Chapter 38: Signal Fire!

The gas was the first sign of something wrong.

Sweet and thick, rolling through the trees like a living thing, and Honenuki, who was crouched in softened ground resetting his scare position, breathed it in before he knew what it was. His eyes went wide. His arms went slack. He dropped face-first into his own liquefied dirt and didn't move.

Beside him, Kendo saw him go down and her hand was over her mouth before the thought finished forming. The gas. Poison gas. She enlarged her hand and grabbed Kodai, her own lungs burning from the single half-breath she'd caught.

Across the forest, in pockets and clusters, the same thing was happening everywhere at once. The gas rolled in low and heavy, hugging the ground, filling every hollow, and the eighteen scarers of Class 1-B, spread out across the trail for maximum coverage. Kaibara dropped mid-step. Bondo went to his knees, drifting out of consciousness. Rin crumpled against a tree. Wherever the gas was thickest, kids fell, and wherever it was thinnest, kids ran, and nobody knew which direction was safe because the gas was everywhere and the dark was everywhere and the fun was over.

Then the fires started.

Blue, at the far edge of the forest, a line of flame climbing the trees with a sound like tearing paper, and the glow of it threw the gas clouds into sharp relief, rolling walls of purple-lit poison backlit by something that burned hotter than any natural fire had a right to.

In the clearing outside the forest, Tiger saw both at once, the gas and the glow, and he frowned.

"Ragdoll, how many are in the gas?" He asked.

Ragdoll's eyes were already wide and working, Search sweeping the forest, her pupils tracking things no one else could see. "Eleven down. Eleven students on the ground, some from each class. The rest are moving but they're scattered, they're panicking, Tiger, it's-"

"Villains." Tiger's voice was flat. "Contact Mandalay. Now."

Mandalay's voice arrived in every skull on the mountain at once.

Attention all students. We are under attack by villains. I repeat, the camp is under attack. Do not engage. Return to the lodge immediately. This is not a drill.

The message hit thirty-nine brains in thirty-nine different states of consciousness and terror, and what it produced was not calm. In the forest, kids who were already running ran harder, and kids who were carrying unconscious friends ran harder still, and the gas kept rolling and the blue fire kept climbing and the dark kept being dark.

In the lodge, Vlad King heard it and was on his feet before the last word landed. Komori and Tsuburaba, mid-training, looked at him with faces that had gone from exhausted to awake in a heartbeat.

"Inside. Both of you. Now. Do not leave this building." Vlad said.

"Sensei, we can fi-"

"INSIDE!"

They went inside. Vlad's blood was already moving under his skin, ready, and he stationed himself at the door.

In the forest, Kendo was carrying two people and trying to think.

Honenuki over one shoulder, dead weight, his face slack from the gas. Kodai under the other arm, conscious but fading, her breath coming in thin sips through Kendo's enlarged palm. The gas was everywhere. Kendo's own lungs were screaming. She'd taken one bad half-breath and the edges of her vision were going soft.

She heard footsteps. Coming fast. She turned, enlarged fist up, ready to swing at whatever was behind her.

Tetsutetsu burst out of the gas alone, wearing a mask. A gas mask, strapped tight over his jaw, fogging at the edges from his breathing. He had three more in his hands.

"KENDO!" He skidded to a stop. "Ran into one of Class A's kids, she made these. Here." He shoved the masks into her hands.

Kendo got hers on. Air. Real air. Her vision steadied. She fitted a mask to Kodai, who sucked in a breath and came back focused, and then knelt and strapped one over Honenuki's unconscious face, his breathing evening out almost immediately.

"Thanks! Let's get back to camp. No telling where the villains could be out here…" Kendo said.

"No! I'm gonna fight." Tetsutetsu's eyes were locked on the gas behind him. "You feel it too, right? Class A fought villains. We beat them at the Sports Festival but that was just a contest between us. They fought real life villains. We both passed the same test to get into U.A. We have the same curriculum. That villain attack at the school was nothing and I'm going to prove it! I'm going to turn this crisis into an opportunity. Heroes shouldn't be running from bad guys like this!" He told her. "So don't try to stop me, Kendo. I'm in Class 1-B of the Hero Course! If I don't stand up here, what's the point?! I'm gonna find these bastards and beat the crap out of them!" Metal started covering his skin.

