The day of the summer camp had finally arrived. It was 08:30 AM, and the summer sun was already asserting its dominance over the asphalt plaza in front of UA Academy.
Students from Classes 1-A and 1-B gathered amidst the chaotic excitement and massive suitcases. Aizawa stood before the bus, his eyes framed by heavy dark circles scanning his students' faces. He dropped a few dry words about the importance of this camp for developing their Quirks and pushing their limits.
At the back of the bus, Tenya Iida was waving his arms like a malfunctioning traffic signal, voice pitched at maximum volume: "Everyone lines up according to the designated seating arrangement! Disorder starts here and ends in failure!"
Everyone finally boarded, and the bus pulled away, leaving a cloud of dust behind. Inside, the atmosphere was boisterous; Kaminari and Mina were playing music, and Kirishima was arguing with Bakugo. Aizawa turned from the front seat attempting to explain the trip's details, but his voice drowned in the sea of noise. He exhaled slowly, settled back down, and muttered under his breath: "This is the only time they'll be allowed to act like this."
In the back seat, Zoro had taken his usual position. He draped a small towel over his eyes and crossed his arms around his three swords. Before sinking into sleep, he nudged Midoriya's seat with his foot and said in his raspy voice without lifting the towel: "Hey, Deku. When we get there, wake me up."
An hour passed. The bus stopped at an empty rest area overlooking a vast cliff. The students stepped out wondering why they had stopped, only to find that Aizawa had planned everything.
From a black SUV, two women in colorful cat-themed costumes jumped out, accompanied by a small boy wearing a red horned hat, his expression radiating pure contempt for everything around him.
"With one look, we steal your hearts! The mountain hero team... Wild Wild Pussycats!"
After their introduction, Pixie-Bob stepped toward the edge of the cliff and pointed her finger toward a very distant mountain peak behind a vast forest, smiling with quiet sadism: "That's where you'll be staying."
The students' eyes went wide. "Back to the bus, now, move it!" Kirishima and Ashido shouted, scrambling toward the door.
Pixie-Bob's smile didn't waver. "It's 09:30 AM. Move fast and you might make it before noon. Kittens who aren't there by 12:30..." She let the pause do its work. "Won't be eating lunch."
She dropped to her knees and drove both hands into the ground. The cliff shook. The earth cracked and rose in waves that swept the screaming students off their feet and sent them tumbling through the air toward the entrance of the dark forest below. Zoro alone corrected his body mid-fall and landed on his feet without a sound.
Mandalay's voice arrived directly inside their heads: "You have three hours. Reach the facility on your own feet, after crossing... the Forest of Beasts!"
The trees shook. Massive shapes of earth and rock pulled themselves upright into towering monsters. While Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki were still readying themselves, Zoro's sword had already moved, splitting the first beast clean in half before any of them had shifted their stance.
"Boring," he muttered.
He spotted another one deeper in the trees, moved toward it and cut it, turned right and found a cluster, then began threading through the forest, working through the earthen monsters one after another, right, then left, then right again, with the unhurried efficiency of someone doing chores.
After several minutes of continuous movement, Zoro sheathed his sword and looked behind him. Nothing. The sound of explosions had stopped. The students were gone. He scratched the back of his head. "Huh? Where'd they go? Left me behind?" And he began walking in a direction chosen entirely at random.
05:20 PM. Sunset.
In front of the Pussycats' wooden facility, the sun was going down. Aizawa stood quietly alongside Mandalay, Pixie-Bob, and the boy, Kota. Then came the sound of snapping branches, and the students of Class 1-A began to appear. They came dragging their feet, clothes torn, faces caked in mud, breathing like people who had survived something rather than merely completed it.
Pixie-Bob smiled brightly. "You made it! Took you long enough!"
Iida dropped to one knee gasping, then lifted his head to count his classmates. His eyes bulged behind his glasses. "Wait. Where is Roronoa-kun?! Did he fall somewhere in the forest? Is he injured?!"
Midoriya looked around, his voice dropping: "Don't tell me he..."
"Who are you looking for?"
The voice came from the completely opposite direction from the forest. Everyone turned to find Zoro stepping out from behind the facility building, not from the tree line. He was clean. Yawning. Hands in his pockets.
Uraraka burst out laughing while wiping mud off her face. "You got lost again, didn't you, Zoro-kun?!"
Iida's arm moved in its mechanical pointing gesture. "How does a person get lost inside a clearly defined forest on what is effectively a straight path?! This defies every foundational principle of basic navigation!"
Zoro's ears went faintly red, but his expression stayed flat. He looked away. "What are you talking about? I got here way before any of you. When I saw you were all taking forever, I went around back to stretch and ended up falling asleep." A beat. "You're just slow."
Midoriya and Uraraka exchanged a look full of suppressed laughter, while Aizawa pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose and said nothing at all.
After a massive dinner where the students worked through mountains of food, everyone headed off to bathe and rest. Zoro had no patience for crowded places. He took his swords and cleaning kit and walked away from the hot springs, looking for somewhere quiet outside.
His feet carried him, by mistake as usual, to a high rocky ledge overlooking the dark forest. There he found the small boy, Kota, sitting alone, staring at the trees with open hatred.
When Kota heard the footsteps, he spun around. "What do you want?! Did you come to act the perfect hero and tell me I need to socialize with the others? Because I'm sick of all of you and your stupid hero games, so save it."
Zoro didn't stop walking. Didn't look at him. He sat down on a nearby rock, laid his swords in front of him, pulled out a cloth, and began cleaning the blade of Wado Ichimonji without any particular hurry.
"Do whatever you want," he said, eyes on the blade. "I came here because their noise was getting on my nerves."
Kota blinked. He had prepared himself for a speech about hope and justice and the importance of community. "You're... you're a student at the academy, right? Don't you want to become a hero? Have people cheering for you?"
Zoro stopped wiping. He looked up at Kota in the moonlight. There was none of that heroic gleam in his eyes that Kota had learned to despise on sight. Just something cold, and sharp, and entirely honest about what it was.
"A hero?" Something between a laugh and a scoff. "Don't lump me in with them. A hero is someone who shares his food. I'm someone who wants to eat all of it himself." He went back to the blade. "I'm a swordsman. I cut down whatever stands in my way. That's it. Nothing more to it."
Kota said nothing. He watched this strange person and felt none of the revulsion he felt toward the others. Zoro wasn't performing anything. He was simply at peace with his own nature, whatever that nature was. For the first time since his parents died, Kota felt like he was sitting next to something real.
Zoro returned to cleaning the blade. Then his hand went completely still.
His features tightened. His pupils narrowed. A cold wind came from the depths of the dark forest, but what he felt had nothing to do with temperature. His Observation Haki had just caught something, a wave of pressure, concentrated and heavy and the color of blood, rising from somewhere deep among the trees. Something that had no business belonging to animals or students.
He pressed the sword back into its scabbard with a sharp click that rang through the quiet night, and looked toward the forest the way a predator looks at something that just moved in the dark.
His voice came out low, barely enough for Kota to catch it: "Looks like this silence... was only ever a short-lived lie."
.
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For Advanced Chapters:
Chapter 77 is Available Now
What Remains… Is Not Over Yet
Zoro is injured, exhausted, and bleeding alone in the forest.Meanwhile, on the other side, Compress is heading towards Bakugo, the villains' second target.What will happen?
What's coming next will be even more
exciting and thrilling.
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