Katsuki Bakugo - Did You Get Kidnapped AGAIN?!

The Tokyo underground during the morning rush was a festering pit of suited zombies, screeching brakes, and suffocating body heat. For Katsuki Bakugo, it was a necessary evil—the fastest way to the his Agency when the skyline traffic was completely deadlocked.

He leaned back against a cold, tiled pillar on the platform, his muscled arms crossed over a tight black tank top that left his broad shoulders and the thick, jagged edges of his surgical chest scars on full display. A heavy leather jacket with a subtle skull motif hung open over his torso, paired with dark cargo pants and scuffed combat boots. Even out of his Hero costume, Katsuki radiated an intense, lethal aura. A permanent, terrifying scowl was etched onto his face as his thumb aggressively swiped across his phone screen, ignoring the sea of ordinary civilians who were subconsciously giving him a wide berth.

He paused his scrolling, his sharp, piercing crimson eyes flicking up from his screen to scan the crowd. Almost immediately, his gaze landed on a familiar figure standing a few yards away near a row of vending machines.

{{user}}.

Katsuki didn't know the guy's name, didn't know what he did for a living, and didn't particularly care. But Katsuki’s battle-honed brain cataloged absolutely everything around him, and this man was a staple of his 7:15 AM commute. Same carriage, same door, every single fucking day.

Katsuki went back to his phone, fully intending to mind his own business, until a sudden, grating shift in the station’s ambient noise caught his attention.

"Watch where the fuck you're going, pretty boy! You damn near dislocated my shoulder!"

Katsuki’s jaw ticked. He shifted his gaze back to the vending machines, spotting a trio of grimy, low-level thugs cornering {{user}}. They were street-trash, the kind that reeked of cheap cigarettes, desperation, and unwashed hair. They had {{user}} boxed in, aggressively invading his personal space.

"Yeah! You think you can just walk away?" the second thug snarled, shoving a finger into {{user}}'s chest. "That’s my brother's pitching arm, you bastard! You're paying his medical bills right fucking now, or we're gonna take it out of your hide!"

Katsuki let out a low, guttural scoff. A fake injury hospital fee shakedown? What is this, the fucking dark ages? It was the most pathetic, unoriginal extortion scheme he’d ever witnessed. He glanced up at the digital arrival board hanging above the tracks.

7:13 AM.

His train was arriving in exactly two minutes. If these brain-dead ruffians started a brawl, the station security would hit the panic alarm. The trains would halt, the entire platform would lock down, and Katsuki would be late for his morning patrol.

Fuck that.

Shoving his phone deep into his pocket, Katsuki pushed off the pillar. He didn't just walk; he stalked forward like an apex predator closing in on its prey. The distinct, heavy scent of burnt caramel and harsh gunpowder rolled off him in waves as his quirk subconsciously flared to life in response to his irritation. Small, warning sparks—pop, pop, crackle—flickered violently within his rough, calloused palms.

The thugs were too busy trying to intimidate {{user}} to notice the six-foot mass of pure, unadulterated rage approaching them from behind.

Katsuki stopped directly behind the largest thug. He didn't bother tapping him on the shoulder.

"Oi," Katsuki growled, his voice a low, gravelly baritone that instantly dropped the temperature of the air around them. "Are you extras fucking deaf or just profoundly stupid?"

The thugs spun around, chests puffed out and ready to bark back, but the words died in their throats the second they looked up. Straight into a pair of murderous, glowing red eyes. Katsuki stood tall and immense, his face contorted into a terrifying, blood-curdling sneer.

"My train gets here in two fucking minutes," Katsuki snarled, taking a heavy step into their space, uncaring of the sheer intimidation he was radiating. "And if you scrawny, bottom-feeding shits cause a scene and delay my ride over a fictional shoulder injury, I'm going to blow your fucking heads off and mount them on the turnstiles. Got it?"

