MHA: Lust Quirk

Wednesday came and the prototypes came first.

I was walking to lunch through the first-floor corridor, thinking about the Hosu internship letter and whether I should tell Aizawa about it, when Mei Hatsume came around the corner at full speed with her arms full of metal and wiring and no intention of stopping.

She hit me square in the chest.

Components scattered across the tile. A boot sole. Loose screws. A spool of carbon-fiber cable. Something that looked like a circuit board landed face-down and cracked. Mei was on the floor with her lab coat tangled under her knees and her goggles over one eye and she didn't look at the mess or at me or at the cracked circuit board. She grabbed a pair of articulated metal plates from the wreckage, stood up, and shoved them into my hands.

"PROTOTYPE ONE." She was already adjusting the orientation in my grip, turning the plates until they aligned with my knuckles. "Shock-absorbing knuckle guards with force-distribution webbing. They channel your punch impact across a wider surface so you break fewer bones. Put them on."

"Hello to you too."

"PUT THEM ON."

I put them on. The guards were light. Two curved plates per hand, joined by a flexible polymer bridge that wrapped around the first and second knuckles. Straps at the wrist. The inside was lined with a gel layer that molded to my hand when I closed my fist. The fit wasn't right yet. The left guard sat crooked on my middle knuckle.

Mei dropped to her knees in front of me, grabbed my right wrist, and started tightening the straps. Her fingers worked fast, pulling the buckle, checking the tension, adjusting the plate angle with a hex key she produced from behind her ear. Her cross-pupils telescoped as she examined the fit, zooming in on the polymer bridge where it met my knuckle. Her face was close enough to my hand that her breath fogged the metal.

"The bridge needs to seat flush against the proximal phalanx or the force distribution skews lateral." She twisted the plate a quarter-turn. "There. That's better. Make a fist. No, a real fist. TIGHTER."

I made a tighter fist. She held my hand in both of hers and squeezed the guard against my knuckles, testing the compression.

She smelled like solder and burnt coffee. Her hair brushed my wrist.

She moved to the left hand. Same routine. Pull, adjust, hex key, check. She held both my wrists and turned my hands over and studied the guards from every angle. Her thumbs pressed against the inside of my wrists where the pulse was and she had no idea she was holding me like that. A girl in a 1-B uniform walked past, slowed down, looked at the pink-haired girl kneeling in front of a boy and holding his wrists, and walked faster.

"Make a fist."

I made a fist. The guards moved with my hand, the polymer bridge flexing, the plates distributing across the knuckle surface. It felt natural. Like wearing gloves that happened to be reinforced titanium.

"Punch something."

"Now?"

"THE WALL. Punch the wall."

I looked at the hallway wall. It was concrete painted white. A fire extinguisher was mounted three meters to the left. A motivational poster about Plus Ultra was taped above a recycling bin.

I punched the wall. Lightly.

The impact traveled through my fist, hit the gel layer, and dispersed. The force spread across the plate surface and went into the wall and my knuckles felt like I'd pushed against a pillow. The wall, however, cracked. A thin line from the point of impact, radiating upward.

Mei's scope-eyes went wide. Her pupils telescoped to maximum zoom, locked on the crack in the wall, then snapped to the gauntlets, then back to the crack.

"Harder."

I punched harder. The crack widened. A chunk of concrete the size of my thumbnail fell to the floor. The guards held. My hand didn't hurt. The gel layer compressed, absorbed, redistributed, and the only sensation was warmth across my knuckles where the kinetic energy had been swallowed.

These were better than my bare fists. By a lot. During the Bakugo fight I'd punched through explosions and my knuckles had been raw for days. With these, I could punch through a wall and feel nothing.

Mei screamed.

"MY BABY WORKS!" Both fists in the air. "DID YOU SEE THAT? THE WALL CRACKED AND YOUR HAND DIDN'T! THE FORCE DISTRIBUTION IS PERFECT! THE GEL ABSORPTION RATE IS-"

A third-year stuck his head out of a classroom door, saw the cracked wall, saw the screaming pink-haired girl, saw me standing there with metal on my knuckles, and retreated without saying a word. The door closed softly.

Mei grabbed my hands. Both of them. She pulled them toward her and pressed the gauntlets against her chest, hugging my fists against her sternum, her arms wrapped around my hands and the guards and the wrist straps, her lab coat bunching around our combined arms. Her chest was flat against my knuckles. She was bouncing.

