Hey guys! Originally there was going to be more to this chapter, but as I was writing it I realized that it was getting a bit lengthy (~5000+ words) so I'll just be adding that all to the next chapter! Hope you like it!

Chapter XI

Dammit.

Stepping inside his room, Bakugou slammed his door behind him with a satisfying bang. The room shook and the door vibrated on its hinges, but at this point really Bakugou didn't care. Iida could come in and rant to him about "respecting the dorms" or some shit like that all he wanted and he would slam it again in his face, hard enough to dent the door frame simply to spite him.

It wasn't like anyone would notice at this point. He was pretty sure that at this point everyone was upstairs checking on dumbass Sparky as if Bakugou had tried to blow his head off his fucking shoulders. He didn't. All he did was talk to the guy, and things spiraled out of control from there.

As the room stopped shaking, Bakugou was delved into a deep silence as he stood there in front of his door, chest heaving. He couldn't sit down. His mind was whirring in a million directions, buzzing with thoughts and adrenaline. At one side, his hand was clasped tightly into a fist. In his other, he held Kaminari's cell phone. It felt small and fragile in his hand, and it was all Bakugou could do not to take it and smash it on the floor simply out of rage.

He didn't know why he took it. It was a spur of the moment decision when his brain had been buzzing with too many different ideas of what to do and what might help, and he just acted on one of them before he was able to properly think it through.

All he knew was that his "meeting" with Kaminari hadn't given him the answers he wanted. He could barely even call it a meeting; it was more like an interrogation. An interrogation where Bakugou got too angry too quick when Kaminari pulled the victim card, and of course everyone came rushing in to Kaminari's rescue. It was just fucking perfect; he could only imagine how it must of looked. Kaminari cowered in a corner, shivering, while Bakugou stood over him with explosions in his palms and his voice raised to a yell. It was the perfect attacker-victim seen.

Only that wasn't what it was. At first, Bakugou had just thought that something had been weird about the hospital incident. Something didn't entirely match up. Maybe Kaminari knew something he wasn't supposed to know, or there had been accident or something. But now, something else was tugging at him.

Just before Bakugou grabbed him, something had happened. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kaminari move. His panic-stricken face seized for a moment, and instead there was...something else. Something wrong. He didn't know what it was, but the sheer shock of it caused Bakugou to falter for just a moment. And that movement at the corner of his eye, his arm, continued forward, and Bakugou knew what would have happened. He saw his muscle movements. He saw the direction his arms were going.

His hand was charged with electricity, crackling yellow at the fingertips. Headed straight for his head. Going in for the kill.

And then he stopped.

And then he missed.

But Bakugou saw it. He saw what happened. It happened fast, so fast that maybe if he was anyone else he would have missed it. But he wasn't anyone else. He had enough battle training and intelligence in fighting to know an attack when he saw it. He could have chalked the incident up to an emotional outburst, where Kaminari was just afraid, but he knew it wasn't like that. His movements were too sure, too precise to simply be an accident. There wasn't any flailing or kicking; it was one quick, fluid motion with no hesitation.

Kaminari was going for his head. He was going to attack him. He hadn't imagined it. The change in direction was too abrupt for anything like an accident. He was going to shock him in his head, and Bakugou wasn't exactly an experienced electrician, but he had a feeling that if he was shocked in the head it wouldn't produce the best results.

Huffing, Bakugou reached down to look at his hand. When Kaminari first shocked him, it had been more of a surprise, but it didn't necessarily hurt. Now though, it was beginning to burn. Really burn. It stung so badly that Bakugou grabbed his hand and sat down on his bed, placing Kaminari's phone beside him on the dresser. He didn't have much experience with burns. Despite all his time spent in the kitchen, he had never burned himself, not even once.

But the skin was already turning red and blistering, and damn, it hurt like hell. He had been shocked by Kaminari before, but those were more accidental, annoying zaps. This, though. This was nothing like that. This was an actual attempt to harm someone, and he could tell. It wasn't too bad, maybe a first-degree burn as far as he could tell. Still, it was blistering, and he was pretty sure he had heard somewhere that if it blistered a lot then it could, in fact, turn serious. Quickly, he ran through the checklist for burns in his head.

He was a little light-headed, but he wasn't having any trouble breathing or going into cardiac arrest. The best thing to do would probably be to run cold water on it and put on some ointment, and maybe wrap it up in a bandage if things didn't get better. With a small grunt, Bakugou headed over to his bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet above the sinks, which had been stocked with first-aid supplies at the beginning of the year. Rummaging around, he finally found the burn ointment and set it down on the counter before running the colder water and placing his hand over it, which was actually able to take a lot of the pain away.

