Chapter 3: Cannon territory, now with super fighting robots!
Edited by Tabi
It had been a little over eight months since the bakery incident, and now I was currently making my way to UA. The last eight months had been rather hectic. The tutor Nemuri hired for me quit because I already knew everything that they tried to teach me, they quit after giving me a test to find out what grade level I was, and after they found out I was basically three grade levels above what they were supposed to teach (there were a few things that I could have improved upon but I was still two grades above what they were supposed to teach me). They yelled at Nemuri for half an hour about wasting their time before leaving. Nemuri nearly grounded me when I started laughing after they left. Later Nemuri confronted me about how I was already so knowledgeable, I just gave her the nonchalant reply of "people throw away a lot of books," before returning to reading on my phone.
When it came to the matters of my costume and superhero name, no progress had been made, as any costume that Nemuri made for me was… well, a bit too outlandish for my tastes. Thank god she stayed away from the pervy stuff. And as for names, well I refused to be called Sludge Boy, or Goop-Man, or Slime-Lad, or… well, you get the point.
As for training well... I stopped walking for a moment to shiver, closing my eyes as I tried not to remember hell I had gone through under her tutelage. I quickly returned to walking only now at a faster and more rigid pace.
So yea, all in all, things have been going well. My relationship with Nemuri had improved. I was a lot more comfortable around her then I was at the beginning, we talked about cool things we saw on the internet, having conversations about society and its many faults, and a variety of other random things. Turns out Nemuri and I have a similar sense of humor, the weird kind. She kinda reminded me of my actual mom sometimes. I still refused to call her mom though, but I did consider her family at this point.
As I approached the gates of UA I had managed to calm down a little. I saw some familiar faces from the show around the entrance; Tetsutetsu, the annoying guy with the copy quirk, Mineta, the drowsy mind control kid, and the muscle guy who downs sugar. Don't judge me… I suck at remembering names, I often have to ask someone's name several times after meeting them. The only reason I remember Tetsutetsu's name was because of how ridiculous it was. As for Mineta… well when he wasn't acting like a total pervert, I found his character enjoyable in the show. How that would play out IRL, however, would be a different matter.
Looking around I saw that I was one of the tallest people there, then again, when you stand at nearly six and a half feet in height, most are usually shorter than you. I was currently this tall because of the increase in the amount of food I ate in the last eight months compared to the previous six. That wasn't the least of it either, as I had seven super brittle, hyper-condensed, baseball-sized balls, in various places in my body. And when I mean brittle, I mean a little tougher than hardened sand, and when I mean hyper-condensed, I mean that each ball had several gallons stored at least. I couldn't really do anything with them until I uncondensed the sludge, but when I did… let's just say that the hulk, at his tallest in the comics, would be envious of how big I was.
After entering the building and awkwardly asking for directions from a janitor, I had managed to find my way to the massive auditorium. It was honestly kinda intimidating. I quickly found my seat and began waiting for Present Mic to arrive. As I was waiting I overheard some students talking about how difficult the written test was, forcing the memories of when I did the test into the front of my mind. And while it was difficult, the most annoying part for me was when Nemuri kept leaning over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't cheating or anything.
I sat in silence for a while longer, the auditorium rapidly filling up, several of the students sitting near me giving me a quick look before dismissing me. The giant room was full within the next few minutes. As Present Mic entered the room, all conversation the auditorium stopped. Present Mic began his speech, being as just loud and booming as I remembered, I actually had to force myself not to respond whenever he yelled 'Yeah!', and considering I saw several other students flinching whenever he asked for a response, I knew I wasn't the only one being infected by his energy. That or their quirk gave them sensitive hearing and they were flinching at his voice. As Present Mic went on to explain the test, I tuned him out, going over some battle strategies.
"-Additionally, you with the unkempt hair!" a familiar serious voice yelled breaking me from my thoughts.
