Chapter 8

Izuku knows he must look strange, if Tsuyu and Mineta are watching him run. He zigzags instead of running in a straight line, weaving his way through the crowd of wailing dead. It's not as if he can help it. He doesn't just see and hear ghosts; he feels them too, and that means he can't simply walk straight through them the way everyone else can.

As he darts toward the central plaza, he can't help but notice that the ghosts are moving in the opposite direction that he is. They cast fearful glances back at it, at the thrashing darkness that marks where Rei is. She frightens them; they're all dead and murdered, and she frightens them.

It's a jolt when he sees a familiar face among the pale, bloodied, washed-out figures. Narita meets him before he can quite reach the plaza. His form is wavering, blinking in and out of view in the way that ghosts do when they're agitated. Izuku skids to a halt, and Narita nearly crashes into him. Cold, dead hands grip his shoulders, chilling him through the fabric of his gym uniform.

"Make her stop." Blood runs freely down his face, pouring from the wound in his head. Even without visible eyes, he looks desperate. "Please, Midoriya, you've got to make her stop—I can't reach her, and she's so angry—" Rei's screaming leaps in pitch, and he flinches as if it's a physical blow. "And it's hurting him."

"What?" Izuku's breath catches in his chest. Other ghosts are staring, astonished. None of them realized that he can see them, and now here he is getting gripped and shaken by one of their own.

"Eraserhead." The deathly cold grip tightens. "She's crazy enough that he's feeling it, and it's throwing him off. I've never seen him flinch this much in a fight, and he stumbles every time she touches him." Blood runs into his eyes, turning his glare red. "Make her stop, Midoriya. Make her stop or he's going to join us and I won't forgive you for bringing her to him."

"Where is she?" Izuku asks, heart pounding in his chest. "I'll get her out, I promise—she's just scared, she thinks I'm in trouble—tell me where she is. Is she moving around a lot?"

"No." Narita turns, letting go of him to point. "There, she's on the side of the fight, where that pile of downed villains are. She's been tearing at them this whole time. She only moves if the fight gets close enough. I don't think she even knows what she's doing at this point."

Izuku squints, but he can't see her.

"Where the darkness is thickest," Narita says. "That's where she'll be."

And Izuku sees it. He doesn't see Rei, but he does see what Narita is saying. Luck is with him; the epicenter of Rei's black hole isn't in the thick of the fighting. It's going to be dangerous, and it's going to be stupid, and two of his fingers are limp and useless, but if he skirts around the battle and doesn't screw up, he can do it. He can reach her.

"No, what are you—are you crazy?" Another ghost, a middle-aged man with his head hanging at an odd angle. "Don't send him in there!" He turns to Izuku. "Haven't you been paying attention? They'll kill you!"

"Shut up!" Narita snaps. "He's the only one that can get that poltergeist out of there!"

"I won't die," Izuku whispers, half to himself. He can't stand here much longer; he's out in the open, and if he lingers then some villain is bound to take advantage of an easy target. "I can do this. I won't die. I won't die."

"Who are you talking to?"

Izuku jumps, whipping around to see Tsuyu standing behind him. Mineta is nowhere to be seen.

"Where's—"

"He ran toward the entrance," she says. "It's for the best—he can't run as fast on his own, and if I'm going to follow you, I can't have him hanging off of me." She turns her head, scanning the scene beyond him. "I don't know what you're trying to do, Midoriya," she says. "But if we stay out here much longer, they'll see us."

"I told you not to follow me," he almost hisses. It isn't just nobility driving him to say that, though his main fear is that he'll lead her into injury and mortal danger. But a smaller fear is that she'll see him talk to ghosts, or otherwise act in ways that he won't be able to explain.

"Well I didn't listen," she says. "So what's your plan?"

"I'm not going to get in Aizawa's way," Izuku says. "I'm just going to—to see if there's anything I can do to lighten his load." It's not a lie, what he tells her. That is very much what he's going to do. "Listen, I'm aiming for the other side of the plaza. There's some serious stuff going on at the entrance still, so we can't go that way. But if we find a quieter place to catch our breath, then so much the better, right?"

"Are you trying to help Aizawa-sensei, or get somewhere safe?" Tsuyu asks.

"Both. If you have to follow me, then meet me there, okay?"

He doesn't wait for an answer; if she's determined to follow him, then there's no way he can convince her not to. Izuku turns wide, gives Aizawa's battle a generous berth, and runs like he has never run before. More than anything, he wants to call out to Rei, to let her know as soon as possible that he's alive and almost unhurt. But if he does, then the villains will hear him, and he won't be alive for very long after that.

Something is very, very wrong.

