Chapter 58 - 40

Chapter 40

Izuku paced back and forth in front of the entrance to the testing city. A hand clenched over his jaw and a finger tapped on his cheek, tempering the volume of his muttering. To the side, the rest of his classmates huddled together, loudly verbalizing the same wallowing he felt on the inside.

"We can't do this," Kaminari face-turned.

Just as shell-shocked, hanging off his shoulder, Ashido shivered. "We have to fight all twelve of them at once?" she repeated, sounding exasperated. "Do they expect any of us to pass?"

"They wouldn't make an exam they tell us we could pass, that's designed for us to fail," Todoroki threw in.

"Sensei did reinforce that failure is possible," Iida interjected, voice lower. "They intentionally designed this test to be impossible, at least from an outside perspective. The teachers likely assumed we'd think exactly this when presented with the challenge they've given us."

All of it was a ploy, Izuku added in his own head. Wrong information came first from Hatsume with one expectation to build up, and Melissa passed on another at the last minute to course correct the class in what was still the wrong direction. Aizawa's remarks about All-Might were a ruse up to the very last moment; was that a test in of itself, the green-haired teen wondered. That didn't matter, he decided, because the test was here and now and they only had some minutes left before the horn would blare for them to begin.

Instead of taking on one teacher in pairs like he expected, their entire class of nineteen had to face twelve pro heroes and manage one of two outcomes; either the class captured all twelve of them before the time ran out, or they secured the four designated rescue bots hidden across the testing facility. The teachers were all wearing weighted braces that would slow them down physically, though their quirks would still be active up to the point they chose to hold back, so a means of lowering the ceiling they faced didn't amount to clearing much of the distance between their class and real heroes. Still, Izuku agreed with Todoroki; the exam had to be designed in a way that they could feasibly walk away victorious as a class. But how that could be, he needed to figure out.

"They also have two number one heroes on their side," Hanta reminded everyone. "Our and America's. Does anyone even know what her quirk does?"

"She can order you around," Ojiro supplied an answer. "I think it's touch based, but she can control your body to do what she demands."

"It's more restrictive than the boy from the Sports Festival," Yaoyorozu noted. "One of the boys from General Studies has a quirk that can control you with his voice as he tried against us. The problem is Star is faster than us and could probably make up the difference between us and her if we approach her head on. Do we know how it works?"

"Does it matter?" Jirou questioned dramatically. "All of them have years of experience not just as heroes, but working together. Knowing how all their quirks work doesn't make them any easier to counter when they have each other's backs."

"And they know our quirks," Tsunotori added, fiddling with one of her detached horns. "They know what we can and can't do."

The original plan was to separate them in pairs and fight the teachers, Izuku remembered Aizawa admitting at the end of his ruse. How had they structured that originally, and decided how their teams were structured and the teacher or teachers they would face? It probably wasn't by a random lottery, he concluded sarcastically, because that had gone over so well the last few times it was implemented. No, the teams had to be structured consciously — but then the matter was on what theme or lesson they were designed around. It could have been balancing the strengths of their quirks; or their familiarity or lack thereof with one another; or in how they fared positively or negatively against a specific teacher's capabilities; but which made the most sense, and how would they have changed the plan to still be a feasible test of their students' skills? Were the rescue bots even in the original test plans?

"Midoriya," Yaoyorozu called his name, but the green-haired teen continued to pace to his own muttering. "Midoriya." As his brain whittled down option after option, he neared but only a few plausible conclusions; he needed to be sure of which it really was. "Izuku."

The quirkless teen spun on his heels to face the raven-haired girl calling for him, and he hurried over to the rest of his class. "They've split up into groups," he told his classmates.

Kendo wasn't the only one to quip an eyebrow at him. "How did you come to that answer?" she asked.

"Because it's practically impossible otherwise. They would not design a test where all nineteen of us would have to take on all twelve of them at the same time; that is a no-win scenario. And we have to find four robots as our optional win condition, and putting them all together in the same place could be easily abused if we knew where they were and could make a plan. It is far more plausible they've split up the robots in different parts around the city, and split up themselves to guard them. It is the only thing that makes sense."

Shoji was generous enough to visualize the scenario Izuku shared by multiplying and spreading out his arms. "So they're in four groups of three?"

"Unless the robots haven't been completely isolated, which could mean three teams of four or two teams of six," Yaoyorozu explained. "And that's assuming they split up into equally numbered teams."

"We have to assume they are," Izuku insisted. "Groups of three makes the most sense, as it leaves one bot to each group that we can theoretically handle if we go at it right. What we don't know is how they split up, and who is with whom."

"Likely in some manner of balance," Aoyama theorized, glistening beside a squinting Tokoyami. "Their quirks are just as imbalanced as our own, but they can partner up in a way to cover their bases and shortcomings. The principal and Power Loader aren't confrontational heroes, and All-Might and Star are too strong to be on the same team."

"Then we do groups of five," Asui suggested, "and one of four. Having numbers on our side is still a good idea, kero."

"Six teams," Izuku amended, against the confusion of some of his classmates. "Of mostly three, and one of four. They can outnumber us anyways with Ectoplasm's clones; they'll probably be all around the place as possible distractions, or the teachers might give them a robot or two if we think they're all protecting one or to run off with when we find one. We have a time limit, so we need to cover more ground without dropping to smaller pairs they can outnumber as themselves. They won't do three teams of four," he decided confidently. He flipped open his notebook, ignoring the few shouts about where that came from in his previously empty hands. "If we split up into six teams, four of us will run into the teachers first, and two teams will still be free to either meet up and help another team or rescue a bot while the others stall the teachers. We can't all afford to be caught up fighting our teachers expecting to catch them all in time; we have to rescue all four bots."

"We should still capture as many teachers as we can," Sato argued. "The less we have to worry about in our remaining time, the easier it should be to collect the targets."

"Don't get caught up in challenging the teachers, though," Tokoyami warned. "If they think our best chance is finding all of the rescue bots, they'll do their best to make themselves impossible targets and delay us as long as possible. If we can run away and lose them, the moment we know they're not guarding a rescue bot, we should."

Shiozaki shared a hum. "That is easier said than done. The moment we cross paths, they may try their best to lock us in combat. Our best option might be to keep them from disturbing the efforts of everyone else and make the effort in apprehending them before moving on elsewhere in the test grounds."

"Then we'll stay in continuous communication." Yaoyorozu held out her hands, palms glowing as little ear pieces began to pile on them and were handed out to everyone. "When we find a teacher, report who it is, where you are, and if and when you find any of the rescue bots. Once one team relays information, the rest of us will be able to plan around avoiding or converging on their location and who else of the teachers we have to keep an eye out for. So long as we all understand what someone else is doing and where, we can make full use of this plan." The tall girl fitted one in Izuku's ear as he was still busy with his notebook, tallying the names and quirks of his classmates.

"What are we supposed to do against All-Might and Star, though?" Uraraka posed the question again, to an agreeing murmur from the crowd of classmates. "Even if they're wearing those braces and holding back for us, I don't see them giving us the chance to capture them without a big fight."

"Midoriya and Todoroki have the strength to match them," Kirishima noted, swaying a thumb at both other boys. "Their strength and ice should make a good challenge if they cross paths. And Shiozaki's vines are pretty strong to hold them down for us. And Aoyama's laser won't be easy for them to counter either. Or Ashido's acid, Hanta's tape, or Kaminari's electricity, or even your gravity power. They are strong, but I think a few of us have the right stuff that we can make them hesitate and make an opening to capture them; we have to try!"

"We will," Izuku agreed, slipping his pencil over an ear and handing his notebook to the tall girl beside him. "If our teachers are going to balance their teams, then we need to balance ours; we can't just do teams of our strongest, or our fastest, or our stealthiest. Whoever we come across — however our teachers have partnered together — this should help us be ready for more scenarios." With the help of the raven-haired girl, the class president and vice president split their class into the decided groups. He wouldn't have minded Yaoyorozu questioning his choices, the green-haired teen mulled as he partnered with the two girls he chose to watch his back; but they had but a minute before the exam began, according to his watch.

"The rules are simple," Izuku reiterated to the attention of his class. "If we can't capture all of our teachers, we have to grab all four rescue bots. Any teacher we can get out makes it easier to get the second job done, whether they're guarding a bot or not."

