The arena breathed in waves—noise swelling, ebbing, returning louder as the sun tilted toward late afternoon. Repair drones zipped across the ring, smoothing cracked tiles, scouring scorch and frost in quick, geometric paths. When the bracket above the stadium pulsed to its next pairing, the crowd leaned forward as if pulled by a string.
TOKOYAMI FUMIKAGEVS.IIDA TENYA
Present Mic pitched himself over the edge of excitement. "ALRIGHT, HERO FANS—WE'RE SHIFTING GEARS! ON THE LEFT, THE MIDNIGHT AVENGER WITH A LIVING SHADOW—TOKOYAMI FUMIKAGE! ON THE RIGHT, THE MAN WHOSE LEGS WOULDN'T PASS A NOISE ORDINANCE—IIIDA TEEEENYA!"
Laughter rippled through the stands. Iida jogged out to his mark, posture perfect, every step practiced. He paused, bowed to the judges, then to his opponent. Tokoyami answered with a measured nod, Dark Shadow rising behind him in a tall, weightless silhouette that made the air around it seem thinner.
Harry tipped forward until his forearms rested on the railing. "Two styles that hate chaos," he murmured. "They'll try to control each other's rhythm." Ochako nodded without looking away. "Whoever breaks first loses."
Midnight raised her arm. "Begin!"
Iida vanished.
Engines screamed; the tiles behind him fractured in a sharp, clean line as he crossed the center in a blink, heel pivoting, body aligned like a thrown spear. Tokoyami didn't step; his left hand flicked, and Dark Shadow surged out like night being poured. Iida's first strike hammered a wall of black that flexed and held. The shock rolled up his shin and into his hip; he used the recoil, rolled his shoulders, and slid away before a claw could close around his ankle.
"WOO! FIRST IMPACT—AND DARK SHADOW HOLDS LIKE A BUNKER!" Present Mic yodeled. "THIS IS POWER MEETS PRECISION!"
Aizawa's voice came through drier, almost bored, which for him was approval. "Iida's making micro-adjustments mid-burst. He's reading where Tokoyami places his weight."
They circled in jagged halves. Iida burst in, feinted to the right, juked left, and tapped a heel hard enough to throw dust up into the light. Dark Shadow arced to intercept—and stuttered weakly where the sunlight ate at its edge. Iida snapped past, clipped Tokoyami's shoulder with a palm and used the contact to pivot behind him.
Harry tracked the angles. "He's testing how far Tokoyami can project in full light."
Tokoyami's eyes narrowed. "Dark Shadow, widen."
The silhouette spread, not as a wall this time but as a curved shield that overlapped lanes and forced Iida into a funnel. Iida checked once, recalculated, and used his engines not for distance but for a series of short, violent corrections—three staccato bursts to unbalance the curve of the shadow's reach, then a low leap that scraped rubber on tile as the claws came down where his head had been.
"HE'S THREADING A NEEDLE IN A HURRICANE!" Mic cackled. "DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS, UNLESS YOUR HOME IS MADE OF FOAM!"
Iida angled toward a bright patch where the afternoon sun cut a triangle into the ring. Dark Shadow slipped sideways to cover, its edges thinning. When he tried to press the advantage, Tokoyami sank, stance low, shoulders set. There was nothing panicked in him, nothing rushed. He waited for Iida to commit. When Iida did, Dark Shadow snapped, taking the hit on its thinner edge—giving ground, then rebounding to slam against Iida's forearms with enough force to rattle his teeth.
The blow shoved Iida back into shade. Dark Shadow thickened instantly, claws bristling.
Aizawa, quiet: "He's baiting the engine into bad light."
Iida adjusted again, breath audible even above the engines. He glanced once at the way shadows pooled near the ring's boundaries, then cut hard across the center seam and kicked a chunk of fractured tile high into the air. It spun, flashing bright, and threw a sudden scatter of light onto Dark Shadow's face. The living night recoiled as if struck; Tokoyami's jaw clenched.
Iida's mouth tightened. "Recipro…"
Engines howled into a scream.
"BURST!"
He became a line. The impact rattled the stadium. Iida drove shoulder-first into Tokoyami's guard, Dark Shadow dragging at his arms but thinning under glare, Talons raked, caught fabric, slipped. The momentum carried them—two bodies and a living shade—skidding toward the edge.
One step. Tokoyami planted. Dark Shadow hooked Iida's elbow and wrenched. Iida re-angled in a blink, knees bending, hips dipping, all math and muscle memory—then pushed, every piston in his body firing at once.
Tokoyami's heel bit the paint. The next inch wasn't his to keep.
BZZT—OUT.
Midnight's crop sliced the air. "Winner—Iida Tenya!"
