Disclaimer: I do not own MHA nor am I earning money from writing this. As a rule of thumb, if you recognize something in this fic, I probably do not own it.

"I might be going insane" – Normal speech

'It isn't normal to have voices in your head' – Thoughts, Writing

True – The voices in your head

"You will never forget this day" – Remembered speech

Chapter 22

Once the large doors to the classroom had shut behind them, the group of students was aimless for a few moments. They were out of class much earlier than they should have been, and they didn't know where to go. As the adrenaline began to wear off and they realized how hungry they were, they decided to get some lunch.

Unfortunately, as they found out when they arrived at the locked doors of the nearest dining hall, they were too late for the buildings to still be open for lunch and too early for them to be open for dinner. A few of them tried the various doors to the building, yet all of them were locked.

Taking a bet that M4 was watching, Izuku walked up to one of the doors that they had already tried and placed his hand on the handle. He waited for a second as he felt the vibrations of the door's electronic locking system shift and then pulled open the door, holding it behind him as his classmates swarmed towards the path that led to food. Tomoyo protested the decision to break into a school building but followed them in nonetheless.

Inside the building, as he had expected, there was nobody. The staff, headed by Lunch Rush, had left for their break, and the custodians had already gone through the single-floor building, signs proclaiming 'Wet Floor' still left up and the floors dry from the time passed.

There were a few baskets of fruit that hadn't been put away, but that was nowhere close to enough for a group of hungry teenagers. Looking around the hall, Izuku spotted a few doors that clearly led into the kitchen areas. With the grace and stealth that he had refined over the years, Izuku managed to escape from his classmate's attention and make his way into one of the kitchens.

They were much more fleshed out than the ones in the dorms, clearly meant to serve hundreds of students each meal. The sheer amount of stove space, the size of the pots resting on the back burners of the unlit stoves, all of it was far more than Izuku had ever worked with before.

With the increased scale of the kitchens came the increased scale of the pantries. Izuku grabbed two dozen eggs, not even making a dent in the remaining supply, and placed them next to the stove before pulling out a few pans. Grabbing a stick of butter and a few different types of vegetables and pre-cooked meat, Izuku turned on the burners of the stove where the pans were resting. Even if omelets were normally a breakfast food, they were healthy, quick to make, and full of protein.

When he walked towards the doorway leading to the area where the staff stood when serving the food, Izuku spoke to M4. "Hey M4, could I have a chef's hat?"

His request was immediately obliged, the nanobots imitating his hair reforming into a dark green chef's hat. The transformation was completed just as he entered the main room, his disappearance having gone unnoticed by everyone except for Katsumi. Smiling, he cleared his throat loudly to get the attention of the rest of the class.

In the twenty seconds that it had taken him to do all of this, everyone had taken at least one piece of fruit and was eating, a few of them complaining about the lack of variety of food. When they saw Izuku behind the counter, there was a multitude of questions about how he had gotten back there. After a few seconds of overlapping voices, Izuku called out over them.

"I'll have something ready in a few minutes, and if any of you can cook well just hop over the counter. Please don't all come into the kitchen though, maybe two or three people at most."

With that, Izuku raised the metal grate that had been lowered over the counter and turned around, heading back into the kitchen. A minute later, he was joined by Mai and Ochako. Mai took note of the ingredients that Izuku had retrieved and the multitude of pans sitting on the burners and got to work without a word, cracking eggs three times as fast as he would have been able to with her six arms.

Izuku was busy chopping the vegetables he had retrieved into pieces small enough for the omelets, moving with trained precision as he cut the onions, peppers, and tomatoes into perfect cubes. The sausage and ham were already finished, sitting in neat piles to the side of the cutting board along with the cheese.

Ochako used her quirk liberally, flicking chopped meat and vegetables across the kitchen from where Izuku had pushed them to the side of his board to the individual pans of cooking eggs in front of Mai. It took the three of them a minute to get into a rhythm, but once they did their production skyrocketed.

