Chapter Text
Two hero classes. Three gen ed. Two management. One support. Over a hundred competitors crammed into a single room. We all entered through a big door that closed up behind us, and the only other door was sealed shut, leaving us idling in a dimly lit box. A few students had already started jostling for the space right in front of the exit. Anything to give them an advantage in the first round of the UA sports festival.
"The first round is simple," Jirou-sensei said, the pro hero's voice transmitted from the announcer booth down through a set of speakers in the wall, "It's a race to see who can climb the mountain and reach the peak first. But the water is always rising. If they take too long, they'll get swept away!"
Climbing, height, mountain, water, race. Flight would be good, or some kind of super speed. I got a mole transformation once. That could be useful.
A brief mental tug and both of my eyes filled with the unique tingling sensation of a quirk.
Left Eye: Walls Have Ears. Mebuki can hear anything said in darkness.
Right Eye: Detergent Pores. Mebuki's sweat has cleaning properties, so her clothing will always be squeaky clean!
Immediately the low murmurs of whispered conversations became perfectly clear, like the world was a TV and someone had just turned up the volume.
"Stop pushing!"
"Do you think they'd let me phase through the door before it opens?"
"Wanna go out after this?"
"I'm just going to forfeit. Everyone knows us gen eds don't stand a chance."
"I'm hungry."
"Don't worry, just believe in the me who believes in you!"
"—attacking other students is against the rules," Jirou-sensei continued, her voice distinct enough from the crowd to understand, "but changes to the environment are allowed."
The sudden burst of noise was deafening. I could hear every whispered conversation and quiet pep talk. Too many voices to follow any one thread without some kind of multitasking quirk. I blinked each eye individually to let the quirks switch out and focused back in on the announcer's voice.
"10. 9. 8. 7. 6," she said.
Left Eye: Poke. By poking someone with her pointer finger, Mebuki can drive them into a mindless rage.
Right Eye: Hemophilia. Mebuki can expel blood at a rapid pace from any body part. If she overuses it, she'll get lightheaded.
My right eye twitched out of habit, but I held it back. Normally I would swap out a villainous quirk in a heartbeat to get something more heroic, but right now every second mattered. If it was a race, being able to propel myself with a jet of liquid like that upperclassman with the water quirk could make a big difference. But did I want my first impression to the pro heroes in the audience to be me spraying blood everywhere?
I kept the quirk and let it start building up power, but blinked my left eye to get rid of Poke. Sabotage wasn't my style and Hemophilia would already make me look villainous enough without me driving my classmates into attacking each other.
"5. 4. 3. 2. 1."
Left Eye: Super Metabolism. Anything Mebuki eats is instantly converted to energy. As long as she has snacks, she'll never get tired!
That quirk would be a lot better if I had my hero costume, but the UA gym uniform didn't have any food in it. Unless... Did the blood from Hemophilia count as food? A discreet spurt from my fingertip filled my mouth with a metallic aftertaste but didn't give me any energy, so I blinked Super Metabolism away. Looks like I'd be starting off down a quirk.
"Go!"
The room began to shake as the ceiling split in half and retracted to reveal the sky. The cheers of the crowd echoed from above. I heard a few shouts of surprise from the direction of the supposed exit door when it remained sealed. It must have been a decoy. The real exit was above us.
As if to punctuate my thoughts, ladders unfurled down the walls at regular intervals. Not that all of my classmates needed them. From one moment to the next Shunji was gone as he found a spot to teleport to. One of the 1-A students lit up as his body was covered with arcing golden lightning and he positioned himself in a runner's stance. In an instant, he took off and ran straight up the wall almost faster than I could follow. Meanwhile, Houjo had been growing a pillar of crystal from the ground beneath her ever since the ceiling opened up. Already it'd grown enough to reach the opening where the ceiling once was, and she stepped off of it like an elevator. Another student, not knowing how Houjo's quirk worked, tried to climb the pillar and got pincushioned by the shards when it shattered into pieces.
I sprayed a test burst from Hemophilia from my feet to see if the quirk had charged up enough yet. The blood pushed my gym shoes straight off my feet and sent me a meter into the air before guttering out. I landed with a squish in my now-soggy socks, deeply regretting not taking my shoes and socks off before I used the quirk. Especially since it still needed a few more seconds to get strong enough to propel me out of the hole.
My left eye took that chance to settle into a new quirk. Hopefully it'd be something less gross.
Left Eye: Seed Spitter. Mebuki can spit out seeds that rapidly grow into trees as long as they have soil to grow in.
