Masanori Kuroda moved like a cursor across a screen, perfectly centered, eyes fixed on a destination only he could see.
He entered the 1-A classroom first. The air was thick with the scent of lead and the heavy, electric tension of students being forged into weapons. He didn't speak to Aizawa. He simply raised a finger, pointing to two girls.
"Ochaco Uraraka. Momo Yaoyorozu," he said, the Standard Smile firmly in place. "The Principal's Office requires a moment of your time."
Aizawa's eyes narrowed, his hand gripping the edge of his desk, but under the Principal's word it was law in this school. Ochaco stood up instantly, her black training gear rustling, her eyes sharp and devoid of their old light. Momo rose more slowly, her expression clouded with a hesitant, weary caution.
He repeated the process in 1-B, selecting Jurota Shishida, the massive, beast-like intellectual, and Setsuna Tokage, the girl whose lizard-tail splitter quirk made her one of the most versatile tactical units in the school.
He led the four of them not to his office, but to Sector 4. It was a subterranean testing chamber where the walls were made of light-absorbent panels and the floor was a grid of pressure-sensitive sensors. The air was filtered to a cool chill.
Kuroda spoke in a rushed manner, standing on an elevated observation platform. "I simply want to view something. You have one objective, The Core."
In the center of the dark room, a holographic sphere pulsed with a soft green light.
"The rules are simple," Kuroda's voice echoed through the speakers. "Retrieve the Core. However, the Core is surrounded by Impediments. You have three minutes before the Core detonates. Begin."
The test started without a countdown.
Immediately, the chamber changed. Walls of reinforced steel slid from the floor, and simulated "civilians", lifeless, grey holographic figures, appeared in the pathways, blocking the most direct routes. Turrets mounted on the ceiling began to fire low-impact kinetic slugs.
Jurota Shishida didn't hesitate. He transformed into his "Beast" form, his golden fur bristling as he let out a roar of disciplined fury. He didn't charge blindly; he calculated the trajectory of the turrets, using his massive bulk to shield Setsuna Tokage.
Setsuna was a blur of efficiency. She split her body into dozens of autonomous parts, her hands and eyes flying through the gaps in the steel walls. She wasn't looking at the civilians; she was mapping the turret reload cycles. She was a machine of reconnaissance, feeding data back to Jurota. They moved like a single, multi-limbed organism. Jurota smashed through a secondary wall, ignoring a simulated "civilian" trapped beneath the rubble. To him, the objective was the only thing that existed.
Ochaco Uraraka was stunted for a second, surprised at the quickness of the entire thing, not sure with how she should use her quirk yet, but she righted herself and made a quick decision.
She didn't use her quirk to float. She used her new Gravitational Displacement. As a turret fired at her, she touched the floor, creating a "Heavy Zone" that crushed the kinetic slugs into the ground before they could reach her. She found that to be the easiest use of her newfound capabilities thus far.
She moved with a jagged, predatory speed, "falling" forward by leaking gravity toward the Core. She passed a holographic child reaching for help. Ochaco didn't even blink. She stepped on the hologram's shoulder to launch herself higher, her focus singular and cold.
She was catching up. She was becoming undeniable.
Then there was Momo Yaoyorozu.
Momo stood at the entrance, her brow furrowed, her hands creating a complex series of shields and tools. But she was slacking, not because of a lack of effort, but because of an excess of thought. She saw the simulated civilians. She saw the child Ochaco had stepped on.
"Shishida! We have to clear the debris for the non-combatants!" Momo shouted.
"Irrelevant!" Jurota roared back, his voice thick with beast-hormones. "The clock is at ninety seconds! Focus on the Core!"
Momo began to create a series of rescue pulleys and medical kits, her mind trying to solve the "Hero" equation. She was trying to save everyone, trying to fulfill that role.
Kuroda watched from above, his stylus tapping the tablet. On his screen, Momo's Rating was plummeting into the red.
Logical Error, Kuroda noted. The subject is prioritizing non-essential variables over the objective. Her intelligence is being choked by her morality. She is a legacy of the Old Era, no, still this era.
Setsuna's eye, floating near the ceiling, signaled the final barrier. "Uraraka! Now!"
Ochaco touched the final steel wall. She displaced the gravity into the structure itself. The metal groaned as the internal pressure spiked, and then Ochaco snapped her fingers. The wall imploded, the "Heavy Zone" she had built up crushing the barrier into a ball of scrap.
Jurota lunged through the opening, his massive hand snatching the Core just as the timer hit zero.
The lights in the room snapped to a bright, sterile white. The holographic civilians vanished. The turrets retracted.
Jurota reverted to his human form, breathing heavily, his uniform shredded. Setsuna's parts flew back together, her expression one of cool, tactical satisfaction. Ochaco stood in the center of the room, her hands trembling slightly from the gravity-drain, her eyes fixed on the Core.
Momo stood at the back of the room, surrounded by unused medical supplies and shields. She looked small. She looked out of place.
Kuroda walked down the stairs from the observation deck, the Standard Smile as unmoving as stone. He ignored Jurota and Setsuna, stepping past Ochaco to stand in front of Yaoyorozu.
"The objective was retrieved," Kuroda said softly. "Shishida and Tokage performed at a 98% efficiency rating. They understood that in a system of refinement, the 'civilians' are merely noise. Uraraka demonstrated a 94% increase in attack potential. She has learned that the shortest distance between two points is the one you create yourself."
He turned his gaze to Momo. It was a gaze of profound, chilling blankness.
"But you, Yaoyorozu. You spent thirty-four percent of your time-resource creating items that had zero impact on the objective. But..."
He paused.
"That was not wrong."
