MHA: Lust Quirk

He was muttering before Present Mic even called his name.

The sound carried from across the arena. Fast and low, syllables running into each other, his mouth going nonstop while his eyes tracked over me like I was a textbook he was indexing. Shoulders. Arms. How my weight sat on my heels. All of it feeding into whatever obsessive catalog ran in Izuku Midoriya's head every waking second.

Green hair spiking in every direction, worse than mine. Freckles across his nose and cheeks. Big round eyes that always looked a half-second behind whatever was happening to him, still catching up, still processing. He was shorter than me. Thinner. His right hand was already bandaged from earlier rounds, white gauze over fingers that had been broken and healed and would be broken again. He broke himself. That was how Izuku Midoriya fought.

One For All. All Might's Quirk, the one that had been passed down and passed down and passed down until it landed in a kid who couldn't use it at less than a hundred percent. Full power or nothing. Every activation destroyed whatever body part channeled it. His solution was to use individual fingers so he could keep firing after the first one shattered.

The kid who saves the world. The actual protagonist of a story I'd watched on my couch in another life.

The arena was still marked from the Todoroki fight. Cementoss had patched the worst of the ice damage but the surface was uneven in places, ridges where frozen concrete had buckled and been smoothed too fast. My chest was still sore from the ice. My palms still burned from the cold. I'd beaten the number two hero's son twenty minutes ago and now I was standing across from the kid who would beat the demon king and the bruises hadn't finished forming from the last round.

And right now, with taped-up hands and a muttering problem and a Quirk that tore him apart every time he touched it, the math between us was ugly. I had Mina's gains baked into every muscle fiber. He had ten fingers and the willingness to break all of them.

"SEMIFINAL! HAYAMI VERSUS MIDORIYA! BEGIN!"

He moved first.

Right hand up, index finger extended, thumb braced. Delaware Smash.

The air tore open between us. A cone of compressed wind pressure erupted from his fingertip and hit me in the chest before I finished processing the sound. My feet dragged backward on concrete, grinding shallow grooves. My shirt flattened against my ribs and my hair whipped straight back and for a full second the wind was the only thing in the arena. Genuine force. Enough to throw a normal person out of bounds.

I leaned into it. The pressure throbbed behind my sternum where the bruise from Todoroki's ice was still fresh.

Midoriya's right index finger was purple. Bent sideways at the second knuckle. Broken.

He didn't look at it. His left eye twitched once and his breathing got shorter and he was already bringing up his middle finger.

I started walking.

The second Delaware Smash caught me square in the face. My eyes watered, ears popped, and the force was a wall shoving me backward. Weaker than the first. Pain was doing what pain does to the body producing the force, and his hand was running out of fingers to sacrifice. My shirt tore at the collar. The concrete behind me cracked in a line from the redirected pressure.

I kept walking. Thirty meters. Twenty-five.

His middle finger snapped. The sound carried across the arena, wet, a green stick breaking. Someone in the crowd made a noise. Midoriya's face went white for a half-second. Jaw locked. Eyes wet. He brought his ring finger up.

"Stop," I said.

He flicked.

The third blast hit my shoulder and spun me a half-step sideways. Weaker again. Two broken fingers and the hand was losing structural integrity, the force dispersing wrong through bones that weren't aligned anymore. I took the hit and closed the distance from twenty meters to ten.

His ring finger hung at an angle that made my stomach turn. Three fingers on his right hand pointing directions fingers shouldn't point. He was bringing his left hand up. Fresh fingers. A full set of five unbroken chances to hurt me, and his eyes were wide and terrified and locked on mine.

I covered the last ten meters at a sprint.

My hand closed around his left wrist before the fourth flick launched. His fingers were still cocked, the motion loaded and ready. His skin was hot under the gauze and his pulse slammed against my thumb. He tried to pull free. Twisted his whole body into the wrench, every kilo he had committed to breaking the grip.

Sixty kilos of kid fighting as hard as he could and my arm didn't move.

He planted his feet and braced and pulled with his legs and I held his wrist like a door handle. The strength gap was visible to sixty-five thousand people and every camera in the building.

"Let go." His teeth were clenched. The tendons in his forearm strained under my fingers. "I can still fight."

I swept his legs. Shin behind the ankle, shove to the chest. He hit the concrete flat on his back. The air went out of him.

He rolled. Hands and knees. His right hand couldn't take weight so he braced on the heel of his palm, broken fingers hovering above the concrete, and pushed himself up. Legs shaking. Left hand coming up again. Index finger extended. Thumb cocked.

He'd break every finger on both hands. He'd fire Delaware Smashes until he ran out and then try to fight me with ruined fists. The kid just didn't stop. There was nothing in him that knew how.

I grabbed the front of his gym shirt and pushed.

One hand. One shove. He left the ground, feet clearing concrete, and landed on his back past the white line. Slid to a stop. His broken fingers curled against his chest. Green hair spread on the ground. Chest heaving.

