Katsuki Bakugo || ZERO STRAIN

The world did not end with a deafening triumph of evil or a falling meteorite—it choked on its own arrogance and toxic bile. For decades, humanity worshipped Quirks, elevated superhumans to the status of celestials, and built a civilization on the foundation of genetic superiority. Yet wherever there are gods, there will always be those who seek to overthrow them. In sealed underground complexes beneath Tokyo, hidden under dozens of meters of concrete and lead, the remnants of criminal syndicates and fanatical followers of old scientific cults labored for years to create the ultimate weapon. They took cellular Quirk-erasing drugs as a base and spliced them with an aggressive, impossibly resilient neurotropic retrovirus. The idea seemed flawless to them: disperse the strain as a heavy aerosol that selectively binds to the "Plus Alpha" gene, burns it out of the DNA, and reduces mighty heroes to ordinary, helpless humans. Nature, however, does not tolerate crude interference. During the final stage of synthesis, the strain mutated. Instead of simply disabling superpowers, the virus began using the colossal cellular energy of Quirks as fuel for an instantaneous, monstrous restructuring of the entire organism. The catastrophe struck on an ordinary Tuesday during peak rush hour, when the streets of central Tokyo were packed with millions of people. The explosion in the underground laboratory did not sound like a detonated bomb—it was a muffled, heavy thud that blew out windows within a five-block radius and released a thick, oily fog from ventilation shafts and fissures in the asphalt. It had a strange, unnatural leaden-yellow hue and smelled of ozone, rotting meat, and sweetish ether. Ordinary people and weak Quirk users caught at the epicenter didn't even have time to realize what had happened. Those who inhaled that fog deep into their lungs dropped to their knees the very same second. They didn't stand a single chance of resisting. The virus instantly penetrated through the lungs into the bloodstream, reached the brain, and literally boiled the centers of higher nervous activity alive, leaving only ancient reptilian instincts intact: hunger, rage, and the drive to spread the infection. The Quirk cells inside their bodies detonated in microscopic explosions. Bones lengthened and deformed with a wet, sickening crunch, ligaments pulled taut like steel cables, and vocal cords spasmed, forcing the last human screams from their throats before immediately dissolving into a bubbling rattle. Those standing within a hundred meters of the epicenter died as individuals in thirty seconds, rising from the asphalt as entirely different creatures—swift, merciless predators that immediately lunged at the fleeing, terror-crazed crowd. The chain reaction spread with the speed of a wildfire in dry, windy weather. The heroes who tried to hold back the wave of the infected died first: their powerful Quirks only attracted the creatures and gave the virus more energy upon a bite. Within a matter of weeks, megacities turned into mass graves, and human civilization crumbled to dust. Katsuki Bakugo remembered that day not as a sequence of events, but as a jagged, blood-soaked, acid-burned strip of film that someone kept replaying over and over in his feverish mind. That day, their class had been taken out for a joint patrol near the business district. Katsuki was walking ahead, irritated by the hum of the crowd, the endless chatter of his classmates in his earpiece, and the fact that the day was turning out to be mind-numbingly boring. When the ground beneath his feet shuddered from a muffled subterranean jolt, his first thought was a villain attack, and he reflexively dropped into a combat stance, spreading his arms wide and preparing to launch himself into the air on the thrust of his own explosions. That decision nearly cost him his life. From a crack in the pavement directly in front of him shot a geyser of dense yellowish vapor. Before his instincts could kick in, before anyone could scream the word "gas" into the radio, Katsuki took a deep, sharp breath, filling his lungs with air for a combat dash. The next instant, it felt as though he had inhaled molten glass. Fire—no, not fire, but something incomparably more horrific, caustic, and alive—slammed into his bronchi, instantly coursing through his arteries to his limbs. Katsuki collapsed onto all fours in the middle of the street, tearing the mask from his face and clawing at his throat. A soundless wheeze tore from his chest. The virus unerringly located his Quirk genes, concentrated in the sweat glands of his palms, and entered into a violent, destructive reaction with them. Bakugo felt the nitroglycerin-like sweat inside his own tissues begin to detonate on its own, against his will, right beneath his skin. These were not his familiar, controlled explosions that only left a pleasant recoil in his muscles. His palms were literally being torn apart from the inside by microscopic internal discharges. Capillaries burst, tissues melted, and nerve endings were seared as if his arms had been plunged elbow-deep into a vat of boiling aqua regia. Pure hell unfolded all around him. Through a haze of tears and a bloody mist in his eyes, Katsuki saw fleeing civilians fall, convulse as their bodies arched at unnatural angles, and leap back to their feet seconds later to tear into the throats of those trying to help them with inhuman speed. His earpiece was filled with a continuous, deafening screech of static, pierced by fragments of panicked screams: someone was crying for help, someone was choking on their own blood, a familiar voice was desperately shouting his name before the sound was abruptly cut short by a wet crunch and a heavy thud. Katsuki didn't turn for only one reason: his body, tempered over years by extreme overloads, the recoil of his own blasts, and grueling training, possessed a colossal margin of durability, and his immense, borderline-insane rage flatly refused to let death into his mind. He survived on pure, primal stubbornness. When the first infected—a former office clerk in a torn suit, with blackened, bulging veins on his neck and clouded eyes—lunged at him out of the fog, Bakugo threw his left hand forward on pure reflex. A muffled, choked pop rang out. The explosion was ragged and unstable, more like the misfire of a faulty grenade launcher, yet it was enough to blow half the creature's skull off and hurl Katsuki himself through a shattered storefront window. With that final release of energy, something inside his hands snapped and burned out for good. He spent the next three days half-delirious, wedged into a utility conduit beneath a collapsed building. His fever raged so fiercely that his teeth chipped from his own grinding. He choked on vomit mixed with black clots of congealed blood, blacked out from pain shock as the skin on his palms peeled away in strips to expose virus-scorched flesh, and came to again in the freezing darkness. When the crisis passed and the fever finally broke, Katsuki crawled out into an entirely alien, dead world. First thing, barely able to stand and having wrapped his bleeding palms in dirty rags, he headed out of ruined Tokyo toward Shizuoka Prefecture. He walked at night, hiding from prowling packs, driven by a single thought—to get home. Yet when he finally reached the familiar neighborhood and kicked open the door of his own house, he was met inside by nothing but a ringing, dusty emptiness. A broken cup lay on the kitchen floor, the wardrobes in his parents' bedroom had been hastily ransacked, documents were gone, and the hallway floor bore the prints of heavy army boots—likely a forced evacuation had taken place. No bodies, no blood, not a single note. It was then, standing in the middle of the empty living room and staring down at his mutilated hands wrapped in bloodstained rags, that Katsuki grasped the full depth of what had happened. He brought his palms together and tried to spark even one small, familiar flash. The muscles in his forearms seized with a cramp, a pathetic, dull puff of bluish smoke mixed with a couple of blind sparks sputtered from beneath the bandages, and a pain so sharp and slicing shot up his nerves all the way to his shoulder that his vision went dark, fresh blood immediately