Shahryar - Look, you snort magical drugs, you get magical high with magical aftermath, that's how it works :v
Detrametal - Don't worry, Tsuyu will be headpatted. This isn't negotiable. And let's just say that cola might turn out useful :v
Le Phoque Blanc - Happy to hear :D
Lord kaile - Not exactly a ghost. She has a body, but with some shapeshifting ccapabilities. In a way, she is still a human, just with different definition of mortality. As for Deku, well, it'll be revealed in time.
(***)
"Alright, so, is everyone ready?" Izuku (somehow, he is the head of their group - he has no idea why) announces, as they are all gathered in front of him on Sunday morning.
They look surprisingly professional. Might be the addition of combat vests, everyone has one, except for Toga. They have a lot of conveniently accessible pockets for their newly obtained alchemies.
Concealment glyphs make it so that they aren't arrested by the police for carrying guns around and generally speaking looking shady as hell, despite a patrol just walking by and them doing a pre-mission line-up in front of the UA.
Toga has just a belt, because she is all about mobility. Well, belt, and some very… tight-fitting yet elastic bodysuit, that Hatsume apparently asked her to use for testing. It's black.
Apparently, it shouldn't tear when she does her transformation things. It's extremely pleasing to the eyes in Izuku's opinion, and he is rather certain that Himichan knows about that. And that it has greatly contributed to her decision to wear it.
Todoroki has his submachine gun and a combat vest. With a belt under the lower edge of said combat vest. He is wearing it all over his school uniform.
The belt is decorated with seven (7) coca cola cans, arrayed right next to each other.
"I just fucking can't." Bakugou announces loudly. "Library Freak, what the fuck?"
"Provisions." Todoroki replies dryly. Of course he knew what it was about, even without Bakugou pointing it out. "I have more in my backpack."
Of course he has more in his backpack.
Izuku sighs. Todoroki is being himself so much that it hurts, but hey. He is the most knowledgeable and dangerous out of them all. And he apparently visited the mental hospital in question once in the past.
On a dare.
On a fucking dare.
He won said dare.
It wasn't even an actual dare, just some 'Mirio Togata' guy saying all of that as a joke, but Todoroki spent a night there either way, just to rub that into his face.
It was a very Todoroki way of asserting societal dominance over someone.
"You know what, let's just go there already." Bakugou decided to be the reasonable one. Izuku stares at him in shock. "It's a long trip either way, and we want to be out of it before the night and… WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STARING AT ME LIKE THAT, SHITTY DEKU!"
Oh, look, Bakugou actually didn't become a victim of supernatural impersonation. Phew.
(***)
The mental hospital is… intimidatingly large. And kinda… rough? Brutallist even. Might be quite old, and, frankly, it looks like some of the buildings partially collapsed in the meantime.
Izuku can see… vines. No, wrong term. It's as if something spread its roots through the building itself. He can see a meter wide 'root' exiting one of the windows and reentering the building from another one.
Creepy.
But it probably explains why Shiozaki sent them here for some supernatural plant samples.
"Alright, final heads-up." Todoroki suddenly announces, stopping them all. "From here on, you're going to have to follow my instructions quickly and to the letter. No back talking. Keep your gas masks on at all times. This place is dangerous."
"You don't fucking say." Bakugou grumbles. "It's giving me bad vibes alright."
"Oh?" Todoroki glances at him. "Is it your sixth sense speaking?"
"No, I just want to feed whatever shit designed this hospital to crawler mimics." Bakugou cuts back. "This is a fucking crime against aesthetics and my eyes."
Todoroki sighs, before deciding to focus on the rest of them.
"This place gets worse during the night, when things normally dwelling in the detention area start prowling the whole building." Todoroki already gave them that talk, but clearly decided to repeat himself to make sure that the message stuck. "It's approaching noon, so we can expect mostly some occasional undead and minor plant-like cryptids. If you see a weird plant, do not approach it unless I give you a green light. It might explode."
Midoriya thinks that he saw similar 'environmental hazards' in some FPS games, especially the more horror ones. It's like a staple thing, really.
"Some of those things are producing poisonous or hallucinogenic spores, hence the gas masks." Todoroki continues. "Also, we're doing a quick scouting trip on the verge of the complex and far away from the detention area. Midoriya, please try to not do anything stupid, alright?"
