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When Izuku was admitted into UA’s heroics course, he was moderately afraid of Principal Nedzu. A little less so of Aizawa-sensei.
Both of them had been known in the heroic circles as the ones focusing on outsmarting their opponents, connecting the dots with the smallest amount of information and generally being a nuisance.
A few days into the school year, he was forced to revise that opinion to his advantage.
Admittedly, letting the reporters into the school was no fault of his. But it was also obvious it was no fault of Mineta, either. And yet, after being caught giving an interview to some of the vultures, he was booted out on the spot, no questions asked.
Not that anyone complained about that. The guy was sleazy enough to alienate absolutely everyone in the classroom after a single day - with the exception of, perhaps, Kaminari.
So Mineta was out. Surely a fluke. An excuse to get rid of the pervert.
But then it happened again.
Apparently, Kaminari short circuiting while protecting himself and two of his classmates was not enough to prove he was merely an innocent student.
Him wandering off somewhere, reappearing at the end, unscathed while still in his choo-choo-train mode was suspicious behaviour. Unbecoming of a heroic student. And the fact he couldn’t break through whatever blockade was there that prevented them from reaching out to the campus…
Izuku was still pretty certain they only did that because the teachers thought he was on the right track to copy Mineta. Stupid - on his own, he would never get enough confidence to pull half the stunts Mineta tried.
Despite the UA’s utter failure to keep the unwanted guests away, they were still planning to go ahead with their famous Sports Festival. That was pretty much the last nail in the coffin.
The coffin in which Izuku laid his respect for Principal Nedzu’s intelligence, that is.
But UA was not done, producing additional nails at truly alarming speed.
Izuku didn’t really mind - he would have been having fun, regardless - but it was rather callous to allow a televised event two weeks after one of the classes got pretty much held hostage by three scores of villains in one of their own facilities.
He was proved right when Hagakure had been found talking to a pair of people identified as known villains. According to her, she was being congratulated for getting through the first task, the obstacle race.
Because it’s easy to spot an invisible student among the obstacles, not to mention the clouds of dust kicked up by all the other students.
According to Principal Nedzu, she might have been divulging classified information, however unwittingly. And as such, she had been dropped down to General Education, opening up a spot for the formerly-General-Education student who showed promise during the one-on-one event.
The media buzz surrounding the Sports Festival covered up the news about the Hero Killer’s attack on Ingenium, but Izuku still expected at least one person to make the connection between Iida and his older brother.
Then Aizawa-sensei signed off on Iida’s request to intern with Manual - in Hosu - and at this point Izuku was pretty much convinced he was willfully ignoring all the red flags being raised right in front of his nose.
Of course, Izuku wanted to intern with someone who would be in Hosu, too, intending on seeing this entire mess in person.
But All Might kept pushing that old geezer Gran Torino on him. Thankfully, the man was working the Nomu case with Endeavour, last Izuku heard, so there were good chances they’d drop by Hosu at some point.
Finding Iida was merely a question of figuring out where most of the noise was coming from and then running in the opposite direction.
Having snuck a tracker on the boy didn’t hurt, either.
“Hello, Stain,” Izuku said as soon as he arrived - and boy, was his Full Cowl fortunately timed. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t murder my classmate. I still have plans for him, after all.”
Stain actually stopped his blade, turning to look at Izuku. Iida, also, tried his best. He was temporarily paralyzed, though, and he didn’t fall down in the best of positions.
“I’ve met your brother tonight,” he said, slipping out of his fighting stance. “I wasn’t… impressed with his logic.”
“He’s still getting there,” Izuku smiled thinly. “He’s not the brightest crayon in the shed, if you know what I mean.”
That earned him a soft snort from Stain and a confused noise from Iida.
“And you?”
“Oh, I agree with you,” Izuku’s smile widened, showing off his canines. “Every hero should be just like All Might. And your crusade, leaving fresh corpses in its wake, is quite beneficial for my purposes.”
“Oh?” Stain sheathed his katana. Izuku didn’t let that fool him - the man was a danger, blade in hand or not.
“I admit, they’re not quite as ready as I would like them to be,” Izuku glanced over his shoulder towards the orange sky, illuminated by the raging fires. “But they’re getting there. Soon enough, we’ll have multiple All Might copies running around, ready to help him hold up the world.”
Stain merely nodded, leaving without another word.
Leaving both Iida and Native behind, barely alive.
Izuku called his babysitter - pardon, Gran Torino - immediately.
Iida tried to tell Chief Tsuragamae about the conversation Izuku had with Stain, but without Tsukauchi, nobody believed him. Especially not when Native claimed he hadn’t heard anything.
