The gate to Battle Center E jerked aside with a clang that rattled my ribs. Half the examinees erupted like launched arrows. I didn't. I set one hand on the satchel strap, felt the weight of twenty chances bump my hip, and reminded my feet that panicking counts as a choice.
I can't win a damage race. Not against kids who could turn the air into knives or punch trucks into confetti. So I'll out-save them.
"Go, go, go!" Present Mic howled from the speakers above the gate. The sound bounced down the street like rubber bullets.
I slipped in at a measured pace, letting the sprinters eat the centerline while I hugged the storefronts. The fake city was too clean: glass like teeth, signage with brands that didn't exist, alleys that hid nothing until they hid everything. I thumbed the satchel flap, felt the slick edge of a scroll's rim under leather, and kept moving.
The first 1-pointer rolled out from behind a mailbox, chassis scuffed, arm raised to swat. It saw me and bleeped like an angry microwave.
"Gale," I said.
The satchel whispered against my palm. A repulsion scroll slid into my fingers like it had been waiting for that exact word. I popped it one-handed. A compact pulse of force punched the bot across the street into a wall hard enough to dent its casing. Sparks coughed from its joints. It jittered, fell, twitched. Point scored. One. The number didn't matter. The satchel's weight did.
A boom went off three blocks over. A slab of façade peeled and fell. A boy vaulted it, clothes flapping. Another kid—girl with hair in twin buns—threw a crescent of ice that bit a 2-pointer in half. I watched a suit-clad examinee jump, knees hissing with engine light, and kick a 3-pointer hard enough to leave a boot print. The robot went down like an insult.
Racing them to kills would be like trying to outshout Present Mic.
I cut left into a narrower street, eyes mapping fire escapes, door handles, the distance to the next corner. The ground vibrated under distant treads. A 2-pointer shouldered out from a garage door ahead—saw a boy on his back, legs scrambling like a flipped beetle—and wound its arm.
"Aegis."
The barrier scroll kissed my hand. I snapped it open and threw the spell in front of the kid like slamming a car door. A curved plane bloomed—clear, humming. The robot's strike smacked the shield with a concussive thud and skittered off.
The kid stared up through the shimmer, eyes huge.
"Up," I said. "On your feet."
He flailed upright. Blood striped his forearm. The robot backed up to reevaluate, servos whining.
"Bind."
The paralysis scroll slid into my fingers. The beam that lanced out wasn't showy; it was a narrow line of structured will. It touched the bot's knee assembly and froze the motor. The 2-pointer stuttered, locked a second, two—
"Take it!" I barked.
The kid didn't need more. He scrambled, slammed a metal pipe into the bot's exposed joint with a yell that sounded like he'd been waiting his whole life to make it. The robot folded. He stared at the wreckage, surprised at his own success.
"Alleyway," I said, already folding the empty scroll paper and jamming it into the satchel's trash pocket. "Two blocks down, left side, blue door. It's clear—"
"R-right!" He started to bolt, then hesitated. "Your qu—"
"Later!" I had already turned.
Points didn't stop bleeding.
A scream tore from the next street over. I sprinted. A girl lay on her side, foot trapped beneath a chunk of decorative concrete that had jumped from a ledge to be unhelpful. Her friend knelt beside her—white-knuckled, useless—while a 1-pointer angled toward them like it could smell panic.
"Curtain."
The satchel obeyed like a trained dog. Smoke blossomed from the scroll I cracked and rolled across the street, thick, sudden. The robot paused, optics confused. I dove into the gray and planted my hands under the slab.
"Lift," I said.
The levitation scroll's model slid through muscle and bone into the stone, and the slab went light in my grip, as if it had remembered it was just molecules and could be persuaded. I heaved; it rose an inch. The girl gasped, yanked her foot free. I let the stone drop the instant her ankle was clear and the levitation snapped with it, the weight thudding back to earth.