Why is it always him that's called out?! Maybe Kacchan is the actual trouble magnet and Izuku is the one that keeps being drawn in, huh?
"We're raising so many fucking flags about the detention area, ugh." Bakugou groans. "I'm at this point almost certain that we won't end up there simply because it's too heavy of a foreshadowing."
"I can't imagine anything else going wrong with that excursion." Todoroki replies non-comittantly. "It's either an unexpected detention area visit or nothing."
"Uhm, by the way." Izuku raises his hand. "I think I kind of forgot to ask. What happened to that place? Like, why is it abandoned?"
"Apparently one of the patients used to dream about a certain tree." Todoroki replies, before pointing to the large root that Izuku noticed earlier. "When he was spending the night in the detention area, the tree passed through his body and entered our real world fully. This is the result."
Fucking spooky.
(***)
Midoriya's party enters the building. Half a minute later, two people emerge from the forest at the edge of the mental hospital.
"Looks like their first proper dungeon crawl." Decay announces, with a hint of envy in his voice. The magister is wearing his signature outfit, a tattered hoodie with human hands all over them. "And here of all places, can you believe the coincidence, Overhaul?"
The feeling of change and reshaping, of death and rebirth. A butterfly flying nearby changes into a caterpillar, but one of a completely different species to its own confusion. Something in the air itself twists. Thankfully, it didn't change to anything poisonous.
This time, that is.
"I'm not interested, at all." His companion replies dryly. He is wearing a black shirt and black dress pants, and a gasmask. "I am only here because I was ordered to be here by someone I really can't refuse. And you know it. Why are we even here?"
"Hey, I'm just following orders as well." Decay replies, before putting his backpack on the ground. He pulls out a sandwich. "Hey, want some?"
Overhaul glances at the maggots populating the sandwich and shivers internally. Mages of the Ancient of Filth are absolutely goddamn disgusting.
"No, choke on it." Overhaul can only hope that it will happen. But he doesn't think it's possible. Decay also doesn't seem to mind. "Those are just a bunch of total nobodies that we're following. You could end them in a few seconds tops, just blast the whole area with your decay. Who the hell sends two magisters to do something like this?"
The real question was 'who the hell gets to send two magisters to do anything at all', but they knew the answer to it. No one else did.
Overhaul could have spent that time much better. For example, doing his research. It was important. Vitally important.
The negative side-effect of speaking to Decay is that he gets to see him take a bite of his sandwich. He is absolutely going to have to find a way to erase those images, or they won't let him sleep at night.
Metaphorically speaking, he doesn't even sleep nowadays unless he is bored and wants to fast forward to the next day.
"Hey, I know I could have killed them if I wanted to, it's not my first meeting with them." Decay sounds vaguely offended. Overhaul wishes that he actually felt offended. "You have no idea how much effort I put in fighting them seriously enough to make them think that I was actually ready to kill them! I'd totally kill them if not for Sensei's orders. I even had to rig the Point of Decay I fired at Midoriya to only affect inorganic matter."
Right. Sensei. Overhaul hates that man (he honestly doesn't even know why), but it's not like they ever had a lot of choice when allegiances were involved. Beggars can't be choosers and all that.
"Although honestly, they are surprisingly good for a bunch of low level NPCs." Decay adds. "Especially Todoroki. They have potential."
Right.
"It must have been very hard not to squash them accidentally." Overhaul decides to ignore the last three sentences entirely. Decay shrugs. "And I still don't see what's the point of the whole ordeal. Shoto Todoroki, maybe. That fire fuck he calls his father is dangerous enough to be a threat to us, but other than that? And you said that Todoroki is an extra."
"Because he is." Decay replies, his sandwich finally eaten. Overhaul manages not to shiver when he sees a particularly large maggot trying to crawl out of his mouth. Blegh. "We're here for the kid with messy hair. The skittish one. Midoriya something."
"Why?" Overhaul asks. That's what bothers him right now.
"No fucking clue, but Sensei has one rather fucking cool nickname for him." Decay replies. Then he makes a 'damn I forgot about it' face. "Speaking of, contact Sensei and tell him that Blasphemy-That-Walks is about to enter the mental hospital."
