The Ghost in My Code

The gates of the mock city loomed like a dare. I stood just inside them, breathing in the electric tang of ozone and oil, the sun reflecting off glass and metal. My gear felt heavier than usual, not because of weight but because my entire plan hung on every strap and clip working the way I designed them to.

Focus. Think like a support tech. Move like a hero.

I tightened the harness around my ribs and checked the placement of my shock batons along my hips, twin black lines with insulated grips and variable settings. The capture line coiled at my lower back hummed faintly as the motor responded to my touch. Knee pads secured, gloves sealed, goggles synced. I tapped the side of my visor and my HUD flickered to life: heat signatures, structural readouts, and a scrolling bar of quick protocols. Aizawa would probably hate the automation, but I had nothing else. No quirk to lean on. Just this.

When Present Mic’s voice boomed go, bodies surged past me, a wave of momentum and nerves. I didn’t rush with them. I pivoted into an alley, recalibrated my sensor ping, and let the field bloom through the visor. The smaller bots clustered two streets over, a tidy ball of targets. They were worth points, but I wasn’t racing for kills. I was here to keep people safe and keep machines intact.

I moved, boots striking in a measured rhythm. The first two-pointer rolled into my path, turret tracking. Before it could fire, I stepped inside its arc and snapped the left baton against its sensor array. The baton discharged a tight, precise pulse. The robot shuddered, optics dimming, and I caught its momentum, twisting my hips to guide it toward the curb. It hit the sidewalk, power cycling in a safe loop. Non-destructive, just as planned.

Footsteps pounded behind me. A boy with steel-hard arms barreled into a three-pointer, smashing it open with a shout. Shrapnel arced toward a girl with long hair and headphones. I slid, arm coming up to shield my face, and flung the capture line past the glittering spray. The motor whirred, the line snaking around a fallen signpost and yanking it into the debris path. Metal clinked against metal and dropped harmlessly in a pile. The girl flashed me a quick, startled grin before sprinting on.

“Watch the cross street!” I called to no one in particular, already moving again.

I herded bots like stray dogs, my baton taps and line snags pulling them out of sightlines and away from panicked examinees. I coaxed a swarm into a narrow corridor, then hit the dirty gray panel on my wrist. The signal blinked. The corridor’s maintenance shutters tried to drop, stalled, then stuttered down halfway. Not enough. I cursed under my breath and adjusted, launching a pair of adhesive pods from my hip rig. They slapped to the wall with a sticky thwip. I switched the batons to a wider discharge and crossed them like an X, sending a synchronized surge into the pods. The shutters responded to the voltage change and slammed the rest of the way with a grinding sigh, trapping the two-pointers in a harmless pen.

I didn’t get any points for that. I knew it even before my counter stayed stubbornly at zero. It wasn’t a mistake. It was the plan. Keep others free to score. Keep everyone intact.

Someone screamed. I spun and spotted a first-year-looking boy tangled under a fallen railing, a one-pointer scrabbling up his legs. I sprinted and dropped into a slide, baton striking the bot’s wheel. It bucked, stalled, and I flipped it neatly onto its back. “You good?” I asked, bracing my foot and hauling the railing up just enough for him to wriggle free.

“Thanks!” He lurched to his feet, eyes wide. “Uh—your points—”

“Go,” I cut in, jerking my chin toward the street where a four-pointer thundered past. “You can still catch that.”

He went. My counter remained at zero.

I kept moving, the city’s grid settling into a pattern in my mind. Narrow lanes funneled bots; open squares attracted chaos. I used that. I picked chokepoints, rigged trip lines, and redirected paths with barriers that weren’t meant for this but worked anyway. A girl with gravity-defying steps floated past overhead, eyes bright with determination, and I found myself cataloging her route, the angles, the risk. I didn’t linger. There were more voices, more clashing metal.

Three bots converged on a red-faced kid whose explosions sputtered out, his palms smoking. He snarled and stumbled. I launched the capture line at the nearest bot’s leg joint, yanked, and pivoted. It careened into its partner and both toppled like a clumsy dance. The third raised its arm. I dropped low and jabbed my baton into the seam of its casing, holding the charge a heartbeat longer until its processors dimmed to a gentle hum. I eased it down. No permanent damage. Efficient.

“Behind you!” a voice called.

