Gigantomachia stared at him for several long seconds.
The mountain wind howled between them, carrying drifting ash, dust, and the slight metallic scent of blood through the ruined forest. The gigantic beast's cataract-white eyes lingered on the glowing construct surrounding Yuta as if memorizing him.
Then, without another word, the giant turned around.
"…Huh?"
Yuta's brain genuinely failed to process it for a moment.
Gigantomachia simply took a step forward.
BOOM.
The entire mountainside trembled from the impact alone.
Then another.
BOOM.
Far below the summit, the students instinctively stiffened as the gigantic figure began moving again.
"It's moving!"
"Is it attacking?!"
"No…" Todoroki narrowed his eyes through the drifting haze. "…Wait."
Gigantomachia walked directly toward the enormous crater he had emerged from earlier. Every footstep caused loose rocks to bounce violently across the slope.
Bakugo frowned sharply. "…The hell is he doing?"
Nobody answered. Up above, Yuta didn't lower the Susanoo just because of Machia's words.
His Mangekyō remained fixed while his mind screamed at him not to relax around the mountain-sized monster currently turning its back on him.
'This feels like the setup to a horror movie jumpscare.'
Gigantomachia reached the crater's edge and paused. For one brief instant, his head tilted slightly sideways.
"…Strong human, we will meet again." the giant rumbled without looking back.
Then he stepped downward. The earth swallowed him.
CRAAAAAACK.
The gigantic body descended directly into the tunnel system beneath the mountain. Massive clawed hands dug effortlessly into solid bedrock while entire chunks of earth collapsed inward behind him. Within seconds, only the top of his wild hair remained visible. Then even that disappeared.
Silence.
The mountain eventually stopped shaking. Even then, nobody moved. "…He left?" Kaminari asked
"I…" Kirishima stared blankly upward. "…I think he left."
High above, Yuta remained frozen within the Susanoo's ribcage for several more seconds before finally exhaling shakily.
"…You have got to be kidding me."
Unlike everyone else, he could feel the giant creature tunneling further and further away until it disappeared from his stretched thin sensing range. He literally just left after all that.
The armored construct flickered violently. The moment the immediate danger disappeared, the accumulated strain hit him all at once.
Pain exploded behind his eyes and a slight crack emerged over a small area.
Yuta's expression changed slightly. He had almost forgotten that for Mangekyo users, pain and lacking chakra were the least of his problems. Releasing his chakra supply, the orange fractures spread across the construct's skeletal armor before entire sections began breaking apart into glowing embers.
The massive construct destabilized instantly.
The next moment, the upper half of the Susanoo shattered into thousands of fading chakra fragments that scattered into the air like burning glass. The remaining ribcage collapsed inward as Yuta immediately dropped to one knee, one hand slamming against the ground to stop himself from falling completely. Blood dripped steadily from both eyes now.
'…Okay. Yeah. That's probably my limit.'
Yuta forced his heavy eyelids open, his vision swimming in a hazy, crimson tint. With the Mangekyō forcibly deactivating to preserve his remaining sanity, his eyes automatically rolled back into the standard, three-tomoe Sharingan. The pinwheels were gone, replaced by the familiar three dots spinning sluggishly within his red irises.
The last skeletal arm dissolved. Without the construct supporting them anymore, the unconscious bodies protected inside slowly slid downward onto the fractured hillside. Yuta forced himself upright immediately despite the screaming protest from nearly every muscle in his body.
"…Crap."
He caught Aizawa first before the underground hero could slam face-first into exposed rock.
The moment he grabbed him, Yuta's expression twitched.
"…That's definitely broken." One of the underground hero's legs was very obviously broken beneath the knee. His capture weapon had wrapped instinctively around part of the debris during the impact, probably reducing the damage enough before he was grabbed by the Susanoo's hand.
Momo lay a few feet away, a nasty, bleeding gash tracking across her cheek from a flying piece of granite. It wasn't life threatening, but it certainly looked painful. The three Pussycats weren't doing much better, covered in varying degrees of severe bruising, cuts, and dirt from the initial explosion of debris.
