The sun had drifted low enough to gild the arena, turning the chalk-white boundary line around the open ring into a halo. The air tasted faintly of smoke and cold—leftovers from the fights that had burned through the afternoon. Repair drones clicked away, smoothing cracked tiles, and the stadium's noise settled into a living hum that vibrated through railings and ribs.
Two names pulsed on the board. Third place.
IIDA TENYAvs.HARRY POTTER
Present Mic's voice pitched up like a trumpet. "YOUR BRONZE-BATTLE SHOWDOWN! HORSEPOWER MEETS HOCUS POCUS—THE ENGINE VS. THE MAGICIAN!"
Aizawa, flat as ever from the staff row: "Open ring. No cover. If Potter wants control, he'll have to build it himself."
Harry rolled his wrist once. The ring on his finger warmed, a quiet answer. He stepped onto the tile, robe light against his calves—the Feather-Lite enchantment making the fabric move like it had a mind to float. Across the ring, Iida bowed with impeccable form, mufflers at his calves venting in polite puffs. He looked exactly like the kind of person who apologized to a starting gun for making it wait.
Midnight lifted her crop. "Begin!"
Iida vanished.
The engines on his legs screamed, kicking wind that grabbed the dust and hauled it into Harry's face before the sound caught up. Harry's body moved before the thought did: one sliding step with Lightweight already in his robe. He didn't jump; he glided, letting the tile skim under his boots, shoulders turning just enough for the first pass to miss.
Iida's wake tugged the robe's hem. The boundary line circled them like a promise.
Harry flicked a card. Gale slammed across the ring in a flat palm of air, but Iida had already corrected—hips, then shoulders, then ankles—compensating for the push with a burst that kept him upright and fast. He traced a blue arc around Harry, the path tight enough to feel personal.
"LOOK AT THAT ACCELERATION!" Mic shouted. "POTTER'S DODGING BY A HAIR—NO, BY A FEATHER!"
"He's not trying to match speed," Aizawa said. "He's reading rhythm."
Iida cut in, heels biting, leaving crescent scuffs. Harry slid away on the robe's built-in lightness, angle of his foot changing the grain of the glide. The open ring gave no angles to hide behind—the only geometry was movement. He raised Aegis in time to let debris ping off harmlessly when Iida's next shift cracked a tile.
Single shots won't land, Harry thought, feeling the ring's heat steady under his skin. Stop aiming at the arrow. Shape the wind.
Iida dipped his head, visor flashing. "Apologies, Potter! I intend to be swift!"
He was.
He came in a stuttered S-curve designed to yank eyes off prediction and onto panic. Harry put a card to the tile as the first step fell.
Slippery Field.
The sheen spread invisible and immediate, a slick skin on the ring. Iida's lead foot hit it at full burst. His balance—perfect until now—stuttered for a bare heartbeat. He didn't fall; engine and instinct aligned, and he corrected with a brutal step that made the tile bark. But the correction cost him half a beat, and the open ring was a metronome that didn't forgive time thieves.
Harry took the space like a breath. Another gliding sidestep, the robe answering with a feathered lift. He set Aegis to catch the spatter kicked up by Iida's recovery burst and let grit skitter past.
The crowd laughed and cheered in the same sound: delighted at physics being politely bullied.
Iida straightened mid-arc, chin up, flushed with effort and a grin you couldn't fake. "Impressive, Potter! You constrain the field without barriers!"
"Trying," Harry said, flipping a card between his fingers, feeling the stored spell like a hum. "Let's try something ruder."
He opened his hand and made the ring a fan.
Bind cards—one, two, three—left his fingers in quick arcs that burned faint violet. Then four more. Then three behind those, thrown not at Iida but into the spaces his speed loved to eat. The open ring filled with quiet traps, as if someone had drawn a constellation onto the tile.
Mic's voice flipped into glee. "HE'S THROWING A WHOLE DECK! IS THIS—IS THIS MAGIC CARPET MINESWEEPER? THAT'S NOT A REAL THING BUT IT IS NOW!"
Aizawa's eyebrow ticked. "Area denial. Crude. Effective."
Iida burst through the first line. The initial Bind missed by a whisper. The second grazed his sleeve, light-snare flickering and snapping as his engines tore against it. He didn't slow; the effort showed only in the jump of a tendons along his neck. The third missed when he cut harder than human ankles should forgive, the Feather-Lite robe tugging Harry's senses sideways as he slid, adjusting his own position to keep the line of the Bind storm between them.
