"Kacchan!" he called, trying not to laugh as Bambaa-chan and Kacchan started playfully wrestling with each other.
"While I do love seeing such aggressive vigor, now is hardly the time for romance," Midnight-sensei said, licking her lips as she stared at Kacchan and Bambaa-chan where they were standing, both of them now looking at her.
Kacchan looked like he thought she was crazy, and he imagined that Bambaa-chan would have looked at her just the same if she could do anything like that.
"What the hell are you even talking about, Striptease?!" Kacchan demanded.
Midnight-sensei laughed. "While I would love to squeeze the youthful vigor from the both of you, we really have to get on with the Festival," she continued, making her way over to the podium so that she'd be able to address the crowd as a whole again. "The first game for the first-years is finally over, and what a game it was! Now, let's take a quick look at the standings, shall we?" Turning his attention to the scoreboard, Izuku looked over the rankings; Bambaa-chan was of course in first place, but the placements of some of their other schoolmates were fairly interesting. "Now, only the top forty-two will advance to the next round, but don't be too let down if you didn't make the cut," Midnight-sensei continued, a satisfied look on her face. "We've prepared other opportunities for you to shine." She licked her lips, and Izuku tried not to roll his eyes; really, she was just as much of a ham as Uncle Toshi when he was working. "Now, the real fun is about to begin! The chance to fully move yourselves into the limelight. Give it your best!" As Midnight-sensei whipped the cat 'o nine tails she was holding just enough the make it flutter in the air, the screen she was standing in front of began spinning through the varied options again; Izuku wondered if Midnight-sensei's gesture had been some kind of cue, or if she was just being hammy again. "Let's see what we have in store for you next! Will your wildest fantasies come to life? What could it be? The waiting is torture! Prepare yourselves, for this!"
/Ah, it's Cavalry Battle,/ Bambaa-chan said, purring happily, if the tone of her mental voice was any indication. /Those are fun./
As Midnight-sensei revealed the conditions for the Cavalry Battle, while also putting a big, fat target on Bambaa-chan's head, Izuku sighed, sinking his face into his right palm.
/Well, that's… something./
"Partner!"
Rolling his eyes behind his palm, Izuku squeezed the bridge of his nose as Monoma jumped out at him, wrapping his arms around his neck.
"Looks like we get to work together here, too!" Monoma said, grinning widely at him as he grabbed Izuku's shoulders, pulling him back slightly as he took his place beside him and Bambaa-chan. "Right, sis?"
"You're being annoying," Shinsou-san grumbled, making his own way up to where the three of them were beginning to form an impromptu sort of team.
/Looks like you're stuck with that barnacle now,/ Bambaa-chan said, tail lashing slightly in annoyance as she made her way over to where he, Shinsou-san, and Monoma were all standing.
Sighing, knowing that Bambaa-chan was right – he never had been rude enough to tell someone off the way Kacchan did, or direct enough to lay down his boundaries the way Bambaa-chan would – Izuku found himself catching Shinsou-san's eyes. Bambaa-chan's friend from General Studies shook his head, rolling his eyes; Izuku found himself rubbing the back of his head sheepishly.
The sound of someone else making their way over to him drew his attention, but when Izuku turned to see who it was, he felt his face heating up as Uraraka-chan made her way over to where his team were all standing together.
"Hey, Deku, can I join up with your team?" Ochako asked, an adorable look of determination on her face.
"Deku?" Monoma asked, looking like he didn't quite know whether or not he should be angry at Ochako for saying something like that; Izuku had a feeling that he knew what she was getting at, but the words were sticking in his throat with Uraraka-chan standing so close. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know, like 'you can do it'!" Ochako said, holding up both fists like she was the winner of some kind of fighting competition.
"Oh, dekiru, I get it," Monoma said, grin returning to his face as he and Ochako continued speaking to each other. Monoma looked over at him, grinning as he caught sight of the blush that Izuku knew he was sporting. "Still, I don't think my partner is going to do so well with a cute girl on our team; one that's not his sister, anyway."
"Neito-kun, that's…! I mean," he said, trying to grab hold of his thoughts, even as they slipped away from him as quickly as they came when Ochako turned back to him with that cute look of interest on her face.
/Izu-chan, you really are hopeless, sometimes,/ Bambaa-chan said, purring amusedly as she came over to stand with the rest of their team as they all gathered together.
