Were the epic battle between Geten and whatever villain they had sent after him to be viewed by an audience, they would have been bored out of their minds. Ice formed in Geten's direction, then it broke and retreated. Over and over again. It, unfortunately, had yet to turn back against its user, much to Geten's frustration, but he was holding out, and unlike the theoretical audience he wasn't even remotely bored. In fact, he spared a bit of glee as every other part of his concentration was focused on taking control of the surrounding ice, in addition to focusing and pinpointing each spot that the villain in question tried to be sneaky with.
He was clever enough to try focusing his own powers on small chunks of his ice while Geten suppressed the main mass of the wave, creating little icicles to try and stab into the boy in the eskimo suit. However, to his own pride and joy, Geten had proved just as able to figure out where these sneaky little blades were forming and provide just enough focus to stop them without losing concentration on the main body. At least, that was how it worked thus far.
He, admittedly, wouldn't be able to keep this up for long, and not knowing how long the villain he was facing could do so worried him a little. Screw that, he chastised himself. This is my quirk, my domain, and there is no way in hell that this loser will show me up here.
Todoroki had no idea how he ended up with the luck of facing the one Hero-trainee who turned out to be a perfect foil for his own quirk. He was mature enough to realize that it was his own decision to fight alone, and that no one had actually known what this specific boy could do before he was chosen as Todoroki's opponent, but he still felt it was unfair. Like some cosmic force had gone out of its way to show him up at what should have been a simple moment of glory. Damn cosmic forces, hadn't they thrown enough injustices onto him already?
Of course, it did occur to him that the chances of facing someone who could not only control ice as well as him, but make use of his other quirk also, were so low as to be….no, he still had principles. Killing a teenager for being too weak was perfectly fine. Killing a teenager using the exact same methods that he would have, now that thought just got him angry. Angry enough that he lost a bit of concentration and the UA student managed to push his entire wave back a few meters. He quickly regained his composure, but even that slip-up was enough to get his blood boiling. Again.
--
Uraraka ran through her old promise to never hurt children, no matter how low she sunk, in her head as she prepared to touch the boy covered in crystals, make him float to a ridiculous height, and then restore his weight just in time to get him to where his neck would snap as it hit the ground.
He wasn't technically a kid, she thought. The boy looked to be a bit older than her, in fact, or at least no younger. Besides, he was training to be a Hero; this guy would be the sort to try and stop her later, and wasn't it always better to take care of problems before they started?
Luckily, she didn't actually have time to ponder the matter, as that same boy with the crystals formed a massive club with his quirk and attempted to smash her head in. Self-defense overcoming any lingering guilt, she dodged to the side, and would have touched him and sent him spiraling upward were it not for the untimely intervention of some idiot smacking her with a roll of tape as he tried to take out her target.
While she had partially joined with Lord Explosion Murder to learn about being a better (and safer) criminal, she realized that the guy seriously needed some lessons of his own. For one, not trying to get a bunch of people to fight together without making sure they had synergy.
As another of her squad's goons, covered in solid stone armor and excitedly shouting about a manly competition ran forward and got caught up in the same imbecile's quirk-produced tape, she stifled an urge to slap her forehead. The Hero-in-training seized the initiative more than well-enough, extending the crystals growing on his arm to smash into and pin down Mr. 'Scarlet Riot.'
--
As Bakugo saw some of his henchmen, the one with the weird ears and the spiky electric hair, sink into the ground when they neared the creepy-looking hero-in-training with the blue hair, he swore quite creatively at their incompetence and sent a blast straight into said ground, clearing out the loose dirt that surrounded his opponent and technically freeing his followers, albeit doing so by sending them flying through the air.
"And the final boss clears out his own mooks. A cheap developer's trick to inspire intimidation; it only makes the fight easier," the Hero taunted.
Only half-understanding what the creepy loser said, but getting that he was being insulted, Lord Explosion Murder shouted out, "I'll kill you!" before sending multiple explosions at the boy. He quickly dodged around them; this guy was good for a mere trainee.
However, it was still just normal human athleticism vs. Lord Explosion Murder's amazing quirk, so it was only a matter of time before the creep was sent tumbling to the ground. He, in fact, landed right in front of Bakugo's feet, prompting the future number one villain to grin as he held his gauntlets directly above the dry-skinned boy's head…before screaming in pain when said boy lashed out with his fingers and Lord Explosion Murder's arm started to rot as if it were dead.