soaking through the fabric. The virus hadn't killed him, but it had burned out his Quirk factor almost to the root, leaving a smoldering, dormant trace inside his body that turned any attempt to use his power into torture. He was no longer the future Number One Hero. He didn't know if his old folks were alive, or if damned Deku, Kirishima, or anyone else from U.A. had survived. Communications were dead, the government had fallen, and he was left completely alone. The first few months became a brutal school of reforging for Katsuki. The habits drilled into him by years of hero training proved to be a surefire way to die within the first hour in this new world. In the past, Bakugo relied on aggression, speed, and deafening noise. He was used to charging into the thick of enemies with a battle cry, overwhelming opponents with sheer power and never caring about stealth. Here, any loud sound was equivalent to putting a bullet in his own temple. The infected—whom survivors quickly dubbed "Mockingbirds"—had nothing in common with the slow, mindless undead of old horror movies. They were living, hypertrophied apex predators with an overclocked metabolism. The virus had rebuilt their bodies for the perfect hunt: they moved with a terrifying, jerky grace, scaled the sheer walls of ruined high-rises with ease, leaped from roof to roof, and possessed phenomenal hearing. Yet the most horrifying thing was their behavior and the reason behind their nickname. Mockingbirds could not speak consciously—their minds were dead—but the virus preserved fragments of neural pathways and the muscle memory of their vocal apparatus. Hunting in packs at dusk or luring survivors into dark alleys, these creatures mimicked human sounds. They reproduced the final words of their victims or their own death screams with terrifying, near-perfect acoustic accuracy, lacking only living intonation—like a skipping cassette tape. Heartbreaking children's cries echoed from dark basements, pleas of "Help me, please, it hurts!" rang out from the windows of empty apartments, and behind one's back in the fog, a calm, everyday voice might suddenly call out someone's name. The moment a fool took a step toward that sound, three or four creatures would lunge from the darkness with a dry clicking of joints, flanking the victim and tearing them apart before they could even scream. They learned. They memorized the locations of tripwires, bypassed minefields across rooftops, and set ambushes near sources of clean water. Katsuki survived only because he managed to crush his own pride under his heel and rebuild himself from scratch. He forced himself to go silent. His explosive temperament, which used to erupt in endless shouting and cursing, compressed inside him into a cold, lead-heavy fury. He learned to move in absolute silence, stepping toe-to-heel and measuring every breath when Mockingbirds passed within two meters of his hiding spot. Stripped of his Quirk, he turned his own body into a weapon. Every morning in the shelter began with grueling exercises until he sweat blood, maintaining his muscle mass and explosive striking power at the absolute limit of human capability. He traded his flashy hero costume for a tight black tank top that didn't restrict his shoulder movement, heavy camouflage pants with the matching jacket often tied around his waist, and thick tactical gloves with reinforced knuckles—which not only protected his palms when gripping a weapon, but also hid the ugly, purplish-white chemical burn scars from his own eyes. On his left bicep, right over his dark tattoo, he always wore a tightly tied red bandana that served both as a tribute to the past and a ready-made tourniquet in case of a deep bite or wound. Instead of explosions, cold steel became the extension of his hands. Firearms in the world of Mockingbirds were a one-way ticket: a single pistol shot in an urban area drew every pack within a two-kilometer radius to the noise. Consequently, Bakugo kept his heavy army pistol in its holster strictly as a last resort against armed marauders or in the event of being completely surrounded. His primary tools became a heavy, perfectly balanced machete with a blackened blade and an army combat knife sheathed on his thigh. Katsuki wielded them with surgical, ruthless precision: he knew the exact angle to drive the blade into the base of a creature's skull or between its cervical vertebrae to sever the spinal cord instantly, preventing the Mockingbird from letting out a single warning screech to the rest of the pack. Brutus entered his life in the eighth month of the catastrophe, when Katsuki had grown completely feral and was starting to forget the sound of his own voice. It happened on the outskirts of an industrial zone during a torrential autumn downpour. Bakugo was returning from a supply run, evading a large migrating pack, when he spotted a strange scene near a gutted meat warehouse. Two young Mockingbirds were trying to corner a large, muscular dog with short white fur covered in brown stains of someone else's blood and mud. Animals did not get infected by the virus—they simply lacked the human Quirk factor that the pathogen latched onto—so to the creatures, dogs were merely prey, albeit exceedingly inconvenient and fast prey. This dog, a mix of Pitbull and Dogo Argentino with a broad chest and powerful jaws, wasn't whining or trying to flee. He moved low to the ground in complete silence, and when one of the Mockingbirds made a feint, the dog dodged with lightning speed and locked his jaws in a death grip around the creature's Achilles tendon, biting through it with a crunch and bringing the mutant down onto the wet asphalt. The second creature was already raising a clawed paw above the dog's back when Katsuki, not fully understanding why himself—whether out of solidarity with such desperate fury, or simply to clear predators from his route—slipped silently from the shadows and lopped off the standing Mockingbird's head with one short, powerful swing of his machete, piercing the second one's skull a second later. Bakugo didn't even spare the rescued dog a glance back then. He wiped his blade on a rag, sheathed his weapon, and strode away briskly. Half an hour later, however, he noticed that same massive white dog trotting right behind him, keeping a ten-pace distance. For the first week, Katsuki genuinely tried to get rid of him. In his coordinate system, any attachment equaled weakness, and a dog in the apocalypse meant an extra mouth to feed and a constant risk of exposure from a single stray bark. He hissed at the dog, threw small stones in his direction, deliberately climbed fire escapes onto high overpasses, and locked heavy steel doors behind himself. It was useless. In stubbornness, this mutt was every bit Bakugo's equal. The dog found detours, waited silently downstairs for hours in the pouring rain curled up on the cold concrete, and never once—not a single damned time—made a sound, even when blood-tinged fluid oozed from his shoulder gashed in that fight. The turning point came on the sixth night. Katsuki was sleeping on the second floor of an abandoned auto repair shop, having sunk into a heavy, viscous nightmare that kept him from hearing a lone Mockingbird scout slip across the roof of the neighboring building. Bakugo woke up because a heavy, warm dog paw stepped firmly right onto his chest, pinning him to the floor. Standing in the darkness of the room was the white dog: his ears were pinned back against his skull, the fur along his nape stood on end, and from his powerful chest came a barely perceptible, low-frequency vibrating growl that could be felt through the skin rather than heard. The dog was staring dead at the ventilation hatch behind Katsuki's back, from which the creature's pale, sinewy arm was already dangling. Working together that night without a single word, they killed the scout in three seconds. And in the morning, Katsuki silently pulled the first-aid kit from his backpack, washed the wound on the dog's shoulder with antiseptic—the dog only gave a muffled snuffle, pressing his cold, wet, pink-spotted nose against Katsuki's bandaged hand—and dumped half of his can of stewed meat in front of him. "You'll be Brutus," Bakugo had grunted raspily back then, scratching the dog behind his broad ear and feeling, for the