MHA: Lust Quirk

The first test was the fifty-meter dash.

Iida went first. Engine Quirk in his calves, blue exhaust flames from the pipes in his shins, 3.04 seconds. The tracking device beeped the number and Iida stood at the finish line adjusting his glasses like the result was merely adequate. The kid was going to be a nightmare about punctuality.

Bakugo went next. Explosions from both palms, launching himself forward in a low arc that left scorch marks on the track. He landed hard, turned around, and stared at the rest of the class like he was daring someone to beat his time. Nobody did.

Ryo waited in the middle of the pack. Stretched his shoulders. Rolled his neck. Watched.

Tsuyu crouched at the starting line, knees splayed wide, fingers spread flat on the ground. She looked like she was about to catch a fly, and then she pushed off and her body uncoiled in a single motion, low and fast, legs driving with a power that didn't match her size. Frog musculature. Inhuman and hard to look away from, but half the class wasn't watching because Mina Ashido had just stepped up to the line.

Mina didn't run. She dropped into something that looked like the start of a breakdance move, hands out, feet together, and then acid pooled under her soles and she slid. The entire fifty meters. Low, fast, hips shifting for balance, arms out, grinning the whole way. She came in well under five seconds and she did it looking like she was having the time of her life. A few people actually clapped.

Ryo made himself focus. His turn. He ran it straight, no Quirk enhancement visible, and came in at 5.8 seconds. Unremarkable. Exactly where he wanted to be.

The body wanted to go faster. He could feel it in his legs, that engine of stored strength from the original's two girlfriends and whatever they'd done together in junior high, a reserve he hadn't earned and couldn't fully explain. He didn't let it out.

Mid-pack. That was the strategy. Strong enough that nobody questioned the "Enhancement" Quirk. Weak enough that Aizawa didn't start asking how an orphan with a basic physical augmentation was outperforming kids with flashier abilities. The goal today was to be forgettable. Ryo Hayami, Seat 19, enhancement type, decent scores. Move along.

Grip strength: 78 kg. He could've cracked the device. He gave it a firm squeeze and stopped.

Standing long jump: 4.2 meters. Solid. Nothing special. Bakugo detonated himself across the entire sand pit. Todoroki froze a ramp and slid. Ryo jumped with his legs and landed normally, like a person who was good at jumping and nothing more.

Side steps: middling. Sit-ups: middling. Seated toe-touch: he was actually flexible, which was annoying, because it was the one test where holding back felt stupid. He reached past his toes by a few centimeters and stopped there.

Through all of it, Aizawa stood off to the side with his phone-device, recording scores. He didn't react to anyone. Shoji registered 540 kilograms on the grip test with his six arms and Aizawa recorded the number like it was a homework grade. The man taught like he was filling out a tax form.

But twice during the side-step test and once during the long jump, Ryo caught Aizawa's eyes on him. On his face, on whatever his face was doing while everyone else's was tight with effort or bright with showing off. Ryo's face, he suspected, was doing nothing. Because nothing about this was stressful. He knew every Quirk in this field. He knew who was going to win and who was going to lose and he knew the whole thing was a bluff. His body language was wrong for a first-year under threat of expulsion, and Aizawa was a man who noticed wrong body language for a living.

Ryo made himself frown during the next test. Tried to look like he was trying. He wasn't sure it worked.

Ball throw.

This was the big one. One at a time, a softball from inside a marked circle, Quirks allowed. Aizawa held up a phone-like device to track the distance.

Bakugo first. He palmed the ball, wound up like a pitcher, and screamed "DIE" at the top of his lungs as he threw. The explosion cracked the air. 705.2 meters. He turned around with a grin that was mostly teeth.

"Die?" Ryo said, to nobody in particular. Kaminari, three spots behind him in line, snorted.

Todoroki threw next. Ice and efficiency, no screaming, no wasted motion. His ball went far. He didn't seem to care exactly how far.

Then Ochaco.

She walked up to the circle with her usual bounce, pressed all five fingertip pads against the ball, and tossed it. Gentle. Underhand, almost. It left her hand and went up. And kept going up. And didn't stop.

The tracking device in Aizawa's hand flickered. Then it displayed a single word: INFINITY.

Ochaco pressed her fingertips together. Her face went green. For a second Ryo thought she was going to throw up right there on the field, and she clearly thought so too, because her cheeks bulged once and she swallowed hard and pressed a hand to her stomach. Then she straightened, smiled, and said "I'm okay!" to nobody who'd asked.

There it was.

Zero Gravity. He'd known the number. He'd known the Quirk, had seen it animated, understood the mechanics. But watching it in person was different. She'd removed gravity from a physical object by touching it with her fingers. The ball was still going. It was probably in the upper atmosphere by now. And she'd done it so casually, like anyone could just reach out and cancel gravity with their fingertips.

Her Quirk was absurd. One of the most versatile abilities in this entire class and she was going to spend the first year thinking she was behind Bakugo and Todoroki because she couldn't blow things up. He already knew she'd come up with the Meteor Storm strategy against Bakugo on her own, no help, and still lose, and still not cry about it, and he knew all of that and it didn't change the fact that right now, on this field, standing in this stupid blue tracksuit with her hand on her stomach and her cheeks still faintly green, she was grinning like she'd won a prize.

The tracksuit pulled across her shoulders when she raised her arms. Brawny build, Horikoshi had written. He'd thought that was an odd word choice for a character design note. Standing here, he understood it. She wasn't delicate. She was sturdy. Strong shoulders. Thick wrists. The kind of build that made you think she'd grown up carrying things.

She had. Her parents ran a failing construction company. She'd probably been hauling debris since she could walk.

Ryo looked away before he spent too long on it.