Harry threw more. He wasn't aiming to hit; he was carpeting the ring.
Iida planted, vents flaring. "RECIPRO—!"
"Brace," Harry whispered.
"—BURST!"
The engines went from howl to something that made the air sweet with metal. Iida became a blue-white slash. Binds snapped one after another, glass threads breaking, light stuttering. The ring of the open arena blurred around him, a horizon looped into a bracelet. The crowd rose in a wave, the stadium's humming spine pitching up to match him.
Harry adjusted his grip on the world. Lightweight made the floor kind to his feet; Lift kept his center of gravity where he asked. He flicked three more Bind cards not to intercept but to predict—the place between steps, the fraction between bursts, the half-breath where engines complete a cycle.
The first caught Iida's trailing calf for nothing but a stutter. The second caught an elbow and died with it. The third didn't catch at all—until the lingering sheen of Slippery pulled a heel a centimeter wider than intention.
The fourth Bind seized his knee. The fifth took his far wrist, flicker-flicker-click around tendon and fabric. The sixth wrapped his waist. Iida wrenched, engine blasting, shredding two of them, but three more slapped on during the correction. Harry didn't stop. Bind, bind, bind—a storm of restraint threading itself across lanes until Iida's sprint became a tug-of-war against ten invisible hands.
Iida stumbled, righted, stumbled again, spun, and went down near the boundary line, a bright tangle in a ring meant for clean lines. He slid to a halt along that chalk-white edge, breath hard, bound like the world's most determined dumpling.
Silence lasted exactly one blink. Then the arena burst, laughter tangled with cheers. It wasn't mockery. It was relief and delight at a clever thing done cleanly, at a problem solved with nerve and nerve's friend, patience.
Present Mic almost fell out of the booth. "AND THAT'S A WRAP—NO REALLY, LOOK AT THAT! OUR CLASS REP JUST GOT TIE-DYED! WINNER—HARRY POTTER!"
Midnight put two fingers to her lips, whistled approval, and tried to stop grinning long enough to make it official. "Confirmed," she managed. "Winner, Harry Potter."
Harry jogged over, dropping to a knee near Iida's shoulder. The cords of light unraveled at a touch, reforming into cards that slid, blank again, into his palm. "Sorry," Harry said, cheeks flushed. "It looked less like bullying in my head."
Iida laughed, the sound half pant, half pride. "On the contrary! You identified the limitation of my speed—traction and path dependency—then neutralized it through area denial. Efficient. Admirable." He accepted Harry's hand up. "I must refine my countermeasures."
Harry snorted. "I must learn to stop when the dumpling looks done."
They shook hands the way people do when both of them know they'll remember it later. The crowd gave them a standing appreciation—a clean, warm sound that had less adrenaline in it and more respect.
From the staff row, Aizawa tugged his scarf up to hide the way his mouth wanted to turn. "He weaponized spam," he said.
"Beautifully!" Mic shouted. "AND NOW, FOLKS, THE FINAL! WE'VE GOT ICE IN THE VEINS AND DYNAMITE IN THE FISTS—TODOROKI SHOTO VERSUS BAKUGO KATSUKI!"
The open ring reset in a hurry, drones skittering, tiles sliding, the chalk boundary freshened to stark white. Wind worried the stadium flags; the light went from gold to a whiter blade as the sun slid lower.
Todoroki walked out as if the air were measurement. Bakugo walked like the floor was a dare.
They didn't nod. They didn't need to.
Midnight's crop snapped. "Begin!"
Bakugo ignited.
He didn't run; he detonated steps into being and rode them. The first blast vaulted him past the midpoint, the second angled him for a dive, the third hit the tile near Todoroki's left hip with concussive intent. Todoroki answered with ice. It arrived from beneath him and beyond him, a slab that made a wall that became a ramp that became a cage with no top.
The top didn't matter. Bakugo took it anyway, blasting up, then down, blowing holes where there hadn't been holes until there were. Shards rang off the boundary, skittered across chalk.
"USE YOUR FIRE!" he yelled through the steam.
Todoroki's right side glittered with frost. His breath came in white ribbons. He lifted his hand and the ring froze outward like a rumor given permission. Ice towers grew, low and wide, then higher, placing and replacing the world until movement for anyone else would have become a polite suggestion.
Bakugo laughed—a little raw, a little bright. He hit an angle and rode it. The detonation he planted in the corner of a slab sent him spinning around it like a coin trick, the next blast catching the momentum and turning it into an aerial whip that cracked down within arm's reach of Todoroki's shoulder.
