He heard Bakugo before he saw him.
The screaming cut through everything else — the crowd noise, the distant sirens, the overlapping shouts of people who'd decided the safest response to a crisis was standing in a semicircle and watching it. Yami shoved through the outer ring of bystanders, led by the sound, and broke into the shopping district to find the scene already staged like something out of a textbook on why certain locations were villain magnets.
The sludge villain filled the intersection.
Not a man in a sludge body. Not a figure with a liquid coating. The villain was the sludge — a mass of animate brown-gray slurry the size of a pickup truck, pulsing with something that was not breathing because it didn't have lungs, extending and contracting between shop fronts as if it was breathing anyway. In the center of the mass, partially submerged, was a blond teenager being steadily consumed. Explosions popping off his palms in irregular bursts, panicked rather than controlled, each one disappearing into the sludge without inflicting meaningful damage.
Bakugo Katsuki was drowning in slow motion while his own quirk fired uselessly around him.
Six pro heroes stood at the perimeter. He'd expected this part and still found it worse to watch in person. Water quirk — couldn't use it without accelerating the drowning. Wind quirk — same problem. The others at angles where attack meant hitting Bakugo. The classic hero paralysis of a hostage scenario with no clean lines, waiting for someone with the right tool, and the clock the sludge villain ran on wasn't their clock.
Yami positioned himself at the edge of the crowd on the right side and scanned for All Might.
Not there yet.
"Coming. He has to be coming. He's in the area — he was in the tunnel, he caught the villain in the tunnel, the villain escaped from the containment bottles, he's — somewhere in the radius. Give it two minutes."
He clocked exits. He clocked angles. He calculated exactly how close he'd need to get and how visible he'd need to be for presence to register as meaningful action, and he was doing the calculation with the part of his brain that had spent three weeks turning reconnaissance into habit, and the other part of his brain was watching a fifteen-year-old kid's face go purple while slime flooded his airways.
"Two minutes is a long time," he thought.
Then the crowd broke on his left.
Green hair. A backpack gripped by one strap.
Midoriya Izuku hit the hero barrier at a dead run and broke through it on pure momentum and the fact that nobody was quite braced to stop someone running toward the villain rather than away, and he was already screaming — the name, just the name, Kacchan, the kind of scream that wasn't conscious, that happened below the level of decision — and he cocked his arm back and threw the backpack at the sludge villain's eye with everything he had.
It worked for approximately three seconds.
The sludge recoiled from the impact. Bakugo got half a breath. The pro heroes at the perimeter all shouted variations of get back, don't, stop — and Deku stood there with his empty hands at his sides and that specific expression, the one that wasn't brave so much as it was just past the part where stopping was an option.
Yami was already moving.
Not instinct. He didn't have instincts for this. He had the calculation, which was: All Might needs to see someone willing to die for nothing, and the green-haired boy already went, and if I'm three seconds behind him then I'm visible, and if I get close enough that the sludge takes interest, then something heroic and irreversible is happening.
"This is going to hurt," he thought, and crossed the perimeter at a run.
He made it six meters into the intersection before the sludge moved.
Not toward Deku — toward him, because he was moving, because he was new, because the villain was the kind of predator that tracked motion. A tendril the width of a firehose swung out from the main mass and hit him across the midsection and he didn't have time to brace before the impact folded him and then the sludge was everywhere — in his mouth, in his nose, forcing itself past the clenched line of his teeth with the patient, hydrostatic pressure of something that didn't need to hurry because he wasn't going anywhere.
He clawed at it. His fingers sank in and pulled out nothing.
His lungs found no air. He could hear his own heartbeat, the frantic close-up thudding of it, and he could hear — muffled, distant, getting further — Bakugo's quirk going off again, and Deku shouting something, and one of the pros calling for clearance on a wind attack. He tried to move his legs and got a foot off the ground and then the sludge pulled him down and the last light went horizontal and then vanished.
"Not what I —"
Not fear. Not the chest-pressure of the Tuesday evening at Koizumi-Tanaka Financial Services. Just cold, and darkness, and the specific flat indignity of having run a three-week training regimen toward a specific outcome and arriving too slow to accomplish any part of it.
The last sensation was the taste of sewage.
Then nothing.
Not sleep. Not unconsciousness.
