Greetings, my fellow humans!
This is yet another post. I am brain dead from writing a 2.3k philosophy essay yesterday. Please send help.
-SpiritOfErebus
…
Wednesday, 12am
"Thank you for adjusting your lessons to my jet lag, Shield-san."
"Just David is fine." the inventor said to the girl in front of him, waving his arm casually. "I heard you really wanted to get into some sort of a tech internship, right? Thinking about joining the support course?"
"Well, not… exactly." Yaoyorozu said, scratching her temple slightly awkwardly. "I… realized my limitation with my quirk wasn't exactly its strength or speed, but my creativity and knowledge of mechanics. If I can memorize some of the structures of more advanced support items, I would be able to advance my combat prowess further."
"You are aware that copyright laws are a thing, right?"
"...Yes." Yaoyorozu sighed. "Which is why I'm merely here to learn about prototypes. I won't be distributing the actual patented devices, and I'll try to engineer my own versions in the meanwhile. All I wish to learn is how the design process works."
David Shield smiled. His scheme was working,
"Then how about this? I'll make you my temporary assistant, and in return, you'll be helping me out with an assortment of research projects. Your quirk is very convenient for producing rare or hard to get materials, and it's more precise at the micro scale than any 3-D printers I have immediate access to. I think that with this arrangement, we can both benefit. You can learn about support items, and I can further my personal research."
"I… guess that's fine?" Yaoyorozu said, raising an eyebrow. "But why me, specifically?
There was indeed a reason. David Shield had wanted to make the quirk amplifier for almost five years, ever since All Might had been injured. He knew that Toshinori couldn't stay as All Might for much longer, which was why the device was needed. With it, he would restore All Might to his former greatness and ensure at least another ten years for society.
All Might was now down to three hours per day. Three hours, after deteriorating from that battle so long ago.
The higher-ups didn't want him to work on this project. It was too dangerous. It would be destabilizing if it got into the wrong hands. Sure, David Shield knew that.
But this girl didn't have to know anything about what she was producing. She wouldn't know any of the physics that went into the strengthening of a quirk with a device. She wouldn't know how the science worked, but she could produce anything, as long as she understood the blueprints.
Effectively, she was a traceless 3-D printing machine.
"I'm doing this because I saw potential in you." David Shield said instead. "What you have achieved with your base, human levels of strength, is frankly astounding. You have shown that modern people don't have to be limited by quirk, if you can produce a tool that does the same! Frankly, you are… revolutionary. I wanted to be a hero too, you know?"
"Really?"
"Yeah." David Shield smiled sadly, remembering his old work with All Might. "Instead, I was All Might's sidekick, and I couldn't exactly contribute in a meaningful way other than making his costume. My quirk isn't particularly useful, so now I'm trying to contribute in another way. Through I-Island. Through science. And I think that if you do succeed, you will be a great way to bridge the gap. To begin to end quirk discrimination, and to start a new era of human progress."
"That seems much too grand, and similar to an attempt at manipulation." Yaoyorozu said. "I don't think that my own, personal success as a hero can even breach the top twenty heroes in just Japan, let alone actually make an impact in the world."
"Hey, who knows if we don't try?" David Shield smiled, "Now, how much do you remember of your mechanics lessons during the past two days from my assistants?"
The blueprints of the theoretical quirk amplification device sat in a drawer, almost ready to be mass produced by a quirk. His off-record project was about to begin.
"I should really think up a name for it."
Wednesday, 9am
The titanic blows of the large man before him sent Kirishima skidding back, his arms crossed in a hardened guard as the gigantic slab of rock impacted him. His heels scratched deep lines into the dirt training field as he leaned forwards, trying to neutralize the residual force sending him back.
This was a true test of his quirk. It felt like his skin was vibrating out of his skin-like shell, but he gritted his teeth and continued on.
But the fact of the matter was that Kirishima couldn't take these blows.
"As a hero of durability, you have to be aware of your duty!" Crust, the top 6 hero in Japan, shouted. The hexagons that protruded from his arms shrank back down while the dust cleared from within the arena.