The still-living flesh surrounding the rotten area was still very much alive, as the pain of the nerves still connecting to the dead flesh attested, and he was forced to grit his teeth and bear it as he jumped away from the Hero-in-training before the rot could spread.
This quirk could be a problem. I can't let this bastard touch me.
If his opponent needed to touch him, however, then, no matter how dangerous the quirk might be, then, well, Bakugo was no slouch at ranged attacks. This fight was still very much in his favor.
--
Iguchi had gotten more from his martial arts training than expected, if his ability to block or dodge all of the attacks sent his way were any indication. He still hadn't managed to actually land a hit on anyone, but that was to be expected for a loser like him. No, this was not the time for his usual self-doubt, this was the time to make use of his instincts.
The gecko within wanted to run, and he didn't really disagree; while sensitive about the inherent cowardliness of the act, he also knew that their best bet was to contact the teachers, and he was arguably the best suited for getting out of there at the moment.
Unfortunately, the guy with the tail in front of him proved to be too good at preventing his escape; the tail itself was useless, too busy evading Tsuda's attempts to stab it, but he was apparently just as good with his fists, forcing Iguchi to use everything he had just to stay in the fight. He certainly couldn't get past his opponent's guard, not without putting himself at too much risk, but then it occurred to him that maybe Tsuda was giving him the opening he needed without even realizing it.
Iguchi ducked under the next blow at the last possible second, jumping between his opponent's legs and getting crushed between them for his efforts, but as he anticipated it meant that the villain shut down his own mobility and gave Tsuda the in he needed to go in for his own punch to the villain's head. Said villain, panicking, swung his tail around and wrapped it around Tsuda, which immediately turned out to be a huge mistake as the Hero-in-training grew knives all over his body, piercing the flesh of this villain's quirk appendage in dozens of places. The screams were chilling.
Not enough to stop Iguchi from quickly scrambling away once the villain involuntarily dropped him in throes of pain, but enough to make him shudder as he scampered up the walls, making a note to buy something nice for Tsuda later.
--
Toya was fading in and out of consciousness. Thanks to Toga completely ignoring his perfectly clear (he thought it was clear, at least, he wasn't really in the best mind-set to judge at the moment) instructions to run, the villains were forced to fight the weirdly energetic girl and thus let go of his own throat before he properly asphyxiated. While grateful for the sudden influx of oxygen and release of built-up carbon dioxide, he still needed a moment, and didn't seem to have one as the purple-ball boy stopped panicking about the fight Toga was having with his fellow villain for long enough to remember Toya was there.
"Sorry, I'm not into it. You'll have to die quickly." The diminutive villain rushed at Toya with a knife, expecting the target to be immobilized, but, with a great mental effort on the part of what little was left of his brain, Toya managed to steal the ball sticking him to the ground with his quirk and roll to the side at the last possible second.
"No fair," the villain whined. "Your quirk is a hard counter to mine!"
Toya, understandably, was happier about this news than his opponent as he also tried to target the knife that the boy was wielding. It did work, but either his oxygen-starved brain was still struggling or he needed a lot more practice, as he somehow managed to pull the sharp end into his hand, prompting him to shout in pain and drop it. Instinct rather than logic prompted him to reach down and pick it up quickly, which his opponent exploited immediately. Another sticky purple ball, tossed with shocking speed, landed in the ground and touching his hand as it was level with the knife.
"Good luck taking something that's already in your hands," purple-balls taunted.
Much to his frustration, Toya thought that this guy might be right.
--
Toga had been practicing to compensate for moving with different body proportions, and practicing combat maneuvers with Stain for a while before that, so she could dodge out of the way whenever Poison Dart Frog thought to lash out with her tongue. Unfortunately, it turned out that she hadn't spent as much time practicing environmental awareness as she thought, as when she jumped out of the way of the next tongue-lash she landed with her front foot halfway off the ledge of the shipwreck zone's pool and quickly lost her balance, falling in.
Once she was in the water, Poison Dart Frog wasted no time whatsoever submerging herself and rushing forward to grab Toga by the legs, pulling her under. This was…not good. Himiko had no illusions about an easy solution coming from someone rushing in to save the day. Was this how it was going to end?
She allowed herself a second or two to think about what she had accomplished in life, wondering whether it was worth it…no, she wasn't dying here. There was too much left to do.