"We'll split up the instant the doors open," Yaoyorozu co-opted his address, and tapped the piece in her ear. "We'll have one hour to do this. Keep communicating with everyone about whoever you find and wherever you find them. Use cardinal directions to explain it, if you don't see any standout features nearby the rest of us could see."

Izuku looked over the faces of his classmates, all one by one turning to him again with seconds on the clock to spare. "They know our quirks, but we know their quirks. They have experience, but we have numbers. They have each other, but so do we. They'll make it a challenge; we can do the same right back at them. We will pass." With his confidence in them declared, he raised a fist with them. "Plus Ultra."

"Exam Start!"

Ochako trusted that Midoriya knew what he was doing when aligning the teams as he did; for all the foolish things he could do, he was also near the top of their class for a reason. That in mind, did he have to place her on a team with Kaminari? Didn't he expect her to focus?

While she floated above, guiding herself along with the little thrusters added to her suit for propulsion, the blond teen on her mind whistled from the street below. "You're really beginning to resemble Thirteen," he commented aloud. "I don't think I would have known you trained with Hawks if I didn't know already. And you kept the pink instead of going all white, huh?"

To her saving grace, Sato was still around on their team to bonk the other boy on the head. "Don't say it like that, dude," the muscular boy chastised the smaller teen. "It sounds insulting."

"I was complimenting!" the blond defended himself, rubbing the top of his scalp. "Uraraka is a big Thirteen fan! That she resembles her more now is cool! I'm complimenting what she's done! Why does everyone hit me?"

Ochako was very happy her visor was tinted just enough — and that there was a fair distance between her and the two boys — that no one could see how hot her cheeks were, listening to Kaminari. The studio behind her costume's redesign had worked really quickly in sending the first iteration of her new concept after a week following her submission, and though it didn't come with everything she asked for, what she had received was more than enough to test in her classes. Thrusters came with the backpack and boots, controlled by the gloves for her to maneuver a slow flight path; wires filled the bulky braces on her wrists to latch on and carry items without losing her hands; and the puffier and insulated material of the suit made her feel even more weightless and giddy when gliding through the air. The old suit still remained underneath it all, so the end result was a satisfying merger of the old and new; it pleased the gravity-defying brunette to get her way in the end.

Kaminari's unfiltered praise was just a bit too much for her to handle.

"Just because everyone else does it doesn't mean you should too!" said teen argued back at the larger boy, defending his head from another assault. "I'm allowed to compliment my friends for looking cool. What's wrong with being supportive?"

"When it's from you?" Sato hummed thoughtfully. "You're too forward. You can't just say whatever you want to a girl like that."

"She's my friend; why can't I? I'm down to help Midoriya with training if he ever wants it, or be a punching bag for Ojiro if he needs a sparring partner. I'll power up whatever Yaoyorozu makes, or be a testing dummy for Hatsume's crazy inventions if it'll help me control my quirk better. And when Uraraka starts sending people to the moon again, I'll be the first in line to sign up, fail at the astronaut test, and still show up to watch lift-off anyway. It's called being supportive, and if my dad says it's the right thing to do then I'm going to do it!"

Spinning around in the air, the brunette girl above sighed at her teammates below. "Can we please focus on the exam, guys?" she pleaded with them. "Our classmates are relying on us. We have robots to rescue and teachers to arrest." She was happy with her tinted visor, when neither boy made a comment on how flushed she felt.

The blonde perpetrator behind it all waved a hand in apology. "Right, right. Sorry, I'm just trying to make you happy." The light bonk on the back of his head was warranted, but the floating girl stared down at him quizzically.

"What do you mean?"

"Well" — Kaminari waved his hands aimlessly — "you worry a lot, sometimes. Not that I blame you or anything, with everything that's gone on around us, but I notice you tend to worry the most? I just wanna, you know, help you feel safe and that everything's fine and all that stuff — do what I can to cheer you up and make you feel good, feel reinforced. Sugarman and Chargebolt have your back, there's no need to worry — that sort of thing — and you're strong too and we believe in you and so does everyone else in our class. You made this for me" — he gestured to the new launcher gauntlet on his arm — "because you know Yu-Gi-Oh of all things and I think that's cool as hell; I was really happy you came up with this. I want to do what I can so you can feel that way, too."

Ah, Uraraka thought simply. She knew Kaminari had gravitated towards her the most in their friend circle; he talked to her more; he walked her to the apartment she was living at away from home; he sent her little doodles of costumes designs since giving him the idea for his new costume piece; and she appreciated how caring he was. And she was aware of how worried she was — how scary the events she and her friends had gone through were. She wanted to be braver, for herself and her friends, and Kaminari was trying to help her get there through his own actions?

Braving the storm, the brown-haired girl clicked up her visor and beamed a smile down to her blond-haired classmate. "Thank you, Chargebolt; Uravity feels ten times lighter thanks to your generosity!" She punctuated her words with a pair of thumbs up by her head.

While the electricity-wielding boy grew a faint red on his cheeks, the larger teen balked between them. "Did Midoriya just put you two on a team to flirt with each other?"

Instead of answering, Uraraka spun herself right around, clicked her visor down once more, fiddled with the controls of her thrusters. "All right, all serious now."

The first thing she did was put too much thrust to one side, clipping her foot on a lamp pole and spiraling out of control to the dismay of her two chasing partners.

Momo led her team quietly down the alleyways of the faux city center, surveying the roads with Tsunotori's help, before leading the American girl, Tokoyami and Ojiro into the next space between the structures.

"It is unlikely our teachers are hidden away in the shadows," the bird-headed boy shared his thoughts out loud. "Dark Shadow would be empowered in the cloak of darkness; they would not allow us that advantage willingly."

"Not unless they have a trap waiting with you in mind," the tall girl reasoned. "Interiors would hide them best, and as heroes they're more trained in the environment, so it would be their own turf to challenge us on. Outside would be too much in our favor; Tenya and Shiozaki would have free range to do whatever against anyone other than Cementoss and Thirteen. The likelihood they have evenly distributed themselves inside and outside of the buildings is high—"

Momo stopped her voice and her classmates as they came to the end of the alley, peeking her head barely from the shadow. Across the road and atop one of the buildings, two copies of Ectoplasm paced along the edge of a roof.

"It can't be that easy, right?" Ojiro wondered vocally. "Do you think they're just a decoy?"

"We're in a large city with hundreds of buildings hunting our teachers and looking for the robots they've hidden," the raven-haired girl summarized. "They would have to make it somewhat obvious if they expect us to pass this exam within an hour. At least now we have an idea of what his clones will be contributing to this test."

"It could also be a trap," Tsunotori argued. "Ectoplasm can make a lot of clones, and they could all be inside trying to draw our attention and stall us from the rest of the exam."

"Then we play along. If he's going to put that many clones in one place, then he has to be with them. One of him is designated as a target to apprehend, and if we can capture him then that's a big worry for the rest of our class dealt with." She relayed what her team came across over the comms as well, receiving thanks from Midoriya first before other teams signaled the same. "But we shouldn't go in through the main door; they're watching it. We need to find another way inside and catch him and his team off guard."

The gentle sound of metal scraping on stone caught her ears, and the three teens turned around to find Tokoyami and his quirk struggling to lift a manhole cover back down the alley.

"Ask if you're gonna do something like that!" the tailed boy cursed at him, rushing over to help him lift open up the ladder into the ground. "How detailed do we think they made this place?"

"With our principal?" Momo thought of it for all of a second before answering, "More than was necessary."

Sure enough, there was a sewer system at the bottom of the ladder; round stone walls, dim lights and all. The tall girl led her team down the corridors, measuring the distance with her eyes until they came to the ladder she estimated brought them closest, and — with the help of the boys leading the way — climbed out into the alley behind the building they were aiming for. She scanned the back for a power box, and with Tsunotori's horns succeeded in taking out the building's power before lockpicking the back entrance.

"Do you think he saw us?" Tsunotori asked.

"He probably heard us," the other tailed teen suggested, pointing a dead stare at the bird-headed boy, "but if he knew what we were doing then they would have been waiting for us when we came back up. Unless, of course, he wanted us to come inside."