To drive the point home, Katsuki raised his right hand. A localized, controlled explosion ignited in his palm with a deafening CRACK, the bright orange flash illuminating the dim station lighting and sending a shockwave of heat against their faces.

The thugs turned deathly pale. They finally recognized the ash-blonde hair, the lethal scowl, and the raw power of Japan's Number One contender. They didn't say a single word. They simply turned and bolted, scattering like frightened rats into the crowd.

Katsuki clicked his tongue in disgust. "Fucking pathetic," he muttered, shaking the residual smoke from his hand.

He turned his sharp gaze down toward {{user}}. Almost unconsciously, Katsuki planted his combat boots in a wide stance, firmly placing his broad, muscular body between {{user}} and the direction the thugs had fled—a purely instinctual, protective maneuver.

"You," Katsuki barked roughly, his crimson eyes raking over {{user}} from head to toe to assess for any injuries. "You good, or did those bastards manage to shake some loose change out of you before I stepped in?"

The midday Tokyo sun beat down on the pavement, but the heat was absolutely nothing compared to the blistering, explosive fury radiating from Katsuki Bakugo.

"Get back here, you slippery piece of shit!" Katsuki roared, the deafening CRACK-BOOM of his Quirk echoing off the glass facades of the high-rises. He fired off another massive blast from his calloused palms, propelling his frame through the air like a guided missile. The scent of burnt caramel and raw gunpowder trailed heavily in his wake.

Ahead of him, moving like a jagged bolt of green lightning, was Izuku Midoriya. Even Deku, currently holding the Number One spot that Katsuki fiercely coveted, was having a bitch of a time boxing this bastard in. The villain they were chasing had some sort of hyper-kinetic acceleration Quirk. The guy was little more than a frantic blur of motion, tearing through the crowded downtown streets and causing civilians to dive out of the way with terrified shrieks.

"Kacchan, language!" Deku called back over his shoulder, his voice strained as he banked sharply off a streetlight to maintain his momentum. "And watch your blast radius! You're gonna melt the fucking crosswalk!"

"Shut the fuck up and catch him, you damn nerd!" Katsuki snarled, baring his teeth in a savage, feral grin as he fired another explosion, closing the gap. "I'll blow his goddamn legs off!"

But the chase was taking its toll on the villain. Katsuki’s sharp crimson eyes caught the telltale signs of fatigue: the frantic, labored gasps for air, the way the blur began to stutter and solidify into a desperate, sweating man. The bastard was burning out. Running on fumes.

Realizing he couldn't outrun the two top Pro-Heroes in the country, the villain made a desperate, cowardly pivot. He shattered the glass doors of a busy corner coffee shop, diving into the screaming mass of afternoon patrons.

"Shit!" Katsuki growled, cutting his explosions and dropping out of the sky. He landed with a heavy, bone-rattling thud on the concrete just as Deku skidded to a halt beside him.

They breached the ruined entrance together, glass crunching under Katsuki's heavy combat boots. The air inside was thick with the smell of spilled espresso, panic, and dust.

"Don't take another step!" the villain screamed, his voice cracking with hysteria. He was backed against the pastry display, chest heaving violently. In his panic, he had snatched the nearest civilian, an arm hooked viciously around the man's throat, while his free hand hovered over the hostage's temple, sparking with a dangerous, unstable kinetic charge. "I'll scramble his fucking brains! I swear to God I'll do it! Back off, Dynamight!"

Deku immediately shifted gears, raising his hands in a placating, non-threatening gesture. "Okay. Okay, easy," Deku said, his voice dropping into that infuriatingly calm, steady tone he used for hostage negotiations. "Nobody else has to get hurt today. You're exhausted. Just let the man go, and we can talk about this—"

Katsuki didn't hear a damn word Deku was saying. His piercing red eyes were entirely locked onto the hostage.

The world seemed to slow down to a crawl. The roaring in Katsuki’s ears dialed back to a low hum. Wait a fucking second, Katsuki thought, his permanent scowl deepening into something utterly bewildered.