The sheer concussive pressure from Gigantomachia's initial mountain-cleaving swipe had done its job before Yuta could even manifest the ribs.
Seeing all of this, Yuta exhaled, wiping a fresh trail of blood from his chin. "Man..." he muttered. "Recovery Girl is absolutely never going to let you hear the end of this, Sensei."
"THEY'RE ALIVE!" The sound of running footsteps shattered the silence of the summit. "AIZAWA-SENSEI! YUTA!"
Yuta turned around. In the distance, Vlad King burst appeared, his face pale and grim, followed closely by Tiger and a vanguard of Class 1-A and 1-B students who had completely ignored orders to stay behind Todoroki's ice wall.
"Mandalay! Ragdoll! Pixie-Bob!" Tiger yelled as he rushed forward before instantly dropping to his knees beside his unconscious teammates, his hands trembling as he checked their pulses.
"They're alive, Tiger! Calm down!" Vlad King bellowed, though his own voice shook as he took in the apocalyptic state of the hillside.
The sheer scale of destruction looked even worse up close. Massive trenches split apart the terrain, trees and earth shattered all over the area. The gigantic abyss Gigantomachia had dug through the mountain remained open before them like the entrance to some underground catastrophe.
"…What the hell…" Kaminari whispered.
Vlad's face darkened at the sight before him. However, he had bigger problems now as he dropped beside Aizawa, his fingers flying to the hero's neck before looking at the compound fracture in his leg. "Dammit! Class Rep! I need a splint and medical supplies immediately!"
"Right away, Vlad-Sensei!"
"Yes, Vlad-Sensei!"
Iida and Kendo yelled simultaneously before turning to look at each other.
"I'm faster, I'll do it." Iida said, quickly turning around and rocketing away.
Vlad turned to Yuta."Akutami, where did that thing go?"
"Away." Yuta rasped, not having the mental bandwidth to give long answers to questions he had no answers for. 'Damn .. it's been a while since I've felt this low on chakra.'
When was the last time this happened? If he remembered right, that should be during the YAMANOTE LINE. The time before that was during the sports festival and the one before that was his day after he gained his abilities.
"From what I can tell, it seemed to be after that guy." Everyone followed Yuta's gaze in a certain direction. Sure enough, the sight of a corpse pinned against a surface and a tree, lying motionless fell into their sights. "He seems to be an escaped villain. And before you ask, yeah, he's gone."
As for where that giant ran off to? He didn't know and currently he was in no condition to even care. He had absolutely zero intention of chasing after that freak. Hell, he could barely stand as he was let alone jump down a pitch-black tunnel.
Everyone's faces changed drastically.
"Ribbit. You mean .."
"Yeah." Yuta sighed, rubbing his aching head. Seeing Yuta's condition, a sense of shame welled up in the Pro Hero's heart.
Vlad King had spent twenty years in the hero business. He had seen students pushed past reasonable limits before. He had seen them injured, exhausted, broken in the ways that training and real combat broke people differently. He was not a man who flinched from necessary difficulty.
But looking at a sixteen-year-old on one knee with blood drying beneath both eyes and a destroyed shirt, he felt completely inadequate as a teacher, having one of his students be the one holding the line.
He didn't say anything about it. There wasn't time and it wouldn't have helped.
"Akutami." He called out. "Can you walk?"
"Yeah, that should be no problem." Yuta said.
He stood up to demonstrate, which took a visible moment of negotiation with his own legs that he didn't acknowledge. Vlad of course wouldn't pretend not to notice.
"You need help. Stay with the group on the way down. Don't fall behind."
".." That probably was supposed to come out differently, but why did the first half of that sentence sound like an insult?
"Yes, sir."
Vlad turned back to the immediate logistics. Aizawa's leg needed to stay immobilized on the descent. The Pussycats' varying conditions needed to be assessed for who could move independently and who needed assistance. He had two classes of students on a compromised slope with no functioning homeroom teacher and a giant hole in the mountain that something incomprehensible had just disappeared into.