I snapped a Mend scroll open without taking my eyes off the alley mouth. I pressed my thumb into the cut along her shin and pictured edges closing, blood deciding it had better places to be than outside. The model hummed, low and domestic. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. The pain changed shape.
"Can you stand?" I asked.
She nodded, eyes wet. "Y-yes—thank you."
"Blue door," I said. "Two blocks."
They vanished into smoke, a pair of shadows going the right direction.
I moved. That was the only verb that mattered.
A sign groaned. I looked up. The bracket holding a metal restaurant sign gave way with comic timing and gravity stopped joking. "Aegis." The shield caught it; the impact rang through my shoulder like a tuning fork. I shoved with the barrier's plane until the sign slid off to the side and smashed safely into a flowerbed trying too hard.
"Gale." Scaffolding that had decided to imitate a guillotine got persuaded into a safer angle. "Lift." A beam pivoted enough that a broad-shouldered examinee could yank his teammate free. "Mend." Bandage adhesive wouldn't stick to sweat; magic didn't care.
"Left stairwell!" I shouted through a mouth-mask of dust at one point, when two kids looked ready to sprint straight into a 3-pointer's happy arms. "Stairwell!"
They pivoted. The 3-pointer roared at their absence and stomped a streetlamp instead.
The satchel's weight lightened click by click as the fight turned into a marathon. Twenty to eighteen. Fifteen. Eleven. I kept two Aegis in reserve, counting them like oxygen tanks. Jacket spares remained tucked in cotton on my ribs, insurance I could feel with my skin.
In a narrow alley, two 1-pointers boxed in three examinees who had discovered that an alley is a bad place to fight things designed to fill alleys.
"Burst."
The flashbang scroll tore itself into light and sound. Even with my head turned and eyes squinted, the world went white and then red, a sound like a sheet of metal being ripped right next to my ear. The bots jittered, blind.
"Ignite."
Fire Bolt wasn't elegant. It was a scalpel I lied to by calling it a knife. I shoved it into the first bot's knee; metal glowed, then slumped. The 1-pointer crumpled. "Gale!" The second toppled backward into a pile of garbage bags that burst like confetti.
"Go," I said to the trio. The oldest nodded, grabbed the youngest by the collar, and dragged him the correct way.
A glancing shot of debris clipped my shoulder as I cut back to the main drag; I almost ate pavement. The satchel strap bit. "Watch it!" someone yelled. "Sorry," I said, to the world, to myself, to whatever part of me kept waiting for a teacher to tell me to stop running in the hall.
By the time I hit the next intersection I was sweating through my shirt. My breath had gone from "fine" to "present," and then to "noticeable." My hands quivered when I paused behind a delivery truck long enough to inventory by whisper.
"Aegis, two. Mend, one. Gale… one." The satchel hummed with my words like it liked being accounted for. "Lift, one. Curtain… one. Bind, one. Ignite, one. Burst… spent."
"NO IDLING!" Present Mic hollered from somewhere too excited to be legal. "THE VILLAINS WON'T WAIT FOR YOU!"
"Yeah, yeah," I muttered. "Tell them I'm doing my best."
I rounded the truck and almost ran headfirst into a 2-pointer. It swung on instinct. So did I.
"Aegis!" The shield flared and caught the brunt; my feet slid a half step. The impact broke the last of a tremor in my hands. "Bind!" The beam ticked across its shoulder joint and the arm locked mid-swing. I didn't hang around to admire the symmetry. I cut down an alley before its other arm finished deciding where I was.
"Satchel: eight," I told myself. My voice sounded like I'd been chewing dust. "Keep one Aegis. No more optional fights. Rescue only."
The ground shivered under my soles, a vibration that wasn't another 2-pointer stomping in a bad mood. A shadow unrolled across the far end of the street like a cloud deciding to remember it had a body. People shouted in different keys. From over the rooftops, a head taller than buildings trundled into view—featureless face, arms built to forgot finesse in favor of momentum.
Zero-pointer.
Someone screamed. It wasn't me. It was the exactly correct distance between where I was and where I didn't want to go.