She kicked at her captor, an utterly worthless action. She tried to swim upwards, with about the same results. Then, thinking about something Mr. Stainy had once told her, about how sometimes an unpredictable move was the best option solely because of how unpredictable it was, she flailed her arms until she was in a position to swim downwards. This shocked the villain, loosening her grip for a few seconds, letting Toga kick at her and burst free…only to be grabbed again, but this time around her waste.
Trying to ignore the screaming sensation in her lungs as she spent so much time underwater, she reached down and tried to strangle Poison Dart Frog, prompting the target to smirk. As the flaring pain in her chest grew worse, Toga realized that, even if she couldn't breathe underwater either, her opponent would almost certainly lose her breath long after Toga passed out.
She needed a new tactic to get out of this, cutting into Poison Dart Frog's cheek by instinct rather than aggression, she saw a bit of blood, so beautiful, dispersing itself through the pool, and realized something. She had never thought about the transition state of her quirk as anything more than a brief state signaling the real effect taking place before Izuku started testing the possibilities with her, and although their tests didn't amount to anything, this rapidly expanding droplet of blood before her reminded her that it was technically liquid and that liquid could do more things while dissolved in another liquid.
Toga sipped in the floating blood, ignoring the water that got in her mouth and made her breathing situation even worse, and tried to force a transformation. She already looked like Poison Dart Frog, so it was hardly a significant change, but that wasn't what she was going for anyways. Her flesh warped and liquified as always, but this time it let her slip from the real Poison Dart Frog's grip and spread out rapidly, becoming wider and wider…would she be able to stop herself and put herself together? It caused a bit of panic for a second, but focusing, she was able to reform herself up by the surface of the pool.
--
Todoroki had had enough of this. Not only was this entire ordeal frustrating and tedious, but his body temperature was rapidly lowering. He was going to kill himself like this. Thus, he did the second most logical thing he could think of; stop relying on his quirk and making use of his excellent hand-to-hand combat skills.
Only focusing on his ice enough that the Hero-in-Training couldn't turn it against him, Todoroki ran up his own pillar and leapt down to where the silly boy in the Eskimo suit was waiting.
"This is ridiculous!" Said Hero-in-Training whined. "I wanted to see which of our quirks was greater."
Todoroki did not bother with a response, simply punching the kid, who in turn dodged at the last second and sent his own swing in the reluctant villain's direction. Judging by their respective stances and reaction times, Todoroki would have guessed that he would have had the upper hand in normal circumstances, but thanks to the onset of hypothermia he had given himself his movements were far too sluggish to act at his full potential. His opponent noticed this.
"Hah, you froze yourself, didn't you? I don't have to worry about that at all!"
The villain questioned why the Hero-in-Training bothered with his warm ensemble if that were the case, but continued to say nothing. Villain-Hero banter was a waste of time that only gave enemies unnecessary information. The mental energy needed for a proper comeback was better spent on focusing his martial arts skills to techniques that favored his much healthier (at the moment) fire-side.
"But why is only half of you frozen?" Eskimo-suit whined as he barely blocked one of Todoroki's strikes and took a blow to the shoulder from his follow-up.
Now that was something he had no intention whatsoever of answering for a complete stranger. Being what amounted to a madman's experiment, albeit with less lab coats and more old-fashioned genetic exchange, had scarred him for life more than enough already.
Not enough, apparently, as when an involuntary shiver caused him to mess up while trying to block the Hero-in-Training's next kick and sent stumbling to the ground, he involuntarily started warming himself up.
Geten noticed his opponent take on a new state; the steam forming on his body indicated that the villain had some sort of power over heat as well as cold, which on one hand made him insanely jealous. Having Geten's own quirk but objectively better had some horrifying implications about the boy's own philosophies about quirks and how they tied into human worth.
It also pissed him off. If the boy could heat himself up at any time, then why wasn't he? Was this kid handicapping himself? Was he…rejecting his quirk? Geten suddenly became furious in a way he hadn't been before. Without thinking on every failure he had when attempting to do this in the past, he reached out toward a nearby puddle and attempted to create more ice. He was going to show this bastard that quirks were sacred, that one should never try to suppress them. If this villain wanted to avoid using his heat for whatever nonsensical reason, then he was going to suffer the consequences. Over and over again.
