MHA: Lust Quirk

The apartment was dark and Ryo was hitting air.

Left jab. Right cross. Left hook. The form was bad. He knew it was bad because he threw punches hard and ugly and without any of the mechanics that made it efficient. The forearm guards from his costume were on the kitchen counter. He was in shorts and nothing else, and the bird stain was up there on the ceiling.

It was late. Tomorrow was the USJ.

He stopped punching and stood in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides and ran through it again. He'd been running through it all night, since dinner, which had been rice and the last of the eggs and a glass of water from the tap that tasted like pipes.

Kurogiri. Warp Gate Quirk. Black mist body with a physical core at the neck, metal collar plates. He opens portals that scatter the class into different zones. He's polite about it. He introduces himself like he's hosting a dinner party while depositing twenty teenagers into six different disaster simulations.

Shigaraki Tomura. Decay. Five fingers have to make contact. All five. If even one is lifted, it doesn't activate. He scratches his neck when he's frustrated, which is always, because everything in his life is a game and the game is never going the way he wants. Hands all over his body, including one covering his face. Pale blue hair. Dry lips. Red eyes behind the fingers.

The Nomu. Bioengineered anti-All Might weapon. Shock absorption. Super regeneration. Brain exposed. It doesn't think. It follows orders. Shigaraki says "kill" and it kills. The thing took a United States of Smash and kept standing. No. That was later. At USJ, it took multiple Detroit Smashes and kept regenerating until All Might went beyond his limit.

He needed to remember what it could do and what it couldn't. Shock absorption meant hitting it was pointless unless you exceeded the absorption ceiling, which only All Might could do. Regeneration meant damage healed. But it was slow. Not smart. It only did what Shigaraki told it to do.

All Might would not be there at the start. He'd overused his time limit that morning. He'd arrive late. In the gap between the villain attack and All Might's entrance, Aizawa would fight seventy villains alone and get his arms broken and his face smashed into concrete by the Nomu.

Ryo couldn't stop that. If he tried to intervene too early, he'd have to explain how he knew the attack was coming. If he explained that, every secret he had unraveled.

What he could do: stay near Tsuyu. In canon, Shigaraki reached for her face at the fountain's edge. Five fingers on her cheek. Aizawa erased it in time but only barely. Ryo was going to make sure "barely" wasn't the margin.

He crouched and threw a low combination at nothing. The apartment floor was cold under his bare feet. His right side, where Jiro's Heartbeat Fuzz had caught him during the Battle Trial, had faded from bruise to pale yellow. Almost gone. Just tender enough to notice when he twisted.

Plan: don't reveal foreknowledge. Stay close to Tsuyu. When the warp hits, he'd end up wherever the portals sent him. In canon, the Shipwreck Zone got Midoriya, Tsuyu, and Mineta. He was in Mineta's seat. So he'd probably land in water.

He could swim. That was enough.

The part he couldn't plan for was the Nomu. If that thing turned toward a student instead of Aizawa, he didn't have the output to stop it. Nobody did except All Might. The gap between the Nomu appearing and All Might arriving was the killing window, and the only strategy for that window was don't be where it's looking.

He stopped shadowboxing and went to the sink and drank water from his cupped hands. The face in the bathroom mirror looked the same as it had on day one. Angular jaw, messy black hair, sharp eyes. He was a week into this world and the body still didn't feel entirely his.

Tomorrow, people were going to get hurt. Aizawa was going to get hurt badly. Midoriya was going to break something.

He sat down at the desk. The blank papers were still there from the first night, the pen next to them. He picked up the pen. Put it down. Picked it up again. Drew a rough floor plan of the USJ from memory, the six zones radiating from the central plaza, then crumpled it and threw it in the trash because leaving evidence was still stupid no matter how scared he was.

His alarm went off at 6:30. He was at the kitchen counter with his cheek on his forearm and a glass of water he didn't remember pouring knocked over next to his elbow. His neck hurt. His back hurt worse.

The bus pulled up to the USJ and the dome was even bigger from ground level than it had been from the road. Massive, white, the roof curved like a stadium. The entrance was wide enough to drive two trucks through side by side.

The class filed off the bus in costume. Ryo walked between Ochaco and Kirishima. Ochaco was already talking.

"I can't believe we get to train in here. Tsuyu-chan said the flood zone has an actual ship in it. Like, a full-sized ship. How do they even get a ship inside a building? Do they build the building around the ship? Or does the ship come in pieces and they-"

"I think they just have a really big door," Ryo said.