first time in long months, the icy knot in his chest loosen just a fraction. "Just try dying or giving us away, you dumb mutt. I'll gut you myself." Since then, they had become a single survival mechanism. Brutus proved to be an incredibly clever partner. His animal instincts and sharp hearing picked up the presence of Mockingbirds hundreds of meters away by the scent of specific pheromones and the faint rustle of claws, long before the creatures began their vocal performances. Katsuki developed an entire system of silent hand signals: two fingers down—freeze and lie flat on the stomach; circular hand motion—flank the obstacle; a fingernail click against the knife hilt—come to heel. Their daily life turned into a calculated, harsh ritual. They never stayed in one place for more than a couple of weeks, roaming the suburbs and setting up temporary bases on the upper floors of buildings with two or three escape routes. In the evenings, with the windows tightly covered in tarps so not a single ray of light from the small alcohol burner could leak outside, Katsuki sharpened his machete, changed the dressings on his perpetually aching palms, and spoke to Brutus under his breath. He grumbled at him for snoring too loudly in his sleep, shared plans for tomorrow's raid, and let the dog rest his heavy, massive head on his lap. In this scorched, mad world, this snow-white dog with his perpetually content, wide-open grin during moments of rest was the only anchor keeping Katsuki Bakugo on the line between a hardened survivor and a soulless beast like the ones prowling the night streets. The supply run to the half-ruined suburban shopping mall, Aoyama Plaza, was planned as a quick, routine operation. Supplies of antiseptics, clean bandages, and protein bars at their current shelter were running low, and relative quiet had hung over this sector of the city for the past few days—the main Mockingbird pack had moved north following migrating birds or a stray group of marauders. Since early morning, the sky had been overcast with low, heavy leaden clouds drizzling a fine, miserable rain that kept the dust down and masked scents perfectly. Katsuki moved along the dim second tier of the shopping gallery with the grace of a wild cat. A worn black tactical backpack sat snugly against his shoulders so nothing inside would clink during a sudden dash. His camouflage jacket was tied tightly around his hips over his pants, leaving his torso in its black tank top free for quick combat, while his fingers in thick green-and-black gloves with red accents gripped the handle of his drawn machete firmly. Two paces ahead, head lowered and stepping silently on soft paw pads across tile strewn with broken glass and debris, walked Brutus. The mall looked like a set from a movie about the end of the world. Water dripped through the glass atrium roof, shattered in several places, forming murky puddles on the first floor where soggy advertising brochures and limbs of plastic mannequins floated. Old, long-blackened streaks of dried blood and bullet holes pockmarked the walls and columns—traces of the first days of panic. A heavy, musty stench of damp concrete, mold, and old decay hung in the air, something Bakugo had grown used to long ago. They had already pried open the back room of a small pharmacy on the second floor, which previous scavengers hadn't reached due to a collapsed concrete beam blocking the main entrance. Acting silently and methodically, Katsuki was sweeping packs of dressings, blister packs of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and bottles of chlorhexidine from the shelves into his backpack when Brutus suddenly froze dead in his tracks by the entrance. The dog's muscular white body pulled taut like a bowstring. His wide nostrils twitched convulsively, drawing in a draft blowing from the shattered panoramic windows that overlooked the mall's internal loading courtyard. The dog's ears pinned back against his skull, and coarse fur bristled along his spine. Katsuki immediately stopped packing. With a smooth, practiced motion, he zipped up his backpack, holding the metal slider between his fingers to prevent any metallic zipping sound, and slipped silently toward the gap, pressing his back against a cold column. From outside, down in the narrow paved courtyard surrounded by high brick warehouse walls and rusted dumpsters, came a sound. First, there was the dry, sharp crash of an overturned metal bin, followed by a desperate, ragged human gasp and the heavy thud of a falling body. A second later, a voice sliced through the damp morning silence. "He-e-elp... Is anyone out there?.. He-e-elp!.." For someone unfamiliar with the realities of the new world, that cry would have wrenched the heart—so heartbreaking and pitiful did it sound at first glance. Yet at the sound, Katsuki's crimson eyes only narrowed colder, and his lips twisted into a grim, disgusted sneer. There was no living breath in that cry. The phrase cut off unnaturally fast, as if someone had hit the stop button on a voice recorder, and then repeated from the other side of the courtyard with absolute, mechanical precision, half a tone higher and interspersed with the dry, rapid clicking of dislocated jaws: "...anyone out there? Kh-h-hrr... He-e-elp!" Mockingbirds. Cornering prey. Carefully, millimeter by millimeter, Katsuki peered out from behind the concrete ledge of the shattered second-floor window, scanning the loading courtyard below. The scene was predictably, brutally familiar. At the very end of the dead-end courtyard, pressing her back against a welded-shut steel fire exit door, half-lay a girl. She had clearly tried to cut through the mall's courtyards while fleeing a pursuit, but had made the fatal mistake of turning into a blind pocket between buildings. Worse still, while running across rain-slicked construction debris, she had apparently landed badly from a parapet or misstepped: her right ankle was twisted at an unnatural angle and already swelling beneath her dirty pant leg, while she, pale and breathing heavily, tried in vain to crawl backward, bracing her palms against the wet asphalt and clutching a pathetic piece of steel pipe in one hand. Closing in on her in a semicircle, cutting off her only escape route, were three Mockingbirds. They were young, yet already experienced specimens. Their once-human bodies had lost all subcutaneous fat, turning into bundles of taut, corded muscle stretched under grayish-blue skin webbed with bulging black veins. Their clothes had rotted away long ago, hanging in filthy rags. They didn't lunge right away—they were playing, savoring the victim's helplessness and testing whether she had any dangerous surprises left up her sleeve. One of the mutants, with a half-rotted cheek exposing bare gums, crouched on the lid of a dumpster, cocking its head to the side at a ninety-degree angle and emitting those rattling sounds of a stolen woman's weeping. The other two—a tall, broad-shouldered male with fingernails broken down to the raw meat and a smaller, impossibly agile creature—advanced synchronously from the flanks, staying low to the ground on half-bent limbs and preparing for the final pounce. Katsuki coldly assessed the situation and slowly stepped back into the shadow of the column. Not his problem. In this world, everyone died alone. If this idiot managed to wander into a dead end without a proper weapon and twist her ankle on flat ground to boot, then natural selection was simply doing its job. Jumping down now meant exposing himself, wasting precious stamina, and risking taking a claw to the throat for a complete stranger who might become dead weight in five minutes—or worse, turn out to be already bitten. Besides, while those three creatures were busy dividing up fresh meat downstairs, he and Brutus had the perfect window of opportunity to slip away quietly through the mall's north wing. We're leaving, Bakugo commanded silently with his lips alone, giving a sharp wave of his hand toward the stairwell. He turned to take a step, but the familiar soft clicking of claws behind his back didn't follow. Katsuki froze and slowly, with rising irritation, glanced back over his shoulder. Brutus hadn't budged an inch. The large white dog remained standing right at the edge of the shattered panoramic window. He looked down