"Hayami wins by ring-out!"

The applause was confused. Scattered clapping that couldn't decide if it was supposed to be celebrating. The fight had lasted less than two minutes and the kid with the broken fingers had been shoved out of bounds like he was in the way.

I stood at the boundary line and looked at him.

This kid saves the world. He fights the final boss with broken arms and wins because he refuses to stop and the entire line of One For All holders stands behind him and he gives up the thing that made him powerful because the world matters more than his dream.

And I just pushed him out of a bracket.

Good. He'll be fine. Deku always gets back up.

Midoriya was already sitting up. His right hand stayed pressed against his stomach, three fingers swollen and purple, and his left braced on the concrete. He was muttering. The muttering probably hadn't stopped through the impact and the slide and the loss.

"-wind pressure insufficient at range, durability exceeds the force-to-mass ratio I calculated, need to account for the enhanced shock absorption, if I double-channel through two fingers simultaneously the structural stress increases but the concentrated output might-"

His own loss, already broken down into variables and equations. The notebook in his head filling pages on the kid who'd just beaten him.

I held out my hand.

He looked at it. At me. At the hand again. Took it with his left, the one that still worked, and I pulled him up. His grip was firm even though his fingers were trembling. He weighed nothing.

"Recovery Girl," I said. "Your fingers."

"I know." Still muttering under his breath, eyes turned inward. Then he blinked. Focused. His eyes were clear green and steady and the startled look was gone. "You're really strong, Hayami-kun. I don't have an answer for your durability yet."

"Yet."

His mouth twitched. Barely there. He turned and walked toward the tunnel with his broken hand cradled at his side and his good hand already reaching into his gym bag for the notebook that was obviously in there.

The stretcher team intercepted him near the tunnel entrance. He waved them off with his left hand, kept walking. Someone in the upper section started clapping. Others joined. The applause that Midoriya got for losing was warmer than anything I'd gotten for winning.

That tracked.

I walked back toward the center. My chest ached behind the sternum where the first Delaware Smash had hit, layered on top of the bruise from Todoroki's ice. My shirt was torn at the collar. Ears still ringing faintly from the wind pressure. I rolled my shoulders. Opened and closed my fists. My knuckles were cold-burned from the Todoroki fight and the new ache from the wind sat on top of the old ache from the ice and I was going to ignore all of it until the tournament was over.

Cementoss was already patching the concrete where the Delaware Smashes had cracked the floor. His cement flowed smooth and fast and he worked without looking at me. I'd fought three rounds today and he'd been repairing the arena after every one. The man probably wanted to go home.

A woman in the third row of the general seating was eating yakitori and had sauce on her chin. She'd gotten some on the sleeve of her jacket and didn't seem to know.

In the 1-A section, Mina was sitting with her knees pulled up. Quiet for once. Watching the tunnel where Midoriya had disappeared. Her gold eyes were flat in a way I didn't see from her often.

Ochaco's hands were in her lap. Bandaged from Bakugo. She was looking at the spot on the concrete where Midoriya had been lying. Her jaw was tight. She knew what it was like to be on that floor.

Momo was in the row behind them with her notebook open on her knee. She wasn't writing. The pen was still. She was watching me.

The scoreboard updated.

BAKUGO. WINNER.

Ryo vs Bakugo. The final. National television.

Bakugo. Grenade gauntlets and a permanent snarl and explosions that ran on rage and nitroglycerin sweat. Who'd fought Ochaco like a real opponent because treating her as anything less was an insult he couldn't stomach. Who'd blasted her across the arena until she couldn't stand and the crowd had booed him for the only respectful thing he'd done all day. Who'd won, and she'd gone to a hallway with a flip phone pressed to her ear and her voice cracking.

I wanted to win so you and Mom could see me on TV.

That had been her, sitting on the floor, crying into a phone call to a father who couldn't afford to come watch. And I'd sat next to her and held her while the sentence kept breaking apart in her mouth.

I knew what Bakugo could do. The AP Shot. The Howitzer Impact. Explosions as propulsion and offense at the same time, a Quirk that ran on violence wielded by a kid who took every fight personally. Todoroki had range and Deku had raw power, but Bakugo had both and he was angry and anger made him sharper. He was the best combat student in 1-A and the tournament bracket had been feeding him fights all day. He'd be warmed up. He'd be pissed. He'd come at me with everything from the first second because Bakugo didn't have a setting below maximum.

He was going to be a problem. A real one.

Bandaged hands pressed together. Brown eyes in the stands. Four fingertip pads on the back of my hand and a thumb held carefully up.

I'd said "you will" and she'd believed me.

The final was in an hour. I cracked my knuckles against the tunnel wall as I walked and the sound echoed off the fluorescent corridor walls. My hands hurt. Everything hurt. Three fights today and the fourth was going to be the worst.

Good.