God of Heroics: Comicman!

Tsuburaba had his forehead on his desk and had been there for ten minutes.

"Summer school…" he said into the wood. "A whole summer. In a hot room. While you guys are in the mountains eating curry and being happy."

"You don't know that yet." Awase said, without much conviction.

"I failed the practical, Awase. Komori failed the practical. There's no version of this where they let the two losers go camping with everyone else. They're going to lock us in here with worksheets and the smell of our own regret."

A few seats over, Komori had pulled her head buried in her arms. A small, muffled, deeply sad voice came out of it.

"I let my spores down," she said. "I had him… I was so close…"

"You carried that whole match," Kendo said firmly, crouching by her desk. "Both of you ran into the two worst matchups in the building and you made the R-Rated Hero work for it. That's not nothing."

"It's not passing, either." Tsuburaba mumbled.

The door slid open and Vlad King walked in with a stack of papers under one arm and a look on his face that several students would later swear was him fighting a smile, though no one was brave enough to say it to him.

"Sit," he said, even though everyone already was. He set the papers down. "Final exams. As you know, two of you didn't clear the practical exam."

Komori's head somehow drooped further.

"Which means," Vlad King went on, dragging it, "those two students are going to need extra work. A great deal of it. Harder than anything the rest of you will see."

"Here it comes…" Tsuburaba whispered.

"At the training camp."

The room went still.

Komori's head came up out of the hood. "...What?"

"You heard me." Vlad King crossed his arms. "All twenty of you are going to the woods. The two who failed will be doing supplemental training on top of the regular program, and I promise you it will be worse than any summer school, because I'll be the one running it and I am not a patient man." He looked at the two of them, and the gruffness cracked just enough to let something warm leak through the seam. "Did you really think I'd ship two of my students off to a classroom while I took the other eighteen up a mountain? Use your heads. We don't leave people behind. That's the entire job."

Tsuburaba was on his feet. "WE'RE GOING TO CAMP?!"

"That's what I said."

"BUT WE FAILED!"

"And failure has consequences, which I just described to you, and you'll hate every second of them." Vlad King grinned. "But the ones who fail are the ones who need the camp most. So nobody's getting left behind. Now sit down before I change my mind about how merciful I'm feeling."

Tsuburaba sat down so fast his chair squeaked. Komori had raised her head instantly after hearing they could go with her hand covering her mouth.

"The whole thing was a ruse!" Kaibara said slowly, working it out. "The failure stakes. You wanted us scared enough to take it seriously."

"The teachers designed every matchup to land on the thing each of you is worst at," Vlad King said. "We told you we'd crush you. We meant it. But the point was never to crush you, it was to make you find a way through anyway, because that's what the job is going to ask of you for the rest of your lives. The ones of you who lost still learned where your wall is. That's worth more than a clean pass." He picked the stack of papers back up. "Which is why the failures train harder. You met your wall. Now we knock it down. Camp guides. Take one, pass them back."

The papers went around. Manga took his and looked at the packing list, and his speech bubble drew a slow, climbing line of question marks, because the list was long.

"Sleeping bag," Tetsutetsu read aloud, eyes widening with each line. "Trekking boots. Rain gear. Mess kit. Bug spray. Towels. Swimwear. A flashlight AND a lantern. Who has all this? I don't have any of this. I have protein, iron, and weights."

"Most of us probably don’t have this stuff..." Kendo said, scanning her own. Then, because she was class president and a list of twenty people who all needed the same things was a call to action, she stood up. "Okay. We've got tomorrow off. Tests are done. Everybody needs basically the same gear." She looked around the room. "We go together. All of us. Kiyashi Ward, tomorrow, get everything in one trip. Anyone who wanders off and buys the wrong sleeping bag is on their own in the mountains."

"A class trip to the mall." Pony said, bouncing. "YES."

"I guess you could see it as that..."

"It's a trip!" Tokage said.

"...It's a little bit a trip." Kendo admitted.

…

The Kiyashi Ward Shopping Mall was the biggest in the prefecture, a cathedral of commerce that had to stock for every kind of body a quirk could produce and every age that walked through the doors, which was why it never emptied. The next morning twenty students of Class 1-B came through the entrance in their civilian clothes under a clean blue sky, and for about four seconds they looked like a normal group of teenagers.

