MHA: Lust Quirk

"You fight ugly, ribbit."

Tsuyu was standing by the water fountain outside the locker rooms with a paper cup in her large hands and her wide dark eyes on me. She'd changed into her school uniform. Her hair bow was slightly crooked.

"Thanks, Asui."

"Tsu." The correction was quiet and automatic. She took a sip of water. "Your technique is bad and your defense is worse. You just hit hard enough that it doesn't matter." She looked at me over the rim of the cup. "It was fun to watch, kero."

She walked away. Her footsteps were silent on the tile, the frog thing where her feet gripped surfaces without sound. She turned the corner and was gone.

A janitor was mopping the corridor and the mop left wet streaks on the tile that reflected the fluorescent lights. I stepped around the wet section and kept walking. The burns on my arms stung when the fabric of the replacement shirt they'd given me shifted against the blisters.

Jiro was waiting at the end of the hall. Leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her earphone jacks coiled loosely around her forearms. She straightened up when she saw me.

"Sixty-two," she said.

I stopped. "What?"

"Your heart rate. During the Todoroki fight. I tracked it the whole time." Her jacks twitched against her arms. "Sixty-two beats per minute. You were fighting the son of the number two hero and your pulse was resting."

I should have been more careful. Jiro's jacks could hear heartbeats from across a section of stadium seating. I'd known that from the anime and I'd been too focused on the fight to think about what she was recording.

"I have a low resting heart rate," I said. "Good cardio."

"Your resting is fifty-eight. I checked during homeroom." Her eyes were narrow, the dark triangular shapes under her bangs. "You spiked to seventy during the cavalry battle when Ashido grabbed your arm. You spiked to seventy-four when Yaoyorozu brushed past you in the hallway before the bracket. But during an actual fight where someone was trying to freeze you solid, you were at sixty-two."

She had my numbers. She'd noticed the pattern and I didn't have a good answer for it.

"And during the Bakugo fight," she said, and her jaw tightened and one of her jacks curled into a tight spiral against her wrist. "The ice cracking during the Todoroki fight sounded like a chord progression. D minor to A flat. Your punches were on the offbeat. It was-" She stopped. Her cheeks went red, the color climbing from her neck to her jaw to her ears. "That's a weird thing to say."

"It's a cool thing to say."

Her mouth opened. Closed. The blush got worse. She unwound one jack from her arm and jabbed it at my chest like a finger. "You're weird, Hayami."

She walked past me. Her shoulder bumped my arm and the jack that had been pointing at my chest dragged across my sleeve as she passed and the cable was warm from being coiled against her skin.

Momo was in the analysis room. Sitting at one of the consoles with a notebook open and a pen behind her ear and the footage from the tournament playing on the screen in front of her. She'd paused it on a frame from the Todoroki fight where my fist was connecting with ice.

"Hayami-san." She didn't look up from the notebook. "Your approach against Todoroki and Bakugo was identical. Close distance, absorb damage, grapple. You don't adapt."

"Worked twice."

"That's attrition. It isn't strategy." She turned a page. The handwriting was immaculate, lines of analysis in columns, numbers in neat rows. "Your physical stats are anomalous. Your Apprehension Test results placed you mid-class. Today you outperformed Todoroki and Bakugo in raw output." She tapped the pen against the page. "Enhancement Quirks scale with training, but the rate of improvement you're showing doesn't match any recorded growth curve for your Quirk class. I haven't worked out why yet."

"Maybe I train hard."

"You don't." She looked at me for the first time. Her dark eyes were steady and sharp and the pen was still tapping against the notebook. "I've timed your weight shifts. In the obstacle race you favored your left ankle. By the cavalry battle the compensation was gone. That's a structural change, not a training adaptation. Training doesn't fix structural imbalances in two days."

She closed the notebook. "I time everything, Hayami-san. The numbers will make sense eventually."

A promise. Backed by a brain that had aced every exam U.A. had ever given her. Momo Yaoyorozu was going to figure out why my power didn't match my training, and the real answer was the one thing I couldn't let anyone know.

I left the analysis room and walked toward the campus exit. The hallways were thinning out, students heading home or to the locker rooms, the post-tournament energy winding down. Someone had left a congratulations banner half-taped to the corridor wall and it was peeling at one corner.

Kendo was standing near the junction where the 1-A and 1-B corridors split. Her school bag was over one shoulder and her ginger hair was down, the side-ponytail undone. She was talking to Tetsutetsu about recovery supplements when she saw me and stopped mid-sentence.

"Hayami."

"Kendo."

"My class noticed." Factual, flat. "Monoma won't shut up about it. He's already planning some speech about how 1-B would have done better if the bracket was different." She paused. "He's wrong, obviously. You would have beaten anyone in that bracket. Including ours."

