MHA: Lust Quirk

Aizawa was the one who told me.

He caught me after homeroom, which meant he stayed awake for an extra thirty seconds, which meant it mattered. The rest of 1-A was filing out toward the cafeteria and he stood by his podium with his sleeping bag pooled around his ankles and his capture scarf bunched at his throat.

"Usagiyama called the school."

I stopped. My bag was half on my shoulder.

"The Rabbit Hero. Billboard Number Five." His voice was flat, bored, the register he used for everything including apparently a top-five pro hero requesting a meeting with a first-year. "She wants to see you before she decides on the internship. Training facility in District 7. Here's the address."

He held out a slip of paper. I took it. His handwriting was worse than mine.

"She doesn't take interns," I said.

"She doesn't." He picked up his sleeping bag. "She also doesn't call schools. So either she's making an exception or she's going to kick you through a wall for wasting her time. Either way, go today. She specified today."

He walked out. The sleeping bag dragged behind him like a deflated yellow slug.

I looked at the address. District 7. Forty minutes by train, south side, the kind of neighborhood where the buildings got shorter and the gyms didn't advertise. The handwritten note I'd sent her agency, which was really just a PO box because she didn't have a real agency, had said one thing: You said I fight like garbage. I want to fight less like garbage. One week.

That was it. Five days ago. I'd figured she'd toss it or ignore it. Most pros had agencies and staff and interns they were already training and a system for processing applications. Mirko had herself.

She'd called U.A.

I pocketed the address and went to the train.

The neighborhood around the facility was industrial. Warehouses with corrugated walls, a tire shop with a hand-painted sign, a ramen place with steam coming out of the vent and a line of construction workers outside. The training facility was a concrete building with no sign. A metal door with a deadbolt and a buzzer that didn't have a label.

The door was unlocked. I pushed it open.

Inside was a gym. Bare concrete floor, exposed pipes on the ceiling, fluorescent tubes that buzzed. Heavy bags hanging from chains along the back wall. A speed bag. A rack of weights that looked like they'd been there since before Quirks existed. The air smelled like rubber mats and old sweat and underneath that, metallic, like blood that had been cleaned but not well enough.

Mirko was at the far end.

She was kicking a heavy bag. Each impact sent it swinging on the chain and the chain links groaned and the bag lurched and came back and she kicked it again. Her white hair was pulled back and sweat had darkened it at the temples and her rabbit ears were pinned flat against her skull. Sports bra and compression shorts. The muscles in her legs were visible with every strike, the definition in her calves and thighs built from years of fighting things that fought back.

She kicked the bag and one of the chain links popped. The bag sagged to the left. She kicked it again and a second link broke and the bag dropped and she didn't stop. She was working anger or boredom or both through the bag and the bag was losing.

The third kick broke the last link. The bag hit the floor and slid and stopped against the wall and sand leaked from the split canvas.

She turned. Wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. Her red eyes found me.

"You're the kid from the Festival."

"Yeah."

"You applied to my agency."

"You don't have an agency."

Her mouth twitched. Her canine showed. "Exactly. I don't take people."

She crossed her arms. She was taller than me. I'd noticed that at the Sports Festival when she'd gripped my shoulder, but standing straight in a bare gym with a destroyed heavy bag behind her and her ears up and her eyes on me, the height was different. The rabbit legs added a couple inches through the ankle structure.

"Why me?" she said.

"Because you're the strongest solo fighter in the country and I'm a brawler with no technique. I need what you have."

"Flattery."

"Truth."

She looked at me. The same read she'd done at the stadium hallway. Her eyes moved from my feet to my hands to my shoulders to my face, and she was picking apart what kind of damage I could take and what kind I could give.

She moved.

I'd seen fast before. Iida's Engine was fast. Todoroki's ice was fast. Mirko was different. She crossed the gym floor in less time than it took me to register she'd started. One second she was by the heavy bag. The next she was in front of me, her face inches from mine, her ears forward and her red eyes close because she was taller and she was leaning down and her breath was warm on my jaw.