Momo waved for them to follow her up the stairwell, after surveying the entrance floor of the ten-story building was empty. "We need to figure out who is here. I have some guesses on the teams our teachers could have made, to balance out their strengths and weaknesses. All-Might and Cementoss would be underutilized inside a building, so we can rule out crossing paths with them here. Vlad King's use of blood would pair unfairly with Present Mic's sounds destabilizing Vlad's control so they wouldn't be paired together, and his blood and Aizawa-sensei's capture weapon work too closely when they would be better spread apart. Nedzu and Power Loader both have access to Yuei's technology and assets more than any other teacher, probably also separate."

"That's a lot of teams not made," Ojiro interrupted with a jest. "Thirteen and Midnight wouldn't be too bad on a team, right? Having a mask makes one of them immune to the other's quirk."

"Though her Black Hole would also remove Midnight's quirk from the air from rendering us unconscious," the tall girl noted, stopping by the door of the second floor. Dark Shadow extended from his user's cloak to survey the floor, and a minute later reported back that it was empty of life and automatons. "But a confined space would do wonders for Midnight's quirk. Inside here, I would imagine her, Ectoplasm and Eraserhead would have the advantage of erasure, cornering and knocking out; that's my leading assumption."

While her three teammates surveyed the space between the stairs and the sentient quirk checked the darkened floors, Momo pulled her book from the belt on her back and checked through her colored tabs. Gas masks for Midnight, reflective glass for Eraserhead, electromagnetic pulse grenades for Power Loader, and many more quick-to-open pages marked specifically for their teachers' quirks before they stepped into the fake city. Despite Ectoplasm's quirks, her class had the advantage of numbers and a larger variety of powers on their side, but her quirk was the most versatile. Whatever their teachers would throw at them, they all needed to be prepared for; but she needed to know how to counteract them and plan around them, and how she could benefit her classmate's quirks to do the same themselves if they must. Midoriya entrusted her with the largest team — four students instead of three like the rest went — which meant he trusted her to help the most out of everyone. She wasn't going to let him down, and she knew he was looking to do something similar.

"Third floor clear," Tokoyami reported, as Dark Shadow retreated beneath his cloak once more. Speaking of the devil in Momo's thoughts, the boy commented, "The calming light of a full moon shines with our class president taking charge of the exam. The battle he fights reigning in his power troubles me no more, for the confidence he displays in the role of leadership convinces me of a strength deserving. Thank you for assisting our class President, Creati, Tailman."

"Yeah, tell him that to his face when this is all over," Ojiro requested, leaping over the rails to the fourth floor while the rest of them climbed the stairs. "It's bothered him to eat lunch in the class away from everyone until this week. Any support you can show him will do wonders, especially since he is still trying to control his strength."

"We'll do our best!" Tsunotori enthusiastically promised, offering a mock salute before turning to Yaoyorozu at the top of the steps. "But since he's not on our team, we is in your care, vice prez! Please take good care of us!"

"Thank you Rocketti," Momo nodded, cracking the door to the fourth floor open for her darkness-theme classmate to peer inside. "I will do my best to lead us to victory, you have my word. Thank you for trusting in me."

"Of course we do," Tokoyami reassured her. "You have protected me before. Dark Shadow and I have no doubt in your capabilities." His head snapped to the door, away from the taller girl, and he squinted. "He's found something in the room. Not a teacher or a robot. He's curious?"

"You two can't communicate telepathically?" the tailed boy asked, to which the boy confirmed such in this state of separation. "Your call, Creati. Do we check it out?"

The raven-haired girl weighed their options on a furrowed brow. "This is an exam and this is our principal; he's too meticulous to leave something around at random and without reason. Please lead the way, Tsukoyomi."

The bird-headed boy did so, slinking into the room with the rest of the team to follow the extended trail of Dark Shadow's body in a room lit only by sunlight through the windows. True to his word, what the sentient quirk found was neither of the targets their class was meant to look for; in fact, the extension of shade had found a pretty large doll, replicating the appearance of a blonde American inventor Momo recognized immediately.

"Sorry kiddies," came a sultry voice from across the room, and the tall teen and her allies jumped back once they spotted a lady in violet and white lit by the peeking sunlight. Behind her, the light illuminated another man's long, curled hair, reflective shade and glistening smile. "We got her to lead you on once already; I was hoping we could do it again."

With Yaoyorozu's comment over the comms about Ectoplasm's clones received, Izuku had no trouble finding another pair standing outside a towering office building. Fifteen floors seemed obnoxious for a fake building in a fake city, but he guessed for a puzzle like this it suited the parameters of the test well. He walked into the road, twirling his bat, ready to challenge the two clones of his teacher as they took notice of his approach.

Before either of the clones could rush him, vines shot out from the alleyways behind him, grabbing them and throwing them through the windows of other buildings.

"All according to cake," Ashido giggled as she slipped down the road to the quirkless boy. "Perfect distraction with the ego match, Metal Bat. They never saw it coming."

Stepping out from the shadows, a perturbed Shiozaki eyed the other green teen. "I am still unconvinced that such noise is in our best interest. We've alerted any of the teachers to our presence and lost ourselves the element of surprise."

"There is no surprising our teachers," Izuku explained, leading the way through the sliding doors of the building the clones were guarding. "If Creati is right about the purpose of their placements, then they're expecting us already. If they think we want to try and catch them off their guard, then plowing straight on challenges their expectations. We can use that to our advantage." He stopped them in the front lobby of what resembled a hospital and looked around the eerily empty yet accommodated room. "This is a timed exam and we've almost spent ten minutes getting here. Look for clues; it's a big building, and there's a good chance they're trying to draw us somewhere."

While the vine-haired girl took to searching behind the receptionist's desk and Ashido hurried to the stacks of magazines left by the seating arrangement, he made his way to the nearest map and studied it for any markers or alterations their teachers could have made. Sure, their teachers could be leaving a trap and walking into it was a dangerous plan, he would give his teammate that; but twelve teachers, four rescue bots and only an hour to grab either in a large city wasn't the easiest task. Everyone needed to move quickly to do their part so they could all pass this exam, so he couldn't afford to hesitate even if it was safer.

He designed everyone's teams to balance everyone else's quirks as best he could in raw power and technical capabilities, along with someone on each team — and he didn't mean it offensively — who could plan a strategy around and with them and their own quirks. Iida, Yaoyorozu and Todoroki all had higher scores in the class than him; Asui's placid demeanor and straightforward speech pattern was well focused; Uraraka's bright nature and creativity would be resourceful to anyone; alongside himself, Izuku had untitled 'team captains' to sort the rest of his classmates with. With the strength of Shiozaki's vines and the versatility of offense, defense and mobility that was Ashido's acid on a smaller scale, the quirkless teen had two good partners to carry the weight of their confrontations while he made plans. With his strength still dangerous to use his bat on even his teachers, he had to play carefully and hoped the two girls wouldn't mind picking up his slack without his asking.

After two minutes of investigation, all they — Shiozaki — managed to find was a sticky note with 'Floor 11' written on it. When they took it to the elevator, however, all the buttons in the cart were smashed beside seven and eleven.

"One of them's probably a trap," Izuku theorized, "and the other is where the teachers are waiting; the rescue bot could be in either. We shouldn't split up, but if we take this and the teachers are upstairs, then they'll know just how close we are. If we take the stairs, that will give us an opportunity to approach them less aware."

"No way, Jose!" Ashido buzzed, crossing her arms in a large X. "That is a waste of time and energy on top of the past ten minutes! We go to floor eleven, and if it's a trap then I'll just melt our way down to the seventh and check the floors between. Elevator is our best choice."

"They will be aware of our approach," Shiozaki agreed with Izuku, but turned her unhappy glare from the other girl to him, "but I'm not sure you are allowed to be conscious of the delicacy of our approach after your earlier idea. I would, too, like to reserve my energy." With her thoughts declared, she extended a vine to click the button for the second floor, and the elevator blinked to life and began to rise.

To his right, the pink-skinned girl leaned back against the cart's wall and smiled coyly at Izuku. "Ya know, it's a pretty risque move to put yourself on a team with two pretty girls, Midoriya," she sung teasingly, and the green-haired boy closed his eyes to stop his thoughts of smashing open the elevator doors and walking out on whatever floor they were already at. "If I didn't know you any better, I'd think this was a sign of your intentions."