I turned to run with the flow of examinees because surviving is also a skill—and then I heard it again, a thinner sound from a side street. Not the panic of the crowd. Not the cheer of someone scoring points. A cry pinned under weight.
It wasn't smart to go toward it. I went anyway.
The side street was a pocket of bad luck. A chunk of decorative cornice lay at the wrong angle across a girl's thigh. She had both hands on it in the useless way people do because they need to be doing something. Another examinee—boy, eyes wild—kept throwing himself at the stone and bouncing off.
"Back!" I snapped as I slid in. "Both of you—back!"
They listened because panic likes being told what to do. I planted my feet and—
"Aegis." The barrier sprang where the cornice threatened to crumble and turn two problems into five. Pebbles bounced off the shield and pinged away into the alley.
"Lift." The slab went uncertain under my fingers. It rose an inch, grinding, then two. The quality of the girl's scream changed: from trapped to shocked. "Gale," I hissed, and the last of the repulsion scrolls shoved the slab that last mean centimeter so I could pivot it. She dragged her leg free with a sob.
"Bleeding?" I asked, breath sharp.
"S-some," she managed.
"Hold on." "Mend." The warmth that gathered under my hand was small and local; this wasn't a miracle. It was the kind of practical care you offer in the spaces where people don't die if you do it right. Blood slowed and then sulked into stopping. Her shin knitted enough that it wouldn't betray her on the first step.
The ground shook again, this time with punctuation.
The zero-pointer turned into the mouth of the side street like a mountain deciding to look for company. It wasn't here for me; it wasn't here for anything except being large and disrespecting architecture. But its foot chose its path and that path included us.
I reached for the satchel and felt absence. The storage nodes were warm, not with power, but with the memory of it. The jacket spares had already gone somewhere and helped someone and didn't plan on coming back.
"Run," I told them both, but the boy had already bolted at the first sight of the thing's shadow. The girl tried to stand. Her leg trembled and said absolutely not. She fell to one knee.
"Up," I said, and braced my shoulder under hers. She was light in the way people are when they can't afford to notice they're heavy.
I reached for a spell that wasn't there. I groped for the start of a model I hadn't stored on anything yet, felt the edge of it—lighten the body, shift the center of balance—and felt it tear. Live-casting was math under a fist. It was threading a needle in a windstorm. The equation just wouldn't hold for longer than a breath, not with my heart throwing itself against my ribs like it hated me.
The zero-pointer's shadow swallowed the alley mouth. Its foot rose.
The satchel couldn't help me. The Tome in my head couldn't help me. For one terrible, clear second, I could walk away and live. The exam would end, and I would wake up tomorrow and go back to a life where boys got to slam me into lockers for fun and no one else knew the smoke patterns I'd drawn in my blood.
Pain lanced through my scar like a hot wire. Not burning, exactly. A pressure, a presence, as if someone had put a finger in the wound and pushed it to see what would happen.
A hiss uncoiled at the edge of my thoughts. Not a voice, not words, not yet—the shape of one. The suggestion of a smile with too many teeth. The idea of a hand offering power the way a cliff offers a view.
Walk away. The thought came in my own voice, generous with logic. She's almost a stranger. You've saved a dozen others. You did your part. No one will know you didn't—
"Shut up," I told myself. Or the absence of anyone else. Or the thing that had followed me across worlds hiding in the scar. My mouth was dry. The air tasted like metal.
I couldn't leave her.
"Get behind me," I said to the girl, surprising myself with how steady it came out. She stumbled back two steps, grabbed a drainpipe, eyes white.
I lifted my hand.
"Don't," I told the thing in the scar, and it laughed-that-wasn't-laughter in the cavity behind my teeth.
The zero-pointer's foot came down.
Something in me… opened.
Red flooded the edge of my sight, not over my eyes, but from a point inside. The world sharpened around the edges like it had been out of focus and I hadn't noticed how merciful that had been. The cut along my jaw from earlier throbbed in time with the scar and then vanished under it.
