"You want to hire me to teach Hero Support?" Taylor could hear the surprise in her voice.
Nezu smirked at her, "Why are you so shocked? Ever since All Might credited you for his new costume you have been one of the most sought after designers in Japan. Are you opposed to the idea?"
"I'm not necessarily against it, Aizawa-san had just made it sound like you wanted me to teach Heroics when he brought this up."
Nezu waved his paw, "Well he wasn't entirely wrong. You would still be brought in to give lectures and exercises that capitalize on your experience and perspective. It is just that-"
Nezu's voice trailed off and he seemed to be struggling with what to say. Finally he just gave a shrug and sighed.
"I just think it would be best for our students' mental health if your lessons on heroics were delivered in small doses."
Taylor wrote a large 78 across the top of the paper and then placed it at the top of the finished pile. She glanced to her left already knowing what she was going to see but smiled anyway.
The pile of ungraded projects was empty. She was finally free.
She felt her smile deepen as she remembered her mother once telling her that teaching was fun but grading was hell. Now having become a teacher she could not help but agree.
One side effect she had not expected when she had accepted Nezu's offer was the feeling of closeness it gave her to her mother. So many half forgotten memories came back in full as she gained context to the frustrations her mother had to have been dealing with, and the joys that accompanied them.
She stood up and stretched then glanced at the clock. She still had an hour and a half before she was supposed to meet Toshinori at the cafe. She considered replying to Ryoi-san's feedback on her planned lecture for the third year class about investigating serial murderers. She had recreated some of the Slaughterhouse Nine autopsy reports she had been studying at the students' age to use as examples, but he felt they were unnecessarily graphic. He was probably correct, but she was still feeling stubborn about it right now, so it was best to put that off until tomorrow.
All throughout her workshop her spiders stopped working on the half dozen projects she had going and went back into their terrariums. She stopped in front of each of the half finished costumes, inspecting her work and making sure she hadn't made any mistakes while weaving purely using insectoid senses. Satisfied had not, she grabbed her checkered overcoat and walked to the door.
She pulled on the coat as she stepped outside. It was getting a bit too warm for it, but she did not particularly enjoy the stares her robotic prosthetic attracted when she went out in civilian clothes without covering it up, so she chose to wear it anyway.
She turned around and locked the door to her workshop. It was a two story building tucked away a short distance from the main building in order to decrease the odds of someone wandering into it unintentionally. It had become the subject of a number of rumors around the school, most of them stemming from Present Mic nicknaming it the Hellmouth.
As she entered the main building Nemuri approached her. "Taylor, it is good to see you, and not even in costume. Going to actually spend a night in your bed rather than working in your lab or terrorizing villains?"
Taylor smiled at her friend, "I have plans tonight."
"Oooh, got a hot date?"
"No, just meeting up with an old friend." Or at least the oldest friend she had left.
"Well that is less fun for me." Taylor glanced at the older hero who was still smiling broadly. "Anyway, it is your choice for book club next month. Is there any way I can convince you to choose something that was written within the last century?"
Taylor smirked, "What can I say? I love the classics."
Nemuri groaned, "Well at least I tried. Make sure you have a relaxing evening with your friend. "
Taylor sighed as a man made of slime burst out of a convenience store one block over, cash streaming out of him.
"Thief! Someone stop him!"
It was her day off, she had only been collecting a token swarm of insects, and she didn't have any good options available to restrain a man made of fluid. But as she quickly searched she could not find any pro heroes nearby.
She tasked a small part of the swarm with catching the money being dropped by the criminal so she could return it to the store owner and tagged the criminal with a bug to keep track of him. In the nearby alleyways she started amassing a much larger swarm.
After running a few blocks the slime man ducked into an alleyway and stopped running. As he attempted to peek his eyes out from the alley surreptitiously to check if he had been followed, she amassed her swarm behind him and spoke with her swarm voice, "I don't suppose you would be willing to release the money you just stole, would you? You have already lost half of it."
The man jumped towards a sewer grate and flowed inside of it, leaving even more cash behind him.
"Of course not." Taylor spoke with her real voice this time, turning around and starting to walk quickly in the direction he was headed. She sent a part of the swarm to trail the slime man in the sewers and pick up the cash he was continuing to drop as he fled.
After a while the man stopped, hiding under another sewer grate in a tunnel. She could hear him panting with her swarm. Then he spoke, "Shit! I dropped all of the money! This was a complete bust! And now I've got that creepy bug hero on my back."
Taylor considered making her swarm known to him again but thought better of it. She really wasn't equipped to deal with this kind of quirk right now, and if she had collected all of the money she was fine dropping it here.
Then he flowed out of the grate and spoke again, "Perfect, I'll use that kid's body to escape."
Taylor instantly dropped into a sprint towards the tunnel and ordered every insect she had under her control into the tunnel to surround the villain. The instant it had grown large enough for her to use her swarm voice she ordered, "Release the boy now."
The slime villain laughed, "Why? So I can lose my leverage? If any of your bugs comes closer I will snap his fucking neck."
As Taylor reached the tunnel she spoke with the swarm again. "If he dies you die."
"Wha-"
"My swarm will devour you bit by bit until it reaches whatever part of you you cannot survive without." Taylor stepped through the swarm and continued speaking with her own voice echoed by the swarm, "Then that will be devoured as well. Do you understand me?
"The fuck!"
She glanced at the boy in the slime villain's grasp. His face was still covered by the villain, he wouldn't have much time left.
"I guess I'll start with the eyes." She ordered the swarm to surge.
The world went black.
Izuku flailed his arms in a desperate attempt to dislodge the villain who was currently suffocating him, but his hands simply passed through the villain's fluid body.
