Showdown! The Best of the Best

Chapter One

He awoke to the sound of the earth trembling, a violent tremor that shook him into consciousness.

As he tried to sit up, he quickly found it impossible. The throbbing in his head was violent, persistent, and steady. Waves of vertigo crashed through him, and nausea surged mightily upward from his gut into his throat rapidly. Rolling, he vomited into the dirt, his body shaking. He wretched until the contents of the last day had been emptied from his stomach.

Where was he? Though it was still massive agony to move in any capacity, he had gotten a limited look at his surroundings since he'd regained consciousness. He seemed to be in some kind of dense jungle, a tropical arbor where light was sparse and alien noises echoed through the trees. This place wasn't familiar to him whatsoever. The only location he knew of that even remotely resembled this was the Forest Training Camp, and that had been mostly burned to the ground.

Did Kurogiri send me here? He pondered as he slowly tried to rise again. Was there another villain attack? 

That seemed unlikely. Then again, so had all the other attacks on his school, the illustrious U.A. High, home to some of the world's most promising heroes-in-training. He was among them. But, at this current moment, Izuku Midoriya, perhaps better known as Deku, hadn't the slightest clue where he was. 

USJ, the battle at the Forest Training Camp, and the fight with the Hero Killer Stain had all been terrifying and humbling experiences. But Izuku wasn't quite sure he'd ever been as terrified or as lost as he was at this very moment.

"All Might?!" He screamed. "Aizawa-sensei?!"

His voice was lost in the eerie blackness of the jungle. No response.

Izuku's eyes welled up and he doubled over, biting back a sob. He was lost. Worse, still, he was alone. It wouldn't be so bad, if only he had Iida, Uraraka, or even Kacchan by his side. But he was completely and irrevocably solitary. There was no one around to help him...no one around to save him.

He had no other recourse but to start walking.

The tears flowed freely now, and Izuku wept quietly to himself. There was clearly no one around to see him now, so why bother trying to hide it? The forest was dense and hard to navigate, and he found himself stumbling and even falling more than once. It was slow-going, and he found that, even after a fairly lengthy amount of time had passed, he'd made little progress.

Even as the terrain grew noticeably more treacherous, Izuku began to regain some semblance of composure. As his tears dwindled, he tried to make sense of this situation, and how he'd gotten to be in this dense jungle. Perhaps this was in fact an elaborate villain attack. Was it in fact the doing of Kurogiri, the smoky, ethereal teleporting villain who was a key figurehead in the nefarious League of Villains? From what Izuku knew of him, this kind of teleportation was beyond Kurogiri's power.

One thing he was almost positive of was this:  he was not in Japan. Perhaps this was some hidden area of the Unforeseen Simulation Joint? No, he figured. If it was, a teacher, or perhaps a fellow student, would have appeared to inform him of how he got here. So if he wasn't in his home country, and he wasn't at UA...where was he?

Izuku stopped, dead in his tracks, as the earth beneath him trembled faintly again. From a vast distance away, he could hear the distant rumble of the earth. He knew that sound--the murmur of displaced rock, the grinding of roiling stone. What did it mean? Were there others here besides himself, or was he truly alone?

And, if the former were true, were the others in this forest friend or something else?

He went to move again, then stopped. Something else was amiss. Izuku knew this for a fact, because what he felt was an instinct he had felt before, and an instinct he knew well. He'd felt it at USJ, he'd felt it at the Forest Training Camp, and he'd felt it in Hosu. Something---or someone--was watching him.