Ice flew towards Todoroki, making him wonder whether or not his distraction over having used his heat without meaning to let the Hero-in-Training take control of his ice once more, but a quick analysis of the battlefield showed that he was creating it from some of the bodies of water that littered this disaster zone. Come to think of it, his opponent had just spent the entire time manipulating Todoroki's ice and not sending any of his own out.
While Shouto had, at first, assumed that his opponent just had half of his own quirk, except without the apparent weakness of lowering his body temperature, it turned out that he could actually manipulate ice from the surrounding environment, but couldn't create his own whole-cloth like Todoroki could. That meant that he could probably win this, or at least finally gain a worthwhile advantage, by taking out any nearby sources of water. Unfortunately, the best way to do that would be by using his fire.
His father had been obsessed with power. He couldn't stand the idea of anyone stronger than him, and was willing to kill or crush anything that made him question whether that was happening. Many a Pro-Hero and would-be great villain learned that lesson the hard way. It was occasionally whispered that the only two things keeping Japan from becoming a burning ruin with him atop, glancing from side to side to check if there were any survivors that might be future threats and thus should be immediately eliminated, were All-For-One and All-Might.
The Number One Hero and God of Japan was repeatedly too much for him, and the only reason All-Might had let the man live after their first and only fight was because he respected Endeavor's spirit of destruction. He apparently saw kinship in their ideals. Todoroki would hate All-Might for that more than any of his most heinous crimes.
Rather than embrace his fate and accept that there were and would always be others above him, Endeavor decided to secure a future for himself by forcing his seed into an innocent woman with a quirk that happened to counteract his weakness (he produced fire, at the cost of raising his body temperature, and she produced ice, at the cost of lowering her body temperature), and making a 'him' that truly held no weaknesses.
It didn't work; two of Shouto's siblings were coldly (ironically enough) murdered for being weak. The eldest vanished a long time ago, secreted away by Pro-Heroes. The bastards never saved Shouto.
No, he was left to suffer all of Endeavor's anger, all of Endeavor's malice, and all of Endeavor's expectations, no matter how brutal. The society that let him do this, that saved his brother but didn't lift a finger for him, that did nothing for his poor broken mother, would freeze. Endeavor's enemies would die, but not by his flames. They would face his mother's vengeance, not his father's, and so he still refused to burn the boy in front of him.
He hesitated to even attempt to take away his weapons, but he thought the matter over, convincing himself that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't really be a betrayal of his ideals to use his fire on the environment.
"You would betray yourself by not using your quirk? You would reject who you are? Well then, see what someone who knows and appreciates exactly what they have will do to you!" Geten screamed before sending several hardened cubes of ice, gathered into clubs, straight for the villain's head. He was so angry about this situation that he didn't even have time to notice and get excited about the fact he produced so much from liquid water.
--
Something pulled the water Toga and Poison Dart Frog were currently swimming up into the air. When it turned to a mass of ice cubes, Toga suspected that it was Geten's quirk, albeit at a far greater power level than he had ever managed before. She was grateful for that, as it helped her grab for the side of the pool and pull herself up, hoping that her opponent would have less of an advantage on the land. Looking back and preparing for another tongue lashing, she was surprised to see the villain caught up in a mass of the ice, curling in on herself and…hibernating like a frog?
Apparently this girl's quirk did make her into a frog, including the inability to handle cold. Toga could probably use this. With Geten nearby, and a quick glance in his direction showing that he was surrounded by a huge wall of ice (did he create all that, or did one of the villains have a similar quirk?), she realized that if she could just get the villain over there, the fight would be done.
Unfortunately she didn't have time to think on it, as Poison Dart Frog dropped from her icy prison and fell back into the liquid water, immediately reanimating. Behind her, she heard the creepy guy with the purple hair from earlier expressing surprise at how much fun it was to penetrate a guy as Toya repeatedly screamed out in pain.
Realizing that she still looked like the villain, and that her partner probably wasn't watching their fight, she turned to him and shouted, "let me finish this one. You go help out against that ice-hero, it looks like our guy's in trouble."
"But Todoroki is so scary!" The boy whined.
"The Hero-in-Training that he's fighting might be a pretty girl," she pointed out, which prompted him to grin lecherously and apologize to Toya for ending their 'fun' early and running off in Geten's direction.
Leaning over a bleeding Toya covered in stab wounds, she let him know that she was Toga and asked if he was okay. His "hnnng" was the only response she had time to get before the real Poison Dart Frog lashed out her tongue once more.
