….
The workplace experience program went satisfyingly.
Unlike the original timeline, where Dabi vaguely remembered things going sideways in about four different directions at once, this time he had made sure every student landed somewhere that actually fit them.
He spent hours going through agency offers, cross-referencing quirk types, personality profiles, combat styles, and learning their needs.
It was boring, tedious work, and he did it anyway…
Hhaa, maybe I am not a bad teacher for once.
Coming back, there were few placements he was particularly careful about.
Yaoyorozu went to the agency of the Dragoon Hero, Ryuko Tatsuma, which specialized in team coordination and large-scale rescue missions. Her Creation quirk and strategic thinking were valued there rather than overshadowed.
Much better than wasting time at the Snake Hero Uwabami's workplace.
Kirishima trained under Fourth Kind, a hero known for discipline, defense, and strong work ethic. As a martial-arts-type hero, Fourth Kind's close-range combat style fit perfectly with Kirishima's Hardening quirk.
Tokoyami worked with Hawks' agency.
Every placement had been carefully considered, and things were going well.
Which was exactly why Dabi knew something would eventually go wrong.
….
Meanwhile, in the Osaka region, Bakugo and Shoto were at the Hero agency of Stain.
[Red Justice Agency]
Red Justice being Stain's Hero name, which Dabi still thought sounded like a knockoff energy drink but had long since stopped bringing it up.
Right now, Bakugo was face-down on the training room floor with Stain sitting on top of him.
Just sitting there, cross-legged, like Bakugo was a particularly loud piece of furniture. Shoto stood off to the side, watching and unlike canon, he hadn't gone to Endeavor's agency.
"Get the HELL off me, you bastard!" Bakugo snarled, face pressed into the mat with both arms pinned as he thrashed uselessly. "You hear me?! I will kill you! I swear to god I will - MOVE!"
"Kill me, he says." Spinner leaned against the far wall with his arms crossed. "Yeah, real heroic."
"Oi, Dabi." Stain didn't raise his voice.
He turned his head toward the other side of the room, where Dabi was on the floor doing push-ups with what looked like an unreasonable amount of weight stacked on his back–
"You truly wish for someone like this to walk freely through society?"
Beside Dabi, Twice was crouched down, counting reps. "Forty-seven! No wait… thirty-two! You're killing it, boss! This is painful to watch!"
Dabi didn't answer Stain, he just kept going.
Stain waited a second, then stood up off Bakugo in one clean motion and looked down at him.
"Alright. You want to kill me so bad." He said, dragging a finger lightly along the blade's edge, just enough to split the skin into a thin red line. "Go ahead. Get up."
Bakugo pushed himself up and barely took a step before his knees buckled, dropping him hard as he caught himself with his hands while crushing pressure closed in from every direction, forcing him into the pavement, worse than the weight training Dabi had put him through before the Sports Festival.
The harder he pushed against it, the heavier it became, as if the weight responded to his effort and punished him for it.
Shoto stood off to the side, silent and unmoving, his eyes shifting from Bakugo to Stain, then briefly to Dabi, still doing push-ups as if none of it concerned him.
Gentle appeared to be practicing poses while La Brava filmed him, neither of them particularly bothered by the hostage situation unfolding ten feet away.
Shoto watched it all and briefly wondered whether coming here had been a mistake, but the thought vanished within seconds.
Bakugo being placed with Stain had Dabi written all over it.
He couldn't officially choose internships for his students, but influencing someone desperate for power? That was easy, and pairing two extremists on opposite ends of the same question was far too tempting for him to leave alone.
What a hero should be.
What a hero absolutely should not be.
A kid who screamed about murder every time he got frustrated, placed under the supervision of a man who has the capability to hunt down heroes he deemed unworthy and had very strong feelings about what those words actually meant.
It was either going to work brilliantly or end in a fistfight…
Dabi finished his set, stood up, and checked something on a screen only he could see.
====
[GENETIC MILESTONE SYSTEM]
THREE EVOLUTION PATHS:
| [BREATH OF THE SUN] – 100/100% ✓
| [SUPER SOLDIER] – 100/100% ✓
| [ARACHNID GENOME] – (22 → 30)/100%
LIFE SPAN LEFT: 119+ Years
====
Dabi gained additional ten more from the rest days and training alone - while the [Arachnid Genome] continued developing each time he pushed his body past its limits - something he hadn't neglected.
He pulled on his shirt and started walking toward the door.
"Stain." He didn't turn around. "Don't go overboard with them."
On his way out, he paused beside Shoto. For a long moment, he just looked at his younger brother - the masterpiece who looked remarkably out of place in a room full of societal rejects.
"I still don't get why the hell you picked this place." Dabi scratched the side of his jaw. "But since you are here, shut up and focus on getting stronger. That's it. Don't think of anything else.'"
The irony wasn't lost on Dabi. He had told Shoto to find a place where 'no one knows who your brother was' - but Shoto had done the exact opposite.
Who should I blame though? He wondered.
He had explicitly told Twice to make sure Stain's invitation list didn't include the Todoroki name, but Twice's dual personality had apparently mishandled the memo.
…and even after that, he still couldn't pinpoint why Shoto accepted it.
"Hey! Hey, Boss! Where are you going? Take me with you! Stay away from me, you are a bad influence!" Twice called out, his mask twitching as his voice battled for dominance.
"Got a student to check on," Dabi muttered, glancing back at Stain, who currently had a knee pinned into Bakugo's spine. "Teaching is a pain in the ass."
…and he was gone.
The instant he left, Stain released his quirk, the pressure lifting as Bakugo sprang to his feet, his palms already popping with the acrid scent of nitroglycerin.