"..." Kendo knew where he was coming from.

Even she felt the urge of heroism encouraging her to act. But truthfully, she knew that wasn't heroism. She just wanted to test her strength. Test her power against real villains like Class A did. Prove that their training with Fukidashi had meaning. Meaning in the real world.

Kendo looked at Kodai. Kodai looked back, steady behind her mask, already understanding.

"Stay with Honenuki. Keep low, stay upwind. If the gas shifts, move." Kendo set him down against the base of a tree in the thinning air. "We'll come back for you."

"Mm." Kodai crouched beside Honenuki and put a hand on his shoulder.

Then Kendo and Tetsutetsu turned and ran back into the gas.

Somewhere deeper in the forest, where the gas hung thickest and the blue glow hadn't reached, Kamakiri heard the screaming stop.

Kamakiri had formed blades over his nose and mouth.

A figure moved in the trees ahead.

“Pretty. So pretty. No. This is work. So alluring. But no. Can't... Pretty flesh. Gah! So enticing though... Gotta do the job.” 

A blade, white, long, curved, punched out of the dark between two trunks and buried itself in the tree six inches from Kamakiri's head. An enormous, sharpened, extending human tooth, still connected to something back in the shadows by a length of enamel that gleamed wet in the blue firelight.

More teeth followed. They came from every angle, extending out of the dark like the legs of some impossible spider, each one sharp enough to split wood, and Kamakiri threw himself sideways as three of them punched through the space he'd been standing in and buried themselves in the ground.

A figure hung in the web of teeth above the trail, suspended by his own enamel, a straitjacketed man with a mask over his face and eyes that caught the light wrong. He wasn't looking at Kamakiri. He was looking past him, at the ground, at something Kamakiri hadn't noticed yet.

A severed vine. One of Shiozaki's, cut clean off at the end where the gas had reached her before she'd retreated with the others. The villain was admiring it.

"Beautiful," Moonfish whispered, and his voice was wet and wrong. "The texture of it. Plant fiber. I want to taste it. I want to taste all of it."

Then his eyes found Kamakiri, and the admiration drained out of them, replaced by something that was only hunger.

"But you're in the way."

Six teeth extended at once.

Kamakiri's blades came out of his forearms, his shoulders, his shins, every edge he had, and the sound they made was the sound of a boy who'd been told his whole life that he looked like a villain finally meeting a real one and finding out what the difference was.

He cut the first tooth out of the air. It fell in two pieces, enamel ringing on stone, and Moonfish shrieked and fired six more.

Kamakiri rushed forward.

He was a blender for the villain’s attacks. His blades slashed, diced, and severed any tooth aiming for his body. As a man who’s been training both his blades and his body under increased gravity, it was a rip-tastic time for him. The young boy finally able to cut loose for the first time in a long time. Run, jump, spin, slice and dice, the villain’s blade-teeth were frail compared to Kamakiri’s blades.

More and more teeth pierced toward him the closer he came. Kamakiri slashed and sliced faster and faster. Shards of teeth flew from the impact, stabbing into the ground or into trees. Kamakiri gradually gained more and more ground as his arms waved rapidly.

“I’ll carve you apart!!!” Kamakiri shouted.

“Your flesh will be sweet!!!” He screeched.

Kamakiri broke through the sea of teeth and appeared in front of the villain. With a swing of a blade, Moonfish was nearly bisected in two if he didn’t rise to the sky with an extended tooth pushing him off the ground. 

As Kamakiri crushed the teeth he used to gain elevation, more and more teeth were approaching him from every angle. Kamakiri shouted as he spun with his blades flailing, protecting himself and destroying the attacks. A spiral whirlwind of sharpness. 

“Blade Tornado!” 

White shards surrounded him as he looked up and leaped into the sky with a grin on his face.

Several blades pierced toward his body as he formed a spiral blade slash once more. After smashing through the teeth, he realized he was floating in the air as Moonfish was suddenly on the ground now lurched at an unnatural angle with more teeth flying at him.

Kamakiri understood something. He may be strong enough to handle the villain’s attacks, but he was not anywhere near fast enough to lock him down.

“Shit…” Kamakiri slashed the teeth with blades forming out of most of his body before landing in a carved patch of ground. When he rushed toward Moonfish, Moonfish’s teeth were enough to push him out of the way of the attack at fast speeds. And they’d restart to the beginning once more.