Midnight-sensei announced that time for them all to pick their teams was starting to run out, so he, Shinsou-san, Bambaa-chan, and Monoma assembled the team they'd been working on since the next competition had been announced. In the end, he was the one chosen to be the rider, since with his array of Quirks he'd be the best-suited to keep their points – a daunting 10,000,335 of them – from falling into the hands of any of the teams who were going to be competing against them. Once the timer had fully counted down, releasing them all into the next stage of the Sports Festival.
Concentrating, Izuku called up his Gravity Nullification Quirk.
"Everyone, jump!" he called out to his friends, and Monoma.
Once they were safely in the air, Izuku let himself relax, just a little; even though they would only have to keep out of the reach of all of their schoolmates for fifteen minutes, there was always the chance that Kacchan or someone else would be able to make it up to where they were in an effort to steal the headband he was wearing.
"Here, Neito-kun," he said, pressing his left hand against Monoma's left cheek, holding Kacchan's Quirk in that strange place between passing it off and letting it lie dormant within the greater whole of his own All For One. "We need maneuverability."
"Sure thing, partner!" Monoma called back, and Izuku looked down briefly to see Monoma's grin; he returned it with a thumbs up and a smile.
Sure, Monoma might have been more than a bit overbearing sometimes, but he was just as much one of Izuku's friends as Kacchan.
/Izu-chan! There's something coming up from the ground on our right!/
"Neito-kun!"
"Got it, partner!"
As Monoma swung them around, getting their team out of the path of what turned out to be one of Mineta's sticky balls, Izuku made sure to keep an eye out for anything else that might be able to come up after them while they were in the air. Bambaa-chan's eyes – like any cat's; something he'd read up on a lot when Dad had adopted her – were more attuned for seeing motion than anyone without some kind of vision-enhancing Quirk or other, so Izuku knew he would be able to count on her to spot anything else that might be coming up from the ground to threaten them.
Almost before he'd finished that thought, however, something long and pink shot up into the sky from their right – the same exact position that Mineta's ball had come from, in fact – while at the same time Kacchan came blasting in like a rocket from in front of them.
"You're not getting away so easy, nerd!"
"Neito!"
"Woah!"
Chest heaving as he panted in surprise, Izuku braced himself against the sudden lurch as Monoma blasted them backwards, hoping that they would at least be far enough out of range of Kacchan's explosions that he wouldn't be able to reach them before he had to let up on those explosions of his. Out of the corner of his right eye he could see whatever pink thing had lashed out at them yanking itself back down into wherever it had first come from. Still, for the most part he had to keep his eyes on Kacchan, even as his old friend fell back down to the ground.
Before Kacchan could lift off again, an actual mountain of ice exploded up from the ground, with Todoroki-san and his team riding on top of it.
"Looks like you could stay up there longer than I thought," Todoroki-san said, his stoic tone sounding sharper than Izuku had ever heard it before. "But I'll be taking that now."
/Watch out, Izu-chan, he's not the only one we have to worry about,/ Bambaa-chan said, and Izuku knew that if he could look over to see her, he'd have seen her tail twitching with the same anxiety that he could hear in her mental voice.
Looking down at the ice mountain that Todoroki-san was standing on top of, he could see that Ochako was blasting towards him on some kind of jetpack, and when he looked down to the team that she'd presumably been working with, he saw some other girl with thickly-curled pink hair, who was holding some kind of grapple-gun that she'd clearly used to scale the ice mountain that Todoroki-san had created in nearly an instant. Monoma blasted their team back as Ochako blasted forward on a course to intercept his team, and Izuku shuddered.
There was a look of such complete, fierce determination on her face, and even as he called up Kurogiri-sensei's Quirk and sent her to the other side of the arena, Izuku still found himself remembering it. Still, he couldn't think about that anymore, since Todoroki-san was throwing up a barrage of ice at him, and it looked like Kaminari-san was holding out some kind of lightning rod or something. Calling up the first Quirk that Dad had given him, the one that had first revealed what Izuku's own Quirk was capable of, Izuku melted the jagged ice with his Dragon's Breath Quirk.
