The heat of the crowd pressed down like summer even though the sun hadn't shifted. Vendors still hawked skewers, the hiss of grills flared through pauses in the roar, and the stadium's big screens re-lit with a new layout—red dots scattered across a simplified arena map, each dot ringed with a numbered zone. Midnight stepped onto the central dais, two fingers pinching her whip as if it were a conductor's baton.
"Listen up, contestants!" Her voice slid silk-sure through the amplifiers. "Round Two of the U.A. Sports Festival begins now. This one tests more than legs. It tests minds."
The map zoomed in, labeling circular platforms, scaffold towers, and barricaded corners. A neon clock appeared in the corner: 01:00:00. The murmur in the stands tightened to an edge. Several people in the pro boxes leaned forward with new interest.
"Teams of three," Midnight continued, smile wide and dangerous. "Each of you keeps a personal flag worth points based on your Obstacle Race placement. Keep your flags safe, or steal someone else's. Bring captured flags back to your base to bank points. Quirks and support items are allowed. No deliberate lethal force." She snapped the whip—not an order, a flourish. "When the hour expires, the top point earners advance."
The rules hit like a gust. Students turned to each other in a sudden, awkward shuffle of allegiance. You could feel the mental gear shift ripple through the crowd: this wasn't the horse-stacking spectacle everyone expected. This was a problem with too many variables and only sixty minutes to solve it.
Present Mic couldn't help himself: "WOOOO! CAPTURE THE FLAG, BABY! TACTICS ON DECK! Who's building fortresses? Who's going raiding? WHO CAME TO PLAY?"
Harry already knew the team he wanted before the exclamation point finished vibrating. He looked across the floor. Midoriya was already looking back.
They didn't wave. They didn't shout. They met in three quick strides.
"We're teaming," Midoriya said, breath a little fast, eyes brighter than they had any right to be for someone who had just thrown himself across a ravine and a minefield. "You and me."
"Obviously," Harry said, and felt something settle in his chest that had been loose since the USJ.
"Me too!" Ochako popped in, hands raised, cheeks flushed from the run over. "If we're the million-point magnet, you are not doing this without me."
Harry's mouth twitched. "Team Deku-Potter-Uraraka?"
Ochako made a face. "That's objectively terrible."
"Captain gets to name the team," Midoriya said, already grimacing, already flustered by the thought that he might be the captain. "We'll… circle back."
Around them, partnerships snapped into place. Bakugo hooked an arm around Kirishima's neck and jerked his chin at Kaminari. "You two. With me. We're not hoarding—we're hunting."
Kaminari half-grinned, half-blanched. "If by hunting you mean—"
"I mean blowing," Bakugo said, walking already. "Move."
On the far side, Todoroki stood like a marker in a quiet current, and Momo and Shoji simply collected at his flanks as if placed there by an unseen hand. He glanced once at the map and then at the short list in his head of likely problem teams. His expression didn't change.
One of the 1-B kids looked over at Midoriya's trio and muttered, not as quietly as he thought: "One million flag? Everyone's going to dogpile them first."
Harry heard it and didn't bother to bristle. Of course they would. The plan didn't need to be dramatic; it needed to be inevitable.
Staff shepherded teams to their starting bases. The arena had been reconfigured without anyone seeing—panel floors rearranged to reveal clusters of stone circles, scaffolding, stacked shipping crates pulled into barricades, the suggestion of alleyways cut from the general flatness. Every base had at least two approaches. Most had four. All of them felt unfair in exactly the kind of way a proctor thought was "good training."
Their base was a raised circular platform twenty meters across with half-meter walls around most of the rim and four ramps like cardinal points. If the Obstacle Race had been about moving forward, this was a lesson in being surrounded.
Midoriya saw it and exhaled through his nose. "Okay. We can make this work."
Harry set his satchel on the low wall, flipped the flap back, and lined cards along the stone in neat rows, each face down, each with a tiny sigil written by hand along the edge. He didn't think about it; the movements lived in his fingers now. "Then we don't let them climb," he said. "And if they climb, we make sure it hurts their pride."
Ochako bounced once on her toes and then steadied, eyes narrowing as she surveyed the platform. "You'll need me on flag duty, right?"
"First priority," Midoriya said, dropping into a crouch and producing, from somewhere, a pencil stub and scrap of paper that looked like it came from the back of his own hand. He started sketching circles and arrows over a rough map of their base. His knee bobbed; his line stayed straight. "As soon as the clock starts, you float our flags."
"How high?" she asked.