Nothing is the only accurate word, and it falls short because nothing implies some kind of space, some kind of waiting-room quality, somewhere you are while you are not somewhere else. This was not that. There was no dark. There was no silence. There was no sense of time passing because there was no sense of anything at all — no cold, no ramen aftertaste, no muscle soreness from the morning run, no shaking hands. The Ichigo Yami who had woken up in a wrong-ceilinged apartment three weeks ago and eaten salty instant ramen standing at a counter because sitting down felt too permanent simply stopped, the way a file stops when you close the program, and there was nothing and no duration to the nothing and no awareness of the nothing and —
Something booted up.
Not a sound. A presence. The specific arrival of information in a space where there had been none, the way a screen goes from black to content without any intermediate state.
He was lying on his back on concrete. Cold concrete, late afternoon sky above him — the same shopping district intersection, same pro heroes, different configuration, the sludge villain nowhere visible, the crowd thinned out, the light shifted. Later. Much later.
"Twenty-four hours," something in the back of his mind supplied, and then he realized the thing supplying that information was not in the back of his mind. It was in front of it. Overlaid on his vision in clean, cold text, white characters against nothing, the kind of interface that suggested function over form and had never once considered personality.
[RESURRECTION PROTOCOL: DEATH ATTRIBUTION SYSTEM — INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
[FIRST DEATH LOGGED. BOOT SEQUENCE FINALIZED.]
[DEATH LEDGER — ENTRY 001: KILLER: SLUDGE VILLAIN. METHOD: SUFFOCATION/ORGANIC SUBMERSION. PAIN INDEX: 7/10. TIER: D-CLASS.]
He stared at it. A sparrow landed six inches from his left hand, looked at him, flew away.
[BASE STATS INITIALIZED. ALL STATS: 10 (CIVILIAN BASELINE).]
[FRAGMENT INVENTORY: ACTIVE. CAPACITY: 5. CURRENT: 0.]
[SKILL POINTS AWARDED: 1. SOURCE: FIRST DEATH BONUS.]
[CYCLE CLOCK: ACTIVE. ANNUAL RESET: 364 DAYS REMAINING.]
He sat up slowly. His ribs didn't hurt. His lungs felt clean. The body that had been drowning in organic slurry twenty-four hours ago had been reassembled from whatever specification the system operated against, and the result was a fifteen-year-old who felt fine and was reading a text overlay that was explaining, in terse mechanical shorthand, what it had just done to him.
Death attribution system. He turned the phrase over. He'd died. The system had logged it — who killed him, how, the scale of suffering, the class of threat. And then it had built him back.
He looked at his hands. Steady. No shaking.
The stats listed at civilian baseline meant nothing extraordinary — all ten, all average, a plain adult human who hadn't trained for anything. The skill point meant one future choice. The fragment inventory meant there was a mechanism for acquiring abilities, and the capacity of five meant five slots for whatever those abilities would eventually be.
The cycle clock meant he had three hundred and sixty-four days in which every death would be attributed and logged before the counter reset and started again.
"Kill attribution," he thought. "The system tracks who kills me and what they can do. And then —"
He needed to know what came after the logging. He needed to understand what a fragment actually was, what the skill tree looked like, what the annual cycle reset actually gave him. He had questions and the interface appeared to be a cold mechanical readout with no interest in answering them.
He checked his pockets. The school ID was there. The phone was there, battery dead. The newspaper was not, because he'd been killed in an intersection and presumably had not been carrying it.
Pro heroes had cleared the scene sometime in the past twenty-four hours. He was alone in a shopping district with the early evening light going amber and a text overlay in his vision and one skill point to spend and no idea what skills were available to buy.
He got to his feet.
His legs held. Everything held. He rolled his shoulders, flexed both hands, took a breath that went all the way down without any resistance.
"Okay," he thought. "So that's what dying feels like. And that's what the system does when you do."
He looked at the intersection — the faint discoloration on the concrete where the sludge had been, scuff marks from the heroes' boots, a forgotten hero support staff jacket left by the perimeter. The green-haired boy had been here. Bakugo had been here. Whatever had happened in the subsequent twenty-three hours and fifty minutes, he'd missed entirely.
The text in his vision stayed steady, waiting.
He turned east toward the apartment and started walking, reading the interface as he moved, looking for the part that told him what came next.
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