Every few minutes, Mai would slide each of the ten completed omelets onto the plates that Ochako had laid out. With a touch, they floated in front of her as she gently pushed them through the doorway leading to the rest of her hungry classmates.

While they had been cooking, Tomoyo had run around the room until she found the remaining clean silverware on a cart and brought it over to the rest of them, allowing them to pick what they wanted. When the first omelets came out, there was a brief argument over who would have to wait for the second batch and who would get to start eating immediately.

The debate was short-lived, however, as the hot pans and efficiency of the three chefs delivered them another batch before they could reach a conclusion. When the third batch was finished, Izuku, Mai, and Ochako left the kitchen and began to eat with the rest of them.

The conversation was much more lively than any of their meals at the dorm, the shared experience and fear of their first day bringing them closer together than living in the same building had. Katsumi's retelling of Izuku's graduation gift to her had gotten them curious, and so he was cajoled into finding a news article about it. The top result was overly sensational, and despite him scrolling past it to find a more reputable news site the rest of them still managed to read it on the screen of his laptop.

'Anonymous Informant Solves 10-Year-Old Cold Case! The Reaper Captured at Last!'

Fortunately, the fourth result was the official press release from the precinct that had pulled off the capture, with a few comments from the heroines that had pitched in to help with the capture. The video displaying the model tracking her past attacks was displayed, this time with an overlay that was slightly easier to read. The report described the stakeout in great detail, with covert members of the police replacing the civilians in the area of the predicted attack for three days before Reaper arrived.

Upon spotting her and recognizing her from the image Izuku had provided, they had discreetly notified the three heroines present and blitzed Reaper before she could react to their foreknowledge.

The brief did credit the "anonymous informant", but unlike the first result, it was only a single line mentioning him at the beginning of the article where the information that he provided was described, not pages of speculation on his identity.

Although this scenario wasn't exactly common for the police, it happened regularly enough that they had a set procedure to deal with it. There were quite a few women with quirks that helped them with this sort of analysis, and while some of them directly worked for the police there were others that preferred to keep a lower profile. If the informant provided information regularly and maintained contact with the police, then eventually the police would negotiate for their services in the longer term.

Others were like Izuku with regards to Reaper – a burner email address, quickly deleted after contacting the police. They couldn't be tracked down without significant effort, and it was better for the police to maintain an unofficial network of information than to alienate a helpful community by persecuting them. Because of this compromise, his involvement was mentioned in a perfunctory way to allow him to disappear afterwards in the hopes that he would resurface once again.

By the time that Mina, who had been asking about the story, had finished the article, Izuku had eaten his first omelet and was working his way through his second. Between bites, he managed to answer a few of her questions – yes, that really had been him; no, he wouldn't do it too frequently; no, not even if she kept pestering him about it.

Once he had finished his second omelet, the conversation of the people around him turned to the other parts of what Katsumi had said, more specifically the 1-S party. Izuku described the ones he had interacted with the most in great detail: All Might, Aquarius, Timepiece, and Ferra. Once he got into his speculation about the quirks of some of the people at the party, most of his classmates stopped following the story.

Katsumi, who was used to his abrupt derailment of conversations to talk about something related but random, kept the conversation alive in their place. Although she never found other people's quirks as interesting as her own, content with her explosions as she was, Izuku's fanaticism had worn off on her over time. In the middle of his discussion of the implications of Caritas's quirk affecting M4 as a person and not as an object, the rest of his classmates finished their food and began to stand up, convincing the others to get up and walk their used dishes over to the dish return.

When they reached the entrance of the cafeteria, Izuku spoke up. "Kacchan, I'll be back at the dorms in a bit. I have to go back to Support and fill out the form for the capsule I used on the first ball throw. I'll be back by the time classes would have ended."

Katsumi nodded, hugging him briefly and watching as he walked off, only turning to follow her classmates after he turned the corner around the building and was out of sight.