"THAT'S IT!" His face twisted in a mask of pure, unadulterated rage. "You're DEAD, you hear me?! I will murder–"
Stain did not flinch or reach for his notched blades or even shift into a defensive stance, he just looked at Katsuki Bakugo.
"Kid."
…and that one word was enough.
Stain's eyes had that flat, cold quality, like a door that opened onto something you really didn't want to see the other side of.
The bloodlust radiating from him was almost visible, a tangible pressure that thickened the air and filled the room, leaving Spinner rigid, La Brava lowering her camera, Gentle going still, and even Twice falling silent, the most alarming sign of all.
Six feet away, Shoto felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
"You wanna finish that sentence?"
Bakugo's mouth was still open but nothing came out.
"No? Then here me out." Stain said, stepping closer. "Every time you open your mouth, it's kill this, murder that. You say those words like they're cheap, like they are just empty noise you throw out when you are throwing a tantrum."
He took another step, invading Bakugo's personal space.
"Do you have any idea what they actually cost when someone means them?"
Bakugo didn't move. His hands were still raised, sparks still fizzling weakly between his fingers, but his feet refused to follow his brain's command to attack.
Every survival instinct he possessed was screaming a single, panicked warning: Don't.
"Wh–" Bakugo's throat had gone dry.
Stain was inches away now, looking straight down into Bakugo's wide, trembling pupils.
"So here is the deal." Stain's voice dropped to a whisper that felt sharper than any blade. "You and me. Right now. A death match where only one of us walks out the door. That's what you want, isn't it? That's what you just screamed. I'm ready when you are."
Everyone in the room felt it and Bakugo most of all.
This wasn't a bluff and something silly as intimidation for the sake of theater.
The man standing in front of him would actually do it or he had done worse, to people who probably deserved it less.
"You don't have the stomach for it? Then stop saying it. It's that simple." Stain hadn't so much as blinked. "Because me? I am not like you. I don't throw those words around to feel tough. I have put people in the ground, kid. People who talked exactly the way you do. Heroes who thought wearing the title meant they could say whatever they wanted without it meaning anything... A villain in a Hero's skin."
A pause. "So I will ask you one more time. Are you taking it back, or are we doing this?"
Bakugo's palms had gone deathly still. His jaw clenched hard enough to strain his neck - looking like a kid who had reached the edge of something real and was staring straight down.
"…villain." Bakugo said, the word barely more than a raw, scraped whisper.
"Hah?"
"I said–" Bakugo's voice cracked back to life, shaking and furious. "Don't you EVER, compare me to… I am NOT a villain! I am NOTHING like them! Who the hell do you think you are talking to?!"
He didn't finish the word cleanly, his eyes burned in something deeper, harder, and more painfully honest than his usual bravado.
This time he meant it down to his bones.
Stain studied him for another long, silent second, searching for a flicker of a lie. He didn't find one.
Then he stepped back, one, two, three paces, his posture easing as the suffocating pressure lifted and everyone could breathe again.
"Hm." Stain rolled his neck. "Alright. You get to live."
La Brava let out a breath she had been holding for about forty-five seconds, Gentle unclenched his hands and Twice whispered. "That was the scariest thing I have ever seen. Can we do it again?"
"But next time." Stain added, voice steady as he looked back at Bakugo. "If those words leave your mouth and you don't mean every syllable, we are done talking. Understood?"
Without waiting for a response, he crossed the room toward Shoto. The younger Todoroki stood pale - as if several fundamental assumptions about his world had just been quietly rewritten.
"Now." Stain studied him for a second. "Your turn. Dabi didn't push you on this 'cause that's how he is, but I am not him." He crossed his arms. "Why did you come here? And don't give me the getting stronger line. I already heard that part."
Shoto met his gaze, his voice as flat and even as ever, though this time there was a half-second pause before he spoke, one that hadn't been there before.
"Getting stronger is the first reason." He paused. "The second..."
His gaze dropped to his hands for a moment, then lifted again.
"I am here to leave him behind." Shoto stated.
…and that was it, nothing more, no names spoken, yet everyone in the room understood, except for Twice that is…
Deep down, buried under layers of stoicism and ice, was a truth Shoto rarely admitted even to himself: he was jealous.
Despite knowing how much suffering Dabi had to go through to reach where he was - Shoto Todoroki - was in fact jealous of what his brother had achieved.
He suffered. Yes.
But he also won.
He successfully clawed away from their father, and became something on his own.
He respects his for the achievement… and yet at the same time couldn't help but want the same.
Stain immediately understood that.
"Hah! Is that what you think you are doing?" Stain stepped closer, his long, tattered scarf swaying like a serpent. "You say you want to escape his shadow, yet here you are, standing in another man's. You didn't choose a path, boy."
Shoto's eyes widened slightly.
"You traded the 'Number Two' for the 'Underground Ghost.'" Stain hissed, leaning in until his nose nearly touched Shoto's. "You are still just a kid looking for someone to tell him how to stand. If Dabi tells you to jump, you jump because you think it's 'freedom' just because it isn't Endeavor's way. But it's still his way, isn't it? You just switched masters."
Stain uncrossed his arms, his lip curling in a sneer.
"If you're here to 'find yourself' through Dabi, you've already failed, he doesn't want followers or shadows, he wants a hero who can think for themselves."
Shoto held his gaze, but the frost along his right side thickened, a visible strain of his inner conflict, as he remained without an answer.
Stain looked between them - the boy who had just been forced to confront his own hypocrisy, and Bakugo, who was still staring at his hands in the corner.
He thought back to Dabi's tired remark on his way out the door.
Yeah... teaching is a pain in the ass.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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