God of Heroics: Comicman!

Class 1-B rode out to the testing grounds in their hero costumes, twenty students who had passed the written exam and were now, by their own confident accounting, about to farm a city full of robots for points. Tetsutetsu had a number in his head. He'd told everyone the number. Kamakiri had told him the number was stupid and offered a bigger one.

"Robots… Beautiful, simple robots." Tsuburaba said, stretching in his seat.

"I'm going to apologize to each one before I break it." Pony said.

"You don't have to apologize to robots."

"I want them to know it isn't personal that I’m genociding them."

“Genociding? Who taught you that word?” Kendo glanced at Monoma with a stern look.

Monoma innocently averted his gaze as Pony pointed directly at him.

The buses stopped at the edge of an uninhabited training city, blocks of empty streets and dead-windowed buildings rolled out under the sky, and Vlad King led them off and lined them up in front of a cluster of waiting teachers.

A lot of teachers.

Cementoss. Midnight. Snipe. Power Loader. Thirteen. Ectoplasm. All Might. Present Mic, waving.

"Why is everyone here for robots?" Awase muttered.

"Maybe they're bored and wanna watch?" Kaibara said, but he didn't sound like he believed it.

Vlad King faced his class. "No doubt some of you have heard things about today's practical."

"ROBOTS!" Tetsutetsu declared, with the full faith of a man who had bet money on it. "Battle simulation, sir! Like the entrance exam!"

"That was the plan," said a bright little voice, "right up until I changed it!"

Nezu came up Vlad King's back and perched on his shoulder like the world's most cheerful omen. Vlad King, to his credit, didn't flinch. He just stood there with a principal on him and let it happen.

"It's me! The one who could be a dog, or a mouse, or a bear, but more importantly, the principal!" Nezu spread his paws. "The villain attacks this year, the Hero Killer, the recent student tragedy, the rising activity across the country, all of it has made one thing clear. Fighting robots teaches you to break inanimate objects. It does not teach you to fight people who are trying to hurt you or kill you. So as of this term, U.A.'s practical exams have been revised. And thus!” He paused. "You will be fighting your teachers."

Several groans came from the students.

"You'll work in pairs," Nezu continued, delighted. "Each pair faces one teacher, who will be playing the role of a villain. You have thirty minutes. You win by placing these handcuffs on your teacher, or by one of you escaping through the gate at the far side of your battlefield. To keep things sporting, we'll be wearing super compact weights, courtesy of the support course, so we're only allowed a fraction of our strength." He held up one paw, showing a dense metal bracelet that looked far too heavy for his small arm. "Each of you will be evaluated individually. And do remember, everyone. Your teachers chose these matchups personally. We know exactly where each of you is weakest."

He smiled a smile even more villainous than that of actual villains! "We are very much looking forward to it."

The pairings went up on a screen mounted to the lead bus.

Kamakiri & Shiozaki vs. Vlad King

Tokage & Shishida vs. Snipe

Kendo & Tetsutetsu vs. Cementoss

Shoda & Rin vs. Nezu

Yanagi & Kodai vs. Thirteen

Pony & Awase vs. Present Mic

Honenuki & Bondo vs. Power Loader

Kuroiro & Kaibara vs. Ectoplasm

Komori & Tsuburaba vs. Midnight

Fukidashi & Monoma vs. All Might

The class read the board in silence. Then everyone's eyes did the same thing at the same time as they turned to look toward their teacher opponent.

Their teachers smiled back at all of them. None of them felt relieved by those looks.

“Looks like our class’s number one gets to face off against the world’s number one.” Kamakiri chuckled.

Manga was standing with his spine straight and bubble blazing with a challenger’s smile. There was no better challenge for him than taking on the Symbol of Peace! Because that was his spot in the near future. Besides, other than All Might, the only other teacher he could think would be a good test for him was Class 1-A’s homeroom teacher but he didn’t see him here so…

All Might and Manga smiled at each other, ready for the battle ahead.

Monoma drifted up beside him, pale as his costume's dress shirt.

"Fukidashi."

"Yeah."

"We are going to die."

"You gotta believe, Monoma! You can’t reach the top unless you can brainwash yourself in believing the impossible!" Manga roared. "Isn't it great?"

“Looking at our death and failure is great? What nonsense are you even talking about?” Monoma looked at him like he was mad.