Midoriya Izuku POV

As Izuku walked the path leading towards the Support Course building, he reflected on the events of the day so far. There were certain ways that he could have done better, in retrospect. The capsule had certainly helped curry favor with his teacher, something that he needed to avoid getting sent to the support course as she had so frequently threatened. Without that, he wouldn't have been able to get her to agree to the spar for his individual test, which made her see the two of them in a new light.

Their fighting styles were much the same – drag the opponent into a fight that you could win and then beat them. Shiko could erase her opponent's quirk, eliminating any advantage that her opponent possessed before fighting them with years of skill. In the middle of a fight, such an advantage would cause nearly anyone to lose their tempo unless they had specifically trained to not use their quirk. Izuku, similarly, manipulated events before the fight so that he held all of the information and forced the opponent into a situation where using their quirk was difficult, useless, or actively detrimental to his opponent before fighting with his years of training against an opponent who underestimated him.

Hopefully, with the scores he had set on the aptitude tests, his classmates and his teacher would recognize his accomplishments and break the preconceptions they had of quirkless people and men in general. For now, however, he had to tidy up the loose ends of his quirk-guided actions earlier that day.

While he was walking, he pulled his phone out of his pocket to check if anything had happened while he was in class. He had quite a few messages from the 'UA Boys' chat, so he clicked on that first. There were messages from almost everyone around the time of the scheduled assembly earlier that day, people trying to find each other among the thousands of students streaming into the stadium. There were a few messages asking where he was that he hadn't seen, though they died off as the scheduled start of the assembly occurred.

A few minutes into the assembly, however, there was one text that stood out.

'Shin: Izuku, where's 1-A? Nozomi just called for all of you to come to the stage but nobody stood up'

'Shin: Is everything okay?'

These two texts were the last two in the group chat as of this moment, six hours later. Quickly, Izuku moved his fingers to type out his reply.

'Izuku: Don't worry, everything is fine with us'

'Izuku: Our teacher decided that we "didn't need to go to any assemblies" and ran us through a bunch of tests, threatened to send whoever placed last to Gen Ed'

'Izuku: She didn't actually follow through with it though.'

After a few seconds of silence, a reply appeared on his screen.

'Kei (President): I was about to be very worried there'

'Kei (President): How'd you do? Worried about getting expelled?'

'Izuku: Second place, could have done better if I knew what the tests were beforehand.'

'Yoshihiro (Vice-President): what'

'Shin: WHAT'

'Shin: SECOND? IN THE HERO COURSE?'

'Kei (President): This warrants a celebration! Does this Saturday work for everyone?'

'Shin: Sorry, caps'

'Shin: But my point stands, that's insane'

'Shin: How did you even do that?'

'Izuku: It turns out that if you get relatively good scores on all of the tests that you end up doing a lot better than having one excellent score and seven bad ones'

'Izuku: But honestly I'm not surprised at all, this was basically the entrance exams with no planning time'

'Yoshihiro (Vice-President): congratulations'

'Izuku: I don't think I'll do so well the second time around unless I get to work though, and this time she's going to carry out her threat'

'Izuku: Five months remain.'

'Izuku: Also, aren't you all in class right now? I know I got dismissed early but maybe we should talk later.'

'Izuku: I'll see you on Saturday.'

'Shin: I'll be there Saturday.'

Finally arriving at the Support building, Izuku turned off his phone and slid it into his pocket. Scanning through the main door, he made his way to the first-year labs. A few seconds before he arrived, however, one of his passive questions triggered.

'I will be injured in the next minute.' True.

Izuku immediately began asking more questions.

'I will be injured in the next minute if I act on the warning I just received.' False.

'I will be injured in the next minute if I do nothing.' False.

Izuku was surprised at the relatively straightforward plan of action but wasn't going to question his good fortune that the solution to his problem was so simple. As he stood in place, he began asking a new question at an interval of two seconds: 'I would have been harmed in the next minute if I had not changed my course of action.'