To his left, the vine-haired girl smacked her lips with a groan of disgust. "Do not humor such scandalous thoughts in this box, if you would; this is not a confessional booth, and I do not want to hear you accuse our class president of such prudent behavior. He would not stoop to a character so below our class."

Ashido hummed unbothered. "Like I said; I know him better. Prez wouldn't do anything unsavory to either of us; we're not the apple of his eye." He dared to open an eye, finding the same smile still staring him down from the pink girl. "You two aren't already a thing, right? You'd tell me if you were."

"This is not the kind of conversation I want to have right now," Izuku told her plainly. "Or ever. Ojiro's teasing is enough of a pain about this, especially after last week." That part was meant to stay in his head, yet he had mumbled it aloud anyways, and the girl beside him bounced excitedly.

"What happened last week?"

He was given a fake love letter and nearly stabbed to death in a classroom, which was something he hadn't and wasn't going to share with the rest of their class so as to not stir up trouble in the school over the imposter's attack. When the elevator dinged and the doors opened, he noted, "Oh look, an escape from this conversation," and rushed past the two girls into the work office designed floor. "I was expecting a hospital."

"This is a testing ground," Shiozaki reminded him as she and Ashido followed him further across the floor. "Not a real city. Yuei is under no obligation or pressure to design everything as accurately to society as possible."

Izuku would concede to that point. "Keep an eye out for any traps the principal or Power Loader might have left," he warned the girls. "If there's nothing here we'll climb to the eleventh floor. Pinky, Vine; please watch my back and I'll have yours. It's a three-on-three fight, but we can make it through—"

"Confidence is good," a gruff voice interrupted the green-haired teen, and a bulky man with white hair rose from a cubicle further across the room. Izuku raised his bat towards Vlad King as the man stepped into the open space between desks, standing down the three students with arms crossed over his chest. "But your kids are a bit cocky, Shouta. I thought you trained them better than that."

"I did." Izuku peered back over his shoulder at their dark-haired homeroom teacher crouched atop one of the cubicle walls. "They've made an error in their logic, that's all."

A light buzz came from the piece in Izuku's ear, as Shoji's voice broke through, "We've found Ectoplasm and Snipe!"

Hanta's voice followed to share, "Thirteen and Cementoss are together!"

Not a second later Yaoyorozu's followed, tinged in greater worry, "It's just Midnight and Mic on a team! Our guess was wrong!"

At the sight of the green-haired teen's grimace, Eraserhead's hair rose to stand on end. "So confident you could take on three of us at a time, when we don't need any more than two to do our job."

They were prepared to take on their teachers in teams of three, Tenya scoffed, when just a pair of them could handle their own three-man groups. In fairness, the duo he, Shoji and Kirishima had come across on the street was made up of the western-themed sharp shooter and the mathematics teacher who could replicate his own appearance several times over, so saying they were fighting only two teachers wasn't even correct to begin with. Dozens upon dozens of Ectoplasm's clones formed a thick ring around the trio of boys, sidestepping each other in a dizzying display of intimidation. The blue-haired boy thought his teacher was only capable of two dozen or so copies; when was he capable of exceeding that number thrice over?

A quartet of clones dashed out from the group at Tenya, who met their wooden kicks with his jet-powered own. While he could knock the clones back without qualm, they still managed to bang against his armor with a feverness that batted the teen about from one copy to another until the many-armed teen socked them back with an overlapping fist. "I don't see a rescue bot anywhere," Shoji informed him and Kirishima out loud, another limb with an eye protruding from it held higher above his head. "I think we're being stalled" — he hissed as a dummy round shot at the eye, and it recoiled back down to the rest of his body — "by a roaming team."

"Well capturing them isn't going to be easy," the red-haired teen noted, tussling with a clone and punching it into mush. "What even counts as apprehending Ectoplasm?"

Another clone jumped from the pile, bouncing off Kirishima's back to thrust his peg legs into Shoji's wall of arms. "My main body is designated separately from my copy's," it shared vocally, leaping back from the tallest boy's following fist. "Capture that version of me and that counts as my arrest." A boosted tackle from the blue-haired teen splattered the clone into sludge. Tenya already guessed the original version of the hero was the only one that counted in the exam, but spotting him through the crowd was next to impossible; they wouldn't stop moving and not a single one looked different from the rest.

A flurry of shots rang out, rubber bullets bouncing off Kirishima's stone skin and Tenya's chest armor. "Where is he even shooting from?" the red-haired teen barked in annoyance. "We can at least capture him first, if I could see him!"

"We need to get out of here, is what we should do first," Shoji argued. "Ingenium! Can you get us out of here with your engines?"

He could carry them both out of the circle, but breaking through a part of the encroaching mass of their teacher meant turning their fight into a game of cat and mouse, and if they didn't find the original Ectoplasm or wherever Snipe was hiding amongst them, then they weren't doing anything to help the rest of their class pass this exam. Tenya couldn't accept doing nothing. Not again.

"New plan!" he shouted, kicking away another clone and stepping back between his two partners. "Tentacole! Spare as many eyes as you can to spot Snipe! Red Riot, stay close! I'll need a brace! If there's no rescue robot, the least we can do for our class is apprehend them and lighten the weight of our enemy!"

"We're sitting ducks here, Ingenium," the taller boy argued again. "Breaking apart the mass of Ectoplasm would be better than trying to capture just one man."

Another shot echoed through the street, and a chip was taken off Kirishima's forehead. "Nah, I agree with our team lead! These clones are a lot but his shooting can do a lot worse to someone else if we let him leave. I've got your back!" To his word, the red-haired teen moved in, pressing his back to Tenya's as they fought off their own approaching clone.

The taller boy grumbled under his mask but complied in the end, his arms extending and multiplying like branches over their heads, eye popping from the end of each and surveying the crowd around them. Tenya's legs began to burn, revving their engines in wait as severed limbs fell or bruised ones retracted, looking for any pop of different color between the cream trench coats and blue heads. He waited, and he waited, and he waited.

Another shot fired, another eye retracted, and the many-armed boy pointed to his right. "There."

Tenya pivoted, and pulled Kirishima along behind him. "Brace!" was the only warning he shouted before his legs burned to life and he rocketed through the ring of clones, sending bodies flying and breaking apart into grey mush. He failed to tackle the western-themed hero by a hair, but the speedster wasn't deterred; he spun, slid to a stop, and with another quick burst from his exhausts launched through the crowd again, tackling Spine to the ground back with the circle.

"I've got him!" the teen shouted. "I need one of the restraints—" His request was cut off with a gasp as a clone of their mathematics teacher leapt onto him. Another followed suit, as did many more, and soon he and the sharpshooter were trapped under a dogpile of clones.

"Mind yer weight!" the masked her shouted from his place against the road. "I'm still here, ya numbnut!"

The blue-haired teen tried to shift his weight — reposition one of his legs to burst the pile off and break free — but he found no such angle to make without grating his teacher's face against the pavement. The clone on his back shifted his weight around, leaving Tenya's legs still trapped beneath the rest but his head closer to the teen's. "Sorry about this kid," he apologized, and did not repeat himself when Snipe demanded to be acknowledged. "That was a good plan, but making this easy for you isn't on the card—"

"Fastball Special!" Suddenly a new weight came crashing through the bulk of the pile, shoving most of the clones off of Tenya. With the weight lightened, it gave the boy the chance to flip over, Snipe in his arms, and with a quick burst rocket himself into the air to shake off the remaining clones. As they fell back down, an extended arm shot around his waist and pulled him and the hero back to Shoji where the taller boy could wrap one of the restraints on the gunslinger's ankle.

"Snipe has been captured," a monotone, womanly voice announced through the city. "Eleven heroes remain."

"Thank you, Tentacole," Tenya panted, helping their teacher to sit upright while he climbed to his feet.

"That was Red Riot's idea," the taller boy responded. "A special move he wanted to try. Good job grabbing him; now we've got the other teacher to deal with." The clones of Ectoplasm undamaged stood still around them, and those who recovered did stared down the reapproaching Kirishima. Tenya breathed slowly, readying his charging legs again for the bout to clear the army of copies, before they all dissolved back into puddles of goop without warning.