I spun, breath tight, and a bladed arm swept toward my face. I brought my forearms up, the gauntlets sparking as they absorbed the impact. The vibration rattled my teeth. I leaned into it, slid my foot to set my balance, then shoved back, forcing the bot’s center of gravity off. It toppled into a vending machine, sending cans clattering. I flicked a glance at the labels out of pure habit. Sugar. Caffeine. Not useful. Move.

Sweat crawled down my spine. My lungs burned. I checked my counter again and immediately wished I hadn’t. Zero glared at me like a judgment.

It wasn’t about points. It was about process. I repeated it like a mantra, adjusting my grip on the batons. A pack of examinees dashed across the intersection to my left, hope and panic mixing in their faces. Above us, speakers crackled, the timer ticking down somewhere I couldn’t see.

I jogged toward the next alley, scanning for more clusters. The map I’d drawn in my head kept rearranging as explosions bloomed and sidewalks cracked. I adjusted with it. My body moved on a practiced sequence: brace, strike, redirect, tether, release. A small two-pointer skittered at me. I sidestepped, clipped its sensor, and corralled it toward the line of disabled bots like I was guiding it home.

The city roared, and I swallowed the dry taste in my mouth. Keep going. Keep everyone moving. My hands steadied as I rounded another corner, the weight of my plan settling into my bones like a kind of truth I could hold.

A one-pointer lurched from a storefront, tracked me, and fired. I ducked behind a mailbox, counted the rhythm of its shots, then popped up and sent the capture line snapping around its barrel like a leash. I yanked. It stumbled, servo whining, and I guided it into a cracked planter, wedging the muzzle under concrete until it stopped trying. A boy in roller-blade boots skated by, eyes flicking to my immobilized target. He threw me a thumbs-up and took the next corner hard, chasing his own points.

The HUD fed me heat blooms at the end of the block—three two-pointers gathering near a collapsed awning, pinning a girl with vines for hair. She twisted, her plant tendrils bracing against the metal as she tried to get free. I sprinted, legs pumping. Before the bots could crush down, I vaulted onto a newspaper stand, launched, and brought both batons down on the central unit’s shoulder seam. The joint seized. It jerked sideways into its partner. The third aimed for me; I shoved off the disabled casing, landing in a crouch. One baton jab to the sensor array, one quick sweep to its wheels. The machine stuttered and whined. I used the flat of my glove to push it over gently.

“Can you move?” I asked, already wedging my shoulder under the awning’s frame to take some weight.

“I—I think so,” she said, vines retracting from instinctive defense to grip. She slithered out from under the sagging metal, cheeks flushed. “Thank you.”

“Watch the southern alleys,” I said, nodding toward the grid where my HUD ticked with new movement. “Bots keep looping there. You can rack points fast.”

She hesitated, looking at my zero, then nodded with a soft, grateful smile and ran. I glanced down at the stubborn number locked in place on my visor. Zero. The corner of my mouth tugged, not a laugh, not a grimace—just a hard acknowledgment. Then I moved.

I found a cluster of examinees hemmed in at a four-way cross. Two three-pointers had wedged themselves like boulders between parked cars, cutting the path in half. A broad-shouldered kid tried to shoulder-charge a unit and bounced off, swearing. “Back up!” I called. “Give me space.” I slapped two more adhesive pods onto the asphalt in front of the machines and thumbed the batons to a charge that would travel, not destroy. The crackle ran through the pods, across the road, and up into the bots’ traction systems. Their tires spun, catching nothing. I looped the capture line around a mangled bike rack and drew it tight across their path. “On three push left!” I shouted, counting them in. They shoved. The bots skidded, hit the line, and toppled with a heavy, harmless clang.

“Go!” I waved them through. A round-faced girl with cheeks marked by familiar pink ovals—Ochaco—hovered weightless for a heartbeat as she bounded past with another examinee. She looked over her shoulder, eyes meeting mine. I held her gaze just long enough to see her relief before she vanished into the next street. Heat flickered low in my chest and I shoved it aside. Focus.

My counter: still zero.

A smash. A storefront burst into glass confetti as a large two-pointer fell backwards out of it, chased by a boy in a sleek support suit with jets hissing at his calves. He overcorrected in the air and slammed into a streetlight, stars in his eyes. The bot’s arm rose to finish the job. I sprinted, slid on my side, and jammed a baton up into the actuator. The discharge was sharp, contained. The arm locked. I used my free hand to shove, altering its fall so it clanged harmlessly into a pothole. “You okay?” I asked the jet boy, offering my hand. He took it, dazed, using my arm to haul up.

