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Denki doesn’t know up from down.
His fingers are singed from overuse, every shockwave weaker than the last. He’s been forced to fall back on his sword and shield, the risk of blowing a fuse too high. Even with armor on, the idea makes him feel naked.
Musutafu lies in ruins around him.
He’d lost track of Sero an hour ago, the other camper leaving with the rest of the aerial offensive. If he squints, he can see Hagakure around bends in the light, an invisible force taking down Empousai. Jirou has one jack in the ground, sending whistle frequencies that have the Hellhounds’ ears bleeding. The other has been ripped from her head, the makeshift bandage wrapped around her skull already soaked through. Mineta disappears beneath the foot of a Giant, but not before slicing its tendon wide open. The monster loses balance, and that’s all the opening Denki needs to send his sword home as it falls.
He’s covered in dust and sweat and blood, and his body hurts, and he’s so tired. He surveys the other campers around him. Most of them are younger—eleven or twelve at best—and holding their own more out of need than skill. The rest are beyond help. A telltale stench permeates the air, and he has no choice but to keep breathing it in.
Static tingles up his arm, more ache than his quirk. They’ve been fighting for hours with no signs of stopping. Every minor triumph is buried by a surge of new enemies.
Right on time, a meteoric crash resounds from the next block over. Jirou slaps a hand to her ear with a scream, jack recoiling. When he catches her eye, she looks terrified.
“GO!” she yells. She has one hand on her sword and a shimmering presence behind her with another. It’s the only reason Denki runs.
When he turns the corner, her reaction makes awful sense.
A monster the size of a house crawls out of the crater where it landed, opening its mouth and emitting a sound like nails on a chalkboard. A Nomu. One of the most dangerous creatures in mythological history— an abominable chimera of demigod remains and manufactured evil. They were unnatural at their core. Nomus hadn’t been seen on the mortal plane in centuries.
Denki has reckoned with his mortality no less than five times today, but this blows them all out of the water.
No two Nomus are the same. Some can fly. Others breathe fire. There’s no way to know what you’re dealing with until it’s too late. Aizawa had trained them to fight Nomus at camp—prepared to a fault—but those were dummies in controlled spaces. The real thing is different.
This monster looms over the street, dousing everything in shadow. The nearest campers attempt to hit it with a volley of arrows, but the Nomu merely swats them out of the sky—and then it leaps with its cavernous maw opening towards them. The archers have no time to scatter before they’re crushed under its body.
Chaos erupts as everyone charges. The remaining members of the Apollo cabin continue to shoot, while others try to stab at the Nomu’s limbs—armored scales that refuse to give way. Denki is nearly blinded by its huge yellow eyes as he runs to flank its sweeping tail. There’s dragon in this Nomu, or worse, drakon. Every cloudy exhale it takes leaves the air feeling thinner, its serpentine body leaving no other assumption.
In this purely physical battle, they are already losing hard. No sword can pierce its skin. No arrow has landed. The Nomu continues on its warpath as if the demigods are ants under its feet—and maybe they are. Another matter of life and death.
Denki doesn’t see a way out of this one. He figures he might as well go down fighting.
The Nomu approaches, sharp teeth bared, and he lights up with indiscriminate electricity. It’s probably the last thing he will ever do.
When he comes to a minute later, he’s flat on his back—the wind knocked out of him, but alive.
His brain is definitely fried. The haze is slow to clear, and he takes a few hard blinks to ground himself. The Nomu is wounded. As he sits up, Denki can see where the currents traveled through its body.
It had worked. But the beast was still standing, and that was all he had left in him. He doesn’t want to give up, but he has to be realistic. Gods, he doesn’t even know where his sword landed.
And then, the tide changes.
So faint at first, he thinks he’s imagining it, but it grows in volume with every second. The familiar call of a deafening war cry, followed by the thunderous sound of chariots charging into the battle. More campers emerge from the smoky distance under a sea of red banners. He feels a surge of mania course through his body.
Reinforcements.
“FOR ARES!”
The children of Ares arrive with a fierceness, weapons at the ready, and led by a figure in familiar blood-colored armor. Bakugou Katsuki’s face is covered by his helm, but he is unmistakable where he stands.
Bakugou points his spear and waves his hand in a wide circle. Half of his unit splits off to support the campers on the fringe, while the rest follow his lead toward the Nomu. Once they surround it, they descend upon the beast—javelins and lances at the ready.
The Nomu whips its tail across the path of two chariots, knocking them over. The riders take cover, before attacking again.
They’re relentless even as they fall, fighting with reckless abandon. Children of war to the core, and Bakugou is a whirlwind of red and strength. He throws himself onto the Nomu’s shoulders, hanging on with one large hand. With his other, he aims true.
Bakugou stabs his spear into the Nomu’s eye, blinding it on the left side. The monster screeches and throws him off, forcing him to roll into a defensive stance.
