Glancing out the window behind him at the still rising moon, Izuku guessed about thirty minutes had passed since he met War Dog in the forest or... "did that actually happen?" he asked aloud, sitting up. He definitely hadn't been knocked unconscious or exposed to Recovery Girl's quirk. He felt too good and too energized for that.
There were voices beyond Izuku's privacy curtain. "No, couldn't catch her," Midnight said. "She was gone like a shot and over the wall before my quirk could kick in." Ah. Midnight had used her power, Izuku had passed out and War Dog had fled.
"Ah, Midoirya," Nedzu greeted him from Aizawa's shoulder as the greenette drew back the curtain. Yamada stood grimly beside Eraserhead. "We were wondering if you could shed some light upon this situation?"
"I'm never jogging anytime near twilight within a week of a full moon ever again," Izuku decided. He would often have to be out working at those times, but he could promise not to go out for recreation ever again. "There isn't much to say, Nedzu, I'm sorry. I felt something was off so I was looking behind me a lot. I nearly ran into her... I thought she was False Flag at first. War Dog... seemed to think that was funny. She said she wanted to apologize to me," Izuku explained.
"For what?" Midnight stared at him, clearly unnerved.
"For biting you during your disappearance of which you have missing memories?" Nedzu clarified, immediately understanding and deciding that all heroes present were cleared to hear this information.
"Yes. She said that she found me in a "snake pit" or was it "den of vipers?" Something like that... sorry, my brain was trying to do too many things and the details are fuzzy, but I don't think the phrasing was important. She thought I was one of the group she had decided to dismantle, but realized later that I was there to fight the same group she was after I guess... and then she said," here he hesitated again. Nedzu waved him forward. "That "you didn't deserve the bite you got for your trouble, either of you." I was trying to get her to explain what she meant by that when Midnight rescued me."
"Chased the villain off, more like. You really should have tried to hold her, Kayama," Present Mic complained. "I don't like that someone managed to slip through our security and then slip out
again."
Nedzu's whiskers twitched. "I care not to think of the blood bath that could have resulted had anyone save perhaps Eraserhead made an attempt to keep War Dog here. Best for us that she ran and I doubt she will return, having now settled her business with Midoriya..." Izuku wasn't sure what body language or tone cue he had picked up on; Nedzu was borderline impossible to read, but the principal was definitely holding something back. What else had War Dog done?
"I was enjoying that run," Izuku complained, overreacting to a small inconvenience in order to facilitate underreacting to a life threatening one.
"It is a shame, indeed, for it is quite a lovely evening," Nedzu chirped. "If you remember any other details, do let us know, Midoriya," the mammal said, giving him a clear dismissal.
Izuku nodded. "Thank you so much, Midnight." Though, it really would have been convenient if she had arrived a few minutes later. The greenette almost got answers to his questions. But, then again, the universe acted as if it would implode the moment Izuku stopped being confused, what with all these ridiculous twists and turns it placed between him and the truth, so perhaps it was for the best after all. The greenette didn't want to be responsible for the apocalypse or flying pigs or hell freezing over or whatever.
"I'll take you back to your dorm," Aizawa volunteered.
The pair set out, leaving the other heroes to discuss security concerns. Izuku sighed. "You are a trouble magnet," Eraserhead told him as they approached Heights Alliance. "Maybe even a superconducting trouble magnet."
"I noticed that," Izuku agreed. "She could have just... sent me a letter or put an add in the newspaper." That would have been a classified to behold. "But instead she decided to show up in person and give me a heart attack." He considered things for a moment more, then said, "still, I suppose it was nice of her to apologize?"
Aizawa nodded thoughtfully. "Most people don't apologize for nearly killing you, it's true."
"It still seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to talk to me for... such a trivial reason." Craig's List Missed Connections were just perfect for this kind of thing if the classified adds were too old fashioned for War Dog.
"I highly doubt it was the only reason she was here," Aizawa said darkly. "I don't know lots about War Dog; I don't think anyone does, but she doesn't seem the kind to act carelessly, or mess with heroes just because she's bored. I think tomorrow we're going to find out someone stole files or accessed computer equipment... or we're going to find a corpse."
Izuku shook his head. "I doubt she killed anyone. She was completely clean and... she's a messy fighter. She would have been soaked in blood."
Aizawa actually sighed in relief. "Good to hear, Midoriya." The greenette nodded, happy to be useful in any way after that disaster.
Eraserhead shepherded Izuku back into the common room. "Nerd?" Katsuki asked him.
"Everything's fine now," the greenette replied. "I'm going to go to bed and stay there for a while. Good night." He would let Aizawa explain what happened to the class... or not, as the case might be.
As 1-A and 1-B collected the next day, ready to begin training, Izuku spotted Shinsou lingering by Aizawa. The purple haired student wore one of the full face masks used for voice alterations. Ah, so Shinsou was the student trying to transfer into the hero course. The ability to alter his voice would be exceedingly useful given that his quirk was verbally activated in some way. The support equipment supported the hypothesis that Shinsou had to get people to answer him directly in order to control them. The purple haired student glanced at Izuku nervously, hunching his shoulders a bit. Izuku waved at him ever so slightly then looked away.