“Well, I was always told I had a screw loose growing up.” Manga tossed his head back and laughed loudly.

“You’re probably the only kid who would ever laugh at the thought of fighting All Might…” Monoma sighed, but despite himself, he found the corner of his lips widening as well. Manga’s positivity was infectious. He was glad he was acting more like himself these days.

Togaru Kamakiri walked into an empty city block looking happier than he had in two weeks.

"Finally," he said, blades sliding out of both forearms, long and bright. "Something that hits back."

"Kamakiri-kun." Shiozaki's hands were folded, her vines stirring at her shoulders. "We should be cautious. Sensei knows everything about us."

"I know everything about me too. I'm going to slice him to pieces."

Vlad King was waiting for them in the middle of an intersection, arms loose at his sides, vambraces gleaming. He didn't posture. He just watched his two students approach and rolled his neck once.

"Come on then. Show me what you two have learned so far." Vlad grinned at the two.

Kamakiri crossed the open ground at a speed faster than Vlad expected and his opening cut was a horrific thing, a rising slash from a forearm blade that would have sliced any villain in the country in two.

It opened Vlad King's forearm instead, a deep burst of red where the teacher took the cut on purpose, and Vlad King chuckled.

The blood twisted in the air like it was alive, hardened into something solid, and slammed Kamakiri across the chest hard enough to throw him into a parked car. He flipped over the car and crashed on the ground next to his partner.

"Lesson one," Vlad King said, as more red snaked out of the gash and gathered around his fist. "My quirk is Blood Control. Every drop you spill belongs to me."

Kamakiri pushed himself off the floor and did exactly what everyone watching knew he would, which was attack again, angrier. He cut Vlad King twice more in the next exchange, devastating cuts to the shoulder and thigh.

Vlad King's smile widened, and the air around him filled with red.

The blood came off him in streams, hardened mid-flight into tentacles. Kamakiri blocked the first whip on his forearm blades, cut the second out of the air, and the third took his legs out while another caught his collar and pinned him to the asphalt with his own momentum.

"Three cuts," Vlad King shook his head, standing over him. "You've armed me three times, and we're ninety seconds in. Keep going. By minute five I'll have enough out of my body to wrap this whole block in red, and you'll have given me all of it." He leaned down. "Is that how you save the people behind you, Kamakiri? By handing the villain a bigger knife every time you swing?"

Kamakiri snarled up at him from the ground. And then, visibly, painfully, he leaped backward toward Shiozaki.

The snarl stayed. The blades slid back into his arms.

"Shiozaki. Plan B. The stupid one." He gritted out.

"It is not stupid, Kamakiri-kun. It is reasonable."

"Same thing." He groaned.

Vines erupted across the intersection.

Shiozaki had been growing them the entire time from two blocks back, threading green through gutters and sewer grates and the undersides of parked cars while her partner bled their teacher into arming himself, and when they came up they came up everywhere, a forest rising out of the city. Vlad King's blood met them mid-air, red against green, and for every vine the blood cut, three more wrapped the cutting edge and dragged.

There it is. Vlad King thought. He hauled one arm free, blood reshaping. "Vines don't cause me to bleed. Good."

Kamakiri came through the green with his blades out once more. Vlad was about to shake his head with disapproval once more until he received a blade to the gut that sent him sliding backward. That blade wasn’t sharpened… It was blunted.

That little hard-headed bastard could use his brain. Vlad thought with pride.

Kamakiri launched himself off a shattered slab of asphalt, closing the distance in a blur of green.

Instead of the razor-thin scythes he usually favored, the protrusions sliding from his forearms were thick, flat-edged, and heavy. Vlad King swept a hardened tendril of blood aiming for the boy's ankles, but Kamakiri vaulted over it. Mid-air, a flat column of metal erupted from Kamakiri’s heel, and he brought it down in a brutal axe kick that pinned the blood-whip to the street, shattering the asphalt beneath it.

Using the pinned whip as a pivot, Kamakiri spun, driving a heavy, blunt elbow-blade straight for Vlad’s jaw.

Vlad raised his thick vambrace to block. The impact rang out like a hammer striking an anvil, sending a shockwave through the intersection. Vlad’s boots skidded back an inch. He grinned, his small eyes narrowing, and threw a massive left hook, his fist encased in a hardened boxing glove of his own floating blood.

