If you were to ask me whether I liked dogs, I would probably have to say that I didn't. I wouldn't particularly say that I disliked them, either; they were just a category of animal that I had never held any special affection for. Before you say that dogs are amazing because they provide unlimited amounts of love and affection, I acknowledge that this is the case. However, since I already have a little sister, owning a dog would be superfluous. Besides, owning a dog requires that you walk it, pick up its bowel movements in little plastic baggies, and is just generally a lot of work; which as far as I am concerned is something to be avoided whenever possible.

So if you were to point at a culprit for me taking leave of my senses and leaping in front of a speeding car, it wouldn't be the fault of the dachshund that had slipped its leash chasing after a butterfly, or any generalized affection for all things canine on my part. No, it was that I was on my way to U.A.'s entrance exam, and so was caught up in unrealistic daydreams about being a hero. Cultural brainwashing is a scary phenomenon. Even I, who had watched firsthand as dreams of a 'successful' life turned my parents into miserable wage-slaves who only really spoke to their children on Thursdays, had somehow been hypnotized by visions of a heroic future, seduced into throwing my safety away in pursuit of an unreasonable ideal. In the moment where I tapped into Stockpile, flung myself at breakneck speed off of my bike into the middle of the road, and clutched the dachshund into a protective embrace with both arms, I could almost see that glorious road to fame and fortune stretching out before me.

The shock of the car's bumper shattering my tibia was a rude awakening. So were all the scrapes and bruises that I acquired as the strong impact at the bottom of my legs sent me spinning across the road, not just rolling from front to back but also whipping around heads over tails. I didn't stop until I slammed into the curb back-first, every muscle up and down my spine singing out in agony. I was stunned by the pain, incapable of thinking or moving, and might have passed out from the shock if the mutt in my arms hadn't whined and started licking my face.

"AHHHHHHH!" Using Zaimokuza's Regeneration Quirk was painful even at 1/108th strength. Being the cautious and sensible person that I was, I had saved up a stockpile of Regeneration in case of emergencies that was probably 20% as strong as the real thing. Unsurprisingly, using that stockpile was 20 times as painful. "AHH! Hah, hah, hah." It did its job, though - after a few seconds, my body was more or less healed, other than a bone-deep ache in my right shin.

"Young man! Young man, are you alright?"

"Ohmigosh I'm so sorry he just slipped out of my hand and it was nice out so I couldn't use my quirk to grab him and then you saved him and ohmigosh are you okay?"

Two voices overlapped as a pair of figures jogged over towards me. One was an older man wearing what looked like a liveried uniform; the other was a pretty girl in a fresh, fashionable skirt and loose t-shirt. I'll leave it to you to decipher which voice belongs to who.

"Young man, can you hear me? Do I need to call an ambulance?"

I groaned, but pushed myself up to a sitting position, keeping one arm wrapped around the dog to keep it from escaping. "Not sure yet," I called out. "Gimme a minute."

"Ah! Sable! Sable you're okay!" The girl shouted, and the dog responded back with a couple of yips. As the girl got closer I could see her more clearly; she had bright orange hair tied up into a side-bun, beautiful light brown eyes filled with thankful tears, and a grateful smile on her face, tinged with just a touch of concern. "I couldn't move fast enough and then you were all glowing orange and jumping off your bike and flying into the road and then you got hit and you were rolling and it looked bad and then you screamed but you're okay too?"

"..Ah. Yeah," I said foolishly, a little embarrassed. It had been a long time since a girl that wasn't my sister smiled at me like she meant it, I wasn't used to it! "I've got a regeneration Quirk… sort of. Here," I said, and handed the dog over to her. "Keep a better grip on him next time."

She let out a deep sigh of relief and nodded her assent. Not far behind her, the man in the uniform sighed in relief as well. "I'm very glad to hear that, young man. That was a brave and foolish thing you just did. Are you sure that you're alright? I could probably give you a ride to the hospital, or to wherever you were going if you'd prefer," he offered.