The crowd's roar hit like warm rain. Iida stood panting, chest heaving, engines ticking hot. He bowed deeply. Tokoyami bowed back, as if the ring were a shrine and this was the only way to leave it.
"You moved like intention itself," Tokoyami said, voice low.
Iida flushed. "You forced me to re-evaluate every stride."
Dark Shadow peered around Tokoyami's shoulder, eyes bright and curious. "Fast," it observed, and then folded into his back like a tide rolling home.
Harry clapped once, a soft, precise sound. "Clean," he said. Kaminari made a strangled noise. "My man just drifted a living shadow around a corner. I need a nap."
The bracket above them re-laced its lines. Iida's name slid forward to meet Todoroki's.
Present Mic recovered enough oxygen to bellow, "GIVE IT UP FOR STRATEGY AND SPEED! But don't sit down yet, folks—we've got a powder keg next! Tactical brilliance meets detonation! YAOYOROZU MOOOMO… versus BAKUGO KATSUKI!"
A low rumble ran through the stadium—cheers, groans, a few nervous laughs. Momo rubbed the heel of her hand along her jaw once as she stepped into the light, expression clear, posture threaded with steel. Bakugo rolled his shoulders, chin lifted, walking with the easy, predatory balance of someone who believed in only one problem and only one kind of solution.
"Don't count her out," Harry said, almost to himself. "If she can build under pressure, she can take the match back."
"Yeah," Ochako said, twisting a wrapper between her fingers. "If."
Midnight held the moment taut, eyes slicing to each competitor in turn. "Begin!"
Bakugo moved first—with him, it was always first. A blast took him off the ground; the air cracked and pushed against itself. He shot across the ring at an angle that made sense only to someone who thought in three dimensions all the time.
Momo's first carbon shield came up so fast it seemed to appear out of air—and shattered under the close-range explosion. The impact knocked her sideways; she rolled, thumb already pressed to skin, pulling a smoke emitter, a flash unit, a foam canister from under her arm in three motion-blurred gestures.
The flash went off like a camera the size of a house. Bakugo flinched away—half a second, maybe less. The smoke frothed up and out, swallowing his silhouette. Momo didn't run. She knelt behind the haze and built.
"YES! BUY THAT TIME!" Mic howled. "IT'S A CRAFTY COUNTERBUILD!"
Aizawa's mouth flattened. "She's still too slow."
Momo's hands didn't stop. Carbon knit under her palms into reinforced struts; a capture net spilled out and clicked into launching brackets she locked against the tile. She tossed the foam in front of the launcher, set three micro-snares in a triangle pattern, and then—breath even, jaw tight—stood.
The smoke rippled. Bakugo blew through it like a bullet. His boots splashed into foam and sank. He didn't hesitate. Palm down—BOOM—the blast blew a crater under his feet and vaporized the gel around his ankles. The rebound threw him up and back; he twisted midair, reoriented, and fired at the capture net just as Momo swept the lever.
The net snapped wide, metal links hissing. Bakugo twisted again, a fractional turn that made the links scrape his jacket and slide off his shoulder. The blast he threw at the tile behind Momo didn't touch her—he wasn't aiming to. It blew the ground aside and created a slope under her footing.
She slid. He followed the angle.
Harry tracked the lines without realizing his body had leaned to match them. "He's denying her surfaces," he said. "He knows she needs stability to create cleanly."
Momo planted a talon of carbon under her heel, turned the slide into a pivot, and fired a second net—higher, cutting across Bakugo's approach as if he'd been standing where she wanted him. He wasn't. He blasted off the slope he'd made and got above the net a heartbeat before it would have folded him. Her eyes flicked up. Her hands moved again.
Foam grenade. Stun flash. A long rod forming along her forearm—conductive baton. She finished it as Bakugo dropped out of his arc.
They met in a crack of light and noise. The baton touched his bracer; the discharge stung and jumped. He snarled, struck the tile beside her again, and the concussive wave kicked the baton out of her grip. He fired into the ground at her left foot. She was already stepping right as the blast blossomed, using the push to throw herself into a roll, coming up behind a fresh carbon panel that began to buckle under the heat and shock.
The stadium's sound climbed—a ladder of voices, rung by rung. Momo's breath stayed even; the only tell was the way she pressed her mouth flatter between actions, compressing indecision into the smallest possible space so it couldn't expand and take the room it wanted.
"COME ON," Kaminari groaned, clutching the rail. "Lock him down—lock him down—"
Bakugo didn't wait for locks. He treated every surface like a spring, every explosion like punctuation, every approach like a line he would write over your paragraph. He cut around the panel as it cracked and threw a low blast that splintered her next build before it could set. She launched a mini-cannon anyway, a narrow-bore contraption that fired a tethered clamp with enough force to dent a car door. He saw it half a breath before it fired and used a palm-pop to shove himself six inches sideways. The clamp punched empty air and smacked the tile with the ugly sound of metal meeting stone at a bad angle.