Sweat. Under the sweat, something green, herbaceous. Under that, heat. Just heat coming off her skin.

My hands stayed at my sides. I didn't flinch. I wanted to. Every animal instinct I had was saying the predator was too close. But I'd watched her fight High-End Nomus in the anime. I'd watched her lose limbs and keep swinging. This wasn't the scariest thing she could do.

"If I take you," she said, low, her mouth close, "you do what I say. You train until you puke. You patrol where I patrol."

Her ear twitched.

"And you don't EVER slow me down."

"Deal."

She stayed close for another second. Her eyes on my face. My pulse was hammering and she could hear it. Rabbit ears. She was listening to my heartbeat spike and she hadn't backed off.

Then she grinned. Wide. Her canine caught the fluorescent light and her ears went from forward to relaxed and her eyes narrowed. The same grin she'd given me at the stadium.

"One week. Don't make me regret this."

She extended her hand. I took it. Her grip closed around mine and the pressure was immediate and the bones in my hand registered the force and my Quirk registered the contact. The pulse of heat through my chest was stronger than it had been at the stadium. Close proximity, sustained contact, Billboard Number Five.

I squeezed back. Hard enough that she felt it.

Her eyebrow went up. "Strong hands for a kid."

"I hit things."

"You keep saying that like it's a personality." She let go. Walked back toward the destroyed heavy bag and picked up a water bottle from the floor. Drank. Wiped her mouth. Her back was to me and the muscles along her spine shifted when she moved and the compression shorts sat low on her hips and I looked at the weight rack instead.

"Be at Hosu City station Monday at 6 AM," she said without turning around. "I'm tracking a case there."

Hosu.

She was going to Hosu. The Hero Killer had been sighted in that district and a combat-obsessed solo hero who hunted the worst things in the country would obviously investigate serial attacks on heroes. I didn't have to engineer it. I didn't have to steer her toward Hosu or invent a reason to be there. She chose it because she was Mirko and Mirko went where the fighting was.

"Hosu," I said. "Got it."

"Six AM. Not six-oh-one." She turned around. The water bottle dangled from her fingers. "I don't do orientation. I don't do pep talks. I don't do hand-holding. Monday morning I'm going to kick you awake and we're going to run and when you can't run anymore we're going to fight and when you can't fight anymore you're going to watch me fight and take notes. That's the internship."

"Sounds perfect."

"It's brutal and most people quit by lunch." She tossed the water bottle and caught it. "But you walked through Bakugo's Howitzer Impact on national television and came out the other side grinning. So maybe you're too stupid to quit."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me."

She snorted. An actual snort, through her nose, and one ear flicked sideways and for half a second she looked like a woman who'd been surprised into laughing.

"Get out of my gym, kid. Monday. Six AM."

I walked to the door. My hand was on the metal frame when she spoke again.

"Hayami."

I looked back. She was standing in the middle of the gym with the broken heavy bag behind her and the fluorescent lights overhead and her white hair was damp and her red eyes were steady.

"That note you sent. The one about fighting less like garbage."

"Yeah."

"I kept it."

She turned away. Picked up a roll of athletic tape from the bench and started wrapping her knuckles. I stood in the doorway for a second and then left.

The metal door closed behind me. The ramen place across the street was still serving and the construction workers had been replaced by two guys in coveralls arguing about a motorcycle. The sky was overcast and my hand was tingling where she'd gripped it.

I walked to the train. My phone buzzed. Mina. where r u

I typed: had a meeting. back soon.

Three dots. with who

mirko

The dots disappeared for a while. Then: the rabbit hero????? the hot one?????

I put the phone in my pocket.

Monday was three days away. Monday was Hosu. Mirko kicking me awake at dawn and the Hero Killer somewhere in the same city with a sword and a philosophy about fake heroes. Iida was going to Manual's agency in the same district with his brother's name and his brother's anger and he didn't know what was waiting.

Mirko had kept the note. I didn't know what to do with that so I got on the train.