The next day in class, Minoru stared up at Aizawa pale-faced as Aizawa finished his dry summary of Midoriya’s encounter with Shigaraki during their mall trip and went on to explain that their usual accommodations for the summer camp were canceled in favor of a secret destination.

  Shit. He’d completely forgotten that Shigaraki showed up at the mall, and mis-remembered that the secrecy around the summer camp location had been thanks to the attack at U.S.J. Even now, when he tried to remember attending the mall trip in the past, he only vaguely recalled trying to sneak after some of the girls and then getting summarily locked in a changing room.

  Minoru leaned as far over his desk as he could, stretching his arm to the maximum so he could poke Midoriya in the back with his pencil. “Midoriya, Midoriya, you actually talked to Shigaraki? What did he say?”

  Midoriya half turned, keeping most of his attention on Aizawa sensei. “He was really angry. Talked a bunch about the Hero Killer and his nomu attack on Hosu City. It sounded like he was competing with the Hero Killer or something. He actually asked after you, Mineta. I was honestly glad you were at supplemental lessons.”

  Minoru slid slowly back into his seat. He was on Shigaraki’s radar? That…did not bode well, though he supposed he should have expected it to some extent, given his involvement in Hosu City.

  Minoru refocused on Midoriya. “But no one was hurt, right?”

  Midoriya shook his head slightly. “No. Thankfully, Uraraka interrupted us and Shigaraki backed off.”

  Minoru sank back in his seat. “Good. Good.”

  As Midoriya turned his attention back to the front of the room, Minoru stewed. Had he forgotten anything else? He didn’t think so, but then again this incident had escaped him. He’d have to spend some more time going over his notes, trying to fill in any gaps that he found.

  Resolution made, Minoru tried to return his attention to their normal school-day, but try as he could, his attention that day was shot.

  Time passed, the kids in supplemental lessons grew more and more comfortable taking down their teachers while playing at villain “tag”, and at last summer break was upon them and with it the first day of the summer training camp.

  All through the bus ride, Minoru was a bundle of nerves. This was it; in a lot of ways, this training camp was the main reason he’d generally tried not to change things too drastically. If it went down the way he remembered, it would give the heroes a critical chance to catch All For One and put his machinations to rest permanently. But at the same time, he remembered the horror stories he’d heard from his classmates and those from Class B.

  The attack at U.S.J. had been terrifying, but aside from Shigaraki and his nomu, the villains they’d faced there were small fry. If things went the way he’d remembered, as he hoped and feared they would, the villains they would be facing in these woods would be of a completely different caliber.

  At last, the bus pulled over onto an overlook with a grand view of a sprawling woodland surrounded by mountains. As the students climbed off the bus, eager to stretch their legs, an air of confusion swept across the class.

  “What kind of rest stop is this?” someone called out.

  Aizawa sensei glanced their way. “Of course we stopped here for a reason…”

  Before he could continue, however, he was interrupted by a pair of women in cat costumes. “Heya, Eraser!” called one of them. “Rock on with these sparkling gazes!” She struck a pose.

  “Stingingly cute and catlike!” called the second, also striking a pose.

  Together they finished: “We’re the wild, wild pussycats!”

  The class stared in shell-shocked silence.

  “These are the pro heroes who’ll be helping us out this time,” said Aizawa, never missing a beat. “The Pussycats.”

  Midoriya couldn’t contain his hero-worship. “They’re a four-member hero team who all work under a single agency! This veteran team specializes in mountain rescue operations! They’ve been in business for 12 years now…”

  “We’re 18 at heart!” shouted the Pussycat in the lighter-colored costume, smushing Midoriya’s face with her paw and stopping his expositional monologue cold.

  The hero in the darker costume ignored the two of them, speaking to the rest of the class. “This whole area here is our territory. Your lodging is at the foot of that mountain over there.” She pointed to one of the peaks at the far side of the forest.

  “Huh?” said Uraraka. “Then why’d we stop halfway…?”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Uh oh,” muttered Sato.

  “Let’s…get back to the bus? Hurry!” said Sero, suiting actions to words.

  The Pussycat in the dark costume continued as if they hadn’t said anything. “It’s now 9:30 A.M. I’m thinking…around noon, at the earliest. Kitties who don’t make it there by 12:30 won’t get any lunch.”

  At this point the entire class was in a mad scramble for the bus, but the Pussycat in the lighter costume pressed her hands to the ground, and the very dirt under their feet flung the entire class up and over the edge of the overlook into the trees below.

  As Minoru was shoved over the edge, desperately looking for something to arrest his fall, he felt something snug tight around his chest, yanking him back and to the side.

  Minoru flew off in a completely unanticipated direction, and he heard the Pussycat calling out, “This is our private territory, so feel free to use your Quirks! You’ve got three hours to reach the facility on foot! Make it through…the Beast’s Forests!”

  Minoru came to rest on his back looking up at Aizawa sensei, who disengaged his capture fabric with a flick of his hand.

  “Oh? Did I miss one?” asked the lighter-dressed Pussycat, bounding over.