"Clearly, the one that trained you didn't have a good gauge of your skillset." Crust sighed. "Though your technique is clearly good, it's one that relies on agility and brute strength too much. I'll admit, your usage of your quirk to boost your punching power is creative, but your quirk itself lacks the raw durability that our type of heroes need."
Kirishima wanted to rebuke Crust's statements at Li Shuwen, but he was too exhausted. His lungs felt out of breath. His arms felt like they were trying to jump off a building, and his legs felt like they were trying to hold his arms back from jumping off said building.
"I don't think that you're exactly content with me kind of insulting the one who trained you." Crust said, getting back into a fighting stance. "It's very manly that you feel such strong bonds, so I'll allow you to attack me once. Show me what you've achieved."
Kirishima unhardened his whole body, shaking off the soreness. He inhaled, feeling the air fill his aching lungs, and exhaled, feeling as the air flowed out of his mouth. His teeth, hurting from gritting them for too long, ached as the motion caused them to shift slightly.
He twisted his body, adjusting his footwork on the loose, dirt ground. The dirt, previously stirred up by his skid marks, was now smoothed over by his feet as he slowly began to breathe in and out in sync with his footwork.
He closed his eyes, feeling the trembling of the earth as Crust's weight drastically changed in preparation for his attack. He felt the flow of balance shift through him as he brought both his arms forwards, his fists held together, palms facing outwards.
"I'm ready." he said, before slowly and methodically stepping forwards.
"I thought you were full of passion back when I saw you fight in the sports festival." Crust shouted, "But where is your passion now? Where is your drive? Stop taking the coward's approach and fight me!"
Those words did sting, but Kirishima still advanced slowly, his motions consistent in speed. Slowly, he drifted to the side as he made preparations to fight Crust.
He knew that he didn't stand a chance. He knew that against the number six pro hero, even if they were going easy, that his one month in technique training and two months in physical training at UA weren't going to mean anything.
But Ba-JiQuan was a type of martial art that relied on explosive force. And at the very least?
Kirishima could surprise Crust.
Amidst his slow approach, Crust lost his patience. His arms cracked as scales began to sprout all up his forearm and fist with a harsh, crackling noise, the appendages swelling to become inhuman. The little gray patches that only existed on the back of Crust's hands spread to create hexagonal constructs that Kirishima knew from experience was basically indestructible. But he didn't have to destroy anything to get anywhere.
Crust ran forwards speedily, going from rest to motion impossibly quickly. However, Kirishima knew that although Crust had power and durability in spades, balance was what restrained the man.
After all, Crust's speed relied completely on imbalance. Of the sudden creation of mass on his forearms, and running forwards and generating momentum on his arms while the mass slowly increased.
Crust's foot slammed down before Kirishima, spraying the soil into the air. Kirishima brought his head back, avoiding the spray of dirt as a right-handed straight punch soared for Kirishima's head.
But that was exactly what Kirishima wanted. Raising his left arm, he brought his hardened elbow down on top of Crust's right forearm in one practiced motion, directing the impact towards his side. The titanic force then scraped past the smooth, hardened surface on his left torso, making a small scratch as the hexagons ripped past the clothing. The force of Crust's punch caused a dust cloud to erupt behind Kirishima.
Utilizing the momentum from the punch and his own footwork, Kirishima turned the right half of his body into Crust's guard. Blocking Crust's scaled left arm from crushing him with a sweep of his left arm, Kirishima's hardened palm strike impacted Crust's sternum.
Of course, Crust's chest was also armored, but the impact visibly shook Crust slightly. As Crust's movements stalled a bit because of the pain and the impact on his breathing, Kirishima's left leg reached out to entangle Crust's right leg, which was completely rigid because of the armor plating that had sprouted on it, but with a sideways motion that struck at the back of Crust's knees, Kirishima's target stumbled slightly.
And it was only just slightly.
Normally, that combo would have unbalanced and winded any average person. But Crust was the number six hero for a reason. The blows barely had an impact.
