The stadium had a way of breathing with the crowd—long inhales of hush, ragged exhalations of noise. When the bracket flickered on the jumbotron and two names burned brightest at the top, the sound tilted, sharpened.
Izuku Midoriya vs. Shoto Todoroki.
Present Mic's voice rolled out like a drumline. "HERO FANS—THIS IS THE ONE YOU CAME FOR! POWER VERSUS PERSEVERANCE! ICE-COLD PRECISION VERSUS A HEART THAT DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO QUIT!"
Across the student section, heads craned. Bakugo leaned forward, elbows on his knees, jaw set. Iida adjusted his glasses and then forgot to push them back up. Ochako clasped her hands so tight her knuckles went pale. Harry, hood of his robe down, watched with the steady stillness that had become his default in an arena—eyes half-lidded, attention razor-thin and everywhere.
On the field, the gates rose.
Todoroki walked out with the same measured, unhurried cadence he used for everything. Frost light clung to the right side of his face, turning the scar there into the edge of a glacier. He didn't look at the crowd. He didn't need to. When he reached his mark, he simply set his stance and put the ring, and the mountaintop behind it, between his eyes.
Midoriya bounced once on the balls of his feet and stopped himself as if remembering there were eyes on him. The nerves were obvious; so was the pressure that turned them into attention. He rolled his shoulders back. He inhaled. When Midnight raised her hand, he stared straight ahead and nodded to himself once.
"Begin!"
Ice answered first.
Todoroki barely lifted his arm—the ground surged white. A wall the size of a building slid forward, cold wind biting the first three rows of the stands. It hit Midoriya's lane like a tide.
Midoriya didn't flinch. He planted, raised two fingers, and snapped a flick downward. Air detonated. The shockwave splintered the oncoming ice into glittering shrapnel that sleeted past him in a glitter cloud.
"HE BREAKS THE WAVE WITH A FINGER FLICK!" Present Mic whooped. "AND WE'RE OFF!"
Shards rained down. Midoriya ducked, rolled, came up into another burst—downward this time, cratering the tile at his feet to throw himself sideways as a second ice crest roared in. Each time Todoroki moved, the field changed. Each time Midoriya moved, the air cracked like a bullwhip and made a space where none had existed a breath before.
The first minute was pattern. The second was pressure. The third was something else: a conversation.
"You won't win like this," Midoriya shouted, voice hoarse but certain as another wall slammed toward him. He broke it with a fist this time, skin reddening, knuckles singing with pain. "You're not using all of it!"
Todoroki's eyes narrowed. "I told you," he said, and the whiteness of his breath fogged the air between them, "I won't use his power."
Midoriya smashed another wave. The impact staggered him; he turned the stumble into a sprint. "Then it isn't yours," he yelled, and the crowd's noise braided around the words, drew them out, threw them back, "and you know it!"
The next ice sheet didn't reach him. It froze where it was and began to recede, as if the ground itself had decided to stop being obedient for a moment. Todoroki's jaw worked once, a small tell on a face trained to have none. He lifted his hand again, slower.
Midoriya met him angle for angle, the ring a chessboard he refused to yield. He used fingers when he could, hands when he had to, an elbow once—each blast precise enough to be audacious. Harry, watching, found himself unconsciously noting the timing—how Midoriya stretched recovery frames, how he broke Todoroki's rhythm by refusing to let one side of his own body tell the other what to do.
"Kid's fighting like a study guide to himself," Present Mic said, half-laughing, half breathless. "EVERY PAGE IS UNDERLINED!"
Aizawa didn't comment, but his eyes were all edges.
The cold built. The steam began, thin curls at first where air met ice and didn't want to be told what temperature to be. Todoroki's right side glowed faint blue; frost crawled up the tiles like an infection. Midoriya's breath came ragged, short—he shook his hand out after a larger blast and flinched when the movement hurt.
"You're going to break," Todoroki warned, not unkindly. "Stop pushing."
