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Chapter 24: Dispersion and Unexpected Synergy
🕑 Added 2025-09-26 05:05:00 +0000 UTCAizawa's words, “Those… are real villains,” fell upon Class 1-A like a concrete slab. The stunned silence lasted for a heartbeat. Then, it shattered into a thousand fragments of panic.
“Villains?!” “For real?! Here?!” “We’re going to die!”
Fear was a sour stench in the air. Several students instinctively backed away, their faces pale with terror. Thirteen stepped forward, extending their arms to create a protective barrier between the kids and the horde emerging from the portal.
“Calm down!” Aizawa’s voice cut through the panic like a whip. There was no trace of his usual lethargy; it was the voice of a professional in his element. “Don't panic! The first rule of survival is to keep a cool head!”
His eyes, red and glowing under his goggles, scanned the crowd of villains in the plaza below.
“Thirteen, your mission is to protect the students and evacuate them immediately! Get out of here and contact the school!” He turned to Kaminari, who was trembling from head to toe. “Kaminari! You! Try to contact the school using your Quirk! Your Quirk is our best bet to get through any interference they’ve set up! Do it!”
In the central plaza, the figure covered in hands scratched his neck viciously, his body hunched over like a vulture’s. His voice—raspy, childish, and full of petulant boredom—slid through the air.
“Well, well. What a disappointment. Where’s All Might?” Tomura Shigaraki said, tilting his head. “We followed the schedule our sources gave us… He was supposed to be here. How rude, to keep his guests waiting.”
He looked up at the group of terrified students at the top of the stairs.
“Well, no matter. I guess we’ll have to improvise. Maybe… maybe if we kill a few of his precious, bratty students, he’ll decide to come out and play?”
The threat, delivered with such nonchalance, froze everyone’s blood.
Aizawa didn’t wait any longer. Without a word, without a battle cry, he simply jumped. He launched himself from the top of the stairs as the cloth of his capture weapon unwound around him like the wings of a dark, avenging angel. He landed right in the middle of the horde.
Izuku watched, his own fear overshadowed by an analytical fascination. He processed the scene not as a terrified spectator, but as a student observing a master.
He’s not fighting, he thought, his mind racing a mile a minute. He’s dismantling. He’s not going for the strongest ones first. He’s going for those with ranged Quirks, the ones who can attack the kids. That guy with guns for fingers, he erases his Quirk with a glare. The other one shooting beams, he wraps him up and uses his own momentum to slam him into three others. No wasted movements. No flourishes. It’s brutal. It’s efficient. He’s… a pro.
Aizawa moved like a lethal shadow, a whirlwind of cloth and precise violence. He was buying them time. Precious time.
“LET’S GO!” Iida shouted, snapping everyone out of their trance. “While Aizawa-sensei distracts them, we have to run for the exit! It’s our duty as students to follow his orders! Quickly!”
The group moved as one, a frightened herd running toward the massive entrance doors. But just as they were about to reach them, a swirling, purple mist materialized before them, blocking the path. Two bright yellow eyes emerged from the mist.
“Not so fast, little heroes.”
The voice was deep, polite, and utterly chilling. The mist solidified, taking the form of a tall, slender man in a bartender's suit, his entire body made of that ominous purple fog.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. We are the League of Villains,” Kurogiri said, bowing his head slightly. “And our humble mission today is to be the final stop for All Might, the Symbol of Peace. We can’t allow you to call for help. That would be impolite.”
Before anyone could react, Bakugo and Kirishima, true to their impulsive nature, lunged to attack.
“DON’T GET IN OUR WAY, SMOKE-WRAITH!” Bakugo roared, unleashing a massive explosion directly at the center of the misty figure.
The explosion had no effect. The mist simply swirled and reformed, unharmed.
“How vulgar,” Kurogiri said calmly. “But useless. My body is a portal. A physical attack is like trying to punch the air.”
He expanded his misty body, a darkness that lunged at them, threatening to swallow them all.
“My job is to scatter you throughout this facility and have my comrades torture you to death,” he announced with terrifying pleasantness. “Enjoy your educational experience!”
Panic erupted again. The mist reached them, and a pulling sensation, as if they were being dragged in twenty directions at once, took hold of them. Screams of terror filled the air.
But in the midst of the chaos, Ochako Uraraka didn't panic. She felt the force of the portal pulling at her and her friends, and her training with Izuku took over.
Don’t fight the force. Redirect it.
“You won’t catch us!” she yelled.