I narrowed my eyes in irritation. Where the heck did he get off, calling me foolish! I knew that damn well myself without anybody telling me! "The way that you drive?" I scoffed, my lips curling up slightly into a vicious grin as he flinched. Slowly, I pushed my way to my feet, wincing in pain as I put weight on my right foot. Apparently I had been hit so hard that even a 20x stockpile of Regeneration hadn't healed me completely. I sneered as I looked at the driver. "There's these laws called speed limits. Maybe you've heard of them? I hear it's a lot easier to brake suddenly if you're going at a safe speed. No offense meant," I lied, "but I think I'll be safer on my bike." With satisfaction, I watched as his face turned slightly purple from humiliation. He bowed to me formally, turned, got back in his pricey-looking black towncar, and just started driving away. Curiously, I noted that there had been someone in the back seat, but the windows were tinted so I couldn't really make out any facial features as the car drove away.

"Ah hah hah hah hah.." the orange-haired girl laughed nervously, still holding onto her dog. She flinched a little bit when I looked at her, but after seeing that I wasn't about to start criticizing her like I did the driver, she smiled at me once again. "Thank you so much for saving Sable! I'm really sorry, there's somewhere that I have to be soon or I'll be late so I can't stay or thank you right away, but is there a way that I can get in contact with you later to thank you properly?"

For some reason, the word late resonated in my brain. Crap! The admission test! "Ah, no, I actually have to leave now too. Like, right now. Don't worry about thanking me really!"

Just as I was turning to leave, she called out. "Wait!" she said, and I suddenly felt a hug envelop me from behind, two warm, squishy sensations pressing themselves against my back. At the same time, my clothes started squirming and rearranging themselves, pieces of torn fabric realigning themselves and stitching themselves back together, other pieces stained by blood or dirt shaking themselves out and cleaning them. She released me, and I turned to look at her. She was blushing fiercely, and I could feel my own face getting equally hot. "Um, your clothes." She said, looking off to the side. "I could fix them with my quirk, so. Anyways. Thank you!"

"Aah. Thanks. And you're welcome," I said, too embarrassed to say much more, and I started walking away for real this time, heading back towards my bike. I looked over my shoulder a few times as I left, watching the girl whose name I never got go her own way. She waved a couple of times in my direction as she did before finally turning a corner and disappearing. For a little while, I felt incredibly proud of myself, basking in the warm endorphins from being hugged and the thrill of success. Then I picked up my fallen bicycle, only to see that the front wheel was completely bent out of shape. "Crap."

Left with no other option, I started jogging towards U.A., dragging my bike along as best I could. With brute strength and Death Arms' quirk I had gotten the wheel so that it was more or less straight, but it definitely wasn't rideable. Worse, as I jogged along, every step I took came with a jolt of pain in my right leg, and I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to use it in an actual exam. What the heck I had been doing? Why hadn't I asked for some sort of compensation? Or bothered finding out if my leg and bike were okay before I let that guy leave? Was it that much fun, playing the hero and looking cool? There are villains that hit even harder than speeding cars, there are heroes that die every year, am I really okay with throwing myself into danger like that? As nice as that hug felt… was it really worth it?

My plans for the test had originally been to arrive early, scout out the other test-takers, and possibly to surreptitiously bump into a few likely candidates before the test started, but by the time I made it to the exam location everyone was already filing in the door. With no chance to copy other quirks, and a leg that was sure to break again if I tried using it while tapping into Stockpile, I was feeling incredibly unconfident of actually passing the exam. Honestly, I probably would have written the whole thing off as a loss, probably even should have. But if I had, then anyone would have been able to search my name on the list of examinees and see that I didn't take the test after all, and there was no way in hell that I was giving Orimoto Kaori that kind of satisfaction. Plus, hey, you never knew, maybe there would be a chance to pick up some quirks in the practical.

