Chapter Text
The fire wasn't his father's. It never was. That was the first lesson Dabi had allowed himself to learn when he finally committed to the shadows. His fire—the relentless, neon blue flames that burned hotter and faster than Endeavor's orange inferno—was an expression of his own rage, his own failed life, and his own self-made identity.
At twenty years old, Touya Todoroki was a ghost held together by spite, trauma, and a powerful, all-consuming Quirk. He was Dabi, a name as brittle and cold as the scar tissue that laced his body, held together by surgical staples and raw willpower that consumed him with a fury so deep it ached his bones.
Exactly one week had passed since he first looked down from that rooftop across the street from the agency and locked eyes with Kuroi Yume. He knew exactly who she was from the underground's hushed whispers—the hyper-efficient phantom consultant villains wouldn't name. He had explicitly promised himself to be wary of her, shaken by the sheer animal alarm that had prickled his skin when she paused under the street lamp.
But wariness was a poor shield against an obsession.
For seven days, he had tracked her through the lower districts, keeping his distance, calculating his blind spots, utterly convinced he was managing the risk. He thought he was hunting. He didn't realize that her charcoal coat was simply a beacon drawing him by an invisible leash. She had already bought his file from Giran. She knew his biological limits, his real name, and his path before he even took a step.
She had led him directly into an abandoned, privately owned training facility on the grimy edges of District 4—a place Endeavor had once considered buying, a detail Dabi had painstakingly unearthed years ago. The symbolism was a deliberate psychological trap. The moment he followed her inside the cavernous warehouse and the heavy doors clicked shut, his carefully maintained wariness vaporized into raw, cornered panic.
The air in the building instantly shimmered and warped. The blue flames erupted from Dabi's palms and mouth, a beautiful, devastating display of raw, destructive power. The fire wasn’t aimed at anything specific yet; it was a protective wall of ruin, a cleansing conflagration intended to incinerate the woman who had turned around and calmly waited for him to walk into her crosshairs.
The heat was agonizing, a familiar torment that was both punishment and affirmation. He pushed past the searing pain, fueled by the memory of Endeavor’s disappointed face and the frantic, desperate sound of his mother’s voice.
Burn it all. Burn the memory. Burn the legacy.
The ceiling beams were beginning to buckle, showering sparks and ash when the sound reached him. It wasn't the sirens he was expecting, or the heavy thud of a Pro-Hero landing nearby. It was a single, measured sound, cutting through the roar of the blaze: a sharp, clinical clap.
Dabi spun, his blue flames licking dangerously high.
Standing just outside the perimeter of his destructive heat zone, completely untouched by the inferno, was the woman he had been stalking. She was dressed in the same pristine, tailored dark coat. She wasn't running, or attacking. She was simply observing his fury with an expression of utter, cold disappointment.
His eyes narrowed, the cross-shaped symbols in her crimson pupils burning through the smoke.
"Stop," the woman commanded, her voice low and entirely devoid of panic or volume. It wasn't a plea or a warning; it was an order, delivered with the casual authority of a drill sergeant. "The collateral output is highly inefficient."
Dabi laughed, a dry, rasping sound. "Inefficient? This is a masterpiece of destruction! Who the hell are you? Get out of here before you become collateral damage, broker."
Forgetting his wariness, he unleashed a powerful stream of blue flame, aiming not for the woman herself, but for the floor in front of her, intending to create a sudden, impassable wall of fire and force her retreat.
The woman didn't move. She didn't flinch. As the flames rushed toward her, she extended her hand, palm forward. A crimson-black flame he had never before seen erupted from the ground, its immense heat reaching him through his own flames. The blue fire—Dabi’s hottest output—was seemingly absorbed, whirling within the sinister-looking fire.
Then, with a casual flick of her wrist, the entire volume of flame was compressed into a small, silent, crimson-black ball hovering above her palm. It looked like a miniature, malevolent star.
She looked down at the tiny ball of compressed fire with the same distaste one might reserve for spilled oil. "Your Quirk is immensely powerful, yet you use it with the reckless abandon of a starving child. You waste two-thirds of your energy on spectacle and self-immolation."
She then crushed the ball of flame in her hand. The fire didn't explode or dissipate with a sound. It simply vanished, leaving the air immediately around her cool and clean, despite the raging inferno behind Dabi.
