By the time Izuku—feeling rather tired from all the sprinting earlier--returned to the viewing room, it seemed nearly everyone else had already arrived. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. It was probably a good thing.
"Let us start with a review of the quest to apprehend Todoroki." Izuku wondered idly who had compiled the highlights reel shown to the class. Nedzu maybe?
Todoroki took the bomb, walked immediately to the tallest structure in his sector, climbed to the highest floor and froze the entire building into a solid block of ice. Holy--that was incredible, terrifying power. There, in a nutshell, was the difference between an underground and a frontline hero; an underground hero would make use of existing obstacles, a frontline hero would make obstacles of their own.
Safe within his ice palace, Todoroki waited. Jiro, Kirishima and Katsuki arrived and immediately began trying to break through the ice at three different locations. They were not working together, but making some progress nonetheless. Mineta began to frenetically climb all over the icy building using his quirk, probably looking for a weak spot . He didn't find one. Jiro found a frequency that allowed her to shatter great chunks of Todoroki's ice and Kacchan began to use more and more devastating attacks to knock his way through a sealed window. Todoroki had to continually renew his protections and, after only five minutes, began to shiver uncontrollably. At this point Kirishima- -who had been mostly ignored as a lesser threat--burst through the lair's defenses and made his way to the bomb before Todoroki could react. Jiro and Kacchan burst through immediately after and touched the bomb at virtually the same time. Mineta joined them shortly.
"Alright. First off, what did the villain do well?"
"His choice to forswear subtlety in favor of force was probably a good one given the power he can bring to bear," Yaoyorozu provided.
"That ice was crazy tough to break through," Kirishima agreed. "He planned that out really well." "And what could he have done better?" asked All Might.
"He could have sealed the bomb in a solid layer of ice so that anyone breaking through his initial
defenses could not reach it immediately," Izuku offered. On some level, given how quickly the glacier-summoner became hypothermic after encasing himself in ice with his charge, choosing to rely on force rather than subtlety might not have been the best decision.
"Now the heroes. What did they do well?"
"Their determination and relentlessness was admirable," Todoroki himself provided somewhat grudgingly.
The heroes did a decent job, and it wasn't clear that team work would have served them better than the three-pronged assault they carried out independently. Izuku offered no suggestions to this group.
They moved on to an analysis of Ashido's attempt at villainy. The acidic student had chosen to conceal herself and her weapon in the dark basement of a randomly selected building. She proceeded to assemble the cardboard boxes in the room into a visual barrier to hide her bomb and positioned herself in an ambush-ready alcove near the bottom of the stairs.
It was six minutes before someone came to check the basement--Ojiro. He narrowed his eyes at the suspicious pile of boxes and carefully made his way down the stairs. Ashido sent a plume of very weak acid splashing across the floor. Ojiro did not fall but rather slid to the other side of the room as if ice skating. Ashido made a rude face at him before running up the stairs, but she had not fooled him. Ojiro made his way to the boxes and tapped the bomb, claiming it for himself before nodding to Ashido and departing. Ashido sighed and returned to her alcove. Asui was the next to arrive followed by Yaoyorozu and then Kaminari. Ashido played the same game with the other three, but none of them seemed fooled. The pile of boxes was just too suspicious.
Ashido had done a good job. It was a fine hiding spot and she had done her best to implement a backup plan. The heroes, however, could have done much better.
"The heroes should have worked as a team to search," Izuku said simply as the time for suggestions rolled around. "They could have found her much more quickly."
"Were we allowed to do that, kero?" asked Asui.
"Of course you were!" All Might replied. It seemed collaboration hadn't occurred to most of the group.
Uraraka chose to hide on the top floor of a building with a pre-shattered skylight. The reason for this became apparent when Hagakure, the first to search that building, finally arrived. Uraraka tapped the bomb and sent it floating up to the roof and beyond. The other student heroes, attracted by the flying prop, arrived shortly, but Uraraka didn't care; what did it matter to her whether it was one or four heroes who touched the bomb?
That match ended with a waiting game. Eventually Uraraka became so nauseous she could no longer use her quirk and the bomb sailed back down to the building's roof. All four heroes captured it together.
The critique was quick for all of them. Uraraka had come up with a creative solution which likely couldn't have been significantly improved upon. Well, hanging the bomb from a high ceiling by a rope might have thwarted Hagakure without requiring Uraraka to exhaust herself with her quirk, but it would not have thwarted Tokoyami and Dark Shadow. Again, the heroes really should have worked together to sweep the area.
"And now for Midoriya." Izuku watched himself run pell-mell through the faux-city before finally descending into the sewers.