"That's less fun."

Mina was ahead of them, walking backwards so she could talk to everyone at once, which was a skill that required either perfect spatial awareness or complete disregard for the possibility of walls. She was telling Sero about a dance move she'd seen online. Sero was nodding without listening.

The interior of the USJ was enormous. They walked through the entrance and onto a raised platform that overlooked the entire facility. Six disaster zones radiated out from a central plaza like slices of a pie. Ryo could see them all from up here. The flood zone to the south with its pool of dark water and the hull of a ship breaking the surface. The ruins zone to the northeast, buildings cracked and leaning. The mountain zone to the west, actual rock faces and alpine terrain. The storm zone with its perpetual rain. The conflagration zone, glowing orange at the edges. The landslide zone, slopes of debris.

In the center of it all, a wide plaza with a fountain.

The fountain was running. Water arcing up and falling back. Nothing wrong with it.

Give it an hour.

Thirteen stood at the top of the stairs in a bulky white spacesuit with a rounded helmet. Ryo couldn't see their face. The suit made them look like an astronaut who'd gotten lost on the way to the launch pad and ended up teaching rescue training instead.

"Welcome to the Unforeseen Simulation Joint!" Thirteen's voice was gentle. "I designed this facility myself, and I'm very proud of it. Each zone simulates a different disaster scenario. Today, you'll learn that your Quirks aren't just weapons. They're tools for saving lives."

Aizawa stood behind Thirteen with his hands in his pockets and his capture scarf loose around his neck. He looked bored. He always looked bored. But his eyes were moving, scanning the facility, and Ryo noticed that because he was doing the same thing.

All Might was supposed to be here. He wasn't.

Ryo already knew why. Three street incidents that morning had burned through his time limit. He was in Recovery Girl's office right now while his class walked into the building the League of Villains had chosen for their attack.

"Your Quirks can kill as easily as they can save," Thirteen continued. The class was quiet, listening. Even Bakugo hadn't interrupted. "Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, our powers can take a life. You must remember this."

Good speech. Important speech. Ryo had heard it before. He watched the central plaza instead.

The fountain was still running.

Ochaco was standing next to him. Her shoulder was close to his, not quite touching. She was looking at the disaster zones with her brown eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. Her cheeks were pink. They were always pink.

Thirteen was still talking about rescue priorities when the lights flickered.

Not all of them. Just the ones in the central plaza. The fountain stuttered, water pressure dropping for half a second, then recovering. A hum in the electrical system that shouldn't have been there.

Aizawa's head turned.

Ryo's didn't. He was already looking.

The black portal opened in the center of the plaza like a wound in the air. It started small, the size of a manhole cover, then expanded outward, edges rippling with dark purple mist. Through it came a figure made of the same mist, shaped like a man in a suit but with no face, just yellow eyes floating in black vapor. Metal collar plates around where a neck would be.

Kurogiri.

Behind him, stepping through the portal with the lazy shuffle of someone who'd rather be anywhere else, came a thin young man in a black turtleneck. Pale blue hair, unwashed, hanging past his ears. Hands. Severed hands attached to his body with straps, on his arms, his chest, his shoulders. One across his face, fingers spread over his features like a mask made of dead fingers.

Shigaraki Tomura.

He was scratching his neck with his free hand. The skin there was already raw.

Behind them, the portal widened, and they came through in a wave. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Seventy. Villains of every shape and size, mutant types and emitter types and people who just looked like they wanted to hurt something. They spread across the plaza like water filling a basin.

Aizawa was already moving. Scarf unwinding. Goggles coming down over his eyes.

"Thirteen, protect the students. Get them to the exit." His voice was flat. "I'll hold them here."

He dropped over the railing toward seventy villains.

Eraser Head.

Ryo watched him fall. That man was about to have both arms broken and his face destroyed and he jumped anyway because twenty kids were standing behind him.

The class was frozen. Midoriya's mouth was open. Ochaco's hand had found Ryo's sleeve. Bakugo's fists were already sparking.

Down in the plaza, Shigaraki tilted his head, the hand-mask shifting, and looked up at the students on the platform.

"Where's All Might?" he said. The voice was thin, scratchy, a voice that spent too much time talking to itself. "We came all this way and he's not even here? That's so unfair." He scratched his neck harder. "I guess we'll have to make do with the kids."

Kurogiri's mist began to rise.