Yet again, the students of Class 1-A found themselves under attack by villains; however, this time, Class 1-B was caught in the crossfire. The villain before me, the Sandman, mentioned Bakugo; they want him alive. As for the rest of us, we're expendable. That's why I chose to stand my ground. I couldn't care less about some idiotic rule about needing a license to defend oneself. I'm going to protect myself and my friends no matter the cost.
My opponent and I fought a battle of gazes for a moment, something straight out of a black and white samurai flick. Perhaps a spaghetti western would be the more apt comparison. Like the fastest sharpshooter in the west, I fired a web into each of his eyes, blinding him momentarily.
As he peeled my webs from his face, I covered the distance between us in a single step. Mist first and his jaw became acquainted, the contact sounding like a boxer laying waste to a punching bag. The lower half of his face turned to dust, and for a moment, I thought I had killed the guy. That was until his jaw started to reform around my fist, locking me in place. I tried to pry myself free, but my hand felt as though it was trapped in dry concrete.
Before I knew it, a mace made of sand, replacing his fist, collided with the bottom of my jaw, my body then arched to the other side of the walking path, and slammed into a tree. It was the hardest hit I'd ever taken, and I was nearly knocked unconscious from that one hit alone. My Spider-Sense began to warn me of his next attack, but my jaw was still rattling and my legs wouldn't move.
The sound of a sledgehammer hitting my chest must've reverberated throughout the entire forest; I was hit with so much power that the tree behind me snapped in half, which would have been my spine if it weren't for the whole superhuman durability I had going on.
"This ain't like what happened at the USJ, kid. We aren't just some random thugs or low-level goons. We're in a league of our own," I could hear him say through the ringing in my ears. Meanwhile, I could still hear explosions in the distance; Midoriya must've still been fighting. I figured he probably had a few broken limbs at that point, yet he still fought. Of course, he was. And if I were to have given up after a few hard hits, how could I call myself the top student in my class?
I laughed through my pain as Sandman approached me slowly, wearing an arrogant smirk.
"Doesn't matter. You're still a villain just like the others. Villains are weak, that's why they do what they do. Can't even take out a bunch of kids on your own. You need a whole posse, like a coward," I told him. I'd regained feeling in my legs at that point, but my ears and jaw still felt like they were vibrating.
"You got a smart mouth on you, kid. We'll see if you can still talk when your lungs are filled with sand!" He threw a wave of sand toward my face, but I narrowly avoided it with a barrel roll.
I approached him, bobbing and weaving past his attacks like a boxer before sweeping his feet. His legs were destroyed, and he fell on what was left of the lower half of his body. I punched him in the face, removing his head from his body. Then, I kicked him in the chest, reducing him to nothing more than a pile of sand. Despite it all, though, his body began to rebuild.
This isn't going to work. I need to find a way to prevent him from reforming. If only I hadn't overused my Quirk earlier, I could probably just zap him.
"What if we just call it a draw?" I asked him, taking a few steps backward.
His head started to reform, as did the rest of his appendages. His smile was gone; I guess getting beaten up still hurts, at least.
"I'd rather just kill ya," he said, growing his fist to the size of a man before sending it my way. His limb stretched the distance between us, but I was ready for it — there's no way I was going to take a hit like that again.
I jumped over his fist, landing on it and using it as a jump pad to launch myself deeper into the forest.
"Gotta be quicker than that!" I teased, hoping to rage-bait him. Judging by how he turned himself into a cloud of sand and started chasing me through the forest, I'd say the rage bait was successful.
I've been called an insect before because of my Quirk, but the way I jumped from tree to tree through the thick foliage, zigzagging past attacks, I felt more like some rodent, maybe a squirrel. It made me wonder if there was some Squirrel Man out there somewhere, perhaps even a Squirrel Girl, who knows.
What I was certain of, though, was that Sandman was falling right into my hand. What he couldn't see, as I was probably a blur in his vision, was that I was creating yet another construct using my webs. It was a simple construct, far simpler than a gas mask — it was a bucket. Why a bucket? Well, if you want to turn sand into something else, you need extreme heat or a liquid. My electricity was inaccessible, my Quirk was overused from training it all day, so that left only one method to beat this bastard: water.
He and I blasted through an opening in the forest. In one motion, I filled the bucket with water, flipping forward as he chased me from behind. Before he could realize what was happening, I flung that water from the bucket onto his body, completely dousing him. His body, which was once floating as he chased me, fell to the ground like a bag of, well, sand. I watched as he struggled to rebuild himself, his hands turning into goop as he reached out to me.
"Guess you're the Mudman, now, huh?" I jested as I scooped up his body with my bucket made of webs. Ensuring every last drop of it was captured, I used my webs to create a lid to lock him inside. My webs were stronger than steel; I was certain that there was no way he could get out. I'd learned from Midoriya that All Might had similarly beaten a villain right in front of him, using bottles of water instead of a bucket. I figured it must've been a pretty good strategy if All Might used it.
It was then that I could hear Mandalay's voice echoing through my mind; she was using her Quirk to deliver a message across the campgrounds.
"Students of Class 1-A and Class 1-B. You are now authorized to defend yourselves via any means necessary. The student named Kachan is their target. Protect your classmate at all costs."
"Kachan?" I repeated back. "So Midoriya must've beaten his guy and relayed the message to Mandalay. I'm glad he's alright."
I looked down at my bucket of mud. Since it wasn't moving, part of me thought I'd accidentally killed the guy, which I'd prefer not to do.
