All Might x Student!Reader (Boku no Hero Academia)

Chapter 61 - Breaking Rules

The following morning, the faint light filtered through the curtains and did the gentle work your alarm never could, laying a pale ribbon across the floorboards. You rose into it with the graceless soreness that follows a day spent being thrown at problems until either you or the problem breaks. Muscles protested; your eyes stung. Habit tugged your gaze to the window.

Down below, just across the training courtyard, a very specific weather system raged. Bakugo prowled the chalked lanes like a big cat who had discovered the gazelle enclosure was full of cardboard. Cones lay toppled in little orange defeats. A foam dummy smoldered at the edges as if it had tried to smoke a cigarette and lost the argument. An abandoned water bottle had been repurposed into shrapnel. And facing him—arms folded, chin set, wearing your old scowl like a badge—stood you.

You cracked the window. Cool air slipped in with the sterile tang of sun-warmed gym mats and the metallic lace of ozone. Sound followed—Bakugo's voice, already mid-volcano, rattled the frame.

"Don't tell me to calm down! It's not just a training drill, it's war practice!" he roared, each word underlined by a snap of light in his palms. A cone two meters away trembled at the percussion and rolled, suicidally dignified, into a shrub.

Your other self didn't flinch. She carved the air with a voice that smiled while it stabbed. "Calm down, Bakugo, it's just a training drill."

He detonated on the word just. "JUST? Are you dense? You want the villains to send a polite calendar invite? 'Hey extras, 2 p.m., bring snacks!' This is where you build the reflexes so you don't die, or worse—make me look slow!"

She reached out to the dummy—laminated evacuation map taped to its chest like a last will—and drew a finger across a dashed corridor. "Then maybe don't vaporize the evac route markers. That cone was the evac route marker."

"It was in my line of dominance."

"It was in a straight line," she said without looking up. "Everything is in your line of dominance."

He leaned in with a grin that managed feral and offended in equal measure. "Yeah. Because I dominate it."

Behind him, a foam head tipped and thumped to the mat with comedian's timing. He didn't check. Gravity, in his presence, tended to preemptively apologize.

"You blow up the fake ambulance, we fail the scenario," she went on, tilting her chin toward the cardboard van with a Sharpied red cross and a suspiciously cheerful windshield face. "Again."

"It was in the blast zone!"

"It was parked."

"Which is a rookie mistake!" His palms cracked with light, sweat beading at his temple, posture pitched forward like a sprinter five heartbeats before the gun. "You think villains are going to manicure your little obstacle course so your feelings don't get hurt when I smoke them with an AP Shot?"

"We're practicing evacuation, not urban demolition," she said, and the line slid into the air with the softness of a scalpel.

"What do you call a decisive victory if not a very efficient demolition?" He thumped a thumb into his own chest. "I go first, I hit hard, I break their rhythm, I break their spirit, then we clean up. That's called leadership."

"Leadership is when the ambulance survives."

He blinked, recalibrating pride to physics. "The ambulance can... drive around the crater."

She examined the cardboard wheels, which had all the engineering of a wish. "On what axles, exactly? Hope?"

"That's a support class problem." He rolled into motion, boots chewing the painted lines, energy bleeding off him in impatient sparks. "And what's with your tempo today? You're dragging, extra. Afraid of a little heat?"