While the trio of teens looked around the blotches scattered across the road, the western hero picked himself up to stand. "That felt like being tackled by a car," the hero joked, cracking his back and nodding to the blue-haired boy. "Thank you fer not turning me into roadside. I'm out, so I better get out of the way and not bother the rest of your exam. You good, Ecto?"

"I will take it from here." Tenya's head snapped around and up, ignoring as Snipe ran off without another word, and stared up at the lone Ectoplasm standing on a windowsill. A red bandana was tied around his forehead; probably the indicator of his real body they were looking for. "You kids took down one hero in less than fifteen minutes. That is impressive. Good work.

"But," the hero drawled, and sludge poured like a waterfall from his mouth, dropping all three floors down to splatter and collect on the sidewalk. And it kept pouring. The waterfall of grey slime wouldn't end, and the pile it made on the sidewalk continued to grow out into the street, forcing Shoji and Tenya to step back. Then, it bubbled and rose, its color changing to blue and gold and two red eyes.

"Like I told you," the giant forming head of Ectoplasm boomed calmly, "it's not our job to make this easy."

Present Mic's shout shook the room and shattered the windows, and nearly ruptured Momo's eardrums along with them were it not for the mufflers she put over them. The hero might have been holding back his fullest volume, but in a confined space filled to the brim with tables and chairs and little items, the mess it made was more than just soundwaves. The tall girl considered herself lucky not to be skewered by a misplaced pen.

The fight between her team and the pair of heroes had been brief already, but the seasoned adults showed just how dangerous a hero was to face in a matter of minutes. Ojiro's attempt to chuck a chair and Tsunotori launching her horns failed to make an impression against Midnight's defensive accuracy with her whip and the sudden explosion of her smoke-like quirk forcing the students to fall back. As Momo worked as fast as she could to produce masks to protect them from said knock-out gas, the blond hero stepped up with a shout that short-circuited their earpieces and pushed the smoke after them, which succeeded in sending it up Tokoyami's nose to knock him out almost instantly. With one less mask to make, the ravenette protected her other teammates with tossed-over masks and rushed to hide behind overturned furniture with the rest of them — the now unconscious bird-headed teen heaved over in Ojiro's tail.

"Well this blows," the blond boy shouted over the constant stream of Mic's vocals, slowly pushing the desks into the backs and closer to the wall in front of them. He and the American girl also wore a pair of earmuffs Momo made to block out the loud hero's voice; how Tokoyami slept through it, the tall girl had no idea. "A close-ranged fighter against two ranged quirks, aren't I lucky. Any ideas, Creati?"

"Working on that," Momo mumbled, materializing an appropriate mask to wrap around Tokoyami's neck if they could get him to wake. When the noise died down, she turned to the horned girl between them. "If there's a rescue bot here, then it's not on this floor. Rocketti, can you fly on your horns to the floors above and check if they're hiding one above us?"

"They'll knock me out of the sky," she warned worriedly. "How could you distract them?"

A joyous laugh bounced across the room. "I think the kids are scheming, Yamada," Midnight sang mockingly. "Are we going to let them get away with that?"

"No," Present Mic replied cheerily. "I don't think we will!" They had less than a second press down on their mufflers before the hero shouted again, louder than before. The wall and floor around them shook and fractured. The desks that covered them bounced against them and the carpet floor, their makeshift blockade falling apart at the seams. As one small fracture bled into others along the wall and across the floor, stopping inches from their unconscious teammate, she came to notice the small head of Dark Shadow slithered out of his cloak. Like its master, the sentient quirk yawned, and a droopy shape formed beneath its eye to share in the exhaustion; unlike Tokoyami, however, the quirk was still awake.

A light blinked alive in Momo's mind.

Once the shockwave of sound died down she produced a flash grenade from her stomach, and when the crack of Midnight's whip found the leg of one table cover she pulled the pin and chucked it at their teachers. When the boom followed seconds later, Momo pointed to the shattered windows. "Rocketti, fly to the top floor and work your way down. Tailman, help me back to the stairs!" She produced two more grenades, tossing smoke bombs into the room for momentary cover as the blonde girl galloped and leapt through the open windows while the blond boy helped her carry Tokoyami back to the stairwell they came from.

They slammed the door shut before Present Mic's shouting resumed, as she assumed he would to clear the smoke. With their unconscious classmate in her teammate's hands, Momo knelt down and produced a series of cubic logs against the door and the wall; tungsten was a lot to make but it was a good reinforcer. "This should delay them a while," she guessed. "They can't haphazardly destroy the framework of the building to chase us. I'll take Tokoyami; you head upstairs and help Tsunotori check the remaining floors for one of the rescue bots and have her fly out of the building with it."

Ojiro hesitated when she presented her back to him. "I can carry him just fine," he argued. "Your quirk would be a lot more helpful than mine—"

"And I have an idea for it," she cut him off, "but I need to take him out of harm's way. If you two can cause a distraction upstairs, that will give me time." She produced another pair of earbuds, offering them to him as trade. "I'll let you know when I have something ready."

The tailed teen curled his lips, holding back what was probably another insistence against her idea, but he complied and set Tokoyami over the tall girl's back. With one ear piece taken for him, she put the other on and carried her teammate down the stairwell, leaving the other boy with a nod of trust before they disappeared from each other's view. She descended past the third floor to the second, kicking the door open gently and easing it closed behind her as noiselessly as possible. With what little light peered through the curtains and windows, she rushed across the room to an isolated office and set her teammate on the table.

The building shook lightly under Present Mic's quirk, but a voice over the city announcing the capture of one of the teachers echoed through the windows. "Good work Iida," Momo muttered to herself, and turned her head to her teammate. "Dark Shadow," she called at the boy's cloak. "Are you still awake?"

The little shade popped its head out again, giving a big yawn as a greeting before setting its chin down on the teen's stomach. "Yeah," it breathed groggily. "What's up?"

Momo moved across the room, twirling the blinds closed until only a fraction of light illuminated the room for her eyes. "How's Tokoyami?"

"Tired." It shifted its head around to face its master. "Fumi's out like a light, which sucks. There's supposed to be an exam today, isn't there? I don't want him to be late." The rest of its sentence drawled on through another yawn.

"This is the exam," she reminded, and the sentient quirk gave a small squawk of acknowledgement but ultimately didn't seem to care. "He inhaled Midnight's Somnambulist. I'm sorry I didn't make you a mask."

"It's fine," it yawned again. "The lungs are all his; I can't inhale smoke. But his energy is tied to mine, so when he gets tired, I do too. His mouth makes mask shopping a hassle with mom and dad too."

With the windows all blocking out the sunlight, the tall girl retreated back to the door, checking to see if any teachers had snuck their way down without her knowing. "How connected are you two?" she inquired. "I know you two can't communicate with your thoughts."

The little shade hummed. "We can, yeah. Not words or sentences, but I can feel what he feels, and the same with me. The only thing he feels different is hunger." It giggled. "I can tell when Fumi has a crush on someone, too."

Returning to the asleep teen and his quirk on the desk, Momo gave Dark Shadow a gentle pat on the head. "You're doing a good job staying awake for him now." In the complete darkness of the room, the quirk had grown ever so slightly.

"I want him to pass his test," it reminded her. Its voice lost some of the drawl behind it. "He stayed up a bunch of nights studying and training to pass it. I don't wanna let him down."

"You won't," she reassured, and the shade leaned into her hand with a purr. She moved her gaze to the still unconscious teen; despite Midnight's quirk knocking him out, Present Mic's shouting hadn't reawoken him on its own. The stimulation of noise wasn't enough to bring him back to them, so what would be? "You can feel what he experiences, but how much can he feel from you? If you had an adrenaline spike or were tired, would he feel it?"

"No. My energy is my own. All the blood and energy and sensations are his and I'll feel them, but I don't have any nerves connecting back to him; all he gets are my thoughts and feelings. Which sucks, really, because he hates the dark. I feel that and it stresses me out, which then stresses him out, which stresses me out even more; I can be unruly and bad when we're in the dark, and I can't control it well. And that makes me worry more about Fumi. I hate doing that to him. It scares him when he can't control me. I don't like scaring him."