“ARES, TO ME!” Bakugou calls. His voice wavers, uncommon for him, but given the circumstances, Denki can understand.
The next time the Nomu opens its mouth, the Ares campers strike. They pierce the monster’s forked tongue with a volley of spears and it howls in pain. With a toss of its massive head, it throws the weapons out of its mouth. They land in a broken, smoking pile, half-liquified and covered in substance.
Poison. The realization dawns on everyone at the same time, and then everything starts to go wrong.
The Nomu begins to spew acid, answering a question Denki wishes he hadn’t asked.
One of the Ares fighters barely dodges its noxious venom, but another is not so lucky. Denki watches the top half of a third camper disappear between the Nomu’s teeth with horror. He tries to muster the energy to move, but his muscles are useless from quirk tremors.
The battle cries turn to screams of fear. Bakugou stands almost too still for the moment, fingers flexing around his spear like he’s preparing himself.
Shinsou’s prophecy echoes through his ears with sudden, blinding clarity.
A memory from only days ago. Shinsou, talking in his sleep on the floor of the Big House, his words disjointed and nonsensical. Denki remembers waking up to him tossing and turning, mumbling about secrets and loss and prices to pay. A monster. A child of Ares. It has to be you. The nature of his Oracle tendencies was still in flux, but every half-sentence had meaning somewhere.
It was as long a shot as any, but if anyone could conquer poor odds, it was Bakugou Katsuki.
“Bakugou! A child of Ares is destined to kill it!” Denki screams. “Come on!”
He feels like a live wire. There’s an unsettling thrum under his skin as his words land.
Something is wrong.
Bakugou looks back at him—his red eyes shining with tears, acceptance—before bracing his body and charging. The Nomu rears back with pointed wrath and spits poison straight into his face.
Denki watches as the hardening of his quirk ripples and then gives way, and—
Bakugou’s quirk is Explosion.
No.
No. No. No.
He recognizes the apology and what it means a moment too late. With a pained scream, the leader of the Ares cabin falls. Everything goes eerily silent save for the sickening crack of a body against concrete. Soft skin that never stood a chance.
Denki’s head is spinning with what he saw, what he barely understood, what he cannot change. Bakugou was lithe, his armor too small for the person wearing it. They were the same height. They had the same colored eyes. But their quirks were different. Their hair.
It had blended in with the color of the armor, the color of war being waged around them. He had thought it was soaked with blood like his own.
The earsplitting screech of the still-standing Nomu wrenches reality back into brutal focus. Bakugou’s—not Bakugou’s—body lying prone in the dust.
“Kacchan—” he hears in the distance. That’s Midoriya making his way into this nightmare. Denki watches as One For All crackles beneath his palms, and he launches himself at the Nomu. It’s not what you think, he wants to say, but it doesn’t matter when the truth is no better. He still can’t fathom why.
Denki stumbles toward the smoking pile of armor and poison as other campers swarm to defend it. He falls to his knees where some are already trying to wrench the half-melted helm off. The yellow-green foam of the poison had eaten away to bone. He realizes the imposter is still, cruelly, conscious— chest rising and falling with rapid, gasping breaths. Ambrosia would be futile.
In his periphery, he hears a chariot land. Footsteps. A guttural, wounded sound. Bakugou, in plain clothes, followed by Shinsou. They must have come from camp, following the Ares cabin who had been following somebody else. Someone finally manages to wrench the metal free, and then they are all forced to confront the terrible truth.
“Katsuki,” Kirishima says weakly. His eyes track to the side where Denki can only stare, frozen, at the disfigured face of his best friend. “Denki. Hey.”
“What the hell were you thinking?” Bakugou’s voice is shaking. Bakugou’s whole body is shaking, the tremble of his words traveling down into his hands where he cradles Kirishima’s head in his lap. He’s crying. “You stupid, shitty-haired, Aphrodite kid. Why?”
“They wouldn’t listen…to anyone else,” Kirishima says. The air keeps catching in the back of his throat. Denki can’t believe he can still speak.
“So you stole my armor,” Bakugou says in disbelief. “You waited until I went on patrol and you stole my armor. And nobody fucking noticed?”
Shame hits Denki in a wave and he hangs his head. Too caught up in his own fear and fighting to realize his own best friend’s sacrifice. What kind of person did that make him?
“Not their fault,” Kirishima coughs, blood staining his teeth. “Not yours either…Denki. They wanted…to believe it. It had to…be…me.”
The cacophony swells around them. An arrow flies past his head. Midoriya almost gets bludgeoned by the monster’s tail. A battalion of centaurs rides past.
“Go help the others,” Bakugou snaps at the other campers. “Help Deku.” The Ares cabin barely hesitates before charging back into the fray. They have their own debts to pay now, and they rally around a cry of Kirishima’s name.
Tears track down into the cavern where Kirishima’s cheek should be, less his own than of those hovering over him. Right now, nothing exists except this.
