Chapter Text
On paper, it was a routine end-of-week combat drill.
No villain attacks.
No surprise guests.
Just Class 1-A running a “capture the flag” scenario in Ground Beta with Present Mic yelling commentary into a microphone he absolutely did not need.
“ARE YOU READY, U-A-A-A?!” he boomed as the class assembled at the starting line.
“NO,” Aizawa said from the sidelines.
Mic grinned at him over the rim of his loudspeaker.
“That’s the spirit, Shouta!”
Up in the monitoring booth, Kuroda stood a polite distance from Nezu and a cluster of teachers, hands folded.
The Board’s consultant had expressed “interest” in seeing how UA handled non-crisis combat training.
Nezu had smiled and said, “Of course.”
He smiled now, sipping tea.
“Today’s exercise is simple,” he chirped. “Two teams, two flags, one battlefield. Standardized terrain. Limited surprises.”
Down below, Bakugou barked a laugh.
“Yeah right,” he muttered. “This school doesn’t know what ‘standard’ means.”
Kaminari shifted from foot to foot, feeling the field’s undercurrent.
No system assistance.
Just his own jittery wiring and the memory of the temple node’s clean air.
He flexed his fingers.
“Denki,” Jirou murmured, bumping his shoulder. “You good?”
“Define ‘good,’” he said.
Hagakure’s gloved hand patted his arm.
“Anti-Gaslight Squad has your back,” she whispered. “Just try not to turn yourself into a taser grenade.”
He snorted.
“I’ll put it on a sticky note,” he said.
Izuku, on Team A with Tsuyu, Todoroki, and half the class, ran through the scenario parameters in his head.
Capture the opposing team’s flag without injuring civilians (holograms, this time) or causing “unnecessary structural damage.”
He could already see the routes.
The chokepoints.
The places the system might try to tilt the scales.
Tsuyu’s voice brushed his mind, cool and steady.
“Kero,” she said. “I’m riding light today. Just local nodes. If something weird happens, we can pull. But Nezu and Tank need bandwidth for the Maze.”
The Maze.
UA Thorn Maze Node 1, as Tank had lovingly labeled it in their files.
A twisted path of decoy processes and corrupt data Nezu had woven around the archive Construct, like a ring of barbed wire around a treehouse.
Today was its first real test.
Nezu stole a glance at Kuroda.
The consultant studied the live feeds with polite focus.
He was exactly where Nezu wanted him: watching the obvious battlefield while something else stirred under the floor.
---
Kuroda didn’t need to sit at a terminal to touch UA’s systems.
His access was baked into the Board’s permissions.
Still, he’d found that human colleagues felt easier around him if he performed the rituals—mouse, keyboard, polite nods.
He typed now, opening an internal diagnostic console.
UA Network Map unfolded.
Cameras.
Training grounds.
Dorm [restricted].
Counseling suite.
One region pulsed differently.
Archives.
Low traffic.
Dusty.
Except for the occasional maintenance ping and a few odd spikes lately.
UNREGISTERED SUBNODE?
He’d flagged it after Hagakure’s sync error and Aizawa’s drill hiccup.
Every time something interesting happened, there were faint ripples in that area’s logs.
Nezu was careful.
Kuroda was persistent.
He created a small process.
No full Agent signature.
Just a probe.
A drone.
He gave it a simple directive:
> TRACE: SOURCE OF ANOMALOUS ROUTING IN ARCHIVE REGION.
DO NOT ALTER. OBSERVE ONLY.
The process slid into UA’s network like smoke.
Kuroda watched its path on a tiny second monitor, almost an afterthought next to the big Ground Beta feed.
Students took their positions.
Whistles blew.
The exercise began.
Kuroda smiled faintly.
It was good to multitask.
---
Beneath the school, in the archive room, the servers hummed.
Nezu watched his own internal monitor, tiny paws folded.
“That’s rude,” he tutted.
On the screen, a small glowing node wriggled toward the temple’s perimeter.
Tank whistled from the laptop.
“Here comes the bug,” he said. “Just like we predicted.”
Tsuyu’s presence rippled through the wires.
“Kero,” she said. “It feels… sharp. Not as heavy as an Agent, but it knows what it’s looking for.”
“Let’s not let it find it,” Nezu said pleasantly.
He toggled a switch.
The Thorn Maze came alive.
To the probe, the archive’s node map… blossomed.
Where there had been a single room, there were now corridors.
Subnodes.
Loops.
Each “door” led to three more.