Then someone near the food court said, loudly, "Hey, that's the Comicman kid!"

And the four seconds ended.

Manga had tried. He really had. He'd worn a hooded jacket and pulled the hood up, which accomplished exactly nothing, because the thing under the hood was a speech bubble that currently had a nervous little sweat-drop drawn in it.

"You can’t hide." Tokage informed him, walking beside him with her hands in her jacket pockets and obvious enjoyment on her face. "You have a billboard for a head."

"I have a subtle and mysterious handsome head."

"You have a head that's currently showing everyone a picture of a sweating cartoon you."

He was thinking of that. Then he started thinking of other stuff.

It wasn't only him, to be fair. People clocked Kendo, who'd been all over the festival coverage, and a couple of younger kids recognized Tetsutetsu and asked to feel his arm, which he flexed into steel with enormous pride. But Manga was the one who pulled a small crowd within the first ten minutes, because Manga had won the whole Sports Festival and Manga had been the boy on every channel holding a building off a crowd two weeks ago, and a bubble for a head is not a thing you mistake for someone else.

Monoma watched a cluster of middle schoolers ask Manga to do the thing with his face, watched Manga obligingly flash a row of celebratory emojis that made them shriek with delight, and folded his arms.

"Unbelievable," he muttered. "I have a perfectly recognizable face. A good face. A face with bone structure."

"Nobody's stopping you." Kaibara said.

"Why is the bubble famous and I'm not?"

"Because the bubble saved forty people on live television and you copy other people's quirks."

"That is a RESPECTABLE quirk, Kaibara."

"To your zones," Kendo cut in, holding up the packing list like a battle map. "Camping store's on three. Sporting goods on two. We split, we buy, we meet at the food court at noon, nobody buys a knife."

"What if the knife is for camp?" Kamakiri said.

"Nobody buys a knife."

“I’m not gonna be anyone’s knife at the camp!” Kamakiri felt like he understood why no one needed to buy knives.

“You’re more than your quirk, Kamakiri. That’s not why I said no knives.” Kendo gently lectured him.

“Good.” He said softly.

---

The camping store on the third floor did not survive contact with Tetsutetsu.

He came out of it forty minutes later pushing a cart that looked like he was outfitting an expedition to summit something with a death toll. A four-season tent rated for conditions that did not exist on the mountain they were going to. A folding shovel. Three different sizes of canteen. A device whose only described function was "fire." Rope. So much rope.

"It's a week of training camp," Honenuki said, looking into the cart like he was nuts. "In summer. With teachers."

"You don't know that, Honenuki. You don't know what's out there."

"Trees are out there. And our teachers."

"BEARS could be out there."

“I don’t think a bear can eat steel.”

Tetsutetsu paused, deeply moved. "...I AM the bear plan." He put back two of the canteens. He kept the rope.

Kamakiri, meanwhile, had drifted three times toward the display case of camping knives with the slow inevitability of a moth, and three times Kendo had appeared at his elbow without seeming to move through the space in between.

"For camp." he tried.

"The class does not have a blade shortage." Kendo said.

"It's a nice knife."

"It's going home with you another day when I'm not responsible for you." She steered him toward the boots. "Trekking boots. Your size. Go."

---

Tokage had a plan for Manga, and the plan was not on the packing list.

She'd peeled the two of them off from the main group, a hand hooked in his sleeve, and walked him past the gear stores entirely to a shop that sold, as far as Manga could tell, exclusively dinosaurs. Plush dinosaurs. Model dinosaurs. A six-foot inflatable dinosaur hanging from the ceiling. Her eyes were brighter than he'd seen them in weeks.

"This is the best store in Japan." she said, with total sincerity.

"I think I have a feeling I know why you said that…" Manga chuckled.

She dragged him to a claw machine in the corner, the kind stuffed with plush raptors behind glass, fed it a coin, missed, fed it another, missed, and made a sound of pure murder in her throat.

"These are friggin’ rigged!" She exclaimed.

"They're a little rigged."

"Hold this." She handed him her jacket. Then, glancing once over her shoulder for witnesses, she popped her hand off at the wrist and sent it slithering up the coin slot, fingers walking into the machine's guts from the inside.

"Tokage."

"What."