Before the blow could connect, a thick wall of thorny vines erupted from the sewer grate between them. Vlad’s punch blew through the foliage, shredding leaves and snapping stems, but the vines absorbed the kinetic energy, deadening the strike.

Kamakiri burst right through the torn greenery. He dropped low, sliding under Vlad’s guard, and sprouted dual, flat-headed rods from his knuckles. He unleashed a rapid-fire flurry of body blows.

Kamakiri was fighting his every instinct to slice and tear, forcing himself to act as a living battering ram. He knew that even a hairline scratch would give his teacher more ammunition.

Vlad grunted, the heavy impacts forcing the breath from his lungs. Relying on his own enhanced speed, the Pro Hero twisted his hips and lashed out with a sweeping roundhouse kick, commanding the remaining free-floating blood to form a wide, solid wall to trap the student.

"Shiozaki!" Kamakiri roared.

"I got you!"

Thick, tree-trunk-sized vines surged from the undersides of the parked cars, crashing into the blood-wall and stalling it just long enough. Kamakiri didn't retreat. He stepped into Vlad's roundhouse kick, producing a thick, unsharpened iron plate from his ribs to absorb the blow. The sheer force of Vlad's kick cracked Kamakiri's improvised armor, but it left the teacher's leg extended and vulnerable.

Capitalizing on the opening, Kamakiri materialized a massive, blunted pillar from his shoulder and violently shoved his entire body weight forward, slamming the dull metal directly into Vlad King's gut.

The heavy blow lifted the massive Pro Hero off his feet, sending him sliding backward across the intersection until his white boots finally found traction against the pavement. Vlad stood up straight, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead, and let out a booming laugh.

"Kamakiri-kun!" Shiozaki's voice rang over the green. "The path is open! Go!"

The vines moved like a wave, and the wave went toward the escape gate, a rolling green road with a gap down its middle exactly one student wide.

Kamakiri hesitated for one visible second. Running was losing, in the religion he practiced. Running was the opposite of everything in his arms.

"Don't you dare waste my efforts." Shiozaki said.

“Fuck! Not using my blades is one thing but having a girl sacrifice herself for me is another!” Kamakiri swore as he dashed toward Shiozaki. He snatched her up in his arms and sped off toward the escape gate, surprisingly still quick.

Vlad King tore half his blood free of the thorns and threw it after them, a red spear the length of a bus. It caught a wall of woven vines Shiozaki raised with both hands and a bowed head, and it punched through, and it slowed, and the slowing was enough. Kamakiri crossed the gate at a dead sprint with Shiozaki protecting their back, and the buzzer sounded.

In the intersection, Vlad King straightened up, recalled his blood back into his body through his gloves, and looked at the two before making his way over to them.

"Heh, not bad." Vlad King looked at the gate, where Kamakiri was bent over his knees and swearing at the sky in triumph. He grinned at them. "You both passed."

Their battlefield was the worst possible one for them, which was the point: an open stretch on the city's edge, warehouses and lots and four hundred meters of nothing between the start line and the gate, with Snipe somewhere in the middle of it holding six hundred meters of locked-on death in each hand.

"He sees us, he tags us," Tokage said from cover, eyes bright with the particular joy she got from terrible situations. "Homing rounds. They chase."

Beside her, Jurota Shishida pushed his glasses up his nose. "Then we are presented with a simple problem of mathematics. He can track what he can see. The question is how many things we can make him see at once."

Tokage's grin showed every sharp tooth she had.

"Oh, I knew getting a nerd like you wouldn’t be so bad!" She patted him on the back before splitting.

“I’ll take that as a term of endearment instead of an insult.” Shishida gruffed.

Fifty pieces of Setsuna Tokage poured out from behind the warehouse in every direction at once, hands and forearms and shins and slices of torso, an exploded diagram of a girl scattering across the open ground at fifty different speeds and heights. From his perch on a gantry crane, Snipe's mask tilted a fraction, and the class in the tent watched the second greatest marksman in Japan do what no one else could do.

He started firing.

It was calm and horrifying. Each shot tracked a piece through the air, curving after it around corners and over fences. He wasn't panicking at the swarm. He was culling it.