The probe dipped into the first, following what seemed like a straightforward path toward the anomalous subnode.
At the end of the hall, it found…
A filing cabinet.
In code form.
Nezu had a sense of humor.
The “cabinet” contained metadata.
Millions of lines of irrelevant, perfectly formatted records: gym occupancy logs from ten years ago, cafeteria menu rotations, air filter replacement schedules.
The probe dutifully began to index.
Kuroda’s console responded with a flood of harmless data.
> ARCHIVE RECORD 0001: FILTER CHANGE.
ARCHIVE RECORD 0002: FILTER CHANGE.
ARCHIVE RECORD 0003: FILTER CHANGE.
Kuroda’s brow furrowed.
He flicked the probe to a different branch.
The Maze opened another door.
Behind it: compressed footage of snow days.
Thick, unremarkable, real.
Hours of kids playing in courtyards.
Teachers slipping on ice.
The probe tried again.
Hallway.
Door.
Inside: counseling AI update logs, with every sensitive field replaced with lorem ipsum legalese Nezu had generated specifically for this purpose.
Kuroda’s process flagged: INCONCLUSIVE.
The Maze smiled—if mazes could smile—and curled tighter.
“Think of it as… a chew toy,” Nezu said. “It’s busy. It’s not biting the furniture.”
“Can it bite back?” Trinity asked.
Nezu’s whiskers twitched.
“If it tries to go through the wrong door,” he said, “yes.”
The probe pressed on.
It wasn’t sentient.
But its directive nagged like an itch.
UNREGISTERED SUBNODE.
It dove deeper.
Hallway.
Door.
Behind this one: nothing.
A small, blank space.
Like an error.
The probe reached.
The “blank” snapped shut like a bear trap.
On Kuroda’s screen, error text flashed.
> TRACE FAILED.
PATH CORRUPTED.
DATA INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED.
The probe fizzled.
Nezu casually tossed a tiny error report into UA’s maintenance queue: POSSIBLE BAD SECTOR IN ARCHIVE DRIVE. LOW PRIORITY.
“Oops,” he said aloud.
Aizawa, watching the Ground Beta feed from a corner of the booth, side-eyed him.
“‘Oops’ what,” he said.
“Nothing,” Nezu sang. “Just a minor diagnostic constellation. Now, watch this flank; Bakugou is about to do something regrettable.”
On the Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus folded his arms.
“That will only work so many times,” he said. “They will send something stronger eventually.”
Nezu nodded.
“Of course,” he said. “But for now, it keeps their eyes… busy.”
Todoroki, in the temple, watched the faint echo of the failed probe dissipate at the Maze’s edge.
“If that had been a full Agent,” he said quietly, “it would have bitten back harder.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure the agent never makes it that far,” Trinity said.
---
On the Ground Beta field, Team A and Team B crashed together in controlled chaos.
Mina skated on acid slicks.
Kirishima blocked a cluster of paintballs with his hardened arms.
Bakugou used the rules as suggestions.
“Katsuki!” Iida yelled from across the field as an explosion rattled a fake balcony. “You’re cracking the ‘no unnecessary structural damage’ clause!”
“It’s necessary if it gets us the flag, four-eyes!” Bakugou shouted back.
Kaminari ducked behind a low wall with Jirou and Hagakure.
Paintballs whizzed overhead.
“We’re pinned,” Jirou muttered. “Sato’s camping that tower. Denki, I could really use some selective lightning right now.”
He swallowed.
The last time he’d tried to go surgical under pressure, he’d had a UI whispering in his ear.
Now it was just his own jittery brain and the memory of Tank muttering about tributaries.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, uh, fifteen percent output, narrow beam, aim for the metal railing, not the person…”
“Kero,” Tsuyu’s voice said softly. “You’ve got this. Remember the branching.”
He inhaled.
Let the current coil.
Instead of shoving it all down his arms, he imagined the lines Tank had shown him.
Main channel.
Side channels.
He split the load, routing some along his spine, some into his legs, some along tiny side nerves in his fingers.
It hurt.
But not like before.
“Peek,” he told Jirou. “Tell me when he reloads.”
She risked a quick glance.
“Now,” she hissed.
Kaminari popped up, aimed, and fired a needle-thin bolt.
It arced to the top of the tower, kissing the metal railing.
Sato, mid-reload, yelped as his support gear vibrated, the voltage just enough to make his fingers spasm and the paintball gun clatter down onto the platform.
No damage.
But enough distraction for Hagakure to slip out, invisible, and yank the gun away.