"High enough no one can leap for them," Harry said. "Hidden by what I'm going to do next."
Midoriya tapped the paper, thoughts clicking visibly. "Harry, I want your Veil overcharged. Two layers if your reservoir allows it. Start wide, settle it down so we can still breathe it for an hour. Can you manage?"
Harry slid a card free—the matte surface pulled out of the stack with a dry whisper—and turned it between his fingers like a coin. "I brewed this one special. It'll sit heavy and stay all hour if I feed it right at the start. Wind may tug, but not enough to matter."
Ochako leaned over the cards arrayed on the stone. "What else do we have?"
Harry fanned a second group with a little flourish despite himself. "Remote charges for the approaches," he said. "Non-lethal only. Flashbangs for when they breach. Robe bind—sticks to whoever steps on it and tries to hug them from the ankles up." He tapped two others. "Gales for push-back. Illusions—simple silhouettes, enough to make a fourth or fifth shadow in the fog so they swing at ghosts. And—" He couldn't help the small, pleased smile. "Tickle."
Ochako's eyes went round. "That's… that's so mean."
"It breaks breathing and balance without breaking bones," Harry said. "No expulsions for making someone laugh."
Midoriya didn't look up from the circles he was drawing, but he smiled because he couldn't help it. "Disruption is still control," he said softly.
Harry pulled a small velvet pouch from an inner pocket of his robe and untied the string. Silver glinted inside: two simple circle earrings, unadorned. He handed one to Midoriya, one to Ochako. "Comms," he said. "Short-range, line-of-sight not required. If you're within the Veil, we stay connected. Tap twice to mute, again to restore. No buzzing. No light show."
Ochako clasped hers in and flinched as the tiny clip pinched. "Ow—okay—hello?" Her eyes widened as she heard her own whisper repeated, softer, ghosting in her ear. "Whoa."
"Harry to Ochako," Harry said. "Say something embarrassing."
"Absolutely not," she said, grinning.
Midoriya fitted his earring and adjusted it with distracted care like it were a gear in a larger engine. "Can you monitor the approaches?"
Harry lifted his left hand. The ring—no gem, just dull silver—caught the hard stadium light and returned it as a thin wink. He touched it to the cracked leather of the small map folio at his belt. Lines unfolded across the interior flap, delicate as spider-silk at first and then darker, thicker—an expanding ripple describing stone and ramp and distance and the particular interference of bodies in motion.
"Map's live," he said. "One kilometer radius if I keep the feed minimal. Closer to five hundred meters if I paint the picture thick." Thin chevrons drifted into place along the ramp lines, marking angles of approach. "I'll go thin until the first hit."
Midoriya reached without looking and rested two fingers against the inside of Harry's wrist, a gesture so brief it would have been invisible if it hadn't been perfectly steady. "You're brilliant," he said, and meant it.
Harry rolled his eyes so he didn't say something stupid, then began to walk the base.
He moved with a carpenter's focus, not a soldier's swagger, palms flat on cards for a heartbeat at a time as he laid them on stone and tucked them into the seams between paving slabs. Each placement was deliberate: a flashbang half a step inside the ramp crest where a charging foot would land; a robe bind a stride down the rise where momentum would work against a body suddenly glued in silk; a Gale angled not directly out but slightly to the side to tumble an attacker into his friend; an illusion token tucked behind the low wall to spring a phantom at chest height—just enough to make someone flinch and misjudge. A tickle square was a little unfair at the ramp apex where fighters tended to plant. He put it there anyway and didn't apologize to anyone in his head.
At each ramp he paused and looked down, squinting under the bright. The ground below their base spread into lanes like spokes. If you wanted to rush them, you could, but you'd be funneled; it was an advantage you didn't squander. He put two more Gales farther out along the line, nested like traps in a storybook garden. The ring hummed against his finger as he synced each one to his sense like he were filing their names.
He finished the last circuit and crouched by Midoriya and Ochako again. "We're strung," he said. "Time it with my calls. Don't blow everything in the first five minutes or we'll be telling jokes and hoping fear is a quirk."
Midoriya scratched a line under his sketch and set the chalk stub down like that made the plan official. "Primary roles," he said, voice clear and calm because he was forcing it to be. "Ochako—flags."
"Got it." She planted her feet, tugged the small flags from their belts—red, green, yellow—and pressed her fingers to them. "Zero gravity," she murmured, and the cloth lightened, tugging away from her hands like fish trying the surface of a pond. She guided them up, up, until they were three little blurs swallowed by the sky above the platform. "I'll keep them moving. If someone gets vertical, I send them higher."