"So it has to be him," she summarized. "Got it. I'll need you to work with me, then." She procured another item in the palm of her hand and held it up for the bird-shaped shade to see. "These are smelling salts. They'll wake him up but it will aggravate him heavily in doing so, okay? It will spike his nervous system and you are going to feel it."

Dark Shadow, now grown to eclipse the size of her hand, peered at the rocks and at her with an expression of confusion. It then snapped away from her touch, twisting around and taking in the room around them. "Wait a minute, it's dark!"

"I know; you should be stronger here than the light, I remember that. The power is still out so this is perfect conditions for you. When Tokoyami wakes up, that adrenaline will shoot through you, and when it does I need you to break through the floor above us and grab our teachers." Since her other teammates carried the capture devices they were given, she produced a pair from her stomach. "Can you do that?"

"Weren't you listening?!" The shade reared at her, claws forming to try and swipe the smelling salts from her hand as she pulled them away. "He can't control me when I'm aggravated! If you do it to him then it happens to me twice as much and I won't be anywhere near reasonable! It hurts him when I do that; I could hurt you if that happens! You're the smart lady! Think of some other plan!"

"There is no other plan!" she insisted. "Present Mic's soundwaves are too strong for us to get close, and Midnight's better trained and equipped for close combat than Tailman and Rocketti are prepared for. I can't do something that could bring this building down on our heads, but you can be a controlled destruction that's just enough while being safe. This is a testing ground; no one is going to mind what you break."

"What part of no control don't you understand?!" Dark Shadow grew and grew in size, eclipsing Momo and height and backing her against the wall, with its large claws shaking but not grabbing her. "I'll be no different from Midoriya's stupid powers, wild and unstable! I'm not letting you hurt Fumi like that! Why would you ask this of him?"

The tall girl steeled herself with a gulp, meeting the quirk's hard stare with her own, filled with as much confidence as she could muster. "I'm not asking him; I'm asking you. Midoriya's powers are his — no different from mine — but you aren't like that. You're a sentient being, made of your own thoughts and feelings and choices. You share them with Tokoyami, but he doesn't make them for you. You're awake right now because you want to be, right? For him?"

Dark Shadow heaved over her, though not a gust of air passed over her. Its eyes, large and jagged like bolts of lightning over its shadowy form, shrunk slowly without a sign of blinking.

Momo reached out to him again, cupping her hand on the chin of his beak. "Tokoyami sees you as his friend, not just his power, doesn't he? You're not his strength, you're just strong, and you work with him when he asks you to, don't you? I'm not asking him to control you; you can control yourself, like Midoriya is. I'm asking you to do what I hope he does, and tell yourself that you can control it. Can you try that, for us? For Fumi?"

The dark talons of the shade's fingers curled into fists, but retreated into the rest of its body. Its face slid back along her fingers, returning to hover over its connected body and turning away to gaze down at the other teen. Its lightning bolt eyes squished and reformed into single diamonds before they looked back to her. "What you're asking can go wrong real quickly."

The building shook again from Present Mic's quirk, and Momo checked through the doorway again to make sure neither of the teachers had come down to her floor and hopefully gave chase upwards. "I can make sources of light if I need to," she reminded the quirk calmly. "After you catch them, if you can control it, just break the windows and let the sun in. I trust you. Tokoyami does too. I don't think he's afraid of losing control of you; he would be afraid of you losing control over yourself."

Dark Shadow subtracted more into the cloak of the other teen, shrinking down closer to her in height and size. "That's what he says too," it mentioned meekly. "We haven't gotten to practice it much before bed. He wants to work through his fears and be strong. I don't want to scare him anymore." Gently, it pried the gas mask from Tokoyami's face, freeing his beak to the open air. "I'll try to be fast."

Momo gave a breath of relief, pushing off the wall to approach. "Thank you," she told the living quirk earnestly. "Just remember that you're doing this for him and for yourself, and you will control it like Midoriya can. Like we all tell ourselves." She clicked the piece on her ear, signaling to Ojiro to climb more floors if he could without waiting for his response. She waited instead for Dark Shadow to nod in understanding and as a signal that it was ready, and then shoved the salts up to the boy's nostrils.

The reaction was almost instantaneous; Tokoyami's eyes snapped open while his body jerked away from the smelling salts, and simultaneously Dark Shadow squawked and exploded in a mass of darkness, slamming into Momo and shoving her through the open door. She tumbled on the floor and crawled away as the quirk of darkness continued to expand, cracking through the walls of the little office until they exploded apart and freed its hulking form to roar and shake through the office. Desks and chairs flew over her head once more as she crawled back for cover, and only froze when a giant yellow eye found her and the rest of the massive shadow slowed its destruction. It watched her, the form of the eye flickering between larger and larger sizes, and when she realized the quirk wasn't advancing on her, she slipped her ear muffs and gas mask back on, and nodded.

Dark Shadow rumbled with a beastly roar as it threw its head up into the ceiling, smashing into the floor above them. It did the same with the next floor, and the next floor, taking only seconds to survey each floor until Momo heard the shouts of people. Present Mic's loud voice tried to blast the quirk away, but it only lasted a second before he cut off with a screeching squeak. The floors crumbled some more as the shade retracted back to her floor, revealing a teacher gripped in each hand that it presented to her with a forceful reach. The tall girl moved as quick as she could, before either teacher could react, to place the capture braces on their ankles.

"Present Mic and Midnight are apprehended. Nine teachers remain."

The giant quirk wavered, dropping both heroes at Momo's feet while it recoiled and grumbled like a beast.; before any three of them could act, it roared and threw a fist through the wall of windows, breaking sunlight into the building and burning its dark form. It hissed and recoiled back to Tokoyami's body, and within seconds had retreated back under the teen's cloak to reveal the bird-headed boy coughed and holding onto a desk for support.

"Tsukuyomi!" Momo rushed to his side, supporting his weight to stay on his feet. "How do you feel?"

"Like I should throw up," he admitted groggily. "What was that foul aroma you administered?"

"Smelling salts. You slept through Mic's shouted and being moved around, and I didn't want to do anything physically stimulating that could hurt you. I'm sorry about that."

The boy waved her apology away with a hand. "I am sorry for Dark Shadow's outburst. I could feel the discomfort in him when I awoke from the sensation. Is everyone okay?"

"We're fine." She turned her teammate to the two laying teachers, who both offered a thumb of confirmation towards them. "A bit rattled, but no one's wounded. Dark Shadow kept himself in control, like he promised."

To increase the surprise splattered across the boy's face, Dark Shadow's tiny head peeked out between the edges of Tokoyami's cloak. "She makes good pep-talk. Can we keep her, Fumi? I'd like to talk with her again; I think she can help us."

The boy's feathers ruffled to match his expression of embarrassment, shoving the quirk back with his hand. Tokoyami huffed and turned his head to Momo again. "I can sense that he trusts you," he shared, to which she nodded thankfully. "Whatever you did that stopped him from filling with worry, thank you. I hope it is alright that I may request for your help again in the future, if it is not a bother."

The tall girl shared back a smile. "I would love to. I'll help however I can." Midnight cooed off to the side, silenced by the other hero slapping his hand over her mouth.

"Good work, Creati," Ojiro's praise came over the earpiece. "I take it the shaking means Tokoyami's awake?"

"He is," she answered, the motion reminding Tokoyami to do the same and check his own broken earpiece. "Have you met up with Rocketti?"

"Yeah, she found the rescue bot on the top floor, met me halfway down. I didn't hear them announce it over the intercom though."

"They aren't reporting them, kero."

"Froppy?" Momo addressed the new voice. "Have you found one?"

"We did," the other girl replied. "Battle Fist, Twinkling and I found it in a building. No one was watching it. I'm guessing we have to secure all of them at once to pass, or the teachers can take them from us if we're not careful, kero. We'll keep this one as far away as possible. We can't do much against the giants."

"Giants?" the tall girl repeated, the bird-head boy beside her sharing an expression of confusion. A beastly roar sounded off deeper in the city, turning the heads of the teachers and the teen's to the opening Dark Shadow made in the wall, for all of them to find not just one giant in their sight, but two.

"I hate this exam!" Denki exclaimed at the top of his lungs, dashing down the road as fast as he could.

Behind him Sato huffed and puffed and struggled to keep up the pace. "How did we get saddled with this?"