“Nice!” Jirou said.
Kaminari waited for the wheee.
It didn’t come.
The world lurched, sure.
Went a little fizzy around the edges.
But he stayed… present.
“I’m… okay,” he gasped. “That was… okay.”
Jirou grinned.
“Damn right it was,” she said.
Hagakure’s giggle floated back from somewhere unseen.
“You zapped the railing instead of his butt,” she said. “Proud of you.”
He laughed, a little giddy.
It felt good.
Real.
His.
Up in the booth, Kuroda watched that play with narrowed eyes.
Kaminari’s output graph had changed since the last time he’d pulled direct logs.
Less peaky.
More distributed.
Yet there were no corresponding entries in the system’s “pilot program” subroutine.
The Board’s window into his quirk was… dark.
“Interesting,” he murmured.
Nezu made a sympathetic noise.
“Teenagers grow,” he said. “Neural plasticity is a remarkable thing.”
“So is intervention,” Kuroda said.
He filed the anomaly.
He would return to it.
Later.
---
While Denki and Jirou improvised cover fire, Izuku’s squad was slipping through the drainage channels beneath the field.
“Feels like a stealth game,” Sero whispered, tape stretched between his hands.
“That’s because we’re stealthing,” Izuku whispered back.
Tsuyu hopped ahead, quiet on the slick floor.
Above them, virtual civilians shouted.
Paintballs popped.
“Flag should be in the central plaza,” Izuku murmured, checking their map. “If we come up behind the fountain, we’ll have cover.”
“Unless someone’s camping it,” Sero said. “Which, considering this class, is like, ninety percent likely.”
“We’ll adapt,” Izuku said.
His heart shouldn’t have been pounding this hard for a drill.
But Kuroda’s hallway stunt had left a residue.
The idea that the ground could stutter under his feet was hard to shake.
Tsuyu sensed it in his erratic mental tempo.
“Kero,” she said gently. “Breathe. This is our stage. Not theirs.”
He exhaled.
Right.
Their stage.
Not a simulation they had no say in.
Not entirely.
As they neared the plaza exit, his danger sense pinged.
Not for paintballs.
For… noise.
The air above seemed thicker.
“Pause,” he hissed.
They halted.
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting his awareness brush against the local grid.
There.
Like a radio hiss.
Someone was pushing a little harder than usual on the monitoring.
“It’s the consultant,” Tsuyu murmured. “He’s watching the central camera cluster more closely. Prodding.”
Izuku chewed his lip.
“The temple?” he thought.
“Nezu’s handling the Maze,” she replied. “We focus on here.”
He nodded.
“Okay,” he whispered to his team. “Change of plan. I’m going to draw fire. Tsuyu, Sero—you loop left. When they focus on me, you grab the flag.”
“Midoriya—” Sero began.
“We’ll adjust if it’s too heavy,” Izuku said. “Promise. This is just… a drill.”
He hoped.
---
Up in the booth, Kuroda ran a quick command on his side monitor.
The Maze had swallowed his probe.
He had logs.
He had filters.
He didn’t have answers.
Annoying.
Perhaps, he thought, a more… dynamic test was warranted.
He cast his mind down the network.
Into Ground Beta.
Into the central plaza node.
The system responded to his elevated priority.
> INPUT: CONSULTANT OVERRIDE REQUEST.
STATUS: LIMITED.
PERMISSION: GRANTED (SUPERVISED).
He nudged.
Just a little.
The flags’ sensor sensitivity ticked up.
The plaza’s “civilian panic” scripts grew more chaotic.
The paintball turrets’ AI re-evaluated target priority.
Izuku’s group surfaced from the drainage channel into a storm of color.
Paintballs hammered the fountain.
Civilians—holographic but interactive—ran in looping panic paths that didn’t match their usual programming.
“Okay this is more than Nezu’s normal ‘spice it up,’” Sero yelled over the noise.
“Agreed,” Tsuyu said, eyes narrowed.
Izuku’s danger sense screamed at him.
Not because of actual harm—the paintballs wouldn’t break bones—but because the pattern felt wrong.
Like someone had grabbed the exercise and turned all the knobs to “stress test.”
“Trinity?” he thought.
On the Neb, Trinity was already on it.
“Yeah, I see it,” she said. “Someone’s playing with the turret AI. It’s slanting harder toward ‘pin them down’ than Nezu’s baseline. My money’s on Clipboard.”
“Can you dial it back?” Izuku asked, ducking as a barrage splattered the fountain edge.