Monoma maneuvered them out of the way of a blast of directed lightning from Kaminari-san, and as he pressed his left hand to Monoma's left cheek, refreshing his friend's copy of Kacchan's Quirk, the sound of Ochako's jetpack drew his attention back to her again. Bracing himself as Monoma blasted them out of the way of the heavy, weighted net that Ochako fired at them – the Support course girl that she'd partnered with had clearly come prepared for more than a few odd scenarios, something that Izuku really would have respected more if he hadn't found himself on entirely the wrong end of it – Izuku whipped his head around and melted yet another barrage of Todoroki-san's ice with his Dragon's Breath Quirk.
Given the fact that he'd had to refresh Monoma's Quirk twice, Izuku knew that he'd only have to keep defending his team's headband for five more minutes; it was one thing to be grateful for, at least.
The barrage of jagged ice missiles that Todoroki-san filled the air with him forced Izuku to call up Air Cannon, adding in an enhancer Quirk to improve the power output, or else risk drying out his throat too much with Dragon's Breath. With Monoma swinging them around in the air, letting them dodge out of the way of Ochako on her jetpack, Kacchan as he rocketed at them with his explosions, and Todoroki-san's ice barrage, even as he knocked more than a few of them aside with his enhanced Air Cannon.
The sound of Present Mic-sensei's shout that signaled the end of the second round, just as he could see Monoma turning to look back at him, prompted Izuku to sigh deeply in relief.
"All right, I'm taking us back down," he said, looking around at the other members of his team with a wide, pleased smile; all of them had worked really well, down to Shinsou-kun and Bambaa-chan acting as lookouts for all of the other teams that might have been able to attack them even while they were in the air. "Everyone, brace yourselves!"
Bringing them slowly back to stand on the arena floor, Izuku let Gravity Nullification settle back into the greater whole of his own All For One, sighing again as he climbed down from his friends' and his sister's shoulders. Blushing as his empty stomach chose right then to make its displeasure known, Izuku took at least some comfort in the knowledge that Present Mic-sensei had said that they'd all be breaking for lunch before they got into anything else.
"Midoriya," Todoroki-san called, just as he'd finished saying his farewells to Shinsou-kun and Monoma.
"Oh, Todoroki-san, I was just going to go looking for you," he said, turning to face his classmate as Bambaa-chan came up to stand beside him. "Would you like to have lunch with us?"
"All right," Todoroki-san said, though he sounded more uncertain than Izuku would have liked.
Still, maybe they would be able to help him with that; Mom was the best, and Dad was good at seeing when people needed help. Bambaa-chan was looking over at him, and from the way she was slightly twitching her fingers in her pocket, Izuku knew that she was thinking about wrapping her left arm around his shoulders to comfort him, but she also seemed to be studying the way he moved, a lot like the way Dad did when he was trying to determine the best way to help someone with whatever was causing them problems.
In the end, though, Bambaa-chan patted him on the back, and the three of them kept walking toward the lunch area.
~MHA~
Watching Midoriya and his sister interact with their family, Shoto found himself almost wanting to be a member; almost wishing that he could accept All Might's offer to inherit Midoriya's father's Quirk. If only Endeavor hadn't been the one to suggest it…
"Wait, what do you mean, you're planning to withdraw?" he asked, in response to what he'd just heard Midoriya's sister saying.
/I've never really been interested in being a hero,/ Midoriya's sister said, shrugging her thin shoulders. /That's why I applied for General Studies in the first place: they have a great mathematics program, and I could still be close to Izuku, too. Really, I've always dreamed of being a pilot./
"And, you're all right with this?" he asked, turning to look at Midoriya's father; the white-haired man raised an eyebrow at him, a considering expression on his face.
"Shoto-kun, are you having trouble at home?" Midoriya's father asked, turning to him with an earnest expression of worry, though he could still see a hint of calculation in the man's red eyes.
Shoto didn't know quite what to say to that; Midoriya's father had helped Touya become legally emancipated, but there was still the thought of Endeavor and what he wanted. Even more than to see Shoto use his Fire Quirk, Endeavor wanted him to inherit One For All. Even though it was a power that Midoriya's father had created, he couldn't go along with what his father wanted.
He wouldn't become the kind of person Endeavor wanted him to be.
"I'm all right, I just have a lot on my mind," he said, turning slightly as Midoriya's mother reached out to him, Midoriya laughing as she gently wiped away something from his left cheek.
There was a part of him that wanted to join up with this family, to accept the Quirk that Midoriya's father had created, passing down through however many generations until All Might had taken it up; still, he would never become the kind of person Endeavor wanted him to be.