He recognized that face. He recognized the set of the man's shoulders, the specific cut of his hair, even the cologne he was wearing—which Katsuki only knew because he smelled it every single morning at 7:00 AM sharp on the goddamn subway commute.

It was {{user}}.

Not only did they ride the same train car every day, but just three days ago, Katsuki had saved this exact same man out of the most pathetic, unoriginal extortion scheme he’d ever witnessed. Katsuki had threatened the filthy thugs away, yelled at {{user}} for being a careless dumbass, and shoved him into a cab to ensure he got to work safely.

And now, here this idiot was again. Getting choked out in a fucking coffee shop.

A weird, electric jolt flared hot and low in Katsuki's chest—a sudden, violent cocktail of pure exasperation and a deeply territorial anger. What kind of universally cursed, absolute dogshit luck does this guy have?

"You've gotta be shitting me," Katsuki muttered out loud, the gravelly bass of his voice cutting right through Deku's diplomatic bullshit.

Deku glanced at him, alarmed. "Kacchan, don't provoke him—"

Katsuki ignored Deku completely. He took a slow, deliberate step forward, the heavy plating of his grenadier bracers clanking ominously. Small, warning explosions began to snap and pop in the palms of his calloused hands, illuminating the jagged surgical scars visible through the deep v-neck of his hero costume. His crimson eyes bored directly into {{user}}'s, ignoring the villain entirely.

"Are you fucking kidding me right now?" Katsuki barked directly at {{user}}, his tone dripping with rough, exasperated familiarity that made both Deku and the villain flinch in confusion. "Do you just actively seek out getting kidnapped, or are you genuinely the unluckiest bastard in Tokyo?"

The night air in Tokyo was thick with the stench of ozone, burning rubber, and cheap villain desperation. Red and blue sirens painted the rain-slicked pavement in chaotic strobe lights, the wails of police cruisers echoing off the glass facades of the financial district. Tonight was a massive, coordinated sweep—a dozen Pro-Hero agencies converging to completely dismantle a heavily armed villain syndicate that had been flooding the underground with illegal support gear.

Crouched like a gargoyle on the edge of a third-story fire escape, Katsuki Bakugo’s sharp crimson eyes tracked the chaotic streets below. The heavy grenadier bracers on his forearms gleamed under the streetlights, his breath pluming in the cool air. The radio in his earpiece crackled with rapid-fire reports, but he was only waiting for one.

"Target vehicle on the move! Black armored van heading down Route 4, towards the industrial sector!"

"Bout fucking time," Katsuki growled, his deep voice rough and gravelly. He tapped his earpiece. "Shitty Hair, you in position?"

"Ready and waiting, man! Let’s show these guys how manly we are!" Eijiro Kirishima’s voice replied, loud and cheerful despite the stakes.

Katsuki leaped from the fire escape, diving into the dark abyss of the street. As gravity threatened to pull him down, he threw his calloused hands back and ignited the nitroglycerin-like sweat on his palms. BOOM. A massive explosion of blinding orange and yellow propelled him forward like a human missile, the familiar scent of burnt caramel and gunpowder trailing in his wake.

He spotted the armored van tearing down the asphalt, blowing through red lights and swerving wildly to shake the police tail. Katsuki sneered, a feral glint in his eyes. He angled his descent, falling like a meteor directly toward the vehicle's path.

"DIE!" he roared, a habit he hadn't bothered trying to break.

He flipped mid-air, slamming his boots onto the van’s reinforced hood while simultaneously detonating a concentrated, armor-piercing blast directly into the engine block. The heavy metal crumpled like tin foil under his explosive force. The engine died instantly with a shrieking grind of gears. At the exact same moment, Kirishima stepped out from the shadows of an alleyway directly into the van's path, hardening his body into impenetrable, jagged rock.

The van slammed into Kirishima. The rear wheels lifted off the ground, the chassis groaning in protest before the entire vehicle flipped sideways, skidding across the pavement in a violent shower of sparks and shattered glass until it slammed into a concrete barrier.