I felt the tell-tale sensation of my body shifting to accommodate a new quirk. It was a small change this time, nothing but a small swelling in the back of my mouth as a seed formed out of nothing, but I'd never get used to the feeling of my body shifting around like that. It wasn't painful, just uncomfortable. Like a random itch in a place you can't quite reach.
The quirk itself wasn't too useful down here where everything was made out of concrete, but the mountain probably had dirt that I-
Bang!
An explosion right next to me made me flinch. It was one of the students from 1-A, the girl with cannons instead of knees. It looked like she was trying to use the recoil to fly out like Ground Zero, but instead she face-planted onto the ground when the recoil sent her spinning.
I reached out a hand and helped her back up. The sports festival didn't have rescue points like the entrance exam did, but a hero who only helped people when they'd be rewarded for it was no hero at all.
"Thanks," the cannon girl said, patting out the embers on the edges of the new knee-sized holes in her gym pants, "I've been practicing that move but it's still 50/50 odds of pulling it off right. I think I'll take the ladder after all."
"Good luck. Looks like a crab bucket."
She nodded and moved to join the crush going on at the base of the ladders. I picked up my shoes and took a crouching stance in preparation for my own attempt.
Then I jumped. Even with the muscles I developed since the beginning of the semester I barely made it a quarter of the way up, but the moment before gravity pulled me back down I activated Hemophilia at full force. The jet sent me flying up out of the hole in the ground like a rocket. Distracted by my success, I overshot the ground and ended up several stories in the air by the time I cut the flow.
"And there goes Nandemo Mebuki from class 1-B! Her quirk lets her have any two quirks, but she doesn't get to choose what they are, so you never know what to expect. She used a paint quirk just now to escape the pit, but what's the other one?"
If Jirou-sensei wasn't already my favorite teacher, that would have earned her the spot no questions asked. There was no way she didn't recognize that the red liquid coming out of me was blood, not paint. But this way the world's first impression of me wouldn't be as a villainous quirk user.
But even as I listened to my teacher's words I was taking in as much information as I could. I hadn't planned to go so high, but now that I was up there I could use it as a vantage point to scope out what I'd be facing.
The first thing I saw was the stands. A massive wall of people in every color and body type stretching from the ground up into the sky. I thought I catch a glimpse of Hurricane but everyone in the crowd blended together. A few were waving flags and holding signs cheering for specific students, probably family members and friends. For better or worse, we were all unknown to the public at large right now.
I sent a brief spurt of blood out of my hand to spin me around toward the arena. Jirou-sensei had called it a mountain, but it looked more like an enormous wedding cake. Three cylindrical pillars of stone and dirt stacked on top of each other, each narrower and taller than the last.
The final layer was so tall I couldn't see the top even from my vantage point up in the air, but I did see a waterfall. It poured off the edge of the top layer down the side until it collided with the surface of the middle layer, where it kicked up a heavy mist with its impact. Through the mist I could see blocky silhouettes that I recognized as the UA testing robots lying in wait. A combat challenge.
Further down, the outside of the middle layer was covered in colorful handholds like a rock-climbing wall. That's where I caught sight of Shunji as he teleported up three handholds in rapid succession before stopping to catch his breath on an outcropping. He was in first place, and I wished him luck in keeping himself there. His teleportation quirk was powerful, but tired him out fast. Our homeroom teacher had hammered it into his head that heroism was a marathon, not a sprint, but from how heavily he was panting it didn't look like the message had sunk in.
Unlike the straight vertical walls of the top and middle layers, the bottom layer was a spiral ramp. It started off at ground level before curving around the bottom of the second layer, stopping just where the second layer's handholds started. One student was trapped in an oversized beartrap and, as I was watching, another fell into a pit covered with a fragile cover of dirt. Traps to slow down the front runners. Students who passed by later would be able to avoid the traps that had already been sprung.
At that point, I was two-thirds of the way back to the ground and rapidly speeding up. I let out a short burst of blood from my feet, not enough to send me back up, but just enough to slow me down to a more manageable speed. Then I did it again, and a third time, and then I crashed down onto the ground. My legs ached from the impact, but nothing was broken. Definitely a big improvement over the time I dislocated my hip with a spring-leg quirk.
Swaying a bit, I lowered myself into a seated position and took the opportunity to put my shoes back on. They might have been bloodsoaked, but there were enough loose pebbles and rocks scattered around to make going in just my socks a bad idea.
I now had a good sense of what this race would entail. I just needed to find the right quirks to win.