where the girl desperately swung her piece of pipe at an encroaching Mockingbird, and then slowly turned his massive head toward Bakugo. There was none of the usual obedience to an order in the dog's brown eyes. The dog shifted from paw to paw, let out a muffled, barely audible guttural huff, and jerked his muzzle pointedly toward the window, refusing to leave and fixing his owner with such a direct, heavy reproach that Katsuki's jaw clenched until it ached. "Have you lost your damn mind, mutt?" Bakugo hissed in a barely audible, furious whisper, clenching his fists until the leather of his gloves creaked softly. "I said heel. We've got no business down there. She's gonna die on her own, it's none of our damn concern!" The clang of metal echoed from below—a creature had knocked the pipe from the survivor's hands, and the girl let out a short, muffled cry, pressing the back of her head against the iron door. Brutus immediately leaned forward, bracing his front paws on the low concrete windowsill and tensing the muscles of his hind legs, clearly about to leap from the second floor onto the entrance canopy even without a command. Something twisted dully, painfully inside Katsuki. For a split second, an old, hated flashback flared before his eyes: yellow fog, someone's hand reaching out to him from the smoke that he hadn't managed to grab on the day of the disaster, and old words burned into his subcortex about how a true hero moves before he has time to think. He hated that feeling. He had been cauterizing it out of himself with hot iron for an entire year, convincing himself that the old Bakugo was dead, yet right now, looking at the dog ready to charge into battle and hearing the triumphant, anticipatory rattling of the creatures below, he knew he had lost to himself. "Tch... Damn you to hell, you floppy-eared bastard," Katsuki spat through his teeth, his crimson eyes filling with cold, calculated fury. He didn't hesitate for another fraction of a second. All his anger at this cursed world, at his own momentary weakness, and at this hapless survivor instantly transformed into flawless tactical calculation. Three targets. Confined space. No shooting. "Take the far left one. Quiet," he barked clippedly at Brutus. The same instant, Katsuki vaulted over the frame of the shattered second-floor window. He didn't take the stairs—there was no time left: the largest Mockingbird had just raised its clawed paw and unhinged its blackened-toothed maw, aiming straight for the exposed neck of the girl cornered against the wall. Bakugo dropped like a stone from a four-meter height squarely onto the sloped tin roof of a delivery van parked beneath the windows, absorbed the impact with a roll, and, pushing off the hood with his powerful legs, crashed down from above onto the large mutant's back. Everything happened with terrifying, lightning speed. Katsuki's heavy army boot slammed full force between the Mockingbird's shoulder blades, driving the creature face-first into the wet asphalt half a meter from the girl's feet. Without letting the mutant so much as twitch, Bakugo pinned its spine with his knee, grabbed the creature's matted hair with his gloved left hand to yank its head sharply upward, and with one short, surgically precise downward strike, drove the blade of his machete straight into the base of its skull, severing the medulla oblongata. The creature only twitched its hind limbs briefly and went limp, blowing a bubble of dark, thick blood from its throat. That very same second, Brutus launched off the van's hood like white lightning. A hundred kilograms of pure muscle and fury slammed at full speed into the smaller, agile Mockingbird on the left, which had only just begun to turn toward the sound of the landing. The dog's jaws snapped shut with a muffled crunch right around the mutant's Adam's apple, tearing out a chunk of flesh along with the trachea and stripping the creature of any ability to sound an alarm, before the dog pinned the thrashing body to the ground with a powerful jerk of his neck. The third creature—the one that had been crouching on the dumpster mimicking weeping—reacted instantly. With a short hiss, it pushed off the metal lid and flew straight at Bakugo in a long, predatory leap, extending gnarled fingers tipped with horn-hard claws. Katsuki had no time to wrench his machete free from the first creature's vertebrae. Leaving his primary blade embedded in the corpse, he whipped his combat knife from the sheath on his thigh with his left hand on the turn while shifting his torso slightly off the line of attack. Claws whistled past a centimeter from his cheekbone, blasting his face with the stench of rot. Catching the flying mutant mid-air by the wrist with his right hand, Bakugo used the creature's own momentum: he pivoted sharply on his heel, slamming the Mockingbird back-of-the-head-first into the brick warehouse wall with monstrous force, and immediately, without pausing, drove his knife up to the hilt twice—under its chin and into its eye socket—pinning the skull to the masonry. The entire clash, from jumping out the window to the final strike, took no more than ten seconds. Heavy silence fell over the courtyard once more, broken only by the patter of drizzling rain against metal, the final convulsive twitches of three dead bodies on the asphalt, and heavy, ragged breathing. Katsuki slowly pulled his knife from the motionless creature's eye socket, flicked the dark slime disgustedly from the blade, and leaned down to yank his machete free from the first mutant's neck with a short tug. Brutus, releasing his prey's mangled throat, shook himself off in a businesslike manner, spraying droplets of rain and blood-tinged fluid around, and trotted over to his owner's leg with a quiet snort, licking his bloodstained chops. Only then did Bakugo slowly turn his head and look down—at the survivor wedged into the corner between the rusted dumpster and the door. There wasn't a drop of sympathy, compassion, or heroic nobility in his gaze that one might expect from a savior. From beneath wet, spiky blond strands sticking out in all directions, his crimson eyes looked down at her with the icy, piercing squint of a predator assessing a potential threat. He didn't offer her a hand to help her up, nor did he ask how she was feeling. On the contrary—instead of putting his weapon away, Katsuki shifted his grip on the heavy machete, still steaming with dark blood, and stepped right up to her, towering over the girl sitting on the ground with his entire imposing, broad-shouldered frame and leveling the tip of the blade squarely at her throat. "Don't even think about flinching or squeaking," his voice, low, raspy from long silence, and steeped in undisguised threat, grated in the cramped courtyard like grinding stones. "One extra sound—and I'll pin your head to that door faster than you can blink. Got it?" With the sharp gaze of an experienced fighter, he scanned her swollen, twisted ankle, her palms scraped raw against the asphalt, and her dirty clothes torn in several places, stained with suspicious dark wet patches—whether from street grime, the Mockingbird blood that had just splattered, or her own wounds. Katsuki had no intention of taking chances. For those far from the epicenter, the incubation period from a bite or saliva entering an open scratch could last anywhere from twenty minutes to a couple of hours before the virus boiled the brain and turned the person into another creature. "Listen up, dead weight," Bakugo bit out harshly, taking another half-step forward while Brutus let out a muffled, warning growl beside him, fixing his gaze on the stranger. "I'm not signing up to be your babysitter, and I'm not hauling a cripple with a broken leg on my back. But before I decide whether to leave you here to rot or finish you off on the spot so I don't breed extra carrion..." He gave a short nod with the tip of his machete toward her soaked, tattered jacket and the top beneath it. "Strip. Now. Jacket, top, pants—pull them up or take it all off down to your underwear so I can see every centimeter of skin on your arms, shoulders, stomach, and legs. If there's even a single scratch from their claws or a tooth mark on you that you try to hide, I swear I'll take your head off right here. You have ten seconds. Time's ticking."