“Yeah—thanks,” he said, then blasted off again, already chasing the next point. Points. Always points. The word needled. My plan didn’t care about points. My chest still tightened.

The timer blared a reminder from somewhere overhead—minutes shaved away. I recalibrated my HUD, widening the scan radius. Distant detonations shook dust from awnings. The map in my head sharpened: three dead-ends I didn’t want anyone funneled into, a bridge with weak supports, a plaza where a four-pointer’s path would give cover if I could steer it. I flicked a small drone from my hip and sent it zipping up. Its camera relayed the roofline. A pair of bots trundled along the opposite side of the block by a fire escape. I tossed a canister—one of mine—into the alley mouth and detonated it. Not explosive. Just a deep, pulsing clang like a server failing hard. Both bots pivoted toward the sound, drawn by the audio priority. They rolled into the alley. I hit the collapsible bollard control I’d found earlier; rusty posts groaned up from the ground, catching their wheels and holding them fast. A boy with tape elbows skidded to a stop nearby and beamed. “Nice! I’ll take it from here!” he said, launching tape to secure their sensors. He smashed them in the next second. Points. He raised a fist in thanks and sprinted away.

Zero.

I breathed and let it burn for a heartbeat. Then I moved again.

On a side street, a girl with long dark hair and a bow was building something sleek from her palm, but her cover was thin. A three-pointer aimed as she worked. I plucked a cracked mirror from a fallen display, held it up at an angle, and flashed its sensor with sunlight. It balked for a beat. She finished her device and launched it, the projectile slamming the bot back hard enough to count. She looked up, startled to see me holding the mirror, then laughed. “You’re ridiculous,” she said, delighted, already turning to spot her next target.

I kept collecting the broken pieces of the city and making them work like extra hands. A dumpy sedan became a ramp to tip a unit onto its side. A shopping cart turned into a moving barricade that I shoved down a slope to block a two-pointer’s path before it could pin a boy with purple balls for hair who was yelping and flinging them like marbles. He made a face at me, then cheered when the bot rolled back and he could land his own counter.

The clock kept eating seconds. The roar changed timbre, a deeper tremor crawling along the street like a warning. I didn’t look up. Not yet. I forced myself to finish the line I’d started: one more alley cleared, one more cluster freed. A girl with horns and a determined scowl barreled after a bot I’d hobbled. I tapped my visor. Zero stared back, flat and unbothered.

It isn’t about points, I told myself again, even as my stomach knotted around the number. It’s about keeping this whole mess from breaking people.

The ground shook harder. The roar became a presence, a shadow stretching across the street. I tightened my grip on the batons and turned toward it, lungs filled with dust and adrenaline, my plan narrowing to a single, inevitable pivot I didn’t want to make yet.

The shadow became the Zero-Pointer’s foot slamming down at the end of the block, asphalt buckling like cardboard. Its torso loomed above rooftops, head swiveling, lenses scanning with lazy menace. Screams ricocheted down the street as examinees scattered, some brave and stupid enough to try to engage before a second look sent them running. A billboard tore free from its brackets and crashed to the ground in a ricochet of bent metal. Dust rolled over us.

I already knew the route I’d take if it pivoted left, the alleys that would funnel people away. But the building beyond it groaned, and when I traced the line of its failing support, I saw her.

Ochaco. She skidded, stumbling as concrete broke loose from a facade above, a collapse rippling forward like a wave. She reached for a boy nearby, touched his shoulder—weight gone, he drifted free of the falling debris with his eyes blown wide in disbelief. She grabbed another piece of rubble midair, forcing it up, her face strained. More came down in a jagged flood. She threw herself under a rebar-laced slab, hands braced as the street dropped an inch under the impact. Her mouth pressed thin; her neck trembled.

The Zero-Pointer’s knee hydraulics hissed, shifting its stance. Its foot rotated toward her like it had chosen her as the next obstacle. No. My body made the decision before my thoughts caught up. I ran.

“Move!” I shouted at two examinees frozen in the middle of the intersection. I tore past them, lungs clawing for air, the world narrowed to the sight of Ochaco crouched under the slab, elbows buckling. Dust spattered her cheeks, clinging to sweat and making a pale mask around her eyes. Her breath came fast and thin. The slab dragged at the ground with a grinding squeal, gravity reclaiming every inch she’d stolen.

I hit my knees beside her and jammed my shoulder under the edge, my boots sliding on grit. The weight pressed down like the ocean. My spine screamed. “I’ve got it,” I said, the lie barely steady. “On three, let it shift and get out.”