Another morbid curiosity of exactly how and where he would have been injured floated through his head, and in a matter of seconds, he found that his left ear would have been injured by a combination of cutting and burning.

Fifty-five seconds of waiting later, Izuku heard the muffled boom of an explosion. His newest recurring question turned to False, and Izuku moved a little more quickly towards his destination, the same place that the explosion had just sounded from.

Upon entering the labs, a few things immediately caught Izuku's attention. The students were cowering away from one of the workstations, which held the remains of an invention that was currently still glowing from the explosion. The debris from the explosion was scattered throughout the room, with two pieces embedded inches into the walls around the height where they could have been the ones to hit him.

Even though he was wearing the nanobot armor at the moment, he was certain that he would have been injured had he been there at the moment of the explosion.

The girl at the station was currently brushing the cooler shards of metal aside and humming to herself as she pulled over a spare piece of metal large enough to push the cooling wreckage of her invention aside and make room for something new.

Maijima Hitomu, who was sitting at one of the other student's stations and giving advice on how to go about improving her invention, sighed and stood up, walking to the front of the room. Near a large whiteboard with a portion separated, declaring 'Days since catastrophic failure: 0'. Taking the eraser in one of her iron claws, she erased the word 'Days' and replaced it with 'Hours'.

That, more than anything, was telling of how the day had gone so far.

As she was putting the eraser back on the shelf below the whiteboard, Hitomu noticed Izuku's presence. Seeing as the rest of the class had already been interrupted by the explosion, she decided to take the opportunity to introduce Izuku to the class.

"Attention, everyone. Hatsume, that means you as well. This here is Midoriya Izuku, and he'll be stopping by the labs from time to time to work on his own work. He's in the Hero Course, but I expect you to treat him as you would any of the rest of you while he's here. I haven't assigned his gear to any of you, but if you're interested you can ask him.'

She then turned her head to look at Izuku. "We did an icebreaker early, so just tell them your name, hobbies, and the invention that you applied with." With that out of the way, she started walking back toward the table she had been at before the explosion. Izuku, now holding the attention of the room, began to introduce himself.

"Ah, hello. My name is Midoriya Izuku, and I enjoy sword-fighting in my free time. The inventions that I applied to this course with were an artificial intelligence and a model of nanobots. Please treat me well."

Izuku bowed lightly, then started looking around for an empty desk. To his utter lack of surprise, both of the desks near the girl who had caused the explosion were empty. Hitomu had called her Hatsume, and that was as good of a basis as any to start with. He pulled out the stool next to her and placed his backpack on it before looking around the room for the requisitioning forms that he had seen during his visit several days ago.

After bringing the form back to his desk and beginning to fill it out, Izuku let his arm move on autopilot while he thought about what he could do to improve and keep up with his classmates physically. There were a few ideas that he had come up with long ago, from altering his biology to make himself more resilient and increasing his muscle density to putting an implant in himself to better interface with the nanobots. However, he had never thought that they were good ideas and his quirk vehemently agreed with him.

Now, however, with the examples of Class 1-S and the target that his teacher had laid on him, he had to think further outside the box. While invasive procedures on his body were confirmed as a bad idea by his quirk, there were certainly external ones that he could rely on. Instead of an implant, he could design something to read the activity of his brain and have it feed that data directly to M4 to control the nanobots with less delay than a verbal command. It would take some time to build a design that his nanobots could form and maintain inside his armor, but in the end, it would most certainly be worth it.

The only problem with such a course of development was that it would mean absolutely nothing against someone like Ferra or Aquarius. Even though the two of them were heroines, there would undoubtedly be a villain with a similar quirk somewhere. It wouldn't matter how good his connection with his armor was if his opponent could turn it against him or ignore it.

Just as he was thinking about getting back into adapting his technology to manipulate Onaic Energy, one of his passive questions tripped up again.

'Something that could hurt me will happen nearby in the next minute.' True.