  Aizawa waved her off. “No, I grabbed him. Mineta and I need to have a little talk.”

  “We’ll see you back at the Catnip Inn then, Eraser!” called the other Pussycat, and together with the small boy who had been silently shadowing them from the start they piled into a car parked off to the side and drove off.

  Minoru pushed himself to his feet as the Pussycats drove away, nervously eyeing Aizawa. “What’s up, Sensei?”

  Aizawa gave him an inscrutable glance, and then turned parallel to the road. “Let’s take a walk.”

  With a last glance toward the edge overlooking the forest, where he could still hear the thumps and shouts of combat between his classmates and the earth monsters conjured up by one of the Pussycats’ Quirks, Minoru turned to follow Aizawa.

  For over a minute, the two ambled their way along the highway in silence. At last, Aizawa glanced at Minoru from the side of his eye. “You know, Mineta, I’ve been teaching a while now and I’ve seen a few things. But you know what I’ve never seen?”

  Aizawa stopped and turned to face Minoru head-on, and Minoru faltered to a stop, as well. “I’ve never seen Principal Nezu interfere with my curriculum to the extent that he has this year. Sure, we plan a lot of things collaboratively as a faculty, but this year…this year, he’s been offering ‘suggestions’ like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Aizawa eyed Minoru, but when he didn’t say anything shrugged and continued walking. “And I’ve been fine with that. The principal is one of the most rational individuals I’ve had the good fortune to work alongside. But then yesterday, long after we’d hammered out the details for this little training camp, he came to me with some very specific instructions about a villain attack he evidently anticipates. Despite all of our efforts to maintain operational security.”

  Ah. Principal Nezu must have brought Aizawa at least partially into the know. That actually made Minoru feel a bit better about the forthcoming attack. Aizawa was nothing if not competent.

  “So I got to thinking…what is the common factor when Nezu sticks his paws in? And that brings us to you, Mineta.”

  Aizawa stopped once more, crouching down partially to put his eyes more on Minoru’s level. “Mineta, is the principal forcing you to work as a double agent?”

  “Wha—?” Minoru stared. That was not at all a question he had expected to field. “No, not at all! There is likely a mole in the class, but I don’t know who it is.”

  Aizawa stared at him for a few moments before standing fully. “Interesting. So you aren’t working as a double agent, but you are in Principal Nezu’s confidence. You certainly know about this predicted villain attack of his, if your nerves today are any indication, too. So. I have to ask: what the hell is going on that has led Principal Nezu to confide in a student, no matter how talented, rather than his pro hero staff?”

  “Ah.” Crap, when he put it like that, Minoru could see what was bothering Aizawa. He wasn’t suspicious about Minoru; he was worried for what he saw as one of his students getting drawn into some sort of plot of the principal’s.

  Well, this was a pickle. Minoru actually wasn’t against telling Aizawa about his situation—he’d considered talking to Aizawa instead of Principal Nezu back when he first regressed—but the problem was that he simply wasn’t confident he could convince Aizawa that he wasn’t making everything up. For all that his sensei was quite intelligent, once he decided something was irrational he rarely spent any more energy on it.

  That said, if he could get Aizawa fully briefed on what was about to happen, he had no doubt that it would drastically improve their likely outcomes. Hm, perhaps if he approached the problem from a lightly different angle. “Say, Sensei, purely as a hypothetical…if you lived through some really horrible times and then your mind went back in time and you realized you could prevent the worst stuff but only by allowing some of the other bad stuff to happen, what would you do?”

  Aizawa scoffed. “Time travel is an irrational basis for a hypothetical.”

  “Just…humor me?”

  “So in this…hypothetical situation in which I have regressed through time, I take it I have perfect knowledge of future events.”

  Minoru shook his head. “No. It’s been a long time. You remember the big stuff, but a lot of the details escape you. And given some of the things you know will happen, it’s difficult, dangerous, or both to share your knowledge too freely.”

  Aizawa stared at him with a look he couldn’t interpret. “Hmm. Well, that’s certainly an interesting…hypothetical, you’ve posed. I’ll give it some thought. In the meantime, I suggest you hurry over and rejoin your class before they start to panic over your absence.” Aizawa waved towards the woods, where Minoru could see a fountain of debris rising in the near distance.

  Minoru glanced over the railing they’d been walking along. Yep, although the forest floor had been sloping up to meet the highway, they were still above the tops of the trees even here.

  He sent a speaking look back at Aizawa, who waved blandly back. “Go on, daylight’s burning.”

  Minoru sighed, grabbed some grapeshot off his head, anchored them to the top of the embankment, and then slid under the railing and over the edge.

  As he worked his way towards the forest floor, he heard Aizawa pull out his phone and dial someone. “Hello, Principal Nezu? Yes, I was just talking to Mineta a few moments ago, and he posed me an absolutely fascinating ‘hypothetical’ situation involving time travel and the conundrums of handling future knowledge that I wanted to discuss with you…”

  Minoru dropped to the forest floor and took off running toward where he had seen the disturbance caused by his classmate’s passage. Hopefully when he arrived on the other side, he’d have a new ally in his fight.