The fork in the hiking trail had a sign: LEFT toward the overlook, RIGHT toward the creek.
He went neither way and sat down on a flat rock at the junction and ran the math for the last time.
The problem had a clean structure. He'd been avoiding that fact for three days because the clarity of the structure was what made it uncomfortable — there was no ambiguity to hide in, no way to find the version where both things were equally correct. Clean problems were harder than complicated ones.
Option A: Stay near Bakugo tonight.
Compress would come for him at some point after midnight, during the villain attack's chaos, when the class was scattered and occupied and the abduction window was open. Yami knew the mechanics — marble compression, someone pinched out of the air, gone before anyone registered the absence. If he was within fifty meters when it happened, he could intercept. He couldn't necessarily defeat Compress — not without OFA at levels that would create evidence problems — but he could disrupt, delay, alert.
Cost: zero system progression. He would spend the night as interference for a classmate's kidnapping and walk away exactly as he was. The fragments he didn't acquire from Dabi or Moonfish or Muscular were resources that didn't exist — you couldn't mourn a potential, only an actual.
Bakugo doesn't go to Kamino. Doesn't get freed by Kirishima and a reckless rescue team. Doesn't have the experience that, in the original timeline, produces something in him.
He stopped himself.
I don't know what not-being-kidnapped does to Bakugo. I know what being-kidnapped did. That's not the same thing.
Option B: Farm the attack.
Move through the forest during the attack's first two hours. Engage Moonfish first — C-tier, manageable, first unique kill. Then position for Dabi or a lesser-tier villain. Muscular only if the circumstance created an opening that wasn't suicide at 4-5% OFA — A-tier first kill could produce a fragment of the order the Nomu had produced, maybe better.
Best-case outcome: two or three unique first kills. Six to twelve SP. Stat point allocation. Potentially a fragment that changes his combat ceiling. Two months of development compressed into one night.
Cost: Bakugo goes to Kamino.
He'd watched Bakugo sleep on the bus with his arms crossed, the specific posture of someone who was resting but hadn't committed to vulnerability. He'd watched Bakugo eat three servings at dinner and yell at Kaminari for reaching across his plate and been yelled at back in the easy register of a dynamic that had settled into its own comfortable rhythm over a semester. He'd watched Bakugo at the mess hall window from the tree line this afternoon — Kirishima had said something that produced an actual laugh, the real one that Bakugo didn't perform for anyone and which appeared only when something genuinely landed, and the laugh had the quality of something that shouldn't have a price on it.
Bakugo didn't know he was in danger.
Bakugo didn't know that the person who knew he was in danger was currently sitting at a hiking trail junction calculating what the danger was worth in stat points.
He's not my responsibility, said the part of him that was doing math.
You came into this world on purpose, said the part that wasn't. You stayed because you chose to. You accepted the system's terms. You could have spent every death since the sludge villain dying in low-risk situations and building progression in a controlled way. You didn't. You went to USJ. You went to Hosu. You're here. Every choice you've made since January has been about positioning yourself where the events are.
You positioned yourself where Bakugo is.
He sat with this.
The forest had the mid-morning quality of a place that was warm but not hot yet, the light filtering through the canopy in the specific way it filtered in old-growth forest, diffuse and green-tinted and without the hard edges of direct sunlight. A bird somewhere above him was doing something repetitive and uncomplicated.
The math said B. The math was correct on its own terms. The fragments from Dabi and Moonfish would be real. The progression would be real. The gap between where he was now and the level where he could protect people without dying to do it would close.
He chose B.
The decision had the quality of a thing he'd known was coming and had been postponing by calling it the calculation rather than the choice, and the moment of choice was the moment he stopped calling it something neutral.
He sat with it. Didn't justify it. Didn't construct a framework where it was the correct moral call. Let it be what it was: a person choosing his own advancement over a classmate's safety, and knowing that about himself, and doing it anyway.
I'll come back from whatever I encounter tonight, he thought. Bakugo probably survives anyway. The class is strong. Todoroki, Deku — no, Deku isn't here. Todoroki, Kirishima, the Pussycats will respond.
Probably.
The word had the weight of the word probably in a context where the alternative cost a person something real.
He got up and went back to camp.
Momo found him at the edge of the communal space at three PM, during the afternoon break between training sessions. She had the wrist transmitter in her hand — a flat band of flexible material with a small circuit housing at the inner wrist position, the kind of thing that could pass for a fitness tracker on brief examination.
"The dead-man's switch activates if your heart stops for more than fifteen seconds," she said. "It sends my relay a signal and the relay forwards to Aizawa's communication channel."
He looked at it. She'd built this in two days, which was not long enough to have built it in, which meant she'd started building it before he'd given her the protocol — had started it the moment he'd said something might happen and had filed the possibility while he'd been considering whether to say more.
"Put your left wrist up," she said.
He did. She secured the band.
"The secondary function — the transmitter — activates on manual hold for three seconds." She pressed two fingers to the housing for three seconds. "That sends a direct alert to Aizawa's channel. If you need immediate support and can't speak, use that."
He looked at her. Her expression had the quality it had when she was operating at the intersection of competent and concerned — the precision was her mechanism, the concern was the content underneath it.
"Come back," she said. Not come back safely or be careful — the two words, which contained everything the longer versions would have contained and were harder to dismiss because they were stripped to essential weight.
"I always do," he said.
She didn't smile. She knew what he always did to ensure that he always did.
She picked up her training notebook and went back to the communal space without looking back.
He stood at the edge of the camp and looked at the mess hall window, where Bakugo was visible through the glass — sitting at a table with Kirishima and Sero, saying something with his hands at the emphatic angle he used when he was engaged rather than irritated, and Kirishima was laughing at it, and the late afternoon light made the whole scene the specific quality of an ordinary moment at the end of an ordinary day.
He thought about standing next to Bakugo tonight instead. The specific counterfactual of it. How easy the version where he just — stayed near, stayed positioned, stayed between Compress and the target.
He thought about what that night's fragments would feel like.
He thought about the Nomu's fragment, cool and heavy in his chest since March. About Stain's fragment, which had required Stain to drive a sword through his throat. About the specific economy of a system that gave nothing without taking something equivalent first.
Two more tonight, he thought. If everything goes right.
The mess hall light caught Bakugo's expression at the exact moment whatever Kirishima had said landed, and the actual laugh arrived — the real one, the unperformed one — and Yami turned away before it finished.
At seven PM he strapped the wrist transmitter on and checked the indicator light. Green. Heart: present and accounted for.
He'd laid out his training gear for tonight in the order he'd need it — the costume elements under civilian clothes, easy to shed or deploy, the athletic tape pre-cut for the wrist wrap, the OFA ceiling at 4.5% and climbing, the fragment slots occupied and ready.
Tomorrow night the forest would be full of blue fire and fog and people who came here to hunt.
He'd be hunting too.
The green light on his wrist stayed green.
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