I looked over to see Iida, who was now pointing at Midoriya. We were at this point now, huh. Personally, I didn't like Iida for the first few episodes, as the moron didn't realize that being worried over an important test like this was a normal thing, and embarrassing Midoriya like that was just a plain dick move. I took a small amount of sludge and formed it into a ball, earning a few looks from some people who sat near me.
"You've been muttering this entire time-" I rubberized the ball... "stop that-" ...took aim... "-if you can't bother to take this seriously leave-" ...and proceed to whip it at Iida's head.
"-You're distract-OW!" He yelped in pain as the ball beaned him. I heard a few muffled giggles around me as I smirked.
The ball I threw carried through the air and landed near the stage. I kept an eye on where it landed so I could retrieve it later.
"Who threw that!" Yelled Iida as he looks around the room.
Muffled snickers echoed throughout the room, most of them directed at Iida as the engine legged teen rapidly glanced around the room for a culprit.
"Calm down contestants," said Present Mic, gesturing with his hands, "Anyways as I was saying..."
I tuned out Present Mic again, snickering to myself as I saw Iida reluctantly sit down with a heavy frown on his face. Twitching every few seconds, while slightly moving his head side to side. Figures he would continue looking.
I pulled out the card I was given after entering the school and began to briefly look it over. It seems that I would be in sector E for my test, I wonder who else would be there.
"Alright contestants! This concludes my speech, now would you please head to the changing rooms and get on over to your designated areas! And remember go beyond, plus ultra!" Present Mic finished his speech by throwing a fist in the air.
None of the students replied as each of them got out of their seat and began to neatly file out at the bottom of the room, as I followed the hoard of students down the steps, I looked around for the ball I threw only to find it was missing. I gave a small shrug after a moment, not like that would matter in the long run... Right? ...Shit, this is so going to bite me in the ass later.
I was now standing in front of the concrete walls of Arena E, the battleground that would decide whether I got into UA or not. I was currently wearing nothing but a pair of plain black sweatpants. I looked around to see several other contestants doing some stretches and getting ready for the action. A mass of black spiky hair caught my attention in the crowd, doing a quick double take I realized the hair belonged to Kirishima. Looking around I also saw the mind control kid, but other than that there seems to be no one else from 1-A or 1-B around.
"Ribbit." a familiar female voice croaked beside me.
I looked to my left to see none other than Tsuyu Asui, proving me wrong on my previous assessment.
"Why did you throw a ball at that guy?" She asked bluntly.
I shrugged in response. "Glasses was being a jerk calling out that other guy for muttering, dude was nervous, no reason to humiliate the guy for it."
Tsuyu just gave me a small nod before walking off. Stoic as ever I see. I turned to the doors and saw that they were now open. I let a small smirk form on my face before crouching. I got into a runner's stance, I formed some springs in my legs before rubberizing them, or as I called this technique now Spring Loading. I wasn't on board with the whole naming techniques thing at first but a conversation with Nemuri convinced me otherwise, as explaining a move that you used commonly enough over and over again got boring and painfully repetitive. Or at least that what she told me.
As I fished compressing my legs, the mind control kid came up to me. "What are you doing?" He demanded.
I didn't bother to give him a response, I tensed the springs in my legs further, it wouldn't be long now.
"Hey," He said in an annoyed tone. "I asked you a question-"
"RIGHT, LET'S START!"
And with those booming words from Present Mic, I rocketed past the stunned crowd and into the arena. As I speed through the mock city I saw a one-point robot in my way. I hit the ground and morphed into a ball briefly before turning into a disk with sharp serrated edges, I slashed through the robot before morphing back to my humanoid state. As soon as my feet hit the pavement I began running towards a two-point robot.
The two pointer tried to step on me, but I quickly dodged it before Spring Loading my legs again. I leaped into the air and grabbed its tail, before morphing my feet into hardened spears and shooting them towards the ground. As they pierced the concrete I made more spikes on them to make sure that they were firmly planted. With my focal point in place, I enlarged my arms and began to lift the robot over my head. That was another interesting thing about my quirk the more sludge I put into my limbs (aka the bigger they were) the more they could lift. I quickly slammed the robot onto the road breaking it. I placed my hands on the road and did a front flip, retracting my legs as I did so. I stood up to receive a missile plowing through my chest, it flew past me and into the robot I recently destroyed. The light of the bot exploding shadowing me I narrowed my eyes at the three-pointer that dared to shoot me. I ran forward and reformed my chest with a fierce glare.