With his hand finally starting to feel better, Bakugou found himself able to calm down and think. Now that he thought about it, if Kaminari had ended up going for the head, it would have been a lot stronger than what he did to his hand. In fact, he was pretty sure he just brought it down at the last minute. When Kaminari suddenly changed direction, Bakugou didn't understand why, but then the door swung open, and suddenly it all came crashing down on him.

Kaminari knew they were all coming. He knew they were going to have company soon. He didn't know how or why, but apparently Kaminari had noticed something he didn't, and had changed the direction of his attack so that it was just bad enough to cause Bakugou some troubling damage, but not bad enough to put Kaminari in hot water. It was so perfect it scared him.

Bakugou suddenly sucked in a breath as the realization came crashing into him head-on like a freight train.

This wasn't some spur-of-the-moment thing. This was something well calculated and analyzed, done in a way that was well executed and thought-out. It had been done in the best possible way, and Kaminari had thought upon it and acted it out in the span of a few seconds. And when he did, something changed about him. The look on his face left and was replaced with the something else, something that Bakugou now had a name for. It was cold and calculating, free of any empathy. It was almost mocking.

Only thing was, it didn't make sense. Bakugou couldn't see a way to match up the kid who got amazed by the concept of fidget spinners with a person who had the complex thinking skills to come up with a plan that Bakugou had failed to see through until now, and had been able to take him by such complete and utter surprise.

Something wasn't right here. Something about this whole thing wasn't right, and Bakugou knew it. It was like there was a cold, sinister hand in front of his face, toying with him, dangling in front of him the truth, and it was just out of his reach. He felt like a horse, and Kaminari was holding the carrot out in front of him as bait, leading him and everyone else forward into something else. Bakugou didn't know what that something else was, but he didn't like being toyed with. Especially not by a dumbass like Kaminari. He was done with this. With all of this.

And the answers started with that cell phone.

Reaching over, Bakugou grabbed it off the desk and opened it up, to where a picture of Kaminari grinning in a Pikachu hat given to him by Sero greeted him. Bakugou scowled at Kaminari's obnoxious smile and swiped up.

The lock screen glared out at him, but he wasn't worried about that. Bakugou knew the passes of everyone who regularly hung around him. It was good to be prepared, and he had watched all of them open their lock screens from a distance in case he ever needed to open them for whatever reason. he never liked the idea of someone who had so much information about him and a connection to a world to tell about it and to be completely helpless as to what they did with that power. He had never expected Kaminari to have a passcode, partly because he didn't think it had ever occurred to him to have one and partly because he figured he didn't know how to set one. However, Kaminari did have a lock screen, and when Bakugou saw the password he was surprised it wasn't something simple like 1234.

It was 0813, which seemed kind of interesting to Bakugou. He noticed that lots of people tended to make their passcodes trace in some sort of pattern across their screen, or relate to significant dates like birthdays or something like that. He figured the 08 meant August, since people didn't usually put a zero in front of their codes unless it involved a date, and the rest would mean August 13th. From what he knew, Kaminari's birthday was in June, so he had no idea why he would have any relations to August 13th. Still, it didn't matter, either. All that mattered was that he had the code.

Punching in the passcode, Kaminari's phone opened up, displaying a yellow background decorated with a black lightning bolt pattern. There were basic utility apps at the bottom, featuring Phone, Mail, Safari, and Music, but then there were other apps, like several news stations and sudoku.

Both took Bakugou by surprise. He had never considered Kaminari to be the kind of person to keep up with the news or ever care about that sort of thing, and especially not to play a game like sudoku. It was a game of strategizing and intelligence, being able to find certain patterns, which up until recently, Bakugou had never considered Kaminari to be very good at.

And the news? That was weird. He remembered a while ago, when there had been an explosion in Shimane prefecture due to a gas leak in one of the buildings, someone had turned on the news during breakfast and Kaminari had chosen to bitch and complain about watching the news until Bakugou finally told him to fuck off. He had never considered him the type to care about that sort of thing. To see him have several news stations, including national and prefecture news was...weird, to say the least.

Wondering what could possibly be so interesting to him, Bakugou tapped one of them, opening up the page. After a bit of searching, he finally found history, and when he did, he arched an eyebrow.