"We were allowed to do that, kero?" asked Tsu. "Nothing was forbidden!" All Might replied.
The cameras in the dimly lit sewer system caught Izuku stowing his bomb and running. "You didn't stay with it?" Uraraka asked.
"W-why would I?" Izuku asked a bit nervously. "I couldn't do anything to defend it, not without attacking someone."
"Your quirk no good for that?" she asked, seemingly perfectly sincere, but Izuku couldn't help but be wary.
"Something like that," Izuku replied. Three people here, maybe four if All Might happened to remember his kidnapping case, knew Izuku was quirkless. The greenette wasn't sure he wanted that number to increase.
The Izuku on screen proceeded to his closet. "I always new there was something about you, Izuku," Kacchan told him. Really Kacchan?
"Oh, grow up!" Izuku sniped back. Kaminari chuckled awkwardly. Izuku felt his cheeks burning, but fortunately All Might was narrating events on the screen rather than paying attention to the conversation at the back of the class.
"There's nothing wrong with being gay," Mineta of all people said. Izuku already knew that the guy was a pervert hyped-up on teenage hormones and angst, so it wasn't something he expected to hear. "Lots of the really hot guys are gay and that's great because I don't have to compete with them for girls." Shouji took a deep breath, apparently trying not to laugh. Kacchan, Ojiro, and Kirishima unanimously decided this would be a good time to face palm. Hopefully Katsuki was regretting his life choices. This was his fault, after all. Asui cocked her head as if considering Mineta's point. Todoroki blushed furiously and Kaminari valiantly pretended to have heard nothing. The rest of the class really had heard nothing, or else they were much better at faking ignorance.
The onscreen Koda began to consult with a number of birds. Due to Izuku's mad romp through the training grounds, the student searched the wrong building first. The birds were not infallible.
Koda found Izuku, realized Izuku didn't have the bomb, and raced back to the ground to find another guide, eventually happening upon the mouse who led him through the sewers. Meanwhile, Iida and Sero searched the city in tandem, Aoyoama joining them after a brief consultation with Iida. Izuku hadn't seen that at the time, vision limited by his vantage point. The three of them made their way to the bomb, eventually, and all claimed it at approximately the same time.
Izuku was, by far, the most successful of the villains. His time to first capture was about twice that of Uraraka who was in second place.
"Well! What did the villain do well in this scenario?" All Might asked. "Everything," said Kaminari and Izuku blushed, ducking his head.
"He took into account the quirks of the people who would be tracking him and made a concerted effort to confound them," Yaoyorozu said.
"Leaving the bomb behind was probably the best choice and quite possibly something we all should have done," Ashido contributed.
Uraraka shook his head. "It only worked for him because he had a really good hiding spot and figured that everyone would look for the villain rather than the villain's weapon."
"And he figured correctly, kero," Asui said.
Kacchan whispered, "good job, nerd," in Izuku's ear.
"That was very impressive, Midoriya," Shouji agreed and Ojiro also gave him a "well done." It was a conspiracy to make him blush as much as possible. He didn't know how to handle this kind of concentrated praise!
"What could he have done better?" All Might inquired.
"It might have been possible to mislead Koda into believing Midoriya had hidden the bomb nearby," Yaoyorozu suggested, "with words or with body language. This could have delayed him further." No one seemed to have much more to contribute.
"What did the heroes do well?" Koda's quirk was used to terrifying effect. Iida and Sero had worked together, as they should have. Aoyama had joined them in the ground search after running into Iida, as he should have. Koda had little motivation to work with the other three heroes, although it would have helped Iida, Aoyama and Sero significantly to have access to some animal- sourced intelligence.
Really, everyone had performed remarkably well given that this was the very first exercise. No one had made any catastrophic mistakes. No one had been injured. No serious damage had been done-- Todoroki's frozen building had thawed long since as had the frosty student himself.
"Excellent work today!" All Might praised them. "This concludes our first class. Have an excellent afternoon!" The number one pro vanished in a burst of wind.
He was having a lucid dream again, but... the emotions had never been this intense before. Were the dreams becoming more powerful or was this just an especially traumatic event? He felt... lost, miserable, furious as if his blood were boiling, affronted like a crusader about to make his last stand on the steps of a doomed cathedral.
"They killed her," Chris said, his head pillowed on his arms as he sobbed on someone's dining room table. Across the room, a lanky young man, probably Latino, with shaggy, coal-black hair lay on his side, apparently asleep... or perhaps unconscious given his impressive black eye. Izuku had no idea who that was. He'd expected Kuma. Where was she?
"We... we don't know that for sure," Izuku replied carefully, setting his hand on the red-head's shoulder, trying to control his own emotions so that he might help his friend.