But Kirishima had kept Crust's arms at bay, along with slightly imbalancing his target. A flurry of blows followed.
As Kirishima aimed upwards for Crust's chin, Crust's instinctual response was to try and block the uppercut with one arm while another one of his arms sprouted armor plating, attempting to fence Kirishima off from pressing his advantage further. However, Kirishima diverted his uppercut into a sideways-upper sweep, diverting the barrier slightly and twisting his body once again to dodge into Crust's guard, before spinning once more and using his other hand to strike at Crust's torso again.
It barely had an effect, but as Kirishima combined his entangling footwork and diverting punches to continue attacking Crust, his smile grew wider and wider.
Whose smile?
Crust's smile.
"Good!" he laughed. "Your potential is amazing! Though you lack offensive power, your technique allowed you to survive one of my punches."
A large armor plate sprouted in front of Crust's chest, impacting one of Kirishima's punches and sending him back with the impact. After the dull clinking sound of one rock punching another rock, Kirishima's footwork stalled as he stumbled back to where he started.
Kirishima exhaled heavily, and grinned back.
"I will accept that my quirk is still not where I want it to be, but I do not believe that you can say anything about my technique not being suitable. My durability and the speed at which I can revert back and forth from hardened to unhardened are a perfect match for this close-quarters style."
"Good. You didn't give up on your path just because I told you to!" Crust said, nodding his head and sticking out a thumb. "Yet, you're not so vain as to completely disregard my criticism. You really are on your path to greatness!"
"Thank you, Crust-sama." Kirishima bowed.
He had spent the last two days familiarizing himself with the agency. It had been enlightening and educational.
But this quirk training from one of the most durable heroes in Japan, possibly second only to All Might?
This was what he was really looking forward to.
Wednesday, 12pm
Interning under Fourth Kind was a nightmare.
Sure, Ojiro had been excited to intern under the man that was known as the Chivalrous Hero, but the man was just… very strict.
About everything.
And having two precise, stable arms was very much a challenge to keep track of. In fact, even Shoji, who was interning with him, was having trouble as well.
"Your fifteen minute-break is up!" Fourth Kind roared from the office. "I'm expecting you all back in the dojo. Right. Now! And then we shall go on patrol!"
Not wanting to write another martial arts segment, since you all surely would be bored by Kirishima's 1.2k word journey down four parts of the Ba-JiQuan movement, the author shall spare this training session from being written into text.
Everybody was progressing.
Wednesday, 6pm
"Our group of people that barely could be considered as gangsters want to surrender to you." Yuki sighed, her head leaning down as she silently wept. Under the compulsion of the masked man's truth quirk, she could do nothing but speak the truth at the meeting negotiating their… surrender.
Behind the man, a small creature floated silently. Carefully avoiding reflective surfaces, it carried something very technologically advanced and small with its tiny little human hands.
"Just a little more now." Hans thought, lying within the vents of the establishment that the yakuza had chosen. The little mermaid was now placing her back against the plastic chair in the coffee shop, slowly and gently floating upwards like she was trying to copy a spy in a movie.
They had planned for this eventuality. If truth quirks existed in the police force, then they would exist in gangs too. Hans didn't expect his prediction to be this accurate, but if it worked, then it wasn't an unnecessary precaution.
After all, they had lied to the gang that they were just surrendering. That surrendering would lead to the least bloodshed, and that the heroes would take care of it after they had been evacuated.
Technically, they weren't wrong. This gang would need to stop being a gang. They would need to go back to being construction workers, because a protection racket definitely wasn't something that would be tolerated by a government sanctioned protection racket, also called the hero business.
But this would be better for them, Hans reasoned. They couldn't handle combat against the enforcers in the Yakuza. Only the heroes and police could.
Their raid was planned for tomorrow. Thursday.
And so, to keep that fact secret from both the gang and the yakuza, Tensei had lied to the leader of the SDC about surrendering.
This was the best way to avoid conflict. This was the best way to avoid bloodshed.