Midoriya bared his teeth in something that wasn't a grin. "Use your fire."
"No."
The next exchange wasn't an exchange. It was a collision. Todoroki lifted his arm; Midoriya met it with a full straight. The shockwave rattled the railings and sent a wash of powdered ice up into the lights. Midoriya staggered back, hand curling over his forearm, teeth clenched hard enough to ache at a distance even if you'd never met him.
The steam thickened. It was visible now—rolling layers of breath and melted intent.
"You're not your father," Midoriya said, not shouting this time. His voice found a range that bounced differently between the pillars and the dome. "You're you. It's your quirk."
Something in the arena shifted. It wasn't loud enough to hear; it was too loud to ignore.
Todoroki's fingers trembled.
His right hand lowered.
His left lit.
Fire came up the arm like dawn.
The temperature swung. The steam went blind. There was a hiss somewhere high up where a cold girder remembered another job. The crowd went silent enough to hear Present Mic's "oh" as a sound instead of a word.
Todoroki's first flame was small—gold and careful. The second wasn't. It rolled out over the arm and into the shoulder and was not his father's, not exactly; it was him, in the way it held itself together, in the way it waited instead of taking. He breathed in, let it fill the place the cold had made, and when he released it, it wasn't a shout. It was a statement.
Midoriya smiled through the hurt. It was terrifying. It was also kind.
"Good," he said.
The finish was inevitable once the truth was admitted. They both knew it; they both refused to be anything but exact about it.
Todoroki threw an ice wave and a flame front at once, the two currents crossing, fighting, harmonizing into something that didn't make sense on paper and made complete sense in a body that had decided to belong to itself. Midoriya answered with everything left—arm screaming, legs burning, heart somewhere between his teeth and the floor. He made a space in the middle of contradictions, and he met the world there.
When the smoke and steam cleared, he was on his back near the line. Todoroki stood swaying, chest heaving, his hair plastered to his forehead, one side flushed with heat, the other crystalline with cold. Midnight waited a beat to listen to the silence and then raised a hand.
"Winner—Shoto Todoroki!"
The noise the stadium made was not a roar. It was relief. It was respect. It was the acknowledgment of two things happening in the same place that rarely do: change, and the people brave enough to force it to happen with them inside it.
Recovery Girl was already moving when the applause peaked. As Midoriya was helped off, he managed a broken-lipped grin in Todoroki's direction, and Todoroki, who didn't smile much or easily, nodded like it mattered.
Harry exhaled the breath he hadn't noticed he'd been holding. Kaminari wiped his eyes like he'd gotten dust in them. Ochako had both hands pressed to her mouth. Aizawa stared a fraction too long and then looked away, as if to pretend he hadn't.
Present Mic found his voice again. "FANS—IF YOU'RE STILL BREATHING AFTER THAT, YOU'RE DOING BETTER THAN ME! WHAT A CLASH! WHAT A—okay okay, I'm fine, I'm fine—WHAT A MOMENT."
The bracket pulsed overhead, lines redrawn, the path narrowing.
Two names lit in the next pane.
Harry Potter vs. Ibara Shiozaki.
Harry stood, smoothing the front of his robe with a habit that was more about centering than tidying. He flexed his fingers once; the ring at his knuckle answered with a mild warmth. He glanced at Ochako. She tapped her earring—reflex, thought—then remembered there'd be no comms in this round and grimaced. "You've got this," she said. "Long range. Keep your space."
Harry's mouth tilted. "That's the plan."
He walked the tunnel with the measured pace he'd learned helps your mind remember to think when your heart is busy.
The field changed as he stepped out: the ice had been scraped into low banks at the corners, the shattered tiles replaced. The afternoon sun had knifed a little lower; the shadows from the awnings cut angled bars across the ring.
Ibara Shiozaki bowed at the line, palms folded gently. The halo of vines around her head seemed to float. "May our contest be a clean one," she said, voice like cool water over stone. "Your art is curious. I hope to see it clearly."