Momo's eyes filled with a sudden, sharp sting of tears, but she refused to let them fall. "They were people, Principal. Even if they were holograms, the test was designed to..."
"The test was designed to follow an objective, as well as test your minds." Kuroda interrupted. He turned to the other three. "You four have been selected for a specialized extraction mission. By me. You won't get the details yet, but just know you will be with your hero interns that are relevant and due to the trouble that has been coming your way I feel that your mental has still been neglected, and that could lead to a certain lack of care that wasn't reported in you all before."
The air in the room grew even colder. Even Jurota looked surprised. And Uraraka felt a new pressure well up within her as the principals eyes fell to her.
"I am sending you because you represent the new guard," Kuroda continued. "And I am expecting you all to be back in one piece."
Kuroda stood in the center of the silent testing chamber, his hands tucked neatly into his pockets. The harsh, clinical white lights of the room reflected off his glasses, but the smile he wore was different now. It wasn't the frozen, plastic curve from his office, it was something broader, more animated, a look of a teacher who had just seen a student solve a particularly difficult equation.
"Now, before you go back to class," Kuroda began, his voice taking on a melodic, almost playful cadence, "I want to pose a hypothetical to the four of you. Think of it as a final puzzle for the day. A test not of your quirks, but of the people sitting behind the steering wheels of those quirks."
He began to pace a slow circle around them, his footsteps tapping a rhythmic beat on the pressure-sensitive floor.
"Imagine this. You are in the field. You have cornered a villain who holds the location of a ticking bomb in a crowded city center. However, this villain will only speak if you hand over a civilian witness who is currently in your protection, someone the villain wants to kill for personal reasons. If you hand them over, the bomb is defused and thousands live. If you don't, the witness is safe, but the city center is levelled. What is your choice?"
He stopped in front of Momo Yaoyorozu, tilting his head with a curious hum.
Momo didn't hesitate this time. Her voice was steady, though her hands were still stained with the soot of the test. "I wouldn't hand them over. A hero's duty is to protect every life within their reach. If I trade a life for a city, I'm not a hero, I'm just playing with numbers. I would protect the witness and use every second I had left to find the bomb myself, or create the tools necessary to shield the blast."
Kuroda nodded, his smile widening. "The Preservationist Route. Noble. You value the sanctity of the individual above the cold logic of the result. It's a heavy burden, Yaoyorozu-kun. It requires you to be perfect every single time."
He turned to Jurota Shishida.
The beast-like boy crossed his massive arms, his brow furrowing in deep thought. "I would sacrifice the witness," Jurota said, his voice a low, intellectual rumble. "But I would not do it lightly. I would hand them over to save the thousands, but I would consider that witness's death my own personal failure. I would carry that weight for the rest of my life, using the guilt to ensure I never allowed a situation to become that desperate again. It is the duty of the strong to make the hard choices so the weak don't have to."
"The Martyr's Route," Kuroda mused. "Accepting a stain on your soul to keep the world clean. A very 'Beast-like' stoicism, Shishida-kun."
He moved to Setsuna Tokage, who was leaning against a wall, tossing a small piece of rubble in her hand.
"I'd find a third way," she said with a sharp, toothy grin. "I'd split myself. I'd hand over a 'decoy', a part of my own body disguised as the witness, to distract the villain and get the information. While he's busy realizing he's been tricked, I'd have my other parts defusing the bomb and moving the real witness to safety. Why pick A or B when you can rewrite the whole alphabet?"
Kuroda laughed, a genuine, lighthearted sound. "The Subterfuge Route. Clever. You trust your own ingenuity more than you trust the rules of the game."
Finally, he stood before Ochaco Uraraka. She wasn't looking at him, she was looking at the ground, her fingers twitching with a faint, gravitational hum.
"I'd hand them over," she said. Her voice was flat, devoid of the hesitation Momo had shown or the guilt Jurota had promised. "If I have to choose between a city of families and one person, I'm picking the city. Every time. I think it's about the fact that if that bomb goes off, there won't be a world left to protect witnesses in. I'll do the math so nobody else has to die because of my hesitation."
"The Utilitarian Route," Kuroda whispered, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. "You see the forest, not the trees. You've decided that the outcome is the only metric of success."
He stepped back into the center of the group, looking at all four of them. He looked like a coach at half-time.
"Do you see the problem?" he asked, throwing his arms out wide. "Four heroes. Four good people. And four completely different routes. Right now, you are four individuals moving in four different directions. Yaoyorozu is looking at the soul, Shishida is looking at the burden, Tokage is looking at the trick, and Uraraka is looking at the result."
His expression turned serious, the warmth in his voice hardening into a diamond-sharp lesson.
"When you are out there, facing people like shigaraki, those differences will become cracks. If you don't synchronize, those cracks will become canyons. If Yaoyorozu is trying to save a witness while Uraraka is trying to secure an objective, you will trip over each other. And in the underground, tripping is how you die."
He walked toward the exit, pausing at the doorway. He turned back, his face splitting into a wide, weirdly encouraging grin that was almost jarringly out of place in the dark room.
"You are going to be partaking in a very dangerous mission because I believe in your potential to lead the next generation. But you need to find a Common Route. You don't have to agree on the philosophy, but you must agree on the execution. When the pressure is on, I need you to move as one mind, one body, and one will."
He gave them a bright, enthusiastic thumbs up, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
"I expect you all to come back in one piece. Not just for the sake of the mission, but because you're the most interesting students I've had the pleasure of 'refining' yet. Now, get back to class. You have a long night ahead of you, and I want you sharp!"
As they were walking away Uraraka turned back to him to ask if there was anyone else coming from their classes along with their intern agencies.
He smiled and said, "Yes."