"Too slow," he said—not a gloat, a sentence carved from fact.
"Reset!" Momo told herself, quiet, firm. Her hands found the rhythm again, went to work.
Harry watched for margin. There, when she sacrificed thickness for speed; there, when she used simpler shapes to force rhythm instead of finesse. She was adapting under a kind of pressure that made most people smaller. The problem wasn't her intelligence; it was the time the world allowed her to show it.
Bakugo bent that time until it shouted. He exploded straight up and came down behind her, palms pointed away to keep the blast from burning her but close enough that the concussive force slapped the panel into her shoulder and shoved her forward two steps. She tried to anchor herself with a carbon spike. He blew the tile next to the spike and the anchor had nothing to bite. Momentum kept its promise. The line came. Her heel kissed the white.
BZZT—OUT.
Midnight cut the air. "Winner—Bakugo Katsuki!"
The roar that followed wasn't clean cheering; it was a churn of noise that carried admiration, frustration, even a little grief at watching a plan almost become a structure and then collapse under weather no blueprint could account for. Bakugo lowered his hands and let the sound go through him like wind. No posing, no salute. Just a breath, a roll of his wrists, and a look back at the crack his last blast had made, as if judging whether he could have gotten more out of it.
Momo sat up, winced once at the welt blooming along her upper arm, and sighed like someone finishing a difficult equation. She stood, brushed carbon dust from her thigh, and bowed. "Thank you for the lesson," she said softly, more to the match than to him.
Bakugo's eyes flicked to her for a second. "Make it faster," he said, and walked off.
Present Mic recovered enough to boom, "WHAT A BOUT! YAOMOMO WITH THE BRAINS, BAKUGO WITH THE BOOMS! TACTICS VERSUS TEMPO—AND TODAY TEMPO TAKES IT!"
Aizawa, almost inaudible under the noise: "Both viable pros. Different problems to solve."
The bracket stitched new lines across the sky.
IIDA TENYA → SHOTO TODOROKIHARRY POTTER → KATSUKI BAKUGO
The student section hummed. Conversations braided and separated. Kaminari speculated about blast radius; Jiro poked holes in his math with a pencil and a smirk. Sero argued that Momo should have doubled the foam; Momo, two rows down, listened, eyes narrowed in thought, and made a note on the back of her hand.
Harry rolled his wrist once, feeling the ring's warmth settle against bone. Ochako nudged him with her elbow. "You okay?"
"Mostly," he said.
"Mostly?"
He watched Bakugo across the floor, the lean set of him, the way his weight always looked ready to move toward or away from force without asking permission. "He breaks patterns for a living. I tend to build them."
Ochako smiled crookedly. "So break one and then build another on top of him."
He huffed a laugh through his nose. "That's the general idea."
Down at the tunnel mouth, Bakugo turned his head and caught Harry's eye the way magnets notice each other. He didn't flash teeth. He didn't need to. He lifted his chin half an inch, a dare and a promise, and then vanished into the corridor, hands in his pockets like he'd been bored the whole time.
"Iida versus Todoroki!" Present Mic hollered, voice spiraling up again as crews swapped scorched tiles and a medic checked Momo's shoulder. "SPEED AGAINST THE STATIONARY STORM! FOLLOWED BY A MATCH WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR—THE MAGICIAN VERSUS THE HOWITZER!"
"Don't say howitzer," Aizawa said flatly. "We're trying to avoid paperwork."
The crowd laughed because it was safer than thinking this might actually be dangerous. The air changed. The sun slid lower, striping the ring with long shadows. The stadium lights hummed as they ramped up—pale, clean, indifferent.
Harry straightened the folds of his robe so they wouldn't catch on his calves, more ritual than practical. He checked the lie of his satchel out of habit and because it calmed the part of his brain that took attendance before every risk. He thought of fog and flash, rope and wind. Of how much could be avoided if you saw the shape of the thing before it arrived. Of how often explosions had opinions about that.
Iida reappeared in their row, freshly cooled, a water bottle in hand and posture still ruler-straight despite the bruises he was trying not to favor. "Yaoyorozu's courage was exemplary," he said, earnest even through the adrenaline's fade. "I shall endeavor to honor the same standard."
"You will," Harry said.
Iida nodded, then looked at the board and swallowed. "So will you."
Harry's fingers flexed once, the ring whispering warmth across knuckle and tendon. "We'll find out."
Below, the judges took their seats again, notes ready. Recovery Girl settled, lips pursed, eyes already counting the number of students who would pretend they didn't need to see her afterward. Cementoss stretched a hand and smoothed a hairline fracture you wouldn't have noticed from the stands but that his quirk couldn't ignore.