One problem at a time.
"Kendo," he said, raising his voice. "You're on Pixie Bob. Uraraka, you use your Zero Gravity quirk to assist in lifting the unconscious. Everyone else, pair up. Nobody descends alone."
The clearing organized itself around his instructions.
"Hey bad guy. Hang in there. You have a lot of blood on your face." Yuta blinked slowly before letting out a tired exhale.
"Do you have to call me that? I'm pretty sure I'm the victim here,"
In the past few days since Tokyo, ever since he got back, Hagakure's address of him alternated between his regular name and that.
Hagakure huffed, her floating gloves planting themselves on her hips. "That's highly debatable."
Despite the teasing tone, the concern underneath it was obvious. One of her invisible hands reached up uncertainly before stopping midway, like she wasn't sure whether touching him would help or just make things awkward.
"…You look really awful right now."
"Thanks," Yuta replied dryly.
"No, I mean like .... actually awful. Not your normal grumpy awful."
'I wasn't aware I had categories.' Yuta thought sarcastically as he reached up to wipe the trail of blood away before pausing slightly.
His Sharingan shifted instinctively toward Hagakure. And froze.
"…Huh?" Yuta went completely rigid. His brain, already suffering from a chakra hangover, utterly failed to process the visual information his Sharingan was delivering.
Because he wasn't looking at an empty jacket anymore.
To a normal human eye, Toru Hagakure was practically a ghost due to the total transparency caused by her quirk constantly manipulating and refracting light around her body. This was what he remembered not just from the anime but also due to introductions before the Internship week began when he first transferred to the Hero Course.
'WAIT.'
Having never watched past the middle of season four before transmigrating, he had genuinely assumed Hagakure was completely invisible at all times. That was the entire point of her Quirk.
But now that his Sharingan was actively focusing on her, his perception kept trying to "correct" the distortion automatically. Under the combination of his quirk and Sharingan, the sight before him that would normally simply view chakra currents in the world of Naruto, didn't just see light. It tracked muscle density, neural currents, and the fundamental flow of energy within a physical frame.
That was the internal appearance. Outwardly, the shape that appeared under the refracted light was visibly condensed enough to show a clear human outline.
For the first time since obtaining the Sharingan, Yuta realized he could actually see something where Hagakure stood There was a moment of silence as Yuta stared. His red pupils locking dead onto the exact space where her face logically should be.
"Uh... Yuta?" Hagakure's floating jacket tilted slightly to the side, the sleeves pulling up toward her chest in a gesture of sudden, profound awkwardness.
Even without a visible face, the immediate shift in her posture screamed that she felt entirely exposed. "Why... why are you looking at me like that? It's kind of creeping me out..."
Yuta blinked heavily, tearing his gaze away as the three dots in his eyes faded away. He rubbed his temples, forcing a flat tone.
"Nothing. Just... the glare from the sun is making my head split. I can barely see straight."
There was a beat of silence. "You totally just stared at me!"
"No I didn't."
"Yes you did."
Yuta felt a headache coming on.
"Is everything okay over there?" Before Hagakure could add anything else, Iida who had returned with a makeshift splint for Mr. Aizawa, shouted.
"It's nothing at all. Just the side effects of my quirk. I might need medical assistance." Yuta quickly moved away, whatever pain and dizziness he previously felt vanished as a new surge of adrenaline appeared from nowhere.
"I see! We need to get you down to the main building immediately!" Iida nodded.
Hagakure seemed to want to say something else. However ...
"Everyone, listen up!" Vlad King's voice boomed over the clearing, instantly commanding the attention of both classes. With Aizawa unconscious, the responsibility fell squarely on his shoulders, and his expression left zero room for argument. "The training camp is compromised. We are under a Code Red evacuation. Tiger, carry Mandalay and Ragdoll. I will secure Aizawa. Todoroki, Bakugo, Midoriya—help the others form a defensive perimeter around the remaining wounded. We are moving back to the facility buses right now!"
"Yes, sir!" the students chorused.
__
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