Chapter 5:

The rhythmic hum of the UA Academy transport bus did little to dampen the chaotic energy vibrating through the cabin. Packed with the students of Class 1-A, the vehicle was a rolling cacophony of overlapping conversations, sudden laughter, and the occasional spark of premature rivalry.

Up in the very front row, slumped low into his seat, Shota Aizawa looked like a man who was actively calculating how many hours of sleep society owed him. His yellow sleeping bag was slung over his shoulder like a security blanket, and his bloodshot eyes were heavy with irritation. He was just closing them, hoping for a precious three-minute micro-nap before they reached the facility, when his phone buzzed violently in his pocket.

He pulled it out, squinting at the caller ID. With a slow, deeply annoyed exhale, he swiped the screen and brought it to his ear.

"What is it, All Might?" Aizawa muttered, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.

"Ahem... my apologies, Aizawa-kun," Toshinori's voice filtered through the receiver, sounding thoroughly embarrassed and strained. "It seems that... well, I won't be able to attend the rescue training session today."

Aizawa's brow furrowed, his hand instinctively rising to rub his temples. He didn't need a medical degree to diagnose the problem. The Symbol of Peace had undoubtedly overextended his daily operational limit yet again, rendering himself completely incapacitated and locked in his fragile, skeletal form.

"What?" Aizawa sighed, his tone sharp. "You can't just back out of a joint curriculum when we are practically pulling up to the USJ gates. This isn't a casual field trip; it's a core foundational exercise."

"I know, I know! It's entirely my responsibility," Toshinori hurried to explain, letting out a weak cough. "That is why I have already arranged for an elite substitute to take my place for the day."

Aizawa paused, his eyes narrowing slightly. That was genuinely surprising. Knowing All Might's stubborn nature and his near-obsessive dedication to his teaching duties, he would usually drag his dying body to a class before delegating it to someone else. "You found a replacement? On this short notice?"

"Yes. Someone exceptionally reliable. You won't have to worry about a thing—"

Before Toshinori could finish his sentence, the heavy brakes of the transport bus hissed loudly, and the vehicle rocked to a gentle halt right outside the grand, dome-shaped entrance of the Unforeseen Simulation Joint.

"Never mind. Tell me the details later," Aizawa cut him off flatly, hanging up the phone without waiting for a farewell.

He stood up, turning around to face the cabin. Behind him, the students were practically vibrating in their seats, pressing their faces against the glass windows to marvel at the sheer scale of the training facility. If he didn't intervene within the next five seconds, their collective excitement might actually tilt the entire bus onto its side.

"Alright, listen up," Aizawa announced, his dull, menacing gaze sweeping across the teenagers. "Line up and get out of the bus. One by one. Don't make a scene before we even step through the doors."

A collective sweat-drop seemed to form across the class. Leave it to their homeroom teacher to address them with the enthusiasm of a prison warden.

"Yes, Mr. Aizawa!" Tenya Iida bellowed, his arms chopping the air like mechanical rotors as he immediately began managing the exit row with militaristic precision.

As the students filed out onto the concrete plaza, the crisp afternoon air did nothing to quiet them. Izuku Midoriya was already clutching his notebook, his eyes wide as he muttered a mile-a-minute analysis of the USJ's architectural design, while Katsuki Bakugo simply shoved his hands into his pockets, letting out a sharp, dismissive snort.

Aizawa stepped off the bus last, looking toward the grand entrance where the space hero, Thirteen, was already waiting to greet them. But as he walked toward the pro hero, his eyes caught a subtle detail out in the distance.

There was no sign of All Might. But parked a short distance away from the UA security perimeter was a sleek, unmarked government vehicle.

Aizawa's eyes narrowed under his long bangs. Who exactly did you send, All Might?

Inside the tinted, leather-lined interior of the government vehicle, the atmosphere was a profound contradiction.

To an outside observer, Hoshimi Miyabi looked like the epitome of an elite black-ops commander—perfect posture, razor-sharp uniform, and a cold, unreadable face that could freeze a villain's blood at fifty paces.

In reality, she was holding a brightly colored, imported carton of melon-flavored milk with both hands, aggressively shaking it up and down in perfect rhythm.

"Yao yi yao... yao yi yao..." she murmured under her breath, tonelessly singing a bizarre, ancient viral meme song from her past life while keeping her face as straight as a tombstone.

From the passenger seat, her sheathed katana suddenly vibrated against the console. A faint, irritated humm-humm sound resonated from the steel. Tailless was trying to force his master to stop polluting the vehicle with the forbidden digital relics of the early 2020s.

Miyabi paused her shaking, tilting her head as her left fox ear twitched. "You don't like it?"

The katana vibrated again, a sharper, more resonant pitch that translated perfectly to: Absolutely not, stop it immediately.

Miyabi merely shrugged her shoulders, her expression unchanging, before leaning back and diving straight into an entirely different flavor of old-world psychological warfare.

"Isolation..." she sang softly, mimicking the dramatic, synthesized echo of a modern brainrot audio trend.

Inside the blade, the spirit of Tailless visibly shivered, his massive single eye metaphorically twitching in agony. Seeing the reaction, Miyabi gave a tiny, internal nod of pure satisfaction. It was flawless payback. How dare her personal weapon throw a tantrum and refuse to let her use its monomolecular edge to cleanly slice open her breakfast melon this morning? Tools needed to remember their place in the hierarchy. Hmph.

Despite the absolute circus occurring inside her own mind, her external demeanor remained entirely impenetrable.