The ice blocked. The block shattered. Todoroki slid two meters, boots carving clean lines that immediately iced over. He didn't look rattled. He looked… inward, a fraction. Like listening for something.
Harry, watching from the finalists' section, folded his arms. "He wants to win the right way," he said quietly. "Not the fastest way."
Iida—freed of binds, dignity intact—stood beside him, breathing quieter now. "He's at war with himself and still executing at that level. Remarkable."
"Infuriating," came a voice from the row behind. Kaminari, half-stood, buzzed with leftover electricity. "If I had that much power I'd—"
"Get electrocuted," Jiro said, deadpan.
On the ring, Bakugo kept coming. Steam blurred the edges of the world. The open arena amplified sound; each blast hit ribs like a knock. Todoroki's ice met them and met them and met them again. He never reached left. He never reached fire.
"COME ON!" Bakugo roared, voice ragged. He torqued a midair explosion and came down like punctuation, both palms angled so the blast hammered the tile beside Todoroki instead of his body. The shockwave took Todoroki's feet out from under him and sent him skidding toward the bright boundary. He caught the slide with a sheet of ice that rose as a brace, hissed under his weight, and held him a breath shy of out-of-bounds.
The next exchange decided it. Bakugo chained three detonations so fast the crowd heard them as one long burn. The ice wall in front of Todoroki shattered into a flying page of knives. Todoroki raised a new wall immediately; it arrived already cracking under the force chasing it. He stepped, placed, reinforced, and still the ring insisted on momentum.
He retreated not because he wanted to but because physics made a case. His boot kissed chalk. The line lit.
BZZT—OUT.
Midnight raised her arm into the steam. "Winner—Bakugo Katsuki!"
The stadium spun up into celebration on instinct, a roar of relief and thrill. It faltered a hair when it registered Bakugo's face. He stood, chest heaving, hands at his sides, eyes burning hot and furious—not at Todoroki, not at the ring.
"USE IT," he told the air under his breath, as if the match hadn't ended and he could still argue it into changing history. "USE ALL OF IT."
Todoroki pushed to his feet slowly. He glanced at his left hand like it might tell him something new if he stared long enough. It didn't. He bowed to the judges with distant courtesy and walked off, breath a thin cloud that dissolved before it knew itself.
The podiums came out under floodlights. Bronze. Silver. Gold.
Harry stepped onto the lower stand, the ring on his finger cool again, the robe's hem whispering against tile. The medal was cool, then warm. He felt the thread of weight change across his collarbones and let it happen.
Todoroki took silver, gaze turned inward, jaw set soft. Bakugo mounted the gold with a scowl that might have melted ice if he'd looked at it, medal hung around his neck like a question he refused to answer. He flexed his fingers once; the knuckles were scraped.
Present Mic's voice, at last, found the right volume. "YOUR FESTIVAL CHAMPIONS! BAKUGO KATSUKI, TODOROKI SHOTO, HARRY POTTER! If this is the future of heroics—folks, we're in for a show."
Applause rolled over them—not the frenzy of a fight but the steadier thing that stays. Banners flashed, confetti cannons snapped somewhere on delay. The open ring held the three of them in a triangle of light as the day slid toward evening.
Harry angled his head, found Midoriya in the stands with a lopsided grin and a sling and eyes that kept trying to memorize. Ochako cupped her hands and shouted something that got lost to the wind but looked like "You did it!" Iida, already recovered enough to start diagramming his own loss in the air, gave Harry a thumbs-up so sincere it hurt.
He let himself smile—small, not for show. His shoulders ached. His palm buzzed with the ring's memory. Somewhere under all of that, something else hummed: the part of him that hoarded ideas.
Lightweight and Lift saved my ankles. Slippery plus Bind solved speed. Cards need faster release under pressure. Remote timing tighter. Map drain minimal under heavy noise. And—
He cut the list off on purpose. There would be time to write it down when the stadium wasn't breathing at him.
Bakugo looked over then, just once. Their eyes met for a fraction. Gratitude wasn't the word. Respect wasn't either. It was something that knew both.
Harry nodded.
Bakugo looked away with a growl that might, later, be a laugh.
The anthem they played for the end of things was too grand and too short, as these anthems always are. When the platforms lowered and the ring went honest tile again, the students turned back into students—talking too loud, planning too much, exhausted and buzzing and full.