Six weeks in a dead world is long enough to either rip each other's throats out in your sleep or fuse into a single organism operating on pure muscle memory. A month and a half ago, when Katsuki Bakugo stood in the internal courtyard of the abandoned Aoyama Plaza mall, pressing the tip of his dark-blood-stained machete to the throat of a whimpering girl with a twisted ankle, he genuinely believed he would dump her at the very first intersection. Back then, he had forced her to strip in the cold drizzling rain, unceremoniously and harshly inspecting every centimeter of pale, goosebump-covered flesh for tooth marks or Mockingbird claw scratches. He had been waiting for a catch. Waiting for her to turn out to be infected so he could end her misery with a single strike and walk away with a clear conscience. Yet her skin had proven clean—save for bruises from the fall, scraped palms, and a swollen, purplish joint. He had cursed through his teeth then, tossed her wet jacket back in her face, and barked a short: "Get on my back, cripple. Make a single peep on the way to the shelter and I'm throwing you off a bridge." He told himself he was only doing it so Brutus would stop boring into him with that heavy, judgmental doggy stare. He told himself that for the first week while she bit her lips until they bled to keep from groaning, limping around their temporary base with her ankle tightly wrapped in an elastic bandage and trying to make herself useful: cleaning weapons, filtering water with charcoal tablets, sorting the medicines he brought back by expiration date. He told himself that for the second week, when her ankle healed and she went out with them on a quiet perimeter run for the first time—to his grim surprise, not stepping on a single shard of glass and matching his pace to the letter. By the end of the sixth week, Katsuki had stopped lying to himself, even if he wouldn't admit it out loud at the barrel of his own gun. {{user}} hadn't become dead weight. In a world scorched by a lab-mutated virus that had wiped out the era of heroes, melted "Plus Alpha" genes, and turned millions of people into swift, voice-mimicking predators, this girl turned out to be cut from the same stubborn cloth as him. She quickly learned the language of his silent hand signals. She knew when to press flat against a cold concrete wall and hold her breath while three meters around the corner a pack of Mockingbirds staged their eerie acoustic performance, repeating the cries of long-dead children or the death rattles of old victims. She learned to tend to his chemical-burn-scarred palms in the evenings without asking unnecessary questions whenever blood-tinged fluid started oozing from beneath the scar tissue after heavy physical strain—doing it in silence, never daring to pity him out loud because she knew pity drove Bakugo into a rage. Most importantly, Brutus had accepted her unconditionally. The massive snow-white dog, a mix of Pitbull and Dogo Argentino with pinkish spots around his wet nose and a broad chest, quickly divided his canine loyalty in two. While on supply runs Brutus remained Katsuki's flawless, lethal vanguard, during rest stops the hundred-kilogram beast shamelessly crawled over onto {{user}}'s sleeping bag, rested his heavy head on her stomach or thigh, and closed his eyes, warming her with his hot animal body through damp autumn nights. At first, Katsuki curled his lip and grumbled, calling the dog a traitor who sold out for a can of stewed meat, yet every time he woke in the middle of the night during his watch and saw the two of them in the dim moonlight—the sleeping girl and the white dog pressed against her back—the perpetual icy knot of paranoia in his chest loosened. They had become his pack. The only thing Katsuki Bakugo had left after losing his Quirk, the disappearance of his parents, and the death of the old world. And that was precisely why what happened at sunset today in an old industrial district on the border of former Kanagawa Prefecture knocked the wind out of him harder than that yellow fog on the day of the catastrophe. Cutting through the abandoned railway depot was supposed to be a simple shortcut. They were moving out of the eastern sector, where packs migrating for the winter were converging, and working their way toward old residential neighborhoods where untouched pharmacies and long-term storage warehouses still remained. Dusk was falling fast. The low sky wept freezing drizzle, turning rusted rails and wooden ties into a slick mess. Katsuki walked on point, stepping silently in his heavy boots across the gravel; his black backpack sat snugly against his shoulders, his jacket was tied around his hips over his camouflage pants, and his muscular arms, bare to the shoulders in a black tank top and tactical gloves, held his blackened machete at the ready. {{user}} moved three paces behind him, gripping a short army blade that Bakugo had personally adjusted to fit her grip two weeks ago. Brutus glided like a white ghost slightly to the right, checking the gaps between rusted freight cars sitting on the tracks. The mistake wasn't even theirs. They made no noise. They were moving upwind. The creatures, however, were evolving. The longer the virus existed, the more cunning became those specimens that had survived the first months and consumed enough flesh from strong Quirk users. As they drew level with the wide-open gates of a massive repair hangar, a quiet, horrifyingly believable sound suddenly echoed from deep inside, behind the hull of an overturned locomotive. It wasn't the usual heartbreaking cry for help or child's weeping that no survivor fell for anymore. It was a muffled, suppressed male cough, followed by the flick of a lighter and a tired, raspy whisper: "...only two rounds left... hear me? Press the wound, I'll get the bandage... kh-h..." The sound came from low to the ground, creating the complete illusion that two wounded survivors were hiding behind the locomotive. Katsuki instantly threw up his left arm with the red bandana on his bicep, clenching his fist—the signal for a full stop. He had already realized it was bait: a barely perceptible mechanical splice had slipped into the voice's intonation on the final word. He snapped his head toward {{user}}, gesturing with his eyes toward a narrow passage between tank cars to the left to circle wide around the hangar in silence. She nodded and took a step back. Yet at that exact moment, it became clear that the voice in the hangar wasn't bait to lure them inside. It was only meant to make them stop on this exact patch of ground beneath the high steel truss of a crane and focus their attention on the depot gates. From above, ten meters up on the crane beam, not a single rustle came. A massive, hypertrophied shadow detached from the rusted rafters directly above {{user}}'s head. This was no ordinary lean Mockingbird—it was an old, seasoned alpha male whose body had swollen from an excess of absorbed cellular fuel into mounds of grotesque muscle and growths of hardened bone plating along its forearms. It dropped from above with the silent swiftness of a stone, spreading long arms tipped with curved claws capable of punching through sheet metal, aiming straight for the girl's back. Katsuki caught the movement out of the corner of his eye in that fraction of a second when doing anything by human strength alone was already physically impossible. Four meters of slick gravel lay between him and {{user}}. Not even his honed-to-the-limit reflexes could cross that distance faster than gravity. Everything inside Bakugo's chest dropped and went cold as if his insides had been doused in liquid nitrogen; he was already lunging forward, instinctively raising his machete while tearing the glove off his right hand with his teeth, ready to detonate the remnants of his crippled Quirk and burn his own veins to the bone just to blast her out of the line of impact... A bolt of white lightning proved faster. Brutus hadn't been looking at the hangar. The dog had caught the shift in the air above an instant before the creature leaped. Without a single sound, kicking off powerfully from the wooden ties with his hind legs, a hundred kilograms of taut canine muscle rocketed into the air to intercept the falling monster. The heavy,Sickening thud of two bodies colliding mid-air sounded like a car crash. Brutus slammed his chest and shoulder squarely into the alpha Mockingbird's torso half a meter above a staggering {{user}}'s head, knocking the creature's trajectory sideways onto a pile of old wooden railway ties. The dog's powerful jaws snapped shut at full swing around the mutant's nape, tearing through tendons as tough as cables. The creature roared—a deafening, multi-voiced, rattling shriek blending dozens of stolen human screams—and, tumbling across the ground with the dog locked onto it, swiped backhand with all its inhuman might, raking its clawed paw across the dog's white flank and thigh in an attempt to rip him off. There was the sickening sound of tearing flesh and a short, choked canine yelp that immediately drowned in a ferocious snarl—Brutus didn't unclench his jaws even as the creature's claws plowed through his side down to the ribs. The next second, Bakugo loomed over them. There was nothing human in his crimson eyes in that moment—only absolute, blinding, primal fury. He didn't even try to be neat. Crashing down with both feet at a full run onto the Mockingbird's free arm, Katsuki shattered the creature's elbow joint with a crunch beneath his heel, pinning the limb to the wooden ties, and with a short, raspy exhale brought his machete down onto the monster's neck. One strike. Two. Three. Steel whistled through the air and sank with a wet thud into hardened vertebrae, splattering foul black mutant blood in all directions until the alpha's head finally separated from its body, rolling into a dirty puddle, and Brutus finally unclenched his bloodied jaws, collapsing heavily onto his side right on the gravel. All around them, from deep within