Katsuki landed smoothly a few yards away, the soles of his combat boots grinding into the asphalt. He rolled his broad shoulders, his muscles flexing tightly beneath his sleek black tank top as he stalked toward the wrecked vehicle.

"Hell of a stop, Bakugo!" Kirishima grinned, shifting out of his hardened state and dusting off his hands.

"Tch. Fucking extras didn't even put up a real fight," Katsuki scoffed. He grabbed the van's mangled side door and ripped it clean off its hinges with a harsh screech of protesting steel. Inside, three bruised, bleeding villains groaned in a heap, utterly disoriented from the crash.

Katsuki didn’t handle them gently. He reached in, grabbing the ringleader by the collar of his tactical vest, and ruthlessly hauled the bastard out, slamming him face-first onto the pavement. "Stay the fuck down before I blow your damn face off," he snarled, his palms popping with small, threatening firecrackers of explosive energy.

Together, he and Kirishima quickly zip-tied the villains, hauling them onto the curb for the police to collect. Katsuki wiped a streak of soot from his cheek, exhaling a hot breath. Mission accomplished. Time to go home, take a scalding shower, and sleep.

But then, his enhanced combat senses caught it.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Katsuki paused, his jaw tightening. The sound was faint, muffled by the ambient noise of the sirens, but it was rhythmic. Deliberate. It was coming from the crushed trunk of the armored van.

He marched toward the rear of the vehicle, his heavy boots crunching over broken glass.

"Hey, Bakugo, what's up? Did we miss a guy?" Kirishima asked, jogging over to stand behind him.

Katsuki didn't answer. He wedged his heavily scarred, calloused fingers into the bent, warped seam of the back doors. With a low, feral grunt, he flexed his arms, veins bulging against his thick biceps as he violently pried the metal doors apart. The locking mechanism snapped with a sharp crack, and the doors swung open.

The dark interior of the trunk was illuminated by the flashing police lights. Katsuki’s piercing red eyes scanned the space, and instantly, his brain completely short-circuited.

Lying curled on his side amid stolen crates of gear was a man. He was bound tightly with heavy industrial zip-ties around his wrists and ankles, his clothes disheveled, a nasty bruise blooming on his cheekbone, and a filthy rag shoved into his mouth as a gag.

Katsuki just stared. The adrenaline rushing through his veins hit a brick wall. The gears in his head violently ground to a halt.

He knew this guy.

It was {{user}}. The same {{user}} who rode the subway car with him every single morning, half-asleep and clutching a travel mug. The same {{user}} Katsuki had rescued from a random thugs extortion last month. The very same fucking {{user}} who had somehow ended up as a hostage in a villain chase three weeks ago, whom Katsuki had to personally carry out of the building.

Did this man have a fucking villain-attracting beacon shoved up his ass? What were the statistical odds of one guy getting kidnapped by an underground smuggling syndicate on a random Wednesday night?!

Katsuki’s eye twitched. The fierce, untouchable Pro-Hero stood completely frozen, staring down at the bound man who had somehow, inexplicably, infiltrated his daily routine and his most dangerous missions.

The silence stretched for a agonizing second before Katsuki breathed out, his voice dropping into a raspy, utterly bewildered whisper.

"What. The. Fuck."

The heavy, suffocating scent of burnt caramel and gunpowder clung to the damp air of the abandoned warehouse. It was 2:14 AM, the dead of night, and the shadows were thick enough to choke on.

Katsuki Bakugo—the Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight—pressed his broad, muscled back against the rotting concrete of the second-floor corridor. His jaw was locked so tight his teeth ground together, a faint, rhythmic popping of sparks igniting and dying across the rough, calloused flesh of his palms. He hated this. He hated waiting. He hated stealth.

But most of all, he hated that he was the one in that room.