"Twelve down, already?!" Tokage hissed from cover, sweat on her temple. “We have to find him or escape quickly!”

"We have to use our brain." Shishida said, and stripped off his glasses. "Climb in."

"In?"

"In."

Jurota Shishida activated his quirk and twenty-six pieces of Setsuna Tokage burrowed into its fur like ticks boarding a god. Her eyes rode high on his shoulders, buried to the iris. Her hands gripped deep in the pelt at his ribs. Her core stayed locked behind the warehouse wall, safe and sightless, seeing everything through the parts of herself woven into a monster.

The Beast charged.

Snipe did exactly what a professional does to a charging mass, which was put rounds into it on a flat line, no homing needed for a target that big. The shots disappeared into the shaggy hide and the rolling muscle under it and the Beast did not even slow; Recovery Girl, in the tent, observed mildly that Snipe's quirk traded power for accuracy and that there was very little point in accurately hitting a freight train.

So Snipe stopped wasting bullets and dropped smoke.

Gray billowed across the lot, swallowing the gantry, the ground, the sightlines, killing his own quirk and everyone's eyes with it, and he moved positions inside the cloud.

The Beast turned in the smoke, lifted its head, and breathed in.

"You are wearing leather, gun oil, and cherry cough drops," it said, in Shishida's unfailingly polite rumble. "Forty meters. Northeast. You have just crouched behind the yellow forklift."

Snipe ran. He was fast and clever about it, low through the smoke, doubling back, but Shishida’s nose did not care, and on the Beast's third lunge the gantry he ducked behind came apart around him, and as he rolled clear with both guns rising, the fur all over the monster's shoulders erupted.

Twenty-six pieces of Tokage hit him at once.

Hands on his wrists, forearms wrapping his elbows, a shin across the backs of his knees, her teeth, in a detached jaw, closing on his coat and hauling. The guns went off twice into the dirt. The Beast's paw came down on his back like the end of an argument, gentle by Beast standards, final by any other.

Tokage's core strolled out of the smoke with the handcuffs spinning on one reassembled finger.

"You know," she said, clicking them shut around the gauntlets of the instructor, "for the record, I'd have figured something out eventually. He just got there first."

"Your swarm bought the time," the Beast said. "Credit is shared."

"See, that's what I keep telling people."

“I told the principal this wouldn’t work with those soft bullets. There’s no threat to ya.” Snipe murmured.

The buzzer sounded.

"WALL!" Tetsutetsu bellowed joyfully, steel from scalp to boots, and put his fist through eight inches of concrete. The wall came down. Another rose behind it. He put his fist through that one too. "ANOTHER WALL! THIS IS THE WHOLE FIGHT? I CAN DO THIS ALL DAY!"

Cementoss sat on a gliding slab of concrete half a block back, hands folded, riding his element like a gondolier, and the city moved for him. Every road bent. Every wall multiplied. He didn't really attack them. He calmly rewrote the streets between his students and the gate, and his voice carried over the grind of stone with a teacher's mild patience.

"Your quirks are strong," he called. "But Steel tires. Big Fist tires. Show me what you do when strength stops being the answer."

Fifteen minutes in, strength stopped being the answer.

Tetsutetsu's punches denting where they'd been shattering, the gray fatigue-sheen on his steel, the way Kendo's enlarged hands trembled at the wrist between swings. They had broken through forty walls and gained two blocks, and ahead of them the avenue to the gate calmly grew ten more.

"Tetsu." Kendo grabbed his shoulder before he could charge again. Her breathing was ragged. "Stop. Stop hitting the city. We're doing exactly what he wants. The gate's over the walls. And so is he. He controls the cement. He's never once controlled the sky."

Tetsutetsu followed her gaze. Then he looked at her, and a grin cracked across his steel face.

"Am I understanding what you’re thinking?"

"We aren't running for the gate."

What followed was, Present Mic would later say while reviewing footage, the single most 1-B play of the entire exam. Kendo and Tetsutetsu charged the final stretch together, Tetsutetsu roaring to make sure every scrap of Cementoss's attention came to meet them, and the teacher obliged, walls rising thick and fast, a gray harvest. At the base of the last and tallest of them, Kendo planted her feet, and both her hands bloomed to their full size, and she laced her giant fingers together into a step.