"Damnit, they are still here. Hold still boy, you are my ticket out of this."
His mind raced. What would All Might do? The answer was obvious All Might would use one of his smashes and blast the villain away. But he wasn't All MIght he was just a quirkless nobody.
A nobody who was going to die at the hands of a villain without even being able to put up the briefest fight. How did he think someone like him could become a hero.
The sunlight stopped streaming in from the mouth of the tunnel, but everything was too blurry and he could not make out what was happening.
Was a hero here to save him? Or was he just dying? The air around him seemed to vibrate, he thought he could make out words but he could not understand them.
His lungs burned. He needed air. His body desperately attempted to breathe in but only the villain's fluid entered his lungs.
Maybe Bakugo was right. Maybe this was for the best. Maybe he would get a quirk in his next life and be able to become a hero.
The tunnel disappeared.
He was floating over a burning city, before him an army of heroes. Neither their lives nor their deaths meant anything to him. There was nothing for him here, only a deep desperate loneliness. He saw the weapon that would kill him prepare to fire. He did not move.
Izuku was back in the tunnel. The world was no longer a blurry mess but something far stranger was happening now. Now the world was still.
In front of him a woman in a checkered coat was standing at an impossible angle. As he focused on her his mind began to provide numbers. Height, weight, velocity, temperature. He realized she wasn't standing, but instead collapsing. As he watched her for a moment he saw her approach the ground ever so slowly.
So the world wasn't still, just in slow motion.
He moved his attention to what was behind her blocking the light from the entrance of the tunnel and saw forty eight thousand five hundred and twelve insects rushing towards him. Numbers started to flood into his mind at a terrifying rate and he forced his attention back onto the woman.
He had no idea what was happening. But it didn't matter. That woman was in trouble, and he would only be able to help her if he could get out of the slime villain.
The thought made him realize he could still feel his lungs burning. He had been distracted by the strange way he saw the world now, but he was still dying. He apparently was just going to experience his death in slow motion.
No, he wasn't going to die. Something had happened to that woman. If he was going to help her he had to get out. He needed to look at the villain, see if he could find some weakness that would force it to release him.
But it was all around him, some of it was still streaming out of the sewer behind him, how would he be able to get a good look from inside him.
Izuku paused. How did he know that the villain hadn't completely emerged from the sewer? How did he know where the villain had come from at all? He had been attacked from behind.
He ordered his eyes shut. It felt like it took an eternity for them to close but once they were firmly shut he found he could still sense the area around him. It wasn't as detailed as what he could see, but it extended a distance behind him, letting him know that there were even more insects swarming in that he could not see.
He turned his attention in closer, focusing on the slime villain. It was completely fluid but there were three denser points within it. Based on the position he knew two of them were the villain's eyes, but the third he had not seen and it was about twelve centimeters over his right shoulder.
He ordered his right arm to rise, and time resumed at its normal pace. He felt his hand push through the fluid and wrap around something squishy but solid.
The villain yelled something but Izuku could not hear him over the swarm of insects descending upon the two of them. He squeezed and the villain let out a piercing scream that seemed to come from the entirety of its being.
The villain twisted and writhed, clearing Izuku's airway. He took in a deep breath, feeling the air circulating through his lungs once again.
He tried to pull his legs free and run to the collapsed woman. But the villain lurched as he did so pulling his feet out from under him.. He hit the concrete and everything went black.
Taylor pulled herself off the concrete and ran at the screaming villain covered in her swarm.
The boy's mouth and nose were clear now the insects near him could feel him inhale air. He stumbled away from her attempting to dislodge himself from the slime, but the villain's thrashing pulled his feet out from under him and he hit the ground hard.
Taylor reached the boy ignoring the quickly dying screams of the slime man. She picked the boy up and plaid him onto his back then checked his breathing and his pulse. Both seemed steady.
She pulled out her phone and called the hero line, "This is Khepri. I have two injuries at my location. A teenage boy who was being suffocated and has hit his head, and a villain with a fluid anatomy who has suffered an unknown injury, possibly fatal."
Taylor answered the dispatcher's questions and hung up with assurances that help was on its way. She then looked at the boy's hand where a teal organ of some kind seemed to be crushed in his grip. She pulled the organ out of his hand and quickly dropped it into the sewer.
A moment later she felt a large man enter into the tunnel walking confidently through her swarm.
All Might emerged looking around the tunnel for a second, "Taylor. I saw the pillar of bugs. What happened?"
Taylor continued to look down at the kid,"The slime man robbed a convenience store. He was suffocating the kid for some kind of master effect in order to escape me. I'm pretty sure he would have killed him."
She felt a large hand gently touch her shoulder, "So you had to kill him to save the kid?"
Taylor glanced at the slime man and saw his eyes were glossy and dead.
"No, I didn't do anything." Taylor looked up at her friend. "Toshinori, the boy triggered. He is a parahuman."
Toshinori breathed in sharply, "That could be bad."
Taylor nodded and started to disperse her swarm as the ambulance approached. "Let's talk about what this might mean later. For now let's just make sure he is okay."
A/N: I wanted to title this chapter 'Trigger Warning' but I was worried that would lead to confusion. I have like five versions of the first part after the flashback. I had planned on opening on Taylor teaching a class. But after a couple of attempts I decided what was most important to show about Taylor in her new life is that she is largely content, we will have plenty of time to see how scary she is as a teacher later. I don't think I got Izuku's voice quite right but I'll get to write him geeking out about heroes next chapter which hopefully helps. I'm glad the response to my first chapter was so positive, I hope you enjoy this one as well.