But as the little mermaid finally slipped the tracker onto the hood of the man and disappeared, Hans felt like something was still wrong.
Nothing had changed. This yakuza would be rolled over by the Ingenium agency, and that would be that. The status quo would still be maintained. The SDC's protection quota would lose its meaning, and those people, the formerly homeless and exploited, would go back to try to find some sort of employment that would lead them onto the same path: being homeless or exploited.
But this was what justice was. It was what had been defined. Heroes and police were part of the system, and what seemed to be a dramatized bunch of neighborhood watchmen that were acting more like gangsters… weren't.
The masked man stood up and bowed to the defeated woman before him briskly, before walking out. Several armed men followed, and the restaurant owner finally peeked out from behind the counter, relieved that the presence of violence had finally disappeared.
Slowly, Yuki stood up from the plastic chair that she had been sitting on. Untying her blindfold briefly and shaking it free of the ice crystals that had accumulated because of the inconvenient quirk that had probably stopped her from getting a job.
Yep.
Nothing had changed despite justice being served.
…
Hans sat down after having waited in a restaurant vent for thirty minutes. Yuki had gone into quite the slump, the hot drink before her slowly stopping to emit white steam and develop into an ice coffee.
Then, she left into the softly raining night.
"...Anything to drink?" the restaurant owner asked in the distance.
"No, thank you." Hans sighed. "My wallet isn't in the mood."
"Yeah, I, uh… It's very disturbing to actually see gangsters meet up in my location." the restaurant owner said timidly. "But it's good to see that the heroes are finally doing something about it here."
"But we didn't actually change anything." Hans sighed. "This new gang is only here because the old one disappeared, and they're here to fill in the power vacuum. Eventually, there'll be another gang here, maybe coming from the east this time, and then gang activity here will resume."
"That's just… terrible." she said, sitting down opposite Hans. "Come to think of it, I think I've seen you around before. Or heard your voice or something…"
"Probably on television." Hans said, sighing. "I was involved in a lot of dumb things."
"No, no… it wasn't there." she thought, scratching her chin. "I don't watch television a lot. Running my parent's restaurant is just so busy, you know? Especially here, in the city."
"I live around here too." Hans said, "I went to a middle school about uh… Forty five minutes away."
"Riko Middle?" the girl said, "And that hero said you were just an intern, right? What year are you in?"
"Just a first year." Hans said. "What's it to you?"
"We were in the same grade!" she said excitedly. "Even though I… uh… dropped out to work, that's still pretty cool, right?"
"Hey, there's no shame in finding a living early." Hans said. "Besides, if your parents aren't working, something is up, right?"
"...Yeah." she said, sighing. "They're sick."
"I know how it is." Hans said. "My family is in crippling debt trying to pay off medical treatment for my grandfather, and now I'm going to a trade school to get employed in a high-paying career out of the equivalent of high school in order to pay off that debt."
"But I don't think I've ever remembered you being this contemplative." the girl said. "You were always so… dismissive of everything."
"Oh, god. Was that what I seemed like?" Hans said, putting his face in his palm. "I was, and still am, kind of pretentious."
"I think you're different, though." the girl said. "Back in school, you always seemed like you were just a storm of unflinching resolve walking around school."
"I don't think I ever was like that." Hans said. "I was just judgemental. And I probably was really insensitive."
"You just always seemed to have a direction, you know? Not tolerant of stupidity and everything like that. You even gave existential crises to some of the bullies that messed with some of my friends. It was like you were the bully for bullies, you know? No wonder you've become a hero."
"So how am I different?" Hans said, looking at the windows. It was still the same, exact face. He tried to stare judgmentally into that much too youthful face, but… he just couldn't bring himself to.
"I guess I answered my own question."
"Hey, early-adult-life crisis, right?" she said, sighing. "I know that feeling."
"What's your name, by the way?" Hans asked. "I mean, we went to the same school and all, but I don't remember ever talking to you."
"Oh, my name is…"
Wednesday, 9pm
"I'm… I'm sorry, guys." Yuki said, sitting down and leaning forwards dejectedly. "I guess this was never meant to be. We've surrendered. We've lost."