"Hey, you alive in there, Mudman?" I asked him. There was no response. "If you think I'm going to remove the lid to check on you, I'm not that dumb. Wanna tell me where your buddies are?" Again, there was no response.
Oddest part about it was that my Spider-Sense was going crazy.
A shadow then loomed from behind me, and when I turned around, I saw that Sandman had grown to the size of a building.
"How?" I muttered. I'd captured his entire body into the bucket I held in my hands; at least, I thought I did. My brain began to theorize, and I landed on a single hypothesis on how he could have possibly escaped. It's that he didn't escape anything — his actual being, or his consciousness, must be a single grain of sand. Before I scooped him up, he must've dug that single grain into the ground and rebuilt himself. It didn't matter that ninety-nine point nine percent of his body was in my bucket; that single grain was free.
The kaiju of a man made of sand raised his fist; for the first time in my life, I truly felt like a bug. This was one thousand times scarier than the giant robots UA liked to use on us. Maybe it's because those robots were never programmed to kill us. All I knew for certain was that I may have bitten off more than I could chew. I was always nervous during my run-ins with villains; however, this was the first time I truly felt terror.
I have to run.
But I couldn't. This lake was his domain, its sands bending to his every will.
"You're a smart kid," he told me. "It's too bad, you'd have made a great member of our team had you not been deluded into being a hero!"
I tried to jump out of the way, but my legs were being sunk into the sand. All I could do was brace for the impact. He slammed his fist, but I caught it with both hands, my body digging deeper into the sand.
"Deluded? If anyone is deluded, it's you!" I yelled, struggling to fight back against his hand. The sand around my feet still consumed me, my body continuing to sink as if I were stuck in quicksand. "How could anyone be against the idea of saving lives! How could someone like you even exist! Why attack heroes? What has a hero ever done to you!?"
Sandman's fist still pressed against me as he started to speak, his voice trembling the Earth. "That's the thing, a hero hasn't done shit for me or to me. I do this for the money. It's my job. Kill, maim, kidnap. Name the price and I'll do it."
"With a Quirk like yours, you could've made money being a hero. You could be saving people!" I fought back, still pushing his hulking fist with my palms.
"Where I'm from, kids don't get to dream about being heroes. Ain't a single hero from Kamagasaki. Not a hero in sight when you walk the streets either. Not even All Might would step foot in that dump." He scoffed. "Be a hero? Save people? Who was there to save my mother? Who was there to save me when I was nine years old, living on the streets?"
I watched as a smile stretched across his giant face. By this point, I was waist-deep in the sand. There wasn't any leverage to help me push against his fist, and I was seeking even faster.
"Who's gonna save you, huh, kid? No All Might. No teachers. None of the other students." He raised both fists and slammed them down onto my head. It felt like I'd gotten hit by a bulldozer going two hundred kilometers per hour, right on the top of my skull. He bashed my skull in again and again, sinking me deeper into the sand until I was neck deep in it. He still wore a smirk, glancing over in the direction Jirou had gone.
"Who's gonna save your little friend? What did you say her name was? Jirou?" With that, he pounded my head into the sand, and my body was completely covered. I started to drown in the quicksand, unable to swim back to the surface.
His words reverberated in my mind. That bit about Jirou echoed the loudest. I wondered if she'd gotten away safely, then I imagined what would happen if he'd found her. Would she die a death like this? Would he fill her lungs with sand as he had proclaimed he'd do to me? My stomach started turning when I inadvertently imagined what it would look like in my head, her corpse tossed aside like trash as sand leaked from her mouth, her lifeless eyes staring at me, wondering why I couldn't save her.
I refuse to lose like this.
Despite having expended all of the electricity within my body, it seemed as though my adrenaline-fueled delirium started pumping my heart in a way that began generating an immense amount of energy. I could feel the power coursing through every last vein in my body as I started quaking in the sand. I supposed Sandman could feel it too, I was certain he could, because the sand started toughening around me. Then I realized that this wasn't his doing at all. As my body was imbued with lightning, the sand around me turned to glass. A burst of lightning pulsed from my body, shattering the glass around me as I launched myself into the sky.
I could see Sandman's eyes widen as I summoned a torrential storm in my hand. Unconsciously, I'd summoned a construct in my hand, a bolt of lightning as if I were the god of thunder himself.
"I will not let you lay a finger on her!" I roared, my voice echoing through the forest.
I launched the lightning bolt at him, hitting him directly in the center of his mass. An explosion of electricity branched toward his appendages, causing miniature eruptions that turned the sand around them into glass. Before long, his entire body had been turned into a glass sculpture, and a look of horror burned onto his face.
"You're just gonna rebuild yourself, I know that, but I also know Quirks have their limitations! You're nothing but a single grain of sand, aren't you!? Turning a grain of wet sand back into dry sand is easy enough, but I bet you can't say the same about turning a single grain of glass back into sand!"
I attached two webs to him before pulling myself toward him, reeling back my fist, imbued with a storm big enough to level a city block. The moment my fist collided with his body, he exploded, and fragments of glass scattered across the forest.
It wasn't until I landed that I realized that my entire body was glowing with a blue and golden aura, as if I'd undergone some old-school anime transformation. My body was trembling, and as the adrenaline died down, my skin felt like it was going to fall off the bone. I reverted to my normal state and fell to one knee, looking around for any living bits of Sandman.
If my one grain theory is true, he's still alive. But it's going to take a while for him to recover.
When I looked around, I noticed that the gas had dissipated. The possessor of the Quirk must've been defeated. Though my body felt like I was going to collapse, knowing that my friends were out there fighting and winning gave me the push to continue forward.