She held out her hand. I took it. Her grip was firm, palm warm and slightly calloused across the base of her fingers. The handshake lasted one second of courtesy and one second longer than courtesy and in that extra second her thumb pressed against my knuckle before she let go.

"Good fights," she said. "All of them."

She walked back toward the 1-B hallway with her bag shifting on her shoulder. Tetsutetsu was still talking about supplements.

I was almost at the main exit when the voice hit me from behind.

"Kid."

I turned. The woman standing in the hallway was tall, dark-skinned, white-haired, and built like a weapon someone had decided to put rabbit ears on. Long ears that twitched as I turned. She was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her red eyes tracking over me, and the muscles visible through her casual clothes were the kind of definition that came from fighting every day and liking it.

Mirko. Billboard Top 5. The solo hero who refused sidekicks and fought High-End Nomus alone and smiled while doing it.

My Quirk pulsed. A hit of heat through my chest. Pro hero, Billboard Top 5, and I hadn't even touched her. My Quirk was flagging the potential, and the potential was enormous.

"Ma'am," I said.

Her lip curled. "Don't call me that. I'm twenty-six, not sixty." She pushed off the wall and walked toward me, every step loaded, and stopped in front of me and looked me up and down. Burns on my arms. Singed hair. The gold medal around my neck.

"Your technique is garbage," she said. "No form, no footwork, no defense to speak of. You punch like a bar brawler who got lucky and you take hits because you're too stupid to dodge them."

"I've heard."

"I like it." Her mouth pulled sideways. Her canine was sharp, visible. "You walked through that kid's Howitzer Impact like it was rain. That's not technique. That's something else."

She reached forward and her fingers gripped my shoulder. Her hand was warm and strong and her thumb pressed into the muscle above my collarbone where Bakugo's AP Shot had left a bruise and my Quirk spiked again on the contact, stronger, flooding through the point where her skin touched mine.

"Don't get soft," she said. She squeezed once, hard enough that the bruise flared, and let go. "I'll be watching."

She walked past me. Her shoulder brushed my arm as she passed and my Quirk hummed with it. She didn't look back. She turned the corner and her white hair disappeared and the hallway was quiet.

I stood still for a second. My shoulder was warm where she'd gripped it. My pulse was elevated for the first time all day and Jiro wasn't here to track it and that was probably lucky. In the anime she'd fought High-End Nomus at Jaku Hospital and lost an arm and a leg and kept fighting. In person she was worse. She was real and she was stronger than me and my Quirk wanted her and that was going to be a whole thing.

I kept walking. Near the campus gate, the path ran between the hedges that bordered the 1-B building, and as I passed them a vine brushed my wrist. Just the edge of it, green and cool against my skin, a tendril that reached through the hedge and touched me and withdrew. I stopped. Looked through the gap in the leaves.

Ibara Shiozaki was kneeling on the other side with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes closed and her lips moving in prayer. Her vine hair was spread around her like a living curtain and the tendril that had brushed my wrist was retracting into the mass, curling back into the green. She hadn't looked at me. Her prayer hadn't stopped. Her Quirk had reached for me on its own.

Her lips kept moving. The vines settled. I walked on.

Mina was waiting at the gate.

She was bouncing on her toes with her phone in one hand and a grin that was all teeth. She'd changed into a hoodie and shorts and her horns were catching the last of the sunset light and when she saw me she made a noise that was part scream and part laugh and full volume.

"FIRST PLACE!" She was bouncing and the bounce put her whole body into it, the pink of her skin catching the evening glow. Her arms went around my neck and the gold medal clinked between us and her horn nearly caught my jaw and she didn't care. "You won! On national TV! My boyfriend won the Sports Festival!"

"You're going to break the medal."

"I don't CARE about the medal." She pulled back. Her gold eyes were bright in the fading light and her grin had too many teeth and she leaned up and kissed me, fast and hard, in front of the campus gate where anyone walking by could see. Her mouth tasted like the strawberry gum she chewed when she was nervous.

"Come home," she said against my mouth. "I have your spare key. I've been texting you for an hour. Come HOME."

She pulled me by the hand toward the train station and her grip was warm and my Quirk was still humming from Mirko's shoulder brush and I let myself be pulled.

Behind us, U.A.'s campus was going dark. The stadium lights were off. The arena where I'd fought three people today was empty and the concrete was cracked.

Ahead, the internships. The agencies that had sent offers. A handwritten note from a small firm in Hosu sitting in my mailbox at school. Stain was in Hosu. Next week's problem.

Tonight, Mina was pulling me toward the train and her hand was warm and the medal was heavy against my burnt chest and the sun was down and Kaminari had probably already called his mother twice.