"Help me!" Toga shouted to him as she attempted to grab onto the frog-girl's tongue and pull it towards her. It was strong, far stronger than a normal human's arm muscles, and she found herself being pulled toward its owner. That was, until said owner lurched in pain. Looking around for what could have caused that, Toga noted that Toya had managed to get a knife into the tongue with his one free hand.
Toga exploited Poison Dart Frog's distraction over this pain to pull her back, further and further until she could touch the villain's tongue right at the edge of the massive wall of ice surrounding the rock-slide zone, which was apparently enough to make the girl go rigid.
Merely tapping one part of her body against solid ice wasn't enough to induce the hibernation effect, of course, but it was enough that Toga could now pull the frog-girl towards herself rather than get pulled. With her movements growing more and more sluggish, Poison Dart Frog quickly fell into worthlessness.
--
Date Grape, using his balls to bounce up the ice barrier, quickly found out that it was not, in fact, a cute girl that awaited him, but some boy in a snowsuit. Deciding to help Todoroki, who seemed to be struggling in spite of how strong he always seemed, out, he plucked a ball from his head and prepared to chuck it at the silly Hero, hoping to trap him while he was distracted sending a huge wave of ice cubes toward Todoroki, but got stopped at the last second by a huge wave of fire covering everything, including himself. This was absolutely not the type of hot action Date Grape had been hoping for as he desperately tried to stop, drop, and roll on the rapidly melting ice, which did put out the flames but also got him soaked through with cold water. This was just not his day.
--
Todoroki had seen the massive crush of ice headed toward him, and panicked. He used his fire in combat, and not directly targeted at potential water sources as he had been planning. Was this all it took for him to give up on avenging his mother and siblings the proper way? Was this all it took for him to become what Endeavor had wanted him to be?
The thoughts horrified him for long enough that the Hero-in-Training, who just got his snow-suit destroyed and was otherwise unharmed by Todoroki's flames, managed to get a solid punch right to the face, knocking him down for the count.
--
Bakugo blasted himself upward for two reasons. One was to get away from the freak that kept calling him a 'boss's' quirk, and the other was to get a bird's eye view of the battlefield so he could strategize. He would have strategized, at least, if what he saw wasn't an utter disaster. As the guy covered in crystals knocked tape-guy to the ground, it seemed that floaty-girl was the only one not downed.
This infuriated him, making him remember that he had a lot of sweat stored up. It usually wasn't a good idea to use such a weapon indoors, but he needed to salvage something from this disaster. His own henchmen would only die if they didn't dodge it, and if they couldn't then they didn't deserve to be his henchmen and he saw no reason to care for their lives.
With that settled, even before he hit the ground he sent the largest blasts he could manage toward a support pillar, then a second blast of comparable size to another. Effortlessly dodging the wannabe Heroes' efforts to strike at him when he hit the ground, he went for another support pillar near the front entrance. With these three taken care, the roof started to creak. Grinning, he launched himself upward, looking for the sweet spot that would bring this entire place crumbling down.
--
The crystal guy in front of her was tough; Uraraka had no idea whether she could do more than dodge him, until they were both distracted by Lord Explosion Murder's sudden shift in actions. When a bit of rubble almost crashed beside her head, she realized that her boss was even more insane than he appeared and that it was probably time to get out there, payment or no payment.
Unfortunately, the next bit of rubble landed squarely on her leg, pinning her to the ground, and the crystal guy, in spite of coming to the exact same conclusion about running for it as she did, did not see it fit to aid her. She tapped the rock, erasing its gravity, but the fall had snapped her leg and the pain distracted her for long enough that a much bigger rock slammed into her other leg, this one just heavy enough that her quirk wasn't working, much to her increasing panic.
--
Neither Stain nor Mr. Compress were fully comfortable having left their students alone in the Rescue Training Center, but they felt it was typically safe enough for both of them to handle the sudden alerts going off. Apparently they had gotten a tip about a potential threat to a girl that Giran was taking care of as a favor to The Boss, and he wanted every one of the staff briefed in case it turned out to be real. He also insisted that they do so out of the students' earshot, so his kids were left alone for a bit. Oh well, they could handle themselves in a safe place like UA.
"Akaguro-sensei!" Iguchi shouted through deep breaths, struggling to get his words out after an apparently difficult jog. "Vi-vi-villain attack, at the Rescue Train-" he didn't have time to finish before both Pro-Heroes called the Vice Principal and ran to aid their class.