They attributed it to blood loss. Hallucinations, they called it.
Iida did not know when to back down. Instead, he was expelled. For pursuing revenge, they said. How very unheroic of him.
Izuku honestly had no idea what to expect from them, anymore. Oh, he knew Aizawa-sensei had a reputation - he had expelled his entire class, once - but Izuku didn’t realize it extended to the entire pedagogical body.
Or maybe they just started rolling with Mineta, Kaminari and Hagakure and could no longer stop the momentum.
The final exams were fairly easy, ignoring the fact Izuku got paired with Kacchan against All Might, a match made in hell. Then again, it wasn’t the only one. Sero and Mina paired against Principal Nedzu, like the teachers wanted them to fail. That one went pretty much exactly the way Izuku expected it to go.
He passed, that’s all he cared about. At this point failing might as well mean expulsion, who knew.
Somehow, the students of 1A received permission to go shopping over the weekend, mostly to prepare for the camp, partially to have fun. Well, the exact proportions might have been opposite to the ones they used when begging Aizawa-sensei to let them go.
Shigaraki, of course, used the occasion to come talk with Izuku face-to-face. Because he’s an idiot who doesn’t know the meaning of the word subtlety, but somehow he’s still smart enough to time his appearance right as Uraraka disappeared in the toilets.
He hadn’t managed to say much, just complained about Stain a lot, until Uraraka came back and he had to scram.
Alarm was raised, police were called, and Uraraka took the fall for his appearance, somehow. Because they were supposed to stay together and yet she left him all alone, because Izuku was a baby who needed to be babysitted constantly, of course.
Though from an outside perspective, with how he kept attracting the shadier sort like he was a villain magnet, perhaps they did think he needed to be chaperoned at all times.
Either way, Uraraka was out of the UA, and now Dekusquad was just down to Izuku and Tsuyu.
He was determined not to let Tsuyu get tangled up in this whole “traitor” mess. He liked how she always said what was on her mind, no embellishments.
Principal Nedzu, in a true Plus Ultra style, decided he summer camp was still going to happen, though the security (which, really, only consisted of “secrecy”) was going to be upped.
So upped, in fact, that they got Detective Tsukauchi question all 15 of the remaining students, just to make sure none of them were sharing information with an outside party.
Yes, fifteen.
“No, not you, Midoriya,” Tsukauchi said after escorting Bakugou back to class. “We know it’s not you. Yaoyorozu, if you would.”
At that point, Izuku was almost offended. Was it truly so unbelievable that he could be the traitor?
So maybe he was being secretive enough to fool a chimera with an actual intelligence quirk. Alright. Would anyone catch on sooner if he dropped the act?
The answer was no, they wouldn’t.
At best, they treated most of his comments and admissions as jokes. Even after he pounded Muscular into a thin paste at the base of the mountain, he only did it “to protect Kota” and as such, it was apparently okay.
Monoma was well-known to have been working hard with Yaoyorozu, learning to control her quirk. And since Yaoyorozu gave the heroes a tracker she attached to a Nomu… Of course they’d blame Monoma.
What a bunch of morons.
Instead of focusing on Kacchan, who got kidnapped, they chose to squabble over who was most likely to be the traitor. A very productive use of their time, Izuku was sure.
At least they took Yaoyorozu and her tracker seriously, basing their entire raid around that.
Pity All For One was already aware of the device, packing up and disappearing into one of the spare hideouts via Kurogiri before the heroes set up even the most basic of surveillances.
If Izuku was being honest, having Todoroki, Yaoyorozu and Kirishima plan to follow the Pro Heroes to make sure Kacchan was rescued was quite amusing to see.
Having Kirishima tell him his hands could still reach his childhood friend while he had both of them encased in casts was… Well, ironic was one word to describe it.
Annoying was another.
But still, it’s not like he had anything better to do. And he was quite interested in seeing the expressions the heroes were going to be making.
He underestimated Shigaraki’s pettiness. Apparently the villains left their hideout stuffed to the gills with Nomu and other deadly traps.
Not quite as safe as Izuku had hoped, but none of his classmates got hurt, so he counted that as a win.
Of course, following the pattern UA had been setting for a while now, Yaoyorozu got blamed for that fiasko, as clearly she had deliberately led the hardworking heroes into a trap.
She was lucky she wasn’t facing charges, they would say, pretending like they would have had any chance of winning against Yaoyorozus’ old money.
After that they - the heroes, the teacher, everyone currently in power - seemed to realize they had no way of tracking Kacchan down.
Not that there was much to track down, considering he was halfway to a Nomu already according to Father’s updates.