The crowd sighed. Grown men sat down on the floor or leaned against the walls, suddenly feeling so tired. The atmosphere in the air felt dull and dreary, almost like a calculus class.
But there was one person that still hadn't given up.
A quirkless man, with his head wrapped in a slightly blood stained white cloth, shakily raised his hands.
"No." he said quietly.
"What don't you understand about it?" Hasanote screamed, her fingers scraping against one another with a metallic rasp.
"The surrender was fake," he said. "It was a plan by Hans to get the Yakuza to meet with you guys so that the heroes could find their location. I heard them talk about it right before Hans started fighting those gangsters."
"How do you know this?"
"I was talking to him before the attack, and I heard him talking with Ingenium about it."
"And the guy I was meeting with had a truth quirk… so he would have known if I knew that the surrender was fake." Yuki reasoned, beginning to understand. "Then the heroes haven't given up on us yet, right?"
"So what are we waiting for?" Hasanote said, grinning. "Obviously, the heroes haven't included us in their raid because we're civilians! But when have we shied away from fighting?"
"But we were beaten up so badly when they attacked." one construction worker said, a bandage wrapping around his bicep. "We couldn't even take on their lieutenants!"
"Are we just going to stand by and let the heroes, let literal interns do all the work for us? In order for us to finally get a foothold in this world?" Hasanote shouted. "Are you just going to stand there and take it, like we've been doing all our lives?"
The bandaged quirkless man stood up from the chair he had been placed in because of his concussion, and shook his head. "No."
He raised his fist, slightly dizzy now that he was actually standing again. Getting punched in the face really did a number on him, but that wasn't going to stop him.
Nothing would stop him again. Not like everything that had stopped him before.
"No." he said, slightly louder this time.
His mutter resounded across the room, sweeping across the room more than a shout ever could.
"We're going to go to war with the yakuza," he said again. "Because, honestly? What do we have to lose? Our lives? ...That's really just about all we have now."
AN
The quirkless guy is the one that talked with Hans in the last chapter, in case you don't remember.
I might be doing a 2-week update schedule? Honestly, I don't really know. It'll probably be closer to 3 weeks. The only thing that I know is that it'll probably be getting slower.
And now for a question: Do you people still actually want to read this thing. Obviously, this will be a biased poll because you all have to read this chapter in order to get to this question, but my point is: Do you all still want to read this arc?
I don't want to be a stat guy, but stats tell me something. That less people are enjoying this fic. I want to be good at writing. I want self improvement, and stats are an indication of it. So, here is this:
I get it. I finally get it. The reduction in stats and reviews. The stagnation in everything related to this fic is caused by the sports festival. It is so narratively broken that it literally broke this fic.
We went from a hodgepodge of canon characters and Hans's "exciting roasts" into Hans and Iida's slightly conversationalist adventure. There was literally no avoiding this. The internship arc was placed directly after the sports festival, and while, in canon, it's about Deku gaining power and smacking Stain… here?
Hans is stagnant in all but character traits. His powers don't grow. He's not overpowered. He's not what you all, as fate and BNHA fans, want to read. It's literally the opposite. There's no more dopamine from success, only the grim, slow realization that even if Hans wins a fight against a villain (see the chapters on Monday), it was still kinda sad, and that society is pretty fked up.
So, well… I get it. Do you all agree with this assessment?
(Also, why is the sports festival fundamentally breaking the narrative of BNHA? Because there was no effort put in for the payoff. It was, effectively, a comparison of base level powers of the characters. No training or work was put into the sports festival, but it delivered tons of dopamine and cool fight scenes. Then, as people expect more and more hype, BNHA was inevitably pushed down the generic shounen route.)
My proposed narrative structure which will literally never happen:
USJ = Training Camp = Stain(Iida learns about his brother's injury in the camp and runs away from the camp on a journey of vengeance) = Sports Festival = Internships = Kidnapping
-SpiritOfErebus