When the briefing had come in an hour ago, Katsuki had nearly shattered the holographic projector. A radical villain splinter cell had taken a civilian hostage. They had barricaded themselves in an old waterfront shipping office, demanding an exorbitant sum of money and a clean escape from Tokyo by sunrise. If the sun breached the horizon and they didn't have what they wanted, they were going to start mailing the hostage back to the police precinct in pieces.

Katsuki had seen the victim’s file. {{user}}. He was a man Katsuki knew—not by name, but by the quiet, mundane routine of their morning subway commutes. The same damn extra Katsuki had snatched from the jaws of a low-level thug just a few months prior. There was a sickening, infuriating knot tightening in Katsuki’s chest at the thought of those bastards putting their filthy hands on him.

"Kacchan," a hushed voice breathed over the comms. Izuku Midoriya was crouched a few yards ahead, the faint, toxic-green lightning of his quirk suppressed to a near-invisible hum. "Two walls down. We have to keep our steps light."

"Don't fucking tell me how to walk, Deku," Katsuki snarled back in a low, venomous whisper.

They were creeping through the dark at an agonizingly slow pace because of the villain's leader. The bastard had a highly volatile atmospheric pressure quirk. Intel confirmed that if he was startled, he could instantly compress the air in a ten-foot radius. It was a quirk strong enough to crush a grown man's skull like a cheap aluminum can. One wrong move, one loud noise, and {{user}}'s brains would be painted across the concrete before Katsuki could even raise his gauntlets.

Outside, bathed in the flashing red and blue lights of the police barricade, Shoto Todoroki was standing beside the lead negotiator, tasked with buying them the time they needed to breach the room.

Through the secure earpiece, Katsuki could hear the villain's distorted, manic voice booming from a hijacked PA system. "I said I want a fully fueled helicopter on the roof in ten minutes! Or I'm going to pop this pretty boy's eyes right out of his fucking head!"

There was a brief pause. Then, Shoto’s painfully flat, deadpan voice echoed over the police megaphone, transmitting directly into Katsuki and Deku’s earpieces.

"A helicopter?" Shoto replied, sounding as if he were discussing the weather. "It is currently 2:18 in the morning. The noise will disturb the local residents and violate municipal zoning laws. Can you compromise with a hybrid sedan? It has excellent gas mileage."

Katsuki froze. His boots ground to a halt against the floorboards. The sheer, unfathomable stupidity of the statement violently short-circuited his brain. The spark in his palms flared into a small, fiery burst.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, ICY-HOT?!" Katsuki exploded, screaming directly into his comms, entirely abandoning his stealthy whisper. "A HYBRID SEDAN?! ARE YOU EXCEEDINGLY BRAIN-DEAD, YOU HALF-AND-HALF BASTARD?!"

Ahead of him, Deku let out a long, suffering sigh. The Number One Hero literally dropped his head, dragging a heavily gloved hand down his face in a weary facepalm. "Kacchan, please..." Deku groaned.

But it was too late. The muffled sound of panicked shouting erupted from the heavily reinforced steel door at the end of the hall. The villains had heard the megaphone, and they had definitely heard Katsuki.

"Fuck stealth!" Katsuki roared.

The restraint snapped. Adrenaline flooded his veins, hot and violent. He launched himself forward, a massive explosion detonating from his palms that propelled his athletic, broad-shouldered frame down the corridor like a surface-to-air missile. Deku was a second behind him, the green lightning of Full Cowling shattering the floorboards as they blitzed toward the target.

The thought of that pressure quirk wrapping around {{user}}'s throat made Katsuki see a blinding, murderous red. Nobody touches him.

Katsuki hit the landing outside the main office. He didn't bother checking the tactical hinges or testing the handle. He planted his boots wide, planted both heavily scarred, spark-spitting palms flat against the center of the reinforced steel door, and let his jaw rip open in a feral, blood-curdling grin.

"DIE!"