It was all crime stuff. But not just stuff like murders and bank robberies. All of it was about crime from villains, but these were villains that he had never heard of, or really anyone had heard of for that matter. It was all back-alley stuff and criminals that no one had never really seen or caught, but were just lurking in the shadows. Hardly anything was known about them, but the damage they did was pretty extensive. There was this one guy who had committed two mass murders, killing about sixteen people in all, and all they knew about him was that his quirk had something to do with disintegration. There was no outer damage to the victims' bodies, but their internal organs had been nearly liquefied, which Bakugou almost found disgusting

The only stuff that wasn't related to back-alley criminals was a surprising amount of stuff about Hero Killer Stain. Most of the hype about him had died down since the Sports Festival, but there were still little things popping up here and there, and Kaminari looked at all of it. Hero Killer Stain sentenced to Life with No Probation. Murders in Furano Now Thought to be Done by Stain Followers. Hero Killer Stain: His Impact on Hero Society.

Reading it sent shivers down his spine. Bakugou remembered a while ago, right after Iida's brother had been attacked by the Hero Killer, Kaminari had said to Ojiro that he thought that Stain was cool. It was pretty common knowledge by now what had happened to Ingenium, so he had basically been openly praising the man who had hospitalized Iida's brother. At the time, Bakugou didn't think much of it. It hadn't surprised him in the least that Kaminari thought Stain was "cool." Any weak-minded person who based their interests based on what was popular on the moment would easily be swayed by something like that. It would probably pass when the next big thing came up. And as for bringing up Stain when they were talking about Iida's brother, he just figured that was Kaminari not thinking before he spoke.

Now though, as he scrolled through more and more Stain results, he began to get a sense of uneasiness. This wasn't some kind of small interest or short fling; this was a borderline obsession and in the creepiest possible way. He wasn't sure what he was expecting to find on Kaminari's phone, but it certainly wasn't this.

Feeling uneasy, Bakugou left the news app and instead went down to Safari, looking through his search history. Again, more Stain and crime stuff. But this time, there was also other searches. The search history was filled with things like "important blood vessels" and "proper flaying techniques." When he looked at that one, Bakugou saw that the most recent ones were accompanied by pictures of small mammals, though he wasn't sure if that eased or worsened the situation.

However, there was also a search where Kaminari asked: "where to acquire dimethylmercury." Bakugou himself didn't even know what dimethylmercury was, so he had no idea how in the hell Kaminari could know. Curiosity pricking at him, he tapped on the search, only to discover after a bit of reading that dimethylmercury was, in fact, a type of highly potent neurotoxin.

"What the hell..." Bakugou muttered, suddenly holding Kaminari's phone as if it were radioactive. He still continued to scroll through Kaminari's searches, but at this point, he wasn't even reading them. His brows snapped together, brain working at lightning-speed as he tried to figure out what all this even was.

His first thought was that this was all a prank. It had to be. It all just seemed like a joke that kept building up until it finally crossed over the edge and became too ridiculous to believe anymore. Some guys thought it would be funny to mess with Bakugou and make all these searches on Kaminari's phone and watch Bakugou get all bent out of shape about it; they were probably laughing at him from behind a corner right now.

But no one in the dorms was really seemed to be in the mood for "jokes," and anyways, this hardly seemed to be funny. Apparently, according to this phone, Kaminari was someone who played Sudoku, had a startlingly creepy obsession with Hero Killer Stain, and had questionable, mildly disturbing search results. That couldn't be further from the truth, and he should know, as he's been putting up with Kaminari for months now.

Now that he thought about it, he probably would have ended up ignoring Kaminari altogether if he wasn't constantly hanging around Kirishima. In fact, Bakugou really only started paying attention to him after the cavalry battle at the Sport's Festival. Up until then, everyone in the class other that Deku, Todoroki, and kind-of Kirishima had just been background characters in his class that he never really paid attention to. But at the cavalry battle, he started to pay a little attention to Kaminari when he realized that the guy could actually be a pretty powerful opponent if he wanted to be.

At the time, Bakugou had formed a team with Kirishima, Sero, and Ashido, while Kaminari had been a supporting member on Todoroki's team along with Iida and Yaoyorozu. Bakugou had hardly given any recognition to half of the teams out there; let alone some guy running around on the bottom of the field.

However, he had been forced to snap to attention when Kaminari finally put his quirk to use. On Todoroki's order, he had been able to electrocute the entire field in one move, thus effectively disabling everyone for a few moments, including Bakugou's own team.

He didn't see where it came from, but he certainly felt it. It snuck up on him like a snake; one moment, he was snatching headbands, and the next, his body was convulsing with electric pulses inside and out. It only lasted a few seconds, but at that moment, it felt like hours. For a few excruciating moments, he lost control of himself entirely. His muscles had been stunted to a stop against his will, tensing up and jolting at random moments. It was as though he was a guest in his own body.