I literally dodged missiles left and right, swerving to avoid as much of them as I could. As I was running forward a devious thought crossed my mind, causing an evil grin to bless my face. I stretched one of my arms out and grabbed one of the missiles out of the air, I planted my feet on the pavement, the claws on my feet digging into the ground. I spun around and sent to rocket towards the three-pointer. The missile collided with its face causing a big explosion to occur. I ran forward not waiting for the smoke to clear. As I passed the three-pointer I saw that its face was utterly destroyed, the machine sputtered for a moment before collapsing. I hopped up onto the three-pointer before jumping into the air, and passed the broken three-pointer I saw a swarm of robots waiting for me on the ground. I grinned as I morphed my hands into giant hammers as I descended towards some one-pointers, after all, I just destroyed three robots that were more than forty meters apart in less than twenty seconds.
This was going to be fun.
Aizawa sighed as he looked at the monitors, occasionally handing hero points to several kids. He found this whole situation annoying. Not the test, he didn't really care about that. But rather the woman who was currently banging on the door trying to get in.
"Let me in please!" Midnight pleaded from outside.
"You know why we can't do that deary." Responded Recovery Girl.
More sobs echoed from outside, "I promise not to hand out any points, just let me watch my son!"
"Sorry Midnight but unless you're handing out points you can't enter."
Midnight groaned in sadness as she slid down the door.
"That purple kid is doing surprisingly well." Commented Cementoss.
Midnight immediately perked up. "Of course he's going well, I trained him after all!" She said with no small amount of pride.
"Your kid's a short pervert that has purple balls for hair?" Aizawa questioned as he watched the short kid attempt secretly to cop a feel from a female contestant he just saved.
There was blessed silence for only a moment before Midnight screamed in rage. "THAT'S NOT MY BABY!"
Aizawa sighed again, this whole scenario was annoying. The eraser hero turned to his right to see a depowered All Might staring worriedly at a screen with a green haired brat on it, and then to his left to see Cementoss doing his best not to look at the screen with Midnight's brat on it with a hate-filled glare.
How troublesome...
Several other students had joined me in fighting the mob of robots. Kirishima, being the only one I recognized. Several minutes had passed since the test had started and I was currently sitting at thirty-eight villain points. Both Kirishima and I had tagged teamed several bots while rescuing other contestants from being blown up or squashed, me pulling them out of the way and Kirishima just taking the blows for them.I morphed my limbs -and occasionally my entire body- into blades, spikes, and a multitude of other things to destroy the bots. Two of my favorite methods of destruction is forming spring cannons out of my arms and blasting rubble and metal at the bots, or entering the bot and destroying whatever looked important from the inside. I personally don't know when Kirishima and I started working together, but we were doing a pretty good job backing each other up. both of us were smiling like loons as we fought.
In the next minute, Kirishima and I had destroyed another 5 robots each, bringing my points up to forty-six. The horde of robots were thinning out to barely a trickle. The soon to be redhead shared a look with me before giving me a grin, to which I returned. We had just begun to run off towards a different area when the streets around us began to rumble, we both looked up the see the giant form of the zero-pointers blocking out the sun, covering us in its shadow.
"Just a minute left!" I heard Present Mic yell in the distance.
We began to run even faster away from the bot, not wanting to get caught up in its rampage. I looked towards the robot as I was running, keeping an eye on what it was doing. The massive bot swiped its arm destroying the top floor of five buildings. I looked around to see if anyone was around where the debris looked like it was going to fall, and proceeded to sigh in relief as I saw that any contestants around the area had already moved far away, as while it would net me a lot of rescue points, I really didn't want to pull a Midoriya right now.
