The costume case had his name on a printed label above the lock, and the label was crooked by about four degrees, which was the kind of detail that didn't matter and which he noticed anyway because PER at eleven meant he was going to notice things like that for the rest of his life and there was nothing to be done about it.
He picked it up. Carried it to the bench. Opened it.
The costume was exactly what he'd requested — dark reinforced bodysuit, the material somewhere between athletic compression wear and light tactical padding, nothing flashy, no cape, no exposed skin below the neck except the hands. The request form had said prioritize durability and replaceability under the design notes section, and whoever had assembled this had taken the notes seriously. The impact padding at the shoulders and forearms was dense rather than decorative. The whole thing communicated built to take hits without communicating built to look good doing it.
He put it on in the changing room and stood at the mirror for a moment.
The body in the reflection was not the body he'd died in. Twenty-four-year-old Koizumi-Tanaka Financial Services was a hundred and three pounds of sleep deprivation and convenience store nutrition held together by deadline anxiety. The body in the mirror was the product of four months of hauling debris and running intervals and eating everything he could afford and then using a dead man's power to build a foundation under it. Taller at the shoulder. Different at the jaw. Still fifteen, still recognizably not his, but the wrongness had been accumulating so much context that it was becoming harder to locate.
He flexed his hands in the reinforced gloves. The material gave at the knuckles, just enough.
Not there yet, he thought, and put the voice that had said it behind him.
All Might in full hero form barely fit through the training ground entrance.
He managed it with the specific grace of someone who had forty years of practice navigating spaces not designed for a man of his dimensions, the golden cape clearing the doorframe by centimeters, and his arrival at the front of the assembled class produced the involuntary straightening of posture that the Symbol of Peace apparently generated as a passive effect. Even Bakugo's feet came off the equipment crate he'd been using as a footrest.
"I AM HERE!" All Might announced. He said this the way he said most things in hero form — at a volume calibrated for the back row of a disaster zone. "AS YOUR TEACHER!"
Yami watched him. Knew the lifespan on that form. Tracked it the way he tracked other things that mattered and couldn't be controlled.
The matchup assignments came out in the verbal format Yami had expected: hero teams and villain teams, two per side, building assignments, the fake weapon as the objective. He listened to the pairs with the focus of someone confirming a known list.
Hero Team D: Iida Tenya and Ichigo Yami. Villain Team D: Bakugo Katsuki and Uraraka Ochako. Building 3.
Iida turned to him with the posture of someone about to open a tactical briefing.
Yami let him run it.
The briefing was thorough, organized, and entirely consistent with a person who had studied hero operations as an academic discipline and was now applying them to a simulation with genuine seriousness. Defensive position on the upper floor. Weapon secured at center. Patrol routes covering both stairwells. Rotation schedule to prevent fatigue. Iida had drawn a map. On paper. In two minutes.
"That's solid," Yami said, and meant it. "I want to modify one element."
Iida's expression prepared itself for the modification.
"I take the lower floors. Alone. I intercept Bakugo before he reaches you."
"That contradicts the fundamental principle of mutual support positioning—"
"Bakugo won't search," Yami said. "He doesn't search. He identifies the biggest threat in his path and removes it, and then he moves to the next one. If I'm on the lower floors making noise, I'm the biggest threat in his path." He let that land. "You'll have ninety seconds, maybe two minutes, before he gets past me. Use them to reinforce your defensive position and cover the weapon from Uraraka."
Iida processed this with the visible effort of a person whose framework was being asked to accommodate something it hadn't been built for. His jaw moved slightly. "Your strategic confidence regarding Bakugo's specific behavioral patterns—"
"He's been demonstrating them since this morning. You watched the same briefing I did."
That wasn't quite the whole truth. But it was enough of the truth that Iida could reach it through his own logic rather than needing to be directed there, which was generally the better outcome.
"I will reinforce the defensive position," Iida said, with the tone of a man filing an objection before executing an order. "However, if your interception fails before the two-minute window—"
"Then you improvise. Which you're good at." Yami picked up his case. "You've got a solid plan for everything above the third floor. Let me handle what's below it."
Iida looked at him for a moment with something that might have been reassessment, or might have been the face he made when he disagreed with a thing and was in the process of deciding whether to continue disagreeing or redirect the energy elsewhere. He redirected it. "Very well. Coordinated communication will be essential—"
The speakers in the training ground crackled.
All Might's voice boomed across every frequency the building had available: "HEROES, YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES BEFORE THE TRIAL BEGINS! VILLAINS, PREPARE YOUR POSITION!"
Iida put his map away and his hand went to his helmet. Yami rolled his neck once, felt the reinforced collar of the bodysuit settle around his shoulders, and listened for the building around him. The ventilation system. The floor's load distribution. The way sound would move through the stairwells.
He'd known this building in the abstract for years. He was about to know it in the actual, and the gap between those two versions of knowing was the part that made his hands run slightly warm inside the gloves.
Not fear. Just the body being honest about what was coming.
The five minutes passed the way countdown intervals passed: the first four at normal speed, the last one at a quarter of it.
"START!"
In the floor below him, through concrete and steel and the architecture of a building designed to simulate an urban combat environment, something detonated.
Bakugo wasn't searching. The sound confirmed it — the explosion didn't move laterally, it moved up, the percussive force of it traveling through the building's support structure in the vertical direction because Bakugo had established where the stairs were and had elected to announce his approach rather than conceal it.
"There he is," Yami thought, and went to meet him.
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