Tetsutetsu hit the step at a full sprint, fully steel, and Itsuka Kendo, with everything left in her arms and her back and her week of tutoring two idiots and her terrible, wonderful, big-sister heart, threw him.

A quarter ton of polished steel went over the wall in a flat, screaming arc. But he wasn't aiming for the gate.

On his floating slab of concrete half a block away, Cementoss looked up. His blocky eyes widened as he realized the trajectory wasn't an escape route. It was a direct assault. The Pro Hero raised a hand to summon a defensive dome, but the ultra-compressed weights strapped to his arms dragged his movements down just a fraction of a second too long.

He couldn't dodge.

"STEEL METEOR!" Tetsutetsu bellowed, crashing onto the slab like a meteor.

The concrete shattered under the sheer kinetic force. Before Cementoss could tap the debris to recover, Tetsutetsu tackled the winded teacher into the resulting pile of rubble. His metallic hands moved in a blur, snapping the capture tape securely around the Pro Hero's thick wrists.

The buzzer blared across the training grounds.

Tetsutetsu stood up from the dust cloud, raising a steel fist in triumph as Kendo limped around the final wall to join him. "TEACHER CAPTURED!"

From the crater, Cementoss let out a heavy sigh, though his face settled into a small, approving smile. "Quick decision-making, the humility to change tactics, and the courage to take the fight directly to the source," he said, holding up his taped wrists. "You've passed, both of you. Although," he added, looking at the pulverized remains of his floating slab, "someone will be cleaning this up. Probably me."

The other matches ran through the afternoon.

Shoda and Rin spent twenty-nine minutes being dismantled by a maniacal principal playing a little too much into his villain role with a wrecking ball. Every plan Shoda made, and he made six, Nezu had anticipated before the crane finished its first swing, sealing streets with collapsed buildings, herding them with falling rubble, laughing the entire time in a register that several students said they would be hearing in their sleep. They passed with eleven seconds left, and only because Shoda finally threw out the seventh plan and did the one thing too simple to predict: he tagged a chunk of flying debris as it passed, let Nezu's own demolition carry it across the field, detonated Twin Impact to bring an already-falling wall down across the crane's path, and sprinted the gap with Rin's scales covering his back. Nezu applauded them from the crane cab and called it "delightfully rudimentary."

Yanagi and Kodai learned in the first minute that everything they threw at Thirteen simply ceased to exist, eaten mid-air by Black Hole along with most of their composure. Their third option was the kind of quiet genius the two of them specialized in: Kodai shrank a bus to the size of a toy, Yanagi floated it gently past Thirteen at ankle height where it wasn't worth vacuuming, and Kodai restored it to full size directly between the rescue hero and her own line of suction, an instant steel wall that bought them the eight seconds of blind sprint they needed. Both barely passed.

Pony and Awase took the worst sound in Japan head-on. Present Mic's first Loud Voice scattered Pony's horns mid-flight like leaves and put Awase on his knees, and for ten minutes they could not get within a block of him. Then Awase stopped trying to approach and started building, welding car doors and signage into a curved barricade, then a second, then a third, a chain of sound-shadows down the street, and Pony fired her horns in flat arcs from behind each one, never giving Mic a target to face, forcing him to swivel his directional speaker between angles while Awase leapfrogged shelters. The horn that finally took the speaker unit off his collar came from directly above. Both passed, half-deaf and celebrating.

Honenuki and Bondo turned their battlefield into a war beneath the war. Power Loader vanished underground in the opening seconds and made the surface a lie, sinkholes and collapses and steel claws erupting under their feet, faster in the earth than anything 1-B had ever seen, faster than Honenuki, which no one thought possible. So Honenuki stopped racing him and started shaping the racetrack: he softened the ground in great connected fields, let the mole tunnel into them, and re-hardened the earth in sequence, closing tunnels like valves while Bondo poured glue down every opening the teacher tried to dig back out of. The mech came up one last time inside a softened pool with nowhere left to go, and Honenuki set the ground around it like concrete to the waist. Cuffed. Both passed.

Kuroiro and Kaibara fought a war of attrition against an army. Thirty Ectoplasm clones flushed Kuroiro out of every shadow on the block, and for fifteen brutal minutes the match was Kaibara alone, both arms spinning, drilling through clone after clone after clone. He went down eventually, swarmed and pinned. It didn't matter. He'd done his job, which was to be the entire war, because while every clone on the field converged on the drill, no one was watching the original's own costume, where Shihai Kuroiro had been living in the black bodysuit for six minutes. The cuff came out of Ectoplasm's own collar and closed on his wrist. Both passed.