Aizawa Shouta has been acutely aware of this ever since the damned warping villain scattered his students across the USJ facility. Instincts scream at him to help them, to gather them up and get them to safety, but he cannot follow those feelings even though he wants to. He's surrounded, hemmed in, and outnumbered. All he's capable of right now is subduing as many villains as possible, and keeping the bulk of the fighting and the strongest members of their forces here in the plaza, instead of running off into the facility to go after the students.

His students.

At first, he had mistaken it for simple alarm, the natural dread that he should feel when seeing the children under his charge in danger. But even now, as the battle goes on and adrenaline rushes through his veins, the fear does not fade as it normally does. As it always does. If anything, it escalates with every passing minute.

The feeling chokes him, squeezing the very heart in his chest until he's sure his pulse will stop altogether. His reaction time suffers for it; he has narrowly missed death more individual times in this single fight than he has in his past year of hero work. And every now and then, chills grip him, the feeling of someone walking over his grave. If they are sudden enough, then they force him to blink, and his quirk-erasing hold fails on whatever villain he looks at. He's disoriented, bleeding, and unable to breathe properly.

He leaps back and takes a deep breath to try to calm himself and get his rampaging terror under control. The breath makes noise, a quiet inward wheeze as he forces air into his lungs.

This… isn't right.

No—this isn't right, he realizes. This fear isn't natural. It doesn't feel the way he knows his fear ought to feel. It feels more like someone has plunged deep into his brain, shredded apart consciousness and subconscious, and slammed their fist down on the button marked "Terror".

An emotion-enhancing quirk? He's heard of those; they tend to go hand-in-hand with standard empathy. He switches his gaze from one villain to another, trying to find who is responsible, but the gut-churning terror that grips him refuses to fade.

He looks to the ringleader—the pale one in black, whose face is masked by a severed hand. That one has yet to reveal his quirk. Perhaps it's him?

…No. But who else could it be? Is there another villain on the sidelines, sabotaging him from a safe distance?

He looks. He does not find a villain, but he catches a glimpse of movement. Quick, almost unnoticeable movement.

The fear within him wrenches at his insides—that's Midoriya Izuku, the boy he almost failed on the first day, skirting the edge of the fighting like a fool. What does he think he's doing?

Shouta makes sure to keep his face turned away from Midoriya as he fights. If the boy is going to be an idiot, then Shouta can't afford to give away his presence by looking at him. He tracks Midoriya's progress from the corner of his eye. To his credit, the boy is fast, and he's using what little cover there is to his advantage. If Shouta weren't occupied by being hopelessly outnumbered and artificially scared out of his wits, he might even spare a moment for approval. He settles for relief; it cushions him against the fear, somewhat.

Midoriya ducks out of his line of vision then, and Shouta is too busy dodging a flurry of blows from another villain to keep watching. His scarf wraps around his attacker, and he flings the villain straight into the path of another in mid-pounce. With a meaty thud, they both go down, and Shouta is reeling with terror again and—

All at once, the stranglehold around his heart falls away. Shouta can breathe again, and does so with enough quiet desperation to leave him nearly gasping.

Before he can stop himself, he looks back to find Midoriya not far off, running full pelt away from a group of unconscious villains left in a heap after Shouta had subdued them, toward the beginning of the fight. He could kick himself in irritation. He hadn't thought to look for the culprit among the villains he had already defeated. One of them must have recovered enough to sabotage him from the sidelines. The lot of them are still lying motionless on the ground, with Midoriya racing away, holding his arm out oddly.

His student looks back, and meets his eyes for only a moment. From the distance, and through his eye-concealing goggles, Shouta catches the flash of desperate hope in his student's eyes.

He's not sure what Midoriya has done. By the time the day is over he won't have the chance to wonder, or to scold the boy for his recklessness. But at least, in this moment, he can spare a moment of gratitude before he turns back to the villains, and finds the ringleader charging at him to attack for the first time.

Izuku's heart is in his throat as he tears past the battlefield, plunging in an out of the blackness. He sees the darkest point just ahead, hovering in the midst of a heap of unconscious, motionless villains. Other villains battle around him, from the low-level thugs to the hulking, muscular brute with dark blue skin and unblinking eyes. Rei's darkness lashes at him, chilling him to the bone marrow, but he keeps his feet moving and hurls himself straight into where the shadows are thickest.

He feels her more than he sees her, a floating cold spot in the heart of the black hole. Izuku reaches out, and his fingers brush something that burns like dry ice. He wraps his arms around a familiar small form, and when he breaks through the other side of the darkness, he takes her with him.

She struggles in his arms, clawing at him, lashing out with pure rage.

"Rei," he whispers. "Rei, it's me."

He looks back. The blackness is already scattering, giving him a better view of the battle. He searches it briefly, and finds Aizawa looking in his direction. With the goggles it's impossible to tell if he's looking at Izuku.

Izuku skids to a halt some distance from the edge of the fighting, nearly losing his balance. He falls to a kneeling position, clutching Rei with both arms to make sure she doesn't get loose and go back to her raging.