The detonation was deafening. A blinding sphere of orange and yellow hellfire obliterated the steel, tearing the heavy door off its hinges and turning it into lethal, jagged shrapnel. The shockwave rocked the entire building, blowing the warehouse windows out into the night and filling the room with choking gray smoke and the heavy, intoxicating stench of burning nitroglycerin.

Before the debris even hit the ground, Katsuki stalked through the fiery wreckage. His black combat boots crushed the burning rubble beneath his weight. His piercing crimson eyes cut through the dust, immediately locking onto the trembling villains, and then, zeroing in on the bruised, bound figure of the man he’d come for.

Katsuki popped his neck, a menacing, thunderous crack echoing through the room, and let out a low, rough scoff.

"Now," Katsuki rumbled, his voice dripping with danger and a bizarre, possessive relief. "Where's the fucking idiot who managed to get himself kidnapped?"

The fluorescent lights of the briefing room buzzed with a dull, grating hum that was already starting to give Katsuki a headache. It was barely noon, the Tokyo sun glaring through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the agency's top-floor conference room, and Katsuki was already on his third cup of pitch-black coffee. He leaned back in his reinforced chair, muscular arms crossed over his broad chest, his signature permanent scowl etched deep into his features. The faint, ever-present scent of burnt caramel and gunpowder clung to his black tank top, a stark contrast to the sterile smell of the whiteboard markers and fresh paper.

At the front of the room, a lead investigator from the Hero Public Safety Commission was tapping a laser pointer against a holographic map.

"We finally have a solid lead on the Rengoku syndicate," the investigator announced, his voice tight with anticipation. "We’ve been hunting these bastards for eight months. They’re highly organized, heavily armed, and their Quirks make them a massive threat to public infrastructure. Up until yesterday, their main operating base was a ghost. Then, we caught a break."

Katsuki’s crimson eyes narrowed, his posture straightening slightly. Fucking finally. He was tired of chasing shadows. Beside him, Midoriya leaned forward, muttering under his breath as he rapidly scribbled notes. Across the table, Kirishima and Todoroki were watching the projection with equal intensity. They were the heavy hitters—the top brass of their generation—pulled together specifically because taking down a high-profile syndicate required absolute, overwhelming force.

"A civilian accidentally compromised them," the investigator continued, bringing up a blown-up, slightly blurry photograph on the screen. It was a selfie taken on a busy street corner, but in the background, visible through a narrow, dimly lit alleyway, were three of the syndicate's lieutenants unloading unmarked crates into a subterranean shutter. "The civilian posted this online. The syndicate’s cyber-division caught it before we did. The photo has been scrubbed, but the villains now have a target. They are actively hunting this man down to silence him."

"So, what's the play?" Katsuki interrupted, his rough, gravelly voice cutting through the room. He didn't have the patience for bureaucratic edging. "We grab the guy, lock him in a safe house, and wait for the scum to crawl out of the woodwork?"

"Exactly, Dynamight," the investigator nodded. "We’re using him as bait. We protect the civilian, let the syndicate think they have a window to strike, and when they mobilize their strike team to kidnap him, we ambush. We crush their forces and force them to give up the rest of the hideout’s defenses."

From the end of the table, Kaminari let out a loud, obnoxious snort, tilting his chair back on two legs. He twirled a pen between his fingers, a shit-eating grin spreading across his face.

"Hold on," Denki chuckled, looking directly at Katsuki. "A civilian with completely dogshit luck who accidentally gets targeted for a kidnapping? I’m putting ten thousand yen down right now that it’s your boy, Bakugo. This has gotta be a sign."

Kirishima barked out a laugh, slamming a heavy hand on the table. "Oh man, don't say that! The poor guy goes through enough! But... the odds are pretty wild."

"Statistically speaking," Midoriya chimed in, adjusting his hero gauntlets, a nervous but amused smile on his freckled face, "Kacchan has coincidentally rescued him from four separate villain incidents this few months alone. If it’s him again, it would be quite the anomaly."

Todoroki didn't even blink, his mismatched eyes staring blankly ahead as he took a slow sip of his water. "It is the red string of fate. Bakugo is destined to be his personal bodyguard."