"Harry—Veil," Midoriya said.
Harry lifted the overcharged card. The sigils along its edge were slightly different than the older models—thicker loops, a nested spiral that looked almost like he'd copied the shape of a snail he'd once seen. He pressed his thumb into the paper where blood had stained it when he'd written it, felt the old sting in phantom, and breathed out.
"Veil," he said, quietly.
It rolled out like a soft storm, not a bang but a bloom. Smoke that wasn't smoke poured from the card and spilled over the lip of the wall, unfurling in sheets, curling, sinking until the platform became an island in a sea of gray. It smelled faintly of cold stone and rain that hadn't yet fallen. Sunlight turned the fog to cut glass and then to absence. Sound thudded down, wrapped in wool. Harry fed the trickle—one sharp pulse—and then let it stabilize as a skin over their base.
From outside it would look like a storm had decided to nap on their circle. From inside, visibility was a tunnel fifteen, twenty meters long. You could move; you just couldn't assume.
"Comms check," said Midoriya softly. His voice came through their earrings at the same time it came through the air.
"Copy," Harry said.
"Copy," Ochako echoed.
"Okay." Midoriya set his fists, flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders the way he did before he did something foolish and noble. "I'll take the south ramp for start. If they come faster from another side, call it and I'll switch. Harry, if you see numbers greater than three on any vector, I want illusions ready to split them and a Gale on my word."
"Like dominoes," Harry said.
Ochako looked up into the warm gray. "I'll keep them off the flags," she said. "And if someone tries to jump into our fog, I'll make them float. See how they like losing footing."
"Great." Midoriya's smile flashed for a second, quick and firm. "We hold. That's it. We hold."
On the far side of the arena, a different kind of plan took shape. Todoroki's team raised walls—the first knee-high, then waist-high, then a smooth shoulder of ice that made the platform look like a cut gem. Shoji positioned himself at the edges like a living array of sensors. Yaoyorozu created steel supports to brace the ice where it would otherwise be vulnerable to a determined climber.
Bakugo's team didn't even pause to regard their base. "We're not babysitting," he said, voice carrying just enough that the nearest microphone found it. "We're collecting." Kirishima whooped. Kaminari sparked in uneasy agreement.
The stands crackled with it all: little kids coped over the barrier to see better; scouts wrote and underlined names; a woman in a crisp suit with a pro agency pin tapped her pen against her lip and stared at the gray cloud settling over one circle. Present Mic roared joy at the audacity on display. Eraserhead stood at the railing and watched without moving at all.
Harry angled his map folio and watched the lines ink themselves thinner and quicker. Motion signatures blipped around the nearest three bases, hesitated, split. One dot—fast, bouncing, familiar—was already vectoring their way. He didn't need the map to guess who. He felt the urge to smile and didn't indulge it.
"South-west," he said into the comm. "Single fast mover, two trailing, then a messy cluster breaking from a base beyond. Thirty seconds."
"Copy," Midoriya said, pivoting toward the southern ramp. He sank a little into his hips, weight balanced. "We won't let them in."
"North," Harry added a second later. "Two. Slow and steady—feels like they're testing the fog before committing."
"I can annoy them," Ochako offered, already easing to the center point where she could pivot quirk lines through the murk.
"Let them walk a little closer first," Harry said. "Tickle squares will humble anybody who thinks they invented footwork."
She covered a laugh with the back of her wrist. "That is so mean."
"Effective," Harry repeated, and felt the small, unhelpful flash of joy that came from having the perfect tool for a problem he'd invented for himself last week.
The stadium clock ticked down from 00:00:10. A hush fell in waves, the kind that wasn't truly quiet because it contained ten thousand held breaths.
Midnight raised her whip again. The leather shivered as it arced. Sunlight licked the length of it like it were a blade.
"Heroes-in-training—begin."
The crack bounced around the bowl of the stadium and came back as a cheer that made the platform tremble. The clock blinked to 00:59:59 and began to bleed seconds.
In the Veil, the world closed until it felt intimate as a held breath, warm and close and dangerous. Harry's ring thrummed faintly with the sympathetic tension of traps keyed, the way a musician feels the tautness of strings before the first note. The map spooled thin lines as the first dots rushed their way. Midoriya took one quiet step to set his stance, and Ochako lifted her palms as if cradling a sky nobody else could see.
The storm, having found its shape, held perfectly still, waiting to be disturbed.