And Komori and Tsuburaba did not pass.

It was a quiet sort of heartbreak. Tsuburaba's quirk needed deep breaths, and the air on Midnight's battlefield was hers, and within four minutes the boy who'd walked on the sky was on his hands and knees, fighting his own lungs for every solid wall he raised. Komori carried it alone for a while, her spores against the aroma in an invisible airborne war the cameras could barely film, mushrooms blooming in walls of cover, and she got them within forty meters of the gate before Midnight, patient and gentle and merciless, fanned a final wave over their last barricade. The screens showed the R-Rated Hero carrying both sleeping students out of the battlefield herself, one over each shoulder, and laying them on the medical cots with unexpected care.

The battlefield was a dense slab of downtown blocks with the escape gate a kilometer out, and at the start line Manga Fukidashi held out his hand. Monoma took it. His throat tingled with the pressure of words wanting out.

"How many do you have?" Manga asked.

"Before my throat goes?" Monoma flexed his fingers. "I've trained it since the festival. Eight heavy ones. Maybe ten. Small words, more."

"Then we don't go crazy early." Manga's bubble had gone to work, panel lines moving, sketches forming and erasing. No prep time, no traps, no building. Just a city, a partner, and a kilometer of open war against the strongest hero alive. "Listen. We can't cuff him. Even I’m not that insane. And we can't outrun him to the gate, he's faster than me even weighted. Which leaves one thing on the table."

"Which is?"

"You." Manga turned to look at him, and the grin in the bubble was the trap-builder's grin, the one Kendo had mud-flavored nightmares about. "Your quirk is the cheat code, Monoma. One touch. One touch and you're holding the strongest quirk in the world, and the moment you are, the whole match flips. He can't fight his own power plus mine. Everything we do, every word, every trap, every step, all of it funnels to one thing: getting your hand on All Might."

Monoma stared at him. Then a mad smile spread across his face. "Fukidashi, I have never liked you more than I do right now."

“What?! I thought we were best buds!”

The siren sounded.

Somewhere in the city, a voice like a landslide answered it.

"I AM HERE!"

The words arrived before he did. All Might came around a corner six blocks out at a walk, and the walk was worse than a charge would have been. His costume's colors burned against the gray street. The weighted bracelets on his wrists looked like toys.

"I am a villain today, young men!" he boomed. "Property damage means nothing to me! Collateral means nothing to me! And I have done my homework!"

"GO!" Manga said.

They split. Manga went left and his voice started laying the city's new rules as he ran.

"BETO-BETO!" Adhesive flooded a crosswalk. "NURU-NURU!" The next street went frictionless. "BATAN!" A wall of solid kanji slammed up across an alley mouth.

All Might came through the middle of all of it like the morning through a window.

He didn't blunder into a single field. The Number One Hero ran the gauntlet reading it, calling the words as he met them. "Beto-beto! Adhesive!" He went over the crosswalk in one flat leap. "Nuru-nuru! I watched your festival matches, young Fukidashi, every one!" He crossed the frictionless street without breaking stride, skating it, using it. The Batan wall he simply hit; the kanji were durable and could be broken. His fist went through them with ease.

"All Might studied me?!" Manga exclaimed, cutting down a side street.

"Your words are amazing!" All Might's voice chased him between the buildings, cheerful as a parade. "But a word, once spoken, is a thing in the world! And things in the world can be SMASHED!"

"Yeah…" Manga muttered, lungs burning, bubble drawing a tiny sweating cartoon of himself, "I'm getting that, thank you, sensei."

But Manga never came in believing he could defeat All Might with his quirk alone. Even a handicapped one.

Three blocks of laid words had done their real job, which was to make All Might move the way Manga wanted, over this crosswalk instead of that one, down this street, around that wall, every avoided trap a wall of its own, herding the unherdable man one choice at a time toward a position neither hero nor villain would ever think twice about: a plain intersection with good sightlines and a manhole cover.

Manga stopped running. He turned in the middle of the intersection, planted his feet, and faced the Symbol of Peace alone.