The words that came out of my mouth weren't Japanese. They weren't English. They were old drawing through a narrow throat, sibilant, coiled, precise:
"Sss—eith'—kar."
I didn't know what I'd said. I knew what it meant.
The magic didn't pour this time. It tore. It clawed its way out through my hand like something desperate to be born. The air twisted around my palm as if it had remembered it could decide things. A line of force snapped into existence and wasn't a line at all, but a bite.
It met the zero-pointer's ankle joint where plates overlapped like cheap scales. Metal screamed. The limb didn't shatter—it separated, peeled like an unwilling lid. Bolts shot free like panicked birds. The foot came down wrong and the world bucked; the zero-pointer listed and slammed into the street with a sound that jammed itself into my spine.
I said another word that had more s than a snake convention and the tearing took the knee next. Armor peeled back like foil around a microwave disaster. Hydraulics popped. The leg folded to the wrong place and stayed, hissing.
The shard—because that's what it felt like now, a shard with opinions—wanted more. It wanted to keep ripping until there was nothing left but edges and noises. The girl behind me made a thin sound that had nothing to do with the robot and everything to do with me.
Somewhere, beneath the roar of power that wasn't mine, the part of me that had drawn perfect circles on bad paper spoke up with a voice like cool water.
Stop now.
I froze in the space between commands.
The zero-pointer's torso groaned. It wasn't going to get up. Not soon. Not here. The alley had become a geometry problem where the solution was leave. The girl's breath hit the back of my neck in hitching bursts. My chest felt like a furnace that had forgotten what off meant.
I closed my fist.
The tearing power snapped away so fast I almost fell. The edges of the world blurred again. Red bled off my vision. The scar burned and then cooled to a throb. My eyes stung. My tongue felt wrong in my mouth, like it had been wearing someone else's shape and had only just remembered its own.
I turned, slow. The girl stared at me silently, mouth parting. She looked grateful the way people look at firefighters. She looked frightened the way people look at storms.
"C-can you walk?" I asked. My voice came out hoarse, rougher than I remembered owning.
She nodded, then glanced at the ruined machine like it might grow back. "Th—thank you," she managed, then swallowed. "How—"
"Run," I said, and didn't trust what else might come out if I gave myself room. I pointed toward the blue door two blocks over. "Safe street. Go."
She limped away, didn't look back until the alley mouth. When she did, it was quick, conflicted, like she wasn't sure if she wanted me to still be there.
I was. I had one hand on the wall because my legs had decided they wanted input on the conversation after all. The satchel hung empty as a mouth waiting for words. My fingers shook, then clenched, then shook again.
"Not your power," I told the wall, the street, the part of me that felt like a borrowed knife. The statement needed to be said out loud so it would have mass. "Never yours."
A horn wound up somewhere in the city, long and final, the sound competitions make when they realize they need to be over. Robots froze mid-motion and then powered down with a chorus of sighs. Examinees yelled victory; others breathed like they'd been under the surface too long. Proctors' whistles cut the air into neat sections.
I pushed off the wall and stood on my own, because that mattered, too. Dust grit my teeth. My heartbeat tumbled in my throat. The alley looked like the inside of a junkyard blender. The zero-pointer lay on its side like a broken god.
Scores? I had no idea. I hadn't farmed 3-pointers. I had hauled bodies and shut cuts. If rescue points were real, I'd put weight on their scale. If they weren't, I would go home with shaking hands and the memory of a voice I didn't want in my mouth.
I turned my head and looked along the roofs, toward where Battle Center B would be, invisible behind buildings I didn't have eyes for. For a second I pictured Izuku, knees pumping, lungs burning, muttering numbers between punches. Then I let the picture go, because right now the only thing I had to carry was the satchel strap and the choice I'd made.
"Examinees, gather at the rally points!" a proctor shouted down the block, megaphone voice cutting clean.
"On it," I said, to no one, and stepped out of the alley into the mess I had chosen to live in.
The scar stayed quiet.
For now.