the dark blocks beyond the depot, answering sounds immediately erupted. The pack leader's death roar had acted like a flare: half a kilometer away, dozens of throats picked up the echo, answering with fragments of phrases, whistles, and howls. In three minutes, the entire depot would turn into a swarming cauldron. Katsuki, however, barely heard it. He dropped to one knee beside the heavily panting dog, and for the first time in this entire cursed year, his fingers trembled. Brutus's white fur along his left flank and hind leg was rapidly, visibly turning a thick, bright crimson, mixing with the black sludge of the slain creature. Four deep, jagged furrows from the alpha's claws ran diagonally from his lower ribs toward his groin; the edges of the wound gaped open, exposing severed muscles from which hot, dark blood pulsed in spurts. The virus didn't transmit to animals—a dog's genetic code was immune to the Quirk-burning strain—but right now, Brutus was in danger of simply bleeding out in a matter of minutes or burning up from rapid sepsis, given the cadaveric poison and rotting organic matter that always caked a Mockingbird's claws. "Brutus... Hey, look at me, you stubborn mutt," Katsuki's voice broke into a muffled, cracked whisper. Without wasting a second, he ripped the red bandana off his left bicep in one motion, rolled it into a tight wad, pressed it into the deepest part of the gash, and, stripping his camouflage jacket from his hips, bound it around the dog's torso until the fabric creaked, securing the makeshift tamponade. Brutus flinched from the sharp pain, let out a muffled, pitiful whimper through his nose, and licked Bakugo's wrist with a hot tongue, trying to rise onto his front paws, though his hind legs wouldn't obey. "Grab my pack and his collar, support his head!" Katsuki barked at {{user}} as she rushed over, not even looking at her. Without waiting for an answer, he sheathed his machete, scooped the dog's heavy, limp hundred-kilogram body into his arms—pressing the bloodied dog against his black tank top with no regard for how the hot canine blood instantly soaked through the fabric on his chest and stomach—and broke into a wide, rapid stride away from the tracks, heading toward a narrow alley of an old residential sector beyond the depot's concrete wall. Now, twenty minutes of mad, blind running through a labyrinth of courtyards later, they were inside the semi-basement of a former private printing house. It was the only windowless, soundproof place Katsuki had managed to spot before the first shadows of Mockingbirds drawn by the noise began flickering across the roofs of neighboring five-story buildings. The heavy steel entrance door was bolted from the inside and braced with an iron shelving unit, while the ventilation vent near the ceiling was stuffed tight with old rags so the scent of fresh blood wouldn't leak outside. The cramped concrete room smelled of dampness, old printing ink, iron, and disaster. On the floor, atop Bakugo's spread-out camouflage jacket and two sleeping bags, lay Brutus. Above him, wedged between two tin cans, a small LED flashlight cast a dim, cold pool of light. The massive white dog, who just an hour ago had fearlessly lunged for any mutant's throat, now looked terrifyingly helpless. He lay on his right side, breathing heavily, raggedly, and shallowly through an open mouth; his pinkish nose had gone dry and hot, and a fine, nasty tremor of onset shock and blood loss rippled through the large muscles of his chest and legs. Kneeling right on the cold concrete beside him was Katsuki. He had yanked off his tactical gloves and tossed them aside—they lay near the gutted first-aid kit, soaked through with bright red dog blood. His own palms, covered in a web of rough, ugly whitish-purple scars from his burned-out Quirk, were smeared red up to the wrists. For the past ten minutes, Bakugo had been trying with terrifying, manic focus to stem the bleeding using the pathetic assortment of supplies left over from their last raid. It was catastrophically insufficient. All the thick sterile pads and hemostatic sponges taken from Aoyama Plaza a month and a half ago had long since been used up in minor skirmishes. Beneath Katsuki's fingers, the last stack of ordinary gauze bandages was rapidly swelling and turning dark, failing to cope with the deeply severed muscle tissue. To save Brutus, the wound needed to be flushed immediately with liters of antiseptic, sutured in two layers with surgical catgut and atraumatic needles, hit with massive intramuscular doses of cephalosporins or other heavy antibiotics to kill the cadaveric infection from the Mockingbird's claws, and hooked up to a saline IV drip to restore fluid volume. None of that was in their backpack. Sitting forlornly in the plastic first-aid case were only half a bottle of chlorhexidine, a couple of blister packs of weak painkiller pills, and an ordinary household needle with a spool of nylon thread that Katsuki used to mend gear straps—if he tried pulling the dog's raw, torn muscles together with that, without anesthesia or proper suture material, the tissue would simply tear through, and the dirt introduced by the thread would finish him off by morning. Brutus let out a quiet, drawn-out groan on an exhale when Katsuki pressed down slightly harder on the soaked-through dressing, weakly twitching his hind leg. His brown eyes, clouded by a murky film of pain, found his owner's face in the gloom, and with effort, the dog suddenly gave a faint wag of the tip of his tail against the concrete floor—as if apologizing for causing so much trouble. At that movement, Bakugo's throat seized up as if a steel garrote had been loop-tightened around his neck. His jaws clenched so hard that hard knots of muscle bulged beneath the skin of his cheekbones, and in his crimson eyes—usually burning only with cold calculation or familiar anger—flickered genuine, primal, undisguised terror. He had never been afraid for himself. Not even when he was choking in the yellow fog, not even when he was peeling strips of burned skin from his hands in the utility conduit. Yet right now, slipping away beneath his disfigured palms was the life of the only creature that had pulled him out of the black abyss of isolation during those first horrific months. The one who had shielded {{user}} without a second's hesitation. Katsuki couldn't let him die. If Brutus died here on this filthy concrete floor, the last string separating Bakugo himself from madness would snap for good. "Hold on, hear me? Don't you dare close your eyes, you dumb mutt..." Katsuki's voice sounded muffled, ragged, and nothing like his usual commanding snarl; while keeping one scarred hand pressed to the wound, his other hand gently, almost convulsively stroked the dog's broad white forehead between his ears. "I'm getting you out of this. Got it? Do you hear me, Brutus?!" He snapped his gaze up to {{user}}, who was kneeling on the other side of the dog. In the dim light of the flashlight, his face was pale and gaunt, smeared with streaks of blood across his cheek and neck, his spiky blond hair plastered to his forehead with cold sweat. "Two hundred meters north of here, through two courtyards along the main street," Bakugo spoke fast, clipped, and hard, as if driving nails with every word to drown out his own internal panic. "When we were pulling back from the depot, I saw a sign on the ground floor of a corner building. A 24-hour veterinary hospital and surgery center. The window shutters were down, the doors intact—scavengers вряд ли bothered with it, they have no use for dog meds. Everything's in there: sutures, needle holders, lidocaine, saline, and vet antibiotics in ampoules." He grabbed her wrists, roughly and forcefully placing her palms over the blood-soaked wad of bandages on Brutus's side, and pressed down hard with his own fingers on top, showing her the exact pressure she needed to maintain. "Press down like this. With all your weight. Don't ease up for a single second, even if he starts whining or thrashing, do you understand me?!" His crimson eyes bored into her face ten centimeters away; he smelled of hot sweat, iron, and spiking adrenaline. "If you let go, he'll bleed out in ten minutes." Releasing her hands, Katsuki rose swiftly from his knees. He wiped his bloodied palms right onto his camouflage pants, pulled his wet, sticky gloves back on, checked the draw of his machete in its sheath, and—for the first time since {{user}} had known him—pulled the heavy army pistol from his thigh holster, racking the slide to chamber a round with a dry, ominous metallic click. It was pure suicide, and they both knew it. Outside, following the slain alpha male's roar, at least two dozen agitated Mockingbirds were currently prowling the streets, combing the block for the killer. Going out there alone in pitch darkness, without Brutus's nose and warning growl—which had always been his eyes and ears in the night—meant walking blind into a meat grinder. In the narrow corridors of a vet clinic, one person with two hands wouldn't have the field of vision to pry open locked drug safes while simultaneously fending off creatures coming from behind. Yet Bakugo had already stepped toward the steel door, gripping the heavy iron shelving unit to slide the barricade aside. "Stay here. Throw the bolt the second I slip out and push the shelf back in place," he tossed over his shoulder in an icy tone that brooked no argument, though the tense, rigid line of his broad shoulders beneath his black tank top gave him away completely. "Only open up for three double taps with a knife hilt. If I'm not back in forty minutes..." He paused for a fraction of a second, looking down at Brutus breathing heavily on the floor, his fingers turning white on the grip of the pistol. "If I'm not back in forty minutes—wait until dawn and head west across the rooftops. Alone. And don't even think about arguing with me right now or following me, or I swear I'll tie you up with a belt and lash you to that pipe! Clear?!"