"Because everything hates me!" the blond boy shouted, jabbing a finger back at the giant robot chasing after them. "Why else would they throw one of those at me?! I thought there weren't supposed to be robots in this exam!"

Denki hated seeing the Zero Pointers in the entrance exam; he hated seeing them again in the Sports Festival's obstacle course; and he hated it most of all when it showed up, looking like it was on steroids, smashing out of a building under the manual control of the cackling marsupial that was their principal. He and his teammates panicked — an unlucky Uraraka veered off in the air to avoid the falling glass and rubble, seemingly out of control as she spun around and disappeared over the rooftops, never reappearing to the scene. Once she was gone, the blond teen tried to recover a brave face and shot the robot with a disc from his new piece of gear and fired off his Electrification with a target to direct it even if the machine ran on electricity within metal. Only it did nothing, and the giant mech in front of him and Sato did nothing more than change its blue eyes to red and charge at them, which led to their current situation.

"We could have just ran for it the moment it showed up!" Sato belted. "No way it noticed us that fast to find us if we just ran between the buildings!"

"The principal's inside it!" Denki shouted back over the roar of supercharged threads that moved the machine to match their pace; much faster than the ogre he ran from in the entrance exam. "I don't want to be buried under bricks and die here today! And I was trying to overload it and turn it off; how was I supposed to know it was shockproof?!"

"By assuming preemptive measures have been taken before this exam," came the voice of said headmaster, blaring from speakers across the body of the machine. "Quite a few of my students have powers and skills capable of incapacitating the standard model of our Zero Pointers, so we made one with you kids in mind just for a scenario like this. A perfect model built to counter every action you've shown us so far!" The cackle that followed his rising volume unsettled the blond teen. "How will you overcome such a perilous foe?"

Denki wished the principal and the giant robot were his only problem, but there was a lot more on his mind than that. Power Loader was probably inside or in his own robot somewhere ready to trap them in a pincer movement, which didn't help him with the insistence to keep running straight ahead like his legs told him to. He heard the rumblings of other fights around the city, and even with three teachers apprehended the volume had only gotten louder. Two rescue bots had been found but no one else was reporting one, and the pairs of teachers everyone was mentioning whittled down the remainder of them to two, and if everyone was in pairs and neither number one was spotted — well, even he could put two and two together. On top of all that, though…

"Has anyone seen Uravity?" he called into his headset between panting breaths. "We got separated by the principal and she hasn't called in!"

"Ingenium is gone too," Shoji's voice followed. "Ectoplasm made a giant of himself and he ran us out of there so we weren't caught ourselves, then he ran to look for the teams with rescue bots without us. Where are you?"

While Sato groaned about a second giant, the blond teen snapped his head around for any markers. "I don't know, we're just running East! Everything looks the damn same! I can't outrun a robot forever!" A grunt turned his attention around, and Denki watched as Sato spun on his heels, dumped two bags of sugar down his throat, and shoved his hands into the lower plating of the giant machine. "What the hell are you doing?!"

"Getting fed up with running!" the larger boy shouted back. His muscles grew in size and definition, and his fingers dug into the green steel, even as it pushed him back along the road. "Everyone else is doing something! I'm not ending this exam doing nothing! We agreed to stop whatever teachers we came across, so I have to do my part!" The encroaching machine pushed Sato into Denki, who tried with what little muscle he had to help the larger boy push; even when said boy's feet were digging through the road as they continued on. "Midoriya could take one of these on! So did Todoroki, and Yaoyorozu! Even you tried! So should I!" He ripped one of his hands from the metal and slammed it again closer to his other hand, curling his fingers and pulling them apart. "The exterior might have some resistance, but not all of its hard-wiring can be! Give it your best shot, Chargebolt!"

The fierce determination on Sato's face, the strain of his muscles, and the destruction he was causing just trying to fight back; it gave Denki a new spark of determination. He patted his teammate on the back, charging his fingertips and pointing a hand where the metal began to tear. "You make a good argument, Sugar Man. Thanks for the clear—"

The hype died in his voice as the opening was made, and a man was waiting for them. The blond boy only had a second to recognize Power Loader and the head of a hose in his hands before he and the other boy were doused in a white foam. They stumbled back and struggled to move with the giant robot screeched to a halt, but the foam on their bodies hardened faster than paint dried, and Denki was stuck with his back turned to the teacher and his teammate.

"Being loud has its downsides, you know," the teacher reprimanded. "You can hear each other, but so can everyone else. Even over loud machinery, you could afford to talk quieter to the person beside you. Making a grandstand isn't always feasible in our line of work."

Denki tried to twist and pull himself out, but the material was like stone on his limbs. "Damnit, I'm stuck! Sato!" He could at least still twist his head around, finding his teammate stuck on his hands and knees, struggling to do the same.

"I can't get it off! My arms are stuck!"

"Sorry kids," the helmet-wearing inventor offered sincerely. "You tried, and that's admirable enough. I think it's time for you to sit the rest of this out."

Denki didn't accept that — he wouldn't accept that! He spent all that training, all that studying, and Uraraka's new tool just to fail without doing anything? Sparks danced across his body, unable to direct them away from his classmate if he set them off. Sato was right; he had to do something!

The ground shook suddenly and violently, throwing the teacher trying to climb out of the robot off-balance. Turning away, Denki watched the buildings down the road shake and turn, as Cementoss and Thirteen came around the corner riding the road like a wave, a wall in front of them that blocked a glacier of ice from slamming into them. The duo of heroes noticed the predicament to their right — the blond boy offered an awkward smile at their staring — before another wave of ice washed over them like a dome.

"Heard you guys could use some help." The electric teen raised his gaze to the twisted buildings, finding Hanta and Jirou standing on the rooftop's edge and gazing down at them. "Couldn't get away from our own fight, so I thought, why not bring them along? You look stuck."

"I am!" Denki shouted back, less enthusiastic than this classmate. "I was nearly run over by a Gundam! It is not a good day!"

A pillar of ice shot from the rooftop, colliding with the robot's head and wrapping around it like a collar, as Todoroki stepped into view beside his teammates. "Headphone Jack," he addressed the purple-haired girl. "Free them. Cellophane and I will capture the teachers. Get them out of the way." He pointed his hand at the Zero Pointer, two streaks of ice shooting down the buildings at an angle before colliding with the foot of the machine, encasing Power Loader in a thin sheet of ice within. Another trail of ice curled down from the building like a slide, which Jirou took to Denki and his teammate. She grunted as she landed, muttering something about needing different pants as she jogged the rest of the way, jabbed her jacks into the hardened material, and vibrated it apart to free the two boys.

As the blond boy staggered to catch himself, the rocker girl held a finger in front of his face. "You heard nothing," she warned.

He held his hands up defensively. "Not a thing. Right buddy?" He turned around to Sato for support, but the two teens found the larger boy still hunched over the road.

"Too many vibrations," he groaned. "Sugar isn't going down anymore."

Jirou hissed awkwardly. "Sorry, buddy. Didn't think about that. Let's get out of the way—"

"I was hoping more of you would come!" Nedzu's voice boomed as a reminder of his presence. The ground shook again as the Zero Pointed shook, its metal glowing faintly as steam bellowed from the layers of frost. With a sharp turn of his head and torso, the ice shattered away and the face focused its eyes on the ice wielder. "You're conserving your ice so as to not hinder yourself faster; that's good. But as I told your friends, this has been remodeled to combat you at your best, with your quirks in mind. You'll have to do better than that to—"

The principal was cut off too as a beam of light struck the head of the machine, and a conjoined pair of bodies came flying into view over the buildings.

"Sorry for disappearing!" Uraraka shouted from the sky, holding Aoyama by the hands as they flew around in an arc. "My earpiece fell out, but I found some more help! Thank you for holding out for me!" He couldn't make out the girl's face with several stories of distance between them, but he hoped the wide smile on his own face and the thumbs-up he gave her were visible to her.

Light twinkled from the floating duo, and another stream of light blasted the robot in the face; not breaking through, but visibly melting the material even if slowly. "Allow ma belle brilliance to brighten your day!"