Harry returned the bow. "I'll try to keep the smoke to a minimum."
Midnight raised her arm again. The crack of her crop was almost unnecessary; the air already felt like it had heard the start.
"Begin!"
Vines leapt first, and not shyly. They shot forward in a fan, two high, two low, one splitting the lane as if to trip him at the ankle. The tips were blunted—no barbs—but the speed promised bruises if they caught wrong.
Harry didn't let them. He threw two cards in a cross and flicked the ring. Gale erupted forward, a flat wall of pressure that knocked the outer pair off course and bought him a lane. He slid left, the lightness riding his robe turning what would have been a dive into a sideways float. The center vine snapped at where his calves had been.
"FAST FEET FROM THE MAGICIAN!" Present Mic crowed. "SHIOZAKI ANSWERS WITH—WHOA—A FIVE-PRONGED PINCER!"
Ibara didn't relent. More vines surged, braiding midair to form a shield against the next burst of wind and then splitting to stab through the gaps. Harry's hands moved faster than his breath. Aegis flashed gold in front of him—the first strike pinged off; the second slid; the third whipped around the edge and kissed his sleeve before he batted it away with the card's afterglow.
He tossed upward next, not forward. Flashbang blossomed above Ibara's position with a bang and a magnesium flare that turned the world white for a blink.
It would have blinded most opponents. Ibara flinched, vines curling inward to guard her face, then splayed again almost at once. She'd grounded herself, Harry realized—not in electricity this time, but in stance and habit, using the moment to check the angle the light cut and then folding it into the attack rhythm she was already running.
"Apologies," she called, and the sincerity in it wasn't theatrics. "That stung."
"Imagine my surprise," Harry said dryly, and flicked Firebolt.
The bolt wasn't a spear so much as a comet—a tightly wound twist of heat that skated, not straight, but with a small lazy arc to make parries choose wrong. It grazed the front rank of vines; chlorophyll flared and retreated, the ends blackening, the scent of scorched green rising sharp.
Ibara did not panic. She split the burned lengths off and re-knit the line with clean growth, the flow of the movement prayer-like, continuous. "Nonlethal," she said, half to herself, half to him, "but discouraging."
"Mutual preference," Harry said, and threw Gale again.
They danced the width of the ring that way for a full minute—she pressed, he broke angles; he jabbed, she remade the shape he'd bent. Where Midoriya and Todoroki had turned the arena into a thesis about identity, Harry and Ibara turned it into calligraphy: stroke and counterstroke, the art in the negative space between.
He felt the tempo change first in his shoulders, then in the ring beneath his boots. Ibara shifted patterns—two fakes up high, one heavy swing low into his leading foot. He boxed the top feints away with Aegis and hopped the low line, then realized the trap as the hopped vine snapped upward like a sprung snare.
He didn't try to clear it with muscle. He touched Lift against his thigh and let the spell answer with a push instead of a pull. The world lost a little gravity; his body went lighter than the robe it wore. He drifted over the snapping line, turned it from a pin into a cue, and landed on a part of the tile he had already mapped as the next useful point.
The crowd liked that. It wasn't a roar; it was a sound closer to a grin.
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN," Present Mic cackled, "HE JUST BUNNY-HOPPED A VINE WEB LIKE HE'S GOT SPRINGS FOR BONES!"
Ibara narrowed her eyes. Vines lanced again, this time in a spiral—the kind of pattern that her earlier opponent might have tried to power through and gotten caught by in layers. Harry didn't let the spiral finish being what it wanted. He flicked Flashbang again, not above her this time but to the side, so the light angle turned her own shield into a temporary blindfold. He triggered Veil while the flare afterimage still lived.
Fog rose fast, an inhalation of cloud that draped the ring in a gray so gentle it would have been beautiful if it hadn't been trying to get between two people whose job it now was to ignore beauty. The veil didn't hide sound; it didn't need to. It hid intention.