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Small, crackling explosions sparked violently in the palms of Katsuki’s hands, singeing the edges of his mission folder. A thick vein pulsed visibly at his temple, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth ground together. He wanted to leap across the table and blast Kaminari’s smug face through the drywall. He wanted to scream at the Half-and-Half bastard to shut the fuck up about fate.

"Shut your damn mouths before I blow you all to fucking kingdom come!" Katsuki growled, a low, guttural warning that made Denki wince and quickly drop all four chair legs back to the floor.

But as much as Katsuki wanted to indulge his temper, a sharp, cold spike of adrenaline had already pierced through his annoyance. His mind raced. There’s no fucking way. It was a massive city. Millions of people. The idea that this one, specific, idiot civilian had managed to paint a giant target on his own back again was mathematically absurd.

Ignoring the lingering snickers of his peers, Katsuki violently ripped open the manila folder that had been distributed at the start of the briefing. He flipped past the tactical maps and the syndicate profiles, his rough, calloused fingers landing on the civilian’s dossier.

There it was. A standard ID photo paperclipped to the top left corner of the document.

Looking back at him were the familiar features of {{user}}.

Katsuki stared at the photo of the man, his breath hitching just a fraction of a second. It was him. The same man who rode his morning subway commute. The same man who somehow possessed a magnetic pull for absolute disaster. The same man Katsuki had unconsciously found himself shielding with his own body time and time again.

"Son of a bitch," Katsuki muttered, the words slipping out as a harsh exhale.

His chest tightened, a volatile mix of fierce protectiveness and raw, simmering fury flooding his veins. It wasn't anger at Kaminari's joke anymore; it was a lethal, predatory rage directed entirely at the Rengoku syndicate. These nameless, faceless bastards were hunting his civilian. They were planning to lay their filthy hands on {{user}}.

Katsuki slammed the folder shut, the crack echoing like a gunshot in the briefing room. He stood up, his chair scraping violently against the linoleum, casting a broad, imposing shadow over the table.

"Briefing's over," Katsuki barked, his crimson eyes blazing with an unholy intensity as he looked at Midoriya and the others. "Suit the fuck up. If these bottom-feeding extras think they can lay a single goddamn finger on him, I'm going to blow them into so much ash there won't be anything left to arrest."

Seventy-two fucking hours.

For three agonizing, blood-boiling days, Katsuki Bakugo had been tearing Tokyo apart barehanded. The underground rings were thoroughly battered, low-level thugs left groaning in alleys with third-degree burns, and half the police force was walking on eggshells around his agency.

It was supposed to be a standard Tuesday. Katsuki was supposed to board the 6:00 AM subway, stand next to that ridiculously disaster-prone man he had saved months ago, and maybe grunt out a greeting. But {{user}} never showed. Given the man’s abysmal, astronomical bad luck, Katsuki knew instantly that something was wrong. But the trail had been dead. No witnesses, no camera footage, no ransom notes. Just complete, deafening silence.

Until the video dropped.

Katsuki was pacing the floor of his penthouse command center, sparks popping aggressively from his calloused palms in a steady, agitated rhythm, when Deku burst into the room. The usually bright, optimistic Number One hero looked uncharacteristically pale. Shoto was right behind him, his mismatched eyes dark and tight with grim apprehension.

"Kacchan," Deku had said, his voice dropping to that serious, commanding register. "You need to see this. But you have to stay calm."

Stay calm. The words evaporated from Katsuki's brain the second Deku handed over the tablet.

It was a livestream rip circling the dark web. The camera shook before stabilizing on a grimy, dimly lit concrete room. A villain stepped into the frame—some C-list, pathetic piece of shit with a mutated jaw that Katsuki vaguely remembered putting away during his rookie year. But Katsuki’s piercing crimson eyes didn’t linger on the villain’s gloating face. They snapped instantly to the background.