Then, just as soon as it started, it was over. It was as if someone had flipped off a switch, and suddenly the shock covering the entire field just stopped. Bakugou doubled over, gasping for breath as he struggled to recompose himself as quickly as possible. For a few moments after that, the field was in complete disarray, but just out of the corner of his eye, Bakugou caught Todoroki's team moving swiftly though the crowd, snatching headbands from their disarmed opponents as if it were nothing.

It was then that Bakugou finally felt a searing hot rage bubble to the surface, but it wasn't until he saw a small flash of golden hair right beside Todoroki that it all became clear.

"What the hell? Was that fucking SPARKY?" He roared, though whether it was out of rage or disbelief, he wasn't sure. No one answered him, but no one had to. He wasn't even looking for an answer; he was just so furious that someone had managed to disarm him so easily and hindered him from getting back at Monoma that he wasn't thinking clearly. It wasn't until later on, when everyone was taking their lunch break that he was finally able to calm down enough to think it through.

He had sat in a corner by himself to eat from a bento box, watching everyone and thinking over everything that had happened during the cavalry battle. When he saw Kaminari, he stopped. This was the 'whey' guy. The guy who sat two seats over him. Up until then, he hadn't even bothered to learn his name. He only learned it when he saw it beside his picture up on the screen when they were flashing the winners of the cavalry battle.

Kaminari. This guy, who he hadn't even paid attention to until now, had been one of the only ones who was able to attack and disarm half the field in one move. The only other person Bakugou knew who could do that was Todoroki, and he was one of the only people Bakugou considered to be a decent rival to himself. He had never even really paid attention to Kaminari until now, but he was starting to wish he did.

Hell, he even got some of the most hero offers in the class, fifth only to him, Todoroki, Iida, and Tokoyami. The four of them had placed top in the entire Sports Festival, and Kaminari was just after them. Just next to some of the top people participating in the U.A. Sport's Festival. The guy could actually be pretty powerful if he wanted to be, it wasn't for a few unfortunate things holding him back.

First, of course, there was the side effect of his quirk. Having a wattage limit to how much power he could use was a big barrier to himself as a hero, and plus, there was just his intelligence in general. Those two things were probably why Bakugou stopped considering him to be a decent rival to himself.

As he started hanging around Kirishima more, he noticed that Kaminari started to pop up here and there too. First it was little things like butting into their conversations or just happening to be near Kirishima at the same time Bakugou approached him, but soon enough it morphed into actively trying to hang out with Bakugou and attempts to joke around with him, sometimes trying to include him in a lot of the stuff he was doing.

At first, Bakugou thought that he was just flat-out annoying. He would lash out at him, but for some reason Kaminari just kept coming back. He didn't know if he was trying to make him like him or if he was just that oblivious, but he always went on with him like nothing had happened. Eventually, Bakugou just gave up. He hung out with him in the commons and played video games with him, and sometimes even let the occasional "Kacchan" slide by.

However, at one point, Kirishima had said that he was "happy he and Kaminari were finally friends," and that had really irked Bakugou the wrong way. He didn't want to call Kaminari his friend, and he certainly didn't want other people to think that they were friends. He told himself that Kaminari was more like a dog: easily entertained, attention seeking, stupidly loyal, and high-maintenance. He refused to consider him anything more than that.

Even so, he figured he knew Kaminari pretty well, which was why he found this so hard to believe. Because the things he had seen on that phone didn't match up with the image of Kaminari he had in his head. In his mind, Kaminari had always been that ditzy, popular, dumb-fuck of a kid who did reckless things without thinking and put more time into trying to look cool that anything else. Those things didn't exactly go hand-in-hand with searching up various neurotoxins and extensive research on human anatomy. It didn't even match up with sanity. It was unsettling and disturbing and caused Bakugou's mind to race faster than he could scroll.

He continued to look through Kaminari's phone, finally leaving Safari and finding all sorts of things. At one point, he stumbled across a paint app, which confused him until he realized that it was filled with graphs and notes. He clicked one of the graphs, squinting his eyes trying to read it, but eventually, he decided that he just couldn't make sense of it. Lines and dots connected to each other in ways that seemed incoherent, and somewhere along the way Kaminari had started calculating something that Bakugou didn't understand.

Bakugou had always considered himself to be fairly good at math, always being in higher classes than his peers throughout school, but looking at this seemed absolutely ludicrous to him, like he was reading another language. He didn't understand of it, but apparently Kaminari could since apparently he was the one who wrote it.

Bakugou only shook his head. He had taken Kaminari's phone to try and find some idea as to what exactly had happened, not whatever the hell this shit was. He was starting to think that someone had taken Kaminari's phone, or this was someone else's phone altogether. It wasn't completely out of the question for Kaminari to copy someone else's code if he couldn't think of his own, which would explain using similar passcodes, and the yellow-and-black background didn't mean anything.