I now ran alongside Kirishima, looking at him for a brief second I decided to introduce myself.
"I'm..." I paused for a second to remember my new last name, "Kayama, you?"
He gave me a big smile in return. "Kirishima, nice to meet a manly competitor like you out here."
I gave him an awkward nod as we ran into a new street that had seven active robots.
"Thirty seconds!" Present Mic yelled.
I tuned to Kirishima as a stupid idea popped into my head. "Want to become a human cannonball?"
I didn't even have to wait a second before I got a nod, thumbs up, and an epic grin. I morphed into a giant spring cannon and opened a door on my side for Kirishima.
"Hop in," I said as I formed a head from the door while compressing the sludge spring as much as I could.
My new… friend, I guess, stared at me weirdly for a second before hopping in.
"Tell me when you're ready!" I yelled as I moved my head to the top of the cannon to better aim at the oncoming robots.
"Ready!" Kirishima yelled almost instantly.
"FIRE IN THE HOLE!" I yelled as I released the spring and let the metapod imitator fly.
Kirishima blasted through two one-pointers and a two-pointer before he ended up stuck in a wall, his legs comically sticking out. The remaining four bots continued marching towards me as I morphed back into my humanoid state. I did a quick headcount of the bots as I modified my arms into blades, a one-pointer, two two-pointers, and a three-point bot. I took a step forward and stretched one of my arms towards the three-pointer.
"TIMES UP!" Present Mic yelled, signifying the end of the exam.
I flinched a little before retracting my arm, not wanting to find out what would happen if I destroyed a robot after the exam was done. The four remaining bots came to a stop before turning around and marching away from me, returning to wherever they came from. I sighed before running towards Kirishima, who was still stuck in a wall. When I reached him I grabbed one of his legs and ripped him from the wall before placing him on his feet.
"You ok?" I asked bluntly, knowing that the chances of him being hurt from that were unlikely
Kirishima brushed a hand through his hair to get rid of the some the dust that ended up in it before giving me a thumbs up. "I'm fine, that was pretty fun though."
I apologized about blasting him into a wall, to which he waved off, replying that it didn't even hurt and I didn't need to worry about it. After that, we began making our way back the entrance, on the way back we began talking about our quirks after Kirishima began to ask about mine. When I mentioned my ability to harden my sludge, Kirishima's mood seemed to dampen a bit, before I told him how brittle I was in that state, causing him to lighten up a bit.
As we passed the gates and walked towards the bus I noticed that Cementoss was by the buss making sure that everyone returned and that no one had any serious injuries. As we passed him and got on the bus, just before I took a seat I felt that someone was staring at me, and not in the usual, 'what is he' kinda way. I slowly glanced around the bus to see who it was but found that everyone else was already preoccupied talking to someone else. I looked out the window for a moment, thinking that I was just being paranoid when I saw it. A fierce glare filled with unkempt hatred, on the face of the usually calm Cementoss. I blinked, and then it was gone, if only because Cementoss turned away to check on other other contestants that just arrived.
"Hey, you ok Kayama?" Asked Kirishima, who took a seat beside me.
I flinched before turning to him "Yeah, just, uh..." I shifted nervously. "Just wondering how well I did."
Kirishima smiled at me again. "Don't worry about it, you destroyed plenty of bots out there! There's no way we didn't pass!"
I raised a non-existent brow at him. "You know there's a difference between passing, and doing well right?"
My new friend just laughed.
The bus began to move as everyone returned from the arena, everyone chatting and bragging to each other about how many bots the destroyed. I stayed mostly quiet, the image of Cementoss's glare seared into my brain. The thing that made it stick so much was the familiarity of the glare rather than the intensity of it. Because it was the same damn glare that woman from eight months ago had.
Thirty minutes had passed, everyone had returned to the main building, changed back into our regular clothes, and were currently exiting the building to be picked up by family, bus', just walking home, or to the train station. Unfortunately for me, I was being driven home by Nemuri, who was currently standing near the front gates, being surrounded by students and parents alike. Fuck. At least she was wearing normal clothes and not her hero outfit.
