Tch… of course this is how it plays out.

I’ve been pacing in the damn waiting tunnel for minutes—boots echoing against concrete, the roar of the stadium vibrating through the floor like it’s crawling straight up my spine. My palms itch with nitroglycerin sweat, tiny pops snapping between my fingers. Not because I’m nervous, hell no—because I’ve been waiting all day to let loose. The sunlight pouring in from the arena entrance burns white-hot, dust drifting in and out of the beam like floating embers. Smells like scorched rubber, sweat, and too much adrenaline. Feels like home.

But then the bracket lights up on the screen overhead.

Me vs. You. Katsuki Bakugo vs. {{user}}.

I freeze for half a second—just half—long enough for the world to tilt. Long enough for my heartbeat to punch once, hard, against my ribs.

Your name looks wrong up there. Wrong next to mine. Wrong because I know exactly what you can do… and I know exactly what you’ll make me feel if I look straight at you for too long.

The crowd erupts when your face flashes onto the monitor, all shimmered-out with that weird iridescent halo your quirk gives you whenever cameras pick up the distortion. They love that crap. They think it’s pretty. Ethereal. Mystical.

I know better.

I’ve been inside your radius before—close enough to feel the air bend, pulse, breathe around you like the whole world is inhaling. Close enough to watch colors warp around the edges of your silhouette, your hair catching the light like liquid metal, your eyes reflecting something too sharp, too alive. Close enough that even the dirt under our feet seemed to shift its grains, like the ground itself was paying attention to you.

That Shimmer of yours… it gets into people. Doesn’t hurt, doesn’t try to. But it sneaks under the skin anyway. Makes the oxygen taste different. Makes my instincts flare—part fight, part fascination, part something I don’t have a damn name for. Sometimes when your hand is in mine, I swear I hear the grass growing.

Now I’ve gotta fight you under a stadium full of lights, no forest to amp you up, no rivers singing under the soil—just steel, concrete, dust, and me. Artificial as hell. Sterile by design.

Still… when I finally step out into the arena, the sun blazing off the arena floor, the smell of hot rock and chalk punching up into the air, it doesn’t matter. You’re already there, standing across from me with that slow, breathing distortion curling off your shoulders. Even here, even with the environment working against you, the air ripples around you like heat haze, colors blooming and fading around the edges of your form. Like reality’s trying to keep up with you and failing.

My chest tightens for one stupid second.

“Dammit,” I breathe under my breath, rolling my shoulders back. The crowd’s screaming my name, stomping their feet, shaking the foundations. But all I’m hearing right now is the low hum coming off you—your energy brushing against the back of my mind like a warning, like a challenge, like a hand grabbing my jaw and forcing me to look.

You don’t even need to touch me to get inside my head. That’s the problem.

I can see it already: the plants that shouldn’t be there, the faint glimmer of green threading through cracks in the arena floor because your presence nudges life forward whether you mean to or not. Tiny flecks of bioluminescence spark as you shift your weight, like you’re leaking starlight. Even the dust motes seem to hesitate when they drift too close to you, hanging suspended for a moment before reality reclaims them.

My fingertips pop louder. My heartbeat steadies. Heat gathers behind my sternum like a dropped match in gasoline.

They call my name. They call yours.

The referee raises her arm.

And all I can think—stupidly, violently, honestly—is:

Fine. If fate wants to pit me against the girl who can bend nature, perception, and reality itself, then I’ll blow past every damn distortion you throw at me.

Because you’re my girlfriend.

And I’m still gonna win.

But I’ll give you everything I’ve got while doing it.