“Not without starting a tug-of-war he’ll notice,” she said. “But we can… side-step.”
“Side-step how?” Tsuyu asked, skidding beside him.
“Temple,” Morpheus said.
Izuku’s heart lurched.
“Wait—we can’t pull people mid-drill,” he said. “Not without—”
“We can pull one,” Tank said. “We’ve done it. Hagakure. You. Aizawa.”
“Two?” Trinity asked.
Silence.
“That’s untested,” Tank admitted. “The node’s thin. It might strain. Lag. But if Clipboard is using this as a chance to tighten the screws on your decision-making, we can use it as a chance to test our own escalation.”
“You want to yank two of us out while turrets are going haywire,” Izuku said.
“Consider it a stress test,” Morpheus said.
Tsuyu’s throat bubbled.
“Kero,” she said. “We can choose where we glitch. Better here than in a real fight later.”
Izuku looked at her.
“You’re already half in the wires,” he thought. “If anyone can anchor two, it’s you.”
She smiled.
“Flattery,” she said. “Dangerous.”
He took a breath.
“Okay,” he said. “Then we pick two.”
“Not me,” Tsuyu added. “I’m bridge. Not payload.”
“Not Todoroki,” Tank said. “We need him bracing the node from the Construct side.”
“Me,” Izuku said.
“That’s one,” Trinity said. “Second?”
A paintball burst inches from his head.
He flinched.
Across the plaza, he saw Kaminari’s team sprinting toward cover, Jirou shielding her face, Hagakure’s invisible hands tugging them along.
Denki looked up.
And for a moment, their eyes met.
He’d been the system’s pilot.
He’d had its training wheels.
He’d lost them.
He’d chosen them over a clean success.
If Kuroda was poking the turret AI to see how they handled increased pressure, Denki was likely on his list of “interesting variables.”
“We take Denki,” Izuku said. “Him and me. If the node can handle two of us while the field is live, we’ll know it can handle more in a real emergency.”
The idea of asking someone else to risk a brain glitch on purpose made him queasy.
But Denki had already been punished once for doing the right thing.
If they could give him a space the system truly couldn’t touch…
Tsuyu groaned softly.
“Kero,” she said. “He’s going to freak out when he sees his own neurons.”
“Then we’ll hold his hand,” Izuku said.
Aloud, he shouted across the plaza:
“Denki! On me!”
Kaminari—who had been about to dash with Jirou toward the left flank—stopped.
“What?” he yelled back.
Paintballs splattered around them.
“Just trust me!” Izuku shouted.
Kaminari, because he’d already accepted worse things without a plan, swore and sprinted toward him.
“Midoriya, this better not be one of your ‘step into the explosion’ ideas!” he yelled.
“Technically it’s a ‘step out of the explosion,’” Tsuyu muttered.
In the temple, Todoroki pressed his hand to the node’s core representation—a glowing sphere above the pond.
Tank’s fingers flew.
“On my mark,” he said. “We lock to Midoriya and Kaminari’s signatures. Tsu, you grab from the Matrix side. Trinity, you steady the Construct. Morpheus, you stop them from panicking.”
Morpheus inclined his head.
“Always,” he said.
Nezu’s avatar appeared at the edge of the courtyard, watching.
“Try not to tear the wallpaper,” he said.
“Three,” Tank counted. “Two. One.”
Tsuyu reached.
---
To Denki, it felt like missing a stair.
One moment he was mid-stride, paintball in hand, heart hammering.
The next, the sound cut out.
The color drained.
He stumbled.
“Wha—”
Then he was somewhere else.
He caught himself on polished wood.
Looked up.
Courtyard.
Temple.
Koi pond.
Sky glitching like a bad TV.
Midoriya stood a step away, also mid-stumble.
Izuku’s temple-avatar flickered solid.
He grabbed Denki’s arm.
“Got you,” he said.
“What the— where the—” Denki spun, eyes wild. “Did I get knocked out? Did someone hit me with a flashbang? Is this what dying feels like?!”
Tsuyu hopped down from the veranda, blanket trailing.
“Kero,” she said. “Welcome to the temple. Again. For real this time.”
Denki stared.
At her.
At Todoroki.
At Trinity and Tank and Morpheus at the far edge.
Then at his own hands.
They looked… the same.
But sharper.
“Okay,” he said faintly. “I changed my mind. I’m not ready for lore.”
Izuku squeezed his arm.
“Remember what we talked about in the archive?” he said. “World not what it seems. Pods. Matrix. Ship.”