Izuku sighed. 'The device that Hatsume Mei is currently working on is going to explode in the next minute.' True.

Snapping back to reality, Izuku looked around. At some point, he had completed the form and had begun to take notes on his computer about his ideas for building a portable MRI for his armor. The 'Hours since catastrophic failure' sign was up to one hour, and the girl sitting to his left was fervently working on what looked like an oversized grenade.

From this, Izuku began to put the pieces together. Hitomu had mentioned that his gear hadn't been assigned to anybody to work on, which implied that everyone else had been assigned to work on the gear for someone in Class 1-A and 1-B. To the best of his knowledge, Katsumi was the only person in either Hero course who possessed an explosive quirk.

Hatsume had been assigned to build support equipment for Katsumi.

Hatsume was stress-testing equipment for Katsumi.

Suddenly, the uncaring reactions to the first explosion made a lot more sense. It wasn't an equipment failure or a lab accident, but rather a planned test. She had likely announced it beforehand, which was why people had been further away from her when he entered the room.

Now, she was going to test it again, and the resulting explosion could cause problems for him. He couldn't point it out without justification, and leaving the room just before something blew up could seem like it was sabotage on his part.

After thinking for a few seconds, Izuku unzipped his backpack with one hand while pressing a key on his computer to alert M4 to pay attention to him. By the time both of his hands were on the keyboard again, the message 'shield, right side, 49 seconds' had already been sent and M4 had indicated that he had received the message. Over the next forty-five seconds, the nanobots contained inside the backpack slipped out and joined his second skin, making him almost unnoticeably bulkier as his metallic shell expanded to accommodate them.

Just as the nanobots had finished moving to their places, Izuku noticed Mei reaching for the vial of nitroglycerin that she had prepared to pour into the containment system. Counting the seconds down, Izuku tapped the alert button once more at his quirk's confirmation that there was one second left.

The events that followed seemed to happen in slow motion. Izuku's right side ballooned out into an elliptical shield just as the sparking began, leaving the bodysuit underneath as the only thing covering his skin. One of his classmates, who had a quirk that gave her a sense for danger, snapped her head towards the direction the two of them were sitting. Mei, who noticed the failure just as quickly, angled the half-finished support gear away from the rest of the room to control the direction of the explosion as best she could.

Before either of the two girls that had noticed the failure had time to say anything, the explosion drowned out all other noise in the busy classroom. A burst of fire from the expanding reaction made its way out of the opening that Mei had poured the nitroglycerin into moments earlier. Because the grenade-shaped container wasn't sealed, there were no errant pieces of shrapnel flying across the room this time.

The fire, however, washed over Mei's desk and spread toward Izuku and the empty desk to Mei's right. Izuku's makeshift shield kept the fire from spreading toward him, ensuring the safety of the forms he had filled out and his laptop as well as himself. With nothing to burn on the empty desk, the wave of fire quickly died out.

The first sounds to break the momentary silence that followed the explosion was a resigned sigh from their teacher and the squeak of a marker on the whiteboard as the hopeful '1' was replaced with a '0'.

Once the silence was broken, everyone snapped out of the daze that the explosion had put them in and looked over at the source of the explosion. Mei, who had been relatively unaffected by the explosion directly in front of her, was already looking around for the piece of metal that she had used to move the wreckage of the first attempt away. Izuku, however, made for a much more interesting sight. Pencil-thin strands of silvery metal connected him to a full-body shield of the same composition, with half of his body behind the shield looking normal and the other half replaced by a figure in a black bodysuit.

Under their gazes, the shield began to flow back into him, reforming his earlier appearance while he continued to type away at his notes. Unfortunately, the calm appearance that he was putting on was soon to be interrupted.

"Green! What was that shield that you just used? How does it work? Can I get a sample of it? I could make so many babies with that!"