So I locked up my battered bicycle, caught up to the tail end of students entering, and did my best to suffer through the written examination while ignoring the pain of simultaneously channeling Regeneration into my leg, hoping to recover it even just a little bit more before I had to use it again. I was so distracted by the pain that I accidentally wrote down my actual thoughts on heroics in the writing prompt, only remembering halfway through that I was supposed to be writing about why I wanted to be a hero. Math and Science were never strong subjects of mine to begin with, but with my leg aching I wound up unable to focus, just applying whatever formulas I remembered by rote and hoping for the best. Probably the only bright spots in my entire exam were Literature and History, but even there I'm sure I wound up making mistakes that I otherwise wouldn't have.

Even before the practical, I was already pretty sure that I had failed. Despite that, when time was up, I filed into the auditorium with everybody else, determined to see things through one way or another.

"EVERYBODY SAY HE~Y!" I winced. Ugh, noisy! To my utter lack of surprise, nobody said 'hey' back to Present Mic, who was apparently not only a pro hero and a radio DJ, but also a teacher. Oi oi, if I became a hero, would I have to take three jobs to make ends meet too? No, calm down, he probably just has a frivolous personality and terrible financial discipline to go with his terrible taste in music. Oh, wait, he's actually starting to explain things, I should start paying attention... Okay, so we use our quirks, beat up robots in a fake city, get more points for stronger robots, no attacking other candidates. Simple enough, I guess. And here's the handout for the robots, why are there -

And just as I was thinking that, some moron started shouting. "May I ask a question? There appear to be no fewer than four types of villains on this handout! Such a blatant error, if it is one, is unbecoming of U.A., Japan's top hero academy! Blah blah blah blah blah, I have an enormous stick lodged in my rectum, someone should probably make sure I'm not smuggling prohibited materials into the exam room! I'm clearly afraid nobody else here will notice how morally superior to them I think I am!"

… Yeah. That rule about not attacking other candidates was a good one, because otherwise I would have been tempted. Granted, it was probably good that he clarified that there was a massive robot that gave us no points to beat in the exam location, but jeez, what a jerk. Inwardly, I felt bad for the green-haired kid he had shouted at. Who looked a little familiar, actually, was he from my school? Before I could figure out just who I was looking at, though, we broke up into our assigned groups for the practical exam. I was still limping a little bit as I followed all of the other students, despite having spent multiple hours of the written exam trying to heal my leg. The exam was only ten minutes long, so I could probably run on it normally for that long, but using Stockpile while moving was absolutely out of the question. That was going to make things trickier.

Well, it wasn't like I had no options at all. Since we had been given the option to bring what equipment was necessary to use our quirks, I had brought a wooden baseball bat with me. As we waited in front of the mock cityscape for the exam to start, I started channeling my stored reserves of Kamui Woods' quirk and commanded the wood to grow. A few of the other students nearby looked at me with impressed looks on their faces as my baseball bat swiftly grew, rapidly coming to resemble an enormous war club or tetsubo, one that was rapidly growing so heavy that I had to struggle to lift it. The pro hero Ectoplasm, who was overseeing the exam, turned his black-helmeted face in my direction with what I thought was a curious look, but evidently whatever I was doing wasn't too against the rules, because he didn't say anything to me about it.

Instead, he just shouted "And…. START!" There was a few seconds of delay, then suddenly everyone came to the same realization that I had - the test was on. Quickly, I began the second phase of my plan. As soon as I got enough clear space around me, I switched quirks to Mt. Lady and instantly saw the ground drop away from me as I grew to nearly triple my current height. The heavy war-club in my hands, which previously had been so bulky that I could barely manage to carry it, appeared to shrink down until it was once again a comfortable fit in my hands. With Mt. Lady's quirk active I was roughly 20 times stronger than normal, and if I used Death Arms' quirk at the same time I could push that up by another 20% or so in just my arms. It would have to be enough.

Despite the fact that I was so much bigger and heavier, because Mt. Lady's Quirk strengthened her body to match her size, the situation didn't put any additional stress on my leg; I was still limping, but only a little, and the length of my stride helped put me at the front of the pack of examinees. Within a few seconds I was among a pack of robots, which though larger than human sized were only up to about the size of my waist. Grinning like a madman, I decided to use them to take out some of my frustration. WHAM! The head of a robot went flying as I used my war club like the baseball bat it had originally started as and hit a home run. SMASH! A machine prepared to leap at me, only to be hammered into the ground by an overhead swing. BANG! I used the war club like a battering ram, shoving the robot into the wall. OOOORRRAAAH! I lifted a robot up by the legs and threw it into another robot! For the first few minutes, I was actually feeling pretty good about myself and how I was doing!