Suddenly, her acute senses flared. Her fox ears swiveled slightly toward the right window. Through the heavily tinted glass, she caught someone staring directly in her direction.

A tall man in a tattered black capture scarf and a wrinkled jumpsuit was standing on the plaza, his tired, bloodshot red eyes locking onto the government vehicle for a brief, suspicious beat before he turned and continued walking back toward the sprawling dome of the USJ.

"Shota Aizawa, huh," Miyabi muttered, crossing her arms over her chest.

She ran through what little data she could extract from her foggy memory banks. His Quirk was Erasure—the ability to temporarily shut down the biological mechanisms that allowed others to use their powers.

Does it work on energy signatures that aren't Quirks? she pondered, her eyes drifting back to her katana. If he stares at me, does my Ether energy stop flowing?

Probably not. Ether was an environmental, supernatural anomaly tied to her transmigrated core, not a genetic factor in her DNA. But even without her energy, she had five years of elite martial arts mastery and a terrifyingly high base physical stat line. You didn't need a Quirk to swing a piece of folded steel at supersonic speeds.

Still, she had to admit, some of the powers in this universe were remarkably conceptual. The space hero waiting at the entrance, Thirteen, possessed a Quirk called Black Hole that literally atomized matter.

A black hole is impressive, Miyabi thought, giving a solemn, solitary nod to herself. But slashing space itself is infinitely cooler.

She felt a brief surge of pride, silently honoring her unofficial, motivational father figure Vergil. A true motivator.

Inside the katana, Tailless simply stared out through the spiritual veil, his single eye wide with a mixture of exhaustion and despair. He was entirely convinced that after five years without a software update or a patch note from the universe, his master was finally, completely losing her mind.

Time to get to work, Miyabi thought, draining the final drop of her melon milk with a sharp, rhythmic swallow.

She tossed the empty carton into the vehicle's small trash receptacle, adjusted the high collar of her uniform, and gripped the hilt of her katana. The heavy door of the government sedan clicked open, and she stepped out into the crisp air of the plaza.

Her crimson eyes drifted upward, locking onto the massive, sprawling dome of the Unforeseen Simulation Joint.

Almost instantly, her fox ears twitched. A faint, unnatural distortion hummed in the air—a subtle pressure variation that the average pro hero wouldn't notice, but to someone intimately familiar with the erratic fluctuations of spatial rifts and Hollow anomalies, it was glaringly obvious.

Miyabi's eyes narrowed into sharp slits. She let out a slow, deliberate breath, shaking her head faintly.

All Might... you are going to owe me a lot more than ten melons after today.

The hazy, fragmented memories of her past life finally snapped into focus. This was the catalyst event. The USJ ambush. A coordinated strike by a radical faction of villains specifically engineered to execute the Symbol of Peace. In the original timeline, All Might's absence had forced a classroom of terrified children and a severely outmatched faculty to hold the line against monsters until backup arrived.

But today, the variables had shifted.

A slow, terrifyingly calm realization settled over her. If Tomura Shigaraki, Kurogiri, and that artificial monstrosity—the Nomu—were currently deploying inside that building, then today wasn't just a simple substitute babysitting gig. It was a high-threat tactical anomaly.

And anomalies, she mused, her grip tightening on her sheath, are exactly the kind of high-stakes catalysts that trigger system parameters.

Inside the blade, Tailless felt the sudden, massive shift in Miyabi's internal energy. The spirit's single eye widened as a dormant excitement began to mirror her own. It had been far too long since they had encountered a target that didn't immediately shatter upon the first contact.

A biological weapon designed to absorb kinetic shock, Miyabi thought, her lips curving into the faintest, almost imperceptible ghost of a smile. I wonder how many localized spatial cuts its cellular regeneration can actually process before it unravels.

Of course, she couldn't just casually butcher the creature in front of a class of impressionable teenagers. The socio-political fallout of a government official performing a live, high-definition dissection would be an administrative nightmare. The public relations department would lose their minds, and she could already picture the sensationalized media headlines debating the human rights of a bio-engineered apex predator.

But rendering it entirely non-functional? That was well within her operational mandate.

Without another second of hesitation, Miyabi moved.

To any onlooker, she simply vanished. A sudden, violent displacement of air tore through the plaza as she accelerated into a high-speed sprint, her body blurring into a streak of midnight black and crimson.

BOOM!

A muffled explosion echoed from deep within the structure, followed immediately by the shattering of internal glass and a sudden spike in ambient electromagnetic interference. The security system had been completely severed. The attack had begun.

Miyabi didn't bother using the front doors. In a single, fluid motion, she launched herself off the concrete plaza, her legs propelling her dozens of meters into the air like a kinetic missile. She soared toward the massive glass skylights crowning the apex of the dome.

Through the reinforced pane beneath her feet, the entire central plaza of the USJ was visible.

Down below, a thick, swirling vortex of dark purple mist was rapidly expanding across the central plaza, separating Shota Aizawa from his students. Kurogiri was already spreading his shadowy mass, preparing to warp the fragmented pieces of Class 1-A into localized disaster zones to be picked apart by street-level thugs.

Target acquired, Miyabi noted.

The space-warping villain was wide open, entirely focused on the children.

Miyabi raised her sheathed katana, the steel beginning to thrum with a dense, freezing pressure that caused frost to violently spiderweb across the glass skylight before she even touched it.

It was time to introduce the League of Villains to what storm can do.