Denki blinked.
He remembered.
He’d filed it under “horrifying but to be dealt with later” and shoved it into the same mental drawer as “Mineta’s browser history.”
“You weren’t kidding,” he said weakly. “You really weren’t kidding.”
Tsuyu’s throat bubbled.
“Kero,” she said. “We need you to stay calm for maybe ten seconds.”
“Calm is not an available setting!” Denki squeaked.
“We’re testing the node,” Tank called. “We just pulled two of you at once mid-drill. So far, no desync. That’s good.”
Denki pointed.
“At the… at the cosplaying IT department,” he said. “Who the hell—”
“That’s Tank,” Izuku said quickly. “He’s friendly. He likes your quirk. He thinks your neurons are cool.”
“Big fan,” Tank confirmed.
“And we dragged you here because Clipboard McCreep is using the drill to test you,” Trinity added. “We’re testing back.”
Denki swallowed.
“So this is… like… a pause menu?” he asked. “For my brain?”
“More like a hidden level,” Tsuyu said. “We pulled you off the main server into a local cache. Your bodies are still moving in the drill. Nezu’s feeding the system a slightly older version of your movement data. From its perspective, you just hesitated.”
Denki’s eyes went round.
“That’s— that’s illegal,” he whispered.
Izuku smiled faintly.
“Yeah,” he said. “Feels good, right?”
Denki let out a hysterical laugh.
“Oh my god,” he said. “We’re save-scumming reality.”
Todoroki’s mouth twitched.
“Don’t say that where Nezu can hear,” he advised. “He’ll put it in a presentation.”
Nezu, standing off to the side, made a note.
Save-Scumming Reality – potential paper title?
Morpheus stepped closer, expression gentle.
“Kaminari Denki,” he said. “You were the system’s favorite project for a while. It offered you control in exchange for obedience. It has now revoked that control as punishment. We are offering you another path. It will be harder. Slower. But it will be yours.”
Denki looked between them.
At the pond.
At the glitching sky.
At Midoriya, who had jumped off a roof to prove a point.
“Do I… have a choice?” he asked.
“Yes,” Tsuyu said immediately.
“Always,” Aizawa’s voice added, his avatar appearing near the temple door.
Denki yelped again.
“HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE IN HERE,” he demanded.
“Enough,” Aizawa said. “You can say no. We’ll keep training you the old-fashioned way. We’ll keep sabotaging their attempts to put a leash on you. You don’t owe us anything.”
Denki looked down at his hands.
They were trembling.
“They took it away,” he said quietly. “The smoothing. The UI. I knew it was bad. I knew it was a leash. But… it was still something. It made me feel like I wasn’t… broken.”
His voice cracked.
He rubbed his thumb over his palm.
“I don’t want them to be the only ones who ever made me feel that,” he whispered.
Izuku’s chest ached.
He put a hand on Denki’s shoulder.
“Then let us help,” he said. “Let us be the ones who show you you’re not broken.”
Denki laughed wetly.
“You nerd,” he said. “That’s the cheesiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Is it working?” Izuku asked.
“…Yeah,” Denki admitted.
Tsuyu smiled.
“Kero,” she said. “Then we start small.”
Tank pulled up the wireframe of Denki’s nervous system.
“Welcome back to Denki OS,” he said. “We did basic mapping last time. Now we’re going to sneak a few firewall rules in. Ones the system can’t see.”
Denki swallowed.
“Firewall rules,” he repeated.
“For example,” Tank said, highlighting a cluster near the visual cortex, “we can teach your brain to treat certain UI overlays as noise. Not commands. If the system tries to project ‘recommended path’ prompts again, you’ll feel them. But you’ll be able to route around them. Think of it as… training your adblocker.”
Denki’s eyes lit up.
“You’re teaching me how to install mods on my own brain,” he breathed.
Trinity grinned.
“Now he gets it,” she said.
Izuku squeezed his shoulder again.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he warned. “We have to drop you back into the drill before the delay gets too big.”
Denki nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Patch me.”
Tank guided him through a quick exercise.
Breathe.
Feel the faint whisper of the old system UI—the ghost of the interface he used to see, now mostly gone.
He’d learned to ignore it.
Now Tank nudged him toward something more active.
Every time a fragment of that whisper brushed his awareness (“RECOMMENDED:” “SUGGESTED PATH:”), he mentally tagged it with a bright, obnoxious color.
“Pink,” Denki muttered.
“Pink?” Izuku echoed.