"The classes will be competing in groups of four..." Aizawa explained, approaching the crowd. "And our class will at last show our superiority--" 1-B's Monoma began to say enthusiastically.
"With two members from each class," Aizawa continued. Oh. That was... not what Izuku had expected. Clearly nobody else had expected it either. Monoma snapped his mouth shut. "Shinsou will join twice, so two teams will consist of five students. Heroes frequently have to join impromptu teams in the field and, moreover, we'd like the classes to learn to work together. You may be rivals in some ways, but you are all UA students and you should be each other's fiercest allies." Unspoken was, "times are changing and all of us need to have each other's backs."
As the random number generator churned out matches, Izuku quietly begged the universe not to set him with or against Shinsou. It wasn't the brainwasher's fault, but Izuku was not going to be able to handle that, not with all the stress he'd been under lately. The universe must owe him for last night, right? Being stalked down by War Dog because he happened to be out on a run by himself when she was breaking into the school was such unbelievably bad luck, the greenette must be owed some good fortune now, right? Please?
The matches were announced and Izuku winced. No. Such. Luck. Shinsou would be one of his opponents. At least Izuku wouldn't have to fight with Shinsou. That would probably be worse than trying to fight against him... Izuku had gotten extra unlucky as he was slated to take part in the last match, meaning he had a very long time to think about how much this was going to suck.
"Matches last fifteen minutes. Keep the injuries and the damage to a minimum," Vlad King told them. "Whichever team has more captives in the prison cage at the end of fifteen minutes will be the victor. Let's go!"
Class 1-B had a number of powerhouses who somehow hadn't made it far in the Sports Festival. The ability to turn huge swathes of the landscape into quicksand was... impressive and potentially deadly.
Izuku wasn't paying nearly as much attention as he should, busy dreading combat against the brainwasher. He'd been fine at the Sports Festival... well, mostly fine... for the handful of
seconds that the match had lasted. The two had had a civil conversation about it later. Izuku would be fine this time, too. It would be extra awkward because Shinsou now knew about Izuku's... issues with brainwashing quirks and was clearly as dreadfully unhappy about this fight as Izuku but it would be fine.
The greenette was shocked back to reality by Todoroki exploding into an arc of crimson flames, spinning them into a weak tornado... "Whoa!" screeched Ashido. "I didn't even know he could-- why didn't he--what is that?"
"That's one of Fire Wheel's finishing moves," Izuku said dumbly. It wasn't very good; this was probably the first time Todoroki had ever managed to pull it off, but it was still a wild, amazing thing to see. He'd really done it... by becoming obsessed with a very different flame wielding hero, their chaotic classmate had overcome whatever block kept him from using his own fire.
Despite the sloppiness of the attack, the opposing team was unable to recover from the surprise of being assaulted with a power they had never seen before. Todoroki's allies, Bondo, Tsunotori, and Ojiro, made short work of incapacitating their opponents. "Wow," Kirishima said quietly. "He's been holding out on us or something..."
Izuku slipped back into his stress haze and only jolted out of it when Iida started propelling himself across the training ground like some sort of rocket. "What is happening with everyone today ?" Ashido yelled. Good question.
"Anyone else have totally new quirk features they've not told us about?" asked Sero. He was looking at Izuku, wasn't he?
"Like we'd say if we did," a 1-B student the greenette didn't know well, Shishida, replied. "It would ruin the surprise," Uraraka shrugged.
Uraraka, Mineta, Monoma, Awase and Shinsou versus Midoriya, Ashido, Yanagi and Tetsutetsu. Izuku's team was probably not going to win; his only ambition was to make sure that their loss wasn't the result of the greenette himself having psychological problems.
The team of four convened next to their "prison." "So what's the plan?" Tetsutetsu asked, Yanagi standing behind him with a curious expression on her face.
As no one else spoke, Izuku took over. "I think we probably have to answer Shinsou for him to use his brainwashing quirk on us. We can't reply to each other, then, because Shinsou has the ability to sound like any of us, so we have to fight not necessarily without speaking but without answering anything that we've heard." That would go against a lot of instincts for hero students. They were all being trained to verbally acknowledge receipt of all information or instructions. "They're likely to want to lay a trap for us; Mineta's quirk is really good for that and Monoma can copy it. I bet that looks weird, though..." Monoma with purple hair... "I don't actually know what Awase's quirk can do..."
"He can weld things together," Tetsutetsu explained, "on an atomic level. Works on people and objects."
"So they're a team full of capture quirks," Ashido mused.
"Our interests of victory might be better served by refraining from hasty entrance into combat, rather encouraging the enemy to take the offensive," Yanagi suggested.
Izuku nodded. "I was thinking along those lines. We might have to go to them, but then Yanagi could attack from a distance with Poltergeist," Izuku vaguely remembered hearing about Yanagi's quirk at some point in the past, maybe the Sports Festival, "the rest of us could throw things," Tetsutetsu seemed to perk up at that suggestion, "and we could force them to come to us."