But still, they decided to cut their losses, announcing that, sadly, Bakugou had been working in tandem with the villains. That it wasn’t a kidnapping but merely a retrieval of one of their members.
Izuku was sent the video of Kacchan’s reaction to that particular press release; it was quite amusing, seeing the hope die within his eyes. He had been trying to kill Izuku’s light for years, blowing it up to smithereens with his oh-so-lovely quirk. It was about time karma caught up.
But Izuku was getting tired of the charade, even after he stopped playing along.
No one would find him at all suspicious, and it was grating on his nerves. Was he not a villain material? Truly?
So he decided to do the most outrageous thing he could think of and graffitied the inside of the 1A dorms.
A simple “League of Villains” would do the trick, he thought. It’d convey the intended message quite nicely.
Sadly for him - and curse his luck, honestly, he’d have to check if Father hadn’t slipped him some chance-skewing quirk because this was getting ridiculous - Shinsou had been the one to walk in on him.
And, of course, as the buffoons over at UA were wont to do, they assumed he brainwashed that poor dear, Izuku.
UA took special precautions to make sure their precious pupils - or whatever’s left of them - were safe during the Provisional License Exam. They took every precaution, even going as far as only having All Might and Mic-sensei as the chaperones.
So when everything fell apart like a house made of gasoline-soaked cards built over a bonfire, it was obvious whose shoulders the fault was going to fall on.
Spoiler alert: it’s not the Symbol of Peace.
It was getting ridiculous, to be honest. Really? They’d drop a man employed by UA for over a decade like a hot potato based solely on weak conjecture?
At this point Izuku was pretty sure he could walk into a staff room and poison them all before they’d even consider him as the actual traitor.
Actually…
He walks into a staff meeting with a stack of lunches lovingly prepared by Lunch Rush, everyone’s names written out in sharpie on the lids. The topic of the meeting? The traitor, of course - or the spy, they hadn’t decided on that one yet - and whether they’ve actually managed to weed them out with their string of expulsions.
They hadn’t. Izuku would let them know, he was nice like that.
“Midoriya,” Aizawa was the first to address him, his voice gruff and tired. Losing one’s husband to a witch hunt does that to a person.
“I’m here in All Might’s stead,” Izuku smiled brightly. “I brought lunches!”
The teachers cooed and thanked him, scrambling to get all their favourites out of his arms.
He’s given a spot at the table, everyone ignoring him in favour of food. So eager to take a break from all this jumping at each other’s throats.
Izuku waits until they’re mostly done. Might as well die with a full stomach, huh?
“You know,” he started, his feet swinging playfully under the table. “All of the students you’ve expelled, except for the pervert, are now happy members of the League of Villains.”
At least three teachers choked on their rice. A new personal record!
“Well, that’s only expected-” Cementoss started, but Izuku didn’t let him finish.
“They weren’t members before they were forced to leave UA.”
That got him some suspicious stares. Cogs were starting to turn in the teachers’ otherwise empty heads.
“How do you know that?” Midnight asked.
Izuku pushed himself away from the table, pacing slowly behind the teachers’ backs, forcing them to strain their necks.
“It’s quite funny,” he mused, hands folded behind his back. “All this witch hunt, all this mess, you’ve been scrambling to find your traitor for almost exactly a year now, and you have nothing but eight new villains to show for it.”
He turned around sharply, at the head of the table opposite to Nedzu.
“And you’ve never even suspected the real traitor.”
“Midoriya,” Aizawa-sensei calls, his sleeping bag shifting softly. Reaching for his capture weapon, no doubt. “Where did you say All Might was?”
Izuku grinned.
“Good, you’re catching on. A little too late, but better than never, huh?”
If Present Mic was still one of them, he would have been the one to repeat the question. But he’s not, and it seems Midnight chose to pick up his slack.
“Where’s he?”
“A bit too busy keeping company Recovery Girl,” Izuku shrugged, enjoying the way they relaxed. “It’s such a hassle, being dead, you know?”
Aizawa’s capture tape sneaks around him, binding his arms, but the hold it had on Izuku was weak.
“Ah, the neurotoxin is setting in. Right on time.”
Nedzu was the first one to drop. His intelligence might have made him a threat if he finally decided to use it, so his portion was deliberately spiked with far more than necessary.
His tea, too. As it was the crutch he used to activate his quirk, it was likely he’d try and chug down as much as possible once it became clear he needed the extra IQ points.
And why would Izuku pass up on such a gift?
“Why?” Aizawa asked, his form already slumping over in his chair.
Half of the other teachers were already laid out on the table, struggling to stay conscious. The others weren’t that far behind. In less than ten minutes, it’d all be over, once and for all.
Izuku shrugged.
“Why not?”