And then the two and three-point villains started showing up. Not only bigger than the one-pointers, they were also more heavily armored, the sorts of targets that required either overwhelming force or precision damage to defeat. Glancing ruefully at my war club, I saw that it was already starting to splinter, the hastily grown wood no match over the long term for solid steel. Sighing, I shrunk back down to my normal height, tossing the now useless lump of wood aside as I did. From there on out, I was down to one or two Stockpiled explosions, one or two Stockpiled Death Arms Punches, a Backdraft Blast or two, and two or three stored up uses of miscellaneous quirks before I would be out of useful abilities. What's worse was, since they all required Stockpile to be useful, I basically would have to stand still while using any of them or risk re-breaking my leg, this time without any Regeneration saved up to fix it afterwards.

Well, I had a good run, but it was time to go to Plan B: looking for people to pretend to help out or save so that I could copy their quirks. My leg still hurt, but I ran at full speed anyways, adrenaline numbing the pain until it felt distant and unimportant. Not far from me, a pink-skinned girl was trying to bait a three-pointer into stepping onto a field of goo that she had laid down. I stopped, braced myself so that my weight was on my left leg, and tapped into Stockpile and Backdraft simultaneously. Almost painlessly my right hand shifted into a metallic water cannon, and a jet of compressed water rocketed forth, striking the robot from the side and sending it sliding over the field of pink acidic goo until it impacted the side of the building.

"Hey, this one's mine!" She said, skating over the slippery goo field to get closer to it and finish it off before I could steal it.

"I know, you're welcome!" I shouted back, turning away for now. I'd press her for a high-five or something like that after the exam was done. Further along past her, I saw a guy who looked like he was made completely out of metal, trying to chase down a fast-moving 2-pointer so that he could tear into it. I rushed up to it and grabbed its leg, very temporarily tapped into Stockpile, and used a saved-up explosion to blow its leg off at the knee. As the thing skidded to the halt, I ran past the steel-guy and clapped him on the shoulder, shouting "All yours!"

My hand ached from the explosion as I ran past, his confused cries of "wait, weren't you the giant guy?" following me as I left him to his prize. Shortly, I came into a giant plaza full of people and robots fighting, almost too many for me to choose from. A bird-headed young man picked a robot up with his shadow and crushed it in midair, a blonde girl fired arrow after arrow of what looked like solid light into metal chassis, a good-looking ikemen bastard flew carefreely above the plaza, swooping down to tear at vulnerable wires and weak spots.

I knew that time was running out, so I just lunged at the closest 3-pointer, waiting until I had grabbed its leg until simultaneously tapping Stockpile and Death Arms. In an instant, my arm strength surged even above where it was while using Mt. Lady's quirk, and I hoisted the metal body of the 'villain' up enough that its vulnerable underbelly was exposed. "Shoot!" I shouted at the girl firing the laser arrows, and she obliged, her energy blasts gouging into the unarmored metal. It started to spark and burn so I dropped it and skipped back a few steps, winding up not too far from the girl who had defeated it.

"You know those points are mine, right?" She said, tossing her head back imperiously. Her blonde hair fell in actual ringlets, and I was half tempted to poke her to see if she was an anime character.

Instead I just shrugged, then jumped towards her to pull out of the way of a Level 2 that was barreling towards us from behind. "Watch your back!" I shouted, then took off running for another target. I managed to find another pack of one-pointers and briefly jumped back up to giant size to deal with them, although now that I had lost my club I had to throw them about bare-handed or smash them into each other in order to take them out.

Just as I was finishing those robots off, the earth shook. A massive, colossal robot slowly rose above the mock cityscape. The Zero-Pointer. It was the sort of opponent that we didn't need to try to defeat, something better off evaded as quickly as possible. An obstacle, not an enemy.