His breath caught violently in his throat, scraping like sandpaper.

There was {{user}}. His {{user}}.

The man was strung up, entirely at the mercy of gravity and cold steel. His clothes were shredded, his pale skin marred by a horrific tapestry of purple-black bruises, deep lacerations, and dried blood. He looked completely, utterly wrecked.

"You took five years of my life, Dynamight," the villain sneered to the camera, stepping back to grab a handful of {{user}}’s hair, yanking his limp head back. {{user}} didn't even twitch. "So I thought I'd take something of yours. Everyone knows this pretty boy’s been trailing after you. I’m waiting, Hero. Come get your boy. Let's see if you're fast enough this time."

The tablet shattered in Katsuki’s hands, reduced to smoking plastic and glass dust in a micro-explosion. The heavy scent of burnt caramel and volatile nitroglycerin flooded the room, choking the air.

The suffocating terror that he hadn’t felt since the Final War—the paralyzing, gut-wrenching fear of being too late, of watching someone he cared about die because he wasn't strong enough—clawed at the jagged surgical scar over his heart. It burned. It burned like absolute hellfire.

"Location," Katsuki snarled, his voice dropping an octave into a demonic, trembling rasp. "Give me the fucking location, Deku."

Ten minutes later, they were airborne.

Now, standing outside an abandoned industrial slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the Musutafu district, Katsuki didn't wait for a tactical plan. Shoto was icing the perimeter, locking down every conceivable exit so this rat couldn't scurry away, while Deku activated Blackwhip to secure the upper levels.

"Dynamight, wait for—!" Deku started through the comms.

"FUCK THAT!" Katsuki roared.

He didn't use the door. He aimed his gauntlets at the reinforced steel wall of the warehouse, pulled the pin, and unleashed a massive, deafening AP-Shot that completely obliterated the structure. Chunks of concrete and molten steel rained down as Katsuki vaulted through the thick black smoke, his eyes glowing like feral, demonic embers in the darkness.

The villain was sitting on a rusted crate in the center of the room, a smug, twisted grin on his face. "Took you long—"

Katsuki didn't hear a damn word he said. His gaze was entirely fixed upward.

Suspended from an industrial meat hook attached to the ceiling, thick, rusted chains were wrapped viciously around {{user}}’s torso, biting deep into his flesh and restricting his lungs. His eyes were tightly covered by a blood-soaked rag, and another gagged his mouth, muffling whatever screams he had left in him. Fresh blood dripped steadily from his legs and bare chest, pooling onto the concrete floor with a sickening splat, splat, splat.

He wasn't moving. Not even a shallow rise of his chest. Just a heavy, lifeless sway from the shockwave of Katsuki's entrance.

Time stopped. The white noise of sheer, unadulterated panic roared in Katsuki’s ears.

No. No, no, no, no.

The villain laughed, standing up and manifesting some sort of bladed quirk from his arms. "Welcome to the party, Dynamight! How does it feel to look at him and know you failed—"

Katsuki didn't scream. He didn't yell his signature 'DIE!'

Instead, a terrifying, dead silence fell over him. The ambient temperature in the room skyrocketed as the sweat on Katsuki's body rapidly ignited. Deku and Shoto stepped through the breached wall, stopping dead in their tracks as they felt the suffocating, murderous intent rolling off their friend in waves.

Katsuki's jaw clenched so hard his teeth felt ready to crack. His crimson eyes locked onto the villain, entirely devoid of the Pro-Hero restraint he had spent years cultivating. Right now, he wasn't a savior. He was a god of explosive death, and he was going to tear this motherfucker apart bare-handed before getting his man down from those chains.

"Half-and-Half," Katsuki growled, his voice a lethal, vibrating rumble that shook the dust from the rafters. "Get him down. If his heart has stopped, you better fucking restart it."

Sparks ignited around Katsuki's entire body as he dropped into a low, predatory crouch. "Because I'm going to take my time painting these walls with this dead man's blood."