Chapter Text
Shota Aizawa knew deep down that the Forest Training Camp was going to be a nightmare. Anything and everything involving his latest crop of students tended to be.
The USJ rescue exercise turned into a 100 villain ambush they all barely escaped from.
The students’ internships led three of them to try and apprehend the Hero Killer all on their own.
A fourth of the students failed their practical final.
Rationally speaking, Shota knew better than to hope for anything different this time around. Hell, before they even left for Nagano, Midoriya had apparently been held hostage at the mall by the Shigaraki villain while shopping for supplies. That was a headache all on its own, as it led to not only a mess of media uproar, but they had to secretly switch up the location at the last minute and remove All Might from the camp altogether. That should have been the end of it - especially since the first two days were relatively uneventful - but Shota should have figured that this was the calm before the storm. And now that the storm had made landfall, he couldn’t help but be shocked at just how everything went so horribly wrong.
One minute, he was getting remedial lessons ready along with King Vlad. The next minute, a full fledged ambush by the League of Villains was taking place.
What followed was three hours of utter chaos. To sum up: Midoriya overdid it with his Quirk for the upteenth time, a six year old was almost killed by an A rank villain, a black haired villain who Shota assumed was the leader of the attackers started a raging forest fire and nearly attacked the remedial students, another unknown villain released a poisonous fog in tandem with the aforementioned fire, two of the Wild Wild Pussycats were out of commission until further notice, and to wrap it all up, Katsuki Bakugou wound up being kidnapped by the villains they failed to apprehend.
If he were to be honest, it was a miracle nobody was killed.
Fifteen minutes after the villains escaped, reinforcements arrived. Police, firefighters, and paramedics showed up in order to help where they could; whether it was taming the fire before it got out of control, re-arresting the villains who were defeated as well as taking statements from everyone, and treating all those who were injured before transporting them to the hospital. People were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, their shouting overlapping to where Shota could make neither head nor tail of what anyone was saying. The blinding lights and blaring sirens of the police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances assaulted his senses to where it was almost too easy for him to miss the sheer amount of students being loaded up in ambulances, almost like they were on a factory assembly line.
Out of the 39 attending the camp, more than half of them were injured. 15 were unconscious with severe injuries, and 11 were conscious yet mildly to moderately injured. As they were on their way to Central Hospital, that only left 13 unharmed students who were currently being questioned by police.
“What a zoo, huh Eraserhead?”
Shota was broken out of his thoughts by Vlad King, who stood by his side and watched the madness unfolding around them.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” he responded, cracking his stiff neck.
“How could we have not seen this coming?” Vlad King asked, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And now the students -”
“We did what we could, given what information we had,” Shota curtly interrupted. “We switched the location and took All Might off the roster specifically so this wouldn’t happen.”
“That didn’t help any, did it?” his fellow teacher frostily asked. “Now, more than half of our students are injured, and a Pro-Hero and another student are unaccounted for!”
“You think I don’t realize that?!” Shota snapped, glaring at him. “That unaccounted for student happens to be from my class!”
Vlad King opened his mouth before abruptly closing it and looking down at his feet, arms crossed over his chest.
“I know, Eraserhead,” he said evenly. “We’ll get him back, though. It shouldn’t be too hard figuring out where he’s being held.”
He took a glance over at Shota, and when he didn’t offer up anything, he decided to ask the million yen question: “Why do you think they want Bakugou so badly?”
“... I have no idea.”
And it was the truth. He had performed admirably in the USJ Attack per word of mouth, and he put on an impressive performance at the Sports Festival, netting the most internship offers out of anyone in Class 1A. It was certainly a distinct first impression, but had it attracted the attention of the League of Villains? Did they sense his unyielding conviction towards heroism and want to use it for something nefarious? How long had they been planning this attack?
“Either way, we need to report all of this to Nedzu before the press gets wind of it,” Shota continued, casting a glance at Detective Tsukauchi engaging in extensive conversation with Todoroki and Tokoyami. He appeared to be frowning as he held up his recorder, ocassionally interrupting them. “There’s no telling the field day they’ll have with this -”
“And speak of the devil,” Vlad King dryly remarked. “Look who just arrived.”
The headache Shota felt coming on was a rare kind that was associated by the bane of his existence: journalists. They started off small, but still came barreling through like a freight train, almost identical to the army of news vans that joined the emergency responders. They were reminiscent of leeches swarming towards an open wound, ready to suck it dry of blood, ready to twist the narrative into some shocking headline that would get the public's attention, truth be damned.
It was both infuriating and exhausting.
“We’d better head them off before they get to the students,” Vlad King said with a grimace, setting his shoulders back. “There’s no telling what sort of questions they’ll try asking them. Knowing them, they’ve probably got a headline already made.”
Shota snorted and joined his co-teacher in approaching the lion’s den.
“Hopefully by the time we get to them, the emergency workers will have already scared them away. That way we can focus on what actually matters: the investigation. We don't have time to corral and placate a bunch of obnoxious journalists."