Chapter 37: Banquet of Darkness!

Day two started at five again.

They went at it like they did on day one. Then came evening, and the kitchen, and the discovery that the strongest freshman class in Japan could not cook.

"It's curry," Kendo said, apron on, sleeves rolled. "Rice, vegetables, roux. Children make this. We can make curry."

They could not, at first, make curry.

Tetsutetsu was banned from the fire before the fire was even lit, by unanimous pre-vote, and stood at the vegetable table instead, snapping carrots in half with his bare hands and calling it prep. Kamakiri offered his arm blades for the dicing and was refused on hygiene grounds by five people at once, and sulked, and then was quietly overruled by Kendo who decided a blade was a blade if you washed it, and Kamakiri diced an onion into perfection in four seconds and was insufferable about it for the rest of the night. Bondo hovered at the edge of the kitchen with his huge hands half-raised, wanting to help, terrified of what a stray drop of Cemedine would do to a stew, until Kendo put him on rice-washing, water only, and he washed rice with Plus Ultra levels of care.

"I could add mushrooms!" Komori offered, appearing at the pot with a double handful of something she had absolutely grown herself.

"NO!" said the kitchen.

"They're edible! I promise! I wouldn't accidentally poison my friends! Come on, give me a little credit!"

"NO!"

Shishida turned out to be the real weapon, tasting and adjusting, and between him and Kendo the pots slowly came under command. Awase welded a wobbly table leg solid without being asked and announced he had contributed the most important thing, structure. Shiozaki said grace over the vegetables while they were still raw, to get ahead of it and without any smart comments. Tokage stole pieces of carrot with detached hands from across the room until Kendo threatened to put the hands in the curry.

And at the tomato crate, Kodai had been assigned tomatoes and was slicing them, and had, without visible movement, eaten roughly one tomato in slices for every tomato that reached the pot. Vlad King, passing on patrol, stopped. Looked at the crate. Looked at Kodai. Took one tomato off the top, ate it in two bites like an apple, and walked on without a word.

Kodai watched him go.

"Mm." She said, with profound respect, and returned to her work.

Manga was useless in a kitchen and knew it, so he'd taken over the job of morale, parking himself on a stool with his ruined voice and holding up his bubble as a scoreboard, drawing running commentary: a little chef's hat over whoever was doing well, a skull over Tetsutetsu's carrot massacre, a slow-loading bar labeled HUNGER at a rising percentage that had half the kitchen checking it compulsively. When the first pot finally came together and the smell rolled out over the camp, real curry, actual food, made by their own hands, his bubble put up fireworks.

They ate like they'd earned it.

"It's better than the Pussycats'." Tetsutetsu declared, on his third bowl, with his mouth full.

"Let's not be telling lies now." Honenuki said, on his second.

"It's ours, though."

"...It is ours, though." Honenuki allowed.

…

Komori and Tsuburaba found out about the rest of their evening when the plates were cleared and Vlad King appeared behind their seats like a weather system.

"You two," he said. "With me."

"...Us two?" Tsuburaba said with fright in his voice.

"Camp was the deal. Did you think I forgot?" Vlad's grin showed the lower canines, and there was nothing cold in it, which was somehow worse. "Failed the practical, remedial training at camp, harder than anything the others do. I keep my promises. Let's go."

The class watched them get marched off into the dark as two prisoners of war, Komori and Tsuburaba cried for help, and the class offered them the deep and sincere sympathy of teenagers who were extremely glad it wasn't them.

…

Day three broke them down and built them back the same as the days before, and by the time evening came, the whole camp had earned its dinner twice over, both classes, forty exhausted kids and the smell of two rival foods on the evening air.

Which was when Pixie-Bob climbed onto a rock with her paws cupped around her mouth and lit the fuse on the night.

"Mew mew mew, LISTEN UP, kittens! Bellies full? Plates clean? Good! Because your reward for all this intense training is some intense FUN!" Her grin went wide and wicked under the visor. "Tonight, both classes go head to head. A TEST! OF! COURAGE!"

The camp erupted. Cheers, groans, one long theatrical wail from somewhere in 1-A.

"Here's the game!" Pixie-Bob paced the rock like a game-show host. "One class walks the forest trail in pairs. The other class hides along it, and their whole job is to scare the walkers out of their skins. Quirks allowed for the scarers, in fact, encouraged, get CREATIVE, but no direct contact, startle only! There are name cards at the halfway point; grab yours to prove you made it, and come back. Whichever class makes the other wet their pants more, wins!"

"Please don't say it like that." someone from 1-A said faintly.

"And," Pixie-Bob sang over them, producing a coin, "by luck of the draw... Class B is on the offensive first!"

Class B cheered.

It was far better to scare people than be scared.

"Sorry to break it to you," came Aizawa's voice, flat as ever, as he appeared at the edge of the firelight with a folder under his arm, "remedial group. You've got your extra lessons with me now."

Five members of Class A wailed into the night escorted away by Aizawa and his capture tool.

The scarers melted into the Beast's Forest as full dark came down, and Class 1-A lined up at the trailhead, drawing lots by lantern light, and Mandalay's voice arrived in every skull at once with the rules.

…

The first pair made it two hundred meters.