That was Mei, who had scooted her chair closer to Izuku and was shaking him by one shoulder in her excitement. At the same time, she was using her quirk to zoom in on her vision of Izuku's skin and clothing. At the magnification that she had been using to work previously, she couldn't tell the difference between her own skin and the skin being simulated by Izuku's nanobots. As her vision became sharper, however, the few differences that she saw began to add up.

Izuku's second skin was incredibly accurate, mimicking his own perfectly in almost every regard. However, under a high enough magnification, it almost seemed uniform to someone with Mei's level of experience. The pores of his skin were all there and replicated by the nanobots, but they were all the same in appearance. The hairs on his arms were constructed, but they were much closer to each other in length than they should be, having never fallen out or grown due to their artificial nature.

When she zoomed in close enough to see the individual cells of his skin, the faint lines of the interlocking triangular pattern that formed his skin were all too apparent.

Her intense focus was broken by Izuku's response. "As I mentioned in my introduction, these are my nanobots. I can tell you how I made them, but they wouldn't work like you probably want them to unless you have a way to control them on a macro scale."

Mei's imagination exploded with possibilities, all of the inventions that she could bring to life with technology that worked on such a small scale. Miniaturizing larger machines into wearable equipment was one of the main advantages of her quirk, but she was limited by how precise her hands could be despite her incredible vision. It was one of the things that had frustrated her ever since she had first realized that her quirk could help her play around with her mom's spare parts. With the ability to build with the level of precision that nanobots implied, she could create something truly revolutionary.

As the class went on, the two of them started working together and they learned a lot about each other's style of building.

Izuku's method was based on hard work and certainty, planning everything that he would make months in advance before bringing his vision into reality. Despite his self-education in all things, he wasn't particularly gifted or inspired in a majority of them, and technology was one of them. Sure, he had M4 and his nanobots, but those were created as a step toward something else and then refined into what they were today. If he didn't have the need for a smart assistant or more resilient equipment, he never would have taken the steps to make either of them in the first place.

Mei was similar, but on an entirely different level.

Despite her quirk only allowing her to see as well as a normal human with a good enough microscope, she was truly gifted. Having first picked up a tool in her mother's workshop at the age of three, she had found her passion long before Izuku ever tried to build anything. Her strength, however, did not lie in her planning but in her inspiration. With the random pieces lying in the scrap heap at her mother's workshop, she had built a handheld device capable of sending a directed electromagnetic pulse to disrupt technology that left no lasting environmental effects and used it to enter UA. Now that she had access to new components, as soon as she finished the boring task that she was assigned she had so many ideas to pursue.

The two of them used each other as sounding boards for the rest of the period, with Izuku moderating her increasingly over-the-top ideas and Mei giving him a few suggestions on how to solve a few of his many design challenges. By the time that classes ended, the board read 'Hours since catastrophic failure: 2' and their classmates and teacher were shooting the duo nervous glances as they overheard the conversation.

Returning to the dining hall, this time without breaking in or preparing himself food, Izuku found the rest of class 1-A at one of the larger tables and sat next to Katsumi. The two ate the dinner prepared by Lunch Rush while Izuku told Katsumi about how his afternoon had gone, leaving out the two explosions. Her idle focus on the conversation briefly became overbearing when he mentioned some of the ideas that Mei had helped him with, but after a few more minutes of the story, she calmed down.

Izuku had only ever had her as a friend that he could rely upon, and she wasn't insecure enough to think that a girl Izuku had just met would steal him away from her. So long as she wasn't taking advantage of him, and from the sound of it the girl couldn't manipulate a rock if she tried, Katsumi would happily support him making a few more friends.

Izuku went to sleep that night tired but fulfilled. It had been a productive day if nothing else, and it had only been his first at UA. Who knew what the days to come would bring?

Author's Note: I've been suffering from a few plot bunnies bouncing around in my head and so I was unable to finish the next chapter before this one was released. The muse does not stop, however, and I'll do my best to continue updating as usual or you will know the reason why.

Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment or review if you have any questions or if there's anything you'd like me to know.