--
The belting winds had almost proven more difficult than the villains in the end, especially as Izuku insisted on dragging their unconscious bodies out of there. It made what should have been simply leaving the Hurricane Simulation Zone a shockingly difficult ordeal. Thus, they didn't get out until the roof was already shaking.
"What did those villains do?!" Soramitsu shouted in shock.
"The whole place is about to come down on top of us," Musatado shouted, trying to stifle his panic. "If you really want to save these guys, we're going to have to book it."
The unspoken question about whether or not they should leave the unconscious villains in their care to the fate they inadvertently created for themselves wasn't directly answered. They just kept carrying them as they ran for the nearest exit.
--
Seeing the collapsing roof and realizing that they had to get out of there asap, Toga decided that she didn't have time to save Toya properly and instead ungraciously cut his hand away from the sticky ball on the ground. He ignored the pain, and she ignored how pretty his bleeding wounds looked, as they both spared a brief glance toward Poison Dart Frog and mutually decided that, as unheroic as it might have been, they didn't have the strength and time to save her and that she had tried to kill them anyways. It would be acceptable for amateurs like themselves.
--
Date Grape finally managed to get up, in spite of being covered in burns and paradoxically soaked through with water that would probably give him hypothermia if he didn't get out of those clothes soon. Quickly assessing the situation, and realizing that it was time to stop fighting and get out of there, he pointed that out to the boy in the charred snowsuit who was clearly debating whether or not to save himself or carry Todoroki's barely conscious body with him.
"Let us run, then you can save yourself!" Date Grape shouted out.
"Dammit!" Snowsuit Hero shouted before another bit of falling rubble convinced him to head out, leaving the villains to make their escape.
Grabbing Todoroki and pulling him out of there, he realized that the other Heroes had been much more cruel and self-serving, leaving Poison Dart Frog in her half-hibernating state to be crushed as they made their egress. Thinking that he was absolutely demanding a groping from her for this, he ripped her tongue away from the ice and quickly rubbed it between his hands to warm it up and shut down her frog instincts. In spite of the rewards he was 100% demanding later, it wasn't selflessness; her quirk was their best bet at getting out of there quickly.
--
Tenko was rotting away a piece of the wall. It might seem counterintuitive, until one realized that he was creating another exit for his fellow students as a piece of rubble fell in front of the door.
"Over here!" He shouted out, hoping that his classmates could hear him.
"Help me!" One of the villains, some girl with her leg stuck under a particularly large piece of ceiling, shouted out in response.
Tenko had never felt so torn in his life. On one hand, it was a Hero's duty to help everyone he could. Leaving anyone, even a villain, to die like this, would be a violation of everything he planned to stand for. On the other, she was asking him to run back into a collapsing building and risk his life to save someone who just tried to kill not only him but his classmates. A bunch of teenagers. The fact that she seemed to be the same age changed nothing. Was her life worth his?
Before he could contemplate the matter further, the rest of his class showed up. Izuku, unlike himself, didn't hesitate. Tossing another villain that he had apparently rescued after defeating to the opening that Tenko had created, he ran to the girl and tried to pull the ceiling bit off of her leg, without even checking to make sure she couldn't hurt him once he was freed.
It took too long; the event that had been teased since the support pillars were blown up finally happened and the entirety of the roof came crashing down right over their heads. The rest of Class 1-A, some with defeated villains in their arms, ran out, but Izuku had gotten himself too far and took too long with that rock. They weren't going to make it.
An unreasonable weight of stone and steel came crashing down onto the pair's head, prompting Tenko to jump forward without thinking, all ten fingers held straight up, and using his quirk to rot away the mass just as it came inches from smashing all three of them.
Uravity, her last act being able to pull off just enough of her quirk that the boy could pull the rock off of her legs, had a lot less regrets than she would have thought when the falling ceiling fell directly towards her face. Sure, she had lived a life doing pretty awful things, but she had a good reason, at least at first, and she had done what she loved. Only a few people ever got hurt, and most of them were rich and powerful. Or Heroes-in-Training, but what were those but spoiled brats anyways?
She did regret that the boy who risked everything to save her was going to die from his decision, but that couldn't be helped. Why did he save her? Where did this Hero, in the real sense of the word, come from?
That question, more than shock and surprise, stopped her from acting the instant she felt herself covered in a massive pile of dust rather than the heavy rock and steel she was expecting.