"I do know, okay? Here," the man thrust a stack of freshly printed papers into Izuku's hands. Izuku couldn't make sense of what they said, not a single word, but his memory-self could and they were damning.
"How did you get this?" Izuku asked, strangled.
"You brought it to me," Chris replied softly, "those documents you lifted?"
"Oh. I... I didn't know any of this was in there..."
"I know you didn't. It's not... not your fault, either of you. But they killed her, and they're going to get away with it, with everything."
"No they aren't," Izuku said.
"No one would ever believe us; this may be proof to you but no one else would believe it," Chris coughed.
"I believe. People like us will believe," Izuku said, "and that's all you need for a rallying cry."
The fierce emotions faded away as the greenette woke, well, most of them anyway. "Did Kuma die?" Izuku wondered as he copied down all the details he could remember from the vision. "Was she murdered? Is that what was going on there? Why, though? It sounded almost like the government had her killed or... someone's government? The Japanese government or the United States Government or... who? Those documents were in English weren't they?" He wasn't sure. They could have been in Japanese. "I stole those documents... what in the world were these people involved in? It has to have something to do with the societal upheaval when meta-humans started to become more common so was Kuma killed by radical anti-meta-human protesters, or an anti- meta-human faction in the government? I don't even know for sure that she was a meta-human or even sympathetic to them. And now I'm using the word meta-human instead of quirked... whatever. I was clearly a meta-human supporter given my reaction to the protest on campus and Chris was, too, so probably Kuma was as well? But were Chris and Kuma meta-humans or not? And if these aren't my memories and I'm pretty sure they're not, does the person whose perspective I share have a quirk? Whose side were they really on? How many sides are there and what even are they?"
Through all the largely fruitless analysis, Izuku found himself feeling... terribly sad. It didn't make sense. He knew, he knew, that if the people in his dreams were real in the traditional sense then they were all long since dead, but the thought of Kuma being murdered so young... ached as if Izuku had lost a friend. He didn't even know the woman that well! He'd only seen her in a half- dozen dreams and yes, he liked her but... she shouldn't be any more dear to him than a character in a historical documentary so why did it suddenly hurt to think about what happened to her?
Izuku took a deep breath, checked his clock--1:39 am--and tried, fruitlessly, to turn his brain off and return to sleep.
Predictably, Izuku was dead on his feet the next day.
"You alright Izuku?" Katsuki asked him as Izuku nearly walked into a pillar at the train station.
"Weird dream," he mumbled.
Kacchan raised a questioning eyebrow. "You're still having those?"
"Yeah."
"And you don't... think you should tell someone?"
Izuku shrugged. "Who would care?"
"I might," Kacchan muttered. "Auntie might. Ojiro might. Shouji might. Hell, the detective that looked for you might, or Aizawa for that matter."
Point taken but... "I think it would be in my best interest," Izuku said very, very carefully, "to keep quiet about this," and he should really start writing all the details of his dreams in code.
"Wha... why?"
"I... may be seeing things that people don't want seen," Izuku said even more carefully. A government conspiracy to murder a young woman? It might have happened decades ago, but it would likely still be something Izuku would better off knowing nothing about. Well, no, that wasn't exactly it. Izuku wanted to know and he wanted other people to know, too. He wanted justice for his slain friend (if that was indeed what had occurred, he still couldn't be sure.) No, it wasn't that he'd rather not know about this, but that if he let on to other people that he knew and the wrong person overheard... Izuku could be in danger of sharing Kuma's fate.
"What the hell is this mess?" Katsuki muttered, staring at an enormous gaggle of people standing between them and the UA gates. The obstacles had cameras. And notebooks.
"Oh dear," Izuku said. Reporters.
"Hey! You go to UA! What's All Might like as a teacher?" someone shoved a microphone in Izuku's face. The greenette neatly ducked and began dancing through the crowd, easily avoiding every haphazard attempt to stop him.
"Oh you cheating nerd!" Kacchan yelled as Izuku sidestepped a final camera and slid through the UA gates.
"Sorry, Kacchan." Izuku's friend tried to make his way through the crowd by shouting a lot. It wasn't working very well.
Aizawa appeared in Izuku's peripheral vision, walking along the outer wall of UA . The underground pro ducked into the sea of reporters, fished Kacchan out of the flood, and returned to UA grounds proper just in time for a barrier to fly up and force the reporters back. "Head to class," Aizawa told his students before returning his attention to the reporters. Izuku heard him yelling something about "official statements" and "trespassing" and "lawsuits."
"Well, this is going to be an interesting day," Katsuki muttered.