Making sure that the hell they were all living in normally was within wi-fi and phone range was a chore. But it worked. Overhaul sends a message from his very magitek phone, before looking back at his companion. Who just asked a question.
"What do you think are the chances of any of them surviving?" Decay says, and Overhaul sighs loudly.
"Zero dot zero." Overhaul replies. "That's if they run into that. Solid eighty percent with Todoroki Shoto around if they somehow enter the detention area."
"Looks like we're in agreement." Decay replies, before humming something to himself. "Gotta hide and wait for a moment to see if they get out that way. I have a console to entertain myself. What do you have?"
"An overbearing desire to murder you." Overhaul replies dryly. Decay grins at him, and the desire grows in intensity.
(***)
The Gunga Mountain Mental Hospital is … freaky, on the inside. It's clear that it was abandoned ages ago, and everything valuable was stolen long ago. Aside from leftover and completely ruined pieces of furniture.
It barely felt like a mental hospital. More like a nondescript default 'old abandoned building'.
The only truly unique part of it was the plantlife. It was everywhere. Some doors and corridors were completely overtaken by it. Some of it was blooming, sometimes intensively enough that it felt like a slightly more colorful smokescreen.
On three occasions, something was stalking through the corridors in front of them. Something resembling humans. Apparently (they had that talk earlier, before departing to this place), it was everything that was left from the patients.
Shambling figures, more plants than men. Initiates were killing them off one by one, but whatever crawled into reality through the dreams of one of the patients and made this place into its nest was bringing them back.
There were injuries from bullets, knives and magic still visible on them. Injuries patched up with plants. Some were better described as 'roughly humanoid patchworks of plantlife', their human past covered entirely.
'Gardeners', is how Todoroki referred to them.
Former orderlies were out there as well, but apparently they never left the detention area during the day. No one knew why. Some say that they tried to stop whatever was crawling through (while probably having no idea what the hell was happening) and said 'whatever' changed them to protect itself.
In short, spooky as fuck.
But it was hard to remember that when you saw Todoroki amuse himself by using the small bottle of Ashido's 'super slippery lubricant' on the stairs and watching some random gardener fall off and break his neck.
"That was a solid 7/10." Shoto announces through his gasmask. "The landing was sufficiently hilarious, but I think he could break more bones."
"Shoto." Izuku at this point starts to realize what Kacchan is feeling when he is witnessing his love shenanigans. And he promises to himself to be nicer to his best friend. "Please. We're doing a dungeon raid in an universe of extradimensional horrors, at least pretend that things are scary here for you."
"Give up, Deku." Kacchan groans. Shoto Todoroki flinging the sense of decorum and heavy atmosphere out of the window was clearly painful to him as well "That's just Library Freak. We have to get used to it."
"This place isn't really dangerous to me." Todoroki replies. "Unless we run into the orderlies, and those do not leave the detention area during the day. Also, gardeners are completely deaf, they move around purely by their eyesight. With Toga's sense of hearing we do not need to worry about being ambushed. The rest is just me finding childish joy in seeing humans suffer grievous injuries."
… he just had to put it that way, didn't he?
Izuku sighs. Yeah, he isn't paid enough (he isn't paid at all, actually) to try to give Shoto the therapy he clearly needs. He simply isn't sure if it would give him any contribution points, and he's kind of interested only in those nowadays.
"How are we doing with plant samples?" He asks. Uraraka salutes to him from the other side of the corridor.
"We have five plants that Todoroki said were supernatural and uncommon!" She announces loudly. "Nothing super rare, but if we find a few more, it should be enough!"
Uraraka was left in charge of their mission objectives. She was no tank like Bakugou, no commander like Izuku, no scout like Toga and no Shoto Todoroki like Shoto Todoroki, so she was going to carry the goods.
She was alright with being helpful that way.
Which honestly made sense since even her skillset made her into a bit of an… extra, so to speak.
They were at this building for like an hour already, and this was a respectable haul. Even with Todoroki's shenanigans, the atmosphere - and the sheer fact that yes, there were actual monsters prowling the area, was… tiring.
"Great, let's move around that building for an hour more, grab as much as we can and leave." Midoriya decides. Shoto looks vaguely sad about his entertainment going to end. "Seriously though, I thought this would be more terrifying? The introduction was spooky, but the rest…"
"As I said, entering the detention area in the basement is a suicide, you'd need a small army of veteran initiates to survive." Todoroki replies. "Entering this whole complex at night is almost as bad."