Dabi stared, his mind racing. No one had ever contained his fire like that. Endeavor fought it with brute force; Heroes deflected it with water or earth. This woman had treated it like a piece of faulty machinery and simply shut it off.
His shock gave way to fury. "You think you can lecture me?"
He propelled himself across the floor in a burst of speed and unleashed a sweeping arc of fire, trying to outflank her defense.
She moved with impossible speed, a blur of darkness. She was suddenly behind him. A hand, strong and surprisingly cold, clamped around his wrist—right where the surgical staples held his burnt skin together. She applied a precise, agonizing pressure, enough to completely destabilize his stance and stop his Quirk completely.
Dabi froze. The crimson X’s focused on him created a suffocating pressure. His instincts screamed at him to run, to fight, but he was stuck under the pressure of her gaze.
"I can do more than lecture you," she murmured, her voice now a sharp whisper right by his ear. "I can neutralize you. Your entire fighting style is a series of emotional statements. You attack simply, you prioritize wide dispersal over localized penetration, and you rely on the opponent's fear of the heat. You are predictable. You are the opposite of efficiency."
She twisted his wrist just enough to send a spike of white-hot agony through his nervous system. He cried out, the fire sputtering and dying on his fingers, and he dropped to one knee, defeated not by power, but by technique.
She released him instantly and stepped back, returning to her initial position of serene, controlled disapproval.
Dabi looked up at her, breathing heavily, the pain in his body temporarily eclipsed by a terrifying, new realization. This woman wasn't a Hero. She wasn't a rival Villain. She was something else entirely. Something cold, precise, and infinitely superior.
"Who… who are you really?" he managed, the question raw as he trembled. The pressure he felt might have dissipated, but the memory was vivid in his mind.
"I am Kuroi Yume," she replied, folding her hands neatly in front of her. "And I am here because your 'masterpiece of destruction' has caused a local temporal anomaly that my external sensors detected. You are wasting a considerable resource, Touya Todoroki."
The use of his real name—the name he had tried so desperately to burn away—hit him with brutal force.
"Don't call me that," he growled, pushing himself back to his feet, ignoring the pain in his arm.
"It is your name," she said dismissively. "But I will respect your desire for anonymity. Dabi, then. You wish to burn your father’s world. You wish to dismantle the foundation of the Hero society he represents. You have the raw power. But you lack the fundamental strategy to succeed. You are a candle against a hurricane, convinced your light is enough."
She surveyed the burning warehouse, then met his gaze, her crimson pupils unwavering.
"I teach efficiency. I teach the cold, strategic logic necessary to win a war that relies on infiltration and long-term planning, not raw output. Your father relies on spectacle. You are currently repeating his mistake, only with a different color fire."
She stepped forward, closing the distance between them until the heat of his dying blue flames rolled off her charcoal suit. "I offer you the ability to become the scalpel, Dabi, not the wrecking ball. You have the hatred; I will give you the strategy. Your brother, Shoto, is already my student."
Dabi looked at his trembling hands. The scar tissue felt tight and wrong. He felt the humiliating, profound ease with which this woman—this Knave—had overpowered him. She had seen through his performance, his anger, his life, and reduced it to a failed strategy.
But she hadn't judged the hatred. She had offered to refine it.
He thought of Shoto, the boy he had been tracking for weeks, suddenly displaying that perfect, controlled tension in his shoulders. He realized this woman was the source. She was already dismantling Endeavor’s legacy from the inside out, and she had known he was watching the entire time, completely bypassing his attempts to be cautious.
The destruction behind him was loud, but Arlecchino's silence was louder. He made his choice, the same cold calculus Shoto had made months earlier.
"You teach me how to win," Dabi rasped, the blue fire in his eyes hardening into a cold, determined focus. "You teach me how to make him pay."
Arlecchino's lips curved into that subtle, terrifying smile. "Then you must submit to my instruction without question, Dabi. My methods are absolute, and I tolerate no inefficiency. You will be a weapon of perfect, controlled hatred."
Dabi nodded, the pain in his wrist forgotten. He had found a teacher who understood his fire better than he did.
"I accept. When do we begin?"