Luckily, a life of opportunism had her acting in the next instant, using her quirk to float away from the scene as soon as she could suppress the nausea and flaring pain from her broken bones. Everyone else was too shocked to do anything about her flight.
--
"Izu!" Toga screamed as she ran into the pile of dust Tenko had turned almost a dozen meters of the roof into. Please have been enough. Please have been enough.
She didn't do anything to stop the villain from escaping, too hyper-focused on finding her friend alive to think about it. She found him, on the ground coughing up a storm. Hugging him in relief, she pulled him up, still covered in the powdery remnants of what was once the Rescue Training Center's roof, and for once in her life had the normal human reaction to seeing someone she cared about covered in blood.
It wasn't his, she noticed as she looked closer. Tenko had barely reached Izuku and the villain he'd saved; the dust was still solid rock and steel less than a meter behind him, and she could see the arm of some desperate villain trying to reach for the boy as it crushed whatever body it had once belonged to.
Suppressing how amusing she actually found the sight, she focused on her friend and how he would react once he noticed someone he couldn't save. Lifting him up, she led him out to where a Mr. Stainy and Mr. Compress had just started taking turns checking to see if the students were alright, inspecting the villains, and figuring out what the hell happened while they were gone.
--
"Miss Toru, report," Night-Eyes demanded of the girl he secretly had observing his current frustrating little project.
"Date Grape, Poison Dart Frog, Todoroki, Uravity, and Lord Explosion Murder managed to escape and are currently lying low. Tape-Strangler is dead. Everyone else was taken into custody. I'm not sure it was that great of a loss. The four that escaped, minus their dear leader, were the only ones that looked competent, and I'm being generous with Todoroki and Uravity. Your fears were right; Lord Explosion Murder might be useful as an attack dog, but he's utterly useless in a command position. He barely bothered to learn what his followers could do and did more damage to them than to his enemies. Also, he came this close to killing me without even knowing I was there."
She let a hmph that informed him she had her arms crossed in a disapproving manner at the moment. He ignored that, and she sighed before continuing.
"Of course, he also happens to be ambitious, so if you want to control him you're still going to have to string him along with promises of more power in the future, and even he's not stupid to fail and notice if you never actually give him any."
Night-Eyes merely adjusted his glasses. "I will take your advice under consideration. Now please take care of the other things we talked about."
He didn't see any response, as there was nothing to see, but he somehow got the feeling of her saluting him before he heard footsteps going in the opposite direction. Sighing, he called on some more of his associates to learn the results of the more important mission.
"Eri is secured," a voice happily confirmed.
Well, that was nice to hear after listening to the full extent of Lord Explosion Murder's failures. He hadn't seen any of the Terrible Trio's futures, so he didn't get to know about this result ahead of time. Pleasant surprises were a rarity in most with his life. They were practically unheard of with his quirk.
For his last call of the night before he could start preparing his next plans, he finally made contact with Nedzu.
"Lord Explosion Murder failed just as badly as expected," Night Eyes informed the damn mouse-thing.
"Well, well, well, let's see if he learns from this as you also predicted," a disturbingly cheerful voice answered.
Before Night-Eyes could argue about the boy's worth for the millionth time, his conversation partner continued, "we just have one more recruitment drive, and I think that one of your proteges will be ready to move on to our real plans. Now, I've been talking with the Yaoyorozu family about their spats with Detnerat, and I have an offer that they can't refuse, and the last free Ingenium didn't quite get the message that Stain wanted him to get when he mutilated the poor boys' brother. I'm pretty sure that we've also finally gotten through to Animal Liberator and Tsuki-Yomi. Why don't you send our explosive little friend to give them the final push? It's the same as the last mission he succeeded, and I for one can't wait to see what he's learned from this little escapade. After a little jailbreak I'm sure you can organize, you'll finally have your branch of the youth teams complete!"
Night-Eyes knew why Nedzu was so obsessed with this project, but he still had to suppress a sigh. "We lost one in the botched raid."
"Oh well, mere humans are replaceable. I'm sure that I'll have a dossier on a suitable replacement within 24 hours."
He had no doubt that that was true, just as he had no doubt that there wasn't any point refusing the weird animal on it. "It will be taken care of," he confirmed.
--
A/N: action scenes are so hard to write. I have no doubt that there are a thousand plot holes I'll only notice in hindsight, but I wanted to get the next chapter out before October ended. I hope you find it passable.