of him. He passed over Todoroki's ice corridor like a bad decision leaping a good one. He shot ahead of Bakugo's smoke. For a moment he was a green smear against the bright.
He hit near the finish line and slid in a storm of dust, the plate bucking out from under him and skittering away. He rolled, skinned a shoulder, and sprawled on his back with the look of someone who had expected pain and received it, then realized it had been worth it.
The stadium forgot how to breathe and then remembered all at once. The sound was a wall.
Todoroki's footfalls never stuttered. He crossed next, cold air unbothered by other people's miracles. Bakugo arrived with fury in his posture and fire in his palms, crossing hard enough that the ribbon on the sensor pole snapped and fluttered. Iida ran through the beam like a test he'd prepared for—chest up, form intact.
Harry's world had narrowed to the step-and-flight rhythm of Lift and the way his lungs felt like he'd run up a mountain. He could see the finish now—two more long bounds. One mine popped too close on his left; he let the force shove him, adjusted his hips in the air, let the Feather-Lite robe turn a stumble into a glide. He landed, pushed, and crossed in the clean stripe of the sensor's glow. His knees wanted to go out. He denied them the privilege and kept moving a few steps more before letting himself stop.
He bent forward with his hands braced on his thighs until the breath came back in something like a regular shape. The ring on his finger was warm and slick with sweat. His robe stank of dust and burnt propellant. There was a smear of gray across his sleeve that would never come out. He smiled without meaning to.
The order was already forming around him. Midoriya lay on the track staring at the sky like it had told him a secret. Todoroki stood with a posture that made the sun look like it had chosen him. Bakugo stalked back and forth three steps like a caged thing that couldn't decide whether to eat the bars or set them on fire. Iida shook out his legs, engines coughing heat, and then straightened with his hands on his hips and a little nod, as if confirming to himself that the math had indeed come out correct.
More finished in a ragged rush—Kirishima shouting something joyous and incomprehensible, Jirō jogging in with the pale, focused look of someone whose brain was still full of distances, Yaoyorozu stepping over the line and immediately turning to check who her plates had helped and who was still coming. Shoji, Sero, Tsuyu—faces flushed and bright.
It took a few beats for Present Mic to find a version of his voice that could fit back into the space after what had just happened. When he did, it poured across the stands like someone opening a valve.
"WHAT A RACE!" he yelled, joyous and hoarse. "WRITE IT DOWN, PEOPLE—MIDORIYA! TODOROKI! BAKUGO! IIDA! POTTER! THAT'S YOUR FIRST FIVE ACROSS! IF THIS IS ROUND ONE, I DON'T KNOW IF I'M READY FOR ROUND TWO—AND I LIVE FOR THIS!"
Harry straightened and pushed his hair out of his eyes. People were looking at him the way they look at a puzzle piece that suddenly seems like it might fit somewhere important. What is he using? Gear? Quirk? He didn't have anything to say to that, and there wasn't time anyway. Staff ushered finishers toward the staging tunnel while the rest of the field worked through the last meters—some limping, some laughing, one or two crying and laughing at the same time.
Midoriya sat up with a wince, blinked dust out of his eyes, and saw Harry across the lane. He lifted a hand and made a vague, disbelieving gesture in the shape of a thumbs-up. Harry returned it without thinking, then shook out his aching calves and followed the crowd.
As they passed under the archway into the cooler dark of the tunnel, the stadium noise folded over them like surf. The race, with all its heat and sharp edges, slipped abruptly into the past. Ahead, another board waited to be set, pieces shuffled into new alliances. The air down here smelled like concrete and nerves.
Harry flexed his hand once and felt the ring catch the light. The card edges in his sleeve rasped each other softly when he moved. He didn't rehearse what had gone right or wrong. That would come later, when there was room to write.
For now there was only the next event, already assembling itself out of rules and tension in the dark just ahead.