"That's cheating and illegal, I'm pretty sure."

"It's creative use of my quirk in a low-stakes environment." Inside the glass, a plush raptor rose, gripped firmly in a detached and entirely unauthorized hand, and dropped neatly into the prize chute. Her hand strolled back out and reattached with a soft pop, and she held up the raptor in triumph. "See? Rescue."

"You rescued a toy."

"From an unjust prison."

"If Kendo saw this, you’d get a chop to the head."

"Kendo is on the second floor buying eighteen identical flashlights and she will never know." She tucked the raptor under her arm and looked at him, and for a second the sharp grin softened into something only for him. "You needed a dumb hour. You've been carrying that lady behind your eyes for three weeks. Don't argue with me, I can read the bubble even when its blank." She bumped her shoulder into his. "So. Dumb hour. Dinosaurs. No saving anyone. Girlfriend’s orders."

"...Yeah," he said. "Okay."

"Good." She shoved the raptor into his hands. "This one's yours. His name is Gary. Take care of Gary like he’s our first son or we're breaking up."

“My firstborn already? And he’s named Gary?! Why did we adopt an American dinosaur son?”

“Don’t ask questions! Girlfriend’s orders!” Tokage didn’t know why she thought of the name Gary either… It felt like a Gary, so she named him Gary.

They saw some merch on their way back to the others.

There was a novelty shop near the escalators, the kind that sold whatever was popular and legally available, and a spinner rack out front was hung with hero masks. Official ones for the big names, Endeavor, Hawks, All Might, the licensed merchandise of grown professionals who'd signed the papers. And below those, in a discount bin, the bootlegs.

Manga stopped dead.

There, in a cardboard bin marked 30% OFF, was a foam mask shaped like a speech bubble. Not quite his proportions. The blue was too dark. The little tail at the bottom was on the wrong side. And printed across the forehead, in a font that was almost but legally not his, was the name: BUBBLE BOY!

His speech bubble lit up with a burst of stars.

"They made me into a mask." he breathed.

"They made BUBBLE BOY into a mask." Tokage corrected, picking one up and turning it over. "They can't use your real face or name. You're fifteen and you don't have a license, so technically you're not a hero, so technically this is a totally original character that has nothing to do with you." She flipped it back into the bin. "It's a knockoff."

"It's an amazing knockoff." The stars in his bubble flattened into a deadpan line as he held one up. "The neck’s on the wrong side. My neck does not go there. And 'Bubble Boy'? I'm Comicman. I have a whole brand."

"You have a whole ego, is what you have…" She snickered.

"That too." But he was still holding the mask, and the stars were creeping back into the bubble around the edges of the deadpan, because somewhere under the bad foam and the wrong shade of blue was the thing he'd wanted since he was small enough to draw heroes in the margins of his own homework. Somebody, somewhere, had decided kids would want to be him. There was a bin of him. Discounted, misspelled, legally distinct, and real.

That was when he heard the small voice.

"Whoa! Look at that one!"

A little boy, maybe six, had wandered up to the spinner rack with a parent a few steps behind, and he wasn't looking at the Bubble Boy bin. He was looking up at a mask on the rack above it, a flat gray thing with a red slash across it.

"That's the Hero Killer's mask! It's so cool!"

"That's the Hero Killer's mask." said Kamakiri, who had appeared at the end of the aisle with a shopping bag in one hand and an expression Manga had never seen on him. "You could get in trouble for wearing that one, kid."

The boy had already pulled it down and held it up to his face. "But it's awesome! Don't I look cool?"

Kamakiri shook his head. "No, you look way cooler as someone that saves people. Trust me on that one."

The kid lowered the mask, uncertain. His eye caught the bin below it instead, and the speech-bubble masks, and then he caught the actual speech bubble standing four feet away, attached to an actual head, and his entire small face rearranged itself.

"...You're-" he said. "You're- you're the-"

Manga crouched down to his level. His bubble drew himself in his hero costume.

"Yo." He greeted him warmly.

The kid squealed.

