4 – Costumes
Ryo walked into Classroom 1-A on muscle memory and yesterday's Quirk discovery sitting in his skull like a rock he couldn't put down. He'd slept well. The body had slept well. Whether those were the same thing was still an open question.
Aizawa was already there, looking exhausted, which was how he always looked. He told them their hero costumes had arrived and to head to Ground Beta in full gear. Then he left, presumably to go die somewhere in his sleeping bag.
The locker room was chaos. Twenty kids who'd never worn anything more tactical than a school uniform trying to figure out clasps and buckles and support gear they'd only ever drawn on a design sheet. Kaminari's jacket was on backwards. Kirishima couldn't find his second gauntlet. Sero was tangled in his own tape.
Ryo's costume was simple enough that it took about three minutes. Black compression suit, tight, showed every line of whatever muscle the body had earned from its two ex-girlfriends. He tried not to think about that. Dark gray armored vest over the top, reinforced panels at the chest and back. Forearm guards with padded knuckle plates because he punched things and liked having intact hands. Combat boots with grip soles. No mask. No helmet.
He looked at himself in the locker room mirror. Black, tough, done. He looked like a guy who showed up to hit people and didn't feel the need to advertise anything else about it.
The tunnel leading out to Ground Beta was long, concrete, lit by fluorescent strips. Twenty students in hero costumes walking toward daylight. The sound was boots on concrete and fabric shifting and nervous laughter and Iida saying something about posture.
Then the tunnel opened up and the sun hit and the class walked out into Ground Beta.
It was a city. Fake, contained, walled, but a city. Five-story buildings packed together in blocks, streets between them, built so future heroes could practice saving people from things that wanted to eat them. Ryo had seen it on screen. In person it was bigger and quieter and the buildings looked like they'd already been punched a few times.
But the buildings weren't what anyone was looking at.
The costumes.
Bakugo's was all black and orange with grenade gauntlets the size of his torso, and he stood like he'd been born in it. Todoroki's was simple, dark blue, half his body frosted white at the edges. Midoriya's was green, All Might-inspired, the hood with rabbit-ear points that looked a lot less cool in person than whoever drew them probably intended. A mouth guard covered half his face.
Iida had full armor. Actual metal. He looked like a knight who'd been sponsored by a car company.
Tsuyu was in a bright green wetsuit with beige gloves and knee-high flippers, and she looked exactly like someone who was going to jump into water and not come back out for an hour. Practical. Compact. She walked like she always did, low and even, each step placed.
Mina was in a purple-turquoise camo bodysuit with a fur-lined waistcoat and acid-proof boots. The bodysuit was tight and didn't pretend otherwise. She caught Ryo looking and flashed a grin with too many teeth. He didn't look away. She didn't seem to expect him to.
Jiro stepped out of the tunnel and Ryo actually paused. Black jacket over a ripped pale-red shirt, black tights, choker, and boots with speakers built into the soles. Red triangular face paint under her eyes. She looked like she was about to play a set at a venue that didn't check IDs. The punk-rock aesthetic worked on her. The P.E. tracksuit hadn't even hinted at it. Her earphone jacks swung at her sides, loose, and she was fidgeting with one of them the way a guitarist fidgets with a pick.
Ochaco's costume was a navy full-body suit with pink accents, a choker at her throat, gauntlets on her wrists, and knee-high boots. The bodysuit fit close and he registered that fact before his higher functions could intervene, because as of yesterday his Quirk ran on exactly this kind of input. Strong shoulders. Rounded hips. The blush on her cheeks that was always there, permanent, not a reaction.
She waved at him from across the group. He waved back. Normal.
Then Momo walked out of the tunnel.
Her costume was a crimson high-collared sleeveless leotard. The collar went up to her jaw. The front was cut open from her neck to her navel.
That wasn't an exaggeration. The opening ran the full length of her torso, exposing skin from collarbone to waist, held in place by what looked like structural engineering and willpower. Red heeled boots. Double utility belts at her hips. A book strapped to her thigh. Long black hair in a spiked side-ponytail.
Her Quirk was Creation. She materialized objects from exposed skin. More skin meant more surface area for complex objects. The costume was functionally necessary.
He understood that. His eyes were still catching up.
She walked stiffer in this than she did in the school uniform. Chin up. Eyes forward. Shoulders locked at an angle that was less posture and more armor.
A voice boomed across the training ground.
"I AM HERE! COMING THROUGH THE DOOR LIKE A NORMAL PERSON!"