Of course, he hadn't known Kaminari that long, but he had a feeling he had him pretty figured out. He didn't see how you could possibly mistake getting the lowest grade on every test they had ever done for genius. He wasn't afraid to say that the guy was an idiot, and that was what he had stuck by this

Then again, you didn't do the kind of quick thinking Kaminari did back in his dorm by being an idiot. Bakugou's hand still burned with a ferocious sting, a constant reminder of what had happened. No matter how many times he played the scene over again in his mind, he couldn't deny what had happened. What Kaminari had done was smart, and startlingly so.

Now that he thought about it, this wasn't the first time Kaminari had done something like that. Back at the beginning of the year, on the bus ride to the USJ, he remembered talking to everyone on the bus and how a bunch of them were poking fun at him. He didn't remember the exact details of what had happened, but he remembered that on the way there, Kaminari had said something to him that didn't make a lot of sense.

"It's only been a brief while since our socialization has commenced, and yet we have already been made apologetically cognizant of your personality, redolent as it is of a turd being steamed in a sewer." He had said, a shit-eating smirk on his face. Bakugou understood what he said, but the sudden usage of vocabulary had taken him by such surprise that for a moment he was completely dumbfounded.

However, that was the only time he could really think of where Kaminari had done anything like that. Bakugou knew that Kaminari had a little knowledge in areas like literature and the arts and stuff, as there would be times when he would sometimes use a big word or quote some unknown author that apparently was really important, but he had never thought much of it. Remembering facts and figuring stuff out, which was what intelligence was based on, were two entirely different things.

But now, he was beginning to wonder if they were more connected than he thought. Biting his lip, Bakugou could practically feel the gears turning in his head. At first, all that stuff had seemed like little incidents, too minor to be of any real importance. But with everything that had happened, it was starting to make him think.

Kaminari showed obvious signs of ignorance. That much was clear. But he couldn't possibly be that stupid; part of getting into U.A. was scoring well enough on a written exam, which he had obviously been able to pass, or else he wouldn't even be here. Bakugou figured that if Kaminari had knowledge in areas like that, then he would show the little signs of knowledge consistently and spread out. Instead, they would randomly pop up here and there in little pockets, that was just now starting to seem too random. Too out-of-the-ordinary to be considered normal. Almost like he was trying not to do anything like that.

And then it clicked.

Kaminari played Sudoku. He had a wide array of knowledge in areas such as science, math, literature, and who knew what else. He had just shown that he had the quick thinking skills to be able to do something that Bakugou couldn't see, and it had only shown through for just a moment like he was trying to hide it. But Bakugou had seen it. He had seen the glimmer of arrogant, calculating and unempathetic intelligence that flashed in his eyes, so cold and raw that it was impossible to unsee it or deny it. It was now that it finally made sense.

Kaminari was smart. Really smart. He just didn't want anyone else to know.

It was like someone had finally poked the final hole in the dam, and all the water came rushing in. He found his mind racing with unexplored ideas and wondering and thoughts that all seemed to be screaming out to him at the same time with all this new information. But, above it all, the only thing Bakugou could think was why. Why in the hell would anyone willingly choose to be seen as an idiot?

And besides, by now it wasn't obvious that being smart wasn't the only thing he was hiding. After seeing the sudden change in Kaminari's entire demeanor back in his room, coupled with the new knowledge he had been given, it was obvious that something else was going on here. When Kaminari suddenly changed his attack on Bakgou, something else changed inside of him. It was like the grief and stress he had felt about Sero just turned off, like someone flicking a switch.

But that wasn't what worried Bakugou. What worried him was how he looked so much more comfortable in that than anything else he had ever shown to them.

He had taken Kaminari's phone to look for clues about the whole Sero Incident. Now, it was obvious that something much deeper was going on here. Something sinister.

He only had a few more moments to look through Kaminari's phone before his train of thought was broken by a ding and a bang.

The ding was what he heard first. He felt Kaminari's phone buzz in his hand and looked down to see a notification sliding down from the top of the screen.

💬MESSAGES
Tomurska Aogima
hey kid next report is coming up. you better be ready.

He barely even had time to register who this Tomurska Aogima character was before the knock came.

It was loud and rattled on the door, and almost instinctively, Bakugou felt himself tense up. Right. At the moment, he had been so caught up in the apparent discovery that he had forgotten the crisis at hand, unfolding on the floor above him. However, when he heard someone pounding on the door outside, it all came rushing back to him.

Which was why he had no doubt in his mind about who was at that door.