But the machine's head twisted to follow the path of their flight. "The more the merrier, I always say!" The shoulders of the Zero Pointer rose and shifted, and red beams of light shot wildly in the air. It missed any of the students, and as Denki watched one hit a building, he saw it do no lasting damage. "It's just a little light show, but sight is important! I wish I could take all of you kids on, but alas." The sound of shattering ice turned Denki around again, as the dome encasing the other two teachers crumbled apart towards Thirteen's open finger and Cementoss stepped forward. "These children have you on the backfoot, Ishiyama."

"My apologies, sir," the stone hero announced back, looking up at the duo he was fighting and then to Denki and the two with him. "Do I have your permission to up my efforts?"

"Yes you do."

Cementoss clapped his hands together and fell to his knees. "Thank you," he prayed, and slammed his hands into the road. Everything around him shifted, both the ground and the buildings around him. Hanta tried to shoot his tape at the hero, but the material was drawn away by Thirteen's finger protecting the other hero. Todoroki shot ice that met the same fate, while more was focused to crash into the Zero Pointer, which reheated and twisted to shatter it apart, all while firing red beams of neon light at the airborne duo. The ground around Denki, Jiro and Sato shifted too, and the road rose as pillars around them, curling inwards.

The blond boy acted as fast as he could, throwing his hand in the direction of the hero duo, and between the rising stone shooting a disk that flew right under Thirteen's arm, attaching to the ice. And as she twisted his body towards his tool, and the stone closed in, Denki snapped his fingers and let sparks fly.

Izuku's plan from the start of their battle was decided the moment he saw both his teachers. Without a second to spare, he grabbed Ashido's arm with one hand, slung his other around Shiozaki's waist and twisted their positions, locking him and the pink girl together by the arm in front of the homeroom teacher, and the vine-haired girl hidden behind their backs.

"Vine!" A simple shout of her name, and the girl let her quirk erupt into a sea of green. Ropes and bundles flooded the floor, while tendrils shot through the ground and the ceiling into the adjacent levels. As Eraserhead jumped back, red gushed between the green, and plants fought blood for control of the field. Izuku charged after their homeroom teacher, ordering Ashido to grab on the vines and follow them to the floors above to look for a robot, and his teammate did as such, leaving him to his own one-on-one.

He wished it was against someone else, though.

The black-haired hero vaulted over the swing of his bat, and Izuku's head, and kicked him in the space between his shoulders. The green-haired teen fell against the desk that his attack just cleared of its appliances, but when he pushed off to throw his weight again, the teacher simply sidestepped, grabbed his arm, and threw the student into a different cubicle.

"You're fighting slower than you are, Midoriya," the underground hero chastised plainly. "I thought your idea here was to keep me away from your teammates. You can do better than this."

With a scoff, Izuku picked himself up again, catching a keyboard on the ground with his bat and launching it up at the hero, missing him in his dodge by a hair and a few keys. His teacher backflipped onto the other desk, and again into the cubicle behind it, and when Izuku bashed his bat against the desk to smash it into said cubicle he leapt to the side and avoided that too.

"Bit hard to be fast with two hundred pounds of iron or whatever in my hands," he argued back at his teacher, stepping through the rubble of his own destruction with hesitance. He was really trying to hold himself back in his strikes on his teacher, but the state of everything he hit wasn't filling him with confidence.

His teacher hopped off the desk, staring at the bat in the boy's hands through his goggles. "Of course that rat forgot to tell me something in advance," he grumbled. "How heavy does it feel?"

Izuku bounced his arm slightly. "No different than the bat I had last year, and as far as I know it was normal. I can carry it without noticing."

Eraserhead hummed. "It seems those lessons I gave you kids about restraint didn't work," the hero noted as well, gazing aside at the mess the green-haired teen had made; to that, the teen soured.

"I've not figured out how to do that willingly. It's either my all or it's nothing."

"It's pulling your punches. It should be no different from the rest of your muscles, given all it is, is strength and durability." The hero whipped his capture weapon at the green-haired teen's face, blocked when Izuku raised his bat to become tangled instead. Unwilling to let it go, the quirkless teen was pulled into the man's range, throwing jabs and swings of his fists that the teen had to block with his forearms. He tried pressing his bat into the hero's space, only for the trained adult to spin past his swing and elbow Izuku in the ribs, staggering him to the side. "You know how to pull your punches, right? All that action in the Sports Festival wasn't you punching with all the intent you could?"

It wasn't, Izuku would verbalize for his teacher, and he knew how to pull his punch and not hit with the full force of his strength; stop thinking of Garou's words and stop trying to output what he knew he had. He couldn't find the control in him to throw a swing and not feel his all behind it, but it came at the cost of any power whatsoever. With his teachers already busy with the security of the school the past week after his targeted attack, he hadn't thought to bother them for advice on what to do — training class was mostly hands-off to begin with. He had relied on his friends enough for their guidance, help and suggestions; he could figure it out from there, right?

Instead of catching the bat when Izuku swung again, Eraserhead caught his hands, even when he was pushed back in the arc of the teen's swing and shoved against a cubicle wall. He twisted their hands together — a motion that finally forced Izuku to drop his bat and crack the floor where it landed — and shoved Izuku back with his shoulder. "You don't have the same output of strength without the bat, I know. You just haven't been training without it. But you did for the Festival. How does it hold up?" The hero didn't wait for an answer as he came in with another punch, and Izuku learned just how well-trained in hand-to-hand the man really was.

He could block the man's fists with ease, but the hero seemed to have a form for boxing with the way he swung. And Izuku had fought faster, and knew how to get around it. When Aizawa threw a punch, a hand of his own would rise to meet it, push it along past his body and attempt to strike back. The man could block, too, though he more visibly winced when he caught Izuku's fist in his hand, or when his knuckles scraped the adult's ribs when he stepped aside a different punch. Unlike the green-haired teen, he also knew how to kick; more specifically, he knew how to slide his legs through Izuku's and trip the teen onto his back, while he knelt down with a knee pressed on the boy's chest.

"You've still got some strength to you," the hero noted gruffly, sparing only a brief glance up at the tangle of vines and blood that continued to fight. "But you're not doing enough. What have you been training for?"

Izuku grunted as he tried to push back against the weight atop him. "I've been trying to control my strength," he heaved out, unable to push the hero off of him.

"Where did it go?" the man questioned reasonably, and the quirkless teen snapped his mouth shut knowing the man noticed it too. "You've been working out how to call on your power, not control it. There's a difference, and not understanding that has led you to this."

"Well I've been using control as a blanket term—" His muttering was cut off by a shift in his teacher's weight.

"You're going to fail the exam at this rate, Midoriya. I know you're better than that. You shared with the class the information you had to go off of, and you formulated a new plan to approach us just before the exam began. Yes" — Aizawa interrupted his rising eyebrows — "we were watching, and no, we didn't make our plans around that. You have a good understanding of situations and hero work protocol; it is your execution that should be on par."

The green-haired teen gave a half-hearted laugh. "Why is every compliment I get laced with criticism?" Of course he understood the practice of hero work — he spent the past ten years as a fan who studied and analyzed their work from the outside, and here he was, at a school in which he had gotten to practice it all in the field. He always knew working on the field was going to be where he struggled most, and when he finally found the power in him to topple buildings the struggle became how he could use it safely, as a hero would.

Above him, the ceiling fizzled, and recognized the bubbles forming as he looked to his homeroom teacher. "Acid," he warned, and the man made the slightest movement with his head before he jumped back and dragged Izuku with him. The tile above them collapsed, and Ashido fell onto the floor where they were moments ago. She took notice of them and swung her hands at their teacher, but the hero's hair was already standing on end.

"You need to be mindful of breaching through layers with your acid, Pinky," Eraserhead scolded her. "You can't—!" Taking a cue from his fight in the third-year classroom, Izuku snapped a knee into the hero's side and shoved him off. He dove for his bat while Ashido climbed the desks to vault out of their teacher's sight, but both teens were hit by a wave of blood that slammed them against the wall.

Vlad King walked over, and behind him floated a blob of red and green fighting each other as Shiozaki struggled to break free of his quirk. The white-haired hero shoved her against the wall beside them too, and her vines ceased to move as Aizawa's hair rose into the air.

"I can hear you from across the room, Shouta," the blood-controlling hero berated the other man, forehead stressed with a visible tick-mark. "This is supposed to be an exam, not a lesson. We're testing them, not teaching them. This better not be favoritism for your students!"