Right. Says the person that did that on a goddamn dare.
"Why did no one try to, dunno, clean it up entirely?" Izuku decides to ask. Toga decided to approach the window and look through it at the courtyard. "It would mean less supernatural and murderous things creeping around, right?"
"Why?" Todoroki replies with a question. "There is very little to gain, just a ruined building that no muggle remembers anymore. For as long as the local crawlies do not leave it to stalk people, no one cares about it enough to clear it up. Besides, the aberrant that changed this place into what it is today might need a magister to kick it back where it came from, and that's even more costly of an investment."
Right. Initiates are all about 'is it worth it'. Having a magister die or even be injured while knocking something out - something that, as stated, didn't bother leaving this place - felt like a waste of assets.
There were even no further 'civilian' casualties, since the Censor hid the whole area from the non-Initiates. So no one could just accidentally stumble upon it and get eaten. Or turned into more gardeners.
Besides, Midoriya suspected that they weren't the only people ever sent here to pick up someone's 'groceries'. So it was a potentially useful foraging spot, with little to zero threat of experienced initiates dying for as long as they didn't enter the detention area.
Yeah, no wonder it was left alone.
Midoriya reaches this conclusion about a second before Toga (who was still watching the courtyard through the window) shrieks, leaps to the side and pushes Bakugou behind.
"The f…" Kacchan is about to shout when something enters the corridor through the window that he was just pushed aside from.
Or, to be exact, something enters through the wall (then again, it was clearly not structurally sound), coming from the direction of the courtyard.
It's massive. Its bulky arms are longer than they should, being used to maintain upright posture. Like a gorilla, except one mostly composed of plants. It's face is… vaguely human, but the eyes are missing.
Or, they aren't.
They suddenly pop up from the empty sockets (must have been… deeper?), connected to the body with some flexible stalks.
"Oh shit, an orderly." Shoto announces, interrupting the total silence and confirming Izuku's fears. The fact that there are actual emotions (namely, shock) on his face is telling. But he snaps back into life almost instantly. "We have to…"
The orderly swipes its massive arm at Bakugou, who just stood up (with Toga wisely jumping further away).
Even with his reinforcement magic on, Bakugou is still sent flying, hitting the wall with enough strength for the impact to push the air out of his lungs. The orderly starts contorting in pain(?), the fire from point blank Ignition to the face clearly not being something it enjoyed.
(Midoriya pointed out yesterday that people can learn some basic spells of different schools as proven by Todoroki and his Overheat - so Bakugou promptly learned Ignition because that was, in the end, a spell to be used in melee. It was one of their two new secret weapons.)
"... leave now." Todoroki concludes his announcement. "Don't use guns, they can hear and we don't know if there aren't anymore in the area."
Right, Todoroki might have been shocked by the orderly's arrival, but it clearly didn't last. Shoto's really goddamn good at this business.
Uraraka - who had the distinct misfortune of being on the wrong side of the corridor - quickly sneaks past the now blinded orderly, managing to not get hit by its random arm swipes. It was pretty close though, and Izuku almost felt his heart stop at one point.
Toga jumps towards Bakugou and helps him get up. He doesn't look injured, but it's clear that he is treating the situation seriously enough to not bark at her for helping him.
Izuku is fairly certain that if the orderly hit someone without strengthening magic, they would die instantly.
"Right, we're leavin…" Izuku is about to make it official, when the orderly suddenly grabs its own head and squashes out the flames… together with most of the flesh. Before it even has the time to fall to the floor, the sudden bloom of plants regenerates the injury, replacing the missing flesh with some really strange plantlife. "Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me."
Regeneration.
Now it made sense why the initiates were keeping out of the detention area. If there were more of those things, all of them regenerators, then trying to fight them all in a restricted space was a recipe for a total party wipe.
Then Todoroki throws his coca cola can at the orderly.
Midoriya can see the motion in his peripheral vision and, to be honest, his brain goddamn bluescreened at the concept.
Was it because he wasn't sure if Todoroki lost his mind (both to actually part with one of his most prized possessions and to respond that way to a regenerating plant murder-gorilla) or … honestly, he didn't really have any alternative to the idea of Shoto Todoroki losing his mind.