What followed took eight minutes and Tokage filmed forty seconds of it. The boy, it turned out, had watched the rescue broadcast with his mother and had been Comicman for two weeks straight; he had a Comicman drawing in his backpack that he produced with shaking hands, a crayon thing of a blue figure with a bubble head holding up a building, and Manga looked at it like it was a masterpiece. He signed the back of the kid's bootleg Bubble Boy mask, because signing a child's toy isn't pretending to be a licensed hero, it's just being a person a kid likes. He told the boy that the building drawing was better than anything the news had shown. The kid's mother had her hand over her mouth. The kid was vibrating.

"When I'm a hero," the boy announced, with the absolute conviction of the very young, "I'm gonna save people with a smile too. Like you. Not like the scary mask guy."

"Yeah you are," Manga said. "I can tell. You've already got the most important part figured out. A hero’s heart that wants to save people."

When the kid finally let go and was towed away by his overwhelmed mother, still looking back over his shoulder every three steps, Manga stayed crouched for a moment longer than he needed to.

"You okay?" Tokage asked, quieter.

"Yeah. That… It’s hard to explain but stuff like that means a lot to me." He stood up.

"Are you buying one?"

"I'm absolutely buying one."

He bought three masks.

There was an alarm that came at twenty past noon, right as the class was reconverging on the food court with bags and trays and Tetsutetsu's rope.

It was the voice of mall security over the PA: an incident reported, all patrons asked to make their way to the nearest exit in an orderly fashion, please do not run, please leave your purchases if necessary.

People in a public crowd did what people in a big crowd did during emergencies. The first few people standing up too fast, and the rest panicking to follow behind them.

And twenty heroes-in-training moved without being told to.

Kendo stood on a chair with her hands up and her voice loud and stern, telling people which way the nearest exit was and that there was plenty of time. Tetsutetsu and Bondo planted themselves at a bottleneck where two streams of people were about to crush together and became a patient, immovable lane divider, one civilian at a time, this way, you're fine, keep going. Pony took a lost toddler's hand and matched her pace to his. Shoda read the floor map at a glance and called the second exit nobody had noticed, splitting the crowd in half. Honenuki and Awase took the back, sweeping for stragglers, checking under tables, the way Thirteen had drilled into them in a dome.

Manga stood at the top of the down escalator and just talked, his bubble showing a big steady smiling face for everyone coming toward him.

“Everything is good everybody! You’re all doing great and the exit is right this way!”

People who were about to panic looked at the kid with the cartoon smile for a head telling them it was okay, and decided, against the evidence of an evacuation alarm, to believe him.

The crowd emptied out without people crushing each other, no one falling, and no one being trampled.

Outside in the sun, the class regrouped on the curb with whatever bags they'd managed to keep, while police cars slid past them toward the entrance they'd just left.

"Anyone know what it actually was?" Kaibara asked.

"Security's not saying." Honenuki had his phone out. "News is calling it a reported villain sighting inside the mall. Police responded." He scrolled. "Whoever it was, they didn't catch anybody. Person was gone by the time they swept it."

Tetsutetsu held up his bag.

"I still got the rope!" he said.

Everyone laughed.

"We got most of it." Kendo said, doing a fast headcount of bags and people the way she counted everything. "Boots, bags, rain gear. The big stuff. Anybody missing something critical can grab it on the way to the buses next week." She looked at her class, all twenty of them, sun on their faces, bags at their feet, every single one accounted for. "Not a bad outing."

They said their goodbyes by the station as the afternoon was ending.

It took a while, because it always did with twenty people who liked each other. Tetsutetsu made everyone promise, individually, to bring their A-game to camp. Komori was already deep in a plan with Pony about which cabin would be the idol cabin, summer school threat apparently forgotten in the face of the fact that she was going at all. Kamakiri and Awase argued about whether the rope was useful. Kuroiro announced that the forest at night would finally be a place that understood him.

They scattered toward their trains in twos and threes.

Tokage walked with him to his platform.

"Take care of Gary." she said.

"How could I not take care of our adopted son? Do you think I’m some sort of deadbeat father?"

"Mhmm." She gave him a long look. “I believe you wouldn’t leave me as a widow.” She smiled a toothy grin.

"How can the man who will surpass God, not even take care of his own?" he agreed.

She bumped his shoulder one more time and peeled off toward her own line, and Manga rode home with an adopted dinosaur son named Gary and three masks of a hero called Bubble Boy.

It had been a good day.

The mountains were a week away, and he could not wait.