She didn't notice.

I noticed.

"Um."

The voice came from nowhere. From the air, three meters down the hallway, near the recycling bin.

"Should I come back?"

Toru Hagakure. Invisible. The air near the recycling bin was doing a thing where the light bent slightly at the edges.

"Hatsume," I said. "You're hugging my fists."

Mei looked down. At her arms wrapped around my hands. At my gauntlets pressed against her chest.

"Oh." She let go. "Those are attached to you, aren't they."

She was already pulling a crumpled blueprint from somewhere inside the lab coat. The paper was stained with coffee and what might have been soy sauce. She unfolded it and held it up. A cross-section diagram of a boot sole with layers labeled in her tiny handwriting.

"Prototype Two. Shock-absorbing boot soles." She held the diagram sideways, then flipped it, then held it at an angle as if the cross-section made more sense that way. "The polymer-gel insert goes here-" She pointed at a layer in the diagram. "-with the kinetic return spring mounted at the heel. You land from height, the gel compresses, the spring stores the energy, and the next step releases it. Hard landing becomes a launch."

She was walking and talking and the blueprint was over her shoulder and I was following. Students in the corridor stepped around her. A second-year hero course kid flattened himself against the wall as she passed because he'd learned from experience.

"The polymer formulation is different from the knuckle guards. Knuckle gel absorbs and disperses. Boot gel absorbs and returns. Same principle, different application. Your legs generate more force than your arms and the landing stress on your ankles is-" She turned a corner without looking. A first-year nearly walked into her and she didn't notice. "-currently between four and six times your body weight depending on drop height. The springs redistribute that into forward momentum. I need your boots for fitting. The ones you have are-"

"Trash. You mentioned."

"COMPLETE TRASH." She stopped walking. I almost ran into her. She was two meters from the Development Studio door and she spun around and the blueprint was in my face. "Look at this stress curve. Your current boots have a shock absorption rating of basically zero. You're landing on CONCRETE with RUBBER SOLES. Every drop landing is microtrauma to your tibial plateau. In six months you'll have stress fractures. In a year you'll need surgery. My boots fix that AND give you a spring effect. You're welcome."

"I didn't say thank-"

"YOU'RE WELCOME." She folded the blueprint, crammed it back into her lab coat, and pulled the door handle. "The carbon-fiber cable for Prototype Three needs another day. The magnetic anchor is giving me trouble. The field strength has to be calibrated to your mass or it'll snap on retraction and hit you in the face and that would damage a perfectly good baby."

"Nice to know you're worried about me."

"I'm worried about the CABLE." She stopped at the workshop door. Turned. The goggles were back on her forehead and her scope-eyes were fully telescoped, zoomed in on my face from two meters away. "Come back Thursday. I need stress-test data. Bring your feet."

She went inside. The door closed. The soldering iron hummed to life. The rotary tool whirred. Through the small window in the door, she was already at the workbench with a boot sole in one hand and a caliper in the other.

I flexed my hands inside the gauntlets. The gel shifted with my fingers. The plates caught the hallway light.

"She's either the most oblivious person I've ever met," I said to the air near the recycling bin, "or the most dangerous."

"She's both," Toru said.

A giggle, light and high, from the empty air. The light shimmered near the wall where she was standing.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Since she tackled you. I was going to say hi but then she started measuring your hands and it got interesting."

"Interesting."

"You turned red when she pressed your fists against her chest. Just so you know. Very red. Like, tomato-in-a-hero-costume red."

"I did not-"

"I'm invisible, not blind." Another giggle. Footsteps heading away, invisible shoes tapping on tile, already fading. "See you in class, Hayami-kun! Nice gauntlets!"

I stood in the hallway with prototype knuckle guards on both hands and a cracked wall behind me and a dent in the concrete where the second punch had landed. The motivational poster above the recycling bin had a new crack running through the word ULTRA.

Someone was going to ask about the wall. I'd deal with it later.

The gauntlets fit perfectly. The gel was warm against my skin where it had molded to my hands, adapting to my knuckle shape. Built for my hands specifically.

Thursday. Stress-test data. Bring my feet.

I walked to class with the gauntlets still on because taking them off felt wrong.