Jiro and Hagakure were doing fine, nervous, giggling, holding their lantern high, right up until the forest went silent. The insects stopped. The wind stopped. Their own footsteps stopped making sound, and both of them looked down at their own feet crunching soundlessly on dead leaves, and the wrongness of it crawled up their spines. Jiro had it worst; a girl whose whole quirk was hearing plugged an earphone jack into the ground on reflex and got nothing, no heartbeat, no forest, no world, it was like they were disconnected from reality. Somewhere off the trail, wrapped in a shiin field he'd hung on a branch like a lantern of anti-sound, Manga watched their faces go through the whole journey from confusion to horror, and his bubble, floating disembodied in the black where he'd let only it catch the moonlight, slowly drew a single wide unblinking eye.

The screaming, when the silence let it back in, was ear-aching. Hagakure's lantern was later found forty meters from the trail.

…

Deeper in, the second pair, Aoyama and Mineta, already clinging to each other before anything had happened to them, met Yanagi's stretch of trail, where the forest floor had come alive: sticks and stones drifting up around them in a slow orbit, a child's toy pinwheel, produced from who knew where, turning gently in windless air at eye level, and then every floating object stopping at once, in perfect stillness, aimed at them.

Mineta's scream hit a register that could probably win an award. Aoyama, to his credit, fainted with elegance.

…

The third pair got Tokage, and Tokage had spent all day thinking about it. Midoriya and Uraraka came up her stretch side by side, Uraraka chanting something about ghosts not being real. A hand walked across the path on its fingers, unhurried, like it had somewhere to be. Midoriya froze. A quarter of a face, one eye and a curl of hair, rose slowly from behind a log to watch them pass. And then, from directly above, in the branches, a jaw, just a jaw, whispering down at them in a voice that came from nowhere and everywhere: "you're almost halfway."

Both walkers set land-speed records.

…

And Kuroiro ruled the whole night, present everywhere and located nowhere, a voice out of the shadow directly beside an ear, a white grin surfacing in the dark of a hollow tree, a patch of night detaching itself from the night. He had waited his whole life for a sanctioned occasion, and he conducted himself with the joy of a man who never knew true freedom until now.

By the sixth pair, Class A's screams had achieved a rhythm the scarers could set their watches by, and the 1-B kids drifting back from completed ambushes to reset were exchanging giggles and handshakes in the dark.

There were holdouts, of course. Todoroki and Bakugo drew each other, and walked the entire gauntlet side by side in flat silence. Kodai got them. She'd worked out something with Honenuki before the walk, and executed it without a word: a stretch of path softened to soup under their feet, and Kodai herself, standing in it, sunk to the chin, motionless, just a pale face on the surface of the trail, eyes open, watching them approach.

Todoroki and Bakugo stopped. Looked down at the face in the ground.

‘Ah,' they said, and stopped.

On the ridge above the valley, ten figures stood in the dark and watched the little screams rise out of the forest like sparks.

"Listen to them," said the one wrapped in a patchwork of burnt skin and staples, and his voice had no more heat in it than a dead fire. "Playing monsters. They've got no idea the real ones showed up early."

"Can we go down NOW?!" said the hooded one, and there was a wet clicking from inside the hood. "My blood's up. It's been up for an HOUR!"

"Not yet." Dabi didn't turn around. "We wait for the signal. All ten, all in position, all at once. Our shadowy orchestrator went to a lot of trouble planning this. We're not going to ruin it because you got itchy."

"I'm just SAYING!"

"Just shut up."

Below them the forest glittered with lantern light and terror, and a girl in a schoolgirl's cardigan crouched at the lip of the ridge with her chin in her hands, watching it all with wide, shining, delighted eyes.

"They're having so much fun down there." Toga sang, softly. "Look at them. It's so cute I could die." Her eyes tracked the trail, and found, in a shaft of moonlight far below, a small floating shape drawing a dripping grin for two screaming teenagers. She made a high, happy noise. "THERE he is! The bubble! Oh, he's even weirder in person."

"That," said the big one, "is the one I get to break?"

"That's the job." Dabi's dead eyes settled on the distant glowing shape, the most famous first-year in Japan, the boy from the festival, the boy from the broadcast, the boy on the merchandise, the boy the whole country had already half-crowned. "U.A. put a crown on a fifteen-year-old and everyone sees him as the future. The next symbol, growing up right on schedule, so that when the old one finally rots, the sheep have something new to feel safe about." He turned his head and spat. "So we take the future away from them. In their own camp. On their own mountain. Every promising little hero we put down tonight is a hole in tomorrow, and the bubble kid is the biggest hole of all. Kill the next number one before he happens."

"And if he doesn't die easily?" the lizard-faced one asked, hand resting on the hilt across his back.

"It doesn't matter." Dabi grinned. "They already lost one from the Hero Killer. That’s more than enough. Tomorrow morning every parent in Japan looks at U.A. and sees a school that buried one child in June and couldn't protect its golden one in July, on its own ground. All Might's precious next generation, burned in the cradle. Let's see the Symbol of Peace smile through that press conference." He flexed his scarred fingers. "Their reputation dies tonight even if nobody does. Everything else is bonus."

"Three samples," Toga reminded the dark, cheerfully, holding up her little machine and giving it a shake. "I'm shopping for three. Ooh, maybe the lizard girl. Did you see her festival thing? So romantic. I bet her blood is-"

"Positions." Dabi said.

They melted off the ridge one by one, dispersing into the treeline above a forest full of children playing at fear, and Dabi stood alone a moment longer, looking down at the far little lights, at the screams that were still, for a few more minutes, the fun kind.

"This'll just be a signal fire." he said, to no one.

The blue flame left his hand almost gently.

And on the far edge of the Beast's Forest, out where no lantern reached, the first tree began to burn.