Lightning Serenade

Chapter 63: Insiders

When Denki heard some others piling in downstairs, he rushed down the steps to the common room, his soreness momentarily ignored in favor of seeing his classmates faster.

"Well, well, well! Look who we have here! A bunch of people who I thought were friends and who would inform me when they were going on a crazy intense undercover mission to infiltrate the Yakuza," Denki greeted, friendly malice in his tone.

Kirishima looked pretty rough. He rubbed the back of his neck and blinked at Denki with tired eyes. "Sorry, man, but I couldn't tell you. You know how these things go."

"I would know how these things went if I was ever invited to them!" Denki argued, but smiled as he joined the group of tired hero students.

"It's actually better that you weren't there," Kirishima offered with a yawn. "There were some villains there from the League of Villains. We had no idea who to fight and when. It was super confusing and actually pretty terrifying."

When Denki didn't respond, Kirishima apologized for bringing the League of Villains up, thinking it was a sensitive topic.

"Dunce face can't respond because of that fucking quirk. He can't talk about the League of Villains, but he don't look scared to me," Bakugou muttered as he stomped through, not bothering to catch up with the other students who had slowly been gathering in the common room to find out what the commotion was all about.

Kirishima's eyes darted over Denki's face, and he nodded, sighing in relief. "Just punch me in the face if you don't want me to keep talking."

Denki laughed and sat down on the floor, ready to hear about the secret undercover mission that was no longer a secret now that it was done. Other classmates joined him.

Kirishima talked about blasting their way in, all of the hallways, and running into Toga and Twice. "It was weird. They were taunting us, you know, verbally, but they made no move to actually attack or even hinder our efforts. When one of the Yakuza members asked them for help, they called him a 'big, strong man who can handle his own shit,' blew him a kiss, and left. And, uh, spoiler alert, he was a big, strong man, but he apparently could not handle his own shit."

Everyone laughed. Kirishima was tired, but he was so grateful to have made it out of there in one piece. For a second there, he wasn't sure if he'd see his classmates' faces ever again.

"It was weird. The leader of the League of Villains popped in out of nowhere, too. I got separated from Fat Gum, and I was losing the fight. It's not like... it's not like training or when there's a lot of back up, you know? I only had myself, and I was failing majorly."

His classmates listened intently with bated breath as Kirishima explained what had happened.

Kirishima was fighting with everything he had. Fighting blind, even, when blood would drip into his eyes. His quirk was getting more difficult to activate every time he let it slip, but he couldn't really hold onto it either.

He tripped backwards after a particularly bad hit. He might have been able to recover if it hadn't been for a large piece of rubble aiding in twisting his ankle and sending him to the floor. He had squeezed his eyes shut, wondering if death hurt as bad as dying did.

"I can take it from here," he heard as the Yakuza villain stumbled closer. When the villain hesitated, Shigaraki insisted, "go get patched up. More heroes are bound to show up any minute. You think they came here without backup? Are you all this dense?"

The Yakuza villain snarled at Shigaraki and spit a glob of blood at his feet, but he did leave. Kirishima wanted to beg him to stay, to send Shigaraki away and continue the fight on their own. He wasn't prepared to fight the Yakuza, he learned quite quickly. So, how was he supposed to fight the League of Villains after being so thoroughly pummeled?