Harry took three light steps right, two forward, and slid a card along the tile near the pale slash of her leading foot.
"Oh," he said quietly, mostly for himself. "This is going to be rude."
He retreated two paces and waited.
Vines slashed the fog, impatient. "You need not hide," Ibara called, and even muffled, her tone stayed warm. "I will not injure you unduly."
"I'd prefer not to be injured duly either," Harry said, and touched the ring to the card he'd left by her boot.
Tickle worked like it was supposed to: not a laugh track, not slapstick, not cruel. Just a sudden, overwhelming compulsion in every small muscle connected to laughter to do the job it had been made for and never allowed to do this loudly. Ibara's knees buckled. The first giggle slipped out in surprise; the second was a helpless surrender to how the body disliked being asked not to laugh.
She went down, hands braced, vines twitching like startled birds. "What—what is—this is—" She hiccuped between words and laughed again, mortified and somehow cheerful at once. "Unfair!"
Harry winced sympathetically, because it was, and because the crowd was now laughing with her in that contagious way laughter has. "Forgive me," he said. "It's effective."
He didn't waste the window. Two cards, quick as flipping a coin. Bind flickered out, red cords of force twining around a cluster of vines and knotting them into themselves. Gale followed, not a blast this time but a shove with a palm behind it, angled like a wrestler's foot. Ibara, already off balance and unable to control her breath, slid.
The boundary line came up like a bow drawn too far.
She crossed it, still laughing. Midnight's whip snapped the sound back into order. "Winner—Harry Potter!"
The relief in Ibara's sigh as the tickle cut off was audible all the way to the twenty-fifth row. She pushed herself up, flushed but smiling, and bowed low. "I concede with gratitude," she said, voice a touch rough. "Your craft is… inventive."
Harry returned the bow, the stiffness in his shoulders repeating an apology in posture. "Thank you. Your control is beautiful."
They shook hands. The vines unknotted themselves as if embarrassed to have been found tied in public; a few leaves still singed at the edges curled in on themselves dignifiedly.
"MAGICIAN ADVANCES!" Present Mic bellowed, finding his gusto again. "PUT YOUR HANDS TOGETHER FOR A MASTERCLASS IN LONG-RANGE CONTROL! FIRE, FOG, AND—UM—WHATEVER THAT WAS!"
"Humor," Aizawa said flatly, somewhere under the commentary. "It was humor."
Harry made his way off the field to the susurrus of a thousand conversations about the ethics of tickle magic and whether someone could sell replicas of his cards legally (they could not). In the tunnel the air was cooler; it tasted like concrete and a little blood someone had already mopped up.
Ochako met him a few steps in, wide smile already recharging. "That was so mean," she said, delighted.
"Necessary," Harry said, and then let the corner of his mouth slip. "But yes."
Midoriya had a sling now. He put his unbandaged hand up for a light fist bump and winced when he made any contact with the world. "You looked… smooth."
"Practice," Harry said. "And luck."
He turned to the board because avoiding it wouldn't make it less true. The bracket had cut itself down again. The lines had simplified. The next pairings glowed in hard light.
Tokoyami Fumikage vs. Iida Tenya.
Bakugo Katsuki vs. Yaoyorozu Momo.
If Todoroki did what he seemed capable of doing, the semifinal would be him and the boy who could change the temperature of a room by walking into it.
Harry flexed his fingers. The ring answered. He looked at the ice scuffs still hiding in the seams of the reset tiles and at the scorch lines where the fire had decided to kiss something before it cooled.
"So," he said, not to anyone in particular, and not unkindly, "fire and ice."
Ochako followed his gaze, then glanced up at him. "You'll think of something."
He didn't say I'll try. He'd used that up already today. He just nodded.
Outside, the stadium found its breath again. Present Mic ascended to another pitch. The sun slid lower, gold at the edges now, setting the ring aglow as if the fights had polished it.