So naturally, that was when my half-healed leg finally decided to give out. As I started stepping away from the Zero-Pointer, I stepped on a piece of rubble that rolled under my foot. Suddenly, all my weight was being placed on my leg from the side, rather than from the top, and under the misdirected pressure my shin gave out with an incredibly painful snap. I screamed in pain for the second time that day, my eyes watering as I did my best to get out from underfoot despite the broken leg. A few feet at a time, I crawled out of the path of destruction, whimpering and trying not to sob as I did so. Despite my best efforts, however, for a second I was convinced that I wind up underneath one of the Zero-Pointer's giant metal feet despite every safety precaution that U.A. had taken.

And then suddenly, she arrived. A girl with long, black hair and ice-blue eyes was suddenly standing before me, while at the same time the air went from a warmish March afternoon to the middle of bleak winter. The humidity in the air spontaneously condensed into snowflakes as she grabbed the descending metal foot, her body glowing in a soft white light as she held it above her head, seemingly effortlessly. Between the snow and the glow she looked like a yuki-onna, a myth come to life. She turned over her shoulder to look at me. "Get away from here before you get frostbite," she said in a studiously neutral voice. "I've got it under control."

If I could have put any weight on my leg, I would have. Instead, I painfully pushed myself up until I was kneeling on my right knee. "Not really an option," I said through gritted teeth. "Let's work together. Push on three!" And with that, I tapped into my last unused combination of pro-level quirks, All Might's Stockpile and Mt. Lady's Gigantification. Mt. Lady's quirk was normally a bad one for combining with Stockpile. Before I saved up enough stored power to match Mt. Lady's maximum height, all that the saved power went to height and none of it went to duration. In other words, unless I saved a simply ludicrous amount of power, I was never going to be able to use Stockpile to boost my height above 5 meters for more than a couple of seconds at most.

However, in this situation, a couple of seconds was all I needed. I surged up under the Zero-Pointer's center of mass at a breakneck pace. After a mere second of the boost, my arms were long enough that I could wrap them around the back leg of the robot, the one not being held by the yuki-onna girl to my right. Eventually, I was as tall as I was going to get, about half the Zero-Pointer's size. As soon as I hit my maximum height and strength, I shouted "THREE!" and lifted and pulled as hard as I could, trying to remove the Zero-pointer's footing. To my right, I could feel the air get even colder, and the force on the robot we were both opposing getting even stronger, until suddenly that foot of the robot lifted as well and it began tipping backwards. Once we had it in the air, I switched towards pushing, attempting to wrestle the thing down to the ground.

The Zero-Pointer hit the ground with a crash almost loud enough to drown out the sound of a high-pitched whistle blowing and calling the examination period to the end. Kindly, the beautiful yuki-onna girl reached down to offer me her hand. Almost reflexively I took it, copying her quirk as I did so. "Thanks," I muttered. It was a great quirk, something along the lines of absorbing ambient heat energy in order to boost her physical strength and speed, but given that she had put herself in harm's way to rescue me I felt a little bit guilty in copying it.

Surprisingly, the beautiful girl pulling me to my feet shook her head. "I was just doing what I should have," she said, and I blinked at her in confusion. I was about to ask her what she meant by that when I heard an older, unfamiliar voice.

"All right, all right now. Who's injured? Yes, come here dearie." Surprisingly, there was an elderly woman walking through the crowd of examinees, bestowing a healing quirk with a kiss. It vaguely reminded me of a pro hero that I had heard of before - Nurse Girl, maybe? - and with the help of the Yuki-onna girl I limped over to get fixed up, readying myself to copy yet another useful quirk as I did so.

Fun fact: Recovery Girl's Heal Quirk operates using the same bodily resources as Zaimokuza's Regeneration Quirk. Not more than a few seconds after her lips touched my skin, I felt a sudden surge of fatigue and collapsed unconscious, out like a light. I woke up sometime in the late evening with an I.V. in my arm and was eventually sent home with some admonishments against overdoing things, with my hopes of stealing quirks in the after-exam camaraderie dashed and my hopes of passing the entrance exam similarly low.