All Might. The guy was huge. Bigger in person than any screen had managed to convey, big enough that Ryo's sense of scale adjusted and then adjusted again. Blue and red and white and yellow, the smile that covered half his face.
Ryo knew what was underneath that. The wound. The missing stomach. This was a man held together by scar tissue and stubbornness who'd chosen to spend his remaining time teaching kids.
He looked at the ground for a second. Then he looked back up.
All Might explained the exercise. Battle Trial. Two-on-two, heroes versus villains. The villain team would defend a payload, a fake nuclear warhead, inside one of the buildings. The hero team's job was to capture the villains with capture tape or touch the payload. Fifteen minutes. Heroes got five minutes to scout before entering.
The teams were drawn by lots. All Might pulled balls from a box.
Team A: Midoriya and Ochaco, heroes. Team D: Bakugo and Iida, villains. First match. Ryo watched Bakugo's jaw lock when Midoriya's name came up and thought, yeah, that was going to go exactly how he remembered.
More draws. Team B, Team E, Team F.
"Team C!" All Might announced. "Villains. Hayami and Yaoyorozu."
Momo turned toward him. He turned toward her. She had about four inches on him in the heeled boots and was already reaching for the book strapped to her thigh.
"Team G! Heroes. Kaminari and Jiro."
Kaminari pumped a fist. "Let's go, Jiro!" Jiro whipped him across the back of the head with an earphone jack without looking at him.
"Don't make it weird, Kaminari."
Ryo watched the exchange and then looked at Momo. She had the book open. It was thick, handwritten, tabbed with colored markers. She was already reading.
The first match happened. Team A versus Team D. Ryo watched it on the control room monitors with the rest of the class, and it played out exactly how he'd expected. Bakugo went berserk. Midoriya broke his arm. Ochaco improvised. It ended with a destroyed building and a green-haired kid unconscious on a stretcher.
Then it was their turn.
The building for their match was a five-story concrete block with narrow hallways and stairwells at each corner. Ryo and Momo had five minutes to set up before Kaminari and Jiro entered. They stood in the payload room on the fourth floor, the fake nuclear warhead sitting between them like a particularly ugly coffee table.
Momo had the book open on the warhead's surface. She'd already sketched a floor plan from the building schematic All Might had provided.
"Kaminari-san's Electrification has a wide discharge range but his control is limited," she said. Her voice was formal and rapid, each sentence landing like she'd rehearsed it. "Indiscriminate discharge will incapacitate himself after one major use. Jiro-san's Earphone Jack provides detection capability through walls and floors. She'll locate us before they enter."
She pointed at the second-floor stairwell on her sketch. "If I place trip wires here and here, connected to smoke grenades I can create, their advance will be funneled. If I then create a secondary barrier on the third-floor corridor, it forces them to approach from the east stairwell, which gives us a chokepoint."
She pointed at four more locations. Described what she'd make at each one. Fallback positions. Contingencies. What to do if Kaminari discharged early. What to do if Jiro detected the trip wires with her jacks. What to do if both happened simultaneously.
She hadn't looked up from the book once.
"The issue," she said, and her pen stopped moving, "is that I'm not certain the smoke grenades will be sufficient to mask our positions from Jiro-san's sonar capability. She could plug into any wall and detect our heartbeats, which would render the-"
"Momo."
She stopped.
"Your plan covers every angle they could come from. The trip wires are smart. The chokepoints are smart. The fallback positions mean even if the first layer fails, the second one catches them. You've already thought of everything Kaminari can do and everything Jiro can do and you've built answers to both."
She was looking at him now. The pen was still in her hand. Her mouth was slightly open, like she'd been about to say the next sentence and it had stalled out.
"You already know how to beat them," he said. "So let's go beat them."
Her shoulders dropped. For a second she stood like a person instead of a presentation.
"I'll set up the second floor," she said. Her voice was the same formal register but the speed had changed. Slower. Steadier. "If you could take a forward position on the second-floor landing, you'd intercept anyone who gets past the first layer."
"Done."
She closed the book. Clipped the pen to her belt. Turned toward the stairwell.
Then she stopped.
"Hayami-san."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you."
She walked down the stairs and the red of her boots disappeared around the corner and Ryo stood in the payload room alone, looking at the floor plan she'd drawn, which was thorough and would have worked even without him there.
From the stairwell, two floors down, he could hear the faint sound of objects materializing. Momo was building.