He then discovers that he and Kacchan weren't the only people who came to the outing with a secret trump card. Because the coca cola can glistens and explodes when it touches the orderly's head.
Or, to be exact, it seems that its contents were magically rigged to freeze into a long, nail-shaped form going in the direction of the impact. The orderly's head is pierced through by a spike of frozen fizzy drink, and it falls to the ground with a loud thump.
"Library Freak, what the fuck." Bakugou interrupts the resulting silence by voicing the public sentiment.
"Provisions that double as grenades when in a pinch are the best provisions." Todoroki announces. "You really thought that I would be carrying them on my belt if I didn't expect to have to use them during a fight?" He looks actually surprised at the misconception.
Izuku - and not just Izuku - felt like saying something along the lines of 'yeah, that would be surprisingly in-character for you', but… yeah, not the time for that.
"We need to leave." Todoroki announces while heading towards the nearest door. "Its regeneration will push the spike out of its brain in a minute at best. We don't have the time to waste on going back the normal way, so we'll get to the building wall facing 'outside' of the complex, then I'll make an ice ramp to…"
Midoriya saw Toga suddenly leaping forward towards Todoroki, while shouting something alongside 'dodge!'. In Shoto's defense, he did so, just not fast enough. Thankfully for him, Toga was just fast enough to tackle him to the side before another orderly's fist punched through the wall and his abdomen.
A second later she was slammed into the wall on the opposite side of the corridor with the impact of the punch that hit her in her side. She slumped down, while the orderly tore the door out of their frame and attempted to enter the corridor, just to get hit by another coca cola grenade.
"Himichan!" Izuku leaps towards the ghoul. Toga smiles at him faintly.
"I'm… alright." She replies. Her hand is on her injury (injury, this blow probably broke at least some ribs, and that's without counting damage to internal organs), casting one of her healing spells on herself. "I don't think that I can move while healing myself, then again I kind of don't feel my leg…"
Izuku decides that it's time for some princess carry - he does so gently, but she still yelps in pain. Then he almost jumps up in fright, because Todoroki pulls the trigger of his submachine gun.
Izuku looks behind his back, just to see another orderly charge at them through the corridor, clearly undeterred by the gunfire. It's fast, it's incredibly fast. But then Todoroki clear goes 'fuck guns, this is a crisis situation' and blasts most of the hallway with his ice, stopping its charge.
"RUN!" Todoroki actually manages to be emotional about this. The entire party runs towards the other end of the corridor (more orderlies crawling through the open door or crushing through the window), except…
Then they suddenly fall through the floor. Except, the floor was still there. What?
(***)
"Aaaand they're gone." Decay sighs. "It looks like they no-clipped, after all." Overhaul has no idea what the term means. But he does know that there was an area of spatial distortion in that particular area of the mental hospital that, in certain circumstances, could… lead elsewhere.
Or, to be exact, lead to Elsewhere.
It was probably the amount of the supernatural in the area, a fact that the orderly swarm greatly contributed to. Then they just walked through the right (or, more like, wrong) place and bam, reality broke, swallowing them whole.
"So, they are dead." Overhaul replies. Shame, especially if they really had as much potential as Decay seemed to indicate. "Any idea what agitated the orderlies so much?"
"I think…" Decay smiles faintly. "... they are going to meet the reason for that. Contact sensei and tell him that Blasphemy-That-Walks is about to have a date with destiny. Then we're leaving."
(***)
Suddenly, they are all in the middle of the desert. The sand is white (they will discover that it was in fact bonedust a few minutes later). The sun is massive and black, it's like watching an oversized eclipse except his eyes don't have issues with that.
The whole desert is dark, but not as dark as it should logically be. They can all see some sort of ruins in front of them.
Todoroki looks around, takes a deep breath and turns towards Midoriya.
"Midoriya." He says, looking genuinely horrified for once. Even despite his emotions being suppressed with his magic side-effects. "What the fuck?"
(***)
Todoroki is being emotional, that's a good signal of just how BAD the situation is. And it's only going to get worse from here on, trust me lol. I decided that it's enough of the urban fantasy trappings. Like at certain point of Bloodborne, it's time to see what's under the aesthetic, and it's very, VERY not good. For everyone involved.