Chapter 3: The First Thaw
The city was chaos.
Explosions bloomed in the concrete canyons as the other examinees unleashed their Quirks. A girl with a cannon for an arm blew a 2-Pointer apart. A boy with a tail like a whip smashed another. And everywhere, the ash-blond boy from the entrance was a whirlwind of explosions and furious shouting, blasting his way through the robots with terrifying efficiency.
Rayan ignored them all. He slipped into a side alley, his movements economical and quiet. The noise was jarring, the bursts of heat from the explosions making his skin crawl. He needed control. He needed quiet.
He found his first target. A 1-Pointer. It rolled toward him on its single wheel, red sensor-eye glowing. "TARGET ACQUIRED."
Rayan didn't slow down. He simply raised his bare right hand as he ran past it and pressed his palm flat against its metal chassis.
There was no sound, no boom. There was only a hush.
A spiderweb of intricate frost exploded from his palm, covering the robot in a fraction of a second. The metal groaned as it contracted under the extreme, sudden cold. The red eye flickered and died. The robot's joints seized, locking solid. It wasn't just covered in ice; the ice had penetrated its internal workings, freezing circuits and snapping delicate connectors. It skidded to a halt, a lifeless, white statue.
Rayan pulled his hand away, leaving a perfect, frosted handprint. He felt the familiar, dangerous pull—the whisper in his mind that told him to let go, to freeze the whole street, to turn the whole city into his own quiet, white kingdom.
He grit his teeth, forcing the power back. Control.
He moved on. Two 2-Pointers cornered him. He didn't panic. He placed both hands on the asphalt between them. The ground itself turned white. A wave of ice surged up their legs, immobilizing them before they could even raise their arms. He was efficient. He was silent. He was racking up points, but he was doing it with the silent lethality of a blizzard, leaving a trail of frozen, inert statues behind him.
He was so focused on his internal battle—use just enough, no more—that he almost missed the scream.
It was a girl's voice, high with panic. "Whoa! Too many!"
He rounded a corner and saw her. It was a girl with a short, brown bob and a kind face, the same one who had stopped the green-haired boy from falling at the main gate. She was backed against a wall by three 2-Pointers. She had tapped one, which was now floating helplessly in the air, but the other two were closing in, their mechanical arms raised to strike. She looked pale and seemed to be fighting nausea.
Rayan's first instinct was to turn away. Getting involved was complicated. His power was an area-of-effect hazard. If he tried to freeze the robots, he might hit her. The memory of his mother's frostbitten hand flashed in his mind.
But as one of the robots lunged, he saw the genuine terror in her eyes. He couldn't just watch.
He didn't have time to freeze them solid. He needed to disrupt.
He slammed his right palm onto the ground. Instead of a wave, he focused. He pushed the cold, not as a killing frost, but as a sudden, slick sheet. A patch of treacherous black ice spread across the pavement directly in the path of the lunging robots.
The first robot's foot hit the patch and its own momentum betrayed it. Its legs went out from under it in a comical, clattering spray of limbs. It crashed hard, giving the girl the opening she needed. She lunged forward, slapped her hand on its chassis, and then on the third one. "Release!" she gasped.
The two robots she had just touched, along with the first one, went floating upwards, then crashed down onto the immobilized one on the ground. She had disabled all three.
She slumped against the wall, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed. She looked over at Rayan, who was standing twenty feet away, his hand still on the ground, a light steam rising from his skin.
"Wow! That was amazing timing! Thank you!" she panted, giving him a wobbly, grateful smile.
Rayan looked at her, then at his hand. He slowly stood up and, turning his back to her, began to carefully pull his glove back on. He didn't want her to see his pale skin, or the vapor.
"Be careful," he said. His voice was muffled by his scarf, coming out flat and devoid of emotion. "Don't get cornered."
He walked away before she could say anything else, leaving her staring at his retreating back, her gratitude turning into slight confusion at his cold, abrupt departure.
He needed to get away. That interaction was too much. His control had been fine, but the stress of it... he felt the chill inside him stirring again.
He spent the next few minutes taking down robots in an isolated part of the city, rebuilding his mental walls. He had 45 points. It was a solid, respectable number. It was probably enough. He should find a place to hide and wait out the clock. He just wanted this to be over.
Then, the ground shook.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a tremor, like a footstep from a giant. A shadow fell over the entire street.
Rayan looked up, and his blood ran cold—colder than even he could make it.
The Zero-Pointer.
It was colossal. A moving skyscraper of green metal and menace. It dwarfed the buildings, its massive arm swiping and obliterating the top floor of an office block as if it were cardboard. The ground shook with every step.
"That's... that's too big," Rayan whispered, his breath catching in his throat.
His immediate, visceral reaction was to run. This was what Present Mic had warned them about. It was an obstacle, not a target. Around him, everyone else had the same idea. The street filled with panicked examinees fleeing for the gate.
Rayan turned and ran with them. This was not his fight. This couldn't be his fight. To stop something that big, he would have to let go. He would have to unleash a glacial-level event. He would freeze the entire city block, and everyone in it, including himself. It wasn't possible.
He was halfway down the street when he heard a cry. A different cry. Not panic, but pain.
He stopped. He looked back.
It was the brown-haired girl. The one he had helped. She was on the ground, trapped. A large piece of concrete debris had fallen and pinned her leg. She was struggling, but it was too heavy.
And the Zero-Pointer was turning toward her.
Rayan froze in place. He stared. His heart hammered against his ribs. Help her. You have to help her.
But... how? He couldn't get close enough to just freeze the robot's foot—it was too large, too high. If he created an ice wave, he would hit her. He would bury her in the same ice he used to stop the machine. He would give her the same scars his mother had.
He was trapped by his own power, useless.
No. I can't. I can't risk it. I can't hurt her.
He took a step back, shame and fear warring within him. He was a coward. He knew it.
It was in that moment of frozen indecision that he saw it. A green blur.
It was the muttering boy. The nervous one from the auditorium. While everyone, including Rayan, was running away, this boy was running toward the robot. Toward the girl.
Rayan watched, dumbfounded, as the boy crouched. The air around the kid seemed to shatter. "DETROIT... SMASH!"
The boy launched himself into the air, a hundred feet, two hundred feet, a green rocket ascending toward the robot's face. He pulled back his arm, and with a cry that seemed to rip from his very soul, he punched the robot.
The resulting shockwave was unlike anything Rayan had ever experienced. It was a physical explosion of wind. Rayan threw up his arms to shield his face as the entire robot's head caved in, and the machine's body, all ten thousand tons of it, was blasted backward, collapsing into a heap of scrap metal.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Rayan stood in the ruined street, the wind from the punch whipping his hair. He stared up. The boy was now falling, his arm and legs broken and flailing uselessly. He saw the brown-haired girl, now free from the rubble, slap the falling boy, using her Quirk to make him float just before he hit the pavement.
Rayan didn't move. He just stared at the wreckage. At the boy, now broken on the ground. At the girl, collapsed and sick.
He had 45 points, earned through careful, cold, surgical precision.
That boy had zero. And he had just done the most heroic, and the most insane, thing Rayan had ever seen.
The buzzer sounded, signaling the end of the exam.
Rayan slowly, numbly, put his other glove back on. He felt a profound, aching hollowness in his chest that had nothing to do with his Quirk.