Kirishima was currently standing beside me, staring at the scene with wide eyes.
"That's Midnight." He said with a hint of awe, a light blush on his face.
"Yep." I said bluntly, deeply regretting several of my life choices.
"The R-rated hero"
"Yep."
"I heard that she worked at UA, but what is she doing at the gate." He wondered quietly, jerking his head at the pro hero discreetly.
I sighed in regret as I began marching toward the crowd. I slipped past the crowd and grabbed Nemuri's wrist before pulling her away from her adoring fans, everyone at the gates was shocked by my actions. Nemuri then began to wave at the people who surrounded her previously.
"Sorry folks seems my son-" She yelled gleefully, putting as much emphasis on the word as she could. "-wants to get home as fast as possible!"
And thus the world was silenced for a moment before it erupted in noise.
"WHAAAAAT!" Every sapient being in a one-hundred-meter radius shouted in shock.
"END ME!" I yelled hysterically at the heavens in embarrassment, hoping that some deity in the vast multiverse would hear my plea.
I was currently at home sitting on the couch, staring intently at the screen of a laptop, which currently had google queued up on it. I was about to do something I had been avoiding for the last eight months, I was going to research the fuck out of the Sewer Monstrosity. 'What?' I could hear someone shout in the deep recesses of my mind, 'you've never looked him up.'
'No,' I metaphorically reply, 'as I had more important shit to do like figuring out laws and customs for heroes, cramming the names, quirks, and costumes of as many heroes I could find into my brain in order to not stand out like the sorest of thumbs whenever someone brought them up and surviving Nemuri's… *shudder* training. So no, I don't know jack all about the fucker, and never really cared about it till Cementoss glared at me like that crazy woman from eight months ago. So fuck off you judgemental metaphysical voice in my head.'
'Ok,' indignantly replies the voice as I desperately try not to descend further into the insanity of my psyche, 'but only because I feel like it and not because you told me to,' it huffs as it walks away.
I blink for a moment, trying to regain focus. The fuck is wrong with me?
'Doctors are still trying to figure that out.' I heard a different snide voice reply quietly.
I decided it's time to nope the fuck out from this, as I have better things to do then descended into insanity right now.
It was nine p.m. and Nemuri was currently out doing hero work, so I was secluded to find out how terrible the Sewer Monstrosity is. I leaned forward and typed the villains name in and hit enter, it was time to descend into a cesspool of villainy. As soon as the page opened I clicked the first link, and my eyes were laid bare to all the horrors that the fucker did. I back out the page after roughly forty minutes before clicking on the second link. And so this repeated for the third link, and the fourth and the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth, and so on and so on. It was two a.m. by the time I finished, and the most accurate description of me at that time was a literal pile filled with horror and disgust. Ten pages, filled with a thousand names each, of all of his victims, and those are just the civilians. Over a hundred heroes died trying to take down this thing. Ten thousand casualties caused by this… aptly named monstrosity. Video after video, each one age restricted and for good reason. This fucker, and potentially me by proxy could dissolve any organic material if he wanted to. And his preferred meal was human flesh. Soul scaring screams echoed in my soul from each millisecond of every video, as a two-story hill of reddish sludge, reached out with malformed, goopy tendrils scooping up person after person, within seconds all of their skin was gone, but the poor fuckers were still alive even after that. And their screams were made worse by the horrific distorted laughter of said hill, as it crept forward at a disturbingly fast pace.
I stood up slowly and dragged myself to my bedroom, I plopped down on my bed and just laid there, not making a sound. After about twenty minutes I noticed a hand on my shoulder. I looked up the see Nemuri there with a solemn look on her face. The glow of the laptop dimly lighting my room from its place on the table. I didn't say a word as I sat up and hugged Nemuri, a hug that she didn't hesitate to return. And as I sat there with my head over my guardian's shoulder, I desperately wished I still had the ability to cry.