She's still struggling. Izuku crouches low and clings to her. "Rei. Rei, stop," he whispers. "It's okay. It's me. I'm sorry—I didn't mean to scare you like that." The struggles weaken, and she finally goes limp and cold in his arms. When he feels small, frigid hands clutching at his arm, he finally looks down at her.

Black eyes stare back, wide and terrible with fear.

"I'm sorry," he whispers. "It's okay. It's gonna be okay, I promise."

She twists around in his arms and hugs him, burying her face into his chest. The screaming has finally stopped. His friend is silent.

"Midoriya!"

He looks up to find Tsuyu catching up, keeping low to the ground as she darts along. "Tsuyu?"

"Are you okay?" Tsuyu whispers, dropping down beside him. There's some scant cover here, but not much.

"Fine," he says tightly. He watches the fight. To anyone who doesn't see what he does, Aizawa seems to have gained his second wind. He doesn't stumble or pause as he fights, and Rei's darkness has vanished so that Izuku can clearly see the whole scene. Narita is back, watching the fight and following Aizawa's every move. For the first time, Izuku feels the knot in his chest loosen as he just dares to hope. "I think… I think it's going to be okay. We have a chance now."

And then, across the way, the man who wears severed hands reaches out and catches Aizawa's elbow before it can strike him. As Izuku watches, aghast, the black sleeve of Aizawa's costume crumbles, and the arm beneath it begins to crumble as well before Aizawa breaks free. Rei, raising her head to watch, lets out a low hiss.

"What kind of quirk is that?" Tsuyu whispers, horrified.

Izuku hushes her. "It's not over yet," he murmurs desperately. "It's not over, he's just hurt, he can still—"

He doesn't see the hulking dark one move until it's already on top of Aizawa. It's fast—far faster than a person that size has any right to be. Their teacher turns to look at it, and has to bend his head back just to look at the face—the misshapen, deformed mess of a face, with its exposed brain and rolling, unblinking eyes.

The brute brings its upraised hand down, and the fight is over before Izuku can blink. Before his eyes, Aizawa's shattered goggles go flying, and his teacher's blood spatters the ground. The tide has turned so quickly that Izuku feels sick with vertigo, and he can only watch in helpless horror as his teacher takes the most brutal beating that Izuku has ever witnessed.

A strangled noise escapes him. He doesn't think—his mind is burned blank with panic. All he sees is Tsuyu horrified beside him, Narita screaming his head off as he hurls his intangible form at the monster, Aizawa limp and broken on the ground—Aizawa pale and washed out and bloodied, standing before him with blank white eyes, just one more ghost for Izuku to talk to.

Even when the beating stops, it doesn't, not really. The monster—Noumu, Izuku hears the pale villain call it Noumu—pins him down, breaking and crushing his arms until Aizawa cries out with pain. Narita's scream joins it.

He moves, because in that moment rushing in to certain death is less terrifying to him than cowering and doing nothing as another ghost is made in front of him. His body moves, and he doesn't think. With Rei following at his side, he ignores his classmates' warnings and runs.

He makes no sound. The lower-level thugs are either out of commission or watching the beating, the Noumu is busy with Aizawa, and the pale villain's back is to him. Rei is with him, and she is eager. She wants to hurt them, she wants to terrify them, she wants to make them pay, and the power of her fervor gives him speed. Izuku's hand curls into a fist, and he calls on One For All as he lunges at the pale villain's unprotected back.

Sorry, Aizawa-sensei, he thinks. It looks like I'm going to have to cripple myself this time.

He doesn't want to watch Aizawa become a ghost. He doesn't want him to talk to Narita and Mrs. Kitayama yet. He wants Aizawa to make them wait longer, as long as possible. It can't be his time yet, it can't.

He pulls his arm back, rippling with One For All. He may break his bones again, but if he can take out the leader in the process, then it will be worth it.

At the last moment, the pale villain turns to face him, eyes sparking with a wild, joyful light. At precisely the same moment, Tsuyu's tongue wraps around his chest with a wet smack and yanks him back out of the villain's reach, just as one of his pale, bloodless hands lashes out at him. Izuku loses his hold on One For all, and the sparking energy dissipates.

"Oh." The pale villain's voice trembles with glee. "What's this? Did you want to join him?"

Rei shrieks, and her rage seeps into Izuku's skin. He forces himself blank, just to keep from spitting with fury. Tsuyu drags him farther back, away from the man who wears severed hands. Her tongue releases him, and she dashes forward to catch his arm and drag him back with her full weight.

"Sorry, Midoriya," she murmurs. "But if I let you get yourself killed, I couldn't forgive myself."

Izuku clenches his teeth until his jaw creaks. He looks from the pale villain to where Narita huddles by Aizawa's prone form, and his eyes burn. "You shouldn't have—"

Narita's bloodstained face turns to Izuku, and his jaws open wide to scream again. "RUN!"