"That's far enough!" His voice cracked across the empty city, and his bubble blazed with the splash-page glare of a final battle. "You want a fight without preparations, sensei?! Here it is! Me and you!"

All Might slowed to a walk again, smiling, six meters out. "Young Fukidashi. You are many things, but you are not a man who fights recklessly." The blue eyes were bright and alert. "Where is your partner?"

"Right here!" said the manhole.

It hadn't been a manhole for ten minutes. Monoma had been under the intersection since the second minute of the match, guided through the utility crawlspace by the sound of their battle, and the cover came up silent while All Might's eyes were on the boy in front of him, and Neito Monoma rose out of the ground at the villain's heel with his hand already reaching, and his fingertips brushed All Might.

Contact.

Monoma felt the copy take, felt Comic swap over and the new quirk slot into its place, the strongest quirk in the world, his now, his, and he braced for the flood of it, the strength, the size, the speed of being All Might.

And there was nothing there.

"All Might’s a freaking dud…?" Monoma whispered.

All Might was already turned. He had turned the instant the fingers touched him, faster than the eye, faster than the thought, and his fist was already there, enormous, filling Monoma's whole sky, and for one frozen fraction of a second Monoma looked past the fist at the man's face and saw something he would have nightmares about: All Might's villainous smile.

The fist landed.

Monoma left the intersection like a golf ball. He cleared a parked truck, hit the street beyond it, bounced, and a blue-and-cream blur arrived under him before the second bounce, Manga's gravity-built speed closing thirty meters in the time it took to fall, and caught his partner out of the air with both arms and skidded ten more meters on his heels.

"Plan A's dead, buddy!" Manga said. "You still alive after taking a punch from the strongest hero in the world?"

Monoma's nose was bleeding freely and one eye was already swelling and he started laughing anyway, a wheezing, unhinged sound. "His quirk. Fukidashi… his quirk… is a dud…"

"I don’t know what a dud is but it is time for plan B!"

He threw Monoma over his shoulder and ran, because the street behind them had just exploded, and the explosion was wearing a cape.

What followed was the worst kilometer of Manga Fukidashi's life.

He ran flat out through the city with a classmate on his back and the #1 Hero on his heels, and he spent words over his shoulder like a man bailing out a sinking boat. "NORO-NORO!" A slow-field swallowed the street; All Might leaped over the dome of slow. "DORO-DORO!" The avenue turned to thick mud; All Might sped through the entire avenue. "GURA-GURA! BATAN! BETO-BETO!" Destabilized ground, kanji walls, adhesive sheets; he smashed, he leapt, he read each one aloud as he beat it, polite as a man remembering flashcards, and he was gaining.

"This is FUTILE, young men!" The voice was right behind them now, delighted and enormous. "I did a lot of studying before this final exam! There is nothing you can say that I haven't prepared for!"

"He's right!" Manga's voice was starting to fray at the edges, and he could feel it, the heat down his throat, the rasp climbing syllable by syllable. Eleven heavy words since the siren and a sprint on top. "Monoma! New plan! NOW!"

"I just got hit by the number one hero and you’re relying on me?! I can only copy quirks!" Monoma snapped from his shoulder, upside down, watching All Might smash a word that was meant to stop him with ease.

“You’re more than your quirk, man! I told you this!” Manga reminded him.

Monoma sighed. He started thinking. "He breaks dangerous words that go beyond strength, dodges the debuffing words. He can read everything we throw between us and him. So we stop throwing words at him."

"What does that mean?"

Monoma twisted on his shoulder, looked ahead at the distant gate, looked back at the avalanche in a cape, and the plan arrived.

"Hurry it up. My throat's going. If my voice cuts out we're done, you understand me, it's both of us or it's nothing," Manga rasped.

"Then stop talking," Monoma said, "and put me down, and when I say the word, you say it with me."

All Might caught them at the last intersection before the gate.

He came down out of the sky in front of them, blocking the gate. The shockwave of his landing alone took both boys off their feet and put them in the ground hard enough to crater it. Manga came up coughing. Monoma came up spitting blood. The escape gate stood eighty meters past the broad blue back of the strongest hero alive, and it might as well have been on the moon.

"You ran well, heroes!" All Might said warmly. He rolled his shoulders, and the street trembled. "But the exit is closed. So! Show me what's left, young men. Show me everything."