Kamakiri was breathing hard. Fighting against someone who really didn’t care if you lived or died was a lot different from robots and classmates… It had to have only been three or four minutes of fighting but he feels like it's been hours. 

How exciting! Kamakiri thought to himself.

He wasn’t going to lose. He didn’t feel like he was going to lose. Just because he couldn’t close the distance now, didn’t mean the fight was over.

At least that’s how he felt until he realized the villain had his attention on someone he wasn’t even aware of now.

"SHIOZAKI! WATCH OUT!" he screamed.

Her quirk was the worse match-up for a guy with a quirk like this… Kamakiri sped toward her as her vines were getting shredded by this guy with ease. Just as a tooth was about to pierce through her praying hands and chest, Kamakiri’s blade shattered it.

Ibara Shiozaki’s vines hit the ground.

They drove straight down into the soil and vanished, and Moonfish didn't notice, because Moonfish was looking at Kamakiri, and Kamakiri was giving him plenty to look at.

“Blade Domain!”

Kamakiri cut a dome around himself. A defense. Every tooth that came within two meters of him met an edge, and the air filled with the sound of shearing enamel, and Kamakiri held the center of it with his body moving at full power and his eyes on the monster in front of him because he had to keep his friend alive. And a hero can not allow someone to be hurt in their presence if they can do something about it.

"You're annoying,!" Moonfish hissed, extending more teeth, faster, thicker. "Really annoying! So annoying! Devouring your flesh won’t even be sweet!"

Beneath the ground, Shiozaki's vines traveled.

They went deep. Under the root systems, under the rocks, through soil, forcing through packed earth, converging on the point where all the teeth originated.

Moonfish realized it a half second too late.

The ground beneath him erupted.

Vines, dozens of them, burst upward through the soil and wrapped him. His legs first, then his torso, then his arms inside the straitjacket, the vines twisting around his entire body. Moonfish thrashed. His teeth grew, pressing against the vines, and the vines tightened and layered themselves, over and over and over.

The thorns won. They'd grown under doubled gravity for months. They were harder than they had any right to be.

Moonfish hung in the air, suspended now by vines instead of teeth, every limb bound, every tooth pinned, wrapped completely, a mummy of thorns in the dark forest.

He screamed a muffled scream before the vines silenced those as well.

“And I thought I was scary.” Kamakiri snarked.

“I’m not scary, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t suggest such.” Shiozaki turned her head, slightly offended.

“Probably even scarier than me.” He added.

They walked away, carrying a homicidal villain in front of them.

Mandalay's second message hit every mind on the mountain like a bell.

All students. By order of Eraserhead, you are authorized for combat. I repeat, you are authorized to fight. Defend yourselves and each other. This is a direct order from your teacher.

In the forest, in the gas, in the dark, the message changed everything. Kids who had been running stopped running. Kids who had been hiding stopped hiding. The authorization wasn't permission to be heroes. It was permission to survive.

“Hear that, Kendo?! We’re allowed to kick some ass!” Tetsutetsu was running through the smoke.

“I said wait, Tetsutetsu! Don’t you understand?! This gas is-”

“Bad news. Yeah, I know, I’m not an idiot.” 

“You are an idiot!” Kendo corrected him. “Mandalay didn’t mention the gas at all. That means it hasn’t spread within view of the clearing. It’s just weird. The gas seems to be flowing in a set direction. Normally, it would just disperse and fade. Take a look! The gas is thicker here than where we started.” Kendo pointed behind them.

“So… What’re you saying?!” Tetsutetsu asked.

“I think it’s swirling around some sort of origin point. Like a typhoon.” She gestured with her hands. “That means there must be someone in the middle who’s shooting out and controlling the gas!” Kendo figured.

“Kendo, you’re a genius!” Tetsutetsu exclaimed.

“Then why am I the one following you…? Geez…” She sighed. “Alright then! If the gas gets thicker as we head toward the center, then we’re up against the clock. Because the filters in these gas masks can only do so much. The thicker the gas, the less time they’ll support our breathing.”

“In that case, we’d better make a mad dash for the center! And we get to kick some ass, right?!”

“Yeah, I guess…” She hid her own excitement.

“This damn gas is causing trouble for the others! I don’t like it. It pisses me off! Let’s freaking do this!!! Kendo!!!” Tetsutetsu roared.