This time it's Izuku who catches Tsuyu by the arm and drags her back until she starts running too. Narita's warning only offers them a split second's head start, and it's not enough; the pale villain is already upon them.

A grating scream drives like nails into his skull as Rei throws herself between them. But the villain's hand plunges straight through her, and Izuku can barely get his arms up to shield himself from the villain's quirk.

One of the villain's hands closes around around his wrist. The other catches Tsuyu by the back of her neck. Rei howls, finger-claws dragging at the villain's hidden face. Izuku stares, transfixed, and waits for the pain to come.

It doesn't.

They wait on bated breath, frozen with fear, the villain unreadable as he watches their skin fail to crumble and flake off like old paint.

The villain seems to sigh. "Damn," he says, and his grip loosens as he looks over his shoulder. Izuku follows his gaze, all the way back to where Aizawa lies broken on the ground, head raised, eyes glowing red and suffused with blood as he keeps them fixed on the pale villain. "That was pretty cool, Eraserhead."

The Noumu smashes Aizawa's head into the concrete with a sickening thud. Blood spreads across the ground, and Aizawa never makes a sound.

The pale villain's grip has loosened, enough for them to break free before his quirk can reactivate. They only have a few seconds before he notices and attacks again, but for Izuku, those moments stretch to a miniature eternity.

He doesn't look at Tsuyu, tense with fear beside him. He doesn't even look at the pale villain, dressed in black and draped in severed hands. He looks past him, to where his teacher lies still and silent on the ground. To where, slowly, a form flickers into view—transparent, weak, and wavering, like an image with bad reception—beside the body and the Noumu and the silent Narita.

Aizawa stands next to his own body, pale, ragged, and blood-streaked, his form faded and transparent but very much visible.

A scream fills Izuku from toe to tip, threatening to rip itself free, but he keeps his mouth pressed shut, and instead it floods through his veins like pounding adrenaline. He tears his eyes from the apparition and turns them to the villain who caused it, and he has never, ever wished to make a ghost before but in this moment he understands why some people do.

Darkness gathers not far from where they stand, and Rei shrieks in fury as the warp villain appears in their midst. The pale villain straightens up at the sight of him.

"Kurogiri," he says. "Did you kill Thirteen?"

The distance is not great enough to keep Izuku from hearing the villain's cold, rumbling voice. "No, Shigaraki Tomura," he says. "I put Thirteen out of commission, but one of the students escaped the facility." The glowing eyes narrow. "Once he's out of range of our signal jammer, he'll soon be able to call the school for help."

The hope rises in Izuku's chest, but he stamps on it viciously. No—he already made the mistake of getting hopeful before. He won't make it again.

As he watches, the pale ringleader flies into a quiet rage, clawing at the sides of his neck where the disembodies hands don't cover. He mutters half to himself, snarling threats at his comrade, and Izuku can hear the way the villain's voice hitches and cracks.

And then, as suddenly as it started, the tirade stops. Slowly his hands sink to his sides, leaving angry red scratches on his own neck. "It's no use," he says calmly, as if he wasn't ranting and spitting just seconds ago. "We can't fight dozens of pros. So it's game over for now. Yes…" His hands shake and flex at his sides. "Let's go home. But first…"

He looks back at them, fingers curling as if he imagines wringing their necks, and Izuku feels his mingled terror and rage rising within him as he takes in the pale, bloodless villain. It fills him from his stomach to his heart to his lungs, drowning him. The villain steps up to him again, fingers twitching eagerly, and the thoughts flee from Izuku's head.

And so, with no thoughts to distract him, it's the force of habit and pure instinct that makes him breathe in, and out, again and again until the storm ebbs and flows away again. Slowly, as he watches the villain's hidden face—pale, washed out, not so different from a ghost—the flood drains away on its own and leaves a silent fog of blank numbness in its wake.

Rei's distorted form writhes within his line of vision, as she snarls like a beast that crawled from the depths of some dark pit. A stone's throw away, Narita stands with Aizawa's spirit, both of them faded and bloodied. As Izuku watches, Narita's pale hand—solid in his vision—reaches out to Aizawa's translucent figure, and passes through it in the same way the living pass through the dead. The same way Izuku cannot.

What enters his mind then is not hope, but merely an idea, neither happy nor sad, that clears his head. What he sees of Aizawa is different from what he's seen of other ghosts. His ghost is nearly but not quite there. Perhaps that means he is nearly but not quite dead.

All around the facility, the dead pass through. Broken, mangled, with no bodies to breathe and no hearts to beat, they wail and weep and follow their murderers and wait, always patient, for their time of reckoning.

Izuku lifts his eyes to the villain's, and breathes out again.

My friends are scarier than you.