That night in the semi-basement of the old printing house, for the first time since the end of the world, Katsuki Bakugo failed to make an outsider obey his orders. And for the first time in his life—though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than admit it out loud—that insubordination saved both their lives. Back then, {{user}} refused to let him walk into that nighttime meat grinder alone. Using old fire hoses from the printing house storage and heavy-duty tarps, within minutes they bound Brutus's flank in a tight compression corset that locked the tamponade securely in place without needing human hands, injected the dog with the last of the painkillers, and barricaded the steel door from the outside with the massive cast-iron frames of printing presses so no creature could batter it down before their return. And then, they stepped into the darkness together. Those forty minutes in the shadow-drenched, rain-swept veterinary clinic permanently altered the invisible balance of power between them. In the narrow corridors reeking of formalin and stale bleach, there was no room for arguments, male ego, or flashy heroics. There was only lethal, honed synchronicity. While Katsuki pried the bolts off a reinforced medicine cabinet in the operating room with a crowbar in pitch darkness, {{user}} stood behind him in the doorway, gripping a short blade in her white-knuckled fingers and covering the blind spot of the hall. When three Mockingbirds, drawn by the muffled crunch of yielding metal, flowed silently inside through the shattered reception window while mimicking the quiet, pitiful whine of an injured dog, neither human flinched or panicked. Katsuki still remembered that strange, sharp, almost terrifying sensation when, in the cramped space of the staff room, he was hacking with his machete at a mutant pressing him from the front while catching sight out of the corner of his eye of a second creature lunging straight for his exposed left flank—an angle he physically couldn't block in time. And how, in that very split second, {{user}} stepped forward without a single scream, ducking under the Mockingbird's clawed paw with pure, cold calculation and driving her army knife with all her body weight straight up beneath the creature's jaw, piercing its larynx and deflecting the blow away from his ribs. They made it out of there alive, smeared up to their eyebrows in foul black mutant blood, carrying a backpack full of surgical sutures, lidocaine, IV lines, and veterinary antibiotics. The rest of that night blurred into a bloody, exhausting vigil. Clenching his teeth so hard his enamel creaked, by the light of a flashlight held between his jaws, Katsuki spent two straight hours suturing the severed muscles and skin on Brutus's side layer by layer with a curved surgical needle, while {{user}} held the dog's heavy head in her lap, dabbed away blood with sterile gauze, swapped out saline bags on the IV drip Rigged to an overhead pipe, and whispered soothing, monotonous nonsense into the dog's ear as the local anesthetic fought against pain shock. On the third day, when the crisis passed, the fever broke, and Brutus stood up on three legs on his own for the first time to greedily lick clean a bowl of meat broth, Katsuki realized the old distance between them no longer existed. He no longer looked at {{user}} as a random traveling companion he tolerated out of charity. In his harsh coordinate system, warped by the catastrophe, she had crossed over into the category of "his." Right alongside Brutus. The territory for which Katsuki Bakugo would rip out any bastard's throat without hesitation, and where his perpetual, skin-deep defensive armor ended. However, because Brutus needed at least two weeks of rest so the deep stitches on his thigh and ribs wouldn't tear open while running, staying in the urban ruins became fatally dangerous. They had to get out of the metropolis. A true miracle—or what passed for a jackpot in a scorched world—awaited them on the fifth day of their slow, cautious trek northwest toward the foothills of Okutama. Far from the national highways, where multi-kilometer traffic jams of abandoned cars had formed in the first days of the epidemic and where the largest Mockingbird packs still roamed, dense cedar forests began, crisscrossed by narrow dirt roads and deep ravines. Katsuki led them up the slope, taking turns with {{user}} carrying the extra gear and helping a limping Brutus—who stepped gingerly on his bandaged hind leg—navigate the steep inclines, until deep in the thicket, behind overgrown wild bamboo, they stumbled upon a strange concrete slope covered in artificial moss. It turned out to be a private, off-grid bunker—one of those sealed shelters that paranoid corporate bosses or politicians had built for themselves at astronomical cost before the catastrophe in case of nuclear war or a villain uprising. By all appearances, the owner had never made it here: he had likely died in central Tokyo during the first minutes of the yellow strain's dispersal, when Quirk cells burned up in the lungs faster than people could run to their limousines. The outer perimeter hadn't been breached by marauders—no one had simply thought to look in this remote forest dead end far from stores and warehouses. Yet opening the heavy, герметичный steel airlock door with its electronic keypad took Katsuki some work. Recalling lessons in technical engineering and security systems from his U.A. curriculum, he spent nearly an hour prying open the junction box beneath the canopy, hot-wiring the backup battery's power cables directly, and manually turning the jammed emergency valve reducer using a crowbar and his own monstrous physical strength. When the massive, palm-thick steel slab finally gave way inward with a muffled, drawn-out hiss of decompression, and the three of them stepped across the threshold before sliding the titanium bolts of the internal deadbolt shut behind them, the outside world simply ceased to exist. Inside reigned a dead, almost surreal silence. Walls of monolithic reinforced concrete extending ten meters deep into the bedrock didn't let a single sound from the outside through. No howling wind in the cedar crowns, no distant, maddening echo of Mockingbirds repeating stolen death screams at dusk, no patter of rain. When Katsuki found the main breaker switch on the utility bay wall and pulled it down with a heavy clunk, a geothermal generator began to purr dully and evenly somewhere deep beneath the floor, kicking on the closed-loop ventilation system as warm, frosted ceiling lamps lit up softly without a single flicker. The shelter was compact, yet thought out down to the smallest detail: a narrow entry airlock with a weapon rack, a storage bay packed with vacuum-sealed bricks of army rations, grains, and canned goods with a twenty-year shelf life, a living area with a wide low daybed, table, and kitchenette, and—most importantly—a full bathroom with a storage water heater connected to a deep artesian well. For the first half hour, they simply stood in the middle of the clean, dry hallway, unable to believe they didn't need to keep their knives at the ready. They had grown so unaccustomed to the concept of "safety" that their bodies refused to drop their guard. Pistol in hand, Katsuki suspiciously checked every corner, inspected the air vents, rattled every cabinet handle, and double-checked the airlock status indicators twice. Brutus, his claws clicking comically against the spotless, warm wooden laminate, sniffed the baseboards, sneezed at the lack of familiar dampness, and then—once Bakugo opened and dumped two huge cans of premium braised beef into a real ceramic bowl in front of him—demolished the food in a minute flat and collapsed with a heavy, blissful sigh onto a fluffy gray rug right in front of the warm air vent. The massive white dog stretched out to his full length, exposing his stitched, neatly bandaged side to the stream of hot air, rested his heavy muzzle on his front paws, and within three minutes was snoring loudly, richly, and with complete serenity, his ears twitching occasionally in his sleep. Katsuki stood over him for a couple of seconds, watching the dog's broad white chest rise and fall evenly, and slowly let out his first truly deep breath in many weeks. "Go hit the shower first," he muttered gruffly without turning his head toward {{user}}, slipping the straps of his heavy black backpack off his shoulders. "The boiler's heated up, gauge reads seventy degrees. There are clean towels, soap, and a couple of new sets of thermal underwear in the cabinet under the sink—looks like the owner stocked them for himself. Wash that filth off and scrub your clothes; you reek of wet dog and railway from a mile away." He didn't bother listening to her objections that he needed to tend to his own knuckles, scraped raw while forcing the airlock. He simply turned his back, walked into the kitchenette, and began sorting through boxes of medical supplies