“You’re a hero,” Denki says. Bakugou nods, not looking away from Kirishima for a second, and he realizes that this is all the time he gets to say his piece. “You’re a hero, Kirishima Eijirou, and you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
Kirishima tries to smile but his lips are too cracked, eyebrows knitting as he looks back at him. It makes the tiny scar on his brow stand out in horrifying contrast to the rest of the damage, and Denki’s vision blurs with the sudden well of emotion. Shinsou’s hand wraps around his wrist, tight. An anchor.
“I love you,” Bakugou says. Desperate. Begging. “You’re unbreakable.”
Denki feels sick to his stomach.
“Some curses are…unbreakable too,” Kirishima reminds him. “It’s okay, Katsuki.”
Bakugou flinches at his words.
It was so easy to forget the weight of Kirishima’s godly parentage, that stupid rite of passage. How could love be the fatal flaw of a child of Aphrodite? Denki looks at the two in front of him and thinks—easily.
“Fuck that. Fuck all of that. Eijirou—” Bakugou breaks down, as fractured as Denki’s ever seen him, and his heart keeps breaking. All of this is so fucking unfair.
A fondness ghosts over Kirishima’s face, reminiscent of every other time he’s looked at Bakugou. An immeasurable feeling reaches through the reflection of his eyes as the light starts to fade. His breath rattles.
“You were it for me.”
“You’re not dying,” Bakugou insists. “You’re not.”
Kirishima doesn’t reply.
“Eijirou.” Bakugou’s voice turns frantic. He shakes Kirishima’s limp shoulders, pulls him close. “Eijirou—someone call a FUCKING MEDIC—”
“Bakugou, stop. Stop, man.” Denki grabs his arms, his own eyes raw and burning. “He’s gone.”
It takes Denki and Shinsou both to pry him off and through it all, gut-wrenching sobs. Bakugou wrings himself dry between promises and pleading and cursing the name of every power that be. He knows Bakugou processes it when his shoulders slump forward, Kirishima’s body still unmoving. Denki knows he’s lost them both today.
“Please,” Bakugou whispers, and the look in his eyes is manic, uncomprehending. He turns his head to the sky. “Please. Whatever you want. Please.”
Olympus is silent. The gods allow this, as they do everything else. And in this moment, Denki understands their traitor more than anything. He brushes his fingers over Kirishima’s face and gently closes his eyes.
The Nomu’s scream pierces through the air, the monster still standing despite everything being thrown at it. This time, the real Bakugou looks up at the Nomu, pure hatred in his expression. It’s one he has long outgrown—one he used to reserve for Midoriya before the world fell apart. Now, he doesn’t hesitate to call out his name.
Midoriya stops short, relief and confusion washing over his face. When he looks down to where Denki kneels beside Kirishima’s body, the grief returns in overwhelm.
“CLEAR A PATH, DEKU.” Bakugou roars, palms sparking. “IT’S MINE.”
Midoriya, to his credit, recovers quickly. He compartmentalizes as they all have to and moves to support Bakugou. Green light arcs and shatters the ground around the Nomu, downing a pack of smaller creatures.
Bakugou grabs his spear from Kirishima’s limp hand, looking back at him once more before charging. No armor. No shield. No fear. Just a boy challenging fate in a skull shirt and jeans. The deadliness of someone who already lost everything there was to lose.
“I’LL SHOW YOU DEATH,” Bakugou screams at the Nomu. “I’LL SHOW YOU DESTRUCTION.”
An explosion launches him off the ground, where the monster attacks seconds later. He moves with a fury, catapulting his way up the creature's neck, to head, to where he can look it in the eye. As it rears back, he strikes with a monstrous sound, driving his weapon into the remaining socket with the atomic force of his quirk behind it. The shaft shatters on impact. The skull of the Nomu combusts.
The creature’s corpse swings wildly toward a building before crashing into the side. Bakugou free falls out of the sky and Midoriya catches him midair, landing them both a safe distance away. Denki can’t do anything but stare alongside everyone else.
Nomus were beasts of legend. Prophetic gibberish aside, never before had anyone taken one down alone and with such lethal efficiency.
In any other situation, Bakugou would be bolstered by his victory and hungry for more. Instead, Denki watches as Midoriya puts a hand on his shoulder, mouth moving as he casts a glance back at the small group of mourners. Bakugou doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t say a word. He just watches the smoking body of the Nomu dissolve with a vacant look.
The war continues to wage around them. Time marches on.
“Kirishima gave his life for us.” Shinsou’s voice is brittle as he stands. “We have to keep fighting. To honor him.”
“We can’t leave him here,” Denki says, but he knows. Only shrouds make it home.
Like he can hear them from a distance, Bakugou picks up another weapon from a nearby body. When he starts walking away, Midoriya lets him go.
Denki says one last goodbye, and then he follows.