Her eyes shot to my visor, recognition flickering even through panic. “Y-you can’t—”

“Three,” I said, voice scrapping out. I brought my kinetic jack up from my belt one-handed, thumbed the switch, and wedged the flat against a fractured beam. The indicator spat green to yellow in a heartbeat, whining as it spooled charge. The Zero-Pointer’s shadow edged closer, its looming foot rising.

“Now!” I barked. She released a sliver of the slab’s mass. It dropped an inch, crushed into my shoulder, drove a sharp shock through my collarbone. I jammed the jack in deeper and fired.

The first pulse hit like a punch against the metal. The beam flexed with a reluctant creak. The jack’s heat sank into my palm. “Go!” I ground out. Ochaco scrambled, sliding on her knees and elbows, hair stuck to her forehead. She squeezed through the gap and away, but her eyes flicked up, catching the Zero-Pointer’s foot as it started to descend.

It was going to step on us.

I squeezed the trigger again. The jack howled. Lights spiked orange, then red. The motor thrashed against the housing. The slab jumped a fraction of an inch, enough for me to roll my shoulder and keep it from pinning me. “Ren!” she shouted, reaching back, panic in the shape of my name.

“Just go!” I yelled. I kicked the jack into a better angle, breath hitching as the weight pressed harder. I could feel the tolerances I’d calculated in the workshop like a ghost in my hands. This wasn’t designed for this. The casing vibrated, heat ripping down into my bones. The foot came down. The street cracked around the jack as if it were a twig.

The device screamed. A smell like burning plastic filled my mouth. I pressed the trigger to its stopper.

The kinetic jack blew.

It shattered in a violent, snapping pop. Shards of carbon fiber bit my palm and cheek. The recoil punched my wrist back. The beam sagged, the slab came down another inch, the edge scraping my shoulder, kissing bone. My ears rang. For a heartbeat, the world was a high thin whine and the pressure of a city on my back.

“Ren!” Ochaco’s hand grabbed my forearm, small and warm and shaking, trying to pull me free. She was crouched low, dirt streaking her face, eyes huge and bright. Behind her, the Zero-Pointer’s foot hovered, mechanics screaming as it powered through the last arc of its step, blotting out what little sun got through the dust.

“I’m okay,” I lied, teeth gritted, the weight eating the word. I planted my other hand flat against the rubble, fingertips grinding into grit, leverage stolen from a dead tool and a bad plan. My counter blinked uselessly at the edge of my vision. The foot kept falling. The slab groaned again, sliding toward my chest in a slow, inexorable grind. Ochaco’s grip tightened, a desperate anchor in the chaos.

Heat flared behind my eyes, sharp and wrong. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hold this and there was nothing left to throw at it. The Zero-Pointer’s shadow swallowed us whole.

I shoved both palms flat against the slab, fingers splayed, skin grinding over grit and bent rebar. Something in me broke open. It wasn’t pain; it was too cold. A sharp click under my sternum, a snap like a relay closing, and a thin, bright thread stretched out from my hands into the rubble and beyond. It jumped the rebar, jumped the broken conduit, leapt like it had been waiting for a path. My breath locked in my chest.

The Zero-Pointer’s foot froze mid-descent. Not a slow stall. A jarring stop like someone slammed a kill switch. The ankle pistons shrieked, hydraulics locking hard, a grinding, tortured whine cutting through the dust. My HUD flashed useless warnings I didn’t understand because they weren’t mine. For a heartbeat I saw schematics I had never studied bloom behind my eyes: pressure valves, servo feedback loops, a spiderweb of system calls screaming for relief.

“Ren?” Ochaco’s voice was a thin thread. She was still braced near me, hand on my arm, her body low. The shadow didn’t move. The foot hung a meter above us, pressure fighting itself, plates quivering.

I didn’t move either. Something ran through me and out, an electrical taste on my tongue, metallic and bitter. I pressed harder, as if the rubble had a pulse I could keep time with. The line tightened. I could feel the robot’s knee joint shiver, feel the exact screw that had been torqued down too tight in maintenance, feel the emergency floodgate in its hydraulics slam shut because I told it to. I didn’t have words for that command, but my body did. It spoke anyway.