It was a long walk home. The wheels of my busted bicycle squeaked insistently as I trudged through the chilly night air. It had been a crazy day. Saving a girl's dog, being saved by a girl, cutting loose with my quirk, writing what had to be the worst essay ever to disgrace the U.A. admissions process… for all that I was inconvenienced by the lack of a working bicycle, I was perversely glad for the lonesome silence and the opportunity to stop and think. Somehow, I felt as though a ghost had been exorcised from me. I knew I had most likely failed the exam, but I had done so without compromising, without regrets, and while giving it everything I had. Somehow, I felt relieved that I could finally put my childish dreams to rest.

When the rejection letter finally arrived, it was a Thursday. For once, my parents were home, and we were all sitting around the living room like a facsimile of a loving family. "Hey, Onii-chan, what's this?" Komachi asked, waving the envelope around. "It feels like there's something heavy in it."

Focusing my eyes on it, I recognized the seal. "My rejection letter from U.A., probably," I said. Komachi, of course, had heard a lightly edited account of the whole saga, and how her heroic brother had given up his chance at attending his dream school in order to save the life of a pet of a random passerby. "Go ahead and open it."

"AH HA HA HA HA! NEVER FEAR, FOR I AM HERE… as a holographic recording!" Holy crap, that was All Might. Damn, U.A. took their rejection letters seriously these days. "Young Hikigaya, I cannot tell you how happy I am that the flames of your youth were not dampened by the incident eleven months ago!" Wait, he remembers me? No way, he probably has staff that keeps track of these things for him. "Unfortunately, while the written portion of your exam was just barely a pass," whoa, I actually passed? No way! "Unfortunately, you only received seven Villain Points during the practical exam, not nearly enough to make the mark."

I sighed, and shrugged my arms. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Man, they recorded a video just to tell me -"

"And if villain points were the only measure by which you were being judged, you would not be receiving this message!" What. "RESCUE POINTS!" What. "To be a hero is to help other people!" What, no. Stop. "Every time that you helped another student during the exam, our team of judges voted on whether to award you points, and how many points they gave you." No, no, stop, I was only stealing Quirks. They had to have noticed, right? "On multiple occasions during the exam, you put your own personal gain at risk in order to assist other students!" My parents and my little sister were all beaming at me with pride, and I felt sick to my stomach. "Young man, you earned more than enough rescue points to qualify as a student of U.A.!" No, stop, you're wrong! "However, young man, I will admit that your essay on your heroic motivations did give us some pause." Oh thank god. "After all, U.A.'s hero course is a course for heroes, first and foremost!"

"Onii-san, what the heck did you write?" Komachi asked accusingly, only to be shushed by my mother.

"Uhm, excuse me?" It was a soft voice that only I sort of recognized, until I saw a girl with a shock of orange hair talking to a holographic recording of Ectoplasm, and realized where I had heard it. "There's this boy with dark hair who was limping today… um, he wasn't in my group for the practical, but he saved my dog from being run over a car this morning, and he broke his leg. He said he had a regeneration quirk, but… um, he didn't look all the way better when I saw him later, so if there's anything I can do… anyway, I just thought you should know."

"Ah, yes, I beg your pardon." This voice was garbled, as though it had been obscured by voice changing software. "I'm sorry to admit this, but my driver was speeding on the way to the exam location, and nearly ran over a dog that had run into the road. A student taking your exam saved the dog, at the cost of breaking his leg. I'm afraid that he might have failed the practical… no? Oh, that's such a relief. What? A recording? No, I'd rather stay anonymous, thank you."

"Young Hikigaya, your heroic deeds were not in vain!" All Might's face, big and beaming, made it front and center into the holographic projection. "While we cannot in fairness give you any rescue points outside of the examination period, your actions were more than enough to ease whatever doubts we had as to your character! Young man. You have passed! Welcome to the Heroics course at U.A.!"

Looking at the smiling face of All Might in the hologram, and the faces of my family all around me beaming with pride, I just barely made it into the bathroom before I threw up.