His turn. He stepped into the circle. Palmed the softball. It was lighter than he expected, or his hands were stronger than he'd calibrated for.

Sixty-seven meters. He threw it with about a third of what the body could do, maybe less. The number appeared on Aizawa's device and Aizawa's eyes moved from the screen to Ryo's face. Briefly. Then back to the screen.

Ryo walked back to the group. Kaminari gave him a sympathetic wince. "Tough draw after infinity girl, huh?"

"Yeah," Ryo said. "Real ego check."

It wasn't. But Kaminari didn't need to know that.

More throws. Kirishima. Sero. Tokoyami, whose Dark Shadow extended from his body and hurled the ball with an arm that shouldn't have existed. The class was settling into a rhythm of watching, reacting, and comparing when Midoriya walked into the circle.

The class got quiet. Not because of Midoriya. Because of Bakugo, who'd gone rigid the instant Midoriya picked up the ball, jaw locked, eyes tracking every movement like he was waiting for something specific and ready to be furious about it.

Midoriya wound up. Threw.

The ball went nowhere. It left his hand with the energy of a regular throw and dropped into the grass about forty meters out. No Quirk. No enhancement. Nothing.

Because Aizawa had erased it.

Ryo saw it happen. Aizawa's eyes had gone red, the dark circles vanishing as his irises lit up. His hair lifted off his shoulders, floating like there was a breeze nobody else could feel. The scarf around his neck, the Capture Weapon, drifted loose. For about three seconds, Aizawa looked like the reason villains didn't come to this part of the city at night.

"If you're planning to break yourself on every throw," Aizawa said, walking toward Midoriya with that flat voice that somehow got flatter when he was actually serious, "you'll be a liability. Not a hero. A problem for the people trying to save you."

Midoriya went white. Then his mouth pulled tight like he was about to cry. Then his jaw set. He looked down at his hand. The hand that still worked. The hand Ryo had watched flex and unflex on the sideline ten minutes ago.

Aizawa blinked. The red faded. His hair dropped. "You have one more throw."

Midoriya picked up a new ball. Ryo already knew what was going to happen and he watched it anyway.

The windup. The throw. At the last possible instant, Midoriya channeled everything into the tip of his right index finger and the ball rocketed off his hand with a crack that sounded like a small-caliber gunshot. 705.3 meters.

His finger was purple. Swollen to twice its normal size, bent at a wrong angle, clearly shattered. He was holding his right hand with his left and his teeth were clenched and his eyes were wet and he said, "I can still move."

The class erupted. Bakugo launched forward screaming something about hiding Quirks. Aizawa caught him with the scarf in one motion, wrapped him mid-charge, and held him in place without looking away from his phone.

"Stop making me use my Quirk. I have dry eye."

Ryo watched all of it with his arms crossed. He'd watched this scene before, on a screen, in a language he didn't speak, with subtitles he'd sometimes skipped because he was eating. Now Midoriya was right there and his finger was actually broken and Bakugo was actually restrained and Aizawa actually looked like he hadn't slept since the last time someone tried to kill him, which for all Ryo knew was last Tuesday.

The remaining tests finished. More sit-ups. The long-distance run. Ryo placed mid-pack in everything. He could have done a lot more. He kept the lid on and the lid held.

Results appeared on Aizawa's device, projected for the class. Yaoyorozu first. Todoroki second. Bakugo third. The names went down. Ryo was fourteenth. Comfortable. Anonymous. Midoriya sat at the bottom, twentieth, and the color left his face.

"And the person in last place," Aizawa said, and paused long enough for Midoriya to stop breathing, "will not be expelled. It was a logical ruse. To get you to perform at your best."

Midoriya's knees buckled. Ochaco caught his elbow. Iida started lecturing someone about school policy. The tension broke and half the class started talking at once.

The foreknowledge was holding. Every beat and every outcome exactly where he remembered it. Which meant the rest of it was coming too.

Aizawa dismissed them. The class drifted toward the locker rooms in clusters. Ryo hung back. He was doing it again. The catalog. Running through each classmate like entries in a database, pulling up what he remembered from the anime, cross-referencing with what he'd just seen in person. Yaoyorozu, Creation Quirk, recommendation student, first-place finish, going to choke at the Sports Festival because she doesn't trust herself. Todoroki, Half-Cold Half-Hot, won't use fire, Endeavor's son, that scar is from his mother and a kettle of boiling water and he's going to carry it for years. Asui was blunt as a shovel and would nearly die at USJ and asked to be called Tsu but only if she trusted you.

He stopped.

Tsuyu was ahead of him, walking with Ochaco. She said something and Ochaco laughed, and Tsuyu's mouth moved in that wide, slow way, almost a smile but off, like her face had a different vocabulary for the same expressions everyone else used. A sleeve of her tracksuit had ridden up and the skin of her forearm was pale and slightly textured, smoother than it looked but still different from human skin. She adjusted the sleeve without looking at it, a motion that was so practiced it had to be automatic.

He'd been about to catalog her. Frog, cold-blooded, vulnerable to dehydration, useful at USJ, romantic potential: patient approach.

She was walking next to her classmate and laughing and fixing her sleeve.

She's not a wiki article.

He turned toward the locker room. Jiro and Momo were walking ahead of him, close enough that he could hear Momo explaining why the ranking weighted certain tests higher. Jiro's jacks swung at her sides. The left one hung a few inches longer than the right, angled back toward Ryo, the tip hovering at chest height.

He watched it for three steps. The jack held steady, pointed at his chest like an antenna tuned to a specific frequency.

Jiro was talking to Momo about the test scores, voice even. But she had a furrow between her eyebrows that hadn't been there an hour ago.