Such a one-track mind… I can’t say I dislike that about him… Kendo thought with admiration

Coming right for me. Three… No, two perhaps. Someone must have caught on and started charging in. I’d expect no less from an elite school. Mustard reached into his school uniform. “But unfortunately for them…

He pulled out a gun.

“No matter how great their quirks…” 

“I FOUND YOU!!!” Tetsutetsu came bursting out of the gas.

Mustard fired.

“They’re only human.”

BLAM!!!

Tetsutetsu was not affected by the bullet. His forehead smashed into Mustard’s helmet. Mustard cried out in pain as he was smashed into the ground. It was over in seconds.

The gas began to thin. All of it. Everywhere. Without Mustard's concentration sustaining it, the poison started dispersing into the night air, the purple clouds fading, the forest slowly, painfully, beginning to breathe again.

“That’s what you get for busting up our training camp, you little brat. The Class B Special!” Tetsutetsu made up a handsign toward the downed boy.

“What are you doing…?” Kendo looked down at the surprisingly young villain.

“Come on, make the signs. It’s our class’s sign. I just made it up.” Tetsutetsu said.

Kendo sighed before forming the symbol that stood for Class B. Both hands as if they were putting up the number four.

In the deep forest where the blue fire hadn't reached, where the gas was thinning now but the dark remained, Setsuna Tokage was alone.

She'd been a scarer, positioned along the trail's sixth stretch, and when the gas rolled in she'd done the smart thing: she'd split. Literally. She'd come apart into pieces and scattered them high, above the gas line, floating her core and her vitals in the branches while the poison rolled beneath.

What she hadn't expected was the voice.

"Oh, I found one!"

It came from below. From the trail. From a girl in a schoolgirl's cardigan who was walking through the poison gas like it was a spring breeze, a mask over her mouth, a knife in her hand, and wide shining eyes that tracked the floating pieces in the branches the way a cat tracks a moth.

"I saw you at the festival," Toga sang, stepping over an unconscious 1-A student without looking down. "The confession. On TV. SO romantic. I watched it so many times!"

Setsuna reassembled. Fast, pieces dropping out of the trees and clicking together.

"Who are you?" Setsuna questioned, this wasn’t some girl from Class A.

"I’m Toga! I wanted some blood but you were so quick! Getting no blood is no fun. Usually, with a good wound I can suck it all out. Slurp, slurp, you know? With this machine, a little cut’s all I need to drain you dry. Makes my job sooo easy. So I’m gonna stab you." She lunged as soon as she said that.

She was faster than she expected from a girl who looked her age. The blade came in low, aimed at the thigh, and Setsuna twisted sideways and the knife caught her across the forearm. Shallow. A line of red that stung like a paper cut and then worse.

"Oh," Toga breathed, looking at the blood on the blade. "Oh, it's sweet."

Setsuna didn't give her time to enjoy it. She kicked, her leg connecting with Toga's wrist. The knife stayed in Toga's hand but the angle broke, the follow-up stab going wide, and Setsuna backed up three steps and put a tree between them.

"Your boyfriend!" Toga popped around the tree, knife first. "He’s not really my type, you see. Usually the people whose blood I want I'm in love with or want to be in love with, but your boyfriend is no fun at all. Even if I drink your blood, you don’t have to worry. I won’t try and steal your boyfriend. He’s totally not my type at all."

Setsuna ducked the swipe and threw a punch that Toga slipped under like water, the girl flowing around the fist with amazing flexibility.

Toga's knife came back at a speed she couldn’t dodge. Aimed at Setsuna's stomach.

And Setsuna's body did something her brain didn't plan.

The fear hit first. The deep lizard-brain kind, the part of her that had survived a hundred million years by knowing when something dangerous was coming and the body couldn't dodge in time. Her quirk fired on instinct.

Her torso split at the point of contact.

The knife passed through empty air where her midsection had been a tenth of a second ago, the two halves of her body separating cleanly around the blade, and the separated piece, her right side, her right arm, her right fist, was already swinging, carried by the momentum of the split, a full-force hook that caught Toga across the cheekbone with the weight of a girl who'd trained under doubled gravity for months.

Toga's head snapped sideways. Her feet left the ground. She hit the tree Setsuna had been hiding behind and went down.

Silence.