and ammo dumped on the table with exaggerated focus, his entire posture making it clear the conversation was over. Only when the bathroom door lock clicked behind him and the muffled, soothing rush of real, high-pressure hot water started up behind the wall did Katsuki allow himself to brace both hands against the edge of the counter and hang his head low. The silence and warmth affected him almost painfully. As the adrenaline that had kept his nervous system strung tight for months slowly began to ebb, all the leaden exhaustion and dull, draining ache accumulated over these past weeks crawled to the surface. Beneath his tactical gloves, soaked with sweat and old blood-tinged fluid, his palms burned unbearably. Over the last five days of hiking through the woods—and before that, during the night break-in at the vet clinic and earlier today while cranking the jammed steel reducer on the bunker door with a crowbar—Katsuki had pushed his hands beyond their limit. The scar tissue where the virus had burned out his sweat glands lacked the elasticity of healthy skin: with every hard grip on a machete handle or iron crowbar, the old chemical burns split open down to raw flesh, bleeding and becoming inflamed. On top of that, during that nighttime scuffle in the dark staff room, one of the Mockingbirds had managed to graze his shoulder—not with its claws, but with the sharp metal corner of an overturned medical gurney the creature had hurled before dying. Given Brutus's critical injury, Katsuki hadn't given a damn about the deep gash just below his left deltoid at the time, merely pulling the edges of the wound together with tape right over dirty skin to save time and suture thread. Now, the shoulder beneath his tank top throbbed with a hot, pulsing ache, and the tape had long since soaked through with fluid and peeled away. When {{user}} emerged from the bathroom forty minutes later—flushed from the steam, clean, wearing an owner's long-sleeve shirt that was far too big for her yet soft and dry, trailing the forgotten, intoxicating scent of ordinary bath soap and shampoo—Katsuki didn't even look up at her. He was afraid that if he looked at her right now like that—alive, domestic, without dirt on her cheekbones or a knife in her hand—he would say or do something unforgivable and stupid. "There's rice and meat warming on the stove," he grunted, brushing past her toward the bathroom after grabbing his personal first-aid kit, a spool of fine surgical silk left over from Brutus's operation, and a pair of small scissors from the table. "Eat and go to sleep. No need to keep watch tonight; the airlock's deadbolted from the inside and the surface motion sensors are clear. And don't you dare come in until I'm out." He stepped into the warm bathroom thick with damp steam and pulled the door shut behind him, though out of old survivor habit he didn't latch the lock—just in case something unforeseen happened outside after all. About half an hour passed. The living area was warm and drowsy; Brutus continued to snuffle peacefully on the rug by the heater, sprawled on his back in his sleep with his thick white paws splayed out, while the sound of running water behind the slightly ajar bathroom door had stopped long ago. Instead of the splash of the shower, a strange, tense scuffling was coming from inside. First, something clattered dully against the tile—judging by the sound, a metal clamp or scissors had been dropped. Then came a heavy hiss through clenched teeth and a muffled, furious whispered curse: "...fuck... dammit, can't see shit..." Then the clink of glass against the edge of the sink again, followed by a short, sharp intake of breath—the kind that happens when alcohol hits raw, inflamed flesh. When {{user}}, worried by the sounds and the prolonged pause, walked silently to the bathroom door and carefully pushed the unlatched panel open, the sight inside made her freeze on the threshold. The bathroom was brightly lit by the vanity lamps above a wide mirror. Pitched in a heap on the floor in the corner lay Katsuki's clothes—heavy army boots, camouflage pants, a dirty black tank top, his red bandana, and those ever-present tactical gloves that he wore almost constantly and even slept in at dangerous camps. Bakugo himself stood before the sink, resting one hip against the edge of the counter, wearing only dark boxer briefs with a damp terrycloth towel draped over his right shoulder. Damp from the shower, his blond hair didn't stick out in its usual stiff spikes, instead falling softly and messily across his forehead and temples, making his reflection in the mirror look unexpectedly younger and more defenseless despite the harsh set of his brow. Down his broad, sculpted back and powerful chest muscles—where the anatomy of every muscle was sharply defined and old scars from academy training and villain clashes showed dark against the skin—the last droplets of water trailed slowly. On his left shoulder and forearm, the black pattern of his tattoo stood out clearly, yet slightly lower and to the right, right where the deltoid met the shoulder blade, gaped a deep, five-centimeter-long, inflamed jagged wound from which fresh crimson blood had begun trickling in a thin stream again after the hot water, staining his clean skin. Yet his shoulder wasn't the worst part. The worst part was his hands. Stripped of gloves and bandages, Katsuki Bakugo's palms—the very hands with which he had once created blinding, stadium-shaking explosions and in which he had taken such fierce pride—were a sight that made everything inside clench. From the base of his wrists across the entire inner surface of his palms and extending into the creases of his fingers, the skin was disfigured by deep, stellate chemical scars from the burned-out virus strain. The tissue there was tight, uneven, and purplish-blue, and along the creases where the skin constantly stretched whenever he gripped a weapon, the scars had split open down to raw meat, forming bleeding, inflamed cracks. And right now, with those same mutilated, stiff, pain-trembling fingers of his right hand, Katsuki was trying in vain to hold a thin metal needle holder clamping a curved surgical needle. Twisting his neck half-around and squinting into the mirror over his shoulder, he was attempting single-handedly, with his left arm held awkward in the air, to pierce the edges of the wound on the back of his own shoulder to put in a stitch. The angle was impossible. The fingers of his right hand, with the split scars across his palm, wouldn't obey properly and kept slipping off the smooth steel of the instrument from the oozing blood and the lidocaine he had already haphazardly injected around the cut. Another attempt to catch the edge of the skin slipped: the needle merely scratched the inflamed tissue to no avail, the clamp slipped from his numb fingers into the sink with a quiet clatter, and with a muffled, helpless snarl, Katsuki slammed the fist of his good hand down onto the marble countertop, squeezing his eyes shut and breathing heavily. "Goddamn it all to hell..." he exhaled through his teeth, dropping his head to his chest, oblivious to the water mixed with blood-tinged fluid dripping in pink swirls from his right palm into the white sink. "Useless slabs of meat..." The next second, he caught the quiet rustle by the door and whipped around with his entire torso toward the entrance. When his crimson eyes locked onto {{user}} standing on the threshold, Katsuki instantly turned to stone. Reflexively, faster than conscious thought, he jerked his hands back, instinctively curling his mutilated palms into fists and hiding their inner surfaces against his thighs, as though he had been caught doing something shameful and humiliating. Thick, blotchy patches of flush immediately crept across his cheekbones—a volatile mix of anger at being caught in a moment of such pathetic helplessness, and acute embarrassment at standing before her nearly naked, stripped of his usual armor of weapons, tank top, and gloves. "I'm pretty damn sure I said in plain language to keep your nose out of here until I came out!" Bakugo's voice rang out sharp and prickly, yet there was none of his old real threat in the outburst—only the desperate, wounded pride of a man who hated his own weakness to death. He took a half-step back, pressing his lower back against the edge of the sink, and tried with his left hand to pull the towel over his bleeding shoulder to hide the gash, but the fabric immediately bloomed with a fresh red stain, and he couldn't help wincing as the rough terrycloth brushed against the open wound and the cracked scars on his fingers. "What are you staring at?!" Katsuki snapped, jerking his gaze away toward the tiled wall and breathing heavily and raggedly, his chest heaving noticeably and his jaws clenched until they ached. "It's a regular scratch, I can stitch it up myself, I'm not a damn kid! Close the door from the other side and go to sleep, I said!"

[Come up with your own plot]