A boy in green tore past my peripheral vision, arm cocked, eyes wild, jaw set. The world snapped back into normal speed. He jumped on loose concrete like it was solid ground and drove his fist up into the Zero-Pointer’s frozen face. The impact crushed through armor with a crack that ran up my spine. The head exploded in a blossom of shattered alloy. The foot above us twitched, then sagged, weight shifting somewhere else as the entire frame listed.

“Go!” I barked at Ochaco, voice breaking. It wasn’t the slab that scared me anymore. It was the heat in my hands, the way the world had wires running through it—and I had my fingers on them.

She scrambled out first, tugging hard at my jacket. We slid on dust. The slab scraped past my shoulder and slammed into the street in a burst of chips where my ribs had been a breath ago. I pitched forward and landed on my palms on open ground. The thread snapped. The taste vanished. I gagged on air that smelled like hot oil and pulverized concrete.

The Zero-Pointer collapsed two blocks away, a slow-motion fall, carcass grinding across rooftops. Cheers erupted in the distance. My ears filled with a rush that wasn’t sound, like radio static smoothing out, gone before I could catch it.

“Ren, hey—” Ochaco dropped to her knees in front of me. Her hands cupped my face, thumbs smearing dust, eyes searching. “Are you hurt? Can you breathe?”

I nodded and then shook my head, chewing on both answers. My palms burned. I turned them over. Tiny cuts bled through ground-in dirt. Nothing that explained what had happened. “Did you—did you see—”

“The foot stopped.” She looked over her shoulder as if making sure it was still true. Her mouth parted, shock cracking through the adrenaline. “You—how did you—”

“I don’t know.” The words scraped up dry. The inside of my skull felt too big. Behind my brow, that ghost-map lingered: the angle of the actuator, the hysteresis curve of pressure that had spiked and then plateaud under my will like a creature tamed. I swallowed, throat tight. “I don’t know.”

She tugged my gloves free without asking and laced her fingers with mine, grounding me in skin and pulse. “We need to move,” she said softly. Around us, another bot’s carcass smoked. People were running again, shouting that time was almost up. Her gaze flicked to my hands and back up. “Can you stand?”

I let her pull me up. My legs worked. My head did not. I kept seeing the moment when everything had responded to me like I belonged in its circuitry. I wasn’t a part of that machine. I had never been part of any machine like that. That was the point of all my gear—bridge, not merge. My stomach turned.

We peeled away from the worst of the debris. I checked for other examinees trapped nearby out of habit, eyes scanning, body moving while my brain tried to sort itself. I wanted to explain it to myself in the language I understood: a glitch, a power surge through ruptured lines, a lucky pause in the hydraulic feed caused by the foot’s angle. But I could feel the lie in my bones. There had been no luck in the way the emergency valves had answered. They had answered like I had pressed them.

Ochaco stayed too close, as if distance might break whatever had held the robot off us. Her shoulder brushed mine every third step. “You saved me,” she said, more quiet than before, like it had just hit her.

“You saved me first,” I said automatically, voice thin. My chest hurt, but not from the slab. The ache had a different shape. The counter on my HUD ticked with a late jumble of numbers I didn’t care about.

The timer siren wailed. The test was over. Sound flooded in—the aftershocks of the Zero-Pointer’s fall, the excited babble of voices, the crackle of spewing hydraulics finally bleeding out with the head gone. I looked at the spot where we’d been pinned, at the crushed jack, at the smear my shoulder had left in dust, then back at my hands again.

They looked like they always had.

“Ren.” Ochaco squeezed my fingers once and then let go. “We should go to the gate.”

I nodded. I was numb and thrumming at once, every step measured, watching for something inside me to move again. The cold thread didn’t return. I didn’t know if I wanted it to. I didn’t know what it made me.

At the exit, medical bots waved us toward triage. Voices blurred. Hands checked my shoulder, my wrist. I flinched when cool saline hit my palm cuts, then stared as the medic wrapped them. My mouth kept wanting to confess to someone that I had reached into a thing that shouldn’t have let me in and touched its heart.

When I glanced down the lane, the broken colossus lay in a heap, and for a split second, the world flickered. Not vision. No—interface, a hum I couldn’t unhear now that I’d heard it once. It faded. I swallowed hard.

Ochaco caught my eye and smiled with brittle softness. She reached for me again, a small, grounding touch on my elbow. “You did good,” she said.

I couldn’t make myself agree. I nodded anyway. My hands felt too light without the weight of the slab. The dust stuck to my skin like proof of something I didn’t understand.

I followed the crowd through the gate and tried not to look at anything with wires.