With fierce determination, she slapped the palm of her hand on the ground. A visible pulse of pink energy expanded from her hand, creating a localized zero-gravity zone around her. The force of Kurogiri's portal lessened upon them. Seizing the moment, she shoved Iida and Tsuyu, who were closest to the exit, out of the mist's immediate reach.
“Hold on!” she shouted.
She skated across the floor, using the now-floating debris to propel herself and them toward the relative safety of the entrance. Iida looked at her in absolute astonishment as his feet touched the ground normally again outside the zero-gravity field.
“Uraraka-san! Your control…! Your quick thinking!”
She smiled at him, her face filled with a new, fierce confidence. “We have to get out of here and get help! Let’s go!”
Meanwhile, in the heart of the chaos, the rest of the class was being swallowed up. Momo, closer to the edge of the mist, reacted with logic. The skin on her arm began to glow as she quickly created a heavy metal bar to drive into the ground and resist the portal's pull.
But chaos has its own rules.
“DIE, YOU MIST BASTARD!”
Another of Bakugo’s explosions, fired blindly in his frustration, detonated near where Momo was. The shockwave hit her hard, making her lose her balance and breaking her concentration. The half-formed metal bar vanished, and she stumbled, falling directly toward the swirling vortex.
Izuku, who had been using Ochako’s zero-gravity zone to stay safe, saw Momo fall. Time seemed to stop.
“YAOYOROZU!”
Without a second of hesitation, he lunged forward. His body, strengthened by months of hellish training, moved on pure instinct. He dove, grabbing her firmly by the waist just as her feet were about to be swallowed by the portal. He used all his strength to pull her back, yanking her from the edge of the vortex.
They landed hard a few feet away, in a messy heap on the tile floor.
“Yaoyorozu, are you okay?!” he panted, helping her sit up. “Yes… I think so,” she said, still dazed from the blast and the rescue. “Thank you, Midoriya-san.”
They breathed a sigh of relief for an instant. An instant that was far too long.
“Not so fast, you two!”
A new voice, coarse and guttural, made them spin around. From behind a stone pillar, a secondary villain had appeared: a burly, brutish-looking man with a lethal-looking bazooka resting on his shoulder. He aimed at them. And fired.
The projectile, a small rocket, shot out of the barrel with a sharp hiss, flying straight toward them.
There was no time to think. No time for a plan. Momo, with adrenaline and fear coursing through her veins, reacted on pure instinct. She turned to Izuku, grabbed him with desperate strength, and hugged him, burying her face in his chest as if trying to shield him with her own body.
The instant her torso pressed against Izuku's uniform, the exposed skin of her chest, right at her sternum, glowed with blinding intensity. A translucent, multi-layered shield, with the complexity of a honeycomb, sprouted from her sternum. It expanded, fully forming just in time to take the hit.
BOOOOOOM!
The explosion was deafening. The shield held. It didn't break, didn't crack. It was a masterpiece of defensive creation, born from the pure instinct to protect. But physics is a cruel mistress. The kinetic force of the impact was immense, and it threw them violently backward as if they were rag dolls.
They flew through the air, straight into Kurogiri's mist, which was still swirling nearby, waiting for its prey. They disappeared into the dark vortex.
The sensation of being transported by Kurogiri's portal was like being thrown into a blender full of darkness and sickening colors. There was no up or down, only a disorienting whirlwind and the feeling of free-falling. The journey lasted an instant and an eternity.
They came out of the portal in mid-air, about thirty feet up. And they fell.
The impact with the water was a brutal shock. The cold, deep water swallowed them; the noise of the outside world was replaced by a bubbly, aquatic silence. Izuku, disoriented, struggled for the surface, his lungs burning. He emerged first, coughing and spitting out water, his hair plastered to his face. He frantically searched around him.
“Yaoyorozu!”
He saw her a few feet away, floating face down, motionless. Panic flooded him. He swam to her, grabbed her, and turned her over. She was conscious but dazed, coughing up water.
“Are you… are you okay?” he gasped, helping her stay afloat. “Yes…” she murmured, trembling from the cold and shock. “The shield… it used up a lot of energy.”
They looked around, trying to get their bearings. They were in the middle of a large body of water. In the distance, they could see the silhouette of a large ship. The Shipwreck Zone. They were alone.
The peace lasted for exactly one second.
A splash to their right: a shark-featured head with blade-like teeth emerged from the water. Another splash to their left: a pair of slimy tentacles slithered across the surface. More splashes. Everywhere. Figures with aquatic Quirks, grotesque-looking villains, began to emerge from the murky water, forming a circle that tightened around them.
They were in the water. They were exhausted. And they were completely surrounded.
Shit, Izuku thought, his heart sinking with the weight of despair. We're surrounded.
