"Wha! Whatdja do to your head?"
First day of class, in April finally. I'd packed up my stuff, gotten into the drab gray school UA uniform, and headed off to school. But before I even got to the front door, I saw a boy with a big head of spiky red hair. It was really noticeable and eye catching, almost standing up on top of his head like a big giant letter. For a few seconds, I didn't recognize him. Then I saw the eyes. It was Eijiro Kirishima, all ready for UA.
"This is your high school debut? You've got horns how! We're horn buddies now!" Just like mine.
He nodded and struck a nice big aggressive pose.e "Damn straight! Don't touch them though, you'll mess them up." He suddenly looked even more serious. "I'll never regret my inaction ever again I'm gonna be a hero who can protect people. I'm saying sayonara to my old pathetic self!" He turned away, ready to walk straight into class. I remembered his face, from back in the locker room.
"Kirishima…you were really beating yourself over that whole thing, huh?" He looked like he was starting to sweat a little. "That bad?"
He looked pretty upset. He headed over to him and punched him quickly on the arm.
"Don't overload yourself with pressure!" I told him as he flinched and hardened. "Ow - wait, that doesn't hurt, but why the hell?"
"How are you gonna say Sayonara when you're still pulling that gloomy face?" I asked him, then leaned in, put my finger to my lips, and smiled. "When you've actually overcome yourself, deep down, come and tell me, kay? I'll go spread rumors of Mr High school debut all over the place. I'm looking forward to it!"
He smiled at me, a soft and welcoming grin as the cherry blossoms blew all around us. "My bad," he murmured.
We walked into class together, Class 1-A through a gigantic open door, and took our assigned seats. I'm near the front of the classroom, right behind some strange blond boy and in front of a girl with green hair and a kind of frog-like face. Next to me is another blond boy, and Kirishima's right behind him.
The other kids were getting super rowdy. Everyone was talking at the front door to some boy with green, curly hair, when a sudden voice came from nowhere.
"If you're gonna be hunting for buddies, do it elsewhere."
A weird looking old unshaven dude, living inside of a sleeping bag!
"This is the hero department," he said, while taking a breath out of a bag.
"Who the hell," I could almost hear everyone thinking, "is this guy?"
He emerged from inside the cocoon, unshaven and calm and bored looking, dressed in black with a huge scarf around his neck.
"Hm, it took you lot 8 seconds to quiet down. Life is short, kids. You're all lacking in common sense."
It was just dawning on everyone, me included, that this guy was, in fact, our teacher. And a minute later, he confirmed it. "I'm your homeroom teacher, Shota Aizawa. Pleasure meeting you." He held up what looked like a gym uniform, some funny blue thing with white Us and As on it. "Wear this immediately, and meet up at the PE grounds."
A change of clothes later and we were standing outside in the morning, ready to take -
"A quirk apprehension test?!"
A cute girl with short hair was asking "What about the ceremony, and the guidance counseling?"
"If you want to be heroes, you don't have time for that," said Mr. Aizawa. "You all understand the school's reputation for freedom on campus. That freedom goes for us teachers too. The softball pitch, the standing long jump, the 50 meter dash, endurance running, grip strength, sustained sideways jumps, upper body exercise, seated to touch. These are all activities you know from middl school, naturally. Physical tests where you were barred from using your quirks. The country still hasn't gotten around to standardizing those sorts of records, or keeping track of average performance levels. Well, that's negicence on the part of MEXT. Bakugo," he said, turning to one of the really loud boys with spiky blonde hair, "How far could you pitch a softball in middle school?"
"6-7 meters," the boy answered.
"Try using your quirk this time around. As long as you don't exit the circle, anything is fine. Don't hold back."
"Got it," he said, winding up to pitch - the n screaming "DIE!" as the ball blasted out of his hand with a giant explosion and flying out of sight. I could see Eijiro watching him with a big dopey grin on his face, and I couldn't agree more. That looked awesome!
"Before anything else, one must know what they're capable of," said Sensei, holding up a measuring calculator for all of us to see. 705.2 meters! "This is a rational metric that will form the basis of your 'hero foundation'.
"Awesome!" I cheered, clapping my hands together. "That looks so fun!"
This seems to displease Sensei. He said "It looks like fun, you say? So you were planning to spend your three years here having a good old time? What happened to becoming heroes? All right, then. In that case, the student who ranks last in total points will be judged hopeless and instantly expelled. Our freedom means we dispense with students as we please." He gave a strange grin. "Welcome to the Hero Department."
The cute girl was protesting again. "This is our first day! Even if it wasn't, that's just unfair!"
"Natural disasters, massive accidents, ego-mad villains…all kinds of calamities can happen when we least expect them. The world is full of unfairness. It's our jobs as heroes to reverse it all, and restore reason. If you were counting on a friendly chat at the local McDonald's after school, that's too bad. From now on, for the next three years, all you can expect from life at UA is one hardship after the next. This is 'plus ultra'. I expect you to overcome these trials and climb to the top. Now then, that was the demonstration. Time to step up to the plate."
The first up was the '50 meter dash'. I went alongside the blond boy who sits in front of me. He was sneering at the other students who'd gone before us. It didn't take me too long to overtake him, as he fell flat on his butt before too long - his quirk let him shoot a belly button laser! "If I keep shooting for longer than one second, my stomach will collapse, you know," he said, as if that was something to brag about.
The rest of the events went by pretty easily. The only cool thing that really happened was during the baseball toss, when the cute girl - her power made things lose gravity - threw the ball to infinity, and after getting yelled at by the teacher, the curly-headed boy threw it over 700 meters like Bakugo.
Finally, all the results were done. I felt my heart pounding. I was pretty sure I'd done well, but a lot of other people had too! What if I was going to get expelled on the first day?!
"By the way, I was lying about expelling someone," Sensei said, as if this was obvious. Well, not to us it wasn't! What the heck?
The results came up. I was in 9th place, which was pretty cool. Kirishima was right ahead of me in 8th; that Bakugo boy was in 4th, the cute girl in 10th. First was someone called 'Yaoyorozu'. Thankfully, though, me and Kirishima had both made it in!