"That sounds like a good plan," Ashido agreed. "Let's go?"
"Let's!" Tetsutetsu clanged metal fists together. "Quietly," Izuku hissed.
The four of them made their way through the tangled network of pipes that covered the training ground. In a real refinery, they would have to worry about the contents of these pipes which could be anything from octane to methyl mercaptan, potentially explosive or lethal, but for this exercise the plant was assumed to be non-operational and, though their instructions were to do the least damage possible, they need not worry about chemical spills.
The group moved quietly, listening for any sign of the enemy. Izuku kept one eye upwards as the others watched ahead, to the side, and behind. "Remember not to respond to anyone anymore," Izuku said, smacking Ashido lightly when she almost replied to this statement. "We shouldn't all stand next to each other like this. Fan out and put some distance between everyone, but make sure that you keep an eye on the people behind you."
When a ladder provided an opportunity, the greenette jumped up onto a higher level, quietly leaping from ledge to ledge to keep pace with his allies. "Help! There's a trap!" someone yelled, someone who sounded like Tetsutetsu but could be Shinsou.
"That wasn't me!" someone else who sounded like Tetsutetsu said. Izuku got his staff in hand--he wasn't going to use knives in this kind of chaotic training--and waited. This was the ambush they expected, but it hadn't been sprung in a straightforward way...
"Look up!" Izuku called, "Mineta's quirk and Uraraka's!" The opposing team had sent dozens of the purple orbs floating weightlessly towards them. The spheres dropped suddenly. Izuku had total cover. The others did not, but Yanagi's quick reaction saved them, the orbs lighting up with an eerie purple glow and shooting away into the distance as Poltergeist took control.
"Too bad," Monoma's voice mused. Where was he? Ah. There he was, walking down a side corridor.
"I've got Monoma but I can't seen anyone else!" Fossa called to his teammates as he slipped between two large pipes and dropped to the ground in front of the copy cat, swinging his staff towards the enemy's shoulder. Monoma tried to catch the weapon. He had probably copied Uraraka's quirk and would thus be able to send it flying if he managed to grasp the staff with all five fingers. The 1-B student was not skilled enough to do so, however, and got hit three times in the ribs for his trouble before falling to the ground with a harsh, "oof."
Fossa dodged a flying orb by instinct, giving Monoma the barest hint of an opening. The copy cat didn't manage to touch Izuku with all his fingers, the greenette leaping back before weightlessness could doom him, but Monoma had grazed him and thus could have copied his quirk... if he had one. Monoma's eyes narrowed, "but that doesn't make any sense," he said. What did quirklessness look like from Monoma's perspective? Izuku almost giggled as he took advantage of his opponent's hesitation to clobber the blonde in the head. The blow was far from Fossa's maximum strength; he didn't want to do serious damage, just stun Monoma long enough to cuff him to a pipe. Standard handcuffs wouldn't always be effective, but they were handy to have and in this case they should suffice; there was nobody on the opposing team with the strength to break these restraints and if Monoma had copied another student's quirk with that much power he likely would have used it already.
Fossa followed the sounds of an all out brawl, sliding around the corner into the middle of a very sticky situation.
Poltergeist tossed about streams of Ashido's acid as well as many of Mineta's orbs. Mineta also tossed about many of Mineta's orbs. Awase had managed to fuse Tetsutetsu to a pipe at some point, but Tetsutetsu had ripped the entire pipe out of its housing and was now swinging it around like a spear. Awase did not seem to know what to do about this, being forced to back further and further away. A huge steel beam crashed into the center of the melee courtesy of Uraraka, sending everything into a chaotic upheaval until a new status quo emerged from the wreckage. There were a half dozen similarly heavy objects laying across the battlefield already.
A white scarf shot out of the darkness and grabbed at Ashido who shrieked. Shinsou... Fossa took his staff and slammed it against the scarf, trying to pull the brainwasher off balance. It worked well enough to free the greenette's pink haired classmate before Fossa had to dive for cover from a barrage of purple spheres. There were entirely too many projectiles in play. "Worst dodgeball game ever," Izuku muttered, somehow managing not to be smashed flat by a fused set of flying cinder blocks... Awase and Uraraka could do quite a lot of damage together, couldn't they?
Shinsou jumped into the fray, deciding to take a risk and attack straightforwardly while Izuku was distracted. Fossa matched a few blows, dodged a capture scarf attack, and took the purple haired opponent to the ground--Shinsou screeched. "Ah, god my knee! You broke it!" he howled. He hadn't hit him that hard, had he?
Startled into stupidity at the idea of having done serious damage by accident, Izuku slipped and replied, nothing more than, "are you--" intending to inquire after the other student's health. It was enough.
He didn't have enough time to reflect on what an absolute idiot he was to be caught by such a trick. Stupid, stupid, Fossa. The immense stress of the last day was no excuse. He had to admit that it was a clever move on Shinsou's part, though.