“Pink,” Denki repeated. “Hot pink. Flashing. If it’s their idea, I want it to look hideous.”
Tsuyu’s throat bubbled.
“Kero,” she said. “Good choice.”
Primitive, but effective.
Tank anchored the association.
“Now,” he said, “any time you see that color attached to a thought about where to stand or when to fire, you know it’s not you. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, necessarily. But you can pause. Double-check. Choose.”
Denki exhaled.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, that’s… something.”
Izuku tested his own awareness.
He felt the temple’s hum.
The drill’s distant tug.
The thinness of the node.
“We have to go back,” he said. “Now.”
Tsuyu nodded.
“Kero,” she said. “Ready?”
Denki grabbed his sleeve.
“Wait,” he said. “If I— if I go blank out there… if the system punishes me again—”
“We’re watching,” Tsuyu said. “From both sides.”
Aizawa’s gaze was steady.
“So is your homeroom teacher,” he said. “You screw up, I’ll yell at you. Not them.”
Denki huffed out a laugh.
“Comforting,” he said.
Tsuyu reached.
The temple blurred.
---
On the field, less than a heartbeat had passed.
To everyone else, Izuku and Denki had just… hesitated.
Midoriya’s foot hit the ground again.
Denki’s momentum redoubled.
Paintballs still flew.
Turrets still tracked.
“Okay wow that was disorienting,” Denki gasped. “Time travel sucks.”
Izuku’s heart pounded.
But the node had held.
Two bodies.
Two minds.
One glitch.
And Kuroda… hadn’t noticed.
Yet.
“Denki,” Izuku shouted, pointing. “Left turret! Short burst on the base relay! Non-lethal!”
“Copy!” Denki yelled.
He sighted along the railing.
He felt a whisper—“Angle ten degrees higher, full power, collapse the whole platform.”
It flashed hot pink in his mind.
Ugly.
External.
He snorted.
“Nice try,” he muttered.
He nudged the current along his new side channels instead.
Short burst.
Controlled.
The bolt hit the turret’s power coupling, not the turret head.
It sputtered and died.
Paintball barrage lessened.
Sero whooped.
“You’re scary now, man!” he yelled.
“Scary in a good way!” Mina added, sliding past.
Denki laughed.
“Hell yeah I am!” he shouted.
Up in the booth, Kuroda frowned.
Kaminari’s output graph had shifted again.
Not smoothed by the Board’s program.
Something else.
Something local.
Like a routing layer he couldn’t see.
“Neural plasticity,” Nezu repeated, shrugging.
Kuroda didn’t buy it.
But his earlier probe still hadn’t returned anything useful.
He filed it away.
Patterns.
Later.
Always later.
---
When the drill ended—with Team A technically winning on points but Team B claiming moral victory because Bakugou had landed a ridiculous mid-air capture—the class stumbled back into homeroom, covered in paint and bickering.
“—should’ve seen your face when the turret died,” Jirou told Denki. “You looked like you just invented a new swear word.”
“I did,” Denki said. “It’s ‘take that, you capitalist laser.’”
“That’s not even—” Iida began.
He stopped.
Because Hagakure had drawn a little maze in the corner of the whiteboard.
Just doodling.
Circles and lines.
A rat here.
A piece of cheese there.
A stick figure with glasses and a frowny face just outside the maze, labelled: Clipboard.
In tiny letters near the center, she’d written:
> we built this
Izuku smiled.
Small.
Quick.
He caught her invisible eye and nodded.
Tsuyu, sliding into her seat, hummed.
“Kero,” she whispered in his mind. “Temple held. Denki patched. Maze chewed. That’s a good day.”
“And Kuroda?” Izuku thought back.
“He’s annoyed,” she said. “Which is also a good day.”
At the staff table, Nezu scribbled something on his blueprint.
Aizawa dropped into his chair, capture scarf looped around his neck.
He looked tired.
But less alone.
“Alright,” he said. “Open your notebooks. Today, we learn how to identify and ignore garbage feedback. From hero rankings… and from certain consultants.”
The class chuckled.
Some more nervously than others.
The Matrix hummed around them.
Outside, Kuroda reviewed his logs, already planning his next probe.
Inside, under the floors and in hidden code, UA’s thorn maze grew thicker.
The temple node solidified.
Two students had walked its courtyard in the middle of a battle and returned without losing themselves.
The system would adapt.
So would they.
Thread by thread, glitch by glitch, Class 1-A was learning how to turn “errors” into weapons.
The world might be code.
But it was their debug session now.