Setsuna's body reconnected. The seam sealed. She stood there, shaking, staring at her own fist, at the girl on the ground, at the place where her body had been in two pieces a second ago with a knife between them.

"Haha… I just learned a new technique to kick my boyfriend’s ass, thanks to you!" She cheered.

Toga got up.

She got up grinning, blood running from her split lip, her cheek already swelling, and she looked at Setsuna with an expression of pure, terrifying delight.

“I love tattered guys reeking of blood. That’s why I always carve people up in the end. But your boyfriend is never like that. He’s too strong. He’s boring. A total snoozefest, you know what I mean?” She smiled. "But I already got what I needed." Toga held up the knife. The blood from the forearm cut, the first one, the shallow one, was still on the blade. She touched it to the little machine at her hip and something clicked and whirred and stored. "However, I can always love a good romance!"

She heard something. Footsteps, coming through the thinning gas, and Toga's head turned, and the delight in her eyes dimmed into something that was, for just a second, professional.

"Too many," she said. "I don't want to die today." She looked at Setsuna one more time. "See you next time, lover girl.” She blew a kiss with a bloody hand.

And she was gone. Into the trees, into the dark, into the night, and Setsuna stood in the clearing alone confused.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going, lunatic?!” Setsuna rushed after her, ignoring the person behind her.

“Tokage!!!” Shoda shouted after her. “We don’t chase villains as heroes-in-training…” He jogged after her.

The forest was breathing again, but it was still burning on the eastern edge, blue fire crawling through the trees.

Shishida ran on all fours through the thinning haze, the Beast's nose tracking scent through poison and smoke. Bondo. Behind the second ridgeline, face-down, pulse steady. He scooped the huge boy up like he weighed nothing and ran. Rin. Slumped against a tree, scales deployed as if he'd tried to fight the gas itself. Over the other shoulder.

Kuroiro moved through the shadows the gas couldn't fill, pulling people out of dark corners, emerging from tree-shadow to tree-shadow with an unconscious classmate in his arms each time. He found someone in a ditch and carried him three hundred meters to clean air without ever entering the gas, because the shadows didn't breathe.

Pony's horns launched, hooking the shirts and belts of downed students and dragging them upwind. She couldn't see them once the horns left her sight, but she could aim, and she did, and when a horn came back empty she fired another.

Yanagi floated the ones she could reach, one at a time, straining at her weight ceiling, the camp-trained extra kilos making the difference between dropping someone and getting them to safety. Each lift taxed her. She did it anyway.

At the trail entrance, Shiozaki received them, vine after vine reaching out to pull the arriving bodies into the clean air, wrapping them gentle as blankets, checking pulses with tendrils. Kendo arrived with Tetsutetsu and the unconscious Mustard clutched in one giant hand, and added both to the line, and stood up, and looked at the forest that was still burning.

"Where's Manga?" she said.

Nobody could answer.

He'd been running toward people all night.

That was the thing. Since the gas hit, since the fire started, since Mandalay's voice had arrived in his skull like a starter's pistol, Manga had been moving. His throat was gravel. Three days of training. A whole evening of scare-craft words. And now this. Every word cost him, and he was running out of them.

He was running when the forest around him suddenly turned blue.

The air itself ignited, a wall of blue flame that rose twenty feet on three sides of him in a single breath, cutting off every direction but one, and the heat hit him like opening an oven door with his face.

He threw himself backward. The fire closed the gap. He was in a box of blue flame, ten meters square, shrinking.

"I finally found you Fukidashi Manga. Numero uno on our list of kids to kill."

The voice came from the fire. Through it. Behind it. A figure standing in his own flames calmly, stapled skin and dead eyes and a mouth that pulled at its stitching in something that was not a smile.

"Smaller than I thought for the potential future #1." Dabi said. "The festival footage made you look taller and cooler. I guess TV does that."

Manga smiled despite the dangerous villain in front of him. A hero’s job was to make people smile. And how could a hero make people smile if they didn’t know how to smile themselves?

"You know," Dabi said, and the blue fire tightened by a meter. "Some people are already calling you the next All Might?" His head tilted. "I don't see it."

Dabi raised one hand, and the blue light gathered in his palm, and his dead eyes settled on the small dark shape in the center of his killing floor.

"Let's find out if the next number one burns like everyone else."

The flame left his hand.