They showed him.

Two boys with one quirk between them stood up out of a crater and threw the whole dictionary at God. "BYUN-BYUN!" from two mouths at once, and the air filled with a barrage of high-speed projectile-words hammering him from both flanks. "GOOO!" and a column of tornado wind ripped up the intersection, street signs and glass spiraling. "BARI-BARI!" Lightning crawled and tore. Manga went left, Monoma right, scissoring, words overlapping, fields stacking, Gyuu-gyuu constriction over Toro-toro syrup over Pika-pika flash, layered and interleaved with a coordination that seemed instinctive, and in the heart of all of it All Might planted his feet and weathered his students like a cliff weathering a sea, smashing what could be smashed, enduring what couldn't, his costume tearing in the lightning and the glass-wind, his smile never moving an inch.

In the intersection, Manga and Monoma ended up shoulder to shoulder, backs to the distant gate, eighty meters of open ground behind them, the Symbol of Peace before them, wreathed in lightning and torn cloth and patient as forever. Manga's voice was a shredded rasp. Monoma's was blood and gravel. Between them they had perhaps one heavy word left, and All Might could see it, and his smile turned kind.

"It's over, heroes. Your time has come."

"It’s not over till it’s over…" Manga croaked.

His bubble, battered and pale, drew one last picture: a tiny cartoon Manga and a tiny cartoon Monoma, riding a rocket.

"Sensei. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch…"

The two of them grabbed each other's collars, turned toward the charging All Might, and screamed the last word together.

"DOKKAAAN!!"

The explosion was the biggest thing either of them had ever made.

Two voices, one quirk, every remaining scrap of two ruined throats, detonating a point-blank bomb with two teenagers riding the front of the blast wave. The intersection vanished in light. The shockwave hit All Might square and he was sent flying across the city, smashing through buildings, cars, and anything else directly behind him. The Number One Hero, the Symbol of Peace, stood in a crater clutching the tattered remains of his suit to his chest like a startled maiden at a bathhouse, blinking at the place where his students used to be.

His students were in the sky.

They went up and out in a flat screaming arc, two boys and eighty meters, tumbling, on fire in at least one small place each, howling, and it was not clear to anyone watching whether the howling was agony or laughter. Manga had one word left in the wreck of his voice and he wheezed it alive as the ground came up.

"...fuka-fuka."

The cushion-field caught them like a hand.

They hit it, sank, bounced once, and rolled together across the line of the escape gate in a tangle of scorched costume and blood and smoke, and the buzzer sounded.

For a moment the two of them just lay there on their backs, past the gate, staring up.

Then Monoma started laughing, which hurt, audibly, and kept doing it anyway, and Manga's wrecked throat produced something like a death rattle with joy in it, and the two of them lay in the dirt beyond the gate laughing at the sky like a pair of lunatics, seared, deaf in one ear each, bleeding from places neither of them had inventoried yet, having just executed a plan so stupid that no instructor alive would ever sign off on it.

But when your opponent is the Number One Hero, the Symbol of Peace himself, there is no good plan. There is only the question of what you are willing to sacrifice to win.

A shadow fell over them. All Might stood at the gate's edge, holding his shredded costume together at the shoulder with one hand, and looked down at his two broken, cackling students for a long moment.

"That," he said at last, "was the single most irresponsible escape I have witnessed in my entire career."

"Thank you, sensei." they croaked together.

"It was not a compliment." He shook his head grimly. Then a smile began to grow on his face. "It was MOSTLY not a compliment. YOU BOTH PASSED!"

He scooped them up, one under each arm like baguettes, and carried them to Recovery Girl, who took a single look at the state of their throats and hit All Might with a lecture.

…

The results board went up at the end of the day.

Eighteen passed. Two names sat below the line, and Tsuburaba stared at them with the gray face of a boy watching a summer die, while Komori, just woken, was being quietly hugged by half the girls in the class at once.

Manga sat on a medical cot with a regenerative throat lozenge dissolving on his tongue and his voice under doctor's orders not to exist until tomorrow. Beside him, Monoma was being held upright mostly by bandages and smugness. Across the tent, Tokage caught Manga's eye and mouthed lunatic at him with extravagant clarity, and a sorry not sorry was drawn in his bubble.